Chapter 29
29
Bridie paused because the barmaid had just arrived with a tray, and they waited while she transferred everything to the table. A cafetière, two white mugs, two napkins, a tiny china milk churn and a bowl of brown and white sugar lumps.
The rich scent of good coffee hit Finn as Bridie thanked her.
‘You’re welcome. Have a great day.’
Finn wondered what she would think if she knew this was a long-lost mother and son reunion. Better than TV, although maybe not as volatile as Jeremy Kyle. Was Jeremy Kyle still going? Finn had a vague memory of a scandal.
Actually, it was nothing like Jeremy Kyle. They were both way too controlled – edging their way around the emotional minefield that led from the past to today to this sanitised bar made up of straight lines and wooden floors and grey pendulum lights.
He wanted to run away. It was on the tip of his tongue to say, I can’t do this. It was a mistake finding you. Let’s just leave the whole thing, let’s just forget it , but he was frozen on the hard cushioned couch that had hardly given at all when he’d sat down on it.
He watched as Bridie pushed a mug and the sugar bowl towards him. ‘Will you have sugar? I’m not sure how you take it.’ Her voice was apologetic.
A few minutes later, when she’d pressed down the plunger on the cafetière, he saw they took it the same way. Not much milk and two lumps of brown sugar.
‘Are you in a hurry, Finn?’ She broke the silence.
‘No,’ Finn said as he stirred his drink. ‘Why? Are you rushing back?’ He resisted the temptation to add ‘to your other family’ but the words were there, swinging in the air.
‘No. I’ve nowhere to be. And you’ve every right to know what happened. I owe you that.’ She sipped her coffee and straightened her back and took a deep breath. ‘OK, well, Christopher and I met at school in the seventies in Belfast. We were eleven when we met. He was the only English boy at our school and he was bullied because he was English, he was different. You know how kids are. And we were also in the midst of the Troubles. I was one of the few kids who’d share a civil word with him. That was how it began. We got talking. We realised we had masses in common and later on I fell for him.’
‘At the age of eleven?’
‘That’s right.’ She shrugged. ‘I think when you meet your anamchara , your soulmate, you know it. However young you are, and that’s what happened to us. He said he would marry me as soon as we were old enough. And I wanted that too. I adored him.’
‘So what happened?’
‘When he was fourteen, his family moved back to England, and he had to go with them. I wanted to go, but I was too young, of course. My mammy and daddy wouldn’t hear of such a thing. They said it was a crush, they said I’d forget him once I found a nice Irish boy. I knew they were wrong. Christopher and I promised we’d keep in touch, and we did.
‘For the next eighteen months we wrote letters. There was no internet in those days, no mobile phones. We did have the landlines, but phone calls to foreign countries were expensive. Our folks weren’t happy about us running up expensive bills.’
Her eyes shadowed. ‘Then the letters from him stopped coming. I was frantic. I thought he might be dead. I waited and waited. After a while I realised he must have moved house. I tried to trace him. I managed to get in touch with the people who were now at his address, and they said the previous family had left no forwarding details. I was heartbroken.’
Her voice was steady as she met his eyes, and for the first time, Finn felt a stab of empathy for her. As he’d have felt for anyone, he realised, who’d been recounting the same experience to him.
‘So you forgot about him?’ he asked.
‘I didn’t forget about him, no. When I was seventeen, I packed a bag and I got the ferry from Belfast to Liverpool and I went to England to look for him. I went to the address where he’d been living and there was another new family, who told me the last family had gone, and they’d left no forwarding details either. So the trail went dead. After that I did stop looking for him, yes. I fell out with my family too. I was sure they’d conspired somehow with Christopher’s parents to keep us apart, although they always swore they hadn’t.’ She took another quick sip of her coffee. ‘I never went back home. I stayed in England. I felt closer to Christopher in England. There was always the hope that I’d bump into him. So in time I moved on. I had to. I’d got work with the only one of my family I hadn’t fallen out with. My uncle Paddy, who’s a showman. He did the fairs and I went with him. I helped with the rides. There was a lot of travelling. We were at the goose fair in Nottingham when I met your father. I expect he’s told you.’
