by Laura Elliot
‘A chip off the old block,’ he’d said and touched her arm. Gentle kitten strokes, smiling, as if he’d known that sooner or later she would come back to his fancy apartment. The question had refused to go away. Even in the garage with the music mix thudding inside her head, it had been there, demanding an answer.
‘Why did you say I was a bonnie baby?’ Asking the question meant that nothing would ever be the same again but leaving it unanswered was no longer an option.
‘That’s how I always imagined you,’ he’d replied. ‘A strong, healthy child – not a little titch.’
‘Not premature, you mean?’ Lindsey had been unable to continue.
‘What are you asking me?’ He had leaned towards her and stared deep into her eyes.
‘I want to know about my mother. Before I was born… and my father.’ She’d stopped talking when he’d clasped her fingers between his warm, comforting hands.
‘But you know the truth already, don’t you, my poor, hurting child?’ He’d spoken gently when the tears rushed into her eyes and had drawn her nearer. ‘Lindsey, I know how painful the truth can be. But not knowing ourselves is the greatest pain of all. Your mother was a foolish woman in love with the wrong man. Don’t punish her for a mistake that turned into such joy.’ His eyes had glittered with knowledge. ‘Cherish what you have, my dear. Stewart gave you as much love as any father could bestow on his natural child.’
Lindsey had felt no surprise, just an overwhelming tiredness, as if she’d come to the end of long journey that had begun in Havenstone on the night she’d listened to the bitter words Sara had flung at her husband... At Lindsey’s father.
Albert had stroked her hair. His fingers had nestled in the nape of her neck, moving in a slow, circular movement as his voice comforted her. She hadn’t wanted him touching her hair. He had been drinking when she’d arrived and in his eyes she’d seen something unsettling, a flicker, a gleam of satisfaction. He had wanted her to ask the question. Sara had been right about secrets. There was a time when silence was more important than honesty. He had released her secret and she hated him for it.
‘Let me go.’ She’d struggled from his embrace.
He’d held her for an instant longer, his grip hard as steel.
‘Can’t you see his face when you look in the mirror? The sins of the mother visited on the child. The truth is everything but she refused to listen… Wicked girl…’ His voice had broken as if glass had caught in his throat.
She’d walked towards the door, terrified he would try to touch her again. His words had followed her. She hadn’t wanted to hear. He’d stood in his doorway, watching as she’d run down the long corridor towards the elevator. When it glided to a halt and the doors slid noiselessly across, he’d still been standing staring until she was safe in the mirrored space, gliding downwards towards freedom.
She’d walked for a long time. The lights of the city had melted into shimmering walls. The sound of traffic had been loud in her ears. People had moved too fast, jostling against her. Everything had looked the same as before – yet nothing would ever be the same again.
In the garage she could dance into the past. She tapped Peter’s name on her mobile phone, the photograph of his face beside the number. He answered immediately. She was laughing fit to cry and he kept calling her name… Lindsey… Lindsey… But she shouted him down, her voice breaking on the word ‘father’, unable to say it aloud as all the dazzling lights spun her towards the ceiling. She was outside her body, her feet skimming the earth until darkness came like a plunging star and carried her away.
Chapter 32
Beth eased herself out of bed and entered the children’s bedrooms. Each room was a silent oasis of darkness and quiet breathing. She did not enter the attic bedroom. Tonight, Lindsey was staying at Melanie’s house, celebrating her friend’s seventeenth birthday. The Leaving was beginning soon and the strain was showing on her face: she was tense, distracted, turning resolutely away from Beth whenever she asked questions.
She returned to bed and listened to the night sounds: the creaks and sighs of seasoned wood, a distant house alarm activated, a sudden blast of music and laughter, probably a party somewhere nearby. Familiar comforting sounds which she gathered around her as she drifted back to sleep.
The telephone rang at two in the morning. Peter made no sense. How could Lindsey be unconscious and in an ambulance when she was staying overnight with Melanie? He was on his way to the hospital and would meet Beth there. Unconscious. Beth kept whispering the word as she pulled on a pair of trousers, fumbled in the wardrobe for a jacket. She woke Robert and told him to look after the younger children. In the midst of her terror, she realised that although he was shocked he was not surprised.
