The Second Child Read online

  Behind me her child, who is my child, starts to snore.

  A door bangs somewhere at the back of the house, startling me so badly that my heart thuds against my chest. The conversation stops dead. There’s a clatter of footsteps and I turn abruptly towards the kitchen and come face-to-face with Phil and Rosie, who have finally come in from the garden.

  ‘Hi there.’ From Phil’s goofy expression I can tell that he’s drunk, blissfully, happily, ignorantly drunk, and beside him stands Rosie, glowing with health and fitness and clear-eyed innocence.

  33

  Understanding

  ANNE

  ROSIE BANGS the front door shut behind her, off to spend her birthday money with Holly and Megan. The sound reverberates through the house and my head. I’m free at last; free of Rosie, of the Rudaks and of Steph, who, as much as I love her, is another pressure. She knows me so well. When I’m with her it’s so tempting to unburden myself, let fly my real feelings, but it doesn’t help. I’m still alone. Still trapped by circumstance. Still vulnerable.

  I know that I really should do something to ward off my introspection – tackle the study, clean the kitchen, get the house back in order – but instead I push my bare feet into my old gardening shoes and go outside. Despite the grey sky, the garden offers respite. To prove to myself that I’m doing something useful, I wander along the edges of the lawn picking up stray leaves and pulling out the occasional weed that Stan has missed. I notice that the clump of white anemones in the big side border has been flattened. Rosie and her damn football, no doubt. I try and right the plant, pack soil around the base and snap off the broken stems, but I suspect it’s too badly damaged to survive.

  The party went well. Steph said so, the Rudaks seemed to enjoy it, my sister texted to say what a nice time they’d had, and Rosie was in her element. Overall it was a success. The weather was good, the food was good, the atmosphere was good and Lauren’s reaction to her hat was great. Against all expectations, it was a proper celebra-tion of both their birthdays.

  The stain on the day was Nathan’s call. Rosie and I haven’t spoken about her subterfuge and I have no plans to raise it with her. What good will it do? It will only cause more tension between us, and I already know why she did it. She wanted to be with her new family on her birthday; it’s as understandable and as painful as that. Not talking about it is the only course of action I can think of that doesn’t bring with it the risk of direct conflict. Instead we’ll conspire, as we have so many times before, in blaming Nathan. Us against him. The glue that holds our relationship together. Having a common enemy: is that what our relationship has been reduced to?

  The leaves on the horse chestnut rustle in the wind, but apart from that it’s quiet. My headache ebbs, withdrawing to the edges, biding its time. I wander round the side of the house and dump the broken stems into the nearest compost bin.

  I find myself thinking about Lauren again, drawn to the simplicity of one daughter in preference to the complexities of the other. In the few fleeting moments that I shared with her over the weekend I took a huge step forward. I was tentative at first, but Sarah seemed far more willing to let me in this time. She even trusted me to be alone with Lauren a few times, and I can’t imagine she lets many people do that.

  It’s such a curious experience, unsettling, but I am learning.

  I’m learning to look beyond her RTS and see her personality. I’ve realised that Lauren can ‘speak’, even without words. That she is adept at communicating what she needs through her signing and her facial expressions. I often don’t understand her, but Sarah and Phil know exactly what she means. They can read her gestures and her unspoken requests. They’re able to gauge her level of comfort or discomfort in the angle of her body or the shake of her head, and they know how tired she is by how frequently she blinks. Their instinctive anticipation of her needs and their deftness at managing them, even with an audience, in a strange house, without any of their normal aids and supports, is humbling.

  They know the code for unlocking their daughter.

  And they can make her laugh. That’s been the other revelation of the weekend, the moments of lightness and happiness. I’ve discovered that Lauren has a good sense of humour and a love of pure silliness. And that she takes real pleasure in her music and her favourite nursery rhymes, and in other people’s laughter. I thought her inert, indifferent to her surroundings and to the people in her life, but I was wrong.

  And she is no longer indifferent to me. I made her smile and she held my hand.

