I googled his name, the right one this time, and I was impressed by what I found. The list of links to theatre productions went back years and he had worked all over the UK. Synge, Behan and O’Casey were there as well as Chekhov, Ibsen, O’Neill and some contemporary stuff. He’d also written a number of reviews and articles and was currently directing a Martin McDonagh play due to open at Battersea Arts Centre in a few weeks’ time. I found no social media accounts which didn’t surprise me as he was a little old to belong to the Facebook generation. However, I did find the contact details of his theatrical agent in Notting Hill Gate.
I thought again about Kathleen Slevin seeing the two men take my brother away from the Mother and Baby Home in the open-top sports car. Instinct had always told me Tess’s brother was one of them. I remembered how Julia said that Tess told Dad that her brother was more attached to the Protestant family in the lodge than his own. The question was, did Timothy Dempsey know where my brother was now?
I put Julia’s letter and the article back into the envelope and slipped it into the drawer of the bedside cabinet. Then I picked up my iPad again and found the contact details of Dempsey’s theatrical agent. I hesitated for a moment, wondering if I was well enough to get back on that emotional roller-coaster search for my brother again. Then I thought of the promise I’d made to Tess and about everything she had gone through. I couldn’t let her down. I made a screenshot then sent it to my phone.
Chapter 32
London was locked in a blood-slowing cold. The TV screen in the hotel bar said temperatures would plummet to minus two and snow was expected by late evening. Christmas lights twinkled in the windows of the half-empty bars and restaurants along the Southbank and a thin layer of frost shimmered on the ground. The Thames was the colour of a shiny green olive and the dome of St Paul’s was blue-white against the black night sky.
I glanced at my watch. Ten to six. The play started at seven thirty. It would take a good hour to walk to the theatre in Battersea but walking was what you did in London, whatever the weather. I pulled my cowl scarf up around my face. I regretted wearing my new red Hobbs coat. I’d chosen it to make an impression but it was too thin and the cold stabbed right through it. Some of the performers along the bank were turning in for the night. Yoda was climbing out of his flimsy lime-green Jedi dress and reaching for his Puffa jacket, and an African steel band in earmuffs and gloves were handing round a bobble hat for cash and packing up. I dropped a pound coin in the cap of a homeless man sitting in a doorway, hidden in a hijab of scarves.
The day after receiving the article about Timothy Dempsey I’d sent an email to his agent in Notting Hill explaining who I was. I said I wanted to touch base after Tess’s death and included my contact details. I mentioned nothing about trying to trace my brother. Three weeks on, after two further emails and a message on the agent’s answer machine, I’d had no reply. If I needed any further proof that my uncle knew something about Donal’s whereabouts this was it. Angry at his stonewalling, I decided to take matters in my own hands.
I kept up a brisk pace down the Embankment to keep warm, passing a young couple on a bench facing the Thames. They looked in their twenties, Latino and beautiful. His gloved fingers were entwined in her long dark hair and they were kissing. I stopped in my tracks, the memory returning like a push in the chest.
In the weeks after the Manchester bomb Joe and I fell for each other quickly. We spoke every other day by phone and every weekend without fail he’d come up to Manchester or I’d go to London. The sight of his pale denim jacket and boyish grin at the end of the platform at Euston made my heart somersault. The second I stepped past the ticket barriers he’d pull me to his chest and kiss me long and hard then we’d smooch shamelessly on the Tube all the way back to his shared flat in Shoreditch.
We continued our long-distance relationship for the next two years. Joe lived in the East End in a shared flat long before the East End was gentrified. We spent Saturday nights drinking with students and locals in The Bricklayers Arms or The Griffin or we’d wander to the Eastern Eye on Brick Lane for a cheap curry. Now and again we’d meet up in the Founder’s Arms on Southbank with Joe’s work colleagues from the tech start-up where he was a programmer. Sundays were always spent in Greenwich with Paddy and Peggy and a roast dinner or bacon and cabbage. I’d fallen for them as quickly as I had Joe. The atmosphere in his childhood home was calm and conflict-free. It was a revelation to me that family life could be so happy.
