What She Never Told Me (21 page)

Chapter Thirty-One

The following evening, I drive out to Bettystown, half-hoping to see Declan on the beach with Bran. But there’s no sign of him among the few lone walkers exercising their dogs.

It’s probably just as well. He has been in my mind a lot. I’ve failed him twice. But, while I’m undecided as to whether I should tell him about the abortion, I still feel a need to see him, at least to make some kind of reparation for the way I cast him off all those years ago and for my more recent treatment of him. I was never in love with him, not before and not now. I used him as a human comfort blanket to deal with the breakdown of my marriage. It is as simple as that.

What I should really do at this juncture is leave Declan alone, but I convince myself that he and I can still be friends. I send him a text telling him I’m back in Ireland and that it would be lovely to meet for a drink. He doesn’t respond and I tell myself that his obvious unwillingness to see me is probably for the best.

I walk briskly into the wind, the sound of the sea in my ears and the taste of it in my mouth. My thoughts feel free, unanchored, and the images they conjure up float and bump into each other. My mother and David Prescott. My mother and Dermot. The old flat in Drumcondra. The letter from Ailish to Santa Claus. Sandy. Sandy and Julia. Liam O’Connor. Richard. The little hand reaching up to the green postbox is there, too, but it moves quickly in and out of my mind as I stride along the strand, still disturbing, but diluted by the other images that are flying through my head.

Back at the house, I take out a road map and start to work out my journey to Kenmare. It will be a long drive. The route-planning website gives a driving time of more than four and a half hours, but I decide it will be safer to allow six hours, even more. I will set off at eight, tomorrow morning.

I’m so absorbed in my route planning that I almost miss the sound of the door being tapped on lightly. Assuming that the caller is one of the neighbours, I open it without checking the spyhole. It’s Declan.

‘Oh. This is a surprise.’

‘Is it? You sent me a text saying you were here.’

‘And you didn’t reply. So it’s a surprise.’

‘Can I come in?’

‘Of course. I’m sorry; I don’t mean to be rude. It’s just that you haven’t been in touch, you haven’t responded to any texts. But I’m glad you’re here. I went to Bettystown earlier. I looked out for you.’

‘I did actually set out for Bettystown. Bran is in the car. But I decided to come straight here.’

‘I’m glad you did,’ I say, without thinking. And then, because I don’t want to give Declan the wrong idea, to lead him on, I add quickly, ‘You can advise me on my route to Kenmare.’

‘You’re going to Kerry? When? What for?’

‘Tomorrow morning. I’m going to visit some . . . some old friends of my mother.’

‘How long will you be down there?’

‘I’m not sure. A day, maybe two.’

‘A long way to go in the car for just a day or two.’

‘Well, I may stay longer. I’ll see. Look, are you hungry? I did a shop this morning. I have pasta, cheese, eggs, bacon. We could do a carbonara. And I have lettuce and tomatoes for a salad. Or we could go out.’

‘Let’s stay here,’ he says. ‘Look, I’m not . . . I’m not assuming anything. I just wanted to see you. That’s all.’

I turn away, not wanting to let him see how pleased I am by what he has said, and start pulling things from the fridge and the cupboard.

‘Here,’ I say, handing him a big saucepan. ‘Get the water on for the pasta. I’ll get going with the other stuff. And why don’t you bring Bran in? He’ll keep us on the straight and narrow.’

When we sit down to eat, he quizzes me about what I’ve been doing in London, how often I’m likely to come back to the house.

‘I don’t know, but often enough, I hope. A few times a year, I suppose. Maybe a lot, during the summer. I still have a lot of things to sort out in my head, but I’m sure of one thing. I’m a Londoner now, Declan. I’m not coming back here.’

‘And Sandy?’

I’m still attracted to Declan. It wouldn’t take much to tell him that
Sandy and I are finished, which wouldn’t be entirely untrue because I still can’t get beyond the affair with Julia. There’s still a wide gap between Sandy and me that may never close. What would be wrong with having the occasional comfort of Declan? I could make it work. I could reach my hand out to him now and tell the lie that’s already forming on my tongue, the lie that will send us scooting upstairs to my bed tonight and other nights.

But I stop myself. No more lies.

