What She Never Told Me (8 page)

He still hasn’t mentioned my breakdown and I wonder when it is going to come up. But it won’t be tonight and I’m glad about that.

It’s almost like old times as we chat over dinner. If anything, it’s even better, and I feel myself daring to hope that we may be in sight of a new beginning. I ask him which of the two rooms he would like.

‘I thought I might bunk in with you,’ he says. ‘If that’s all right.’

‘It’s fine . . . but I thought . . .’

‘Can I come back, Lou? Can we start again?’

‘Yes,’ I say, choking. ‘But . . .’

‘We’re going to be all right,’ he says.

Later, his big arm flung chastely across me, I lie awake for hours. I can’t help tormenting myself with questions. Did he sleep like this with other women during the months we were apart? Was there one woman or were there several? But I chase these thoughts away, because I don’t want to have them tonight. I don’t want to sleep, either. I want to be awake, listening to Sandy’s breathing and feeling what I haven’t felt for a very long time. I want to feel the way I did all those years ago, when a singing lesson turned into a love affair.

I liked the sound of his voice when he rang me to book a consultation. It was low and soft, with a Scottish lilt that had a touch of roughened velvet to it. And when he turned up for his first lesson, I liked the look of him, too. You wouldn’t call Sandy good looking in the traditional sense. But he’s big and broad and protective, the kind of man you know you’ll be safe with, even if you’re seeing him for the first time. And when I saw him for the first time, filling the door frame, with a great big smile on his face and a load of music tucked underneath his arm, I couldn’t help but be immediately charmed by him.

‘So, tell me a bit about your singing. What are you looking for from lessons?’ I asked. What I really wanted to know was whether he was married, whether he was available, what it would be like to lie beside him at night and feel him press into me.

‘Well, I sing bass in a choir. We’re going to be doing Beethoven Nine soon, and some of it lies a bit high for the basses. I want to work on the top of my voice, but I think I need to work on my voice in general, and you come well recommended by our chorus master, Michael Robinson.’

‘Ah, you sing with Marylebone Voices? It’s a very good choir. Yes, I know Michael well. Let’s crack on then, shall we?’

Nothing happened for a long time. I fancied him in a gentle kind of way. There was something about him I couldn’t put my finger on. It wasn’t that he reminded me of anyone in particular; it was more a kind of recognition, as if I had known him all along. But even that didn’t explain it. When he first started coming for lessons, I had been wrapped up for a while in a long-distance romance with an American journalist I had met through Ursula and who was based in Dubai. It was high-octane stuff: the phone call from Chris saying he had a few days off and why didn’t we meet up in Rome or Paris or wherever; the three or four days of intense emotional and physical activity; and then the weeks of hardly any contact. I was beginning to wonder whether I could be bothered with this lark for too much longer.

Sandy usually had his lessons in the early evening. Sometimes, if he wasn’t rushing off and I didn’t have anyone coming after him, we walked down to the pub on the corner for a drink. We talked about anything and everything – books, films, music and politics. He sometimes referred to the divorce he was going through, but didn’t give me the impression he was suffering because of it.

‘We probably got married for all the wrong reasons,’ he said. ‘You know, you get to thirty, you’re working long hours, you look at the person you’re with and you think it all adds up to the right timing. And a few years later, you’re still working long hours and you realise that, if you ever had anything in common, you don’t have it any more.’

‘That’s sad,’ I said.

‘Sad, but, in our case, true. Elizabeth isn’t musical, either. It’s not that she doesn’t
like
music. She does, but she can take it or leave it. It’s probably towards the bottom of her top ten likes, behind books, films, trekking—’

‘Trekking?’

‘Aye. Peru, Nepal. She’s very fit, very tough. You wouldn’t catch me doing that stuff. I’m a delicate flower.’

I laughed. ‘And now? Where is she? Do you see her?’

‘She’s in Exeter with another academic, who’s more than delighted to head into the mountainy distance with her whenever they have the opportunity. I see her when it’s necessary. It’s what they call an amicable divorce. What about you?’

