“‘You remember him?’ he asked. ‘He used to be a good lad but he chose the wrong side when the fighting broke out.’
“Remember him? Of course I remembered him. But I kept Brenda’s secret and hid my concern.
“‘What about him?’ I asked.
“‘Bad news, I'm afraid,’ my friend told me. ‘He was shot a few weeks ago. He was hiding out in the back of beyond, but you know how it is. They tracked him down, and shot him dead.’
“My heart ached for poor Brenda.
“I had no means of finding her, but I hoped and hoped that she would come to me. She never did, though.
“Then, when I had almost given up hope, I got another letter.
“She gave no address this time either, and said only that her baby was well and growing, and that she was about to leave the country and put it all behind her.
“About two years later, I got a letter saying that she was going to marry a good man who loved her.
“So I lost my dearest friend and, until this day, I never knew what had become of her.”
“It sounds as if she went to America – or somewhere like that,” Sheila ventured.
In spite of herself she was moved by the old woman’s story, although she felt that the advice Roisin had given the young Brenda had been the worst possible.
But then she had been young and romantic herself at the time, not much more than a child. Who could blame her?
“I thought as much myself,” Roisin admitted. “But I know better, now. She went to the North. The man she married must have been called Doherty, and your father, or I suppose it would have been your grandfather, would have been the son she bore to Patrick Stevens – brought up with her husband’s name.”
Sheila smiled kindly at the old lady. Such a sad story, and so many years ago. If it pleased her to believe that she had reached some sort of happy ending, it would be cruel to cast too much doubt on it.
Sheila, however, was clear in her own mind, that her grandfather was not the offspring of Patrick Stevens and Brenda O’Hara.
For one thing, she thought she remembered Frank saying that his grandmother’s name was Sheila. That was why Sheila had been given that name.
And Frank Doherty was a very ordinary man. There was no aristocratic streak in his parentage, she felt clear. He was the source of her colouring certainly.
But Sheila was well aware that her fine bone structure came from her mother. Kathy had often remarked on it, complacently, in the more recent past.
Sheila was not really so like her father. She was the product of the mixture of both parents.
So her likeness to Brenda O’Hara was just one of those things.
Sheila smiled kindly at Mrs Boyd Cassidy and thought how awkward it all was.
It was hard to know what to say.
Francis Delmara pushed open the door and came into the room.
Sheila felt a surge of relief.
She could escape now and would not need to invent comments on a bygone tragedy which was nothing to do with her.
“Roisin, darling, your albums are truly wonderful, but I must tear myself away. This lovely girl needs her beauty sleep. Sheila, beautiful, time to go.”
“Tomorrow I’m having a small party,” Mrs Boyd Cassidy said graciously. “You must both come. There are some people I want to introduce to Miss Doherty.”
Sheila would have liked to refuse, but Francis was already accepting. Afterwards he told her, “Roisin Boyd Cassidy can be very useful to us, Sheila. She’s taken a real liking to you, so let’s make the most of it.”
Sheila would not have minded if she had not had a very definite worry at the back of her mind about the people Roisin Boyd Cassidy wanted her to meet.
She felt almost frightened.
Was something about to happen which would not be at all what she wanted?
But there seemed to be no way of avoiding it now.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Mary had gone with Orla several times to the meeting in the Church of Ireland centre at Queen’s.
Something about the atmosphere of the place gave her a feeling of peace and release.
Over the last few months there had been some excitement. Mary, on the fringe of things, gathered that there had been some visitors over from America who were concerned about the situation in Belfast.
It seemed strange, Orla said, that other countries had begun to send missionaries to Ireland – for centuries it had been the other way round.
The leaders of the meeting were full of fresh enthusiasm now.
“The rest of the world looks at us,” one of them said, when he and Orla and Mary were sitting chatting over a cup of coffee one evening in late January. “They’ve seen Christians fighting each other for years in the name of God. What do you think He feels about that? Now they see us unable to make terms for peace and let go of the past. We need to show the world that some Christians at least can love each other, whatever label they grew up with.”
His eyes were bright with enthusiasm.
“What about your own plans, girls? You’ll be graduating at the end of this year.”
Orla flashed a look at Mary, her fierce grey eyes bright under their thick brows. “I’ll be all ready for Africa when I get through finals.”
Orla still meant to go to Africa to teach.
It was what she had meant to do for so long.
Mary, who was not looking forward to seeing Orla disappearing from her life, said nothing.
“So it’s still going to be Africa, Orla?” asked Tony. “Don’t you feel that you might have a calling to stay here? Surely the need at the moment is just as great?”
Orla smiled one of her rare smiles.
“I can’t argue with that, Tony. All I know is Africa is where I’ve been told to go. There’s no change there.”
How can she be so sure? wondered Mary. It’s all very well to say she knows she’s been called. What does that mean? Has she heard a literal voice?
No, not from anything she's ever said.
It was hard to believe that Orla was talking about something real.
