Lost Daughter

by Ali Mercer

  Becca contemplates this for a moment; she looks slightly resentful, as if Rachel has just blamed her for something that she’s in no way responsible for. Then she says, ‘I didn’t know Leona had a daughter.’

  ‘No reason why you should. It’s probably not the kind of thing I would have told you. She had her when she was quite young, and gave her up for adoption.’

  Had she mentioned Leona to Becca? She must have done. It was odd that Becca had remembered – she didn’t usually take all that much interest in parts of Rachel’s life that didn’t directly involve her.

  ‘She was round the other day,’ Becca says. ‘I think she’s working on some kind of business thing with Dad.’

  ‘Is she? He didn’t tell me. I haven’t been in touch with her for ages.’

  ‘Yeah, they looked at stuff on the computer and then we went to the weir.’

  ‘You went there? That’s quite a long walk.’

  ‘Yeah. It was my idea, actually. They asked where I thought would be a good place to go, and it’s always nice there in the summer. We all had ice cream at the lock house.’

  OK, so there was nothing wrong with Mitch and Becca and Leona going to the weir. It was a nice place. A favourite place. They were lucky to have it close by.

  But there was everything wrong with it. It was just plain weird. What was Leona doing ignoring her and hanging out with her husband and kid? Because Mitch was still her husband. And Leona was her friend… or had been, until not so very long ago, anyway.

  Elaine comes out of the house carrying the pinboard with the photos, and Rachel gets out of the car to take it from her.

  ‘Are you sure you want it?’ Elaine says.

  ‘I’m sure,’ Rachel tells her, and puts it in the boot.

  ‘Thanks for your help today,’ Elaine says. ‘We’ll be in touch.’

  She startles Rachel by pulling her into a quick, clumsy embrace, then abruptly withdraws, as if she’s as taken aback as Rachel is by this sudden display of emotion.

  ‘I’m sure it made a difference for Aidan having someone familiar there,’ she says. ‘I suppose that’s what we all need when we’re in a strange situation – someone to rely on. I can see that he trusts you.’

  ‘I suppose he does,’ Rachel says.

  But it is frightening to be trusted, especially by someone as vulnerable as Aidan. A huge responsibility. An honour, and one she can only pray she can live up to.

  Maybe Mitch hasn’t told her about his meetings with Leona because he’s worried that she’ll think something’s going on? She can see why he might be worried, given the way she’d behaved on Becca’s thirteenth birthday.

  Aidan might trust her, but Mitch doesn’t and neither does she. She doesn’t trust herself to see clearly or stay calm, or to keep her head above water. She may have managed to emerge from the Deep, but she will always be afraid of sinking back down again, and losing sight of the light.

  Forty

  It’s all still uncomfortably familiar: the same old questions about sex and appetite and arguments and suicidal thoughts and sleep, and Sophie Elphick’s carefully neutral expression as she notes down Rachel’s replies, each one a number, a score between 0 and 10. The feeling that comes over Rachel as she answers is familiar, too: the same old sense of shame, the awareness of having a weakness, an Achilles’ heel. She will always need to be on the lookout for the warning signs: unhealthy thoughts, anger, anxiety, and other signs of strain. She will have to watch herself, and not give in.

  But at the same time, it’s completely different. This is a one-off follow-up session, designed to assess whether she’s continued to benefit from the counselling programme since it ended. It’s a reminder – both of how bad things had been and of how much has changed, and how time has moved on and carried her along with it.

  It’s not just that it is high summer, although that does mean that she feels less closed in with Sophie Elphick than when the blinds were down and it was dark outside; Sophie in a short-sleeved T-shirt looks a little bit more like a casual visitor, less like a professional than before. The bedsit is also quieter than usual, and it is undeniably a relief not to be interrupted by moans of sadomasochistic pleasure from Miss Spank, who had suddenly moved out the week before. Thankfully, none of her other neighbours have chosen this particular time to put on their very loud music, or to stand in the front garden, just outside her window, arguing on their mobiles and smoking. It could almost just be her and Sophie there, as if she lived in her own private house.

