What She Never Told Me (5 page)

We walk to one of the older pubs – the kind of place frequented by old men who sit at the bar in silence, nursing pints of Guinness – and head for the snug. Declan’s hair, once so dark it was almost black, is streaked with grey, and his face has a lived-in look about it. He’s older, of course. But there’s something else different about him.

‘The glasses! You’re not wearing any!’ I exclaim, remembering the old black spectacle frames.

‘Contact lenses. I’m ashamed to confess that vanity got the better of me a long time ago,’ he says.

Now it’s his turn to check how I have changed, and I sit back and allow him to look me up and down.

‘You look the same. You haven’t changed,’ he says. ‘So what’s your life like these days?’

I tell him about my singing career that came to an end and about my move into teaching. I give him the short version of the Sandy saga.

‘Children?’ he asks.

‘No,’ I say, and quickly turn the focus on to him. ‘Your turn now.’

He lives in Skerries, about fourteen or fifteen miles south of Drogheda on the coast, with his wife and two sons. He talks a lot about the boys. He’s proud of them. One is at university in Galway, the other still at secondary school. His wife is called Áine and is a teacher.

‘And what do you do? Did you become a vet?’

‘I didn’t, in the end. I went for medicine. I’m actually a psychiatrist now.’

I start laughing. I laugh so much that Declan begins to look worried.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ I splutter. ‘It’s just that Sandy is a psychiatrist, too. What a bizarre coincidence. I really do pick them, don’t I?’

He’s lost for words and for a few seconds we look down at our drinks. But when we look up again, he lifts his hand to my face and puts his mouth on mine. And I kiss him back.

Time is playing tricks with me as I fall into the embrace. It takes me back nearly three decades as I feel the familiarity of the way he holds me, of the surprising softness of his mouth. But his arms are stronger than they used to be. They remind me of Sandy’s. Every touch makes me think of Sandy. But Sandy is gone. He’s a memory, I tell myself. Past tense. No future. Just this minute, Declan is the one who’s real, and I lean into him, closing my eyes, losing myself in both the present and the past.

He pulls away.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says, but he’s smiling in a slightly idiotic-looking way and his eyes are bright.

‘I’m not sure I am.’

‘I shouldn’t have done that. I’m s—’

‘Declan, if you say you’re sorry again, I’ll give you a thump! Forget it. It was a kiss. We kissed each other by mistake. Neither of us is going to go to hell for it.’

He looks stricken for a moment, but then he laughs.

‘As mistakes go, that was a nice one, I have to admit,’ he says.

He walks me to my car. He doesn’t ask for my number and I don’t ask for his.

‘Goodbye, then,’ he says.

I drive away, my eyes firmly fixed on the road ahead. But I know that, if I look into the rear-view mirror, I’ll see him standing in the same spot, looking after me.

The encounter has turned out to be nothing like the emotional car crash I might have expected. Maybe it’s simply a matter of so much time having passed. What happened to us – to me – seems now to belong to a past so distant that it’s almost irrelevant. Almost. I turn on the car radio that’s tuned to Lyric FM and let the wall of sound that is Wagner expand into every corner of my mind so that there’s no space for anything else.

*

Fortified by the visit to Bettystown, I tackle the first of the two trunks. My mother had allowed me, when I was a child, to use them for dressing-up games. There are old clothes going back to the early 1960s, dresses and skirts and blouses dating from before I was born. There are no trousers or jeans. She never wore them.

The clothes are beautiful and in pristine condition, but it puzzles me that she held on to so many things she no longer wore. Maybe she kept them to remind her of her youth. I slip on an ancient yellow sleeveless dress with a small waist and flared skirt, the kind of thing that became fashionable again a few years ago when
Mad Men
was so popular on television. The dress won’t zip up at the back. I’m a different shape from my mother. Her bones were small, her limbs long and slender. Mine are bigger and stronger, although I, too, am tall. I recall her brother at the funeral, thin and angular, a male version of her. Perhaps my heavier bones come from my English father. My almost-black hair is coarser than my mother’s. Does that come from him, too?

I try on a few other things, but they neither fit me nor suit me, and I’m about to close the lid on the first trunk when I see something poking out from a tear in the lining. At first glance, I think it’s an old cinema or concert ticket, but it’s not. It’s a small blue envelope. I extract it carefully from the lining and examine it. It’s addressed in pencil and in the hand of a child who has just begun to learn to write in big block capitals.

SANTA CLAUS

LAPLAND

NORTH POLE

I don’t immediately give the envelope much thought beyond assuming that this is something my mother kept from her own childhood. There’s an old stamp on it and the envelope looks as if it may once have been sealed, but subsequently opened. Inside, I find a letter on a folded sheet of lined paper, blue like the envelope. The capitals fill the page.

DEAR SANTY,

PLEASE BRING ME A NEW DOLL FOR CHRISTMAS.

MY DOLL IS SICK.