  The wind gusts through the trees and I head back inside my empty house, into the ‘study’. Sarah has left it tidy. The beds are made, the towels are folded and the curtains are neatly tied back, let-ting in the sunshine and the shadows. Instead of stripping the beds, I look around the room. I have a sudden, strong image of it at night, darkness pressing at the window, a single lamp casting a warm, yellow glow. There is Lauren, sitting up in bed, her hair freshly washed and still damp at the hairline, a big picture book open on her knee. And there is me, in bed beside her, the duvet tucked around us. I’m reading to her, pointing out the pictures. As we read together, she grows drowsy and leans into me. We choose one last book, her favourite, then I settle her down to sleep, pulling the covers around her, and kissing her goodnight before switching off the lamp.

  Yes, it could work. It would take time and effort and it would cost, a lot, but it’s not impossible. I could extend this room out towards the boundary of the property, using the dead area between the house and the hedge. There would definitely be enough space to put in a decent wet room, maybe even a side entrance, with a ramp to the front and back gardens. It would be like a little self-contained unit. Purpose-built. Lauren could come for weekends, in the beginning. I could have help to start with, just during the day, someone with experience of special-needs children. It could work, with some planning. The house would feel full again. It would be a home again. And I would be a mother again. Lauren would need me, in a way that Rosie no longer does. She would never leave me, like Rosie will. The thought of it grows and becomes more defined in my mind, more appealing, more feasible. And if I was a mother again, people might treat me differently. I would have a role, a purpose, a different status. Everything would change.

  I realise that I’ve been looking at it from completely the wrong perspective. Having Lauren in my life might not be the worst thing that could happen; it might be the best.

  SARAH

  It’s a relief to be back home, back into our usual routine, back in my safety zone.

  ‘So, then. Does she live in a mansion?’ James is all ears. He’s sprawled on the sofa, a bowl of popcorn balancing on his belly in anticipation of a full rerun of the weekend. ‘Not quite,’ I reply.

  ‘Not far off. It was all very posh. And their garden is enormous.’ Phil flops into a chair.

  ‘So what was the party like? Did you meet the rest of her family?’

  ‘Her aunt and uncle came.’

  ‘That it?’ James misses his mouth, and a handful of popcorn trickles down his T-shirt and disappears down the side of the sofa. He proceeds to dig around, trying to retrieve it. ‘No sign of Rosie’s mysterious dad then?’

  ‘No.’ Phil and I exchange a glance and, by mutual agreement, neither of us mentions the call. I suspect Phil is happy to pretend that Nathan doesn’t exist, except as the bogeyman, but for me the call reminds me as much of Rosie’s manipulation as of Nathan’s peculiar relationship with his ex-wife and ex-daughter.

  ‘Doesn’t sound like much of a party.’

  ‘Oh, mate. You’d have loved the food. There was gallons of it. Anne sent us home with a goody bag of leftovers, there’s loads of it in the fridge.’ James puts the popcorn down, planning an imminent raid on the kitchen, no doubt. We entertain him with tales from the weekend; me, Anne’s taste for unusual art and expensive wine; Phil, the number of bathrooms in the house and how dull Rosie’s uncle was. It’s an anodyne, safe rendition of something far more
complicated. Phil is wise enough to rein in his undiluted pleasure at spending more time with Rosie, whether out of deference for James’s feelings or mine, I’m not too sure; and I keep quiet about Anne’s surprising shift in attitude towards Lauren.

  Supper is a pick through the Tupperware boxes that Anne sent us away with. James shamelessly flits between sushi and chocolate cake, then back to olives and cheese.

  ‘You’ll be sick.’

  ‘Doubt it.’

  Then there’s a lull, tiredness catching up with Phil and me, and a full belly catching up with James.

  ‘Chelsea are playing,’ James ventures.

  ‘Go on, if you want to. I’ll clear up and come though in a while.’ They manage to find second gear and disappear to grumble and grouse at the TV, a shared pleasure that bypasses me completely. As I wash up, I reflect on the weekend.

  It did go much better than expected – better, in hindsight, than I wanted it to. The effort Anne made for Lauren, and with Lauren, was not what I was expecting. It was good, I suppose, but it was also confusing, and worrying. She’s at least beginning to see her as a person in her own right. It obviously demonstrated to Anne that Lauren is loving, and lovable. Perhaps even a child that she could imagine loving?