Though I hid it from my Mancunian friends, I’d also fallen in love with London. Up north many of us resented the capital because every government invested so much in it. Power and culture thrived while we got so little and we saw nothing of ourselves in the city’s wealth and glamour. Yet at that time I couldn’t help being wooed by the hustle and bustle of the place, the diversity, the history, the variety of arts venues and theatres. The view of the city from the Southbank on a summer night or Greenwich Park at dusk filled me with awe. Arriving at Euston on Friday evenings felt like pulling off a dark hood. I was liberated from Tess’s black moods and Mikey to look after and those weekends with Joe were some of the happiest days of my life. I was in love and I was free. If I hadn’t had Tess and Mikey to care for I’d have moved to London in an instant.
One Friday evening I was about to leave Brantingham Road to get the Euston train when Mikey fell through the door looking like he was plugged in on high voltage. He was as high as a kite, rummaging through drawers and bags and demanding money from Tess. Thinking I couldn’t leave him alone with her, I rang Joe at work and told him I wasn’t going to make the train. He said he was gutted as he had a surprise for me but he understood (he and Mikey weren’t yet at the stage where they loathed the sight of each other). Joe said he’d have to go the Founder’s to drown his sorrows. Shortly afterwards Mikey left the house again. Raging, I decided I’d had enough of being treated as a doormat. I went over the road to ask Rose O’Grady to keep an eye on Tess during the weekend then I got on the next train to Euston. I hugged myself at the thought of surprising Joe.
The Founder’s was heaving with warm bodies when I bounded in, weighed down by my backpack. Joe’s colleagues were sitting at the back of the pub on the patio. Phoebe, a brittle Chelsea blonde who had a habit of imitating my accent every time we met, pointed at the door with a tight smile. She said Joe was outside. Off I went, jostling through the pints and suits. I couldn’t see him anywhere in the crowd. Then I looked further out towards the river, stopping in my tracks. He was sitting on a bench with his back to me next to a girl with long dark hair.
My legs weakened and I grabbed the arm of a large American standing next to me who roared with laughter, put me in a headlock and asked if I wanted a fight. When I’d wriggled free I slumped against the wall of the pub to get a better view. The girl was tall and lithe with a nose-ring. She was heavily made up and wearing a tight white minidress and had long tanned legs that seemed to stretch to the far side of the Thames. I looked down at my white legs, denim cut-offs and scraggy Van Morrison T-shirt. When I looked up again, Joe and the girl had their arms around each other. I lowered my eyes, convinced that was it. He had someone else on the sly all along. I felt like I was about to shatter into a thousand pieces and was about to turn and walk away when they pulled apart. The girl stood up and pulled on a pink jacket then Joe turned round and saw me. He got up, waving me over, his face lighting up. By the time I got to the bench a huge grin had spread across his face. He turned to the girl who picked up the small pink suitcase that lay beside her feet.
“Here she is. Bloody hell. She made it after all. Sinéad, this is Carmel, the love of my life.”
He introduced me to his cousin who was over from Cork for a few days and staying with Pat and Peggy. He’d been hoping the three of us could spend the evening together but she was already late for her flight and had to rush off to get to Gatwick.
I watched Sinéad disappear into the crowd feeling both immense relief and self-loathing. When s
he’d gone Joe pulled me on to his knee, kissing me long and hard and telling me how happy he was to see me.
I hated myself. Why oh why did I always imagine the worst? Just minutes earlier I was about to walk away from him forever without even questioning what was going on. It was only later that I came to understand why I did things like that. Losing a parent early on in childhood often leaves you with an irrational fear of losing other loved ones, such as a partner or a child. Joe was my first real love and when I saw him that night on the bench with his cousin I automatically assumed I’d lost him. I came to the realisation that it was probably the same fear that had held me back from having a child for so long.
