by Liz Nugent
‘Away? Where?’
‘Just … away.’
‘Can I come and see you? I can bring a photo. It’s been in the papers. The guards are looking for her.’ I couldn’t hide the desperation in my voice.
‘We don’t talk to the papers. Nobody who leaves here ever comes back voluntarily.’
This one was a right bitch.
‘Can I find out where her baby is, at least? She could have gone looking for her.’
‘If your sister was here for two years and left without her baby, it means that she took a while to make up her mind, but she must have eventually signed the adoption papers. The whereabouts of the child is privileged information and will not ever be released. The baby will have been placed with a good Catholic family. I can’t help you. Goodbye.’
I reported what I had discovered to my parents. Ma cried. Da broke down too, which wasn’t like him. ‘I should never have sent her there. We could have kept her here. She wouldn’t be the first on the street to have a bastard child.’
Ma reared up on him. ‘Bastard child? That was my grandchild, and yours too. She might have been all right if we’d kept her at home, but you were always too bloody proud for your own good. I let you beat her and I let you send her away and now, I think … I think she’s …’
Ma didn’t finish the sentence, but we all knew what she was thinking. I left the house and went back to my own flat. I couldn’t accept it. Annie, my big sister? Annie was larger than life, people said. She couldn’t be dead.
Ma and Da had always been a team. I hadn’t known till now that Ma had wanted to keep Annie and her baby at home. The cracks in their relationship began to appear then. On a later visit home, I noticed Ma had moved into my old room.
My relationship with Dessie strengthened. He had been really kind and helped me put up posters in shops and bars near where Annie had lived and in buildings she had cleaned. O’Toole fobbed us off with excuses and didn’t return Da’s calls. I tried to believe that no news was good news.
But by Christmas, Annie had been gone for six weeks. I rang O’Toole myself. On Christmas Eve, I met O’Toole – Declan – for a pre-arranged drink in O’Neill’s on Suffolk Street. I had tried to arrange a meeting with him in the station, but he had refused and insisted on a drink instead. ‘Less formal, you know what I mean?’ I knew what he was playing at, but I had no other way of speaking to him. He was already drunk by the time I joined him. I told him the nun in St Joseph’s had no recollection of anyone from the guards ringing there about my sister. He didn’t care enough to deny it. He just shrugged his shoulders and smiled awkwardly.
‘You need to forget about her. All this worry will give you wrinkles and you’re a beautiful girl.’
‘What? I’m not just going to forget about her.’
‘We could go back to my flat and open a bottle of vodka and I could help you forget?’
He put his hand on my thigh. I knew he was sleazy, but I hadn’t thought he would be so obvious.
‘No, thank you,’ I said, removing his hand, unable to keep the disgust out of my voice. ‘You’ve met my boyfriend, Dessie?’
‘Don’t be a fucking ice queen. You’re better-looking than your sister, you know. You could charge more.’
I threw my glass of Guinness in his face. He jumped up, and as I hurried out of the bar, he roared after me, ‘You stupid fucking bitch! She’s dead. Everyone knows it but you.’
7
Lydia
All the pressure got to Andrew in the end, I suppose. My relationship with him was strained, to say the least. I was used to being the one who was looked after, but now I’d find him weeping in the shower and uncommunicative for days at a time. He stopped socializing completely, took sick days from work and stayed in bed. I urged him to see a doctor, but he said he was afraid of what he might say. He didn’t want to be anywhere near me. One evening, I found him in bed in one of the spare rooms.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I don’t want to share a bed with you any more.’
‘But, darling, why? What have I done?’
He looked so exhausted. ‘Nothing. You managed everything really well. I just hate that you were able to.’
I ignored the implication of what he was saying. ‘Come back to our room. Laurence would be so upset if he thought we were fighting. And we’re not fighting, are we, darling?’
He allowed himself to be led back to our bed. I offered him one of my tranquillizers, but he refused. ‘You and your pills,’ he said. I kissed him gently on the mouth, but he turned his head away, unable to respond. I hoped that he would snap out of this humour soon. Apart from anything else, it was tedious.
