Bird of Passage (31 page)

‘From your island?’

So many unfinished things. I couldn’t settle. I had to get away. Had to try to remember.’

‘Remember what?’

Finn started to laugh. ‘If I could remember that, I wouldn’t need to find out, would I? It’s hard enough to remember ordinary things from back then, when I was a child. But I always had this feeling that there was something important. Something I did or didn’t do. I don’t know what it was. But I blame myself. I think it might help if I knew what had happened to my mother.’

‘You were a wee boy. How could you be to blame for anything?’

‘I only know the way I feel. And I feel guilty as sin.’

‘Oh!’ Kevin raised his glass, briefly. ‘Well, there you go. It’s pretty normal, isn’t it. Cradle Catholics. That’s what we were born for, isn’t it? Guilt? Absorbed it with our mother’s milk.’

When Kevin Gleason finally brought news of Finn’s mother, it seemed as much of a surprise to the priest as it was to Finn himself. Finn had just come in from work  and he rushed around, pulling the bed straight, clearing away his dirty breakfast things. 

‘Finn, Finn, it’s alright. You don’t need to clear up for me. You should see my place in the morning. If I didn’t have Mrs Mackay coming in to sort it all out, I’d never find the time.’

‘But I like to keep everything straight.’

‘I can see you do.’

‘Sit yourself down.’ Finn whisked a newspaper off a threadbare armchair with lurid green upholstery.

‘Thanks, Finn. I’d have said let’s go out, but I think this needs to be said in private.’

Finn perched on the bed. ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’

‘No, no. She isn’t dead.’

‘No?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘I just had a feeling...’

‘She’s not dead, Finn. But the lads in your school were right. She was admitted to one of the Magdalene Laundries, not far from Dublin. I’m assuming there was plenty of laundry work in the city so the place must have done rather well. You were sent to the school and she was sent to work in the laundry.’

Kevin glanced around, uncomfortably. He had known that this would be a difficult conversation. He liked Finn, liked his honesty and his lack of guile. And he pitied him. The young man had been cruelly treated, mostly by those who claimed to know better, who
should
have known better. He needed a friend. But that didn’t make dealing with him any easier. There was an electric kettle on a plastic tray, with a single mug and a packet of Tetley’s teabags. 

‘Can I make you a cup of tea or something?’  

Finn shook his head. ‘There’s whisky. In the cupboard there. Have one yourself.’

Kevin got up, found the half bottle with two thick tumblers, poured out a measure for Finn, and one for himself. ‘Here. Take a good swig.’

‘Is she still there? In that laundry? How can I get her out? Will they let me go and get her do you think?’

‘She isn’t there. Not any more.’

‘They let her out? When did they let her out? Where is she? Can I see her?’

 ‘Finn. It’s complicated. She’s not dead. And yes, I think you can see her. I can arrange it. If she’ll agree to see you. Which I think she will. But it will have to be done carefully. And you won’t need to go back to Ireland.’

‘So where is she?’

‘She’s in England. You’ll need a long weekend, maybe. A day or two off work would do it. If I can arrange a meeting, I’ll ask Hugh to give you the time off. It’ll be alright. Drink your whisky and I’ll tell you all about it.’

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

Kirsty’s pregnancy was smooth and uneventful. She even escaped with only minor queasiness instead of proper morning sickness. All her tests were clear and there was, so she was constantly assured, nothing to worry about. The baby was very active, especially at night. When she and Nicolas lay in bed, he was enchanted to feel the energetic kicks and punches against his back. ‘Do you think it’s a boy?’ he whispered. ‘It feels like a big strong rugby player to me!’

The labour was another matter. Nicolas made sure that she was taken to a mainland hospital in good time which was just as well, since the child arrived earlier than predicted. If it had been up to Kirsty, she would have preferred to stay on the island, with the local midwife in attendance, but Nicolas was so solicitous and so insistent that there was no arguing with him, and the doctor agreed with him.

Kirsty had never known pain like it. Why did nobody warn me about this, she thought. Why did nobody
tell
me? Nevertheless, the memory of the pain soon slid away from her in her preoccupation with the baby. She remembered the sharpness of it, but time itself had contracted and instead of hours, it felt like minutes. She understood why nobody told you about the pain. It was because nobody could remember it as it truly was. Perhaps this was a biological imperative, something that happened so that you would be able do it again.

The child – a girl, and not Nicolas’s rugby playing boy - was big for a first baby, big for an early baby. Kirsty didn’t like to dwell on that fact. It was just as well that she was a long, strong girl, since it took forceps to drag her into the world, and she spent her first night in a Special Care Unit with the other premature children. She weighed all of nine pounds, and looked like a cuckoo in a nest, with her face all bruised from the forceps and a crest of black hair peeping out from the top of the blanket.

In the middle of the night, they wheeled Kirsty down to the unit to feed her. She had been insistent about breast feeding, although the nurses came and asked her if they could give the baby a bottle ‘just to start her off’. Nicolas might have agreed but Kirsty was wide awake by this time, exhausted and in pain, but determined. 

‘No. I have to feed her myself,’ she said. ‘If I don’t start now, I might not be able to do it. And I don’t want her getting used to a bottle before she gets used to me.’

‘You don’t argue with my wife when she’s in this mood,’ said Nicolas with a certain amount of pride. ‘She is a redhead, you know!’ So they trundled her down in the lift, in a wheelchair, with a drip still attached to her arm and in the quietness of the special care unit, they put the baby to her breast. After a few false starts, the child turned towards her mother, nuzzled close, latched on.

