What She Never Told Me (17 page)

‘Peter isn’t my biological son. Sadie and I never . . . never managed to consummate our marriage. My problem, not hers. And then one day she mentioned that she was pregnant, and I said that was good news, and eventually Peter was born.’

I stare at him.

‘That’s it? She told you she was going to have a baby that you knew couldn’t be yours and you just said it was fine? There was no discussion?’

‘None whatsoever. It wasn’t necessary. I hadn’t been able to give my wife what she wanted and needed. I felt a great deal of pain, naturally. But I also felt a kind of relief, if you can understand that.’

‘Did you not think of talking to someone, to a doctor, about your—?’

‘About my impotence? Here, in Dublin, in the 1960s? No. It wasn’t a subject I was able to discuss with anyone. Even with Sadie.’

‘Yet you’re talking to me about it.’

‘Oh, I’m an old man now. It doesn’t matter any more. It stopped being important a long time ago. What’s important is that I have a son.’

‘Do you know who Peter’s biological father is?’

‘Does it matter? In every respect, I became Peter’s father. He knows the truth, or at least most of it. He knows who his biological father is, as do I. But, in every other sense, I’m his father and he’s my son. We accept each other. We love each other. I loved his mother – not in the way she would have wanted, I admit – and she found a way of compensating for that, a way that hurt me very much. But good came out of what she did.’

‘Did she keep her affair going?’

‘Yes, but so discreetly that, if I hadn’t wanted to know whether or not it was continuing, I could have ignored it.’

‘But you wanted to know.’

‘Yes. And the knowledge was a torment. But it was also a comfort, because I knew that, as long as she continued that affair, she would stay with me.’

He stops walking and stands to face me before speaking again.

‘I’m telling you this because you have a long history with your husband. He has certainly betrayed you. But we are all flawed, Louise, and I hope that whatever decision you eventually make about your marriage will be in your best interests. The decisions I made proved to be the right ones for me. And for my wife and son.’

We continue our walk in silence, and I wonder what it has cost him to tell me about the tragedy of his own marriage, his inability to perform a fundamental act of intimacy that would have cemented his relationship with his wife. Yet, at the same time, I’m aware of a tiny thought forming in my mind, a question as to whether his marriage really was the tragedy I see it as. He had a wife who had been unfaithful to him, but out of that betrayal came the son he would probably not otherwise have had.

And then I think of my own marriage, try to think of Sandy’s betrayal as something that he and I can deal with together. Would I really be capable, some time in the future, of looking back and seeing all this as a barely significant blip in our marriage? And what about this baby? If I were to take Sandy back, how could I deny him contact with his child? But if I slam the door finally on what has been mostly a great marriage, will I regret it some day?

Thinking about this is too much for me and I force myself to stop. I look at Richard, who’s walking quietly beside me, his eyes fixed on the road ahead. I slip my arm through his.

‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘I’ll think about everything you said. But not now. It’s still too raw. It still hurts more than I can bear.’

Chapter Twenty-Two

Despite having intended to maintain a certain amount of distance, I can’t help being curious about Declan’s life. He lives in a big old house with outbuildings, one of which his wife, Áine, has turned into a studio where she paints.

‘Is she good?’ I ask. We are lying in bed after a particularly energetic and satisfying bout of sex.

‘Not bad,’ he says. ‘Actually, she’s more than not bad. She’s very good. One of the local galleries has sold a few paintings of hers.’

‘What kind of stuff does she paint?’

‘Landscapes, seascapes. Portraits of the boys.’

‘And of you?’

‘I’m not the best sitter. She tried once, but got exasperated with me.’

He sounds proud of his wife. I tell him so and ask why his marriage isn’t working.

‘I never said it wasn’t working,’ he says. ‘As marriages go, it’s a good one. We complement each other. If we were a business, we’d probably get some kind of award.’

‘So I got the wrong end of the stick. You’re not dealing with marriage fatigue or failure. You just want a bit of excitement, is that it?’