I should have taken it more seriously. My poor husband had physically aged a decade in a month, his movements had slowed down, and he started shuffling around like an old man. I should have realized that the strain of keeping our secret on top of the financial trouble would be too much for him, but when I look back on it now, I am so sorry that Laurence’s birthdays and Christmases were ruined for ever. The twenty-fifth of December will never be a good day for us.
The day started off relatively well. I made a special appeal to Andrew to get out of bed and be in good spirits for Christmas Day and Laurence’s birthday. We gave him our birthday gifts, and we all exchanged Christmas presents. It was almost how it used to be. Andrew’s mother Eleanor was due to come over after she had dined at Andrew’s brother’s house.
After dinner, Andrew and I were in the kitchen, cleaning up. He was moaning about Laurence’s weight and his uncouth girlfriend. He was being quite cruel about the idea of them being a couple. I did not like her either, but my intuition told me it was a passing fancy. Helen’s mother was Angela d’Arcy, a poet of note, so status-wise she was just about acceptable, but Andrew, so quick to be irritated these days, said, ‘What does she even see in him?’ and then I saw Laurence. He had been standing at the kitchen door and heard Andrew’s whole tirade. We had allowed Laurence to have a little wine with dinner to celebrate the fact that he was eighteen, but I don’t think the drink suited him, because he had this really aggressive, hostile expression on his face when he looked at Andrew, as if he despised him.
‘There are worse things to be than fat,’ Laurence said insolently.
‘Oh dear, please let’s not fight,’ I said, trying to broker a truce, but Andrew ignored me.
‘What are you trying to say?’
‘Nothing,’ said Laurence, sullen.
‘I’m sorry you heard me say those things. I know I haven’t been very … well recently …’
Laurence left the room abruptly, slamming the door behind him, not allowing his father a chance to apologize.
Andrew turned to me. ‘He knows.’
‘Don’t be silly, darling. He doesn’t know anything.’
‘But the way he looks at me … he won’t even be alone in the same room as me any more –’
I cut him off. I was determined the dead girl wasn’t going to ruin Christmas for us. ‘We are not talking about that. You should speak to Laurence. Let him know that you actually care about him.’
‘For God’s sake, Lydia, of course I care about him, but I don’t intend to smother him like you do. He’s eighteen. He’ll have moved out of the house by the end of next summer.’
‘Don’t say that. He can live here as long as he likes.’
‘Well, if I was him, I’d be gone like a shot. You indulge him like he’s a little boy. You need to let go.’
‘I would have been able to let go if you hadn’t destroyed our plan by killing that girl.’ I whispered it.
‘So now it’s OK to talk about it, is it? When it suits you? Her name was Annie.’ Andrew’s temper flared. I knew to stay quiet. He would brook no interruption in this mood. He whispered furiously, ‘You carry on as if nothing has happened, and I’m living a waking nightmare, in dread of every knock on the door. You have it all arranged. If anything happens, I go to prison and you and Laurence go away
and live a very nice life without me. Can you imagine how a judge might be treated in prison?’
I moved the glass and decanter out of his reach because he was very angry, angry enough to smash something, but he barely noticed.
‘Have you ever loved me the way I love you? Really? I actually liked Annie. You chose her, remember? I didn’t mind that she was a plain-looking girl, because it was less of a betrayal of you. She was different of course, but she was sweet and funny …’
I put my hands over my ears, but I could still hear him.
‘… but it was only ever you, and now I have to look at her fucking grave out the kitchen window every day! I did it all for you –’
I wanted to speak up then about the violence of his language, but he put his hand up as a warning to me.
‘And no, of course you didn’t ask me to kill her, but you kept on and on at me – “Don’t let her make fools of us”, “Get the money back from her”, “You should never have trusted her”, “Why did you believe her?” – on and on and on until the pressure was unbearable. And when Annie threatened to blackmail me, I snapped. And she was a living human being. I’m on a knife edge, Lydia, don’t you see?’
