Getting married just seemed the obvious thing to do. They decided on a registry office. He had been resident in Australia for two years. She had her birth certificate and passport. There were no difficulties. Until Sadie realised something. Once they got to the registry office he would see her name wasn’t Sally Donovan.
She worried about it for days. One night, in bed beside him, she heard his voice in the darkness.
‘Have you changed your mind, Sally?’
‘About what?’
‘Marrying me.’
‘No. Of course I haven’t.’
‘What’s wrong, then? You’ve been tossing and turning every night since we decided to get married.’
She made her decision. ‘Larry, there’s something I haven’t told you.’
‘You’re already married?’
‘It’s not that.’ She hesitated. ‘I’m not Sally Donovan. It’s not my real name. I changed it when I ran away. I needed to.’
‘What’s your real name?’
‘Sadie. Sadie Faraday.’
‘I’d have changed it too. Sally Donovan’s a much nicer name.’
‘You don’t mind?’
‘Of course I don’t. I can hardly talk. Larry’s not my real name either.’ He pulled her close then, and became serious. ‘Sally, we both did what we had to do to try and make our lives better. You changed your name, ran to Queensland. I changed my name and ran to Australia. And then we met and now we’ll have the same name. If you want to change it to O’Toole, that is? I think Sally O’Toole’s an even better name.’
She found herself in tears. ‘So do I. I’d love to change it to O’Toole.’
‘Stop that crying, then. We can’t live happily ever after if you keep crying, can we?’
He was right. They were starting afresh together now. She decided in that moment there was no need to tell him anything else about her background. ‘What did I do to deserve you?’ she asked. She wasn’t fishing for compliments. She genuinely wondered.
He kissed her. ‘I ask myself the same thing about you.’
They got married and had a small party. They kept working, agreeing that they’d have a honeymoon down the track, when they had more money saved. They moved into their own cheap flat. They didn’t bother with contraception. Six weeks after the wedding they realised they wouldn’t need to for a while, either. Sadie was already pregnant. Ten months after the wedding, Maudie was born.
Larry chose her name. It wasn’t from his family. ‘It’s sentimental, but there was a poem I loved when I was a kid. It was the only one I ever managed to memorise at school. But if you think it’s too old-fashioned… ?’
He recited the poem for her. It was ‘Come into the Garden, Maud’, by Tennyson.
Come into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat, night, has flown,
Come into the garden, Maud,
I am here at the gate alone;
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad,
And the musk of the rose is blown.
Sadie loved it too. Larry had unknowingly continued a Faraday tradition, choosing a name from a poem or a song. It made her sad for a few days, until she reminded herself that it was Larry who had chosen the name, not her. And soon she was too busy caring for Maudie to give her family and their traditions much thought.
She would never have believed her life would turn out this way. She had a husband who loved her, and a husband she loved. A daughter who had arrived in an easy, uncomplicated fashion, and had brought them nothing but joy since. Sadie had literally fallen in love with her at first sight, the moment the midwife passed her daughter to her. She hadn’t been out of love with her since.
Larry was equally smitten. He marvelled at Sadie’s mothering skills. ‘You’re a natural at this, Sally,’ he often said, watching her change their daughter’s nappy, or, later, teaching her to count. ‘You didn’t train as a kindergarten teacher before you met me, did you?’
She laughed it off. It was just instinct, she told him. Instinct and love. And it was. If she had enjoyed and loved Maggie, and she truly had, nothing had prepared her for how she would feel about her own daughter. She revelled in every moment. The look of her. The smell of her. The feel of her. The changing expressions, the little starfish movements of her hands, the intense concentration on her face when she stretched. Sadie’s fascination increased the older Maudie grew. She recorded every highlight. Not in a scrapbook. Something stopped her from doing that. She kept photo albums instead. Lots of them, with detailed captions underneath each photo.
