‘Do you give her a name or do the other people do it?’ Adam’s mother is doing her best not to cry as she asks it.
‘Maisie,’ says Becky. The name comes unbidden. From out of nowhere, like the child herself.
‘It means pearl,’ says Adam. ‘From the Greek.’
‘Margarites,’ says Adam’s dad, himself born half-Greek on his mother’s side. And bearing a name now, the baby adds another stitch. It is one thing to give away an unwanted child; it is another to give away Maisie.
Becky looks to Adam, willing him to be resolute where she fears she won’t be. Tell them all it’s time to go. Begin the arrangements. Strip away her name, gifted in a moment of weakness, of instinct. Take it back; it’s not hers. The child, the name, none belong to her. Take them away now.
Maisie opens her eyes and blinks. Her lips move. The beginnings of a cry. The baby is handed back to Becky and Becky looks at him, silently pleading: doesn’t he know what to do any more? He has been so certain.
Maisie latches onto Becky’s other breast and begins to feed again.
‘She’s going to be tall like you,’ says Adam.
Becky’s bones ache with exhaustion. She reaches for the last thing she can find.
‘Adam,’ she says. ‘Don’t you realize? If I keep her, you’ve got a daughter for the rest of your life.’
Let him decide.
If he can carry that weight, she’ll carry hers.
‘OK,’ says Adam.
‘No,’ says Becky. ‘Listen to what I’m saying.’
‘I know what you’re saying,’ he says. ‘If you want to keep her, I’ll try my best to be a good dad.’
It is incomprehensible, this offer. This stupid, kind, too-generous teenage boy. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s making her decide.
‘Keep her.’ It spills out of Janette, who has lost a husband but gained a granddaughter, and who finds that she cannot now lose her too.
‘We’ll help,’ says Adam’s father to Adam.
‘You don’t have to decide now,’ says Adam to Becky. ‘You can change your mind any time, if you think about it.’
The people from the agency tell Adam much the same. People change their minds all the time, he reports back. Sometimes forever, sometimes only for a few months.
‘She needs to smell your skin as well, son,’ says Adam’s dad, who has done all the reading, despite the situation. ‘That’s how she recognizes you to begin with.’ So Adam peels off his T-shirt and holds Maisie against his skinny chest. He rocks her gently, cradling her head and neck, kissing her cheek. It comes easily to him. Of course it does, thinks Becky. He’s generous with this as with everything else.
For a moment she thinks: look at everything that Scott is missing here. Maisie is hers alone. Scott doesn’t exist in the baby’s universe, and never will. Becky feels knowledge harden into the kind of secrets that are kept forever. She’ll never tell. And so Scott will never face justice. She cannot have one and keep the other.
Maisie falls asleep in Adam’s arms as he sings a low, private song to her.
Later, Janette does what she can with the night feeds and nappies between the extra shift work she has to do, covering the mortgage on her own now that Bill isn’t coming back.
On a good week for Becky, Adam visits often, bringing cakes and pies and lasagnas from his mother, changing nappies, rocking the baby, walking and playing with the baby while Becky sleeps off the long nights of feeding. He falls asleep with Maisie on his chest before returning home. But there are days at a time when he doesn’t come, and it’s those days Becky finds the hardest and loneliest – missing him bitterly on those occasions for the lightness and warmth he brings, for the break in tedium. But she doesn’t complain, it would be so ungrateful to make a fuss when he has his own future to build, what with exams and coursework and an on-off girlfriend called Charlie with pneumatic tits and good Nike Air Max.
He’s been so generous already with his time and his friendship. She can’t complain. Her loneliness isn’t his fault. It’s hers.
They throw a party at Adam’s parents’ house on Christmas Day, and his dad roasts a turkey with all the trimmings. With his mum and dad and Becky’s mum and the baby, they are six.
Adam takes his A-levels and declines to go to university. Becky suspects that he is concerned with leaving them, though he denies it.
He leaves college with his accountancy qualifications and a good group of friends who like music festivals and pub lunches and getting high, sometimes. Later he starts a business of his own, and still he comes to the house, plays with the toddler, their little girl, bringing lunch and dinner, paying bills, bringing a steady stream of nappies, and later new clothes, so that Becky almost never has to buy anything like that. And the days he doesn’t come? Glastonbury, and most other summer weekends when there are barbecues or park gatherings. On weekday pub nights and long periods of study. She gets it: she and Maisie are just happy to see him whenever he gets a moment.
She continues to battle loneliness: no one her age is in a similar situation and all the women who are have careers and husbands and mortgages. She’s stuck in a no man’s land, but Adam doesn’t need to be brought down with talk of that.
Becky wonders when he will turn around and say, Right, it’s time now, we should tell people the truth. But Adam’s parents love their granddaughter too and all of them are banking memories of Maisie’s first words and steps, like they are precious treasure.
‘No rush. Perhaps let’s not,’ says Adam, when she asks him about it. ‘She’s my Maisie now. That’ll never change now.’
Maisie is at school the day Grandma Janette dies.
Becky finds her, lying on the carpet of the living room.
Everyone grieves, a layer of their Russian doll family removed.
Bill does not
