by Maeve Binchy
‘If this promise is ever broken or if you try to get in touch with Maureen in any way even after she is legally an adult, I can assure you that you will be made to regret it to the end of your days …’
It was the way Mother spoke to a tradesman who had offended her in some way, or to a handyman who had not done a job to her satisfaction.
He had accepted her terms, the man in Bulawayo, the man Maureen had thought was dead for forty years. He had returned the letter, as ordered to do. Attached to it by a small pearl-topped pin was a postcard. A brown sepia picture of mountains and savannah.
The words on the postcard said, ‘I died of a virus on May 15th 1945.’
Maureen put her head down on her mother’s desk and cried as if her heart would break into little pieces.
She didn’t feel the time passing. And when she looked at the clock, the way the hands were placed seemed meaningless. It said a quarter past two or ten past three. It was bright so it must be daytime.
She had come to the house at ten o’clock, she must have been in this semi-trance for over two hours.
She walked around feeling the blood beginning to flow again in her veins. If anyone had looked in the window of the morning room they would have seen a tall dark young woman, looking considerably less than her forty-six years, apparently hugging herself around the waist of her smart navy and pink wool dress.
In fact Maureen was holding in each hand the elbow of the opposite arm, in a physical attempt to hold herself together after this shock.
She felt a rage against her mother, not just because this man had been ordered summarily out of her life, and threatened not to contact his own flesh and blood. But she felt a burning anger that if her mother had kept this secret so successfully for so long, why on earth had she not destroyed the evidence?
If Maureen had never found these papers, she would never have known. She would have been happier, more safe and sure in the world she had built for herself.
Why had her mother been so casual and cruel? She must have known that Maureen would find the evidence some day.
But of course Mother knew that Maureen would not betray her. Maureen would keep up appearances to the end.
Like hell she would. Like bloody hell.
It came to her suddenly that she could do anything she liked about this whole farcical bargain. She had entered into no melodramatic promises about mythical deaths. She had entered into no promise not to contact him for fear of some awful punishment.
By God, she was going to find him, or Flora, or her half-sister.
Please, please may they be alive. Please may she find her father from this welter of documents. The latest being in 1950, confirming a final transfer of assets.
Please God may he still be alive. Seventy wasn’t that old.
She began to work with the kind of controlled furious energy that she had not known since the night before her first big high-fashion sale when they were up almost all night in the stockrooms marking clothes down, and recataloguing and estimating the takings of the following day.
This time she approached her mother’s belongings with different categories in mind. She found two boxes which she filled with early photographs and memorabilia of herself when a child.
If she did find this man, if he was a man with any heart he would want to know what she looked like at her first Communion, in her hockey outfit, dressed for her first dance.
Items which would have been carefully cut up and destroyed were now filed in boxes and labelled ‘keepsakes’.
She sorted and arranged and tidied until she was ready to drop. Then she tied up the bags which were real rubbish, folded the clothes and other items which were to go to the Vincent de Paul, and ordered a taxi to take back the boxes of keepsakes to her own flat.
There wasn’t a drawer now that hadn’t been emptied and dusted out. Much of the ordinary kitchen equipment would go to Mrs O’Neill who had come to clean for Mother over the years. Jimmy Hayes who did the garden could have the lawnmower and any of the gardening tools he wanted. Maureen also wrote him a letter asking him to take for his own use any plants that he particularly liked, and to have them removed quickly. She had decided now that the house would go on the market as soon as possible.
She laid her hand on the small writing desk. The one she had been going to take for the entrance hall of her own apartment. She patted it and said, ‘No’. She didn’t want it now. She wanted nothing from here.
The taxi man helped her in with the boxes. Because he was curious she told him that she had been clearing away her mother’s effects. He was very sympathetic.
‘Isn’t it a pity now that you didn’t have anyone to help you do a job like that?’ he said.
That’s what people often said to her in different forms, like wasn’t it a wonder that a fine girl like herself had never married and settled down.
‘Oh my father would have done everything but he was away, far away,’ she said.
She had mentioned her father. She didn’t care about the surprised look that the taxi driver gave her, or how odd it was to have a father far away when a mother had died.
She felt that by mentioning him she was making him be alive.
She had a long, long bath and felt better but ravenously hungry. She telephoned Walter.
‘I’m being very selfish, and literally using you, so feel free to say no, but are there any nice restaurants open on a Sunday night? I’d love to go out for a meal.’
Walter said nothing could suit him better, he had been doing a particularly tedious kind of Opinion where there seemed to be no solution or a thousand solutions, and one was as hard as the other. He would love to escape from it.
Together they sat and ordered good food and wine by candlelight.
‘You look a little feverish,’ Walter said with concern.
‘I’ve a lot on my mind.’
‘I know, it must have been very distressing today,’ he said.
Her eyes seemed to dance at him across the table. She had never looked more beautiful, he thought.
