There was no denial now, and nor would there ever be again. My pen filled the pages as I journeyed back into the past for the truth, confronting the images branded indelibly on my memory: dressing my baby for the last time; watching the bootee slip from her tiny foot as I handed her to a nurse; my mother waiting patiently with a suitcase in her hand; a nurse scurrying past with a ruched dress and a shawl as another mother asked the unanswerable question: ‘Where is your baby?’ A plastic wrist tag fading in a drawer.
When I had finished my letter to Sara, I wrote to Michelle. For some reason, perhaps because she was a new mother herself, I needed to explain to her how, after the adoption, I felt I had given up my right ever to be a mother again. I tried to articulate my old anxiety about my daughter turning up on my doorstep one day to find me with a new family. I told her I never wanted to have an unhappy child the wrong side of a happy door.
As the rest of the week unravelled, Michelle called and filled in precious gaps. I learned how, at ten days old, my baby had been given a new life but, strangely, had got to keep a form of her original name since her adoptive parents had always planned to call her Sara. Michelle related how, as a teeneager, Sara had grumbled about not having a middle name and her family had suggested she choose one for herself. Without knowing any of the details of her birth certificate, she had opted for Louise. It was a coincidence, certainly, but having a good friend by that name may have influenced her decision. Perhaps stranger was the fact that Sara had been brought up in Barnes in south-west London. Barnes I couldn’t believe it. Throughout the years I’d been living in Wimbledon, my daughter and I had been only three or four miles away from one another.
I keep my appointment with the Post-Adoption Centre and meet a counsellor called Philippa. Warm and sympathetic in reassuring twinset and pearls, she is as taken aback as everyone else by what has happened. Is it possible, she asks, that Sara has engineered this strange ‘coincidence’? I think about this. How could she have done so? How could she possibly have taken a job at Hatton & Baker knowing that I would make an appointment it hadn’t yet even entered my head to arrange?
I was later to learn that a counsellor at Norcap had suggested to Sara the same explanation in reverse: that perhaps I might have stage-managed our meeting. I knew for certain that I hadn’t. And no one else could have offered a remotely plausible theory as to how I might have done so, since I had no means of even finding out my daughter’s name, let alone her place of work.
The event was so phenomenal nobody could accept that it might simply have been an astonishing coincidence. Everyone was searching for a more complex explanation. Could it be synchronicity? Fate? Divine intervention? Seeking some kind of scientific answer, I found myself reading up on synchronicity—the significant coming together of two apparently unrelated incidents—and morphic resonance, the theory that memory has a basis in nature and that the mysterious, almost telepathic interconnections seen in organisms can be attributed to a collective memory within species. Have human beings somehow retained the vestiges of whatever it is that drives ants and bees to organise themselves effectively and efficiently within their colonies? Do we give off some kind of signal that other human beings can pick up?
I could be sure of only one thing. I had always been convinced that one day my daughter and I would meet. It was just a matter of when, and maybe up to now the time simply hadn’t been right.
Looking back, it seems to me that for perhaps two years or more I had been unconsciously laying the foundations for this meeting, putting in place all the elements of the environment I needed to have ready for that day—home, career, lifestyle, outlook, security—to create a space my daughter could comfortably enter. From the age of thirty-five onwards I had at long last been doing my ‘layette’. When I’d studied my reflection in the bathroom mirror that morning before going to Jermyn Street, maybe I had been acknowledging, for the first time in a more conscious way, that everything was in order. Now was the right moment for us to meet. My layette was complete.
In the week-long hiatus between finding Sara and meeting her, all I could do, it seemed, was cry. My friends worried about me. It was as if all the tears I’d been unable to shed for twenty years had been stored in some great lake and once the dam had burst, the flood was unstoppable.
I spent time with Mark—who had by this time given up music and was working with young homeless people as a counsellor—talking through the concerns and developments that were arising on a daily basis. Someone had offered the suggestion that I didn’t have to meet Sara if I didn’t feel able to handle it. Mark read my mind. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘How could you possibly not meet her?’ Not in a million years would I have avoided this encounter, however earth-shattering it might prove to be.
Seb, too, was awestruck by what had happened and had passed on the news to a lot of people on my behalf. Most had been confounded or fascinated but one had actually offered sympathy. ‘Poor Julie,’ said a mutual acquaintance who chose to look at things from another perspective. She had instantly grasped that, since my daughter had been adopted because of my age and social circumstances, when I met her, I would be meeting a stranger from a middle-class home. ‘How will they ever connect?’ she had asked Seb despairingly.
I fretted about this potential problem. I thought about poor Pip Pirrip in Great Expectations, who discovers that the rough criminal Magwitch is his true benefactor, and not, as he has assumed, the genteel Miss Havisham. I did not want to disappoint my daughter or destroy any illusions she might have about me. But I consoled myself with the knowledge that Dickens uses the character of Magwitch to show that class is an artificial construct. What matters is what lies in our hearts. That is what will connect or divide us.
At last we were ready to arrange a meeting. Where should it take place? Tina kindly offered us the use of her lovely new home in Bayswater but I felt the venue should be on neutral territory, and somewhere both public and private, where Sara and I could talk confidentially without being overheard while maintaining a steadying foothold in the world going on around us. Perhaps somewhere in the open air.