So I look at him and tell him the truth.

‘We’re not back together, but we’re working on it.’

He’s angry and disappointed, asks me why I gave him misleading signals. I have no excuse.

‘Declan, I’m sorry. I don’t know whether things will work out with Sandy – they probably won’t – but I have to give it a chance. It’s not great between him and me, if that helps. I did miss you. I’m attracted to you. It’s easy and lovely to be with you, but there’s no point, is there?’

He glares at me and then he shrugs.

‘No, you’re right. There isn’t much point,’ he says. ‘Still, it was great while it lasted, wasn’t it?’

I smile. ‘It was.’

I think about Ursula’s advice, that I should tell him about the abortion. It may not bother him at all. After all, he has two boys. And I think about the promise I have just made to myself.
No more lies
. But I see that he’s trying to be nonchalant, while his eyes show that he’s hurt and upset, and I know that this is one truth I’m never going to tell him.

*

I sleep badly. The night is hot and sticky. There’s not a breath of air moving the leaves in the trees outside. Everything is dark and still, and I lie awake, desperate for sleep, yet unable to calm my mind. The ghosts of thoughts and images dart through my head, but disappear just when I think I’m getting an inkling of what they are. I drift off, wake, drift off again.

And then, in the middle of all the chaos in my mind, I remember with utter clarity what has been needling me since I spoke to David Prescott a few days ago.

He said it would be good to
see Richard again after all these years
. I’m sure of this. Yet Richard, I remember with equal certainty, told me he had never met my mother’s boss and couldn’t recall his name. He said the name David Prescott means nothing to him. Our minds can play tricks over the years. Maybe Richard had simply forgotten. Maybe David had assumed he had met Richard, but hadn’t. But I remind myself that, when it comes to anything to do with my mother, there are no simple explanations for anything.

My plan was to get up early and be on the road by eight for the long drive to Kerry, but the disparity between what I am being told by my mother’s brother, on the one hand, and by her former lover, on the other, is like a parasite burrowing into my brain. I can’t call either of them too early in the morning, so I hang around the house nervously, drinking coffee and jumping up and down to straighten picture frames or pick up balls of dust poking out from under chairs.

Shortly after nine, I call David, apologising for phoning so early in the day and hoping I haven’t got him out of bed. But he has been up and about for a couple of hours.

I get straight to the point.

‘I just want to check something with you. The other day, you said something that made me think you’d met my uncle before. Did you ever meet him?’

‘Yes. Many times. We got along very well, actually. When he came to visit Marjorie, we would sometimes slip off to the cricket together.’

‘He visited her in England?’

‘Several times. But you sound surprised. It wasn’t that difficult to move between Ireland and England, you know,’ he says.

‘And did he know about your daughter dying? I’m sorry, I have to ask you.’

‘I don’t know. I had no contact with him after Marjorie left. He didn’t contact me, either. I have no idea what she told him. Why are you asking all these questions?’

‘I had the impression from Richard that you and he had never met, but maybe it was just me misunderstanding what he was saying.’

I change the subject quickly and tell him I’m about to go down to Kerry to see Liam O’Connor, thank him when he wishes me a safe drive and put down the phone.

I’m puzzled. Richard said clearly that he had never met my mother’s boss and that he couldn’t remember his name. Yet David has just confirmed that they knew each other quite well. Richard told me he hadn’t known about the time my mother had spent in England, yet he made several trips to see her.

I tap his number into my phone.

‘Ah, Louise, are you back? I’ve found some more photographs for you. I think you’ll find them very—’

‘Richard, you told me you couldn’t remember the name of my mother’s boss. You said you’d never met him. But you did know him! And you told me you didn’t know my mother lived in England for a while. But you went to see her there a few times. And you even went to cricket matches with David. What’s going on? Why did you lie about those things? Is lying a Redmond disease?’

‘I-I-I’m sorry,’ he falters. ‘It was your mother . . . She didn’t want you to have any contact with David. I argued with her, but she insisted. She made me promise.’

‘But, Richard, she’s dead! What harm would it have done to help me find David Prescott?’

He says nothing, but I can tell from his breathing that he’s uncomfortable and agitated.

‘And the death certificate. Did you know about that?’

