Saving Baby Amy

by Annie Claydon

  Probably not. The people getting out of the bus were chatting and laughing amongst themselves, obviously having made friendships. They looked good company, but no one was under fifty, which wasn’t the age group that he would have expected Hannah to naturally gravitate towards.

  ‘Well, I never...’ Jon followed Chloe’s pointing finger and saw Hannah climb down from the bus. Her rucksack was one of the first bags out of the luggage compartment and she collected it, laughing with the couple who were standing next to her as the man teased her about something.

  ‘What’s Hannah doing on a silver surfers’ bus trip?’ Jon couldn’t see anything wrong with the people standing around the bus, but he reckoned that Hannah would dismiss them, labelling them as boring.

  ‘No idea.’ Chloe stood up, waving to Hannah, and she bade a cheery goodbye to her companions, walking over to them.

  Chloe had obviously thought about this and knew exactly what she was going to do. No running at Hannah, no frantic grabbing at her, no tears. She spread her arms, smiling as Hannah gave her a hug and a kiss, and then let her go.

  ‘How’s Amy?’ Chloe had told him that when Hannah called, those were always the first words from her mouth.

  ‘I called James this morning and she’s fine. It’s good to see you. You look so well...’ Chloe kept hold of Hannah’s hand. She did look well, less pale than when she’d been with James in Cornwall. And she’d dyed her hair a lighter, more natural colour, rather than the black that she usually favoured.

  ‘You too.’ Hannah grinned at Chloe, and turned her attention to Jon. ‘Thanks for coming.’

  This was something new too. Whenever he’d seen Hannah with James she’d always been the kid sister. But from the way she put her arm around Chloe’s shoulders, it seemed that Hannah had developed a protective streak for her sister. She’d grown up a little.

  ‘My pleasure. We drove down. Had a few days’ holiday.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Hannah raised her eyebrows. ‘That’s good.’

  ‘So did you enjoy the coach trip?’ Chloe ventured the question.

  ‘Yeah, actually. It was only two days, and I wanted to take in a bit of the history of the area, so I booked it. I thought it was going to be dreadful when I saw that lot.’ Hannah jerked her thumb over her shoulder at her fellow travellers. ‘But it was so interesting. One of the guys on the trip is a history teacher—well, he was before he retired—and he really made it all come alive. And his wife’s an absolute darling. So funny.’

  ‘Good.’ Chloe kept her thoughts to herself over Hannah’s abrupt volte face over whether anyone over twenty-five had anything to offer. ‘Shall we go back to the boarding house? Then maybe you can show me around a bit.’

  ‘You haven’t checked the village out?’

  ‘No, I wanted you to show me.’ Chloe had clearly decided that she was going to leave the more difficult questions for later, and for now just watch and wait. It was an approach that Jon reckoned was wholly right.

  ‘Oh, okay, then.’ Hannah seemed pleased at the thought. ‘Have you got the car with you, or do we need to grab a bus back to the village?’

  * * *

  Jon had let them talk, strolling beside them, hands in pockets as if he was just there for the scenery. But he was there. It made her feel strong enough to wait, to let Hannah dictate the pace.

  They dropped Hannah’s rucksack at the boarding house and walked into the centre of the village to get some lunch. Hannah had brought a blue plastic folder with her, and from the way she put it on the table next to her, it held something important. Chloe was dreading the moment when Hannah decided to show her what was inside it.

  ‘When you said you were driving, I thought you might be planning to throw a blanket over my head and tie me up. Take me back home.’ One of the things that Chloe liked about Hannah was that she didn’t beat about the bush. It was sometimes brutal, but at least it was honest.

  Although she wasn’t quite sure that she knew the answer to this. No, I wasn’t sounded as if she didn’t care. Yes, I was wasn’t much of a reassurance that she was here to listen and learn.

  ‘I talked Chloe out of it.’ Jon seemed to have woken suddenly from his reverie. ‘She might not care about losing her licence to practise after being brought up on kidnapping charges, but I do.’