She looked up into Finn’s eyes. ‘He was different from the usual lads I met. He was kind, romantic. He swept me off my feet. And then I got pregnant with you and he wanted us to settle down. I thought I wanted that too.’
‘Did you ever love him?’ Finn’s voice was harsher than he’d intended, and she jumped, swallowed and nodded slowly. ‘I think I did, Finn. Yes.’ She paused and he could see that she was back in the past, reliving it all, her face sad.
‘Then in 1997 I met Christopher again. I found out he’d been looking for me too. He knew I had connections with the fair through my uncle and he’d been going every year, thinking I might be there. He never forgot me either.’
‘So you got back together.’
‘I’m not proud of myself, Finn. I was with your father. You were a wee child, and I loved every hair on your head. But yes, I got back with Christopher.’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘And then I got pregnant again. And I didn’t know what to do.’
‘You could have told my dad.’
‘He’d never have been able to forgive me.’ A tear rolled down her face. ‘I suppose if I’m truly honest, I didn’t want his forgiveness. The feelings for Christopher were the same, you see. The same as they’d always been.’ More tears were running down her face and she wiped them from her cheeks with her hanky, and met his eyes. ‘He was still my anamchara .’
It was Finn who dropped his gaze first.
He wanted to cry too but he couldn’t. He also wanted to hug her and tell her it was OK. It would all be fine. But it wasn’t OK and he didn’t know if it would ever be fine. He felt so terribly conflicted about the fact she had chosen another family over him and his dad, and the space between them felt as unbreachable as it had when they’d first arrived.
A few more people had come into the pub. A pair of women who were obviously good friends sat at another of the low coffee tables, further down the window. They were talking in low voices and occasionally a burst of laughter came from their table. An older couple had just sat at one of the tall tables with stools and were discussing cake.
Bridie broke the deadlock. ‘I’m not proud of myself. I’m deeply ashamed, Finn, you have to believe me. Especially about leaving you. I didn’t think I was the kind of woman who’d abandon her own wee child. How have you been?’ She looked at him imploringly. ‘Have you been OK? Are you married? Do you have a family?’
‘Yeah. I’ve been OK. Not married.’ He didn’t want to tell her about Jade or Ben just yet. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe he wasn’t ready to let her into his life so soon.
There was another gap, shorter this time, and then Bridie said tentatively, ‘Ask me anything you want to know. Anything. I want to make it right. I want to make it up to you. Will I get us some more coffee?’
She signalled to the barmaid who’d just walked past.
‘Same again?’ the barmaid asked, and Bridie glanced at Finn.
He nodded. He was torn. He didn’t want to stay but he didn’t want to go either. He hadn’t expected it to be like this. This pain. It was so obvious she felt as devastated now as he had when she’d left. And in another world – a world where Bridie wasn’t his mother – he might have liked her. She was direct and he was pretty sure she’d been honest too. Everything she’d told him matched with what Ray had said.
He gathered himself. ‘So you’re married to Christopher still?’
‘I am.’
‘And you have other children?’
‘We do. We have three. There’s your brother Declan, he’s twenty-seven, and there’s your sister, Alice, she’s twenty-two, and there’s wee Molly, she’s the baby of the family. She’s nineteen.’
Three siblings who’d grown up without him. Good God. He bit the inside of his cheek, trying not to react.
‘Do they all live in Salisbury too?’
‘Molly’s on her gap year – she’s in Spain right now. Alice and Declan both work for the family business, same as myself.’
‘What is the family business?’
‘We’re builders, it’s the same company Christopher’s father, Nick, started, back in the seventies. But we’ve expanded since then, gone more into the property development side. We’re not that big but it’s local. You may have heard of the company…’
She broke off while the barmaid replenished their cafetière and mugs and milk and sugar.
