I Couldn't Love You More

by Esther Freud

  That first evening Rosaleen stood on the landing and watched while Peter bathed his daughter, splashing her with tiny drops, singing as he soaped her hair. He was a teacher, although he’d have liked to have been a writer, and now that he had help he’d be starting back at work. In the meantime he cooked for Rosaleen, and read her poems, and the three of them went walking through the woods, the baby strapped to Peter in a sling.

  There was a plot of land behind the house, the remnants of a garden, and although it was too late for planting Rosaleen prepared the ground, digging and clearing, making lists of seeds they’d need to buy. There were pear trees, and old raspberry canes burnt black by frost, and she chose a corner to make compost, throwing in the leaves she raked, mixing it with peelings. She warmed milk for little Sylva and fed her by the fire, holding her slight body against her swelling one, shifting her against her shoulder to be burped.

  At the end of that month, Peter asked if she would stay. That’s when she told him she was pregnant. ‘I thought you might be,’ he’d said, and, blushing, looked at her, although she’d seen him looking before. ‘No more secrets, eh?’ His eyes were very blue.

  ‘She’s to be called Chloe.’

  ‘Is that a fact?’

  Rosaleen nodded, so solemn that he’d laughed.

  ‘I didn’t expect to be laughing. Not six months after—’ She didn’t ask, not then, what had happened to his wife. ‘Thank you.’ He took her hand and squeezed it.

  ‘I will stay.’ She didn’t say for how long.

  Kate

  IT’S HIGH SUMMER AS WE WALK THROUGH THE STREETS TOWARDS home. Our road looks swept and welcoming, and the nasturtiums planted by an invisible neighbour have flowered, orange and red. Our gate clangs familiarly as Freya swings it open, and avoiding the cracked tile, we step along the path. I double-locked the door before we left for Ireland, but as I reach up with my key I find it opens on its one loose catch.

  ‘Matt?’ I call into the vacant hall.

  I run upstairs. The bed is as I left it, the chair beside it piled with books, but when I open the cupboard I am assailed by an empty drift of hangers, a shelf swept free of clothes. I step back, sorrow battling with elation, and when I look into the bathroom and see Matt’s toothbrush, hope rises, dipping as I find his shaving brush and razor gone.

  Freya is standing on a chair. I put my arms around her, hold her tight until she squirms, and it is only once I have unbolted the back door and she is outside, stirring the dried-mud segments of potion, that I see the red light of the answerphone is flashing, notice the pile of post. My heart loops as I leaf through it. There is a phone bill, an invitation to a studio show – three friends from art school exhibiting their work; Next time join us scribbled on the back – and a letter from the Convent of the Sacred Heart. We are sorry to inform you that there is nothing we can do to help you in this matter. It was sent before I left.

  I want to rip the letter, but I can’t. I have so little, I must keep it.

  I press the button on the answerphone. You have two new messages.

  ‘Hey there. I’m dropping round on Saturday to get some of my stuff.’ There’s a pause, as if Matt is shocked to be giving me this news. ‘Sorry.’ There’s another pause. ‘We’ll talk.’

  The next message is from Beck. His voice is low and inquisitive. ‘Just wondering how you got on in Cork. Call me when you get a chance. I’d like to know you’re safely back.’

  My finger hovers to replay the messages, but first I scan the phone bill. The repeating number isn’t hard to find. Twenty-three minutes. Thirty-seven minutes. Eighteen minutes. If nothing else, I must send it on to Matt. And then I’m dialling; what is there to lose? ‘Hello!’ A cheerful voice on an ascending scale. ‘Sarah isn’t here right now so leave a message!’ Sarah is presumably at work, and so most probably is Matt. I speak slowly as if I may be hard to understand. ‘This is a message for Matthew Jensen. I’d like to say . . .’ What is it that I’d like to say? Oh yes. ‘Fuck you.’

  I’ve hardly set the phone down when it rings back. ‘Yes?’ but it isn’t Matt, or Sarah, it’s Roberta, who wants me to know – I can hear the shuffling of papers – that the board have decided to increase my hours. They’ve been unusually impressed by recent projects.

  I’m so surprised I ask about a raise. Roberta draws a breath. ‘That’s something that will have to be discussed.’

