CHAPTER 7

i

Kelly

‘Miss Sheldon? Kelly Sheldon?’

The voice on her mobile was masculine, pushy, smug, but she said, ‘Yip, that’s me.’

‘Great! This is Jim Matthews, Lyford Herald. How are you?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘I see you put an ad in our paper last week. Looking for your fellow babies?’

‘Yes…’

‘Great! Our girl Emma told us all about it – eventually. Silly girl!’ He chuckled. A clerk keeping a story to herself? Whatever next. ‘Didn’t want to miss you. Just to get this right, you’ve got evidence that babies were mixed up, right?’

‘Yes.’ Kelly didn’t like him.

‘Great! And your mum’s ill. Human interest story and a hospital foul-up. We want to do a follow-up, big spread, get your story in full, front page maybe.’

‘I see.’

‘So, Kel, let’s fix up for a proper interview, a few pictures, yes?’

She hesitated. A couple of days earlier, this would have been fantastic news. But her universe had slipped to one side since then. Everything was wonderful, aggravating, unnerving, but most of all, confusing. She’d accepted that finding her phantom sister was impossible, a daft idea from the start, and with nothing else to keep her in Lyford, she’d been planning to head home this morning.

But an article. A big article with a full explanation, that everyone would read; that might make the impossible slightly more probable? It was worth a try. One last go.

It would mean an interview with this slimeball. But hell… ‘Okay,’ she said.

‘Great!’

‘With Emma.’

‘Er, sorry, what? Emma?’

‘Emma, the lady I spoke to when I placed the ad.’ Kelly smiled at the phone. ‘She can interview me. I’ll tell her all about it.’

So she’d have to stay another day.

Ben had gone back to his apartment near Heathrow and his job in the city. Reluctantly, furiously, but he’d had to go. She had his mobile number, his home number, his work number, his email address, and he’d already phoned her once this morning and sent a dozen texts, but she felt amputated without him near.

If she couldn’t be with him, she certainly didn’t want to be here, in dreary soulless Lyford, nursing this weird fierce emotion.

It wasn’t just sex. Their one night together hadn’t been an explosion of rampant passion. Almost the opposite; it had been tentative, exploratory, nervous, as if it had been the first time for both of them. Two babes in the wood. But it had been matchless. Why?

Because she was in love, and love, it seemed, was strangely like grief. Numbing. She would do her duty for her mother; give her story to the Lyford Herald and hope the publicity would help trace Roz’s birth daughter. But after that, Kelly had had enough. If she couldn’t be with Ben, she just wanted to go home.

The Sat Nav ordered Kelly off the M3. Fortunately. She knew where she was going, but she was finding it difficult to concentrate on the road. It was just as well it was there. Probably take her the wrong way up a one-way street or off a cliff or leave her marooned in a service station in Lincolnshire, but she would take the risk. Better than trying to picture a map in her head when the only image she could conjure up was Ben.

It didn’t hurt anyone, did it, this obsession? And it didn’t really alter anything between her and Roz. Roz was still her mum, would always be her mum, they would still do anything for each other. Kelly would still do everything realistically possible to find the girl with those all-significant genes. Her mobile number and her home address were on record with the Herald, and she had given her story to a desperately nervous probationary Emma, under the guard of the cocky Jim Matthews, nice and plain, all the facts as she knew them, dates and details, without embellishment despite Jim’s fishing. So there it was. Forget it until the paper came out in a couple of days. If there were no useful response, she’d think about a new approach. But just for now, she could concentrate on Ben.

What was he doing? She knew what he was doing; he had told her half an hour ago. He was in a meeting. What was he saying? How was he looking? Was he concentrating on his presentation or thinking about her?

Stop! A car slowed in front of her and she was nearly up its exhaust pipe before she noticed. Leave it. Put Ben on hold, until she was at the Padstows, with her mother, telling Roz all about him.

She turned into their lane at last, crunched to a halt on the gravel outside the house. Roger strolled over to greet her as she opened the door.

‘Hi, Roger.’

‘Hello, Kelly. You’re looking extraordinarily bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.’

‘I’m in love.’

‘Ah. That would explain it.’

‘She’s been good,’ said Roger. They were standing, after dinner, on the banks of the river. Slow drifting water, paling in the evening light. ‘A bit of a crisis the second day, when you’d gone, but other than that, just fine. Eating well, getting plenty of exercise, keeping her spirits up. I think she’ll come through it, don’t you?’

‘She had you taking care of her.’

‘And you’ll do just as good a job, I’ve no doubt of that, as always.’

‘I hope so.’ It had been her mission since she was ten, taking care of her mother. Of course a grown woman, not yet forty, should be able to take care of herself, but most grown women were not like Roz. Few had Roz’s ability to block out problems. Left to manage alone, could Roz be trusted to pay the rent, remember her appointments, take her pills? Or would she think that everything could be solved by an hour of yoga and meditation?

For the first time it crossed Kelly’s mind that being a caring daughter might be incompatible with being a lover. She had a foot in two worlds, and suddenly her balance was precarious.

‘Could be a bit of a hindrance with the great love affair?’ suggested Roger.

‘Oh, don’t say that!’

He laughed and put an arm round her. ‘I do understand. It’s never easy. I can see it from both viewpoints. Your mother needs you and you need your life.’

