The Lying Game (9 page)

‘I
told
you,’ Nell said smugly as Zoey paid for it.

‘You’ve got a really good eye,’ she heard Teri say as the girls traipsed into the arcade and stopped to admire some Victorian cameos. ‘You should go to fashion college or
something. You’d be brilliant.’

‘Fashion’s not really my thing,’ Nell shrugged. ‘Anyway, Mum’s the one with the real talent. She was a way cool designer when she was young. She could’ve been
totally famous if she hadn’t had me.’

Zoey felt a warm tingle spread to her toes. So many of her friends bemoaned the fact that their teenage daughters never spoke to them except to demand transport and clean laundry, and would
rather poke out their own eyes than willingly spend time with them. She had no idea what she’d done to deserve a daughter like Nell, but at this moment she knew she was the luckiest woman in
the world.

She’d completely forgotten about the white envelope on top of the pile of letters she’d shoved into the kitchen drawer.

‘I wish you’d never told me!’ Oliver yelled.

‘How could I keep something like this to myself?’ Harriet shouted back.

They’d been having the same argument for three weeks. Three weeks of going round and round the same subject, having the same fight, rehashing the same facts – and getting
nowhere.

It had taken twenty-seven days for the DNA results to come through. For twenty-seven days Harriet hadn’t slept, had hardly eaten, had spent her days in a waking nightmare and her turbulent
nights drenched in sweat. When Oliver had asked her what was wrong, she’d blamed it on worry over the shock of suddenly learning her father had to have bladder surgery – to remove a
tumour the doctors had assured them was benign – and then felt intensely guilty both for using her father’s illness in such a selfish way and because Oliver made a point of asking after
him often and treating her with exceptionally understanding sweetness.

When she’d finally seen the white envelope in the mailbox and recognized its embossed logo, she’d pleaded a headache and begged Oliver to do the school run, then fled upstairs and
locked herself in the bathroom, her body trembling with nerves, her mouth dry with fear. Downstairs, the usual morning chaos – ‘Where are my soccer boots? Mom! Dad! I can’t find
my boots!’ ‘Who finished the Cheerios? Sam, that’s
so
not cool, you know I don’t like Cornflakes!’ ‘I can’t find my homework! I left it
right
here
!’ – peaked in a crescendo of running feet and slammed doors, and was then replaced with terrifying, empty silence.

She had waited five minutes, ten, needing to be certain nothing had been forgotten, no packed lunches left behind. When she was quite sure no one was coming back, she closed the lavatory seat,
sat down and stared at the envelope in her hands.

Was Oliver Florence’s father? Or was it Ben?

It had to be Oliver. She couldn’t imagine the consequences if . . .

Was Oliver Florence’s father?

It all came down to this. A few sentences on a piece of paper.

She had ripped open the envelope, tearing the contents in her haste. She’d pulled out four pages of charts and closely typed writing stapled together, and a covering letter. Her hands were
shaking so much, she couldn’t even bring the words into focus. In the end, she’d had to flatten the letter on her lap so she could read it.
Paternal subject: Oliver Peter Lockwood .
. . Maternal subject: Harriet Jane Lockwood . . . Minor subject: Florence May Lockwood . . .

Then the usual legal disclaimers about chain of custody,
not to be relied on in court –
yes, yes.

And then the words that changed everything.

It took her three attempts simply to comprehend what the letter was saying. She read it through a fourth time, to be absolutely sure she hadn’t made a mistake. Then she turned to the
accompanying pages of charts and scientific analysis, looking for a way out, a loophole. It could have been written in Mandarin for all the sense it made.

She had turned back to the letter and read it a fifth and final time. Then she had flipped open the lid of the lavatory and vomited and vomited into it until her throat and mouth burned with
acid.

