A Very Accidental Love Story

‘Lily still hasn’t stopped talking about her dad you know, it’s become almost like an obsession with her.’

This, by the way, is delivered with a look that might as well say, ‘if you were around more often, you’d know.’

‘Oh come on, not this again …’

‘Yes, this again. You have to listen to me, Eloise. It’s the first thing she talks about when she wakes up every morning, last thing she asks me about before I put her to bed. When am I meeting him, where is he, have you found him yet, where are you looking … the poor little thing’s not letting it drop. And to be honest, I don’t think this is something that’s just going to go quietly away all by itself, like you’d thought.’

Okay, so now she has my attention.

‘So if you think about it,’ Helen goes on, pausing to dump the now empty tub of ice cream on the coffee table in front of her, then licking every single last dribble of chocolate sauce off the back of the spoon. ‘Would it be such a terrible thing if we did a bit of detective work and tracked him down? I mean, I’d be more than happy to make all the phone calls and do all the work for you. I know how busy you are, but trust me, you wouldn’t have to lift a finger. I’d report back to you at every stage and I wouldn’t do a thing without your say-so …’

I stand stone still and throw her a look so icy that it could freeze mercury. At least, that’s what I hope it conveys. Lately Seth Coleman has been saying behind my back that my glacial stares, once so terrifying, are now starting to make me look a bit constipated.

‘I mean … it absolutely goes without saying …’ she hastily backpedals, realising how unimpressed I am by all of this shitetalk. ‘Not that we’d want him to be a part of her life in any way at all. This is just so Lily can put a face to his name. That’s all. To help her get closure on this and you know … put it all to bed. She’s become unhealthily obsessed and I really think this is the best way to deal with the whole issue.’

Helen trails off, waiting on my response. Then for good measure tacks on,

‘So, emm … What do you think then?’

‘Helen,’ I begin, arms folded, nearly swaying with tiredness by now, ‘Are you completely insane? Why are you even raising this subject? Lily isn’t quite three years old yet, she’ll have forgotten all about it in a few days.’

‘But she hasn’t forgotten, that’s the whole point that you’re missing!’ Helen insists, forcefully coming right back at me. ‘You work twenty-four-seven; you haven’t heard her asking about him morning, noon and night …’

‘Oh here we go,’ I sigh deeply, sinking exhaustedly down into the armchair opposite her and kicking off unforgiving high shoes which have been pinching me since I first put them on … at five this morning. ‘Throw in the absentee mother jibe, why don’t you. Go for it, play the low card.’

Then I remember my manners, remember just how much I owe her for being here when I’d no one else to turn to.

‘Sorry, I really didn’t mean to sound so grouchy,’ I compose myself and apologise.

‘That’s okay. I think that after almost twenty-eight years, I’m well used to you by now,’ she smiles benignly, then looks back at me expectantly, clearly waiting on a fuller discussion to follow.

‘Thing is, I’m very, very tired, Helen. I’ve had the longest day in the longest week you can possibly imagine. Tracing Lily’s father is completely out of the question and to be perfectly honest, I’m not a hundred percent certain that I appreciate you even bringing it up.’

‘But I’m only doing it for Lily,’ she says sweetly, refusing to get riled.

Which of course only riles me up even more.

‘Because you know, this isn’t a bullet that you can dodge that easily,’ she chatters on easily, ignoring the waves of boxed fury emanating from my corner of the room. ‘Sooner or later, the day will come when she’s going to track him down for herself, you know.’

‘Yeah, fine, maybe when she’s eighteen, so why don’t I just cross that bridge when I come to it? I’ve told you Helen, it’s completely out of the question. I won’t have some total stranger barging his way into my baby’s life and maybe even letting her down and wanting nothing to do with her. Which he’d be perfectly entitled to do, you know. I’m only trying to protect her, that’s all’.