‘No! I knew nothing about that. Louise, please believe me. Yes, I lied to you about having met David, and I accept that it was probably wrong to do so. As you say, Marjorie is dead and that promise was one I shouldn’t have kept. But the death certificate – I knew nothing about it. I would never have kept anything like that from you. Marjorie contacted me to say she had ended the relationship with David and was coming back to Dublin. She said she needed time on her own, but she asked me to help her out financially.’

‘And you did?’

‘Yes, we opened a bank account for her and I paid money into it every month.’

‘Enough to pay rent?’

‘More than enough to pay rent. She was my sister. She needed help.’

‘But you didn’t see her?’

‘Of course, I saw her. Every now and again we met for lunch at the Shelbourne.’

‘And where was I?’

‘You were at school. I did ask if I could see you, but Marjorie wasn’t keen.’

‘And what about David? Didn’t you try to contact him?’

‘No. No, of course not, because—’

‘Because she asked you not to?’ I can’t help the sarcasm. ‘Look, tell me just one more thing. Did you know I wasn’t David Prescott’s daughter?’

‘No!’ he says, and with such conviction that I have to believe him. ‘As far as I knew, he was your father and you were his daughter.’

He sounds convincing. And how can I challenge what he says about my mother having extracted a promise from him not to put me in touch with David, especially when I know how persuasive she could be.

‘I feel very sorry about having helped Marjorie to deceive you. Why don’t you come up now and we can talk about it all?’

‘No, I’m sorry, I can’t today. Or tomorrow. I’m going down to Kerry. I’ll call you when I get back. Bye.’

‘Kerry?’ I hear him ask as I end the call.

Chapter Thirty-Two

The house, a long stone cottage, is a few miles outside Kenmare, standing by itself against a mountainy backdrop. As I get out of the car, the front door is already opening and a tall man of about forty-eight or fifty comes out and walks towards me. I take in his dark curly hair, run through with grey, his eyes that are a startling blue, and I wonder why I have a feeling that I know him. An even stranger thing is that I almost feel he knows me, too, because the look he gives me is a deep one.

He takes me inside the house, where a soft-faced woman of about the same age is waiting. This is the woman who answered the telephone.

‘This is my wife, Imelda,’ he says. ‘You must be tired after the drive.’

The sun is still warm and he suggests that we sit in the garden at the back of the house. Imelda brings a pot of tea and slices of home-made fruit cake on a tray, and leaves us. The mountains rise up in the distance, blue and dark at the same time.

It’s one of the most beautiful places I have ever been, but I can tell by looking at Liam O’Connor that he hasn’t had an easy life. There’s a quiet roughness about him and his education has probably been of the most basic kind, but there’s a strong intelligence behind his eyes.

He pours tea, offers me a piece of cake and waits for me to speak.

‘I didn’t want to say too much on the phone,’ I say, ‘because, to be honest, I’m still not sure I understand any of it.’

So I repeat what I’ve already told him, that I was born in Dublin, grew up partly there, partly in Drogheda, and that my mother, Marjorie Redmond, has recently died. He listens, says nothing. Waits.

‘She was once a secretary at Tennyson’s,’ I continue, and now I notice that his eyes narrow slightly at the mention of the brewery.

‘In Dublin?’

‘Yes. The thing is . . . I wanted to get in touch with people who lived in Walter Square in the 1960s and 1970s. You and your family – you were there then, weren’t you?’ I ask.

He shoots me a look filled with anger and hostility.

‘You know we were there!’ he says, getting to his feet. ‘So you lied on the phone about not being a journalist. Raking the bottom of the barrel for a story, I suppose. Well, if you don’t mind, I won’t be talking to you, so you’ve come all this way for nothing.’

‘No! No, I’m not a journalist. I’m a musician. And I’m not trying to get a story. I don’t know anything about you. I just want to know who I am!’

This appears to throw him and he sits down again.

‘What’s this all about, then? Why are you here?’

‘It’s just that I’ve been going through my mother’s things and I found a piece of paper with your family’s address on it – 10 Walter Square. There are a few things I’m trying to sort out. My mother . . . left a bit of a mess behind and I was hoping I might be able to clear at least part of it up by talking to you. I don’t know anything about your family. I know your name and address only because some people helped me find out who had lived at number ten.’

