She shook her head. ‘I haven’t seen her since I was eight years old. And the people who took me never came to see me, to tell me how she was. I couldn’t even send a letter. I once asked Franziska for a stamp, but she told me it was best if I didn’t write. I don’t know why. But I never gave up hope that I would see her again, some day. I just needed to get out of there – and now I have. As soon as I’m married, I’ll go back and find her.’
‘Did you think about running away before?’
‘Every day,’ Anna replied. ‘But I couldn’t go back home, the authorities would just take me again. I had no money, I was underage. I thought if they caught me then I might be sent somewhere worse. I’d heard stuff at school about places where they sent disobedient kids – horrible places. I couldn’t risk it.’
‘And then you got pregnant.’
Anna nodded, smiling. ‘The baby saved me. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.’
Sylvia exchanged a glance with Evelyne. She knew her friend didn’t share that view, that she felt Daniel’s life had been curbed by this pregnant girlfriend, that Anna’s would also be curbed, when she had a baby to care for. This is why there should be easier access to contraception, Evelyne had railed before they arrived at the flat.
‘Daniel hardly even spoke to me until I was fifteen,’ Anna said. ‘Then one day he defended me when Herr Buchs was telling me off about something – I forget what, he told me off so often I stopped listening. But this time Daniel stood up for me, and he took a beating for it. That’s when we became friends, and everything was so much better after that. I wanted us to run away together, but he wouldn’t, even though he hated his father. He couldn’t bear to leave his mother there alone, he said. But when I discovered I was pregnant we both knew he had no choice. We’d have to leave.’ Anna put her hand on her stomach. ‘So the baby saved me, you see. It saved both of us.’
Sylvia took a deep breath. It pained her, what the girl had been through. How little love she’d had in her life, how little help. And she knew, after hearing her story, how much Anna wanted the new being growing inside of her. She thought of her own baby and hoped she would somehow manage to feel the same.
‘Danke,’ Sylvia said, when the questions came to an end, and they both smiled at her attempt at German. She would send Anna a copy of the article when it was published.
‘Brigitte,’ Anna said suddenly, as though the thought had only just occurred to her.
‘What?’ Evelyne said.
‘You can’t use my real name. Please call me Brigitte. It’s my mother’s middle name. Just in case the authorities read it. They can’t know it’s me.’
Sylvia nodded and wrote the name down to show her the spelling. ‘Okay?’
Anna nodded. ‘When are you due?’ she asked.
‘October tenth.’ Sylvia didn’t match Anna’s smile. ‘You?’
‘October sixteenth.’ She beamed, and Sylvia saw how excited Anna was at the prospect of having a baby. She didn’t have much to provide, but she would give it the most important thing of all, the thing she hadn’t had nearly enough of herself – love.
* * *
They left Anna and Daniel’s flat and caught the bus back into Lausanne city centre.
‘I want to do something for her,’ Sylvia said, when they were installed in a cafe. Perhaps it was just her stupid hormones, but her time with Anna made her want to weep.
‘You are. You’re writing that article.’
‘Something more. Something concrete. They have nothing. How are they going to cope with a baby in that tiny flat?’
Sylvia sat back in her chair on the cafe terrace and rested a hand on her belly. Listening to Anna had been emotionally hard, but for some reason she felt physically drained, too, with a headache pounding at her temples. Guilt-induced, probably. Guilt that she had so much in comparison, and yet had been so ungrateful for it.
‘They’ll just have to, there’s no other choice,’ Evelyne said. The waitress came and they ordered drinks – coffee for Evelyne and lemonade for Sylvia. The air had the metallic smell of fresh rain on hot tarmac. Back home, summer had finally broken over the bank holiday weekend with a downpour almost as intense as the drought that preceded it, and here it felt like autumn was finally around the corner, too. It was the end of the long, hot summer – and the beginning of a new phase of life.
‘Thank you for translating,’ Sylvia said. ‘It must have been strange for you, hearing all that about your parents.’
