A Proper Family Christmas (12 page)

In the end, Annabel was very glad that Richard was there beside her after all. Though the social worker had no personal information to impart yet, towards the close of the session the conversation took an ugly turn. After discussing with Annabel and Richard the apparent urgency of their request, she brought up the elephant in the room.

‘Your birth certificate will give you your mother’s name, but it is quite possible, indeed probable, that there will be no name at all under “father”. If your parents weren’t married, your mother would not have been allowed to fill in your father’s name unless he was present at the moment your birth was registered. And then there is the possibility that your mother did not actually know your father’s name. It’s possible that she was raped. Or that your father was someone she would never want to name. Like a relative.’

Annabel closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. Rape and incest. It was not what she wanted to hear. It was certainly a long way from the fairy tale her mother had used to explain the situation when she was very small. In that story, Annabel’s mother and father had loved each other very much. They were just too young and poor to give her everything she needed and so they made the decision to give her to the Cartwrights for safe keeping because they wanted the best for her.

In the car on the way home, Annabel asked Richard what he thought they’d discover at the next meeting.

‘I mean, it’s far more likely that she did know who my father was, isn’t it?’ Annabel recounted the story her adoptive parents had told her when she got a little older. ‘My mother was a teenager. She got pregnant by her boyfriend. They wanted to keep me but they were just too young.’

But suddenly the old story didn’t seem quite as comforting as it had done through the years. Annabel’s parents had never been very specific about the details of the situation that led to Annabel’s adoption. Was that because the real story was so awful?

‘What if I am the product of rape?’ Annabel asked. ‘My birth mother probably won’t want to know me and we’ll never track down the man who fathered me. Maybe he’s even in prison!’

‘Stay positive,’ said Richard.

It was hard. How could Annabel stay positive when her daughter was so ill and their one chance to get her a transplant quickly might be languishing at Her Majesty’s pleasure? Annabel’s imagination was running riot. She desperately needed to know the truth.

Due to the circumstances of Annabel’s wish to meet her birth family, the second appointment was rushed through. Though it was not strictly playing by the rules, Richard knew someone at the County Council who made sure that it happened. So just a fortnight after the lecture on the possibility of rape, incest and affairs, Annabel and Richard found themselves back in the same sparse meeting room with the same social worker to hear a ‘birth summary’ and look at the original paperwork. This time, the social worker carried with her a thick manila file. She put it down on the table in front of her. It was all Annabel could do not to snatch it up. She couldn’t believe how much red tape had been involved in getting to know her own history.

Annabel held her birth certificate in her hands at last. Her original name was Daisy Benson Ross. Her mother’s name was Jacqui.

As the social worker had warned her, there was no name in the space for ‘father’, but the rest of the file held good news. No rape and no incest. Annabel’s birth parents had been going out for two years when her mother got pregnant. The rest of it was just as Sarah had told her. They were not together at the time of Annabel’s birth. Her mother was too young and poor to cope with raising a baby on her own, but she wrote in a letter to the social worker who had handled that case back in the 1970s that she would always love the baby she had called Daisy Benson.

‘Benson is a weird middle name,’ said Annabel.

‘That was your putative father’s surname,’ said the social worker.

Annabel held the birth certificate in her hands. Such an insignificant piece of paper and yet it was capable of changing everything.

There was no time to waste.

The social worker advised Annabel that the best way to proceed when you wanted to contact your birth parents was through an intermediary. As soon as she and Richard had bid her goodbye in the lobby of the council offices, Annabel was calling the first name on the list of intermediaries the social worker had given them. Two days later they had an address. Even better, there was a match on an adoption register. Annabel’s birth mother had been looking for her. She’d been signed up to the register for more than twenty years.

‘Then she’ll definitely want to meet you,’ said Richard.

‘God, I hope so.’

A letter was drafted. Annabel read it and had it sent before she could change her mind.

‘Have you done it?’ Izzy asked that evening, when Annabel visited the hospital to wish her good night.

‘Yes.’ Annabel nodded. ‘I have.’

‘Did they send it first class?’

‘Of course,’ said Annabel.

‘Then she should get it tomorrow, shouldn’t she?’

