The Lie of the Land

by Amanda Craig

  She says, ‘Leave, bitch.’

  Janet gasps, and in that moment she is all the other women who have had some part in harming Lottie’s marriage and home. She hadn’t wanted to blame them, and yet the truth was, she hated them. The steel disc catches her opponent’s head below the jaw, and Lottie has Janet pinned to the wall, both of them panting. She knows that with a little more pressure on the neck she could kill Janet, and Janet knows this too.

  ‘Drop it.’

  Even so, Janet lifts the knife, but she can’t reach past the length of the improvised lance, and the knife falls. Still Lottie won’t release her. She stands locked in her rage, breathing hard. Janet slumps to the floor, and Lottie raises the lamp to smash it down.

  Quentin crawls over, clutching his shoulder.

  ‘Don’t, Lottie.’

  He picks up the knife and throws it well away from them all. It lands in the living room, and then, still sitting, he gropes around the floor with his one free hand.

  She almost shrieks, ‘Help Xan!’

  ‘I’m trying. Key, key. Ah, found it,’ Quentin says, kneeling on top of Janet and feeling in the pocket of her apron. He staggers up, and turns the key. ‘Xan, it’s open.’

  There is no answer from inside, and Lottie’s panic rises. Quentin pushes against an unseen obstacle.

  ‘Xan, can you hear me? Xan?’

  Lottie lunges for the door. She kicks it again and again. It’s clear that Xan must be behind it, blocking the opening; but the crack widens. She can get her hand in through the gap.

  ‘Ambulance,’ Dawn says. ‘I called it. Ambulance.’

  ‘You poor child,’ Quentin says. He’s sitting on Janet’s chest. Lottie runs up the short flight of steps to her son’s room, finds his inhaler, almost falls back down and, snaking her hand round the door, gropes for her son’s face. The touch of his still features almost makes her break down, but he’s breathing, although his wheezing isn’t audible. He needs to be hospitalised, but if she can get some of the inhaler into him, the magic Salbutamol … His lips are slack, and his teeth closed.

  If he’s conscious, he gives no sign. Any dose may help, if it can just get inside him. She thrusts the mouthpiece between his lips.

  ‘Breathe,’ she says, and pushes the cylinder down. ‘Breathe.’

  37

  An Inescapable Web

  Halfway to her car, Sally comes out of her dream. This is not a fairy tale, where babies are found under a bush or dropped by an eagle, and she should know that better than anyone. She can hear her mum’s voice saying loud and clear: It’s not good enough, and the child isn’t yours.

  ‘Oh,’ she says.

  She looks down at the bundle swaddled in her scarf, at the tiny hands curled like two buds by her cheeks. Someone has given birth to this little girl, probably in pain and fear, and somebody had tried to care for her. Although she has been treated almost like an animal, there had been a nappy, even if it was overflowing, and a bottle in the cage, even if it was empty. There had been rags to pad the bottom, and to screen the child from the sun. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

  Also, the baby is, as far as she can tell without knowing her age, not actually starving, even if her muscles are underdeveloped. Her vest is grubby and ill-fitting, but she has seen worse. Although no child should ever be left unattended, it’s possible the cage had been to protect her. But from what – or who?

  ‘Hush, now,’ she says, as the baby sets up a weak, fretful cry.

  Sally has always thought of herself as a good person, which means not only trying to become better but choosing not to be bad – which is a very different, if not unrelated, matter. How could she possibly imagine she might pass off a baby that isn’t her own? It’s not as if babies are lambs. Peter would be appalled, her sisters, her colleagues, everyone would be shocked at such an act. She herself will go to prison or, at the very least, lose her job if found out. In the moments when she’d picked the baby up and carried her to the gates an entire life story had spun through her head, in which she took all her savings out, and the passport she has never used, and bought a plane ticket from Exeter Airport to one of the many places she’s always wanted to visit. She would find some remote place, and bring up this child with love and tenderness, and nobody would be any the wiser.

