Juliette’s mother looked across the table at her husband, or at his hands more precisely, which peered elegantly around the edges of The Times. She had debated whether to tell him, in fact had put it off for over a week, but she knew she couldn’t risk him finding out through anyone else. She coughed delicately, but Giles didn’t appear to hear her, just carried on reading the paper, occasionally tutting, the newsprint rustling quietly. She normally liked to leave him alone at this time, just after breakfast, in that brief moment of peace before he had to leave for work, but for some reason she found she couldn’t put it off any longer.
‘Giles,’ she said. ‘Giles, darling … Giles!’
‘Oh, sorry, dear,’ he said finally, angling the paper downwards, so he could look over the top of both it and his reading glasses, at his wife.
‘I need to talk to you,’ she said.
‘Yes, dear,’ he replied, and waited, and when she didn’t say anything, he hoisted the paper up a little, perhaps about to start reading again.
‘Juliette wants to trace her birth mother,’ Cynthia said, as if it were one word, one fast uninterrupted stream of letters, and this time Giles sighed and laid the newspaper flat on the table, its edge soaking up the remains of the milk from his cornflakes in the shallow beige bowl.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh.’
‘Exactly,’ replied Cynthia, staring at him. ‘What on earth are we going to do?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Giles. ‘What can we do? We knew this would probably happen one day.’
‘Yes, but not now,’ said Cynthia. ‘She’s not long been at university, she’s not ready for it.’ She stood up and paced back and forth, as though the room was too small for her. Then she stopped and leaned against the Aga.
‘Well, what’s happened?’ asked Giles. He shifted uneasily in his seat, and resignedly closed his newspaper and folded it in half. ‘How do you know she wants to? Did she actually tell you? Maybe you’ve got it wrong.’
‘She rang me last week and I knew there was something up, she sounded funny, and it wasn’t even the right day to ring. But she kept chatting on and I was even quite pleased that she sounded interested in my boring old WI stuff, and I assumed she was just a bit homesick – and then she came out with this story about needing to research her origins for an assignment, but it was obviously rubbish …’ Cynthia’s voice started to break a little. She sat down again, looking desolate.
Giles took his wife’s hand across the table, and the sleeve of his crisp striped shirt got a smudge of newsprint on it, just above the cufflink.
‘It’s all right, dear,’ said Giles. ‘What did you tell her?’
‘The truth. I told her where she was born. I didn’t know what else to say … What can she do now?’
‘I’m not sure, dear. But she can certainly go to Somerset House and look up all the births on the day she was born, until she finds her own certificate.’
‘And then what?’
‘I don’t know, Cyn. I suppose once she knows the name though, she can go about trying to trace her.’
Cynthia looked down into the dregs of her coffee and it was strange, they seemed to have settled into a human shape: two eyes, a sad downward mouth, the exact opposite of one of those yellow smiley faces that were everywhere these days. She couldn’t look up at her husband again, she knew that if she saw the kindness in his eyes she’d be unable to stop the tears coming. Cynthia was a reserved woman – she hardly ever cried, and if she did it was usually in private. She wasn’t ready to let out her emotions about this, not even to her husband. Maybe Juliette wouldn’t even go through with it in the end, and they could all forget about everything again for a while. As Cynthia sat there gazing at her diamond-ringed fingers, she knew she was being over-optimistic, like she always used to be, every single relentless month, yes, every single one, until every single bloody hateful month it had come (and she was sure it had been all her fault, not poor Giles’), until eventually it had stopped for ever, and she’d thanked God that she’d been blessed with Juliette instead.