‘A little.’ Evelyne paused. ‘A lot.’ She looked down at her coffee. ‘It wasn’t a surprise, any of that. I mean, I was there. I know what my father is like, how he treated her. But I suppose I never really thought about it beyond the physical. I never thought about what she’d lost. I just accepted it. I was a teenager when she came to the farm and I was so caught up in my own battles with my father that I didn’t consider how hard it must have been for Anna to be away from her own family.’
‘Do you know anything about them?’
‘Not really. I never asked.’ Evelyne picked up her coffee cup and Sylvia saw her eyes were shining.
‘You were a child too. You couldn’t be expected to do anything.’
‘Maybe not. But perhaps I could have been her friend. I just thought she was this skinny, morose kid who never smiled, but in my arrogant youth I never really thought to do anything about that. It’s ironic, you know. The other day I was in Geneva protesting the bulldozing of a centre set up to help women, and yet I was too wrapped up in myself back then to help a young girl in my own home.’
‘Well, you can be her friend now. She’s going to need one, that’s for sure.’
‘I know, and I will.’ Evelyne shifted in her seat, took a sip of coffee. ‘We needed the money, you know, and the extra help. It’s not an easy life, farming.’ She paused. ‘But I know that’s not an excuse for how we treated Anna.’
Sylvia said nothing, sensing that Evelyne had more to say.
‘Mother has been writing me letters.’ She laughed, but there was bitterness in it. ‘That’s pretty brave of her really. I can just imagine her waiting until Father has gone down to the cows, and then whipping out her notepad. Scurrying furtively to the post office.’ She shook her head and her smile dropped. ‘Breaking contact with my mother was like collateral damage. She wouldn’t stand up to him, so I had to leave her too. I didn’t want to.’
‘She’s a product of her generation. And so are you – breaking free of all that.’
‘I suppose so.’ Evelyne shrugged. ‘I’ll never forget the moment I understood that things didn’t have to be as I’d been brought up to believe. It was 1969, I was about Anna’s age, or a little older. I heard a report on the radio about a women’s march in Bern, protesting that the government was intending to ratify the European Convention on Human Rights, even though women didn’t yet have the vote! It was unbelievable, as though they didn’t even consider women to be humans with rights.’ She shook her head. ‘The march was led by a woman called Emilie Lieberherr. God, she was a powerful speaker. Equality. Women’s rights. The vote. These weren’t notions I’d heard too often before then, but everything she was saying just made complete sense to me. It was like someone had provided the answer before I even knew I was allowed to ask the question.
‘That was the beginning of the end for my relationship with Dad. And then he didn’t even vote for women’s suffrage in ’71,’ Evelyne laughed. ‘He told me, threw it in my face like a boast. I knew after that, I couldn’t stay. There was simply no middle ground.’
‘Will you ever see them again?’
‘I hope so, one day. I may not like him much right now, but he’s still my father. And I still have good memories from when I was little, before farming ground him down, before I woke up to the path he was sending me on. I suppose it’s like Anna implied: however tough it was for me, at least they were my family, at least there was love, even if my father buried it well.’
As Sylvia raised her
glass, a sharp, sudden pain stabbed her in the abdomen, taking her breath away. She dropped the glass on the table, spilling its contents.
‘Are you okay?’
‘Yes, I think so. Just a strange pain for a second.’
Evelyne pushed a paper napkin to her and Sylvia mopped up the lemonade. She could feel the baby move almost constantly now. Just five weeks to go. Almost fully baked. How strange it felt to think back to a year previously, when this was the furthest thing from her mind.
‘How does it feel, to be having a baby?’
‘Bizarre. Surreal. Bloody uncomfortable.’
Evelyne gave a wry smile. ‘Perhaps I’ll change my mind one day, but I just can’t see that I’ll ever have a child. And I know I’ll never get married. It feels like social conditioning, a way for society to cast me in a mould and keep me in check. I want a career that earns me enough money to eat expensive dinners and travel to Paris for the weekend and drink cocktails.’ She laughed. ‘I want to have steamy affairs at music festivals and sleep on the beach in India and drink beer at Oktoberfest. I want to sleep with a man half my age when I’m fifty. I want to be free to do as I please, for as long as I please.’
