The Lies We Told(64)
Rose’s voice was loud. ‘Oliver,’ she cried. ‘Don’t! Do you hear me? Don’t you dare!’
While the others watched, open-mouthed, Oliver sank heavily into a chair. He still held the laptop in his hands. At last he sighed and said, ‘Enough now, Rose. Enough.’ The two of them stared at each other for a long moment before finally Oliver turned back to Tom. ‘This woman is Hannah Jennings,’ he said quietly. ‘She’s my daughter.’
24
The Lake District, 2017
When I think of my old life, the one I left behind, it’s our village in Cambridgeshire I picture, the house we lived in for sixteen years – Doug, Hannah, Toby and I. I sometimes wonder if our old neighbours ever think of us; if they remember the family that used to live between them in that quiet row of cottages below St Dunstan’s Hill. But of course they do: how could they not? After all, for a while Hannah Jennings was a household name, the Jennings family front-page news. How, after so much horror, could anyone possibly forget who she was, and what she did?
In my late twenties, when Doug and I still lived in Suffolk, I worked as a nurse on the paediatric ward at the General, where Rose Lawson was completing her specialist training in paediatric surgery. She must have been around thirty then, but she was already very highly regarded in the hospital, and it was clear that all the senior consultants thought she had a bright future ahead of her. It must take a special sort of person to be a surgeon, I’ve always thought, all those years and years of training, all that ambition and talent and single-mindedness you must need.
On the ward she always remembered our names, would often stop to ask after our families, and chat to us about hers. She’d been married a few years I think to her husband Oliver, and they had a beautiful baby girl named Emily. I remember once, one Saturday morning, bumping into them at the large Sainsbury’s in town. Doug and I were there together doing the weekly shop when I spotted them. Oliver was a tall, very good-looking man, and they looked so happy, so close, laughing about something together, and I was struck by what an attractive, perfect-looking family they made. When Rose spotted us and came over we smiled and introduced our husbands. I knew Oliver was a university professor and a published author and I was a little in awe of him, both Doug and I were, but in fact he was nice, really – you could see he was quite sweet, a bit shy even, despite all his success.
We chatted for a while. Rose told us they’d recently bought a huge house called The Willows, not far from our own village. A ‘complete wreck’, she called it, and laughed about how they were going to have to spend years doing it up and how they were both hopeless at that sort of thing. So Doug told them he was a builder and gave them a bit of advice, offered to come out and take a look at it, which they seemed very pleased about.
On the way home I thought about them; about their gorgeous daughter and how content they all looked. I’d stopped taking the pill not long after Doug and I were married, and the worry, the anxiety, had already firmly set in by then, because month after month, year after year, my period would turn up regular as clockwork, and I suppose deep down, I knew something was very wrong. So as we drove home I thought about the Lawson family and closed my eyes and wished and wished with all my heart that we’d be as happy as them one day too.
Despite how nice she was, it was still unusual for someone like me to strike up a friendship with someone like Rose. Even though we weren’t very far apart in age, we were poles apart in terms of class and education. But in fact, six months after that meeting in Sainsbury’s we did become friends, because of a series of events that led us to forming an unusual sort of bond. I suppose it was a case of luck, of being in the right place at the right time – or so it felt back then. Looking back of course, I’m not sure how ‘lucky’ our friendship really was, when you think about what went on to happen.
It began because I was temporarily placed on the maternity ward, due to a staff shortage. Of course, as a paediatric nurse I was well used to working amongst children, had learnt to shut my private longing away in a little box inside myself when dealing with my young patients. But the maternity ward was a different matter. The placement coincided with a brief but unsuccessful pregnancy that had ended in miscarriage. It was the first time I’d actually managed to get pregnant and so much excitement and relief and hope was wrapped up in that positive test result. Doug and I could barely contain ourselves, walking around with our hearts in our mouths, almost too nervous to breathe, praying that finally, finally, everything was going to be OK.
But a few weeks later I felt the first cramping pains. I tried to persuade myself it was nothing sinister, but then the headaches came, the faintness, and finally, as I knew it would, the spots of blood that grew heavier and heavier until there was no doubt that my baby was seeping away from me before it had barely had a chance to begin. I was devastated, absolutely inconsolable. Doug tried to keep positive: it was good news that I could at least get pregnant, he said, perhaps next time it would ‘stick’. He held me for hours as I sobbed, but it didn’t help, nothing did.
And then, by the cruellest twist of fate imaginable, there I was, two days later, placed on the maternity ward. I had to witness baby after baby being born into the world, had to continue as though the sight of each one didn’t feel like a knife to my heart, but there was one in particular that completely crushed me. Candice, she was called, a teenage drug addict, whose baby, like the two she’d had before it (or so I’d heard), was whisked away into care by social workers as soon as it was born, the mother stony-faced, unblinking, indifferent it seemed to me then – though I suppose now, looking back, that she wouldn’t have been, not really. It broke my heart, the unfairness of it all. I would have given everything I had to be that baby’s mum.