The Lies We Told(70)

As far as local friends were concerned I told them that Doug and I had got back together after our split when we’d found out I was pregnant, and we were now living happily together in Cambridgeshire. Yes, I hurt some feelings, burnt some bridges, but, well, it was a small price to pay.

In the event, everything seemed to go our way. I took that as a sign it was meant to be. I told myself, although it hadn’t happened in the best of circumstances, that wasn’t our fault. We’d had nothing to do with Nadia’s death and Lana would have had to have been adopted by someone eventually, so why not us, who had waited for so long and so desperately for her? I guess I made myself not think about Hannah’s real-life family, the grandparents who were mourning both her and Nadia’s loss. I read the newspaper reports about Nadia’s suicide and put them away, out of sight, locking my guilt firmly away as I did so.

So, suddenly there we were: new house, new village, new daughter, new life. God, I was so happy. I thought I had it all, that my dreams had come true at last. Soon it felt as though we truly were just an ordinary, natural family. Doug was as besotted with her as I was and took to fatherhood right away, doing his fair share of nappies and night feeds, cuddling and playing with her as often as he could. He was so proud of her; we both were.

And later, when the small, niggling doubts crept in, I ignored them at first, telling myself that it was nothing, that I was imagining things. Occasionally, when I couldn’t sleep at night and the worry that something wasn’t quite right with Hannah loomed larger, I would torture myself, wondering if her antipathy towards me was because she wasn’t really mine; that she sensed I wasn’t her real mother, or even that I was imagining things because of the guilt I still felt at the dreadful way she’d come into our lives, at all the lies we’d colluded in. But always, at least in the beginning, I’d push the doubts from my mind, because I wanted so badly for it all, at last, to be completely perfect for Doug and me.





27


Suffolk, 2017

From the hallway, the clock above the stairs struck one. The fire had long since died out; the coldness that seeped into the corners of the room made Clara shiver inside her thin jumper. They were all of them seated now: Clara and Mac on the large and uncomfortable chesterfield, Rose and Oliver in the two creaking armchairs. Clemmy lay on the floor at their feet, emitting the occasional uneasy grumble, her eyebrows shooting up unhappily towards first one, then the other of her owners. Only Tom still stood, his back to the window, listening to his mother speak. He continued to drink steadily, pouring again and again from the bottle of wine, watching Rose grimly from above his glass.

‘We cut all ties with Beth and Doug,’ Rose went on. ‘We all agreed it would be better that way,’ her voice rose imploringly as she looked from one to the other of their faces. ‘We got on with our lives, what else could we do? The police had rightly concluded Nadia’s death was suicide, assuming she’d died alone, and that … that … Lana had been lost to sea.’ She looked at Tom. ‘And later, when first you, then your brother came along, we just wanted to put the whole dreadful business behind us.’ She paused, seeming to shrink inside herself as she said in a low, fearful voice, ‘It wasn’t until seven years later that Beth suddenly contacted me out of the blue.’

‘What did she want?’ Clara asked.

‘She was hysterical, saying she wanted to go to the police, that we needed to confess everything. It was a horrible shock, as you can imagine, I had no idea why she was so upset. I tried to get her to calm down, but she became so worked up that in the end I agreed to meet her. When I got there she was still in a state, saying Hannah, as they’d named Lana, had become violent, that she was frightened of her. She said the child had started a fire at her babysitter’s, had hurt her son, that her marriage was falling apart because of it all. She was convinced Hannah was mentally ill – that she’d inherited her mother’s psychiatric issues and that now she – Beth – was somehow being punished for deceiving everyone the way we did. I tried to reason with her but she was beside herself, saying she wanted to go to the police, that she couldn’t stand the guilt any more and wanted to confess that they’d taken the child illegally. She kept talking about how Nadia had died, how wrong it had been to pass Hannah off as their own. Most of all, she believed Hannah needed professional help, that doctors would need her real medical history. The more I tried to talk her out of it, the more upset she became. I decided the best thing for me to do was to leave. And I told her not to contact me again.’

There was complete silence. Clara looked across the room to Oliver, who was still slumped in a chair, his head in his hands as his wife talked.

‘I thought,’ Rose continued, ‘or rather I hoped very much that would be an end to it. But it wasn’t, of course.’ She looked up and met Clara’s eye. ‘Because Hannah had been there all along, in the kitchen where we were talking, was hiding in the next room, listening to our conversation. She had heard everything Beth and I said. She was seven years old and she knew everything – who her real parents were, how her mother had died. Everything.’

Clara put her hand to her mouth. ‘Oh my God, that poor kid.’

Rose glanced at her with the smallest flicker of confusion, almost, Clara thought, as if Hannah’s suffering hadn’t occurred to her in all of this. ‘I didn’t find out for many years that Hannah had overheard us, not until I saw Beth again,’ she went on, ‘and by then it was far too late. In the meantime she grew up, becoming more and more disturbed, fixated on what she’d learned. She became obsessed with Oliver and me, with all of us – her “real” family as she thought of us. She knew the hospital Beth used to work in and tracked me down there. After a while she began to skip school, getting the train over here and following Oliver to work, or standing outside the children’s school, becoming more and more resentful.’ She turned to Tom. ‘She saw you kids as having the perfect life, the life that she should be living.’