by Kate Field
‘And if Gran’s still at it, I don’t see why you shouldn’t be,’ Jonas added.
‘Urgh, gross,’ we all chorused, and laughed.
The following Thursday I woke up to find an email from Ethan in my inbox. Three breakfasts, two hours, and one fresh batch of cherry scones later, I still couldn’t bring myself to even touch the phone again, let alone open the message.
Why was he contacting me now? I hoped it had nothing to do with Jonas and the disclosures at the weekend – but who knew with these sneaky Black men? Manipulation and secrets were second nature to them, and I had no reason to suppose Jonas hadn’t inherited the family traits. Then I told myself to stop being so egotistical. It was probably nothing to do with me at all – it was much more likely to be a favour for Audrey, and purely because I was her neighbour. So I opened the email and read it.
Mary,
If I’d paid attention in Mrs Todd’s English lessons I could have wowed you with the poetic words you deserve, but I only have my plain ones. I can’t give up. I miss you. There are eight million faces here but yours is the only one I want to see.
No one else laughs at my jokes like you do. No one smiles at me like you do. No one has ever filled my head and my heart like you do.
Come to New York. You said you’ve always wanted to visit, and it’s a great time to see it in the fall. Your ticket is booked – see attached. No excuses!
There’s one condition. You have to meet me on Brooklyn Bridge at 7 p.m. on 30 October and take me for a birthday drink. It’s only fair – I bought you breakfast on yours.
There’s a whole colourful world out here. Come and see it. Come and see it with me. Why should we both live half a life when we could have one amazing one together?
I’ll be waiting. You wouldn’t stand me up on my fortieth birthday, would you, Mary Black?
Ethan
Smiling, I clicked on the first attachment. It was a flight ticket from Manchester to New York, booked in my name, for 29 October, less than two weeks away. Another link opened the website for a boutique hotel in Greenwich. And then, as if by magic, as if he had somehow been waiting for me to open the first one, a flurry of new emails arrived from Ethan. They contained a series of photographs of New York landmarks, some iconic, some undoubtedly chosen for me: the Empire State Building; the literary walk in Central Park; Times Square; The New York Central Library. At the end came a picture of Brooklyn Bridge. ‘So you know what to look out for.’ Ethan had written on this message. ‘Tempted yet?’
I’d been tempted before he bombarded me with all the images. I longed to see these places, but I longed to see him more. Scrubbing away my tears, I put down the phone without sending a reply. What could I say? How could I disappear to New York, at a moment’s notice? The children would be at home for half term. I had the bonfire and fireworks display to organise and attend. There might be a colourful life waiting for me in New York, but there was a black-and-white one here, full of mothers and children and dogs and responsibilities that I couldn’t abandon. Especially not for a man who had once abandoned me.
I couldn’t avoid it any longer. Mum had invited me round for dinner and made it clear that nothing less than imminent death would be an acceptable excuse – and probably only then if it were something contagious. Jonas and Ava had cunningly invented homework assignments and revision sessions that would take them to friends’ houses, which meant that I would be the sole gooseberry at the feast. Mum wasn’t in the habit of inviting us over, and to be fair, her garage conversion hadn’t been designed with dinner parties in mind. This had to be the big ‘meet the boyfriend’ moment, the last thing I was in the mood for with Ethan’s email from yesterday still sitting unanswered in my inbox.
I’d told Mum that I would be out until five, and dinner was scheduled for seven, but in the end a headache drove me home early and it was barely three when I pulled onto the drive. It was bad timing: Mum was disappearing through her front door, and a man stood at the boot of her car, lifting out a handful of Booths’ carrier bags. He was tall and stocky, and thick black hair dotted with grey crept over the collar of his coat. He closed the boot and took a few steps towards Mum’s door, kicking his right leg out as he walked in a peculiar half limp.
My heart pounded, making me suddenly dizzy. I’d seen that walk before. I’d seen it countless times, in real life and in my memories. How could there be two men who walked like that?
I slammed the car door and stood on the drive, too dazed to move. The man turned round.
