Chapter 29
TWENTY-NINE
5 AUGUST 2005
Somewhere in one of these notebooks, in one of the crates in the cellar where they are stored, are the pages I wrote after I discovered Adrian’s affair. They were not easy to write – I felt as if my pen was vomiting out the words, so shuddering and ghastly was the process.
We’d barely been married two years. I felt everything anyone would have felt in the circumstances: shock, betrayal, devastation, helplessness. In hindsight, of course, I can see that we were never right for each other: he cared far more about his work in the struggle against Apartheid than he did for me, and I cared more for him than I did for the struggle, passionately though I’d thrown myself into both.
It was for the best, I can tell myself now, all these years later and miles away.
But I still remember the sick, churning fear I felt when I wrote down what I knew, as if writing would make it real.
That is how I feel today. Yesterday something happened and I have barely been able to think of anything else since, yet also until I put it down on paper, in black and white, I can allow myself to pretend – to deny – that it has happened at all.
It happened yesterday, in Imran’s shop. Although of course it didn’t – it has been happening over the course of months and years, across the sea in Ireland, in committee rooms and in the chamber of the Dáil éireann, where Brian Lenihan and his colleagues have been discussing and debating, holding the fate of thousands of women like me in their hands.
Women like me and women like her – because she will be a woman now, an adult. My portraits over the years have charted her growth from babyhood through childhood and adolescence and now she is twenty-two, old enough to drive a car and vote and make decisions about the course her life will take.
A few years ago, they were proposing to make it a crime for adopted people to attempt to make contact with their birth parents. When I read that, I wondered whether she had read it too and how she felt. I felt fear for her, but for myself… relief, I suppose. But also a terrible, aching sense of loss.
Now it has all changed. I went into the shop to buy a copy of the Guardian, and I don’t know what made me pick up the Irish Times as well. The story was tucked away on an inside page, because it is no longer new news. She can put her name on a register and so can I, and if we both do so we will be put in contact with each other.
It is a double lock: unless we both act, nothing will happen.
I can do nothing. Perhaps she will do nothing. And then nothing will change.
I am torn between hope and fear. Hope that I might see her at last, and everything will be wonderful. Fear of – well, everything else. Confronting my own weakness and failure. Coming face to face with someone who will surely hate me – how could she not hate me, after what I did to her? And fear, most of all, of raking up the past just when I have finally found myself somewhere I feel safe.
Am I, though? I’m almost certain that Beatrice has been in my room, going through my things. And weeks ago, before we cleared out the rooms on the first floor, I heard her there at night, searching. Searching for what? It can only be for secrets she believes this house holds – or the secret I myself hold.