A Proper Family Christmas (18 page)

‘And this is you,’ said Jacqui. She placed a Polaroid photograph so old and faded it was almost blank on the table next to Annabel. ‘This is the only picture I had of you. One of the nurses at the mother and baby home took it for me. You’d just had a bath. Look at that little tuft of hair.’

The photograph had obviously been taken out and looked at a thousand times. It was creased and dirty. One corner was all but ready to fall off.

Annabel picked the photo up and looked at it but it was Richard who said what she was thinking.

‘Izzy had a tuft of hair just like that,’ he said. ‘It stuck up like the hair on one of those troll dolls. We could never get it to lie down flat.’

‘Runs in the family,’ said Dave.

Annabel felt tears pricking her eyes.

The only photographs Annabel had with her were on her iPhone and there was nothing on there that went anywhere near as far back as the photographs Jacqui had brought along. Annabel had felt uncomfortable with the idea of showing the Bensons photographs from her childhood with the Cartwrights. She wanted that piece of her to be private from them still, partly out of respect for Sarah and partly to protect herself. But Richard had insisted that they had to show Jacqui and Dave a photograph of Izzy at least and then they could tell the story of the recent weeks and, with luck, the Bensons would draw conclusions as to how they might help without Annabel and Richard having to be explicit. It was worth a try.

‘I took this photograph of Izzy about two weeks ago,’ said Annabel, handing her iPhone to Jacqui. Jacqui smiled broadly as she reached out for the phone. As soon as she saw the photograph, however, her expression changed, just as Annabel had known it would.

‘She’s …’

‘She was in hospital, yes.’

‘What happened?’

‘She was taken ill at a festival. We think she must have eaten something poisonous.’

Richard half-frowned at Annabel as she trotted out the lie, though it was probably a lie he would have told too.

‘She had a violent reaction to it which caused her to have kidney failure.’

Jacqui put her hand across her mouth.

‘She’s at home now but she’s still on dialysis. She’ll have to do that every night until she gets a kidney transplant. We’ve got the equipment in the house.’

‘Oh my goodness!’

‘Her consultant is pleased with her progress and she’s much better now she’s at home but, of course, the sooner the transplant can happen the better.’

‘Whatever must she have eaten?’ Jacqui mused.

‘The toxicology tests were inconclusive, but it doesn’t matter,’ said Richard. ‘The outcome is what it is. It’s just the most awful bad luck.’

‘It’s terrible,’ said Jacqui. But she didn’t make the next logical, to Annabel, step. And she wouldn’t for the remaining time they were at the hotel that day. Eventually Annabel could bear it no longer. She said that they needed to leave. To get back home for Izzy.

‘But we’ll see you again?’ Jacqui sounded desperate, like a teenage girl at the end of a date she’d had such high hopes for.

‘Of course,’ said Richard. ‘Of course.’

While the question had yet to be asked …

Outside, Annabel sank into the car seat, thankful that the Bensons were parked on the other side of the hotel so there could be no protracted goodbyes.

‘Thank God that’s over,’ she said.

Richard took her hand.

‘They seemed like nice people,’ he said. ‘Decent, ordinary, kindly. I’m ninety-nine per cent sure they’ll agree to help us. A hundred per cent, actually. We just have to find the right moment to ask.’

Annabel cried. ‘Why didn’t they just guess what we wanted?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps it will cross their minds later. It was a weird moment for everyone. And not everyone knows that live donation is even possible.’

‘Rubbish. Everyone knows you don’t have to be dead to give a kidney. Why do I have to be related to the only pair of thickos in the world who don’t?’

‘Annabel, please. Try to be open-minded about them. I understand this isn’t just about Izzy. You’re bound to be feeling a bit shell-shocked.’

‘This is daft. I’m a grown woman. Why did I feel like a little girl in there? Why did I feel so angry with them? I hated them. I wanted to pick up the teapot and pour it all over Jacqui’s head. What was she wearing? She was dressed like she was going to a wedding, for heaven’s sake. I don’t want them to be part of my life.’

But they would have to be until they helped Izzy or until the Buchanans knew for sure that they couldn’t.

Jacqui and Dave drove back to Coventry in a state of some shock. When they got to the house, Jacqui told Dave she didn’t think she was in a fit state to face her other daughters yet, so they sat in the car, until Jack pressed his face against the window and stared out at them. Once they’d been rumbled, they had to go in.