  But the real difference is nothing to do with her surroundings.

  Several of Sophie’s standard mood-assessment questions are about a nominal special person in her life, and what her relationship with that person is currently like. Sophie has never wanted to know who she’s thinking of, but it’s always been Becca. Back in the autumn, she had seen little hope for them; she had been terrified that Becca would eventually reject her completely. But now it is obvious to her – and it must be to Sophie, too, even without the reams of data from all these questionnaires in front of her – that she’s more hopeful. Either that, or her situation has become less bleak. Which of the two had come first? She can’t be sure, but she suspects that at least some of the improvement is down to Viv. And Leona too, even if she has decided to abandon her and inveigle Mitch into some business venture or other instead.

  And Becca. She still often feels as if she’s treading on eggshells when they’re together: she knows that if she pushes for intimacy, if she tries too hard to encourage Becca to speak openly about her feelings, she’ll make her clam up. To some extent that’s just who Becca is, at this stage of her life. Surely it’s important to respect her right to privacy… But also, to be there for her, to be ready should she ever want to talk.

  But it’s difficult. Becca seems to be doing better academically, but she’s cagey about the social side of school. Rachel assumes she’s still pally with Amelia Chadstone, but if she mentions Amelia, Becca is quick to close the conversation down or change the subject. Becca is wary of talking about Mitch, too, which has the effect of making much of her home life a no-go area. Maybe it would seem like a betrayal, or maybe it’s just easier for her to keep her parents as separate as possible.

  But for all that, Becca seems more relaxed during their Saturdays together than she was back in the autumn. More trusting. Rachel tells herself that it’s being together that counts, not what they can and can’t talk about. Rebuilding, however gradually. Keeping it going.

  At one time she thought she’d lost Becca completely. But Becca’s still there, and even if she’s not particularly demonstrative or affectionate, she doesn’t seem to hate her.

  When they come to the end of the questionnaire Rachel tells Sophie, ‘I get the feeling that my numbers were a little higher than back in the autumn.’

  ‘They were, actually,’ Sophie says, scrolling through a couple of pages on the iPad on which she has noted Rachel’s scores. ‘You had a lot of twos and threes back then. Now you’re in the low to normal range.’

  ‘Low to normal. It’s not exactly what you’d want as an epitaph, is it? Still, I suppose it’ll do.’

  Sophie raises her eyebrows fractionally, then drops them. Rachel can almost hear her making a mental note: Appeared in good humour. Joked.

  ‘So,’ Sophie says, ‘is there anything in particular you’re concerned about at the moment?’

  ‘Not really concerned, as such. I suppose you could say I have things on my mind. I had a friend, a dear friend who I lost recently; her memorial service was on Saturday. She was an older lady – died of a heart attack. I think about her and her son, how he’s coping, how it will affect him, whether he is missing her and can’t say. He has learning difficulties. I got to know him because I used to take her to see him once a week, and I’m going to carry on visiting now she can’t any more.’

  ‘I see. And your involvement with him – that’s something you want to continue then?’

  ‘Oh, yes. It makes me
feel close to her, somehow. He reminds me of her. Even though he has no filters – he doesn’t hide anything. But there’s a kindness about him.’ She thinks of the warm touch of Aidan’s hand when she led him into the church. ‘A sort of solidity. He’s very steadfast. When he’s decided you’re all right, that’s that, you’re in.’

  ‘That sounds like a beneficial development.’

  ‘It is. The thing I’ve realised about Viv – that was my friend – is that we sort of adopted each other. I never would have expected to have a friendship like that with someone so much older. But she gave me something I’d been missing ever since my mother died. Before that, even, if I’m honest. Even while Mum was still alive, we were never really close. We weren’t able to be.’

  There is a pause. Rachel wonders if she’s about to start crying. She says, ‘I’m sorry. I know these sessions aren’t meant to be about dwelling on the past.’

  ‘Well, strictly speaking, it’s not a therapy session,’ Sophie says. ‘It’s an evaluation. So if there is something you want to say… Do go on.’

