Chapter 31
Madeleine sat back in her chair, wounded.
She felt as if Lucy had drawn back her fist and punched her right in the solar plexus.
Her daughter’s words had stung. Suddenly Madeleine had had enough.
She was tired of it all. Tired of always being the bad cop.
They had no idea how hard she had tried to protect them and the sacrifices she had made for them over the years. Lucy needed to hear a few home truths.
‘You girls go on like your grandmother was a saint! She wasn’t as perfect as you think.
She had a dark side too.’ Madeleine was sick of them canonising Elizabeth.
Although she had undoubtedly been an important figure in the girls’ lives and had helped hugely with their upbringing, Madeleine knew the real reason behind her involvement.
Over the years Madeleine had seen another side to Elizabeth: a vindictive streak that she had done her best to keep hidden from her daughters.
She knew that if she told them the truth, the whole thing would unravel like a spool of thread.
As their mother, it was her job to protect them from that.
‘How dare you! Why would you stoop so low when she’s not even here to defend herself?’ Lucy raged.
‘Oh Mum, why would you say something like that?’ Faith was horrified.
‘It’s true. She could be nasty when she wanted to be. She gave me a hard time about how I raised you girls. She said that I wasn’t a good mother.’
‘Well, she wasn’t wrong,’ Lucy spat. ‘No offence, Mum, but you were hardly Mum of the Year. You had no interest in being a mother.’
‘It’s true.’ Faith, who usually shied away from confrontation, joined in. ‘You shipped us off to boarding school as soon as you could.’
‘After your father died, everything fell on my shoulders. I had to go out and get a job. I had to pay the mortgage all by myself. I had to pay the bills. It wasn’t easy with two young girls, let me tell you, as a single mother, trying to keep a roof over our heads.
I had no help in Dublin, no family around me, no one to share the childcare with.
Sometimes I would get held up in a meeting or I’d get stuck in traffic and then would have to race home to let the childminder finish up.
I was constantly stressed out of my mind.
Boarding school seemed like the only way I could get it all to work. ’
‘You can make all the excuses you want, but the truth is that Elizabeth was more of a mother to us than you ever were!’ Lucy continued.
‘Only because she felt guilty!’ Madeleine cried, losing patience with them. They were always ganging up on her. Painting her as the big bad wolf, when they hadn’t a clue about everything she went through back then.
‘Why would she feel guilty?’ Faith asked.
‘She had her reasons,’ Madeleine retorted, knowing she was venturing into uncharted waters.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Lucy challenged.
‘Well, I think on some level she felt responsible for your father dying so young.’
Faith wrinkled her brow in confusion. ‘It wasn’t her fault that Dad got sick and died.’
Madeleine stayed silent.
‘Mum,’ Lucy pressed. ‘What are you not telling us?’
‘Your dad didn’t get sick!’ she eventually snapped, growing weary of all the secrets.
She had spent years trying to protect them from the truth, to shield them from the harsh realities of life, but what had it all been for?
Now her two ungrateful daughters were throwing it all back in her face.
She was tired of the charade. ‘He took his own life!’
Faith’s eyes grew wide and her bottom lip started to tremble.
Oh God, Madeleine thought. What have I done? In a fit of pique, she had revealed a secret she had sworn she would always protect them from. She wished she could take the words back, swallow them into her mouth, never to be mentioned again.
Lucy blinked. ‘D-Dad killed himself?’ she asked, bewildered.
Madeleine nodded in resignation, knowing there was no going back now.
‘I’m so sorry. I never meant for you to find out this way, but sometimes I feel like you both hate me.
’ With that she heard her voice start to quiver and she realised that tears were leaking from her eyes.
She hadn’t cried in years; the sensation felt alien to her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, wiping away the tears, but they wouldn’t stop coming.
They spilled freely down her face as though she was the Powerscourt waterfall.
What was happening to her? She was mortified.
Her life was falling apart and, for the first time, she felt powerless to do anything to stop it.
‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ Lucy cried angrily. ‘You told us he had cancer. Pancreatic cancer – that’s what you told us!’
‘You were aged four and two; you were too young to understand.’
‘But why didn’t you tell us when we got older?’ she asked.
‘I guess it became too difficult. You girls accepted the story you had been told and the more time that passed, the harder it became to tell you the truth. I even began to believe the lie myself. Your father was dead; knowing how he died wouldn’t have changed anything.
It was more comforting to think that he had been taken by illness rather than finally succumbing to his demons. ’
‘But Nanna never told us – she let us believe the lie too.’ Lucy looked crestfallen at Elizabeth’s deceit.
‘Put yourself in her shoes – she had lost her son. She always wondered if there was anything she could have done to prevent it,’ Madeleine explained.
‘You see, your father struggled with his mental health long before I knew him and I think she blamed herself for not noticing that he was so unwell; so she always felt guilty about it. In the months after your dad died, she was trying to make sense of it all. She was angry, she was lashing out, looking for a reason or someone to blame, and unfortunately I bore the brunt of it. Oh, she said some horrible things to me: she said that he had shouldered the load alone because I had been a stay-at-home mother taking care of you two. She said that if I’d had a job then maybe he wouldn’t have been under so much pressure financially. ’
Faith’s hands flew to her mouth. ‘Oh, Mum, no! Please say this isn’t true?’
Madeleine shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, darling, but I’m afraid it is.
It was a tough few years when you girls were small.
I was drowning in debt, I thought we would lose the house.
He had had a gambling addiction, which I only found out about after his death.
I learned that he had borrowed money off his friends and he had remortgaged the house without me knowing.
