The Carmel Sheehan Story

by Jean Grainger

  Your loving Mum, Dolly.

  It wasn’t until Carmel saw the tear drop on the page in front of her, smudging the ink, that she realised she was crying. Her mother loved her, she really loved her and regretted giving her up. Nobody had ever said those words to Carmel before. Some of the nuns had been fond of her, she knew that, but to hear someone say that they loved you after all these years, it was overwhelming. She read all of the letters, forty in all. She managed to build up a story of what had happened to her mother. It wasn’t anything she hadn’t heard a hundred times before but when it was her own story, the story of how she got to be in the world, it was fascinating. Some were short, the pain of loss palpable through the decades, others were long and newsy as if catching up with an old friend. She said she had to give Carmel up. She was young and unmarried and was forced into a Magdalen Laundry, a workhouse for women who found themselves pregnant out of wedlock. She wasn’t given a choice in the matter. She never wanted to, but she was forced to leave her baby once she was ten days old. Her plan had been to go to England, make some money, and come back for Carmel once she was set up, but when she came back to the laundry where she gave birth, thy said the child had been adopted. They slammed the door in her face.

  Carmel had to stop reading then, panic setting in again. She assumed she came out of a Madelene Laundry, but she had no memory of it. All she knew was Trinity House.

  Dolly never married, she never had any more children, she lived and worked quietly in England, in a variety of dress shops, and ladies’ tailors. She loved clothes and she eventually earned enough to buy a small house in the village of Barton le Clay. She had a little business, dressmaking, and she loved it.

  Every single year, sometimes twice or three times, as often as funds permitted, she would come to Ireland, looking for her daughter, but she was never given any information apart from the fact that her child had been adopted and that there was no way to know anything further.

  The last few letters tell of her sadness to sell her little cottage and to move into Aashna House, the nursing home run by the son of her friend Nadia. Carmel learned how close to the Pakistani community her mother became through her career as a seamstress and how, when the time came when she could no longer take care of herself, the welcoming embrace of Aashna House run by Sharif was the obvious choice. Carmel tried to remember if she’d ever met a Pakistani person before Sharif Khan, but she was sure she hadn’t.

  When she finished reading she held the letters up to her face and maybe she was imagining it, but she thought she could smell a sweet scent, lavender maybe. Just to hold in her hands, letters written to her from her own mother was astounding. Her eye rested on the photo album; she was reticent, not wanting to shatter the illusion that she’d built up in her head of her mother. As she read the letters she imagined Dolly as small, slim and kind-faced, with white coiffed hair and a smart skirt and jacket. She put the letter down and opened the album.

  The first photo was of a baby, in black and white but a fair-haired baby, wrapped in a shawl of some kind. She flipped the photo page and read on the back.

  ‘Carmel, five days old, April 1976’

  Carmel flicked it back again and stared at the child in the photo. It was her. Carmel as a baby. She never pictured herself as a baby before. The nuns had no pictures, there was never a reason to take any.

  The next photo was of a couple walking on a beach, the man was long-haired and bearded, wearing a kind of loose flowing shirt and jeans. The woman, or girl really, she couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen, had long brown hair, hanging loose down her back and a yellow and mustard patterned maxi dress. Both were laughing happily into the camera.

  Carmel flipped it over, ‘Me and Joe, Dollymount, 1973.’

  So that was Dolly. She was pretty, and slender. Carmel tried to see a likeness to her own in the face but failed. She looked at the man more closely, he had blond, what the nuns called dirty blond, hair and a kind of straggly beard. He looked like a hippie, but he had lovely straight teeth. Was Joe her father?

  There were only two other pictures. The first was a group shot of a dark-skinned woman wearing a bright pink sari, a tall, handsome man, clearly her husband, with one arm around her shoulder, and in front of them a little boy with almond shaped black eyes, smiling shyly for the camera. She turned it over.

  Nadia, Khalid and Sharif, 1975.

