And then there’s their father. She listened to what Margaret had to say, but she still can’t understand why nobody seems to want to find him. It still feels as though he’s the missing piece of the jigsaw.
She rubs her throbbing head and sighs. Maybe Margaret’s right. Maybe they are better off without him. Perhaps she should listen. After all, her meddling has done more than enough damage already.
Next to her, her phone beeps, and she jumps. Snatching it up, she squints to read the message.
We need to talk. K
Just that, nothing else. We need to talk. But the wave of relief that washes over Georgie is so immense it threatens to topple her out of bed. Kate’s the person she’s gone to her whole life whenever she needed comfort, or advice, or just someone to talk to. Not having her there has been agony. But now here she is, holding out a – curt, but to the point – olive branch.
Georgie starts to type a reply.
Yes we do. Are you free today? G x
She puts her phone back on the side and waits.
She can’t stop thinking about what she’s found out so far about her new family. About Kimberley’s fragile mental health, no doubt made worse by losing her child, Margaret’s anger, and her determination to go to the police. And she can’t stop thinking about Sam, her twin brother. Just being with him, talking to him, feels so right, and yet it feels like a betrayal of Kate even to think that. She needs to talk to her sister. She needs her help. She hopes she replies soon.
She turns her head to Matt’s side of the bed. It’s empty, but she can hear someone pottering around downstairs. She swings her legs out of bed and shuffles her body into an upright position, her head lurching as she does. She sits for a minute to quell the nausea, then stands and walks towards the stairs. She can hear Matt in the kitchen, whistling along to the radio, and she smiles. At least some things never change.
She walks down the stairs and into the kitchen where Matt’s stirring something over the hob and she peers into the pan to see scrambled eggs.
‘Yum, enough for me?’
He plants a kiss on the top of her head. ‘Plenty. How’s the head?’
‘Ugh, terrible.’ She smiles up at him. ‘Sorry about that, it was a – bit of a tough day.’
‘I guessed that.’ He grins, lifting the empty bottle to show her. ‘I assumed you needed this for medicinal purposes.’
‘Yes, exactly that.’ She smiles, pulling her dressing gown tighter round her.
‘Were you drunk last night, then, Mum?’ Clem’s peering at her over the top of her book, amusement dancing in her eyes.
‘Well, a bit. Did you see me?’
‘No, I was late back, went to Lucy’s. Dad picked me up about nine. You were snoring your head off when I got home. Thought it was a bit weird.’
‘Yes, sorry. There’s been – there’s a lot going on at the moment.’ She’s wondering how much to tell Clem but her daughter has already lost interest and turned back to her book, her mind occupied with other things. She’ll leave it for another day. Georgie turns back to Matt, who’s spooning an enormous pile of eggs into a bowl.
‘Made enough?’
‘Hmm, there is rather a lot, isn’t there?’
‘Don’t worry, I’m starving.’
They sit down at the table to eat and Georgie’s grateful for the normality. The last few days have been so emotionally draining she needs this moment of peace, this oasis of calm, to get her mind back to a good place again. A place where she can prepare herself to go and speak to her mother, and to Kate, and to tell them everything she’s discovered. She wonders how much else there is to find out, then pushes the thought away, for now.
Matt doesn’t ask her any questions while Clementine is still there, and Georgie’s grateful for that too. But when Clem disappears upstairs for a shower she knows she has to tell him what’s happened so far. And as the words come out of her mouth, as she paints a picture for Matt, untangling the twists and turns and the shocking revelations of the past, she can’t quite believe all this has happened to her, or to her – until now – perfectly normal family. When she finishes she turns to look at him and sees him watching her over the top of his coffee cup, his eyes serious.
He lowers his cup to the table and leans forward, running his hand through his hair.
‘Fuck, George.’
‘I know.’
‘I mean – your mum. I just can’t quite put it all together. It doesn’t make sense. How could someone so – so quiet have done something like that?’
