Stolen Child (9 page)

Miriam called this afternoon. No warning. She just walked into my kitchen as if this was still her house. Country people do not understand the nature of privacy, the value of distance. They were used to dropping into Rockrose when she lived here and don’t see why things should be any different now.

Phyllis Lyons does the same. She opens the back door and shouts,
Yoo hoo, anybody home?
Do I need anything in the village? Would I like to sample her homemade jam? Would I like to put my feet up while she takes you to her house to see her mother? She wants to hold you, kiss you, cuddle you. As if she has earned the right to possess you.

Like Phyllis, Miriam is also oblivious of boundaries. ‘Come into my arms, my little cabbage,’ she says, and takes you from your pram or cot without asking my permission. ‘We’re a small community here,’ she reminds me when I suggest a phone call in advance would be appreciated. ‘We don’t stand on ceremony, especially in a village where everyone knows everyone else. Just be glad to have such good neighbours. Remember Phyllis. Where would you have been without her?’

‘Let’s have lunch,’ she said when she came today. ‘It’s ages since you and I have had a chance to talk. I’ve brought food.’

She unpacked a flask of homemade soup and sandwiches. You were sleeping upstairs, quiet for once, and we had the kitchen to ourselves.

When did I intend returning to work? Miriam’s tone was polite but she was looking for an answer. ‘It’s four months,’ she added when I make no reply. ‘I’m coping without you but only just. Have you considered the crèche at the craft centre? It’s the perfect solution.’

‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘I need more time with Joy. In fact, I think I should stay at home for the foreseeable future. I’m sorry, Miriam. I’d no idea she would take over my life but I honestly believe I’m making the right decision.’

She accepted my decision to resign from her company. If she was disappointed, she showed no signs. I used to believe she liked me. Now I’m not so sure. It’s something about her eyes that makes me nervous. Does she suspect? I rationalise my feelings. I see that same speculation in everyone’s eyes, even in the eyes of strangers, which means my imagination is playing up again. That’s what I tell myself, repeating it, every time I take you into Maoltrán and people stop to admire you, to talk about Phyllis Lyons, and how amazing it was that she managed to bring that tractor through the flood, and ask if I’d like to join the mother and toddler club. The sweat starts at the back of my neck and I want to run…just run, you in my arms,
run…running
…back to my house, locking the door and keeping the world away from us.

When Miriam left I took you in my arms and told you about the day I first came to Maoltrán and how the seahorses brought David and me together. You stared at me with those round eyes, as if you could understand every word I said,
and I was back there again, eight years ago, driving through the summer heat, heading towards my future.

Maoltrán, in English, means a bare hillock. As I drove through this small country village with its wide main street and the usual assortment of shops, I could see how it had acquired its name. The surrounding countryside is hilly and pastoral, but the grey rocky outline of the Burren is its most distinctive landmark. I’d passed a one-storey school with stencilling on the windows, and high stone steps leading to a Catholic church. I’d sped past lichen-covered tombstones and a small Protestant church, its ancient heritage diminished by the steel frame of an ugly creamery erected next to it. On reaching the new craft centre I searched for a sign that would lead me to Miriam’s Glasshouse. The small compact buildings exuded fresh cement and paint, the sheen of creativity and hope. Miriam had recently moved from a small studio in the back garden of Rockrose to larger custom-built premises and she planned to expand her business. We’d spoken on the phone and I was confident I’d be her marketing manager by the end of the interview.

My job in public relations was a mystery to her. She read a press release I’d written about an age-resistant moisturiser and asked how I could write with such conviction when I knew there was no truth to the claim. She touched her face, the laughter lines deep around her eyes, the pull of middle age against her mouth.

She was right. What I’d written had no substance but I worked in the business of persuasion. I used words to capture the imagination, to trail it towards desire and the ultimate dream of eternal youth.

‘Why would you change your career,’ she asked. ‘You’re at
the heart of everything in Dublin. Why bury yourself in a small country village?’

Silence is golden. I’d learned that lesson early, knowing that an inadvertent word from me could spark against the tinderbox of my parents’ marriage.

