The Gravity of Love

by Noelle Harrison

  ‘Is that what happened? Did my mother go to live in France?’

  ‘That was the plan,’ Josie said. ‘Mr Martell contacted cousins in New York about finding a family who might want to adopt you in America. He wanted there to be as much distance between Aoife and you as possible.’

  Josie shook her head, mournful now. ‘Oh, I will never forget the hysterics. Aoife and Mrs Martell begged him to change his mind, and I was pure torn apart by it. We all doted on you, darling,’ she said, patting Joy’s hand.

  Joy blinked. It seemed impossible to think that this stranger before her used to bathe her as a baby, sing her songs, rock her to sleep.

  ‘I could see the defiance in Aoife’s eyes, and I was afraid,’ Josie said. ‘She wasn’t going to give you up so easily, and the night before the American couple were due to collect you, she took off with you on her horse.’

  Joy could see it. A moonless stormy night in Mayo, a jittery black stallion, Aoife struggling to mount the horse, her baby girl wriggling in her arms. A desperate young mother with nowhere to turn.

  ‘I don’t know what she was thinking,’ Josie said. ‘She had nowhere to go. No money, no life anywhere else. How could she look after you if her own father refused to help her?’ Josie paused. ‘Still I refuse to believe what everyone else says.’

  Josie leaned her elbows on the table and looked Joy squarely in the face. ‘That’s why I came to tell you the true story today. I was afraid that you might hear different from someone else.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Joy whispered. ‘But what does everyone else say?’

  Again she saw an image of her mother, a faceless ghost, on her big black horse. It made her shiver, her age-old dread of horses resurfacing.

  ‘They say that she was possessed, that she put you up in front of her on her horse and rode straight towards the cliff edge. They say that she was going to ride her horse into the abyss, throw the both of you off the edge. But I can’t believe Aoife would do that.’

  Joy could hear the angry sea bashing against the rocks. The call of the ocean, as her mother must have heard it.

  ‘Whatever happened, the horse reared and threw you off before you even got to the cliff. They found Aoife cradling you in her arms, beside herself with fear that she had done you damage. But you were fine. Right as rain. Tough, like all the Martells.’

  Josie smiled at her and patted her hand again, took her fingers in her own.

  ‘The next day the American couple arrived. Aoife wouldn’t even leave her room to say goodbye to you. She was broken, you see. I think she thought you were better off without her, Joyce.’

  Joyce. Her real name. She thrilled at the strangeness of someone calling her by it.

  ‘The night after you left, Aoife disappeared. We never saw her again. It broke her mother’s heart.’ Josie sighed. ‘Kathleen died a year later, and it broke old Mr Martell’s heart too, but he refused to speak about Aoife, or you, ever again.’

  Joy sat back in her seat. So that was the story of how her life began. It was full of drama, like a fiction, an adventure with people from past times. She couldn’t quite believe it.

  ‘Did you meet the American couple who came to get me?’ she asked Josie after a moment.

  ‘I did, and they were a lovely couple,’ Josie said. ‘That’s how I knew you would be grand. I remember the gentleman in particular. We had a good chat about all the different flowers in the garden. I remember you gave him a bunch of buttercups. It looked to me like love at first sight.’

  Joy nodded, feeling tears prick her eyes. How she wished her father were with her now.

  ‘Tell me, Joyce, did you have a happy childhood?’ Josie asked.

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘Tell me, darling, about your life in America. It would make an old woman who once loved you happy to hear all about it.’

  So Joy told Josie about growing up in Scottsdale. As she described her childhood, the annual Miracle of the Roses parade that she took part in with their church, how her mom used to fuss over her dress and her hair so she looked just right, the wildflower hikes with her father, meeting and falling in love with Eddie and the birth of her two children, Ray and Heather, she felt a hint of pride. She had always thought she was a failure, a nobody, but in Josie’s eyes she could see that her life was something of an achievement.

  At the end, when they had drained the pot of its last drop, Josie wiped her eyes with her handkerchief before pulling out a folded piece of paper.

