It was going so fast now, it had persuaded him for a split second to give up the chase and take the easy option. To ask Emmy.
One hand rested on the telephone, his address book open in front of him, the other held the battered snap between thumb and forefinger. He felt perilously close to upturning many lives. The photograph had developed dogears since he’d acquired it—okay, nicked it—from his brother’s wallet, which was hardly surprising given its movements in the last fortnight. Inside jacket pocket, back jeans pocket, briefcase, in tray, out tray, sittingoom table, kitchen table, bedside table. It had been propped against computer screens, alarm clocks, coffee jars. It had been shoved in cutlery drawers, desk drawers and glove compartments.
Sometimes, the need to look at her had been physical and he kept expecting the knot of hope to undo itself, but so far it had tightened and tightened, like wet rope.
Anger, if he could summon it, was productive, at least in the way a cough can be called productive. The more unpleasant phlegm he could spit out in private, the better he might fare in public. If Maya—he could barely think it without scaring himself half to death—if Maya was his child, and that information had been kept from him, then … well, then what?
But he couldn’t maintain the anger, not when he thought about the timing. When he and Emmy had slept together that forgettable, pointless, lazy night, Christine had been at home in Ireland practicing her breathing for the birth of their first child. If he was angry at all, it was with himself for being so lethargic about his marriage. He didn’t realize in those days that being a good husband allowed you to be a good father. He must have thought it was possible to be one without the other. He never used to think about wives and mothers being different halves of the same equation.
All those perfect moments he’d been allowed with Christopher would have been in jeopardy. That feeling that was slipping so fast from his memory, the knowledge that at last he had done something to be proud of, would have been tainted by knowing that he had also done something to be ashamed of.
The acknowledgment made his anger subside into a rather pathetic gratitude. Gratitude to Emmy for not blowing it all up in his face, gratitude to Niall for being some sort of a father, gratitude to Maya for (presumably) being the kind of child who took what she was offered without question. It was still possible, of course, that Niall had helped to deliver and raise the daughter of a complete stranger—but those eyes. They swallowed him whole every time he looked into them. Now the compulsion, the fixation, the need to know—he didn’t know what to call it—had reached danger level. He was at his desk for the purpose of finishing work on an already overdue project but when he looked down at the lackluster plans for another two-story extension over the garage on another semidetached family home, he knew he could do it with his eyes shut, in his sleep, when sleep came maybe.
In the meantime, he thought he would go and see his mother. Fathers are all very well but mothers are something else again, he realized, glimpsing for the first time how his own two boys had made the only decision available to them.
* * *
His mother had no compunction about doing what she was doing with the kitchen scissors. Mary O’Connor tried her best to forgive most things, but when it came to messing up innocent lives for the sake of something as selfish as your own desires, well, that was different. Disappointment was not something she dwelt upon, but the fiasco of her eldest son’s marriage and the version of family life her grandsons were being offered really hurt. She felt Joseph’s hurt, too, even when he’d been the best part of twenty years in his grave.
Trying to eat her lunch while watching a woman apparently enjoy confessing serial infidelity to her reeling husband on live TV had been the last straw. She hadn’t been able to eat her chicken and broccoli pie for the distaste she felt for it all. But then her pies never tasted quite the same now they were a shadow of their former selves.
Before she had succumbed to the scissors, she had cleared out her cupboards, and a pile of family-sized pie dishes now sat on the hostess trolley, ready for the church auction. There was no one she could hand them on to. Her daughters had all they needed and more.
Whatever happened to the sanctity of marriage? she wondered as she cut the same slim figure out of each photograph. Whatever happened to trust?
The wedding ones had gone straight in the outside bin, glossy white album with tissue interleaves and all, but there were others which had to stay. She couldn’t bear to think of Christopher’s or Billy’s face staring up out of the rubbish at her, but nor could she bear to think of Christine’s doing the same from the bookshelf. She didn’t feel bad about her actions. She wasn’t a vindictive or bitter person, she was hurt. When Joseph was alive, they’d shared their uglier emotions, taken them to church together, and silently left them there, but now she had to deal with them on her own. It would be easier to cut Christine out altogether, rather than be reminded every time she opened a book. And who would know? It wasn’t as if anyone would ever ask to see them again.
Cathal arrived almost too soon.
“Oh, it’s not Sunday already, is it?” she teased, bustling gratefully into action with cake tins and loose tea. The photographs were only just back in their places, the snipped remnants in the kitchen bin. She banged the lid shut.
“Sure it is. Have you not been to mass?” he said, bending down to kiss her soft cheek. His face was cold, having frozen half to death standing for the last twenty minutes on the touchline of a football match between two unknown teams of ten-year-olds in the playing field at the back of the house. The field used to be his shortcut home from school, and in those days the back garden gate had always been left unbolted so that his father could come and watch him and Niall play every Saturday afternoon and his mother could come and call them in for their tea. But today, of course, the gate was locked and long overgrown with ivy and he’d had to go the long way round.
“Never mind,” he said. “Senility comes to us all.”