‘Thanks, love. Sorry…’ She turned back to Finn. ‘Where was I? Ah, yes, our wee company. We’re called Rural Developments.’
Finn felt his head spin a little. He’d been alerted by the name Declan, but not massively because it was an Irish name – there must be thousands of Declans in Ireland. But there couldn’t be that many companies called Rural Developments. Not in Wiltshire. Oh my God. Surely not…
‘What is it, Finn? You’ve gone awful pale.’ She was looking at him in alarm.
‘Your son is Declan Stone.’ He held her gaze, and it was Bridie’s turn to go pale.
‘That’s right. Declan’s my boy. Why? Do you know him?’
Finn didn’t know whether he should tell her that just over a month ago he’d bloodied Declan’s nose and that his wrist still ached from the punch. And maybe it was the shock of the revelation or the way Bridie was looking at him or simply the total ludicrousness of the whole situation, but he started to laugh. And he couldn’t stop.
And the more she sat there looking at him with a slightly bemused expression on her face, the funnier the whole thing seemed.
* * *
At Duck Pond Rescue, Jade had just finished doing the final dog walks of the day and she was about to help Dawn with the feeding round.
She hadn’t heard anything from Finn, other than to say he’d arrived at the pub. She hoped that meant things were going well, and not that they weren’t and he was walking around Salisbury trying to get his head around it all.
Jade couldn’t imagine how he must feel. She had never known her own dad, because he’d gone before she’d been old enough to ever meet him, so when she looked back at the past, or at the mental image she had of her family tree, there had only ever been her mother.
In the space on her family tree marked ‘father’, there was just a blank outline in her mind. Like a profile picture online when someone hasn’t uploaded a photo. She knew his name because it was on her birth certificate. But that was it. Nothing more.
For Finn it was different. He’d known his mum right up until the age of six. Bridie had been there in his formative years. He’d known what it was like to feel her love, and then she’d left him. That must feel so much worse. All of the recent revelations from Ray about Bridie leaving because she was pregnant couldn’t have helped either.
Jade couldn’t imagine what it must feel like to find out your mother had chosen a new life with new children over you. The ultimate rejection.
She stopped to chat with Ursula, who’d taken to popping by regularly to help, although there were no official updates yet on the planning application that was going on next door.
‘I’ll have to start paying you if you come here any more often,’ she told the older woman as she emerged from the hospital block with a half-empty container of water.
‘You definitely won’t have to do that. I’m paid perfectly well, and when I retire I might come in even more – if you’ll have me?’
‘You will always be very welcome here,’ Jade said. ‘You never need to ask.’
Ursula flashed her a smile, her teeth very white in the early evening sunlight. ‘Carmelita’s leg looks good. I’ve just topped up her water. She must be ready to go back to the wild soon.’
‘She is, but I promised Ben he could help with the release. We’re doing it tomorrow night.’
‘Where will you take her?’
‘That’s trickier. With wildlife I’d usually release somewhere close to where I find them. But we actually found her in Ben’s garden, so that’s not going to work. I don’t want to release her too close to here either, or she might decide she fancies a chicken supper, and although my lot go in at night, Carmelita might be brave enough to try a daytime strike. She’s not exactly scared of people.’
‘No, I guess that’s always difficult with wild things. You don’t want them to be terrified of us, but you definitely don’t want them too tame either.’
‘Precisely. It’s a tricky balance.’
The sound of a car coming in through the main gates interrupted their chat and both women glanced towards reception.
‘Ah, Finn’s back. I’m just going to check in with him.’
‘Is there anything I can do?’
‘I was just on my way to help Dawn with the feeds. Would you have time to take over that?’
‘Consider it done.’ Ursula headed towards the feed store, and Jade hurried towards reception.
Finn looked serene, although it could be difficult to read him. She kept her fingers crossed as she went to greet him.