As well as losing my husband, I had people coming to me telling me he had owed them money.
I was scared we would end up losing everything. ’
‘Didn’t he have life insurance?’ Lucy questioned.
‘He did, but in those days suicide wasn’t covered, so the mortgage still had to be paid.
It was an awful, stressful time. I had no choice but to find work and try to keep us from ending up homeless.
I was lucky to get a job in the agency working on the reception desk.
I had no experience; I guess they took pity on me …
but they gave me a chance. I was just answering the phones and making tea and coffee for meetings, but I quickly learned the ropes and through sheer hard graft I worked my way up to where I am today. ’
‘How did he do it?’ Lucy asked, her breath hitching.
‘He jumped from the cliffs.’
She gasped. ‘He did it here?’ Her eyes were wild with pain. ‘In Inishbeg Cove?’
Madeleine nodded, suddenly doubting whether she should have shared this information with her daughters?
Maybe it was too much for them to take in right now.
They had only just learned that he had taken his own life, but to hear he had done it in the village that they loved so dearly, the place that held so many happy memories for them, might be a step too far.
‘His body washed up in the cove three days later.’
‘How do you know he didn’t slip and fall?’ Faith challenged, blinking back tears, refusing to accept the version of events that her mother was telling her.
‘He left a note, darling. He said he was sorry, but he felt it was the only option.’ Madeleine’s voice cracked as she recalled the trauma once more.
‘I was up in Dublin with you girls, and he had come down to visit Elizabeth for her birthday. There was nothing strange about that, but then she called me to say that he had gone out for a walk and hadn’t returned after several hours, which was unusual.
When he still hadn’t come back after nightfall, she began to worry.
But she told me not to fret, saying she was sure he’d turn up soon.
I can’t explain it, but I had a bad feeling as soon as she called, so I bundled both of you into the car and drove straight here.
When I arrived, I left you with Elizabeth to wait in the house in case he returned, while I headed out to search for him.
I was sure I could find him. I must have walked for hours, and some of the villagers, who had heard he was missing, came out to help look for him.
Eventually somebody found his jacket and shoes up on the headland, and I knew.
People told me not to lose hope, that it might not be what it looked like, or even if it was what it looked like, he might have changed his mind and not jumped at all.
Although I wanted to believe them and I desperately clung to their words, I knew in my heart it wasn’t true.
When I returned to the house, Elizabeth told me she had found a letter in his room.
When I read it, I knew that it wasn’t an accident. ’
‘I can’t believe this!’ Lucy spat. She pointed a finger accusingly at her mother.
‘You lied to us. Nanna lied to us. All these years, I believed in a different version of my father. You let me believe that he was a hero, an idol, not a man with a gambling addiction. A coward who took his own life because he didn’t want to face up to it all! ’
‘Lucy, he was very ill. He was a good man who did some stupid things. The one thing I need you both to know was that he loved you so much.’
‘If he loved us, he wouldn’t have left us,’ Faith cried. She pushed her chair back from the table with a screech and stood up.
Madeleine placed her hand on her arm to calm her down. ‘Faith, wait—’ but Faith pushed past her and left the kitchen. Madeleine made to follow her daughter.
Seconds later, they heard the slam of the front door.
‘Do you think we should go after her?’ Madeleine asked.
‘She just needs some fresh air and space to process it all,’ Lucy said quietly.
Madeleine gulped. ‘She wouldn’t do anything stupid, would she?’
Lucy shook her head. ‘No, never.’
‘You two know each other so well,’ Madeleine said sadly.
She sat back down again, knowing that Lucy was right.
What she had told them had altered their universe.
She had always felt an outsider with her own daughters – they seemed to know one another inside out; they instinctively knew what the other was thinking or the right thing to say or do, whereas Madeleine was always second-guessing herself.
When had this distance crept in between them?
she wondered. When the girls were small, they had been so close.
It had always been her and her girls, they were a unit, but then everything had changed.
With the loss of their father, Madeleine had had no choice but to step up.
Suddenly the carefree young mother was replaced by a stressed woman trying to navigate life as a single mother, keep a roof over their heads, and pay off the mountain of debt that had landed on her doorstep.
She threw herself into work and her efforts were recognised with a promotion, which had motivated her to work even harder.
Each hard-won promotion, each rung of the ladder she had climbed, had been a chance for security for her and her daughters.
When the time came for them to go to secondary school, she had chosen boarding school as it meant she could work longer hours and earn more money without worrying about childcare – but perhaps, with hindsight, she should have kept them closer.
It had fostered their independence, which she had always seen as a good thing, but maybe she could have focused less on work and more on their bond.
Perhaps she had been so absorbed with her job that she had overlooked her daughters.
‘Oh, Mum,’ Lucy wept. ‘So that’s why you hate this place so much.’
‘I don’t hate this place, but I guess I do associate it with a lot of bad memories.’
‘It’s a lot to take in. This has come as a big shock to both of us,’ Lucy said, wiping her nose.
‘I’m sorry.’ Madeleine wept. ‘I never intended you to find out like this, especially when you’ve just lost your grandmother.’
‘I’m sorry too, Mum. I said some nasty things tonight.
I didn’t mean them, I promise, I was just overwhelmed by everything.
And I’m sorry for how we’ve treated you over the years.
I guess we have this version of you in our heads.
We thought we knew the full story, but this changes everything. I’m so sorry, Mum.’
Madeleine pulled her elder daughter into a hug, feeling her heart beating in time with her own. ‘Oh, my love, we’ve all made mistakes.’