No One Wants You (24 page)

‘Yes, I am. This is Harry, my husband and this is Father Bernard O’Dea, a good friend of mine. He has agreed to be here, because he has known me for a very long time.’

I asked Paddy O’Sullivan if he had any objection to Father Bernard’s presence. He said, ‘No, none whatsoever.’

We all sat down around the table. Harry recognised his pre-arranged cue, and asked everyone what he or she would like to drink. Paddy had a soft drink, Father Bernard had a gin and tonic, and Mary had a whiskey and water. I wasted no time and asked Paddy directly, ‘Have you spoken to my father?’

To which he replied, ‘No!’

I was taken aback. That could mean anything.

But before I got a chance to talk about it any further, he followed on with, ‘There is no money to be had here, girl.’

Harry came back with the drinks and at this point Father Bernard interjected and said in a voice which did not betray his anger, ‘If Celine was after money, she could have done a lot of things, a long time ago.’

I said, ‘No, I am not here for money. I am here because I want to find my father and establish my identity. I know nothing of my background. I only know what I have been told, and that is very little.’

Paddy then said, ‘There is a big family involved. There are nine children; a lot of them are married with children of their own. There are a lot of people who could get hurt.’

Father Bernard said, ‘Celine has had a lot of hurt also.’

Paddy then said that he would talk to a priest, a Father Houlihan, who was a friend of Doreen’s. He said that he was a hundred per cent sure that his brother Tom was totally unaware of my existence. He said that what he really wanted was for Father Houlihan to get Doreen, my mother, to tell his brother Tom about their daughter.

That sounded fine to me. It was then agreed between us that Paddy would set about arranging a meeting between my mother and the priest. He qualified it by saying that he
could
not promise anything. Paddy then started to ask questions about me.

‘Where do you live? Do you come to Ireland often?’

I replied that I came ‘home’ once or twice a year.

‘Where is home in Ireland?’ he asked.

I said, ‘Mostly we stay at Buttevant, or Castleconnell with friends or Kilkenny with Harry’s parents.’

He asked if I worked. I told him that I was a nurse and had two children. While the conversation had not become friendly, the atmosphere was not as frosty as at the beginning.

He then asked, ‘Where did you grow up?’

‘In Kilmallock,’ I replied.

‘Did you know the Browns of Kilmallock? They had a shop.’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘They are cousins of mine.’

‘Do you know the Powers?’

‘Yes, I do. I worked for them when I was 14.’

‘Did you know Maurice Power’s business partner, Pat O’Sullivan? He is my first cousin.’

‘Yes, I worked for his brother Jimmy, as a housemaid, when I was 16. It was for a short time.’

My mind was in a whirr. The conversation revealed that I had, in fact, spent much of my early days close to my father’s family. I had even worked for them and I did not realise it.

The meeting with Paddy O’Sullivan and his wife came to an end. Paddy asked if I knew what Tom did for a living. I replied, ‘I was told that he was a lawyer.’

‘No, he is not a lawyer.’

‘I do not care if he is a road sweeper, as long as he is my father,’ I countered.

As they rose to go, Mary said, ‘You are the spitting image of Doreen, there is no doubt that you are her daughter.’

The atmosphere had become somewhat light-hearted. Paddy offered, ‘Well, your father looks a bit like myself.’

To which I responded, with a smile, ‘If he looks like you, he must be okay, you are not too bad-looking yourself.’

With that, my genuine Uncle Paddy shook hands with me, gave me his business card and then they left.

I felt elated. I had an uncle. This was my first contact with my father’s family.

I came away from that meeting with a feeling of a degree of acceptance, however tiny. I felt that the mere fact that they had agreed to speak to me at all, meant that I was not totally the scum of the earth.

We left the hotel and walked Father Bernard back to his car. We collected our own car and drove back to Buttevant. Talk in the car with Harry was kept to pleasantries and small chit-chat. The intricate details of my meeting were not discussed, but I went over every minute detail in my head.

I was pleased that everything had gone better than I had expected. I felt content for the first time in months.

Except for one niggling little aspect.

When Mary had said that I was the spitting image of Doreen, I felt that she spoke of Doreen as if she had known her quite well. I was surprised that my father and mother would have kept in touch.