  For a moment, Sally is unable to move. It’s not a question of courage. She’s faced down demented mothers (and fathers), set off down strange tracks in thick fog, helped her husband find lost sheep on Dartmoor and waded through mountains of grief, anger and stress every day. She has been hurt, humiliated, appalled, attacked by dogs, berated and despised. If saving this baby meant more of the same, she is better equipped than most to do so.

  Coroo-coroo, say the pigeons in the tall trees. Why not? What would be the harm?

  It isn’t virtue that stops her, it’s the regulations. Everybody in modern Europe lives for better or worse in an inescapable web of Health and Safety. An unregistered child will not have access to health care, education, a passport and an identity. You cannot exist below the radar of the State these days, not if you want any kind of future, not if you are a loving and responsible parent. If she took this child, she would be far, far worse than Lily Hart with her unvaccinated kids.

  Besides, how does she know where this baby even comes from? The child might have already been kidnapped from somebody, she might be the subject of a desperate search somewhere else in the country or even abroad. Far more likely, however, that she is the product of a concealed pregnancy and birth, either by Janet or by Dawn. It could be Janet – she might be young enough – but it’s far more likely to be the daughter.

  Sally thinks of the little she knows about the teenager, and how drastically she has changed over the past year. She hadn’t always been fat, and clearly, it wasn’t only fat. Of course something has gone dreadfully wrong: it seems clear now. Why had nobody raised the alarm? There is one obvious answer: Dawn is seventeen, the age between official childhood and adulthood, when all kinds of unhappy teenagers disappear into the cracks, unable to access specific kinds of care, yet not fully independent. At such an age, you needed a parent or a responsible adult to fight for you in all kinds of ways. The girl has been living with her mother, to all appearances a responsible single parent with a respectable job and home, but in virtual isolation. She’d gone to the village school, and then to the Secondary in Trelorn, but she had made no friends.

  ‘Standoffish,’ was the general opinion, alongside ‘Stuck-up and snooty.’

  Dawn’s academic abilities had not won her any allies: if anything, the opposite. She’d never gone clubbing or done any of the things normal kids do. Even singing in the choir hadn’t helped. Dawn had a beautiful soprano voice, but it only served to isolate her further.

  Also, the two women are not local. They may live and work and even be educated here but are not part of the community. Even if they wanted to be so, it would have taken decades for them to become fully accepted. Without relations and without friends, Dawn was never going to be noticed in the way that even Lottie’s son would be. That is the good thing about life here, and the bad.

  A small breeze blows on her face, a gust of cool air breathing from the trees. Still she stands and thinks. This has to be Dawn’s baby: people would have noticed a pregnancy in Janet, though she isn’t popular. It would have been a source of scandal, especially given her job with the Tores and her affair with Rod Ball. Dawn, though … why hadn’t she gone to the doctor? Had she been afraid or ashamed? And who is the father?

  Ah, Sally thinks. That’s the question. It wouldn’t be the first time that a woman has a boyfriend who is really after her daughter. If Rod had abused Dawn, and Janet loved him more than her own child, then it made more sense. Either way, this infant must and will end up under child protection, with many agencies involved in sorting out the mess.

  All this will come later, but for now Sally thinks how terrible it must have been to have gone through it alone, without pre-and an
tenatal care, without anaesthetic, and almost certainly without support. What horrors have gone on, unseen and unsuspected, beneath the roof of this gingerbread cottage? If the baby is indeed Dawn’s, what pressure must have been put on her to give up school and any kind of independent life or future? The image of Janet and her daughter comes into her memory: always so close, always together. How much of that was the closeness of love, and how much the relationship between gaoler and prisoner?

  Even so, why hadn’t Dawn simply asked for help? She might not be able to drive or even ride a bike, but she could have walked to the village and found Dr Viner or his wife. Or maybe she was too afraid.