  The last one was a recent photo, based on the fashion. In it there was a large group of people, twenty or more, and in the middle of them a slight, smiling woman, in a wheelchair. She was very thin, and her skin had a yellow pallor. The woman was wearing a bright turquoise scarf on her head, tied behind, pirate style and was dressed in an elegant white shirt tucked into jeans. She wore long silver earrings, and around her neck was a necklace with a bright blue stone. The only person Carmel recognised in the picture was Sharif, he had a stethoscope around his neck and was smiling brightly at the woman in the wheelchair.

  Carmel flicked it over.

  ‘Me after Chemo at my birthday party in Aashna House. Sharif said I needed to take this one with him in it so you’ll believe him if he ever finds you.’

  Carmel felt a lump in her throat, the ‘if’ was scribbled out and ‘when’ was written over it.

  ‘The earrings and necklace are yours now darling. I got them in Karachi, from my friend Nadia when we went to visit her family, and I love them.’

  Carmel opened the box, it definitely looked foreign, in Ireland, boxes for jewellery wouldn’t be that colourful, and there, sitting on the blue satin lining, were the earrings and the necklace.

  Her phone beeped and she jumped.

  ‘Customers please note bin collections will be on Saturday due to bank holiday.’

  She dismissed the automated text from the council but noticed the time.

  It was 4pm, Bill would be home in two hours, looking for his dinner, and Julia was finished school, she could call in at any moment. Panic gripped her, where had the last two hours gone? She had to get back. She couldn’t bear answering their questions about where she’d been all day.

  She gathered the letters and album into the envelope and was just about to place the box in beside them when she stopped. She opened the jeweled box again and took out the earrings and the necklace and slowly put them on. She stood up and looked in the mirror. She looked dreadful, eyes red from crying, mascara smudged all over her face, make-up blotchy.

  A knock on the door. She started in shock. Maybe it was the hotel management, knowing she shouldn’t be in there, coming to throw her out.

  ‘Carmel?’ She heard her name through the door.

  Sharif! She hadn’t time to fix her face, she’d have to open it.

  ‘Just a minute!’ she called, running to the bathroom to splash her face. She patted her face with tissue, afraid to use the lovely white towels in case she left make-up on them. Looking marginally better, she opened the door.

  ‘Hello. Thanks for letting me use the room…’ she began, anxiously trying to fill in the silence.

  ‘It was my pleasure.’ He smiled, and she noticed how his eyes crinkled.

  ‘I was just going…’ she said, making for the door.

  ‘Please,’ he laid a hand on her arm once more. ‘Please let us order some tea, perhaps some refreshments for you, you have not eaten I assume?’

  Carmel was flustered. ‘No. No thanks, I’ve to get back, my husband…and his sister…they will be wondering where I am and…’

  ‘Please,’ he repeated. ‘I have some things I want to tell you, things about your mother, I would like to talk to you about her.’ His measured and serene manner was in direct contrast to Carmel’s disquiet. She looked at him and remembered what her mother had written. ‘He is a special man, trust him.’

  ‘Ok. I’d like to hear it...I’m sorry, this is just all so unexpected. And I’m sorry for running off earlier, I just got overwhelmed.’ She allowed herself to be led back to the chair by the table. Once she was seated, he we
nt to the hotel phone.

  ‘Hello, this is Dr. Khan in 353, could you please send up tea for two, an extra big pot if you can, as well as a selection of sandwiches? Thank you.’

  ‘So, you’re a doctor,’ Carmel blurted, instantly realising how gauche that sounded. She was just like Julia, who would manage to put aside her hatred of everything foreign for a doctor.

  ‘Yes I am, an oncologist. The home I run in Bedfordshire is a care home for those in the last stages of life. That is how your mother came to me, though I have known her for years of course, she was a wonderful friend to my mother. We all miss Dolly very much, we were very close.’

  Chapter 5

  He sat down opposite her.

  ‘So you saw the pictures? Those pieces are lovely on you by the way. She would have been so proud to see her daughter wearing her precious things. Did you read all of the letters?’

