JESS
From <maggie.hartwell@gmail.com>
Jess, you’ve found her! After all this time, after everything that’s happened. I’m so pleased for you, darling. Will you meet her? I hope so. I think you need to.
You know, this whole journey of yours has brought back a lot of memories for me. I remember so clearly when I first saw you as a baby. You were so beautiful, so tiny, and I felt such love for you right from the moment I met you. And you know, I can’t imagine you not being part of my life all these years. It makes me feel quite ill to think that, if the hospital hadn’t got things so wrong, I wouldn’t have had you in my life. It’s brought me such joy to see you grow up as you have, I’ve felt so proud to have you as my goddaughter.
I can’t imagine what you must be feeling right now, at the prospect of finally meeting Anna. From what Daniel said in his email, I presume she must already know you’re hers. Why? For how long? How did she find out? Did she try to find you? I’m sure you have all these questions churning around in your head – and you deserve the answers, Jess, you really do. I hope you get them – and that it brings you the peace you need.
If you decide to meet her, just remember that we are all there with you in spirit – me, your dad, and your mum – we’re there holding your hand in this. We’re your family, darling, whatever happens.
Now, tell me more about this Jorge chap…
‘Are you going to meet her?’
We’re sitting on rocks on the lakeshore, holding drinks from a pop-up bar that seems way too cool for elegant, posh Montreux.
I nod. ‘Julia said Anna will come to Switzerland next week, wants to meet me in Lutry, where she says she used to go sometimes, back when she lived around here.’ I still don’t know if I want to. I don’t know how I feel about any of this anymore. But I know I have to go through with it. I have to end this somehow. I need to know how, and why, I came to live someone else’s life. Tears prick the backs of my eyes and, to my embarrassment, I can’t suppress a loud, ugly sniffle.
Jorge looks at me. ‘Come here.’ He puts his arm around my shoulders and pulls me in to him. I smell a mixture of sweat and suncream and musky man-ness. It’s comforting. Warm. Lovely. If only I could just stay like this, and not have to face up to everything I’ve done, everything that’s been done to me.
‘It feels like a betrayal.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Of my parents. Of Mum, especially. She didn’t know. She thought I was her daughter, through and through. And now it’s like I’m looking to replace her with this new mother. I can’t bear to think that she might think… I can’t…’
He squeezes my shoulder. ‘You know it’s not like that. You’re never going to feel any differently about your mum. Nothing that comes in the future can take away what happened in the years you had with her.’
I sniff, nod. I know that’s true. But what I can’t ever know is how she would feel if she knew what I now know: that I wasn’t her real daughter. Would she love me less? And does Dad, now? Can he, in his heart of hearts, think of me in the same way as he did before?
‘I haven’t told Dad I’ve found them,’ I say. ‘But I have to meet her, don’t I? I can’t just walk away from this now.’
He nods. ‘Even if you just meet her once. Then you can move on, knowing what happened. Closure, that’s what they say in America, right?’
‘Closure.’ I ponder the word. A few years ago there was nothing to close. I knew who I was – or at least, I thought I did. It feels so long ago now. So much has changed. I take my head off his shoulder and sit up, looking out at two paddleboarders drifting past us on the placid lake. ‘I wonder where I’d be now, if Dad and I hadn’t stumbled across that blood donation van. I wouldn’t be here, that’s for sure. Still in London, I guess. Still married. Still in my job.’
Jorge looks at me, a smile tugging at his lips. ‘Sounds fucking boring to me.’
I smile back, meeting his eyes with my own. I see that he cares, he really cares, and it feels good. ‘I guess it does,’ I say.
I arrive early in Lutry on the day I’m due to meet her and I don’t know what to do with myself. I walk down the curve of the lake wall towards a bench in the shade, a short distance from the spot where Anna told Julia she wanted to meet me. It’s a baking hot day, but I think I’m sweating more from nerves than from the heat. I can feel the damp under my arms, even in this sundress, which is the lightest thing I own. It’s white with tiny red flowers and I got it on a shopping trip with Mum, five or six years ago.
Go on, I’ll treat you.
I want to look nice today. I want Anna to think well of me. I don’t want her to be disappointed in how I’ve turned out. But I also need to subliminally state my connection to Mum, to show, in some small, unspoken, sartorial way, that she’s still with me, she’s still my mother and I’m still her daughter. Wearing this dress satisfies both of those needs.