“If we’re lucky,” she replied, touching his paunch and giving him a disapproving nod. She knew that curl of his lips well, from his being sent home from school camp for streaking, getting drunk at a funeral, taking his father’s car without asking.
He was tempted to spill it all out there and then, among the neat Formica worktops and mug trees but her white hair lacked its Sunday grips and she looked tired.
“Are you okay, Mother?” he asked.
“Not so bad for one so old,” she said. “Was that Isabel catching you on your way in?”
“No, why?”
“Oh, just that Theresa has made her decision. She’ll be having the baby after all.”
“She will? You’ll be pleased about that.”
“If pleased is the right word,” she said wearily. “Are you going to tell me something cheerful?”
“Well…” He wished he could. “I’m actually after a photograph.”
“Are you now?” She waited for more, checking the floor for evidence and thinking of the lacerated remains of his marriage sitting damply underneath the teabags.
“Would you help me find one for Billy?”
“A photograph for Billy?”
“One of me. He, er, he needs one for, er, I don’t know.”
If anyone wanted to lay their hands quickly on an image from the O’Connor archives, there was only one place to go. The collection took up a whole shelf in the vast reproduction mahogany-veneered wall display unit, red album after blue, chronologically ordered, every insert dated and captioned. His mother was the undisputed chief librarian, able to put her hands on any event, any year, within a minute of inquiry.
They walked into the sitting room and she watched him run his finger along the spines of her famous albums and pull out a red one. She put the tray down on the coffee table in front of the fire and turned on the shelving lighting. Glass cabinets flashed into life, highlighting junior boxing trophies, graduation portraits, vases so familiar they had lost their ability to sh
ock with their frightfulness.
If it was a wedding photograph he wanted, he’d have to ask Christine now, although Mary doubted she had any left, either. She saw him swallow.
“Er, he needs a picture of me at ten years old for a project. Don’t ask me why. I’m just doing what I’m told.”
“Do you not mean Christopher?”
“No, Billy.”
“It’s Christopher who is ten, Cathal, not Billy.”
“I know that, Mother. Jaysus, I know the ages of my own kids, for God’s sake. I don’t know what he wants it for and I don’t get many opportunities to ask, do I?”
“You apologize now,” Mrs. O’Connor told him quietly, moving back to her teapot.
“Sorry.”
“I should think so, too, but you know, we’ve both made a mistake. Christopher turned eleven last September.”
“So he did.” Cathal felt as if he knew every single detail of that year.
“Ah, it’s lovely that the boy’s in touch, Cathal. Lovely that he asks his daddy to help him. All’s not lost when a boy turns to his father like that.”
Cathal nodded. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to be angry.”
“I know you don’t. Bring a few books over here and let’s see what we can find. You’ll be wanting 1970.”
They sat together on the horsehair sofa that had seen three separate upholsterer shops since 1950, and let their lives wash over them. There was something recuperative for Cathal in seeing his birthday cakes displayed religiously each year, plate gently propped on the very same table that his mother had just put a tin of homemade shortbread on. Five children, a cake a year for eighteen years. That made ninety cakes his mother must have baked and iced, and he’d bet he could find photographs of half of them. Food featured heavily in the O’Connor albums, and with every flick of a page he saw himself take shape. Fat baby, chubby kid, paunchy man.
“You fed me too much,” he said. “No wonder I’ve got this.” He patted his tummy through his blue cotton work shirt.
“Since when did I feed you pints of porter? It’ll be the drink that’s giving you that, not your mother’s baking. But you take after me rather than your father, and there’s nothing wrong with being cuddly.”
“Not that anyone is putting that to the test at the moment.”
“No?”
“No.”
“You miss your boys, don’t you?”
“Don’t worry. We’ll all get together soon, I’m sure.”
“The trouble is,” she said a bit wistfully, “that we all think we have time.”
She patted his leg and he picked up the album he’d taken out first. Then she placed her hand lightly on his cuff.
“Don’t go too fast, Cathal.”
“You turn the pages then.”
“That’s Bessie’s wedding. Would you look at me! What ever made me think I looked all right wearing something so short?”
“That dress was all right. Very soft, as I recall.”
“There’s quite a bit of it in the quilt in Maeve’s room. Billy used to stroke it as a baby, do ye remember?”
Cathal nodded. He wanted, for a split second, to cry.
“That’s our Limerick holiday,” Mary said quickly. “That wee girl wouldn’t leave you alone, said she was going to marry you.”
“Did you keep her address?”
But the joke disappeared into thin air. A loose cardboard frame fell onto his lap, face down. As he turned it over, his stomach went with it.
It was Maya. There she was. Not sitting on the stairs at Bodinnick, but upright on a plain chair with a blue cloth background. In a striped tie. With his own face. Wearing his own school sweater.
“Would you look at you,” his mother said fondly, but Cathal had momentarily lost the power of speech. The snap of Maya in his wallet started to burn a hole through the cotton of his shirt and the wool of his sweater, the mix of his suit.
“… hated them, you did.”
“What? Did I?” He recovered himself.
Mary was smiling.
