Girl Unknown (7 page)

‘You never suspected?’ Caroline said.

‘No … never.’ As I watched for her reaction, I noticed something else, something within me, a disbelief at my own words because, to put it quite simply, they were not true.
I had suspected
. But it was a buried, unconscious suspicion. You see, ever since that weekend in Donegal, the seed of possibility had stayed with me. Had we been
careful? Linda had asked me back then. Careful: up until then, we had always been careful. In fact, care was what had defined our relationship. We’d had to be both careful and circumspect. Nobody knew we were there in Donegal. Nobody knew we were together. Nobody knew we were even lovers. She was my student, after all.

‘It’s hard to believe …’ Caroline said, bringing me back to the present. ‘What will you do if it’s true? What will we do if she really is your daughter?’

‘If she is, she is. It doesn’t have to change everything. It doesn’t have to disrupt the lives we have. We’ll adjust, get to know her, try to make room for her in our family.’

‘As simply as that?’

I said: ‘Why not?’

‘Have you thought how this might affect Robbie and Holly if it’s true?’ she said. ‘If they find out that they have a half-sister?’

I had thought about it. I was worried about how they might react. There had been enough disruption in their lives, and God knew I didn’t want to see them hurt. But I really did think we could make it work.

‘We’ll manage, but first let’s get through this next step.’

Caroline considered what I had said, and asked: ‘What’s she like?’

‘She’s young … bright, a little shy. She has all the gaucheness of a teenager and at the same time enough nerve to walk into my office and introduce herself as my daughter … Whether it ends up being true or not, I have to take it seriously.’

Caroline listened, concentrating on what I had said,
trying to process it all. ‘The DNA test,’ she said. ‘That’s what you mean by “paternity test”, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘How are you going to do it?’

I thought about how I had met Zoë in the pub, how my hand had found the loose strands of hair on her coat and clutched at them. ‘A hair follicle.’

‘Just like that?’

‘I’ve done it.’

‘You’ve done it?’

‘Zoë doesn’t know. I took some strands of hair from her coat.’

‘You’re kidding me?’

‘No.’

‘But that’s not ethical.’

‘I suppose not. I thought it was the best thing to do at the time,’ I said, my voice wavering.

‘But, David, that’s dishonest – it’s underhand,’ she said, appealing to my reason.

‘And you’re an expert on honesty now?’ I snapped. Caroline was more disappointed than hurt. I apologized, but the awkwardness was back, as well as another worry, another fear I couldn’t name as yet.

‘Would it not be better to be upfront with Zoë and say to her that this has been a shock and would she mind if we had a professional check it out, just to be sure?’

‘I know as a first measure it’s not ideal,’ I said. ‘But I’ve thought about it, Caroline. The assertion Zoë is making, it could be a complete fiction. We need to know if she’s telling the truth.’

‘So when did this take place?’ She gestured to the note discarded on the table –
6.30 in Madigans.

‘Yesterday. I met her at the pub before the dinner party.’

‘You told me you were taking a visiting professor out for a drink.’

‘Well, I didn’t. I met Zoë.’

‘Why didn’t tell you me? Why did you have to lie?’

‘We had guests in the next room, Caroline. Do you really think that was the time for me to bring this up with you?’

Her fingers tapped the table. ‘And you’re not going to tell her about the test?’

‘I’m not, no.’

‘I see. I just wish you’d come to me earlier,’ she said. ‘Your whole plan … it makes me uneasy.’

I said nothing. What was the point? I had no plan, but the wheels of whatever it was had been set in motion. Caroline held her hands to her face. She was deep in thought – weighing everything up. I stood up and looked back to the sink, the wine glasses refracting the morning light. I thought of that morning in Donegal and, just like that, she was there, a ghostly presence in the background, my old flame, Linda. And when I missed her, when I wondered what might have been, when I had been with someone else, or when I was with my wife, she still seemed to be there, in the shadows, and – it happened more than once – when I made love to someone else, I felt in some strange way as if I were still making love to her.

