What She Never Told Me (6 page)

Chapter Seven

I wake up refreshed and positive and the sun is shining. After breakfast I walk around with the squared notepad Joe has given me, jotting down ideas and making rough drawings of how I would like things to be. I look at the ceilings in the bedrooms and wonder whether they can be removed to raise the height.

I haven’t been inside the attic, but I can’t imagine that it has been used to store anything very much. My mother would have had to put a stepladder on the small landing between the two bedrooms and then climb in through a fairly small trapdoor. Still, at some point I’m going to have to check what, if anything, is up there, beyond the horrible insulating material that irritates the skin, though I can probably leave that for Joe and his boys.

I look again at the letter to Santa, this time without experiencing that unpleasant physical sensation of the previous day, and I reckon I can blame my nausea on the strength of the White Nights coffee.

But even as I scan the letter for some kind of meaning, I see in my mind’s eye the old image of the little arm stretching upwards. Am I making a link between these two things that doesn’t really exist? Or can it be that I know what the link is, but have yet to make the connection? Maybe I once knew an Ailish but have forgotten all about her. But I don’t want to think about that now. I want to keep it at a distance.

And, in any case, there’s too much to do.

I’ve been through the wardrobes and trunks and put clothes, handbags and shoes into bags that I’ve labelled as things Angela or her daughters might like, things I can take to the charity shop and things that I might be able to sell because of their vintage and the fact that they are beautiful garments in good condition. I’m going to keep nothing except the jewellery, and there isn’t much of that – her wedding ring and a few other pieces Dermot gave her over the years they were married. And the silver cigarette holder.

What I should do now is tackle the various papers, but I can’t face what I know will be a nightmare of separating a jumbled mess into many different piles. My mother may have been elegant, but her approach to filing left a lot to be desired.

I think about her brother and about his invitation that I never meant to take up. But I’ve softened in the months since the funeral; I’m more willing to give him the benefit of all the doubts that have assembled in my head about the value of having any contact with my mother’s family. At the very least, I tell myself, talking to him will help me to build up a picture of the life she lived before she had me, a life she told me nothing about.

I search through my purse for the piece of paper he wrote his number on, the day of the funeral, and find it folded in one of the pockets. I pick up the phone and tap the number in.

‘Richard, it’s Louise. Marjorie’s daughter. I’m back in Ireland,’ I say when I hear his voice at the other end of the telephone. ‘I wonder if you might have time to see me, maybe later this week?’

‘This is a lovely surprise. I’m delighted to hear from you, Louise,’ he says. ‘What are you doing today? Why don’t you come up now?’

I start making excuses. I hadn’t expected to see him so quickly. I’ve had no time to prepare for a meeting.

‘Please come,’ he says. ‘It would mean a great deal to me.’

So I tell him I’ll set off shortly.

The drive takes the best part of two hours because I go wrong several times as I try to navigate the network of motorways that didn’t exist when I still lived in Ireland. But I finally reach Dalkey. It was once just a pleasant little village south of Dublin; now it’s an exclusive suburb where rock and film stars rub shoulders with the locals. Even after the crash, houses here are expensive. My uncle must be sitting on a goldmine.

His house is on a hill above the village and looks straight out over Dalkey Island and across Dublin Bay. It’s one of those Victorian villas you see in the wealthier parts of Dublin. The front door isn’t at ground-floor level, but stands grandly at the top of a set of granite steps with wrought-iron railings on either side. The cordyline palm trees in the garden that surrounds the house and the mountains in the distance give the place an air redolent of the Mediterranean in winter.

Richard leads me into the hallway and down a staircase to the kitchen, where he has put together a lunch of cold meats and cheeses. This was the house in which my mother grew up and which Richard inherited. I look around and think how different my own life might have been if my mother’s family hadn’t rejected her.

‘I’m very sorry that we didn’t really get to know each other. I just want to say that. It has always been a great sadness to me,’ Richard says, as if he has read my mind.

I had never given much thought to my mother’s family. They simply hadn’t featured in my life. Now, though, I can feel myself becoming angry towards them, hating them for not having wanted to have me in theirs.

‘I’m sorry, too, Richard. I look around this lovely place and this beautiful house, and I feel sad for my mother. I feel gutted that she lost all of this because she had me. She could have gone to England and had an abortion, but she didn’t. She was a good mother, a terrific one. And your parents rejected her because of something that no one in Ireland blinks twice at these days.’

