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‘Our parents didn’t want them seeing each other. They made her break it off. He wanted her to return to the States with him. She was very young. He was older …’ Wendy’s eyes drifted to Emily. ‘His regiment left the UK the next day, and she was beside herself. She came to live with me at the guest house, but that night she got drunk, and I found out she’d slept with a guest. There was only one guest that night – well, two, but they’d had a blazing row and his wife, Alice, had left. Months later, the love of my sister’s life, the American, got in touch. He asked her again to go to America. But there was a problem.’
‘Me,’ said Freya.
Wendy continued. ‘She stayed to have you here, at the guest house, and asked me to take care of you. She said she’d be back for you when she’d plucked up the courage to tell him. I knew my sister, and I knew him. He was a staunch Catholic, and his family would never accept my sister if they’d found out she’d had a child out of wedlock. She’d made her choice when she got on that flight and left you behind.’
Wendy fell silent for a moment.
Emily looked at her mother. ‘Is that why you’ve been estranged from your sister all these years, because she’d left her baby?’
‘I want to say that is all there is to it, Emily, but there are always two sides to every story. She asked me to raise Freya, with Gerald, but I already had two young children, a guest house to run, and a baby of my own. How would I cope with another child? But she didn’t care about that.’
Wendy focused her attention on Jeffrey. ‘I told my sister what I had intended to do – contact the father and tell him about the baby.’ Wendy exchanged a glance with Gerald. ‘We knew they were good sorts, decent, hard-working, and they had a lovely home in Cambridge they’d worked hard for. And his wife desperately wanted a child. Although my sister gave her blessing, she did so grudgingly, and things were never the same between us again. I knew she felt I had let her down, but Gerald and I talked things through. Freya might not grow up knowing her mother, but that didn’t mean she had to be deprived of her other parent too. It just seemed the right thing to do, for Freya to have an opportunity to grow up with one of her parents.’
Wendy shifted her attention to Alice. ‘When we contacted Jeffrey and told him about the baby, we weren’t sure how he would react. Of course, Jeffrey was shocked. There was a baby that was his, right here in the guest house. But he so wanted a child. I’m so sorry, Alice, that we had to hatch a plan and deceive you to take the baby. Gerald never did agree with it. He wanted us to tell you the truth.’
Emily smiled affectionately at her dad. That was him all over. She wouldn’t have expected anything less.
‘I’m sorry, Alice. We played you. We played on your innermost desire to have a baby. And we delivered you one on a plate, along with a side order of lies.’
Wendy fell silent.
Jeffrey spoke up. ‘We took the baby on the understanding that we would sever all ties with the guest house. I knew Alice couldn’t take this baby home and then have the mother appear, a week, a month, a year, even ten years later to take her back.’ He turned to Alice. ‘I couldn’t do that to you.’
‘But you met Wendy in London.’
‘Yes. She wrote to me. She couldn’t sever all ties with her niece. So we agreed to meet.’
‘Why did it stop?’ Freya asked.
‘You got too old for swing parks. That was the only way we could meet up without arousing suspicion.’
‘It wasn’t just that, Jeffrey, was it?’
Jeffrey glanced at Wendy. ‘No, it wasn’t.’
Wendy frowned. ‘I made a mistake. On your tenth birthday, my sister got in contact out of the blue. She’d told her husband about Freya. She said she couldn’t stand it any longer, she had to tell him the truth.’
Freya blinked. ‘What happened?’
‘Of course he was stunned by this revelation. My sister wanted to visit me, and he came too. They wanted to meet Freya.’
Alice stared at her. ‘I never knew this.’
Jeffrey sat there, shaking his head. ‘Neither did I until I met Wendy in London that summer, and she had brought along her sister and husband. I was shocked and angry that you didn’t forewarn me, Wendy. I would never have agreed to it.’
‘You wouldn’t have come.’
‘Damn right!’ said Jeffrey.
‘I thought I owed my sister. I imagined all she wanted to do was get a glimpse of her daughter in the flesh, rather than the photos.’
‘You sent her photos?’ said Jeffrey in surprise. ‘They were for you.’
‘Sorry.’
Alice stared at Wendy. ‘She wanted to take her – didn’t she?’
‘Wendy turned to Alice. ‘To begin with, I wasn’t sure what her intentions were. In hindsight, I realised she could see the beautiful young woman she was going to be, and she wanted her back.’
