Authors: Kate Beaufoy
‘I’m sorry,’ Lisa said. ‘Weren’t you expecting me? I did send a telegram.’
‘I got it,’ Róisín managed, finally. ‘But I still can’t believe it. What a vision of elegance you are. Come in, come in.’
‘Thank you.’ Lisa followed Róisín into a narrow hallway that boasted just two doors off. Róisín opened the one on the left. It led into a small sitting room where a fire burned brightly and a table was set for tea. The smell of turf mingled with an aroma of baking, and Lisa felt an overwhelming sense of homecoming as she dropped into the armchair indicated by her cousin.
‘It must have been a terrible journey you had.’ Róisín was regarding her, wonder still evident in her eyes. ‘Flying all that way.’
‘It was tiring. It’s so good to be here, Róisín. What a pretty room!’
‘Thank you. Let me bring you refreshments – you must be starving.’
‘That would be lovely.’
‘You’ll excuse the tea, I hope. We haven’t had real tea since rationing began. We use ground-up blackberry leaves instead.’
‘I wish I’d known – I could have brought you some.’
‘We’ve got used to making do.’
With a smile, Róisín backed through the door, leaving Lisa to study her surroundings. The room was painted in pastels, with sprigged wallpaper beneath the picture rail. There were two armchairs, a small sofa, and a footstool drawn up by the fire, upon which a large cat was snoozing. Several framed watercolours adorned the walls, and photographs were on display atop a bookcase that contained the complete works of Shakespeare, the complete works of Dickens, and the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, all bound in battered Morocco leather. Randomly, Lisa reached for one of the photographs.
It showed a smiling Róisín on a stretch of golden sand, flanked by a handsome dark-haired man and a pretty girl of about five or six. So, her cousin had a daughter. On the back of the photograph, pencilled in careful script, were the words Dónal, Rósín, Caoimhe. Gurteen Strand, March 1941.
The sound of the door opening made Lisa turn. Róisín was carrying a tray laden with sandwiches, scones and thick slices of barmbrack.
‘Oh, my!’ Lisa moved to help her cousin set plates on the table. ‘What trouble you’ve gone to. You shouldn’t have – I know things are terribly scarce.’
‘Sit yourself down. Here in Ireland we’ve plenty enough to eat, although petrol’s fierce expensive. We have a pony and trap for transport.’
‘That must be fun for your little girl.’ Something in Róisín’s expression told Lisa she had made a faux pas. ‘The child in the photograph? Isn’t she your daughter?’
‘She was my foster child.’
Lisa registered the past tense, and stiffened. ‘Oh. I am so sorry.’
‘Don’t take me up wrong – she hasn’t passed away; it’s just that she’s not here with us any more. Molly – her mammy – had been living a while in a Magdalene laundry. She came back for her.’
‘A laundry?’
‘They’re institutions run by the nuns for what they call “fallen” women. Pregnant girls are sent there to have their babbies, and then the babbies are taken from them, and the girls set to work. I took Caoimhe, and promised Molly I’d look after her until she was able to rear her herself. After five years in that hellhole she couldn’t take any more. She said the nuns were worse than the Gestapo. So she ran away, and came to claim her little Caoimhe.’ Róisín pronounced it ‘Kwee-va’.
‘It must have been very difficult for you to give her up.’
‘It broke my heart. In Irish, Caoimhe means “gentle, beautiful, precious”. She was all that, and more, to me. Especially precious.’
‘Couldn’t you have fought to keep her?’
‘She wasn’t mine to keep. She belonged to Molly. And Molly had suffered so much in that awful place, her hands raw from washing the sheets of the very priests who raped her.’
Lisa gave Róisín a look of horror.
‘Yes. They raped and beat her and called her a vile sinner. And when she got pregnant at the age of fifteen, they sent her to that evil place to do penance on her knees for those so-called sins.’ Róisín’s expression was one of uncharacteristic bitterness. ‘That’s when I lost my faith. I haven’t received the sacrament since I heard Molly’s story in the hospital, when I was delivering Caoimhe.’
‘You helped at the birth?’
‘I did. I’m a nurse. I’ve brought hundreds of babbies into this world, but nary a one of my own.’
‘You can’t . . .?’
‘No. And it’s not for the want of trying.’
‘Oh, Róisín! I’m sorry.’
‘Ah, sure. I had her a good while. And wasn’t I blessed to have had her at all?’
‘Yes,’ said Lisa. ‘You were.’