Her fingers were adorned with rings. Celtic swirls and knots, but no wedding band. Not even a Claddagh. My fingers were bare. The indentation where my engagement ring had rested was a stark reminder that I was planning a new future. I couldn’t stop touching it. Like a tongue to a broken tooth, I would find my thumb rubbing against the white circle, as if, somehow, I could hasten its slow fading.

I held up my ring finger. ‘A man,’ I said. ‘I need a fresh start.’

She noticed the white circle left by my engagement ring and nodded. Richard, the villain. No further explanation was necessary.

Richard was my rebound man. Not a good basis to start a relationship but I needed calm in my life after Edward Carter. I was twenty-eight when we met at a party and we became engaged two years later. Richard was upwardly mobile and ambitious, his career in the financial sector giving him the authority to wear pinstripe suits without looking ridiculous. What can I say about our relationship? It was safe and steady and Richard was an eager lover, who only became impatient when I mentioned babies.

‘Plenty of time when we’re married,’ he’d say, whenever I brought up the subject. But I was anxious for a baby, aware of time marching smartly by. The brief mad spell after my mother’s death, when I’d tumbled so heedlessly and headlong into sex, now seemed like someone else’s shambolic nightmare; but the memory of what followed was indelible.

Without telling Richard, I stopped taking the pill. A year passed, hope fading each month. My gynaecologist advised me to bring him along for tests. Deceit had me by the ankles and, just when I’d plucked up the courage to confess the truth, he arrived home one night with champagne and roses. He’d been offered promotion, along with a three-year transfer to his company’s headquarters in New York. We would move the date for our wedding forward and honeymoon in the Big Apple.

‘No babies,’ he wagged his finger at me and said, ‘New York is no place for children. We’ll start a family after we return to Dublin.’

As we drew up wedding lists, booked our hotel and church, I felt myself closing down. How could I describe it? A tight coiling inwards, mentally moving away from his words, physically from his touch, from everything he planned for our future, until, when it was finally time to walk away, I did so without tears or regret. I moved from his apartment, surprised at how little I had to carry with me.

I did not blame him for hating me. Our wedding plans had been cancelled for no reason that he could understand, apart from the reason I gave him. Incompatibility. As an excuse, incompatibility was vague enough to cover a multitude of reasons, yet serious enough to break the foundations of any relationship.

Miriam offered me the job and, when the interview had ended, she invited me to her house for a meal before I began my journey back to Dublin. I followed her car from the craft centre for about a mile. Ancient walls, ridged as the selvaged edges of a rough-knit jumper, ran over the hills. The Burren lay around me, flat pavement rocks marked by dolmen tombs and fortresses. She slowed after we passed the grey house,
where Phyllis Lyons lives with her mother, and took a sharp right-hand turn into a narrow lane. Grass grew along the centre but tyre marks had grooved the edges. A tumbledown cottage was almost hidden by hedgerows and the grassy embankments were aflame with red-hot pokers, poppies, foxgloves and dense pockets of maiden pink. The lane rose sharply until I reached the line of cedar trees sheltering her house. The grey limestone walls blended into the rocky landscape and the name Rockrose had been carved into a gate pillar.

I fell in love with Rockrose as soon as I saw it or perhaps it was David who moved my heart so violently that, for an instant, I needed to possess everything within my gaze. He was dressed in shorts and a singlet, well-worn trainers, a sweatband tied around his forehead. He was playing with a small boy, chasing him around the garden, pretending, with exaggerated gestures, to be unable to catch him.

I parked outside the low drystone perimeter wall binding the front garden and stepped from my car. I watched as he hoisted the boy to his shoulders. David looked so young that day, like a teenager, far too youthful to be a father. I assumed the boy belonged to someone else until Miriam introduced him as her grandson.

Susanne…David lowered the boy and spoke my name slowly, as if anxious to memorise it. His face glistened with perspiration. The faint musky smell of youth oozed from his skin as he took my elbow and directed me into the kitchen.

The long wooden table looked as if it had served generations, as did the six sturdy chairs and the high upright dresser. A sofa was pushed against one wall and the cushions, deep and sagging, provided a trampoline for the boy to bounce
upon. The open window looked out into the front garden and a jug of meadow flowers sat on the ledge.