The more involved she got in her own little family in Brisbane, the more her family in Hobart receded in her mind. She continued to write a birthday card to Maggie each year, sent care of the priests, her message brief: ‘I am very well and happy and hope you are too.’ She always received a letter back from Maggie, filled with news. There was always a letter from Leo enclosed, and occasionally letters or notes from her sisters too. Sometimes she read them, sometimes she didn’t. That annual contact was all she needed. It eased her conscience. She knew they were all right. They knew she was all right. That was enough for her. She was too busy, anyway, to worry about them. She and Larry had set up their own cleaning agency, working nearly sixteen hours a day. It was easy to juggle it around caring for Maudie. They just brought her with them whenever possible, or took turns looking after her at home.
Maudie was four when Larry received a letter from a solicitor in Ireland. His mother had died. He was the sole beneficiary of her will. To his great surprise, she had saved a lot of money over the years.
They moved to Dublin three months later. They had enough money to be able to buy a house almost immediately, the same house in Phibsboro they still lived in. Larry set to work researching cleaning companies in Dublin. There was definitely a gap in the market, he declared. If they were prepared to work long hours again, share the workload and get as much as possible done while Maudie was at school, they could set up their own business there as they had done in Australia.
Slowly, it happened. They came in at the right time, with the right approach, and gained a reputation for hard work and reliability. They also kept trying for another baby. Month after month Sadie was disappointed.
Larry wouldn’t let her get too sad about it. ‘We got it so right the first time with Maudie, why try again?’
‘Don’t you want a big family too? How can you always be so optimistic?’
He hadn’t risen to her bait. ‘You get a choice in life, Sally. You can see the bright side or the dark side in everything. I always choose the bright side.’
Would he always, though? She sometimes imagined telling him the truth about her own life. She imagined two reactions. The bright side: ‘You’ve been lying all this time? You didn’t have an abusive family? Maudie has a cousin and a grandfather and four aunts? That’s fantastic! Do you want to go to Tasmania? Will we organise a reunion?’
Or the dark side: ‘You lied to me from the start? You invented a terrible childhood, knowing that I had been through it for real? All these years have been built on a lie? And you expect me to ever be able to trust you again?’
Truth was too important to Larry. She had seen him with Maudie, expressing disappointment when she told even the smallest of white lies. She couldn’t risk it.
The truth would come as too much of a shock to Maudie too. Sadie couldn’t do it to her daughter. Maudie knew only that her mother had had a difficult childhood in South Australia and that she had chosen to be separate from her family. Maudie had just accepted it and never questioned it. She had no reason to, after all. Why would her mother lie to her about something as important as that?
Sadie rarely missed her family. Once she had made her decision, it was easy to stick with it. Larry and Maudie were her family now. And it wasn’t a complete estrangement. Sadie knew about Leo’s success with his inventions, Myles and Juliet’s move to Manchester and their expanding business empire, Miranda’s life in Singapore, Eliza’s accid
ent and her reincarnation as a life coach, Clementine’s research projects in Antarctica, Maggie’s work success and life in London. At any time over the twenty years she could have picked up the phone and slipped right into their lives. And destroyed the new life she’d built for herself in an instant.
Sitting alone in the living room, staring out at the garden, Sadie decided she had to stop worrying so much. That journalist’s mention of Tasmania had been pure coincidence. She had to focus on all the great things in her life – Larry, Maudie and her first grandchild on its way. They were the real things. She wasn’t going to tell Larry the truth. There was no point. She had made the decision twenty years ago to leave her family. It had been the right one then and it was the right one now.
Time for bed. She walked around the living room, closing curtains, moving newspapers off the table and smoothing down the cushions on the sofa. As she plumped the red one on the armchair, she noticed an odd bulge. She reached inside the cover. It was a bottle made from purple glass. A bottle of perfume. The Moonstruck.
She smiled. She’d been waiting for this. It had been several weeks since she had managed to slip it into Maudie’s bag one afternoon, disguised inside a parenting magazine.
