Girl Unknown (2 page)

Even so, she arrived at a special moment of opportunity in my career. My old teacher and the head of our department, Professor Alan Longley, was due for retirement in two years’ time. He had hinted strongly, on more than one occasion, that his position could be mine if I played my cards right, so to speak. Of course, Head of Department would mean more work, but I was ready for the extra responsibility and willing to accept the challenge. Such was my life: the happy construction of work I had built around me – until last autumn, that is.

Back then, during those weeks in September, as the light changed and the air took on the first chill, I knew next to nothing about her. Not even her name. I don’t think I thought about her again until that Friday afternoon when
I held my student hours. The first of them began trickling in shortly after three – a second-year wanting to discuss his essay, a final-year already nervous about the prospects of graduation, another considering a master’s. One by one they came, and I found I began to search for
her
among them, each time expecting to see her bright face appearing around my door.

In my office, there were two small armchairs and a low coffee-table I’d brought from home where I conducted my meetings with students. I don’t like the power imbalance when I sit and stare at them from behind the desk. I kept the door open throughout these meetings, with both male and female students alike. You see, years ago, when I was a junior lecturer, a colleague was badly stung by an accusation from a female undergraduate who claimed he had molested her in his office. I remember at the time being shocked: he was such a weedy guy, with an unattractive habit of sniffing continuously while concentrating on a point.

Strange though it may sound, I couldn’t imagine him having any sexual desires. Most academics are normal people, leading their lives in the manner of any professional person. Some, however, are cloistered, ill-equipped to cope beyond the protective confines of the university. That was Bill – a hard-working historian, but naïve, it has to be said. Not an unkind man, and quite gentle, really, the accusation hit him like a rocket. Overnight, he became a wild-eyed loon, determined to proclaim his innocence, often at the most inopportune moments – in school meetings, in the staff room over coffee, once at an open day. The claims were investigated by the disciplinary
board and deemed to be unfounded. Bill was exonerated. The student graduated and left. Bill continued with his work, but a change had come over him. He no longer came for coffee with the rest of us, and avoided all social interaction with students. It was no surprise when, a year later, he announced he had taken up a post at a university abroad. I’ve no idea where he is now, though I think of him from time to time, whenever some other scandal erupts on campus, or when I feel the weight of a female student’s gaze a little too heavily upon me.

Something about the way she had looked at me that day, the way her voice had faltered, made me think of Bill. I was curious, but wary too. The doe-eyed ones, who seem young and innocent, they are the ones you have to be careful with. Not the savvy girls with their Ugg boots and fake tans – they can hold their own, and have little interest in pursuing a man like me. I’m forty-four, the father of two children. I eat well and I exercise regularly. Most days I cycle to work; three times a week I swim. I try to take care of myself, you could say. Now, I’m not the best-looking man in the world, but I’m not the worst. I’m just shy of six foot with dark hair, brown eyes and sallow skin. My dad said we had Spanish blood in our veins: ‘From the sailors on the Armada, shipwrecked off the West of Ireland all those years ago.’ I don’t know if that’s true or not. But after what happened to Bill, I have to presume it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that an impressionable young student might develop a crush. But at that stage I’d been married for seventeen years, and I was aware of how costly a stupid mistake could be. Besides, I had too much to lose.

I suppose that was what flickered across my mind the first time we spoke. Her reluctance to walk and talk with me – as if the weight of whatever she wanted to discuss required privacy, silence, the full focus of my attention.

That Friday, I fully expected her to come to my office. She didn’t. I have to admit I was disappointed. There was no explanation – not that I needed or expected one. Neither was there an email seeking an appointment. The following week, I saw her again in my lectures, her eyes fixed on the notebook in front of her, but when the hour was up, she filed out of the theatre with the other students.

The matter went clean out of my head, and I’m sure I would have forgotten about it completely in time. I was busier than ever, juggling my lectures and research along with various other work commitments, not to mention all the administration I had to do. I would also be talking to various media outlets about the 1916 centenary celebrations in the coming months. Caroline had started a new job. Between us we shared the school drop-offs as well as the kids’ after-school activities. Life was full. I was busier than ever. I was happy. I know that now.