“Did I really have that many freckles?” he asked.
“No, I drew them on afterward. Of course you had that many freckles, you eejit.”
“Definitely ten?”
“A darn sight more than ten. You were pickled. They were even on your earlobes!”
“No, not ten freckles, you mad old woman. Was I definitely ten years old there?”
“About that.”
“No, not ‘about that.’ I need to be sure.”
“Does it matter so much?”
“Well, it does if I’m to do the right thing by Billy.”
“Let’s see, is there a date?” She turned it over. “Yes, look, you were definitely ten.”
“Sure?” He was studying its every detail. “I’ll take it then.”
“As long as Billy promises to keep it safe. I’ve not got another.”
Cathal shook his head. His mother was barely visible under the pile of albums, but she meant it. It was the only print of that photograph she had. If you didn’t count the four smaller versions.
“You know, Cathal, some children grow up not even knowing their daddy. And there’s Billy, asking you for a photo. All’s not lost, ye know.”
It might not all be found yet, he thought, giving her hand a squeeze. It was hopeless. His visit had made him feel worse. He had allowed his confusion to spill into ordinary life. Actually, it was worse than that. He had experimented with the idea that it was ordinary life. Involving his mother gave the wild chance a legitimacy.
“Will ye stay for a bite to eat?”
“Another bite?”
“A proper bite.”
“Oh, go on, then.”
* * *
The two photographs were hidden under a sheet of paper—the 8" × 5" portrait of him in his school uniform, and the 6" × 4" of Maya in T-shirt and wellies. More than thirty years separated them, but to him they were identical.
The opening sentence of his letter to Emmy was eluding him. Their union had been so brief that he’d all but forgotten it. He was about to attempt an intimate dialogue with a virtual stranger.
Eleven and a half years ago, he had been commuting between London and Dublin, setting up the firm’s Kensington office and reluctantly staying with Niall at his shared house with a bath in the kitchen and an oven in the garden. One day Niall hadn’t bothered to turn up—he’d obviously come across a better bed for the night—so Cathal, locked out and hungry, had phoned the only other person in London he knew.
Emmy had seemed keen enough to see him—even gone out of her way to do so. They’d met at a strange pancake place in Holburn which was vegetarian or Mexican or probably just cheap. It’d had a lot of green paint everywhere. And plants. A straggly little spider thing in particular, yellowing, hanging from a windowsill.
She’d been with a load of mainly female workmates, celebrating someone’s birthday or sending someone off round the world or something. There had been cards and flowers and stupid little presents like chocolate willies, and as a man he had felt surplus to requirements. Eventually, she had tossed him the keys to her flat and said he could go back if he wanted to. And he had wanted to.
Sex had been the last thing on his mind when he heard the front door open and shut two hours later.
“You don’t have to sleep on that thing if you don’t want to,” she’d said, looking at his feet hanging over the arm of the sofa. “My bed is big enough.”
Emmy had worn a cloak of such unhappiness back then that he had hesitated. It had been a struggle to desire her. Not impossible, clearly, but he’d spent most of the night trying to avoid touching the starved hollows between her shoulder and neck and the wafer thinness of the skin round her ribs. He wasn’t sure how much contact she could take without snapping. And even at the time, he’d known she’d slept with him because it was the nearest she could get to Niall.
Her fridge the next morning had been completely empty apart from someone’s cont
act-lens fluid and a bottle of white wine, he could remember that. That and the condom.
Being married, he wasn’t in the custom of carrying them around, and he was sure he could recall her reaching over him in bed and opening a drawer. She’d tossed it on the bed—“You’d better use one of these”—and he’d struggled to hang on to his erection while he put it on, with her lying there motionless next to him. Not watching or touching or helping, but waiting. Resignedly. Like, hurry up, then, let’s get this over with. And what had she been wearing? Some impossible leotard that only she knew the way into and out of.
The condom thing worried him. His sexual promiscuity had been in the days when men supplied, or more usually didn’t supply, the condoms, and he’d been a little shocked, even put off, by her taking control there. As if she did it all the time. His memory wouldn’t play that kind of trick, surely. Then again, they weren’t fail-safe.
Now, though, when that bloody little electronic rabbit shot out of its stall again and ran rings round the dogtrack of his mind, it got him wondering whether the condom girl had in fact been Emmy, or perhaps one of his other indiscretions that year. God knows, there had been a few. And he didn’t know whether or not he wanted to be right about being wrong.
The table was covered with discarded scribbling. Searching through his old work diaries, he had already identified his trips between Dublin and London but he had always remembered the Emmy thing as happening on his first trip back, which was why, when Niall had told him about Maya’s birth, he had secretly thought, Bloody hell, she doesn’t hang around, does she? But it had never occurred to him that it might have happened on the second. Or even the third. Both dates fitted his research.
A heap of crumpled rejects buried the newspaper. Maybe a phone call, then, to Niall, to find out Maya’s birthday. Cathal picked up his mobile. If he rang while his mother was here, he could use her as a smokescreen. He stared at the numbers for a moment, urging himself to press one.
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