  ‘It seems disloyal. Mum would have hated to be talked about like this,’ Rachel says. ‘I mean, she would have been furious. She was desperate for everyone to think we had a perfectly normal, happy home. After my dad died it was even more important for her to believe that. She clung to it… although she seemed to need to drink a lot to carry on believing it. You’d have thought she barely knew how to live without him. And perhaps she didn’t.’

  Labels, a diagnosis: that would have made it easier, would have turned their home life into a case study, a kind of story that could be analysed and explained. The end product of various factors, which had generated other factors, spilling out toxic influences like radioactive decay. But for that to happen, it had to be talked about. Words had to be found for it. And her mother hadn’t wanted it to be spoken of. What lived on in Rachel’s memory was the atmosphere in the house, as physical and present as an unpleasant smell or the sound of traffic in the background: suppressed aggression, the fear that it might cease to be suppressed, and the outbursts that you could never quite see coming, or prevent.

  ‘My dad was what you might call controlling,’ she says at last. ‘He didn’t want my mother working outside the home; he didn’t like for her to have friends, or to go out, and if she left the house she had to be back by a certain time. Sometimes if she broke the rules he’d be all right about it. And sometimes she’d do some tiny little thing he didn’t like, and he’d explode. He’d shout, break things, push her around, pull her hair. Sometimes he’d put his hands round her neck like he was going to strangle her. He was so strong – when he was like that, when he’d lost it, all you wanted was for it to stop. But however out of control he seemed, he never used to hit her so it would show.

  ‘I learned to keep quiet, keep my head down. When I heard things happening sometimes I’d go in the room… I’d beg him to stop. I think I hoped that me being there might make a difference. Maybe it did, I don’t know… if she felt a little bit less alone with it. Then I’d help her clear up afterwards. I know it sounds terrible, we both knew it was terrible, but it was just part of our lives. It’s extraordinary what you can learn to live with as if it’s normal.

  ‘Then I got a Saturday job, and that changed things. He didn’t like it. On my first day he lost it with Mum, and when I came home I was more challenging with him than usual and he hit me, which he never did, normally – he reserved it for Mum. I was more careful after that. But finally I finished school and got a full-time job, and I moved out. I had a plan; I had it all worked out. That was when I was going to rescue her. I knew that if I could persuade her to enjoy herself and relax a little, she would see that life could be different for her, and that would be the beginning of persuading her to leave.

  ‘So I talked her into meeting me. I was going to take the day off, and we were going to get together at a time when we knew he’d be at work.’

  The old green pinboard is still where she had left it when she brought it back from Viv’s, propped up against the wall opposite the sofa. Aidan, Becca and Bluebell: three reminders. Childhood passed, children changed. Would she have told Viv about all this eventually? Could she have told Leona? She might have, if they’d had enough time. The problem with time was, you never knew when it was about to run out.

  ‘It never happened,’ she says. ‘A few weeks after I left home he was diagnosed with a particularly aggressive kind of cancer – one of the types you get from asbestos; he’d been an electrician when he was younger, and he’d worked in a lot of buildings that had it. Six months later he was dead. Even though I hated him, it was a massive shock – that he could go from being so strong to so weak so quickly. I think there were two things that kept me sane: Mitch and work. I hadn’t been seeing Mitch for that long then, but he was just… I never would have thought I could love a man that much. And I knew there was a whole other world out there for me, that things could be different to the way they had been. I wanted Mum to see that, too, but it was too late.

  ‘She would never hear a word against my dad after he died. She wouldn’t let me help her, either. Not with money, and not with the claim for compensation. She started to drink, and let things go – I think she just didn’t see the point any more. After she passed away I found out she’d remortgaged the house and racked up loads of debt. I got it sorted, but in the end there was nothing left. Anyway, when I did what I did to Mitch – when I flew into a rage with him over my stupid jealousy – he told me I was just like my father, and that haunted me, afterwards. My father’s the last person I would ever want to be like.’