Yet Orla herself had impressed Mary, right from their first meeting, as someone who knew where she was going and what the reasons were.
On the following Monday, Orla and Mary went to the meeting together.
As always, they sat round in a circle and sang, quietly at first, and then more powerfully.
Mary felt again the strange peace which she always experienced at these meetings. She had sometimes asked herself why she continued to come. It was not in order to keep Orla’s friendship. She knew that was something she would always have, no matter what the future held.
These people mostly believed things which Mary, in spite of the teaching of church and school, was not sure she herself could truthfully say she believed. They were good people. She liked nearly all of them. But she felt a wide gulf between herself and them.
God, now. Did she really believe in God? She hadn’t thought about that for years, not until recently. She could remember when she was about six saying prayers at night and expecting God to answer. When had the last time been? Was it when she had confidently asked for a new tricycle for her seventh birthday and been given a doll instead?
Perhaps she had prayed while she waited at the hospital to hear that she was well enough to go home?
No, she thought on the whole that she had not. Her mind had been too numb.
The strange peace lapped over her again. Eyes closed, she allowed herself to sink into whatever it was.
There was a pause in the singing, and a girl’s voice read from the first chapter of Genesis:
“And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters …
… and God said ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”
Mary became aware of a great brightness shining all around her, and through her closed eyelids. She lifted her face and felt the light bathe her.
Inside her head, she heard someone speaking
.
“Mary.”
Mary sat quietly, her whole being flooded with peace and light.
“Mary,” said the interior voice again. “What is it you want?”
Mary said nothing aloud, but inside her head her response was a great cry. “This is it! This peace, this feeling. This is what I want.”
She gave the voice no name as yet.
“Mary,” the voice spoke again. “I can and will give you these and other gifts. But do you want only my gifts or do you want the giver of the gifts as well?”
Mary’s heart was bursting.
“Do you want me, Mary? I can only come to you as Lord.”
Mary bowed her head into her arms. No-one else was aware of it, even Orla on her right hand, as they sang on with closed eyes.
“Yes, Lord,” she said, in the quiet of her own heart. “You are what I want.”
A sense of release flooded through her as she spoke.
Suddenly she realised that she wanted to jump up and dance as she had done when she and Sheila and the others had gone to the Magic Forest.
But there was no hidden fear mixed in with this present delight.
She found that she was singing loudly, along with the other people in the room, a song which had become familiar to her over the past months. Suddenly it was filled with new meaning.
“He’s my Lord
He’s my Lord
He is risen from the dead,
And He’s my Lord …”
Mary sang as if her heart would burst. She opened her eyes and looked round at the familiar faces.
She felt a swelling of love for them all, and especially for Orla.
“Let’s all hold hands and sing that last song again,” said Tony suddenly.
They held hands and sang.
Mary took Orla’s hand in hers and looked round to smile at her.
“What is it, Mary?” whispered Orla, immediately aware that something had happened.
“I’ll tell you afterwards,” Mary whispered back. “But it’s something good – something very good.”
Did everyone here feel what she had just experienced? No wonder they were so sure of what they believed.
Mary felt as if she had come home after long wandering.
At the same time, she felt eager and ready to begin on an unknown journey which would take her to undreamt of places, on a road which ran clear before her feet from that very moment.
She felt that she had wasted her life until then, looking for things in the wrong places and finding nothing. She felt a wild regret for the way she had lived, together with an assurance that it was past history – forgotten.
She could be at peace, and cease to regret, and go forward confidently.
Where she was to go, she had as yet no idea.
But presumably that was Someone Else’s business, and no doubt He would tell her everything necessary in His own good time.
She was ravenously hungry and, when coffee and sandwiches came round presently, she found herself wolfing the food down.
When she went home, she went straight to bed and, for the first time for many months, she slept deeply for nearly ten hours.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Sheila found that being a celebrity was fun.
During the first weeks after her introduction to fashionable Dublin, she found herself showered with invitations. She was interviewed by the Irish Times and found her photograph staring at her when she opened the paper.
Pat Fitzwilliam was particularly pressing with his invitations.
Delmara, who had taken it upon himself to censor Sheila’s social life, and who had weeded out and rejected many of the requests for her company, was happy to encourage her to be seen with Pat.
“It will all help to build up your public image, beautiful,” he told Sheila. “Image is everything. Fitzwilliam is popular and well-known himself – the papers will be all the more eager to mention you if you are with him. It gives them double value.”
So Sheila lunched with Pat Fitzwilliam, danced with him, and was taken driving by him whenever she had a spare moment.
Spare moments were scarce, however. Sebastian O’Rourke was also a contender for Sheila’s company. He had decided to paint her and wanted to begin straight away with rough sketch work.
Here again, Delmara was encouraging.
“To be painted by Sebastian O’Rourke is the acme, darling," he told Sheila. “But don’t agree to it unless he wants you to wear Delmara clothes.”