I could have told him about my American, but I didn’t bother. I realised that there was nothing much to tell.

‘Oh, I’m what you might call fancy free,’ I said. And then, reddening at the lie, I jumped up and went to the bar to get more drinks.

Sandy had a way of making me laugh without saying anything that was downright funny. And he was so different from my idea of what a psychiatrist would be like. I could easily imagine him using no more than his charm to coax his patients into becoming well again.

The lessons were fun and he was a good student. His technique gradually improved to the extent that I hardly ever needed to check his breathing, but he still had his moments of confusion. On the day we got together, he was having one of those moments. So I got up from the piano, took his hand and guided it to my stomach, reminding him how I was able to take in a breath and begin to sing without tensing the muscles there. But even before I had finished the phrase, I became aware that his hand had slipped around my ribcage and was resting in the small of my back, and that his other hand had moved up to my shoulder and was pulling me gently towards him.

We spent hours in my bed, having sex, talking and laughing, having sex again, and when we eventually left the flat to go out for something to eat, Sandy suddenly turned to me in the middle of Ladbroke Grove and began singing ‘Where’er You Walk’. I hardly noticed the litter, the discarded greasy remains of takeaway food, the drunks staggering along the pavement drinking lager from cans. And when Chris rang the following day from Dubai to ask whether I fancied a weekend in Paris, I told him I had met my future husband.

*

I wake to hear Sandy singing ‘Ae Fond Kiss’ at the top of his voice and the clatter of last night’s pots and pans and dishes being washed. By the time I stagger downstairs, he has moved on to ‘Bonnie Mary of Argyle’ and is scrambling eggs and frying rashers.

It’s over breakfast, as we tackle the business of eating, that he brings up my Dublin episode. I tell him about my visit to Richard in Dalkey and learning that my mother had worked as a secretary at a brewery in Crumlin. I don’t have to tell him that I’d hoped to find something there that would lead me to my father. He knows all about my obsession. It’s when I tell him about what happened in front of the postbox that he begins to look worried.

‘What do you think that’s about?’ he asks.

‘Well, Angela wonders whether my mother might have taken me there at some point and something happened that gave me a fright,’ I say. And then, with a laugh, I add, ‘I suppose it would have had to be a very big fright.’

‘You’ve never told me about that postbox memory before, the first one.’

He says this in a straightforward way, but I can feel a hint of accusation somewhere in his tone. What he’s really saying is,
Why haven’t you mentioned this before?

‘No. I haven’t really talked about it to anyone. Maybe I didn’t really think of it as being all that important. It was one of those things that flitted in and out. And . . . well, it wasn’t so disturbing before. It was just . . . weird.’

‘And it
has
become disturbing now?’

‘Yes. I think it started to change and get worse after my mother died.’

‘What do you think made it change?’

‘I can’t think of anything in particular. But it was hard, sitting there and watching her die. Maybe that was it.’

I wait for Sandy to speak again, but he stays silent, frowning now, wearing his analytical face.

‘What are you thinking?’ I ask.

‘I’m thinking that it wouldn’t be a great idea for you to go anywhere near Crumlin again. For the time being, anyway. What I’d really like is for you to come back to London,’ he says.

‘But what about everything I have to do here? I haven’t even started properly on the papers.’

‘They’ll keep. You’re the sole beneficiary. You can take your time.’

‘But there are things I need to look for . . . There could be stuff that explains everything.’

He takes my hands in his, squeezes them and gives me a long look.

‘Louise, you need a break from all this. I don’t want you to be here on your own and, at the moment, I can’t take time off to be with you. The papers can wait. We’ll have a quick sift through them, check whether there’s anything useful, and then we’ll put them in a couple of big cardboard boxes until the house is finished and we can come back to them. I don’t want to overstate the significance of what happened to you the other day, but I don’t want to dismiss it, either. I think there’s a lot of stuff in your childhood that you need to deal with. That’s what your episode in Crumlin is telling me. And I think that’s what it’s telling you.’