I smiled and held Joe’s face in my hands under the clear moonlit sky.
“Was she my surprise?” I asked.
He shook his head and reached into the pocket of his suit jacket on the bench next to him. Smiling nervously he took out a small box and placed it on my bare thigh. A boat full of revellers sounded its horn on the other side of the river then he asked me to marry him. I said yes and he slipped the traditional Irish Claddagh ring on to my finger. It had a small emerald in the crown.
We married shortly after. Looking back we were so young, maybe too young.
As I walked up the steps onto the Albert Bridge, trying hard to hold on to that moment, to clutch on to all the love I’d felt for him in the intervening years. But his and Karen’s betrayal got in the way. It was still there every day when I woke up, a dull ache that never went away.
The Albert Bridge was my favourite of all the London Bridges. That night her chains fanned out from her towers like a necklace shimmering against a black satin sky. I plodded on, arriving at Battersea Arts Centre just after seven.
Posters for Martin McDonagh’s play, The Beauty Queen of Linanne lined the walls. ‘Unmissable,’ said the Evening Standard. The Telegraph described it as “Gloriously funny”. That evening’s performance advertised a Q&A session with the play’s award-winning director, Timothy Dempsey.
I collected my ticket from the box office then hurried to the bar where I downed a large glass of red wine. My heart pounding, I made my way to my seat.
Chapter 33
My seat was three rows from the front of the stage. It had cost twice the price of my train fare but I wanted to make sure I had a good view of Timothy Dempsey. Digging my fingers nervously into the red velvet of my seat arm, I looked up at the ornate domed ceiling and noted the neutered accents and fine wool coats of the wealthy London Irish making their way to their seats. I could have been wrong but I guessed Dempsey had never frequented the pubs of Kilburn or danced in The Galtymore in his younger days. All of this was all a far cry from the Mayo backwater where he and Tess were raised. I scanned the heads around me for the fecund mop of white hair I’d seen in the photograph but I couldn’t see my uncle anywhere.
I forgot all about him the minute the play started. Set in an isolated cottage in Connemara in the nineties, it told the story of a vicious war between a bitter widow Mags and her forty-year-old virginal daughter Maureen. The simmering violence, explosive outbursts and doses of insanity made me feel very much at home. The play spoke about emigration. Those who stayed behind in rural communities often ended up living embittered lives and those who left sometimes found it hard to cope with upheaval and change. The daughter Maureen suffered a breakdown in London after racist bullying by her English co-workers.
I immediately thought of Tess. Had running away from Ireland helped or hindered her mental health? After Dad died she’d become very unwell and had been abandoned by a lot of her friends in the Irish community. The stigma of mental illness sent them running and like a beautiful cracked porcelain doll she’d been left behind in the back room of a toy shop. Would she have been abandoned in the same way if she’d been living in a tightknit community like Mags and Maureen? Would there have been more kindness? Who knows? The play threw up many questions I’d been asking myself for years and I loved every minute. At the curtain call I was on my feet applauding with the rest of the audience. I’d almost forgotten my reason for being there. Then the lights dimmed, a hushed silence fell over the auditorium and Timothy Dempsey walked on stage.
He sat at the hewn-wood kitchen table that had been the centrepiece of the set. He was slighter and older than in the photo. Seeing him in such a typical Irish setting, surrounded by pictures of the Sacred Heart and the Virgin and a backdrop of the Connemara mountains, unnerved me. A thin blonde with horn-rimmed glasses sat next to him and introduced herself as the theatre’s artistic director. As she read out his bio, he lowered his eyes and crossed his legs, circling his right foot nervously in the air. Tanned, in an impeccable navy suit and pink shirt, everything about him suggested good taste.
He answered the director’s questions in a quiet considered manner with a finely tuned sense of humour. In contrast to Tess, there wasn’t a hint of Mayo in his accent. Both Tess and Dad had little desire to assimilate outside the Manchester Irish community and they’d never altered their accents to fit in. Dempsey on the other hand, could easily have been mistaken for an English country gent. After a while the director opened up questions to the floor.
