At my wedding reception, my new husband’s little daughter tugged on my dress and asked, “Can I tell you Daddy’s secret now that you’re my mommy?” — but what she said next made my stomach drop.
When I met Iain three years ago, I understood inside about a fortnight that his daughter was the most important thing in his life, and that this was not negotiable, and that I did not want it to be.
Etta was three when I met her and six on my wedding day.
Her mother, I was told, had di:ed giving birth to her. Iain was left with a newborn and a funeral in the same fortnight, and it took him years to be a person again.
I never tried to be a replacement. I was very careful about it — I have read the things you read.
But over three years Etta and I got close in the way you do when you are the one who does the school run on Wednesdays. We baked. We had Friday films. She started asking, at about five, when I was going to be in the family “for real.”
When Iain proposed, she was beside herself.
“Does that mean you’re actually going to be my family now?”
“It does.”
Our wedding was small — forty-one people in a function room in Ovingdale with the good light. Etta walked down in front of me carrying a basket and took it extremely seriously.
And at the reception, while Iain was over by the window with his cousins, somebody pulled on my dress.
“Can I tell you Daddy’s secret now that you’re my mummy?”
I smiled. I was expecting something about biscuits.
“What secret?”
She looked across the room at her father and dropped her voice.
“Daddy made me promise never, ever, ever to tell you.”
And my smile went.
“Then why are you telling me now?”
And she looked honestly puzzled, the way children do when adults fail at arithmetic.
“Because you’re my mummy now. I thought that meant I was allowed.”
I got down beside her, in that dress, on that carpet, and asked her what she meant.
And she put her mouth right against my ear.
What she said.
“I remember my mummy.”
“Daddy says I can’t, because she died when I was borned. But I do remember. She had a blue coat and she did the wheels on the bus with the wipers.”
And then, because she is six and she was watching my face:
“Don’t be cross. Daddy says if I say it to people they’ll think I tell lies. That’s why he made me promise. Especially not you, because you’d know.”
***Especially not you, because you’d know.***
I looked across that room at the man I had married two hours and forty minutes earlier and I did not know a single thing about him.
Because a child cannot remember being born.
But a child can absolutely remember a blue coat.
What I did with the rest of that night.
Nothing. I want to be honest about that immediately.
I did the speeches. I did the first dance. I cut a cake and posed for forty-one people and at about ten o’clock I danced with my husband and put my head on his shoulder because there were cameras.
And at about eleven I put Etta to bed upstairs and she asked me if I was cross and I said no, sweetheart, not one bit, and I sat on the edge of that bed for a long time after she was asleep.
And what I was doing, in that room, was going back through three years like a woman doing a stock-take.
There are no photographs of Etta’s mother in that house. Not one. I had been told they were in a box at Iain’s mother’s, for when Etta was older.
There are no photographs of Etta as a newborn either. The earliest one is from about fourteen months. I had been told his phone was stolen in 2019, which is a thing that happens.
There was nobody from her mother’s side at the wedding. Nobody. I had been told they were a small family, and difficult, and that they had blamed him.
And Etta says things. She has always said things. Mummy had a red car. Mummy used to sing that one. I’ve been to the sea with Mummy. And every single time, for three years, Iain said the same sentence, in the same gentle voice, over her head, to me:
“She does that. She makes a picture out of what she wishes.”
And I believed him. Twelve, fifteen, twenty times. I believed him and I went and made a cup of tea.
The Sunday.
I asked him at four in the afternoon on the day after our wedding, in the kitchen, before we went anywhere, because I could not get on a plane with it.
I said: Etta told me she remembers her mother’s blue coat.
And he did not say she doesn’t and he did not say what blue coat.
He put both hands flat on the worktop.
And he said: “Right.”
Just that. And then, after about twenty seconds: “I need to sit down.”
What actually happened.
Noelle was twenty-six when Etta was born, in the May of 2019.
She did not die that day. She was in the room for all of it and she came home.
What happened afterwards was an illness — a serious postnatal psychiatric illness, which came on fast in the June, and which is a real thing that happens to real women and which most people in this country could not name if you asked them.
She spent from the August to the December of 2019 in a specialist mother-and-baby unit called The Larches, with Etta, which is what those units are for and which is a good thing and not a shameful one.
She came home. She was treated. She got better, and then partly worse, and then better again in the way that is not a straight line.
And in the June of 2021, when Etta was two, Noelle went to live near her sister in Tarrow Bay.
And in the August of 2022 she was killed on the coast road, in a car, by a van that came out of a junction.
She was twenty-nine. Etta was three years and three months old.
Three years and three months. That is how long that child had a mother for, and a blue coat, and a woman doing the windscreen wipers on the way to the shops.
And in the November of 2022 Iain Teale sold the house in Kelsmere, moved forty miles to Ovingdale, enrolled his daughter in a new nursery, and started telling people that his wife had di:ed giving birth.
Six weeks later he met me in a car park because I reversed into him.
Why.
He gave me three reasons over about four hours that Sunday, and they got worse in order, which is how you know somebody is actually telling you something.
The first one was Etta. He said he did not want her growing up knowing her mother had been ill like that, because people are stupid about it, and because — and he said this looking at the floor — he had read things about it running in families, and he had decided she was never going to be looked at that way.
The second one was Noelle’s family. He said they blamed him for the June of 2021 and that he could not have them near Etta.
And the third one took him about three hours to get to.
In the June of 2021, in a bad fortnight, Iain asked Noelle to go.
Not for ever. He has never claimed it was for ever. He says he said something like I can’t do this at the moment, go to your sister’s for a bit.And she went. And the bit turned into fourteen months, because it does when nobody picks up a phone, and then a van came out of a junction.
“Died in childbirth” is a sentence with no June of 2021 in it.
That is the whole of it. He did not invent a dead wife to be tragic. He invented a version of her death that starts and ends on one day, so that the two years in the middle — the unit, the phone calls he did not return, the fortnight he asked her to go — do not exist and cannot be asked about.
And it worked, for three years, on everybody, including me.
And the one thing he said on that Sunday that I have not been able to put down, because it is the only moment in four hours where I saw the size of it from inside him.
I asked him what he thought would happen. Long term. When she was twelve, fifteen, when she got a phone and a surname and a search engine.
And he said: “I thought I’d have told her by then.”
And I said when.
And he said: “Every year. Every single year I thought: this year. And then her birthday comes, and her birthday’s the day her mum got ill, so not then. And then the August comes, and that’s the accident, so not then. And then it’s Christmas.”
FULL STORY on the next page.
