The Other Daughter

by Caroline Bishop

  Jorge looks at me, a smile tugging at his lips. ‘Sounds fucking boring to me.’

  I smile back, meeting his eyes with my own. I see that he cares, he really cares, and it feels good. ‘I guess it does,’ I say.

  * * *

  I arrive early in Lutry on the day I’m due to meet her and I don’t know what to do with myself. I walk down the curve of the lake wall towards a bench in the shade, a short distance from the spot where Anna told Julia she wanted to meet me. It’s a baking hot day, but I think I’m sweating more from nerves than from the heat. I can feel the damp under my arms, even in this sundress, which is the lightest thing I own. It’s white with tiny red flowers and I got it on a shopping trip with Mum, five or six years ago.

  Go on, I’ll treat you.

  I want to look nice today. I want Anna to think well of me. I don’t want her to be disappointed in how I’ve turned out. But I also need to subliminally state my connection to Mum, to show, in some small, unspoken, sartorial way, that she’s still with me, she’s still my mother and I’m still her daughter. Wearing this dress satisfies both of those needs.

  I look at my watch. Ten to midday. I glance down the promenade. It’s fairly busy. It’s a Saturday lunchtime, so the restaurant terraces are full. Couples and their kids are strolling by the lake, ice creams in hands; some people are swimming in the water, or sunbathing on the grass down the end of the promenade, under willow trees. It’s like any other day, for them. But for me it’s a threshold, a turning point. However, unlike the other one, back in London with Dad when we went to give blood, this one I’m walking into with my eyes open. I know what I’m doing – even though I don’t know if I want to do it.

  I didn’t think I’d recognise her. But when I see her, I know her instantly. She’s standing by the wall near the cafe. She’s wearing a mid-length navy skirt and a white sleeveless shirt, with flat red sandals. Her eyes are covered by large tortoiseshell sunglasses and she’s carrying a small red leather handbag over one shoulder that she keeps hoisting up, as though it’s heavy, but it’s so small that I doubt it. She’s nervous, that’s what it is. The realisation relieves my own nerves a little.

  I stand up. Smooth down my dress. Take a sip of water from the bottle I’m carrying, hoping it will settle my troubled stomach. I think of Mum, the last time I saw her, just before her trip to Turkey.

  See you soon, darling. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!

  Would you do this, Mum? I think now. Are you okay with me doing this? I wish I had her blessing. I wish she could tell me that it’s okay to meet the woman who gave birth to me. I debate turning around and walking to the train station and going back to Julia’s. I could pack my things and be out of there that afternoon. A short flight and I could be with Dad, back trying to pretend this whole thing didn’t happen. I take another sip of water and it’s while I’m tightening the cap on the bottle that she looks directly at me and then I know the decision has been made for me.

  She takes a step forward, then stops. Takes her sunglasses off. I stand up and walk towards her, my legs shaking so much I don’t know if I can actually cover the thirty metres to where she’s standing. I stop in front of her and then I don’t know what to say.

  ‘Jessica?’

  I nod. Her hand goes to her mouth and I see her eyes crease. ‘Hello,’ she says in English. ‘Hello, Jessica.’

  I don’t know what to do. Whether to hug her, or kiss her three times in the Swiss way. In the end I stick out my hand in what seems like an absurdly formal manner given our relationship. But then again, she’s a complete stranger to me. ‘Hello,’ I say, and she takes my proffered hand in both of hers and squeezes it. I pull it away after a moment.

  ‘Sehr schön,’ she says, as though to herself. Her eyes look watery. They’re my eyes, I realise. My colour. Or mine are her colour. Her face shape is mine, too. An oval, with a sweetheart hairline. Her hair is darker than mine, but it’s surely dyed.

  This is my mother.

  I’d always just dismissed the fact I didn’t look especially like either of my parents. Shrugged it off. It was what it was. But now, here, is evidence that in fact I do.

  ‘Did you have a good journey?’ I say it only to say something, and once it’s out there it seems ridiculous. I’m meeting my long-lost mother for the very first time and I’m spouting small talk. She smiles, doesn’t take her eyes off me and I think perhaps she hasn’t understood. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t speak German,’ I add. ‘Uh, I mean, Julia said you can speak English?’