‘Well, would you look at you now, Mary-bear!’ he said, and affection thickened a voice I had longed to hear again for years. ‘Aren’t you a grand sight for your Daddy’s eyes?’
Chapter 27
The front door banged shut behind me, and I fell to my knees on the hard tiles of the hall floor. This wasn’t real. This couldn’t possibly be real. That man standing outside on my drive – the man who walked like my father, spoke with his accent, and in every way resembled an older version of my father – couldn’t possibly be my father. Could he?
I bent over, hugging myself, and rocking backwards and forwards. My eyes stung but no tears fell. My heart had recognised him even before he’d turned around, before he’d spoken. But where had he been for the last thirty years? Deep down, I had thought he must be dead – that nothing else could have kept him away from me, however badly he had fallen out with Mum. And yet here he was, unpacking groceries, as if he had never been away. What was going on?
Dotty scratched on the kitchen door, whimpering to be released, and the sound brought me back to my senses. I let Dotty out and stomped over to Mum’s garage, barging through the front door without knocking, and into the lounge. Mum and her boyfriend – my father – were standing in the window, arms round each other. They turned as I walked in. Mum’s face was tight and pinched; his shone with such joy that it temporarily distracted me. But I couldn’t be distracted. I had to know everything.
‘Where did you go? That day when you walked me to school and kissed me goodbye – what happened? Why were you not there when I came home? Where have you been for every single day since then? How could you abandon me like that when you knew, you must have known, how much I adored you?’
‘Mary-bear …’ He moved away from Mum, his arms outstretched as if he intended to hug me, but I stepped back, and crossed my arms against my chest.
‘Stop it. Don’t Mary-bear me. That’s what you called me when I was a child. I’m not a child any more. That’s what happens when you disappear for over thirty years. You missed me growing up. You missed me going to university, getting married, having children, getting divorced. You chose to walk away from all that, from whatever future waited for the eight-year-old me, and you don’t get to walk back in now.’
‘Oh Mary, as if I’d have ever made a choice to leave my little sweetheart …’
‘You must have done! Unless you were locked up somewhere and unable to escape …’
I hadn’t meant it as a serious suggestion, but Mum glanced at him sharply, and he nodded.
‘Sit down, Mary,’ she said, but I shook my head.
‘No! Just tell me what’s going on.’
‘Your father was sent to prison. That’s why he didn’t come home.’
I sat down, sinking onto the dralon armchair as if my legs had been kicked from under me – and along with them, another little piece of my history.
‘That’s not true,’ I said. My daddy in prison! It was impossible. Everyone loved him. He couldn’t have done anything wrong. ‘He left because of you.’ I stared at Mum. ‘You drove him away, always shouting at him. I heard you. He couldn’t bear to be with you.’
‘You’ve got that wrong, Mary. I loved your mammy with all my heart.’ He took Mum’s hand, and led her over to the sofa. Mum’s face softened as he looked at her, in a way that shook up my memories. I had seen them like this before – their younger selves, holding hands, laughing, happy. How had I forgotten that? ‘We never had a cross wo
rd until I was an eejit and got myself into trouble. And then she only shouted at me because of what it was going to do to you.’
I glanced over at Mum. The pinched expression had gone, as had the frown that had pulled her eyebrows together for as long as I could remember. Could I have been wrong about her? Had I blamed her for years, when really she had been grieving for a lost husband every bit as much as I had grieved for a lost daddy? How much pain must I have caused her, rejecting her when I was all she had left, hating her when she had done nothing wrong?
‘But how did I not know?’ I asked. ‘There must have been publicity. Was it not in the newspapers?’ Could I have found the answer to his disappearance easily if I’d searched for him on the internet? I’d never done it – too proud to look for him, if he didn’t want to find me. ‘Did people in the village not know?’
‘Yes, they did,’ Mum replied. ‘But I spoke to everyone I could, and asked them to keep it a secret, for your sake. And they kept their word, didn’t they?’