Róisín managed a smile, then set about pouring tea.
London wasn’t London any more. It was a city mired in rubble. In the West End, many of the theatres had been shut down or bombed. The civilians on the streets were clad in shapeless, worn-out garments and down-at-heel shoes: fashion was a thing of the past. On their side of Grosvenor Square, her grandparents’ house was one of a handful that hadn’t been hit.
Gramps answered the door in his carpet slippers, a woollen blanket wrapped around his shoulders. He was unshaven, and looked many years older than when she had last seen him. He said nothing, simply took Lisa in his arms on the top doorstep and held her for a long time. When he released her, Lisa clasped his hand and led him into the drawing room, instructing the cab driver to leave her baggage in the hall. The tall windows were boarded up, and flanked by heavy blackout curtains. There was a smell of damp and drains, and every surface was covered in a layer of grime.
Gramps made a helpless gesture. ‘I’m sorry you had to come home to this,’ he said. And then he slumped down upon the old leather chesterfield and started to cry.
Taking a handkerchief from her clutch bag, Lisa wiped Gramps’s cheeks and told him gently to blow his nose. ‘Is it Grandma?’ she asked, when he’d finished sobbing.
‘Yes. She died last week, Baba. We buried her the day before yesterday.’
Lisa took her grandfather’s face between her hands and pressed her lips to his forehead. Then she took off her sheepskin coat and laid it over his lap.
‘How did she go?’
‘Very peacefully, in her sleep.’
‘Here?’
Gramps shook his head. ‘In a home, not far from here.’
‘You mean, a residential home?’
‘It was more of a hospital, really. It had got to the stage where I couldn’t look after her, Baba. She took to wandering, and refused to go into the air-raid shelter. She’d just bolt from the house when the sirens started. I was terrified that she’d end up hurt, or dead. So I had her committed.’
‘Oh, poor, poor Gramps. How long ago?’
‘Nearly a year now.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I couldn’t upset you, Baba. I knew you’d want to come back at once, and everything was going so well for you over there. There was nothing you could have done for her, anyway. She wouldn’t have known you.’
‘I could have helped you!’
‘I have Eva to look after me. She moved in when her house was destroyed.’
‘So Great-Aunt Eva’s living here now?’
‘Yes. She’s gone out, to the grocer’s. She’ll be a while – the queues are endless.’ He sniffed, then managed a wry smile. ‘Don’t imagine we’ll be feasting on chicken or beef this evening. You might get a vegetable hotpot, if you’re lucky.’
‘Things really are that bad?’
‘Yes. Though we’ve been lucky, Eva and I. The house is still standing, and our hens are thriving.’
‘Hens?’
‘There’s a hutch in the back garden where the summerhouse used to be. We have an Anderson shelter out there as well, but nowadays we tend to go to the Underground to take cover. The Anderson floods so easily.’
‘What’s the Underground like?’
‘One puts up with it.’
It was clear that Gramps didn’t want to talk about conditions in the Underground. Lisa changed the subject.
‘So the summerhouse is gone?’ She had fond memories of the pretty trellised pagoda, all grown over with Virginia Creeper, where she’d sneak off and lose herself in a book, knowing that her grandmother was unlikely to find her there and rail at her for being lazy.
‘We demolished it so that we could use the wood for fuel. Look – we managed to get in some coal for your homecoming.’
Gramps indicated the paltry fire burning in the grate, and Lisa thought of the fine turf fire in Róisín’s cosy house in Connemara, and the sandwiches and freshly baked barmbrack, and the wild strawberries they’d picked as they rambled down a boreen near Clifden, chatting until sundown came and it was time for Lisa to return to Foynes.
‘I brought you oranges from California.’
‘Oranges! I’ve forgotten what they taste like.’
‘And razors.’
Gramps managed a smile. ‘What luxury. The last ones have had to do me for six weeks.’
‘Wait here.’ Lisa moved to the hall, where the driver had left her bags.
Undoing the straps of her suitcase, she accessed the compartment that contained the luxury items she’d brought with her from LA. The cigarettes and nylon stockings that she’d bought for friends had been donated to a delighted Róisín, but she had fine French milled soap, still, wrapped in tissue paper, and shampoo that had been intended for Grandma, and silk socks and razors and oranges for Gramps, as well as a bottle of Tanqueray gin.
Returning to the drawing room, Lisa sat down next to Gramps and pressed an orange into his hand. ‘Smell that,’ she told him.