  ‘I have something else to tell you now. A few years ago a lady came by,’ Josie said. ‘She told me she had known Aoife for many years in London, and that she had been very good to her. Aoife had confided in her and told her about the little baby girl she’d lost. This lady gave me Aoife’s address. She told me that if you ever came looking for Aoife to make sure to give this to you. So that’s exactly what I’m doing.’

  Joy opened the piece of paper with shaking hands. On it in neat black script was an address in London.

  ‘This is where my mother lives?’

  ‘According to that lady it is,’ Josie said. ‘Although I never got her name. She was Irish, lived in Sligo I believe.’

  Strandhill, County Sligo, Easter Sunday,26 March 1989

  Moonlight streamed in through the windows as the night closed in on Marnie’s house in Strandhill. Lewis and Caitlin, or Cait as she had told him to call her, had been talking for hours. None of this felt real to him, and yet every time he looked at Cait, he saw the striking resemblance she bore to Lizzie and it slapped him in the face again. He had a daughter. He imagined his sister’s laughter, the amusement in her voice: ‘Now that got you, didn’t it, Lewis?’

  Along with the shock, the trepidation, the joy of this, Lewis also felt grief. He hadn’t seen Cait grow up, and now she was a young woman on the cusp of entering the world. Apparently he’d just caught her in time. She’d been sorting through some of her mother’s things and preparing to put the house in Strandhill up for sale, and tomorrow she was travelling back to London, where she was based. She was moving in with her boyfriend and working as a waitress for the summer. She already had a place at Goldsmiths art college in the autumn that she had deferred for a year because her mother had been sick.

  His daughter wanted to be an artist, just like her mother. It didn’t surprise him.

  Cait opened a bottle of red wine and offered to make him some dinner, but he wasn’t sure he could eat anything. In the end they picked at cheese and crackers while drinking the wine. To eat and drink helped his heart slow down. Every now and again he felt a deep, intense pain in his chest as he reminded himself that Marnie was dead. He couldn’t quite believe he had come here to find her gone.

  ‘How did you find out I was in Arizona?’ Lewis asked Cait.

  ‘Your address was in one of Mum’s old address books. It looked like she’d written it in years ago. I don’t know how she had it.’

  ‘She never once contacted me,’ Lewis said. ‘I promise I had no idea about you, Cait.’

  ‘Do you think you would have come back to see me if you had known?’ She looked at him warily.

  ‘Of course,’ he said.

  ‘Even though my mum married my dad . . . I mean Pete.’

  ‘I would have wanted to know my own child. My daughter.’

  Cait gave him a hard stare. ‘It’s easy to say that now, but you don’t know, do you? I mean, you have your own family in Arizona, don’t you?’

  ‘I was married, but that’s over now,’ he said.

  ‘No kids?’

  ‘No.’

  He thought of Samantha all those miles away and the years they had travelled together. It made him sad to realise now how they had clung to each other out of loneliness. But she had made him part of her family, and he would always be grateful for that.

  ‘So am I your only child?’ Cait asked him, looking at him with her brilliant green eyes.

  ‘Yes. Just you.’

  ‘Damn, I was hoping for some siblings as
well.’ She gave him a wicked grin before turning serious again.

  ‘Did you know about my mum’s diary?’

  ‘No, I had no idea.’

  ‘She kept one the first couple of years she lived in London, until 1967. She just stopped writing them then. I guess she got too busy, what with work and having a baby.’

  He thought back to Marnie’s little flat in South Kensington. His memory searched the bedroom, the tousled bed, the sunflower-yellow curtains floating in the spring breeze and the rainbow colours of Marnie’s clothes hanging in the stuffed wardrobe with the open doors. He saw the bedside table. Was it his imagination or was there sometimes a notebook on it, pen lying across it at the ready.

  ‘After my mum died I had to go through all her things. When I found the diary for 1967 I was curious,’ she said. ‘You know, because it was the year of my birth. Little did I know what I would find out.’ She sighed, tugging on her wild hair. ‘I was surprised that she’d only written in it up until 14 April. Then it’s just blank pages.’