‘What was she like?’ everyone wanted to know.

‘Does she play cricket?’ asked Jack.

Jacqui ruffled Jack’s hair. ‘I didn’t have a chance to ask, love.’

‘Did she seem like one of us?’ Sophie asked.

‘She was very nice,’ said Jacqui.

‘They came in a Porsche,’ said Dave.

‘Bloody hell. Definitely not one of us, then,’ said Ronnie.

‘But she looked like you,’ Jacqui told Ronnie then.

‘Only thinner?’

‘Not much. But she’s got the same eyes. And when she smiles, she looks a bit like Chelsea. And when she frowns, you can see a bit of Granddad Bill.’

‘Poor woman,’ Chelsea laughed.

‘Her voice is dead posh. She went to a private school. And then to Oxford.’

‘I’ve been to Oxford,’ said Jack, eager to join in.

‘Not like your new auntie did,’ said Ronnie.

‘We went on the train,’ Jack remembered. ‘Did she go in a car?’

‘Go and see if Granddad Bill wants a cup of tea,’ Ronnie told her son. ‘We need to talk seriously to Grandma and Gramps.’

The adult Bensons and Sophie gathered round the kitchen table, scene of so many big discussions, such as what Ronnie would do when she got pregnant.

‘It was her house we went to in Little Bissingden that day, Ronnie. You were right.’

‘Did she recognise you from there?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Don’t you think it’s bizarre that we walked around their house and had no idea?’

‘It’s quite a coincidence,’ said Chelsea. ‘But I suppose it was the wrong context.’

‘And Annabel was very busy that day. There were at least twenty other people with us,’ Jacqui said in mitigation. ‘Anyway, they haven’t lived there long. They used to live in South Kensington.’

Chelsea and Ronnie already knew all this, of course, from their Google searches, but they pretended it was all new information.

‘They still keep a flat in town for when Richard has to work late. They’ve got a dog called Leander. A black Labrador.’

‘What about their daughter? She’s the same age as Sophie,’ Ronnie said.

‘Just a little older,’ said Jacqui. ‘Dave, you tell them, will you? I don’t think I can.’

Dave explained the full story, including Izzy’s plight.

‘Wow,’ said Sophie, remembering the girl in the big house. The one who had been so full of herself? So privileged. ‘She needs to have a kidney transplant.’

‘She could be waiting a long time.’

‘Just goes to show,’ said Ronnie with an unfortunate hint of smugness in her voice. ‘Money can’t buy you happiness.’

‘Don’t,’ said Chelsea. ‘She’s just a kid … Are you seeing them again, Mum? Will you get to meet Izzy?’

‘I hope so,’ said Jacqui. ‘I just wish I thought Daisy liked us more.’

‘It might be a good start to call her Annabel,’ Ronnie observed.

Just then the kitchen door crashed open. It was Jack and Granddad Bill. In the electric wheelchair.

Jack was waving one arm ahead of him. ‘Exterminate! Exterminate!’ he said in his best Dalek voice.

‘Mind the paintwork!’ cried Jacqui as Jack steered Granddad Bill’s chair into the doorframe. Jack jerked the chair forwards, crashing into a kitchen cabinet. Then backwards into a radiator. Then forwards again into Chelsea’s chair. There was much shouting and Granddad Bill let out an enormous fart in the excitement. Jack jumped clear of Bill’s lap and rolled on the floor.

‘I need my gas mask!’ he cried.

Granddad Bill had given Jack his old World War Two gas mask the previous Christmas. It was among Jack’s favourite things.

‘Stand up, young man,’ Bill told him. ‘This is nothing compared to the mustard gas they faced in the trenches.’

Jack stood up and staggered around the kitchen table, hamming it up for his audience. Granddad Bill forced out another fart for comedy’s sake.

Sophie put her head in her hands.

‘I can’t wait until Annabel meets those two,’ she said.

Unable to sleep again between her churning thoughts and the baby backflipping inside her, Annabel got out of bed and wandered down to the kitchen. There she looked through the album of photos her adoptive parents, her
real
parents – Sarah and Humfrey – had put together to mark the occasion of her fortieth birthday. Annabel had dug the album out that morning, while she was still wondering whether or not she should show it to Jacqui and Dave. She decided she was glad that she hadn’t.

