JESS
From <maggie.hartwell@gmail.com>
Darling Jess,
I’ve read your last email several times now and tried to make sense of everything you’ve discovered. I can’t fathom why Daniel didn’t tell you he was married to Anna, and what that means. I know you feel very frustrated and confused, maybe angry with him too. Remember you’re allowed to be all those things, Jess. I know how you beat yourself up about everything, but this is such an extraordinary situation, so just let yourself be whatever you need to be. It’s perfectly understandable that you couldn’t just confront Daniel when you saw him there. Wait until things settle in your head a little, and then maybe email him again? I think he owes you answers now.
I saw your father at the show the other night. I don’t think it was his cup of tea, to be honest, but he was tactful, as always, and effusive about my sets and that’s the main thing! He’s doing okay, getting through things in his own way. I know he’ll be glad when you’re back – as will I. And don’t worry, I haven’t said a thing to him about what you’ve discovered – that’s for you to do, if you wish.
Hang on in there darling, you’re making such good progress. Call me anytime.
All my love,
Maggie xx
‘Where’s maman?’
‘She’s gone to work already. So has your dad.’
‘But I want to give her this.’ Léa holds out a letter and I take it, knowing as I attempt to read it that I haven’t absorbed fluent French by osmosis over the last few weeks, much to my disappointment.
‘What does it say?’
‘I will play on Saturday and people can come.’
I see the signature is Madame Jeanneret and I know that’s the lady who runs the tennis course, a lithe woman in her fifties with short blond hair and rather severe black-framed glasses.
‘Like a tournament? Wow! Can I come?’
‘Oui.’ Lea nods. ‘And maman and papa. I want you all to come.’
‘And Luca?’
She frowns for a second and then nods. ‘If he wants.’
‘Good. We’ll all be there, I’m sure. I’ll put this in the kitchen and make sure your parents read it when they’re home from work, okay?’
‘Okay.’ She nods. ‘I’m going to beat Céline.’
‘Is she your arch rival?’
‘What is that?’
‘The person you want to beat the most.’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I hate her.’
‘That’s a bit harsh.’ Poor Céline, whoever she is. Knowing Léa as I now do, I certainly wouldn’t want to face her over a net. ‘Now go get your swimming stuff ready. We’re meeting Jorge at the pool, remember?’
She skips off towards her bedroom and I walk to mine. I gather my towel and swimsuit into a beach bag and check my phone, relieved to see there’s no message from him cancelling on me. My stomach does a little hop at the thought of seeing him again, at having a day by the pool with some adult company.
Despite the low regard he’s entitled to hold me in after my behaviour so far, it seems he isn’t averse to spending some more time with me too, and the thought is a pleasant surprise. I just hope he doesn’t ask too many questions. Part of me wants to explain my obsession with the Chevalleys that night in the jazz club, and to tell him about my trip to Reichenbach, about seeing Daniel in the garden, a question in his eyes as he looked up and I turned and fled. I want to ask Jorge why I did that; I want him to solve this whole mess for me and stop the jitters that ripple through me when I think of Daniel potentially being my father, and of Julia possibly being the woman who’s living my life. But I don’t want to admit to the extent of my snooping in Julia’s things, of finding the letter from Anna Meier, because I don’t want to see dislike or pity or anger in his face. I want to see the smile he gave me as we sat around a table with his friends in the jazz club, the crinkles around his eyes as we laughed about Swiss washing rotas.
He’s not there when we arrive and I busy myself sorting the children out. I apply sunscreen to Luca as he tries to wriggle from my grasp, set out the towels on our chosen patch of grass and pile discarded clothes into a vaguely neat heap by my beach bag. I’m content to sit at the edge of the pool as Luca and Léa take it in turns to throw themselves in – Luca, curling himself up in a ball to create as much splash as possible; Léa holding her nose with one hand and jumping arrow-straight into the water. It’s warm and the cloudless sky is a delicious shade of blue. A slight breeze in the air keeps it from getting too hot. It should be sublimely relaxing, but my blood can’t settle. My mind’s on a treadmill.