‘I know it’s not the time, but then there never is any really good time, but perhaps you might think of …’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, should we go on a holiday together, somewhere we would both like, Austria you once said you would like to visit?’
‘There’s no fishing in Austria, Walter.’ She smiled at him.
‘There are probably no fashion trade fairs either, but we could manage for two weeks couldn’t we?’
‘No, Walter, we’d drive each other mad.’
‘We could leave each other alone.’
‘Can’t we do that better living apart?’ She gave him a very bright smile.
‘There’s something on your mind.’ He looked hurt and troubled.
‘Yes, there is, and I can’t tell you now. But please remember tonight and that I wanted to tell you something. I will soon.’
‘When?’
‘I don’t know. Soon.’
‘Is it another man? I know that sounds very corny but you have that kind of look about you.’
‘No, it’s not another man. Not in that sense. I’ll tell you, I’ve never lied to you, and when I do tell, you’ll realize.’
‘Now I can’t wait,’ he said.
‘I know, neither can I, I wish people worked on Sundays, why does the world close down on Sundays?’
‘You and I work on Sundays,’ Walter complained.
‘Yes, but offices all over the world don’t, damn them.’
He knew it wasn’t worth asking any more, he would hear nothing. He leaned over and patted her hand.
‘I suppose I must love you to let you get away with all of this performance.’
‘Oh will you go away to hell, Walter, of course you don’t love me, not even in the slightest, but you’re a great friend, and I’m sure, though I don’t intend to find out, that you’re a smashing lay as well.’
The waiter’s arrival just at that moment, in time to h
ear Maureen’s extravagant compliment, prevented Walter from saying anything in reply.
She slept a little but not much. She was out of her bed, showered and dressed, by six a.m. The time difference would be three hours. She would start telephoning International Inquiries, and giving the out-of-date numbers, hoping that it would not be too long a haul. She had almost weakened enough to ask Walter if there were international directories of solicitors worldwide that she could study down at the Four Courts, but no, she must give him no details, no hints; later she would tell him. He deserved that. She hadn’t decided what she would tell everyone else, when she found her father; if she found him.
It was not as difficult as she had feared. It was probably twenty times as expensive in terms of telephone calls, but she didn’t care.
The firm no longer existed in Bulawayo, helpful operators got her listings of other solicitors, finally she found that the original company had moved to South Africa. She found herself talking to people in cities she had never even thought about even if she had acknowledged their names … Bloemfontein, Ladysmith, Kimberley, Queenstown.
She found one of the names that had signed one of the letters in Pretoria. Maureen Barry was crisp.
She explained that her mother had died and that it was her last wish that she Maureen should contact her late father: to whom should she now make the inquiries?
It wasn’t a file that would have been kept open for forty years, the man told her.
‘But you haven’t thrown it away. Lawyers don’t throw anything away.’
‘Can’t you inquire at your end?’
‘I have, they know nothing, the firm has changed, they say, and it’s true that all the documents were handed back to my mother at her request. I have to try at your end.’
He sounded a nice man despite his accent and the way he said rilly instead of really and tried to work out what was the best way to go in the ind instead of the end.
‘I fully realize that this is professional work, to research on my behalf, I am totally prepared to pay a professional fee for your time and expertise,’ Maureen said. ‘Would you like me to approach you through solicitors here to put it on a more formal basis?’
‘No, it seems to me that you are a person who could be dealt with in her own right.’
She could hear him smiling from across the world, a man whom she’d never met in a country she would never visit (nor would any of her friends) on account of its policies. Mother had been heard to say once she felt very sorry for those whites having to give up all their privileges and nice homes. But it hadn’t gone down well. Mother hadn’t been a fool, she didn’t go that route again.
He said he would call her shortly.
‘I wonder have you any idea how shortly I hope it’s going to be.’
‘I think so,’ he said in his curious clipped accent. ‘If I had just lost one parent and had the hope of finding another I would know that there was a lot of urgency involved.’
She didn’t know how she got through the Tuesday and the Wednesday. He phoned her, the man from Pretoria, on Wednesday at 8 a.m. with an address of a solicitor’s firm in London.
‘Is he dead or alive?’ she asked, her hand at her throat waiting for the reply.
‘They didn’t tell me, truly they didn’t tell me.’ He sounded regretful.
‘But these people will know?’ she begged.
‘These people will be able to get a message to whoever is concerned.’
‘Did they hint?’
‘Yes. They hinted.’
‘What?’
‘That he was alive. That you would be talking to the principal involved.’
‘I’ll never be able to thank you,’ she said.
‘You don’t know yet whether you have anything to thank me for or not.’
‘But I’ll tell you. I’ll ring you back.’
‘Write to me, you’ve spent enough on telephone calls. Or better come out and see me.’
‘I don’t think I’ll do that, would you be any use to me? What class of an age of a person are you at all?’
‘Stop putting on that accent. I am sixty-three, a widower, with a beautiful home in Pretoria.’
