by Clare Boyd
‘Was that in the diary?’ I glanced over to the whiteboard schedule, knowing I would not see a play date with Beth written down.
‘It was a last-minute thing. But I think they must have raided the sweet jar because she was a little hyperactive when she got back.’
‘They should have that sweet jar under lock and key when Rosie goes round,’ I said light-heartedly.
But paranoia set in like a ticking time bomb. Why had she been hyper? Had Vics seen a change in Rosie? Had they talked? Had Rosie told Vics about what I’d had said? Rosie’s visit to see Beth should not have been particularly noteworthy on any other week. It was home from home for Rosie over at 2 Virginia Close. Surely Vics would have called me straight away if she had been worried. Unless Rosie had sworn her to secrecy?
I went up to kiss them goodnight.
Noah was already asleep.
Rosie had her teddy tucked under her chin and her book close to her face.
My assessment of Rosie began: the rings under her eyes were as black as night and she wouldn’t look up from her book.
I was not her real mummy.
‘Night, Rosie.’ I kissed her on the forehead.
I was not her real mummy.
She flashed me a fake smile and returned to her page. ‘Night Mum.’
I was not her real mummy.
‘Good day at school?’
‘Fine.’
‘Love you,’ I said and I blew a kiss to her from the door.
How would I ever tell her?
‘Night.’
Worries about the rings under her eyes consumed me all evening. Peter was as subdued as I was. Since I had told him what I had said to Rosie in the heat of the moment, he had seemed distant and disconnected. We didn’t talk properly and we made the unusual decision to eat supper in front of the television.
Before bed, I read through my emails in preparation for tomorrow.
When I finally sank into my pillow, my eyes blinked into the dark.
A memory of Rosie and me driving together last autumn came to me. We were alone, just the two of us, possibly on the way to a play date or a party. As we wound through the countryside, Rosie had jumped up in her seat excitedly and pointed, ‘Look, Mummy, oh wow, did you see that?’ Expecting something extraordinary or outlandish, I asked her what she had seen. She was full of wonder. ‘The wind blew into that big tree and there were hundreds of shiny leaves raining down like sparkles. Oh, it was beautiful, Mummy,’ she had sighed.
Whenever I saw trees shedding leaves in autumn, I thought of Rosie’s face lit up and how she had seen sparkles.
I would suggest a walk this weekend through the woods. The trees were bare at this time of year, but the leaves were still thick on the ground.
I had to sleep now.
My legs were twitching, restless. While my eyes were tired, my body had other ideas. It wanted to keep me awake, knew I needed to think.
It became torturous to lie in the dark with my thoughts churning through my head. I struggled on, replaying my argument with Rosie on a loop, eyes dry as I blinked into the dark.
Peter whispered, ‘Gemma.’
‘What’s up?’ I mumbled, pretending to be sleepy.
Peter turned over to face me, ‘Are you awake?’
‘I am now.’
‘I can’t sleep.’
‘I’ve got a busy day tomorrow,’ I yawned, turning away from him. I couldn’t bear the thought of talking to him about Rosie and our row. He had been so angry with me when I had confessed to the monumental slip-up.
He was silent. His breathing heavy.
‘Can I just ask you something?’
‘Go on then.’
I lay on my back and waited. There was silence for quite a few minutes before he formed the question.
‘What if we told Rosie the truth properly?’
‘No.’ My tongue felt thick in my mouth.
‘Fuck,’ he said, sitting up and bending over his knees as though he was about to throw up.
‘I know I really screwed up, but we just have to ride it out. She’ll settle when she realises nothing’s changed.’
Peter brought his body next to mine. ‘Remember how you used to read stories to your bump?’
‘She loves books now, doesn’t she,’ I replied quietly, grateful to him for reassuring me when I hadn’t asked for it. I turned to face him with my knees pulled up to my chest under the duvet.
‘And you breastfed her and nurtured her and loved her all these years, all of her life. You are all she has ever known. How much more real can a mother be?’
The answer to that question was too blatantly obvious to say out loud without undoing all of his kind-hearted words.
