Chapter 41
FORTY-ONE
‘This can’t be it.’ Beatrice stopped, looking at the roughly drawn map in her hand. ‘It says number eight Lombard Street, but this looks all wrong.’
She gripped her umbrella, keeping the scrap of paper safely out of the rain. The owner of the pub with rooms where they were staying had seemed quite certain he was directing them to the right place, confidently sketching the streets on a piece of paper with the logo of a whiskey distillery at its top and including helpful arrows showing them which way to walk.
Clearly, he hadn’t actually had a clue. That or he’d been playing some kind of elaborate joke on them.
‘Let me see.’ Neil held out his hand, but Beatrice’s own was shaking so badly she almost dropped the paper on the wet cobblestone street.
Since their arrival the previous evening – even before that, since before they’d boarded their flight – she’d been wracked with nerves. She’d felt none of her usual excitement when the plane accelerated down the runway, its speed forcing Beatrice’s back against her seat before the jolting of the wheels stopped and soaring weightlessness began. Her anxiety had lifted only briefly after the bus journey from the airport – the same as any bus journey from any airport to any city, she’d thought, watching the stretches of anonymous motorway and grey industrial buildings flashing past the windows – when she’d been able to show Neil some of the sights she remembered from her first visit.
‘This is Trinity College, where Oscar Wilde studied.’
‘This is Ha’penny Bridge – I’ll show you the sketch I did of it sometime.’
‘This is where I went for dinner – the beef and Guinness pie was insane.’
So they’d gone there for dinner, but when a plate of the identical beef and Guinness pie was placed in front of Beatrice, she’d suddenly felt as if her mouth had been filled with sawdust and was unable to eat a thing.
‘Nervous?’ Neil had asked gently.
She’d nodded. ‘I feel like I’m going to spew.’
‘Come on then.’ Neil had pushed aside his own half-finished plate and gestured for the bill. ‘The sooner we go to bed, the sooner it’ll be tomorrow and you’ll be able to stop worrying.’
They’d walked back to their lodgings and said goodnight outside their separate bedrooms. Beatrice had thought for a moment about pulling Neil into a hug or inviting him in, just to see where it would lead. But it wasn’t right – she couldn’t use him like that, for validation or to pass the time or as some kind of human Zopiclone.
It wouldn’t be fair. He deserved better.
So she had slept alone – or rather, not slept, twisting in her bed in between being tormented by dreams in which the house on Damask Square burned to the ground, her father arrived in Dublin and bundled her off to the airport before she could fulfil the purpose of her visit, and she found a piece of paper with a name on it that should have been her birth mother’s but was Livvie’s.
Now, here they were, outside the General Register Office – or where the General Register Office should have been but wasn’t. Beatrice had thought she’d known what to expect: a grand, official building with pillars at its front and a flight of stone steps leading up to an imposing wooden door, like something out of Harry Potter.
This wasn’t that. It was a modern, double-storey building that looked more like a block of council housing or a government office than a wizard’s bank or a storage vault for secrets.
‘Look.’ Neil gripped her wrist, steadying her hand so the paper didn’t fall. ‘It says over there, Research Room. This is the place.’
‘Yes,’ Beatrice said. ‘I suppose it must be.’
She tucked the scrap of paper into the pocket of her jeans and stepped on to the cracked concrete path leading up to the unassuming door. She could feel her heart pounding; her head felt as if it was floating high above her shoulders – like she was watching herself from above. She was barely conscious that Neil had taken her hand in his.
He pushed the door open and they stepped inside. The room was warm, carpeted in hard-wearing grey tiles. At intervals around it were pods and banks of desks, padded chairs set in front of them and privacy screens dividing them.
It reminded Beatrice of nothing so much as the library where Neil worked, except instead of the rainbow profusion of books that filled the shelves there, here the books were in only three colours: red, green and black. They were stacked neatly, each colour together.
‘I guess we go over there,’ Neil whispered, pointing towards a window on the far wall marked ‘Reception’.
Behind it stood a middle-aged woman in an olive-green cardigan that looked hand-knitted. Her greying hair was held back from her face by a tortoiseshell Alice band and she wore steel-framed glasses. She looked like a picture of a librarian in a children’s book.
‘May I help you?’ she asked.
Beatrice felt suddenly furtive and ashamed, as if she was doing something that wasn’t allowed.
‘I’m adopted,’ she began. ‘I was hoping to?—’
‘Speak up, please,’ the woman said, but her smile was friendly.
