Homecoming (20 page)

Dulcie flicked a glance at Rae.

She was made of tougher stuff than Rae and her gaze said: This woman still hasn’t a clue.

But Rae understood that the woman’s life had changed more than she could cope with. The drop from luxury to poverty was a steep one: the shock took longer to wear off.

‘You will be all right,’ Rae said again. ‘You won’t starve.’

She ticked off points on her fingers. ‘You have two healthy children, the bank are not going to repossess your house, there is hope that in time that you will be able to sell this house and have enough to buy a smaller home. Your husband might find a job – or you might!’

Rae could sense rather than see Dulcie’s eyebrows raising. Rae knew she was verging ever so slightly into ‘with my crystal ball…’ territory and that nobody knew any of this for sure, but she felt that hope was part of the prescription for a woman in Shona’s situation. It wasn’t enough to help her with food for the kids; she needed to be told that one day her life might improve. That would be worth more to her than a fifty-euro shopping voucher for a supermarket chain she wouldn’t have dreamed of going into before.

‘You think so?’ Shona said bitterly. ‘It doesn’t feel like that to me, I can tell you. I’m broken, my husband is broken, and that’s all our daughters see. I can’t imagine us ever getting out of this.’

‘None of us can see the future,’ said Dulcie crisply. She began to write in her notebook. ‘Let’s make a list of outgoings.’

Afterwards, Rae got silently into Dulcie’s car and felt about a million years old. She wanted to go home, find Will and give him a huge hug. At least they’d never had to go through this with Anton. Imagine the pain of it –

Dulcie interrupted her thoughts.

‘You’re brilliant, Rae, but you’re too soft,’ Dulcie said firmly. ‘There, I’ve said it and I don’t want to be a horrible old bat, but you can’t fix her. She seems a touch unrealistic, but things will improve and she’ll come out of it all right. She could go back to work herself.’

‘I know, Dulcie, but think of the pain she’s going through now. Mrs Mills isn’t in pain for all that Terence makes her life so difficult. They may be broke but they’re coping. Shona isn’t coping and I hate seeing that.’

It hurt her to see another person’s naked pain. Like those young people today with the baby, no jobs and a nasty landlord. She wanted to help but there seemed so little she could do, even working with Community Cares.

‘She’ll have to cope,’ Dulcie declared. ‘Everyone has to. You cope and I cope. We’ve gone through hard times.’

‘True.’ Rae nodded. It was good to remember that.

Dulcie was right: try as she might, Rae couldn’t fix the world.

Denise greeted her in the café with the news that Pavel had phoned to say he wouldn’t be in for his shift at Titania’s the next morning.

‘If he wants to leave, I’d prefer if he just told us,’ Denise said huffily. She’d taken the call and was insisting that Pavel wasn’t ill and that this was a scam because Pavel was going to better-paying job interviews.

‘Pavel’s a very honourable person,’ Rae said. ‘He must be sick. He wouldn’t let us down for another job without telling us.’

‘Hmmph,’ was all Denise would say. But Rae knew she was right. It was a nuisance, that was all. She locked up and left for home.

The heavens opened as she was running across the square and even though it was a short trip, she got soaked.

Will had lit the fire in the living room: Rae felt its warmth as soon as she stepped into the hall. ‘Hello, love, I’m home,’ she shouted.

Will didn’t shout back. He must have gone back to the garden office. He did that sometimes: came in to heat up whatever dinner she’d prepared earlier, then went back to finish up his work.

Rae didn’t bother with her evening cup of tea. She wanted to change out of her wet clothes as soon as possible. The last thing she needed was to catch cold.

Upstairs, she had a speedy shower, then stood at the window brushing her hair and looking on to the square. It was dark now, but under one of the street lamps she could make out the cluster of purple-hued early irises she’d admired that morning. Each one an Old Master all by itself, delicate purpleedged petals drooping like a child’s bottom lip. In the heavy rain, the irises were hanging their heads under the weight of water.

Her mind kept drifting back to the woman from the big house that she’d met earlier. She had more than a touch of affinity for poor Shona today. Rae could understand what it felt like, not wanting people to find out the truth. It wasn’t that she was ashamed of her past, but it was easier to forget it. When you left it behind, you could start again any way you wanted.