He winces and begins to say something, but stops.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I shouldn’t have said that.’

‘It’s all right. You’re entitled to say what you feel.’

But I don’t say any more because he looks too uncomfortable. I’ve said enough.

Over lunch, he tells me about their childhood, his and my mother’s, in this lovely house with its gravel drive and gently rolling lawns. He tells me about the games they played as children and the pets they had.

‘Then I went off to boarding school. Only down the road. Ridiculous, really – I could have gone there as a day boy. But that’s what you did in those days, if you had a bit of money – you sent your children away. We were, I suppose, what used to be called Castle Catholics. Marjorie refused to go away, though. They wanted to send her to some place down the country, but she threw a few tantrums and they gave in. She went to the local convent as a day girl.’

‘And then what?’

He looks at me as if he’s not sure what I am asking.

‘I mean, what did she do after school. And –’ I falter, bracing myself to ask the question I’ve wanted to ask since I arrived here – ‘how did she come to have me?’

‘She did what most other girls who didn’t want to become teachers or nurses or work in a bank did. She went to secretarial college and did shorthand and typing. And then she got a job as a secretary. She worked for years at the Tennyson brewery in Crumlin. And then she . . . well, she had you.’

‘I never knew that. Where she worked, I mean. She told me nothing, really. And she never told me anything about my father. I was hoping you might be able to.’

‘I’m sorry, but I have no idea. She didn’t tell our parents or me anything about him, either. It does surprise me, though, that she didn’t talk to you about him. Didn’t she tell you anything at all?’

‘She told me he was called David Prescott and that he was English, and that he’d gone back to England before I was born. She told me nothing more than that. Does the name mean anything to you at all?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

But even as disappointment wells up in me, I feel a tiny bubble of hope, because Richard has given me a piece of information I hadn’t previously been aware of – where my mother had worked before she had me. That had been something else she had glossed over, telling me only that she had worked in an office and that it hadn’t been very interesting.

‘Is it possible that my father worked at the Tennyson brewery, too?’ I ask. ‘Maybe he was her boss. Was her boss English?’

‘I really can’t remember, Louise. He may have been English – almost certainly was, because it was an English company and only a few of the senior people were Irish. But even if the man she worked for was English, it doesn’t necessarily mean he was your father. Marjorie was . . . vivacious, outgoing. She had friends. She knew a lot of people, a lot of men.’

‘But if my father was English and she worked for an English company, surely the most likely place for her to have met him was there? At Tennyson’s?’

‘She could have met him somewhere else. She hung around with a fashionable crowd. And there were a lot of English people at Trinity. He could have been one of them.’

‘I could still go and talk to the brewery people. They would have a record of when she worked there, who she worked for, wouldn’t they?’

‘Ah. Well, now, I’m afraid Tennyson’s doesn’t exist any more. It closed down years ago. Look, Louise, it may be that your father is the man she worked for. Or it may be someone else who worked for the company. But if your mother refused to tell anyone – even you – anything about him, it’s highly likely that he was already married. And it’s very unlikely that he’s still alive. He would probably have been a few years older than Marjorie. That would put him closer to ninety than eighty. I very much doubt that you’re going to be able to find him, and my advice is not even to try.’

I want to argue, but everything he is saying makes sense. Trying to track down the father who never even knew I existed would be mission impossible. I feel my eyes becoming wet.

‘I know I’m being a bit childish, but I had it in my head that you could tell me everything I needed to know.’

‘If only I could. But there are other things I can tell you about your mother. I have things to give you, too.’

He takes me to a sitting room and gestures towards several ancient-looking photograph albums piled on top of a coffee table.

‘I’ll leave you to look through them. I don’t think you’ll have any trouble working out who’s who,’ he says. ‘I’ll come back shortly.’

All the photographs are black and white. Cracked and grainy, they recreate the past in a way that’s impossible to achieve with colour. Richard is right; I can easily work out who is who – the floppy-haired boy making faces at the camera or, oblivious to it, frolicking with a spaniel on the lawn; the little girl in her smocked dress, her attention focused on the doll she cradles in her arms.