Then one afternoon, in October, returning to my office from a school meeting, I found her sitting on the floor next to my door. Knees drawn up, hands clutching her ankles. As soon as she saw me, she got to her feet, and pulled at her clothing.

‘Can I help you?’ I asked, my hand searching in my pocket for the key.

‘Sorry. I should have made an appointment.’

‘You’re here now.’ I opened the door. ‘Come in.’

I went to my desk, placed my bag on it. The room was chilly. I walked to the radiator and ran my fingers along its top. The girl went to close the door.

‘No, you can leave it open,’ I said.

She gave me a slightly startled glance, as if she wished she’d never come.

‘Let’s sit, and you can tell me what’s on your mind.’

I took one of the armchairs, but she just stood, fiddling with the zip on her sweater. She was small and thin, bony wrists emerging from her cuffs, which had been picked at and unravelled. Nervous fingers constantly moving.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Zoë,’ she said quietly. ‘Zoë Barry.’

‘Well, Zoë. How can I help you?’ I asked, tidying a bunch of journals at my desk.

Her hands became still, and in a voice that came out as clear as a bell, she said: ‘I think you might be my father.’

2. David

Students come through my door every day of the working week. Some have ordinary questions, course-related queries. Others are in trouble. They want my help. They may not even know what’s wrong. And then again, others
are
trouble. Over the years, I’ve had my fair share of problem cases. They have ranged from benign to complex. But none was like this. None spelled trouble so clearly and lucidly, or announced the problem with such candid, if sheepish, clarity.

‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

‘Can I close the door?’

‘No, I don’t think that’s a good idea.’ I gestured for her to sit down in the chair opposite.

‘I know it’s probably a shock,’ she said, taking a seat and putting her bag down by her feet.

‘A shock?’ I said. More of an intrusion, or a preposterous allegation, than anything else. I inspected my itinerary for the day. It was full: one meeting chased by another. The module review committee was going to be particularly taxing. I also needed to get to the library to talk to Laurence about the oral histories he was sourcing for me from the British Library.

‘Well, yes … I’ve come in here out of the blue and revealed to you that I am your daughter.’

‘Sorry, I’m still struggling to follow. Why is it you think I might be your father?’ I said.

Her expression didn’t change. Shy, meek even, as if she were there against her will. ‘I’ve been thinking about how to put it so it wouldn’t come out as bluntly,’ she said, leaning forward slightly. ‘It doesn’t seem to matter which way I turn the phrases over. You are my father.’ She coughed awkwardly into her sleeve. ‘I thought it would be better to tell you straight rather than dancing around it, if that makes sense?’

The planes of her face were smooth. It was an open face, an honest one. Her eyes were green, wide and bright. Her hair fell over her face occasionally and she had to push it back – a kind of tic, I supposed.

‘Actually, it’s a relief to tell you,’ she said, giving me a watery smile. ‘I’ve tossed this around for ages, sitting in your lectures, knowing all the time you’re my father and that you had no idea. It got so I couldn’t bear it. I felt like I had to tell you.’

Her voice, though tentative and soft, had the earthy guttural of the North in it. Because of all the reading and research I’d been doing recently, it made me think about those American soldiers during the Second World War stationed in the various towns of Northern Ireland – Coleraine, Ballycastle, Portstewart – and their unwritten legacy: the ones who left behind sons and daughters they might never have known about, while others were sought out later in life by their offspring. I had always thought this a joyful, if complicated, legacy – an ancillary tributary to the river of the past – an enriching one, even.

Still, I became annoyed at the vagaries of my own
mind and the distraction the girl had brought to my day: her prank, the articulations of an unsound mind, whatever it was.

I picked up my notebook, drew myself up from the chair, and walked to my desk. I felt the short fuse of my temper fizzle. ‘Again, what makes you think I’m your father?’

