There was a distracted and far-away expression in your mother’s eyes that night. I had not seen it before and it unnerved me. We sat on a bench by the cross-shaped, frozen pond and she looked away from me, up at the sky, and then at the towering black statue of the Children of Lir, which had been draped with green, white and orange fairy lights. When I took her hand she squeezed my fingers very hard. Tears filled her eyes and started to spill down her cheeks. I put my arm around her shoulder and she gave a small, timorous sob. I asked if she wanted a cigarette – she had started smoking by then – but she shook her head.
‘I probably shouldn’t,’ she said, and wiped her face with her sleeve.
‘And why’s that?’
‘Because I’m pregnant, Billy. I’m going to have a baby.’
Her hands were shaking when she said it and her lips were trembling. I looked at her for a while. I asked if she was sure and she nodded. She had been to a doctor in town. She had not gone to the family doctor because she had been afraid that he would tell her parents. A girl in college had known about this discreet, gentle doctor and had made the appointment for her. There was no doubt whatsoever about it. She was going to have a baby in six months.
I was astounded, love, because I thought that we had been so careful. I simply could not figure out how this had happened to us. I think that I probably said nothing at all for a while. It was desperately cold in the park, so cold that I thought it was going to snow. I remember feeling this terrible, absolute certainty that I would always remember this conversation and what was about to happen. It was the first time in my life that I ever had that sensation. I held your mother’s quivering hands and kissed them. I wished I could do something to stop her crying. After a while I told her it did not matter to me that she was pregnant, we could get married anyway.
‘It’s not the first time this ever happened to people,’ I said, and I remember trying to laugh. ‘I mean to say, it’s not like we just met last week, is it? It’s been two years now, after all. It’s nearly time we named the day, that’s what my Da keeps telling me.’
‘I don’t think you understand, Billy,’ she said.
‘I do, Grace,’ I said. ‘Of course I do.’
She shook her head. ‘It’s not yours,’ she said.
She knew who the father was, she told me. He was not somebody she loved, and he certainly did not love her either. It was just a stupid thing that had happened and she was ashamed of herself. She had been to a party in college and had too many drinks. She had ended up going back to this person’s flat afterwards. Things had happened, they had lost control of themselves. She could not say that she did not know what she had been doing, because she did. And now it was too late. She said all this to me very calmly, as though it was a speech she had written down and learnt by heart. It was only when she spoke about how we could not even think of getting married now that she began to get visibly upset once more. She hung her head and wept into her hands.
I held your mother as tightly as I could and told her that I did not care about any of this. I do not know how long we must have sat there with me telling her again and again that I did not care. I pleaded with her, love, I am not ashamed to tell you. I begged her. I said that we could get married and she could have the child and we would bring it up together. We would be a family together and nobody would ever interfere with that. I told her there was nothing in the world that could ever stop me loving her, not even this. But she did not believe me, or would not, and perhaps she was right, after all.
Because of course I did care. I did care.
When she dried her eyes and started to speak again there was a coldness about her that terrified me. She seemed immune and detached, she would not even look at me. She had made plans, she said, and they did not involve me any more. She told me that she could never see me again. She was going to leave in a minute or two and she did not want me on any account to follow her.
After she had left, I sat there feeling shell-shocked and stared at the pond. To be honest, this is another of those times about which I do not remember very much. A few minutes ago I put down my pen and began to rack my memory, searching for some tangible thing to tell you about exactly how I felt that night after your mother left, but the truth is that I can recall nothing for a few hours except the unmerciful bitterness of the cold, the glint of the lights on the statue of the Children of Lir, the doleful sound of country-and-western music coming from one of the dancehalls out on Parnell Square. And ice. Ice on the water.
Much later, at about ten o’clock, an attendant came over and told me that I would have to leave now, he was locking up for the night. I left the park and walked down the street, looking for a pub. I could not find one, so I went into the bar of the Gate Theatre on Parnell Square. I had some drinks there and then the play must have ended because I remember the room being suddenly very full of wealthy-looking men in sharp suits and women in fur coats and pearls. I stayed for a while and had more whiskeys and Coke. I think I must have got into an argument with somebody, because after a while an usher in a royal blue military-style uniform marched over and asked me to leave.
I went out into the street feeling badly drunk. I did not want to go home. I did not want my mother to ask me why I was back so early. I wondered where Seánie could be. He did not have a telephone at home – none of us in Ringsend had phones in those days – so I could not ring him. I was desperate to talk to somebody. I remember just walking around aimlessly for a while and I think I might have been sick in an alleyway behind the GPO. Then I recall being on Leeson Street, where the late-night drinking dens used to be at that time. I had somehow got it into my head that Seánie would be in one of these clubs. I managed to talk my way into one place, which was tiny and flashing with white light and full of dancers in Santa Claus hats. Of course, Seánie was not there. I had some drinks. When the club closed it was after four. I walked up and down Leeson Street for a while, then I sat on the cold steps outside one of the Georgian houses. I remember a prostitute going by and staring down at me for a few moments before walking on, her heels clacking on the pavement. Next thing I recall is being woken up by a milkman just after dawn.
