by Maeve Binchy
“Why do you ask this now?”
“I want to know. Are you or aren’t you?”
“You know I am, Kathy.” A long silence.
“No I didn’t know. Not until now.” Fran came toward her, reaching out. “No, go away from me. I don’t want you to touch me.”
“Kathy, you knew, you felt it, it didn’t need to be said, I thought you knew.”
“Does everyone else know?”
“What do you mean everyone else? The people who need to, know. You know how much I love you, how I’d do everything on earth for you and get you the best that I could get.”
“Except a father and a home and a name.”
“You have a name, you have a home, you have another father and mother in Mam and Dad.”
“No I haven’t. I’m a bastard that you had and never told me about.”
“There’s no such word as ‘bastard,’ as you well know. There’s no such thing anymore as an illegitimate child. And you were legally part of this household since the day you were born. This is your home.”
“How could you…” Kathy began.
“Kathy, what are you saying…that I should have given you away to strangers for adoption, that I should have waited until you were eighteen before I got to know you and only then if you sought me out?”
“And all of these years letting me think that Mam was my mother. I can’t believe it.” Kathy shook her head as if to clear it, to take this new and frightening idea out of her mind.
“Mam was a mother to you and to me. She welcomed you from the day she knew about you. She said won’t it be grand to have another baby round here. That’s what she said and it was. And, Kathy, I thought you knew.”
“How would I have known? We both called Mam and Dad Mam and Dad. People said you were my sister and that Matt and Joe and Sean were my brothers. How was I to know?”
“Well, it wasn’t a big thing. We were all together in the house, you were only seven years younger than Joe, it was the natural way to do things.”
“Do all the neighbors know?”
“Some of them maybe, they’ve forgotten I imagine.”
“And who was my father? Who was my real father?”
“Dad is your real father in that he brought you up and looked after both of us.”
“You know what I mean.”
“He was a boy who was at a posh school and his parents didn’t want him to marry me.”
“Why do you say ‘was’? Is he dead?”
“No, he’s not dead, but he’s not part of our lives.”
“He’s not part of your life, he might be part of mine.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“It doesn’t matter what you think. Wherever he is, he’s still my father. I have a right to know him, to meet him, to tell him I’m Kathy and that I exist because of him.”
“Please have some tea. Or let me have some anyway.”
“I’m not stopping you.” Her eyes were cold.
Fran knew she needed more tact and diplomacy than had ever been called on in work. Even the time when one of the director’s children, there on a holiday job, was found pilfering. This was vastly more important.
“I’ll tell you every single thing you want to know. Everything,” she said, in as calm a voice as she could manage. “And if Dad comes in in the middle of it I suggest we move up to your room.”
Kathy’s room was much bigger than Fran’s. It had the desk, the bookshelf, the handbasin that had been put in lovingly by the plumber in the house years ago.
“You did it all from guilt, didn’t you, the nice room, the buying my uniform, and the extra pocket money and even the Italian classes. You paid for it all because you were so guilty about me.”
“I have never had a day’s guilt about you in my life,” Fran said calmly. She sounded so sure that she stopped Kathy in the slightly hysterical tone she was taking. “No, I have felt sad for you sometimes, because you work so hard and I hoped I would be able to give you everything to start you off well. I worked hard so that I could always provide a good living for you. I’ve saved a little every single week in a building society, not much but enough to give you independence. I have loved you every day of my life, and honestly it got kind of blurred whether you were my sister or my daughter. You’re just Kathy to me and I want the very, very best for you. I work long and hard to get it and I think about it all the time. So I assure you whatever I feel I don’t feel guilty.”
Tears came into Kathy’s eyes. Fran reached her hand over tentatively and patted the hand that clutched the mug of tea.
Kathy said: “I know, I shouldn’t have said that. I got a shock, you see.”
“No, no it’s all right. Ask me anything.”
“What’s his name?”
“Paul. Paul Malone.”
“Kathy Malone?” she said wonderingly.
“No, Kathy Clarke.”
“And how old was he then?”
“Sixteen. I was fifteen and a half.”
“When I think of all the bossy advice you gave me about sex and how I listened.”
“Look back on what I said you’ll find that I didn’t preach what I didn’t practice.”
“So you loved him, this Paul Malone?” Kathy’s voice was very scornful.
“Yes, very much. Very much indeed. I was young but I thought I knew what love was and so did he, so I won’t dismiss it and say it was nonsense. It wasn’t.”
“And where did you meet him?”
“At a pop concert. We got on so well then I used to sneak out to meet him from school sometimes and we’d go to the pictures, and he was meant to be having extra lessons so he could skip that. And it was a wonderful happy time.”
“And then?”
“And then I realized I was pregnant, and Paul told his mother and father and I told Mam and Dad and all hell broke out everywhere.”
“Did anyone talk about getting married?”
“No, nobody talked about it. I thought about it a lot up in the room that’s your room now. I used to dream that one day Paul would come to the door with a bunch of flowers and say that as soon as I was sixteen we would marry.”