  Chloe shot him a silent thank you and Hannah grinned. ‘So I’m not going to need the pepper spray to defend myself?’

  Maybe Hannah was joking and maybe not. Jon smiled. ‘That rather depends on what you’re defending yourself from.’

  He went back to his meal and the matter was dropped. When the waitress brought coffee, Hannah reached for the folder. ‘I want to show you... I found some things out. About Dad.’

  Chloe breathed a sigh of relief. The nagging fear that perhaps there had been legal papers in the folder, something that formalised Hannah’s intention to leave Amy behind, was unfounded. ‘Show me. I’d love to see.’

  Hannah opened the folder on the first page. A black and white map of the village, a few of the buildings coloured in by hand. ‘This is where Dad lived. In blue. And the mauve is where our grandmother was born.’

  Chloe leaned over the map. ‘Right here? By the village green?’

  ‘Yes, her parents had a shop.’ Hannah’s face had the intent look she got when she had hold of something and wasn’t letting go. ‘Haberdashery.’

  Hannah leaned over, flipping through the pages, finding the right one. The photograph was a copy of an older one, the creases showing up on the print. ‘Who’s that standing outside?’

  ‘Guess.’ Hannah’s face was flushed with triumph.

  ‘I don’t know. The proprietor...our great-grandfather?’ Chloe peered at the figure. She could hardly make any features out, just a man in a white apron standing in the shadow of the doorway. He looked as if he had a moustache.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Wow.’ Chloe looked at the photograph again. ‘Where did you get this? You’ve done it all in the last week?’

  ‘No, I’ve been working on it for a while, using the internet, but coming here everything fell into place. The pasteur at the church gave me the photo. His predecessor had a thing about the village history and he collected a load of things and catalogued them all. It’s all still kept up at the church, along with the parish records.’

  ‘But...’ The nagging doubt that there was something wrong with the photograph suddenly resolved into certainty. ‘The shopfront. It says Delancourt. That wasn’t our grandmother’s name, was it?’

  Hannah laughed. ‘Wondered when you’d notice. When Dad’s father left, she reverted back to her maiden name. And Dad took her name, because he didn’t want anything to do with his father.’

  Chloe stole a glance at Jon. Families breaking up, not wanting anything to do with each other. If the subject was a sore spot for him, he wasn’t showing it.

  ‘Why did Dad do that?’

  ‘His father beat them.’

  ‘How on earth do you know that?’

  ‘The pastor at the church put me in touch with someone who knew Dad. They were at school together. I went and talked to him.’

  Sadness suddenly struck Chloe. This was all fascinating, but Hannah had left her own child to chase people who were long dead. She asked the question as gently as she could.

  ‘This is why you left? To find out about our dad?’ Chloe swallowed down the impulse to be cross with Hannah. Surely this was no reason to abandon Amy.

  The light died in Hannah’s eyes. ‘No, I...’

  ‘Sometimes, when you can’t make sense of the present, it helps to try and make sense of the past. Because the past is over and done with and can’t hurt you.’ Jon spoke suddenly, his voice gentle.

  Hannah’s eyes began to blur with tears. ‘I’m sorry, Chloe.’

  ‘It’s
okay. You did the best you could, Hannah, and you made sure that Amy was safe.’ Chloe was beginning to see that maybe Hannah had done the only thing she could do. Something was very wrong, and she’d been trying to protect Amy from that. She reached for her sister’s hand, holding it tight.

  Hannah was retreating fast, her face taking on that look of dumb watchfulness that Chloe had seen so many times before. They had to stop now. She glanced at Jon and the ghost of a nod told her that he understood.

  ‘May I look at your photos, please, Hannah?’ He slid his hand across the table towards the blue folder.

  Hannah nodded, and Jon started to leaf through the pages, asking questions and complimenting Hannah on what she’d found out. Slowly Hannah began to emerge from her shell and started to talk fluently. It seemed that this project was her way of making sense of something.