‘Yes but…’ Kelly took a deep breath, furious with the confusion fate had thrown at her. ‘They can go together, can’t they?’

‘Why not?’ he agreed.

‘He has a mother too; he has to sort things out with her.’

‘A caring sort.’

‘Yes. Trying to be.’

Roger hugged her, reassuringly. ‘It will work out all right, don’t worry. You deserve it, you and Roz. It’s an order. Neither of you are to be unhappy.’

‘Yes, Boss.’

‘You’re our mission, you know that. Our daughters almost. We have a vested interest in seeing you both come good.’

She nearly said, ‘Daughter and granddaughter, you mean.’ Then she realised how right he was. It wasn’t a mother and daughter that Roger and Mandy and the others had offered a refuge to, twenty-two years ago, but two children, equally vulnerable, equally in need.

She had a memory, so distant it was almost formless, of the warm oil-lamp glow in the half-ruined farmhouse, of being in a nest of cushions between Roz and Mandy, as they shared a book, Mandy’s finger following the words as she read aloud, hieroglyphs that Kelly could not yet understand. Roz’s head bent over to follow the finger just as Kelly’s was, her hair tickling Kelly’s cheek. Roz learning to read.

While Kelly had grown from baby to toddler to happy curious child under their guidance, Roz had grown too, moulded by her surrogate parents so that, one day, mother and daughter could step out into the world together and survive.

What would have happened if Roger and Mandy had not been there for them? ‘We owe you,’ she said. ‘Big time. Really. I do know it.’

Roger chuckled. ‘As long as you’re both happy, that’s all that counts. Now, tell me about this Ben. You could talk about nothing else at dinner.’

‘So he’s going to come this weekend and you’ll love him, I know you will.’

‘Of course I will, if you do,’ said Roz.

‘He’s twenty-five and he comes from Coventry but he works in London—’

‘Yes.’ Roz laid a hand on Kelly’s arm to redirect her attention to the road. ‘You told me.’ At least thirty times. She wasn’t puzzled by her daughter meeting a man from Coventry who worked in London. All sorts turned up in Pembrokeshire in summer.

‘I should have taken a photo. Why didn’t I?’ Kelly wasn’t one for photographs. She looked with her own eyes, at the here and now.

‘I don’t need a photo,’ said Roz. ‘He’s—’ She laid a hand on top of her head. ‘About this tall. Brownish hair, hazelish eyes, quirky smile—’

‘All right.’ Kelly laughed. ‘But that doesn’t do him justice, you know. He’s altogether lovely, and I can’t stop thinking about him and I think I’m going to die without him.’ She paused for breath.

Roz gazed at Kelly and smiled. Could she really be feeling such excitement and intensity? Roz tried to equate it with what she had felt, for husband and lovers. There had been something overwhelming when she had been young, but had it really been love? Need. That was all. Clinging to any arm that offered to hold her up. She’d fulfilled some sort of fantasy by marrying Luke Sheldon, but that wasn’t the same, nothing like the love Kelly had for this Ben. She had wanted someone, anyone, and when Luke had shown such a clear, flattering liking for her, she had stuck to him like a limpet. Until the tide of his drunken violence had touched Kelly, and washed them both off the rock. The occasional lovers that had followed had been friendships, brief touches in moments of loneliness. Her need had gone, quenched by the only love that really mattered to her, love for her child. Mutual dependence that would last forever.

Why hadn’t she known that one day love might steal her daughter away? ‘I’m looking forward to meeting him.’

Kelly pictured it with an inner glow. Her mother and Ben together in Carregwen. Ben walking with Kelly on the hills, feeding the sheep with her, retreating to her beautifully eccentric bedroom with her.

Ben, with his smart suit and his perfectly cut hair. Ben with his well-paid graduate job, and his gleaming new car and his place near Heathrow. Kelly felt a twinge of panic. He was far away and the gulf between them was so very vast. Their worlds were so alien, so incompatible. How could it possibly work?

It would be enough to see him again. Just bring the threads together and hope they would weave themselves into something manageable.

A junction ahead.

‘Where are we?’ she asked. No Sat Nav now. They were back in the Astra, so smooth and soft-spoken that it no longer felt like their car, but the garage had not fitted Sat Nav and Kelly was really going to have to concentrate. Get her mother home, that was the first step. Then check on the animals, get in some groceries, and only then think about Ben.

After she had thanked Joe for his help.

Ah. She had forgotten about Joe.

‘No, it’s been great,’ Joe assured her. ‘Everything’s fine, like, you know. Cool. Except I’ve been missing you.’

Kelly hugged him. That was all right, she owed him that. And he’d understand. Or at least he wouldn’t be too badly hurt. They were friends, never really more than that. Not lovers in any meaningful sense, she could see now she knew what love really was. He’d move on, no trouble. But maybe she’d explain tomorrow. She didn’t want to be dishonest about it, but it wasn’t really fair to leave him looking after her farm for her for more than a week, then come home and tell him it was all over between them.

‘Are you coming up the Mill tonight, then?’ he asked.

‘Not tonight. I need to sort Mum out. But tomorrow. I’ll come round to your place tomorrow.’

‘Great! Black Amber on in Swansea, this weekend. I got tickets when you said you were coming home.’