  Now that she knew he was a doctor his manner made more sense, reassuring and kind. He was comfortable asking delicate questions. Carmel felt when he looked at her he was gazing into her mind.

  ‘Shall I tell you about her?’ he asked, his dark eyes never leaving hers.

  Carmel’s face must have registered her dilemma. She’d buried her curiosity about her mother all her life, as a way to save herself from the emotional rollercoaster that meeting birth parents inevitably seemed to cause. Sharif misinterpreted the reason for her hesitation however.

  ‘I’m sure he’ll understand.’ Sharif spoke quietly, sitting still, almost aware that any sudden movements on his part would send her scurrying out the door.

  ‘Ha!’ Carmel was aware how loud her reaction was, and how inappropriate it must seem. She felt her cheeks redden and she rushed to explain,

  ‘Sorry, you must think I’m awful. It’s just that he wouldn’t, understand I mean.’

  Sharif looked perplexed. ‘But he does know of your circumstances, the fact that you were adopted?’

  ‘I wasn’t.’ The pain of years of rejection weighed heavily in those two words.

  ‘But I assumed, that you were placed into care and adopted. That’s what your mother thought as well.’

  Sharif lost a little of his assurance and composure.

  ‘No. I never was, I was born in a laundry, that’s where they put women like my mother, you know, who were pregnant. I don’t know how long I was there, there are no records. I must have been moved to Trinity House at some stage, that’s a children’s home out in Drumcondra run by the Sisters of Charity, I spent all of my childhood there. Then, when I was eighteen, the nuns told me it was time for me to move on, the state wouldn’t pay for my care anymore, but I had nowhere to go. Because I’d been there the longest, they allowed me to stay on, as a helper. I didn’t earn anything, but I got room and board in return for taking care of the little ones and things like that. I used to help in the convent as well with some of the older nuns. I liked it actually, they were lovely mostly.’

  Sharif looked at her in admiration.

  ‘I’m amazed at how you can be so calm. I, we, always thought you had been adopted.’ He paused. ‘But please, I’m sorry for interrupting. Please go on.’

  ‘Well, I suppose I always knew I couldn’t stay there forever. The nuns never put pressure on me or anything, but the authorities used to visit, and the sisters were in breach of the regulations by keeping me there, and I hated the idea of them getting in trouble. But I had no proper skills, I was okay at school, but not brilliant or anything, and anyway further education wasn’t available for kids in care. Then one day, they got a letter, from a widower, asking if there were any young women interested in meeting him and his children, with a view to marriage. I suppose it must sound like a story from the fifties rather than the nineties, the nuns even remarked on how ludicrous a suggestion it was in that day and age, but I said I thought he sounded nice and I’d be happy to meet him.’

  If Sharif thought that it was a mad or tragic story, his face gave no indication of it. ‘Go on.’

  ‘And so I met Bill one day in Trinity House and he was quiet but nice, at least I thought he was. He took me out for a cup of tea, told me about his home and the farm and his little twin daughters. And so, after about three or four meetings, he proposed and I said yes. I felt like I was getting a home and a family at long last.’

  The silence filled the space between them, then there was a knock on the door, her heart leapt, her nerves jangling.

  ‘That will be the tea.’ He got up and walked over to the door, had a brief word with the porter, tipped him and returned bearing a tray, laden with tea and sandwiches.

  ‘So, shall I pour?’

  She smiled and nodded. Glad that the interruption had diffused the atmosphere created by her revelations.

  She took a sip of tea and one of the sandwiches he offered.

  ‘So, did you live happily ever after?’ Sharif asked.

  Puzzled by the question, she thought for a moment. Nobody had ever asked her that before.

  ‘I suppose I was grateful that he wanted me, that he was willing to marry someone with no past, no family to claim her, and he is kind, in his own way. He doesn’t say much, and he’s out a lot and now that the girls are gone, well there’s not much to do around the house, but he’s never cruel or mean. The problem is, that he loves his first wife, he still does and I’m no match for her. I tried to be, to be a good wife and mother but it never really worked out. To be honest, we never talk, I...I...’ she struggled to find the right words, ‘I disappoint him.’

