All the Single Ladies

by Jane Costello

  I swallow, not knowing what to say. My mind is swirling with possible responses, the most prominent of which is: No, Alistair, everything is not all right. And by the way, have you noticed that the mother of your child is an alcoholic?

  Instead, I manage a weak: ‘What makes you ask that?’

  He hesitates. ‘I don’t know . . . It struck me you hadn’t been round much lately. And Ellie’s been acting a little . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh it’s nothing. Forget it. Sorry – I’m going to have to go, Sam. I think Sophie’s awake.’

  I phone Jen next.

  ‘Oh God . . . I’m so glad you phoned,’ she says breathlessly before I can start to tell her what’s happened. ‘I can’t stay on for long because I’m at work and we’ve got a staffing crisis.’

  ‘What’s up, Jen?’ I ask, almost on autopilot.

  ‘I’ve got to split up with Dan. It’s the only way.’ I say nothing. ‘Sam . . . are you there?’

  ‘Yes,’ I reply.

  ‘We went out for dinner last night and he started banging on about how frustrating it was for him to have still not found “the one”. So I came out with it and said, “Where do I fit into all this?”’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘He started squirming and said, “Well, I really like getting together with you and . . . I think you’re wonderful, just wonderful . . . but, well, I like what we’ve got. You don’t want a big full-on relationship, do you?”’

  Jen continues for the next two minutes and she’s clearly upset, but I’m of no comfort. I don’t even get round to interrupting her frantic conversation to tell her what happened with Jamie.

  ‘Look, I really do need to go. Is everything all right with you, Sam?’

  I’m about to answer, but she interrupts again. ‘Oh God – sorry, honey. There’s an emergency here. And I’m due to see Ellie again tonight. I’m determined to get her to see sense. I’ll text you if there’s news.’

  For the rest of the evening, I feel as if my house is not my own. Nothing is going to mend today. Not a million-pound lottery win. Not a lifetime’s supply of Jimmy Choos. Not God deciding I can eat as much cake as I want for the rest of my life and never put on weight.

  I wander round the house aimlessly, considering possible ways of cheering myself up. But the music on my iPod just hurts my insides and the Galaxy bar in the fridge has never been less appetizing. I pour a glass of wine, but can’t touch it. I just look at it and think of what it and its kind have done to my best friend.

  So I follow an urge that grabbed hold of me the second Jamie walked out of the door and hasn’t left since. I race upstairs to my laptop and, sitting on my bed as I wipe away tears, I frantically log on. I go straight to Facebook to see if Ben is online – and my heart sinks when he isn’t. I pick up my phone and stare at it, wondering if I should confide in him about this. This man for whom my feelings remain so complicated.

  I am about to press call, when a new status update appears. It says he’s at Panoramic – one of the city’s best restaurants – with Mildred Muldoon.

  I frown. Mildred. That’s his elderly cat-owning neighbour, is it not?

  As I click on to her profile picture my heart is thrashing. And what I see manages to make me feel even worse than I felt already. Which, frankly, I hadn’t thought possible.

  Mildred – who, Ben jokingly said on our first date, ‘might want to marry’ him – is not a seventy-four-year-old, blue-rinsed, varicose-veined pensioner as I had assumed. Mildred is a twenty-four-year-old pseudo-supermodel, whose public profile boasts no fewer than 372 pictures, not one of which makes her look less than jaw-droppingly gorgeous.

  Frantically, I flick to Ben’s page, and am confronted by a sentence that hits me like a freight train.

  Ben Moran is in a relationship.

  Chapter 77

  By the time I get to my mum’s, it’s gone ten o’clock, and she opens the door with something in her hand which, on closer inspection, turns out to be a novelty shoe horn fashioned in the shape of a piece of broccoli.

  ‘It’s Aunt Jill’s birthday next week and she’s so tricky to buy for. So I got something that I thought would have universal appeal,’ she says, apparently seriously.

  She sits on the sofa and starts wrapping the gift as I plunge into the chair opposite. I close my eyes briefly and wonder if I can actually confide in Mum. It’s not something I’ve ever done before.

