What She Never Told Me (23 page)

Chapter Thirty-Five

We get to know each other in the days that follow, Liam and I walking and talking, making video calls to New York. Sometimes Liam leaves Nora and me to chat alone. She’s managed to cancel several weeks of singing engagements and has booked a flight to Shannon. She’s going to be here in less than a week’s time.

It’s Imelda who breaks the spell. ‘We’ll have to tell the Guards,’ she says.

Telling the Gardaí is something that hasn’t entered my head, so immersed have I been in this strange new family, in having a brother and a sister and a whole world that I knew nothing about until just a few days ago.

Once we go to the police, nothing will be left unexposed. There will be media interest, not only in me and Liam and Nora, but also in Richard and David Prescott. And maybe even in Sandy.

I want to protect all of them from the imminent and inevitable intrusion into their lives. But, most of all, I want to protect my mother – Marjorie, the woman I still think of as my mother. The press will crucify her and she won’t be able to defend herself. It will be up to me to defend her, and yet how can I say anything good about her without hurting Liam and Nora?

Some things start to make sense, including my mother’s insistence that I go to London to study. I hadn’t really wanted to leave and I was homesick for months, almost bursting into tears every time I heard an Irish accent on the Tube or a piece of music from home. But my mother had convinced me that I had to go to London. Now I know she never really thought I was going to have the big career as a singer she had made me believe in. I was never going to be good enough for that. But, had I stayed in Ireland, been content to perform in concerts, oratorio and the occasional opera, there might have been photographs and interviews in Irish newspapers, and they might have led to someone spotting a resemblance to the O’Connors and starting to ask questions.

Yes, all of this makes sense. But there are other things that don’t. Why had she taken the risk, all those years ago, of remaining in Dublin with a stolen child who could have been recognised? Taking her to cafés, like Bewley’s, even sending her to school, although it wasn’t a national school, but a private school, nowhere near Crumlin.

Was she mad? I ask myself this question several times a day. But that would make what she did too easy to explain away. She had loved me, there was no doubt about that, and had given me a wonderful childhood. She had also sought to reassure Mary O’Connor that I was safe and well, that I wasn’t dead. She wasn’t the monster that the papers will make her out to have been.

And I think back now to that last night in the hospital, when she made that strange shushing sound, and wonder whether, in some final moment of lucidity, she was trying to tell me at last what she’d done. Was she trying to say
Ailish
?

Tomorrow I will drive to the little airport at Farranfore, between Killarney and Tralee, to pick Sandy up. It was Nora who pushed me, over and over again, to invite him.

‘I’ve mentioned it to Liam and Imelda, and they agree with me,’ she said.

‘But, Nora, this has nothing to do with Sandy.’

‘It has everything to do with him. This – everything that has happened – is the biggest thing in your life, in our lives, even in Sandy’s life. You’ve just found out you’re not who you thought you were and he’s just found out that the woman he married, thinking her name was Louise Redmond, is someone else entirely. You’re Ailish O’Connor now. You have to make something good out of all the damage that was caused. You’ve got us, but you can have Sandy, too. At least give him one more chance. And, anyway, I’d like to meet him because he’s been part of your life for so long. We all would.’

Sandy has been in my mind a lot over the past few days. Despite the joy and excitement I feel about discovering the family I never knew existed, I keep hearing the hurt in his voice when I told him not to come. And I remember that previous conversation, when he said he had felt as if he wasn’t enough for me, as if he didn’t matter.
We’d stopped being the way we used to be
. And we had. I had blamed everything on him, but now I realise I had been pushing him away for a long time. Maybe I had been keeping him at arm’s length all along.

I called him.

‘Sandy, will you come? I need you.’

The lightness in his voice told me everything I needed to hear.

‘I’ll be there tomorrow.’

I haven’t spoken to Richard or David since I left Drogheda, and I plead with Imelda and Liam to leave it for just another few days before calling the Gardaí.

‘What harm can it do to hold off for a bit? What difference will it make, after so many years? Look, I’ll call them both today. And Sandy is arriving tomorrow. Can’t we wait?’

Imelda defers to Liam, who, I can tell, is relieved to have the prospect of a few more days of privacy before his life is put on display to the world.

‘I think we should wait until Nora is here,’ he says. ‘Ailish, those calls you have to make – do you feel up to them? I can do them with you, if you want.’

Ailish
. My name. It’s what Liam and Nora and Imelda call me, and I’m still getting used to it. Louise has been my identity for most of my life and now I know that everything about that identity was false. But I’m not yet ready to become Ailish. I will have to grow into her, learn more about her and who she was, and reconcile her memories with mine. I’ve spent hours in that little room, unfolding her clothes, staring at them, willing them to tell me the story of my childhood. But they sit limply in my hands, keeping their stories to themselves.

