A Proper Family Holiday (32 page)

‘Please,’ said Chelsea. ‘Let’s go back to the hotel so Mum can tell us the whole story. She deserves that at least. So does Dad.’

To Chelsea’s great relief, Ronnie agreed.

Arm in arm, the sisters headed back to the Hotel Volcan to join their mother and father.

Chapter Forty-Seven

Jacqui

Forty-three years earlier

It was decided that it would be for the best if Jacqui left Coventry as soon as the pregnancy started showing. Thank goodness, her mother observed, it was fashionable that year to dress in shapeless smocks, so that even at five months gone, Jacqui didn’t look all that different from her school friends. She didn’t put weight on around her face or on her arms. Her parents’ neighbour, Mrs Green, who was exactly the kind of person to be scandalised, didn’t seem to have noticed a thing. She still asked Jacqui what she was planning to do after she got her exam results.

At five and a half months, however, Jacqui’s mother started to get twitchy.

‘I think it’s time,’ she said. ‘People will start to talk.’

So two days later, her father drove her to stay with her aunt near Chelmsford. They were mostly silent on the drive, but Jacqui felt sure she could hear accusation in his every exhalation. He carried her suitcase to the door. Jacqui had gone to carry it herself, but her father said, ‘Not in your condition,’ as if he were any proud grandfather-to-be, but of course he wasn’t. He definitely wasn’t proud.

After a cup of tea and some small talk with Auntie Pam, her father prepared to leave. Jacqui saw him to the door and reached out to hug him, but he backed away and squeezed her hand instead.

‘It’s not for long, pet,’ he told her. ‘Once this thing is sorted out, you can come home and everything will be back to normal.’

Jacqui agreed, though she didn’t see how it could possibly be true.

You can’t imagine what it’s like to be pregnant until it actually happens. Her parents were acting as though the baby were some kind of tumour, to be wished away and never spoken of again, but Jacqui’s body hadn’t taken on board the news that the baby wasn’t staying. She had the same hormones as every expectant mother. She cupped her stomach protectively when walking through a crowd.

Auntie Pam did her best, but she’d never had children. Half the family said Pam
couldn’t
have children; the other half said she’d never wanted to. Whatever the reason, Pam didn’t seem to want to talk about the changes to Jacqui’s body or the feelings churning in her mind.

‘You just tell me when, you know …’ Pam couldn’t find the words. ‘I’ll drive you straight to the hospital.’

The day came. Jacqui’s waters broke. Thankfully, she was in the bathroom at the time. She told her aunt she would be fine to clean the floor before they went to the hospital, but Pam was desperate for her share of the responsibilities to end. She insisted they go right away. Jacqui sat on a towel in the back of the car.

The small private hospital Jacqui had been booked into looked attractive enough on the outside, housed as it was in a mansion built by an eighteenth-century businessman to showcase his enormous wealth. On the inside, though, the building was as austere as any prison. Unlike the maternity ward at the general hospital, the corridors were largely deserted. There were no anxious husbands pacing for news, no prospective grandparents eager to help. Auntie Pam helped Jacqui to the front desk and left her there.

There were few kind words in the delivery room, as though the pain of labour was all part of the punishment for stepping out of line. Jacqui accepted it. She wasn’t going to give the slab-faced midwife the satisfaction of seeing her pain and fear. She gritted her teeth. She’d faced worse. No, Jacqui decided five minutes later, actually, she had never faced anything as frightening as this. How she longed for Dave to be there, holding her hand.

The baby was born and immediately whisked away.

‘What is it? What is it?’ Jacqui wanted to know. Nobody would tell her. She was left alone with a bloody towel between her legs. Ten minutes later, she was back on the ward. She still didn’t know whether she’d given birth to a girl, a boy or a kitten.

‘Mrs Ross?’

Jacqui wasn’t immediately aware that the ward sister was addressing her. Mrs Ross was her mother’s name.

‘Mrs Ross?’

‘You mean me?’

‘Who else do you think I mean?’

‘I’m not Mrs—’

‘I know,’ said the nurse, raising an eyebrow.

Later, Jacqui realised that the nurses addressed everyone as Mrs. Even the thirteen-year-old girl in the bed opposite who hadn’t stopped crying since the moment she was wheeled back from the delivery suite.

‘You can see your baby now.’