‘Send the test off,’ Caroline said. ‘Get the preliminary results. But promise me you won’t seek the girl out or
spend any time with her that you don’t need to. Not until we know for sure.’

‘I promise,’ I said.

The radio was playing in the background: a listener was complaining about the impending water charges. Another demonstration was being planned in town, he added, and as he did so, it occurred to me that within this house, within the confines of what we called our home, a real and indelible crisis was going on, which would disrupt our family unit irrevocably, but outside, beyond the boundaries of our home, life carried on – people were up in arms about water charges, about employment, about governance and corruption, but the very same people were going about their daily business. Life carried on – no matter what.

‘What are you two talking about?’ Holly said, standing in the doorway with her coat on. I don’t know how long she had been standing there or how much she had heard.

‘I’ll be with you in two minutes,’ Caroline said, and Holly went back to the living room. ‘No contact with the girl,’ she said to me. ‘Not until we find out more.’

‘Agreed,’ I said.

She stood up stiffly, as if the truce she had made with me was unsatisfactory, but one she had to accept whether she liked it or not.

Without looking at me again, she called to Holly, ‘Come on, love. Time to go.’

Holly kissed my cheek before she left and, it occurred to me only then that I had made a promise to Caroline that there was no way I could keep.

7. Caroline

My husband is not a vengeful man. Yet that Saturday morning when he told me about this daughter, about Zoë, as I sat and listened to him talking of DNA tests and establishing parentage, one distinct notion kept rising to the surface: this was David’s way of getting his own back.

It was all so unsettling, so worrying. Who was this girl? What did she want from us? I had no way of knowing how it would impact on our lives. No idea to what extent she would want to become involved with our family. Would she expect to be treated in the same way as David treated Robbie and Holly? Would she expect us to provide for her? Pay her college tuition? Her rent?

I said nothing of this to Holly as we drove west of the city. Instead I allowed her to chatter on as she switched from one radio station to another, a happy buzz of excitement coming off her at the prospect of our shopping trip to Ikea. Since turning eleven, she had developed a pressing desire to assert her own taste and I had promised to buy new furniture for her bedroom. It was late morning by the time we had finished pushing through the showrooms and I was downstairs in the warehouse, a little weary and looking forward to coffee and a scone, when it happened.

Holly had returned to the bed-linen department, having
changed her mind about the pattern she had chosen, so I was alone in the aisle, scanning the stacks of brown boxes for the one I wanted. Having found it at last, I pulled it out and hoisted it on to my trolley. I was just straightening up when a woman came towards me and slammed her trolley into mine. Instinctively, I gripped the handle and looked up at her. Her eyes bright with fury, she was staring at me. Before I could say anything, she slammed her trolley into mine a second time and I let out a cry. The force of the impact caused some of her items to clatter on to the concrete floor. I didn’t move, the suddenness of the aggression, the sharp focus of it, shocking me into inaction. She was a woman of my own age wearing jeans and a grey turtle-neck, dark hair drawn back into a ponytail. I had seen her occasionally at the school gates before the time of my indiscretion, but not since. Now she was fixing me with an expression of venom as if she wanted to slam me with her trolley, to push me back against the shelves stacked high with boxed furniture and watch as it all came crashing down on my head. There was something electric about it, the snap of current passing between us. It lasted no more than a minute. Then she drew back from me and turned, half walking, half running, struggling with the heavy trolley as she rounded the corner. The items that had slipped from her cart – a set of mixing bowls and some magazine files – remained on the floor where they had fallen.

Shaken by the encounter, I glanced around to see if anyone else had witnessed this strange assault, and there was Holly. She was holding a different set of bed-linen under her arm. She came towards me, and – this is the
part that really kills me – she put the package on top of the boxes and, without looking at me, without uttering a word about what she had just witnessed, she said, in a small, flat voice, ‘I think that’s everything.’ Then she walked towards the checkouts.

Holly has always been the more resilient of my two children, even though she’s the younger. She lacks the sensitivity of her older brother, which has worried me from his infancy. I suppose because she is the baby of the family I sometimes underestimate her strength of mind, her astuteness. But every now and then she surprises me with her maturity. Did she know somehow what I had done? Who this woman was?