  The baby sighs and makes a small, birdlike cry.

  ‘You need help, don’t you,’ Sally murmurs. Tears pour down her face, and she rubs them off with her shoulder. She needs help herself, really. Pete doesn’t understand this desperate need she has for a child, or what is worse, maybe he does – and this is why he’d concealed his infertility and allowed her to go on hoping.

  Her anger at his deception, his presumption, is partly what has driven her to the brink of this madness.

  ‘Oh, what to do, what to do?’ she mutters.

  To grow up in care is not something anyone in social services would wish for their own child. A baby like this stands a good chance of being adopted, but it’s always a choice between two or more sorrows. Every moment that passes will make Sally’s decision more difficult. She yearns for this child as she has never done for any of the thousands of babies that she has helped into and through the world. She is entrancing, with her delicate features and curling copper hair. But she is not Sally’s.

  Baggage is looking at her through the gate with anxious eyes and a frown on her long face. When the springer sees Sally, she barks, imperiously. It’s a tone Sally has rarely heard, and it reminds her that she has a responsibility to Baggage, too.

  ‘Just a moment, dear one,’ she says.

  Peter isn’t the one whom Baggage comes racing to see, plumy tail whirling, or rolls over for in a shameless display of neediness and affection. Peter isn’t the one whom Baggage approaches to thrust her head onto her knees, to sit and gaze beseechingly for a walk, or who jumps onto a sofa for the pleasure of snoozing by her side. If I carry on another step, she thinks, I’ll never see my dog, my darling dog, again.

  The betrayal of trust hurts her as much as if he’d gone with another woman. Clearly, Peter hadn’t known before he married her, and she would have noticed if he’d caught mumps after. He must have had the disease at some time during his short, neglected childhood, perhaps after his mother died. It must have been devastating to find out; no wonder he’s been so insistent they could be happy without children.

  ‘But that wasn’t a choice for him to make on his own,’ she says aloud.

  The memories are a rip tide. All those years of trying for a baby, at first thrilled and confident, then less and less thrilled and less confident, until the joy seeped away. Pete hated any intrusion on his privacy, but eventually, after much persuasion, they had both been to see the fertility clinic and had tests.

  Sally winces at the memory. Just getting Pete to provide two sperm samples had been a struggle. It was an affront to his pride, and also his sense of decency. He’d been given a dirty magazine, and told to go to the toilet.

  ‘I kept wondering what trouble those poor girls had got themselves into to be making such an exhibition of themselves,’ he mumbled.

  Typical of her husband to worry about that.

  It had never occurred to her to ask to see the doctor’s letter to Peter. She’d accepted it when he told her that everything was fine: not a direct lie, but an implied one. For her, the tests had been much more complex and invasive, needless to say, but worth going through the agonising cramps caused by having her tubes blown just to be told she, too, was fine. Of course she was: she has been able to conceive all along.

  ‘I’d sooner trust a vet than a doctor,’ he said. ‘Load of old cobblers.’

  She bought multiple packs of pregnancy test kits, because each month she would go through the ritual of peeing onto its stick every day for ten days, praying for the blue line of success to show in its window. Each time she did it, she would pray: to God, to Nature, to whatever might control conception. There were stories about women who had periods when pregnant, and false negatives, and she could not understand why she was so persistently unlucky. She’d heard of couples who were allergic to each other, or who had undertaken pagan rituals.

  When she went back to the GP again, five years later, one of old Dr Drew’s successors had suggested that maybe they try other options while they were young enough, like IVF. He must have been bound by patient confidentiality, unable to tell her that no amount of hoping and waiting would do the trick, but why couldn’t her own husband be honest? Now, in her heart, she knows he’d probably never have felt comfortable with such a decision. Artificial insemination is for sheep, but not his wife. Even if he hated his own dad, he’d want a child to be his and hers alone. Pete can’t understand how families have changed. The rock-like qualities he has have made him stick to farming in the teeth of the foot-and-mouth crisis, fly strike, blizzards and droughts. It’s a sacred duty, a debt he pays with no sense of the land belonging to him, but he hasn’t thought about her, and what she needs.

