by Holly Watt
‘It sounds wonderful.’
‘He always loved walking along those cliffs. But the paths are terribly crumbly. He must have just missed his footing,’ Vivienne said firmly.
‘Of course,’ said Casey. ‘Did you visit the other places he was sent?’
‘Some of them, yes. Cairo, once or twice. Delhi. Robin and I went on the triangle around Agra and Jaipur not long after we were married. Daddy always enjoyed showing us new places.’
‘And Dhaka?’
The slightest hesitation. ‘Once.’
‘When was that?’
The shortest pause. ‘Two or three years ago? Not long after he had moved across there. Not long after my mother . . .’
They chatted on. And finally, Casey said, ‘Thank you so much, I won’t take up any more of your time, you’ve been so very helpful.’
She hung up, typed up a few paragraphs for Harry, and then turned to Miranda. ‘I’m quite sure of it,’ she said. ‘It’s her.’
13
Vivienne Hargreaves lived in a Devon longhouse, on the edge of one of the prettiest villages. The house made up one side of a cobbled courtyard, and old stone barns another two. Casey and Miranda admired the slabs of granite, the daffodils bobbing in a stone trough. Pink and red camellias climbed the north wall. A black Labrador, sunning himself on a mounting block, barked what might have been a welcome.
‘I’m a bit busy . . .’ Vivienne opened the door, a child squalling behind her.
‘It won’t,’ Casey smiled automatically, ‘take very long.’
Her father’s just died, Casey had said to Miranda, before leaving the office. Shouldn’t we wait?
For how long? Miranda’s jaw was set.
I don’t know.
There we go.
Is everything OK with . . . You know.
Yes. Fine.
‘We’re from the Post,’ Casey spoke to Vivienne. ‘Actually, we talked yesterday. About your father.’
‘Oh,’ Vivienne smiled. ‘His obituary. Of course.’
The hall was dark, with small windows and granite flagstones, uneven in places. In the kitchen behind Vivienne, Casey could see rows of bottled fruit, and strawberry jam prettily labelled. Two canaries hopped around a cage.
‘Shall we go into the sitting room?’ Vivienne was polite, but not instinctively warm. ‘They’re so inconvenient, these old houses. Impossible to heat. But we do love it here.’
Vivienne had thick dark hair and a strong jaw. Her green eyes were small, with firm eyebrows in a straight line above. She would be pretty, glossed up in London, Casey thought.
‘Your house is very beautiful,’ Casey said obediently.
Vivienne smiled around at her. She was prodding the fire, kneeling down without a thought for her sensible blue jumper and grey cords. The mantelpiece was covered in copperplate invitations, and there was a framed photograph of Vivienne, beaming, holding a tiny baby outside a beautiful church. Toys were scattered around the room. A wooden xylophone here, a stuffed lion there. An illustrated Snow White lay spine up on the floor, a pretty girl smiling on the cover.
‘Thank you.’ Vivienne sat back on her heels. ‘Can I get you tea, coffee?’
‘Tea would be lovely,’ said Miranda. Because a hot drink always slowed the pace.
‘I won’t be a moment.’
Vivienne crossed the hall to the kitchen, and they heard her switch on a kettle.
Casey and Miranda looked at each other, thoughtfully. They didn’t speak.
‘Theo’s out for the day with my husband, Robin,’ Vivienne came back in. ‘And Josie is meant to be asleep in her room, although she doesn’t seem too keen on that.’
The grizzling continued from upstairs. Vivienne handed around flowered teacups and saucers. How do you take it? Milk? Sugar?
‘Now,’ said Vivienne, in the end. ‘How can I help you?’
‘We’re researching,’ Miranda said, quite calmly, ‘surrogacy in Bangladesh. We have reason to believe that your children were born out there, and that your father helped you get a passport for them to bring them home to England.’
Vivienne froze, perched on the edge of her armchair. The saucer fell from her hands, smashing pink and white chips over the flagstones. Vivienne put her hands to her mouth, holding back the scream.
‘What do you mean?’ Vivienne just managed to control her voice. As Miranda began to speak again, the scream burst out. ‘Get out of my house. How dare you? How dare you? Go to hell.’