‘Thanks, but I’m fine. I’ll make the calls now, get them out of the way.’

Liam and Imelda leave me by myself.

David first. He listens quietly as I tell him that my mother, still grieving for their daughter, abducted another woman’s child and brought her up as her own.

I tell him that Mary O’Connor had twin girls of roughly the same age Louise would have been and that Marjorie took one of them. She probably never intended to do such a thing, I tell him. Maybe she had known their mother from her time at Tennyson’s and, back in Ireland, had become obsessed with the two little girls, secretly watching them, aching for a glimpse of them. And then, maybe, on that dark and cold evening, on Louise’s birthday, she took one of them in a moment of emotional madness.

I don’t tell him about the other thought that refuses to go away, that she had always intended to take one of those children and had opted for the plainer, dark-haired child rather than the red-haired one who might have been more easily recognised. I don’t tell him because I know it can’t be true.

And then I hear a sound I don’t immediately recognise. It’s the sound of an old man crying.

‘Are you all right, David?’ I ask, when his quiet weeping subsides.

‘I’m fine. I’m fine,’ he says. ‘It’s just the shock of it all, the thought of how desperate, how desolate Marjorie must have been. I shouldn’t have taken her at her word when she left. I should have pursued her. If I had . . .’

His voice trails off, but the ghost of what he was going to say hangs in the air: that, if he had pursued my mother, she wouldn’t have stolen me from the O’Connors.

‘Oh, David. Don’t do this to yourself. You knew my mother. You couldn’t have made any difference whatsoever.’

‘Will you come and see me soon?’ he asks.

‘Of course,’ I say. ‘Very soon.’

I’m more nervous about making the call to Richard. I should tell him in person, I think, sit with him and comfort him as I tell him the appalling truth of my mother’s actions. But I don’t have time to make the journey to Dublin and return in time to meet Sandy at Farranfore. And I don’t want to leave my brother, my new family, even for a day.

So I pick up the phone and dial the number slowly. I’ve rehearsed what I’m going to say to him, but as the phone starts to ring at the other end, I find I’ve forgotten all the careful sentences I’ve planned in my head. When he answers, I don’t even say hello. I just launch into what I have to tell him. And what’s really odd, really surprising, is that he doesn’t even react. Maybe he’s in shock. Or maybe . . .

‘Richard, say something! Speak to me!’ I shout into the phone.

His voice comes back, weary and barely audible.

‘I-I don’t know what to say. I tried to tell her, tried to make her see sense, but she wouldn’t listen. I’m sorry you had to find out this way.’

Christ. What is he saying?

‘You knew? You knew all along and you did nothing about it?’

‘No, not all along. Not until late last year, shortly before she died. She hadn’t been feeling well, but wouldn’t go to the doctor. She said there was no point. I think she knew then that there was something seriously wrong with her. She came here and told me the whole story.’

‘She told you that the real Louise had died and that I was a child she had stolen?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did she tell you why?’

‘She was in despair after her child died. She didn’t try to make excuses for what she did.’

‘Did she say she regretted it?’

‘Not in so many words . . . but I could tell from the way she spoke and the way she looked . . .’

‘I can almost – only almost – understand why she did it. What I can’t understand is why she didn’t come to her senses and put things right. She could have done that. She could have left me in Clerys or the GPO with a note pinned to my coat and run off. I wouldn’t have been able to identify her. There was no CCTV all over the place in those days.’

‘I think perhaps she felt that, once she’d taken you, there was no going back.’

‘Is that what she told you?’

‘Not exactly. Louise, I’m so sorry about it all.’

‘But why didn’t you tell me? Why did you tell me all those lies when you knew so much? I trusted you, Richard. I really did.’

‘Marjorie gave me permission to tell you the truth if I thought you could handle it. I would have told you eventually, but not then. Not when you were going through such a difficult time.’

‘No, Richard, I don’t think you would have got round to telling me. I think that, for whatever reason – maybe the spotlight that would come down on your own family – you would have gone on letting me think I was a Redmond. And now there are going to be reporters crawling all over your family, talking to your neighbours, asking if they remember my mother, talking to your son—’

‘Reporters? You’re not going to talk to the press, are you?’ He sounds panicky now.

‘We have no intention of talking to the press. But we have to tell the Gardaí. My mother – your sister – committed a crime. And it turns out that you’ve known about it for a long time, but haven’t said a word. We can’t pretend it didn’t happen. Things have to be cleared up legally and, when that happens, the press will be all over it. And what you’ve done amounts to perverting the course of justice.’