We agree on the Pagoda in Kew Gardens at three o’clock on the Sunday afternoon. Michelle acts as go-between, relaying and confirming the details. I know she is affected by all this. Her voice quavers on the phone during these conversations. Until the beginning of this week she was a complete stranger but now we are like two sisters caught up in a family drama. She has been the catalyst for this reunion and I thank her for everything she has done. She responds, warmly, that she hopes all will go well. Before ringing off, she remembers something.
‘By the way, I don’t think I’ve mentioned it, but Sara has short, blonde hair.’ And then she is gone.
I put down the receiver, trying to absorb the implications of what she’s just said. My own hair is long and dark. Martin’s was a mousy mid-brown in the years we were together. Is it common for brown- and dark-haired parents to have a blonde child? Might Martin have been fair as a small boy? I don’t know. In any case, Sara is grown up now. I’m gripped by a sudden fear.
Could there possibly have been a mistake?
Three o’clock at the Pagoda. At five o’clock in the morning my bedroom looks as though it has been ransacked by burglars. I have tried on every piece of clothing I own but still I don’t know what to wear. I have decided against high heels, but all of my footwear seems frivolous. Eventually I unearth a pair of sensible black boots. Now, hours later, I am putting them on for the third time with a pair of sensible black trousers. They peek out sensibly from beneath the hems. I am also wearing a black rollneck sweater and have tied my long hair back from my face. I check myself in the mirror. I look like a policewoman. Juliet Bravo. I reach for a dusky pink checked jacket chosen, after a great deal of deliberation, a while earlier. I put on a slick of lipstick and then wipe it off again.
Finally I leave the house.
I am determined to arrive early. If there is one thing in my life for which I must not
be late, it is surely this —a date with my daughter. Elephant and Castle tube station is comparatively quiet as today is a Sunday. It is 11 November. Remembrance Sunday. I descend in a lift to the dusty platform, board the train that arrives in a rush of wind, change on to the District Line for Kew. Might I have been quicker taking the overground from Waterloo? It doesn’t matter. I emerge from Kew station with plenty of time to spare. But then I enter the gardens through the wrong entrance. Now I am faced with a long walk, past the glass walls and domed roof of the Palm House, beyond the scented Rose Garden and past pockets of milling tourists.
A view I encounter suddenly overlaps with an image in my memory. I am disconcerted for a moment and then I place it: the pictures I had pasted into photograph albums with my mother as a child. My dad, laughing, chasing a baby as she crawls across a lawn. A toddler standing under a tree, wrapped up against the chill of a winter’s day, like this one. My parents, Sara’s grandparents, used to bring me here. Perhaps, at this very moment, I am treading the same ground we once walked across together.
‘She has short, blonde hair…’ A blonde woman passes me and my heart swells.
Could this be her? She turns slightly to one side as she walks on and I can see that she is at least fifty years old. My body is responding to triggers over which I have no control, like the body of a new mother, which is, in a way, what I am.
I walk on and at last the Pagoda is rising in front of me, all 160 feet of it. An impressive piece of eighteenth-century Chinoiserie, it’s a memorable landmark for such a significant meeting. The kind of location Hitchcock might have chosen for the final scene of a movie. Is this an ending? Or a beginning?
I sit down on a park bench beneath the Pagoda to wait, looking out on to a green lawn, trees and the various paths that all lead to this point.
‘Poor Julie.’ Perhaps my friend is right. Perhaps my daughter only wants to meet me to satisfy some curiosity. One brief encounter and she might go her own way, back to her life and her family. She has had a good upbringing in a big house in Barnes. What does she have in common with me, a child with no bedroom who lunched daily on pie, mash and liquor?
We may be strangers but we are bound by blood, by history and by those brief summer days we spent together when I whispered secrets into the gateway to her mind. Perhaps she might not even come—
I catch sight of someone. No, two people. A woman in her forties walking with a young woman, approaching at a distance along a path to the left of me.
The girl has short, blonde hair.
Clothes not unlike my own. Black jacket, trousers, boots.
They have almost reached me, but the girl veers suddenly away from the Pagoda. She is walking on…Then, as though summoning her courage, she turns back. She is moving towards me.
I see her now, straight in front of me: my own grown-up baby, smiling back at me, my face in hers.
Somehow I have got to my feet. My body knows what to do even if my brain doesn’t. What am I going to say? What words could come close to bridging the separation of all these years? I take a few steps forwards, relying on my body. I trust my body now, as it seems to be the only part of me that is functioning. It is aching to hold her.
‘Can I give you a hug?’ My voice is a hoarse whisper but suddenly she is there in my arms. We cling to one another tightly. I taste in one salt kiss our tears mingled together on her cheek. The world has shifted on its axis. Nothing will ever be the same. ‘You have my face,’ I say, as though she might have stolen it.