The smile fell from her face. She reached into her bag for a tissue. I could tell she was struggling to maintain her composure. Perhaps I had been too curt. I had, after all, a duty of care to her as a student. She was young, lost; it must have been very difficult for her to pluck up the courage, however misguided, to come in to talk to me.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘you’re clearly upset. And, believe me, it’s not the first time I’ve had a student here in tears. University life can be daunting. People struggle. But there is help out there, if you ask for it. Let me give you the number of someone in Student Services you can call.’ I went behind my desk and wrote the number on a Post-it. Claire O’Rourke, a counsellor on campus, was an old friend. As I scribbled the note, I wondered briefly what she would make of the girl’s claims.

Ripping the page off the pad, I went to hand it to her but she didn’t reach out for it. She didn’t look at it at all.

I returned to my desk. ‘If you don’t want the number, that’s your call,’ I said. The situation had grown tiresome. I had work to do. ‘I’m trying to offer you help, but I can’t force you to take it.’

I tapped the space bar on my keyboard, stirring the computer to life. The monitor brightened and the image of Robbie and Holly dissolved.

‘My mother’s name was Linda,’ the girl said, and my hand released the mouse. ‘Linda Barry.’

Linda Barry … Hearing her name again was like having an unhealed wound prodded. I had not heard it for so long that I felt as if I was dreaming, or as if time was playing tricks. My mouth dried up.

‘Linda Barry?’ I said and, just like that, I was transported to another time, another place. It was as if her name was a secret password to the past – to my past, to a younger, more feckless and passionate man, and the time that went with it. A password that contained pain, too. I felt winded, and all at once on guard.

I looked at her again for any signs of resemblance when the figure of another student appeared in the doorway.

‘Dr Connolly?’

‘Not now,’ I said testily. ‘I’m in the middle of something,’ I switched off the monitor. ‘Come back later.’

‘A little over a year ago, she told me about you,’ the girl said, her voice barely a whisper.

‘She told you about me?’

‘She thought I needed to know,’ the girl said, pulling at the strands of her sleeve.

I could tell she was waiting for me to say something, while the possibility of what she had revealed began to ghost its way through my mind.

‘She told me when she was a student at Queens, you were her course tutor,’ she said. ‘She told me you had become friends, and that, for a while, you were lovers.’

It felt wrong – listening to a student discussing me and Linda, describing us as
lovers
. Could it be true? Had Linda had a child?

I thought about the weekend we’d spent in Donegal before we split up. Three days in a remote part of the countryside. I had felt as if I were shrugging off my previous life, the years of study, the immersion in academia receding from memory, like waking from a long dream. Beneath the surface, there had lingered the knowledge of a parting. Soon I would be returning to Dublin to take up a position in the university from which I had graduated three years before. The life I had lived in Belfast, at Queens, would draw to a close. And this relationship, this love affair – I had no idea how much it meant to me – it, too, would be laid to rest. We both knew it, although neither of us had said so.

The girl held a hand to her lips and I saw there in the rounded shape of her face a resemblance. A simplicity that might have been plain were it not for the liveliness of her eyes – Linda’s eyes, or were they? I couldn’t be completely sure.

‘I don’t see how …’ I began. ‘I can’t understand …’

‘She said your affair was brief. Afterwards, she went abroad to do a master’s degree. That was when she discovered she was pregnant.’

I had, by then, completed my PhD and returned to Dublin. I had met Caroline again and our relationship – broken for those three years in Belfast – had resumed. After Linda, after the swirling highs and lows, I felt ready for something solid, stable and dependable. ‘But she never said. She never told me …’

I remember what a relief it was to climb into marriage, to feel the safe, firm structure of it form around me. But with this girl in my office, I was again all at sea, the roar
of waves in my ears drowning much of what she was telling me. I kept thinking of Linda with a baby –
my
baby. How could she not have told me? How could she have gone through all of that alone?

‘This must be difficult,’ she said, regaining her composure. ‘It’s got to be a lot to take in.’