‘Oh, my God . . .’

I can imagine all too well how Richard’s life will come under scrutiny. The fact that another man fathered his son may be exposed. Journalists will write about his background, his parents and their privileged lives in a village where houses now cost millions. They may even speculate as to whether he colluded with his sister in the abduction of a child from a working-class family that his own parents would never have had contact with.

I can’t put him through that. Not when I think about how my mother used him, placing the responsibility for putting right what she had done wrong on to him.

‘Listen, Richard, here’s what we’ll do. I’m not going to tell anyone that you knew anything. It was horrible of my mother to tell you what she did and then dump the responsibility for telling me on to you. Maybe you would have told me, as you say, and that’s what I’m going to try to believe. So, when the Gardaí ask you whether you knew anything, just tell them you didn’t. It’s better that way. For all of us.’

I hear him exhale, a long slow breath.

But I haven’t finished.

‘I think you should come down here and meet my brother. You don’t have to tell him what you’ve just told me, but you have to talk to him. I’m going to give you the address and you can work out where to stay. I don’t think it would be appropriate for you to stay with Liam. There are hotels in Kenmare.’

He takes down the address and says he will think about coming down in the next few days.

‘Thank you, Louise,’ he says. ‘For . . . understanding.’

‘I’m not Louise, Richard,’ I say. ‘My name is Ailish.’

Chapter Thirty-Six

I watch him come down the steps of the plane and, a few minutes later, he’s striding into the lounge towards me.

‘Louise!’ he says, wrapping his arms around me and holding me tight, until I think I’m going to suffocate. But I don’t stop him.

‘You look good. You look happy. Happy and beautiful,’ he says.

‘You look good, too.’

Just a few words, but they feel like the best words I’ve heard and said in a long time.

When I drove from Kenmare to Kerry Airport, I took the most direct route, avoiding the mountains. But this time I take the road through the National Park because I want to show Sandy the spectacular landscape of the county in which my brother lives, and because we need this time together before he meets the family that will become his, too. If we can get our marriage to work again.

‘I have to tell you something,’ I say, ‘and I’m afraid you’ll hate me for it.’

‘I could never hate you. You know that.’

But as I tell him about the abortion, I think I see a hundred thoughts fly across his face. His eyes seem to have dulled a bit, become wearier. What is he thinking about, I wonder, every time I glance across at him. Is he seeing a fast-moving set of images telling the story of a child that was never born, or maybe another child never conceived that could have been his? Ours.

‘It’s all right, hen,’ he says finally. ‘What could you have done? You were only a kid. You didn’t have the wherewithal to stand up to your mother. And Marjorie must have thought she was doing the right thing.’

We drive on in silence for a while. There’s something else I’m struggling with. I’m afraid to tell him about the miscarriage that I kept secret from him. How can he forgive me for concealing something like that? And do I have to tell him? Won’t it be better for us and our future together if I don’t? If I tell him, I may lose him all over again, and I don’t think I can bear that. But when I look at him and he turns his head slightly to catch my gaze and smiles at me, I know I have to risk telling him what may drive us apart for good.

So I steel myself and start to speak. ‘There’s something else . . .’

I pull over and stop the car. I want to look down at my hands, protect myself from the look in his face that starts as one of mild enquiry, but will shift to appalled disbelief and then maybe even hatred as I tell the story of how deep my deception went. But I look straight at him and I don’t falter, even as I see the light leave his eyes and he looks away from me and out of the car window.

‘I’m sorry, Sandy. I’m so sorry.’

‘I have to get out.’

He walks away from the car. I watch him until he disappears from sight and I’m seized by a fear that he won’t come back. But I’ve done the right thing, even if I lose him for ever.

He comes back after what seems like a very long time and gets into the car.

‘Is there more? Or was that it?’

I could tell him about my recent affair with Declan, but I’m not going to. What happened between Declan and me this summer isn’t part of the truth that needed telling. So I say, ‘No, there’s nothing more,’ and wait for Sandy to tell me that this is too much and that our marriage is over.

He doesn’t, though.

‘I’m not going to say I’m not upset. You’ve driven a fucking stake through my heart, Louise. You were pregnant and didn’t tell me. You had a miscarriage and didn’t tell me. So I’m mightily upset. But I’m not walking away, because I think and I hope we’re at a point where there’s nothing secret any more.’

Relief and hope sweep over me and I close my eyes in a futile effort to stop the tears that are welling up and streaming down my face. And then I’m aware of Sandy’s arms around me and his voice saying, ‘Come here, hen, it’s all right,’ and I feel as if everything has come full circle. I feel reborn.

