by Alyson Rudd
Neither woman spoke for a few seconds and then Lauren frowned.
‘I remember I saw other versions of my mum but I didn’t know them. It used to upset Mum when I mentioned them so I stopped telling her even though I was letting her know that she was the prettiest and the nicest.’
Miriam gazed about her study and her eyes settled on a painting of a jug of water containing some fading bluebells placed on a small mahogany table. The artist was unknown but she was often mesmerised by the image. It was at least two hundred years old and yet could have been painted in that very study a week earlier. Sometimes the light was exactly the same.
‘How is this making you feel?’ she asked Lauren. ‘Is it distressing?’
Lauren’s eyes were shining almost feverishly.
‘No,’ she said louder than she meant to. ‘It’s liberating.’
‘Shall we continue?’ Miriam asked, and Lauren nodded, so Miriam composed her thoughts.
‘I think I have to ask you how you saw other versions of your mother. Did you have dreams?’
‘No, not dreams,’ Lauren tilted her head to one side and felt herself propelled through a set of old-fashioned double doors where she could see herself sat in front of a sunbeam.
‘I remember it now. There were threads, thick threads like sunbeams, and I could peer through them and see people I knew, people I didn’t know, and I knew I couldn’t mention these beams because when I had done it upset everyone and my friend Debbie called me names. It was my secret.’
‘Do you see them still?’
‘No, I lost them.’
‘When you woke up in the garden a few months ago?’
‘No, I had an accident when I was thirteen and…’ Lauren’s bottom lip began to tremble. ‘Only I didn’t have an accident. I’m sorry, I’m confused.’
‘Did you hurt your leg in the accident?’
‘Yes, yes, and I keep on being surprised I can wear any shoes that I like.’ She smiled weakly. ‘I feel a little less liberated right now. Sorry.’
Miriam allowed half a minute to elapse. Her patient had shifted from being elated to exhaustedly confused. Miriam wrote down ‘How many lives has Lauren lived?’ and underlined it.
‘We can stop now,’ she said ‘but my feeling is that we should try to keep things chronological and slow and not jump ahead to big events like your accident. Let’s see how the accident fits in later. At home, when you are up to it, why don’t you write down as much of your childhood as you can – you know, birthdays, holidays, the big memories – up until, say, aged twelve, and then we can go from there next time.’
As Lauren drove away she wondered if she had found an ally or if she was being patronised. She was relieved too, though, that they would take it slowly. Miriam was patient and logical and she needed that. She understood that she missed her mother, the adoring one, the prettiest one, the one she supposed would miss Lauren so much that the pain would be unbearable.
‘And I miss someone else,’ she said to herself softly, because why else did she have this gaping hole in her blossoming, huge heart.
* * *
The writing was hard, so Lauren sketched. She sketched a young slim and tall Vera, a Vera without a mole anywhere on her face, a Vera with a touch of designer flair to her outfits. By the time she returned to Miriam’s serene house, she had a reasonably clear idea of the childhood that felt most real. It was a childhood full of the people she knew now but the detail was either marginally altered, as in the case of the disappointing Christmas decorations, or dramatically so, as in the lack of a close called The Willows. And there was a sort of buffer between the two, another childhood that mirrored the first but was indistinct. She tried to draw the Vera from that one but it was impossible to catch hold of the image for long enough.
‘I had no idea you were so talented,’ Miriam said as she looked at the sketches. ‘Who are they?’ she asked, pointing to the drawing of two impish little boys. ‘They lived in my cul-de-sac,’ Lauren said shyly for it was strange, was it not, to refer to a street that did not even exist and was, right now, full of sheep.
Miriam smiled encouragingly as she listened to Lauren’s peculiar and fragmented childhood illustrated by mysterious sketches in which her mother’s face sometimes had a mole on it and sometimes did not.
‘… And then I moved into a house, I fell in love, I think, and I got a really good job.’
‘In London?’
‘Yes, in London. Charlotte Street.’
