51

Sylvie

Is it really you?” Helen touches my face as if I were a dead child come to life. I stiffen. “Good Lord,” she rasps. “Baby Forest.”

I stare, fascinated, shocked, as tears slide freely down her cheeks, cutting tramlines through her foundation. Helen is dissolving in front of my eyes. The distance between us is closing.

Outside the window, Jake’s guitar, the sound of a different world. Keep playing, I think. Please keep playing.

“You had eyes like a blackbird.” She looks radiant, as if the real Helen has broken through the Botox. It’s the first time I’ve seen her truly smile. “Ant bites all over you. Red raw cheeks.”

Mum never told me that. Or that I was called Baby Forest.

“I mixed your milk powder with water from the stream.”

“You did?” It’s like seeing a line drawing emerge on a page. Tears bulb between my lower lashes.

“Thankfully, you refused to touch it.”

I feel weirdly proud of my baby self.

“I wanted you all to myself.” She sniffs, ugly crying, not caring. “So did Mother . . .”

Jeannie. With the flawless skin and dark curls in the newspaper photo. Jeannie pregnant, outside a stucco house, smiling, a little boy tugging her skirt. And I suddenly long to meet her.

“But you only had eyes for Big Rita,” Helen continues, her polished demeanor rupturing. She snorts back the tears. She wipes them on her shirtsleeve. “Your gaze followed her around the room. If you were crying, she’d swoop down and pick you up and soothe you, like a nanny, yes, yes, but also like she was born to do it.”

My heart throbs. It feels like a door to the past is being pushed open, inch by inch. Behind it I see a young Rita, vertical and full of life. A woman born to graze ceilings and stars. A natural mother. The contrast with how she is now, horizontal, on a hospital bed, slays me.

“You two . . . Gosh. It was like you recognized something in each other. I . . . can’t explain.”

I miss Mum so intensely then it hurts.

“Never in a million years . . .” She digs in her pocket for a tissue. “You say you have a sister too?” Her face clouds. “All my life I’ve longed for a sister. You were mine for a short while.” She brightens again. “What’s your sister’s name?”

“Caroline,” I say, and finally lose it. “Can I borrow your tissue?”

“Let me.” She dabs my eyes. I can smell mint on her breath. Possibly gin. She pulls back and stares at me intensely, a question forming. “What were you told about it all, Sylvie? Growing up.”

Something inside me twists. “I didn’t want to know,” I say.

A gleam in those pale whippet eyes. “Well, do you now? Could you stomach it?”

I think of the little girl I was in the apple tree, all the bits of me I’ve suppressed. Steve’s saying, “Don’t go there, Sylvie. Remember, that’s not who you are.” And I hear Jake’s guitar, louder now, more insistent, beating across the still green canal. One strum. Two. “I want to know everything.”

---

The British Museum flashes past the taxi window, a déjà vu stream of columns and stone and amulet-blue sky. A few minutes later, the taxi swerves into Great Portland Street. “We’re here.” Helen can’t hide the anxiety in her voice—like a plucked untuned violin string—and it makes mine worse.

We’re buzzed into a tall building, grand, frayed at the edges. She still won’t tell me where we’re going or why. All I know is that she made a furtive call before we left. “Trust me,” she says.

I don’t, not quite. But for the first time in years, I’m beginning to trust myself to be able to deal with the truth, not to be sunk by it.

There’s a lift, small, metal, like a shark cage. Helen won’t set foot in it—“I’d rather scale the drainpipes”—so we pant up five flights of stairs. The apartment door isn’t locked—someone’s expecting us. My heart starts to knock in my chest. I hesitate. My feet are weighted like stones. Helen beckons me in and closes the door behind us with a high-security metallic crunch. It’s dark in here. Stale. The walls are stamped with sad exotic trophies, the head of an antelope, a huge rhino. There’s a moth-eaten tiger skin on the floor. It feels like an old gentlemen’s club, the kind that excludes women, leathery, stuffed with hunted dead things.