  ‘And all the births and marriages of the Delancourt family are in the church records?’ Jon was examining the family tree that Hannah had drawn up.

  ‘Most of them. I’ll show you. And we can go to the churchyard as well. Our grandmother’s buried there. And guess what her name is.’

  Chloe shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I can’t remember Dad ever mentioning it.’

  ‘Flora Delancourt.’

  Jon looked questioningly at Chloe’s smile. ‘My middle name’s Flora.’ The more she thought about it the more she liked having her grandmother’s name. ‘That’s so nice, Hannah. That he called me after her.’

  Hannah was grinning too. ‘Yeah. I think so too.’

  Jon’s fingers touched Chloe’s arm. She followed his gaze across the road and nodded, turning to Hannah. ‘Can we take flowers? There’s a florist over there, we could get some.’

  ‘Yeah. I think that would be great.’

  * * *

  It had been a long day. They had gone to the church, and then Hannah had walked them around the village, more than once if the familiarity of some of the landmarks and houses wasn’t just déjà vu.

  After dinner, Jon had gone back to their room, making an excuse to leave them alone to talk. As soon as he was out of earshot Hannah had turned to her.

  ‘Well?’

  It was the question that Chloe had been dreading, because she’d been asking it of herself for the last few days and hadn’t come up with a satisfactory answer. What on earth was she doing?

  ‘Good question.’

  Hannah leaned back in her seat in the deserted sitting room. ‘Which you’re not going to answer. Jon told me that you weren’t an item.’

  ‘Well, we weren’t at that point. It all just...happened. It’s not serious.’

  Hannah pulled a face. ‘Of course it isn’t serious. It’s been...what, three days? Nothing’s serious after three days.’

  It felt like a lot longer. It felt as if somehow she’d known Jon her whole life, without actually knowing him. ‘Yes, but this... Neither of us have any intention of making it serious in the future.’

  A slow smile spread across Hannah’s face. ‘So...? Friends with benefits?’

  ‘No!’ Actually, Hannah had hit the nail pretty squarely on the head, even if there were some important differences. Surely friends with benefits didn’t spend most of the day thinking about each other.

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘Okay. It’s probably friends with benefits.’ That was the closest she could get to explaining it in a few words, even if it didn’t cover the feeling that Jon had broken her and then re-made her into someone who was slightly different.

  ‘Shame. He’s nice. He’d be good for you. Jake was a creep, leaving you like that.’

  ‘What?’ Chloe had never said anything about Jake to Hannah. She’d tried to protect her from the more awkward facts of life, and there had been a few things she hadn’t mentioned.

  Hannah pressed her lips together. ‘I know what you were doing. I was only a kid and you kept all that to yourself. It was pretty obvious, though. You got ill and he walked out.’

  This had to stop. And Chloe had to be the one to stop it because Hannah needed to release some of the secrets that seemed to be eating her up. She leaned forward, taking Hannah’s hand.

  ‘There’s a lot we haven’t said to each other, Hannah. But the trouble with secrets is that you hug them close and they come back and smack you in the face.’

  Hannah raised her eyebrows. ‘Jake smacked you in the face?’

  ‘Not literally.’ A few months—just a few weeks ago Chloe wouldn’t have been able to bring herself to talk about this. It was an uncomfortable reminder that Jon really had changed her.

  ‘Look, Hannah. I was very ill, and I still worry about ever being that way again, even if I do know that it’s not going to happen. And I felt so alone when Jake dumped me. I wanted to protect you from all of that but it was wrong of me not to say anything and I’m really sorry for that.’

  ‘It’s okay. I did know.’

  ‘Yes, and if we’d discussed it, I could have told you it was okay. It was hard, and I felt dreadful, but in the end I was determined that I’d get through it. Wouldn’t that have made you feel better?’

  Hannah nodded silently.

  Chloe took a deep breath. Jon had given her the courage to tell her own secrets, and maybe he could give her the courage to ask the same of Hannah.