‘Holly,’ I said in the car. ‘About what happened back there –’

‘Please, Mum,’ she interrupted. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

Throughout the journey home we were silent, but I kept thinking of her reaction – the coolness of it. Was it possible she knew? It made me wonder at how much she had been exposed to, my daughter with her steady gaze, her father’s cool demeanour. The guilt was stirring within me again. It was never far away.

More than a year before Zoë came into our lives, I became involved with a man whose son went to school with Robbie. The word ‘affair’ seems wrong – a false name for what occurred between us. I don’t think you can properly call it an affair if there was never full-on sex, can you? A fling, perhaps, although that makes it sound so throwaway, as if I’m the type of woman who whimsically forgets
her marriage vows whenever the fancy takes her. I’m not that type of person. His name was Aidan –
is
Aidan, for he hasn’t died, he’s just not in my life any more; we met through the Parents’ Committee. This ‘fling’, for want of a better word, lasted three, maybe four months. It wasn’t love, never that. When it ended, Aidan and his wife took their son out of Robbie’s school and the family moved to a different part of Dublin. David and I made the decision to keep Robbie where he was. In hindsight, I think it was a mistake.

I thought David had forgiven me but, in the aftermath of his revelation, I began to suspect he had actually been biding his time, waiting for the right moment, the right opportunity to present itself. Revenge had come in a way I had never imagined: in the form of a teenage girl.

I didn’t say it to him. How could I? There was a time when I could have spoken my mind to David about anything. I never used to be afraid of confrontation. But something had happened in the aftermath of my indiscretion – a change in the dynamic between us. It was true that he had taken me back without punishment or reproach. But ours was no longer a relaxed home. An undercurrent of tension ran through everything. Even though we never told the children what had happened, what I had done, it was impossible to shield them from the atmosphere that developed between us. They regarded me with cautious eyes as if anxious I might plunge them back into a time of uncertainty. David acted with the same calm exterior, the same cool-headed thinking I had known of him. We carried on. We got through it. But I had lost some of my power. It had slipped away,
relinquished because of the debt I owed him for his forgiveness.

On that Saturday morning, we made an agreement, David and I. We would put the matter of Zoë to one side until we had definitive proof. For the two weeks it took to decode the strands of DNA, identify a pattern, an affinity between David’s genes and Zoë’s – or none – we would try to live our lives as best we could. Everything would continue as before – work, the children, the house, our relationships. Just for those two weeks.

Easier said than done.

For the first week there was a buzz in my brain, a low-grade headache. I put it down to poor sleep. I tried to kill it with paracetamol so I could focus on my job but still it persisted. Going back to work for a company I had once been a part of was not the triumphant return I had secretly hoped it would be. It was disconcerting how far things had moved on in the past fifteen years, making the landscape almost entirely unrecognizable to me. I willed myself to become absorbed in the challenge, however difficult I found it. All the while, in the back of my head, there was this hum:
Zoë.

I don’t think I even recognized her as a person then. Instead I saw her as a problem I didn’t know how to solve. Work allowed me to drown out the hum in my brain. It was in the evenings, after dinner, the kids occupied with homework or friends or TV, when David and I were alone together, that the sound was amplified.

‘What does she look like?’ I asked him.

It was night, and we were lying awake in the dark. Somewhere down our street, a car alarm was going off.

His gaze moved from the window to the ceiling, and I felt him smoothing the duvet around him. ‘Much like any other first-year student,’ he said, his voice flat.

‘Come on, David. They can’t all look the same. She must have some distinguishing features.’

‘Her hair,’ he said then, and I found myself grow tense. ‘She has this shock of blonde hair. Long springy curls – almost white, it’s so blonde.’

‘She doesn’t sound like you.’

‘Linda’s hair.’

Linda. Her name spoken in the darkness of our bedroom. I thought of her, all those years ago, and imagined David running his hands over those blonde curls, knitting his fingers up in them, marvelling at them, loving them. I had conjured up the image and now wished I hadn’t.