I know where this is going. He wants me to consider psychotherapy. But he doesn’t come straight out with it because of how I’ve reacted in the past. Once, after one of those conversations, I had a dream in which a man was riding a bicycle up and down Ladbroke Grove in front of the flat. He was standing on the handlebars, doing all sorts of strange contortions, making the bike do a bizarre series of jumps and wheelies. I felt disapproving. He shouldn’t have been doing such dangerous manoeuvres in the middle of a main road. I mentioned it to Ursula the next day.

‘Easy peasy,’ she said. ‘Trick cyclist.’

‘Trick cyclist?’

‘Slang for psychiatrist.’

‘So the dream means that I disapprove of what Sandy does?’

‘Nah, it’s not about Sandy. It’s about what he wants you to sign up to. Psychotherapy. You don’t like it. You think it’s dangerous.’

She was right. I didn’t like the idea of it at all. Maybe it’s an Irish thing, the idea that you just get on with whatever it is you need to get on with, that you don’t dig too deep for fear of what you might disturb. And maybe some things shouldn’t be disturbed. They lurk in dark places in our minds for a reason; we’ve banished them to the shadows because we don’t want to be reminded of them. But my childhood was a happy one, even without a father. There was nothing that I wanted or needed to forget.

*

When Sandy goes to have his shower and I’m sitting, drinking another mug of coffee, my thoughts stray back to the postbox memory. I had told both him and Angela that I hadn’t talked about it to anyone before.

But that’s not strictly true. The memory had always been there, but after we moved to Drogheda it came more often and more strongly for a while. I told my mother about it once when she came into my room to say goodnight. I thought she might be able to tell me what it was about, but she said nothing for a long time and, when I looked up at her, there was a look on her face that I didn’t recognise or understand. It was as if she had turned into someone else. She sat on the edge of my bed without saying a word for so long that I became scared. And when I said, ‘Mamma! Mamma! What’s wrong?’ she turned and walked out of the room without a word, leaving me to put out the light and turn on my night light by myself.

Hours later, I woke, the bang of the front door echoing around the house and in my ears. Then silence. I got out of bed and opened my bedroom door. All the lights were on, but there was no sound. Starting with the kitchen, I walked around the house, ending up in the bedroom my mother shared with Dermot. The lights were on there, too, but the bed was empty.

In a panic, I opened the front door and stared out into the night. It was pitch black, the kind of darkness that had always made me nervous, that made me think I would be swallowed up by it. But my fear for my mother was greater than my terror of being devoured by the dark, and I ran towards the gate.

The lane that passed our house stretched up the hill to join the main road into town, but it also continued in a half-hearted way down to the river, which was already widening as it made its way to the sea. I looked back at the house, where the lights burned bright, making the darkness seem blacker still, and turned down towards the river. I broke into a run, stumbling over potholes that I couldn’t see. All I could think of was my mother and whether it was too late to save her.

When I got to the bottom of the hill, the reflection of the moonlight in the water created enough light for me to see the two figures ahead. My mother and Dermot were sitting on the low stone wall that ran along the river bank. He had one arm around her and his other hand held hers. They weren’t speaking. They just sat quietly and, for a moment, I thought, There’s nothing wrong; they just went out for a walk. Except that Mamma was wearing only her nightdress and no shoes or slippers, and Dermot was in his pyjamas.

‘Are you all right, Mamma?’

She didn’t answer, but looked through me with eyes that seemed more dead than alive.

‘She’s grand,’ Dermot said. ‘Nothing to be worried about. She’ll be fine in the morning, when she’s had a good sleep. We’ll get her home now.’

They stood up and I saw how gentle Dermot was with her. He held one of her hands and I held the other, and we walked slowly back to the house. Dermot made hot milky drinks for the three of us and, once she had drunk hers, put Mamma to bed. She fell asleep straight away.

I looked at the clock. It was nearly four o’clock and there was a grey light in the sky.

Hours later, when I woke, my mother was in the kitchen making scrambled eggs and acting as if everything was normal. But I was already blaming myself for what had happened. I had upset her by talking about the postbox memory and, because of that, she had gone to the river. There was no other explanation. I made a silent vow never to bring it up again.