I nodded, but I was mentally raking back through the past. I could no longer remember the details, but the impressions had never left me: of conversations silenced as I walked in; of glances exchanged over my head; of sympathy that I had shaken off, unwanted. I had shrunk into myself, hating being an object of gossip, a hatred that had dogged me throughout my life. It had never crossed my mind before that it might have been well meant. I couldn’t imagine my proud, private mother going round to her neighbours one by one and begging for their secrecy. And they had given it, and kept the secret all these years. How much regard must they have for Mum to have done that? The same Mum that I belittled at every opportunity. Shame burned in my heart.
‘Did Audrey and Bill know?’ I asked. I couldn’t bear the idea that Audrey could have known a secret of this magnitude and hidden it from me; I needed to know that out of all this mess, there was one person left that I could trust.
‘No, only people who lived in Stoneybrook at the time.’
Amid my own relief, I noticed the sadness flash across Mum’s face. She must know how much I loved Audrey, couldn’t have missed how much more time I spent with her than with my own mum. I tried to imagine how I would feel if Jonas or Ava did that to me, and I failed – even tiptoeing to the perimeter of that idea was so painful that I had to draw back. I looked round this room, as if seeing it for the first time: living room, dining room and kitchen all squashed into one, hardly bigger than a prison cell itself, but accepted by Mum without hesitation for my sake. Every available surface was crammed with photographs of me – on my own, with Leo, with the children. Mum’s love was evident everywhere, if only I’d been willing to see it.
‘What did you do?’ I said, turning to my dad. ‘It must have been serious to have been in prison for so long. Did you kill someone?’
‘Ah Mary, I was so drunk I could hardly remember then, never mind now. I’d been out celebrating St Patrick’s Day in Manchester, and enjoying the craic, but somehow a fight started, punches flying everywhere, and the next thing you know there’s a fella lying on the floor bleeding, and the ambulance and police showed up. All but three of us had run away, and the landlord was happy to point the finger at us. The wee fella had fallen and banged his head, and died a month later. Involuntary manslaughter they called it. I couldn’t tell you whether I laid a finger on him or not, and that’s the truth.’
My stomach heaved. How could the perfect daddy I’d worshipped ever have been guilty of this?
‘And you were sentenced for thirty years for that?’
Mum jumped up.
‘I’ll make us some tea,’ she said. Dad followed her to the other end of the room, where amongst the boiling of the kettle and the clatter of spoons and mugs, I could hear a whispered debate going on. Mum was waving her hands in the agitated way I knew well, and Dad took hold of them and kissed each in turn, before pulling her into his arms. The gesture was so affectionate, so gentle, that I understood one thing clearly: whatever he had done in the past didn’t matter to them. He was neither wholly good nor wholly bad – exactly the same as the rest of us. Mistakes could be regretted and forgiven. And despite the shocking events of this afternoon, my thoughts strayed again to the email I had still not answered, and someone else who perhaps I should learn to forgive too …
Mum thrust a mug into my hand, and sat down again opposite me. Dad loitered at her side.
‘The prison sentence wasn’t thirty years,’ Mum said, rushing out the words as if they were burning her tongue. ‘It was ten.’
‘Ten? But that means …’ I put down my mug before my shaking hands could spill the contents. I looked at my dad, holding his gaze. ‘You were released when I was eighteen?’
‘I was.’
I felt like I’d been tricked. I’d assumed he’d been let out this year, and come straight home to Mum. I’d been ready to forgive, to accept that he hadn’t really abandoned me. And perhaps he hadn’t, when I was eight. But when I was eighteen … What possible excuse could he have for that?
‘Why didn’t you come back then?’
‘I decided …’ Mum began, but Dad interrupted.
‘We agreed, Reenie. Tell her straight.’
‘We agreed it would be better if he didn’t come back. You were at university, doing well. You were engaged to Leo, and he had a bright academic future ahead of him – an early professorship, that’s what everyone said. You were settled and happy, as far as I could tell. What would have happened if your convict father turned up and the old story was raked over again? I couldn’t have stopped the gossip a second time. What would it have done to Leo’s chances to have a former prisoner for a father-in-law? There was too much to lose.’
