Daughters by Elizabeth Buchan

her pyjamas – grey ones with pink edging. She
loved
them. The stairs had smelt of new paint, which made her head swim. Eve was asleep in the room they shared further along the passage and Maudie was in her cot.
    She was listening for her mother – who, she knew, was not her real mother but was her mother all the same.
    In her line of sight under the window there was a blue and white pot of hyacinths. Before Christmas, she had helped her mother to plant them. Three bulbs. ‘One for each of you.’ Her mother had flicked Jasmine’s nose with a finger, speckling her cheek with bulb fibre.
    She could never tell her mother her secret. Her and Eve’s secret.
    They hated Maudie.
    They had decided to hate her before she was born. When her father had said, ‘You’re going to have a baby brother or sister,’ he had not seemed pleased and they had taken their cue from him. Then she had overheard him on the phone to Aunt Lucy, saying, ‘This was not my idea.’
    Her mother hadn’t been herself when she’d told them she had a surprise for them. Half smiling, half crying, she had told them they were going to be so happy when the baby arrived. She grew very fat and, one day, she was taken away and Aunt Lucy came to look after them.
    No one had actually been truthful and spelled out that a baby cried and smelt – which Maudie did. Worse, she took up all the adults’ attention.
    Her toes dug into the sisal matting. Pinpricks of cold climbed up her legs. The house creaked and groaned, andthe smell of the hyacinths drifted past her nose. Save for the light cast by the lamp on the table in the hall, it was dark, and she shivered, half pleasurably, half fearfully. The house was a special place and she knew all the secret bits that even her mother didn’t suspect. Like the den in the attic, which she and Eve crawled into when they wanted to vanish. When she grew up, she planned to live in the house, too, but she hadn’t told anyone about that. Yet.
    Since Maudie’s arrival, their mother hadn’t been the same. She was just as nice, of course, but they could tell she didn’t seem to think about them in the same way.
    Not so long ago, their mother had made them sit on either side of her. She had told them that yet another brother or sister was on the way. She had smiled a lot. ‘How exciting for us.’
    But the surprise had never arrived, and her mother hadn’t smiled or laughed at all. Instead she’d cried. A lot.
    She was crying now in the room opposite the bottom of the stairs, which was why Jasmine was keeping watch because she wasn’t sure if she should go down the stairs to help her. Her father was angry. ‘What sort of life do you think we have now?’ he asked, in a very loud voice.
    There was a long silence. Then her mother cried out, ‘A punishing one.’
    On her perch at the top of the stairs, twelve-year-old Jasmine breathed in the smell of hyacinth – thick and cloying – and felt the iron of adult knowledge creep into her soul.
    ‘I refuse to take sides,’ said Jasmine.
    Eve replied, ‘You’re my sister, Jas. We come from the same DNA.’ She touched Jasmine’s cheek, but her tone was huffy. ‘We’re in this together?’
    The date crisis had run its course, and turned full circle. June was out because the workmen would be at Membury well into July. Late July was out owing to the Havants’ summer holiday, which had been booked at great expense for the second half of the month. August was a possibility although Eve was reluctant – ‘No one’s around in August’ – but, as it turned out, no catering company worth their salt was available earlier than the September date.
    Everyone was sick to death of the subject.
    Jasmine and Eve were on a bus that had elected to drive extremely slowly through Hackney. Crawl. Brake. Crawl. Their destination was an East End museum, which had mounted an exhibition of house interiors through the ages. Just up Eve’s street. The outing and the bus ride had been her idea