Sheila was happy to comply. She gave O’Rourke to understand that he could paint her under Delmara’s condition, and he groaned.
“Gowns! Dresses! I’m not interested in what you wear, girl, I want to paint your face, your body!”
Sheila managed not to giggle, and regarded him gravely and inquiringly.
“The clothes don’t matter, as long as they don’t conceal your shape,” O’Rourke said. “But I warn you, Sheila Doherty, if I paint you, I’ll make love to you.”
“Oh, yeah?” was Sheila’s inward response. “That’s what you think!”
But she did not say it aloud, and contented herself with raising one sardonic eyebrow.
O’Rourke was exciting and Pat Fitzwilliam was sweet, but Sheila felt no inclination to let either of them make love to her.
She was, she believed, through with all that sort of thing, since John Branagh had dropped out of her life.
She was a career woman and had no further interest in love. So she thought.
One bright spring day, she drove out with Pat in the early afternoon in his private sports car, a Lamborghini.
They headed south, as far as the Wicklow hills.
Bare spaces, empty of people for miles around, stretched out on every side. The sun picked out the purple of heather and the green of the fresh new leaves beginning to appear on the hedges that lined the narrow roads where they drove at a leisurely pace. Sheila delighted in the scattered primroses and violets along the nearby banks.
Presently they parked the car in a high grassy area and strolled peacefully about, enjoying the clear air and the spreading views of green fields and misty mountains.
Pat raised the subject again of Sheila’s resemblance to the famous Lady O’Hara.
“I don’t know who first noticed it, Sheila,” he began, “but I’ve lost count of the number of people who’ve mentioned to me that you’re the spitting image of that portrait in Loughry House.”
“The one you offered to take me to see, Pat?” asked Sheila sweetly.
Pat blushed. “Yes, that’s right. You never did get to see it, did you?”
“Tell you what,” Sheila said thoughtfully. “I’m quite anxious to see it by now. Suppose you point it out to me next Tuesday. That is, if you’re going to this lunch party of Sally’s?”
“That’s a date," agreed Pat happily. “Mind you, she’s not as good- looking as you by a mile, Sheila. Her nose is too short to my way of thinking. But there’s definitely a look of you about her.”
Sheila grinned. It was nice to be told that you were better looking than a famous beauty. She still hadn’t quite got used to the idea.
Sally Kilpatrick’s lunch party was held in due course in the town house which had previously belonged to the O’Hara family and which had been bought for Sally and her husband Tod as a wedding present by her wealthy parents, Hugh and Rosemary Frazer Knight.
Sheila was seated part way down one side of the long table with its shining white linen damask cloth and gleaming silver cutlery.
Lifting her sparkling glass of Waterford crystal in one hand, she gazed at its gleaming rim and sighed with pleasure as a delicate china plate of melon and strawberries in a red wine coulis was placed before her.
Her neighbour, a stout red-faced man whom she had met several times before, but whose name she had so far failed to remember, misinterpreted the sound.
“Bored?” he asked in a low voice. “These large affairs are all like that. Why don’t you and I slip away as soo
n as possible afterwards and go somewhere more interesting?”
Sheila shook her head at him with a gently mocking smile. “At three o’clock I’m due at the Burton studios for a photographic session for Now magazine, no excuses accepted. I’m a working woman. My life runs to a strict time-table.”
“Some other time, then.” The words were spoken with obvious regret. “I’d like to show you my yacht. It’s moored down at Dun Laoghaire – a short run in the car. Any time that suits you, suits me too.”
“I’ll have to check. Delmara sets up assignments without letting me know half the time.” Sheila smiled vaguely and turned to her other neighbour. A yacht sounded good, but not if it meant fending off her red-faced acquaintance for several hours.
Pat, sitting on her other side, was only too glad to seize her attention, given the chance.
“I made Sally put me beside you,” he told Sheila as soon as she had turned her face to him. “I had to use all sorts of threats and bribes, but it was worth it. But you must talk to me, when I’ve gone to so much trouble, instead of turning your back and wasting time on Jack Kavanagh there."
“Fine by me,” Sheila said, smiling at him.
She had become quite fond of Pat by now, and was happy to fall in with Delmara’s plans and spend time with him. Occasionally she hoped, vaguely, that he wouldn’t think she was encouraging him seriously. She didn’t want him to end up hurt.
“Remember to show me this portrait when the meal’s over,” she said, and concentrated for a few minutes on the exotic chicken dish which had replaced the melon.
Further down the table, Sally Kilpatrick was conducting a two- handed conversation. On one side of her was Finley Boyle, a Member of the Irish Parliament, a TD, to whom she was talking seriously about the current political situation. On her other side was Tricia Scanlon, the only daughter of a shipping millionaire and a member of the international jet set to which most of the guests belonged. With her, Sally was chatting frivolously about a recent scandal among their acquaintances, dextrously conjuring with both conversational balls at the same time.
Sheila, half listening to Pat Fitzwilliam, could hear snatches of this conversation at the same time.
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