‘No, Louise,’ he tells me, looking steadily into my eyes. ‘You’ve got the wrong end of the stick there, as well. It’s not excitement I’m after. I could have gone after excitement before, but I didn’t. I didn’t marry Áine for excitement. I married her because I found her attractive – in her personality and in her looks – and because we got on well. I knew we’d have a good marriage, and that has turned out to be the case. I love my wife. I’ve never been unfaithful to her before. So, as they say in America, go figure.’

His speech makes me uncomfortable. I’ve wanted to see his marriage as something steady and boring, something he fell into because it was comfortable and easy. It’s clear that this isn’t the case. He loves his wife, but I’m the girl who let him down. And, despite being a psychiatrist, he hasn’t worked out that he wants me
because
I’m the girl who let him down, the girl he needs to come back to him so that everything can be sewn up nicely.

I’m trying to find a way of telling him this, but he’s not ready to stop talking.

‘Yourself and myself, we didn’t see each other for years and now we see each other every day. I tell lies to my family when they call from Italy. I tell them I’m doing this, that and the other to explain why I’m not always at home when they call or why I have my mobile switched off. All I can think of is you and being with you, having sex with you. But what are you thinking? Oh, sure, I know you’re enjoying what we get up to, and I know that it probably helps you cope with your marriage breakdown. But is there anything beyond that? I doubt it. And here’s something else that bothers me: I never did understand why everything changed so drastically between us, all those years ago. Did I do or say something to upset you? What did I do that was bad enough to make you drop me without explaining why?’

This is the moment I should tell him that he and I conceived a baby together and that, encouraged or persuaded – I’m not sure what the difference is, in this case – by my mother, I got rid of it, had it scraped out of me in a clinic in London, and chose to tell him nothing about it.

But I don’t say anything, because I don’t want to revisit that particular time in my past. I don’t want to feel again the emotional pain that lingered for a long time and that I eventually found a way of shutting out. And I don’t want to hurt him. But I do want to be at least partly honest with him.

‘I’m sorry, Declan,’ I say. ‘I can’t remember what happened. It was too long ago. And I don’t know what to tell you about what I’m thinking. I don’t know if there’s the remotest chance of Sandy and me getting back together. Sometimes that’s what I want, and sometimes I’m so angry that I don’t think I could ever forgive him. When I’m with you, I feel good about myself. Yes, I love the sex. It’s brilliant. And I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t feel something for you. The trouble is that I just don’t know what I feel or how much.’

He turns away from me to look at his watch, which he’s left on the table beside the bed, gets up without a word and goes to the shower. I start to follow him, but he closes the door and I hear the lock turn. When he comes out again, wet and wrapped in a towel, all traces of me washed away, I’m overwhelmed by a sadness that surprises me and that I can’t disguise. I start crying. He throws the towel aside and pulls me to him and we fall back on to the bed. I’m holding on to him without having had to explain myself, keeping him in thrall to my questionable charms. It’s a small victory for me, but it doesn’t feel like one. It feels more like a trick.

*

‘Hi, there! It’s Joannie.’

The voice is jaunty, bright, and for a couple of moments I’m confused, unsure of whether the person on the other end of the line is trying to sell me something or whether I should know her and am having a brief memory lapse. The affair with Declan has softened my previous sense of urgency and I’ve done little work on the papers. But then I remember the young woman who was so kind to me when I went back to Walter Square in search of Mary O’Connor.

‘Joannie, how are you?’

‘Grand, thanks,’ she says. ‘I have a bit of news for you. My boyfriend did a bit of checking up on this Mary O’Connor. There’s no Mary O’Connor registered on anything to do with the house, but the name on the deeds was Thomas O’Connor. He seems to have bought it in 1975, but he must have been living there before – renting it, like – because that was the address for him before it all went through.’

‘Yes. He would have been working at Tennyson’s and paying rent on the house. Tennyson’s built the square. Everyone who lived there in those days would have been renting. I suppose the brewery would have sold off all the houses eventually, when it closed down in Dublin.’

‘There’s a bit more. The house was transferred in 1984 to a Liam O’Connor. That would have been this Thomas O’Connor’s son, I suppose.’