The following Wednesday, Kit asked me if I would like to go and see the ‘family mansion’ in Clarina, County Limerick, where my mother had been brought up as a child. Tony and herself had discovered it on a drive one Sunday. I said that I would love to see it, and that I would like to meet Clifford, Rosaleen’s other son, who was living there.

‘Oh great,’ said Kit. ‘You will be able to have a tour of the estate grounds and the mansion. We had better leave early, as it might take quite a long time to take the entire tour of the house and grounds.’

I thought Kit sounded a bit strange when she said this, but I was too excited to think much of it. The four of us, plus Kit as navigator, headed off with Harry as driver, for the Grand Estate of the Clifford Dynasty, at Ballybrown, Clarina, County Limerick.

We arrived at Clarina and took directions from Kit for Ballybrown. As we drove through Ballybrown, Kit yelled from the back seat, ‘Hauld your horses there, Harry, you’ve passed it.’

I said from the back, ‘How could we have passed it? There has not been sight nor light of a mansion for miles.’

‘Reverse up there about 50 yards, Harry,’ Kit ordered.

Harry reversed the car and stopped outside a small cottage.

Kit said in a low, serious and somewhat angry voice, ‘There it is now for you geril. This is what all the grandeur is about. There is your mansion for you now. Your mother’s family really have something to crow about, don’t they?’

I was aghast. I said, ‘Kit, it is no bigger than the place that I grew up in. They condemned me to that life because I was not good enough for them. Who do they think they are?’ I wanted to say so much more but I didn’t want to upset my boys.

It was a grey, unpainted cottage. It had three rooms at most. I mean three rooms altogether. It looked a wreck. Memories flooded back to me. I would have walked by this house many times, as part of a group of inmates who were being brought for an afternoon walk from the Mount industrial school, just a couple of miles down the road. This triggered a flashback to the few times that Sister Bernadette said that she had met my grandmother ‘in town’. She referred to my grandmother as, ‘The grand lady in her fur coat.’ Sister Bernadette often asked her if she would like to come and meet me, to which she would reply that she wanted ‘nothing at all to do with me’. She ‘wanted no shame
brought
on her family, by acknowledging the existence of her bastard granddaughter’. If Sister Bernadette had only seen the ‘large mansion’ that my grandmother, the ‘grand lady’, had lived in, the nun might not have held her in such high regard.

The entire estate consisted of no more than one acre, two at most. I could not equate what I saw in front of me, with what I had experienced when I met my mother and her sister, and what I had been told by Sister Bernadette. How could these people have paid £300 to imprison me in such a hellhole, while they were nothing more than ordinary cottage-folk, living in hardly better circumstances than I had been sentenced to? It didn’t make any sense.

Thinking back to my mother’s conversation with Sister Bernadette at our previous meeting, I realised that this tiny cottage could never in its wildest dreams have accommodated an Adam’s fireplace. Who was she trying to impress?

I could not even laugh at the absurdity of it all.

Reeling from a sense of shock, I knocked on the door. A man, who turned out to be Rosaleen’s son Clifford, answered the door and invited us in. Both he and his wife Barbara were friendly, welcoming and hospitable. It was a very strange feeling for me, to stand in the home of the woman who had sold her first-born grandchild.

I was completely churned up inside.

I felt physically sick.

Clifford said that I was the spitting image of his Aunt Doreen. I told Clifford that I had met my uncle, Paddy O’Sullivan, for the first time, just the night before. He was visibly taken aback and very shocked at this news. I told him that my Uncle Paddy and a Father Houlihan were going to speak to my mother, to get her to tell my father of my existence.

I felt Clifford become uneasy. After that he could not get rid of us quickly enough.

We left after a short time and headed back to Buttevant. My mood lightened on the car trip, as Kit and I had some good laughs about the lifestyle of the ‘rich and famous’ I had imagined going on in the Clifford lands and estates!

We returned to London at the end of a very eventful week. So much had been revealed and yet, so many questions remained unanswered.

FIFTEEN

My Father’s Voice

DESPITE MY CAREFUL
strategy, events now began to take on a life of their own and to spiral out of my control.