When she said she came from the West of Ireland, people so often assumed she came from a scenic spot. If you came from the town, you just said the name of the town, so the vastness of saying ‘the West’ implied a remote cottage in the shadow of some beautiful mountain, with stone walls, elemental views and the roar of the ocean just a mile away.

Rae wasn’t the sort of person who lied, but she was always deliberately vague about her home. Let people picture the scenic spot and the odd cow peacefully outside.

It was better than telling them about the ugly concrete bungalow outside Limerick city with the broken-down cars on the drive. Easier to vaguely say
yes
, she loved the wildness of nature in the West, than to mention that their garden back home had almost no plants left alive in it when she last saw it. The back garden was filled with sparse, heavily mossed grass and the front was concreted over. Rae was so competent and so kind that she knew her friends in Community Cares assumed she’d come from a home where kindness was the currency. But it hadn’t been. Chaos had been the currency. Chaos, poverty and the high-octane rows that came from two people who should never have married being stuck together in a tiny house with a child they didn’t want.

She went downstairs. In the kitchen, Will had laid the table and put her favourite cherry-red napkins out. There was still no sign of him.

A casserole she’d made and frozen at the weekend was heating in the oven and there was rice measured out by a saucepan, ready to cook.

Rae busied herself checking the casserole and boiling the water. When the rice was simmering, she went back up to the hall where the morning’s post lay on the hall table. Will would have taken any business letters down to his office. All that would be left were probably bills and she’d better open them now.

Taking the post back to the kitchen, she peered at the rice to see how it was doing.

There were two bills addressed to both of them, and an official-looking letter addressed only to her.

She ripped it open, scanned the first typed line and froze.

Dear Rae,

I am writing to you in connection with a birth which occurred in the Blessed Helena Nursing Home in Limerick on 27 August 1969.

We are trying to track relatives of that baby and thought you might be able to help us with further research.

It that’s not the case, I am sorry for bothering you by
mistake. If you can help, can you phone me on the number given at the bottom.

Yours sincerely,

Moira Van Leyden

Underneath the line explaining that Moira was a social worker was a mobile phone number.

Rae stared at the letter blankly. She had never fainted in her life. She didn’t believe in it. Fainting was for truly ill people or the elderly, not for healthy people. But now Rae could feel the blood leaving her head and knew that, if she didn’t sit down, she would fall to the floor.

She sank on to a kitchen chair and read the letter again.

She’d been waiting for this all her life with both great hope and great fear.

The hope was that one day she’d meet the daughter she’d thought about every day since she’d last held her in her arms. People sometimes said that about things – that they thought about something or someone every day, and it sounded ludicrous. But Rae knew it was entirely possible to do this. She’d done it. Not one single day had gone by that she hadn’t wondered about her baby. Jasmine.

The fear was what this revelation would do to Will and Anton.

Rae had never kept secrets from Will. Except for this one.

How could she tell him now that she’d lied by omission all their married lives together? How could she tell her husband and son that, at the age of sixteen, she’d had a baby girl and given her up for adoption?

She could still recall exactly when she’d discovered she was pregnant. It was a freezing January day in 1969, and it was on the verge of snowing. Rae’s class in school were due outside for games and they all gathered gloomily in the cloakroom where they changed into their sports skirts and gym shoes and muttered about how it was too cold, and Miss Ní Dhomhnaill was a sadist for making them go out on a day like this.

Rae didn’t want to play camoige on a freezing pitch, she didn’t want to go anywhere at all. She wanted to curl up in a ball and beg God to let her period come. She was five days late. They’d been five days of worrying.

She sat down on the cloakroom window ledge and rested her body wearily against the glass. Around her, her classmates talked and changed. She heard someone whispering and saw another girl reach into her school bag and take out a packet. Rae recognised the white and blue packaging of a sanitary towel. Something, if she was right, that she herself wouldn’t need for a long time. In that moment, Rae knew instinctively that she was pregnant.

Years later, she wondered how she knew for sure. What instinct had told her? She hadn’t felt it with Anton, had barely dreamed it was real – her punishment for what happened when she was sixteen.