They’d been passing the Moonstruck back and forth between them like this for more than two years, ever since Maudie had found it in Sadie’s wardrobe. Sadie had kept it all those years, carrying it around Australia, from hostel to hostel, bringing it to Ireland with her. It was her one link with her sisters. One that brought good memories.
Sadie didn’t tell Maudie that it had once belonged to her mother. She made up a story on the spot, telling her daughter that she and a schoolfriend used to play a game, passing it back and forth between them, the rule being that it was never to be spoken about. Maudie had opened the stopper and pulled a face. ‘No wonder you didn’t want to keep it. It’s disgusting.’
Sadie pretended not to notice when Maudie slipped the bottle into her own handbag. She had also said nothing to Maudie when exactly a week later she was having breakfast and it fell out of the Cornflakes packet and into her bowl with a clatter.
‘Good God,’ Larry said across the table. ‘Those free plastic toys are getting huge these days.’
Once, during a visit to Maudie and Lorcan’s flat, Sadie hid it in their fruit bowl. A fortnight later, she found it in her own house again, tucked in one of the windowboxes. One Christmas she noticed it hanging from a branch of their Christmas tree. Back and forth it had gone, with never a word said about it between them.
She was smiling as she went upstairs to bed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
They heard Miranda’s car arriving long before she herself appeared. A beeping of the horn all the way up the laneway. Moments later, her voice from the yard outside.
‘Where is he? Where is this mystery man? Let me take a look.’
Inside the kitchen, Leo, Maggie, Gabriel, Juliet, Clementine and Eliza sprang up from the table. They had all been there together since early that day. Arriving from different countries into different airports, they’d somehow managed to get to the Donegal house within ten minutes of each other.
Miranda had phoned to say her flight had been delayed. ‘You’re not even allowed to speak to each other until I get there, though. Do you hear me?’ she said. ‘Go to your rooms and wait. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’
Juliet had been the first to meet Gabriel. She was instantly welcoming. ‘You’ve shocked us. I hope you don’t mind me telling you that. But it’s a pleasure to meet you. If you can survive the next few days, you’ll survive anything.’
Maggie anxiously kept an eye on Gabriel, but he was more relaxed than she was, laughing with Juliet, enjoying Leo’s tour around the house and yard. Juliet had the house looking beautiful. It was festooned in Christmas decorations, with a small pine tree in the hallway. Maggie’s presents – the ones she had sent to Donegal, at least – were in a colourful pile underneath. Gabriel was taking in everything. He’d been like that since they arrived at Belfast airport – asking questions and making observations. They’d taken a detour into the city to collect the hired camera equipment that Leo – or his wonder concierge, at least – had managed to organise from New York.
Maggie had continued reading the diaries as Leo drove, anxious to get through them all as soon as possible. She’d been conscious of her grandfather watching her throughout the flight too, obviously trying to gauge her reaction. She’d told him she wanted to read through all nine notebooks before she spoke to him about them. It had almost been a relief to arrive in Glencolmcille and tuck them away out of sight in her bag. His anxiety was making her anxious.
Clementine and Eliza had arrived next. Maggie hugged her mother close for a long time, before introducing Gabriel, feeling as shy as if he was her real fiancé. The excitement in the house increased with Miranda’s arrival. There were more rapid exchanges of news; details from Clementine about Antarctica; comments about how well everyone was looking, that New York was obviously good for Maggie. And most especially, remark after remark about the surprise engagement.
Between Leo, Gabriel and Maggie, they somehow pulled it off. There was one awkward moment when Maggie realised she and Gabriel hadn’t actually discussed the question of public shows of affection. As they all sat talking in the living room, the two of them should have been side by side, even arm in arm. Maggie was too self-conscious to be able to make the first move. Gabriel somehow picked up her concern. He quite naturally came over to where she was sitting on one of the big armchairs, sat on the side and draped his arm across the back. He gave her the quickest of winks. She gave him the quickest of winks in return.
She knew Clementine was noticing everything. As soon as it was possible, her mother came across and spoke to Maggie on her own.
She gently touched her daughter’s cheek. ‘Are you all right, Maggie? Really?’
