‘Eloise, do you honestly think that I spent my whole childhood and adulthood not wondering about my own natural parents? Who they were and where they were from? And what were the reasons why they’d given me up for adoption? Do you really think that’s not something that obsessed me for just about as long as I can remember?’
‘But, you never mentioned anything before …’
My voice gets increasingly smaller and smaller then trails off into nothing. Because the thought is unspoken between us. Why would Helen tell
me
, of all people? Why would anyone bother to tell me anything about their private life? Even if she had phoned me to talk, chances are all she would have got would have been my voicemail, or else a promise from my assistant to get the message to me. Which, I shamefacedly have to admit, the chances of my returning would have been slim to none.
Have to say I’m feeling very, very small right now. Something that’s happening far too often lately.
Thankfully Helen is too humane to really hammer the point home though and I feel an even deeper surge of gratitude towards her for this small mercy.
‘You see,’ she goes on to explain, distractedly picking up one of Lily’s stuffed cats from the floor in front of her and thoughtfully playing with it, ‘because our parents were fantastic to me and I loved them both so much, it seemed almost like ingratitude to want to know who my real family were. But that didn’t stop me from always wondering, and in later life, becoming absolutely determined to find out the truth about my birth family. Who were they, why they gave me up, all of that.’
‘But Helen,’ I say, a bit softer now, ‘Mum and Dad adored you, idolised you.’ You were like their little treasure. I want to tack on, and we both know that I was the also-ran daughter, the difficult one, the one they always had to worry about, but somehow there’s no need to. It’s unspoken between us. She already knows.
‘I know all that and believe me, I couldn’t have been more grateful to either of them. Or, God knows, have had a happier childhood. But you’re missing the point. Because no matter how loving a family you grow up in, knowing you’re adopted still leaves a scar. You spend so much time wondering. Think about it. Your mother, the person who’s supposed to love you and protect you more than anyone else in the world, gives you away. The first thing that happens to you in the first few days of life is that you’re rejected. And I just had to find out why. And also to let her know that I was okay and thank God, that things had worked out well for me. So, it took me years to pluck up the courage, but eventually I decided to do a bit of detective work. I told our mum of course; I’d die if she thought I was doing anything behind her back. But she understood that this was something I absolutely needed to do and she was incredibly supportive. Came with me to the adoption agency and everything.’
‘And …?’ I manage to get out, overwhelmed by the tidal wave of guilt at not being there for her. At not even knowing about this before now.
‘I was too late. My birth mother had passed away about two years previously. She’d had breast cancer and apparently died very young, in her early fifties. She was only sixteen when she had me and it turned out my biological father, her boyfriend, had been killed by a drunk driver in a car crash shortly before I was born, which was why I was put up for adoption in the first place. She was grieving, I imagine, and felt she couldn’t cope with a new baby on top of everything else she was going through. I don’t even blame her either – chances are I’d have done exactly the same thing in her shoes. She was only sixteen for God’s sake, she was still a kid herself.
‘But please listen to me on this Eloise,’ Helen says gently, leaning forward and looking at me intently, ‘I now have to spend the rest of my life living with the fact that I was too late. That if I’d gone about tracking down my birth mother years ago, I may have been able to meet her, might even struck up some kind of a relationship with her. Maybe I could even have seen her before she passed away. But I kept putting it off and now I have to live with the what-ifs. All I’m saying is, don’t put Lily through what I’ve been through. She’s obsessed about finding her real dad just like I was and it’s not going to go away. So please, for her sake, deal with this now, while there’s still time. She has a right to know, just like I did. And our mum supported me when I went digging for the truth, so why not do the same for Lily?’
Oh God, I think, looking sympathetically across at her. I feel so awful for Helen, for what the poor girl had to go through. And could she have a point? Is this whole thing turning into an obsession for Lily that won’t go away until she finally finds out who her father is? Then one awful mental image after another starts to crowd in on me; of the child sitting on a bus today and asking the driver if he is her dad. Of her not even being able to enjoy a harmless TV movie without fantasising about who her real dad is … Drawing pictures of him …
Who knows what’s going through her little mind?