With Jasmine, she’d known for sure.

She’d got to her feet, grabbed her coat and school bag, and pushed her way blindly past everyone, not wanting people to see the tears.

‘You’re bunking off games?’ said Shelley, who was one of the few friends she had in the class. Shelley’s parents had a farm six miles from Rae’s shabby bungalow. They’d been friends since they were little. Shelley’s parents were kind to Rae and never let their disapproval of her parents interfere with their daughter’s friendship with her. Other people weren’t so kind. It didn’t matter how nice she tried to be: other people judged her by her parents.

People admired Rae for her work ethic and for arriving spotlessly clean every day from the unpainted, shabby bungalow. Nobody had ever seen the inside. The Hennesseys didn’t do entertaining.

But Rae’s hard work wasn’t enough. People didn’t want their daughters hanging around with the Hennessey girl, no matter that she seemed like a decent creature. Look at the parents. Who’d want their child going into that house? No, it was easier to keep the Hennesseys at a distance.

‘I feel sick,’ Rae told Shelley now.

‘You’ve got a hangover, haven’t you?’ Shelley said with a hint of admiration. ‘I’m warning you, Rae, that Davie is a real boyo. Don’t trust him, right?’

‘No,’ said Rae faintly.

It was all gone way beyond that. There was no one to blame but herself. She’d been the one who’d had a fight with her parents, she’d been the one who’d gone to the disco in anger because there was no money in the Hennessey house for the extra lessons that would help Rae in her state exams in June. Maths wasn’t her strong point, but with a little extra work, the principal had told her, she’d get there.

But Paudge and Glory Hennessey made it clear they had no intention of paying for extra lessons.

‘Get away out of that,’ Paudge had roared at her when she’d raised the subject. ‘Far from bleeding grinds you were raised. You go to the convent and that’s good enough for you. It was good enough for your mother.’

Rae had felt the anger rise in her. Normally she said nothing: it was easier. But today, something burst inside her.

She’d turned on them, on her unshaven father sitting in the threadbare chair with a bottle of beer in his hand, and her mother, sitting beside him calmly rolling a cigarette, her long dark hair greasy. The house was filthy despite Rae’s efforts. There was nothing on for dinner – there rarely was – and it was cold because the Hennesseys hadn’t bought coal for months. Paudge’s unemployment cheque got cashed in the pub. Coal for the fire was a long way down the list of his priorities.

‘Good enough for her, was it?’ Rae shrieked. ‘I’m sure the nuns hold her up as the example of excellence. “Look at Glory Hennessey, hasn’t she done well? Thank goodness she never did any extra lessons or bothered with exams, because she’s turned out so well without all of that.”’

‘You little bitch.’

Rae felt the flat of her mother’s hand sting her cheek.

‘After all we do for you!’

Rae sat there, immobile. There would be a mark on her face, she thought blankly. Her mother hadn’t hit her for a long time, but she was very strong and a flat-handed slap left marks. Rae didn’t care about the mark. She wouldn’t bother covering it up with make-up like she once might have. Everybody knew what her parents were like: why bother to pretend otherwise?

Davie and his bottle of whiskey in the youth club disco had seemed like a life raft. He’d been after Rae for a long time.

‘You’re beautiful, you know that?’ he’d say.

Rae could see that there was some sort of symmetry in her face and she knew other girls admired her dark eyes, slanted eyebrows and the cheekbones that made them call her ‘Cheyenne’. But she didn’t see it as beauty.

True beauty was cherished and loved, wasn’t it? Like people in films who were loved. How could beauty come out of her life?

Tonight, she didn’t pass Davie by. He was one of the Sullivans; they were all pale-faced with midnight hair and heavy five o’clock shadows. Menace surrounded them, but Davie was all right. Eager.

Unable to believe his luck when Rae smiled at him and let him lead her on to the crowded dance floor, he murmured that he had a bottle of whiskey hidden in the cloakroom. Rae wasn’t normally one of the teenagers who drank. Tonight was different. Tonight, she’d be everything everyone thought she must be: a member of the crazy, reckless Hennessey family.