Chapter 12
12
Nadia sat on the edge of her bed. The sun had only just come up; it was early. She had a day off today, prearranged, thinking she’d be relaxing in a beautiful hotel with her colleagues, congratulating themselves on the amount they’d managed to raise for the air ambulance charity last night. But instead she was stewing, she was worried, she was all over the place.
Her sister Monica, the sister she’d never told anyone about, was here in England.
And so was Archie.
And more confusingly, Monica was here looking for her, after all this time.
None of it made sense right now.
And to have this all blow up in her face here, in Dorset, in her safe place where nobody knew hardly anything about her background, made it so much worse.
She padded across the bedroom carpet, navigated her way past her overnight bag with things untidily scattered around it from last night as she’d tried to find her washbag and toothbrush when she arrived home.
She’d considered staying at the country house after Archie and his son left, once they’d talked, but she’d made the snap decision to leave when she saw the minibus pull up outside nice and early for pickup. She saw it as her escape, a way to run away from the drama and the inevitable questions from everyone else about who the mystery man was, never mind what Hudson had to be thinking after Archie showed up. She’d run across the gravel parking area to the minibus, taking the driver by surprise given he was here more than an hour before the party would come to its close. He confirmed there was a spare seat for the journey back to Whistlestop River and so Nadia had run back into the beautiful venue, gone upstairs, got her things together and run back outside under the cover of darkness to hide on the minibus, away from prying eyes. The driver had been happy for her to stay onboard; perhaps he’d picked up on her distress and felt sorry for her. Others on the minibus had been in fine spirits when they finally left over an hour later but Nadia gave the odd smile and then settled with her head against the window, watching the streetlamps flash on by, passing cars, the blackness of the unknown outside. They could’ve been anywhere; the only scenery she recognised was as the bus slowed and pulled into Whistlestop River and began the rounds of dropping people at their doors.
She ran her fingers through her hair as she went into her bathroom. It had been tightly ringleted last night but those ringlets had loosened overnight, and given up by now. She switched the water on in the shower. It always took a couple of minutes to come through hot rather than tepid and she held her hand beneath the jets until it obliged. It was almost robotic the way she climbed in and stood letting the water soak through her hair, down her face, over her skin.
As she lathered up her shampoo, she thought about Hudson: the way they’d got closer last night, how every touch from him sent a zing right through her. She remembered the admission that he had split up with his wife, the hope she’d felt that this might be the start of something between them. And then she remembered the look on his face when she told him she had to talk to Archie. It was obvious there was a history there with this man who’d shown up at the fundraiser but she hadn’t had any choice but to deal with it straight away. And it was all too much to explain to Hudson at a party where she’d been taken by surprise. Hudson didn’t even know she’d been pregnant before, twice, never mind that this stranger to him had been the father of her first baby nor that he was now married to her sister, the sister she’d never confessed to having. Nadia had walked away from Monica, the only close family she had, two decades ago and hadn’t looked back.
The memory of talking to Archie bashed at the corners of her conscience as she lathered up her shower gel.
When Nadia had asked Hudson for some time with Archie last night, she’d needed it but she hadn’t wanted it. What she’d wanted was to tell Archie to go away, to leave her to her own life, but when she looked into the eyes of the little boy with the same pale complexion and warm brown eyes as her sister Monica, she’d barely been able to speak. There was no doubt about it, the little boy was her nephew, and she’d never even known he existed. Prior to Archie showing up, she’d told herself over the years that perhaps her sister and Archie’s relationship had fizzled out, but with this little boy standing right in front of her now, the wedding band on Archie’s ring finger, it seemed they were in it for keeps.
‘Daddy, I’m bored,’ the child beside Archie had moaned as they stood outside the marquee.
Archie set down the rucksack from his back and pulled out an iPad. ‘I don’t usually let him have much time on this but it’ll give us a chance to talk,’ he explained to Nadia as if he had to answer to her in some way. Perhaps he did, but not for that.
