Lost Daughter

by Ali Mercer

  ‘Do you remember when I came in for my interview?’ she asks him.

  ‘Of course! Of course I do. It was very short, wasn’t it? Partly because I was so preoccupied. And also because you were so determined.’

  ‘I was. I’d had a few rejections by that point. You were up against my wounded pride.’

  ‘Your wounded pride was quite formidable,’ Frank says.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. You said the office appeared to be in chaos and I clearly needed a Girl Friday. You made quite an impression, you know, right from the minute you appeared, taking the steps up to the office two at a time.’

  She remembers that, too: he had been waiting on an upper landing to meet her and she’d said she was looking for Frank Darling, and he had looked her up and down not as if she was a prospective employee and he was the boss, but more as if she was a visitor he was surprised by. And then he had said, You found him. Let’s go and get this over with.

  He clears his throat. ‘So how is Becca? And Mitch?’

  Oh God. He doesn’t know.

  ‘Oh… They’re fine. Becca turned thirteen, so I have a teenager now. And she had a starring role in the school show. Turns out she can really sing.’

  He doesn’t say anything. He just looks at her in that familiar, puzzled way, as if he knows something isn’t quite right but isn’t going to push her to say what it is.

  It would be quite easy not to tell him… to change the subject, and finish her coffee and pastry and say how nice it had been to see him and goodbye.

  It would be easy, but it would leave her feeling like a coward, and knowing that she had been too ashamed to tell the truth.

  ‘Mitch and I have separated,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t in a very good state. I… had a kind of crisis. So I moved out. Becca and Mitch are still in the house, and I see Becca at the weekends.’

  ‘I see. I’m sorry to hear that.’

  And he really does look sorry. And shocked. As if it matters to him to think of her as being happy. As if it genuinely dismays him to learn that things have gone so wrong for her.

  ‘I don’t really know what’s going to happen next,’ she says. ‘Things have settled a bit, and we seem to be getting on a bit better. What I want is to keep things as stable as they can be, for Becca’s sake. It’s so hard for her. Such a difficult age, when so much else is changing. And she adores her father, always has. He played such a big role in bringing her up, they’ve always had a really close bond.’

  She looks down at her hands. Capable hands, not elegant; as her mother had sometimes pointed out, they were like her father’s. A tear splotches onto one, another on the other. She keeps her head down. Frank will have seen that she’s crying, but she would rather nobody else knew it.

  Weeping in public is the ultimate sign of defeat. At one time she would have done her utmost to avoid it. And yet here she is, with tears tripping down her face in a franchise coffee outlet in one of the world’s busiest airports, surrounded on all sides by travellers.

  She reaches for her handbag and there it is, Mitch’s handkerchief, which she has taken to carrying around with her. No particular reason. She just likes it. So why not? She wipes her eyes and looks up at Frank.

  ‘I had depression,’ she says. ‘It started after my mother died. I was on medication for a while, and I had some counselling. I’m doing better now, but I feel like it wouldn’t take much for me to go backwards again.’

  She waits for him to recoil, to make his excuses and leave. He doesn’t. He says, ‘I know how hard it is. I’ve been through it, too.’

  And she’s stunned. Of all the things that he could have said to her, this is the one that she could never have predicted.

  ‘This is not to belittle what happened to either of us,’ he says. ‘But it does happen to a lot of people. There’s no shame in it. Or there shouldn’t be.’

  She says, ‘Do you mind if I ask you when it was? Or would you prefer not to talk about it?’

  ‘I don’t mind talking about it to you,’ he says. ‘It was after my marriage broke up. I felt like a failure. Again, not an unusual experience. But that doesn’t make it any easier. Anyway, I honestly think work got me through it. At least it was something I could do.’ He smiles at her. ‘You always used to cheer me up, too, you know. I knew I could rely on you. That’s a rare thing, in any walk of life.’