‘Is that who you and your boyfriend bought it from?’ I ask.

‘No. There were a few people in between. Liam O’Connor sold the house in 1998. But here’s the interesting thing: it was the auctioneer my boyfriend works for that handled the sale, and it looks like Liam O’Connor had already moved when he put the house on the market, so there’s an address for him down in Kerry. Have you a pen handy?’

‘No, give me a second. I’ll go and get one,’ I say. It’s a white lie. I always have a pencil handy, ready to mark a score or, when I answer the phone, ready to write a lesson or session into my diary. But I need to step away from this conversation for a few moments and try to understand why my heart is beating so fast, and slow it down. When I pick up the phone again, my voice is as jaunty as Joannie’s.

‘Fire away,’ I say, and she reads out an address near Kenmare that sounds as if it might be a farm or a smallholding.

‘No phone number?’

‘No, sorry. And he may not be at that address any more,’ Joannie says. ‘Even so, you might still be able to track him down.’

‘Joannie, you’ve been incredibly helpful. I’m really grateful,’ I tell her.

‘Ah, sure, it was no big deal,’ she says, downplaying the extent to which she has gone out of her way to help me.

It is a big deal, though. I have no idea who Liam O’Connor is, who Thomas and Mary O’Connor were, and it may be that they have nothing to do with my mother. But I won’t know that until I find them.

I call directory enquiries and ask for a number for Liam O’Connor at the address Joannie has given me.

‘That number is ex-directory,’ the operator says.

I want to scream in frustration.

Chapter Twenty-Three

I feel as if I’ve been here forever. It’s still August, but there’s a sense that the summer is over. I haven’t been able to face going back to London. I have no idea whether Sandy is in the flat or whether he has moved in with Julia. I’ve sent texts and left messages telling people I’ve had to stay on in Ireland for a while because of family stuff. I sit outside White Nights with my coffee, quiet amid the bustle around me, unable and unwilling to think beyond the present. The river is flowing as fast as ever, people are going about their business, moving back and forth across the little bridge. Occasionally, I see someone I recognise, but even when I catch his or her eye, there’s no discernible flicker of acknowledgement. Have I changed that much? I could call out to them, approach them and say,
Hello, do you remember me?
But I don’t.

Part of my reluctance stems from an admission that, despite having lived for years in this town, I failed to put down real roots here, created no lasting foundation for strong friendships capable of standing the test of time. It would be easy to blame my mother for having been so interfering, but I could just as easily blame something in myself, an inability to stand up to her – until Sandy appeared on the scene.

What would be the point, anyway, in trying to resurrect one of these old friendships, if that is what they can be called, that I know I won’t keep up? If you leave something, you can’t go back to it. And yet I have, in a way, gone back to Declan, haven’t I?

I feel a bit like Oisín, one of those mythological heroes in the stories my mother used to read to me. He fell in love with a fairy princess called Niamh and went to live with her in Tír na nÓg, the land of the ever-young. After three hundred years, he was starting to miss Ireland and wanted to go back for a visit, so Niamh gave him a white horse for his journey and warned him that, if he dismounted and set foot on the soil, he’d never return to her. But his girth broke and he fell to the ground and immediately became a withered old man and died. I feel as if I’m still on the horse, but only just.

Leaving Ireland wasn’t my idea. Drogheda was a great town. It had its own personality, despite being so close to Dublin. People were lively and kind, and I was happy there. At some point, I would have had to leave it to go to university or music college, but, even then, Dublin rather than London would have been in my sights. I was doing well with my piano studies, which surprised my mother. Most children I knew hated practising their scales. Not me. I loved the regularity of it, the certainties of where the notes had to go, the way I could spread my fingers and know where they were going to fall. Learning the piano had been my idea and it was Dermot who had initially encouraged me. It was Dermot, too, who paid for my singing lessons, driving me up to Dublin regularly to see a well-known teacher.

My mother, having smiled indulgently at me from the sidelines, only began to show serious interest in the possibility that I might have a career when invitations to sing solos at local concerts started to come in. And when it finally came to making a decision about whether to go to university to study history or to go to music college, and I was adamant that I wanted to be a singer, my mother stunned me when she told me I should think about auditioning for the top London colleges.