  ‘Do you think you are like him?’’

  ‘No. At the time I thought maybe Mitch was right. I don’t any more. What I did was wrong and I’m sorry I did it – I shouldn’t have lashed out the way I did. But what happened to Mitch when he hurt his hand was an accident. It’s different to the way my dad bullied my mum all those years.’

  Sophie nods. ‘We all need to control our aggression, and find ways of channelling it that don’t harm other people. That doesn’t mean anger is a bad thing in itself. Anger can actually be a constructive emotion, a spur to action: it’s what you do with it that counts. But guilt can hold us back. Sometimes it’s possible to become attached to guilt, to use it as a way to keep on beating yourself up because that’s what you think you ought to do. If you’re really sorry for what you’ve done and have tried to make amends, it may be time to let the guilt go.’ She draws a deep breath. ‘Do you think there are any points of similarity between your relationship with Mitch and your parents’ relationship… any parallels, or echoes?’

  Rachel stares at Sophie. This is new territory. ‘No, I don’t think so. I mean, I always worked. That was really important to me. Mum wasn’t allowed to. And Mitch is an artist. He’s about as different to my dad as it’s possible to be.’

  Sophie doesn’t say anything: she just waits – that significant counselling pause that means you’re being left to work something out for yourself.

  ‘I loved him,’ Rachel says eventually. ‘As time went on, I knew he wasn’t happy. But I always felt that it wasn’t really me he was dissatisfied with: it was himself. Maybe somebody else would have brought out something different in him.’

  Sophie says, ‘Were you happy?’

  Rachel shrugs. ‘I felt I just had to keep going.’

  ‘It’s very important to look after yourself, as well as other people,’ Sophie reminds her. ‘Now, do you remember the techniques we talked about that you can use to calm yourself if you feel your emotions are becoming overwhelming? Maybe we should revisit those.’

  This is more comfortable territory for Sophie; breathing exercises, in through the nose and out through your mouth, smell the strawberry and blow out the candle, think of a time and place when you were happy or someone you were happy with. Then the hour is over, and Sophie wishes Rachel well, reminds her of the various websites and group meetings she can turn to for support, a
nd gets up to leave.

  On the way out she spots the framed school portrait of Becca, smiling awkwardly against a mottled blue background, which is on the top of the chest of drawers next to the picture of her as a much younger child, in her red sundress, and the study for the Persephone painting.

  ‘I hope you don’t me asking,’ Sophie says, ‘but is that your daughter?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s Becca.’

  ‘I’ve met her. It was just before Christmas last year. I was invited to St Anne’s to give the girls a talk, and she fainted. I felt terrible afterwards. I hope she was all right?’

  ‘Oh yeah, yeah, she was fine. Bit shaken up.’

  ‘She’s been OK since?’

  ‘Yeah, she has.’

  ‘That’s good to hear,’ Sophie says. ‘You know, it’s a real achievement to have a positive relationship with your daughter after your own childhood was so difficult. I know it’s been a challenging time for you, but it sounds as if Becca’s thriving.’

  ‘If Becca’s doing all right that’s probably more to do with Mitch than me,’ Rachel says. ‘He’s the primary carer.’

  ‘He may well be, but you’re still her mother. Whatever you’re doing, you’ve just got to keep it up.’

  ‘I still think I sometimes get things a bit out of proportion,’ Rachel says. ‘There’s this friend of mine, a friend I don’t really see any more. Suddenly she seems to be seeing a lot of Mitch. I don’t like it. I don’t get it. I’m even starting to wonder if something might be going on. But I’m actually scared to try and find out, in case I blow up again—’

  ‘Just remember the breathing exercises,’ Sophie says firmly. She holds out her hand for Rachel to shake. ‘Good luck.’ And with that she takes her leave.

  Forty-One

  Aidan has been quiet and subdued ever since the memorial service. He refuses outright to leave the visitors’ room and go to the little café; it is as if he has used up all his tolerance for venturing further afield, and wishes only to ensconce himself in familiar surroundings.