The Fish Ladder (31 page)

When the match resumed Robert kept glancing back in our direction. I felt that, if we hadn’t gone when he came out of the dressing room, he would come over and speak to us. I watched him shake hands with the referee, the opposing captain, the linesmen and then, as he approached the edge of the pitch, I took Evie by the hand and we flowed down the steps of the stand. Robert glanced briefly in our direction, but he was still talking, and we left the ground.

We checked into a coaching inn in a nearby town. Evie made hot chocolate for both of us – her first time, scrutinising the instructions on the sachet – and poured a generous glass of sherry for me, from a cut-glass decanter on a lace doily. We talked about having hot baths, talked about getting something to eat. Ate the complimentary biscuits instead and curled, a knot of limbs, into the bed.

I had seen my half-brother and he had smiled at me. I was indes­cribably happy. But he had smiled without knowing who I was. This knowledge munched at my equilibrium like a caterpillar inside an apple. In the weeks that followed I veered over what to do. Nothing? Or something? If so, what? Robert was thirty-five years old. It was possible that he might retire. The last match of the season coincided with Evie’s half term.

We decided to go back. On the Saturday morning before we left I wrote a letter.

Dear Robert Thomas

I wonder if you remember, at the match against Llangennech, a woman with short hair wearing a long green coat and a young blonde girl with a ponytail. You smiled at us as you walked onto the pitch. We had driven from London to see if the Robert Thomas who played for Llanbeuno might not be the same Robert Thomas we had been seeking. Your smile confirmed it.

I am aware that this letter will come as a surprise to you.

I am a member of your family who was given up at birth. Eighteen months ago I was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of cancer. It was for this reason that I wanted to locate my birth family. In part it was because I knew that a family medical history would be invaluable to my daughter. But, in truth, I ached to set eyes on a blood relative. I have approached the older generation of the family and been told, in no uncertain terms, the past is the past. I am sorrier for this than I could ever say, for that past is my ‘present continuous’. I do understand that to have had an illegitimate child in the 1960s was considered shameful; though I had hoped that time would soften this.

I have agonised over what to do because no one goes lightly against the wishes of their blood ties, even if it is against the wishes of someone one has never met. But you are the only blood family I have ever seen, other than my child, and the questions of what is right and what is wrong are complex.

I beseech you not to judge those who have known of me and, I imagine, never spoken of me. It’s possible that only one person now living ever knew of my existence in the first place. I would ask you to think deeply about whether or not to share this letter with them.

I have had no way of knowing if you were the ‘right’ Robert Thomas. When I saw you across the pitch, though, I knew in an instant it was you. So did my daughter. She said: That’s him! Number 8. We have come back now to give you this, having no postal address.

I hope and pray with all my heart that you will view this letter positively. I pray that we can meet as friends. Whatever happens, your smile will sustain me for the rest of my life.

With my very best wishes

Kate Norbury

PS. I am staying tonight at the Dragon Inn in Montgomery.

And I added my mobile phone number.

The last match was another away game, in a quiet village, where the Afon Rhiw, a tributary of the River Severn, was intersected by an aqueduct. We parked next to the aqueduct, among a strip of trees between the canal and the river, and made our way to the ground.

We arrived just a few minutes before full time. When the whistle blew the players walked into the tunnel below the stand. Robert walked past me, but I was transfixed. Evie said:
Mum!
and I handed the letter to one of the players.

‘Could you give this to Robert Thomas, please?’

He looked at the envelope. ‘Yeah, all right.’

‘Thanks.’

And I walked away from him. Evie caught up with me; I could sense that she wanted to run. We went back to the place where we had left the car, among the trees between the river and the canal, and we climbed the bank onto the aqueduct. Below us, along the lane, people were returning to their cars. Soon there was only a handful of vehicles left. Others walked in the direction of a pub next to a bridge across a bend in the Rhiw.

The riverbed, where it flowed beneath the aqueduct, was paved to protect the supports of the structure from erosion. The river rustled as it slipped across the stones. The trees still seemed bare, but the new leaves were rolled tight, and were bright, making the light beneath the bridge an absinthe green. There was a flick of bronze, a stroke, slight, quick as a meteor. A goldcrest. Above our heads stacked clouds unfurled. Evie said they looked like candlewax.

And then suddenly Robert was there, walking down the lane towards the aqueduct, relaxed, in conversation with another man. He was wearing jeans and a shirt, no sign of a letter, either in his hand or in his pocket. He passed beneath us.

‘He hasn’t seen it,’ I said.

‘How do you know?’

‘Look at him! That isn’t a man who has just been told, after running about for ninety minutes, that he has a long-lost relative.’

‘Mum! You must have given it to the wrong man! What if it’s in the hands of his enemy!’

‘Enemy? Maybe the other guy hasn’t come out of the shower yet.’

‘What shall we do?’ she wailed, her hands on either side of her face.

‘Nothing. We’ll just hang around here for a bit.’

‘How could you go to all that trouble and then give the letter to the wrong man?’ she said.

‘I don’t know! Just be quiet, Evie!’

‘You be quiet!’

And then my mobile rang. Unknown caller.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi Kate, this is Robert. How are you?’

‘I’m fine, thank you, Robert. Thank you for ringing me.’

‘Where are you?’

‘We’re in the car park.’

‘Well, I’m in the pub, and I would ask you to join me, but there are thirty players in here and you’ve clearly gone to a great deal of trouble. Do you know where the bridge is?’

It was about five hundred yards away. We’d passed it on the way to the ground.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Will you meet me there in five minutes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Great!’

‘Thank you!’

I stared at the phone. Stared at Evie.

‘Oh my gosh!’ she said.

