The Winter Children (44 page)

Francesca sleeps for some of the taxi ride, exhausted by the events of the day. The rest of the time, she gazes out of the window at the motorway as they drive into the gathering night. She
wonders where Olivia is and how she is feeling. The devastation she witnessed on her face is something Francesca will never forget and she feels wretched for her part in it.

I have to make amends somehow. I don’t know how yet. But she has to know how sorry I am.

She thinks of Dan and whether Olivia will ever forgive him. But she knows that the greatest struggle will be with herself. She, Francesca, can hardly believe she spent so long obsessed with
something that never existed and never could. What will Olivia be thinking about her own failure to see through Dan’s lies? She will blame herself. She will want to punish herself for being
so stupid.

But she’s got the children. She’ll stay strong for them.

Francesca thinks about the beautiful babies. She feels the same core-deep love for them, and the need to be with them, but her lust for ownership has faded. Perhaps it was because they were
partly a means to bring her to Dan, and that’s over now. Or perhaps it was because today she knew the truth: they are Olivia’s children and nothing can change that.

Will I ever see them again?

She can’t bear the thought that she might not. But that isn’t a question for now. It must wait. Now, she has to get back to her old life and make sure that everything in life she
really values is still there. And to her surprise, she longs most of all for her husband.

When she gets to the flat, Walt greets her with a huge hug.

‘Frankie, you’re back.’ He stands back and smiles at her. ‘I thought that house had cast some sort of spell on you. I was beginning to regret ever buying it, if it meant I was going to lose my wife!’

She hugs him again, drawing strength from his solidness. She can rely on him. He’s not a dream; he is real and he loves her. ‘You haven’t lost me, I promise.’

‘Is all this madness over?’ he asks. ‘You’re ready to come home?’

‘It’s over,’ she says with a sigh. ‘I’m ready to come home.’

‘Good. Then let’s go out for dinner and you can tell me all about it.’

He takes her to their local brasserie, where the staff know them well and bring Walt’s favourite wine over immediately. Francesca begins to feel her tiredness lift. It’s a relief to
be out of the emotional turmoil that’s been her life for the last month.

Walt looks at her over the bread basket and lifts an eyebrow. ‘Now, Frankie. I get the feeling that something’s been going on. Is there anything you want to tell me?’

She hesitates. Once, she would have said airily, ‘No, nothing. Everything is fine,’ and she would have kept all her anger and sadness and secrets to herself. Her legendary self-control. But now she sees how pernicious it’s been, leading her into a fantasy world, making her do foolish things, and feel false emotions.

And look at what the lies and silence have done to Dan. His world is shattered. The pieces may never be put back together.

‘Well?’ Walt asks. ‘You’re awfully quiet.’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I’ve got a lot to tell you. But it all starts a very long time ago. Twenty years ago, in fact.’

‘Sounds like a long story,’ he says and smiles at her. ‘But we’ve got all the time you need.’

1960

In the lushness of spring, Julia sometimes wonders if the events of that winter’s night were all a dream. There is certainly a dreamlike quality to the way Alice simply vanished. The
night the baby was born was the last time she saw her. They went back to the school, Donnie carrying Alice in his arms to the door, and when they made it back to the dorm, they crept into their
beds, Julia wondering if they could ever really conceal the fact that Alice had given birth, then she slept soundly for the remaining few hours of the night. When she woke, Alice’s bed was
empty and Miss Allen said she had been taken ill and was in the san. It had snowed too hard for any cars to get through to them immediately but a few days later, she heard that Alice’s mother
and stepfather had come and taken her away.

She has not told anyone of the events of the night, but she is haunted by the memory of the birth and the dead baby. She becomes introverted and quiet, concentrating on her work and staying away
from the other girls in case they ever ask her what she knows about Alice. All she wants is to get to the end of the year, and back to her parents in Cairo, where she intends to beg to be taken away from Renniston forever.

