Chapter 53
FIFTY-THREE
10 DECEMBER 2005
I can hear the shower running and Beatrice singing. Don’t Cry for Me Argentina – she has sung it while she gets ready almost every morning since she moved in. I wonder what it is about that particular song that appeals to her? Is it a favourite of her mom’s – that musical woman who has a baby grand piano in her front room and sings in the church choir?
Perhaps someday I will ask her. If I did, she would probably look at me in surprise, unaware of this habit she has.
Then she might become self-conscious and stop doing it. And I don’t want her to stop – I don’t want to make her feel anything other than at home in this house. Having lost her for so long, I don’t want to do anything that might frighten her off.
Even my portrait of her I am working on in snatches – a few brush strokes here, the adjustment of a line there – because I do not want to ask her to sit still for too long lest she becomes restless and makes a run for it.
It reminds me of those early days when Maud turned up at the house and I tempted her with tasty food and warm places to sleep, but always left a window open for her so she could come and go as she pleased.
But even when I work on the portrait alone, my charcoal and my brushes seem to capture her as if she were there in front of me: the smooth curve of her cheeks, the gleaming curtain of her hair, her delicate hands. How beautiful she is. Any mother would swell with pride at having produced such a girl, with all her flaws and complexities. A young woman who, despite her privilege, has been dealt a difficult hand and is playing it as best she can. I find myself admiring her – her energy, her spirit, her courage in coming here to seek the truth about who she is.
I am full of wonder now that I know she is my daughter. I have never felt the connection I felt with Livvie – that meeting of minds, like falling in love. But I cherish her – I want to protect her, to be here for her, to keep her safe from harm.
Perhaps, then, this is what mothers feel, and what I felt for Livvie was something quite different.
I don’t know. I have never been a mother before. I am working it out as I go along.
I wonder how different she would have been if she had grown up with me, in the house in Clonmara, learning to ride a pony and running wild in the fields before being ordered inside to wash and change for tea and hold her knife and fork like a lady.
I wonder what would have happened if I had told Declan about her. Sometimes I used to imagine that he would leave his wife and be with me. God, how stupid I was! As if he would have done that. Declan was no fool – I was the fool and I know in hindsight that I was not the first of his students with whom he’d had such a dalliance.
He would never have left her – that pretty woman in the photograph on his desk, taken on their wedding day, her dark hair crowned with flowers. All that would have happened is I would have been kicked out of college in disgrace instead of choosing to leave with my head held more or less high.
Is it all worth it? The pain, the shame, the years of hiding and running away?
To hear my daughter singing in the mornings like a lark – yes. To know that even if I couldn’t hear her, even if I had never met her, she would be alive and singing?
Yes, it is.