She’d spent all afternoon obsessively reading about similar cases online. It didn’t happen very often, of course, especially these days when there was such tight
security at hospitals, identity bracelets were put on mother and child, prints of tiny hands and feet were carefully taken and filed with the baby’s medical notes. Most of the stories
she’d found of babies carelessly muddled up had taken place in small village hospitals and dated back to the Fifties. Some mistakes had been quickly rectified; others hadn’t been
discovered for years. Two girls switched at birth in 1951 in a small town in Wisconsin hadn’t discovered the truth until they were forty-three years old. But mistakes like this did still
happen, even now. Only three years ago, two Russian women had discovered they’d been given the wrong daughters twelve years before. A few years before that, two newborn Czech girls had been
muddled up, and the mistake hadn’t come to light for nine months. And it wasn’t just Eastern Europe. In 2008, two mothers in Illinois had been given the wrong baby boys after
they’d been taken to be circumcised, and their bracelets had come off and been accidentally swapped. It happened. She couldn’t think how it had happened in London in 1998, but it had.
The DNA results were unequivocal. Florence May Lockwood was not related in any way to Oliver Peter Lockwood or to Harriet Jane Lockwood. She was not their biological child.

It was unthinkable. Unbelievable. But Florence was not their daughter.

She had entirely forgotten it was Florence’s prom that night until Oliver came into her study and found her still obsessively scouring the Internet. She’d quickly pulled up a work
spreadsheet so he wouldn’t see what she was doing as he chattered on and on about taking the kids to Flatbread Pizza. She had to tell him. But how? How could you tell the man you loved
something that would break his heart? Did he really need to know?

But then he’d kissed her neck, stroked her shoulders, touched her in the way only he knew how, and she’d realized she couldn’t do it, couldn’t keep this lie from him. It
would always be there between them, eating away at their marriage. They’d always been honest with each other. It was a fundamental pillar of their relationship. Even as her body responded to
him, as he’d stripped her naked and moved inside her, she’d known she couldn’t keep her secret any longer and pushed him away.

As he’d yanked on his trousers, furious and hurt, she’d laid it all out before him: the terrible, creeping doubt that had consumed her after Florence’s accident, about sending
off their toothbrushes, secretly, without consulting him, without asking him.

And Ben. She’d had to tell him about Ben, since that was the starting point of all this.

At first, that hadn’t seemed to matter. All he could focus on was Florence.

‘How?’
he’d demanded when he’d finally understood what she was saying to him, when he’d read the letter three, four, five times, as she had, and thrown it
back at her. ‘How can this have happened? I was with you when she was born! I held her, I even cut the cord! I watched them put the bracelet on her, I saw them bath her and wash her, I was
with her every second! How could there have been a mistake? Jesus Christ, that damn hospital identity bracelet is stuck in your bloody baby book! Mistakes like that just don’t happen these
days!’

‘They do,’ she’d said wearily. ‘You weren’t with Florence every second of every day. She went off to the nursery with all the other babies, remember? She was there
for three days. It could have happened at any time.’

‘But you
breastfed
her, Harriet! She came back to you every few hours! For God’s sake, wouldn’t you have
noticed
if you’d had the wrong baby?’

You were her mother. What kind of mother doesn’t know her own child?

He hadn’t said that, of course. He hadn’t needed to.

‘It was all so
new,’
she’d pleaded, knowing how weak it sounded. ‘It took me a while to get to know her. Everyone kept saying how much she looked like you when
we took her home, even you! Why
would
I think she wasn’t ours? How could I have known?’

‘Remember the stork-bite?’ he’d said suddenly. ‘That pink birthmark on the back of her neck?’

‘Of course—’

‘And how quickly it faded?’

‘The midwife said it would. It wasn’t a proper birthmark, it was just from the delivery.’

‘Yes, but to fade
completely
in twenty-four hours?’

Oh God! How had she not remembered this? He was right. They’d both remarked on it at the time, how quickly the birthmark had vanished. Overnight, in fact. And then they’d forgotten
about it, too caught up in the chaos of new parenthood to give it another thought.

Somewhere out there was a little girl who
had
gone home with a birthmark.
Their daughter.

‘The first night in the hospital,’ she’d said, piecing it together. ‘You’d gone home to sleep. The fire alarm went off. Florence was in the nursery. I tried to go
to her, but the nurses said it was just a false alarm, told us all to go back to bed. But they were all running around, no one knew what was happening—’

‘Florence is our daughter,’ he’d interrupted as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘We’ve loved her and raised her for fifteen years. I’m her father. You’re
her mother. That’s all that matters.’

‘Our
child
is out there!’ she’d cried then. ‘The baby I carried inside me for nine months! We can’t just ignore that!’

‘Yes we can.’