Miriam was breathless. The other life was flowing from Lauren’s lips so matter-of-factly and causing her no distress at all. And it sounded genuine, real, normal. In fact, having got to know Lauren, Miriam thought this London life would have suited her much better than her provincial one.
‘I know Charlotte Street,’ Miriam said. ‘It’s between tube stations.’
‘Yes, we were nearer to Goodge Street,’ Lauren said so naturally that had Miriam been in court and sworn in she would have had to say Lauren was telling the truth.
‘Life sounds good,’ Miriam said, knowing it could not be good, not really, or else why was Lauren here as a patient.
‘I can feel lots of happiness,’ Lauren said. ‘Here and in London.’
Miriam kept writing, kept waiting.
‘And then Tim asked me out and I moved in and he asked me to marry him.’
Miriam stopped writing.
‘Did you love Tim? Do you love Tim?’
‘Well, I did marry him,’ Lauren laughed. ‘You’re thinking I’m a bonkers bigamist but it’s not like that. It’s a whole other life, not a secret life lived at the same time.’
‘No, I understand that at least,’ Miriam said in her gentlest voice. She was increasingly sure that something painful was on the horizon, that Lauren did not know what was coming, that she, Miriam, would have to be alert and reassuring.
There was so much detail missing but Miriam resisted the temptation to slow Lauren down. There would be time for the detail later.
‘Two hearts,’ Lauren said shaking her head and smiling. ‘Madness, but there you go.’
Miriam made a note: ‘Only two hearts? Might be three.’
‘I can’t believe how easy it is to see some of the chronology now,’ Lauren said. ‘It was a like a jigsaw puzzle dropped on the floor but I can feel the rhythm of it now. I think you have the knack, Miriam, of letting people find their story.’
‘Good, good,’ Miriam said. ‘So, you married Tim.’
‘Yes, I sort of saw my wedding to him when I was in the church for the service for Peter Stanning. It was the same church and I feel a bit guilty about that but I’m not sure why.’
Miriam wanted to know whether the guilt was attached to Tim or Simon or the church but she remained silent.
‘Anyway, I kept working and George came to see me but I have no idea why that is significant or indeed why he would be with me in London or why I remember it so clearly but I do. And I’m pregnant and we have a ridiculous dash to the hospital because I can’t walk and—’
Lauren’s eyes widened and she began to tremble. She held her hand out to Miriam, who took it and held it firmly.
‘It hurt so much,’ Lauren said. ‘I couldn’t push properly, every push felt like I was taking a hammer to my own head.’
Miriam noticed a bead of sweat on Lauren’s forehead but could not note it down because Lauren was clinging tightly to her hand.
She sank back. ‘My baby,’ she said. ‘I never saw my baby.’
Tim
If he had been asked whether being a widower had slowed him down at work, Tim would have denied it with good reason. With one less salary, one larger mortgage and a live-in au pair to fund, he felt he had to raise his game.
Pilot was expanding rapidly and new staff kept arriving, which only served to create more expansion. Tim tried to sit in for most of the recruitment interviews.
‘If we gave you the power to change one thing about the firm,’ he asked a slim young man with slick
ed-back hair, no stubble and a Greek surname with eight syllables, ‘what would you do?’
The young man knew that the wrong answer was to say that Pilot was perfect but the right answer was not to state that something fundamental needed to change. So he alighted on the building’s reception and how the display about missing people was too prominent and could dampen the mood of sensitive prospective clients.
‘Did it dampen your mood?’ Tim asked.
‘No, not all,’ he said.
‘You’re not overly sensitive then?’
‘Er, no,’ he said, wondering if he had missed the memo which said that the new vibe in advertising was to be charitable and soppy.
As always, Tim confided in Bella when an interview was over.
‘Was I a bit harsh on him?’ he asked.
‘Not at all,’ Bella said. ‘We wouldn’t want him here if he thought Lauren’s display was upsetting or inappropriate.’
