‘I’m Henry’s mother,’ said Isabel sharply.
‘I know. Sorry. But this girl, Frances? Why was she giving you postcards?’
Isabel relented. ‘She only had two requests and that was one. It was very clever. I remember being impressed. She had two postcards and she wanted us to post them for her from abroad, from France. One was to the crowd in work and the other was to her parents in Sligo. We’d been talking about taking a final holiday as a childless couple anyway so it worked out well. I’ve always loved Paris.’
‘And?’ I was growing impatient, worried Isabel’s tranquil lucidity would start to crack. ‘Why did she want you to send the cards from abroad?’
‘For the postmark,’ said Isabel. ‘So they’d think she was in France. She said the postmistress where she was from would have the thing read and the contents told to half the village before her parents ever received it. Everyone in work would think she was off on a glamorous sabbatical and everyone at home would think she was having a wonderful time in France. Very clever. Wasn’t it very clever, Conor? Do you remember I said that at the time?’
I didn’t know what Isabel had taken, Valium maybe, or perhaps it was just the shock of the situation, but it was like she was under a spell. She was so pliable I could have folded her up and stored her under the couch.
‘What was the other requirement?’ I asked. ‘What was the second thing she asked you to do?’
Isabel looked at Andy and her smile wavered. ‘She didn’t want Henry to know. Ever.’
‘That he was adopted?’
‘She didn’t want him ever coming looking for her. He was ours.’
Isabel looked at her husband as he continued to stare out the window. I tried to catch Andy’s eye but though he was watching the action he wouldn’t engage. I had no idea what he was thinking.
‘But isn’t there an adoption cert?’ I asked. Andy would know more about this stuff than me, if he’d just open his mouth.
Isabel went to say something but stopped herself. She shook her head.
‘Or a birth cert?’
Finally Conor turned. He shot his wife a warning look. She shook her head again. ‘He’s ours,’ she said simply. ‘We have the birth cert to prove it.’ Then Isabel smiled, staring just beyond Andy. ‘Father Clogher signed it as our witness. A home birth at our house in Clontarf. That’s where I gave birth to Henry, and then we moved.’
I was losing her. ‘And you never told Henry?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said Conor, calm and unapologetic and final. His single-word offering to the conversation.
‘A cul-de-sac is a great place to raise a child,’ said Isabel. ‘No traffic, lots of other children.’
The four of us sat there as this meaningless statement fluttered around the room. I was out of questions. Then Andy finally spoke.
‘And what about me?’
Isabel studied the source of the question. I put myself in her head and felt the marvel at the foreign accent on familiar lips.
‘What did you know about me?’ Andy pressed, his focus firmly on Isabel.
‘Nothing,’ she said finally, her voice barely a whisper. ‘We were abroad, in Paris, when she went into labour.’
Then Conor delivered his first full sentence since we’d sat down: ‘We didn’t know there were twins.’
Tears started to form in Isabel’s eyes.
‘She gave me to a religious order, St Patrick’s Guild.’
‘She should have given you to us.’
Andy too was blinking hard. Isabel met his gaze and held it. Conor and I barely existed.
‘Maybe she thought you only wanted one.’
Isabel’s eyes shut in pain. ‘Why would she think that? Why wouldn’t she have given us both? Conor? Say something, for God’s sake!’
‘What do you want me to say, Isabel? How should I know? This isn’t any less of a shock to me.’
Scooter’s barking had turned to a whine. He was scratching faintly at the back door.
‘Were you . . .? Was your life good?’ asked Isabel, guilt splashed across her face.
‘Can’t complain.’
She nodded as if his answer was more satisfactory than it was. ‘And you grew up in Australia?’
‘I did.’
‘I’d say that was nice,’ she said. ‘Don’t they have Christmas Day on the beach there?’ She was like a taxi driver or someone making idle chit-chat in the supermarket queue. ‘Sounds idyllic,’ she agreed, though Andy had said nothing. ‘You’re so like him.’