  ‘You know, when I had that interview with you I was desperate,’ she says. ‘If you hadn’t taken me on I think I really would have begun to despair. Do you remember you gave me an advance on my first month’s wages? That gave me my freedom. It meant I could leave home. I didn’t even tell my parents I was going. One day I was there, and the next I’d moved out. I know it sounds brutal, but it felt like that was the only way I could do it. Things had been pretty difficult for a while. Actually, it got worse as soon as I got my first Saturday job at the department store, when I was still at school. It was as if even that little bit of independence was a threat.’

  And then she tells him why she’d had to go. As she’s talking she has the strangest sense of familiarity; something about the way he listens, without seeking either to interpret or qualify what she’s saying or do anything other than take it in, reminds her of someone else.

  It isn’t till much later that she realises who it is who has that same calm, receptive, judicious manner, who expresses sympathy but not shock or anger, and who sees her experience not just as an agonising, damaging personal drama, the way Mitch had perceived it – as something isolating and exceptional – but as a kind of trauma that she has in common with many others. It’s Frank’s wisdom that she recognises, and the person it reminds her of is Viv.

  Twenty-Eight

  Rachel

  Nineteen years before the loss

  The minute Rachel let herself in, she knew. Everything had seemed all right when she left that morning to start her Saturday job at Pinkney’s department store. Or at least, it had been as close to all right as it ever was. But now the house was the wrong kind of quiet, and the atmosphere had that weird electricity that lingered after something bad had happened.

  Someone was moving around upstairs. Her mum. Her dad was in the living room, in front of the TV, drinking a beer.

  She said good evening. He grunted and didn’t look at her. He was a big man, thickset, with brawny arms from the removals work he did, and he was powerful in other ways, too; his scowl could instantly darken the mood of a room. Right now, he was in the tense, silent mood that often came before or after an outburst, and meant he had to be left alone. But which was it – had he already blown up, or was he about to? She withdrew and went quietly upstairs, already dreading what she might find.

  Her mum was in the master bedroom. Usually it was immaculate: heart-shaped cushions in pale blue satin arranged on the matching coverlet just so, the vanity set laid out on the white dressing table, the full-length mirror reflecting everything. Rachel’s dad had let her choose exactly what she wanted, and had paid for it all with only a few indulgent complaints about the cost. He did that, sometimes. He’d say, ‘No more than you deserve,’ or ‘Only the best for my girl,’ and Rachel’s mum would look tearful and grateful and wring her hands and he’d tease her: ‘No need to get all het up about it, Joanie. What are you going to do when you really have something to cry about?’

  She had something to cry about now, but she wasn’t sobbing. She never did, in the aftermath. The instinct to make everything go back to normal, to not do anything that he might take as provocation, was much too strong.

  Survival instinct: something terrible happened and she put it back in its box by just carrying on. Despite how frail she sometimes seemed, her ability to keep going was nothing short of miraculous.

  The room was in chaos all around her, as if it had been shaken by an earthquake. The mattress had been yanked off the bed, exposing the frilly valance; the satin coverlet was on the floor, littered with paperbacks that had been swept from the bookcase. The full-le
ngth mirror had survived but the dressing table had been upended, scattering the vanity set, and the china hand that had held her mother’s necklaces had lost them and half its fingers.

  Rachel’s mum was in the middle of it on her hands and knees next to a square of newspaper, picking up shards of glass from the little hand-blown perfume bottle that had never had any perfume in it.

  ‘Oh, Mum. Are you all right?’

  Joanie looked up at her and offered her a smile that was meant to be reassuring, though her eyes were so sad that the effect was anything but. Her fair, curly hair had been pulled out of shape, and her mascara had run and smudged into dark patches.

  She was a small, birdlike woman – Rachel’s dad hated for her to put on weight – and her reflex response to suffering was to be cheerful and plaster a brave face on it. In another kind of life, and another marriage, she would have been the kind of woman who had lots of friends and knew all their troubles. As it was, she was someone other people were wary of. She was unnaturally chirpy; they thought she was nervous and overwrought.