‘Sometimes I wish I knew what Kaarina had been like as a child,’ I said simply.
After three months of searching through donors’ files, having gained access codes to numerous clinics’ websites, we had found Kaarina Doubek, the dark-haired, blue-eyed 24-year-old medical student from the Czech Republic who wanted the 5000-euro fee for a solo cycling trip across Morocco and a deposit for a flat, whose grandparents on both sides had lived into their nineties, whose hobby was jazz piano, but who admitted to being a terrible cook and very lax about tidying her bedroom. After which she had included about ten exclamation marks and a smiley face. I had liked how open and funny she had been, while many donors barely got beyond their measurements and flattering photographs.
Peter turned onto his back. ‘Does it matter where she gets it from?’
‘You seemed to think so the other day.’
‘I was just over-worrying.’
‘But now Rosie’s older... I don’t know... certain traits of hers, I’ve started wondering... you know?
‘Her intelligence and wit come from me obviously,’ he quipped, clearly trying to keep it light, frightened of what we were opening up.
‘On paper, Kaarina was very smart. And so is Rosie.’
‘And we’ve always believed it’s more about nurture than nature.’
‘I don’t know anymore,’ I admitted.
Peter’s face was shrouded in the darkness of the room. If the moonlight had reached him, I wondered what I would have seen.
Kaarina had not been Peter’s first choice. He had been in favour of a very beautiful six-foot-tall mathematician with a passion for flower arranging and blonde hair, similar to Peter’s.
His main gripe with Kaarina Doubek was that she had opted not to meet the donor recipient or the child in the future. I knew this was not going to be a problem for me. If we were not going to tell our baby that he or she was not genetically mine, then we would never need to meet Kaarina.
After some arguing, we had eventually rejected the mathematician based on her size-eight shoe size, and both of us had fallen about laughing and then had rampant sex, releasing the tension of our search.
‘Well, Rosie’s temper definitely comes from you,’ he snorted now.
‘It’s easier for you,’ I shot back sharply, proving his point.
‘Believe me, none of this is easy for me.’
‘Do you remember that photograph of Kaarina in her file?’
‘No,’ he sighed.
‘The one of her when she was a teenager?’
‘I think so.’
‘Rosie looks just like her in that photo.’
‘I’ve forgotten what she looked like.’
‘Come on, Peter!’
‘You shouldn’t have asked me to burn everything if you wanted me to remember what she looked like.’
I shuddered. I longed to see the photograph of Kaarina again now, to see into her eyes again, into her soul maybe. In my head, her face had morphed into an angry grimace, just like Rosie’s when she was having a tantrum.
‘Rosie and Noah look more and more different by the day.’
Peter pushed himself up and put his hands behind his head. ‘Do you think we would’ve told Rosie sooner if Noah hadn’t have come along?’
I stared
at the moon shadows on the wall. ‘Who knows.’
‘We should have sued that bloody doctor.’
I thought of Dr Drummond’s box of tissues on the mantle and his sad smile.
‘You know Pattie and John Ambrose?’
‘From New Hall?’
‘They had four unsuccessful rounds of IVF and then got pregnant naturally with Toby after they’d given up all hope. There’s no rhyme or reason to it sometimes.’
‘No wonder they’re broke.’
‘They’re blessed. We were blessed.’
‘And we got lots of brand new linen out of it,’ Peter retorted. Always a joke from Peter. But I didn’t feel like laughing.
‘We needed those new sheets.’
‘You spent three grand we didn’t have on Egyptian cotton.’
‘When Dad legged it with Jill, Mum painted all the bathrooms pink.’
‘I got off lightly then.’
‘I was just giving you a three-grand taster of all the bills to come,’ I laughed half-heartedly, referring unnecessarily to the expense of the IVF treatment and egg donation for Rosie’s conception.
The thought of the high price of that clear-out gave me palpitations, just as it had when I had handed my credit card over to the shop assistant, only an hour after the unsparing consultation with Dr Drummond. I did not want to think about that shopping binge, or that linen cupboard. I did not want to think about how I had wanted to drench every old sheet I ripped out from the cupboard in my tears, but how I was unable to find even one tear to grieve for the child Dr Drummond had told me I would never have.