  ‘The thing is, I’m going to be working towards my own exhibition,’ I tell her, and as I speak I push open the door to my studio and I step in among the trees.

  ‘I’ll let you know,’ she says with a new warmth, ‘about the raise.’

  WE STAY CLOSE TO HOME those next few days. I set up a shade in the garden and we sit outside with pens and crayons, scissors, glue, and fill the pages of our scrapbooks. Freya’s involves much sticking. Mine is a record of our trip. I draw a sketch of the convent, the slope of the stone steps, the fortified front door. I draw a picture of the castle folly, the rectangle of its lawn, the encircled crosses, the names of the nuns. More importantly I write down Carmel’s words.

  Patricia.

  Her good coat.

  Singing to Felix through the night.

  How much would a hundred pounds be now? A thousand? Two?

  Her father must have loved her.

  Isabelle. I set it beside Felicia. Beside Kate.

  As ever, I’m not sure who to be.

  Rosaleen

  THEY WERE EXPECTED AT THE HOSPITAL, A SMALL CLEAN COTTAGE hospital, where the midwife gave her reassurance that a second baby was almost always easier than a first. There’d be gas and air, and in the event of any complications, an obstetrician would be close at hand.

  Rosaleen had been mindful to wear her nana’s ring and to refer to Peter as her husband. She looked at Peter now, sleeping, peaceful beside her, the pale form of him, a light in the dark room. Slowly, quietly, she slid from the bed, careful as she creaked over the boards, and holding tight to the banister she crept downstairs.

  There was a gathering inside her, cramping, bloody, as she inched open the front door. She’d wait as long as she could bear it – fear broke across her back – and she closed her eyes against the hanging crescent of the moon. Damn this, a contraction swelled, and she fought away the image of herself gripping that basin, doubled in agony as she was forced down the stairs. Slowly she made her way along the path beside the house, and into the wood behind the garden. Branches hung low enough to swipe her face, each leaf damp with dew. She reached a clearing and sat with her back against the trunk of an oak, the wood pressing warm against her spine. The light was grainy, each blade of grass vividly outlined, and as she breathed in, exhaled, breathed in again, the birds began to wake, small cheeps and squawks cut through with song. The melody coiled inside her, twisting and lilting so that she began to hum. She hummed in a low round roll, lifting the pain as it descended, swooping with it, drawing it away.

  It was light by the time Peter found her. She was bent over, palms pressed to the wood. ‘My love.’ He laid his hands on her, but there was no time to answer; she must sing the baby out. ‘Sweetheart.’ He tried to ease away her hands.

  Rosaleen shook him off. She mustn’t break the rhythm of her humming. If she stopped for even a moment she’d be lost.

  ‘Rosaleen!’ His voice was firm. ‘We have to get to the hospital.’

  ‘Mmmmmmm, mmm, mm.’ Her eyes were closed.

  ‘I’m bringing the car, stay right here.’ She laughed, or would have if she’d had breath to spare. Bring the car, she thought as she rode the swell of a contraction. She’d not be agreeing to anyone’s orders again.

  When Peter returned, he had Sylva with him. Rosaleen caught the bright gleam of her hair. ‘Sylva,’ she managed before the rolling started, deep down and rising. ‘Please,’ Peter was begging, but she lost sight of him, and when she next looked up, he had a blanket and a steaming bowl of water. ‘They’re on their way.’ She didn’t dare ask who. There was work to do, and she
was going to do it.

  By the time the ambulance arrived, the baby was born. It slithered out on a roar of pain and triumph, and Peter held it up. ‘A girl,’ he told her, and he kissed her dark head.

  ‘You did well,’ the paramedic said, admiring, leaning down to cut the cord, looking to Peter to check he’d noticed the baby wasn’t his.

  Rosaleen could only make a strangled sound of need, and her daughter, wrapped in a towel, was placed in the crook of her arm. Her eyes were open, blue-black, and watchful. ‘Hello.’ She felt her whole self falling.

  Why had Chloe failed to say that as her heart opened, it would also break?