‘God bless you,’ she said.
‘I hope he’s alive and good to you,’ said the stranger from South Africa.
She had to wait an hour and a half before she could talk to the man in the London firm of solicitors.
‘I don’t know why you’re talking to me,’ he said in a slightly peeved tone.
‘I don’t know either,’ Maureen confessed. ‘But the original agreement was that my father and I should not get in touch during my mother’s lifetime. I know it sounds like something from Hans Christian Andersen but this is the way it happened. Can you listen for two minutes, only two? I can explain it quickly, I’m used to business conversations.’
The English solicitor understood. He said he would be in touch.
Maureen began to have far greater faith in the speed of the law than she ever had before. Walter would tell her about delays and adjournments, she knew herself the endless palaver about contracts with suppliers. But suddenly in the middle of the most important event of her whole life she had met two law firms who seemed to understand her urgency. To sense her impatience and respond to it. On Thursday night she checked the answering machine in her flat but there was nothing except a kindly invitation from Mother’s friend Mrs O’Hagan to drop in any evening for a sherry just as you did with your own poor mother. And there was a message from Walter who was going to the West of Ireland at the weekend, there would be lots of lovely walks and gorgeous food, he said, as well as fishing. And there needn’t even be any fishing if Maureen would care to join him.
She smiled. He was a good friend.
There were two clicks where people had hung up without leaving a message. She felt restless, and then annoyed with herself. How could she expect these people to act so swiftly? And suppose her father was alive and in England, which was the way it looked now … perhaps he didn’t want to get in touch, or he did and Flora didn’t want him to, or his daughter. She suddenly realized that there might have been other children.
She paced the apartment, walking the length of her long living room, arms hugging each other. She couldn’t remember when she had last been like this, unable to settle to anything.
The phone when it rang made her jump and the voice was hesitant.
‘Maureen Barry. Is that Maureen Barry?’
‘Yes.’ She spoke half words, half breath.
‘Maureen, it’s Bernie,’ the voice said. And there was a silence, as if he was waiting desperately to know what she would say.
She was able to say nothing. No words would come out.
‘Maureen, they told me you had been trying to get in touch, if that’s not so …’ He was almost ready to ring off.
‘Are you my father?’ she whispered.
‘I’m an old man now, but I was your father,’ he said.
‘Then you still are.’ She forced a lightness into her voice. It had been the right thing to do, she heard him laugh a little.
‘I rang before,’ he said. ‘But it was one of those machines, you sounded so formal I had to ring off without saying anything.’
‘I know, people should be hanged for that,’ she said. Again it was right, he was relaxing.
‘But I rang again just to hear your voice and think: This is Maureen speaking, actually the sound of her voice.’
‘And did you like the sound of it?’
‘Not as much as now when it’s a real conversation. Is it a real conversation?’
‘Yes, yes it is.’
There was a silence, but it wasn’t a heavy one, it was as if they were both settling into the strange ritual of talking to each other.
‘Would you like to meet me?’ she asked.
‘There’s nothing I would like more. But would you be able to come to England to find me? I’m a bit feeble now, I couldn’t come to Ireland to see you.’
<
br /> ‘That’s no problem. I’ll come as soon as you like.’
‘It won’t be the Bernie you used to know.’
She understood he wanted her to call him Bernie, not Father. Mother had always referred to him as poor Bernard.
‘I never knew you anyway Bernie, and you only knew me for a short time, it will be no shock to either of us. I’m freewheeling down to fifty, a middle-aged woman.’
‘Stop, stop.’
‘No, it’s true, I’m not actually grey because I have such a regular relationship with a hairdresser …’ She felt she was burbling on.
‘And Sophie … she told you … before she …’ He was hesitant.
‘She died two weeks ago … Bernie … it was a stroke, it was quick and she wouldn’t have recovered, it was all for the best …’
‘And you …?’
‘I’m fine. But what about seeing you, where will I come, and Flora, and your family?’
‘Flora is dead. She died shortly after we left Rhodesia.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Yes, she was a wonderful woman.’
‘And children?’ Maureen felt this was an extraordinary conversation. It sounded so normal, so run of the mill, yet she was talking to her own father, a man she had thought was forty years dead until four days ago.
‘There’s just Catherine. She’s in the States.’
Maureen was pleased somehow.
‘What’s she doing there, is she working, is she married?’
‘No, she’s neither, she’s gone with this rock musician, she’s been with him eight years now. She sort of goes along wherever he is to make a type of home for him, she says, it’s all she ever wanted. She’s happy.’
‘She’s lucky then,’ Maureen said almost without thinking.
‘Yes she is, isn’t she? Because she’s not hurting anyone. People say she’s a loser but I don’t think that, I think she’s winning if she has what she wants without hurting anyone else.’
‘When can I come and see you, Bernie?’ she asked.
‘Oh the sooner the better, the soonest the very best,’ he said.
‘Where are you?’