He’s still listening to me, but I can tell he’s not convinced that I’ve come all the way to Kerry just to satisfy a desire to know who lived at the address I found in my mother’s house. So I tell him the whole story, about my attempt to find out who my father was, about tracking down David Prescott and being shown the death certificate with my name and date of birth on it.

And as he listens, I see that his face changes, becomes tighter, and that the frown that has appeared on his forehead grows deeper. He’s staring at me in a way that I find frightening.

After a long silence, he looks towards the mountain and, when he returns his gaze to me, his expression has changed, has become less hard, though his eyes are still that piercing blue, the blue of the mountains and the sea.

‘You told me you were forty-three. What date were you born?’ he asks.

I’m slightly puzzled by his interest in my age and date of birth.

‘The eleventh of December, 1969.’

He seems to think about this for a few seconds, nodding as if making calculations in his head.

‘It’s true we were there. At number ten. All of us,’ he says, speaking so quietly that I have to lean forward to hear him. Again, I catch a glimpse of that sad quality he has about him.

‘What do you know about us, about the house we lived in?’ he asks, and something in his question leaves me with a feeling of disquiet.

‘Nothing,’ I say.

‘The worst thing happened there. I try not to think about it too often, but I’ll never get it out of my mind. And it’s even worse for my sister.’

He gets up and says he’ll be back in a minute. The evening is soft and beautiful and there’s only the gentlest of breezes, but I have a feeling that whatever he’s going to tell me will blow me apart.

When he returns, he’s carrying a crumpled old plastic bag from which he takes several newspapers, yellowed and ancient. He hands one of them, the
Evening Herald
, to me and points to a news item on the front page. The headline is big and bold, shocking. I begin to read, but after just a few words I have to stop. My head explodes with pain and my stomach heaves so strongly that I can’t stop its contents from shooting out of me. And then I hear myself crying out. ‘No, no, it can’t be! It’s impossible! No . . . !’

*

I’m shivering, despite the warmth of the evening sun. Imelda rushes out with towels and a bathrobe, and wraps me in them until I stop shaking. Then she takes me to the bathroom, where she gently removes all my clothes and puts me sitting in the tub. And I sit there, naked and weeping, as she runs the shower hose over me, washing me with soap and a sponge until I’m clean again.

When I’m dry, Imelda takes me to a bedroom, gets me to lie down on the little single bed and pulls the covers up around me.

‘I’m going to leave you to rest for a little while,’ she whispers. ‘Just close your eyes and try to sleep.’

But there’s no prospect of sleep. I close my eyes and a terrible scene opens in my mind, like a film being acted in front of me. I see Walter Square and a little girl, underdressed for the cold night in just a skirt and jumper, running along the pavement towards the green postbox, her shadow dancing behind her, thrown about by the street lights. I hear her little shoes making the lightest tap-tapping sounds. And now I see and hear other things, too – the Christmas lights glowing brightly in some of the windows, the bare branches of the trees, the ghosts the little girl’s breath makes in the cold air, the sound of her voice as she warbles away to herself. I hear bells ringing, the Angelus bells. It must be six o’clock.

And I see the postbox, the oblong mouth placed too high for such a little girl, so that she has to stand on tiptoe, has to strain and stretch to get her little arm high enough to reach it.

But she never does, Mamma, because you were there, ready to snatch her away.

Did she cry, Mamma, that little girl, when you took her? Did she call for her mother, the one who would die not knowing what had happened to her daughter, whether she was alive or dead?

Did she call for her sister, her twin sister, who had to grow up with part of her missing?

How did you comfort her, Mamma? Did you even try?

And how did you choose that little girl, Mamma? Maybe you just happened to be there on that night and acted on impulse, on the spur of the moment. You were always very impulsive.

Or was it all part of a plan? Did you see that other mother with her little twin girls in their matching navy-blue coats and envy her, ask yourself why she should have two when you had none? Did you think that other mother – 
my mother
 – wouldn’t miss one of those little girls?

Oh, Mamma, how could you have done such a thing
?

*

‘Five, four, three . . .’