  ‘Whatever it is that’s the matter, it can’t hurt me, Hannah. And it can’t hurt you either. If you’ll tell me, I’ll just listen and maybe that will help.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  IT WAS LATE when she got back to their room, and Chloe opened the door quietly, sure that Jon must be asleep. But the light by the bed was on and he was propped up on the pillows, reading.

  ‘How’s Hannah?’ He seemed to be able to read Chloe’s distress and confusion on her face.

  ‘Sleeping. We talked quite a bit.’

  He nodded. ‘Can you tell me about it?’

  ‘Yes.’ Chloe sat down on the bed next to him. It seemed that tonight he’d made some kind of decision, because even though the evening had been warm he was wearing an old T-shirt, the bedcovers pulled over his legs. It seemed strange not to find him naked in their bed.

  ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’

  Yes. More than anything. ‘I told her about what happened with me and Jake, and how I felt I’d let her down. She told me some things about Amy’s father. I thought that there was no contact between them after she came home, but she texted him and told him she was pregnant.’

  ‘What was his reaction?’ The look in Jon’s eyes told her that he already had some idea.

  ‘He said that the baby probably wasn’t his anyway. When she told him that she loved him and there hadn’t been anyone else, he said that if she really loved him she’d terminate the pregnancy, and let him get on with his life.’

  Jon shook his head, cursing quietly under his breath. ‘If James had only known that. If I’d known it even...’

  ‘Why do you think she kept quiet? James was ready to wring his neck anyway. She sent a photo when Amy was born, but he just messaged back telling her never to contact him again. She said that she felt so worthless. Perhaps that’s where some of these bad feelings about herself started.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be all that surprising.’ The tenderness in Jon’s eyes was making her melt. ‘So all the time you’ve been putting a brave face on things, and so has Hannah.’

  ‘I was so quick to accept that she didn’t care about him because I was trying not to care about Jake. When I told her that maybe she should just let him go, I thought I was giving her my honest opinion, but maybe it was just what I thought I should do.’

  ‘It was good advice. I don’t see that Hannah would have benefited by having him in her life.’

  ‘Thanks. But I know what I’ve done wrong.’

 
‘She really is better off without him. And so is Amy.’

  He reached for her and Chloe shifted towards him on the bed so that he could fold her in his arms. Chloe wanted to just curl up with him, but the bedclothes were in the way. Surely friends with benefits only wanted to be close for the good times, not the bad.

  ‘Thank you. For being here.’

  ‘I just drove.’

  She dug her elbow into his ribs. Or where she reckoned his ribs must be under the T-shirt and the duvet. ‘No, you didn’t. I don’t think I would have had the courage to try and break through with Hannah if you hadn’t been here. And I know it must have been hard for you.’

  ‘Me? I don’t—’ He broke off as Chloe reached up, putting her finger over his lips.

  ‘If you’re going to tell me that none of this is hard for you, you can save your breath.’

  ‘Yeah, okay. It’s hard. You and Hannah and James are all so close and...to be honest, I don’t think any of my family would even notice if I went missing, let alone come and find me.’

  ‘I’ll find you.’ Chloe started to peel away the layers of bedclothes that were wrapped around him.

  ‘Hey. Don’t you want to sleep?’ He broke off, groaning as Chloe’s hand found its way inside his boxer shorts.

  ‘No. I want to let go of the past. Don’t you?’

  He levered his body over hers, rolling her backwards on the bed and pinning her down. ‘Yes, I do. I want to promise you...whatever you want.’

  She knew he was sincere, even if he was struggling with the idea. He did want to let go of the past and promise her at least a part of his future. But she couldn’t ask him to do it. Asked-for promises didn’t work.

  ‘Don’t promise me anything, Jon. This is what I want. Exactly this.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  She pulled him down for a kiss. His kisses held nothing back and promised her everything. ‘I just want you to make love to me.’

  He smiled down at her, tenderness in his face. ‘Take your clothes off, sweetheart.’