Sylvia smiled. ‘I wanted all that too,’ she said, before amending her sentence at Evelyne’s raised eyebrows. She twisted her wedding ring around her finger. ‘Okay, I know I’m not as radical as you, but I wanted the career and expensive dinners and the freedom to do as I pleased.’
‘No steamy affairs?’
‘Well…’
Evelyne laughed.
‘Getting pregnant at this age was the last thing I wanted. I feel like I’ve veered off down a path I never intended.’ She and Jim now had a taupe-coloured sofa, a coffee machine and a crib in the spare room. Had she lost her aim in life like a coin down that sofa?
‘Then fight.’ Evelyne grabbed Sylvia’s hand across the table. ‘Fight to make things different. Fight to have a career and be a mother too. If we all fight in our own small way then maybe things will change.’
Sylvia smiled, hearing Maggie in Evelyne’s words. If those two brilliant women thought she could do it, maybe she just could. ‘I suppose we’ll just have to see what happens,’ she said. ‘To the both of us.’
Evelyne picked up her cup of coffee. ‘To women. Santé.’
‘Santé.’
It was just after they’d toasted the future that Sylvia looked down to see a circle of blood growing steadily outwards across her skirt.
AUGUST 2016 Montreux, Switzerland
JESS
I’m sitting next to Julia in the car and I don’t know why I’m here.
‘Let me drive you. We haven’t had much time to chat recently and I’m going that way anyway,’ she said this morning. Daniel Buchs still hasn’t replied, and I can’t bear to spend all day refreshing my email. I’m hoping the art exhibition will be a distraction, and I was quite looking forward to taking the train to the gallery in Martigny on my own, spending the half-hour journey contemplating my crazy mixed-up life while watching the mountains go by. It’s Sunday, Julia’s only day at home, and I want to scream at her to actually spend this time with her family, not with me. But she insisted, so here I am, snapping my seatbelt on and watching her pull into the traffic. I wonder, with a growing sense of unease, why she insisted quite so much.
She doesn’t say anything for the first few minutes and the silence goads me. I want to ask her about how she grew up, about her home life, the absent father and single mother that Michel talked about, the parents who could possibly be mine. I open my mouth, and then close it again.
We’re on the high motorway above the lake when she finally says it.
‘I know what you did, Jess.’
My stomach plunges. I look at her. Her eyes are fixed on the road ahead and she’s smiling in a serene way that freaks me out.
‘I know you signed for the package from Coca-Cola. I called the delivery company. They emailed me a scan of your signature. So I know you received it, but what I don’t understand is why you didn’t give it to me.’
I look away, out at the lake. Sweat beads on the back of my neck. ‘I don’t know,’ I admit.
Julia sighs, and I understand she knows it isn’t really about the package.
‘It wasn’t a deliberate thing. I mean, I didn’t intend to keep it from you, I just… did.’ I pause. I know now why I’m here, why I’m sitting next to her in this car. It’s like the clouds have parted after rain, and I suddenly see what’s going to happen. I know we won’t leave the car until the truth has been spilled, and the thought is almost a relief. I take a breath. ‘Okay, I was cross with you.’
She glances at me, and then back at the road. ‘Why?’
I hesitate, then rip off the plaster. ‘Because you were choosing to go to your work event rather than Léa’s tennis competition.’
She nods, as though I’ve confirmed her suspicions. She indicates and pulls out to overtake a car ahead. I glance at the speedo; we’re going significantly over the limit. I want to tell her to slow down, but I don’t.
‘D’accord.’ She gives a short laugh. ‘I understand. You think I’m a terrible mother and I should stay at home with my kids like a good Swiss Hausfrau and not go to work?’
‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘Unless you want to, of course.’ I want to. I’d have given up my job in an instant to stay home with my children if I was lucky enough to have them and could afford to. But I know it’s not fashionable to say so. It’s like my guilty secret, something you’re not allowed to admit to these days. ‘But I think you should tuck your children into bed occasionally, and be there on the weekends when your daughter has an event that’s important to her.’
