As I watched Hannah turn from a mewing, downy kitten into a beaming, affectionate toddler, I wanted the same for her. I wanted her to have a father who would love her and swing her round by her hands in a garden, carry her on his shoulders and complain, good-humouredly, about her nappies. I wanted to have someone I could talk to about her, someone who might have an opinion on whether I was feeding her the right things for her age, who might think about schools or shoes.
I had soon found that men were not interested in women with babies – the men I knew, anyway. They were not interested in why you couldn’t meet them at the pub in the evening, why you suggested the park at Sunday lunchtime. They didn’t see the charms of my beautiful, fair-haired girl, just the restrictions she imposed on me. So when Steven Villiers bumped into me outside the supermarket and not only did not eye Hannah like she was something infectious, but offered to push the buggy for me, so that I could manage my shopping more easily on the short walk home, was it really any surprise that I was lost?
He reminded me at first of the father of the family I lived with. He had the same shabby-expensive way of dressing. But that was the only similarity. Steven was compact, but gave the impression of height. He had a kind of inbuilt authority, one of those people who make you stand back slightly without quite understanding why. He was surprisingly old never to have married – a fact he put down, while looking me straight in the eye, to never having met the right person. He lived with his mother in a beautiful house at Virginia Water, the sort you see in expensive property magazines, with huge, neatly clipped hedges and a bathroom for every bedroom. He was surprised when I expressed awe at what he possessed – he was the kind of man who assumed his life was the norm, and never bothered to enquire further.
Given his background, his assets, I was unsure for a long time what he saw in me. I wore clothes from charity shops. I was no longer wild-looking, but there was no way I could have been confused with the kind of sleek, moneyed girls he had grown up with. I had nothing to offer. When I look at photographs from that period, I now know a little better. I was beautiful. I had a kind of unworldliness, despite my situation, that men found appealing. I was without friends or support and therefore malleable. I was still emotionally giddy from my daughter’s birth, anxious to see love everywhere, to bestow what I felt for her on everyone around me. I thought he was a saviour, and everything I said and did would have convinced him of that. It was probably how he saw himself then.
The first time I went to bed with him I lay in his arms afterwards and I told him of my life, of the mistakes I had made, while he held me close, kissed the top of my head and told me I was safe. There is something remarkably seductive, if you have been alone and vulnerable, in hearing you are safe. He said he was meant to be with me, that he thought I was his mission. I was so grateful, so besotted, that I saw nothing worrying in that statement.
Six weeks after we met he asked me to marry him. I moved in with him and his mother. My clothes became more conventional – he took me shopping – and my hair was tidier, which was more fitting in the fiancée of that kind of man. I took a new pride in my housekeeping skills, slowly adapting under the terse tutelage of my prospective mother-in-law. There were hiccups, but Hannah and I learnt together how to live under that roof. I had grown up, I told myself. I enjoyed the challenge of fitting in.
Then, some four months later, I discovered I was pregnant. Initially Steven was shocked, but quite quickly delighted. Letty was born as it grew light on the morning of 16 April, and I thanked God, as Hannah and Steven cooed over her, that I finally had a family of my own. A proper family.
Letty was not the most beautiful of babies – in fact, she resembled a shar pei for several months longer than she should have – but she was the most adored. I used to watch Steven’s uncomplicated love for her, her grandmother’s affectionate fussing, and wish it had been the same for Hannah. As a baby, Letty was as sweet-natured and sunny as they come.
Perhaps it was sleep deprivation, or just the moment-to-moment nature of life with a new baby, but it wasn’t until several months after Letty’s birth that I realised Steven hardly noticed Hannah. Until then I had told myself he loved her, that his occasional thoughtlessness towards her was a male thing, rather than deliberate omission. I had little to go on, you see. Having been brought up by my mother, and seen so little of my grandfather, I wasn’t familiar with the ways of men. Steven was a good provider – as his mother was always telling me – he knew about discipline and routines, and if Hannah frustrated him with her two-year-old tantrums and her faddiness about food, was it any surprise that he sent her to bed? Letty was so adorable – was it any surprise that fairly often, Hannah’s own behaviour was seen as wanting?
I tell myself now that I was blinded by the demands of new motherhood. That one sees what one wants to see. But in my heart I should have known. I should have grasped earlier that my daughter’s increasing silence was not solely the result of adapting to a new sibling. I should have seen that my mother-in-law and Steven had become harsher with her, their criticisms more openly expressed. Mostly I should have guessed it from that woman’s attitude.
She never forgave me for saddling her son – her senior manager with prospects – with a child who wasn’t his. She didn’t like the fact that I had no history, as she called it. Oh, she was polite enough to start with, but she was one of those bridge-playing women, the ones with blue helmet hair and Jaeger cardigans, and everything I was screamed irresponsibility and fecklessness at her, whether I was making a lentil stew (hippie food) or letting Hannah sleep with me when she was two.
She dared not say anything at first, when Steven and I were locked in our bubble of new love. She had led him to believe that he was the head of the family since his own father had died, and now found that she had painted herself into a corner because he would not discuss my supposed faults. Until Letty was born, when I could not meet their standards. Then my inability to cope with two small children in the manner Steven and she expected was gradually revealed. As the toys spread across the floors, and our beds remained unmade until the afternoon, my clothes wore epaulettes of baby milk and Hannah screamed in a corner over some supposed misdemeanour, my mother-in-law discovered she could say and do whatever she liked.
Once, before it got too bad, I dared to ask Steven whether we might find somewhere of our own, whether we might be happier by ourselves, but the look he gave me was withering. ‘You can barely get those girls dressed by yourself,’ he said, ‘let alone run a house. Do you think you’d last five minutes without my mother?’