‘God willing.’

‘And how long do you think it will take her to get back to us?’

‘I don’t know, sweetheart. But I shouldn’t think it will be long, given that she’s been looking for me all this time.’

‘I don’t understand why you didn’t just email her.’

‘Because I don’t think this is something that should be done over email. A letter will get results just as quickly, I promise you. The intermediary has had lots of experience with this.’

‘OK,’ said Izzy. ‘But if you don’t hear from her in a week, you’ll email then, right?’

‘Of course I will.’

Annabel kissed Izzy on the top of her head. Izzy closed her eyes and smiled.

‘I’ve got a good feeling about this,’ Annabel said, as much to convince herself as Izzy.

For once, the Royal Mail lived up to their promise and Annabel’s letter via the intermediary was delivered the very next day. What Annabel didn’t know, however, was that Jacqui Benson was not at home in Coventry to receive the promptly delivered envelope. She was on holiday in Lanzarote, celebrating her sixtieth birthday with her husband, her father-in-law, her two other daughters and her grandchildren and would not be home for another six days.

The Bensons’ family holiday was eventful to say the least. On the second evening, six members of the group were struck down by food poisoning, sparing only Chelsea, Jacqui’s youngest daughter, and Jack, her six-year-old grandson. Once the food poisoning was out of the way, the week had progressed with family rows aplenty. Sophie, Jacqui’s granddaughter, had even gone missing for a while.

The catalyst for that particular event would have interested Annabel. Jacqui had not told either Ronnie or Chelsea about the existence of their older sister or the adoption until that birthday celebration week. Chelsea’s reaction had been muted but Ronnie had been furious. The big problem as far as Ronnie was concerned was that, like her mother, Ronnie had become accidentally pregnant as a teenager. Jacqui and her husband Dave had actively encouraged Ronnie to keep the baby, Sophie, and as a result Ronnie had abandoned her plans to go to university. Upon hearing for the first time that Jacqui had made a different choice some forty-three years earlier, Ronnie was convinced she had become a victim of Jacqui’s guilty conscience. Jacqui had encouraged Ronnie to give up on her ambitions and follow through with her unexpected pregnancy in an attempt to set things straight.

While this argument raged, Sophie was eavesdropping in the hotel corridor. Upon hearing herself described as a mistake, Sophie had gone AWOL, heading into the arms of a local boy and a whole lot of trouble. The local boy, more accurately described as a man a good decade and a half Sophie’s senior, got her drunk. She threw up all over him. Running from his anger, she headed down to the sea and, in her inebriated state, managed to walk off the end of a derelict pier. Thank goodness a fellow holidaymaker – a man called Adam, who had befriended Chelsea earlier in the week – saw Sophie fall into the water and went to rescue her. She sobered up pretty quickly once she’d been dragged out of the waves and the shock of almost drowning made her ready to forgive her mum.

Sitting on the aeroplane back to Birmingham Airport, Jacqui was just grateful that the two daughters she had raised were still speaking to her. She felt lighter, too, for having shared her secret. She was glad that she and Dave had explained the sadness that had bound them but, if she was honest, she didn’t really think that anything would change. She didn’t really believe that her long-lost daughter would ever come back into her life.

The baby that Jacqui had called Daisy would be more than forty years old. Forty years was a long time. Jacqui knew that Daisy could have had access to her birth records for more than twenty of those years. In the meantime, Jacqui had done everything she could, signing up to every post-adoption contact register she could find, because by law she was not even allowed to know the name Daisy had been given by her new family. She couldn’t idly Google her or look up her address on the electoral roll. All Jacqui had been told all those years ago was that Daisy’s adoptive parents were a happily married couple in their early thirties. He was in the army. She was going to be a stay-at-home mum. It would be the perfect situation.

Once Daisy’s adoption was finalised, Jacqui had asked if her new family would send her photographs of Daisy in her new home. The social worker had promised to ask but the pictures never came. She didn’t know whether she had the right to ask again. She decided that she probably didn’t. The last thing she sent Daisy was a small box of gifts on her first Christmas. She never even knew if they arrived.