  The thought makes me shiver. She wouldn’t, surely she wouldn’t. Not Anne. Lauren wouldn’t fit into her life or her stylish home. Anne wouldn’t contemplate it: the commitment Lauren needs, the massive changes it would require. No, she wouldn’t. I’m almost certain of it.

  But a shard of doubt sticks in my throat. I dry my hands and stare out at the garden. No, the issue is Rosie, not Lauren. That’s the battleground. I discipline myself to concentrate on that. What to make of Rosie’s lie? Because that’s the only way to look at it: she bare-faced lied to us about her dad pulling out of seeing her and, worse, she lied to her mum to engineer the whole weekend. I’ve not discussed it with Phil, because I know that secretly he’ll be pleased. He’ll see it as yet more evidence of Rosie’s growing bond with us. Which it is, but at what cost…? The truth, and her mother’s feelings. Anne’s conversation with Steph was never meant for my ears, but it has lodged in my brain. It haunts me. Her sense of betrayal and confusion, and her crushing sense of loneliness. The desolation when she said, ‘whatever happens, I’m going to have to deal with it on my own…’ was real.

  I hate the stew of empathy and fear that I feel whenever I think about Anne.

  Nathan’s absence in their lives seems as oppressive as a presence. After all these years, he still seems to have the power to pull their relationship with each other out of shape. And yet he’s an enigma. A man with seemingly bottomless reserves of cash but, apparently, no reserves of real affection, or any sense of involvement or responsi-bility for what is going on. I feel a wave of powerlessness mixed with restlessness sweep through me – sympathy for Anne, uncertainty about Lauren, confusion about Rosie and, a new feeling, enmity towards Nathan.

  My laptop sits on the side. I go, fetch it and open it up. Perhaps I might feel less out of control if I knew more about what I was dealing with. I start searching, seeking to fill in the blanks from a weekend that has raised more questions than answers.

  I begin with Anne.

  Anne’s public persona is polished and deeply uninteresting. It’s an ‘old before her time’, solidly Middle England existence. There are numerous photos of her at different charity events alongside couples who all look like Clare and Robert; solid, suited, respectable people. I notice that in many of the photos Anne is the only woman without a man at her side. Of her working life, there is virtually nothing. She doesn’t appear to work, or certainly hasn’t for a long time. I find one biog that mentions her spending time as a medical secretary before her marriage, but nothing recent. In half an hour of searching I find very little to fill in the neat outline that Anne presents to the world: a comfortably-off woman with an enviable life, on the surface.

  I’m so absorbed in what I’m doing that I don’t hear James come into the kitchen. ‘It’s rubbish. I’m off up. Night, Mum. See you in the morning.’

  ‘Night, love.’ I dip the screen half-closed as he leans in to give me a kiss.

  Phil follows him into the kitchen. He grabs a beer from the fridge. ‘I’ve just checked Lauren, she’s fine. Fast asleep. You okay? Are you gonna come through?’

  ‘In a bit.’

  ‘I can turn it off and we can watch something else.’

  ‘No, it’s all right. I was just going to look for a foldaway bed. See if I can’t find a decent one, for when Rosie visits.’ The ease of the lie should trouble me, but it doesn’t.

  ‘Okay.’ He opens his beer and ambles out. The search box beckons. I type in ‘Nathan Elkan’ and a trapdoor onto another world opens up.

  Nathan is much more in evidence than Anne, in fact he’s quite high-profile. There are lots of references to him. He’s the Head of Neurology at University College Hospital and a member of the General Medical Council. There are plenty of pictures of him at different stages throughout his career. As I skim through the various links, he jumps back and forth in time, changing his haircut, gaining and losing weight, perfecting his angled-to-camera pose, but always commanding attention with his dark eyes and strong jaw. I catch myself comparing him to Rosie for a second, before I realise how ludicrous that is. He does not look like Lauren, her disability having erased any familial likeness in one fell swoop. This is her biological father and he wants nothing to do with her. Something bitter and nasty twists in my gut.

  I keep searching, stoking my escalating hatred of him. In the process I stumble across some society-page photos of his wedding to his second wife, a skeletal blonde beauty called Francesca. He traded up second time around: younger, richer, thinner. There are homes in London and on the Suffolk coast. What shocks, but does not surprise me, is that there’s no mention of Anne by name. A couple of the early profiles do reference a daughter, Rosie, from a previous marriage; the later ones merely list his three children as Marcus, Eloise and Freddy. To all intents and purposes, Anne and Rosie have been airbrushed out of his life.