Helen knows me well and must sense that I’m wavering, because next thing she’s sitting cross-legged on the sofa in the Lotus position, looking serenely calm, fair hair neatly flicked over her shoulder.
‘Aren’t you in the least bit curious yourself,’ she puts it to me, ‘to know anything at all about him? I mean, he must come from good stock, he’s got to be intelligent, because Lily couldn’t just get it from you and you alone. Sure, just look at her. She’s so alert and advanced for her age, don’t you think so?’
I nod, tears of pride surprising me by stinging my eyes. Lily is incredibly bright; I’ve no doubt about that. She never even had baby-talk, she started speaking words clearly and distinctly at eighteen months and by aged two, she was talking in whole sentences, like a proper little lady. Already she’s learning to read and can assemble all her own toys and even more impressive, can amuse and entertain herself for hours without getting bored. She even surprised me by being musical at a very young age and when I bought her a piano, she took to it like a duck to water. She’s too young for proper lessons yet, but the second she is old enough, I’ve been intending to hire private tuition. To be perfectly honest, I’m only itching for her to turn three so I can get a proper IQ test done on her. Because I know she’ll score high, just know it.
‘I’ll bet her father turns out to be … A senior consultant cardiologist in the Blackrock Clinic,’ Helen chips in dreamily. ‘Or because she’s so musical, maybe a conductor. With the Philharmonic at the New York Met. Or maybe he’s a physicist well on his way to winning the Nobel Prize by now. One thing’s for certain though, he must be really good looking, because she’s such a gorgeous little fairy.’
‘Hmmm,’ is all I can say, getting intrigued now in spite of myself.
‘Either way,’ she goes on, still in her fantasy world and I think barely even registering me now, ‘if you were him, and if you had a little girl this special, wouldn’t you want to know about it?’
The funny thing is that when it boils down to it, I actually know so little about Lily’s father myself, it’s ridiculous. And I’m surprising myself by wondering about it now, as it’s something I rarely do. Once I had Lily, I banished all thoughts about whoever he might be completely out of my mind. She’s mine, I thought. Mine and no one else’s. One thing is for certain though, whoever he is and wherever he is, he’s got to be someone very special – because isn’t Lily the living walking proof of that?
Oh, sod this anyway. You know something? It’s curiosity that’ll be the death of mankind. Not all this crap about climate change.
No, it’s curiosity, plain and simple.
The fertility clinic I attended went by the unlikely name of the Reilly Institute, which at the time, appealed. It sounded like a place where you do night classes, I remember thinking at the time, not somewhere you’ve to reveal all about your private life and your full medical history, get totally undressed, then undergo possibly the most mortifying medical procedure ever devised by man. I’ll spare the details, but all I’ll say is that it involves lying on a sheet of freezing metal naked from the waist down, while being prodded with a load of ice-cold spatulas, and I’ll leave the rest to the imagination. Trust me though, no torture meted out to witches in medieval times could have been more excruciatingly painful or mortifying.
You know me by now; I did my homework and did it thoroughly. Firstly I found out from the concerned, mercifully sensitive nurse who was looking after me, whether or not the bank recruited, let’s just say, a certain type of donor? Because I was fussy; I wanted someone intelligent, talented, from ‘good stock’, as Helen put it. I bombarded this poor, patient nurse with a thousand questions – on average how old were the donors? (Under age forty apparently is preferable, I knew from my own exhaustive research on the subject. Higher sperm motility.) How and when did donors sign away legal rights to any child conceived using their sperm? And most importantly of all, how exactly was confidentiality maintained?
I must have driven her nearly insane with my inquisition; I requested a full list of donor profiles, then asked for information about each donor’s physical characteristics; ethnic background, educational background, occupation, general health, and hobbies and interests. Some banks will even provide photos, which I took a lightning-quick scan though, then dismissed. Somehow it made the whole mortifying process far simpler not to attach a face to a number on a donor profile.