Jacqui moved to Essex and then Bristol and got herself a job as a secretary. She shared a flat with two other girls. They didn’t know her from before and she didn’t tell them why she never went back to Coventry. She lived in Bristol for almost ten years. On the way home from work she passed a playground. Sometimes, she would stand by the fence and watch the children playing there, looking for little girls of about Daisy’s age. Would Daisy be walking? Would she be talking? Would she be that tall? Would she be wilful like that little girl who didn’t want to get back into her pushchair? Would Jacqui ever see her baby girl again? Would she even recognise her if she did?

Not having Dave to talk to about it was the worst. But they had split up before Jacqui knew she was pregnant and somehow her parents had persuaded her that it was best Dave didn’t know about the baby at all. For his sake, they said. He was just starting out as an apprentice. Being lumbered with a wife and a baby would really hold him back. Jacqui thought her parents were acting in her and Dave’s best interests. As an adult, she realised they’d been afraid that Dave might try to stop the adoption. They’d never really liked him. They were hoping Jacqui could put her mistake behind her and start afresh once the baby was gone. As it happened, the adoption was so traumatic that Jacqui subsequently left home and never spoke to her parents again.

Even after she and Dave got back together, married, and went on to have Ronnie and Chelsea, Jacqui ticked off every year in terms of Daisy’s age. On the anniversary of Daisy’s birth, she would try to find a little time to be by herself and think about the girl Daisy might be now. That had become difficult when Ronnie and Chelsea arrived on the scene.

As Daisy’s eighteenth birthday approached, Jacqui felt a swell of anticipation. At the age of eighteen, Daisy could have access to the records connected to her adoption. She could start the search. Jacqui even bought Daisy an eighteenth birthday present: a charm bracelet. She would buy identical bracelets for Ronnie and Chelsea when they reached the same landmark. But Daisy’s eighteenth birthday came and went. She didn’t get in contact. And the silver bracelet that Jacqui had chosen so carefully grew black with tarnish as it languished in a drawer while Daisy turned 21, 22, 25 … 30 …

Since then, Jacqui had tried not to hope so hard, but there were still the odd moments when she felt sure that a reunion was just a breath away. She read somewhere that adoptees were more likely to search out their birth parents when they themselves became parents. When might Daisy become a mother? In her early thirties? Late thirties? Aged forty? That wasn’t so unusual these days. Jacqui imagined Daisy passing every milestone but still no letter came.

Dave was more stoical. Though Daisy was his daughter too, Jacqui knew he didn’t have quite the same attachment to the baby she had given away. Dave had nothing to go on but his imagination as far as Daisy was concerned. Dave had not even known that Jacqui was pregnant, after all.

So Dave had not ever seen his first daughter. He hadn’t held her in his arms and breathed in the warm yeasty smell of her new-born head. After the birth, Jacqui had spent six weeks in a mother and baby home, doing everything that new mothers do. Not breast-feeding, though. The nurses told her that it would only make things more difficult when Daisy was finally ready to be handed over. Jacqui should try not to get too attached.

But six weeks was a long time in the life of a baby. There were days during those weeks when Jacqui forgot that Daisy wasn’t going to be staying with her. Those days, she felt happier than she ever had, looking down into Daisy’s dark blue eyes and wondering whether they would soon start to go brown, like Dave’s. Jacqui decided that she would make a good parent. She was always happy to go to Daisy the moment the bell rang and the unmarried mothers were allowed to go to the nursery. In between those times, Jacqui did her chores and comforted even younger, more fragile girls.

‘This isn’t the end,’ she told one girl in particular. ‘Perhaps we’ve got no choice but to give the babies up now, but I promise you it won’t be the last time we see them. They will come to look for us. I know.’

Some of the other girls refused to hold their babies at all. They resigned themselves to the fact that the babies were going to be taken away and decided that refusing to get too attached was the only way to deal with the pain ahead. Those who could afford it paid for their children to be fostered as soon as possible. Jacqui had always thought differently. She would take whatever precious time she could. She loved Daisy so hard and so well because she wanted some memory of that time to imprint itself on the dear little child. She wanted Daisy to remember how well loved she was, as if that would bring her back sooner.