Suddenly I feel hands on my back and my brain is purged of thoughts for a few, empty moments when all I can feel is the unpleasant, bristling sensation of water up my nose and in the back of my throat. It can only be two or three seconds until I emerge spluttering to the surface to see the kids laughing at me and a sheepish Jorge standing on the edge of the pool where I’d been sitting.
‘What the…’ A choke in my throat ends my sentence and it’s just as well. I cough and breathe deeply as my heart rate begins to slow again.
‘Sorry,’ Jorge says, but I see from the smile twitching at his mouth that he isn’t at all. ‘I couldn’t resist.’
I glare at him, wanting to both punch him for nearly drowning me and hug him for turning up. ‘Right,’ I say when I can speak again. I struggle to stop my mouth twisting into a smile. ‘Come on, kids!’ I lunge at the water and spray an arc of it onto his legs. He jumps back, but not quickly enough to avoid his shorts being soaked. He stands there laughing as Léa and Luca take my lead and soon he’s so drenched he may as well be in the pool.
‘Okay, you asked for it.’ He strips off his sodden T-shirt and it lands on the ground with a heavy thwack. He jumps in the water, sending a tidal wave over our heads, and then all four of us are having a water fight, flinging our hands through the pool so spray hits our faces and we can hardly see. Léa leaps on Jorge’s back to try and push him under, Luca’s tugging at his arm, I’m splashing his face and he’s gasping for air, begging us for mercy. And then I’m laughing, unable to stop, my stomach aching with the effort, and it feels so good, so familiar, like revisiting an old friend I haven’t seen in years and years. I need this. I’ve so needed this. Maybe Patrick was right: laughter is one of the most important things of all.
After five minutes I’m exhausted. I haul myself out of the pool and sit on the edge again, the sun prickling my skin as it dries.
‘You wound them up nicely, they’ll be knackered later,’ I say to Jorge when he joins me on the edge. He’s tanned and lean, and I’m aware of my own less-than-toned belly and the ugly tan lines from my first trip to the pool when I underestimated the strength of the Swiss sun.
‘You’re welcome.’ He grins.
‘No work today?’
He shakes his head. ‘Now the festival’s over I have a couple of weeks off. I’m staying here this week, then I’ll head into the mountains with a few friends next week.’
‘Hiking?’
He nods. ‘We’ll spend some time in the Valais, hike, camp, sleep under the stars.’
‘Sounds amazing.’
‘Maybe another time you can come. But not with these two.’ He nods to the pool.
‘I don’t know, I think they’d both be faster than me. When I went hiking with them and Michel a few weeks ago I was definitely the slowcoach.’
‘Slowcoach,’ he repeats it, savouring the word. ‘I like that.’
I forget he’s not a native English speaker, he’s so good at it. And French, obviously. And Spanish, naturally. But not Swiss German, I think, remembering my behaviour at the club.
‘I’m sorry about last week.’ I stare into the pool, avoiding his eyes. ‘I had a lot on my mind and I guess I wasn’t able to focus on much else.’
He looks at me and shrugs, smiles. ‘Forget it. Want to talk about it?’
‘Jorge, Jorge, regarde-moi!’ shouts Léa and she takes a breath, leans over, head down in the water, until she’s doing an ungainly handstand, legs akimbo.
‘Très bien. Encore une fois!’ he calls back when she emerges.
I think of him catching me snooping. Of the private letters I riffled through. I shake my head. ‘There’s nothing much to say.’ But I want to tell him, I need to tell someone. I look at him. I can be selective, I suppose. ‘Actually, I think I might have found my biological father.’
His eyebrows shoot up. ‘How?’
‘It’s a long story.’ I think of the letter, the elaborate script of A. Meier that led me to Thun and then Reichenbach. ‘This man… he’s the brother of someone who used to know Mum. I found someone here in Lausanne who once knew them both.’
‘So are you going to contact him?’
‘I already have, but I didn’t know then that he might be my father. And now I think that’s likely, I don’t know if I should contact him again. I don’t know if I want to actually meet him.’ For so long I’ve thought I needed to know who my biological parents are. But now I don’t know if I can stand in front of them, face to face, and talk to them. I don’t know if I can make them real. Because if Anna and Daniel are my real parents, what does that make Mum and Dad?
