The Love of My Life(68)

Will she want him back?

The whole thing is just awful.





Chapter Forty-Four


EMILY


One year later (December)

The evening after Charlie’s adoption finally went through the courts I left Granny’s for the first time in months.

Some time later I found myself outside Janice and Jeremy’s, in the middle of a downpour. It was a beautiful four-storey Georgian house, right on Highbury Fields. Their huge front door sat expensively between pillars, and an engraved sign by the letterbox said NO FLYERS, because they were too important and cosmopolitan for handymen and pizzas.

You could see right through the window to their kitchen, and a big marble island larger than my grandmother’s dining room. Jeremy was sitting at it, reading something on a laptop.

I stood still in the rain and watched him for a while. His tie was off, swirled round his computer, a glass of red wine nearby. If Charlie had started talking, this was the man he’d be calling Daddy. This house, these people, were his life.

At one end of their huge dining table stood a highchair.

I dug my fingernails into my palms, breathing with the pain. Occasionally in the last year I’d been to a support group for mothers who’d given their children up for adoption, and heard many of them talking about ‘trusting’ or ‘breathing with’ the pain.

As of 2 p.m., my baby was no longer mine, and there was nothing I could ever do to change it. Breathing exercises were an insult.

Momentarily I allowed myself to imagine it was me upstairs with Charlie, not Janice: giving him a bath, being splashed and playing with toys. Or perhaps in Granny’s little bathroom, with the grumbling floorboards and the window that never quite shut.

The pain made me want to lie down and curl into a ball, right there on the rainy pavement.

I stood for a long time, freezing and wet, until Janice suddenly appeared in the kitchen, holding a child’s bottle. Before even putting the bottle down she walked straight into the sitting room at the front, to look out of the window.

It had been dark for a few hours, and I was on the other side of the road, by a tree. But I realised too late that I was still too close to a streetlamp, and she saw me straightaway. She pressed her face closer to the glass and framed her vision with her hands, to get a better look. I didn’t dare move. My hood was up, so she couldn’t see my face, but she knew. I sensed her, just as she sensed me. Urgently, she turned to call Jeremy.

I ran, slipping into the shadows past the leisure centre, pushing unfit legs towards Highbury and Islington Station.

Stupid. I was so stupid. What had I hoped to achieve?

Jeremy reached me just as I got to the pelican crossing. I should have pulled free when I felt a hand on my elbow – I should have sprinted – but I stopped and turned around. Nobody but Granny and my GP had touched me in a very long time.

‘Emily?’

I shook my head. ‘No.’

‘Emily . . .’ He gently pulled me across the road so we were standing on the pavement. The rain drummed on my hood.

‘She looked like she checks out of the window every night,’ was all I could say.

‘She does.’ Jeremy hunched uselessly against the rain.

‘Why? Have you two had some sort of trouble?’

Jeremy shook his head. ‘No trouble. Charlie’s perfectly safe. She’s just . . . She’s just been very anxious since we took him. She’s been really afraid you’d change your mind.’

‘So afraid she checks out of the window all the time?’

After a pause, Jeremy nodded. ‘She’s wonderful with Charlie,’ he said. ‘So you don’t need to worry about the effect this anxiety’s had, but . . . Anyway, now it’s all legalised I think she’ll be able to draw a line. Start to believe she really is a mother.’

I had not expected this. The scenes that played in my head had involved Janice and Jeremy smiling with joy at their sleeping toddler, coming downstairs to drink wine together and talk about all the funny things he’d done that day. It hadn’t crossed my mind that she could be anxious. Especially about me. About Emily Peel, who’d lain in bed for months on end, hardly able to take care of her most basic needs.

‘I’ve never been here before,’ I said. ‘This is the first time. And, obviously, the last.’

He started to say something but I interrupted.

‘I will never get over what I did,’ I said. ‘It’s ruined my life. But you don’t need to worry, Jeremy. I’m not stalking you. It was just a . . . I don’t know. The finality of the court order going through. I panicked.’

He nodded. ‘I understand. But it mustn’t happen again – Janice will call the police if you harass us, and I won’t stop her.’

I closed my eyes against the rain for a moment.

‘I’m so sorry, Jeremy. Please don’t tell her it was me. It’ll only cause unnecessary alarm.’

‘Absolutely. I’ll say it was a nutter.’

I nearly smiled. He nearly did, too.

‘Just . . . Just tell me Charlie’s OK,’ I said. It was rising up inside me, again; the longing. The deep sea swell of it. ‘Tell me he’s well, and happy.’

‘He is,’ Jeremy said, gently. A bus with steamed windows pulled in behind him. ‘Oh, Emily. He is very well, and very happy. You don’t need to worry about him at all.’