She stood from her seat, approaching him slowly, her hand outstretched. ‘Can I?’
Andy nodded and gently she touched the features of his face. I turned away in embarrassment. Scooter’s scratching got louder. I heard Isabel’s gentle sobs.
‘I broke it playing rugby,’ he said. I kept my eyes trained on the only piece of fluff on the entire cream rug, waiting for it to end.
‘I can’t believe you’re real. It’s a miracle.’
My vision started to blur. I imagined what would happen if I stood and announced my pregnancy. Instead, without looking up from the rug, I said: ‘I’ll make tea’, then moved quickly into the kitchen. My cheeks were burning. I stuck on the kettle and threw my weight against the back of the kitchen door. I’d already been through it all, I’d done my time. I wasn’t interested in reliving the experience. I just wanted us to leave.
I stood for a few minutes while everyone in the room next door caught up. When the water was boiled I slowly made a pot of tea, allowing it to brew, searching for biscuits in what Isabel called ‘the goodies press’. The most exciting thing in the whole cupboard was oatcakes. The box of pastries I’d brought the day before had probably been binned without either of them so much as peeking inside.
I loaded the tray, adding the oatcakes still in their packaging, and carried it through just as Isabel had done the previous morning. Conor was sitting where I’d left him but Isabel and Andy were at the dining table with a photo album opened in front of them. I caught a glimpse of Henry in a nappy sitting in a suitcase. I had seen these photographs before. The tray clattered to the table and they looked up. I started to pour.
‘I’m okay, dear,’ said Isabel.
I gestured the pot towards Andy.
‘I don’t drink tea, remember?’
‘You don’t drink tea?’ exclaimed Isabel.
‘Well, sometimes you do,’ I said, recalling the evening in Gianni’s chipper. But he didn’t hear.
‘Not really, no,’ he told Isabel.
‘We’ll have to change that, won’t we, Conor?’
Conor said nothing. I brought him over a cup and saucer and left them on the footstool in front of him.
I poured myself a cup, if only for something to do, and was relieved to find I hadn’t gone off it. I walked aimlessly around the room, sipping from the thin rim. I was fuelled by unease and growing irritation. I didn’t want to be here in the house Henry grew up in, going through all the same realisations I’d been through weeks previously, watching it dawn on these people as it had dawned on me. I wanted to be back at Aberdeen Street cooking dinner and decorating, laughing and talking. I wished then that I’d told Andy about the baby.
I washed the crockery that hadn’t needed to be dirtied in the first place and a couple of other odds and ends around the kitchen. I filled Scooter’s water bowl. Walking back from the kitchen to the living room, I heard Isabel laughing. The photo album had been joined by another. She’d accepted it all so readily.
I caught Andy’s eye over Isabel’s head. Will we go? I mouthed, and he did a half-nod half-shrug. Then he returned his attention to whatever picture Isabel was showing him.
‘I suppose it’s time to head,’ I said loudly.
‘If you think it’s best, dear,’ replied Isabel, standing from the dining chair. ‘Thank you for coming.’ She was walking towards the hallway to see me out, something she hadn’t done since the first time I’d called to this house.
‘Re
ady?’ I said, peering around her, and Andy went to stand.
‘Oh, he doesn’t have to go too. Do you?’ She turned to Andy and I recognised the familiar reluctance to say his name. ‘You can stay a little while longer, can’t you? I’ve so much I want to know. How you found us, for one.’
Andy looked at me and I raised my eyebrows.
‘I can stay a little longer,’ he said.
‘Oh, wonderful!’
‘But how will you get home?’ I asked.
‘He’ll be fine, Grace, you go on. We’ll take care of him.’
‘I’ll talk to you tomorrow,’ said Andy, and I could think of no further argument.
Isabel took the opportunity to usher me into the hallway and out the front door. She pulled the latch across and drew it open. ‘Thank you for bringing him back to us,’ she said quickly, not realising her slip of the tongue as the door closed in front of me.
