What She Never Told Me (13 page)

‘Would you like to?’

‘Not really, but I probably should, shouldn’t I?’

‘You don’t have to talk about anything you don’t feel comfortable with.’

So I lie on the couch saying nothing. Thoughts come into my head and nearly make it on to my tongue. I want to say that I never felt good enough or strong enough to have children, but I can’t, even to Sheila, because I’m not even sure that I felt that way.

When I get home, I send texts and emails to all the people I’m scheduled to work with over the next few weeks and cancel the sessions, explaining that I have to go to Ireland on family business. Within minutes, return texts start to come in. Ben sends one of those smiley things – except it’s not a smiley because the mouth on the face is turned down – and says he’ll miss me. Julia hopes my trip goes well and is looking forward to seeing me again when I return. I feel slightly better disposed towards her, but my envy is still there. It lies low and deep and sharp.

Chapter Sixteen

Another touchdown in Ireland, but this time Sandy is by my side, holding my hand tightly in his as we leave the aeroplane. We’ve booked into the modern hotel on the south quay while we work out whether the house is habitable – knowing Joe, it probably is – and we drive straight there to check into our room. Then we head to Angela and Joe for lunch.

They’ve always been fond of Sandy, and when he accompanied me on some of my visits to see my mother, he sometimes stayed with them, sitting up late into the night with Joe, drinking whiskey and bonding in that strange way men have – not through shared confidences, but through talking about football or rugby.

Joe is eager to take us to the house. The first thing I notice is that the trees and bushes have been cut, so that the house is more visible from the road. The rhododendron, no longer in bloom, is still there, but there’s less of it.

We go inside. The little hallway has been demolished and the two pokey rooms on the ground floor have been transformed into one big room. Joe has done a beautiful job with the extension, which lets light flood into the kitchen through enormous sliding floor-to-ceiling glass doors and a huge skylight. The other half of the extension, separated by a small storage area, is a bedroom and en-suite shower and lavatory. It, too, is light and airy, with white wooden Venetian blinds in the window recess. The floorboards, laid over concrete, are beech.

‘It’s fabulous, Joe, just fabulous! Like something out of
House and Garden
!’ I say. ‘I love it.’

‘You haven’t seen everything yet,’ Joe says, steering us towards the staircase that had previously been positioned against the wall separating the two rooms, but which has been moved to the far wall. Upstairs, there’s now just one big room and bathroom. The ceiling has been taken out to create more height.

‘Impressive, Joe,’ Sandy says.

‘It’s turned out well. We’ve reassembled the beds and put the furniture back, but, if I were you, I’d sling that stuff out as well,’ Joe says. He looks at his watch. ‘Right. I’d better be off. I have a job out in Termonfeckin. We’ll be seeing you down at our place, anyway.’

Joe takes his leave and we take a couple of chairs out to what used to be a dreary old back yard, but is now paved with yellow sandstone slabs.

I’m already thinking about the flowers I’m going to plant in pots and the climbing plants for the wall that surrounds the yard that is now a patio.

‘Clematis, maybe,’ Sandy suggests.

‘What about wisteria?’ I say, but then remember that David Prescott’s house is hung with wisteria. ‘Actually, maybe not.’

Sandy thinks we should do as Joe suggests and chuck out the furniture, replace everything. He looks at his watch. ‘It’s only four o’clock. We could scoot down to that big furniture place. What do you think?’

An hour and a half later, we’ve bought a load of sleek, modern furniture that will be delivered tomorrow. When we return to the hotel, we celebrate with a bottle of champagne, delivered to our room, which we drink on the balcony overlooking the river.

We haven’t even looked at the boxes. They can wait until tomorrow.

*

We made love last night and again this morning. I could have stayed in that king-sized bed all day with Sandy, just lolling around, ordering food when we needed it, wandering out to the balcony every now and again to watch the endless, fast flow of the river. It felt as if we’d been transported back to those early days when we first got together. But we’re here for a reason, so we eventually go to the house.

As we start organising the contents of the boxes we had already sifted through before we went back to London, my phone rings. It’s Joe.

‘I forgot to tell you – the only thing we found in the attic was a little wooden box with a lock on it. No sign of a key anywhere. You’ll find it in the cupboard under the sink, in a plastic bag.’