‘That sounds – great. I’ll see you tomorrow, and we’ll talk.’ She kissed him on the cheek. Couldn’t he tell? No, not Joe. She watched him mount his motorbike and rumble away down the rutted track. Then she went inside to clear up his beer bottles. Clearing up a stage of her life that was gone for good.

ii

Vicky

Gillian looked at the lime green mini, tucked up against the wall of the house. Vicky had only driven it a couple of times. Preferred to walk or cycle. Never mind. Exercise was good for her. Gillian, washing the windows, gave the windscreen a quick wipe over. Might as well keep it sparkling for the girl.

She tipped the dirty water down the drain, and went back in, wiping her hands on her apron as she took it off. How was Vicky? She wished she knew. Gillian was living on broken glass. Vicky was a whirlwind inside, driven by some inner obsession, but burning herself up in her determination not to show it. She had always been like that.

Hadn’t she?

Gillian pictured Vicky walking to Junior School, her hand in her mother’s. Yes, she had been quiet, no running and shouting, no naughtiness, but she had not seemed unhappy back then. Not defensive, determined to keep Gillian out.

Adolescence made such a misery of lives. Was that it? The angry self-assertive teenage years turning a quiet happy child into a sullen unhappy woman? Unhappiness made worse by Gillian’s stupid silence about the adoption, but surely not caused by it? Exacerbated by Joan, of course. That went without saying. Gillian could remember her own teen years, the endless fights and tussles. Joan would make anyone sulk and storm.

Maybe every family went through this. Every mother left yearning for the time when her child had been young and dependent and cocooned in her nest. Gillian made herself a cup of tea and sat down, pulling the old photograph albums out. Vicky as a baby, gurgling contentedly in Gillian’s arms, rolling on a rug in the garden. Vicky’s school photographs, the little shy smile gradually becoming more confident, the soft round baby features altering year by year into the future woman. Vicky smiling broadly at the camera, looking pleased, almost cocky. In the back garden. Cosmos and scarlet runner beans. Gillian could remember that shot. It had been the summer after her GCSE exams. She had just had the results, she’d done so well, everyone had been so proud. Only Joan had scoffed, but Joan would.

Vicky on her seventeenth birthday, surrounded by cards and holding up the car keys triumphantly. The more controlled smile of a teenager, who didn’t want to be so uncool as to whoop like a baby, but still a smile, still genuine. And then…

Gillian flicked through pages, first with a pang, then with alarm. So few pictures of Vicky, as if she were determined not to be photographed. And when she was caught, she was looking away, or head down, or her long hair shaken to conceal her face. No more smiles, happy or haughty. Just blank eyes.

What had happened? Gillian was holding in her hands evidence that all her daughter’s happiness had vanished in a puff of smoke. It was there, on the page for anyone to see, so obvious, yet she had lived with Vicky every day and she’d noticed nothing. She’d been irritated by the increasing antagonism and isolation, yes, but she’d never noticed that it had all begun then. Just like that.

What was it she had missed? God, how terrible a mother had she been? So desperate to adopt and an utter failure. Frogmarching a child into a career far beyond the dreams of anyone else on the Marley estate – was that really successful motherhood?

A rattle and thud at the door. The paperboy. Automatically, she went to the door, picked up the Lyford Herald and unfolded it without reading a word. She could only think about Vicky and her own failure.

Back to the photographs. She went through them again. It was so screamingly obvious. What had happened? Vicky had been at Sixth Form, taking A levels. She had worked hard, aiming for medical college – and that was all her life had been. Up, to school, home, upstairs to study. At weekends, breakfast, upstairs to study, down for dinner, back to her room.

‘So responsible, so dedicated,’ Gillian had said. But it hadn’t been dedication, had it? Vicky had been turning herself into a recluse, and Gillian had stood by and let it happen.

Was it the illness? After she’d discovered that she had a condition she could never cure? It would be understandable. But no. It hadn’t been diagnosed until Vicky had started university. And she had taken it well. She had almost seemed to welcome having something that she could take charge of and control. So not the diabetes then.

A boy? It must have been. Puppy love and then cruel disappointment. Had that sad little claim to sexual experience been Vicky falling for some spotty youth, being spurned, breaking her heart? Why couldn’t she have talked to her mother? Gillian could have helped. She could remember what teenage infatuation felt like. All joy one moment and the end of the world the next.

Gillian sighed and closed the albums, putting them back on the shelf. Tidied the room, plumped up the cushions. Picked up the Lyford Herald again. Began to read.

Missing Daughter Quest: Hospital Rapped.

The typical Herald tabloid style. She looked at it with just curiosity at first, until the details began to blare at Gillian. Kelly Sheldon…her mother Rosalind who suffers from a form of diabetes known as MODY, Maturity Onset Diabetes of the Young…trying to find her mother’s lost baby…March 1990… There was someting about a mix-up at the hospital, but that must just be a cover story. Her heart was thumping so loudly, she didn’t hear the footsteps on the stairs at first. She rolled the paper up, thrusting it behind a cushion on the sofa.

‘Vicky!’ she said, flustered. ‘Finished up there? I’ll make some tea.’

‘You okay?’ Polite, guarded.

Was she concerned for Gillian? It was Vicky who mattered, not Gillian, and not this Kelly Sheldon person. ‘I’m all right. But how about you?’