The woman I had noticed stands in the shadows. A family friend has accompanied Sara. My daughter asks the woman to leave us for a moment and we move to the shelter of the Pagoda. Sitting on a bench, we nervously take cigarette packs from our pockets and hold lighter flames for each other. We draw deep, smoky breaths. Our hands dance through the air as we speak, legs crossed at the same angle as though, in spite of all the years we have been separated—our genes and souls still know we are one, have maybe even engineered our reunion.
Sara has read my letter and it’s time for questions. We begin to fill in the blank spaces of our lives. As she speaks I realise how near we must have been to one another over the years. As well as growing up in Barnes while I was in Wimbledon, she has spent a lot of time in Spain, where her family lived for a while. Many, many times in our lives perhaps we have been separated by only a few miles.
The family friend walks at a distance, keeping a protective eye on her charge. She was once Sara’s ballet teacher, I am told. I learn that Sara was a good dancer, that she had a chance to work with the Joffrey in New York. I remember black plimsolls bound with ribbon, tiptoeing across the creaky floorboards at Lefevre Road. A Dying Swan.
‘How did you feel?’ I ask. ‘When you saw my name on the script?’
She lowers her eyes and shakes her head slightly, as though she’s seeing it all over again. ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ she replies softly. ‘Michelle took one look at me and knew something was wrong. I was shaking. The words just tumbled out. “That’s the name of my mother.”’
She gazes back at me now, as though to make sure I’m here, that this isn’t a dream.
‘She must’ve thought I was mad. She said that you’d been in the office just the day before, that I’d brought you both coffee. She insisted she must have introduced us—she always introduces secretaries to clients—and maybe she did, but she couldn’t have mentioned your surname or the coffee would’ve ended up in your lap.’
We both laugh, suddenly, nervously, relieved we share a sense of humour. The tension eases. I see the family friend relaxing too as she circles at a distance.
Sara continues: ‘I tried really hard to remember seeing you in the office.’
‘Me too,’ I whisper.
‘Michelle thought I was mistaken. She said you were too young. But I knew it had to be you. It’s a strange name, isn’t it?’
I smile and thank God for my strange name.
‘I told her to ring you,’ she continues. ‘Straight away. I told her she must. I had to know for sure.’
I remember the call coming through in my busy office. Had it really only been on Tuesday? The tone of Michelle’s voice. Something was wrong. She had something to tell me, she said. How could I ever have possibly guessed it could be this? Whatever I told her could stay within her office walls. But all the while, Sara had been on the other side of the door, waiting for her answer.
Tell her it’s me.
‘She came out of her office and just looked at me,’ Sara goes on. ‘She had tears in her eyes and she said, “Sara, we’ve just found your mother.”’
Sara looks confident but her body gives her away. She has my mother’s nervous hand, its tremor satisfied by a cigarette. I reach into my bag and take from it photographs, ghosts from the past: Margaret Mary Exley and Bill Wassmer, and Martin, her father. She stares down at the missing pieces of her life.
‘I always knew you were there,’ she says.
‘I always knew you would find me,’ I reply.
She tells me about seeing her birth certificate for the first time. Names on a page. Occupations: ‘Spinster’ and ‘demolition worker’. No illusions, no chance to indulge in teenage flights of fancy about having royal blood.
‘When I saw your names there in black and white, suddenly, you became real people.’
She had tried to seek us out but, with my mother’s maisonette handed back to the council and all trace of the Wassmers erased, had come up against a brick wall at Gullane House. It had been the same story with Martin and Bridie.
‘I just felt probably the time wasn’t right.’
I look down at my hand, at the two rings I’d taken from my mother’s hand in St Thomas’ Hospital: her wedding ring and my Irish grandmother’s single gold band. I slip from my finger the one that belonged to the grandmother I never met and give it to Sara—a link with her past. And it fits. She sits close beside me, twenty years old, no longer imagined but real. I take in every facet, every i
nch of her, as she talks on. All too soon the family friend arrives, a signal that our meeting is at an end.
Is this an ending? Or a beginning?
I take a deep breath. ‘Would you like to meet again?’
My grown-up daughter pauses. Then she smiles.
Chapter Fifteen
Emotional Journeys
The day after our meeting in Kew Gardens, Sara wrote me a letter.
Dear Julie,
I just felt like writing to you to say thank you. What for? I’m not totally sure! But our meeting on Sunday was perhaps one of the best things that has ever happened to me.
I had the urge to write to you and now I’ve started I’m not quite sure what I want to say! I am glad that things have worked so well and although I have no demands of you, I hope and feel that as time goes on we can build a relationship as friends. I want to thank you for the ring you gave me. Whatever happens I will treasure it always.
There is still so much I want to learn from you and about you and I hope you don’t think I’m being ‘pushy’!
I hope you don’t mind me writing this letter, I just felt the urge to do so. I will ring this week.
All my love, Sara xx
As I reached the final line, I smiled. My tears were all dried up, as though a period of mourning had ended. In the days that followed I read the letter over and over again, studying the handwriting—big, bold letters, not unlike my own.
A week later, I travelled up to Jermyn Street again, not to see Michelle this time, but my daughter. My daughter. I heard myself saying this constantly, just to relish the feel of the words in my mouth. Two words that, in combination, I had barely allowed myself to utter in twenty years.
More Than Just Coincidence Page 17