  My words seem to snap her out of her thoughts. ‘Yes, yes, I have learnt it for you,’ she says, her accent a singsong.

  I cock my head, confused. ‘We only just met.’

  ‘I mean, I’ve been learning it for forty years because I knew you were growing up in England and I hoped… I wished… I would meet you one day.’

  My stomach twists. She knew. She knew where I was the whole time. I feel hot, too hot, as though I might faint. She takes my arm and leads me to the lake wall and nods for me to sit. I can’t keep my eyes off her face.

  ‘I used to come here all the time,’ she says. ‘I’d bring the pram and walk along the lake and sit at the end on a picnic blanket.’ She turns to me, takes my hand again. ‘I don’t know where to start.’

  I take a long breath, trying to calm my racing pulse. ‘How about with how you knew? How did you find out I’d been swapped with another child? I mean, that must be what happened, right? When did you find out? And if you knew the hospital had made such a terrible mistake, why didn’t you do something about it?’

  She looks down at her lap and I see her hands are shaking. A family walks past us with a toddler pushing a plastic buggy, which she rams into my foot. The mother apologises and ushers her child away with stern words, but I barely look at her. My eyes are on Anna, willing her to speak. I need to know, right now. I need this story out.

  ‘You have to understand, I was only sixteen when I had you.’ She looks up at me. ‘I should never have been pregnant at that age. We had no money. I rarely saw Daniel in those first few months when we arrived in Lausanne because he was working all the time to support us. I was so alone, and after being so happy I’d left the farm I was living on, I became very scared.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Everything. Scared the authorities would find out I was an unmarried sixteen-year-old and take the baby away from me, put it in some horrible institution or with some family that wouldn’t love her. And I was scared that, even if they didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to give you a good life. I didn’t want you to end up like me.’

  My head feels light, fuzzy. My brain is trying to grasp something, but it’s just out of reach, languishing in the fuzz.

  ‘And then there was Sylvia. She was older than me, and I thought she was so chic and sophisticated and intelligent, with a career and prospects and a husband with the same. I was completely in awe of her. And when she interviewed me—’

  ‘Wait, you actually met Mum? She interviewed you?’ I’m struggling to keep up with this succession of facts that are revelatory to me.

  Anna nodded. ‘Yes, for an article about my time at the farm. Daniel’s parents’ farm. I’d lived there since I was eight, when the authorities took me away from my mother and sister and sent me to live there. I worked like a dog, and they gave me no love, little kindness.’ She shakes her head and something pricks at the back of my mind.

  The television news. A lawyer and a distinguished older woman with tears in her eyes. What had Michel said? Something about children taken from their families and sent to work on farms. Abuse. Neglect. Government apologies.

  ‘Sylvia seemed very interested in what had happened to me. I didn’t know why, back then,’ Anna continues. ‘I thought I was just unlucky in the life I’d had. I didn’t know it had happened to thousands of other children, too, that it was a systematic failure. I didn’t know the government would later apologise for a system that took us from our homes and deemed my mother and
others like her to be unsuitable parents.’ She breathes out a short, sharp breath and looks down at her feet. ‘What a thing to say! My mother loved me and my sister, even if she couldn’t always provide for us. She wasn’t unsuitable, she was just alone, and poor, and unhappy. It wasn’t acceptable to be divorced in a small community in the 1960s, so everyone looked down on her. Mum had no family in the area, no one to support her, so she got a job, but people said she was neglecting Cornelia and me for going to work – there weren’t many childcare options in those days – and then rumours started about Mum and a local man. They said she was living a “loose life”, and that’s why she lost her job – and then us. Instead of trying to help her, the authorities took her children from her and left us in a place far, far worse than the home we’d left. And they never came to check we were okay, they never seemed to care what happened to us.’ She shakes her head. ‘Society was completely against women like my mother, women who didn’t behave as they wanted.’ She sighs. ‘But then people are good at making bad decisions, I certainly know that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I’m completely lost, desperate for clarity and trying to process everything she’s said, like my brain’s two steps behind her, struggling to catch up.