FROM AILISH

I feel an unease that prickles my skin, makes me shiver.
Ailish
. There’s no Ailish that I know of in my mother’s life and none that I can think of in my own. I don’t recognise the writing – it could belong to any child in the early stages of learning to form letters and words.

But as I read the letter over and over again, read the address on the envelope, that strange old image comes back of the small arm reaching towards the slot of the green postbox. I try to look through my mind’s eye at that small hand, try to read the address on the envelope held by the little chubby fingers.

Does the hand belong to me? And if it does, am I posting that letter to Santa Claus from a girl called Ailish? But why would I be posting a letter on behalf of a child whose name means nothing to me?

I concentrate, squeezing my eyes shut. But I can’t make sense of anything. The image is too hazy, as if it has been captured through a Vaselined lens.

And then, with no warning, my stomach lurches and I think I’m going to vomit, so strong is the bile that rises to my mouth. I rush to the bathroom and kneel in front of the lavatory, my head resting on my arm, waiting for my stomach to erupt as pain builds in my head. But the nausea eventually subsides and I sit back on the floor against the wall with my eyes closed, willing the headache to retreat.

I haven’t eaten very much today and maybe the two cups of strong coffee I had at White Nights were too hard on an empty stomach. I go to the kitchen and eat a few cream crackers, and gradually my stomach settles and the pressure in my head lessens.

But I can’t forget the sense of unease I felt as I read that letter.

There are so many things I’ve wanted to ask my mother, things I’ve been able to put aside on some shelf at the back of my mind since my return to London after the funeral. But now I’m back in Ireland and my head is full of anxiety. More than anything, I have wanted to know my father, or at least something about him. I can’t understand why my mother chose not to let me have any contact with him. Now, in this letter to Santa Claus in Lapland, there’s a new mystery, and I have a bad feeling about it.

Oh, Mamma, why couldn’t you have told me more about your life, about all the things you kept from me?

Chapter Six

Angela, laid back in her usual way, shows no annoyance at my not having told her in advance about my trip and immediately invites me round for dinner.

‘I’ll come and pick you up,’ she says.

‘You don’t have to. I hired a car.’

‘You won’t be able to have a drink if you drive. We’ll get you a taxi back, or you can stay here.’

When she arrives, I tell her what I’ve been doing and show her what I’ve found. The name Ailish doesn’t ring any bells for her. She examines the envelope and the letter, but has no answers.

‘They’re a bit battered looking, aren’t they? And that stamp looks old,’ she says. ‘All I can imagine is that your mother was supposed to post it for someone and forgot. Can you think of any relatives or friends?’

‘Not really. There was only her brother. There may have been cousins, but if there were, she never mentioned them. Both of her parents were only children. Anyway, there’s no Ailish that I can think of. And there’s no Keaveney called that, is there?’

She shakes her head. ‘You still have a load of papers to go through. You might find something among them that will tell you a bit more. And if you don’t, well, it won’t have been all that important, will it?’

‘I suppose not.’

But I’m not so sure.

My mother’s cancer wasn’t officially diagnosed until days before she died. When she told me on the telephone that she wasn’t feeling well, I knew something was very wrong because she was rarely ill and never acknowledged any kind of physical weakness. I called Angela, who used to be a nurse, and asked her to drop in on my mother. I hoped she would be reassuring and tell me there was nothing to worry about. But she wasn’t. ‘I think you’d better come over,’ she said. I took the first available flight from Heathrow. But, by the time I got to the house, the ambulance men were taking her out on a stretcher that looked a bit like a sled, and I wanted to weep at the sight of her, swaddled in blankets and looking like an elderly Snow Queen.

How could I have asked her the questions I wanted to ask after that? It would have been like telling her I knew she was about to die. It would have been cruel.

Joe is cooking steaks and he already has a bottle of red wine open.

He’s a builder and a good one. He has survived the recession without having to lay people off. When we are all sitting down and eating, he asks me whether I’m any closer to a decision on the house. I’m not.

‘Well, if you want my advice, you should fix it up, whether you decide to sell it or keep it. It needs a lot doing to it,’ he tells me.

This doesn’t surprise me. It’s not a warm house, for a start. Nor is it a particularly comfortable one. It had started out, some time in the 1910s or 1920s, as a two-up, two-down with an outside lavatory and no bathroom. At some point, a one-storey extension was built to house a small bathroom and kitchen. No one is going to look twice at this house in its current state.

‘That bathroom and kitchen should be knocked down and rebuilt. I told your mother that when she bought the place. Offered to do it for her for next to nothing, but she wasn’t interested. All she wanted was central heating installed and the walls painted. She could have had a lovely little house,’ Joe says.

‘At least she asked you for your advice before she bought it. She certainly didn’t ask for mine,’ I said.

‘She asked me for advice only in the sense that she wanted to know if it could be lived in straight away. I never understood it, moving there after the other house,’ he says, shaking his head as if the disbelief that my mother had done such a foolish thing has never left him.