‘Me? I’m okay. Why?’

‘If you had a problem, you could talk to me, couldn’t you?’

‘What?’ Vicky’s face twisted. ‘Talk?’

‘If anything happened, if you were upset—’

‘We don’t talk. Like you not telling me I was adopted for twenty-two years.’

It was never-ending. Every day. Like some scab she had to pick.

‘Anyway.’ Vicky opened the bureau drawer, searching for an envelope. ‘I’ve got a letter to post.’

‘No, don’t take it yet. It can wait a moment. Sit down. I want to us to talk now.’ That touch of firmness that might have made her a good teacher. The mother daughter ties were still there. The girl sighed and sat down, folding her arms.

Gillian pulled out one of the old albums. Not to open, just as a prop. She perched on the sofa and stroked the closed book. ‘I’ve been looking at our old family photographs.’

‘Family.’

Gillian ignored the jibe. ‘Looking at pictures of my little girl. You were a happy child, Vicky…’

A bitter smile.

Gillian went on. ‘I know we had upsets and sulks and tears, sometimes with good reason.’ Mostly the days when Joan was around. ‘But you were happy. You knew how to smile.’

No smile now, just a closed book.

‘And then you weren’t happy. You were doing your A levels and you stopped being happy.’

‘You wanted me to work, didn’t you? You made that clear often enough.’

‘I nagged you, I know. I wanted you to do well and I pushed too hard. I’m sorry. But that doesn’t explain it.’ She drew breath. ‘Was it a boy, maybe?’

Vicky’s lip curled.

‘Did you fall for someone and he didn’t want you? Was that it? And you never told me?’

‘For Christ’s sake, no, I didn’t fall for anyone.’

‘You can tell me, Vicky. You could have told me then. I know it would have been – not easy, bringing a friend here, with Gran—’

Vicky laughed. A harsh burst of outrage. ‘Joan!’

‘I know she’d have said something – Was that it? Did she say something cruel? Did she make you feel no one would want you?’

‘Listen, will you? It isn’t a question of whether some silly boy or some slimy man wants me, it’s whether I want them, all right? I’ve had enough of that, and that bitch Joan can play her games with someone else!’

Gillian turned cold inside. Joan. ‘Vicky, what games did Joan play? What did she do that made you so miserable?’

‘I am not miserable!’

‘You’re not happy.’

‘Happy? How do you want me to show I’m happy? You’d feel better if I dropped my studies and went out whoring each night, is that it? That’s what happiness is?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Oh really? Because I thought that was exactly what everyone wanted. Well, don’t worry, I’ve tried it. Joan saw to that. And…’ She stopped.

‘What? For God’s sake, Vicky, what are you talking about?’

‘You really don’t know, do you?’

‘No!’ Appalled, Gillian braced herself for what was coming.

Vicky, trying to be disdainful, was going to talk, it seemed she couldn’t help herself anymore.

‘That time, just after my seventeenth birthday, when Granny Wendle was ill?’

‘Yes, I remember. Terry and I went…’ She and Terry had gone to see his mother who was dying in Romford. Stayed over a couple of days until she’d passed away. They hadn’t taken Vicky. She had her studies and she was old enough now. It wasn’t like leaving a baby with Joan. A seventeen-year-old girl would be safe enough, surely?

How could she have been so stupid?

‘What happened?’

‘What do you think? Joan thought it was time I had some fun and she’d better arrange it. She called Dana round and Gemma and Jade.’

Joan’s willing lieutenants, Sandra’s youngest daughter Dana, and her granddaughters by Sharon. Hard bitten, hard biting girls, as unlike Vicky as it was possible to be.

‘She told them to take me out,’ Vicky continued. ‘Show me “a good time”. That’s what she kept calling it. Gemma and Jade made me put on all this stupid make-up and some of their clothes, and I could see Joan and Dana laughing in the mirror. Except that I couldn’t see much because they took my glasses away. I thought, “Okay, put up with it, go out for one night and maybe they’ll shut up and leave me alone.” So when they’d got me all tarted up, they took me out. Joan was on the doorstep, winking at them, saying, “You make sure she has a good time, eh. Poor kid doesn’t know nothing. You show her what it’s all about.”’

Gillian covered her face with her hands.

‘They took me to a pub, kept trying to get me to drink but I didn’t want to. I expect they put something in my Coke though. They were laughing as if they had, so I didn’t drink that either.’

Vicky had started her account in an almost conversational tone, treating the episode with contempt. But she couldn’t keep it up. The underlying hysteria was welling up, and she spoke now in staccato bursts, on the verge of hyperventilating. This was it, Gillian knew. It would all come out. Nothing could stop it now.

‘They produced this boy. They kept telling me he liked me. Pushing me at him. He was laughing, in on the joke with them, pulling faces at me. Making obscene gestures. It was disgusting. I ran. Locked myself in the toilet. Jade came to get me out and I said I was going home, so she said, “Yes, all right, we’ll all go home with you.” But he came too. Craig.’

‘Craig Adams?’ breathed Gillian. She knew him, him and his leering mates, the estate’s future pimps, if they weren’t already.

Vicky shook the question off. ‘When we got home, Joan pretended she couldn’t see anything was wrong. Said she could tell everyone was having a great time. I tried to go to my room, but they wouldn’t let me in. Kept saying how mean I was. To poor Craig. They pushed me into Joan’s room with him and held the door shut. Joan watched telly. They locked me in with him so he could show me what was what.’

