The Lies We Told(69)
Rose caught hold of my hand. ‘I’m begging you, Beth, please help us.’
Doug shook his head and I pulled my hand away from Rose’s. ‘Doug,’ I said, ‘can I talk to you in the kitchen?’
Once we’d shut the door behind us, Doug hissed, ‘There is no way we’re doing this, Beth.’
‘Doug,’ I began, but he cut me off.
‘The very idea is insane. We can’t take in someone else’s child! A woman died tonight, we should tell the police!’
We must have been in there for half an hour, arguing back and forth. I think I wore him down in the end. ‘It’s one night,’ I promised him. ‘Just one night. Let the baby have a good night’s sleep in peace and we’ll decide what to do in the morning. Please, Doug,’ I said. ‘Please.’ I think he knew that there would be no talking me out of it and eventually, reluctantly, he agreed. ‘One night,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’
We went back to the living room. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘We’ll look after her tonight.’ I could hardly look at Oliver as he thanked us, his eyes full of shame and gratitude.
After they had left, Doug and I took care of Lana. We fed her, changed her, and made her a makeshift bed next to ours. She was such a good little soul; so peaceful and quiet. I did with her what I’d never allowed myself to do with any of the babies I’d looked after in the hospital: I closed my eyes and held her to me and let myself pretend she was mine. She seemed to fit in the crook of my neck so perfectly, it felt so right to have her snuggled against me.
When she was sleeping peacefully, I took a deep breath and steeled myself to talk to Doug. ‘I know the circumstances are awful,’ I began cautiously, whispering in the darkness, ‘but this, surely, is the answer to our prayers. You heard Rose, she’ll get us the necessary paperwork so we can get a birth certificate saying she’s ours. They’ll think Lana died with her mother, that her body was lost at sea. No one need ever know.’
He kept repeating the same thing, saying it was morally wrong, that we could get into terrible trouble. I thought I’d never change his mind. But when Lana woke a few hours later in the middle of the night, I passed her to him while I went to make up her milk. When I came back, he was sitting on the end of the bed holding her, an expression on his face as he gazed down at her that I’d never seen before. It was a scene I’d imagined so many times throughout those endless years and years of hope and disappointment, and I felt a lump lodge itself in my throat. I sat down next to him and silently passed him the bottle.
‘I was thinking,’ he murmured as we watched her drink. ‘What if you’re right? What if this is our only chance? If we never did manage to have our own, or for some reason couldn’t adopt. What then?’ He looked at me. ‘You’d never forgive me, would you?’ He sighed and added, ‘I don’t think I’d ever forgive myself.’
I closed my eyes. Could this be true? Could we really be about to do this? Careful not to disturb Lana, I put my arms around him. We both watched as she fell asleep again, her little head with its beautiful thick dark hair on his chest. Our daughter. I felt overcome with happiness.
The days following our decision were utterly surreal. The practicalities of adjusting to new parenthood, the fear of what would happen if we were discovered, the guilt we felt about her real family, was interspersed with the pure joy of having Lana so suddenly and unexpectedly in our lives. She was absolutely perfect. We decided to call her Hannah after my grandmother, and that was when it began to feel as though she was really and forever ours. But there was a huge amount of fear and anxiety too. We had to keep her existence secret from the world while we worked out how to pass her off as our own. Luckily, the house we lived in then was down a lane, set slightly apart from our neighbours, so there was nobody to hear her when she cried. We would take it in turns to drive to a town far away from our village to buy her formula and nappies.
We knew we had to come up with a plan. I thought if we were going to commit to such a huge lie, then it had to be to everyone – to all our friends and family – and we would have to move away from the Suffolk village we’d lived in all our lives. I resigned from my job at the hospital. Doug had wanted for some time to expand his building business, so he applied for a loan, and the idea was to move from the area and start again. We began researching villages and areas in Cambridgeshire, the next county, miles away from our village, where no one would know us.
Two weeks after Hannah came to us, I went to the local pub to have a drink with friends, and broke the news that Doug and I had decided to split up. In the shocked silence I told them that I was going away for a while to stay with a friend from the hospital while I worked out what to do. I knew the gossip would spread like wildfire. Later that night, I took Hannah, drove to a town near the Cambridgeshire village we’d chosen to move to, and stayed in a hotel while I looked for a house to rent. Doug gave notice to our landlord and a month later, came and joined us.
My parents had moved to the Lake District after I had married Doug, so the fabrications we had to weave, though difficult, were not impossible. When I announced my ‘pregnancy’ to them I said that, because of my previous miscarriages, we’d waited four months before telling them. Later we said that as the baby had arrived a month early she’d had to spend several weeks in the hospital’s neo-natal intensive care unit – a place where only the child’s parents are allowed to visit. Finally, citing problems with the move and so on, we were able to put off their first visit for a further couple of months. Hannah was a naturally very small baby, so when my parents did eventually get to meet their grandchild they didn’t guess that she was in fact far older than we said. It was very difficult – I hated lying to them, but what else could I do? Doug’s own mother had died some years earlier and his father, who lived in Devon, was not the type to be much interested in newborns, so that at least was easier.