Chapter Ten

Back in London, we’ve fallen into something like our old lives. Sandy has moved back in, but is so much in demand at conferences that he’s often away from home. He has even taken a break from the choir, a big wrench for him, especially with Elgar’s
Dream of Gerontius
coming up.

We haven’t talked about our several-months-long separation. It doesn’t feel right to ignore it, to act as if it never happened, but I don’t want to be the one to bring it up and push for answers that I may not want to hear. So I throw myself back into my teaching. Most of the time, I use a studio in central London, not far from Oxford Street. Sometimes, if all the studios are booked up I teach in the flat.

Before we got married, we thought about selling our flats and buying a house, maybe one of the Edwardian houses a bit further north, but still close to Ladbroke Grove. My flat wouldn’t be big enough for children, Sandy said. I remember being struck by a strange feeling when he said that. We’d never seriously discussed children and his remark made me realise that he’d simply taken it for granted they would eventually materialise. I had assumed that, too, without really giving it any thought. But when he began talking about the children we would have to fit into our home I was terrified. I made all the right noises, but inside my head all I could hear was some inner voice whispering,
No, no, no
.

I remember, too, that when we first got together I woke up once to find him gazing down at me. I rubbed my eyes to get the sleep out of them and squinted up at him.

‘That’s a strange look you’re giving me,’ I said.

‘I’m thinking that, if we have a child, I want it to have your eyes.’

‘Well, I certainly don’t,’ I said. ‘My eyes are far too small!’

‘Ah, but that’s why they sparkle so much!’

Foolishly, I had thought at the time that the conversation was about me, but even then he must have been thinking ahead to children that didn’t yet exist. And never would.

We never did get around to buying a house. Sandy sold his flat in Fulham and moved in with me and, a year or so after we got married, we bought the basement flat and connected the two to make a maisonette. I stopped taking my birth-control pills, but secretly prayed I wouldn’t get pregnant. Sandy didn’t seem to anguish over it. Once or twice he suggested it might be good for both of us to get checked out. But we didn’t do anything about it and, now, when I look back, I ask myself why Sandy didn’t push more. I don’t have an answer. In any case, I don’t think I was the only one feeling ambivalent about having kids because Sandy eventually stopped talking about them, too. If he had been that keen, wouldn’t he have made more of an issue of it?

I’ve started going to the gym with Ursula. I hated it at first, and tried to find excuses not to go, but Ursula wouldn’t let me back out. Now, I look forward to the sessions. I feel good after them.

I’ve also started to see a psychotherapist, but the pressure to do so has come less from Sandy than from Ursula and Angela.

‘Her name is Sheila Fitzgerald and she’s good,’ Ursula said, handing me a piece of paper with a name, address and telephone number. ‘She’s Irish, too, so she’ll have a head start on understanding where you’re coming from.’

‘You went to her?’

‘No, but one of my exes did. I rang him up and got her deets.’

I like Sheila. She’s about the same age as Angela, around sixty. She even looks a bit like Angela – on the sturdy side and with once-fair hair, cut in a soft bob below the jawline. At our first session, just over a month ago, I sat facing her and told her about the Crumlin incident that had brought me to her. Now it’s the beginning of June and I’ve been seeing her twice a week, but we haven’t returned to the Crumlin episode yet.

Our sessions go like this: I lie on a couch and Sheila sits at the back of the room, where I can’t see her, and I talk and talk. I talk about anything and everything, but not about Crumlin. I’m doing this reluctantly. I’m doing it because I know I have to do it if I’m going to get a grip back on my life.

So I talk about my mother. I could talk for hours about her, about what I loved about her and what I hated about her, too. Only I don’t use the word
hated
to Sheila because she will read too much into it.

‘She could be a bit overprotective,’ I say. ‘You know, not happy about the crowd I hung around with when I was in my teens.’

‘What about Ursula?’

‘Oh, she loved Ursula. We were like twins. We were inseparable from day one at school. No, it was more the new friends I was making that she was . . . wary of.’