‘Making Noah was loads cheaper, that’s for sure,’ Peter snickered, snuggling closer.
‘We should go to that hotel again some day,’ I said whimsically, thinking about how we had held hands along the windswept beach, and how there had been writing in the sand marking the year 2010, as though marking Noah’s beginnings.
It had been on our first weekend away without Rosie, who had been four years old and on a sleepover with Granny Helen. We had walked for miles along the cliffs, soaked in a steam bath, eaten a five-course supper, ripped each other’s clothes off drunkenly on the four-poster bed and then fallen asleep too tired to have sex. It had been the next morning that we had made a new baby out of the healthy eggs I had not known were there.
‘As for Number Three, he was practically free,’ he laughed, placing his hand on my growing belly. The vision of a drained bottle of red and empty containers of curry sprang into my mind. We had not planned on a third. I was not ready for a third.
I crossed Peter’s two fingers over. ‘Let’s hope this one’s an easy baby,’ I said.
‘He?’
‘Did I say he?’
‘I think so.’
‘Wishful thinking.’
‘Don’t you want a baby girl?’ he asked, surprised.
‘Boys are easier.’
‘I know Rosie’s hard work, honestly, I really understand, but we’d never change her.’
‘Of course not,’ I replied. A chill ran up my spine. ‘But being her mum is so hard sometimes, Peter.’
‘I know, I know,’ he soothed. Finally the jokes had run out.
‘Sorry,’ I said, pulling myself away from him. ‘I’ll be back in a minute, I’m just going to check on her.’
I crept into Rosie’s bedroom. My heart seized up. The sight of her curled up at the bottom of her bed – dysfunctional even in sleep – was captivating; the frowsy smell of her bedclothes reminding me of how grown-up she was becoming. I feared the speed of her growing limbs as I brought the duvet back over her body, wanting to protect her from the chill of the night forever, wanting to protect her from all of life’s dangers, knowing this was impossible.
I was taken back to her tenth birthday a few months before. We had given her a pair of clumpy black boots that she had wanted, even though it was the height of summer. She had tried them on with her nightie, squealing with delight. Her long, skinny legs had stuck out of them and I thought she looked like a fashion model. Briefly, time had flashed forward to give me a glimpse of what she would look like as a teenager, and how beautiful she would be.
To celebrate, we had given her the choice of either having tea and cake with a few of her school friends, like Beth, or going out as a family to a pizza restaurant. She had chosen the pizza restaurant with us, which had delighted Peter and me.
Sitting opposite her in the restaurant as she sipped at her fizzy drink and talked about the book she had been reading would go down as one of the happiest times of my life. Strange, that such a small, prosaic ten minutes in a nondescript chain restaurant could have provided such intense joy. The ten years of nurture and love – and drudgery – seemed to culminate in this beautifully simple moment. I was sharing a relatively grown-up chat with my daughter – whom I might never have been able to conceive – about books. Pride had throbbed through me like a heartbeat, and I had wondered whether my feelings had the power to push light out from my skin.
* * *
When the alarm went, it was still dark. I woke up with a sinking feeling, remembering the conversation Peter and I had had the night before. I hadn’t been able to explain how I really felt, as though there was a mountain of the unsaid between us.
I couldn’t face getting out of bed to make the early train for my meeting.
One of the aphorisms that I had written on a neon pink Post-it and stuck to my computer at work read:
Failure will never overtake me if my determination to succeed is strong enough!
When it came to Rosie, failure was overtaking me, flooding me. With all the determination in the world, I was not succeeding.
To divert my thoughts, to relocate the idea that I was quite capable of standing on my own two feet, I tried to decide which suit I would wear today. The blue or the grey? It was ten to five, which gave me five minutes before I had to get out of bed.
Then the door to the bedroom opened. I expected to see Peter and I was surprised to see Rosie, instead.