‘I’m working. Showing up here is?—’
‘I know it’s sudden, but please.’ He spoke in a lower voice so his son wouldn’t hear. ‘I really didn’t have any other choice but to do this.’
‘There’s always a choice.’ Her heart thumped double time. ‘Why are you here? And how did you know who I worked for, where I’d be tonight?’
‘Excuse me…’ A woman behind Nadia bumped into her and apologised. ‘The ground is a little uneven.’
Nadia acted as though this was a completely ordinary encounter and hadn’t almost knocked her off her feet with shock. ‘Careful, it’s worse out here; you don’t want to fall in your heels and twist your ankle.’
‘At least I know there are plenty of medics,’ the woman chortled before she and her friend headed across the grass and around the house, presumably to the car park.
‘I really need to talk to you,’ Archie prompted as Nadia’s smile slowly faded away again.
Nadia briefly looked behind her into the marquee, expecting to see Hudson hovering somewhere. But he wasn’t. All she could make out was a sea of people enjoying themselves, coming together on what was supposed to be an evening of celebration.
‘Please, Nadia. Do you really think I’d show up if this wasn’t important?’
He had a hint of a Swiss accent but, like her and Monica, he was raised by British parents who had lived in an area with expats, he’d attended an international school much like the girls, and so you’d never really be able to pick where he was from.
‘Where’s Monica? Is she with you?’
His gaze flitted to his son, who was preoccupied with the iPad already even though they were standing around.
‘Can we talk properly?’ he urged. ‘There’s a bench, over there at the edge of the lawn.’
Nadia said nothing, but her feet took her in the direction he’d indicated across the grass just about visible in the moonlight and with the lights streaming from inside the marquee.
‘This is Giles, by the way,’ Archie said as they made their way over. ‘Say hello, Giles.’
The little boy obliged but only gave her a cursory glance because he was far more interested in technology than in some random woman he’d just met. Nadia got the impression Giles had no idea that they were related.
With Giles at one end of the bench, Archie slid closer to Nadia. It felt odd to sit in such close proximity after all this time.
Her shock gave way to fury. ‘Why are you even here?’
He checked Giles was engrossed and turned his body slightly, leaned a little more in Nadia’s direction. ‘Monica is missing.’
‘What do you mean she’s missing?’
‘She came here to the UK; she came to Dorset – to find you.’
‘But you just said she’s missing.’
‘I know she’s in England but I’ve no idea exactly where.’ He added some context – he’d noticed her passport missing, found an email from Eurostar, put two and two together and come up with five, it seemed.
‘I haven’t seen or heard from her.’
‘But she’ll be looking for you, Nadia. And she’ll be doing it pretty blindly. She wouldn’t have much to go on – you broke off all contact and made it impossible, so she came here without direction, with no firm plans of a place to go.’
‘So this is my fault?’
‘I didn’t say that. Please, lower your voice.’ He checked Giles was still engrossed and he was. ‘Giles knows his mum is here; so far, I’ve told him we’re having a bit of a holiday before we see her.’
‘You still haven’t said how you knew where I was.’
‘I saw you on the television: the appeal. I went to the airbase, was told you were at a fundraiser. It wasn’t hard to work out from there; the posters are all over town.’
She looked over at Giles again. ‘Does he know who I am?’
‘He thinks you’re an old friend.’ His brow furrowed. ‘You were once upon a time. You were more than that.’
‘Well, things got ruined, didn’t they?’
He didn’t respond but instead said quietly, ‘I can’t lie to my son forever, but I was hoping we’d find her before I had to. I was hoping we’d find her before?—’
‘Don’t you have an app or something on your phone to track her? That’s what I’d do.’ She couldn’t listen to any more. ‘I have to get back to this event; this is work, this is important.’
‘So is this. Monica is pregnant again.’
‘Congratulations,’ she said flatly.
