‘She sounds like a guardian angel.’
I wasn’t sure if that’s how I’d describe her. I poured some more tea from the pot. All my years at home, my father and my brothers took up all of the oxygen, but here, it was like we could finally breathe deeply. It’s only in something’s absence that you realise how much space it takes up.
‘There’s something I want to tell you, Martha.’
‘You’re leaving Dad?’
She gave me a double take.
‘I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about it, but no. Your father is … well, he’s not perfect. But he’s dependable, and even though sometimes I wish I could change so many things about him, he has given me a home where I feel safe.’
I had never heard her speak about my father that way. Despite the fact that I still had a different opinion, I understood and respected hers.
‘What is it then?’
‘It’s not something serious … what I mean is, it won’t change anything, for you at least. But it might help you to understand the past. My past.’
She turned the teacup on the saucer, slowly choosing her words. It was strange for both of us to hear her voice like this, when we’d always communicated in silence.
‘After Shane, I began to realise that the past isn’t something we leave behind. It is living with us, every day. It isn’t simply DNA that we inherit. I think there are other things passed down through the generations. Memories, perhaps.’
She was speaking from a place of deep pain, I could see that. I moved my chair closer to hers. The atmosphere in the kitchen took on an air of intense stillness, as though it too was waiting for her story.
‘My mother was adopted as a baby.’
Of all of the things she could have said, I never would have anticipated that. Our family history was something I had seen as set in stone. How could I have been missing such a huge chunk of information?
‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’
‘I suppose I didn’t think it affected you … and besides, mothers want to protect their daughters. My mother protected me, as much as she could, but my grandparents were not kind people. How they were ever allowed to adopt is something I’ll never understand. You know that your grandmother died from pneumonia when I was three years old?’
I nodded.
‘That’s the story we told everyone. The truth is that she set off to Dublin to find her mother. I don’t know all of the details; my father only told me from his hospital bed before he died. It was the sixties and she told him that having her own daughter made her desperate to find her real mother. I don’t know why she thought she’d find her in Dublin, but either way, she never did find her. There was an accident and she slipped from the platform. The train hit her.’
‘Jesus Christ, Mom, I’m so sorry.’
She kept her head down, as though she just wanted to get the story out.
‘Well, my grandparents, the Clohessys, raised me after that. Reluctantly. My father had a job and men weren’t expected to stay home back then. So they took me in and spent every day reminding me of their sacrifice. That was when I lost my voice.’
I grabbed her hand.
‘It doesn’t change anything, but it changes everything, doesn’t it?’ she asked.
I nodded, wiping her tears this time.
‘Did you ever try to find them? Her biological parents?’
‘No, but I thought about it. Many times. My grandparents wouldn’t talk about it. They did not say it outright, but I got the impression that the adoption might not have been very official.’
‘We could try now?’
She shook her head.
‘It’s too late. But I wanted you to know because it’s your story, as well as mine.’
We sat there for hours talking, drinking more pots of tea and raiding the biscuit tin. It was only when it grew dark that I realised I should have been getting dinner ready.
‘Will you stay?’ I asked.
‘No, I’d best be off now so I can catch the last train.’
As she put on her coat and we walked out to the hallway, she turned to look at me again.
‘I should have told you every day what a wonderful young woman you were. I sometimes feel like I wasn’t fully present, you know? Just going through the motions. That’s what happens when you keep a part of yourself hidden. Anyway, I wanted you to tell you now so you’d know, you were always enough, Martha. It’s just the people around you were too wrapped up in their own pain to see it.’
We hugged tightly, right by the bannister where Shane had fallen. I began to cry. I didn’t just cry, I sobbed in her arms. She held me and shushed away the bad memories, rocking me from side to side. The wooden staircase creaked like the bough of a tree beside us and I could hear a soft rustling.
‘It sounds like this old house is trying to tell us something,’ she said in a playful voice, as though she were telling a fairy tale to a child.
‘It does, doesn’t it?’ I smiled, wiping my eyes with my sleeves. ‘I think that too sometimes. Maybe next time you can stay for longer?’
‘I’d like that,’ she said, then turned to step down on to the pavement. She turned and waved again and called up to me. ‘I’m looking forward to meeting Madame Bowden too!’
I waved and then registered the strangeness of what she had just said. She had already met Madame Bowden.
Chapter Forty-Eight
HENRY
‘Are you aware that you have a great big bloody tree root growing out of your ceiling?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the branch sticking out of the gable?’
‘That too.’
‘Oh good. Not just me then.’
I’d decided to visit 12 Ha'penny Lane by my old entrance, the basement window, but found a very large branch growing out through one of the broken panes. We decided I should probably come through the front door instead. I held the folder with Opaline’s papers aloft, theatrically making it clear that I had a proper reason for visiting.
‘The lady of the residence is out having her hair set,’ Martha said and I was relieved to hear it. She could be a bit overpowering, even if she was technically rooting for me.
‘I think it’s trying to tell me something,’ she said, plucking one of the leaves from the branches that formed an arc over her bed. She seemed bizarrely unfazed by it.
‘Yes, I think it is trying to tell you something very important about the unsound foundations of the house. You really need to have this looked at.’
She batted my concerns aside and put on the kettle for tea.
I moved in for a closer look at the tree. ‘Did you do this?’
‘What?’
‘What you seek is seeking you.’ It was carved on to the bark of the tree.
She stepped behind me and leaned over my shoulder.
‘No?’
I turned around to see her face. She looked different, somehow. As though the shadows she carried inside of her had been replaced by an iridescent light. She looked happy. Despite the tree. Or perhaps because of it.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘Nothing. You look well, that’s all.’
She smiled and tilted her head to the side. It felt like a moment where one of us should say something, but neither of us could even begin putting our feelings into words.