My mother’s mother and father – my grandparents – appear in some of the photos, and I study them, searching for hints of the attitudes that would lead them some day to reject their daughter and her child. But, in their formal clothes, their stiffly held poses, their expressionless faces, they give nothing away. They are of their time.

I turn the pages and move through those lives, see my mother and uncle in school uniform, see them as young adults – he, languid and handsome as he smokes a cigarette; she, arrestingly beautiful, elegant in a blouse and skirt. Later, there are photos of Richard with a young woman and a small boy, who must be his wife and son. My mother appears in some of them, playing with the child or chatting with the woman.

Richard comes back and sits down beside me on the sofa. He asks me whether I have any questions.

‘Not really. Not for now, anyway. There’s too much to think about. If it’s all right, I think I need to get going now.’

He takes the photograph albums and holds them out to me.

‘Would you like to keep these?’

I nod. At this moment, there’s nothing I want more. I will take the albums back to Drogheda and look at those photos of my beautiful mother again and again.

‘I hope you’ll come again. I would very much like to get to know my niece,’ Richard says as I leave.

I could tell him that he’s left it a bit late, that he could have got to know me when having an uncle and a cousin would have been a good thing for a little girl living with her mother in a northside flat with no garden. But I promise to keep in touch, and I will, not only because he’s my mother’s brother, but also because he’s a kind man. I’ve begun to like him.

He walks me to my car and, as I pull the seatbelt across me, he leans down to speak.

‘Louise, I know it must be hard for you, losing your mother and not having any contact with your father. But Marjorie must have had a good reason for not telling you anything very much about him. You should keep that in mind,’ he says.

I give him a weak smile and say nothing. My visit has given me a lot to think about, but I’m making no promises.

It’s only when I’m back on the motorway that I remember I haven’t asked Richard whether he knew anything about Ailish, the little girl whose letter to Santa Claus never made it to the snowy wastes of Lapland.

Chapter Eight

I get up early after a restless night during which I woke several times thinking about what Richard had told me – that, even if my father had worked at the brewery, he was almost certainly no longer alive and that there was little point even thinking about trying to find him.

I look again through the albums he has given me, poring over each grainy photograph, trying to imagine this early life of my mother that was so different from anything I had known.

She had never talked much about her childhood, brushing off my occasional questions with short responses and shifting to a different topic. I used to ask her about her parents, what they looked like, whether they were kind, whether I would have liked them. She told me they were nice enough and looked ordinary, like anyone’s parents. Sometimes I persisted, asking question after question, but that was never a good idea because then she would snap at me. So I gradually came to understand during the years of my childhood that her own wasn’t something she was happy to talk about. Some topics were out of bounds.

Until yesterday, I had never seen any photographs of her as a child or of her family. Now, I have several albums, and they keep me absorbed for much of the morning as I study these snapshots of her life as the daughter of a well-off family in an affluent southern suburb of Dublin. Her parents don’t look ordinary at all. Her mother looks haughty, as if her eyes never look in any direction other than straight ahead or down. Her father, too, looks like someone who has never questioned his station in life. In some of the photographs, I catch shadowy glimpses of domestic staff.

And, as the day goes on, I become aware that this entrée into my mother’s family life, through Richard and through the photographs, isn’t lessening my need to find out more about my father. Far from it. It’s true that she didn’t want me to know anything about my father, but if I do manage to find him, how can it hurt her now?

Richard has given me one important piece of information that I hadn’t previously been aware of – where Mamma had worked before I was born. I decide to walk into town and do some research into Tennyson’s at the library.

The library is well endowed with computers and I quickly gain access to a terminal. There’s quite a lot of online information about the brewery, and I learn that it was built in the mid-1930s by a family-run company with headquarters in Northampton. Like other philanthropic industrialists of the time, the Tennysons looked after their employees; in Dublin, the company built workers’ houses laid out over several garden squares.

I key
Marjorie Redmond
,
Tennyson’s Brewery
and
Dublin
into a Google search box, but there are no matches for my mother’s name.

I make one positive discovery, though. I learn that the company still exists, with one plant on the outskirts of Northampton, brewing a small range of real ales.

I check out Tennyson’s website and find a contact email as well as a telephone number and an address. I sit, staring at the screen for a while. I have nothing to lose by contacting the company. But should I call or send an email? What should I say or write? I almost convince myself that I should wait, go back to the house and think about it for a few days. But I’m here now and there’s no time like the present. I start typing.

