A Proper Family Christmas (15 page)

Adam took Chelsea to Bocca di Lupo, an Italian restaurant tucked away behind Shaftesbury Avenue. Chelsea loved it. They laughed and talked all night long. There was never a pause in the conversation. On the contrary, they had so much to tell each other that they kept talking over themselves, so eager were they to share their stories.

‘I can’t believe we didn’t meet years ago,’ Adam concluded, when they worked out that they had been to several of the same gigs and frequented the same Shoreditch pubs back when Chelsea was first in London, working on a women’s weekly magazine, and Adam was a young architect who had yet to meet his wife Claire, Lily’s mother.

‘Lily wanted you to have this,’ Adam said, pulling out a piece of paper from his wallet.

Chelsea unfolded the piece of paper to reveal a rather good drawing of a flower.

‘I suppose I should have bought you a rose myself,’ said Adam. ‘Maybe one of those guys will come in later on.’

‘You mean a flower seller?’ said Chelsea. ‘Only twenty pounds a stem. I don’t need one of those. This flower is much more rare and precious. And it will never wilt.’

Chelsea meant it. She was incredibly touched by Adam’s daughter’s gesture. The little girl hadn’t exactly taken to Chelsea upon their first meeting. Things had only got worse when Adam and Chelsea tried to broker a friendship between Lily and Chelsea’s nephew Jack. But this little drawing seemed like a good sign. And if Chelsea was going to fall for Adam, then she was well aware that he came as a package deal.

As the evening ended, with a mammoth snog at the tube station, Chelsea already knew that she would be seeing Adam again. She was so pleased by the prospect of another date that even the next day’s train ride to Coventry – with the inevitable weekend delays – could not dampen her spirits.

Despite the odds, Chelsea’s train arrived in Coventry on time. Ronnie was waiting for her in the station car park. She wasn’t on her own. She’d brought Jack along.

‘He insisted,’ Ronnie said.

‘Auntie Chelsea, Auntie Chelsea. Sit in the back with me!’

Chelsea slid into the back of the car alongside Jack on his booster seat. Jack was overjoyed.

‘I knew you would come and see me,’ he said. ‘This is brilliant. I can show you Minecraft.’

‘Minecraft?’ Chelsea asked.

‘Don’t get him started,’ said Ronnie. ‘Still, at least it makes a change from the bloody sonic screwdriver.’

There was no chance whatsoever that Ronnie and Chelsea would be able to talk properly on the drive back to Ronnie’s house. Of course, Jack was convinced that Chelsea’s visit was all about
their
newly minted friendship. When they got to Ronnie’s he dragged Chelsea straight into the living room and treated her first to a slideshow of photographs from their recent holiday in Lanzarote. There were several that Chelsea would have preferred to delete.

‘Ha ha! Look at that one,’ Jack laughed at a photograph of Chelsea caught midway through a mouthful of pizza. ‘You look like a hippopotamus.’

‘I’m writing you out of my will,’ said Chelsea.

After that, Chelsea simply had to be introduced to Minecraft, which seemed to be some kind of virtual Lego on the XBox. She watched and feigned interest while Jack attempted to build a Tardis. She nodded sagely as Jack explained the difference between ‘creative’ and ‘survival’ modes.

‘And now you have to go to sleep,’ he said. ‘Before the creepers can get you.’

‘I see,’ said Chelsea. She had no idea what he was on about.

‘Do you want to have a go?’

Jack passed Chelsea the controller and allowed her roughly twenty seconds to make the onscreen avatar move before he snatched it back.

‘Like this,’ he said, whizzing through the moves like the digital native he was.

‘Bring back the sonic screwdriver,’ Chelsea stage-whispered to Ronnie.

Jack heard.

‘Do you want to play with the sonic screwdriver? I’ve still got it. I’ll get it for you now.’

Over the top of Jack’s head, Chelsea and Ronnie pulled faces straight out of Munch’s
Scream
.

There was no peace until Jack had to go to a children’s birthday party that had been in the diary for weeks. Mark took him there. Apparently, he protested loudly all the way. Parties were rubbish and he wanted to stay home with his auntie.

But at last Ronnie and Chelsea were able to sit down with Chelsea’s iPad, connect to 4G and bring up the Googled photographs that Chelsea had looked at the week before. Ronnie’s Internet service was still down and she was desperate to see what her sister already knew.

