A Tale of Two Sisters

by Anna Maxted

  ‘Seeking birth son, adopted Birmingham, 1978 . . .’

  ‘Jem: seeks to give message to Stan, missing . . .’

  ‘Nicola, looking for daughter, adopted. Born 1979 . . .’

  ‘Seeking contact with Mum: Joelle, Mexborough? . . .’

  ‘Adopted female, born 1981, seeks mother . . .’

  I scrolled down the list with a cold heart. You fucking careless bastards. After two hours, I was on page forty. There was no sign of anyone named Sarah Paula and I shut the laptop with a snap.

  I had case notes to read through for work, but I was consumed. And then I realised: I had an address. Sarah Paula was eighteen, she certainly lived with her parents, and people who made you give away your illegitimate baby, despite it being their own grandchild, were not the adventurous sort. I bet they were still living in the same house. I called Directory Enquiries, gave the name and address.

  ‘Is it B. Blatt?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said smoothly, and took down the number. I stared at it, dialled.

  ‘Hello?’ said a smart voice.

  ‘Is that the surgery?’ I said.

  ‘You have the wrong number,’ replied my grandmother, and put the phone down.

  No I haven’t. It was an intoxicating thought. I had the power to give this woman a heart attack. It would be the perfect crime. I’d ring back. I’d say, ‘Oh, hello. I’m calling for Sarah Paula. It’s Jane Susan. Remember me?’ She’d suffer a cardiac arrest and fall down dead, and even if the police traced the call, they couldn’t convict me of speaking.

  The phone rang, and I jumped.

  ‘Cassie? It’s Dad. I can’t speak for long, I’m calling from work. I wanted to check you’re ok.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. He seemed to require more, so I added, ‘It’s weird.’

  ‘Yes.’ He paused. ‘You weren’t too upset by the letters?’

  ‘What letters?’

  ‘The letters from Sarah Paula.’

  ‘She didn’t write any letters,’ I said.

  ‘I think you’ll find she did. She wrote to the agency, and then, somehow, she got our address and wrote to us. Vivica hit the roof. Vivica . . . Cassie, I’ll call you back.’

  Sixty seconds later, the phone rang. ‘Mummy will be round shortly,’ said my father. ‘She has some letters to pass on. I’m afraid she saw fit to . . . edit the documentation. We realise this is the right thing for you to do. But . . . don’t be too hard on her.’

  When Mummy showed, she was wearing dark glasses, a headscarf and a beige mac, in deference to some tragic heroine of the silver screen, possibly Audrey Hepburn. She passed over a white envelope. ‘I don’t care what you think, she was a silly, silly girl,’ she said, and stamped back to her new Beetle Convertible in Tornado Red. (Daddy had called it ‘Tomato Red’ by mistake one day and she’d gone mad.)

  ‘God’s sake,’ I muttered, and shut the front door. Then I took the envelope upstairs to my study, and pulled out the letters.

  Sarah Paula’s girlish handwriting, in black ink, was squat and rounded. Thickie handwriting, I thought, with a sneer. The letter was addressed to the General Secretary of the NCAA.

  Will you kindly let me know how my little babe Jane is, I’m so anxious about her, I would have wrote to you last week but I’ve been ill . . . and parting with little Jane hasn’t helped. I know that you will hear from Jane’s new mummy from time to time but I wish you could have someone who could pop in at her new home on the spur of the moment just to see if she is being treated all right.

  The next letter was dated two months later.

  Dear Madam,

  You promised me that after my little girl was taken away that you would get her new mummy to send me a photo of her. Just to give me peace of mind, I will pay whatever it is as I must have a picture of her. I worry so much about her. I am hoping you will let me know all about her and how she is keeping. It would break my heart if I could not get a photo of her. Sorry to trouble you but I know you would feel the same being a mother yourself.

  The third was dated two months after that.

