The Christie Affair (36 page)

Once you’ve lost a baby their cries will reach you anywhere. Across miles of parkland. From an open window two streets away. You wake in the middle of the night and find yourself in the wrong place, you’re supposed to be elsewhere,
with
someone. Wherever she is, you know she’s waking too, blue eyes opening in the dark, searching for the one person in the world who answers to the name. Mother. Not a pretender. Her own real, true mother. The body knows, even when the mind does not.

When, finally, I made it home, grey-faced and ruined, I found a stack of letters from Finbarr waiting for me, some of them with money enclosed – for the journey to Ireland he didn’t know I’d already taken.

‘Why won’t you answer, Nan?’ he wrote, again and again.

His parents never told him how I’d landed on their doorstep. He knew nothing about the night I’d lain beside him, holding myself against his feverish body. Sister Mary Clare had never written to him, I was sure, and even if she had, the Mahoneys would have thrown the letter away.

‘If you don’t love me anymore,’ he finally wrote, in a letter that landed in England before I did, ‘I want to hear you say it to my face. I’ll come to London to hear you say it.’

I picked up pencil and paper to write back to him. But there was too much to say. Too much sorrow to deliver.

When my mother wrote to Aunt Rosie to tell her what had happened, Rosie travelled from Dublin to Sunday’s Corner and insisted on speaking to the Mother Superior, who sat her down and showed her a death certificate.

Mother: Nan O’Dea.

Baby girl: deceased. And there, written beside the word, was the same day in November they’d sent her off with the man I’d seen from the rooftop.

It was Sister Mary Clare’s handiwork. I knew it.

‘I’m so sorry, Nan,’ my mother sobbed, when she told me. Never having seen Genevieve that day, the laughing picture of health.

‘She’s not dead,’ I promised.

My mother looked at me, sorrowful for my loss, and possibly my delusion.

What could I do then but walk, all over London and beyond, refusing to rejoice in my freedom, wanting to search for Genevieve but not knowing where to begin? I clutched my body, cruelly bounced back to what it had been before, my stomach flat and smooth, my milk dried up.

If I’d been right enough in the head to track time, I could tell you the date I returned home to find Finbarr, sitting on the curb in front of our building, a satchel at his feet. It was the only time in my life where my heart didn’t leap at the sight of him. There was nothing I could do but break
his
heart once by telling him about Genevieve, and twice by sending him away.

If only he’d come for me just a little later, when I was at least able to pretend to be my old self. By the following spring, I was working a few afternoons at Buttons and Bits. Megs was already training as a nurse. Louisa, still home but already engaged, was taking a secretarial course. At our kitchen table she taught me the shorthand and typing that would one day lead to my job at the British Rubber Company. By that summer, I could walk through the world and present a face that didn’t look entirely broken, or constantly searching.

I was, though. Constantly searching. Did I ever stop? No. Did I ever plan to stop – did I ever think there would come a time, or a moment, when I’d admit defeat and the impossibility of my quest? Of course not.

Four years after my return to England, quite by chance, I found her. Unmistakable. I was visiting my sister Megs at her new home in Torquay, where she worked as a nurse.

Megs took a day off and we went for a walk on the beach. A little girl ran towards us with the peripatetic zigzag of small children. At first I thought the child was on her own but as my eyes searched through the sunlight I saw two women a long way behind her, so distant I could barely make out their forms. When the little girl found Megs and me in her way, instead of running around us, she threw her arms around my legs.

‘Oh,’ I said, looking down into a pair of bright blue eyes. She had a high forehead and shiny dark hair cascading backwards as she looked up at me. Sweet, pointed little chin. I knew her in an instant. And she knew me, too. I know she did.

‘Nan,’ Megs said sharply, as I stooped to gather the little girl in my arms. ‘You can’t just pick up other people’s children.’

The little girl didn’t agree. She returned my embrace as if she remembered the last time her mother had held her. Her real mother.

‘Teddy,’ one of the women called out. ‘Look here, Teddy, we must head back to Ashfield.’

The child’s consciousness returned to her present-day life. She squirmed out of my arms and ran back to the women, who turned and walked off in the other direction. I grabbed Megs’s arm to steady myself.

‘There, there,’ Megs said. ‘You’ll have one of your own one day, Nan, you will.’