Gillian could feel her knees buckling. That drumming in her ears again. She was dreaming this. She must be dreaming. ‘He raped you.’

‘Oh no. We were having a good time.’

‘He raped you!’

‘No!’ Vicky leapt to her feet. ‘No! He didn’t have a gun or a knife. I decided to go along with it. It wasn’t rape.’

‘It was! It was rape.’

‘No, I am not a rape victim!’ Vicky pressed her hands to her chest, flinching from the word.

‘And Joan knew?’

‘Of course she knew. It was her little birthday treat. Make a woman of me.’ Tears now, burning on Vicky’s cheeks. Gillian could see them through the blur of her own.

‘Oh God, oh God.’ She couldn’t stop shaking. She wanted to vomit. ‘You didn’t tell me.’ She reached out, but Vicky turned her back.

The girl had been raped and hadn’t said a word and Gillian had noticed nothing. She thought back, trying to recall. Her mother-in-law’s funeral. Vicky had been silent, moody, but Gillian had been preoccupied, stressed with the arrangements and upset about the death of old Nora. She had put Vicky’s sullenness down to teenage stroppiness and maybe the trauma of the first funeral she’d attended. But it hadn’t been that at all. It had been the worst thing a mother could contemplate, barring the actual death of a child, and Gillian had done nothing. She had snapped at the girl.

And now, how was she to make up for it? She had wanted to put things right, but not this. Nothing could mend this.

She swallowed hard, took a deep shuddering breath and crossed to her daughter. ‘Vicky. I didn’t know, I didn’t know.’ Again she put her arms out to hug her.

‘No!’ Vicky fought her off, shoving hard. ‘Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me.’ She was rigid, her hands claws.

‘Oh Vicky, I’m so sorry. Forgive me, I should have realised, but I was just so selfish! Oh God, and I was so determined – I was going to be such a perfect mother, give you such a perfect life and all I did was ruin things for you. When I read about you being found, that day, it was like a wonderful flower bursting open in front of me and all I’ve done was trample it down.’

‘Must be me, mustn’t it,’ snarled Vicky. ‘Mothers take one look at me and want to kill me.’

‘What?’

‘The first one did! My birth mother. At least she didn’t drag it out for years.’

‘Oh Vicky, no one thought she wanted you dead. She left you, so carefully, where you would be found.’

‘No. No that’s not right. What do you mean, no one thought? You… She… No, she left me for dead!’

‘I promise you, she didn’t. I still have the cuttings, when you were found, when I first thought – hoped… She’d wrapped you up, and when I read it, I thought, I’ll wrap you up cosily, too, I’ll make everything lovely for you, just as she must have wanted to, but all the time—’

‘No! There was nothing about me being found. It was just about her, that woman, trying to kill me.’

‘Kill you? No, no, you’ve got it wrong, Vicky. I’ll show you. I’ve got it, 20th March, 1990. I thought it was the beginning of a whole new world.’

‘20th? No. No. I’ve seen her! I’ve read the story. It was the 23rd!’

Vicky backed away. Gillian couldn’t get her head round what her daughter was saying. Vicky had been abused, horribly, and telling the truth seemed to have unleashed total chaos in her mind.

‘I saw the woman,’ Vicky insisted, in a whisper. ‘She claimed her baby was snatched, but no one believed her, because she made it up. I believed her story. I found her. Here, in Salley Meadows. I told her I was her daughter, and you know what? She slammed the door in my face. She thought I was lying, because she knew I should be dead. She gave birth to me, she tried to kill me and now she won’t speak to me.’

Gillian steadied herself on the back of the sofa, trying to pin down one small fact in this whirlwind. ‘I think your birth mother is in Wales.’

‘What!’

Gillian groped among the sofa cushions and produced the rolled-up newspaper.

‘I think this must be about her.’ Shaking, she held it out.

Vicky took it as if it would burn, unrolled it and stared at the front page.

Bright, attractive Kelly Sheldon, 22, is in Lyford on a mission…

‘I think it must be her,’ said Gillian, faintly. She couldn’t stand it any longer. She groped her way to the kitchen sink and threw up. Shivering, she ran the cold tap, soaked her face. She had no idea how to handle this. She ought to know what to do, driven by maternal instinct, but she was no mother. She was a selfish cow who had wanted a child. This was no house to bring a child into. She’d known it, always, even back then. You don’t bring a child within a mile of Joan. If she had had a true mother’s love for Vicky, she would have let another family take her.

She straightened, still shivering, and groped her way back to the living room.

No Vicky. The Herald lay on the floor, its first page ripped off. The front door was standing open.

Of course Vicky had to get out. They all did. Get out, away from here.

Gillian walked. The air was warm, cloying, not fresh. Traffic fumes hung in it. She couldn’t breathe. Past the electricity substation, surrounded by broken wire. A nasty place.

It had been a nasty place forty odd years ago when she had lost her virginity in the long grass behind it. Learnt what it was all about, according to Joan. Arranged by Joan. Gillian’s disgust and misery, and Joan’s evil cackle. ‘Had a good time, girl? Always knew there was a slut in you.’