“We’ve got company,” I say, gauche with nerves, gesturing around at the taxidermy.

“Ugh. Don’s horrible stuff. Daddy won’t be parted from it,” she says. It takes a moment for me to connect. The newspaper stories, hidden for so long by Mum, are starting to flesh. I’m about to find out the answers, the bits she scissored away. My heart beats faster.

Glass eyes follow us as we cross the lobby and go into a smaller, darker room, scratchily overheated, furnished with polished antiques and dimly lit with green-shaded lamps. It’s the kind of room children instinctively misbehave in. Again, Helen shuts the door behind us. I feel a prick of claustrophobia. Two eyes—bromide blue, Helen’s eyes, Elliot’s eyes—stare out of the gloom.

A thin, rather sickly-looking elderly man sits upright in a battered leather chair. He’s wearing a jaunty spotted navy bow tie at a lopsided angle, as if he’s hurriedly tied it on for the occasion. And he’s still recognizable as the fraught man in the newspaper, dashing out of the court.

On a table beside him is a bowl of walnuts. A silver nutcracker. A wicker basket containing a blown ostrich egg. Everything is clammily still. Loaded with meaning. I immediately want to leave.

As Helen kisses him briskly on each cheek, he squints over his shoulder at me. “Daddy, this is Baby Forest.” Her voice fills with wonder again. “The foundling. Found.”

Painfully slowly, her father puts on the spectacles that hang on a chain around his neck and peers at me, frowning, with an expression of dispassionate curiosity.

“As I explained on the phone, Daddy, she’s Big Rita’s adopted daughter. And . . . yes, hold on to your hat, Annie’s mother. I’ll explain how that happened later. Teenagers on smartphones basically.” Her father looks understandably confused. He scratches the folds of his scraggy neck. “Sylvie, this is my father, Walter Harrington.”

I struggle to smile. My armpits are wet. I can hardly breathe in here. There’s something toxic, cloying, caught in the dust our feet kick up.

“Dear girl, I owe you an apology.” There’s a wheezy rattle in Walter’s voice.

An apology? For what? For a moment, I just stand and stare at him, forgetting my manners. My heart flutters.

“You’d better sit.” Helen steers me to a nearby chair, like a fussing aunt, and pushes me into button-back upholstery. “There’s no easy way of telling you this, Sylvie.”

I glance at Walter, adjusting his bow tie, his expression stern. There’s a drop in pressure in the room, headachy. The visit suddenly feels as if it could detonate in any direction. Why did I trust Helen? Why am I here?

“Daddy and his housekeeper, a psychopath called Marge, they planned it.” Helen’s voice vibrates with fury. A vein pulses under her eye. “You being found in the woods.”

Even the wooden African masks on the wall scream, “What?”

“Marge put you on that tree stump.” Helen shakes her head, as if she can’t quite believe it herself. “She left you there. Your birth mother couldn’t bear to do it.”

“Is this some sort of joke?” She walked away. Only it wasn’t my mother? It was Marge? Marge of the flying fig roll. The room swims in the green lamplight.

“No, I’m afraid not.” Helen’s face sags with regret. “The rest of us had no idea at the time. None at all. Please believe that. Big Rita never knew, did she, Daddy?”

Walter nudges up his glasses, which leave an indent on either side of his nose. “Correct. Although I was scared she’d guess.”

My feelings hurl around like angry children. I don’t know how to be in my skin. What to say. What to do. I don’t care about who died now, who killed. I must leave. But when I try to move my legs, they’re useless mush.

“After Don died, Daddy cut Big Rita out of our lives. Brutally.” Helen’s mouth thins to an angry line. “Took out court orders. You like a lawyer, don’t you, Daddy? Threatened her, said if she ever spoke to the press, to anyone about that summer, he’d hammer her life into the ground, drag her name through the mud.”

“You . . . you . . .”—I feel faint with rage—“arsehole.”

Walter puts up his hands in surrender. “In my defense, I was crazier than my wife by then. I just didn’t know it at the time.”

“Just say sorry, won’t you?” says Helen icily. “For once in your life, Daddy.”