I look at my watch. Ten to midday. I glance down the promenade. It’s fairly busy. It’s a Saturday lunchtime, so the restaurant terraces are full. Couples and their kids are strolling by the lake, ice creams in hands; some people are swimming in the water, or sunbathing on the grass down the end of the promenade, under willow trees. It’s like any other day, for them. But for me it’s a threshold, a turning point. However, unlike the other one, back in London with Dad when we went to give blood, this one I’m walking into with my eyes open. I know what I’m doing – even though I don’t know if I want to do it.
I didn’t think I’d recognise her. But when I see her, I know her instantly. She’s standing by the wall near the cafe. She’s wearing a mid-length navy skirt and a white sleeveless shirt, with flat red sandals. Her eyes are covered by large tortoiseshell sunglasses and she’s carrying a small red leather handbag over one shoulder that she keeps hoisting up, as though it’s heavy, but it’s so small that I doubt it. She’s nervous, that’s what it is. The realisation relieves my own nerves a little.
I stand up. Smooth down my dress. Take a sip of water from the bottle I’m carrying, hoping it will settle my troubled stomach. I think of Mum, the last time I saw her, just before her trip to Turkey.
See you soon, darling. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!
Would you do this, Mum? I think now. Are you okay with me doing this? I wish I had her blessing. I wish she could tell me that it’s okay to meet the woman who gave birth to me. I debate turning around and walking to the train station and going back to Julia’s. I could pack my things and be out of there that afternoon. A short flight and I could be with Dad, back trying to pretend this whole thing didn’t happen. I take another sip of water and it’s while I’m tightening the cap on the bottle that she looks directly at me and then I know the decision has been made for me.
She takes a step forward, then stops. Takes her sunglasses off. I stand up and walk towards her, my legs shaking so much I don’t know if I can actually cover the thirty metres to where she’s standing. I stop in front of her and then I don’t know what to say.
‘Jessica?’
I nod. Her hand goes to her mouth and I see her eyes crease. ‘Hello,’ she says in English. ‘Hello, Jessica.’
I don’t know what to do. Whether to hug her, or kiss her three times in the Swiss way. In the end I stick out my hand in what seems like an absurdly formal manner given our relationship. But then again, she’s a complete stranger to me. ‘Hello,’ I say, and she takes my proffered hand in both of hers and squeezes it. I pull it away after a moment.
‘Sehr schön,’ she says, as though to herself. Her eyes look watery. They’re my eyes, I realise. My colour. Or mine are her colour. Her face shape is mine, too. An oval, with a sweetheart hairline. Her hair is darker than mine, but it’s surely dyed.
This is my mother.
I’d always just dismissed the fact I didn’t look especially like either of my parents. Shrugged it off. It was what it was. But now, here, is evidence that in fact I do.
‘Did you have a good journey?’ I say it only to say something, and once it’s out there it seems ridiculous. I’m meeting my long-lost mother for the very first time and I’m spouting small talk. She smiles, doesn’t take her eyes off me and I think perhaps she hasn’t understood. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t speak German,’ I add. ‘Uh, I mean, Julia said you can speak English?’
My words seem to snap her out of her thoughts. ‘Yes, yes, I have learnt it for you,’ she says, her accent a singsong.
I cock my head, confused. ‘We only just met.’
‘I mean, I’ve been learning it for forty years because I knew you were growing up in England and I hoped… I wished… I would meet you one day.’
My stomach twists. She knew. She knew where I was the whole time. I feel hot, too hot, as though I might faint. She takes my arm and leads me to the lake wall and nods for me to sit. I can’t keep my eyes off her face.
‘I used to come here all the time,’ she says. ‘I’d bring the pram and walk along the lake and sit at the end on a picnic blanket.’ She turns to me, takes my hand again. ‘I don’t know where to start.’
I take a long breath, trying to calm my racing pulse. ‘How about with how you knew? How did you find out I’d been swapped with another child? I mean, that must be what happened, right? When did you find out? And if you knew the hospital had made such a terrible mistake, why didn’t you do something about it?’