‘What do you know about this?’ She shook him fiercely and he sobbed, terrified by the dread on her face.
‘She messed around with some stuff – nothing heavy. Some E.’
‘E! You mean ecstasy? Jesus Christ! Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I didn’t want to upset you. You were so worried about everything. Dad and all.’
‘She’s unconscious, Robert. She could die. How am I going to feel then? When it’s too late to be upset?’
‘I’m going to ring Dad,’ he shouted. He ran to the phone, his back turned to her as he rang Stewart’s mobile. ‘I want him here. You should never have sent him away.’
She needed him too. His calm solid presence, comforting her.
‘I’ll do it,’ she said. ‘I’ll ring him as soon as I reach the hospital.’ She hugged her son, inhaling the musky sleep smell on his skin. ‘Don’t worry. She’s going to be all right. I know she is.’
Peter was sitting grimly in the waiting room between Lindsey’s two friends when Beth arrived. From his expression it was obvious that words had been exchanged. The Gardaí had already been called and names taken. Melanie was crying into a tissue, her shoulders heaving. The second girl stared blankly at the opposite wall.
He rose and came quickly towards Beth.
‘It’s all my fault if anything happens,’ she sobbed. ‘I believed she was staying in Melanie’s house. Why didn’t I check? I always used to check…’
The young doctor who spoke to Beth looked exhausted – gritty eyes, his white coat as rumpled as his hair. Lindsey had become dehydrated and collapsed at a rave. Her body had been wrapped in a ‘space wrap’, a tinfoil blanket, he explained, seeing Beth’s terrified expression, to prevent further dehydration. As her friends were unsure if she’d taken any substances other than E, Lindsey’s stomach had been pumped with charcoal fluid and blood samples taken. Her heart was being monitored until the results of the blood tests came back and her medical team could determine if any of her vital organs had been damaged. Beth shied away from the information so casually offered. Her legs trembled as she followed the doctor towards a curtained cubicle.
‘Can I see her?’ Peter joined them as they were about to enter.
‘Are you her father?’ the doctor asked.
Beth did not turn her head when he replied, ‘I’m her uncle.’
They stared down at their daughter as Lindsey drifted in and out of sleep. Her face was stripped of personality, energy, expression. Only the vital elements showed. In her wide firm mouth and long chin they recognised Della Wallace.
‘Lindsey, what are you trying to do to us?’ Peter whispered.
Her eyes flickered, staring at him without comprehension. She tried to speak.
‘Can you remember anything?’ Beth asked, moving to the other side of the bed. They leaned closer to hear her rasping reply. A rave in the disused garage on Estuary Road. The music mix, the lights circling too fast and a pain, as if her heart was forcing its way from her chest. Then nothing, no warning – she stared at the ceiling lights and at the screens surrounding the bed.
‘Please God make me die,’ she sobbed. Her stomach cramped. Waves of blackness came and went but she was unable to throw up.
‘When will Dad b
e here?’ she muttered. ‘I want him with me.’
‘He’ll be here soon,’ Beth promised, her eyes locked on her child, both of them excluding Peter.
A nurse entered the cubicle. ‘Your husband is on the phone, Mrs McKeever.’ She glanced at Peter. ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave, sir. Only immediate family members are allowed.’
Peter hesitated. When he touched Lindsey’s hair she pulled the sheet over her eyes.
‘I want him to go.’ She sobbed louder. ‘Make him go away, nurse. He has no right to be here.’
Without another word he left.
Lindsey slept and woke again. She shook her head from side to side then lifted her hands, staring at her long tapering fingers, as if she was seeing them for the first time. ‘I want Dad here. Will he be here soon?’
‘As soon as he can,’ Beth promised.
‘He’ll kill me.’ Her mouth trembled.
The doctor re-entered the cubicle. ‘Why should your father do that when you can do the job just as easily yourself?’ He stood at the foot of her bed and checked her chart. ‘Feeling better?’ he asked. He did not sound sympathetic or even interested in her reply. He shone a torch into her eyes and felt her pulse. ‘Do you often make such serious attempts to kill yourself?’