  She waves her hand as if to brush away my question, and I see she’s going to have to do this in her own time. ‘Sylvia – your mother,’ she says, faltering on the last word, ‘heard about my background from Evelyne, Daniel’s sister, and she wanted to write an article for her newspaper. I think she saw it as a… what do you say?’

  ‘A scoop.’ I’ve always known the story of my birth. That Mum was in Switzerland on a commission for her paper and gave birth prematurely in a hospital in Lausanne. But I never knew – or at least, I never thought to ask – what the article was about. I just assumed it was a follow- up to her first piece, the one I retrieved from the paper’s online archive, and that it never actually got written. It blows my mind to think it was about Anna, about my biological mother. They actually met. They spoke. And they parted with the wrong babies.

  ‘And then when we happened to give birth at the same time, in the same hospital, it felt like fate, I suppose.’

  ‘Fate?’

  She looks at me and I see tears running down her face. ‘I’ve been so worried,’ she says.

  ‘About what?’ I don’t think I want to know. Dread is thumping in my chest.

  ‘Worried that you’ll hate me when you find out…’

  I take a breath. ‘Find out what?

  ‘That it was me. That I swapped you with Sylvia’s baby.’

  SEPTEMBER 1976 Lausanne, Switzerland

  SYLVIA

  She heard the cries before she saw they were coming from Anna. The sound she was making was animalistic, as though generated by her very soul. Sylvia walked as quickly as her day-old wound would allow and turned the corner to see Anna, hands on the glass wall of the nursery, Evelyne by her side.

  Sylvia reached them and put her hand on Anna’s shoulder as the girl’s legs seemed to give way and she collapsed to the floor. Sylvia looked through the glass into the nursery and saw only one baby instead of two in the row both their daughters had been in, and her stomach dropped.

  ‘What’s happened? Where’s Anna’s baby?’ she said to Evelyne.

  Evelyne put a hand out, a steadying gesture. ‘It’s okay. It’s not what you think. She’s been transferred to intensive care because she’s got a mild respiratory infection, but it’s just a precaution because she’s premature. The doctors have assured me the baby’s going to be just fine. I keep telling her, but she won’t listen.’ She looked at Anna, as though she didn’t know what to do with her.

  Sylvia crouched down and put a hand on Anna’s arm. The girl looked up and the expression Sylvia saw there was desperate. ‘She’s going to be fine,’ Sylvia said. ‘I know it. They’ll both be okay, these babies of ours.’ She squeezed Anna’s arm, as though to impart some of the strength she felt, some of the faith she had in their futures, such a new feeling she almost didn’t know what to do with it.

  Uncomprehending, Anna looked into her face as if she was searching for something, but Sylvia didn’t know what. Help? Reassurance? Anna put her hand on hers and said something in German. It was a rare word Sylvia recognised, but she thought she’d misheard because she didn’t understand why Anna would say it.

  ‘What did she say?’ She looked up at Evelyne, who shrugged, bewildered.

  ‘She said “I’m sorry”. But I have no idea what for.’

  Evelyne said something to Anna, but she only shook her head, crying like her heart was breaking.

  It took three nurses to persuade her back to her bed.

  AUGUST 2016 Lutry, Switzerland

  JESS

  I don’t say anything for a while. It was the last thing I’d been expecting.

  ‘You gave me away.’ I can hardly comprehend it. Though I haven’t experienced motherhood, I find it hard to believe any mother could do that. But then again, it was forty years ago, when times were different; Anna was sixteen, scared and traumatised.

  She nods, puts her hand to her mouth.

  ‘And you took Mum’s baby.’

  She nods again, looks at me with watery eyes. ‘I swapped the ankle tags when you were both in the nursery, just a few hours after you were born. It wasn’t planned. I just did it spontaneously, when the nurse stepped out of the room for a moment, and then she came back and it was done, it was too late to change it.’ I see tears on her cheeks but I feel my heart harden. I can’t go easy on her. I need to understand this. I need to push right to the very end, until I have every tiny detail out of her.