As soon as I reached London on the following Sunday night, I telephoned Kit to say that we had arrived home safely. This was standard procedure when we travelled from Ireland. Kit told me, ‘That man that you went to meet in Limerick rang here looking for you. He said to call him because it was important.’

I rang Paddy O’Sullivan in Ireland immediately. Paddy himself answered the phone. When he knew that it was me he said, ‘I have good news for you. Your father has been told about you.’

‘So he is my father?’ I asked.

‘Yes, there never was any doubt about that!’

He gave me a telephone number and told me that it was my father’s. He said he thought that it would be best if I waited for my father to call me, rather than I call him. ‘He has had quite a shock, but you will be hearing from him.’

Then he hung up.

I slid to the floor with the phone in my hand. I sat there and I cried for a long, long time. I eventually got up, went in to the sitting room and said to Harry, ‘He is my father and he knows about me.’

Once I had this information, I became impatient.

I wanted to hear his voice.

I could not wait for him to call me.

I had to call him. I dialled his number. I had prepared no speech. I had no idea what I would say to him. A lady’s voice answered the phone. I suddenly did not know whom to ask for. So I blurted out, ‘This is Celine, and I am calling from London.’

Then the lady at the other end of the phone said in the sharp tone of voice that I knew well, ‘I hope you are satisfied now!’ and hung up on me.

I dropped the phone as if it was on fire.

It was my MOTHER’S voice!

I could not figure it out. What was she doing at that number, my father’s number? The awful truth slowly dawned on me.

She must live there.

She must live with my father.

She must be MARRIED to my father.

Little by little it sank in that she must have been married to him all along. All those years while she had spoken of ‘her family’ and ‘the family’, Sister Bernadette and my mother had spoken of my father’s family as if it was a separate and different unit. Now I suddenly realised that they were one and the same family. My father and my mother were husband and wife. That meant that I had brothers and sisters.

Once again, I was the victim of my mother’s cruel games.

I began to unpack all our stuff from our trip. I worked like a Trojan getting Anthony’s school clothes out and ready for him. I had to distract myself.

I was really low. I could not believe it. My mother had won again.

In a moment of madness, I rang my Aunt Rosaleen, just two streets away. She was not there, but her son Terence was
there
. I blurted out to him all that had happened. I told him that my father now knew of my existence. I told him in what I thought was a calm voice. I did not tell him that my mother had answered the phone to me. I did not yell at him in anger, ‘Why did you not tell me that my mother was married to my father?’

I did not hear from my Aunt Rosaleen or her son Terence after that for a long, long time, years in fact. Our bi-weekly dinner dates ceased immediately. I thought it was their way of punishing me for trying to make contact with my father. I felt that they did not want what they saw as the family’s shameful secret, out in the open. They certainly did not want it flaunted about. I can only assume that I was a ‘loose cannon’ as far as they were concerned. Mentally exhausted, I went to bed and cried my heart out.

When Anthony came home from school on Monday evening, he was standing beside me at the sink in the kitchen, in his school uniform, hugging me before I even knew he was back. I needed that hug.

I asked him, ‘How would you like to have real grandparents?’

He said, ‘But we already have real grandparents, Granny Roberts in Ballyogan, in Kilkenny.’

‘That’s right, darling,’ I said. ‘But you don’t have any grandparents on Mummy’s side.’

‘Yes, that’s right Mum, because your mum and dad are dead.’

‘That is not really true, Anthony,’ I said.

Imagine saying this to an eight year old. It was difficult.

‘The mummy and daddy that brought me up are dead, but my real mummy and daddy are still alive. Remember the lady that we met in the hotel with the nun, who I told you was auntie Kathleen, that lady is really your
granny
. Also you are going to have lots of new aunties and uncles.’

Anthony became very excited and wanted to meet them.

I told him not to tell anybody.

He went to school the next day and immediately told his teacher that his mummy had been adopted and had found her mummy and daddy. He also told his entire class. When I went to collect him from school in the afternoon, his teacher, Sister Pat, approached me and excitedly told me exactly what Anthony had told her and the entire class. She asked me if it were true. With an air of pride about me, I said that it was.