She looks down at her lap and I see her hands are shaking. A family walks past us with a toddler pushing a plastic buggy, which she rams into my foot. The mother apologises and ushers her child away with stern words, but I barely look at her. My eyes are on Anna, willing her to speak. I need to know, right now. I need this story out.
‘You have to understand, I was only sixteen when I had you.’ She looks up at me. ‘I should never have been pregnant at that age. We had no money. I rarely saw Daniel in those first few months when we arrived in Lausanne because he was working all the time to support us. I was so alone, and after being so happy I’d left the farm I was living on, I became very scared.’
‘Of what?’
‘Everything. Scared the authorities would find out I was an unmarried sixteen-year-old and take the baby away from me, put it in some horrible institution or with some family that wouldn’t love her. And I was scared that, even if they didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to give you a good life. I didn’t want you to end up like me.’
My head feels light, fuzzy. My brain is trying to grasp something, but it’s just out of reach, languishing in the fuzz.
‘And then there was Sylvia. She was older than me, and I thought she was so chic and sophisticated and intelligent, with a career and prospects and a husband with the same. I was completely in awe of her. And when she interviewed me—’
‘Wait, you actually met Mum? She interviewed you?’ I’m struggling to keep up with this succession of facts that are revelatory to me.
Anna nodded. ‘Yes, for an article about my time at the farm. Daniel’s parents’ farm. I’d lived there since I was eight, when the authorities took me away from my mother and sister and sent me to live there. I worked like a dog, and they gave me no love, little kindness.’ She shakes her head and something pricks at the back of my mind.
The television news. A lawyer and a distinguished older woman with tears in her eyes. What had Michel said? Something about children taken from their families and sent to work on farms. Abuse. Neglect. Government apologies.
‘Sylvia seemed very interested in what had happened to me. I didn’t know why, back then,’ Anna continues. ‘I thought I was just unlucky in the life I’d had. I didn’t know it had happened to thousands of other children, too, that it was a systematic failure. I didn’t know the government would later apologise for a system that took us from our homes and deemed my mother and others like her to be unsuitable parents.’ She breathes out a short, sharp breath and looks down at her feet. ‘What a thing to say! My mother loved me and my sister, even if she couldn’t always provide for us. She wasn’t unsuitable, she was just alone, and poor, and unhappy. It wasn’t acceptable to be divorced in a small community in the 1960s, so everyone looked down on her. Mum had no family in the area, no one to support her, so she got a job, but people said she was neglecting Cornelia and me for going to work – there weren’t many childcare options in those days – and then rumours started about Mum and a local man. They said she was living a “loose life”, and that’s why she lost her job – and then us. Instead of trying to help her, the authorities took her children from her and left us in a place far, far worse than the home we’d left. And they never came to check we were okay, they never seemed to care what happened to us.’ She shakes her head. ‘Society was completely against women like my mother, women who didn’t behave as they wanted.’ She sighs. ‘But then people are good at making bad decisions, I certainly know that.’
‘What do you mean?’ I’m completely lost, desperate for clarity and trying to process everything she’s said, like my brain’s two steps behind her, struggling to catch up.
She waves her hand as if to brush away my question, and I see she’s going to have to do this in her own time. ‘Sylvia – your mother,’ she says, faltering on the last word, ‘heard about my background from Evelyne, Daniel’s sister, and she wanted to write an article for her newspaper. I think she saw it as a… what do you say?’
‘A scoop.’ I’ve always known the story of my birth. That Mum was in Switzerland on a commission for her paper and gave birth prematurely in a hospital in Lausanne. But I never knew – or at least, I never thought to ask – what the article was about. I just assumed it was a follow- up to her first piece, the one I retrieved from the paper’s online archive, and that it never actually got written. It blows my mind to think it was about Anna, about my biological mother. They actually met. They spoke. And they parted with the wrong babies.
‘And then when we happened to give birth at the same time, in the same hospital, it felt like fate, I suppose.’
‘Fate?’
She looks at me and I see tears running down her face. ‘I’ve been so worried,’ she says.
‘About what?’ I don’t think I want to know. Dread is thumping in my chest.
‘Worried that you’ll hate me when you find out…’
I take a breath. ‘Find out what?
‘That it was me. That I swapped you with Sylvia’s baby.’