  ‘Jamie and I have split up again.’ The words tumble out surprisingly easily. ‘I haven’t told anyone yet.’

  I wait for her to respond with the ‘all men are bastards except your father’ speech. Except it isn’t forthcoming. Instead, she stands up silently and walks towards me, perching on the arm of the chair and pulling my head to her chest.

  ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart,’ she whispers, rubbing my back. ‘I really am.’

  I pull back and take in the look on her face. The concern, empathy, unconditional love. I feel suddenly and significantly better.

  ‘What happened?’

  I fill her in on the details and she listens calmly, offering the occasional word of support and advice. After everything else tonight, it feels low-key, undramatic – and exactly what I need.

  ‘Stay here tonight, if you like,’ she tells me.

  I smile. ‘I might take you up on that.’

  ‘Good, because—’

  She’s interrupted by the sound of a key in the door, and I compose myself, expecting it to be Dad back from the pub. It isn’t Dad, though; it’s Julia.

  In every other way but one she looks her usual self: stylishly dressed, beautifully made-up. But when she enters the room this evening she almost skulks. It’s so unlike her usual elegance that it changes her entire demeanour, and reminds me of how miserable she’s looked since the news that her birth mum wants nothing to do with her.

  Mum straightens up. ‘Is everything all right, Julia?’

  ‘Just thought I’d stop and say hello on my way home from tonight’s concert,’ she replies. ‘What are you doing here, Sam?’

  ‘Do you really want to know?’ I ask.

  I don’t know what it is about the way I repeat the story, but Julia’s reaction is unbelievably emotional. She wipes away a tear and throws her arms around me, then beckons Mum to join in. It’s like a rugby scrum, but with less mud and more oestrogen.

  ‘Look,’ says Julia, her lip trembling. ‘No matter what happens, we’ve got each other.’

  ‘That’s the corniest thing you’ve ever said,’ I reply. ‘But totally true.’

  ‘If Jamie doesn’t want you, Sam, that’s his loss. That’s what I’ve told myself about my birth mother,’ she adds. Now I realize what’s eating her. ‘The more I think about the outright “no” I got from her, the more I fail to comprehend what sort of woman she must be. I’m better off without her.’

  Mum pulls away and goes to sit on the sofa. Julia follows and sits next to her, squeezing her hand.

  ‘Mum,’ she continues. ‘I’m so sorry for everything I put you through. The rejection – from my own mother – has totally reinforced what I’ve got with you. I can’t imagine why any woman would want nothing to do with her daughter, can you?’

  I am struck by a sensation that this animosity towards a woman she’s never met isn’t doing Julia any good at all.

  ‘Maybe she has her reasons,’ I say weakly.

  ‘Like what?’ she replies, agitated. ‘There’s no good reason.’ A tear comes from nowhere and slides down her cheek. ‘I swing between telling myself it doesn’t matter . . . and feeling, I’ll be honest, awful. About my mum. About me. About what I could possibly have done to her. About why after, all these years, she can’t bring herself to even say hello.’

  She turns to me again, and I’ve never seen her so upset.

  ‘Does she hate me or something? I’m coming to the conclusion that she must.’

  The silence is suddenly so oppressive that, when Mum breaks it, her words almost echo off t
he walls. ‘She doesn’t hate you.’

  Julia whips round her head to glare at her. ‘What?’

  Mum’s jaw tightens. ‘She doesn’t hate you.’

  Julia’s eyes are blazing. ‘You know who she is, don’t you? You know.’

  Mum looks away and stares into the middle distance, shaking her head. But she isn’t denying Julia’s question. She simply has no idea what to do or say – and, clearly, neither does my sister.

  ‘Mum,’ I say insistently. ‘Do you know who Julia’s mother is?’

  She swallows hard and, with glazed eyes, turns to look directly at Julia. ‘I do.’

  For a moment my sister seems to stop breathing. ‘Then who the hell is she?’ she erupts.

  Mum closes her eyes, filling her lungs with air, attempting to find strength.

  ‘She’s me, sweetheart,’ she replies. ‘She’s me.’

  Chapter 78

  Julia and I sit numbly, trying to work out what we’ve missed. Dissecting Mum’s words and trying to make sense of them. We reach the same conclusion.