I go to the kitchen and find the box. It’s made of dark wood and is slightly smaller than a shoebox. The lock doesn’t look too strong, so I take a knife out of the drawer and twist and lever it until it breaks. I open it nervously and see a photograph of a child – a girl with dark blonde hair. The first thought that comes into my head is that this may be Ailish, who wrote the letter to Santa Claus. But then, in a flash, I recognise her. It’s the other Louise, the child that David Prescott told me was his daughter. And lying beneath the photograph is the death certificate. I sag back on to my heels with a strangled sound. Sandy looks up and rushes over.

I can hardly speak. I just hand him the photograph and the certificate, and I see a look of anger pass over his face.

‘Duplicitous fucking bitch,’ he says. ‘She had these all along!’

I used to stand up for my mother whenever Sandy, not unjustifiably, made disparaging remarks about her. But I don’t now, although the words deliver a sharp sting.
Duplicitous fucking bitch
. That just about sums her up. I feel a surge of anger towards her. And riding that surge is another feeling – of jealousy. I try to push it away. How can I be jealous of a dead child?

‘So Louise Redmond is dead. My mother registered her death and my mother had a copy of her death certificate. And if Louise is dead, who am I? I think I must be losing my mind!’

‘Well, if you’re losing your mind, I’m losing mine, too. No, neither of us is mad. But whatever your mother got up to is looking dodgier and dodgier. Look, go and sit down. I’m going to plough through this stuff again, just in case we’ve missed anything.’

But we don’t do much ploughing through anything, because the furniture arrives and the old stuff is taken away. We spend the rest of the afternoon moving things around. We dress the beds in the new linen we have bought, hang new white towels in the bathroom. The house is becoming ours now, not just mine.

It’s a relief to be able to focus on practical things. I’ve now seen three copies of a piece of paper recording my death. Any further shock today will be too much.

One of the strangest things about all this is the way my life seems to be splitting in two. As Louise-who-is-not-Louise, I’m a wreck, floundering around on a stormy sea without a compass. I don’t know who I am. But when I escape from that no man’s land into the new old relationship I’m developing with Sandy, I find I don’t quite recognise that identity, either. Maybe it’s a version of me I lost a long time ago, but it’s a version of me that I’m beginning to like.

I don’t say this to Sandy, though. I hold it to myself and think about it often, like a secret that must be kept if the spell is not to be broken.

*

The temptation to tip all the papers on to the floor and scrabble around for just the ones we think may be relevant is huge, but we decide that we could end up missing important things by doing this. The only way to proceed is by systematically going through everything, evaluating every piece of paper, every item. It’s boring and backbreaking, and, worst of all, it’s slow. But we are moving steadily through it, stopping every now and again for tea or coffee that we take out to the back yard. I still can’t call it a patio.

Sandy floats the idea that we take the problem to the police. But I don’t want that. At least not unless or until it’s absolutely necessary.

*

We’ve moved out of the hotel and into the house. The days go by and we spend them partly going through the papers, which so far are fairly innocuous, and partly going for long walks. We visit Angela and Joe and Lizzie and Rosie. I see how good Sandy is with the kids. It’s
Uncle Sandy
this and
Uncle Sandy
that. They want him to play all sorts of games with them and he’s happy to oblige. I love those kids, but I don’t have his patience, which seems endless.

One day, it’s particularly hot and Sandy is raring to go out to Bettystown. I’m still a little worried about running into Declan, so I suggest we go to Baltray instead, on the other side of the estuary. I haven’t been there for years and I’m curious to see whether the old wreck of a trading ship is still there, rising ghoulishly out of the sand.

It’s still there, a ghostly hulk, lit by the hazy light of the evening sun, but there seems to be less of it than I remember. The beach is almost deserted. In the distance, the mountains are just visible through the haze.

‘I think I fancy a swim,’ I say. ‘What do you think?’

Sandy isn’t so keen. ‘The tide is still coming in. Why don’t you wait a wee bit longer and then I won’t have to run so far to rescue you,’ he says.

I slip into my bikini. I may be forty-three, but I’m the fittest I’ve ever been because I’ve been going to the gym several times a week with Ursula and, on the other days, swimming at the pool behind Ladbroke Grove.

‘Cover yourself up, you brazen hussy,’ Sandy says. ‘Don’t be inciting the menfolk!’