‘Nadia, it wasn’t only that I saw you on the television that prompted me to come to see you; it was the fact that a baby had been abandoned at the airbase.’
Her pulse quickened and it felt like all the oxygen around them had suddenly dropped. It was a moment before she managed to ask him, ‘How pregnant?’
‘Thirty-five weeks when she came here, she’d be thirty-eight weeks almost by now.’
Nadia’s emotions whirled up inside of her, she felt nauseous, she wanted to run away and yet she knew she couldn’t. The timing… it could fit, couldn’t it?
‘Can I get you something – a glass of water?’ Archie asked.
She looked at him. She felt like he’d asked her the most stupid question in the world.
Lena might well be Monica’s baby, that was what he was saying, and nothing, certainly not a glass of water, was going to do anything to help her get her head around that.
‘Monica should’ve been back in Switzerland by now. It was a risk travelling so close to her due date. She’s not in a good place, mentally. It’s not a rational thing to do, come over to look for someone when you’ve no idea where they are, not really, leaving her child behind, her husband, her life.’ He was rambling and his voice shook. ‘I don’t know what to do, where she is, whether this baby you found…’
‘So you think that Monica came to England, had a baby, somehow discovered where I worked and left it for me, is that it?’ She began to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. ‘Is that supposed to make up for what she did? I lost a baby with you, things with us ended, she swooped in and took you for herself and now she has a sudden attack of conscience? Wants to give me a baby to make up for it?’
‘Nadia—’
‘No!’ The sound of merriment floated out of the marquee and taunted her as the evening cooled and the air made her shiver as her fury at the unjustness of the past turned to tears threatening to spill.
‘Is it really that far-fetched that she’s had the baby and left it because she’s not in her right mind?’ Archie asked.
‘Yes!’
‘You didn’t hear the way she’s been talking about you lately: the longing to make contact, the regret, not to mention the guilt. She was always sorry for what she did. So was I. But you didn’t want to hear it.’
‘Damn right I didn’t.’
‘She was going on and on about not having you around when Giles was born, how she wished you could have been, how she didn’t want our second baby to miss out on family. I’ve not seen her this bad in years. When I got to England, I phoned round all the hospitals to find out whether she’d ended up at any of them and that might be why she hadn’t got in touch but I found nothing to help me. I then began to wonder whether, if her head is in a really bad place, she may not have given her real name at a hospital. And then today, Giles put the television on and the appeal was showing and I saw you.’ He smiled. ‘I saw you and felt like these twenty years faded away.’
‘They haven’t faded, Archie; I’ve made a new life.’
‘Without me, without your sister.’
‘I had to. We were together, you and I, before we lost the baby. I thought we could make a go of things and even though we split up, despite the fact we’d decided we worked better as friends, it didn’t make it easier when my sister took you for herself.’
He let the moment settle before he asked, ‘Have they any clues as to who left the baby?’
‘In the few hours since you saw the television appeal again today?’ She sounded patronising but this was all so much to cope with. ‘No, Archie, they haven’t.’
Lena couldn’t be her sister’s baby, could she?
No, it was ridiculous.
She pushed away the very real feeling of what it had been like to hold Lena, to feel the weight of her in her arms, the softness of her hair against her cheek, the way the baby had looked up at her as she took the bottle.
Had it been her own past that had made her feel an attachment? Or was Lena a part of their family?
The appeal had given her away. She hadn’t given it a moment’s thought. She’d never been on social media with her maiden name, so her sister, if she’d ever been looking, wouldn’t have found it easy to trace her. Her romance with Jock Sutton had happened so quickly and not under the gaze of her sister that Monica wouldn’t have known much about him, let alone how to find him. Nadia had met Jock in Switzerland shortly after her mother died from a sudden stroke. He was there for a conference and extended holiday and a few weeks later she packed her bags to return to England with him. To start over. She wondered sometimes whether having a different surname, no longer being Nadia Fischer, had pushed her into thinking marriage was a good idea, a way to disappear into thin air and leave all the hurt behind.