I stood there speechless in the evening twilight. ‘Do you like rice pudding?’ I heard her say as she turned from the frosted glass back into the house. A low inaudible response followed and then, ‘I knew you would!’ A door opened and shut somewhere inside, and in the garden there was a sudden breeze. I made my way down the path, looking back to see Conor immobile in his seat by the window.
I walked slowly out of the garden, turning right, past the house with the For Sale sign and out of the estate. From the mouth of Rosedale, the Walsh home was entirely obscured by hedges and trees. Was Andy being polite or had he wanted to stay? Surely he wouldn’t rather hang out with Henry’s parents than with me. Didn’t he realise how weird that was? Didn’t he know he was a ghost in that house?
I waited at the side of the road as two suitable buses passed me by. Aberdeen Street held none of the appeal now that I would be in it all alone. It seemed so cold, like it belonged to late November and not the last days of May. I got on another bus entirely, one that was heading for my parents’ house.
Conor
FORTY-SEVEN
Iknew Frances Clinch was pregnant before she told me. She’d been spending chunks of her workdays locked in the women’s bathroom on the first floor and the rumour mill had carried word the rest of the way. The gossip must have reached Frances’s ears too because the day she came in to tender her resignation, she was doing so with immediate effect. She would not be working out any notice and if that meant sacrificing her last pay cheque or forgoing references, then so be it. It was a Wednesday, the last one before Christmas, and she’d be leaving on Friday and not coming back.
It took me all of eight minutes to get the real reason out of her, and as many minutes again for her to offer us the child. I’d like to say it was my years spent cross-examining and bartering that extracted the information, but the poor girl was desperate to tell someone. She hadn’t an ally in the world.
I didn’t coax the child off her. Let me be clear about that. There was never the faintest possibility she was keeping the thing. And I was in two minds about the whole business myself. I still wanted a child, of course I did, I wasn’t one of those men who just went along with their broody wife’s whims and before they knew how they were going to afford it all had acquired a football team of offspring. Children were something I’d given some thought to. I had always wanted them. Well, that’s not true, not always, but from the day I met Isabel. We were a solid match and I knew she’d be a great mother. She was loving and thoughtful and we had shared values. But her body, as she put it, let her down. The miscarriages had taken their toll and I was beginning to think we should stop trying, hedge our bets and thank our lucky stars for such a happy and love-filled relationship.
But then Frances suggested we take the baby. She’d rather that, she said. A girl from her village had given her child to the nuns and, if even half the stories were true, she didn’t want anything to do with that. The child would be ours, she told me, and that would be the end of that.
Isabel agreed immediately. As I recall it now, I was only halfway through telling her about the predicament of this poor secretary who’d sat before me that afternoon in admirable stoicism when Isabel made the suggestion herself. It had been at least two years since I’d seen that kind of hope in her. I told Isabel I’d take care of it all, and I took her silence to mean it would never have been any other way.
Father Clogher, too, seemed to know where I was going before I had arrived at my question. He said to give him forty-eight hours and in less time than that he was back with a name and address for an older couple near Roundwood. Good Catholics, always happy to help another parish. Father Clogher drove Frances there himself. Isabel and I were watching The Late Late Show the other night and there was an elderly man in the audience talking about how his mother had been taken from her village to a Mother and Baby Home in the dead of night. The local priest had put his mother on the crossbar of his bike and cycled her there. Seven months pregnant and she sat like that for nineteen miles. Isabel and I didn’t say a word, we never spoke about it, but I imagined she was experiencing the same sense of outrage. Ours wasn’t anything like that. It wasn’t a forced adoption. Frances wanted nothing more than to be rid of the child. She presented herself to Father Clogher’s parochial home at 11 a.m. on a sunny Saturday afternoon and he drove her to Roundwood in his parish car, which, if I recall correctly, was a rather spacious Renault 18.
Isabel and I bought this house on the other side of the city. We told the old neighbours we were ‘expecting a child’ and that we needed more of a family home. We didn’t lie, we just fudged the details. When we ran into a few of them over the years, as was bound to happen, Henry’s exact date of birth wasn’t a topic of conversation. They just said what a loss we’d been to the road and that we should call around for lunch some Sunday. We said we would but never took any phone numbers.