  ‘Mum,’ she says, ‘you know you mean as much to me as any biological mother. But I’m talking in literal terms. I’m talking about the woman who physically gave birth to me.’

  Mum’s face is devoid of colour, but it has a veil of calm as she stares at the clock on the mantelpiece. ‘I know. So am I.’

  Julia shakes her head, looking as if every breath has been sucked from her.

  ‘You’re my birth mother?’

  My heart is hammering so fast I can barely concentrate on anything else.

  Mum puts her head in her hands briefly, then looks up and composes herself. ‘I am, sweetheart. And I know I’ve got a lot of explaining to do.’

  Julia is clearly failing to comprehend any of this. She’s not alone. Mum needs to start talking.

  ‘Gary already told you the outline of the events, and that, essentially, is it. He told the truth. Your dad and I had met a few years earlier and fell totally in love. But we had . . . a rough patch. At the time, I thought we’d never recover from it.’

  ‘What happened?’ I splutter.

  She takes a deep breath. ‘Our first years as a married couple were no honeymoon period. So much went wrong, particularly in that third year. Your dad’s father died. He lost his job. In the event, he was out of work for only a short period, but at the time it was horrendous. Plus, as you already know, I had five miscarriages.’

  ‘Which was why you adopted Julia,’ I mutter. ‘Or we thought you’d adopted Julia.’

  Mum swallows. ‘I can’t tell you what that was like – with the babies, I mean. Every time we got our hopes up that this was it . . . this was the child we desperately wanted . . . I lost it. My job meant I was always delivering other people’s babies so, every time we experienced it again, the pressure, the pain – it was unbearable. I was six months pregnant with the last baby. The grief was indescribable . . .’ She shudders and her voice trails off before she continues. ‘We’d been together for four years and the pressure got to us. Badly. And, well, we decided we needed to be apart for some time. Your dad was convinced that the worry about him losing his job had contributed to me losing the last baby. Six months was the furthest along I’d ever got.’ She shakes her head. ‘That was ridiculous, of course. But the point is that neither of us was in a good place.’

  ‘So Dad left you?’

  ‘We both agreed that splitting up was the best thing to do. The thing is that sometimes, when difficult things happen, relationships get stronger. But we were young and . . . we didn’t know how to handle it.’

  Julia and I can’t speak as we take all this in.

  ‘He was – and always has been – the love of my life,’ Mum tells us. ‘And although I thought having some time apart was the right thing to do, equally I couldn’t cope with the idea of not spending the rest of my life with him. It was a mess. I decided to make a clean break.’

  ‘You went to London, like Gary said,’ Julia offers.

  Mum nods. ‘My parents were, obviously, completely against the whole thing. Well, you know what they were like, Grandma Milly in particular. I was a married woman, for goodness’ sake. It was a difficult time. I got a job in a maternity hospital, which some people thought I was mad to do, given what I’d been going through with the miscarriages, but that was my vocation. I’d always been a midwife; I didn’t know anything else. Not that I can deny I was as miserable as sin. I was lonely. And I desperately missed your father. That’s when I met Gary.’

  Julia swallows. ‘I see.’

  Mum squirms. ‘He was living in the same street where I was renting a room and we became friends. That was all. But, one night, we got talking about what had gone on between Frank and me. I got upset and . . . I don’t know, I felt in need of human contact, I suppose. That night it turned out to be more than that. You don’t need me to spell it out. I . . . I made a mistake.’ She looks at her hands. ‘It happened only once and we agreed to put the whole thing behind us. My feelings for him were nothing like those I had for your father. I couldn’t have started a relationship with him; I was still in love with someone else. With Frank.’

  ‘So when did you get back together with Dad?’ I ask.

  ‘Four days later, I got home from work to find your dad waiting on the doorstep. He’d got another job. He’d wanted me back all along but had been determined to get work before he approached me. There was simply no other man for me.’

  ‘So you moved back up north straight away?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes. Gary and I promised to stay in touch, but things were awkward. Then . . . well, life threw us a googly.’

  ‘You found out you were pregnant?’ Julia asks.