“But it didn’t happen obviously?”
“No, it didn’t.”
“And why did he not want to stay around and support you even if you didn’t marry?”
“That was part of the deal.”
“Deal?”
“Yes. His parents said that since this was an unlikely partnership and that there was no future in it, it might be kindest for everyone to cut all ties. That’s what they said. Cut all ties, or maybe sever all ties.”
“Were they awful?”
“I don’t know, I’d never met them until then, any more than Paul had met Mam and Dad.”
“So the deal was that he was to get away with it, father a child and never see her again.”
“They gave four thousand pounds, Kathy, it was a lot of money then.”
“They bought you off!”
“No, we didn’t think it was like that. I put two thousand in a building society for you. It’s grown a lot as well as what I added myself, and we gave the other two thousand pounds to Mam and Dad because they would be bringing you up.”
“And did Paul Malone think that was fair? To give four thousand pounds to get rid of me?”
“He didn’t know you. He listened to his parents, they told him sixteen was too young to be a father, he had a career ahead of him, it was a mistake, he must honor his commitment to me. That’s the way they saw it.”
“And did he have a career?”
“Yes, he’s an accountant.”
“My father the accountant,” Kathy said.
“He married and he has children now, his own family.”
“You mean he has other children?” Kathy’s chin was in the air.
“Yes, that’s right. Two, I believe.”
“How do you know?”
“There was an article about him in a ma
gazine not long ago, you know, lifestyles of the rich and famous, that is.”
“But he’s not famous.”
“His wife is, he married Marianne Hayes.” Fran waited to see the effect this would have.
“My father is married to one of the richest women in Ireland.”
“Yes.”
“And he gave a measly four thousand pounds to get rid of me.”
“That’s not the point. He wasn’t married to her then.”
“It is the point. He’s rich now, he should give something.”
“You have enough, Kathy, we have everything we want.”
“No of course I haven’t everything I want, and neither do you,” Kathy said, and suddenly the tears that were waiting came and she cried and cried, while Fran, who she had thought for sixteen years was her sister, stroked her head and her wet cheeks and her neck with all the love a mother could give.
The next morning at breakfast Joe Clarke had a hangover.
“Will you give me a can of cold Coca-Cola from the fridge, Kathy, like a good girl? I’ve a bugger of a job to do today out in Killiney and the van will be here for me any minute.”
“You’re nearer to the fridge than I am,” Kathy said.
“Are you giving me cheek?” he asked.
“No, I’m just stating a fact.”
“Well, no child of mine is going to be stating facts in that tone of voice, let me tell you,” he said, face flushed with anger.
“I’m not a child of yours,” Kathy said coldly.
They didn’t even look up startled, her grandparents. These old people she had thought of as her mother and father. The woman went on reading the magazine and smoking, the man grumbled. “I’m as good as any other goddamn father you ever had or will have, go on, child, give me the Coke now to save me getting up, will you.”
And Kathy realized that they weren’t in the business of secrecy or pretending. Like Fran, they had assumed she knew the state of affairs. She looked across at Fran standing with a rigid back looking out the window.
“All right, Dad,” she said, and got him the can and a glass to pour it into.
“There’s a good girl,” he said, smiling at her as he always did. For him nothing had changed.
“WHAT WOULD YOU do if you discovered you weren’t your parents’ child?” Kathy asked Harriet at school.
“I’d be delighted, I tell you that.”
“Why?”
“Because then I won’t grow up to have an awful chin like my mother and my grandmother, and I wouldn’t have to listen to Daddy droning on and on about getting enough points in the Leaving.” Harriet’s father, a teacher, had great hopes that she would be a doctor. Harriet wanted to own a nightclub.
They let the matter drop.
“What do you know about Marianne Hayes?” Kathy asked later.
“She’s like the richest woman in Europe or is it only Dublin? And she’s good-looking too. I suppose she bought all those things like good teeth and a suntan and all that shiny hair.”
“Yeah, I’m sure she did.”
“Why are you interested in her?”
“I dreamed about her last night,” Kathy said truthfully.
“I dreamed that I had sex with a gorgeous fellow. I think we should get started on it, you know we are sixteen.”
“You’re the one who said we should concentrate on our studies,” Kathy complained.
“Yeah, that was before this dream. You look awful pale and tired and old, don’t dream about Marianne Hayes again, it’s not doing you any good.”
“No, it’s not,” Kathy agreed, thinking suddenly of Fran with her white face and the lines under her eyes, and no suntan and no holidays abroad. She thought of Fran saving money every week for her for sixteen years. She remembered Fran’s boyfriend Ken going off to America, had he, too, found some rich woman? Someone who wasn’t a plumber’s daughter who had dragged herself up to the top in a supermarket, someone who wasn’t struggling to support an illegitimate child. Ken had known about her. It didn’t appear that Fran had gone to any trouble to keep it all a secret.