I write that my mother, Marjorie Redmond, worked for the brewery in Dublin for several years during the 1960s, that she died recently and that I’m trying to get in touch with her former boss, an English manager whose name, unfortunately, I cannot recall, to tell him about her death. Perhaps the company can put me in touch with him.

I don’t mention David Prescott. I don’t know whether it would have been possible in those days, but I’ve often wondered whether my mother had simply made up a name to put on my birth certificate. Better to find out who she had worked for and then contact him in the hope that he can give me all or some of the information I need.

But how likely is it that the brewery will give out a name to someone writing out of the blue? And what if the man I’m seeking hadn’t been her boss, but someone from another part of the company? No, I have to do this a different way, a more inventive way.

I delete what I’ve written and I set up a new email account in the name of Sandra Munro. It’s not very imaginative, but I need something I’ll remember, and Sandra Munro is as close to my husband’s name as I can get. Then I write that I’m carrying out research for a book on the impact on local communities in the British Isles of philanthropic companies and their approach to employee welfare and housing. In particular, I say, I’m interested in talking to any former senior staff who worked in the Dublin plant in the 1960s and 1970s, before it closed down. I add my address, my mobile number and my London landline, read over the entire message several times and click
send.
I can feel my heart pounding against my chest.

It’s unusually mild and dry for early April and, when I go to White Nights for something to eat, I sit at one of the tables outside so that I can listen to the fast flow of the water and the squawking of the gulls as they circle and swoop. It’s a strange kind of music, discordant yet harmonious. It matches my mood. I have the
Irish Times
with me, but I can’t concentrate on it; my nerves are strung too tightly.

What would my life have been like had I remained in Ireland? Apart from those years of being married to Sandy, when I was happier than I had ever thought I could be, would it have been so much less of a life than the one I have in London? Would it have been so very different? I might have ended up giving piano lessons to children who didn’t want to learn and to adult beginners with little hope of ever becoming even competent, let alone good. But every now and then there might have been a child or adult whose delight in music made my efforts worthwhile.

I might have married Declan.

My nerves are jangled, too jangled to face the mess of papers that waits for me back at the house. A different plan forms in my head: I’ll go to Crumlin. I know from my internet research that the brewery has been redeveloped into offices and film and recording studios. The building also houses a little museum devoted to the history of the company’s operations in Dublin and its place in local history. I tell myself it’s unlikely that I’ll accomplish anything useful by going there, but at least I’ll see the place where my mother worked and – maybe – met my father. There may even be someone in the museum, a former worker, who may have known her.

I could take the car, but I know that Dublin traffic is a nightmare, so I leave it outside the house and walk to the railway station. For a station on the main line between Dublin and Belfast, it looks pleasantly old-fashioned. I don’t have long to wait for a train and, as it moves out of the station, I close my eyes and think back to those excursions my mother and I made all those years ago, in trains with compartments that we often had all to ourselves.

The train is one of those commuter trains with long open carriages, but at least it’s not crowded. There’s a flutter of excitement in my stomach as we pass through the stations at Laytown, Balbriggan, Skerries, Rush and Lusk, Malahide, Portmarnock, the sea on our left, shimmering in the sunlight that refuses to stay behind the clouds for long. I have a good feeling. Finally, I am doing something that may or may not lead me to David Prescott, but at least I will have tried.

Leaving Amiens Street Station – I still think of it by that name because it’s what my mother always called it, even though its official name is Connolly – I hail a taxi. Twenty minutes later, I’m standing outside the brewery, a low-level but striking redbrick building that dominates the surrounding area.

Inside, there’s a central lobby with signposts indicating the way to the various studios and even a theatre. What I’m looking for is the museum that’s housed on the top floor. It’s tiny and crammed with photo boards showing the life of the brewery over the decades and the lives of the people who worked there.

I scrutinise the black-and-white photographs, in particular those that appear to be from the time my mother worked there, but I can’t find her face among them. I approach the woman who seems to be in charge of the museum, telling her that my mother once worked here as a secretary and asking whether it might be possible to talk to anyone who had worked at the brewery in the 1960s.

‘There are still a few old timers who pop in, but we never know when they’re coming. You can always leave me your name and a phone number and I may be able to get someone to call you. I’m not promising anything, though,’ she says.