She’d stared at him incredulously. ‘Oliver, we can’t just pretend this hasn’t happened! We can’t just abandon her! She’s our daughter!’

‘No!
Florence
is our daughter!’

‘Of course she is! I love her as much as you do. Nothing’s going to change that. But we have another daughter somewhere out there, a child who’s
part
of us.’ The
tears were falling now, fast and hot on her hands. ‘We’ve got no idea where she is, Oliver, how she is, what kind of family she’s with—’

‘Precisely.’ His tone had softened. ‘Harriet, we have no idea what kind of family she’s with, or what they might make of all of this. Have you thought through what might
happen if we try to find her? Suppose we track down the people who have our biological child – and that’s a big
if
right there. People move, women marry, change their names . .
. it wouldn’t be easy. But OK, suppose we found her. What do you think the other family might do?’

‘They’d be shocked, like we are, but then—’

‘Then what? Suppose they decided they wanted their daughter –
our
daughter, Florence – back? Suppose they decided to sue for custody?’

‘They couldn’t do that!’

‘We don’t know that. Right now, we don’t know anything. I’ve got no idea of the legal ramifications of this, and nor have you. God knows which court would have
jurisdiction or what they might decide. All I know is that if we leave well alone, we’ll never have to find out.’

He wasn’t listening to her. He’d made up his mind. All he cared about was making this go away.

‘Please, Oliver.
Please.
We can’t just forget about it. Forget about
her.
I can’t, I
can’t,
not now I know.’

‘You’re the one who opened Pandora’s box!’ His voice had cracked. ‘Why couldn’t you have just left it alone?’

‘I told you,’ she’d whispered. ‘I had to
know.’

‘I
didn’t have to know!’ he’d cried furiously. ‘Don’t you realize what you’ve done? We have to keep this from Florence for the rest of her
life! I’m going to have to lie to my daughter again and again, look her in the eye and
lie
to her, just because
you
needed to know!’

‘What else could I do?’ she’d said helplessly.

‘Nothing,’ Oliver had shot back. ‘You could have done
nothing
.’

The room had shrunk to the four feet between them, a distance that suddenly seemed unbridgeable.

He’d crossed his arms, literally barring her from getting close. ‘Tell me, Harriet. All those stories you looked up online. How many of them had a happy ending?’

She’d stared wretchedly at her hands, tears blurring her vision. The Czech babies: at nine months old, when the switch had been discovered, the authorities had decided it was in the best
interests of the children to be switched back. Nine months old! A baby knew you by then, reached out for you, smiled at you. Your love for it was part of the warp and weft of your very being. How
could you be expected to swap your baby for another as if you were exchanging a handbag?

Oliver was right. What if the other family
did
sue for custody? There had been several cases right here in America where that had happened, with confused children forced to shuttle
between the parents who’d raised them and their biological parents like the children of divorce, only a hundred times worse. Was that really what she wanted for Florence? It would scar her
irreparably. And what if – like some of the children she’d read about – Florence decided she wanted to live with her birth parents instead?

If she looked for her baby, the child she’d carried and nurtured and given birth to, she risked losing Florence, the daughter she’d raised and loved for so long.

How could she choose? How could anyone expect a mother to
choose
?

‘I know it hurts,’ Oliver had said painfully. ‘It’s the same for me. But we have to forget about this. We have to put it behind us for ever.’

‘And . . . if I can’t?’

‘You have to.’ His expression had hardened. ‘I swear to God, Harriet – if you don’t let this go, if you do anything to risk this family,
anything,
I will
never forgive you.’

That hadn’t been the end of it, of course. For the past three weeks, they’d returned to the subject again and again, rehashing the same arguments, hitting the same
roadblocks and resolving nothing. Oliver was adamant: she was to do nothing, say nothing, forget she’d ever opened that letter. He refused to discuss it or tell her how he really felt, as if
burying his head in the sand would change anything. For the first time in sixteen years of marriage, she had no idea what was really going on in his head, and it frightened her. They’d
disagreed about important things before – whether to have a second child, for instance – but nothing had ever left them implacably polarized like this. The gulf between them yawned
wider every day. She’d once read that the death of a child caused ninety per cent of marriages to collapse as each parent retreated into their own grief. They hadn’t lost Florence, of
course, and yet in some ways it was almost as if they
had
been bereaved.