‘Here.’ Casey stepped forward to help, but Vivienne was pushing her away with a sudden violence. Don’t touch me.
The room was silent, for a moment. Vivienne’s eyes flicked to the photograph, the baby wrapped in the long white dress. Her hands clenched.
‘I am very sorry to ask you about this, Mrs Hargreaves,’ began Miranda.
‘No,’ Vivienne spat. ‘You’re not. You’re not remotely sorry.’
But there was no denial in her voice. Vivienne slid out of her seat, down to the floor, automatically feeling for bits of china.
‘I don’t . . .’ She tried for calm too late. ‘I don’t know what you mean . . .’
‘We’re just trying to find out what is going on in Bangladesh,’ said Casey softly. ‘We have heard some very disturbing things, and we need to understand. Careful,’ she put out a hand again, ‘you’ll cut yourself.’
‘What do you care?’ Vivienne looked up from the floor, crouched among the shards. Her lips were pulled back from her teeth, almost a snarl. ‘You’ll never be able to prove a thing. Even if the clinic was raided by the police, our names wouldn’t be on anything. Theo is my child, mine and Robin’s. And that’s the end of it. The DNA . . . Everything.’
‘Look.’ Casey kneeled down on the floor beside Vivienne. ‘We can keep you and your family out of this. But we think terrible things are happening to women in Bangladesh, right now. And it may have got worse after Theo was born, for all we know. If you tell us what happened, it could help us find out what is going on.’
‘I want you to get out of my house.’
‘That,’ Miranda said quietly, ‘won’t help anyone.’
There was a long silence. Vivienne looked at Casey, across the old Persian rug. She pushed herself backwards to sag against the armchair.
‘We would, ’ Casey repeated, ‘keep you and your family out of it.’
A gust of wind blew around the courtyard, sending a door banging outside.
‘Why should I trust you?’ Vivienne’s voice was sullen.
‘You don’t have to,’ said Casey. ‘But we will have to go to the police with what we know already. And then it will be the police that come for you, not us.’
‘No,’ said Vivienne. ‘Please. You don’t understand. We were so desperate for Theo. We would have done anything. Anything.’
‘I know,’ said Miranda gently.
‘How,’ said Casey, ‘did this all begin?’
‘Do you promise?’
Casey looked at her. ‘I promise.’
Vivienne stared at her, for a long time. Then she climbed back onto the armchair.
‘It was Dr Greystone.’ Her voice was dull. ‘In Harley Street. We had been seeing him for months. Years. And nothing was working. Not the drugs, not the IVF. Nothing. It becomes your whole world. You can’t think about anything else. And every month, it gets worse, as time slips away. And one day you get one more call from one more friend – “We’re pregnant!” And you can’t stop crying.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Casey automatically, thinking: Dr Greystone. Dr Greystone.
‘It cost a fortune too,’ Vivienne said. ‘An absolute fortune. And people, who really mean the best, start saying, “Shouldn’t you and Robin get a move on? You’ve been married for years now.” And you can’t believe anyone could be so stupid, and thoughtless, and cruel.’
‘As if it’s so easy,’ said Miranda.
‘Exactly.’ Vivienne spun towards her. ‘When you’re growing up, and you’re reading Just S
eventeen and More, they all imply a man just has to look at you . . . And then . . .’
‘So what happened,’ Casey asked gently, ‘with Dr Greystone?’
‘We had been trying and trying,’ said Vivienne. ‘And I could get pregnant. I just couldn’t stay pregnant. No matter what they did. They tried everything. And one appointment, Dr Greystone just asked, had I considered surrogacy? And I hadn’t. I mean, I knew that some people did it. In America, and places like that. But it’s different in the UK. Much more complicated. I could never understand the idea of women just giving up their babies. To go through all that and then just give them away. What if they didn’t hand them over? I just couldn’t take anything more, not then.’
Vivienne had picked up the stuffed lion without thinking, stroking its golden coat.
‘So what did he recommend?’ Casey was lining up china chips on the coffee table. ‘Dr Greystone?’
‘First, he suggested Nepal,’ said Vivienne.
‘Why Nepal?’ Miranda’s voice was calm.