Georgie shrugs. ‘That’s what I want to find out. I mean, I know I’ve been really angry with her. But now I just think, what must have happened to make her do something like this? Did she plan to take me from Kimberley? Or was it a spur-of-the-moment thing, something she did while her heart was breaking after Dad died?’ She hesitates, lost in thought. ‘It doesn’t matter how angry I am with her, I still think I know her pretty well, and I just can’t imagine she would ever plan something like this. Can you?’
Matt shakes his head. He’s known Jan for a long time and he simply can’t imagine a woman as quiet and overprotective as she’s always been walking into a hospital and taking someone else’s baby. Something serious must have happened.
‘You’ve got to speak to her.’
‘For all the good it will do. You should have seen her the other day, Matt. She was like a woman possessed. But you’re right, I do need to at least try. But I’m going to talk to Kate first. I think we need to sort things out.’
Before all this, Georgie had never been worried about speaking to her sister. Ever. In fact, if anything, she’d always been the first and often the only person she wanted to speak to when something went wrong.
But earlier, as she pulled up outside the familiar house and walked up the path, her whole body was shaking and her heart felt as though it was going to thump right out of her chest. Not only because of what she was about to tell Kate, but because they hadn’t spoken since she walked out on her and their mother nearly two weeks before.
Here she is now, and her body is quaking as she tells Kate exactly what she’s found out since she saw her last. As the sisters sit there on separate sofas, the silence grows so large it threatens to get bigger than the room, to shatter the ornaments that have been carefully dusted and placed on the shelves.
‘I am Louisa Foster,’ she says, simply, breaking the silence. ‘I walked into that house and I knew the second I saw Kimberley that she was my mother. And she knew me too. She went white as a sheet. I thought she was going to faint.’
Kate stares at the coffee table, running her nail along the outside edge of the wood. She doesn’t look up.
‘And your brother?’ The word comes out slightly choked, as though it’s got stuck halfway out. ‘What was he like?’
‘He was – lovely.’
Kate looks up now, sharply. ‘But is he like you? Does he look like you?’
Georgie knows Kate doesn’t want to hear the truth, not really, but she can’t lie any more. She nods her head. ‘Not exactly, but – yes, there’s something about him that looks like me. He’s – we’re definitely related.’
Kate nods briefly, and looks back down at the coffee table. Georgie’s heart hammers against her ribcage.
‘It’s a mess, Kate.’
‘You’re telling me.’
‘No, it’s worse.’
Kate’s head snaps up, her forehead creased, waiting. ‘Worse?’
Georgie swallows. She’s been dreading this bit, worried how her sister is going to react when she tells her. ‘The thing is—’ She stops, unsure how to carry on. ‘The thing is, Kimberley’s screwed up. Badly. She’s clearly on something most of the time, which makes her seem calm, a bit zombie-like, but it’s obvious she’s a bag of nerves. But then there’s her mother. Margaret.’ She pauses, looks at Kate. ‘She’s angry, Kate.’
‘Well, I guess she would be. Anyone would be.’ Her voice is like glass as she contemplates this woman she’s never met.
‘She wants to go to the police.’
Kate doesn’t speak straight away, and Georgie doesn’t know what to do with the silence. She’d thought Kate was going to explode, shout and cry and scream, rail against this terrible new development. But instead she sits there, still as a statue, her face a mask, staring at a spot on the wall just behind Georgie’s shoulder, until Georgie starts to wonder whether her sister has even heard her. When she does say something, her words are quiet, deadly.
‘Aunty Sandy does too.’
‘Aunty Sandy does what?’
‘She wants to tell the police too.’
‘What? Why?’ Georgie’s not entirely sure she’s heard right.
Kate shakes her head sadly. ‘She’s hurt, George. But she’s also furious at the way Mum spoke to her last time she saw her, at the way she’s been treating her for the last few months, to be honest. I know she’s always been on Mum’s side, no matter what, but this time Mum’s gone too far, and Sandy’s flipped. Something about what Mum was doing in the garden the other day, that digging, and the swearing at her, calling her a bitch. She says she’s had enough of covering for her, of lying for her, and that it’s time.’
‘Time?’
‘For her to pay. Her words, not mine.’
‘God.’
‘I know.’
