Peeling Oranges (3 page)

***

The moon is covered over. There are no stars to guide the Wise Men in their path. I see the light on the stairs. It leaves two steps in darkness. I am used to nocturnal perambulation. (It was at boarding school I learned my insomnia tables by heart). On the wall of the landing there is a wedding photograph of Martha Foley. A beautiful lady, immortalised behind glass.

My mother has not aged. She has metamorphosed.

In the drawing-room Mam is propped up with cushions on an armchair. The fire has gone out. She is wearing her overcoat and is struggling with a brooch which she is unable to fasten.

‘What’s wrong, Mam?’

‘I’m losing the use of myself. The pin is bent. That’s what life does.’

I fasten the brooch on to her overcoat.

She taps her chest. ‘Don’t mind me. I can breathe better when I’m up.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I’m all right now.’

‘Why don’t you tell me about being burgled? It must have been horrible.’

She clears her throat. ‘It was such a long time ago. Patrick … your father… he was in Spain…’

She stares beyond my forehead as if searching for something in a distance. ‘Horrible?’ she says. ‘What was horrible?’

***

I light a lamp in the study.

New Year’s Eve 1947:

Martha is not happy. She is keeping some secret from me. It is New Year’s Eve and she is not happy. Maybe she is homesick.

6 January 1948:

Martha is with child. The day of the Magi. If she would only confess that she was unfaithful I would forgive her, but she just bursts into tears and says she wants to go to London to see Marie Stopes. She saw her poster there on our honeymoon on our way to Spain. It became fixed in her mind. She doesn’t realise that what she is saying is, Close the stable door after the horse has bolted. She is unpredictable, irrational. As days and weeks pass, I watch her stomach rise like yeast. I am perturbed. She is melancholy – so unlike the girl I first knew. She will not confide in me.

18 June 1948:

A baby boy was born at 4.05 a.m. It was a difficult birth – Caesarean. Martha lacked the will needed to push the child into the light. She kept saying she wished she were dead. Both baby and mother were nearly lost, very nearly lost.

***

On the same day a telegram was sent from Madrid to Dublin to record the birth of
Derek Foley
. It didn’t record the long travail which the birth entailed. Telegrams don’t record marathons. Letters of congratulations arrived from Muddy and Peg and some friends from the Liberties on the occasion of ‘
the happy event’.

Some of the letters in the desk drawer are from a Gearóid MacSuibhne or from my mother. (Did she keep copies of her letters or were some of them ever sent?). I open one of my mother’s letters to Gearóid MacSuibhne: faded writing on yellowing pages. An initially neat hand succumbing to a spidery scrawl. A gush of words, impatient for ink, flying in many directions, trying to find something to stab. Written in Irish. Accent marks land randomly, surprising letters not used to stress. She speaks of ‘watching this mountain growing inside me
’
, while back in the Liberties Muddy was knitting me a blue matinée coat, and Peg bought a pram, and the rocking cot that went back in generations in the Woodburn family was made ready for me. It was enough to break a heart.

July 1948:

Martha weeps and weeps and weeps. I ask her if she wants Peg or Muddy over for company, but she says she doesn’t want to see anybody. I ask her why she is so sad. She says, ‘Sadness! Some seek it out (I’m sure she is referring to me), ‘and others have it thrust upon them.’ She won’t explain what she means. I am nearly at my wits’ end. I thought I could adapt. Isn’t it a child I wanted all along? But not like this. Do they know the circumstances back home? She says they don’t. They’ll make a laughing stock of me or stone her to death with their big white stones.

***

I read these entries over and over.
‘Unfaithful?’
Where does that leave me? How can one confront an ailing mother about a past infidelity, even if it led to the spawning of oneself? A child is not the moral guardian of his parent.

I write in my own diary:

Who was my father? I walk in a fatherless world. Can one parent rear a whole child? Am I maimed?

December 1949:

My indigestion is bad today – severe pains in my chest. I must eat less red meat.

August 1950:

There is such heat. It rebounds off the pavements with its muscle, trying to fell one with its blows. There is no ventilation anywhere. The buildings are so high, they contain the heat within the streets like an oven. Outside the city the orange trees have dried up. The fruit is withered and sickly. It is so difficult to breathe. I must get to the sea. I must contact L. I have not been for some time. She is agreeable to do what I ask. I must write to JB and make all the arrangements. With M here it is very difficult. I am losing my grip. How suddenly it can happen. And yet, when one looks at all my neat files, one could say this man
led an ordered life.

That was Patrick Foley’s last entry in his diaries.

***

‘Who was L?’ I ask at breakfast.

‘L? L is for the..’ Saliva appears around her lips.

‘Why didn’t you move long ago, Mam?’

She’s got a half vacant stare. ‘You go to school and you come home, don’t you know? You’re a big boy now.’

‘Do you have any secrets, Mam?’

‘Lord, secrets, is it secrets?’

Her eyes light up like a child about to play a game. She starts to sing. ‘L is for the way you look at me…’

***

She did try to abandon me. In one of her letters to Gearóid MacSuibhne she relates that she brought me back from Madrid to Dublin a few weeks after giving birth to me. She was evidently distraught at the time. Patrick records her saying, ‘Moses was abandoned, and there was no rebuke from the pulpit.’