We switch seats and he takes over the driving, occasionally putting his hand on my knee in reassurance. We have just a few miles left of our journey, and I have something to say.

‘Sandy, I’ve been thinking . . .’ I say, tentatively, not quite sure how to put it into words. ‘I know I’m nearly forty-four now, but maybe we could still think about a baby . . . We could do IVF or maybe we could adopt.’

He leans over and leaves the lightest of kisses on my cheek.

‘We can do either of those things, but we don’t have to. We can be fine as we are,’ he says, putting his hand on my knee and leaving it there. ‘And we’re fine. Very fine indeed.’

We drive through Kenmare and out towards Liam’s house.

‘Maybe we can buy a place down here, near your brother,’ Sandy says.

‘Maybe we can,’ I say, quietly happy that he’s thinking of a future that embraces my new family.

‘And in the meantime,’ he says, ‘what should I call you?’

‘Ailish, I suppose. But, to tell you the truth . . .’

We look at each other and start laughing.

*

Liam and Imelda are waiting for us outside the house. My brother stretches out his hand to my husband. They’re both nervous of each other. And then Sandy opens his arms wide and hugs Liam, and I feel as if my heart is going to burst with happiness.

It’s so different from that first time I took him to meet my mother and Dermot, all those years ago. I remember how my heart began to race as we neared the house.

‘I’m a bit nervous about this,’ I admitted to Sandy.

‘As if I hadn’t guessed already. You’ve been wired up to a brick for the past week.’

‘You don’t know my mother. She can be . . .’

‘A pain in the backside?’

‘I was going to say “difficult”.’

‘She probably thinks I’m not good enough for you.’

‘It’s not that. She’s used to being the one who makes all the decisions and now I’ve made a decision to get married to someone she’s never laid eyes on. She can be a bit omnipotent. Don’t be surprised if she’s a bit standoffish with you.’

‘Och, dinnae fret, hen,’ he said, going all Scottish. ‘I’ll be as charming as the Bonnie Prince himself. She’ll be mad about me.’

I wouldn’t be too sure about that, I thought to myself.

Minutes later, we were beyond the town and in the lane that led to the house, and Sandy whistled as he took in the view out over the estuary. My own breath escaped as it always did when I saw the way the light came off the water and heard the sounds the seabirds made, sounds that seemed to float on the wind. Time always seemed to stop for me when I looked out over those flat channels and had the sense that everything else might change, but the estuary would stay the same, except for the constantly shifting light.

The gate was open and, as we turned into the drive, Dermot was already coming out of the house.

‘Come in, come in,’ he said, giving me a hug and Sandy a vigorous handshake. He was still a fine-looking man and a healthy one, but he was old now and I couldn’t help but feel a stab of sorrow at the thought that he probably didn’t have many years left.

‘Where’s Mamma, Dermot?’ I asked as Sandy got our bags out of the car.

‘Ah, she’ll be back any minute. She’s gone for a walk with Molly. We weren’t sure what time you’d be here.’

I looked at Dermot, lifting my eyebrows and inclining my head in a conspiratorial gesture that he returned. The man’s a saint, I thought. And yet, even though I knew my mother was pulling a stunt, I ached to see her.

She made her grand entrance about half an hour later, when Dermot, Sandy and I were sitting, drinking glasses of whiskey by the fire they always lit in the evening, winter and summer. We heard the dog first, barking in excitement as the sight of the strange car told her there were visitors in the house. Then Mamma swept in. She was in her sixties, but looked much younger. She had changed her style over the years and at that time favoured loose cashmeres and linens that gave her a different kind of elegance, made her look ageless. She no longer wore her hair long, but had had it cut into a simple straight bob that she pushed back behind her ears. Her hair was white, but her eyebrows were still dark and her eyes still deep blue, almost navy.

She looked like something from an upmarket fashion catalogue, dressed in a long, dark grey jumper over jeans and plimsolls, a long silk scarf wound several times around her neck.

‘Oh, Louise, I am
so
sorry not to have been here when you arrived, but Molly needed a walk and I really didn’t think you’d make it down so quickly,’ she said, opening her arms to me.

She turned her attention to Sandy then, bathing him in the aura of munificence that radiated from her. She was on top form and I was relieved, but I wasn’t ruling out a change of mood at some point during the visit.

‘So you’re taking my daughter on, Sandy,’ she said, beaming at him as if he were rescuing me from an otherwise unavoidable spinsterhood.

He beamed back. ‘Aye, if she’ll have me.’

For the rest of the evening, I veered between relief that they seemed to be getting on and annoyance that she had managed to captivate him with no trouble at all.