  ‘That’s the last day I saw your mother,’ Lewis said.

  ‘So what happened between you and Mum?’ Cait asked. ‘Why did you run out on her all those years ago?’

  Lewis shook his head. ‘It’s complicated.’ He heard his voice trembling.

  Cait considered him for a moment, as if waiting for him to expand. But he didn’t know where to begin. He had failed Lizzie, and he had failed Marnie. What would his new daughter think of him when she knew everything about him?

  ‘Do you want to hear the last thing my mother wrote?’ Cait said, getting up from the couch and walking over to a bag hanging on the back of the door. She took it down and unzipped it.

  ‘I carry the diary with me everywhere,’ she explained. ‘I like to read bits of it every now and again. Mike thinks I’m obsessed, but I can’t help it.’

  Lewis watched her pull out a leather-bound notebook, wound with string. Immediately he felt a jolt of recognition. He had seen that diary. It had been lying on Marnie’s kitchen table the last time he had been in her flat, but he had always thought it was merely a sketchbook for work.

  Cait leafed through it, until she came to one page. She looked up at Lewis uncertainly. ‘Do you want me to read it?’

  ‘Go ahead,’ he said, his voice barely louder than a whisper.

  Cait swept her red hair away from her face as she looked down at her mother’s journal and began to read. ‘I went to the hospital and found Lewis . . .’

  Then she slammed the diary shut. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do it,’ she said, handing it to him. ‘You read it. Later.’

  She picked up the wine bottle and refilled both their glasses. ‘When you read the diary, you’ll see why I thought she told you she was pregnant and you walked out on her,’ she told him.

  Marnie was in the room with them now. Lewis could see her in that green coat. ‘The last time I saw your mother was that morning in the hospital – the day my sister died.’

  ‘I guess you were very upset?’ Cait asked him.

  ‘Yes. Lizzie was only twenty-four years old when she died. Not much older than you.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘She mixed drugs with antidepressants and had a seizure . . . She was very sad, troubled; a lost soul, really.’

  The phone rang in the hall but Cait didn’t move.

  ‘Aren’t you going to answer that?’ Lewis asked her.

  ‘It’s Mike,’ she said. ‘He said he’d ring at midnight. I’ll call him back in a while.’

  ‘I wish I had known Marnie was pregnant,’ Lewis told Cait. ‘All our lives would be so different.’

  ‘Would you have stayed – married her?’

  ‘Yes, Cait, I did want to marry her. I was just too much of a coward to ask her,’ Lewis said.

  His daughter didn’t reply. He knew it would take more than his words here tonight to make her believe him.

  ‘It’s getting late,’ she said, ‘and I have to get up early tomorrow to catch the train to Dublin.’

  ‘Right.’ He nodded, standing up awkwardly. ‘Do you have family to see?’

  ‘No, I’ve cousins in Sligo town, but we’ve already said our goodbyes. My grandparents aren’t around any more.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  She shrugged. ‘I’m used to being alone,’ she said. ‘For years it was just me and Mum, after my dad – I mean Pete – died. The only other person around is my godmother. I’ve been living in London with her on and off for the past six months.’

  ‘Cait, you don’t have to stop calling Pete your dad. He brought you up. He was your dad.’

  ‘Yes, and I did love him, although he’s been gone so long now. I was twelve when he died.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I knew Pete. He was a good guy.’

  It pained Lewis to say this, but it was true. Pete had rescued Marnie from the disgrace of being an unmarried mother in 1967. And Lewis couldn’t help but be glad that Marnie, and her daughter, had ended up with a gentle soul like Pete rather than someone like George or Frankie.

  ‘Where are you going now?’ Cait asked as he picked up his jacket.

  ‘To be honest, I don’t know.’

  ‘I think we’ve drunk too much wine for you to drive. Do you want to stay the night here?’

  *

  Putney, London, 30 June 1974

  Sometimes when Marnie watched her daughter, she reminded her of Lewis. Cait’s fierce concentration when she was drawing with her crayons, the tip of her tongue just visible between her lips; her expression swiftly transforming into a stern frown if she was displeased with what she had created. Her features were similar to Lewis’s sister Lizzie though, with her red hair and lively green eyes. At times the similarity disturbed Marnie, but she knew her daughter’s destiny would be brighter than her late, unknown aunt’s.