Why hadn’t she seen it as rape back then? Why had she just endured, because it was one of those things? If she’d seen it straight, seen her mother for what she was, she’d never have left Vicky to suffer the same.

She stumbled on. St Mark’s church. She hadn’t realised she was coming here. Hadn’t been in the place for fifteen years. She’d been regular to start with, with her new baby, guiltily giving thanks, but in the end, Philip Coley’s soul-battering enthusiasm had been too much for her. And then he had gone and the congregation had withered, and there was no more sense of guilt to nag her.

By luck the door was open; she could hear voices in the vestry, some meeting going on. Usually, these days, the place was kept locked. There were no treasures to steal, but anything that wasn’t fastened down would be ripped up or sprayed.

She walked up the central aisle. Plastic chairs and the smell not of sanctity but of polish and disinfectant. She stopped before the crucifix with its pink writhing Christ. A crown of iron thorns. Vivid glistening painted blood. Let the thorns bite deeper, she thought, staring up at the dead image. Let them hurt you like you hurt me. Why did you let it happen to my little girl? I hate you.

But there was nothing here to hate. Sitting down on one of the plastic seats and staring at the image, she knew; there was no God. There was only hell.

iii

Kelly

‘Oh,’ said Joe. Hangdog. It occurred to Kelly that Joe always looked slightly hangdog, so there wasn’t really much change. A shift from aimless contentment to bewilderment. ‘So, that means, we’re not, like, together any more.’

‘But we’re still friends. Just not – you know.’

‘Yes. Sure.’ Joe stood up. ‘I’m going out. Need to get my head round this.’

He sidled out of the door, shoulders hunched. What should she do? Give him space to come to terms with it, or follow him? Either way, she could hardly stay in his digs while he mooched off. She grabbed her bag and hurried after him.

He hadn’t got far. He was standing staring at his bike, hoping it might give him an explanation.

Kelly swore inside. She hadn’t meant to hurt Joe. She had never meant to hurt anyone in her life, but perhaps that had been more the easy-going goodwill of laziness than innate virtue. She wasn’t feeling virtuous now. She was feeling cruel and heartless, and that wasn’t fair because she hadn’t planned this. It had happened, this tsunami. Why did there have to be this flip side to finding her soulmate?

‘Joe, I’m sorry. It just happened. It’s not like anything I’ve ever felt before.’

‘Not for me, you mean.’

‘Not for anyone. It’s not about liking someone, or fancying them. It’s something I didn’t even know existed.’

He looked at her, a hint of puzzled curiosity in his misery. If she had discovered something entirely new, perhaps it was some weird exotic thing, like Lassa fever, and she couldn’t help it.

‘I am so sorry, Joe. I really do like you, I want to be friends, especially after you’ve been so great with my mum being ill – looking after the animals and all that.’

He shrugged, perhaps feeling the self-satisfaction that she had hoped to inspire. He’d proved a true friend when she’d needed him. Never mind that for him it had actually been a rent-free holiday with minimal responsibilities and a chance to drain someone else’s larder. ‘Yeah, well, that’s okay.’

‘We still friends?’

‘Yeah.’ He sounded resigned. She couldn’t really expect him to sound enthusiastic. ‘You still want to come to see Black Amber?’

Damn. ‘I can’t, Joe. Ben’s coming…’

‘Oh. I’ve got the tickets.’

‘What about Maddy?’ Inspired thought. ‘She was really keen on them. I bet she’d love to go. Ask her; she’ll buy a ticket off you.’

‘Maddy? You think? Yeah, maybe.’

He could offer to sell Maddy a ticket or, if he had any gumption whatsoever, he could just invite her. She was unattached at the moment, and even if she were more interested in Black Amber than in Joe, it would salve his dignity a little. It was up to him; Kelly wasn’t going to pull any more strings.

‘Yeah, maybe, I’ll go see her.’

She watched him get on his bike, stamp hard and turn out onto the road.

It had been painful, but it could have been worse. The decks were clear now for Ben to arrive on Friday night. She’d topped up her mother’s prescription and done the shopping. Bought a steak. She might convince him in time that the vegetarian option could be just as good, but baby steps, no need to rush it.

She’d just got to wait out the next twenty-four hours. She turned the Astra for home, feeling that warmth growing as she bounced slowly along the track to the cottage. Just twenty-four hours between her and ecstasy. The office and the pub weren’t expecting her back at work until next week. Nothing else to worry about.

Except that they had visitors.

She didn’t recognise the car. A green mini, parked by the wheelbarrow near the front door. Jehovah’s Witnesses? They usually stopped at the top of the lane and walked down, in their misplaced Sunday best.

She carried the corn to the bin in the shed, gathered up the bags of shopping, slipped into the house, expecting to hear the anodyne murmur of religious platitudes.

She heard her mother’s voice, high with panic.

‘But I don’t understand. It can’t be.’

‘It’s here, in black and white,’ accused another voice, as Kelly, dropping the shopping without a thought, burst into the kitchen.

A girl, her own age maybe, short lank hair, angular face, heavy glasses, slamming a sheet of newspaper down on the pine table at a terrified Roz.

‘Who the hell are you?’ demanded Kelly, grabbing the girl’s wrist.

She turned, wrenching herself free.

‘Who are you?’ repeated Kelly.