Walter bows his head. His pate looks fragile and pale, like the ostrich egg in the bowl. “My deepest apologies, Sylvie.”

I cannot look at him, this reserved, entitled man, who thought he was above the rules and treated a baby like a doll.

“I selfishly thought the baby, you—gosh, how strange life is—would save my marriage. Rescue my beautiful Jeannie.” Everything starts to feels unreal. Dubbed. “I stayed out of the way, even when I got back from overseas, and I hid away here, in this apartment, just to give her a chance to bond with you, the baby she craved, quietly, in the woods.”

Feeling vulnerable, unshelled, I try to stand again, but my legs are still not working, and I sink back into the chair.

“I’d never have thought of such a preposterous thing on my own. Marge presented it, like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a . . . a stroke of luck.” He drags at his wizened cheeks with long, thin fingers. “I wasn’t thinking straight.”

I grip the sides of the armchair, like Caroline in an airplane seat during turbulence. I want Caroline. I should have told her I was coming here. She’d have stopped me.

“We need a drink.” Helen starts clinking glasses at a trolley. She presses a gin and tonic into my hand. I take a swig, feeling as though I’m slipping through the protective net I’ve sewn around myself. Trying to grab things to stop my fall.

“Marge kept everything about you rather vague.” He nudges his glasses up his nose with his thumb. “But I can tell you that your mother was young, nineteen, I believe, and very, very pregnant when she realized. I’m afraid she didn’t know the father’s full name. A sailor of some sort. She gave birth at home, in secret, her own mother as midwife, if I remember rightly. Lived on the other side of the forest, a strict religious family. Dirt poor. Private people. But Marge knew them—she knew everybody, made it her business—and offered a way out.” He grimaces, and something that might be guilt flashes across his features. “I’m not sure she’d have had much choice, your mother. Not like girls do now.”

The ice in my glass cracks. Something inside me does the same. I’m struck by an overwhelming urge to reach back in time and pluck the baby away from all these people—not just the rural family into which I was born, but the Harringtons too. The next moment, as a swig of gin burns down my throat, it occurs to me that this is what my parents did. The “truth” is less about that blood-soaked summer than about the legacy of my adopted parents’ daily small acts of love—what was created anew, rather than what was lost. It’s like seeing myself in the mirror for the first time.

“I’m sure your birth mother was the anonymous caller who tipped off the police the night Don was shot.” Walter is silent for a moment, sifting through the event. “Of course, she was meant to have gone by then. On a ship.”

“A ship?” I breathe. Jo.

“A cruise ship,” Helen confirms. She hands me a tissue. “She worked in the kitchens.”

This hurts my heart. There can’t be many workplaces grimmer than a greasy boiling kitchen under the waterline.

“Wanted to see the world,” said Helen, her voice choking up. “Isn’t that right, Daddy?”

He nods. “And she got to Canada in the end. Just not straightaway.” There’s a hint of annoyance in his voice. “Not like she was meant to.”

Canada. She couldn’t have got much farther from her family. I wonder if she ever forgave them, if she’s got one of her own now, a nice husband, grown-up children. And if she’s ever told them about me or if I’m a tiny precious secret.

“But that summer she hung around, checking on you. Marge couldn’t get rid of her and was terrified she might snatch you back. And the girl might well have if she hadn’t seen how well Rita cared for her . . . you, I mean. Held you, sang to you, all that mumsy stuff. Marge said that’d made a big difference. It stopped her.” He raises an eyebrow knowingly, as if aware of a closer call. “Just.”

Something in me slides. Starts to thaw. I fight this. It’s dangerous to imagine my birth mother was anything but heartless. Not young and scared and manipulated. In a different era, Annie. And it’s strange, fissuring, to think that it was Mum, then just a young nanny, Helen’s Big Rita, who might unwittingly have stopped my birth mother from reclaiming me, rerouting Fate, taking my hand and leading me into a whole different life. I can’t take it in.