Something occurs to Georgie then. ‘So you knew? Before I came here today, that what I told you last time was true? That Mum snatched me?’
Kate nods. ‘I knew from the minute you showed me that newspaper cutting. I just didn’t want to admit it to myself. Because—’ She stops, clears her throat. ‘Well, that would mean you weren’t my sister any more and I don’t think I could stand that. Losing you.’
The sisters sit in silence for a moment, the tick of the clock on the mantelpiece the only sound. Finally, Georgie speaks.
‘You’ll always be my sister.’ She looks at Kate. There are tears running down her face and in one swift movement Georgie moves across from the sofa she’s sitting on to join Kate on hers, and wraps her arms round her, squeezing her tightly.
‘Thank you, Georgie.’
Slowly, Kate pulls away from the embrace. ‘So what are we going to do, then? About these two women who want Mum to pay for what she did? Mum can’t go to prison. She’s ill.’
Georgie nods. ‘I know. And to be honest, even if they do tell the police, I can’t imagine they’d send Mum to prison, not now.’
‘But what if they do?’
‘Oh God, I don’t know, Kate.’ She runs her hands through her hair and clasps them together, her knuckles white. ‘We’ve got to stop them, haven’t we?’
Kate nods. ‘The thing is, Aunty Sandy told me something. Something that changes everything.’
‘Oh?’
Kate nods, thinking back to the day after Sandy had stormed out of her mother’s house, when she’d gone to see her to try and put things right. Sandy had still been angry, but now there was hurt in her eyes too. She looked broken apart, scared.
‘The thing is, Kate, I’ve covered for your mother for too long now,’ Sandy had said. There was a wobble in her voice that Kate had never heard before, an uncertainty her Aunty Sandy had never shown, and it scared her. ‘I think your mother always thought I had my suspicions about what had happened back then, but she never knew for sure what I knew.’ She’d paused, pacing back and forth across her tiny living room. ‘But when Georgie found those papers, and then I saw your mum scrabbling at that patch of earth in her garden, it brought it all flooding back, and I realized I couldn’t lie for her any more. It was wrong. Too many people have suffered.’
‘But what do you know, Sandy?’
Sandy had looked at her as though she didn’t recognize her, this woman she’d known since the moment she was born. ‘I saw her.’
Kate didn’t ask what she meant, who she’d seen. Instead she waited for Sandy to carry on. She needed to know what had happened all those years ago, what had happened that had made Sandy turn against her closest friend all these years later, and so she waited for her to tell her story. She didn’t have to wait long.
‘Your Mum lost a baby, the day before she took Georgie. And I saw her, that day. Only she doesn’t have any idea I saw her.’ She ran her hand through her short hair and down her face, pulling her mouth into a grimace as she did. ‘I’d come round to check on her, to make sure she was OK, because she’d been ignoring me since she’d moved down here and she couldn’t afford a phone, not in those days. But I was worried about her, and so I drove round to see her. It was quite late when I got there, after your bedtime, so I was surprised when I rang the bell that nobody answered the door. I thought she might be in the bath or putting you to bed or something. I peered through the front window and I saw the lights on, and toys scattered across the living room. I didn’t think your mum could have gone far so I decided I’d try the back door, as she usually kept it unlocked, and wait for her to come downstairs. So I – I walked round to the back of the house and as I got near to the garden I could hear crying. I called out but Jan – your mum – didn’t hear me. I walked closer. It was pretty dark, but then I saw your mum, bent over at the end of the garden, by the shed – where she was the other day – digging at the ground with her bare hands. She was like a crazy woman, soil flying out behind her and falling in her hair, her arms covered in mud. She was in her nightdress and I wondered what on earth she was doing. She hadn’t heard me approach and I didn’t want to scare her, so I stopped and waited until she’d finished. I hadn’t planned to spy on her. I’d always meant to let her know I was there, make sure she was OK. But as I continued watching, my concern turned to horror and I found I couldn’t speak. She scooped up a bundle of blankets, soaked in blood. And then she tipped the contents into the hole in the ground, and covered it up, sobbing wildly. I wanted to reach out and hold her, but I was too shocked, too horrified to move. And when she turned round and headed back to the house, the look on her face terrified me. She looked broken, possessed. And I knew in that instant what had happened here. The worst thing anyone could imagine. She’d lost her baby, and in a moment of madness had buried it in the garden.’
