Chapter 39
THIRTY-NINE
28 OCTOBER 2005
I wrote three pages this morning and I will write three tomorrow morning, but I am writing this now because I don’t know what else to do. I feel I should put down what has happened, although I wish it hadn’t – I wish I could just rewind the tape and erase my own weakness, my own stupidity.
I have told Livvie my secret, told her the truth.
She came into my room, about half an hour ago. She would never burst in without knocking, but she was excited and in a hurry – off to her party in the Schiaparelli dress, wanting me to see her in her white foundation and black lipstick, a ghost from the 1920s or some such idea, looking bizarre but beautiful, wanting me to approve and compliment her.
She tapped on the door and then opened it straight away, and came in before I had time to hide the photograph.
I don’t look at it so often now, partly because it has become too fragile from being carried around in my wallet for twenty-two years. When I do, I usually cry, so I suppose I was crying when Livvie came in.
I must have been, because her face changed from radiant excitement to concern and she dashed over to the bed in her high heels and crouched down next to me, her hand on my knee, saying, Are you okay, Orla? Of course I wasn’t okay, but what else could she say?
And then she saw the photograph. It’s only just recognisable now – the colours, never bright, are faded and the edges are tattered. The focus was never particularly sharp, and now it is even more blurred from all the times when I caressed it with my fingers, over and over, not realising that I was rubbing away the emulsion. I’ve stopped doing that now, and I keep it in a little acetate sleeve so that it won’t be completely destroyed.
But it is still clearly a baby. A newborn in a pink romper suit, eyes scrunched shut beneath a pink bonnet, the marks of the forceps still visible on either side of her poor wee head. You can see the arm and hand of the sister who was holding her, but not her face. I don’t know which of them it was who held her and which of them took the photograph. I only found it when I left the clinic, tucked in my bag in an envelope with my name on it.
Livvie said, Is that your baby, Orla? like it was no surprise to her.
I said, Yes. They took her away before I came round from the anaesthetic, and so I never saw her. I never held her.
She said, I’m so sorry, Orla. What a terrible loss. She is beautiful.
That was kind, because in the photograph she looks like any other newborn baby.
I did not want Livvie to think that the baby had died, so I said, It was for the best. She got to live her life and I got to live mine.
Livvie said, She was adopted.
I simply said, Yes.
Livvie said, Do you want to talk about it?
I must have known by then I’d already said too much, because I said, No, thank you. I’ll be all right.
She sat with me for a few minutes, brought me a cup of tea – after offering me whiskey, good girl that she is – and then she went off to her party. She would have stayed with me if I’d asked, but I wanted her to go. Most of all, I didn’t want her to know that she is the first person I have ever told.