  Carmel flushed red. She’d said too much. Suddenly the room seemed stuffy and she needed to get out. What was she thinking? Sitting in a hotel room telling a blank stranger her deepest secrets? She must be losing the plot.

  Sharif put his hands together and tapped his mouth with his joined index fingers, deep in thought. Carmel noticed the length of his fingers, the perfect cream-coloured crescents on the nails. So different to Bill’s calloused hands, his gnarly fingernails.

  ‘I have a proposition,’ he said with enthusiasm. ‘Let us walk, you telephone your husband to reassure him there is nothing untoward about your tardiness in returning home, and we will get out into the fine Irish sunshine. There is a park I believe not far from here, we can walk and talk and it may not seem so…intense…as it now does.’

  Noting Carmel’s reticence he added, ‘Carmel, we have so much to say to each other. So far, I am in shock. Your life is nothing like we imagined. Your mother waited for this day all of her life, how happy she would be to be here with you now, back in Ireland. I want to hear your story, and I want to tell you hers. But sitting here, in a hotel room with a man you have only just met, well it must seem a little…awkward, especially in the light of the revelations you have had to absorb today. So, I propose that we walk, we chat and perhaps we can stop for tea, or a drink if you prefer?’

  The simplicity of the plan made her smile. He struck her as a man who just did things, he didn’t over think it. Unlike her, who over-thought absolutely everything. Perhaps an afternoon wandering around Dublin with him, learning about her mother, wasn’t the end of the world. She both longed for and dreaded to hear the story of how it came to be that she spent her life as a child of the state, and this might be her only opportunity. Neither Bill nor Julia would ever understand, not in a million years. They thought they knew her background and while Bill never mentioned it, Julia did get in the odd poisoned barb. She was beneath them, that much was made very clear. Her birth family or her past was never going to be dinner table chat.

  ‘I’d like that,’ she heard herself say, ‘I won’t ring him, I’ll explain when I see him, it would only…complicate things.’

  ‘Very well Carmel, as you wish.’ He stood up, gave her a grin and taking three of the little sandwiches, he went around the room gathering his umbrella, hat and coat. It was a knee-length camel wool coat and his hat was one of those you’d see in films about the war, did they call them Trilbys? Anyway she thought he looked the picture of elegance. She
judged him to be in his early forties, but the way he moved fascinated her. Like one of those big cats you’d see on nature programmes sometimes. Confident, unflappable, self-assured.

  The weak May sunshine bathed O’Connell Street in thin yellow light as they ambled along. They stopped to look in a window of a shop advertising Irish paraphernalia and she noted Sharif looking at her reflection in the glass. She caught his eye.

  He smiled, ‘I’m sorry, it’s just you look so much like her. Dolly was a unique person, a free spirit, a lover of risks and jokes and she had a hatred for conventions or rules.’

  ‘Like the rule that said, don’t give away your baby you mean?’ Carmel shocked herself with the bitterness she heard in her voice. They were walking again.

  ‘You’re angry, and I don’t blame you. What happened to you, and what your mother thought happened were two very different things, but this is what you must understand Carmel, she was not allowed to keep you. She would have loved nothing more, but the father, your father, was a married man and even though she went to her grave believing that he loved her, he never left his wife. She could not go home, her father was a very strict man and her mother died when she was young, just eight years old. She explained to me how powerful the nuns were, they said she couldn’t have you, she was a young girl alone with no support, no job or money, the nuns insisted she leave you and there was no fighting those nuns. She gave in and her plan was for you to be taken into care, just for a little while, until she got herself sorted out with a job and a home, and then she would come back for you.’

  ‘So, what happened?’ she asked, skirting around a bunch of giggling teenage girls.

  ‘When she came back to the baby home to get you, by now she had a good job. She and my mother set up a dressmaking business in London, she had a little flat and she felt she could offer you something more than a life of drudgery and poverty.’

  ‘If all this is true, why didn’t she come and get me if it was what she wanted?’ Carmel willed herself not to cry.