‘Dr Greystone said surrogacy was becoming much trickier in India.’ Vivienne was sounding more confident now. ‘He said you didn’t quite know what was going to happen in India, that it would be much more straightforward in Nepal, and there was a woman ready to do it. Keen, even. It would be really helpful to her and her family. And we thought about it, and we knew we had to try. After that, we just got more and more excited. But just when we were counting down the days to start, Nepal changed the rules.’
‘Their supreme court banned it for everyone except Nepalis,’ said Casey thoughtfully.
It was the earthquake in 2015, oddly, that shone a searchlight on surrogacy in Nepal. To avoid the Indian ban on gay couples, some surrogates were being inseminated in India and then shipped back over the border to Nepal. When the earthquake struck the Himalayas, killing almost 9,000 people, foreign governments rushed to save the babies. One 747 landed in Ben-Gurion with twenty-six brand-new Israeli babies on board. Of course, there was no airlift for the surrogate mothers.
Nepal wasn’t the only workaround the Indian industry had identified either, Casey knew. By the time of the earthquake, women were being recruited in Kenya, and flown over to Mumbai to be inseminated. When they were 24 weeks pregnant, the women were flown back to Africa, to give birth in designated hospitals in Nairobi a few months later. The parents then picked up their children in Kenya. Three continents, working in an odd sort of unity.
‘Dr Greystone called us into his office one day,’ said Vivienne, gathering pieces of china in the palm of her hand. ‘He said that if we went ahead, he couldn’t be sure we would be allowed to bring the baby home from Nepal, after all. He warned us that it might turn into a complete nightmare. I just collapsed, right there in his office. I remember crying and crying. I said I just couldn’t go on. It had felt like we were so close, finally. But now it was all going to be taken away, just like that.’
The baby had stopped crying upstairs. The house was silent.
‘Then what happened?’ asked Miranda.
‘Dr Greystone called me a few days later,’ Vivienne said. ‘He knew who my father was, you see. It must have come up, in one of our chats. He was nice, Dr Greystone. And we had been seeing him for so long that he knew that my father had moved from Cairo to Dhaka. He had been very kind when my mother died. He knew that she was desperate to be a grandmother.’
Vivienne’s eyes filled with tears again. She looked much younger when she was crying.
‘What did Dr Greystone say when he called you?’ Casey edged Vivienne forwards.
‘He said he’d been thinking,’ said Vivienne. ‘He said they might have found a way to do it in Bangladesh. But that it would need my father’s help to get a passport for the baby.’ Vivienne stared into the heart of the fire. ‘I suppose I knew there was something wrong. Why would they need my father if it was all being done by the book?’
She turned and looked Miranda straight in the eye. ‘But I didn’t care any more.’ She spoke each word with precision. ‘I didn’t care what it would take.’
‘So you rang your father?’
‘Yes.’ Vivienne raised her jaw. ‘I begged him. I pleaded.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He was furious with me,’ said Vivienne. ‘He said he could never countenance anything like that. That I should never even have asked. He put the phone down on me. And he would never do that normally . . . Never.’
‘But you called him back?’ Miranda was watching Vivienne intently.
‘The next day,’ said Vivienne. ‘I told him that Hugh – that’s my brother, he’s in Hong Kong at the moment – was never going to settle down. Not for years. Not ever, if we’re all honest with each other. And didn’t he want grandchildren? And of course my father did, desperately. But he still wouldn’t agree.’
‘Did he put down the phone again?’ Casey asked.
‘Not that time,’ said Vivienne. ‘No.’
Casey imagined it: the daughter weeping down the phone, frantic to her father. Sir William, shaking his head.
She saw him again, the old man in his tattered straw hat, in the green shade of an old olive tree.
‘Robin wasn’t sure either,’ said Vivienne. ‘He wanted to be a father, always had. But he thought we might end up in trouble. By then, Dr Greystone was promising us that the situation was under complete control. Total control, he said. Every step of the way. And so I begged Robin. In the end, I threatened my father. I know it sounds awful, but I did. I said I just wouldn’t go on . . . Couldn’t bear it . . . I half-meant it, in the end.’
That was when he snapped, Casey knew. The emotional blackmail. A lifetime of honour laid aside for his daughter.