  You must forgive me for bothering you so much. There are just a few things I would like to ask about Jane. If anything should happen to her parents. If they get killed or die and little Jane is left they couldn’t put her in a home if I was still alive could they? Please let me know as it keeps me awake at night and I cry myself to sleep just thinking all sorts of things. If anything was to happen and she was left without parents you would let me know wouldn’t you? I would die if she ever got sent away to an orphanage. I would just search the world over to find her. You say so little when you answer my letters. I don’t want to know where she is, all I want to know is, are her new parents poor people? If I thought she wasn’t getting looked after as she should I’d kill myself as I’m so worried about her. Maybe she’s living with poor people and she never gets any sunshine. Please let me know everything about her as she was one year old yesterday and it just tore a hole in my heart when I thought of her, wondering what sort of birthday she had.

  I folded the letter in half and closed my eyes. I pressed my hand over my mouth, and bent double. The noise in my ears roared so fast and furious I felt that my head might fly off my shoulders and explode like a red paint-bomb. I fought the rising nausea and forced my attention to the next letter.

  I wrote to Mrs Montgomery last week to see if she would do me a favour by writing to me each year. I haven’t had any reply, and no doubt she doesn’t intend to answer my letter. I wonder if you will be good enough to write to her and explain that I won’t bother her any more, if she will just send me one letter a year and a snap of little Jane whenever she can spare one. I know I have no claim on her, all I want is an assurance that she has not come to any harm.

  The reply from the General Secretary was also enclosed.

  The adopters are very sympathetic and understanding towards you, but they do so wish to feel that the little girl is now entirely their own daughter, and they are prepared to give her an excellent upbringing. Now that the adoption has been made legal, you have no further claim to her, and you can never reclaim her. Let me assure you, she is a very fortunate little girl. The adopters do not desire to receive further correspondence from you and are sorry they can not see their way to sending you photographs at intervals. The little girl has recently been taken to a photographer and a copy of the picture will be sent specially for you, but this copy must be the last. We hope that you are now feeling happier, and we will post the photograph as soon as we receive it. Little Jane is really very fortunate.

  Yours sincerely,

  General Secretary

  A whole alternate life spread itself out before me like a red carpet unfurled before royalty. Little Jane was not fortunate, and General Secretary, a mother herself, knew it, whatever she said. Jagger was off the hook. I didn’t care. Nothing mattered, except finding Sarah Paula, my Mr and Mrs Hershlag rolled into one. Of course Mummy had hidden the letters. The ferocity of their passion was alien to a buttoned-up person like her, but even she could sense their power, would know that such a feral love would storm through the years and reclaim me, that when I found her I would fall into Sarah Paula’s beautiful embrace and not look back.

  Chapter 9

  I called Greg. Greg was boss of Hound Dog Investigations. We’d met at a dinner party and hit it off. He was rude and he didn’t care, and I liked that in a man. He didn’t blink when I said I’d like to trace my birth mother. No fuss. Greg was emotionally intelligent. Not like some people – tell them something sad about yourself, they weep, and instead of being touched you’re disgusted, because you know it’s nothing to do with you, it’s all their stuff.

  He listened, told me to assemble all the facts – ‘nothing crap like “she likes opera”. I need information that will help identify her. You don’t know her birth date?’

  ‘I have an address,’ I said, with a pang. How could I not know my own mother’s birthday? ‘And a phone number. I think her paren
ts still live there. I was hoping you’d ring and pretend to be from the council, and trick her address out of her mother.’

  I didn’t say to him what I thought, which was, I didn’t want this to be a long, arduous search, trying to dig out birth certificates, marriage certificates, over weeks and weeks. I wanted it to be one quick trick call, as if I hadn’t gone to any trouble.

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Greg. ‘So what prompted this, girl?’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, airily, ‘I read the letters. She wrote these letters. And then, two weeks after I read them, George was telling my parents that for our fifth wedding anniversary his father was giving him a family heirloom – his gold watch. And my mother – my adoptive mother – remembered something. She’d forgotten it all this time. It was a tiny gold Star of David. We’re Jewish – it’s the equivalent of a crucifix. My original mother had pinned it to my babygro. I thought of her, pinning it. And I think, if only I’d known, if only they had told me . . . because all this time, I’d thought she didn’t . . . but it showed that she . . . I might have tried to find her before.’

  Greg paused. Then he said, ‘We’ll do this one for free, girl. It’ll be our good deed for the century.’

  ‘Greg, you don’t have to.’ But I wanted him to. Not because of the money, but because I was looking for anything that would make this less of a deal, that would squish it and squash it until it was a tiny, tiny, inconsequential nothing.