He held the orange to his face, closed his eyes and breathed in. ‘Brings me back to happier times. Picnics on Hampstead Heath with you and your grandmother.’
‘Funny how smells do that. The smell of eucalyptus always reminds me of the house I lived in, in France – the one Grandma never allowed me to talk about.’
‘I’m sorry. It must have been awful for you, a little girl growing up, that your own mother was a taboo subject.’ Gramps looked down at his orange and started to peel it the way a child might who had never seen one before. ‘The tragedy was that there was nothing to tell you, since I knew so very little about her final years. She stopped writing to us then. All I know is that she fell in with a bad crowd.’
A bad crowd . . . The beautiful girls kissing in the bathroom; her mother, smiling at her over the rim of a champagne coupe, her mouth a crimson curve; the balmy nights when Lisa would lie listening to laughter rising from the terrace, voices singing along to the Victrola, the swishing of silk and the tip-tapping of heels passing her bedroom door, the murmured endearments, the sighs as lovers drifted from liaison to liaison . . . A bad crowd? Her grandmother had always led her to believe that her birth father had been the bad lot. Just how bad could
he
have been?
It was time for Lisa to ask the question she had always wanted to, but had never dared. Her paternity had always been a cause for embarrassment in the family: her grandparents used to freeze any time Lisa had touched on it when she was little, and she had learned never to upset her grandmother by asking questions. ‘Whatever happened to Scotch, Gramps?’
‘Scotch?’
‘You told me that my father’s nickname was Scotch.’
Gramps peeled away a segment of orange. ‘We never found out. We presumed that he abandoned Jessie when he found out she was expecting. He was too much of a vagabond to settle down and rear a family, even though he’d promised before God to love and honour her till death. Here.’ Gramps handed her the orange segment, and Lisa shook her head.
‘No. They’re all for you, my pet. You need your Vitamin C. I have oranges every day in California.’
Actually, she thought, she too would have to supplement her Vitamin C while she was here. And her calcium and iron and fish oils: all essential to growing a healthy baby.
‘I’m glad we got to keep you, in the end,’ Gramps told her.
‘I’m not so sure how happy Grandma was. I always felt she thought I was tainted – illegitimate somehow.’
‘She started asking for you, shortly before she died. Thought you were up at Cambridge, like Jessie in her final year before she went to Rouen.’
‘You must miss her awfully.’
‘She died for me a long time ago, Baba, when she began losing her mind. It was as if I were married to a different woman. She was happier, I think, towards the end. All her anger seemed to have ebbed away. I found some of Jessie’s letters to her, by the way, in an old box. Some of them were destroyed by rain – a loose slate in the corner of the tank room – but I managed to salvage a couple of dozen.’
Gramps rose stiffly to his feet and moved across to the walnut chiffonier.
‘Grandma told me years ago that she’d burned them all.’
‘I think she forgot where she put them.’ From the depths of a cupboard, he produced a battered hatbox and passed it to Lisa. It had
Millinery Modes
emblazoned upon it in an elaborate font. ‘Why don’t you read them now, while I take a nap?’
‘I’d rather talk to you, Gramps. I want to hear all about what’s been happening here.’
Even though she was travel weary, Lisa was avid for news of friends and family and neighbours. As well as that, she felt awfully guilty that she had not once enquired after the man to whom she was affianced. She wanted news of Richard.
‘We’ll talk over dinner this evening. I need my afternoon snooze. I’m an old man now, my dearest heart. You’ll find me very dull company after your movie star friends.’
‘Nonsense. They’re much duller than you. In LA, we go to bed at half past eight and get up at half past four in the morning. We’re all walking zombies.’
Lisa accompanied her grandfather to the door, and watched as he climbed the stairs. He had a noticeable limp, the bald patch on the back of his head had spread, and his shoulders were hunched. It was too, too pitiful. Lisa couldn’t bear it. She turned away, and went back into the drawing room. There, she sat down in the middle of the floor and opened the box that had once contained a hat made by
Millinery Modes
, and now contained the vestiges of Jessie’s life story.
The letters were mostly still in their envelopes. Some had French stamps, and some Italian. Some were dated 1918, some the following year. She picked one at random, and slid out the thin paper. It was the first time she’d seen her mother’s handwriting. It was an untidy hand, impatient – as if the pen hadn’t been able to keep up with all the thoughts that were racing through her mind; all the emotions that she wanted to convey, all the news that she had to spill on to the page.