He clutched at his chest and I thought he was being overly dramatic but then he gasped for breath. I watched in horror as he tried to steady himself against the table. I reached out to stop him falling and he grabbed my hand.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ I said, like an idiot, because any fool could see he was having an attack of some kind. He slipped downwards, and I tried to hold him up. His eyes were open, pleading and desperate. He could no longer speak, but I could see that he was begging me to help him. I pulled at his shirt collar, but he had taken off his suit after Mass and was wearing a loose open collar and no tie. I tried to hold on to him, but he was too heavy. He fell through my arms and slumped past me, across the table, displacing the turkey carcass from its serving platter, and then he was face down across the table, his hair in the turkey grease.
I looked at the turkey, which had dropped off the end of the table and slid along the slight slope in the kitchen floor to rest at the skirting board beside the door. I had ordered a big turkey, even though there were only three of us. Daddy had always said a small turkey looked mean, and we could make sandwiches and stews from the leftovers, and all these thoughts about the turkey and how many ways I could prepare it went through my head as my husband died, there and then, in front of me. I stood in shock in those ten seconds while he fought to breathe, until he was entirely still. I looked from him back to the turkey on the floor, trying to believe what I was seeing. And then I tried to shake him. I turned him over and blew into his mouth, but nothing I did worked. I screamed for Laurence. He came immediately and took in the scene at once. My poor brave boy.
Without saying anything at all, Laurence picked up the turkey and put it in the swing-top bin, forsaking the sandwiches and stews. He went to the cloakroom to call for an ambulance and returned with a brimming glass of brandy for me. He mopped the floor and then moved Andrew carefully on to it and put one of the kitchen cushions behind his head. He wiped the grease from the side of Andrew’s face and his hair with a tea towel. I wanted to close his eyes, but there was a kind of empty innocence in them and I needed Laurence to see that. He went to ring Andrew’s brother, Finn, who could relay the news to their mother, Eleanor.
Perhaps because it was Christmas Day, the ambulance took an hour to arrive, or maybe it was because Laurence had told them that Andrew was already dead and therefore it was not an emergency. Eleanor, Finn and his wife, Rosie, were there by then. Finn was shocked but stoic about his younger brother’s passing. They were not close.
Rosie swung into action, making phone calls and filling glasses while Eleanor just cried silently in Andrew’s leather armchair. I resented her sitting there. Andrew was her baby. Eleanor and I tolerated each other most of the time, but she never pulled her punches. Her role as the family matriarch entitled her to say whatever she wanted, and it was usually critical. She could never refrain from commenting about Laurence’s weight. Andrew usually visited his mother alone, and when she came to visit us I sat on my hands and bit my tongue. In our grief on this saddest of days, we did not make any attempt to comfort each other.
I think I went into shock after that. Finn and Laurence found my tablets and fed them to me. I was put to bed and woke up hours later, screaming for Andrew. Laurence came and sat with me, rubbing my arm, assuring me that everything was going to be OK and that he would look after me now. It seemed so stupid to me, a little boy saying he was in charge. The pain of this loss was so much worse than all of the miscarriages.
In the few days before the funeral, I stayed in bed, leaving all the arrangements to Finn and Rosie and my son. I lived in a tranquillized haze. There was some fuss over the clothes that Andrew was to be laid out in. Laurence had chosen Andrew’s favourite mustard-coloured corduroy slacks and burgundy cardigan, and Eleanor was horrified that he wasn’t in his best suit. I was beyond caring.
The funeral happened without my input. I felt as if I were underwater in a swimming pool and everything was happening above my head, beyond the surface of the water. I watched, absorbed, but could not engage. I stood in a receiving line, shaking hands with hundreds of people: politicians, broadcasters, coroners and lawyers. Laurence, by my side, kept me upright and supplied me with tissues. My emotions broke through when I watched Laurence carrying the coffin that contained his father’s corpse. I began to scream, and everyone stood away from me in horror until Rosie and one of her sons hustled me out of the church into the waiting black Mercedes. She found some pills in my bag and I was glad to take them. Eleanor got into the car and told me that I must conduct myself with dignity, and I wanted to slap her, but the pills began to work so I looked out of the window on the way to the graveyard, watching people carrying shopping bags, waiting at bus stops, chatting over hedges, as if nothing had happened. When the coffin was later lowered into the ground, Laurence held firmly on to my arm.