  They had no idea. Or if they did have some idea, it was easier by far for all of them to pretend they didn’t.

  ‘I’m fine, love,’ Joanie said. ‘Just got to straighten up a bit. You wouldn’t mind putting those books back for me, would you?’

  Rachel picked up Perdita’s Prince and Royal Road to Fotheringhay; her mum was fond of historical romances. As she slid them onto the bookshelf she could feel the anger rising inside her. Best suppressed. But she couldn’t keep it down.

  ‘Mum, you don’t have to put up with this, you know,’ she said. ‘He has absolutely no right to treat you like this.’

  Her mother froze. Too late, Rachel heard what she must have heard already – the creak of her dad’s tread on the stairs.

  The door swung open and Jack Steele stood there and stared at them both. He was radiating malevolence: they could have been his worst enemies rather than his wife and child.

  ‘You’re late,’ he said to Rachel. ‘Shouldn’t you be getting the dinner on?’

  Somehow the words were out of Rachel’s mouth before she could stop herself. ‘Maybe you should get it on yourself.’

  He lunged at her and smacked her across the side of her head and she crashed down and curled up with her arm raised to protect herself. Her head was ringing with the shock of it and then her hearing came back and it began to hurt. She touched her ear and looked at her hand and there was no blood, nothing. He’d hit her but he hadn’t punched her, it wouldn’t show, it wouldn’t be obvious, it would pass, if nothing worse happened she’d be able to get away with it—

  He stood there looking down at her; he stepped towards her, and she flinched. He said, ‘I’ve told you before. Don’t talk back.’ Then he went out and slammed the door.

  Rachel’s mum said, ‘Sweetheart. Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m all right,’ Rachel said. And she was, or would be. ‘Could have been worse.’

  She got to her feet. Joanie looked concerned and frightened: not angry. She never got angry. She didn’t see Jack’s behaviour as something he was responsible for – she thought he couldn’t help it.

  It was unusual for Jack to go for Rachel, but then it was unusual for her to challenge him. She’d always been a good girl, beyond reproach. She knew he was proud of her – her school reports, her appearance, her behaviour. ‘Never given us any trouble,’ he would say to people, and they would humour him no matter how often they’d heard it before, because with Jack Steele that was what you did.

  She supposed being proud of her was a kind of love. She was supposed to love him, too – if it was possible to love someone you had to try very hard not to hate.

  ‘I forgot to ask about your day at work,’ Joanie said, with an attempt at a smile. ‘How was it?’

  ‘It was fine.’ She lowered her voice again. ‘Do you think that’s what set him off? Me being out all day?’

  But Joanie didn’t reply. Instead she asked Rachel if she would mind making a start on dinner and went back to picking up pieces of glass, dropping them onto the newspaper so they could be wrapped up safely and thrown away.

  Twenty-Nine

  Leona

  As the plane takes off the woman sitting next to Leona gives her a quick sidelong glance, almost says something, then thinks better of it and opens her book.

  Leona forces herself to let go of the arm-rests. She must look dreadful. She feels it; she has barely slept. Apart from everything else, she hates flying. It’s not being in the air or the possibility of crashing, it’s being shut in and not able to get out.

  Maybe she should have gone by train. It might have been less claustrophobic. But why should she have it easy?

  Her neighbour peers at her again. She’s older than Leona, also travelling alone, casually dressed in jeans and a check shirt: the kind of clothes you wear if you don’t want to draw attention to yourself, if you just want to be left in peace. Probably the last thing she wants or needs is to get dragged into conversation with a panicky fellow traveller.

  Leona has on a backless olive linen sundress covered up by a big Navajo-print cardigan. Not an outfit chosen in order to be forgettable. She can’t bear to wear anything that makes her look like everybody else. Still, she can sympathise with her neighbour’s desire for anonymity. Her own clothes are a kind of disguise, or armour. I don’t care what you think I ought to look like. I look how I choose to look, and it won’t give you any clues about who I once was or where I’ve been.