‘It wasn’t like that…’ She sunk her chin into the sheet, too embarrassed to continue, and touched her flushed throat, raw where the tube had rubbed against it. ‘I took some stuff, tabs. I didn’t care.’ She spoke so softly that Beth had to bend forward to hear. ‘I went to his apartment and asked him…’ Tears trickled from under her closed eyelids.
‘Whose apartment?’
‘Your uncle told me the truth.’
Beth tried to speak but her lips seemed frozen, her mouth so dry she was unable to swallow.
‘Albert?’ She forced herself to utter his name. ‘Are you talking about him?’
‘I thought he was lonely. He told me about Anaskeagh and about Sara when she was a little girl, and all the relatives I’ve never met. He seemed so kind. But the last time, it seemed as if he hated me for something. He said—’ She stopped suddenly and lay silent, her eyes fixed on the ceiling.
‘What happened? Tell me, Lindsey. You have to tell me everything. Did he harm you in any way?’
‘He told me about my father. My real father.’
Beth saw a tremor pass over her child’s face and accepted that the moment she had dreaded but anticipated since Lindsey’s birth had arrived. She had rehearsed what she would say many times, but explanations seemed futile, so hollow when measured against the loss she saw in her daughter’s eyes.
‘Why wasn’t I told?’ Lindsey cried. ‘Didn’t I have a right to know?’
‘To know what, Lindsey?’ She gripped her hands, relieved when her daughter did not pull away. ‘To know that you wouldn’t have had a loving father if it wasn’t for Stewart? He was with me when you were born. Such happiness in his eyes when he held you, his daughter, his beloved child – our beloved child.’ She sighed. ‘I can’t turn back the clock, my darling. No one can. You were always surrounded by love. You’ve no idea the difference that makes.’
Lindsey leaned over the side of the bed, retching violently. Beth grabbed a sick tray and held it under her chin, wiping her face with a damp towel. She tried to make her understand: old secrets, bare bones, breaking hearts. How could she explain dead passion to a young woman who faced the truth of her existence and found it wanting?
Beth gently laid her daughter’s arms under the sheet and sat by her bed, watching over her. Raucous voices carried from the accident and emergency ward. Screams, arguments and tears, they were quiet noises compared to the clamour in her head. She had spent her life running from a monster, never realising he was always two steps ahead of her. He had dominated her sister’s will and sought to do the same to her. He was her monster and now he had entered the nightmares of her child.
Stewart would arrive soon. He would demand to know everything. His fury would make any contact with the politician impossible, his fledgling company destroyed by the truth.
As if sensing her thoughts, Lindsey stirred and grasped Beth’s hand. ‘Is Dad here yet?’ she murmured.
‘Not yet… but soon. He’s going to be very angry, Lindsey. He trusted Albert Grant… just like you did.’
Lindsey’s mouth quivered as if she could no longer bear the enormity of her thoughts.
‘Make everything all right again, Mum.’ It was a childish whisper, repeated once more before her eyelashes closed over her bruised cheeks.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll protect you all.’ Beth held her daughter’s hand as Lindsey sank back to sleep.
‘I will destroy you, Albert Grant.’ She whispered the words fiercely to herself, as she had never whispered them when her sister was alive. ‘I will destroy you utterly.’
An insect, crushed under her feet. The sole of her shoe stamping him into a smear of blood that would be washed away forever in the rain.
Stewart rang again. ‘I’ll be with you soon,’ he said. ‘I’m driving as fast as I can.’
‘We’re waiting for you, my love,’ she replied. ‘Hurry.’
Part 3
Chapter 33
Everyone’s story has a beginning. An instant when the earth moves. When ovum and sperm collide, collude, create. Biological facts are difficult to dispute. But afterwards, after the downward swim into light, what then? As Eva clawed the air, as she uttered her first mucousy cry, was she held briefly in a stranger’s arms? Or did she lie abandoned, welcomed into the world with a stone?