‘Sorry.’ Beatrice felt herself blushing. ‘I wanted – I’m trying to find my birth records. I was adopted, and I?—’
‘Right.’ The woman moved away from the window, pushed open a door next to it and stepped out. ‘Come on, let me show you.’
She led them over to the shelves of books. Now, Beatrice could see that the red ones were marked ‘Births’, the green ‘Marriages’ and the black ‘Deaths’.
‘Do you know the year when you were born?’ the woman asked.
Beatrice nodded. ‘1983.’
‘And the date?’
‘February the twenty-seventh.’
‘That’s a good start,’ the woman said. ‘Entries are categorised by when they’re registered, you see. December birthdays are tricky, because they’re often entered in the following year’s volume. And do you know the name you were given at birth?’
‘Aisling.’
‘All right, so…’ The woman reached out to a shelf of volumes, running a finger over their spines. ‘Here we are. 1983.’
Beatrice looked at the volumes. There were four of them, each about the thickness of a telephone directory. In gold lettering on their spines were printed A–DOOL, DOON–KENT, KENZ–ODEA, ODEI–Z .
The woman took down the first volume and placed it on a table, opening it at random. Beatrice could see columns of clear upper-case printing, not quite black against the not-quite-white paper. Centred at the top of the page, Beatrice read ‘Index to Births’.
‘Now, here’s where you begin.’ The woman pointed towards the fifth column, marked ‘Date of Birth’. ‘The index is alphabetical, so you’ll need to go through each page until you find a date of birth that matches yours. There were about two hundred babies born each day in Ireland, so across these four volumes, that’s roughly how many matches you’ll find.’
‘Gotcha,’ Neil said.
The woman glanced at him, smiling, as if she was noticing him for the first time.
‘It’s good you’re here to help,’ she said. ‘It can take a day or more to go through it all, especially if you’re unlucky enough to have a mother whose name was Murphy, say. Or of course if…’
‘If what?’ Beatrice asked.
‘Sometimes, the records aren’t accurate. Sometimes it’s just clerical error, but occasionally…well, they were difficult times. But we’ll not worry about that just yet, will we?’
Mutely, Beatrice shook her head. The record of her birth would be there. It would be accurate. It had to be. She couldn’t have come all this way to leave disappointed.
‘Now, the next thing you’ll do is you’ll look in the third column.’ Her accent made it sound like ‘tird’. ‘There it says M or F, see? So you get to eliminate about half the results right away, because you’re not looking for a boy.’
‘I see,’ Beatrice said.
‘Then,’ the woman continued, with the patience of a teacher explaining fractions for the thousandth time, ‘you look at the first column – “Surname” – and the fourth – “Mother’s Maiden Name”. If those two are the same, that means the baby wasn’t registered with the father’s surname, which means the parents weren’t married, which almost certainly means an adoption.’
‘Okay.’ Beatrice managed to speak. Now that the scale of the task ahead was clear, her nerves had dissipated and she felt only a steely determination. ‘So when we find a record that looks like an adoption, then we check the name.’
‘Correct.’ The woman smiled. ‘And hopefully you’ll find an Aisling with your birthday and unmarried parents.’
‘It’ll be like looking for a needle in a haystack,’ Neil said. ‘But we’ll get there.’
‘The pages are only printed on one side,’ the woman pointed out encouragingly, ‘so there’s only half as much to go through as it looks like. You’ll be grand. Call me if I can be of any more help.’
She bustled away and Beatrice watched as she pushed the door open and resumed her wait behind the reception window.
Neil picked up the first of the 1983 volumes. ‘Right. Let’s do this thing.’
He carried the book over to a table and set it down, pulling over a chair for Beatrice. They sat and Beatrice laid her hand on the red cover, feeling the slight roughness of the cloth beneath her fingers.
‘Shall we skip straight to C and look for Clifford?’ she found herself whispering even more quietly than she normally would in a library – almost as if she was suggesting cheating on an exam.
‘Your landlady’s last name?’ Luke asked.
Beatrice nodded.
‘But if we didn’t find anything there, we’d only have to go back to the beginning,’ Neil pointed out.
‘Okay,’ she agreed. ‘Let’s start together on this volume, then we won’t miss anything. Once we’ve got the hang of it we can divide them up.’
‘Deal,’ he said. ‘Ready when you are.’
Beatrice opened the book to the first page of names and dates.
Aadair, Mary P. 1983. 24/07/1983. F. Ryan. Dublin North. 1983/Q3 , she read.
‘What’s the last column?’ she asked Neil, terrified that they’d missed something vital.
‘I guess it’s the year and quarter when the birth was registered.’ Neil touched the column header with his forefinger. ‘It mustn’t matter. She’d have told us if it did.’