‘So what needs doing to it now? And how much will it cost?’ I ask.

‘I’d have to take another look at it, but off the top of my head I’d say you’re going to have to spend about 40,000 euro – and that’s with me doing you a good deal. It’s a lot, but if you do decide to sell the house, you’ll get a better price than you’ll get if you put it on the market as it is. And if you keep it, you’ll have a grand little place. Now, that kitchen and bathroom have to go. They’re crumbling away. And the two bedrooms are upstairs and there’s no bathroom up there. So have a think about this. We could turn one of those bedrooms into a bathroom.’

‘Okay.’

‘We’d have another bedroom downstairs, with a shower and so on, in the new extension that we’d put up. And on the other side of the extension, we’d have a decent-sized kitchen. You’d still have enough yard space to have a little patio. And the other thing I’d do downstairs is take down that wall between the two front rooms.’

‘Can I think about it? To be honest, I never understood myself what made her buy that place, but I can see that it could be transformed,’ I say.

‘Oh, and one more thing,’ Joe adds. ‘I’d think about cutting down some of those trees and bushes outside, or at least cut them back. They make that house like a morgue. You need a bit of light in there.’

As Joe talks, I find myself imagining how the house will look if I do what he’s suggesting. Instead of the nondescript off-white paint on all the walls, I could use bold colour. I see my mother’s bedroom upstairs, the internal wall moved back to increase the space, the walls painted a teal blue, the carpets removed and the floorboards covered in a dark brown varnish. I see the transformation that could be wrought by moving walls or taking them away and building new ones.

I’ve always loved rhododendron, but around my mother’s house it has something of the grave about it, something decaying. Cutting away some of the trees and dense foliage outside would enable the sun to penetrate far beyond the tall, narrow sash windows. I could grow roses in the garden at the front and have pots of flowering plants in the yard at the back. I could have a refuge from the emptiness that has been my life in London without Sandy.

‘How long are you staying?’ Joe asks.

‘Maybe a month. Depends on how much I get done. Joe, I want to think about it a bit more, but if I do decide to take your advice and fix up the house, will you do the work for me?’

‘I’d be delighted to. And in the meantime, why don’t you start thinking about what you might like, maybe get yourself a notebook and write your ideas down. I can come around in the next few days, whenever suits you, and do a rough drawing for you, and then, if you do want to go ahead with it, we can get things moving.’

‘Fantastic! Let’s drink to that,’ I say, and for a short while the letter from a child to Santa Claus in Lapland is far from my thoughts.

*

I have a dream that comes and goes. I am searching for my father. People tell me they’ve just seen him – waiting for a bus on Dame Street or walking along O’Connell Street. Time after time, I run to find him, but I’m always one step behind. He has moved on. I wake from this dream to find my face and pillow wet. And in that half-space between dreaming and being fully back in the world, I hear in my mind snatches of a tune sung in a high tenor voice by this imagined father, but muffled and coming as if from a distance, so that I can’t identify the song or the words.

The last time the dream came was shortly after my mother’s death. My father made an appearance in Drogheda this time, not Dublin. It was the same old routine. He had been seen on West Street, then at St Laurence’s Gate, and then at the top of Barrack Lane. But I was too late every time. And then, as I stumbled back down the Pitcher Hill steps, I could see a man swimming in the river. I ran as fast as I could, my body almost taking wing as I took several steps at a time, and pushed through the crowds that were gathering to watch the swimmer. I saw him glide through the water, as if in slow motion, towards St Mary’s Bridge. I ran to the other side and waited for him to emerge. But all that came from under the bridge was a swan, moving slowly upriver. I watched it until it drifted out of sight.

I’ve read somewhere that all the characters in our dreams represent aspects of ourselves. If that’s the case, I still don’t know which part of myself I’m seeking so desperately.

Maybe psychotherapy would be beneficial
. I’ve lost count of the number of times and ways Sandy has hinted or said outright that I could do worse than give therapy a go.

‘It doesn’t have to be traumatic,’ he would say.

‘What’s the point, then, if it isn’t?’ I would answer in a glib way.

Sandy thinks I need to sort out my feelings about my mother. I don’t need to go into therapy to understand that my relationship with my mother has been a complicated one. She was my entire world when I was a child. When I began to explore the world beyond her, she felt insecure and I felt guilty. Even when I married Sandy, I didn’t really separate from her. I understand all that. What more can therapy do for me?

I’m thinking about all this as I lie in bed, unable to sleep. I’m thinking about my mother and Sandy, wishing the two people I loved most in the world had grown to love each other.

What have you got against him?

He’s married.

He’s divorced. Big difference.

So he’s already left one woman. How do you know he won’t leave you too?

She was right. He did leave me and I’m still crumbling away inside with the grief of it all. And maybe that’s why rebuilding those crumbling walls of her house is becoming so important now. Maybe, by fixing the walls, turning that small, unattractive house into something warm and good, I can rebuild myself.