Now, thinking about how I always ended up doing what my mother wanted, I feel a surge of bitterness that becomes physical, a rush of sourness from my stomach into my mouth. But, just as quickly, an image comes into my mind of my mother in the hospital, at first agitated and frequently gasping for the oxygen mask, then eventually frail and silent as the increasing doses of morphine take effect.

It’s too painful to think about her final days, so I make myself look at the paper, order more coffee and think about anything but her suffering. I turn to the exercise book where I’ve been making notes about everything that has happened.

Louise Redmond 1 (me), born 11 December 1969.

Louise Redmond 2, born 11 December 1969, died 30 April 1973.

Death certificate for Louise 2. Real.

Father of Louise 2 is David Prescott, ex-Tennyson’s, my mother’s lover.

David Prescott saw Louise 2 die of meningitis in hospital in Northampton.

Marjorie Redmond, my mother, registered the death of Louise 2.

Marjorie Redmond was the mother of Louise 2.

Marjorie Redmond had a copy of the death certificate of Louise 2.

Marjorie Redmond had a photograph of Louise 2.

David Prescott says he is not my father.

Who is my father? Is he still alive?

Who am I?

And then I write down the details of my recurring memory, of the little hand stretching upwards, and of the episode in Crumlin when the memory seemed to merge with reality as I found myself standing in front of the green postbox in Walter Square.

My writing is fast, but it’s behind the speed of my thoughts, which are racing ahead to the other things that don’t appear to be directly connected: the letter to Santa Claus that I found in my mother’s trunk; the envelope addressed to Mary O’Connor at 10 Walter Square. I’m just starting to write these down when, my head bent over the exercise book, I become aware of someone standing in front of me. I look up.

‘Jesus, Ursula, what are you doing here?’

‘What do you think? I was worried about you. You haven’t been answering your phone. So I rang Sandy.’

‘Ah.’

‘Ah, indeed. Look, I want to know what’s going on. Sandy didn’t give too much away, said I should hear it from you first. So, are you going to tell me?’

‘I’ll tell you later. But you were right all along. He was a lying bastard and I was an idiot. But it’s not just the Sandy thing. There’s a lot more going on, and I’m sorry I haven’t told you. Here, sit down and have a look at this.’

I push my exercise book towards her. ‘That’s about the gist of it,’ I say.

She eventually looks up from my notes, shaking her head in bewilderment.

‘Okay, I don’t understand this at all, but it looks pretty messy. You’d better give me the full story,’ she says.

I’m getting fed up of retelling the story. Sometimes, I do it quietly to myself, feeding in the facts one by one, trying to make sense of them by creating links between them. It’s always the same, though. It never makes sense. But I go through it all again for Ursula, who exhales loudly as I finish the story and sit back.

‘Oh, I forgot one thing, but it may not be connected,’ I say, telling her about the ancient letter from Ailish to Santa Claus.

‘The explanation has to be that your mother had twins. It’s the only one. And the Ailish thing kind of supports that.’

‘Not according to David Prescott,’ I say. ‘Well, it’s not that he said there were no twins involved. It’s just that he mentioned only one child. I think he would have mentioned a second.’

‘Unless he’s lying. Unless he’s got a reason for wanting to keep you, the other daughter, out of his life.’

‘But why?’ I ask, bewildered. ‘And then there’s the fact that both of us were called Louise. Why would my mother have called us both Louise?’

She waves my question away. I love the way Ursula is so certain about everything, right up to the moment when she can’t be certain any more. She grabs hold of things, pursues them until they either work or don’t, but she exhausts them before abandoning them and moving on to the next theory.

‘I don’t know. But we’re only going to find out by talking to David Prescott. He’s the key to all this now. From everything you’ve told me, I’m absolutely convinced about that.’

I look out across the river, feeling as insubstantial as the glimmers of sunlight that land on the water momentarily, only to vanish just as quickly. I’m convinced of nothing, anchored to nothing. But I’m grateful to Ursula for her faithfulness, her insistence on helping me find answers, and if she thinks David Prescott can provide them, I’m ready to try to believe her.