Kirsty looked down at the dark head against the white of her skin, at the little screwed up face, suckling and suckling as though in pain. She smoothed her hand over the dark hair and felt its softness and strangeness against her palm. ‘What have I done?’ she thought. ‘Oh dear God, what have I done to you, Finn?’ She had a sudden terrible fear for the future, compounded with an extreme of love for her daughter.

They called the child India, which was Nicolas’s choice of name,  although Kirsty didn’t object. She liked its air of mystery. And it went well with the dark, exotic beauty of the little girl.  

‘I wonder where we got her from?’ said Nicolas, happily.

‘I wonder.’

‘But your mother was quite dark, wasn’t she?’ Nicolas peered into the child’s face, trying to spot resemblances.

‘She was, yes. And this wee one’s not going to be a redhead, that’s for sure!’

‘No. Well, I love your red hair, Christine, but I suppose it’s one less thing to worry about. At least she won’t get her leg pulled when she goes to school.’

‘And nobody will think that she’s unlucky to have on a boat! Or unlucky to meet on the way to a boat.’

Nicolas was puzzled. ‘Is it? Unlucky to meet a redhead on the way to a boat?’

‘I told you that story ages ago.’

‘No. You’ve never told me.’

‘I must have told you. It was old Ian McNeill. He just thought that whenever he met me on the road he had no luck at his fishing.’ 

It was Finn she had told. Not Nicolas. Finn, of course.

‘Why would he do that?’

‘It was nothing. My grandad sorted it out.’

The baby had a rosebud mouth, sallow skin and a corona of dark hair which could never be persuaded to lie flat, even weeks after she was born. But then, her baby blue eyes darkened. She was a wide awake child, watching everything in the room with intense interest.

They were doomed to months of sleepless nights. Although India was alert and good humoured when she had something to distract her, she was a colicky and complaining child at night. Nicolas offered to employ a nurse, but Kirsty wouldn’t hear of it. She was still feeding India herself and was reluctant to let anyone else interfere. At last, in desperation, they took the baby into bed with them. They were both so ragged from lack of sleep that they would have tried anything. And neither of them could bear to leave her to cry. Once she was fed and changed, Kirsty would put her on Nicolas’s chest, while he lay on his back, propped up on a pillow. The baby seemed to find the position comfortable, and they would all three of them fall asleep, Kirsty tucked in against her husband, the baby sprawled on top of him, soothed by his breathing and his heartbeat.

Annabel sent her a  little sling and whenever the weather was fine, Kirsty would put the baby in it and walk up to Dunshee. Partly this was because the walking seemed to soothe the child, but mostly it was to get out of the house and visit her grandfather. Alasdair was increasingly crippled with arthritis. He ought to have retired long ago, but there was nobody else to take on the farm and he still didn’t want to leave it. Kirsty was glad, because she still liked to sit up in her old bedroom, gazing towards the sea. Often she would trundle the buggy down the track to the beach, park India in the shade, and sketch the cliffs at the south end of the island, trying to capture their soaring, vertiginous quality. 

Like the old ruin, these massive basalt cliffs were becoming something of an obsession with her. She would make sketches and then take them home to Ealachan, where she would use ever larger canvases in an attempt to explore them. When she was sketching, all went well but when she tried to paint them, she was seldom happy with the results. She would complain that the paint had become ‘stuck’  and hard to work, that everything had become too solid, too dragged down, that there was no freedom in it. The work she wanted to achieve, monumental, non-negotiable, would not take shape beneath her hands.

 Kirsty would have judged that she was happy at that time. The child so filled her mind that there was little room for  anything or anyone else and she missed her mother more than she missed Finn. She would gaze at India’s rosy face and wish that Isabel was here, wish that there was somebody to confide in, to ask about things such as potty training.  She had taken the decision to put Finn out of her thoughts and she had largely succeeded.

He’s not coming back. He’s gone for good,  she told herself. He was my friend, but I can’t live the rest of my life wondering if he’s going to get off the next ferry.

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

Finn perched nervously on the edge of a couch, waiting for her to come. The room where he had been asked to wait was so clean that every surface shone. The floor was wooden, with a single blue rug, the walls painted white.  There was an alcove with a white marble statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a posy of sweet smelling pinks in front of it. The scent of them reminded him of his childhood. There had been a procession of some kind – a holy day - when the church was strewn with petals. The whole place had been full of the spicy clove perfume of pinks and stocks, their shredded petals making a kind of scented confetti. What a big part the church had played in his life back then, its rituals stitched into the fabric of his days, giving them shape and meaning. But he marvelled at how the same set of beliefs could result in such polar opposites of experience.

The room was full of sunlight, very warm and quiet. Occasionally he would be aware of distant footsteps, the muted sound of a door closing, a snatch of conversation. But these singular sounds only served to emphasise the silence. The impression was of a stillness which was not oppressive. It was so peaceful that Finn found the tension draining out of him, his eyelids drooping.  

He was again aware of footsteps, but this time they grew steadily closer. He could feel his heart pounding, could hear the drum beat of it in his ears. He rose to his feet as the door swung open but when she came into the room, her face eager and afraid, his first definite thought was, this can’t be her, she’s too small. She always had been small, a slim, diminutive woman – it was just that back then, he had been even smaller, and she had been everything, she had been huge, she had been his whole world.

She had a sweet face, like Sister Rosalie, how strange, all pink and white, but with many fine lines around eyes and mouth. She turned her face towards him, glistening eyes and a smiling, uncertain mouth, dwarfed by the white wimple and the dark veil. She moved smoothly, as though there were wheels beneath the habit. He didn’t recognise her at all. He thought, this must be a mistake. This is a stranger. Why did they think this might be my mother?