  ‘I will. Make me feel better about all the other terrible things we do.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  I had lived for so long not tracing my birth mother that our conversation felt surreal. As if I was an imposter in someone else’s life. Perhaps I was. Reading Sarah Paula’s letters, it was as if time was frozen and I could only think of her as eighteen years old, nearly a decade younger than myself, my poor little mummy. Her handwriting was girlish, rounded, it hadn’t lost its puppy fat – no adult I knew wrote like that. It was strange to think that she was now in her mid-forties. I couldn’t see her as a middle-aged woman. I tried to imagine it but the image wouldn’t come.

  I wondered if she lived nearby. In the next street, for example. You hear about that – it happens a lot. One man commissioned Hound Dog to track down his real dad, and it turned out that as a teenager he’d delivered papers to his own father’s house. I don’t think that was mere coincidence. I think with family, real family, there’s an unconscious pull and there’s nothing you can do about it – it’s like the sea is helpless to the pull of the moon.

  Thank God I’d had my teeth whitened. Of course, Sarah Paula wouldn’t care if my teeth were black and rotten – ok, maybe she would, but only because black rotten teeth aren’t really acceptable in today’s society and she wouldn’t want me to be shunned. My black rotten teeth wouldn’t matter to her, is what I mean. And what would I wear? Tricky. It’s no problem deciding what to wear if you want a man to fall in love with you. They’re easy to please. Short of rolling in manure then wrapping yourself in a horse blanket, it’s hard to go wrong. But your own mother? Actually, my own mother was going to be easy. The last time she saw me I was red, scrawny, screaming, and covered in blood. And yet, she yearned for me, there was a physical ache, it was right there, in the letters, the pain dripped off the page. But I wanted her to look at me and think, wow. And, although I saw now that it wasn’t entirely her fault, I wanted her to regret giving me up. I wanted to show her what she’d missed. So. Hair at Michaeljohn. A Pure Collagen Velvet Luxury Facial at the Dorchester Spa. My black Joseph flares. My burgundy snakeskin boots from Pied A Terre with the three-inch heels. A good quality white linen shirt, under my Nicole Farhi lilac cashmere V-neck. My Elsa Peretti letter ‘C’ pendant in sterling silver from Tiffany. My Elsa Peretti teardrop earrings in sterling silver, also from Tiffany (a present to me, from me – George could only afford H Samuel so I told him to save his money). Although, Sarah Paula, aged eighteen, didn’t sound a very Tiffany sort of girl. I didn’t want to frighten her with too much Tiffany. Ah, bloody hell. It wasn’t as if I was planning to pin a twenty-three-thousand-pound gold spider brooch encrusted with diamonds, rubies, emeralds and sapphires to my chest. My Tiffany armory was me and she could take it or leave it. Well, no, actually, she couldn’t leave it. I very much needed her to take it.

  It was the first time in my life that I worried about making a bad impression. I’ve always been of the opinion that other people can accommodate me. You get nowhere being soft. I’ve never gone for that girly big-eyed wheedle-you-round shit. Women who beg and cajole to get what they want are not only stupid, they are traitors – they tarnish the rest of us, make us ashamed to be female. I find it more effective to intimidate people. That way, they respect you, even if they hate you. But usually they’re drawn to you, because you have faith in yourself, an irresistible trait. You see them watching, hoping that some of your shine will rub off. They want to ingratiate themselves. It means you’ll probably get what you want.

  But I wasn’t so sure that this strategy was appropriate now. I was feeling . . . doubt. For once, maybe softness was the way to go. I’d never given softness the time of day. I wasn’t even sure how to act soft. What do you do, get a feathered fringe? Lizbet had a softness to her. I don’t mean that she was feeble. When I was little she was superb at making my life a misery, a master of psychological torture. In technique, at least, she would have been an asset to the KGB. But at the core, she was a gentle person. There’d always be a point in The Bravery Test – usually after she’d made me sit on a bunch of brown thistles from Mummy’s dried flower display – where my eyes might water, and she’d fall on me, covering me in gloopy kisses, promising sweets. I’d claw and scratch to extract myself from her grip and run off and she’d lumber after me, shouting, ‘Cassie! Please! Wait!’ She needed to please people.