Miriam served beef bourguignon from a large earthenware tureen. David ate heartily, sopping up the sauce with chunks of crusty bread, breaking off pieces and feeding them to his son. By then I had established their relationship. Joey was three years old and David would never be able to deny him: the same dark brown eyes and brown curly hair, the high, broad forehead, the easy grin.

Outside we heard the sharp blast of a horn, repeated three times. It broke like glass into our conversation. Joey jerked his head and looked up at his father. A blue car was parked outside the gate. The driver was female, with long black hair, impatient hands that once again sent out a demanding summons.

‘Time to go, big boy,’ said David. He lifted his son in his arms and ruffled his hair. He carried Joey down the path and handed him over to his mother. The exchange was brief. He returned to the house and went upstairs, muttering an excuse about phone calls he had to make.

‘Young people,’ Miriam had sighed then, ‘so reckless with their happiness.’ For a while after Joey’s birth, Corrie O’Sullivan and David had tried to make their relationship work, she explained, but their son was all they had left in common. Corrine had recently become engaged to a local carpenter and they planned to settle in Canada. Miriam hinted at custodial battles, lost before they would even reach the courts; a single father in his early twenties, no chance.

David’s expression when he had returned from handing Joey over to Corrine had been hard and angry. I recognised what lay behind it. Loss. I understood, as only I could, how he felt as he watched his son being lifted away from him. But at least he and Corrine O’Sullivan could lay claim to their son’s identity.

I’d no idea who had fathered my baby during that crazy year after my mother died. Cervical cancer, the symptoms diagnosed too late. For months afterwards, my father had wandered around in a daze, twitching at sudden noises, as if he expected her to emerge from dark corners or behind closed doors and shriek at him.

I escaped into the arms of Shane Dillon, then Liam Maguire, then Jason Jackson. Dark lanes, the back seats of cars, my bedroom when my father was out. I didn’t enjoy these furtive encounters, the impatient fumbling and tumbling, the brief satisfaction gained by them, not me. Yet my need seemed insatiable. I understand it now. The need to be loved unthinkingly, unconditionally. Such a demanding, primal need. Why else do we perpetuate our race? Why else would we subject our bodies to such grotesque manoeuvrings, the animal grunts and heaves, the savage satisfaction that is instantly forgettable and, in my own case, always dispensable?

‘Slut,’ my father said, when Tessa brought the strain of my stomach against my school shirt to his attention. Five months gone by then, too late for an abortion, which was his first intention. ‘Off to London on the next flight,’ he said. ‘Quick fix.’

But Tessa was determined that he was not going to export my problem. ‘Too late,’ she insisted, ‘and even if your daughter wasn’t five months gone, it’s against the laws of the state and the law of God.’ The country was not yet riven by abortion referenda and opposing views, but Tessa knew which side she was on. Actively pro-life, she’d decided that adoption would be the perfect solution and that’s what probably would have happened in the end.

I’d argued loudly against either option. How I hated them, him and her, smug with happiness, and my mother hardly
cold in her grave. None of us realised that it was my boy who would decide whether or not he would make that hazardous journey towards the light.

I didn’t see David again until it was time for the official opening of Miriam’s new studio. A lively occasion compared to the usual formal launches I’d once organised. No muted and strained conversations as strangers sipped tepid wine and struggled to find common ground. The people who crowded her new studio were loud and boisterous. They had gathered to celebrate her seahorses, those gentle males with their protruding bellies who mate for life and sing their love songs under the silver rays of the full moon. David had just qualified as a geologist. No surprises there. He’d grown up with sand and fire, flint and oxides, and was familiar with the melting and moulding of brittle substances. Petroleum exploration and oilfield development were his fields of expertise. Soon afterwards he left on contract for the oilfields of Saudi Arabia.

I settled into Miriam’s Glasshouse and was soon travelling across Ireland, meeting customers and building up her market base. I rented one of the new townhouses being built in Market Square and she invited me regularly to Rockrose. In David’s room I browsed through his music collection. The Chieftains and Horse Lips sat uneasily beside Alice Cooper, Judas Priest and Black Sabbath. I was familiar with the Chieftains but heavy metal was not a taste I’d acquired. I was repelled yet fascinated by the lyrics: death, pain, anger, loss. I absorbed his presence and thought about his absent father.