‘Oh my God,’ said Ronnie.

‘What?’

‘We’ve met her.’

‘When?’

‘She lives in a fucking mansion. We looked round it when we went to some fete at the beginning of May.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Seriously. Little Bissingden. It was a huge bloody manor house. Jack knocked over a suit of armour. I’ll never forget her face when she came to see what he’d done.’

‘Was she friendly?’

‘What do you think? I mean, she asked if everyone was OK and all that but you could tell she was much more concerned about her precious antiques than my son.’

‘Was Jack hurt?’

‘No. But still …’

Chelsea nodded. This was already going badly. Ronnie had a tendency to have violent reactions to people and it was clear that she was having a very violent reaction to her newly discovered sister.

‘She was a stuck-up cow. You’ve never seen anyone with her head so far up her own arse! I can’t believe we’re related to someone so horrible. I’m telling you, Chelsea, this is a disaster. What else can you find out?’

Chelsea was an expert at extracting information from the Internet, having honed her skills on keeping up with the comings and goings of a number of ex-boyfriends. It wasn’t long before they had Annabel’s address and a record of how much she had paid for her house.

‘Oh. My. God,’ said Ronnie when she saw the figure.

‘Bloody hell,’ Chelsea agreed.

‘Where did she get that money?’

‘She must have been adopted by millionaires. Or married it.’

Next Chelsea looked for references to Annabel’s husband. His name was Richard. He’d studied at Cambridge. He’d been a high-flying lawyer. Currently he worked for a big investment bank.

‘Can you find out what he earns?’ Ronnie asked.

‘I think it’s safe to say “a lot”,’ Chelsea replied. ‘They’ve got a flat in London as well as the stately home.’

‘So we’ve established that she’s not coming after us for money. Then what does she want?’ Ronnie asked.

‘Why does there have to be a motive? Perhaps she just wants to meet us,’ said Chelsea. ‘For the same reason that Mum and Dad want to meet her. The same reason I want to meet her! She’s family.’

‘No, she isn’t,’ said Ronnie firmly.

‘Ronnie, we’ve all three of us got the same mum and dad.’

‘Yeah. But why now? Why not years ago?’

‘Maybe she didn’t even know she was adopted until recently. Her parents might not have told her but perhaps they’ve died and she found a letter or something.’

Ronnie clicked back to the picture of Annabel at that fete. Annabel was standing on the steps to the Great House. The front steps. Not the steps to the scullery entrance where she had greeted the tour group.

In that picture, Annabel did look like them, like Ronnie
and
Chelsea. She had their mother’s eyes and their father’s nose. She had the same fine straight hair. There was no denying it.

‘I don’t want her in our lives,’ said Ronnie.

‘It’s going to happen,’ said Chelsea. ‘We can’t ask Mum and Dad not to see her. We don’t have any right to do that.’

When Chelsea looked away from the screen and at her sister, she saw that Ronnie had tears in her eyes.

‘I don’t want anything to change,’ Ronnie said. ‘We don’t need another sister. We’re already a proper family as we are!’

Jacqui and Dave and Granddad Bill came over to Ronnie’s house for tea that afternoon. Chelsea could see at once that the letter from the intermediary and the subsequent email exchanges had changed everything for their mother. Jacqui was elated in a strangely girlish way. She had the intermediary’s letter and a printout of Annabel’s emails in her handbag, safely protected by a clear plastic envelope. They were just pieces of paper but Jacqui carried them as though they were holy relics. In some ways, thought Chelsea, it was no wonder. As far as Chelsea knew, they were the only mementoes of her first daughter Jacqui actually had.

Jacqui smoothed the letter and emails out on the kitchen table so that Chelsea could read them, but not until she had made sure that the tabletop was absolutely clean. Jacqui did not want to expose these precious things to coffee spills and toast crumbs.

‘She says she wants to see us as soon as possible,’ Jacqui said proudly.

Indeed, why wait?

‘You’re pleased, aren’t you, Chelsea?’ Jacqui asked.

‘Of course I am,’ Chelsea said.

‘I know you haven’t had long to get used to the idea of having another sister.’

‘But you’ve had a very long time to wonder what happened to your baby, Mum. The way I see it, the sooner you meet her, the better.’

‘Annabel,’ Jacqui murmured. ‘I can’t believe she’s called Annabel. I don’t think I ever would have called her that.’