‘But you’re completely missing the point,’ says Helen calmly, reasonably. ‘She’s not a baby any more, she’s a little girl. And all kids want is to be normal, to be the same as the others. If you won’t do this for your own reasons, then at least do it for Lily. Let her just put a face to the word daddy, then let it go. She’s already well able to understand that you’re not with her dad, but just let her get this out of her little system. Then next time other kids in a playground ask her about her father, she can be one of them and answer truthfully about where he is and what he’s like, instead of having to tell the world that she doesn’t even know where he is or what his name is. It’s this whole mystery surrounding him that’s making her so obsessed.’

‘You’re completely exaggerating, she is not obsessed …’

‘Oh no? Do you realise that every picture she’s drawn with her new colouring set is of her dad? Then today we got the bus to the park and she waddled up and asked the driver was he her dad. Same thing to a guy serving on the till in Tesco. Then later on she was watching a DVD of Shrek while I was getting dinner and now she’s got it into her head that her father is king of some faraway kingdom.’

‘Well … This is just a phase and she’ll soon grow out of it.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because kids do.’

‘I didn’t.’

Which of course, suddenly stops me dead in my tracks.

‘I’m sorry … What did you just say?’

‘Eloise, do you honestly think that I spent my whole childhood and adulthood not wondering about my own natural parents? Who they were and where they were from? And what were the reasons why they’d given me up for adoption? Do you really think that’s not something that obsessed me for just about as long as I can remember?’

‘But, you never mentioned anything before …’

My voice gets increasingly smaller and smaller then trails off into nothing. Because the thought is unspoken between us. Why would Helen tell me, of all people? Why would anyone bother to tell me anything about their private life? Even if she had phoned me to talk, chances are all she would have got would have been my voicemail, or else a promise from my assistant to get the message to me. Which, I shamefacedly have to admit, the chances of my returning would have been slim to none.

Have to say I’m feeling very, very small right now. Something that’s happening far too often lately.

Thankfully Helen is too humane to really hammer the point home though and I feel an even deeper surge of gratitude towards her for this small mercy.

‘You see,’ she goes on to explain, distractedly picking up one of Lily’s stuffed cats from the floor in front of her and thoughtfully playing with it, ‘because our parents were fantastic to me and I loved them both so much, it seemed almost like ingratitude to want to know who my real family were. But that didn’t stop me from always wondering, and in later life, becoming absolutely determined to find out the truth about my birth family. Who were they, why they gave me up, all of that.’

‘But Helen,’ I say, a bit softer now, ‘Mum and Dad adored you, idolised you.’ You were like their little treasure. I want to tack on, and we both know that I was the also-ran daughter, the difficult one, the one they always had to worry about, but somehow there’s no need to. It’s unspoken between us. She already knows.

‘I know all that and believe me, I couldn’t have been more grateful to either of them. Or, God knows, have had a happier childhood. But you’re missing the point. Because no matter how loving a family you grow up in, knowing you’re adopted still leaves a scar. You spend so much time wondering. Think about it. Your mother, the person who’s supposed to love you and protect you more than anyone else in the world, gives you away. The first thing that happens to you in the first few days of life is that you’re rejected. And I just had to find out why. And also to let her know that I was okay and thank God, that things had worked out well for me. So, it took me years to pluck up the courage, but eventually I decided to do a bit of detective work. I told our mum of course; I’d die if she thought I was doing anything behind her back. But she understood that this was something I absolutely needed to do and she was incredibly supportive. Came with me to the adoption agency and everything.’

‘And …?’ I manage to get out, overwhelmed by the tidal wave of guilt at not being there for her. At not even knowing about this before now.

‘I was too late. My birth mother had passed away about two years previously. She’d had breast cancer and apparently died very young, in her early fifties. She was only sixteen when she had me and it turned out my biological father, her boyfriend, had been killed by a drunk driver in a car crash shortly before I was born, which was why I was put up for adoption in the first place. She was grieving, I imagine, and felt she couldn’t cope with a new baby on top of everything else she was going through. I don’t even blame her either – chances are I’d have done exactly the same thing in her shoes. She was only sixteen for God’s sake, she was still a kid herself.