  Aoife

  AOIFE HAD A BRANDY, WITH ICE TO MAKE IT LAST, AND AS SHE accepted each powdery kiss and squeeze of her poor shoulder, she ran back over the eulogy, searching for her husband. Honest, hard-working, devoted to his family. There was no word of his temper, the dark depths of his mood, or the rhythm of the man who held her in his arms and danced. A good life, the priest called it, industrious, rewarded, and Aoife had kept her eyes fixed on his face, waiting to see how he would evade the subject of their daughter. The sorrows that we all must bear. That was all the mention he gave her, but afterwards she thanked him, as they all did, for a job well done.

  There was a fine turnout for Cashel’s funeral. The sons-in-law helped carry the coffin, with Mavis’s boys at one end, and Patsy, Tim and Eamon in the middle. There were gold handles, and his name, shined, on a plaque. Mavis stood beside Aoife and held her arm, and it was she who pressed a sod of soil into her hand. Aoife stepped forward, sure that she would fall, and as she let the fine earth scatter she wanted to nudge him, share the joke that, even now, Mavis was in charge.

  There were drinks and sandwiches in the back bar of the pub, with the grandchildren out in the car park, sipping lemonade. So many of them, as if that would make up for the one. ‘There’s nothing like a funeral to give people an appetite.’ Mavis had lost Bob the previous year. As always with Mavis, she’d done everything first.

  KITTY AND ANGELA CAME BACK with her to the house. They were to sleep, the pair of them, in the spare room, while the aunties and their families bedded down at theirs. There was cake, left over, and a plate of sandwiches. ‘Shall I make us something fresh?’ Angela’s face was smudged with crying, but Aoife wanted nothing and, when pressed, neither did the girls.

  The three of them sat in silence and looked out at the bay. ‘Do you remember,’ Aoife said, ‘when I used to read to you from Patricia Lynch?’ They didn’t remember. Had she read Brogeen to herself? The homesickness was terrible that year; maybe it was knowing she’d be going back. ‘We’d sit upstairs in the big bed’ – she felt her eyes mist for the heft of their warm bodies, the noise of the customers, a dull murmur below – ‘and I’d read to you about the little dancing leprechaun always in and out of trouble.’

  They remembered the bed. They’d slept in it, all three of them, when they were home from school. It had tall wooden panels at the head and the foot, and a mattress stuffed with feathers. They’d played ships and shipwrecks, jumping and falling as gales rocked the vessel, and when there was a calm, they’d sunk into its lumpen softness and talked themselves to sleep.

  ‘The summer we first came to Ireland,’ Angela ventured, ‘and stayed over at Kilcrea, it was Rosaleen . . .’ She paused to test the air before continuing. ‘. . . It was Rosaleen who was the wonder, tugging out the wild oats, working until the field was clear.’

  Kitty leant forward. ‘The way she’d brave the sea, swim out into the bay at Youghal. I could see her from my window at Loreto, floating on her back.’

  ‘And the dancing,’ Angela broke in. ‘Now isn’t Jackie the spit of her? Not that Rosaleen ever took a lesson. The ankles on her—’ They all looked down at their own perfectly fine ankles. ‘Never saw such lovely legs. There was no one prettier. The looks she got when she arrived in Cork on a Saturday for the dance.’

  ‘How would you know?’ Aoife hoped she hadn’t been there, and Angela blushed and said it was Declan who’d told her. Of course, it was Declan Shaughnessy who’d chosen Rosaleen first.

  On and on they talked: the elegance of her writing, the grades, the best in the county in her matric. There was her hair, thick and black, how smart it looked when it was smoothed, and her cleverness with a story – did she not sail into that job on the Express? Anyone listening would have thought it was Rosaleen that they were mourning, but with Cashel gone and, with him, the ban against her name, they felt themselves, that night at least, to have her back.

  Kate

  IT IS JULY, AND THE MORNING OF THE SHOPPING TRIP, WHEN the box arrives. I carry it through to the kitchen and set it on the table. It is a proper parcel, tied with string, wrapped in brown paper, covered in a multitude of stamps. My name is in large letters, the name of the street smaller, Great Britain huge. Freya drums her hands as I cut through the tape. Inside, there is a shoebox. Plain, the edges dented, and on the side of the box is written Isabelle, 10th April 1961, and in larger letters: Kelly.