Jorge’s silent for a minute, and I don’t expect him to understand, so it’s a surprise when he says ‘Your parents will still be your parents, you know.’
I feel pressure behind my eyes and concentrate to keep the tears from forming. ‘Will they?’ I look at him. ‘What if I start something I can’t stop? I’m scared of changing my life, rewriting my history. Scared of what it means for my relationship with Dad, and for other people, for…’ I trail off, thinking of Julia, the kids. If she’s her and she doesn’t know it, then I have the power to ruin her perfect life, to turn everything she knows on her head. Bitterness bubbles up inside me. My life was smashed apart, so why not hers too?
‘When I was a teenager, Dad and I didn’t get along too well,’ Jorge says. ‘I spent all my time playing music, I didn’t want to study, I failed exams.’ He pauses. ‘I think it was partly because we’d just moved here and I wasn’t fitting in too well at school. Music was my refuge.’
I look at him; wait for him to go on.
‘Mum was supportive of my music, but Dad thought I should study hard and go to university so I could get a proper job. The more he went on about it, the more I wanted to play. I think I enjoyed provoking him, it was like a game. I couldn’t see that, actually, he was scared. He wanted me to get qualifications so if the music didn’t work out, I wouldn’t end up as a janitor like him. He was angry because he thought I was throwing away a chance that he didn’t have. But I couldn’t see any of that, I thought he was just being an asshole. We fell out for a long time.’
‘What happened?’
‘I failed my final year of high school and my music teacher, who I worshipped, finally said exactly the same thing to me as Dad had: that I needed to graduate high school, I needed a fallback in case the music didn’t work out. When he said it, I realised Dad was right. I repeated my final year, studied hard and got back on track. If I hadn’t, I don’t think I’d have the job I do now at the festival. And believe me, playing the occasional gig doesn’t pay enough to live in Switzerland.’
‘So you and your dad made up?’
He shrugs. ‘Yeah. I mean, I was too much of an idiot to apologise at the time, but he forgave me anyway and we’re good now. But my point in saying all this is that even when we fell out, I knew he loved me. He didn’t like what I was doing, but he was always going to be there for me, whatever mess I made of things.’
I look at him and he looks down at the water.
‘You only have one dad, that’s what I mean. He’ll never love you any less and you’ll never replace him with anyone else. That’s just the way it is.’
I nod, taken aback by his words, by the perception and understanding Patrick seemed so unable to give me, but before I can say anything he gets up from the edge of the pool. ‘Toilet,’ he says, and walks off.
ZJulia’s actually home when we get back from the pool. Léa and Luca rush into the sitting room and start wittering away to her in French so I leave them to it and retreat to my bedroom to send the email that’s been brewing in my head all afternoon. I hope Jorge’s right, that Dad will stick by me even if he doesn’t want me to do this. I know I have to do it because I’ll never get any kind of peace within myself unless I find out who I am and what happened. But still, I intend to protect myself by being evasive. If Daniel knows what happened back then, he’ll understand what I’m saying. If he doesn’t, then he’ll just dismiss me as a nutcase and I’ll have time to consider whether to enlighten him or not.
Dear Mr Buchs,
The words sound strange in my head as I type them on the screen. Daniel Buchs, my probable biological father.
Please excuse me for disturbing you again, but it’s very necessary. Something happened to me a long time ago. I don’t know why, or how, but it’s become very important to me to find out what actually happened. I now know you were married to Brigitte – Anna – and I think you and your former wife may be able to provide me with some answers. If you really have no idea what I’m talking about then I apologise and hope you’ll forgive the intrusion. But I can’t help but think that you might know something about what happened to me in a hospital in Lausanne in September 1976. So I beg you, please reply with any information you may have.
With very best wishes,
Jessica Faulkner (daughter of Sylvia Tallis and Jim Millson)
I hit send before I can change my mind and feel my stomach plunge. It’s done. I’ll soon know, one way or another, whether Daniel and Anna have any clue that the woman they call their daughter was somehow swapped at birth with their real child – me.