‘I guess so.’
Beatrice forced herself to keep her eyes on the third column, scanning it rapidly but – she hoped – thoroughly. None of the birth dates matched her own.
‘Done?’ Neil asked.
Beatrice nodded reluctantly, and he turned the page. Again, there were no babies born on 27 February – nor on the next page, nor the one after that.
It was about ten pages in when Beatrice heard Neil’s voice say, ‘Got one!’
Beatrice’s heart leapt and her eyes jumped automatically to the right. But the letter in the ‘Sex’ column was ‘M’.
‘Sorry, Abberneaty, Padraig R,’ Neil said, ‘you’re no good.’
‘Poor Padraig.’ Beatrice couldn’t help giggling. ‘Hope you have nice birthdays, anyway.’
They carried on. Beatrice tried to stop her attention wandering, but she couldn’t help it. Occasionally an unusual name would catch her eye – a Zeta amid all the Christines and Pamelas, or two babies with the same date of birth, surname and mother’s maiden name.
‘Look.’ She pointed to the entry. ‘Twins.’
Neil nodded. ‘Concentrate.’
It was twenty pages more before Beatrice spotted an entry that made her heart jump in her chest. When she looked at it again, she realised that the date was July, not February – the 7 and the 2 similar enough to confuse her already tiring eyes. But Neil’s finger was pointing at the same name.
‘Full name, Ackroyd, Elaine M. Mother’s maiden name, Ackroyd,’ he murmured. ‘Elaine’s mother wasn’t married. She must have been adopted.’
Beatrice stared at the page. She wondered where Elaine was now; whether her adoptive parents loved her as much as Beatrice’s own; whether she’d ever sat in this room, searching this book for her truth.
Neil turned the page and they continued to scan the columns rapidly in unison before turning the page and beginning again – but Beatrice found herself wanting to be quicker still.
‘Steady on,’ he cautioned. ‘We don’t want to miss anything.’
‘Yes, but… Okay, you’re right.’
Finally, Neil turned a page and the name at its top was Clide. Beatrice felt perspiration spring out on the palms of her hands and abandoned the ‘Date of Birth’ column altogether, scanning only down the list of names.
But they went straight from Clifferly to Cliggett. There hadn’t been a single baby born in 1983 with the surname Clifford. Not on 27 February or any other day. Not adopted or born to married parents. None at all.
Beatrice looked up from the page, her eyes stinging from strain and the threat of tears. She felt as if all their patience had been rewarded only with failure. She looked back at the shelves of remaining books – the three volumes still to go through, along with the remaining quarter of this one, and she was overcome with despair.
‘Come on,’ Neil said. ‘Chin up. You could still be in here somewhere.’
But Beatrice was already on her feet. ‘I’m done with this. I’m going straight to look under Doyle.’
Leaving the A–DOOL volume open in front of Neil, she hurried to the shelves and pulled out the next red book, carrying it back with her arms outstretched like a waitress bearing a tray.
‘Scoot over,’ she said.
Neil closed the book and slid it to one side. Beatrice laid the other in its place and opened it at random near the beginning.
‘Dracott,’ Neil read. ‘You’re too far in.’
‘I know.’
Not wanting to damage the pages, the impatience almost killing her, Beatrice leafed backwards.
‘Doze,’ Neil read, his finger on the bottom of the page. ‘What a name.’
But Beatrice barely heard him. The name sprang out of the page as if it was printed in bright red instead of muted black.
Doyle .
There were three of them. Sebastian R, born in October to a woman whose name had formerly been Kelly. Roisin T, whose mother had been born an Irwin.
And Doyle, Aisling. Date of birth: 27/02/1983. Sex: F. Mother’s maiden name: Doyle .
‘There it is,’ she said. ‘That’s me.’
‘Does that mean your landlady…?’
‘I don’t know. She must’ve got married. Clifford must be her married name. The house never changed hands from when the Doyles bought it until she inherited it. It’s got to be her.’ Her voice sounded loud in the silent room. ‘She must be. It’s here, in the official record.’
‘Hold on,’ Neil said. ‘What if she had a sister?’
The thought had crossed Beatrice’s mind before, but now it made even more sense. ‘You mean if there were two granddaughters, but only one of them got the house, because…’
Her throat closed, imagining it. One daughter who’d done everything right, inherited everything. The other cast out, stripped of her child, her home, her place in the family.
She stood abruptly, the chair scraping against the floor. ‘I’m done searching through records. When we get back to London, I’m confronting Orla. I’m going to make her tell me the truth.’