It’s Declan I’m thinking of, in particular, as I tell her this. And as I lie on the couch with my eyes half-closed, I can see us meeting after school, him taking my books from me and walking me most of the way home. At weekends, we go for long walks. Sometimes he brings his dog along. Bran.
All our dogs are called Bran
.
When one Bran dies, we get another.
He thinks he might want to be a vet. I’m not sure at this stage what I want to do, although I like history. It’s my best subject. Declan is my secret. I haven’t told Mamma about him. I don’t want her to meet him because I know what she’ll do. She’ll invite him to our house so often that she’ll suffocate him. She’ll be nice to him, so nice. But when she and I are alone together in the kitchen, washing and drying the dishes, she’ll say something about him that isn’t exactly bad, but isn’t quite good, either. And that will leave me feeling unsure about him. I know this is what will happen because it’s what she always does.

I’ve never told Sandy about Declan; I would end up telling him things I’d rather he didn’t know. And I’m not ready to tell Sheila about him, either. Not yet. So I tell her about meeting Sandy, losing him and getting him back, and about my mother’s death. But I keep it all at surface level. I’m not ready to dig too deep. She must be bored stiff.

I tell her about the house in Ireland and my plans for it. I like talking about that. I’ve given Joe the go-ahead to start the work. I’m still considering whether to sell it or keep it, but the more I talk and think about what it could look like, the more I think that I’m going to keep it.

We talk a lot about music, about how I came to the piano at the relatively late age of eleven and then discovered singing.

‘It was thanks to Dermot, really. He sang in the local male-voice choir and there was a piano in the house. He had an old recording of Richard Tauber singing “You Are My Heart’s Delight” and he used to sing along with it. It was quite funny – sometimes he came in a bit the worse for wear after choir practice and all he had to do to soften my mother up was sing a few bars of that song.’

I tell her that music is probably the only thing that makes complete sense to me.

‘People have their idiosyncrasies, haven’t they? You just have to accept them. And all sorts of things go wrong and you have no control over them. But music is gloriously predictable. Most of the time, you know exactly where it’s going and it’s utterly satisfying when it gets there. And even when it does something you’re not expecting, you still end up thinking that this was the only way it could have gone.’

I tell Sheila about my childhood in Drumcondra with my mother, how energetic and vivacious she was, how she filled my existence in those early days before I started school and met Ursula.

And then the Dolls’ Hospital comes into my head, and, for some reason I can’t explain, I start to cry. Why would talking about a good memory, a special one, bring tears? But it does – quiet torrents of them. It’s the first time I’ve wept at one of our sessions and I have to use the box of tissues that Sheila keeps on a coffee table next to the low couch. And, despite my having wiped my eyes and blown my nose, the memories of that day flooding back and it’s as if I’m there, fiercely clutching Audrey to me, unwilling to let her be taken from me.

I kept my eyes down and fixed on the frilly hem of her pink dress.

‘Do you not want her to get better?’ the nurse asked, bending down so that her face was level with mine. She had soft brown eyes and there was something warm about the way she spoke.

I felt my grip on my doll loosening.

‘Look,’ the nurse said, making a sweeping move with her arm, and I lifted my eyes and looked around the room. There were dolls everywhere, on shelves, on tables. There were teddy bears, too.

‘We have made all these lovely dolls better and now they are waiting for the little children who own them to take them home,’ the nurse said.

‘Can you really make her better?’ I asked, not quite ready to believe that my doll, whose blue eyes I had pressed too hard when exploring their ability to open and close, could be restored to full health.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘Now, you give her to me and the doctor will examine her.’

So I held out my doll and the nurse took her very carefully and laid her on a table, and a doctor in a white coat came and examined her. After what seemed like a very long time, he looked at me and gave me a big smile.

‘I think we will give your doll a little operation and a good rest in a very nice bed, and after two weeks you can come and take her home,’ the doctor said.

The strange thing is that, although I remember every detail of that visit to the Dolls’ Hospital in Mary Street, I have no recollection at all of having returned to collect my doll. I don’t remember her being part of my childhood after that.