  Soon she’s going to have to face up to the one person whose opinion of her really matters. And this is just the beginning. One day, Bluebell is bound to want to know what really happened. Why Leona gave her up. And Leona will have to tell her. She owes her that much.

  But when Bluebell knows all of it… will she find it possible to forgive?

  The woman next to her says, ‘Excuse me, but are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I’ll be fine. I’m just a little nervous. I’m sure it’ll pass.’

  ‘Can I ask the cabin crew to get you anything?’

  ‘No, no, thank you, there’s nothing that will help. I just have to get through it.’

  ‘Well, if I can help at all, please just ask,’ the woman says, and turns back to her book.

  Can you turn back time? All the way back to the summer of the heatwave, the day I turned nineteen, and the moment when Jake pressed up against me and said, ‘Why don’t you just ring your parents and tell them you’re staying over with a friend tonight?’

  The woman turns a page and Leona stares out of the window. The view of the airport has already disappeared; all she can see is clouds. The sweat begins to cool on her face.

  Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word, and I shall be healed.

  Funny what comes back to you when you’re on the edge. She hasn’t been to church for years. It’s not church she objects to so much as church people. The idea of the people, judging her. She can’t dispute their right to. It’s just that people who are good – good in an upfront, bumper-sticker kind of way – are sometimes difficult to be around when you know that you are not good, have forfeited any claim to be good, and will never be able to think of yourself as good again.

  Viv is a churchy person, though, and she’s a comfort, like the perfect missing granny. But Viv is one of a kind. She’s accepting. Maybe because she knows what it’s like to live with a secret.

  Sometimes, when Leona feels ill or has a pain that she can’t explain, she likes to think that maybe it is because Bluebell is feeling the same way. As if there’s some kind of psychic bond between them even though they can’t see or touch or talk to each other, and know so little about each other.

  They say that people who have lost limbs can still feel them. Toes that aren’t there can still itch, amputated hands can ache in the cold. Absence is in the mind. Presence, too.

  Leona reaches for the bag she has stashed under her seat and finds Rachel’s gift. The heal
ing crystal. What harm can it do? None. She holds it tight, sits back and closes her eyes. The crystal, cool to the touch at first, begins to warm.

  At nineteen, she’d thrown her life away as carelessly as a child tossing a ball in the park, not realising till it’s too late that it’s gone too far to get back. Now the plane presses on, taking her forward, taking her back, and the past looms large as a planet she’s in orbit over.

  What she had thought of as freedom had ended up as the opposite. But it had started with pure pleasure, heady and thrilling, a rush that had made her feel like herself again after months and months and months of being someone else – a mother, who was someone who had no fun at all.

  She’d forgotten what it was like to be just like anyone else, to be doing the things that everybody else her age was doing. But there she was, standing on the pavement outside a central London pub at the end of a baking-hot August day. And there he was, standing with a group of people her friend Emily had got to know since going to university, which is what Leona would have done that year if she hadn’t had Bluebell.

  He was tanned, as if he worked outside – either that, or he spent a lot of time sunbathing in the park. The short sleeves of his T-shirt exposed lean, lightly muscled arms, and the thought of being any closer to him made Leona blush and tingle in a way that was something else she had forgotten.

  Maybe he was a student, but he didn’t look like it – he looked older, more sure of himself. Emily had been a bit vague about what her new friends actually did, apart from hanging out and going clubbing, but Leona knew they weren’t all at university and some of them lived in a squat. This one didn’t look like he lived in a squat, though. Much too well-groomed.

  He caught Leona looking at him and gave her a big, lazy grin.

  Emily came back from the bar with two pints of lager in plastic glasses and passed one to Leona. Leona’s admirer was still smiling at her and raised his eyebrows as if to say, How about it? Emily glanced over her shoulder and caught sight of him. ‘Happy birthday,’ she said to Leona. ‘There’s your night sorted.’