Maggie nodded. ‘I am, really. I’m glad to be here.’
‘Not as glad as I am.’ Clementine lowered her voice. ‘He seems lovely.’
‘He is. I really like him.’ It was nice not to have to lie all the time.
Clementine laughed out loud. ‘Well, I’d hope so.’
In the centre of the room, Miranda was looking like a film star and behaving like a queen. Maggie shot Gabriel a glance. He was smiling. He’d enjoyed her stories about Miranda. It seemed he was planning on enjoying the real thing too.
Miranda gave him an exaggerated inspection. ‘Yes, our surveillance reports have been accurate. You are handsome.’ Then she shook her finger at him. ‘So far so good, young man. But let me warn you, you had better look after that Maggie of ours or there will be trouble. The reason we look like a coven of witches is because we are a coven of witches.’
‘She’s in safe hands, I promise,’ Gabriel said.
‘It’s all very well living love’s young and spontaneous dream, but I really think we need to get to the nitty-gritty. When did you meet? Where are you planning on living? Have you set a date?’
‘Miranda, would you leave them alone?’ Juliet said. ‘Maggie, Gabriel, ignore her, would you?’
‘I know we’ve been trying to for years,’ Eliza added.
‘I’m only asking what you’re all thinking,’ Miranda said.
Leo leaned across to Gabriel, smiling. He hadn’t stopped smiling since they arrived. ‘Gabriel, imagine. I’ve had nearly fifty years of this.’
‘You deserve a medal,’ Gabriel said.
‘Good ploy, Gabriel,’ Miranda said, disgusted. ‘Sucking up to the grandfather-in-law.’
‘I wasn’t sucking up,’ Gabriel began, before Maggie, Clementine, Eliza and Juliet all laughed, telling him, in unison, to just ignore her.
Maggie didn’t get any time alone with Gabriel until after dinner. They had all gathered around the dining table in the large room that had the best view over the sea and the fields. Leo sat at the head, telling stories, so happy to be at the centre of them. Juliet moved back and
forth from the kitchen, delivering several different casseroles, fluffy mashed potatoes and crisp green salads. This wasn’t their July Christmas dinner – that would take place the following evening.
Conversation flowed easily. Clementine talked about her research. Miranda talked about a recent passenger, a famous film star who had locked herself in the first-class toilet with her boyfriend and unfortunately been unable to get out again. Eliza spoke about a new client management plan she was devising, until Miranda too obviously yawned and changed the subject.
Leo waited until coffee was served before making his other announcement. ‘I know I told you I wanted you all here for a special reason, and I think this is the perfect time to tell you. Of course, the main one was to hear Maggie and Gabriel’s news —’
‘To Maggie and Gabriel,’ Miranda declared, holding up her glass. It was the third toast to them that evening. The champagne and wine were flowing very freely. ‘Thank heavens you went to New York, Leo, or we would never have discovered Maggie’s little secret life.’
‘Yes, Maggie,’ Clementine said, in a pretend stern voice. ‘When were you going to tell us?’
Maggie shifted in her seat. She knew she looked as uncomfortable as she felt. ‘I would have got around to it, I promise. It’s —’
‘She’s lying, actually.’
It was Gabriel speaking. They all turned to him. Maggie’s heart started thumping.
‘Maggie and I were going to live there secretly together forever. She’d told me so much about all of you that I thought our best chance of survival was to stay as far away as possible.’
‘Gabriel!’ Maggie said.
‘I’m joking, I promise. Leo beat us to it with the news, but only by a few days. We were planning on ringing you all when we first decided, but Maggie wanted to take it slowly. I think after all that happened with Andrew —’
‘Angus,’ Maggie said quickly.
‘Angus,’ he corrected smoothly, ‘she was worried that you might think it was just a rebound relationship. But it’s not. Well, I hope it’s not.’ He turned to Maggie, his face serious, his eyes twinkling. ‘Please tell me it’s not, Maggie.’
Those Faraday Girls Page 42