‘Not as much as there was to gain!’ What might I have done – what decisions might I have made – if my dad had returned then? If I had known that I had never been abandoned, and that it wasn’t necessary to choose a safe life to avoid it happening again? ‘Where did you go?’
‘Back to Ireland, to do building work for your Uncle Terry. It was all the job I could get.’
‘And you knew where he was?’ Mum nodded. I swung back to Dad. ‘And did you not even want to see me before you left?’
‘I did. I saw you and your man go off cycling together, and I saw that your mammy was right. You were happy, so full of love, laughing and joking like we once had – exactly what I wanted for my Mary-bear. I wasn’t for risking that.’
Cycling? I had never cycled with Leo, only Ethan. But I couldn’t dwell on that now.
‘And one glimpse was enough for the next twenty years?’
‘Who do you think converted this garage, Mary?’ Mum interrupted. I shrugged, thrown by the random question.
‘Some builders …’ I stopped, thinking back. It had been a team of Irish builders. I hadn’t paid them much attention. One hint of that accent and I had avoided the building site at all costs.
‘It was your Uncle Terry’s men. Did you never wonder how I could have paid for it? How I could have paid for anything, when I didn’t work? Your dad and his family have supported us all this time.’
‘You were here, working on the garage?’
‘I was. It had to be the best, for your mammy.’
I couldn’t believe it. My dad had been here, under my nose for months, and I hadn’t noticed. Had I lived my whole life wearing blinkers?
‘If you knew I was getting married, could you not have come to the wedding?’
‘I did, and it shattered my heart to see my Mary-bear given away by another man.’
He was in tears, my big strong daddy, and how I managed to hold back my own I’ll never know. Mum held his hand and he rested his head against hers, and in that moment, I realised how selfish I was being. This wasn’t all about me, and never had been. These two people had given up their love, their lives, to do what they thought was best for me. But they had been wrong. It was the ultimate kindness, and the ultimate mistake.
‘You shouldn’t have done it,’ I said. �
�I wouldn’t have cared how much gossip or trouble there was. I would never have wanted you to be unhappy or apart.’
‘If you love someone, you love them, however long or far apart you are,’ Dad said. ‘I had faith we’d be together one day.’
‘Nothing you do for your children is ever a sacrifice,’ Mum said. ‘You should know that.’
She looked at me steadily, and I knew what she was referring to. She meant Ethan – comparing our situations, assuming that I had given him up to avoid complications and difficulties for Jonas and Ava. She was wrong – that wasn’t the only reason, and probably not even the main one. But far from persuading me that I’d done the right thing, as I returned her gaze, noticing the glow of love about her, the way she clutched my dad’s hand, the softness of her smile – the transformation into the mum of my early memories – I wondered if I’d made a mistake. This was the mum I should have had throughout my life, not the bitter, lonely one. This was the sort of mum I wanted my children to have.
‘I know that I would rather you had been happy. And that I might have been happier if you had been. Perhaps the best thing I can do for Jonas and Ava is to teach them not to be afraid to grab a piece of happiness, whatever obstacles are in the way.’
‘Perhaps you’re right.’ Mum sighed. ‘You must do what you think best. Your dad and I will be here to support you, whatever you decide to do.’
‘You’re back for good?’ I asked Dad.
‘As long as Reenie can stand me.’
Mum laughed – a rare sound, and one I had half thought extinct.
‘Why now?’ I had a sudden panic that this was too good to be true – that one of them would disclose a terminal illness that had brought them together for their final days. ‘What’s changed to bring you back?’
The answer, when it came, surprised me.
‘Leo,’ Mum said. ‘Now you’re divorced, his career can’t be damaged by any gossip about us. And …’ She hesitated. I knew how uncomfortable this must be making her. ‘Your dad has wanted to come home for years, and I wouldn’t let him. When he asked again this year … I simply couldn’t think of a reason to say no.’