Her urge to get away from Archie and Monica, even though she wasn’t even here, felt as strong now as it had been back then when she left Switzerland. ‘Archie, I’m sorry you had a wasted journey coming here this evening, but I haven’t heard anything from Monica. I suggest you call the police if you think the baby is yours. I can’t help you.’
Monica had taken so much from her over time, including Archie, and with issues between the sisters that felt insurmountable, the clean break was the only thing that had kept Nadia sane. Nadia had left Switzerland twenty years ago with Jock, ten years her senior, and come to Dorset where he lived and worked as a surgeon. She’d found a job as a nurse at the same hospital but things hadn’t been good for very long. The marriage had been short-lived, a mistake in the first place which ended with an unplanned pregnancy that almost took her life. They’d called it quits and it was soon after their separation that Nadia found a different family, with The Skylarks.
She began to walk away. The only thing to stop her was Giles running over and tugging at her hand. ‘Am I allowed to run around the big tent?’
The skin-on-skin contact was something she felt hard to ignore.
But she couldn’t get attached. She wouldn’t.
‘I want to stretch my legs,’ he said. ‘Dad is always telling me to do that.’
She felt the defences she’d put up melt away. ‘I’m afraid it’s not safe to run around, not for you or anyone else who might come outside, especially in the dark.’
‘How do you know my daddy?’
Talk about a segue.
Archie had walked over too and all three of them stood beneath the moonlight, halfway between the bench and the party that carried on around them. ‘It’s a long story, Giles,’ he said.
Nadia felt sorry for this little boy, this interesting, energetic nephew. And she felt another remarkable sense of loss when he looked up at her with innocent eyes.
She wasn’t sure what made her do it. If Giles hadn’t stopped her, she’d have been back in the marquee by now.
She bobbed down to the little boy’s level. ‘Your mummy is actually my sister.’
His eyes widened. And then his face fell. ‘But I’ve never seen you. Is that because you live here? It’s a long way on the train.’
‘Yes, it is a long way.’ It was all she had for now.
‘Giles, how about we get going, leave this lady… Nadia in peace.’ Whether Archie appreciated her divulging her identity or not, she couldn’t tell.
‘I haven’t stretched my legs,’ Giles pointed out. ‘You said when we got out of the car that I could.’
‘We’ll go to the beach tomorrow.’
Nadia had been so busy feeling the past twenty years catching up on her that she hadn’t spotted the exhaustion on Archie’s face until now.
‘Can I practise my forward rolls?’ Giles wasn’t asking his dad this time; he was asking Nadia. ‘Is that allowed here?’
‘I’m sure that would be fine, just away from the entrance to the marquee.’
‘Okay.’ He almost took off but paused. ‘Will there be doggy do-dos?’
Archie interrupted. ‘This seems a pretty high-class establishment and I haven’t seen any dogs around.’
Giles started practising. One roll after another, on he went.
‘I don’t know where he gets his energy,’ said Archie. ‘The last few days I’ve been dragging him around so much, we’ve been in the car a lot, he’s done well not to moan more than he has.’
‘How old is he?’
‘He’s four.’
Nadia couldn’t watch the child any more, even though her gaze was drawn to him: to his little smile, the way his eyes had shone with enthusiasm at the thought of being allowed to be out here at night and roll across a lawn that wasn’t his.
‘Archie, I really have to go. I hope you find Monica, I really do.’
His calm demeanour took leave. ‘Nadia, this isn’t just Monica taking a holiday; this is Monica travelling to another country, coming here and not letting me know exactly where she is, Monica not checking in every day with her husband and her son who she adores. This is Monica putting herself and our baby at risk. Monica who might well have left our baby at your airbase. I mean, it’s possible, isn’t it?’