‘My name is Victoria Wendle.’ The girl straightened her cuffs. ‘Allegedly.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Doing what you wanted, aren’t I? Come to visit my mummy.’

‘What?’ Kelly looked across at Roz, who was standing, hand to her throat, scarcely able to breath. ‘It’s all right, Mum.’ She looked down, at the torn sheet of newspaper unfurling on the table. The front page of the Lyford Herald.

It wasn’t supposed to be here. She hadn’t calculated on anyone showing a copy to Roz. This was Kelly’s private scheme.

‘You’re Kelly Sheldon, I suppose?’

‘Yes, but…’ She had asked for contact from the missing girl. An exchange of notes, testing the waters, before they decided where to go next. Nothing sprung on them like this. This was that girl? No phone call, no questions, she’d just driven straight here, on the basis of one newspaper story? She must be a crank. ‘You think you’re the baby I was swapped with?’

‘Oh yes, “swapped” all right.’ Vicky jerked her head in Roz’s direction. ‘I wasn’t quite what she wanted so she swapped me.’

‘I don’t know what story the stupid paper has printed,’ said Kelly, ‘but you’ve got it all wrong. My mother had nothing to do with it. There was a mix-up at the hospital.’

‘Oh yes!’ A harsh laugh. ‘Labels swapped. Is that really what she told you?’ Vicky flung her accusation straight at Roz. ‘Is that what you said?’

Roz raised her hand to her mouth, biting her finger. ‘I don’t know. I heard the nurses – I don’t know. I don’t remember.’

‘It’s all right, Mum.’ Kelly was beside her, guiding her to a chair, but Roz refused to sit down.

‘Don’t get upset. She has no right to come in here, attacking you like this.’

‘No?’ asked Vicky. ‘No right to ask the woman who gave birth to me why she dumped me in a cardboard box and exchanged me for a better model?’

‘I don’t know where you got this idea from—’

‘From the Lyford Herald!’ Vicky picked up the sheet of the Herald and slammed it down again.

What on earth had it said? Kelly picked it up, her fingers trembling with anger.

Kelly, a marine engineering graduate of Pembroke University…

‘There isn’t a Pembroke university. And I never said I had a degree.’ It wasn’t the issue, she knew, but it told her exactly how it was going to be. She read on. Had her mother seen this? ‘I didn’t say half this.’

Roz gazed in bewilderment at Kelly. ‘I don’t understand. You said?’

Kelly put her arms round her and squeezed. ‘I’m sorry. But you were ill and I thought if I couldn’t give you one of my kidneys there might be someone out there who could, so I went to Lyford—’

‘Lyford?’

‘Where I was born?’

Across the table, alone, Vicky was looking at them with loathing, her hands clenching and unclenching.

Kelly was appalled. Why was the girl so angry? Kelly hadn’t pictured their meeting like this. She had imagined shock, maybe, even denial, but not this fierce fury.

Well, never mind Victoria Wendle. An irrational crank. It was Roz that mattered now, and Kelly could feel the life draining out of her mother.

‘Why did you go to Lyford?’ Roz whispered.

‘I thought I could find the other baby. I put an advert in the Herald, and then they wanted to follow it up so I gave them an interview. I didn’t stay to see what they printed. I wish I had. I didn’t say anything about you dying, having just a month to live. I never said anything like that. I just said you’d developed kidney problems, but they’ve made it into a stupid sob story.’

‘You just said kidney problems?’ demanded Vicky. ‘They invented the bit about Maturity Onset Diabetes of the Young?’

‘No, no, I explained that bit—’

‘Well then!’

‘Well what?’

‘That’s what I have. That’s what I have to deal with for the rest of my life. Inherited. Thank you, Mother. Diabetes and a cardboard box were all that you ever gave me.’

Roz was biting her lip, shaking with panic, eyes wide.

‘You have the same condition?’ Kelly tried to think. She had never thought of the probability of them sharing the illness. ‘So you wouldn’t be able to give a kidney anyway?’

‘Give a kidney? You seriously think I’d give up a kidney for her, when she threw me away? I’d rather give her arsenic!’

‘Look, stop it!’

Whatever was going on here, Kelly could sense the girl’s anger eating into Roz like acid.

‘I don’t know why you’re so mad, but it’s not Mum’s fault. She didn’t know she was giving you diabetes. She didn’t know she had it herself until a few months ago.’

‘But she knew enough to decide I wasn’t what she wanted.’

‘You’re talking nonsense.’ Kelly stared at the paper again, searching for some clue to this cardboard box stuff. There was nothing about that in the article. Crap about Roz being on the point of dying and Kelly’s desperate quest and the mix-up in the hospital. The rest was a diatribe against the Lyford and Stapledon Health Trust, hospital incompetence, careless disposal of hospital waste and stuff about a body wrongly labelled in the morgue. Nothing about a cardboard box.

‘Go on,’ said Vicky to Roz. Despite her iron self-control, Kelly could sense shivers running through her like the tremors of an earthquake. ‘Tell her the truth. Tell her how you decided I wasn’t good enough, so you dumped me in a shop door and chose another baby instead.’

Kelly expected Roz to be outraged by this, but Roz’s face wasn’t registering denial. Shock yes, but the shock of awakening, as if cold water had been flung in her face. She gasped.