‘What menfolk?’ I ask, looking around. ‘There’s only you.’

‘Exactly!’

We spread a rug on the sand in front of the dunes and lie down, waiting for the sea to come closer. I use his shoulder as a pillow and we doze peacefully. When I wake up, the waves are just fifty yards away. Sandy is still asleep, his mouth slightly open, and his quiet snores make me think of the sounds a calf might make. I pick my way across the sand and into the waves, shivering as the water curls up around my ankles and, in no time at all, around my waist. I swim out, well beyond my depth.

I look back towards where I know Sandy is, but I can’t see him, so I keep the wreck of the ship in my sight and swim parallel to the shoreline, alternating between front crawl and breaststroke. The water is perfect now, warm and glistening, the evening sun casting a golden glow across it. It’s so calm that it almost feels like a lake. I turn on to my back and drift for a few moments with my eyes closed.

And then suddenly I feel a pull. I’m no longer drifting. I roll back on to my front and try to remember all the water safety rules that were drummed into me over the years.
Don’t fight the current, swim with it until you can move away from it
. But I panic. All I can think of is getting to the shore. So I fix my eyes on the wreck and start to swim towards it, but every stroke seems to take me further away from it. I start to shout.

By the time Sandy reaches me, I’m exhausted, but still pushing against the current. He curls one of his big arms around my neck and shoulders and tells me to lean into him, but to keep using my legs. I have to close my eyes because my face is turned up towards the sun, and even as I start to feel safe because I’m being pulled along by Sandy’s muscular swimming, I have no idea where we’re going or whether both of us will end up being dragged out to sea.

But we do reach the shore, and we collapse on the edge of the water. Sandy pulls me into his arms and holds me tightly until I stop shaking and my frantic gasps for breath subside.

‘Jesus,’ he says, when he gets his breath back. ‘You’re lucky I woke up and heard you. You should have told me you were going in.’

‘You were asleep. I didn’t want to wake you. I’m sorry. I know I did everything wrong. I shouldn’t have fought the current; I should have gone with it. But I just panicked.’

‘Just as well I’m a fit hunk, isn’t it? Come on, let’s get you home.’

We receive some odd looks as we walk back to the car, Sandy barefoot because he hasn’t been able to find his shoes, which were probably swept under the waves, and his shirt and jeans sopping wet and stuck to his body.

Back at the house, I shower the sea water out of my hair and skin. Then it’s Sandy’s turn. He steps out of his wet clothes that are caked in sand, extracting from the pocket of his jeans his wallet, which has miraculously survived, and handing it to me.

‘Do me a favour, hen, and see if you can rescue any of the money in there.’

I take the wallet to the kitchen and pull out the sodden wad of sterling and euro notes, separating them and spreading them out across the table to dry. They’re crumpled and wringing wet, but they can be ironed. The credit cards I wipe dry in a tea towel.

Then I take out the other bits of paper in a third section of the wallet and start to separate them. They’ve suffered more damage than the banknotes. Taxi receipts from Vienna and Prague, his ticket for the Staatsoper, credit card receipts. I notice that one of the receipts is for a restaurant, but the date has been obliterated by the water and the salt. We’ve been there, but not recently, maybe not even in the past year. Someone else has mentioned the same restaurant during the past few weeks. I rack my brain, but I can’t remember who it was.

When Sandy emerges from the shower, I wave the receipt at him.

‘So which of your women were you entertaining?’ I joke.

He takes the receipt, looks at it and tears it up.

‘A very unimportant one,’ he says, pinching my nose.

A few hours later, Sandy’s mobile rings. He looks at it and frowns.

‘Bugger. It’s the hospital.’

It’s very much a one-sided conversation, his only non-monosyllabic contribution being ‘Is it absolutely necessary?’ When I hear this, I know he is being asked to return to London.

‘I’m sorry, hen,’ he says. ‘Bit of a bummer. I’ve got to go back to a meeting about a patient. They’ve called it for tomorrow afternoon. I’ll go over in the morning and, if I’m lucky, I’ll be able to get back tomorrow evening. To be honest, I’m amazed we’ve managed more than a week here without me being called back.’

I’m disappointed, but I knew it was likely to happen, especially when he had taken time off at such short notice. If he’s away for just a day, I can’t complain.