‘Come on.’ I reached for her hand. We clambered down the embankment.

As we neared the bridge, Robert was talking on the telephone. When he saw us approaching he finished his call, turned towards us, nodding, smiling, then lifted both arms in greeting. We all shook hands.

‘Evie, this is Mr Thomas.’

He laughed, ‘It’s Robert . . . Please. I am your brother.’

I looked at him. That wasn’t what it said in the letter. He raised his hand, stilled the unasked question. ‘You don’t have to tell me who you are,’ he said. ‘You are the image of her.’

We stood and chatted for a while on the bridge. ‘Obviously this is a surprise,’ he said, ‘but as far as I’m concerned, it’s a good surprise.’ Evie went for a walk along the river path. We watched her, looking back at us, and she waved, happy. I may have been the image of Mrs Thomas, but Evie had her uncle’s eyes. She held up her iPod and gave a thumbs-up sign. My own eyes kept glancing off the planes of Robert’s face, his hands, his body. I was fascinated to meet someone who looked like me, but was a man. He seemed extraordinarily relaxed. Did I mind if he asked me when this happened?

‘It was before she married your father,’ I said.

‘He wasn’t your father?’

‘I don’t know who my father is.’

His eyebrows furrowed. ‘Ah! She needs to get this off her chest!’

‘I don’t think she wants to. She was really very clear.’

He sighed. ‘I imagine she was . . . My mother, that is, our mother, is a very hard woman.’

‘I think I’ve worked that out,’ I said. A space had opened between us, full of the secret darkness of the years. He saw my fear, and closed the gap.

‘Look, we don’t have to do all this now,’ he said, ‘this is just the beginning,’ and suddenly he was smiling again. But as I returned the smile his own fell away and he said, ‘Look, I’m very sorry for everything that you must have been through. But it’s all right now.’ The smile had already returned.

We met again a few weeks later, on our way up to the cottage for the summer holiday. Evie and I arrived early in a roadside pub, and were looking around for Robert when a man leaned into Evie, passing her a bundle, soft and fluffy, and smelling of milk and fabric softener.

‘Mum!’ Evie cried, and I leaned forward, folding her arms about the baby, showing her how to hold her in the crook of her arm. Robert sat next to us. We all peered into the bundle. From beneath a blue hood, covered in roses, two round eyes stared out.

‘There you go,’ said Robert. ‘Here’s your cousin, Seren.’

‘Oh my goodness!’ Evie cried.

‘It means star,’ he said.

‘She’s got your nose!’ I said. When Evie was born her nose had been a mystery. Now we knew whose side of the family it came from. Seren also had Evie’s eyes, and the two girls appraised one another curiously. When Evie looked up her face was glowing. Seren seemed at home and kicked her feet. I waited for it to be my turn for a cuddle.

In the days and weeks that followed, Robert and I pieced together a fragmented history. Robert asked me why I hadn’t done this years ago. I told him that I had left messages for our mother. I told him that, when the law changed, and birth parents were free to seek their children, I had put my name on the Adoption Contact Register. I believed that she would come and look for me. In fact, I had expected her to appear on my doorstep the very next day. Naïve, without doubt, but these things are the stuff of fairy tale. It’s almost impossible to envisage something sensible, because it falls outside ordinary experience. Still, as the days went by, and slipped into weeks, then months, and finally years, my excitement and resolve had dissipated. After ten years I realised that she wasn’t coming, and after that it had seemed hard to know what to do. It took a diagnosis of cancer to bounce me into action.

Robert didn’t know who Thomas Connelly was. In fact the name meant nothing to him. He did have a grandfather who was buried in the Beach Head Cemetery at Anzio. Of course, in protecting Robert’s identity, I cannot tell you what the name of our grandfather is. But I smiled at the thought of Thomas John Connelly, warmed in his journey through the Underworld, surprised by the gift of an unexpected quiver of arrows in the form of my novena. And I laughed as my Irish heritage evaporated. We discovered that Robert’s home was more or less on my way home, if I drove to London from the Llŷn Peninsula. Robert asked me how come I had a cottage there. I said that the purchase had been an impulse. I just felt happy there. Why did he ask? Well, no reason, he said. But his father’s relatives all came from the Llŷn, and he still had family on the peninsula.

The next time I was in Cheshire I told my brother John about finding Robert. And then I told Mum. She listened carefully to the story. Although she was often confused now, there was a glint of steel about her, a warning, and I knew I couldn’t mention Mrs Thomas. We had never discussed my birth mother since that one night when I was eleven years old, not even when we had all been to the Convent. But Mum was happy to discuss the idea of Robert. She considered the information for a moment and then said: ‘Does that mean there’s a brother for Evie?’ I thought about Baby Seren, her bright eyes and perky nose.

‘More or less,’ I said. ‘More or less.’ I hadn’t thought of it that way.

They say you should never play cards with the devil because he always deals you a shitty hand. I had mistaken the hand that Mrs Thomas held. I had no idea what the name
Connelly
signified. It could simply be, as I had first assumed, that Mrs Thomas had forgotten my name. Part of me suspected that Mr Connelly was the man she believed was my natural father, the man she had met in Australia, and that she knew more than she chose to tell. But I had given Mrs Thomas my word that I would never to write to her again – unless she approached me first. Robert and Evie bore an extraordinary likeness to one another. I didn’t know how long Mrs Thomas had been in Australia, but it did occur to me, watching Robert and Evie together, that perhaps his father was, after all, my natural father, too, and the whole thing had been a terrible mistake. I wondered if, perhaps, I too had travelled – like the martin, the little blue bird – in a long migratory arc that had brought me to a hillside on the
Llŷn
Peninsula, to what was, quite literally, the land of my fathers.