Shortly after that Christmas I heard that your mother intended to go to England to have the child. There was a convent in London where an order of nuns took in young women who were pregnant without wanting to be. She wrote to me before she left to say that she had quit college. She was going to have the baby and give it up for adoption in America. She was never coming back to Ireland. She said that she might write again when she had settled down in London, but, in fact, she never did.
I managed to get her address in London from one of her college friends, but the letters I sent were always returned unopened. Then they began to come back marked ‘Not known at this address’. Finally they stopped being returned at all and I stopped writing.
One day I plucked up the courage to call at her house in Harrington Street. Her father opened the door and let me in. The house smelt of polish and warm bread. He was a broad, handsome man before he got sick, your grandfather, distinguished-looking and vaguely aristocratic in his bearing. He had a beautiful warm accent, half Dublin and half East European. Yes, he smiled, he knew exactly who I was. Grace had often mentioned me to his wife and himself; in fact, he chuckled, they were a little surprised never to have met me before now. She was getting on very well over in London, he said. She sometimes telephoned on a Sunday night but no, he did not have an address. She was always moving around, what with her new job over there. She was working for a travelling theatre company and was never in one place longer than a week or two. I realized then that he did not actually know what had happened. He clearly had no idea about the child. His wife and himself had not exactly been keen on Grace taking a year off college, he laughed, ‘But then, you know my Grace, she has definite ideas about everything, like all the modern young women, isn’t that right?’ Next time she telephoned he would be sure to pass on my best regards and say that I ha
d been asking after her. I wrote out my name and address and asked him to be sure to give them to her. It was very important that she write back to me. He laughed, winked and clapped me on the shoulder. ‘I like your style, Billy,’ he went. ‘Faint heart never won fair lady, isn’t that it?’
He promised to tell her it was urgent that she get in touch immediately but of course the months passed and no letter ever arrived.
One night in the following October, I suppose, or November, when I got in from work the house was empty apart from my mother, who was sitting at the kitchen table by herself. She had sent everyone out to the cinema, she told me, because she thought that she and I should have a talk. Somehow she had found out that Grace had been pregnant. She was very sad to hear it, she told me, but sadder to hear about how I had treated her, abandoning her like that and sending her away to England to have the child by herself.
‘The girl’s only a child herself, Billy,’ she told me. ‘It isn’t right what you’ve done.’
I think I might actually have laughed at this point. Then, when I told her that Grace’s baby was not mine, she went quiet for a while. I thought that she would be horrified, but she did not seem to be. She spent some time peering at the tablecloth, scraping at a tiny lump of grease with her thumbnail. In the end she just sighed and looked across at me.
‘What about St Joseph?’ she said, and laughed softly. ‘That child wasn’t his either.’
‘I’m not St fuckin’ Joseph, Ma,’ I told her, ‘in case you hadn’t noticed.’
‘Oh, I had, love,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry.’
She got up from the table and went to the shelf over the sink. She reached around into a space behind the shelf and took out two rolled-up pound notes. She slapped them down on the table.
‘That’s for you,’ she said. ‘Get over to England and fetch her back here where she belongs.’
I looked at the money. ‘What about Da?’ I said. ‘Won’t he throw the head if he hears you gave me that? That’s your Christmas money, isn’t it?’
‘I’ve discussed it all with Daddy,’ she said. ‘He agrees with me. You’ll have to go over and get her.’
‘I’ll go at the weekend.’
‘No, son. Go tonight. Go now. We could all be dead by the weekend.’
That very evening I took the boat from Dun Laoghaire to Holyhead, then the overnight train to London. I arrived in Euston station around dawn. I walked around the wide, empty streets for a while – it was my first time in London and I knew nobody. I had a cup of milky coffee in a half-empty Wimpy bar. As early as I thought decent I went to the convent and asked after your mother. At first the old nun would not even admit that she had ever been there. It was confidential, she told me, that was part of the sisters’ mission, to offer a secret place to women who needed it. But eventually she took pity on me and said yes, she could not truthfully say that she didn’t know who I was talking about. I was talking about the attractive Jewish girl, wasn’t I, from Dublin? She had left some months ago with the baby – a beautiful healthy baby girl, whom the nun thought would already have been adopted by now. Nobody knew where she was.
I went to the last address I had for your mother, a small flat over a newsagent’s shop run by a kindly Pakistani man in a dirty winding street behind King’s Cross station. The flat was empty, he told me. There had been a fire up there recently and the tenants had gone. He had never met them himself, he said, but they had seemed like a nice, quiet couple. Yes, definitely a couple. A dark-haired young girl, nice looking, very slim, and a slightly older man. Never caused any trouble. Kept to themselves. The girl had liked dancing, he said, that was one detail he knew about her, because one night his wife had called up to her with some food and a few small things for the baby. The door of the flat was open and she had been dancing to the radio, and his wife had thought it so funny to see her dancing like that, all by herself.
He did not know who the landlord was. I could leave an address if I liked.