  ‘I get, maybe, that you might have felt unable to care for a child. But you did, anyway. You just cared for the wrong one. Why didn’t you just give me up for adoption? Why did you have to steal Mum’s baby?’

  I wonder, briefly, if passers-by are wondering what I’m doing to make this woman cry, but I don’t care. I’m owed this explanation and I will have it.

  ‘I wanted Sylvia to have you, only Sylvia. I didn’t want to give you up to a stranger who wouldn’t care about you, the way my foster parents didn’t care about me.’

  I’m hearing the words, but my brain is having trouble grasping them.

  ‘I knew Sylvia could give you a better life than anything I could offer you. I know it sounds crazy but somehow, in my young head, it made sense. I would still have a child – and I so wanted a child to care for, to stop me feeling alone – but I would know that my own baby, you, would be brought up with so many more opportunities, with the privileges that money could offer. I just wanted you to have the best life possible, everything I didn’t have. And perhaps also…’

  ‘What?’ I say. ‘What?’

  ‘Perhaps a small part of me thought if the authorities found out I was sixteen and unmarried and took Sylvia’s baby away from me it wouldn’t hurt as much as if they took you.’

  She hangs her head and I hear her almost whisper, ‘I can’t believe I felt that about her.’

  I shake my head. I can’t process this. ‘So you loved me, but you gave me away anyway?’

  Her face crumples. ‘Yes,’ she whispers. ‘Yes. I gave you away because I loved you. Everything I did was done out of love. I loved you so much I thought my heart would break. And I regretted my decision almost as soon as I did it. I even went to try and swap you back, but Sylvia’s baby had been transferred to another ward and you weren’t next to her anymore so I couldn’t, it was too late. I will never forget that feeling; I have never felt such despair.’

  She pauses, but I wait for her to go on. She knows I need to know every little detail of this.

  ‘And I couldn’t just confess what I’d done. I was scared I’d lose both babies and end up with nothing. I thought I’d go to jail, and my baby would be put in some institution, or with a family that didn’t love her, and then history would repeat itself. I couldn’t, I just couldn’t.’

  She breaks off and wipe
s her eyes. She opens her handbag with shaking fingers and takes out a tissue. I watch her blow her nose, I see how her eyes – her eyes like mine – are red from crying and her face is blotchy.

  ‘I’m sorry you went through all that,’ I say finally, and she looks up.

  ‘You don’t hate me?’

  Part of me wants to hate her. More for my parents than for me. She stole their child. But I can’t. For whatever reason, I’ve had the life I’ve had. And, I realise, with sudden clarity, that despite everything I’ve been through, I’m glad I’ve lived this life. All the pain and heartbreak and grief and sense of failure of the past few years don’t cancel out the most important thing I’ve always had, the thing Anna lost – a loving family.

  ‘I can’t hate you,’ I say, ‘because I’ve had a good life. I had a great childhood and I love my parents more than I can say. And these past four years, losing Mum and then finding out she and Dad weren’t my biological parents, they’ve been gut-wrenchingly painful. But they wouldn’t have been so painful if there wasn’t so much love to start with. I can’t fully understand why you did what you did, but I can’t hate you for it, because to hate you would be to hate my whole life, and I can’t do that. I won’t betray what I’ve had by wishing you’d never made that decision.’

  As I say it, I feel relief rushing through me, lightening the pressure on my chest. I’ve spent so long feeling sorry for myself, grieving, obsessing over Julia’s life and what might have been mine, that I didn’t stop to think that I wouldn’t want a different life because I wouldn’t want to change one iota of my time with my parents. Not Dad’s suffocating worry about my studies and my finances. Not Mum’s ambition and support and sometimes overbearing drive for me to achieve. Not their fierce arguments about politics and history and household chores that always dissolved into wry smiles and stupid jokes and exasperated laughter. Not our dinner table banter, not Dad’s delicious Sunday roasts and Mum’s bizarre, but oddly tasty, chicken curries. It was never perfect. But it was mine, and it’s made me who I am. And perhaps that’s okay. Perhaps being me is just fine.