‘I already have one of my own,’ is what I said out loud. Inwardly I said
Ashfield
, again and again in my mind, memorizing it without a doubt, and vowing to discover all there was to know about the people who lived there.

Was she beautiful?

Yes. More beautiful than you can imagine.

The day Finbarr finally came to fetch me, I sent him away, returning the money he’d sent me against his protestations. We had barely talked an hour before he trudged off, out of sight, heavy with the added sorrow I’d given him.

‘You’ll always know where I am,’ Finbarr said before he left, tears streaming down his face. ‘I’ll never live anywhere without
sending you word. You’ll change your mind one day. I know you will.’

A mother bat can find her pup in a cave full of thousands, even without eyes that see. When your child has been stolen you measure her age by the days that pass. You look into the faces of other children, to make sure. You do this so many times you know with your whole being, you haven’t made a mistake when at last you find her.

Sometimes I wonder if Agatha learned it from me. About the worst violence you can do to a person. What you might be driven to in its aftermath. The wars that can be started, the justice that must be served. All for the sake of avenging a child.

Part Three

16 September 1926

Dearest Finbarr,

I hope this letter finds you well after all these years. My goodness, I hope it finds you at all, and that you will be happy to hear from me. I must admit that even after all that’s happened, even though I haven’t answered your letters, whenever I see your name on an envelope (whenever I see the words, ‘Love, Finbarr’ written across the bottom of a page), my heart somersaults backwards up to the sky.

And so I must tell you what I’d promised myself I wouldn’t, which I take a risk in doing. I have found our baby, our girl, our darling Genevieve. I have seen her and even held her in my arms. She is happy and healthy and living with ‘parents’ at a house called ‘Styles’ in Sunningdale, Berkshire. If you could only see her! She has your eyes, Finbarr. She’s smart and brave and beautiful. She loves dogs and books. In that way at least one of our wishes has come true.

The people who have her are named Archibald and Agatha Christie. And here is the difficult part. Archie Christie plans to leave his wife and marry me. Did I engineer this? Did I plan it? Yes. To you alone I confess that I did. For the only reason that could excuse me. To be a part of my own child’s life.

If I received such a letter from you, if you told me you were about to marry, it would cause me great sorrow but I would thank you for telling me yourself. I hope you understand this is all I can do. It’s too late to take her away from the only family she’s known. At least this way I can be her stepmother. At least I can land my eyes upon her, and embrace her, and call her by her real name when she’s asleep.

I don’t love Archie. But I can’t afford to hate him despite his role in all that happened. He’s my only road back to Genevieve. So I do what must be done. And Finbarr: nothing could be like us, could it? My heart belongs, as ever, to you.

Love,

Nan

The Disappearance

Day Eight
Saturday, 11 December 1926

F
INBARR CAUGHT
A
GATHA
at the top of the stairs on the first floor, his hand on her elbow, urgent but gentle. The house was dark, just after midnight. She and Chilton had missed their dinner. She’d only wanted to gather some tins of food to sustain them.

‘Agatha,’ Finbarr said, his hoarse voice full of urgency. ‘Please don’t say you’ve decided not to help me after all?’

She looked at him, his face barely visible in the flicker of the candle she held, but strikingly earnest. She thought, What a fool Nan is. Any woman with her wits about her would run away with him the moment he asked. The conviction with which she thought this, while Chilton sat waiting for her upstairs, could almost make her sympathize with Archie, the twin desires, the divided loyalty.

‘All it would take is one word from you,’ Finbarr said. ‘Tell her. That your daughter is your daughter. That she’s not Genevieve.’

‘One word! I could offer ten thousand words and she’d never believe me. I could show her a birth certificate and she’d say it was forged. Don’t you see she’s been convinced of this for years now? To accept any evidence to the contrary would be to lose her child all over again.’

Did Finbarr stop in that moment, or any moment, and consider whether
he
believed Agatha’s denials that Teddy and Genevieve were the same person? That when Agatha said
her
child, she also meant
his
child? I doubt he did. It would have been too contrary to his primary goal. I had already told him Teddy’s birthday was the same as Genevieve’s. That Archie’s mother came from County Cork, so he’d have known the perfect place to collect a baby to pass off as his own.

The nuns wouldn’t give a baby to Protestants
, Finbarr had said.