Before then, though, there are the holidays to get through, and when everyone else leaves the school, she is sent to stay in a cottage on the grounds with a retired schoolmistress who looks
after girls not sent home. Julia is the only one this holiday, and she finds, to her surprise, that she treasures the peace and respite of the cottage. Miss Pelham is almost deaf and requires very
little of her. There are regular mealtimes and bed is strictly at eight thirty, but the rest of the time is her own.

She spends long hours wandering through the woods at the side of the school, or lying next to hedgerows reading and thinking, but she stays well away from the east side of the school. The
builders are still there. The pool is finished now and the gym in its last stages of construction. They will soon be gone, and then she can finally forget what happened.

But there is a reason why she wants them to stay.

She is lying on the soft green grass and staring up at the sky, watching clouds move slowly overhead, their titanic billows shifting and changing as the wind urges them on. Birds dart across her
vision, riding the air currents, swooping and diving. Are they swallows or swifts? Or neither?

‘Hello.’ The soft lilting voice comes gently into her consciousness, and a body lies down nearby.

She turns to him, her sight adjusting from the bright expanse above to the face close to hers. ‘Hello, Donnie.’ She smiles. ‘You came.’

She wondered if he would get away today. So far he’s managed most days, now that the work is winding down and a lot of the men have already returned to Ireland. But he’s been able to
wangle another week or two, clearing up.

He takes her face in his hands, gazing at her gently. ‘I didn’t want to miss you. You’re all I live for. You know that.’

She closes her eyes as his lips meet hers.
It’s the most wonderful feeling in the world: his soft, tender kiss, her mouth opening to his, the hot feelings that start in her depths and then engulf her whole body. From the first
moment he kissed her, she knew she was lost. It isn’t like Alice and Roy, though. It isn’t dirty and wrong. It’s beautiful and feels like the most natural, the most right thing in the world.

He stumbled on her by mistake right at the start of the holidays, when she was lying on her stomach in her favourite place, lost in a book, and he was out looking for rabbits. At first it was
awkward and uncomfortable. When they looked into each other’s eyes, they saw the memory of that night, the dead child and the box Donnie made for him. But it also brought them together. They
could only speak about it with each other.

‘So what happened to your girl?’ Donnie asked. ‘Is she all right? I haven’t seen her since.’

‘Nor have I. They took her away.’ Julia bit her lip. ‘I don’t know how to reach her and no one will tell me anything.’

‘Poor wee lass. I hope she gets better.’

Without ever agreeing it, they began to meet at the same time every day, talking idly about anything that crossed their minds. It took a while before she dared to ask about the baby and what had happened to him.

‘He’s safe enough,’ Donnie said. ‘I made sure of that. I didn’t want him dug up by foxes or anything, so I put him somewhere very safe where he’ll never be
disturbed. Better if you don’t know where.’

Julia’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Oh, Donnie. It was so sad. So terrible.’ She choked on a sob.

‘Hey! There, there, it is sad. Children are easily lost. But don’t cry, Julia.’ He put his hand out to her face.

She gazed up at him. He had never called her Julia before. When their eyes met, clear and half afraid, she knew that he was going to kiss her and she started to shake. He was trembling too,
but he moved towards her until, with small advances and retreats, his lips touched hers for that first, amazing time.

‘Donnie,’ she sighs as they lie together in the warm grass now, insects buzzing above them. ‘Oh, Donnie.’ His hands caress her, moving under her clothes, his kisses
driving her wild for him. Every day, they get a little more adventurous, a little braver in the sating of their mutual need.

If Miss Pelham knew what her charge got up to in the warm meadow with the thin Irish boy, she would have twenty screaming blue fits. But no one knows. It is their secret, this trembling
exploration and lush enjoyment of one another.

‘Julia,’ he whispers in her ear, as her fingers touch him lightly, making him draw in a sharp breath. ‘Oh, Julia.’

Olivia knows that nothing will ever make her love her children any less.