‘So. What do you think of my mother?’ I asked him later, when we went to bed in my old room.

‘Magnificent,’ he said.

‘Ah, so she’s reeled you in like all the other fishy-wishies,’ I said, throwing a pillow at him.

He laughed and threw it back at me. ‘You’re just jealous.’

‘She’s been doing a number all evening, you know,’ I said. ‘She made sure she was going to be out of the house when we arrived.’

‘I’d kind of figured that out. But maybe she was as anxious as you were and needed to grab a bit of control for herself. It’s only for a few days. Just relax.’

So I relaxed and the days we spent with my mother and Dermot were good ones. She was on top form, organising trips to Newgrange and Mellifont, cooking, entertaining. She couldn’t do enough for Sandy. There were no moods. She didn’t criticise Sandy behind his back, didn’t refer to his divorce.

When we left to return to London, I kept looking back at Mamma and Dermot standing outside the house, waving us off. Maybe it was my imagination, but as we began the turn into the lane, I thought I saw her body shrink a little, become smaller and older, and I felt the old familiar tears flood into my eyes.

‘It’s all right, hen,’ Sandy said, putting his hand on my knee.

He understood. He always has.

*

We’re having breakfast, the four of us, when the postman arrives with a registered package addressed to me. I tear it open to find a short note from Richard and a bulky sealed envelope with my name on it, in my mother’s handwriting. I get up from the table without speaking, signalling with my raised hand that I need to be on my own for this. Words are beyond me. I feel as if I’m choking.

I walk down to the bottom of the garden and sit on the grass that still has drops of dew on it despite the early warmth of the sun. The note from Richard has only a few words on it.

Marjorie left this with me for you. I have read it. Forgive me for not having told you about it straight away, but she said it would be up to me to decide whether it was necessary. I foolishly hoped that everything would just settle and I would never have to give it to you. I am so sorry. And I’m sorry for being a coward, but I cannot face meeting your real family and having to explain myself to them. Not yet. I will some day.

I start to open the sealed envelope, but my hands are shaking so badly that it drops through my fingers. I stare at it, unable to move. And then Sandy is kneeling down beside me and saying something, but I don’t hear him because my ears don’t seem to be working properly, either. I watch as he picks up the envelope and slides his finger along the sealed edge. It all seems to be happening in slow motion. He holds out the letter to me and I’m almost afraid to take it, in case it slips through my fingers again.

I’m afraid of what I will read.

‘Would you like me to read it out to you?’ Sandy asks.

I open my mouth to say yes, but the word won’t come out, so I nod my head up and down and watch as he unfolds the letter and starts to read.

‘My darling daughter, I write this letter not knowing how much, if anything, Richard will have told you. I suspect that he hasn’t told you very much at all, so I am going to start at the beginning, before you came along.

‘The beginning was the birth of another little girl, a baby I hadn’t planned or wanted. David Prescott was her father. He was my boss and he was already married. I was a little in love with him from the moment I met him. The affair suited me. It was illicit and exciting. It wasn’t meant to go on for several years, but it did and then the inevitable happened. I became pregnant. I panicked. A baby was the last thing I wanted. I thought about going to England to get rid of it. I drank gin in scalding hot baths. I made myself tumble down the stairs. But the baby survived and so I told my parents. The plan was to have it adopted. But when I held my daughter for the first time, my heart burst with feelings I never expected to have. I could no more have given her away than I could have taken my own life.

‘David was eventually transferred back to England and I went with him, although not immediately. Once he and his wife had settled into their house, he found a house for me and my daughter. It was a little bit lonely. He came every day to see us, but he went home every night, except for one night.

‘My daughter had been hot and feverish all day and, by the time David came after work, she was much worse. We took her to the hospital, where we were told she had meningitis and was unlikely to survive. I don’t know whether you can imagine how we felt. We were desperate for her to live and yet, at the same time, already grieving for her.

‘Sometimes when a child dies, the love between its parents dies too. That is what happened between David and me. I know he lost something precious too, but I couldn’t bear to be near him because he was a constant reminder of what I had lost. I left and returned to Dublin. I left my daughter’s ashes with David. I didn’t need a grave to visit or an urn to keep on the mantelpiece to remind me of her.

‘During those first few months after my daughter’s death, I lived in a permanent state of anguish. Dublin seemed to be full of children. I couldn’t bear to look at them. Whenever I saw small children, I walked the other way. And then something changed and I still cannot explain it. I was waiting for a bus one day and recognised a woman whose husband worked where I had worked. Her twins were born a month or two before my daughter. She didn’t notice me because she was trying to keep the girls under control. When her bus came along, I got on as well, and when she and the twins got off, I got off too.