‘Mum, please, no details.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she said, smacking me lightly on the arm. ‘It’ll be your turn one day.’
Would it? I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a father. I didn’t want to inflict what I had experienced on anyone else.
‘You can come in now.’ Neil popped his head around the door. He was wearing a plastic apron over his clothes, as though he had delivered the baby. He was crying. ‘Happy tears,’ he said and I couldn’t help but put my arms around him. It was endearing to see him so vulnerable.
The room was buzzing with the sense that something important had just happened. Then I saw my sister, her dark fringe pushed back off her face with sweat, her nakedness covered with a sheet and a little dark-haired head resting in the crook of her arm.
‘Felicity, it’s time to meet your uncle Henry.’
And then I was crying. Which didn’t seem to matter so much because the baby was crying now too. Then we all laughed and cried until the nurse told us to get out because she had to show Lu how to get Felicity to ‘latch on’。 She wasn’t going to get any rest, that was for sure. Ever, probably.
We spent the night at the hospital together, none of us wanting to break the little bubble of joy we had created. Well, that Neil and Lu had created, to be precise. A new person had joined our family and, without saying as much, we all seemed to be united in the conviction that her experience would be better than our own. We would become better people for her. The process had already started. Perhaps this was why people referred to new life as a miracle, because it had the power to change everything.
I suddenly had an overwhelming longing to see Martha, to tell her everything that had happened. I wanted her here, to be with my family. To be a part of it. I went on a breakfast run and picked up some more things for Lu – basically an excuse so I could call Martha, but there wasn’t even a dial tone. I told myself that her phone was switched off. Simple explanation. While waiting for the coffees, I sent a string of texts with baby emojis, which was so out of character, she might have assumed I had been kidnapped and it was an attempt to communicate my location. Yet as the hours passed and there was still no response, I started to feel like something was wrong. I had explained everything in the note I’d left, but maybe she’d changed her mind. Maybe I was coming on too strong. I was still second-guessing myself when I walked back into the delivery room and almost bumped into someone. A man. My father.
‘What’s he doing here?’
‘Henry, it’s okay,’ Lu said.
It wasn’t okay. It was very far from okay, but the thing about having just given birth to a human is that your feelings trump everyone else’s.
‘I’ll wait outside,’ I said, leaving the takeout behind me.
I walked in circles around the smoking area outside. Why had she called him? Why did she want him there? Every time I saw him, all of the old hurts came to the surface. No son of mine is soft. That’s what he said the first time I fell off my bike and started crying. Then he gave me a thump that knocked me over again. You need to toughen up in this world. I certainly needed to toughen up with him as a father. What kind of a grandfather would he be? I wondered. Then that made me even angrier. He’d probably be the perfect grandfather – get everything right this time around, now that he’d made all his mistakes on me. Lu escaped the brunt of his behaviour, maybe because she was a girl. Sometimes I resented her, but mostly I was relieved that she didn’t have to go through it.
I thought of Martha again. For so long I had hidden the parts of me that seemed broken beyond repair. But she had seen past my feeble attempts at being someone people would like, hiding the breaches within me that always caused me to fall short. I had learned nothing from my father, only how to feel inadequate all the time. I realised now that this was the hollow inheritance passed down through the men in my family. And we spent our lives doing whatever it took to look like a strong man. Like scaffolding around me, it was only ever meant to be temporary. Something was supposed to get fixed inside. Only it never did. And somehow, Martha saw that brokenness and made it okay to be there. She didn’t expect perfection, just honesty. Kindness. After everything she had been through, she was still willing to see that in me. To have the bravery to care about someone again. I checked my phone again. Nothing. If I wanted to be with Martha, I had to make sure I was worthy of her first.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
OPALINE
Dublin, 1922
It was almost Christmas. Matthew arrived with some sprigs of holly to decorate the shop and little parcels with cooked ham, biscuits and cake. Whatever he bought for his own house, I knew he always set aside a little for me, and the kindness of this gesture made my heart ache. I was in no position to refuse his charity. Whilst my catalogue of books was selling well in Ireland and even in the States, money was still quite tight and I was trying to put small amounts aside for the future. No sooner had he stepped inside the door than the stained-glass windows began to bloom with mistletoe.
‘Stop it at once!’ I said.
‘Stop what?’ Matthew asked, holding a sprig of holly aloft.
‘Oh, nothing.’ I blushed. ‘The baby is kicking.’
He placed the holly on the table and gave me a lopsided smile.
‘I remember when Muriel was pregnant with little Ollie. He used to perform all of his gymnastics at night.’
The baby wasn’t really kicking, I’d only said it as an excuse, but when Matthew took a step closer, he asked if he could touch my stomach. I wanted him to, but I couldn’t even speak. I just nodded. As soon as he put his palm gently on the curve of my belly, she began to move.
‘Ha! There she is.’ He grinned. ‘That’s real magic.’
He hadn’t judged me when I told him about the pregnancy. He didn’t even ask for any explanation about who the father was, or where he was. He simply asked if there was anything he could do.
‘Why didn’t you take over the shop?’ I asked. ‘You must have wanted to, when you were younger.’
He took his hand away and I felt the absence keenly.
‘I grew up,’ was all he said, shrugging and looking over the place with misty eyes. ‘Besides, it’s in the right hands now.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, running my hands along the shelf, wondering if he could hear the spines creak and pages sigh as I did.
‘My father was never a wealthy man, Opaline. At least not financially. Yet I remember when times were hard he would never doubt himself, he would simply say that perhaps the shop was waiting to become a library again. And seeing your books here now, I believe he was right. It didn’t want to be a nostalgia shop or even a magic shop.’ He reached out and patted the wooden walls. ‘It has returned to its roots.’
When he left, I filled the silence with a seasonal recording of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker on the Victrola and took down a copy of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, on which the ballet was based. I recalled a note from the library in Yorkshire, which remarked that he was one of Emily Bront?’s favourite authors. If I remembered correctly, she had read his novel The Sandman in its original German. And it was this simple thread of thoughts that brought to mind a possession I had put away and given no further thought since my trip to London. The sewing box.