On her forehead there was a dent, so slight it was difficult to see, covered by purple skin, almost transparent. A shiny purple coin. A fairy kiss that was, according to her father, bestowed on her the instant she was born. When she was older, she demanded a more rational explanation and sensible Liz provided it. A fall from the high steps at the back of the house when she was waltzing around in her baby walker. Her hair was heavy, a curly weight over her forehead. A birthmark was easy to ignore. She never paid attention to it until the night her grandmother confided harsh secrets into her ear and Eva finally understood.
She’d been six months old when she first came to Ashton, a soft blanket replacing sackcloth and the unyielding earth.
‘A cocoon of love,’ said Liz.
‘A fairy princess,’ said Steve. They had been trying for a long time to conceive a child, vigorously at first, then with grim and timely discipline. Month had followed disappointing month, and the arrival of this frail miracle child into their lives was a cause for rowdy celebration. Her parents had deep roots in Ashton and their families, the Frawleys and the Loughreys, arrived in droves to raise their glasses and welcome Eva into their lives.
Steve sang ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ and Liz’s sister, Annie Loughrey, played her fiddle until Liz, mindful of early-morning feeds and mysterious milk formulas, swept the revellers from her doorstep in the small hours.
Ashton was a small Wicklow backwater, and those who lived in its shade of spruce and beech prayed it would remain so. Steve’s garden centre was a familiar landmark with a reputation that brought customers from the hinterland and beyond. Next door, Liz ran the guest house, Wind Fall, catering to commercial travellers and hillwalkers. While the garden centre budded and blossomed with the demands of the seasons, the ordered serenity of Wind Fall never varied.
Eva woke each morning to the sound of her mother’s footsteps passing her bedroom door as Liz went downstairs to prepare breakfast for the overnight guests. She made no secret of her daughter’s adoption, fearing traumatic disclosures in school playgrounds or in the hothouse environment of family parties if elderly relatives drank too much gin. At night, Steve sat by her bed and uttered the magical words that began her story.
‘Eva’s Journey to Happiness’ was a fairy story of thwarted puppy love and family feuding: a vicious vendetta that forced a young girl and boy to give their love child to a convent of kindly nuns, who passed h
er on as a gift to her parents. Eva imagined herself as a parcel, wrapped in birthday paper and streamers. Her body tingled with sympathy for the puppy lovers and their desperate attempts to be together. But she remained untouched by any emotional reality, settling down to sleep afterwards with the same sense of exhausted contentment she experienced after the telling of ‘Rapunzel’ or ‘The Sleeping Beauty’. Maria, her cousin, suffered regular crises of identity and confessed to Eva that she harboured deep suspicions that she too was adopted. It would explain everything. A swan in a nest of ugly ducklings. But that was during her teenage years, the war years when all Maria wanted from life was to muck out stables and vow eternal devotion to horses.
For Eva, horses served only one function: bearers of dung for her father’s precious plants. Maria hated the smell of roses and walked unheedingly over seedling beds until Steve barred her from entering the garden centre. Eva and her cousin were the same age – best friends, incompatible and inseparable.
When Maria grew tired of feeding sugar lumps to her favourite horses and mucking out stables at the Ashton Equestrian Centre, and Eva was not needed in the garden centre, they played in the long meadow grass or swam on summer evenings in Murtagh’s River, soft sloshing mud between their toes, snapping rushes on their bare skin, the flow of water, boggy and brown, rippling over their shoulders. Sensations that belonged to a small space in summer yet, later, looking back to those days, they seemed to span the whole of Eva’s childhood.
One evening, they saw Maria’s older sister, Lorrie, walking hand in hand with Brendan Fitzsimon through the long grass in Murtagh’s Meadow. They sank down in a hollow by the riverbank and failed to notice the girls hiding behind the bushes. A spasm of shock swooped through Eva as Lorrie lifted her slender knees and Brendan lay between them. Eva flattened her body deeper into the earth. When she looked across at her cousin, the glazed brightness of Maria’s eyes and the flushed bloom on her cheeks reflected her own feelings. They began to giggle convulsively, hands clasping mouths, as they crawled away, terrified a snapped twig or the waving ferns would betray their presence.
