And now my mother knew everything.
Despair crept in through the cracks of my coping strategies, and then a deluge of melancholy engulfed me. The battle to keep my head above water was all at once completely unmanageable. I had been gripping onto the routine, the rules, the sameness, for what? What had it brought me? I had been charging around in a permanent state of exhaustion, juggling work and fridge schedules, clocking in and out of the children’s lives, while they didn’t get a say in any of it. All in the name of providing the best for them. But what was The Best? A child who hated me? A husband who drank too much? A family whose members passed each other like ships in the night? For what? For a better house that drained our bank account, for brilliant careers that left us too tired to have sex, for a bigger car that killed the environment, for a smarter school that rewired anxiety into their young minds.
I was holding a mirror up to The Best and its reflection was ugly.
How much room was there left for spontaneity, light-heartedness, romance, boredom, generosity, for hours whiled away fruitlessly, thoughtfully, with books flicked through, newspapers discarded, laughter and games and chatter and innocence.
Didn’t I only have one life? Didn’t the children have only one childhood? Did I really want to live it like this? Was I mad?
My stomach flip-flopped. I lit another cigarette – two wouldn’t hurt. I loathed to end my short snatch of rebellion and contemplation (who would have thought the two went together?).
The journey home was quieter. I thought of my mother. She would be smarting from a decade in the dark, a decade of ignorance, a decade of seeking out resemblances in her granddaughter, finding pride in supposed inherited traits, seeing the line of her genes follow down into another generation of Campbell Women. Her inability to wink was an odd quirk, which was traceable only to Kaarina’s genes, and seemed to highlight so much else that we didn’t know about her heredity. The apocryphal Campbell family stories of rare talents or unusual features from great-aunts and great, great grandparents did not apply. Rosie had been an unwitting fraud. And my mother would have to relearn her relationship with her in the light of their new, less biological, connection to one another. If she had always known, there would have been no trauma of finding out. She would have accepted it without hesitation. Just as Rosie would have. The thought was spine-chilling.
* * *
When I slipped back in, sheepishly, I found the front of the house silent. My mother and Peter were in the sitting room by the fire.
It was too hot in there. There was a sharp tang of alcohol in the air.
They looked up casually as though I was the missing guest they had been expecting.
My mother was in the blue-velvet wing-backed chair to the right, and Peter was on the sofa next to her. I was unable to look either of them in the eye, scared stiff of what I would see. Perched on the edge of the sofa opposite Peter, I was like a schoolgirl in a head teacher’s office.
I straightened the coffee-table book in perfect line with the book underneath it, neither of which I had ever made the time to read.
‘How was Rosie’s head?’
‘I gave her some paracetamol. She’s fast asleep.’
‘Go on, tell me how awful I am.’
‘I’m sure it was an accident,’ my mother stated firmly.
‘You don’t sound so sure.’
‘Gemma, don’t,’ Peter said.
My mother’s wan face was turned at Peter’s as if they were embroiled in a torturous love affair.
‘Don’t what?’
‘Get narky,’ my mother said, rattling the ice in her tumbler before taking a sip.
‘I’m too tired for all this,’ I said standing up.
My mother slammed her glass on the side table. ‘Sit down.’
I slumped back into the sofa, sliding my eyes back and forth across the picture rail that we had fixed in there, exactly ten inches from the ceiling.
Sitting forward, I said, ‘If we’d told you about Prague, we would’ve had to tell everyone.’
‘I’m not worried about what I was or wasn’t told, I’m worried about what Rosie knows.’
I glared at Peter, assuming he had persuaded my mother that it was best for Rosie to know the truth, after all these years, as though either of them could possibly understand it from my point of view. ‘So it’s two against one, is it?’
‘Stop being so childish,’ my mother snapped.
‘I’ve never felt right about telling her and I still don’t. Especially now. Sorry,’ I sighed, sulkily, sounding very un-sorry.
My mother sat up straighter, and closed her eyes for longer than a blink.
‘You did the right thing.’
I was flummoxed, and I looked to Peter and back at my mother. ‘Really?’
‘Yes, darling. You did it for her own good.’
I was then embarrassed by her support, unused to it. I didn’t know what to do with myself or what to say. My throat crunched with un-cried tears. Ten years of holding it back, ten years of unnecessary guilt.
‘I did it for my own good too,’ I said, my voice wobbling.
My mother came around the table and knelt by me, squeezing my knees with her hands. ‘You’ve been so strong.’
‘I don’t know though, Mum, I don’t know. Look at us now.’
Had I? Was it strength or weakness? Certainly, my mother’s support would make it easier to continue as we were.
My mother returned to her armchair. ‘Well, Peter and I were talking about this. If she found out so close to the hearing, it’d be destabilising, actually, you know, potentially disastrous. Is there any chance, any chance at all that she could have overheard anything at any point?’
‘She didn’t need to overhear, I pretty much told her.’
‘Peter said you reassured her it wasn’t true.’
Turning to Peter, I asked him, ‘You still think she believed me?’
‘Yes,’ he replied simply, brushing a hand through his hair. I so wanted to believe it.
‘I have an idea,’ my mother said, sitting forward. ‘Do you have any old photos of when you were pregnant with her?’
‘You think that would reassure her?’
‘Might be worth a try. You and Jackie used to love looking at yourselves in baby photographs,’ she grinned.
‘Did we?’
‘You were so sweet.’
We beamed at each other, mother and daughter, rebooting the love.
‘We’ve got those lovely ones that you took in the south of France by the lavender fields, Peter, remember?’
‘The last holiday we ever enjoyed,’ Peter joked whimsically.
‘One thing though, does she know what an egg donor is?’ my mother asked.
‘Of course not,’ I guffawed. ‘She’s only ten.’
‘They’re frighteningly well informed these days,’ my mother added.
‘There is no way she’d jump to that conclusion. I think the photograph idea is brilliant.’
‘She’ll see where she really comes from,’ Peter said, smiling shyly at me.
My mother held her glass up to me, and announced proudly, ‘Indeed. She’s a Campbell girl all right.’
I swallowed away a fountain of tears. ‘Yes, she is, isn’t she?’
‘And a Bradley, thank you very much,’ Peter added.
‘You’re probably in there somewhere,’ my mother laughed, rolling her eyes at him.
Relief and elation made me giddy for a few moments, until I thought of my sister.
‘What about Jackie?’
‘We can’t tell her too. It’s too risky,’ my mother said.
‘But she’ll be so hurt.’
‘How can she be if she never finds out?’
‘Right, yes, I suppose,’ I muttered, feeling uneasy, my sense of shame reinforced.