As I shut the lid of my laptop, I hear crying in the other room. Léa, screaming in French and wailing in a babyish tone I haven’t heard from her before. I walk into the room to find out what’s going on and see Julia sitting on the sofa with an exasperated expression on her face, her arms around Luca, who sits on her lap. Léa’s leaning over one arm of the sofa, her face red and streaked with tears.
‘What’s going on?’ I say. When Léa sees me, she runs to me and flings her arms around my waist. She says something else in French and I hear my name in there, and though I don’t have a clue what she’s saying, from the stony look on her mother’s face I gather it’s not a compliment about her.
‘I can’t go to Léa’s tennis competition next Saturday, but she doesn’t understand how important work is at the moment,’ Julia says. Her expression tells me she clearly expects me to side with her. ‘Much as I’d love to see her play, I just can’t get away.’
‘But it’s a Saturday.’ It comes out of my mouth like a reflex and Julia frowns, purses her lips.
‘Right now, Saturday is a working day for me. There’s an event at the stadium, all the sponsors will be there and I must be too,’ she says, then to Léa, ‘C’est la vie, chérie. That’s life.’
I feel Léa’s tears dampening my shorts and I stroke her hair, wanting to bundle her into a hug and tell her it’s okay, I have time for her, even if her mother doesn’t. But I don’t say that. I nod at Julia, a brusque recognition of what she’s said, an acknowledgement that she’s my employer and I won’t contradict her, even if I think she’s crazy to put her work ahead of her family. She meets my eyes as her daughter clings to me and I see disapproval in her face – as though I’m the one who’s in the wrong – and I feel fury rise up in me. How dare she be critical of me when I’m the only one of us putting a smile on her kids’ faces these days? How can she be so cavalier with her family, this precious, precious thing, when some people aren’t lucky enough to have one?
‘Come on,’ I say to Léa. ‘I want you to show me what you’ve done in that new drawing pad we picked up last week.’
I take her hand and lead her into her bedroom where she flings herself down on the bed.
She doesn’t speak. I sit there and turn the pages, complimenting her on her drawings as my heart bursts for this eight-year-old girl who I didn’t know six weeks ago, but who right now feels more my own than Julia’s.
Is this how Mum felt? Is this what it feels like to have a daughter?
Even if it turns out she’s not your own after all.
I’m still fuming about Julia’s behaviour the next day when the doorbell goes. I get up from the table, where I’ve been helping Luca complete a jigsaw puzzle, and go to the door. Léa lifts her head from her book and I shoot her a smile, but she doesn’t return it and looks down again. I’ve been trying to think of things that might lift her spirits, but as yet nothing has succeeded. She’s got as much on her mind as I have, it seems.
A delivery driver is holding out a package. He nods at me. ‘Bonjour, Madame.’
‘Bonjour,’ I offer, hoping that’s all I’ll have to say.
He rattles off something that I don’t understand but I don’t need to; the box is addressed to Mme J. Chevalley and the electronic signature pad he hands me is all the explanation I need. I take it, scribble something that vaguely resembles my signature and hand it back. He gives me the package.
‘Bonne journée.’ He turns away, walks to his van and opens the door.
I take the package inside. The kids don’t even look up as I walk through the sitting room and take the box into my bedroom. I sit on my bed and stare at it.
It’s branded Coca-Cola so I know it must be something to do with Julia’s work. I’ve heard her talk about Coke, say what an important sponsor they are of the events she organises. Why it’s arrived here, instead of her office, I really don’t know. Neither do I know why I’ve brought it into my bedroom or why I feel an urge to open it.
All I know is I don’t want Julia to have it.
My heart quickens. The house feels quiet. Léa’s too subdued to be antagonising her younger brother. I think of her face, her tears, and the flash of anger in Julia’s eyes when I said, But it’s a Saturday. And I suddenly realise I don’t care what’s in the box. I don’t want to snoop anymore. I don’t give a shit. But I do want to upset Julia, just as she upset her daughter. I want to mess up the job that’s so important to her, punish her in whatever small way I can.
I get up from my bed and open the wardrobe door, unzip my empty suitcase and put the box inside.
I’ll dispose of it later.