  My hands are shaking as I take off the lid. Inside is a typed form, dated the day before my birth, which states that permission has been granted for adoption, that the mother has given up all rights to her child. It is signed, P a t r scratched through, and then again, another, longer signature, scrawled so wildly it’s impossible to decipher. I wither. Had I hoped that I’d been taken forcefully? And I hear it, the roar of the corridor, the rushing of my dreams.

  Freya is waiting. ‘What does it say?’

  There are more papers. My parents’ names. Caroline and Gavin Hayes. Their signatures, legible. A stamp. A seal.

  Below this is a folded sheet of paper. A letter, pale blue, the writing sloped and fluid. The address of the sender is blocked out with black.

  Dear Reverend Mother,

  I’m writing to enquire whether my daughter . . . [here the name is also blacked out] may be residing in your home. I have reason to believe that this may be so, God willing, as I am sure she will be well looked after there. All the same I would be put much at ease to know for certain. Please could you write to me by return?

  Bless you for your good work.

  Yours faithfully,

  Mrs . . . [the signature has been obliterated]

  The letter is dated the week of my birth.

  Below this, as if the box had at some point been turned upside down and its contents re-ordered, is an envelope, November 1975 stamped across the face of the Queen.

  I open it, and read the address, untampered with.

  GAMEKEEPERS COTTAGE, OAKFIELD, SUSSEX

  TEL: OAKFIELD 325

  Reverend Mother,

  I would like it known that if my daughter Isabelle is to contact you enquiring as to my whereabouts, it is my wish that you pass this letter on to her, so that she might know where to find me. Please be mindful that in some parts of the civilised world this is now the law.

  Rosaleen Kelly (Patricia)

  I read the letter twice before I understand it is from my mother, and then I sit with my back against the kitchen cupboard and I read it again.

  ‘Is it news?’ Freya has tucked herself under my arm.

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Good news?’

  At the very bottom of the box is my own letter.

  I was born in your home on 10th April 1961 and adopted by a Mr and Mrs Hayes from East Sussex, England. Could you kindly provide me with the name of my mother, and any other information that may be useful in finding her.

  Yours appreciatively,

  Catherine Hayes (Kate)

  There is a slip of paper. Good luck. A friend. And then, in brackets, as if it is less likely to count: Carmel.

  WE ARRIVE TO MEET my mother as arranged in the café at John Lewis. I kiss her cheek, and I linger, breathing in her floral scent.

  ‘Hello.’ She is flustered by my show of affection, but Freya has her hand and is pulling her towards the counter. ‘Is that all right?’ she mouths, holding u
p Freya’s chosen treat, and I tell her that it is, and that I’ll have a coffee, although even without one I’m hardly able to sit still. Oakfield. I think of the times I’ve driven past the village, up over the hill and down through the Splash. ‘Faster!’ Alice and I would whoop as water cascaded round the car. Rosaleen Kelly. Might she still be living there, less than ten miles from the place where I grew up? And I picture her in 1975, posting her letter in the market square where I’d posted letters of my own.

  Freya’s cake is large and chocolate. ‘Is this a good idea?’ my mother asks, and not sure if she means the cake, which she is eating carefully with a fork, or her inclusion on the shopping trip, I reassure her that it is.

  My mother outlines her plans. She already has her dress; it’s pale blue. What she needs is a hat. I move through the floors in a trance. ‘Maybe,’ I say and nod, distracted, as she stands before a mirror, and I’m grateful to Freya, who beams at each creation until my mother’s so encouraged she buys a hat with grapes and kumquats moulded out of silk. ‘Wear it!’ Freya demands as it is dropped into a box, five times larger than my shoebox, but my mother says she’ll save it for the big day. Now what she needs is shoes.

  ‘Kate . . .’ My mother pauses as she slips her feet into navy low-heeled courts. ‘I know Alice is hoping you’ll be maid of honour, and Freya of course will be a bridesmaid, but is there nothing tempting you today? It’ll be my treat.’

  I shake my head, and she looks at me as if for the first time. ‘Darling.’ She frowns. ‘Are you all right?’

  I swallow, and my ears fill with rushing. ‘Where’s Freya?’ I spin around, but Freya has barrelled her way into a turnstile of dresses, and there is the dark tuft of her head sticking out. ‘Things haven’t been easy.’ She’ll need to know. ‘Matt’s left, I asked him to, and—’