‘Well, that’s what she is called,’ said Ronnie brusquely. ‘She’s not your Daisy now.’

Chelsea shot Ronnie a glance that said ‘shut up’.

‘Annabel,’ said Jacqui again, as though she was trying the name on for size. ‘I don’t think I can get used to it. She’s been Daisy in my head all these years. Daisy, Ronnie and Chelsea. My three girls.’

‘This is getting weird,’ said Ronnie. ‘Knowing that while we’ve been completely in the dark, you’ve been thinking about another daughter all this time. It’s like we’ve been living with a ghost that only you could see. Living a lie …’

Chelsea started to fear that Ronnie was about to reprise the argument they’d had in Lanzarote, when Jacqui first told them about the adoption and Ronnie went ballistic. Chelsea braced herself but fortunately, Jack interrupted them. He was back from the party. A fellow parent from school had dropped him off. As soon as he came into the kitchen, he jumped on to Chelsea’s lap, knocking the wind right out of her.

‘Jack!’ said Ronnie. ‘Be careful.’

‘I’m getting a new auntie,’ Jack told Chelsea then. ‘Grandma lost her a hundred years ago.’

Jacqui winced.

‘But she’s found her now. Do you think she’ll like cricket?’

Ronnie shrugged. ‘I dunno.’

Chelsea said, ‘I expect so. But she won’t be as good at it as I am.’

‘Hmmm. You’re not actually very good at cricket, Auntie Chelsea. I only said it to be nice.’

‘Check out the diplomat,’ Chelsea laughed.

‘Perhaps my new auntie’s husband will be good at cricket instead.’

‘Yeah,’ said Ronnie. ‘He probably played for England. Nothing less for The Lady of the Great House.’

At the Great House, Richard was finding it hard to concentrate on the cricket on the television. Izzy was out of hospital and back home with her portable dialysis machine but it still felt wrong to try to do any of the things he would ordinarily have done on a Sunday. Annabel was equally unable to relax. When she wasn’t keeping Izzy company in the nest she had made for herself on the sofa or up in her bedroom, she was doing chores. She was always dusting or vacuuming or putting sheets through the washing machine despite the fact that she hadn’t done her own dusting, washing or ironing for years. She just had to keep on the move.

And all the time she kept checking her phone. For news from the hospital about a possible donor. For news from the Bensons. When would they meet face to face?

A meeting was finally arranged by email. It would be the following Sunday. They couldn’t meet her any sooner because of Dave’s work shifts. Jacqui didn’t want to go alone. They had to be there together. They hoped she understood.

‘Why can’t he just take a day off!’ Annabel wailed in frustration.

‘Perhaps he can’t afford to,’ Richard suggested.

‘But … This is important, for heaven’s sake.’

‘We’ve got to approach this calmly,’ said Richard. ‘We are potentially going to ask them to make an enormous sacrifice. We can’t try to rush them into it. We’ve got to make some kind of relationship first.’

Annabel knew Richard was right, but she didn’t care. She was ready to call Jacqui and tell her that they would pay for Dave to take a day off. Time was of the essence.

Richard laid his hand on her arm.

‘Izzy is OK. She’s stable. We can wait a few more days to have this first meeting. We have to take this steadily or we could blow it.’

But each day was passing as slowly as a year for Annabel. She knew she wouldn’t sleep. She had to do something. There was nothing worse for Annabel than the thought that she could do nothing to influence a situation. To be able to do nothing for Izzy was pure hell.

Meanwhile, the new baby was making itself felt. Now that she knew she was pregnant, Annabel wondered how she hadn’t guessed before. The pregnancy was something else to worry about. Because Annabel was considered an older, if not flat-out
elderly
, mother, the list of tests the doctors had offered her seemed endless. There were, as the Mumsnet boards she browsed seemed to take some glee in reminding her, all manner of possible problems to consider. Down’s was just the start of it.

What would Annabel do if they discovered that the baby had some kind of disability? Richard had always been firmly against abortion on such grounds, as had Annabel. But this time? When losing the baby could mean that Annabel would be free to be a donor again? Free to save her firstborn? Annabel hated herself for even considering that as a silver lining. Her desperation to help Izzy was sending her insane.

But as it happened, a second antenatal scan – done privately – was as reassuring as the first. The baby was developing exactly as it should be. Growing normally. Its tiny heart was strong and insistent. This baby was going to be born no matter what else was going on in the Buchanan family.