Jacqui limped behind the nurse to a room full of cradles. She was allowed at last to hold her baby to her breast.

‘Don’t get too attached,’ the nurse told her.

Five weeks later, her father offered to pick her up and bring her back from the mother and baby home she and Daisy had stayed in since the birth. Jacqui had no real choice but to accept. This time, on the drive from Chelmsford to Coventry, her father was unusually chatty. He filled her in on all the gossip from their street. Mrs Green’s cat had gone missing. She was convinced it had been stolen by a cat-sacrificing cult.

‘Most likely it got knocked down on the dual carriageway.’

Jacqui didn’t speak. She watched the miles pass. Her body still hadn’t quite said goodbye to Daisy. At the sight of a mother with a small boy, Jacqui’s abdomen contracted painfully. Where had her baby gone? The social worker had taken Daisy away to her interim foster carers while Jacqui was having a bath one morning. Better that way, was the general consensus. No one tried to comfort her as she stood at the top of the stairs and screamed, with her hair still dripping wet. It would haunt Jacqui for the rest of her life that she had missed her chance to say goodbye. Were they looking after her? Were they holding her tight and keeping her warm? What were they going to call her?

Jacqui’s mother had cooked her favourite meal for tea, as if this homecoming without the baby was something to be celebrated. Jacqui ate three mouthfuls and pushed her plate away.

‘After all your mother’s done for you!’ her father snapped.

A week later, Jacqui left home for good. She left a note on the kitchen table saying she would send a forwarding address. She never did.

Dave never really stopped hoping that Jacqui would come back into his life. He had no idea about the baby. As far as he was concerned, Jacqui had dumped him on the advice of her parents and gone to Essex to pursue a secretarial career. He was convinced that one day she would change her mind about him. Admittedly, as the years passed, it seemed less likely, but it never felt impossible. Dave might have moved around the country in search of work, but his dad, Bill, hadn’t strayed from the same old address. If Jacqui wanted to get in touch with him, all she had to do was call.

Then Bill announced that he was moving. Dave hadn’t lived at home in years. The family home was too big without him. Bill liked the idea of downsizing to a bungalow and spending the money left over on a caravan. He’d always fancied having a caravan.

‘But …’

They talked about the reasons why a move might not be a good idea.
The
reason.

‘She hasn’t been in touch for nine years, son,’ said Bill. ‘I don’t think it’s going to happen now.’

Bill half-heartedly encouraged Dave to get back out there, find a new girl and get on with his life, though Bill knew more than anyone what it was like to have lost true love, having lost his own wife to cancer fifteen years before. Even so, he couldn’t stay in a house that echoed around him just so that Jacqui would know where to post her Christmas cards.

‘Whoever I sell the place to will just have to forward the post.’

The night before Bill moved, Jacqui called.

There was no awkwardness in Jacqui and Dave’s first meeting nine years after they’d last said goodbye and they soon made up for lost time. There was so much to catch up on. Within six months they were engaged. There was no need to elope. They were both more than old enough to chart their own destinies.

Eventually, Jacqui told Dave about the adoption. She told him everything. Dave vowed they would meet their daughter again one day – they weren’t going to keep her a secret – but then the other girls came along and the concept of a sister who had been given away seemed too difficult to explain to a toddler or a five-year-old. Ronnie had enough trouble dealing with being usurped by Chelsea. How would she react to the idea that she wasn’t even the oldest sibling after all? It suddenly seemed better not to talk about it. In any case, Dave and Jacqui were increasingly aware of the possibility that their first child would never get in touch. As birth parents, they weren’t allowed to access any of the details of their daughter’s new identity. Everything was up to her.

The run-up to Daisy’s eighteenth birthday was an especially difficult time for Jacqui. She knew that at eighteen, Daisy would be allowed to apply to see her original birth certificate and find out who her birth parents were. Jacqui felt sure she wouldn’t have to wait much longer, but Daisy’s eighteenth birthday came and went and still there was no news. Her nineteenth. Her twentieth. Her thirtieth. Her fortieth.

People at the adoption support group Jacqui joined online said that adoptees often decided to search for their birth parents after becoming parents themselves. Surely if Daisy was going to become a mother, she would have done so by now. Maybe she hated Dave and Jacqui for giving her away. Maybe she didn’t even know she was adopted. Maybe, Dave dared to suggest one particularly sad year, maybe she was dead.