Isabel was full of energy in those months – preparing for the baby’s arrival, nesting. We bought a crib and toys. Isabel read baby books and I painted the new house. She left the room when I opened the tins; there was lead in the paint and that was dangerous for expectant mothers. She even developed cravings: liver and Mr Freeze ice pops.
‘Maybe it’s psychosomatic,’ she’d say hopefully.
I knew it was nonsense but I said nothing. I just hopped in the car and went to the butcher’s. Over the years, I think Isabel convinced herself she really had been pregnant. Once when Henry was fifteen and refusing to tidy his room, his mother shouted up the stairs after him: ‘I went through labour for you!’ And then she looked at me and rolled her eyes. Forgetting I knew the truth, or maybe just forgetting the truth.
We never once mentioned it, never alluded to it, even in our most intimate moments, lying side by side over the years, keeping ourselves awake worrying about his grades or health or moods. Henry is ours and that’s it. Was ours. I forget sometimes. Emotions have not been my forte but I loved him like it was a form of breathing.
Maybe if Isabel had been the one taking the Formans’ phone calls it would have been harder to fool herself. I paid for Frances’s living expenses and a recommended donation for their Christian generosity, and they provided me with a couple of telephone updates.
The first report, a month after she’d been with them, was that all was well. Frances was blooming, Mrs Forman told me down the line of the pay phone around the corner from my office. ‘I think it’ll be a boy,’ she said, and I felt a pride that was entirely irrational but which I did not dismiss.
The second phone call was generally upbeat too; there was still some occasional vomiting, which was rare, and Frances was bigger than Mrs Forman was used to, but nothing to worry about. So I didn’t mention it. Mrs Forman was a trained midwife and Isabel was sick at that time, stomach problems again. Part of me worried if the physical strain of caring for a child would be too much.
The last phone call, a month before she was due, was more alarming. Mrs Forman was ‘a little concerned’. Frances was very big and still sick but of course she hadn’t been to a doctor so she couldn’t say
for sure but there were old wives’ tales about large pregnancies and late illness and now Mrs Forman wasn’t superstitious herself . . . And on and on. She wasn’t the kind of woman to come straight out and say something so I did the plain speaking for her and maybe I was a little too direct, but I’d been up all of the night before with Isabel who still wasn’t showing signs of improvement. I told Mrs Forman that my wife would not be able to care for anything other than a healthy child. It wouldn’t be fair to either of them. That was our arrangement, and we were delighted to have entered into it.
Nobody ever told me Frances Clinch was carrying twins. I want to make that clear. I never knew. Those words were never said.
Frances didn’t came back to work, though I had kept her job open. I suppose she wanted a fresh start. I saw her one last time, when we stopped by the Formans’ place to collect the postcards. She had written them on the backs of photographs of nondescript seaside settings. I didn’t tell her Paris wasn’t by the sea. I presumed none of her family would realise either.
Chere Maman,
That’s ‘Dear Mammy’ in French! I am having a lovely time. The city is so pretty and everyone at work is really nice. The manager says he’ll be lost when I leave. He has even offered a promotion to make me stay! But I think I’d miss you all too much. The Mona Lisa is even better in real life and I can see the Eiffel Tower from my bedroom window. I’m looking at it right now. Tell Daddy and everyone I said hello and that they’re to try not to be too jealous of me. I hope it’s not raining too much at home!
Lots of love,
Franny
We read the postcards on the way to the airport but didn’t say a word about them, just bought a couple of stamps at a tabac and posted them en route to the Musée D’Orsay, enjoying our last holiday just the two of us. Father Clogher had it registered as a home birth at our old house in Clontarf and he sealed the parish record in Latin. We did our best by Frances and we made it so Henry would never again know what it was to be unwanted. We gave him a better life.
Grace After Henry Page 23