‘I didn’t think that!’ Roz’s eyes flicked from Kelly to Vicky to Kelly, as if she couldn’t comprehend which was which. ‘No, it wasn’t like that!’

‘Mum?’ Kelly said. She too was looking from Roz to Vicky to Roz, chilled – two faces so entirely different and yet, in some appalling way, so much the same. Mother and daughter. The same jaw and cheekbones, the same hair colour. Kelly had never worried that there might be another girl entitled to her mother’s love. Was it the similarities that hurt now? Or the way Roz was focusing on the other girl, with tear-washed pleading eyes?

‘I loved you,’ said Roz. ‘You don’t understand. I was frightened. I was only 17. I thought Gary was going to kill you. I couldn’t protect you. I thought you’d be safer, happier, if I gave you up. I put you where I knew you’d be found.’

‘In a cardboard box.’

‘For warmth, yes. I thought you’d be safer without me. Only after I’d done it, I couldn’t bear it. I wanted you back so much, and there you were, and when I had you back, I knew I could never be without you again.’

Kelly stood frozen. She couldn’t understand what her mother was saying.

Vicky stood silent too, for a moment. The shaking was subsiding, the anger losing its needle-sharp intensity. ‘You didn’t have me back though, did you?’

‘I – yes. I did. I got you back.’

‘Not me.’ The girl pointed at Kelly. ‘It was her. Another baby. Say it. You took another woman’s baby.’

‘No. No! There was no other woman! There was just a baby. Just my Kelly.’ A door opened in Roz’s brain, a door that had been barred and bolted and padlocked for twenty-two years. A door opened and a terrible truth was creeping out. ‘I wanted you back so much.’

Kelly stared at her, feeling something inside herself shrink and shrink until it shrivelled away. ‘You took a baby? Is that what she’s saying? You just took me?’

Roz’s face was grey. ‘You were there. Waiting for me.’

‘Oh God. Oh no. What did you do?’

‘Nothing. You were there, so I picked you up and carried you home.’

Kelly swallowed hard. ‘You thought I was the same baby you had given up?’

‘Yes!’

They both looked at Roz, staring at her, challenging her to tell the truth.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know what I thought. It was all different then. Everything was frightening. I thought Gary would kill you. I thought they would take you away from me. I don’t know!’

It was true. Roz didn’t know. A voice within was telling her she could know if she chose. She could look at it straight and recall it all, cut through the muddle and desperation and see the cold cruel truth. But that would mean letting go of all she had. All her life she had been clinging to someone or something. For years she had clung to Kelly and if she looked straight at the truth now, that one beacon, her daughter, would be lost. Everything would be lost. ‘I don’t know!’

Kelly pulled away. She had no words. She wasn’t Roz’s daughter, not by birth, or by monumental clerical cock-up. She was someone else’s stolen child. This was so different from anything she had imagined, so awful that she couldn’t cope with it. She stared at the girl across the table.

Vicky said, ‘What was wrong with me? What was wrong with you? You loved your baby so much? You’re trying to tell me you were frightened for me? Did you ever, ever bother to think what might become of me? Where I might finish up? Did you?’

‘I’m sorry,’ whispered Roz.

‘Or perhaps it really didn’t matter what happened to me, just as long as you had something to cuddle. Why didn’t you just get yourself a doll? Or a pet? Yes, help yourself to someone else’s pet. Why not? Better than being stuck with me.’ Her bitterness beat around Roz.

Roz flinched.

‘Leave her alone.’ Kelly gripped the back of a chair to keep her balance. ‘She didn’t know what she was doing, all right? It was terrible, but she was upset, confused. And now she’s ill. She can’t cope with this now, with you accusing her. I’m sorry, but just go, will you?’ It probably wasn’t right, leaving this mess like this, but Kelly needed time to find the ground beneath her feet. ‘Please leave us alone.’

Vicky looked at her. ‘Yes, I might as well. I wanted to know who this woman was who threw me away and took another baby in my place. Now I know. She’s nothing,’ She turned and walked out.

The slam of the door. ‘Oh Kelly…’ Roz was in tears.

No. Now the girl was gone, it was Roz that Kelly wanted to shut out. ‘Don’t. I can’t believe this. I can’t believe you could just—’ She wanted to be sick.

She bolted for the door, flew across the yard as Vicky was getting into her car. ‘Stop!’

Vicky clicked her seat belt into place, inserted the key into the ignition.

‘Don’t!’ Kelly clung to the Mini’s door, holding it open. ‘I didn’t mean it. We can’t leave it. I have to know.’

Vicky looked at her. ‘Know what?’

‘Know what happened. Don’t you see? I thought I was Kelly, but I’m not. You’re Kelly. So who am I?’

Vicky switched the engine on. ‘I am not Kelly. I am Vicky. She left me to my fate. Right, I’m leaving her to hers. As for who you are, well, you can find that out for yourself, the same way I did. I told you, I found it all in the Lyford Herald. March 1990. Go and read it if you care that much. I’m not sorting out your life for you.’ She pulled the door shut.

Kelly stood staring after the Mini as it drove away, concentrating on the glimpses of lime green through the hedgerow, the fading engine, so that she wouldn’t have to think about that other thing.

Not think about it. Just like Roz. Was it a talent she had learned from the woman who had taken her? No. She did face up to things, and she would face up to this.

She marched back to the house.