Of course, my parents had to be informed and when my mother arrived at the hospital, she was flushed and frantic. This was all mainly due to the horror that she hadn’t even had one inkling that I was pregnant. Heidi tried to congratulate me further in front of my mum, but it fell on deaf ears. She was quiet for some time, she even spent a few moments gazing at the little girl and holding her tiny hand as she slept, but once she had got over the shock she went straight into practical mode, dictating to me the exact process that would ensue over the next few days.

Once it was done, no one would ever need know.

The most important thing my mother needed me to realise was that Callum was never to know. This was not to get out to him. I suppose secretly a part of me had imagined a life with Callum, me and the baby all snug. Of course, I had revealed his name and the circumstances to Heidi in the throngs of labour, this burly woman who had a penchant for a few gin and tonics on a Friday night and an incompetence for respecting patient confidentiality.

Two days later the home phone rang and it was Callum.

51

ANNIE

I knew everything. The way she had destroyed that poor family’s life. Wasted lives everywhere… who knew where Daisy’s daughter was now, or the man, the teacher? As for the wife… All of it was pure tragedy, caused by the mind of one young callous girl.

I knew everything about her and I showed it all to my son. I told him his wife was not the woman he thought she was. This was the same girl I now treated like china, trying to protect the growing foetus inside her.

Just as she had done before, she was carrying the baby in a completely healthy way. Some people just had the knack of it and some days I couldn’t hide my irritation.

I knew she had concealed that first pregnancy from her parents and she had carried that baby to full term, without one complication. The papers peppered their reports of the seedy love affair with these seemingly irrelevant facts, even risking printing a photo of her. It caused such an outrage at the time, but it made for a much more enticing read and to then hear about the lengths a young Daisy went to conceal the entire affair from start to finish. Even risking her own and the baby’s lives by hiding her pregnancy. In some parts it clearly painted her as the malicious character I knew she was.

And to think that my son didn’t have a clue about what dirty little secrets she was hiding when he married her.

The role of a grandmother is to nurture the grandchild as if it was their own and in many cases be the go-to proxy parent when the actual parent is absent in body or mind.