‘She’s not dead,’ said Jacqui. ‘I can feel she’s out there.’

For years Jacqui had listened to the wisdom espoused, even by Bill, that there was no point telling the girls about the existence of someone they might never meet, but as she approached her own sixtieth birthday, she wanted to unburden herself. She wanted her girls to know the full story. She wanted them to know why she was occasionally a bit too interested in their lives. Jacqui was tired of keeping the biggest sadness of her life hidden. People talked about miscarriages and stillbirths all the time these days. Jacqui wanted to talk about Daisy. Out loud.

‘Oh, Mum,’ said Chelsea. ‘Oh, Dad.’ She put her arms round both their shoulders.

‘That’s why you two are so precious to us,’ said Dave.

‘I always wanted to have another sister,’ said Chelsea.

‘Yeah,’ said Ronnie, ‘but I bet you were thinking “instead of” rather than “as well” as me.’

‘That’s not true,’ Chelsea insisted.

Jacqui held her arms out and Ronnie stepped into them. Parents and sisters squeezed together in a group hug.

‘I wonder what she’d make of us?’ Chelsea mused. ‘Daisy. I wonder if she thinks about us much.’

‘We’re not allowed to look for her,’ Dave reminded his younger daughters. ‘It has to come from her.’

‘We might never get to meet her,’ Jacqui echoed sadly.

‘Oh no, Mum,’ said Ronnie. ‘I’ve got this really weird feeling we will.’

Chapter Forty-Eight

Sophie

The three women stayed in Jacqui and Dave’s bedroom for another hour, going over Jacqui’s astonishing news. Dave excused himself to the bar. It was all a bit too much for him. The idea of Jacqui all alone in the mother-and-baby home made Chelsea cry for her. Ronnie teared up when Jacqui told her that baby Daisy had looked just like newborn Sophie.

‘I guess that gives us some idea of what kind of nightmare Daisy might have been as a teen,’ Ronnie observed in an attempt to lighten the moment.

There was much to talk about with regard to Daisy, but right then, the three Benson women had found a kind of peace. So much so that Ronnie felt able at last to share her other worries.

‘I think Mark is having an affair,’ she blurted out.

Chelsea and Jacqui looked at each other in confusion.

‘What makes you think that, love?’ Jacqui asked her.

‘I found a text message on his phone from Cathy next door. She said she was waiting for him to tell me something. Tell me what? It’s got to be that he’s leaving me, right?’

‘No,’ said Chelsea. She’d met Cathy. She was a nice enough woman, but she had the voice and biceps of a long-distance lorry driver. ‘Never,’ she said. ‘Not Cathy next door.’

‘He’s seeing her. I know he is. Every time he gets a text, he practically throws himself at his phone before I can get to it. He never used to get text messages. Now he’s getting twenty a day and they’re all from her. I’m going to tell him I know.’

‘Oh, sweetheart,’ said Jacqui, ‘don’t you think you’re jumping to conclusions?’

‘Well, tonight I’ll know for certain. I’m sorry, Mum. I didn’t want to spoil your birthday holiday, but I’m going to ask him straight out, after dinner.’

‘Ronnie, love,’ said Jacqui, ‘I really think you’ve got the wrong end of the stick here.’

‘Well, tonight, I’ll find out for sure, won’t I?’

Ronnie wouldn’t get the chance.

‘Where’s Sophie?’ Mark asked Ronnie when the family reconvened for dinner in the Jolly Pirate. ‘What time did you tell her to be back here?’

‘Half past six,’ she said.

‘It’s ten to seven.’

‘She’ll be here in a minute. She’s on holiday, Mark. You’re the one who’s always saying I should give her a break.’

At half past seven, though, when the rest of her family took up their usual table in the restaurant, Sophie was still nowhere to be seen. Ronnie texted her four times and received nothing in reply. Everyone ordered their food. Eight o’clock came and went.

‘Where the hell is she?’ asked Mark, losing his cool at last. ‘She knows she’s supposed to be here.’ The words were angry, but another emotion was written all over his face: anxiety. Sophie was his little girl. No matter that he had been talking about giving her more independence. No matter that she was fifteen and a half years old and as tall as her mother. She would always be his baby.