I write my name and number down on a piece of paper and hand it to her, but the disappointment I feel must be written all over my face because she then suggests that I might like to come back later in the day.

‘That’s when the oul’ fellas tend to turn up. They can have a cup of tea and a biscuit and reminisce about the good old days,’ she says. ‘Though, if you ask me, I’m not sure what was that good about them.’

I wander outside and consider going back towards the centre of town, perhaps doing some clothes shopping around Grafton Street. But I don’t want to be away from here for too long and I decide instead to walk around the neighbourhood and explore the same streets my mother walked along every day for years.

I try to imagine her going to work in the mornings, perhaps smoothing her hair or having a last-minute check of her dress to make sure it wasn’t creased. I think about her leaving the office in the evening, saying goodbye to her boss, making sure she didn’t call him by his first name, being the perfect secretary so that nobody would suspect their relationship, and then waiting for him to turn up at her flat or room.

Was it romantic? Maybe it was in the beginning. And then, as time went by, maybe it became more frustrating than romantic. Maybe they had rows because he wouldn’t leave his wife. Did she become pregnant with me because she wanted to force the issue? Was he the love of her life? And, if so, was Dermot some kind of consolation prize? When I think of Dermot, who became more of a father to me than I might have imagined when we first met him, I feel a twinge of guilt about having embarked on this search that may turn out to be, at best, a wild goose chase. At worst, it may bring the kind of heartache I’m not sure I can cope with. But what else can I do?

I don’t know this part of the inner city, but I feel relaxed here. It has a small-town feel about it and there are children playing in the streets outside the houses. I find this reassuring, even in a fairly compact city like Dublin. My nerves have stopped jangling, probably because I’m actually doing something rather than just playing out imaginary scenarios in my head.

I wander into a square behind the brewery. According to the leaflets I’ve picked up at the museum, it was built to house some of the workers and their families. It’s called Walter Square and it’s typical of the other small estates built by Tennyson’s, with four redbrick terraces laid out around a garden square. But the expensive-looking cars parked here suggest that previous generations of workers have long gone and have been replaced by bankers and doctors.

Oddly, there seems to be something familiar about the square and the houses, although I don’t recognise anything in particular. It’s possible, even likely, I think, that my mother brought me here as a small child and I have somehow retained a memory of it.

Lost in my thoughts, I don’t notice the postbox until I’m in front of it, and all of a sudden I’m aware of that misted, shrouded image of the little arm clutching the envelope, reaching upward. The memory is so vivid and pushes so far forward that it’s no longer just in my mind’s eye. It has somehow moved beyond me so that it’s almost in front of me.

And now I have two images and each one is as real to me as the other: the green postbox that is so much taller than the little girl who has to stretch to reach the slot and the green postbox that I am standing in front of. I look down and see that my arm is stretching out towards the slot, that my hand is touching it.

And I shiver, because I feel afraid.

I’m shaking now and I begin to run, away from the postbox, away from the square. I run until I’m exhausted, filled with dread and not knowing why. I have no idea where I’m going and I’m vaguely aware of people making way for me as I flee in panic. And when I can’t run any more, I sink to the side of the pavement, curl up like a foetus and howl.

I have no recollection of being taken to the hospital or how many hours I’ve been there. I can’t explain to the doctor what happened to me, what made me turn into an exhausted, shivering wreck on the pavement, but I tell him that I’ve been under a lot of stress because of the breakdown of my marriage and the death of my mother.

The hospital won’t let me leave without an adult who can take care of me for a day or two, so I call Angela and ask her to come and fetch me.

Her face has an anxious look on it as she and the doctor move out of earshot to talk, but otherwise she’s as calm as a ship in stormy seas. She settles me into the car and, as we leave the hospital, she tells me that if I want to talk about whatever happened, that’s fine, but that if I don’t want to talk about it for the time being, then that’s fine, too.

‘I don’t think I can face talking about it right now,’ I say. ‘Maybe later.’

But when we get back to Angela’s house, all I want to do is lie down and close my eyes. She puts me in one of the bedrooms, where I fall asleep in seconds. I sleep all evening and all through the night and late into the following morning without waking up. And if dreams have managed to invade my sleep, I don’t remember them.