The next morning I arrived home in Dublin. As the boat pulled in to the quay at Dun Laoghaire, workmen were putting up a long neon sign on the terminal wall: ‘Welcome Home for Christmas to all our Returning Emigrants. Nollaig Shona’.
All this I remembered in my car that night in Bray, with an ache as palpable as a once-broken bone on a cold morning. Mist began to appear in the bay. A foghorn gave a lugubrious moan. The radio crackled as it played.
Angels and archangels
May have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim
Thronged the air –
But only his mother
In her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the Belovèd
With a kiss.
I started up the car and drove home. Ice was forming on the roads.
I felt sure that everything in my life was about to change.
Chapter Five
The trial resumed shortly after Christmas and went on for just over a fortnight. It would have been significantly shorter but all three of them had insisted on pleading not guilty, despite the force and extent of the evidence against them. I attended the hearing almost every day with Seánie. I swear I do not know how I could have got through that dreadful time without him.
Early in the morning we would go down to the hospital together to visit you. Sometimes Seánie would invite me to pray with him, but I was never able to do this. I found the small details of your situation the most distressing – the forest of Christmas cards by your bed, the blue rubber identity tag on your wrist and the plastic tubing around your frail neck like some awful parody of jewellery. The vulnerability of your bare feet. That sounds utterly ridiculous, I know. And yet, to a parent, small things – a child’s bare feet – can awaken the most visceral protectiveness. After the hospital we would have a silent breakfast in a café in Dun Laoghaire, drive into town in his car, turn up at the court just before ten, sit through the morning session, wait for the next extraordinary horror to reveal itself.
Whole days were wasted with legal arguments of various kinds: the jury would have to leave and then it would all start up, seemingly endless words about what could be admitted as evidence and what could not; precise, measured talk of statutes and precedents and ancient acts of parliament. There were times when I wanted to stand up and scream, ‘My daughter is lying half dead not five miles from here. Stop talking! I want no more talk.’ It was like drowning in a sewage of putrid words.
Often I would get the sickening feeling that something else would go wrong and all three of them would get off, just like Quinn, but through some lawyer’s trick or semantic sidestep. I actually grew to despise some of the barristers, so vulgarly polite and smilingly obsequious; even the prosecution counsel irritated me almost beyond belief. He seemed pompous and over-educated, he loved saying the Latin phrases and ornate adjectives of the law, he would roll them around his mouth like a priest saying high mass. I became obsessed with the thought that they would be acquitted. I started to dream about meeting them walking down an exploding street with your clothes in their hands, all three of them laughing together about what they had done. In this dream I would keep running at them, trying to do some kind of violence to them, but always, always, just when I was close enough to strike I would wake up shuddering, my mouth dry and my eyes hot, the damp sheets wrapped tight around my legs and arms like manacles.
One afternoon around the middle of January, Superintendent Duignan took me to one side after the hearing and said he was not sure whether I would want to keep coming into the court every day. For a while he hedged about his reasons for saying this, but finally I forced him to speak honestly. Photographs of your injuries would be shown to the jury the next morning, he told me. He had seen them himself and they were not pretty, was how he put it. He could not absolutely guarantee that I would not see some of these photographs in the courtroom. People who were not used to court procedures often seemed to think that evidence could only be seen by the jury, but this was not always the case. Ther
e would be copies of these photographs floating around the court. If I happened to see them, they would be upsetting for me. He had teenage daughters himself, he added, in a tone of voice which I think was supposed to be in some way significant.
I told him that I had seen you on the night of the attack and almost every day since. I had talked to your doctors at length about your chances. I had sat in the ward with you for hours at a time just watching to see if you would stir. The twitch of a finger, the curl of a lip, these would have been victories to me. It had never happened. Not once in all the hours and nights. Never. There had been many such nights when I’d thought that you had actually died. Curved lines on monitor screens, grey waves gently undulating across sheets of computer paper had been the only proof that I was wrong. I had sat in that ward and watched people old and young being dragged in bleeding and broken around you. One night I had sat there until dawn while the teenage boy in the bed next to you had slowly died. Jesus Christ, I had brought his parents coffee and sandwiches at four in the morning and seen the expressions on their chalk-white faces. I had sat there until I could not stand it any more, until the doctors had asked me not to come at night any more and when I did visit, not to stay for hours at a time. I’d had to talk to your six-year-old niece and nephew, down a telephone line to Australia, and face their confused questions. I had answered the phone to friends of yours who were out of the country and had no idea of what had happened. I’d had to explain to them that you might die soon, while they stood in noisy bars or telephone boxes on the other side of the planet, asking me if this was some kind of twisted joke. I’d had to watch one morning when a doctor young enough to be my son rushed in to start your heart beating again with his bare hands.
‘It’s not that I feel sorry for myself, detective,’ I said, ‘but there’s nothing in a photograph could hurt me now.’
He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘Mr Sweeney, I don’t know if you understand. In some of these photographs your daughter wouldn’t be dressed. She’d be partially naked. They have to show all the injuries to the jury.’