Mammy is counting the seconds to switching off the light and me and Nora are stifling giggles and pulling up the blankets so that they nearly cover our heads.

‘No more talk from the pair of you. If you’re still awake when your daddy comes in, there’ll be wigs on the green.’

‘Night, night, Mammy,’ we say together in a pretend whisper. She closes the door and we wait.

‘Nora,’ I say when I think Mammy has been gone long enough and isn’t standing outside the door. She does that sometimes.

No answer.

‘Nora?’

Still no answer.

‘Stop pretending to be asleep,’ I say. But she’s not pretending. She’s asleep, and even when I shake and tickle her, she doesn’t wake up, just makes funny little noises and turns around in the bed, away from me, and curls up tighter.

It’s not much fun being awake without Nora, so I try to fall asleep too. I think about the Sandman and how he’s going to come and sprinkle sand in my eyes. I don’t want sand in my eyes, because then, when I wake in the morning, my eyes will be sore.

‘Well, now,’ Daddy says, every time I worry about the Sandman, ‘you’d better be asleep when he does his rounds and then he won’t come anywhere near you.’

But even thinking about the Sandman doesn’t make me fall asleep. I’m far too excited. It will be Christmas soon. The day before yesterday, I heard Mammy say it was the Feast of the Immaculate Conception already and the country people were up in Dublin doing their shopping and it would be no time now until Christmas. But when I asked her to help me write to Santy, she said Christmas was still ages away and that she’d help me do it another time. So I asked Liam to help me write it. I made all the words myself, but he showed me how to do it. I put the letter in the envelope and he helped me write on that too. And then I licked it closed and Liam took a stamp out of one of the drawers in the dresser and I licked that too and stuck it on the envelope. I put the letter under my side of the mattress.

Now I’m afraid Santy won’t get my letter in time, so I reach under the mattress and pull it out. I have it in my hands now. I know what it says by heart. Audrey comes into my head and I wonder how she is. We left her in the hospital with the other dolls. I don’t think she’s coming back in time for Christmas. I heard the nurse tell Mammy that they were very busy and they’d do their best, but it might be the New Year before they were able to fix her. That sounds like a long way away.

I sit up in the bed and climb across Nora. She moves a bit and turns around, but doesn’t wake up. I find my clothes and put them on over my nightdress, and then I sneak out of the room. I can hear Mammy and the boys talking in the front room, and the television is on as well. I tiptoe to the back door and open it as quietly as I can. Dingle, the cat, stands up and gives me a cross look, so I put my finger to my lips and whisper, ‘Sssssh.’ He lies down again and goes to sleep.

It’s cold outside and I wish I’d put my coat on as well. So, instead of walking, I run and skip, and I warm up quickly. There’s no one in the street. Patsy Houlihan said they had their Christmas tree up already and, when I pass her house, I see it through a chink in the curtains, all lit up and covered in decorations. Mammy says it’s too early to put the tree up, that it will spoil the excitement of Christmas if we do.

I’m nearly at the postbox now. I hear a sound and then another, like footsteps, but not really, not like normal footsteps. And I hear someone breathing. I look around, but there’s no one there.

I’m at the postbox now, but the slot is too high for me to reach. I stand on tiptoe and stretch and stretch. I’m nearly there. I hold my letter to Santy with the tips of my fingers to push it into the slot. And then something happens. There’s a lady, a tall lady in a dark green coat, and she’s smiling and holding my hand and telling me I have to go with her because my mammy told her to find me.

‘But I have to post my letter to Santy first,’ I say.

She takes the letter from me, but she doesn’t put it in the postbox. She says we can post it another time. She keeps holding my hand tightly and we hurry through the square. But then I see that we’re not going back to my house and that’s when I start to cry.

‘It’s all right, Louise, don’t cry,’ the lady keeps saying. Why is she calling me Louise? And I keep crying because I want my mammy and my daddy and Nora and Liam and Tommy, and she says I’ll see them soon, but first I have to go with her. It takes a long time to go where she wants us to go and I keep having to stop because I’m so tired. And I’m cold, too, and I start crying again, so she takes off her coat and wraps it around me and picks me up, and then I start feeling sleepy and my eyes feel sore, and I wonder whether the Sandman is a lady, after all.