‘Quite,’ Tim said as Emily arrived with Amber so that all three of them could go for a walk, eat a sandwich on a park bench or use the baby-friendly pasta place. If Tim had longer than half an hour to spare he would tell Emily to leave Amber with him so she could go shopping or have some baby-free time otherwise he used their time to catch up on domestic issues such as teething, crawling and whether Emily should enrol in the new water-babies class at the local pool. There were other fathers at Pilot and none of them met their babies or toddlers for lunch, but none of them thought Tim was in any way peculiar.
When Tim returned to the office that afternoon, a tiny piece of egg white on his lapel, Bella was gazing adoringly at a tall man in the lobby whom Tim vaguely recognised.
He introduced himself as George Stanning and pointed at Lauren’s artwork.
‘I wanted to let you know that your wife urged me to investigate my father’s disappearance, she was most insistent in fact, and after a few false starts, I am making progress and I would have liked very much to let Lauren know about it but as that, sadly, is not possible, I wanted you to know how grateful I am that she cared enough to, well, nag me about it, really.’
Tim exhaled. He had braced himself for bad news, although that George might be the one to bring it was absurd.
‘Great, I mean, thank you. Have you found out what happened to your father then?’
‘Not exactly, but I think I know what needs to be done to at least know why he vanished.’
‘Right,’ Tim said. ‘Good luck and, really, do keep in touch. For Lauren’s sake.’
After George had left, Tim stood in front of the display. A man had disappeared when Lauren was fifteen and inspired her to draw and paint so engagingly about the despair and the mystery that he had ended up interviewing her for a job. From behind her desk, Bella watched surreptitiously and guessed almost exactly what was going through his head.
When he turned round she made eye contact.
‘If you were George… or someone like George, and I asked you on a date, would you automatically think I was cheap or odd, or would you think, good on her for taking the initiative?’
‘And did you ask him or someone like him on a date? That kind of affects how I answer you,’ he said.
‘No, of course not but I’m wondering, you know, if I should have done. He’s probably got a fiancée or something. Has he?’
‘Heck, I don’t know, Bella, but if he gets in touch again, I’ll find out for you and to answer your question: ask him to go for a coffee. Just a coffee.’
Bella blushed, wondering if by ‘a date’, Tim thought she had meant full-blown sex after a drunken night on the town. There was, though, no elegant way to deny it if he had, so she smiled her most demure smile and handed him a package to take upstairs to Gregory.
Lauren
There was a box of tissues on Miriam’s desk but Lauren’s agony was dry-eyed.
‘I need to know my baby is well,’ she said. ‘I have to know. It’s my baby. Maybe she died with me. Maybe it’s a boy and he was starved of oxygen and he’s in hospital and alone and—’
‘Or maybe you didn’t die,’ Miriam said.
Lauren stopped summoning terrible images of what might have happened and looked at Miriam.
‘Why would you say that?’ she said.
‘Because this is unprecedented and we don’t know what it means. And you remember this life and you remember that life so why assume they can’t keep running together as they used to?’
For a moment Lauren was filled with a sad joyousness that somewhere she and her baby were snuggling on a sofa, wrapped in warm blankets, healthy and happy and bonding beautifully. Then she clenched her teeth. She knew in the pit of her soul that her baby did not have its mother.
Lauren was drained now, tired of the complexity and the simplicity. Tired of knowing she was alone in the knowing. Mournful that her baby, if alive, would never know her.
‘I didn’t choose any of this. It is what happens to us, that’s all.’
Miriam was baffled, entranced and concerned. She hardly slept that night, and the next morning she opened her diary to find out when she would be able to spend a day in London.
‘It might be unethical,’ she said to the ghost of her dead husband, ‘but I doubt it and, anyway, I don’t care. I’m going.’
* * *
Lauren popped over two evenings later. It was not a scheduled appointment but Miriam was beyond the point where she was going to maintain normal boundaries.