She brought me to the Coombe Maternity hospital, supposedly for a check-up. The truth was she couldn’t stand the sight of me – they were her actual words. (How insensitive my mother was to discovery. Did she think that such outpourings were covert in Irish?). She left me in the ward of the
Holy Angels
and walked away. She walked to the end of Dean Street and then turned around and came back. All the time she kept thinking that I had stopped breathing – I had the croup at the time, according to her letter. It kept nagging at my mother. She couldn’t have it on her conscience if I had died. She took me back. And that is why (I know now) right up to the time I went to boarding school, she never went to bed without coming into my
room and putting her ear near to my face (without ever touching it) to check that I was still breathing. Sometimes I was awake and, with my eyes closed, I naively entertained the luxurious possibility of receiving a hug or a caress, but the examination was always impersonal, peremptory, a medical check.

She enquired about adoption:

There are many women – unmarried mothers – who are leaving their children with the nuns for adoption in America. Imagine, Gearóid, America, so far away. Archbishop McQuaid is insisting that the families have money and strong Catholic morals. They’re going mad for children over there ever since the War. And some of them even in their forties are being allowed to adopt. It’s all to do with money. They are paying one hundred and fifty pounds per child. O’Malley is calling for an enquiry in the Dáil, but it is all covered up. Somebody is making a tidy sum. Perhaps I could consider it, but it would only open up a can of worms, don’t you know? Papers would have to be signed. Things could be found out. Oh, it wasn’t meant to be like this.

I storm out of the study shouting for my mother, but she has gone hiding behind her
dementia
cover like a butterfly behind a leaf. I am fearful of upsetting her, of damaging her frail health even further, but I persist. I must persist.

‘Why did you send me away, Mam?’

She has her back to me, putting plates on the dresser.

‘Send you away, is it? I will never send you away. We will all go together like leaves in the wind.’

‘Could you not stand looking at me, Mam?’

‘What’s that? Don’t talk like that.’

I knew I had said the wrong thing. Her voice breaks down and she starts to cry. Do all mothers cry as much as
mine? She is a broken woman. She was always broken ever since I can remember. But I had pushed her too hard. Emotion has made her lucid. She reaches for her Sweet Afton, as if such poison were a lifebuoy, and coughs so violently that I fear her delicate frame could shatter like a shell. She gasps for breath.

‘My tablets. Where did I leave them?’

***

Ever since I was small, she tried to condition me not to pry. I remember word for word her cautionary tale of Labhras Loingseach. It was the only night time story she ever told me. I was tucked up in bed and asking her questions, always asking questions about anything that came into my head. It was my way of trying to keep my mother a little longer in my bedroom. I dipped my fingers into her silky curls, but she put my hands under the bedclothes and told me to stop asking questions.

‘Stay quiet now and I’ll tell you a story.’

I sat up straight in the bed scarcely able to contain my excitement.

‘Labhras Loingseach was a king in ancient Ireland.’

‘Was he king of all Ireland, Mam?’

‘No, he was one of many kings. Listen. This king had horse’s ears.’

I chuckled. ‘How could he have horse’s ears, Mam?’

‘Stop asking all the questions or I won’t tell you the story. The king had horse’s ears. Some humans had a bull’s head or a serpent’s tail. It was long, long ago. All right?’

‘All right, Mam.’

‘And every barber that cut the king’s hair was put to death so that the secret could be kept.’

‘But, Mam...’

A look of exasperation. Even at that age I recognised it.

‘Sorry.’ I sealed my lips.

‘He would lose the kingship if they ever found out that he had horse’s ears. But there was one mother, a widow who had an only son.’

‘Like you, Mam.’

‘What?’

‘You have only one son: me, Mam, and you are a widow.’

‘Pay attention,’ she snapped.

My mother looked cross. She confused me. What had I done? I tried to give my beautiful mother a hug to make up for vexing her or whatever it was I had done to her.

She drew away. ‘Stop that. Will you listen? This widow pleaded with the king to save her son’s life.’

‘What’s
pleaded,
Mam?’

‘
Begged
. You understand?’

‘Yes, Mam.’

‘She begged that the king would not kill her only son, and the king took pity on her, don’t you know? And he spared her son on the condition that he took an oath, made a holy promise, you understand, that he would never tell the king’s secret to anyone.’

‘And what...?’

‘And that he would hold his tongue,’ she says sharply, silencing my interjection. ‘But the barber could not keep the secret. So he went deep into the woods.’

‘Where the wolf is, Mam?’

‘No, the wolf didn’t come then. He went deeper and deeper into the dark woods and he stood in front of a tree and he told his secret to the tree.’

‘A tree, Mam?’ I chuckled again. This was a funny story my mother was telling me.

‘Yes, a tree; and he felt relieved then, don’t you know? He felt good that he didn’t have to carry a burden anymore, you understand?’

‘No, Mam.’

‘You are tormenting me.’

‘Sorry, Mam.’

‘You are a most ungrateful child. I don’t know why I’m bothering at all. Do you know the trouble you cause me. Do you have any idea?’

‘No, Mam.’

‘All these interruptions. Now listen,’ she said, and she shook me vigorously, her fingers pressing tightly into my arms, hurting me but I didn’t complain. ‘Some time later that very tree was cut down and they made a harp out of it for the king’s harpist. And when the harp was played...’

‘It told the secret, Mam.’

‘How did you know?’

‘I don’t know, Mam.’

I was beaming. I was expecting my mother to pat me on the head or to tell me I was a very bright boy but she did neither.

‘Labhras Loingseach has horse’s ears,’ the harp sang out over and over every time the harpist plucked the strings, and the whole court knew then.’

‘And what happened, Mam?’

‘What happened? That’s what happened.’

‘To the king, Mam, and to the barber?’

‘The king lost his throne, I suppose, and the barber lost his life. So you see...’

‘Call me my name, Mam.’

‘What?’

‘You never say my name.’

‘What a strange little fellow you are.’ She looked at me. I remember that look, a look of mystification that was to be repeated many times as I grew up.