  Mum nods. ‘I didn’t start showing until I was about seven months gone. It was the same ten years later with you, Sam.’

  ‘But how did you know it wasn’t Dad’s child?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ shrugs Mum. ‘I hoped it was. But the timing was such that it could as easily be Gary’s. And given Gary’s beautiful, chocolate-brown skin, it was going to be immediately apparent if the baby turned out to be his. I couldn’t risk your dad discovering everything in the labour room like that. I had to tell him.’

  Neither Julia nor I can move; we’re stunned.

  ‘And he never doubted he wanted to stay with you – even though you were possibly carrying another man’s child?’ I ask.

  Mum looks at me with glassy eyes. ‘Never. That didn’t stop us both being shell-shocked, of course. We didn’t know what to do. The thought of how this would go down with my family . . . Well, can you imagine? It would have been impossible. So I went to stay with Great-Aunt Maggie – Grandma Milly’s sister – until I gave birth. She lived in Colwyn Bay. What is it, Julia?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she says, shaking her head dismissively. ‘Gary mentioned some sort of Welsh connection, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, Maggie kept the secret for me,’ Mum says. ‘I told everyone I was working in London again. My hope, of course, was that I’d give birth to the baby and it’d turn out to be your dad’s. We didn’t have a plan about what to say to people; we were making it up as we went along.’

  ‘But it didn’t turn out to be his,’ Julia says numbly. ‘It turned out to be Gary’s. You must have had to make a plan, then?’

  ‘We decided . . .’ Mum swallows and a tear streams down her cheek. ‘We decided that all we could do was to have you adopted. To do with you exactly as you thought did happen.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’ Julia whispers.

  Mum shakes her head. ‘Because when I held your tiny body in my arms in that labour ward, everything changed.’ Her expression is a strange combination of elation and pain. ‘You were beautiful. I see babies every day, but I’d never seen one as beautiful as you. You were a gorgeous, tiny, healthy baby with a rosebud mouth and fingers that curled around mine as if you were saying to me: “Mummy, I’m yours. You can’t let me go.” And you know what, Julia? I couldn’t. I absolutely could
n’t. Frank couldn’t either. I promise you, Julia, that even if keeping you had meant my own mother and father would never have spoken to me again, then that’s what I would have done. Without question. However . . .’

  ‘Yes?’ says Julia.

  Mum takes a deep breath. ‘Grandma Milly was in frail health. She’d had a bout of pneumonia and I was worried sick that she wasn’t going to survive it. In the event, she recovered and lived another ten years, but at the time that looked very unlikely. The last thing I wanted was to inflict more drama on her. As unreasonable as her prejudices were. So I came up with an idea that I knew could solve everything.’

  ‘To tell everyone that Julia was adopted,’ I say.

  Mum nods. ‘My story was that a woman at the adoption agency – who I knew through work – had told me about you and, when I saw you, I had an overwhelming urge to look after you. Particularly since your dad and I had had trouble conceiving, which Grandma Milly knew all about.’

  ‘And everyone believed it?’ I ask.

  ‘Why wouldn’t they? I simply told them Julia had faced an uncertain future otherwise and, having worked with babies all my life, I couldn’t let that happen. Everyone accepted it.’ She turns to Julia. ‘I was desperate to keep you. It seemed like the only option.’

  Julia frowns, shaking her head. ‘But that was then. That was thirty-eight years ago. Why wouldn’t you have told the truth since? I don’t understand.’

  Mum swallows. ‘The more time that passed, the more I thought that announcing to everyone the reality of the situation would either kill my mother with shock, or make everyone think I needed carting away by men in white coats.’ She scrunches up her forehead. ‘It was more than that, though. It just . . . ceased to become an issue, all by itself somehow. None of us ever really thought about it. I mean, you don’t, do you? You just get on with life.’

  She swallows and bites the nail on her thumb. ‘Plus, whenever we did talk about it, Julia, you were so fixed in your view that biology was irrelevant. That you didn’t give two hoots about finding your birth mother. That I was your mum, no matter what happened. So I convinced myself it wasn’t an issue. I convinced myself – and Frank – that knowing the truth wasn’t that important to you.’