Made me feel a bit more in control, if that makes any sense.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that the whole process took weeks. I trawled through each and every profile on offer, knowing that this was probably the single biggest decision I was ever likely to make in my life. And finally, finally finally, I found The One. No name, just a number, but this one seemed to tick all the right boxes. Blue eyes, fair hair and fair skin, just how I imagined my little baby would look. Supermarket genetics come to life.
The Chosen One seemed sporty and athletic too: he’d won gold medals for the two hundred metres and was a member of the Trinity College rowing team. This appealed; if I had a boy, I reasoned, he’d have great biceps and would look like he rowed everywhere. And he’d grow up with shiny skin and cheekbones you could grate cheese on, like all athletes seem to have. His profile also claimed that he’d written a thesis on Ireland’s economic meltdown and the subsequent road to recovery, which immediately gave me a mental picture that maybe he worked as a high-earning TV economist, one of those young preppy guys who look straight to camera and gravely tell us we’re all doomed, but do it with such persuasive charm that you end up not really minding that much at all.
What swung it for me though, was that his profile claimed he was musical as well as everything else and played classical piano right up to concert grade. That alone made me almost able to picture him; tall, gifted, clean shaven, articulate and an all-rounder. A real renaissance man. The type that if I ever happened to meet him in a bar in real life, most likely wouldn’t give someone like me a second glance, but would be surrounded by tall blonde modelly women with caramel skin and perfect Hollywood smiles.
But not here. Because in the Reilly Institute, it was me that was calling the shots. And I’d decided on him and that was all there was to it. He was good at sport, academically sound and cultured too – barring him having become a self-made billionaire by the age of twenty five, what more could I possibly ask for?
Then came the science bit. A Dr. Casement, with the cold clinical dispassion of someone who spends half their day looking down a microscope, advised that we needed to find out how many pregnancies this donor’s sperm had previously produced. Ten is the recommended limit apparently, to lessen the chances of a single donor’s offspring ever meeting and producing children of their own, instantly making me think of just about every Greek tragedy I’d ever yawned my way through. But my luck was in; astonishingly, I was the first woman through there to have chosen this grade A specimen. Massive sigh of relief.
Then as soon as the sample was fully medically assessed for family history, heritable conditions, any diseases that could be passed down – not to mention infectious diseases like chlamydia, HIV, hepatitis, syphilis and let’s not forget the delightful gonorrhoea – the rest was plain sailing.
I was told it would take a few rounds of treatment before we’d have a successful outcome, so not to be too disappointed if it didn’t take on my first go. But I was having absolutely none of it. Because under no circumstances was I going through all of this malarkey all over again, so I willed my uterus lining to thicken up and do what it was told and miraculously, astonished everyone at the clinic by getting lucky first time round.
Out came Lily, punctual to the dot nine months later and thus ended my involvement with the Reilly Institute.
Until now, that is.
Initially, Helen gamely offered to do the detective work for me – the Jane Marple bit, as she put it – but I told her there was no need. Firstly, as any self-respecting control freak will tell you, either you do the thing properly yourself, or it doesn’t get done. And secondly, whenever you’re cold-calling and trying to find out, let’s just say, information of a sensitive nature, you’ve no idea how much this magic phrase works. ‘Hi there, I’m senior editor of the
Post
and I’m calling to inquire about …’ Works like a charm every time. When people, and particularly Irish people, realise you’re a journalist, they will open up and tell you absolutely anything, if they think it’ll get their name into the paper. Or better yet, their photo. In colour. For all their mammies and pals to see.
The first part is astonishingly easy. Next day at work, I kick closed the inner door to my office and make the call, being careful to keep my voice discreet, calm and business like.
‘Hello, you’ve reached the Reilly Institute, how may I direct your call?’
A woman’s voice, curt and businesslike. So I explain that I was treated there four years ago and now need urgent access to my patient file. For, ahem, personal reasons. We’re terribly sorry, comes the crisp answer, but I’m afraid we don’t give out that information.