Peace
Peace
SHE WAITED TILL THE GIRLS WERE IN BED ONE evening, and her father was behind his newspaper in the sitting room. When she asked if she could have a word he lowered the paper.
‘What about?’
She took the armchair opposite him. She paused, unsure of where to start, half-regretting that she’d taken this step – but she had taken it, so she would continue. ‘I think we need to talk about when you left, because I’m finding it hard to let it go.’
He folded the paper then and set it on the coffee table, and something in his expression told her he’d been waiting for this. She let a pause go by while she collected her thoughts.
‘I kept waiting for you to come back,’ she began. ‘I was sure you’d come back. It messed me up, I couldn’t sleep, I did all sorts of stupid stuff . . . but the thing was, I blamed Mam. I told you that, just before she died. That day you came to see her.’
He nodded. He remembered.
‘I was never mad at you. I was sad and confused, and I missed you all the time, but I never held you responsible. I got it into my head that she must have been the reason you left.’
She shook her head. ‘I know she wasn’t easy to live with – and Frances helped me understand a bit more about that – but you were the one who had an affair, and you were the one who lived a double life for years, and you were the one who finally walked out on us.’
She was careful to keep her voice neutral. She didn’t want to attack him, not when he’d done so much for them in the last while. ‘I was too hard on Mam, and now she’s gone, and . . . I never really told her I was sorry for how I treated her, how I shut her out. I tried, towards the end, but I think I left it too late.’
She stumbled on, conscious of his eyes on her. ‘And even if you didn’t love Mam any more, I can’t understand how you could have left me and Joan. Whatever about meeting someone else, and even having a child with her, if you had really loved us like you said, you couldn’t have walked away like that and never insisted on contact. And I want to get past this, I want to move on, but I don’t know how.’
She sat back – and as if they were connected by some invisible thread, he leant towards her.
‘Ellen, first of all, you looked after your mother when you were going through your own terrible time. You were there for her when she needed you. I think that was your way of saying sorry, and I’m guessing she knew it.’
He paused, and seemed to be collecting his own thoughts.
‘You’re right about me,’ he said. ‘I was completely selfish. I told myself it was for the best that I left, but of course it wasn’t, not for you and Joan. I was just trying to justify my actions. I hurt you unbearably, my first two precious daughters, and I’ll bring that regret to the grave with me. But let me assure you—’
He broke off, got abruptly to his feet. ‘No, let me show you something,’ he said, and left the room, and a memory flashed of her mother going to get the biscuit tin of his letters she’d kept from Ellen and Joan.
He didn’t bring back a biscuit tin: he brought a plastic bag. He set it on the coffee table and drew out a sheaf of pictures. Drawn by childish hands, her and Joan’s hands. The usual houses and stick figures, the usual yellow ball of sun sitting in a scribbled blue sky with thought-bubble clouds, the usual red and green flowers poking from grass. Daddy , she read, underneath the stick figures, and Mammy , and Ellen and Joan . Their earliest pictures, in crayon or paint, putting her in mind of her daughters’ artworks.
The bag held cards too, early homemade ones with Happy Birthday Daddy in the same childish script. Inside one she read I love you Daddy, from Ellen xxx . Later ones had been bought in a shop, some from her and others from Joan, Daddy becoming the more grown-up Dad in the messages inside.
And photos, lots of photos. Ellen and Joan sharing a pram, then two toddlers, then in tiny school uniforms, little bags strapped to their backs. Blowing out birthday candles, opening wrapped presents, standing on a stage in the school hall with their classmates. Sitting on his shoulders or cradled in his arms, or leaning into him as older girls. He’d held on to them all through the years.
‘I missed you both too,’ he said. ‘Every single day. I’m the one to blame, Ellen. I’m entirely to blame, and if you can’t forgive me for that, I understand.’
‘I think I can forgive you,’ she said carefully. ‘It might take a while to get back to where we were, but I really want to try.’
‘I’d love that’ – and it was the start of a beautiful kind of peace between them.