“I thought the nature of the relationship between Mags and her daughter was a bit over the top,” said a middle-aged woman with a Maureen O’Hara head of curls. “Do you really think women are that vicious to each other in real life?”
“They are in Leitrim,” interjected an elderly man behind to much laughter.
A handsome young man with floppy of blonde hair took the microphone.
“I enjoyed your production very much,” he said softly. “I’d like to know if you think there are still small-minded communities in Ireland today like the one portrayed in the play. Or do you think the country has moved on?”
Dempsey sat up and peered at the man, nodding enthusiastically.
“I think there’s been a huge generational shift in attitudes. Most of it is to do with young Irish rejecting the values of the Catholic Church. The paedophile scandals and the Magdalene Laundries have sent them running. There’s a lot of support for the upcoming vote for gay marriage and the lobby to legalise abortion.” He sat back and cleared his throat. “Yet whenever I go back I can’t help thinking the older generation are still quite a conservative lot. Especially in the small towns and villages.”
I shifted in my seat. So he was a smooth-talking liberal now, was he? Agreeing with abortion and outraged by the Magdalene Laundries after what he’d done to Tess? I tutted and exhaled loudly to the annoyance of the man and woman sitting either side of me. A few more questions followed then the theatre director looked down at her watch and said there was time for one more.
Something took hold of me. I took deep breaths and tried to ground myself.
Then gathering every ounce of inner strength I had, I put my hand up.
With a racing heart I watched the microphone make its way along my row of seats. I clutched it immediately with both hands so no one could see how much I was trembling.
Then I spoke.
“I see that you are a native of County Galway like my mother, Mr Dempsey,” I said, swallowing. “You mentioned the Magdalene Laundries earlier so I was wondering if you have any thoughts on the recent discovery of the mass grave at the Mother and Baby home in Tuam?”
Dempsey flinched, craned his neck forwards and looked at me. Then he shrank back in his chair. In the long silence that followed a mobile phone rang at the back of the theatre and someone sneezed.
“Mr Dempsey?” I prompted.
“It’s a terrible tragedy for all those involved,” he said quietly, “but I’m afraid I don’t really know much about it.”
I gripped the microphone tighter and tried to control the quiver in my voice.
“I think you do,” I said, “I think you know an awful lot about it.”
People turned and stared but to my great surprise I held my ground. The search for my sibling had been long and painful and I was finally f
ace to face with someone who could give me answers. I’d been waiting for this moment for months.
“Maybe I should ask you about the illegal adoptions instead,” I said. “About the babies who were trafficked from the Mother and Baby homes all across Ireland and sold on to families and individuals in the US and here in the UK? I suppose you don’t know anything about that either, do you?”
Dempsey froze then crumpled back into his chair, exchanging a look with the blonde who started to shuffle the papers on the table in front of her.
At the sight of his tired-looking arm flopping over his chair arm, I stopped. He was an old man. He was also my uncle. I’d made my point but it was now time to leave. There was no need to humiliate him further.
I dropped the microphone on my seat, grabbed my coat and bag and stumbled towards the exit, treading on toes and apologising. A nervous-looking usher pushed open the door. Before going through it I glanced back at the stage. The director was telling the audience about a new play the theatre was about to launch and Dempsey was sitting with his chin on his chest like he’d suffered a gunshot wound to the head.
I ran down the corridor into the main reception area. Ushers were standing around and a security guard was talking on a walkie-talkie by a side door. I went through the main entrance and stopped at the top of the steps, a blast of cold night air chilling me to the bone. It was snowing heavily and a white blanket covered the ground. I watched the flakes swaying and drifting like feathers, dusting the road and painting a white rim on the roofs of the line of black taxis queueing up outside. Shivering, I pulled on my coat and wound my scarf around my neck. As I made my way gingerly down the steps, a burst of applause erupted behind me.
My Mother's Children: An Irish family secret and the scars it left behind. Page 17