I didn’t think of that doll for years. Not until, just a couple of years ago, when I popped over to visit my mother for a few days, I read a story in the
Irish Times
about the Dolls’ Hospital, and memories of our visit to Mary Street flooded my mind. She looked puzzled when I mentioned it, but after a moment said she had a very vague recollection of having taken me there.

‘What became of the doll?’ I asked. ‘Did we ever go back for her?’

‘Oh, I’m afraid it’s all too long ago for me,’ she said. ‘But we must have gone back. Yes. Yes, I’m sure we did.’

I’m still thinking about that conversation with my mother when Sheila’s voice brings me back to the present.

‘Are you all right?’ she asks.

‘Yes, it was just the shock of remembering it all so . . . so clearly. But what I can’t remember at all is what happened after we left. I can’t remember a thing!’

‘Perhaps you can remember how you felt about leaving your doll behind?’

‘I’m not sure, but I don’t remember being upset or worried. I think I knew she’d be all right.’

‘Maybe your mother reassured you that the doll would be fine?’

‘I don’t remember. I don’t really remember her saying anything or even being there. I just remember the couple and how kind they were, and thinking that they would take care of Audrey – that was my doll’s name. She was called after Audrey Hepburn.’

‘Was that your mother’s suggestion, to name her after Audrey Hepburn?’

‘Probably. I don’t remember.’

‘I wonder whether you felt Audrey would be safe because there would be a couple – both a mother and a father – looking after her.’

‘Maybe . . . I suppose I might have thought that. Two parents being better than one, and all that. But I can’t remember. I always felt safe with my mother, though, if that’s what you’re getting at.’

‘So what do you think happened to Audrey? Did your mother take you back to collect her?’

‘It’s weird, but I have no idea what happened to her. That’s a bit odd, isn’t it, that I can’t remember?’

Sheila throws the question back at me. ‘Why do you think that?’

*

Back in the 1980s you could phone Aer Lingus, reserve a ticket and then pay for it at Heathrow. Or not. A few times, I got as far as the airport, but had to force myself to walk those last few yards to the ticket desk and take out my chequebook. What was I afraid of? Being swept into my mother’s all-embracing, omnipotent orbit?

I loved my mother, even if it sometimes doesn’t sound as if I did. I grieve for her now. But if I ask myself when I was happiest with her, my mind shoots straight back to those early years in Drumcondra, when it was just herself and myself in that small flat with no garden, but with Dublin at our feet. She was always organising things for us to do. In summer, there were those excursions out of town to the sea, the excitement of getting on to the train at Amiens Street, hoping we’d have a compartment all to ourselves.

In the winter, our pursuits were urban. She used to take me around Dublin, pointing out landmarks, telling me about their history, making them come alive for a small child entranced by the magic of a bustling city. She showed me where Nelson’s Pillar had stood at one end of O’Connell Street until republicans blew it up in 1966. She took me to the GPO, the General Post Office, headquarters of the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising. We went to St Patrick’s Cathedral and she told me about Dean Swift, who had written a book called
Gulliver’s Travels
. It was easy to absorb history without realising I was doing it.

These urban wanderings always ended with a trip to Bewley’s Oriental Café on Grafton Street, where, she said, everyone in Ireland turned up at one point or another. I loved it – the old booths, the butter curls, the exotic smell of the coffee, the buns and the cakes. It was always full; there were students from Trinity, just down the road, people up from the country for a day’s shopping, and people who couldn’t walk past it without being drawn inside.

Around the time of my birthday, every year, my mother would take me on a trip far beyond Dublin, sometimes by bus, sometimes by train.

‘Where are we going, Mamma?’ I would ask.

‘It’s a surprise. You’ll find out when we get there.’

We travelled all over the country, usually to cities or big towns – Cork, Galway or Killarney, even north across the border to Belfast or Derry – spending one or two nights in small hotels. After she married Dermot, she still insisted on taking me away on these short trips.

‘It’s good for her to have me to herself every now and again,’ I heard her tell him once. And it was. I revelled in my mother’s company as the two of us strolled around, hand in hand, or, when I was older and taller, arm in arm.