‘Darling, you’re awake. Is everything okay? It’s too early to get up.’
‘I wanted a cuddle before you go to work.’
‘Oh poppet, come here,’ I said, raising the duvet so that she could climb in.
She snuggled into my arm and I kissed her hair.
‘Is everything okay?’
‘Yes.’
‘You sure? You didn’t have a bad dream or anything?’
‘Nope.’ She looked up at me, her blue eyes blinking.
‘Beautiful girl,’ I said, kissing her nose.
Her smile warmed me like sun on skin after a long winter. I drank in her affection, never wanted it to end. I remembered that Rosie had only been a few hours old, swaddled in my arms on the hospital bed, when I first realised quite how hard the cover-up would become. Jacs had cooed that Rosie’s ‘thick dark hair’ was just like mine. I had nodded and agreed, but inside I had been angry with her for her naivety; envied her for sharing her genes with her conventional baby.
‘Don’t let daddy forget to put your gym kit in your bag. Your T-shirt is drying in the laundry room.’
‘Okay.’
‘And I’ve laid out your pinafore on your chair.’
‘But I want to wear my skirt today.’
‘But the pinafore’s smarter.’
Every morning I would tug and tuck and smooth and preen Rosie until she looked box-fresh perfect. It was hard for me to turn off that setting, to let Peter take charge.
‘Okay.’
‘And remember to take your water bottle. The blue one, okay? The red one leaks.’
‘Yes, yes. We can, like literally, remember stuff even when you’re not here you know, Mum.’
‘I can like literally not believe that,’ I teased.
‘Daddy lets us have chocolate spread for breakfast when you’re not here.’
I raised an eyebrow. ‘Don’t ever joke about that.’
‘It’s okay. I like muesli better anyway. It�
�s Noah who likes the chocolate spread.’
‘You’re such a good girl,’ I said, winking at her, playing into her good-girl routine, although it did make me proud to know she now liked the organic muesli I had insisted she ate every morning.
She blinked wildly at me. ‘I want to be able to wink. Charlotte can wink and she’s been trying to teach me but it’s totally impossible. I even tried Sellotape on one eye. Can you teach me?’
My heart leapt into my mouth. I remembered Kaarina’s jaunty profile description. She, too, had been unable to wink. At the time, it had been an irrelevant and jokey detail, adding charm to her profile. Now – in my sensitive, paranoid state – it became a large neon sign that encapsulated the genetic mystery of Rosie.
‘Grandma Helen always told me that real ladies don’t wink or whistle. Don’t learn bad habits from me,’ I replied, a little too sharply.
‘Sorry.’
To salvage the moment, I said, ‘How was Beth yesterday? Did you have fun?’
‘She was fine,’ she mumbled, and then she suddenly wriggled out of my arms.
‘Where are you going?’
She yawned. ‘I’m going back to bed. I’m tired.’
‘Oh, okay. You sure it was okay with Beth yesterday?’
She walked out as though she was deaf and I heard her bedroom door click closed.
Chapter Twenty-Five
TOP SECRET
* * *
Dear Mummy,
* * *
MY HEAD FEELS LIKE A BIG HOT AIR BALLOON FILLED WITH FIRE.
If you talk to Vics about Beth, I’m DEAD.
* * *
Which lie shall I tell?
a) That I was stolen by aliens for an hour?
b) That I was kidnapped by a man in a white van?
c) That I snuck down to the sweet shop instead of going to Beth’s?
INVISIBLE INK ALERT: d) Definitely not that I went to Mrs E’s for cake.
* * *
I think c) is my best.
* * *
INVISIBLE INK ALERT: I don’t know why I said that to Mrs E. I was very angry with you – you said you say things you don’t mean when you’re angry, so, like, whoops, I did! When you said you weren’t my mummy it felt just like a slap on my face. I don’t know why I keep looking at your face now and trying to find bits of it that are like mine. I think I have your hair. I love my hair. I hope it doesn’t get all frizzy like yours when I am old. When I look at daddy, it’s easy. I have his nose and mouth and face.