‘So,’ she says, ‘I think we should go and see David Prescott, and sooner rather than later. My flight back to London is the day after tomorrow. Why don’t you come with me?’

‘I can’t. I have to go down to Kerry.’

I tell her about my visit to the house in Walter Square and the information Joannie has given me.

‘I rang directory enquiries for a phone number, but they wouldn’t give it to me. Ex-directory. I think I’m going to go down there, though.’

‘But that’s madness, Lou! You can’t go off haring down the country on spec. And, anyway, that O’Connor chap is probably nothing to do with anything. For all you know, your mother was doing some Lady Bountiful thing when she worked at that brewery, sending pretty cards to the appreciative locals on behalf of the company. No, Lou, the answers to all this are closer to home. David Prescott is our man. He knows more than he’s told you. It’s a matter of asking the right questions.’

‘I’m not even sure I know the right questions,’ I say.

‘No, but I do,’ she says. ‘Ring him up and ask when he can see us. But do it later. I’m starving. And I need a drink.’

As we stand up to leave the café, my mobile rings. Declan. I let it ring, but I don’t answer. Ursula gives me a sidelong look that I ignore. She doesn’t need to know that I’m seeing him again after all these years. It’s not that she’d disapprove. She’d probably be delighted and say,
Go for it, girl
. But, if I tell her about it, I’ll be giving the affair an importance it doesn’t have. It’s an interlude, no more than that.

We repair to the old Franciscan church, which has become an art gallery with a restaurant. When I was living here in the eighties, the church was still thriving. Drogheda was a town of churches and tall spires. Most of them are still there and attendance remains relatively high. But times have changed and religious vocations are down. You rarely see a nun.

Ursula, as if reading my thoughts, starts giggling.

‘What’s the collective noun for nuns?’ she asks.

‘A coven?’ I say, and I immediately feel a bit mean. There were some wonderful nuns in both my primary and secondary schools, clever and hardworking women who did their best to educate their pupils, but it was often the ones like Mother Bernadette who stayed in our memories.

‘Not bad, but no. Try again.’

‘I give in.’

‘A superfluity! But they’re not so superfluous now, are they?’

‘Do you remember that old witch, Bernadette?’ I ask.

‘Will I ever forget her? I remember that time she made you stand beside her, in front of the whole school, while she painted the grapes.’

‘Believe it or not, I found that painting of the grapes the other day. I took it to be framed. We could go and collect it later.’

‘I can’t believe you’re paying good money to put it in a frame,’ she says, a look of incredulity spreading across her face. ‘I’d have chucked it into the bin. Bad memories. But you always were a weirdo.’

‘I’m turning bad memories into good ones. It’s a psychotherapeutic exercise I’ve set myself,’ I say. ‘And it’s not a bad painting. You’ll see.’

‘You’re turning into an eejit. Now, are you going to tell me the whole Sandy story?’ she says.

I love Ursula. She’s my best friend in the whole world. We survived being parted when my mother and I moved away from Dublin, and we’ve both ended up in London. But Ursula doesn’t have a high opinion of men and I know that, once we get down into a serious discussion, there’s a danger she will launch into a rant about their deceitful ways. That will make me feel worse than I feel already. Still, she deserves to know what has happened.

‘Okay, so . . . you were right about the first time he left. It
was
for a woman. When he came back, he was still carrying on with her. And now she’s pregnant. End of story,’ I say.

She gapes at me in astonishment. ‘Christ on crutches,’ she says, and she’s about to continue speaking, but I take both of her hands and pull them towards me.

‘I can’t face talking about it, Ursula. Not right now. It’s too public and, if I start crying, it’ll be embarrassing for both of us. Anyway, I’m going to need another couple of glasses of wine before I’m able to tell you the whole story.’

It’s less a statement than a plea. Ursula looks as though she’s about to say something, perhaps tell me that I need to talk about it here and now, but then she relents and gives a short sigh.

‘Okay, let’s eat and then we can go and get that painting.’