As she had said last night, there were many, many households all over Dublin where the youngest child was really a grandchild. And Fran had said that in many cases the mother had not stayed at home, the eldest sister had left to start a new life. It wasn’t fair.
It just wasn’t fair that Paul Malone should have his pleasure and no responsibility. Three times that day in class she was reprimanded for not paying attention. But Kathy Clarke had no interest in her studies. She was planning how she should best visit Paul Malone.
“TALK TO ME,” Fran said that evening.
“What about? You said there was nothing more to say.”
“So nothing’s changed?” Fran asked. Her eyes were anxious. She didn’t have expensive creams to take away the lines on her face. She never had anyone to help her bring up a child. Marianne Hayes, now Marianne Malone, must have had help everywhere. Nurses, nannies, au pairs, chauffeurs, tennis coaches. Kathy looked at her mother with a level glance. Even though her world had turned upside down, she wouldn’t add this to Fran’s trouble.
“No, Fran,” she lied. “Nothing’s changed.”
IT WASN’T HARD to find out where Paul and Marianne lived.
There was something about them in a paper almost every week. Everyone knew of their house. But she didn’t want to go and see him at home. She must go to his office. Talk to him in a businesslike way. There was no need to involve his wife in what she wanted to say.
Armed with a phone card, she began to telephone large accountancy firms. On the second call she got the name of where he worked. She had heard of the company, they were accountants to all the film stars and theater people. This was a show business kind of place. Not only did he have all the money, he had all the fun too.
Twice she went to the offices and twice her courage failed. The building was so enormous. She knew they only occupied floors five and six, but somehow she didn’t have the confidence. Once in she could talk to him, tell him who she was, how her mother had worked and saved. She would beg for nothing. She would point out the injustice, that was all. But the place was too impressive. It overawed her. The commissionaire in the foyer, the girls at the information desk downstairs who called up to see if you were allowed access to the prestigious offices above.
She would need to look different to get past these groomed dragons at the desk if she was to meet Paul Malone. They wouldn’t let a schoolgirl in a navy skirt up to see a senior accountant, particularly one married to a millionaire.
She telephoned Harriet.
“Can you bring in some posh clothes of your mother’s tomorrow to school?”
“Only if you tell me why.”
“I’m going to have an adventure.”
“A sexual adventure?”
“Possibly.”
“Do you want nighties and knickers then?” Harriet was very practical.
“No, a jacket. And gloves even.”
“God Almighty,” said Harriet. “This must be something very kinky altogether.”
Next day the clothes arrived slightly crushed in a games bag. Kathy tried them on in the girls’ cloakroom. The jacket was fine, but the skirt seemed wrong.
“Where’s the adventure?” Harriet was breathless with excitement.
“In an office, a smart office.”
“You could sort of hitch your skirt up, you know the school one. It would look okay if it was meant to be short. Will he be undressing you or will you be doing it yourself?”
“What? Oh, yes I’ll be doing it myself.”
“That’s all right then.” Together they made Kathy look like someone who might gain access anywhere. She had already taken Fran’s lipstick and eyeshadow.
“Don’t put it all on now,” Harriet warned.
“Why not?”
“I mean you’ve got to go to class, they’ll know something’s up if you go in like that.”
“I’m not going t
o class. You’re to say you got a message that I had the flu.”
“No, I don’t believe it.”
“Go on, Harriet. I did it for you when you wanted to go down and see the pop stars.”
“But where are you going at nine o’clock in the morning?”
“To the office to have the adventure,” Kathy said.
“You are something else,” said Harriet, whose mouth was round in admiration.
This time she didn’t falter.
“Good morning. Mr. Paul Malone, please.”
“And the name?”
“The name will mean nothing to him, but if you could say it is Katherine Clarke, come here about the matter of Frances Clarke, a client from a long time ago.” Kathy felt that this was an office where people had full names, not Kathys and Frans.
“I’ll speak to his secretary. Mr. Malone doesn’t see anyone without an appointment.”
“You may tell her that I will wait until he’s free.” Kathy spoke with a quiet intensity that was far more effective than her attempts to dress for the part.
One of the gorgeous receptionists seemed to shrug slightly at the other and make the call in a low voice.
“Miss Clarke, would you care to speak to Mr. Malone’s secretary?” she said eventually.
“Certainly.”
Kathy walked forward, hoping that her school skirt would not fall suddenly below Harriet’s mother’s jacket.
“It’s Penny here. Can I help you?”
“Have you been given the relevant names?” Kathy said. How wonderful that she remembered that word “relevant.” It was a great word, it covered everything.
“Well yes…but this is not actually the point.”
“Ah, but I think it is. Please mention these names to Mr. Malone and please tell him that it will not take very long. Only ten minutes at the very most of his time, but I will wait here until he can see me.”
“We don’t make appointments like this.”
“Please give him the names.” Kathy felt almost dizzy with excitement.
She waited politely for three more minutes, then there was a buzz.
“Mr. Malone’s secretary will meet you on the sixth floor,” said one of the goddesses at the desk.