The first months away from Dan were a challenge as she came to terms with the knowledge that Bea and Stan were not the result of an anonymous donor, but of the worst confidence trick she can
imagine. Her husband fooled her. He allowed her to be implanted with Cheska’s fertilised eggs. He let her raise Cheska’s children and never told her. She knew that was a fact, but her
heart could not accept it.

At first she was scared. In the early hours of her departure, as they headed for the airport, she was deeply afraid of only one thing: that she would stop loving the children. She was
terrified that they’d been somehow infected with the disgusting poison of Dan’s lies, and she would never be able to look at them in the same way again. She feared that she would only
ever see Cheska in them and that would be too much to overcome.

They reached Heathrow, but there was no room on a flight for twenty-four hours so she booked them into an airport hotel and sent the car keys back to Dan in an envelope with nothing else enclosed but the parking ticket and a note of where the car was to be found. He would guess from that where she
had gone, if he hadn’t already.

The hours in the hotel were spent in their room, Olivia dazed and distracted, playing over and over the events of the last few days, making connections, working things out. She was alternately
grief-stricken and furious, stabbed by the betrayal, humiliated, and then energised and released by her intense, almost elemental fury.

But the thing that she most feared never happened. Never for a moment did she see Cheska in the children, even when she stared at them, searching for something that might make her feel that
these were no longer her babies.

She sent a silent message to Dan and Cheska:
You can’t take them away from me. They’ll always be mine.

When at last they were able to board the flight and she strapped them into their seats, preparing for the long journey across the Atlantic, she felt more than ever what she had first sensed
when the babies were born: they didn’t belong to anyone. They were themselves. Dan’s attempts to control the creation of his children had failed because they couldn’t be defined
as only their genetic inheritance.

They are who they are.

They all slept on the flight, as they left their old life behind. When the twins woke and asked for Daddy, she told them he was at home. She couldn’t bring herself to say they would see
him soon, but she knew that if they asked, she would lie, to keep them happy.

Does that make me as bad as he is?

When the twins were safely asleep again, she wept silently as she began to feel the pain that so far had been blessedly numb.

Dan . . . Dan . . . I loved you. We had everything. Why did you destroy it all?

Part of her understood that he must have regretted what he’d done. She remembered how he became colder towards Cheska, how much he didn’t want her to visit them. He must have
realised that he’d made a massive mistake allowing her into their lives like that. What possessed him to let her donate the eggs? Couldn’t he see what a hostage to fortune that
was?

But Dan was the arch controller, the man who had to make things go the way he wanted. He must have thought he could keep Cheska quiet. But she wouldn’t stay in the background. She moved
in.

Olivia saw it all: the reason why Cheska wouldn’t leave. Why she couldn’t keep her hands off the children. Her desire to join the family.

Perhaps she even hoped that I’d just piss off and leave her to it, with Dan and the twins. Can she really have been that unhinged? Maybe it was her plan to break the news to me all
along and see if I scarpered.

She didn’t want to think about Cheska, not at all. She shut her resolutely from her mind. Her focus was on Dan and what he had done, and what it meant for all of them. She would work that
out before too long. Until then, she had to concentrate on the twins and on getting through every painful hour until the suffering grew easier to bear.

Her mother and sister welcomed her back with open arms, and it was a huge relief to be back in the safety and comfort of the villa. She was able to pass the twins over for a while and begin to
recover from her bone-deep exhaustion. And here she was surrounded by sympathy, by people who listened as she rattled off her feelings, venting her sorrow and anger. Her mother hugged her as she
wept and sobbed, and wiped her eyes, and held her hand while she spat invective about Dan and Cheska and vowed she would never see either of them again. When her mother reminded her that Dan was
the babies’ father and he would eventually need to see them, she could rail against the idea even while she knew that it would have to happen in the end.

Her comfort was the twins. Their love was the only thing that could heal the hurt in her heart, and their soft warm bodies soothed and helped her in her grief. They soon forgot to ask for Daddy
very much at all, and she began to think that perhaps she could just stay here, nesting in the family home, bringing up her children far from the people who had hurt her.