“It’s true, Sylvie. We always felt watched,” Helen says. “I used to sense someone out there in the trees, but she was so quick, so deft, like a woodland creature. I never actually saw her.” She lays a jewelry-encrusted hand on my arm. “She stayed as long as she could. But she had to bolt after making the call to the police, or she’d have been questioned too. She’d have been rightly terrified.”

A new feeling opens inside me, like the heron’s wings. Forgiveness of sorts. If not forgiveness, understanding. And a sadness so sharp and sweet it feels like relief.

“So you see, Sylvie.” Walter takes off his glasses and rubs his rheumy eyes. “Marge’s mad plan failed. And I failed you and your birth mother. I promised I’d give you every advantage and I didn’t. The shame is mine, all mine.”

My childhood rushes past, imperfect and happy: wind-blistered beaches; the gnarly apple tree in the garden; Dad in his workshop, soft-leaded flat carpenter’s pencil behind his ear; me and Caroline rushing into the cottage with handfuls of wild flowers for Mum, and Mum beaming and saying, “Wow. Aren’t I just the luckiest, most spoiled mother in the world?” I swallow. Feel a charge of pride and truculence. “I had every advantage, Walter.”

“And a bloody lucky escape,” agrees Helen, gulping back her drink.

“Look, Sylvie, if there’s anything you need, anything at all, property, money . . .” Walter begins.

“I don’t want anything from you.” I stand up. My legs feel strong again. Made of steel. “Nothing.”

“I will make it up to Annie and her baby.” Walter splays his hand on his chest. “I give you my word.”

I only just bite back, “Screw you,” because Annie could probably do with all the help she can get, and stride toward the door.

“Oh, must you go, Sylvie?” Helen says, as if I were leaving a dinner party early. “Stay for another drink.”

“After all, here we are,” Walter marvels, incomprehensibly. “We end as we began. With a baby.” He brings the tips of his fingers together. “There’s an excellent bottle of Krug in the fridge.” He looks up at Helen. “Perhaps this time we can celebrate. Not grieve.”

“Except we didn’t need to grieve my little baby sister, did we, Daddy?” The atmosphere in the room switches like a blade. My hand freezes on the door handle.

“Not now, Helen,” Walter mutters, with an embarrassed laugh.

“Why not?” Her lip curls. “Are you ashamed of Sylvie knowing?”

The room grows smaller and hotter. I suddenly feel I’m in the presence of a family secret so murky I don’t want to hear it.

Helen’s telling me anyway. “I had a little sister once, Sylvie. My father told us she’d died in hospital an hour after birth.” She speaks with cool ferocity. “But she didn’t.”

Walter stares into the middle distance. He swallows hard, like he knows what’s coming.

“She just wasn’t good enough, was she, Daddy? She was flawed. Monstrous.”

“She was Don’s baby. She wasn’t mine.” Walter’s words come out choked, as if the bow tie is tightening around his neck. “Your mother couldn’t have coped.”

“You told her a lie! She literally went mad with grief!”

“I thought it was for the best. Everyone did. She was blue. Not breathing properly. And the face . . . the wretched child’s face.” Walter closes his eyes and presses his fingers to his temples, trying to dam the flow of images.

The room starts to hum. An awful possibility is solidifying. Something so disturbing, my brain bucks away from it like a horse.

“It was a cleft palate, Daddy. Just a cleft palate, I’m sure of it. But you saw a monster. Because you saw Don’s child. If she’d been yours . . .”

“She wasn’t.” His face flushes, turgid with bitterness. “She wasn’t mine, damn it.”

The humming sound swarms in my head. The room starts to shudder and contract violently. I lean back against the wall.

“Are you okay, Sylvie? You’ve gone white as a sheet.” Helen’s face looms closer, all her features smudged, a painting melting.

I try to get the words out. My tongue feels too thick. In my bag, my phone starts to ring. The outside world. Annie? The noise twists into my ears like wire.

“Here, sip, darling.” She presses gin and tonic to my lips. My phone rings again. I push away the glass and check my phone, with dread. The hospital.