I think of Mum, always on the go, but still there – usually – to kiss me goodnight and watch me fail at three-legged races. A memory tugs at my brain: a row with Dad, angry whispers that stopped when I approached, a cancelled work trip, Mum’s smile a little too bright.
Julia gives a brusque laugh of exasperation. ‘You think I don’t know that? Of course I do. Of course I’d rather be with my family than at work. But these things happen. It’s a busy time and I can’t avoid it if I want to get ahead in my career. And I do, Jess. I don’t want to be aimless, achieving nothing, floating through life without focus. That’s not an example I want to give my children.’
I feel the dig as though she’s stuck her flawless painted fingernail into my arm.
‘And anyway,’ she continues, her voice strained. ‘I don’t know why you want me around more. It’s clear you think you can do a better job at being their mother than me.’
I look at her and she glances at me simultaneously and it’s the first time we’ve made eye contact since we started this conversation. We both look away instantly, as though we’ve been burned, but before I do I’m surprised to see hurt behind the anger.
‘No,’ I say, keeping my voice steady. ‘I don’t.’
The car enters a tunnel and the sound of the traffic bounces off the concrete walls and roars in my ears. I feel like screaming into the noise, letting everything out until I’m purged of all emotion, stripped back to the bare truth in my bones. The truth that says I’ve wanted my own kids for so long and I can hardly bear to face the fact I may not get to have them. I’m breathless as I watch the pinprick of light expanding, bigger and bigger, until it envelops us and we’re out the other side.
‘You do,’ she says. ‘You’ve been undermining me the whole time. You think I haven’t noticed? Of course I have! You want the children to think you’re better than me. So you bake special cakes and make sure you give them endless bedtime stories and come up with these amazing party decorations and let them watch television when you know I’d say no. I’ve seen you, and I’ve put up with it because I have to, because we can’t find anyone else to replace you at such short notice. But don’t think I haven’t noticed. Don’t think I’m happy about it.’
‘I haven’t,’ I say. ‘I didn’t do that to—’
/> She cuts me off. ‘Yes, you did.’ We’re driving past Villeneuve now, entering the Rhône Valley with its apricot orchards on the plains and vineyards creeping up the slopes. Aren’t there any cameras along here? Or maybe she’s so rich she doesn’t care about getting a speeding ticket.
‘And another thing.’ She looks at me again. I look ahead, willing her to keep her eyes on the road. ‘I know that you’ve been… what’s the word…’ She makes a winding motion with one hand as she searches for it, then slams it down on the steering wheel. ‘Spying. You’ve been spying in our bedroom. I found the necklace, Jess, and I know it was you. Neither Maria nor Michel would break it and not tell me. And the kids don’t have the skills to glue it back together so well. So it must have been you. Putain, Jess, what were you doing in there?’
I’m tempted to deny everything, to make out she’s crazy, she’s accusing me unfairly. But I realise, with a shock, that it’s a relief she knows. I’ve been holding my breath for weeks, and now I can breathe out.
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘I did snoop. I shouldn’t have, but I did. The necklace was an accident. I’m sorry.’
‘But why? Just because you could? Why were you looking in our bedroom?’
And with that release of breath comes six weeks of confusion and anger and heartache and love for Léa and sadness at my impending divorce and despair at my own fucked-up life that’s turning out nothing like I expected. It rises up in me like a hairball in my throat that I have to cough out.
‘Because you’re so lucky,’ I say, my voice strangled. ‘You’re so bloody lucky and you don’t seem to appreciate it. You have a great husband, two adorable children who love you and want to be with you, an amazing career, and you’re living in this idyllic place. You have everything I want, and yet you’re never there. You’re never bloody there. And I couldn’t help it, maybe at first I wanted to… find something out that would make you not so fucking perfect.’ I laugh. ‘But the thing is, I couldn’t find anything. You’ve got perfect clothes and perfect hair and perfect wedding photos and a perfectly clean bloody house. Your life is amazing and mine…’ My voice breaks and I gulp back a knot in my throat. My eyes are blurred and I can’t see the road clearly anymore. ‘My life is an utter mess right now,’ I eventually manage, ‘and I guess I just wanted some of your perfection to rub off on me.’
The Other Daughter Page 23