Back at Avalon, Rosie and her brood handed out sandwiches to the forty or fifty people who milled around our reception rooms. I recognized two or three of the women from some outings I had endured in the distant past, and I wondered who had invited them all. The wives of Andrew’s former colleagues filled our freezer with stupid, useless casseroles and pies, all labelled neatly. They marvelled at the size of our home. A few boys from Laurence’s old school came, and that girl Helen was there, clinging on to Laurence every chance she got, but Laurence was taking care of me. A wizened priest wanted me to pray with him, but I couldn’t bear to be in the room with him, and Laurence led him away towards Eleanor, who was more accepting of his condolences.
In the wake of Andrew’s death, I found it impossible to climb out of the fog. I spent most of my days in bed, and when I ventured downstairs I stared at the television, trying to ignore the empty armchair beside me. I simply could not stop crying. Laurence would bring food on a tray and feed me like I was a baby, and I would eat mechanically, without tasting.
When my mother-in-law and Finn and Andrew’s friends telephoned to see how I was coping, I did not go to the phone but asked Laurence to take messages. I let the condolence cards pile up without opening them. I swallowed tranquillizers to blot out the pain, but really they just took the edge off it and stopped the rising panic that threatened to overwhelm me. I was forty-eight years old. Laurence was all I had now – my boy who was growing up way too fast. And I was terrified he would not want to be my baby for much longer.
After Laurence was born, I had nine miscarriages. They devastated me, every one of them, the pain and the loss and ultimately the fear. I carried one as far as four months, and we really thought we were safe then. I’d never held on longer than ten weeks before that. It was the glorious summer of 1977. We celebrated by having dinner in our favourite restaurant, Andrew, Laurence and I. And then, right after our dinner plates were removed, I felt that dreadful and familiar te
aring in my womb and I doubled over in agony. Within seconds, pools of blood seeped on to the velvet-upholstered seat beneath me. Andrew realized quickly what was happening and carried me out to the car, leaving a dribbled trail of my insides on their plush carpet as we went. Fourteen-year-old Laurence was white-faced and crying, but even he knew. ‘Is it the baby, Mum? Is it?’
Usually, after the miscarriages, it took me a week or two to return from the dead place I occupied with my lost foetuses, but that time it was much longer.
Doctors could do nothing to help me. Three different adoption agencies turned us down. I assumed it would be a matter of making a generous donation, but there were all sorts of interviews where Andrew and I were grilled separately and then together. The questions were deeply intrusive. I told Andrew to use his status, but it didn’t seem to do any good. He pulled every string available to us, and although the first two agencies were not prepared to give their reasons for denying us a child, the third agency gave us a written report. They said that they thought I had not dealt properly with issues in my childhood, and they regretted that I might not be able to meet the needs of a new baby. They said it was strange that I had no close friendships and that I rarely left my family home. When I got that report in the post, I went straight into the agency and screamed blue murder at the woman on reception until she called security. Andrew came to take me home, and after that he insisted we couldn’t apply to any more agencies.
We had never given up on trying for our own baby, even when we had planned that Andrew would get that girl pregnant and pay her for the child. He had been supposed to find a young healthy girl who was poor enough to go along with it. The plan was that once she was pregnant he would visit the girl once a month and pay £200 per month of pregnancy and £500 on the baby’s arrival. A lot of money for a poor girl. A lot of money for us. Though the idea was straightforward, I had to plead with Andrew to go through with it. I had to beg him.
‘Doesn’t Laurence deserve a sibling? We’ll tell him that we were finally accepted by an adoption agency.’