She couldn’t deny it. It sounded ridiculous, and yet…
But then she thought about Monica. Needy and demanding Monica with the desire to be the centre of attention; it had always been her way. And Nadia had never been able to forget it either – Monica struggled at school, Monica got away with rudeness and wild behaviour, Monica did what she wanted and she was rarely pulled into line. All her actions, her decisions, they took centre stage and nobody else really got a look in, least of all Nadia. Monica’s selfishness had taken time from Nadia and their mother; it had cost her Archie. Her best friend.
‘Monica is a grown woman,’ she told Archie firmly. She couldn’t let this destroy everything she’d built up here: her stability, her sense of belonging, something that was hers and hers alone. ‘This seems like another drama surrounding my sister, so what’s new?’ She sounded so harsh, so unlike herself. She felt like a teenager all over again, but for so many years, she hadn’t had to deal with Monica and she wished she didn’t have to now either. ‘Call the police, Archie. Let them deal with it.’
‘You don’t even care?’ He hurled the question at her when she turned her back on him.
She stopped in her tracks and spun round to face him. ‘How can you even throw that at me? I always cared, I cared for years, and it didn’t get me much in return.’
Desperation laced a voice that shook. ‘She’s not in a good place, emotionally.’
‘She never was!’ Luckily, Giles was still giggling so didn’t respond to the raising of her voice. He’d moved on from forward rolls to doing what looked like an attempt at the long jump even though he had no sandpit.
‘This is bad, Nadia. I wouldn’t have shown up otherwise. Don’t you think we both know that you want nothing to do with us? It almost broke Monica when you left. Your parents were both gone and you left without looking back.’
‘Broke her ? Over the years, she almost broke me , Archie. And so did you.’
‘I know things happened between us all, things we might like to go back and change if we had the power to do that. But believe me, I wouldn’t be here if this was a silly drama. She’s changed, a lot. She’s not that same person. And I really am worried about her. About my baby.’
She shivered, rubbed the tops of her arms and rejected his offer of his jacket. She didn’t want anything from him, not any more.
‘Did you know she came to England to look for you once before?’ he asked.
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘She did. She had no idea where to start but she knew Jock was from Dorset. She took off not so long after you left. She didn’t want to be with me; she knew she’d hurt you by getting together with me. She came to find you; she wanted to make amends. She was over here for eight weeks, scoured the county by the sounds of it – the details of where she’d been didn’t come out for a long time. When she came back to Switzerland, she wouldn’t even talk to me. She pushed me away at first; she wouldn’t let me or anyone else help. I thought…’ His voice caught. ‘I thought she might do something really stupid. I thought she was going to take her own life.’
‘You’re saying that to shock me.’ Was his expression forced or was he telling the truth?
‘I promise you I’m not.’
She stood there, the evening warm enough that she shouldn’t be shivering and yet she was.
‘Can we at least exchange numbers, in case either of us gets news? Give me that, please, Nadia.’
She reluctantly put his number into her phone and he gave his in return.
‘You know, she might not even be here in Dorset. She could be anywhere; she could’ve gone to London – she always talked about the big smoke and the theatres and the excitement. Maybe you should try there if you don’t have any luck with the police. Perhaps she’s travelled home by now; you could check with a neighbour.’ And before she walked away, she added, ‘Wherever she is, I hope you find her and that she and the baby are safe.’
Somehow, her legs had carried her back into the marquee, back to the music, the laughter, the fun, the celebrations and coming together. And never had she felt quite so alone as she bypassed everyone to slip out and through the front door of the country house.
In the shower, after she recalled the events and conversation from last night, Nadia still couldn’t believe any of it. The water still running, she leaned her forehead against the cool tiles. Monica. Archie. Lena. It was all too much.
She wanted to hear from Archie to know her sister was safe and yet at the same time, she never wanted to hear from him ever again.
She wanted all of this to go away.
But it wasn’t going to, was it?