Chapter 28
TWENTY-EIGHT
Beatrice was perched on the stairs that led up to the floor above her bedroom. Below, she could see right the way down through the house to the ground floor hallway, so she would know if anyone came in through the front door or up the stairs. And above – above were the attic rooms, with all the secrets they might hold.
She was reluctant to venture there for fear of broken glass, dead pigeons and spider webs. Sometimes, though, she wanted to. It felt almost as if the house was calling her, luring her, promising answers to her questions. Was she the great-grandchild of the mad Irish couple who’d bought this house back before the Second World War? Was Orla connected to them or had the house since been sold and bought by another couple, whose granddaughter Orla was? Would she ever find out the truth?
Not today. Today she was on the stairs for a more prosaic reason: this was the only spot in the house where the internet connection was even halfway decent and the call she was about to make would be difficult enough without it cutting out midway. She wasn’t exactly looking forward to it but, after what she had learned from Neil’s grandfather the previous week, she was determined to go ahead with it.
She checked the text messages on her phone, her fumbling fingers making her realise how much her hands were trembling. Then, taking a steadying breath, she opened Skype on her laptop. The familiar acoustic modem handshake buzzed from her speakers, followed by two familiar voices.
‘Hello, honey.’
‘Hello, sweetheart.’
The screen stayed blank for a second then flashed to life. Beatrice couldn’t suppress a smile. Her mom and dad were sitting at the desk in her dad’s study, beaming into the camera. Her dad was in his wheeled, high-backed leather chair, her mom presumably perched on a stool next to him, because her head was several inches lower than his.
Her mom’s gleaming dark brown bob looked freshly styled and even though it was early Sunday morning and they wouldn’t need to leave for church for another hour, she was wearing bright pink lipstick.
Her dad was wearing a pale blue and white striped button-down shirt and she could see his linen sport coat slung over the back of the chair. His smiling face was handsome as ever, the hair that had once been blond now silver and carefully brushed. It wasn’t just the chairs that accounted for the difference in their height – Beatrice’s mom was petite and birdlike while her dad was tall and stocky.
When Beatrice’s friends at college noticed the photo of them on her nightstand, they’d invariably look at it and say, ‘Wow, you take after your dad.’ If she liked them, she’d smile and say, ‘I know,’ but if she didn’t, she’d say, ‘Actually, I’m adopted,’ and wait for them to cringe.
‘How are you, honey?’ her mom asked. ‘How’s London?’
‘Have you been to the National Gallery yet?’ her dad asked.
‘Is your landlady feeding you properly?’
‘Are you coping okay with those two kids?’
Beatrice answered their questions patiently and honestly, and asked a few of her own – how was Sligo, the family Labrador? Were her parents going to spend their usual week in Florida in August? Had the Gilmores next door sold their house yet?
Then she said, ‘Listen, Mom and Dad. There’s something I want to tell you.’
‘What is it, honey?’ Her mother’s brow creased anxiously. ‘Are you all right? Do you need money? We can wire you some right away. You’ve not met some boy and fallen in love, have you? Because we’d?—’
‘Let Beatrice speak, Ruth,’ her dad chided.
‘Thanks, Dad.’ Beatrice tried to laugh. ‘Please don’t worry, Mom. I’m fine. I just wanted to talk to you about this because it’s important and I don’t want to hurt your feelings, okay?’
‘Go on then, honey.’ Her dad rested his chin on his hand, leaning in close to the screen.
‘First promise me you won’t be hurt or angry.’
‘If there’s something troubling you, we’ll do whatever we can to make it right,’ her mom said – which didn’t actually answer Beatrice’s question.
Beatrice took a deep breath. ‘Here’s the thing. The reason I wanted to come out here – part of the reason, anyway – was because I… I want to know more about myself. My background. That’s why I went to Ireland first.’
‘I see.’ Her dad’s face was grave.
‘It’s not that you haven’t been amazing parents,’ Beatrice gabbled. ‘You’re the best. I love you and I always will. You’ll always be my mommy and daddy. But I decided that I want to find my birth mother, if I can. I’m trying to do that and I wanted to ask if you’ll help me.’
‘Oh, sweetheart.’ Her mother took a tissue from the box that always stood on the desk and wiped her eyes. ‘We knew this might happen one day. We’ve talked about it often, haven’t we, honey?’