There were photographs in that album from every phase of Annabel’s life. There were photographs from a holiday in Tuscany the year of Annabel’s fortieth, on which Sarah and Humfrey had joined them. There were photos of Annabel with Izzy on her first day at secondary school. Izzy’s first day at primary school. Coming out of the hospital with Izzy in a car seat, looking tired and slightly disoriented but very happy all the same. Then, going backwards, there were wedding photos. Annabel wearing that dress that had seemed so fashionable at the time but now looked incredibly dated with its voluminous skirt and huge leg-of-mutton sleeves. Ghost of Princess Diana.

Going further back still, there was Annabel getting engaged to Richard. Annabel graduating. Annabel matriculating. Annabel revising for her A levels in the garden at her parents’ house. Picking up the Latin prize. A photograph from her fifteenth birthday. Her smile tight because she was wearing those train-track braces. Annabel’s own first day at secondary school. Primary school. Her first steps.

On the very first page of the album, there was Sarah standing on the steps of the beautiful Victorian house Annabel had grown up in, cradling a tiny baby in a white blanket.

‘That was the day we brought you home,’ Sarah had told her. That was the beginning.

But now Annabel knew what had gone on before. All that sordid unhappiness. The mother and baby home and the secret teenage pregnancy. It felt like it had happened to someone else but at the same time, it was as though that knowledge had blown away the foundations of who she really was. How could those few short weeks with Jacqui suddenly seem to overshadow all those happy years with Sarah and Humfrey?

Annabel sank into the sofa with her head in her hands. It was awful and she felt so angry. The anger wouldn’t abate no matter how hard she reasoned with herself.

She knew, logically, that all those years ago, when she was just a child herself, Jacqui had made a very brave and responsible decision with regard to Annabel’s future. But Annabel couldn’t make the thought stick. She couldn’t find compassion for overeager Jacqui or hopeless Dave. They were so different from anyone she knew.

She was sinking back into the lowest place she had ever been, where she felt utterly unlovable. Exactly the kind of child that you would want to give away.

And yet she did still have to deal with these people. She had to call them up and arrange to meet them again though she would rather have done anything else. And the baby that kicked and flickered inside her was their grandchild, no matter how she wished it wasn’t the case.

In the end, Richard did the honours. He called Jacqui and Dave from work the next day and invited them to Sunday lunch at the Great House the following weekend. He asked them to pass on the invitation to Ronnie and Chelsea and whomever they wanted to bring along with them. He couldn’t remember which of them had the partner and children and which of them lived in London and worked for a magazine.

Ronnie was delighted to accept the invitation. Chelsea agreed to come too. With Ronnie’s partner and kids and Granddad Bill, Annabel would be cooking for eleven.

Cooking for eleven was no mean feat. Such an undertaking meant that Annabel would have to start preparations on Saturday morning. Especially since there wasn’t a single member of the Benson family who didn’t have some unusual dietary requirement. From Bill’s false teeth to Ronnie’s refusal to eat anything remotely resembling a green vegetable.

‘Why don’t you order in from Domino’s and be done with it,’ suggested Izzy.

‘Because I want them to know that I have made an effort,’ said Annabel, as she wrestled with an enormous turkey. When it came to feeding eleven, a turkey was the perfect option. Especially since Sophie would not eat red meat for ecological reasons and Bill’s teeth couldn’t cope with it.

As she slammed the oven door shut – the turkey only just fitted – Annabel wished once again that Sarah were by her side. Annabel was not entirely fluent in the art of cooking. For her, it was more like a science project than the art natural cooks believed it to be. When Annabel cooked, the kitchen counters were covered in timers, thermometers, calculators and scales. She had never quite picked up Sarah’s ability to gently pierce a roasting bird with a skewer and recognise the moment when it was perfectly done. They’d invited Sarah to join them, of course, but she’d declined, claiming a prior engagement. Knowing her mother, Annabel suspected the truth was that she didn’t really feel ready to meet the Bensons. Annabel could understand that. She wasn’t sure that she was ready to see them again either.

Later that day, when Jacqui assured Annabel that she too had never been confident about roasting meat and always erred on the side of cremation, Annabel’s heart would sag a little at yet another indicator of their consanguinity.