She stopped, took a breath. ‘I’m not proud of myself for leaving then, rather than going to comfort her. But I was so horrified by what I’d seen, I turned and walked away. I got in the car and drove numbly home, without even letting her know I was there.
‘It haunted me for months afterwards, years even, what I’d seen that night. But back then when I finally brought myself to go and see her a few days later, to ask if she needed anything, give her the chance to tell me what had happened, I got a shock. She had a baby there. She had Georgie, and she was acting as though it was perfectly normal. She was telling me this baby – this dark-haired, olive-skinned baby – was hers, even though she looked nothing like her, or you. She didn’t even look like Ray, your dad. But as I peered into the cot and studied Georgie’s face, it all fell into place. After all, everyone had been following the terrible story about the baby who’d been snatched from her cot at Norwich hospital. It was all over the news for days, weeks. And I knew in that instant what had happened – that it was your mum who had taken that baby. I also vowed I’d do anything to protect her from being found out. Whatever I thought of what she’d done, she was my best friend, and I couldn’t let her lose the love of her life and her children. And so I lied. Well, I omitted the truth, which is the same thing. I went along with her lie and now I know that it allowed her to believe that what she had done wasn’t such a terrible thing. It helped her justify it to herself, to the world.’
The room was filled with an oppressive silence as the words sank in. Kate had thought she was going to be sick. So that place where her mother was digging the other day was her baby’s grave? It was almost impossible to believe.
‘So why have you changed your mind now, after all these years?’
‘I – I couldn’t believe it when Georgie came round the other day asking your mu
m why she didn’t have her birth certificate, and what those newspaper cuttings meant. After all this time I thought it was all over and done with. That it was far in the past and that nobody was hurt, so it need never be mentioned again. But then it made me realize that of course people had been hurt, and were still hurting. And now – well, now Georgie has found them, it’s more real, isn’t it? It made me think about what I’d done, how I’d been complicit in these people’s pain. And I hated myself for it. But the final straw came when your mum started digging at the ground the other day and then screamed at me, accusing me of all sorts.
‘It hurt, Kate. And it made me realize I can’t do this any more. We have to tell someone. We have to go to the police. That poor family deserves that, at least.’
Kate takes a deep breath now, having finished telling Georgie Sandy’s story. She can see that Georgie’s face is so pale it’s almost translucent. ‘She buried her baby? That’s what’s buried in that patch of earth, the bit where she was scrabbling around in the dirt? My God, she must have been utterly heartbroken.’
‘I know.’
Georgie frowns. ‘We—’ She stops, unsure whether to say the next words. ‘We have to go and see if we can uncover the remains, don’t we? Give the baby the goodbye it deserves?’
Kate nods stiffly. ‘I suppose we do. Soon.’ She shudders, wanting to get the image of it out of her mind. ‘Poor, poor Mum. I can almost understand why she did it now – why she took you, I mean. Can’t you?’
Georgie nods. ‘Almost.’
‘Except—’
‘Except what?’
‘Well, she had me. Wasn’t I enough for her? Wasn’t I enough to get her through?’ Kate’s eyes are heavy with pain and she blinks as if trying to wipe it away.
‘Oh, Kate, I don’t suppose it had anything to do with you. I think Aunty Sandy was right. I think Mum was probably drowning in grief, almost swallowed up by it, after losing Dad and then her baby. I mean, she buried the baby in the garden, for goodness’ sake, somewhere where she’d have to see it every day and remember what had happened, what she’d done. Someone who was coping, who was in their right mind – well, they wouldn’t behave like that, would they, no matter how grief-stricken they were? And it makes sense, doesn’t it? It explains so much, about the way she was. About how scared she was of us ever going out of her sight. If she could take a baby and get away with it, then what was to stop someone else taking her babies away? And let’s face it, if she’d been caught, that’s exactly what would have happened.’
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