‘Obviously, I can’t keep using you just to handle my millions of yet-to-reach memories but I feel safe here when I do try to piece things together. At home I feel guilty about it. They all need me and I’m not going to get back into the swing of it all properly if part of me is dwelling on my other world. If I know it’s OK to come here, it makes it easier.’
Miriam made them tea, which to Lauren still seemed to take for ever, and then, out of self-interest and with a frisson of excitement, she asked Lauren if she wanted to pin down any detail to the broad brush of her other life story.
‘Yes, that might help, I’m not sure.’
Miriam started a fresh page in her notepad and milked Lauren for information about her London job and her London homes and the following Monday Miriam took the train to London Euston. She had two hours in which to visit several streets before meeting her sister, a solicitor, for a late lunch.
She knocked on the door of an address Lauren had summoned in Paddington as the place where she first fell in love. A young woman answered.
‘I’m terribly sorry to disturb you but I’m looking for Kat, Amy or Luke or a Jeffers,’ Miriam said.
The woman looked blank and shook her head.
‘How long ago did they live here?’ she asked.
‘Ah, yes a few years now, it’s a long shot, I know.’
‘Say the names again.’
Miriam repeated them and the girl frowned.
‘Step inside a minute, there’s some old letters in one of the drawers in Callum’s room. I’ll get them and you can take a look.’
‘That’s really very kind of you,’ Miriam said as the girl loped upstairs. There was some scuffling and scraping and then she returned with a few old, unopened bills and a couple of envelopes with the address neatly handwritten.
One of the personal letters was addressed to a Luke. The rest were of no interest.
‘Would you mind if I took this? It’s really quite ancient and I know his family.’
The girl shrugged. ‘Don’t see why not,’ she said, and Miriam felt a tremor of triumphalism.
She caught a taxi to Charlotte Street where Lauren had first worked and found the agency, still called JSA, if, she thought to herself, the phrase ‘still called’ was appropriate. She asked them about Pilot but nobody had heard the name. She asked them if they knew a Tim Lewis and the receptionist shook her head but a big-boned woman in big shoes who was passing overheard her.
‘Tim used to work here, we overlapped for about a year, and I think he joined Saatchi and then went so
lo maybe.’
‘Can I just clarify that is Tim Lewis and not another Tim?’ Miriam said.
‘Yeah, Tim Lewis.’
‘Have you any idea how I might find him?’ Miriam said.
The woman turned to the receptionist.
‘Put her through to Ped, he’ll know.’
Miriam found herself on the receptionist’s phone asking Ped if he knew where she could find Tim Lewis.
‘Sure, he’s with MVL over in Golden Square.’
Miriam thanked him and then walked to Golden Square, enjoying the fact that although she had not been in the capital for two years, she knew the way.
The offices of MVL were small, very shiny and minimalist.
‘I don’t suppose you have a company brochure, do you?’ she asked the woman in a bright red shift dress who was sat on a cream leather chair behind a glass table.
‘A brochure?’ she said incredulously. And Miriam could see it was a stupid question to ask in a lobby that was completely clutter free. However, the receptionist turned to a black oak filing cabinet and pulled out a glossy postcard that had eight images on the front and one of them was of the three founder members.
‘Which one is Tim Lewis?’ Miriam asked.
The girl squinted.
‘The dude with the blue tie,’ she said.
Miriam placed the postcard in her handbag just as Miss Marple would have done, she thought, thanked the red shift girl and turned on her heels to join her sister at the pancake house they had been using for their once-in-a-blue-moon lunches for the past twenty years.
What Miriam liked most about meeting with her sister was that they never dwelled on how long it had been since they last saw each other and could dive into conversation the way two sisters might had they been in the habit of meeting once a fortnight.
‘I’ve been sleuthing,’ Miriam said.
‘I’ve been helping couples get divorced,’ Samantha said. ‘But as I’ve been doing that for most of my professional life, let’s get to the nitty gritty of your new career.’