  I needed to please Sarah Paula. This wasn’t a confrontation. I wanted to be, damn it, mothered. I wanted someone to call me ‘My Darling Little One’. I wanted her to step into my house and start folding my underwear. She could even lick her finger and wipe dirt off my face with spit.

  I had to soften or she wouldn’t dare. Whereas Lizbet was huggable and people wanted to protect her, they saw me as hard and unapproachable. And they saw right. I didn’t expect Sarah Paula to be up to protecting anyone, let alone me – my nickname at work is Steel Claw – but I wanted her to feel that I was giving her the option.

  It struck me that Sarah Paula and Lizbet would get on. I knew they would. In fact, I couldn’t wait to introduce them. I wasn’t sure where we’d meet – maybe in a royal park or a museum, somewhere casual, yet of note – but I wished that Lizbet could be there, like an asset, alongside the shoes, the hair, the jewellery, the white teeth; see, look, this is my sister, I haven’t done too badly, have I?

  Lizbet was not going to be there, as I wasn’t going to tell her any of this. She would crumble. Let me explain about Lizbet. Lizbet has been happy and cosy with Tim for years. They have a fun little lifestyle, just the two of them. Amusing, low-stress jobs, no kids, no desire for kids, just meaningless sex and general frivolity. She doesn’t like change. As far as family goes, she likes what she’s familiar with, even if what she’s familiar with isn’t that fabulous. To discover that her childhood and our relationship were based on a lie would damage her. I didn’t want to be the one to inflict that wound. Anyway, if she was ever to know, Mummy and Daddy should be the ones to tell her. I felt it wasn’t my lie to confess to.

  But in the grand reunion I was going to have with my real mother, I could still fantasise about Lizbet as an appeasing presence. If there were any awkward silences, Lizbet would smooth them over, leaning forward with that smile of hers, the smile that warmed you from the inside-out, like a mug of hot chocolate, the perfect question on her lips to draw Sarah Paula out of herself. I had this fear that I might perch there in dumb silence, sitting on my hands, a daft smile on my face – me, Cassandra Gabriella Montgomery, who was unfazed by anything and anyone; becau
se most people were all the same in being nothing to me.

  I wondered if I’d recognise her. After all, this would be our second meeting. I told George that I was tracing my mother, and all he could say was ‘weird’. (And then two minutes later, ‘Cassie! Your sister’s cat has pissed in my sports bag!’)

  I had expected him to understand, but he didn’t, and in those few seconds I saw the ground between us split in two. Not to make light of accidentally dropping my marriage and cracking it, but the mental landscape was like something out of Tremors.

  ‘Do you need to?’ he added later. ‘I could understand it if you were eighteen.’

  I was shocked to the core. I knew he was selfish, but I’d always assumed he was selfish for us, not just for him. It hit me that he liked the fact that I had a ho-hum relationship with my parents. George didn’t want to be knocked off the top spot. I lost all respect for him then. If he didn’t understand my need to find my real mother, then he had no respect for what I, as an abandoned baby, had suffered in being given up. (Actually, I didn’t think I had suffered that much, but George wasn’t to know that. It was the principle.)

  Although he did speak to Mummy who rang, allegedly ‘to see if you’d received the email’ (a photograph of a squirrel on waterskis). She said to George, apropos of nothing, ‘So. It could all end happily for Cassie,’ and I knew she was frightened. The role of mother in a family does tend to be assumed by a single person. And yet – unlike George – she was trying to see it my way. I almost felt sorry for her, because I didn’t think she could help it, being the mother she was.

  ‘Ask Cassie to call me if she has a moment,’ she’d said, but I didn’t. I had tunnel vision. Sure, my life was fine, but here was a whole new life. And don’t we all want to refresh our lives once in a while? I was like a gauche teenager dreaming of romance: the details were fuzzy but the gist was clear. Walking through rippling meadows, arms linked, laughing over coffee in a spacious white kitchen while the sun streamed in through the windows – perhaps she lived somewhere hot? I didn’t doubt that she’d never forgiven her parents for forcing her to give me up. I could understand if she’d put oceans between them.