“I hope that works out for you.”
“Thank you.”
“Though, presumably, you do know it’s going to be incredibly difficult? One of my clients adopted a child a few years ago. The little girl turned out to have foetal alcohol syndrome. It’s affected her development in so many ways. It’s been very tough for Helen and her husband. But worthwhile too, obviously. She wanted so much to be a mother.”
As soon as I’d stopped reeling from Grace’s sad tale, I nodded. “It is a very strong impulse.”
“Yes,” Grace agreed, “it is.”
There was silence for a moment. Then she looked at me. “I expect you know Mark and I have been having trouble conceiving?”
“I did wonder. But I wasn’t sure, no.”
She gave a little shrug. “We’ve had the tests. Apparently, there’s no reason for it. Nothing physically wrong with either of us.”
“Well, then, perhaps it will happen in time?”
“Perhaps.”
Suddenly I wondered if I’d ever seen who Grace really was. She’d always spoken to me with such self-assurance. Bossiness, even. As if I were the younger one, not her, and she needed to bestow her superior wisdom and advice on me. Yet here she was, just as vulnerable as I was. Of course she was. Everyone was vulnerable beneath the surface. Some people just hid it better than others.
She was fiddling with her car keys. “But getting back to your situation, I do think it’s a shame.”
I frowned. “What d’you mean?”
“Well, the girls. If you’d stayed with Jaimie, you’d have had two perfectly good stepdaughters to fill the void with.”
I flushed.
“They were upset, you know, when you left so suddenly. Oh, they didn’t say as much, but I could tell. I know them so well, you see, and I think, in some ways, to them, it was like losing their mother all over again when you went.”
What? “But they haven’t lost their mother. Harriet’s alive and well. Very much so.”
She shook her head. “Maybe that’s why it didn’t work out for you with them, then,” she said. “You not understanding that. The girls might see Harriet, spend plenty of time with Harriet, but what about when they need her when it’s Jaimie’s weekend to have them? Sometimes only a mother will do.”
I could feel the blood drain from my face. The familiar sick feeling in my stomach that came with a chasm of memories opening up. A chasm it sometimes felt as if I’d spent my whole life tiptoeing around.
Grace reached out a hand, not quite making contact with my arm. “I’m so sorry, Beth. That was extremely tactless of me. Of course you of all people must understand that.”
“Oh, yes.”
For about a millisecond, we’d been within touching distance, Grace and I. And now we weren’t. There didn’t seem to be anything else to say.
“Well, look, I’d better go. But good luck with your application, okay? I hope it works out for you.”
“Thanks. And I hope . . .” But I wasn’t sure how to finish that sentence, so my voice trailed off.
“Thank you. Goodbye, Beth.”
“Bye, Grace.”
She began to walk away, then turned round for one last parting shot.
“And I do hope you won’t wake up one day and regret everything you could have had with Jaimie.”
24
“So I’m seeing a pattern of relatively short-term serial monogamy in your relationship history. Would that be an accurate assessment?”
“Yes, I suppose it would.”
Maybe there was a hint of defensiveness in my tone, because Clare said, “You understand, this is not intended to be in any way critical of you. I’m simply recording the facts.”
I forced myself to smile. “Of course.”
“But just to be clear, you’ve never had a relationship that has lasted more than a year?”
It sounded so awful. Especially if you added my age to the equation. You’re thirty-seven years old, and you’ve never had a relationship that’s lasted longer than a year . . .
“Yes,” I said. “That’s correct.” It was. It just wasn’t the whole picture. But I couldn’t give her the whole picture, could I? Being in love with someone who doesn’t view you romantically for more than half your life was hardly going to impress, was it?
“And your relationship with Mr. Faulkner, which ended”—Clare consulted her notes—“last January, was the most serious of your relationships to date?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“And you moved to live with Mr. Faulkner in Ely?”
“I did.”
“How long had you known each other before you moved there?”
“About five months.”
Clare tilted her head slightly. “So that was a big commitment on your behalf after a relatively short amount of time.”
“I suppose it was.”
She looked at me, waiting, making me realise how monosyllabic my responses were.
I dredged my mind for more. “The fact that we lived some distance from each other probably sped things up a bit.”
“Could you tell me a bit about that relationship, please? It’s important, obviously, because Mr. Faulkner has children, and you had regular contact with those children.”
I hesitated, speed-trawling through memories of my time in Ely, trying to decide how to portray those months in a positive light. It shouldn’t have been too difficult. After all, it hadn’t been all bad. Far from it. But Clare wasn’t interested in hearing about great sex, and sometimes when I thought back to those months, it was one of the few truly positive things I could remember. Reluctant naturism, missing my work as a veterinary nurse, missing my home city, almost taking up a folk-dancing hobby out of sheer boredom—none of these were either positive or relevant to my decision to adopt. The pushing-a-stone-up-a-mountain reality of my relationship with Jaimie’s girls was definitely relevant, but equally definitely, it would fail to impress Clare if I described it with complete honesty.
“Is this a difficult topic for you, Beth?” Clare asked after the silence had stretched on a bit too long.
“No, it’s fine. I’m just trying to decide where to start.”
“How about describing your relationship with Mr. Faulkner’s daughters?”
I sighed. I couldn’t help it. Clare’s eyebrows immediately lifted. She sat there waiting, pen poised.
“Emily and Olivia are both very sweet girls. But they do have strong personalities, and they didn’t want their parents to split up. Which is only natural, of course. I think it’s fair to say they still hadn’t accepted this state of affairs when I moved to Ely. That they secretly hoped Jaimie and their mother would get back together.”
Clare wasn’t writing very much. Oh God. The stillness of that pen! Obviously, she thought I hadn’t got to the juicy nitty-gritty yet. My head was starting to ache.
“They didn’t react well when I first moved to Ely. They seemed to resent my being there.”
“And how did that make you feel?”
How did she think it had made me feel? Rejected. Frustrated. Lonely. Inadequate.
“Well, it was very difficult, of course. But I kept on trying to . . . bond with them.”