‘You don’t know what it is like.’ Vivienne’s eyes were dull. ‘Your life divides into segments. Two weeks of misery, because it hasn’t happened, yet again. Then two weeks of slow-growing hope. Convincing yourself that this is the month. Then that despair, crushing, again. Another month gone, another month older. It’s the same circle, again and again. Because a month is just enough for the whole trajectory. From hope to despair and back again. That’s one of the things you learn. Hope and despair, and hope and despair. And everywhere you look, there are pregnant women, and babies. Even calves and lambs, for God’s sake. On every street corner, in every magazine, in every single conversation. Because everyone can do it, except you. It starts to feel like some terrible sentence, for a crime you haven’t committed. A sentence that gets a month longer, and then a month longer, every single time. And every month is worse. And one day, you realise that it’s never going to end. That you’re just going to be sad, for ever.’
‘And what happened’ – Miranda brought her back – ‘out in Bangladesh?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Vivienne, and they could see she was telling the truth. ‘I didn’t want to know, not really. We had frozen embryos already, of course. They had been made in Harley Street, months earlier. Always seemed like a strange thing, that my first act as a mother was to have those embryos shoved into a freezer.’
Casey thought of those little half-lives, in test tubes, trapped in ice, stashed in long metal rows.
‘I suppose the embryos were flown out to Bangladesh,’ said Vivienne. ‘God knows how they organised that. They must have found a way. And a few weeks later, Dr Greystone told us that the surrogate was pregnant. And I remember the feeling when we got to twelve weeks . . . The glory . . . The absolute wonder . . . That was when I started believing it might actually work. That it might happen.’
‘And then you flew out to Bangladesh?’ Casey tried to imagine Vivienne in the sprawl of Dhaka. The endless traffic, the tuk-tuks everywhere, the beggars at the lights.
You get to know them. Casey’s fixer had turned to her once, gesturing. That had been in Gulshan, at a particularly chaotic junction, five roads tangling like wool. This girl here, you see her? Cleaning the windscreens. I have been seeing her at this crossing since she was a baby. She’s always
here, at this junction. And she’ll always be here. Unless she is hit by a car, of course. That happens. That happens a lot.
Vivienne glanced around her sitting room, at the silver glowing in the cabinet in the corner, and a painting of a stern Edwardian lady over a crammed bookshelf. Next to the Edwardian matron there was a watercolour of Vivienne, hopeful at twenty, untouchable behind glass.
‘It was extraordinary, Bangladesh,’ Vivienne said. ‘I’ve visited my father in all sorts of places, of course. But never anywhere as chaotic as Dhaka. Have you been there?’
‘Yes,’ said Casey. ‘A couple of years ago.’
‘Dr Greystone told us when to fly out to Bangladesh,’ said Vivienne. ‘He was very precise.’
He could be, Casey knew. Those babies would be carefully timed, for the convenience of the new parents. Induced, quite ruthlessly, to a strict schedule. Or a C-section.
‘We were staying at a hotel in Dhaka,’ said Vivienne. ‘It was meant to be five-stars, but it was still pretty grim. No one from the clinic was there, so it was all a bit nerve-racking. But one day, a man just walked into the hotel lobby, with this tiny scrap in his arms. And there he was, our beautiful baby. Theo. I could hardly touch him. I couldn’t breathe. I loved him, right from the start. Loved him so much. Everything changed, just like that.’
‘Just like that,’ Miranda repeated.
‘You didn’t go to the hospital?’ asked Casey. ‘I know that in some surrogacy cases, the baby is handed over immediately.’
‘No,’ said Vivienne, a wrinkle between her eyebrows. ‘They brought Theo to us.’
‘So you never met the surrogate?’
‘No.’
‘You didn’t need to check he was yours?’ Miranda asked roughly. ‘That they hadn’t brought you some random baby?’
‘He looks . . .’ Vivienne stalled.
‘And then your father arranged the passport?’ Casey asked.
‘Yes,’ said Vivienne. ‘We flew home as soon as we could. We just wanted to get Theo back here, safely into our house. There was no problem at passport control. Not in Dhaka, not here. It was easy, really. Dr Greystone provided all the paperwork we needed for Theo to fit into the British system.’