‘Now, don’t upset yourself, Ruth.’ Her dad slipped his arm round her mother’s shoulder and pulled her close. ‘Of course, we knew this time might come. But you know, it might very well not be possible to trace her.’
‘I know,’ Beatrice began. ‘But?—’
‘It will probably be impossible,’ her mom interjected. ‘We want you to know that. We don’t want you to be disappointed.’
‘If I can’t find her, so what?’ Beatrice said. ‘I’ll just be in the same place I am now. No big deal.’
But she knew that wasn’t true.
Her dad pushed his glasses up his nose. Beatrice knew this meant he was about to go into explaining mode, and he did.
‘Things were different back then, especially in Ireland,’ he said. ‘There was a real culture of secrecy around unmarried mothers. It was believed to be for the best – for them and their babies. We were given almost no information ourselves.’
‘I know,’ Beatrice said.
‘And there’s another thing.’ Her father sighed. ‘We don’t even know if that information was true. Often, what adoptive parents were told wasn’t. They were given details about the baby’s birth parents that had been falsified, in order to make…’
He hesitated, and Beatrice found herself listening intently.
‘In order to make the baby seem more attractive,’ her father finished with a heavy sigh.
‘Not that you could have been anything other than attractive to us,’ her mother cut in. ‘We fell in love with you the moment we laid eyes on you. You know that.’
‘I know,’ Beatrice repeated.
Her father continued as if they hadn’t spoken. ‘The child of, say, a factory worker might have been harder to find adoptive parents for than the child of a university student, as we were told your birth mother was. The authorities knew that, and they wanted to give every baby the best chance. So sometimes…’
‘They lied.’ Beatrice tried to swallow the lump growing in her throat. What if that was the case? What if none of it was true – not the bit about being from a wealthy family in Clonmara, or even what she’d managed to glean about the big house in East London?
What if all her theories were wrong, and her birth mother was still somewhere in Ireland, cleaning floors or working on an assembly line in a factory somewhere?
Her father nodded. ‘Sometimes they lied. With the best intentions, of course. Or sometimes incorrect information might just have been supplied in error. But that culture of secrecy is changing. It has changed. Now, adopted people can place themselves on a register, and if their birth family is on the register too, details can be exchanged.’
‘I know.’ Beatrice felt like screaming, but her voice came out quite calm. ‘I did put myself on the register. I haven’t heard back.’
‘These things take time, honey,’ her mother soothed. ‘She may still?—’
‘Or she may not,’ her father said. ‘You have to keep that in mind, Beatrice. It may very well be that she… that her circumstances mean she’s not in a position to reach out to you.’
She got married and had lots of other babies and she kept all of them.
‘She may have passed away,’ her mother said, as if that was the comforting conclusion.
‘Is there anything else?’ Beatrice pleaded. ‘Anything else at all you can tell me about her that you haven’t already?’
Her parents exchanged a glance. Her mom raised her eyebrows and her dad nodded almost imperceptibly.
‘Not about her,’ her dad said, ‘but about you.’
Beatrice clenched her fists, her nails digging into her palms. ‘Go on.’
‘Before we brought you home to our apartment in Dublin,’ her mom said, ‘we’d already decided the name we wanted you to have. I wanted to name you after my best friend in college. She was the smartest, kindest, prettiest girl I’ve ever known, and she died in a car accident. I wanted to honour her – and you – with her name.’
Beatrice felt a lump come to her throat. ‘I’m glad you did. I like my name.’
Her dad nodded. ‘But they told us the name your… the name you were given at birth.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s an Irish name,’ her mom said. ‘We didn’t want to take it away from you but we thought – it’s hard to pronounce. We didn’t want you growing up having to spell your name all the time. We thought it would make you different from other kids, and?—’
‘I was already different enough.’
‘It’s Aisling,’ her dad said, and patiently spelled it out, the way Beatrice had never had to.
Not long after that, they ended the call. What was said in those last few minutes before they hung up was a blur to Beatrice, but she did remember how it felt to walk back down the stairs, through the silence of the house on Damask Square, the past unfurling like the wooden balustrade that curved gently downwards, thick with coat upon coat of paint at the top, then with the paint stripped away by Luke, then freshly sanded on the first floor and finally newly varnished at ground level.
When she’d walked up those stairs, she’d been Beatrice. Now, she was someone else.