  Marnie still found it hard to believe that the last time she had seen Lewis was in the hospital corridor just after Lizzie had passed away. If she had known then that he would never show up again on her doorstep would she have walked away so quickly? She had believed she was in love with him. She had wanted him to marry her. Marnie could see now it would have been a huge mistake.

  She had been lucky. When it had been clear that Lewis was never coming back, and it had dawned on her that she was unmarried and pregnant, one thing she’d known for sure was that she couldn’t go back to Ireland. The shame, the stigma, would have killed her parents. She could have ended up being sent to one of those awful mother and baby homes and forced to have the child adopted. She had no intention of giving up her baby. It was Eva who had saved her. Eva had promised that she and George would take care of her, and Marnie had never forgotten the generosity of her good friend. Many times Eva had lied to her husband, saying that she had needed Marnie to mind her boys, just so she could go round to their house and lie on their couch when the morning sickness overwhelmed her.

  Eva had also tried her best to find Lewis but had only come up with dead ends. Apparently his mother had no idea where he was. He’d just disappeared the morning that Lizzie died. Never even went to his sister’s funeral. George’s rage at the office had been mammoth. He had called Lewis ‘the ingrate’, swore he would never work as a designer again and became completely paranoid that Lewis would set up his own agency and steal his clients. But none of them had ever heard of Lewis Bell as a graphic designer anywhere else. He had vanished.

  In the first few days after he disappeared, Marnie had worried that he might have hurt himself – that Lizzie’s death had pushed him over the edge – but a week after he’d disappeared, his car had been found parked at Heathrow Airport. Lewis had run away, and Marnie hated him for it. Granted, he hadn’t known she was pregnant, but she’d thought they were in love. How could he have left her high and dry without a word?

  Now, seven years later, Marnie had come to understand that what she and Lewis had shared was not real love. It had been passionate, intoxicating, consuming, but it would never have lasted. Wha
t she had with Pete was lasting because it was built upon a foundation of understanding, respect and truth.

  Pete had been there, all along, right before her eyes, yet Marnie had never actually seen who he was until Lewis had left.

  Her husband was strong. He might not look it, being tall and skinny, even vulnerable with his little round glasses, but his backbone was made of steel. He was her rock.

  It was Eva who had encouraged her to date Pete just a few weeks after Lewis disappeared and before the pregnancy was showing.

  ‘I can see the way he looks at you, Marnie,’ she’d said. ‘That man would do anything for you.’

  Marnie had seen it too. Pete had adored her. But she hadn’t wanted to take advantage of him. She had been heartbroken over Lewis, in bits, a mess, and she hadn’t wanted to cling to the first life raft that came along. Yet Pete had surprised her. On their third date Marnie had begun to really talk to him about design, and he’d seemed pleased that she knew so much. They had talked for hours, and Marnie had confided that she had helped Lewis out with his designs.

  At Pete’s request the next day, Marnie had brought her portfolio into Studio M. It was impossible to hide everything she had done on Macht Shavers, Dalliance Shoes and the Phoenix International Airlines pitch. Pete had looked across his drawing board at Marnie, stared right into her true heart with those steady hazel eyes of his and asked her that crucial question.

  ‘Marnie, was it you who really created all these designs, and the corporate image for Phoenix Airlines, not Lewis?’

  ‘We did them together.’ She didn’t know why she had still protected Lewis. It had been over a month since he’d disappeared, and it was clear he was never coming back.

  ‘Marnie, tell me the truth – that’s all I ask,’ Pete had said. ‘We have to be honest with each other.’

  Marnie had thought about the baby inside her, Lewis’s child, and how she hadn’t told Pete about that yet. ‘Yes,’ she’d admitted. ‘It’s all my work.’

  ‘My God,’ he’d replied, shocked. ‘Why didn’t Lewis tell George? We have to tell him right now.’