  Nathan appears to be precisely what Anne implied: a thoroughly successful, well-respected pillar of society, who is also a total shit. But even that wouldn’t matter to me in the slightest, if this shiny shit weren’t also Lauren’s father. Hard as it is to comprehend, it is Nathan Elkan’s daughter who is asleep upstairs in our house and he is simply not interested.

  My bitterness hardens at the injustice of it all. Finally I have someone I can be angry with, someone to blame for Anne’s loneliness, for Rosie’s behaviour, for my own confusion, for the emotional upheaval that is shaking all our lives, bar one.

  Nathan Elkan.

  He is escaping scot-free and that cannot be right, and it cannot be allowed.

  I go back through my searches until I find the email address for his department at University College Hospital. No one has the right to erase a child from their life. No one. Not even Nathan Elkan.

  34

  Decisions

  ANNE

  ROSIE’S BIRTHDAY weekend clarifies two very important things for me.

  Lauren needs and deserves unconditional love.

  If I lose my daughter, my life will be unbearable.

  It also makes me realise that I cannot let things carry on as they are. The lack of clarity is hurting everyone. So at 9 a.m. on Monday morning I ring to make an appointment to see Callum. His secretary makes a show of having to call me back after checking his diary. She claims she’s had to move two meetings so that he can ‘accommodate me at such short notice’.

  Callum’s office is on Catherine Street. Presumably it was once a cottage, or rather two cottages; it’s been knocked through to form the bijou, brass-plaqued venue inside which Callum roosts, like the provincial solicitor he is.

  The secretary, whose name I can’t remember, even though I spoke to her not four hours ago, asks me to wait while she checks if Callum is free. He evidently is. I can see
straight into his office from the small lobby as she fussily announces my arrival. He shouts through, ‘Anne, come along in. Marilyn, if you’d be so kind as to fetch us coffee.’ I close the door on her and take my seat in his Dickensinspired office. His face is carefully composed to indicate concern. ‘How was it?’

  A small question, but not simple to answer. I remind myself of my decision, and of Callum’s well-paid role in ensuring that my decision is acted upon. I force myself to remember that I have some shreds of courage left. I must do what’s right, for me, as a mother. ‘It went well.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘It confirmed a number of things for me.’

  ‘Such as?’

  Even with Callum I need to be careful how I word my responses. I need to stay in control. ‘Phil and Sarah are good people. They’re a strong family and they’ve cared for Lauren unbelievably well, up until now. They understand her needs and are meeting them in a way that’s truly admirable.’ Callum watches me, closely. I swallow and continue. ‘Lauren is a very special child. Spending some time with her over the weekend has made me realise that. I couldn’t see it before, because of her disabilities. I imagined the problems, but none of the positives.’ Callum waits and I can hear my voice start to betray me. ‘She draws patience and love out of the people around her in a way that’s quite remarkable. When I was with her, my maternal instinct was so strong it was almost overwhelming.’ The next bit is so hard to express, but necessary. I need to say it out loud for it to become an instruction, for it to be something that will happen. ‘But Lauren is their daughter, not mine. They’re caring for her in a way that, sadly, I believe I would never be able to.’ Callum blinks. ‘I do not intend to apply for a parental role in her life, other than whatever the Rudaks deem appropriate.’ Callum’s expression of earnest concern doesn’t waver and I find myself trying to defend my decision. ‘What I mean is, removing Lauren from their care just seems wrong, selfish. She’s happy where she is. I can’t disturb that, can I?’ He neither agrees nor disagrees. ‘I feel very conflicted. I’ve spent so many nights turning this over in my mind.’ This is true, I haven’t slept properly since this all began, tiredness is stamped through my bones. I’m praying for him to interject, but he stays silent. ‘The uncertainty is hurting Sarah and Phil, it’s hurting everyone.’ I take a breath. ‘Removing Lauren doesn’t feel like the right thing to do, and I can’t see how shared care would work. It would be too much of an upheaval.’