Chapter 14 #2
‘Oh,’ Ciara said, still reeling. ‘Hard to understand now, but I suppose it would have been different when he was young.’
‘Yes,’ Maureen agreed. ‘Things were very different then. In any case, he told me later that he had always wondered why he had dark hair and blue eyes when both his parents were fair with hazel eyes. They were wonderful parents, he told me, and he understood why they hadn’t told him he was adopted.’
Ciara kept looking at the young girl in the photo. ‘So then it must be true,’ she said slowly. ‘Madge was my biological grandmother who gave her baby up for adoption.’
‘I think you’re right.’ Maureen looked back at Ciara. ‘You look a little like that young woman in the photo.’
‘Do I?’ Ciara looked at the photo again and saw that her mother might be right. The black hair and those light eyes, the colour of which was not discernible in a black-and-white photo, except that they were light. ‘But how did Martha know where to find me?’
‘I don’t know,’ Maureen said. ‘Could be that those nuns who helped Madge when she gave birth knew who the Doyles were and then Martha might have asked about the people who adopted her little nephew.’
‘But wouldn’t it have been against the law to reveal their names?’ Ciara protested.
‘Of course, but I’m sure the nuns didn’t worry about that.
Martha had been the one to get her sister to that little convent, where she might have been in hiding until the baby – Frank – was born.
She was lucky to have landed in a place where there was compassion and kindness instead of judgement and talk of sin.
There were places that…’ Maureen stopped.
‘I know what you’re trying to say. I’ve heard about the Magdalene laundries,’ Ciara said with a shudder.
‘Martha saved her sister and that little baby from all that misery.’ Ciara covered her face with her hands.
‘Oh, how sad she must have been. And how upset Dad must have been to find out he was adopted.’
‘It was a shock,’ Maureen agreed. ‘He didn’t tell me for a long time. But then, when you were born, he told me. He was so happy we had our own child at last. We’d been trying and hoping and praying for so long.’
‘Had you?’ Ciara asked and lifted her face to look at her mother. ‘I always thought my arrival was a bit of a surprise and that I upset your perfect life.’
‘Whatever gave you that idea?’ Maureen asked.
‘Well, I don’t know. You had to give up your career and then you couldn’t go on your fancy holidays when I was small. And then the school fees and all that…’ Ciara’s voice petered out as she met her mother’s gaze.
‘I didn’t have to give up my career,’ Maureen argued. ‘I chose to take a break to look after my precious little daughter. That was a lot more rewarding than doing marketing and PR for a firm selling tractors, believe me.’
‘Dad always said I was a shock to the system,’ Ciara remarked.
‘You were. But in a good way. You turned our lives upside down and we loved it. At least I did,’ Maureen replied. ‘Frank was more worried about you and followed you around like some kind of mother hen, in case you would break.’
Ciara nodded, smiling. ‘Oh yes, I do remember. He hovered outside every time I was at a party. It used to drive me mad.’ She patted her mother’s hand. ‘Thanks for telling me. And thanks for all the things you did for me through the years. You were the best parents. Both you and Dad.’
‘That’s lovely to hear.’ Maureen patted her eyes with a paper napkin. ‘Oh, this has been quite a morning. I did have a feeling about Martha all along, of course. But I didn’t want to tell you until I was sure.’
‘But why did you never tell me Dad was adopted?’ Ciara asked, with a surge of resentment. ‘Why was that such a big secret?’
‘It wasn’t my secret,’ Maureen said. ‘And your father felt it was a kind of stigma to be adopted and not the biological son of the parents he had thought were his true mother and father.’
‘You could have told me after…’ Ciara stopped. ‘I mean, when he was gone. Why didn’t you?’ she asked. ‘Didn’t I have the right to know?’
‘I suppose,’ Maureen replied, looking sad. ‘But I didn’t think there was any point. Frank wanted you to feel the grandparents on the photos were your real ones. He thought it might cause you a lot of pain to know that they weren’t. He wanted you to feel you had a family.’
‘As I don’t remember either of them, that was a little strange,’ Ciara said. ‘But it wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have known that Martha was going to leave me all this stuff in her will.’
‘That’s true,’ Maureen said. ‘But maybe I should have told you and spared you the sadness you feel now.’
‘It’s okay, Ma. It wasn’t your fault,’ Ciara soothed. She picked up the photo again and peered at it. ‘I wonder who my grandfather was. Someone local, do you think?’
‘Could be,’ Maureen said. ‘We’ll never know, though. The village was much more alive in the forties, I can imagine.’
Ciara put the photo on the table. ‘Martha must have been so young when her sister became pregnant. How brave she was to help Madge like that.’
‘They probably had to keep it from their parents,’ Maureen suggested. ‘I wish we knew more about her.’
‘Their parents must have been running the bookshop,’ Ciara mused. ‘I wonder who started it.’
‘Could have been here for generations,’ Maureen said. ‘This house is late Victorian and it was built with that shop downstairs.’
‘It makes me feel that I need to do something with it,’ Ciara remarked. ‘To carry on the tradition of what is now my family.’
Maureen’s eyes were suddenly worried. ‘That’s what I was dreading to hear you say.’
Ciara laughed and got up. ‘I know. Come on, Ma, let’s not worry about it now and get in the car and drive down to Enniskerry for that lunch. I’m hungry after all this.’
Maureen rose from her chair. ‘Good idea. We can discuss it while we eat.’
Ciara went downstairs to see to Brian and make sure there was water in his bowl, the conversation with her mother still fresh in her mind. She’d had no idea that coming here would help her discover a long-lost family… what else was she going to uncover?