I closed my eyes. Could this be true? Could we really be about to do this? Careful not to disturb Lana, I put my arms around him. We both watched as she fell asleep again, her little head with its beautiful thick dark hair on his chest. Our daughter. I felt overcome with happiness.
The days following our decision were utterly surreal. The practicalities of adjusting to new parenthood, the fear of what would happen if we were discovered, the guilt we felt about her real family, was interspersed with the pure joy of having Lana so suddenly and unexpectedly in our lives. She was absolutely perfect. We decided to call her Hannah after my grandmother, and that was when it began to feel as though she was really and forever ours. But there was a huge amount of fear and anxiety too. We had to keep her existence secret from the world while we worked out how to pass her off as our own. Luckily, the house we lived in then was down a lane, set slightly apart from our neighbours, so there was nobody to hear her when she cried. We would take it in turns to drive to a town far away from our village to buy her formula and nappies.
We knew we had to come up with a plan. I thought if we were going to commit to such a huge lie, then it had to be to everyone – to all our friends and family – and we would have to move away from the Suffolk village we’d lived in all our lives. I resigned from my job at the hospital. Doug had wanted for some time to expand his building business, so he applied for a loan, and the idea was to move from the area and start again. We began researching villages and areas in Cambridgeshire, the next county, miles away from our village, where no one would know us.
Two weeks after Hannah came to us, I went to the local pub to have a drink with friends, and broke the news that Doug and I had decided to split up. In the shocked silence I told them that I was going away for a while to stay with a friend from the hospital while I worked out what to do. I knew the gossip would spread like wildfire. Later that night, I took Hannah, drove to a town near the Cambridgeshire village we’d chosen to move to, and stayed in a hotel while I looked for a house to rent. Doug gave notice to our landlord and a month later, came and joined us.
My parents had moved to the Lake District after I had married Doug, so the fabrications we had to weave, though difficult, were not impossible. When I announced my ‘pregnancy’ to them I said that, because of my previous miscarriages, we’d waited four months before telling them. Later we said that as the baby had arrived a month early she’d had to spend several weeks in the hospital’s neo-natal intensive care unit – a place where only the child’s parents are allowed to visit. Finally, citing problems with the move and so on, we were able to put off their first visit for a further couple of months. Hannah was a naturally very small baby, so when my parents did eventually get to meet their grandchild they didn’t guess that she was in fact far older than we said. It was very difficult – I hated lying to them, but what else could I do? Doug’s own mother had died some years earlier and his father, who lived in Devon, was not the type to be much interested in newborns, so that at least was easier.
As far as local friends were concerned I told them that Doug and I had got back together after our split when we’d found out I was pregnant, and we were now living happily together in Cambridgeshire. Yes, I hurt some feelings, burnt some bridges, but, well, it was a small price to pay.
In the event, everything seemed to go our way. I took that as a sign it was meant to be. I told myself, although it hadn’t happened in the best of circumstances, that wasn’t our fault. We’d had nothing to do with Nadia’s death and Lana would have had to have been adopted by someone eventually, so why not us, who had waited for so long and so desperately for her? I guess I made myself not think about Hannah’s real-life family, the grandparents who were mourning both her and Nadia’s loss. I read the newspaper reports about Nadia’s suicide and put them away, out of sight, locking my guilt firmly away as I did so.
So, suddenly there we were: new house, new village, new daughter, new life. God, I was so happy. I thought I had it all, that my dreams had come true at last. Soon it felt as though we truly were just an ordinary, natural family. Doug was as besotted with her as I was and took to fatherhood right away, doing his fair share of nappies and night feeds, cuddling and playing with her as often as he could. He was so proud of her; we both were.
And later, when the small, niggling doubts crept in, I ignored them at first, telling myself that it was nothing, that I was imagining things. Occasionally, when I couldn’t sleep at night and the worry that something wasn’t quite right with Hannah loomed larger, I would torture myself, wondering if her antipathy towards me was because she wasn’t really mine; that she sensed I wasn’t her real mother, or even that I was imagining things because of the guilt I still felt at the dreadful way she’d come into our lives, at all the lies we’d colluded in. But always, at least in the beginning, I’d push the doubts from my mind, because I wanted so badly for it all, at last, to be completely perfect for Doug and me.
27
Suffolk, 2017
From the hallway, the clock above the stairs struck one. The fire had long since died out; the coldness that seeped into the corners of the room made Clara shiver inside her thin jumper. They were all of them seated now: Clara and Mac on the large and uncomfortable chesterfield, Rose and Oliver in the two creaking armchairs. Clemmy lay on the floor at their feet, emitting the occasional uneasy grumble, her eyebrows shooting up unhappily towards first one, then the other of her owners. Only Tom still stood, his back to the window, listening to his mother speak. He continued to drink steadily, pouring again and again from the bottle of wine, watching Rose grimly from above his glass.
‘We cut all ties with Beth and Doug,’ Rose went on. ‘We all agreed it would be better that way,’ her voice rose imploringly as she looked from one to the other of their faces. ‘We got on with our lives, what else could we do? The police had rightly concluded Nadia’s death was suicide, assuming she’d died alone, and that … that … Lana had been lost to sea.’ She looked at Tom. ‘And later, when first you, then your brother came along, we just wanted to put the whole dreadful business behind us.’ She paused, seeming to shrink inside herself as she said in a low, fearful voice, ‘It wasn’t until seven years later that Beth suddenly contacted me out of the blue.’
‘What did she want?’ Clara asked.
‘She was hysterical, saying she wanted to go to the police, that we needed to confess everything. It was a horrible shock, as you can imagine, I had no idea why she was so upset. I tried to get her to calm down, but she became so worked up that in the end I agreed to meet her. When I got there she was still in a state, saying Hannah, as they’d named Lana, had become violent, that she was frightened of her. She said the child had started a fire at her babysitter’s, had hurt her son, that her marriage was falling apart because of it all. She was convinced Hannah was mentally ill – that she’d inherited her mother’s psychiatric issues and that now she – Beth – was somehow being punished for deceiving everyone the way we did. I tried to reason with her but she was beside herself, saying she wanted to go to the police, that she couldn’t stand the guilt any more and wanted to confess that they’d taken the child illegally. She kept talking about how Nadia had died, how wrong it had been to pass Hannah off as their own. Most of all, she believed Hannah needed professional help, that doctors would need her real medical history. The more I tried to talk her out of it, the more upset she became. I decided the best thing for me to do was to leave. And I told her not to contact me again.’