  As she stands there in the late afternoon sun, the baby lying so sweetly heavy in her arms, Sally makes up her mind. She might not get this baby, no matter how she loves her, but Peter can’t deny her one any longer. He has lied to her, and she is going to lie right back.

  Her mobile has, at last, picked up the wavering signal that flickers along the Tamar Valley. She presses a number.

  ‘Hello?’ Sally says. ‘Hello. I want to report a concealed birth.’

  There has been nothing like this in living memory round here, but then she thinks of her mother’s story. It has been nagging away at her for months. What had happened to Dr Drew’s daughter’s baby? Adopted, her mother told her: beautiful little baby like that was never going to lack a home. That was over forty years ago, but she wonders who the adoptive parents had been, and where. And then, like a key turning in a lock, something else clicks in her mind.

  ‘An unreported birth, yes, of a baby of about ten months. It’s a priority case.’

  It’s the hardest thing she’s ever had to do, but the poor child must go back into the cage, if not into her filthy nappy, though she will keep that. The cream she rubbed onto her poor raw legs will have helped take away some of the chafing, but she’s still a terrible sight. Going back down the passage into the porch and opening up the cage again is like returning a prisoner to gaol. She cuddles the baby as much as she dares, hoping that the love will somehow soak through. Under her breath, she sings,

  Sally go round the sun.

  Sally go round the moon.

  Sally go round the chimney tops

  Every afternoon …

  Then she kisses the little girl and walks to the road and strokes her dog’s soft fur, crying. For a few minutes she had felt like a mother, and now she isn’t any more.

  By the time the police and other services arrive, her tears have gone. She’s calm and composed, explaining that she had happened to stop by the manor gates to make a call, and heard the baby crying. The sight of the child in the cage, the contrast between the exterior of the gatehouse and the filth and abandonment inside, and Sally’s own status as a health visitor are enough to forestall other questions. The baby is photographed, weighed, measured and taken away to a temporary foster home.

  ‘Where is the present tenant?’ a policeman asks.

  Of course, Sally doesn’t know, and neither does Di Tore when she turns up with her sons soon after.

  With Di’s arrival, the scene takes on another aspect. She is as appalled as any of them, but she immediately calls her lawyer and press agent. Di understands, as they do not, that someone will leak this story to the media. The Tores will shortly be under siege.
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  ‘I had no idea! No, you can’t take my statement until I’ve taken legal advice, honestly!’

  They retreat to the manor house. Sally is seen as a friendly face in the chaos, and it’s a better place to give her own statement once the lawyer does arrive. Besides, her mind is still churning over what she’d realised.

  ‘I can’t believe such a dreadful thing has happened on my own doorstep.’

  Sally asks the question that everyone around has been dying to ask for the past seven years:

  ‘How did Janet come to get her job with you?’

  ‘Oh – someone recommended her. Gordon knew someone who knew someone, I think. She seemed fine. Good cleaner, good plain cook.’

  ‘We never liked her, Mum,’ Dexter says.

  ‘I know, I know. Oh my darlings, I should have listened!’

  ‘There’s no answer,’ Sally can hear a policeman saying, after trying Janet’s mobile and leaving a message.

  ‘Does anyone have a number for the daughter?’

  No, it turned out. There was no number for the daughter. Nobody could remember ever seeing Dawn with a mobile. Which should have been another red flag, Sally thinks to herself, guiltily.

  What has Dawn gone through? The more she thinks about it, the more traumatic it must be.

  ‘I’m horrified to think I let her babysit my own sons,’ Di says to Sally. ‘We trusted Janet. Why didn’t she ask us for help? Is she some kind of religious nut?’