After she’d gone, Julia stood by the door with her hands on her hips.
“You’d think he’d been abducted by the fecking IRA,” she said. “Innocent boy, my arse! The woman’s a racist. She’s hysterical because Karen is black.” She turned to me and shook her head. “But she shouldn’t have left you like that. You’re supposed to be on holiday together. She’s supposed to be your friend.”
I shrugged. I wasn’t concerned. I was used to Karen doing mad spur-of-the-moment things like that.
Mattie’s CD finished and Julia went over to the sideboard and put Mary Black on. Flushed from the wine and the fire, she fanned her face as she sat down again.
“You’ll miss Karen when she goes to Rome, so.”
“We aren’t really that close anymore.”
“No?”
“She does her own thing these days.”
“She always struck me as someone who did her own thing. I had the impression she only ever thought of number one.”
I glared at the fire, taken aback. “She’s not a bad person. She’s just not that reliable.”
“You were always very good to her, Carmel. Too good, if you ask me. You were like a puppy at her heel. I never understood why you were so in awe of her. I’m probably biased but you were always the nicer, kinder girl by far.”
I felt my neck and cheeks flush. I’d never seen myself as subservient to Karen at all. I shrugged off Julia’s comments. She didn’t like Karen but then a lot of people didn’t. I often wondered how much of it was racist. She was considered “difficult” because she questioned and challenged. Joe didn’t like her when they first met either. He said she was uncompromising and controlling but they got along as the years went by.
Dev, Julia’s grey pointer, trotted into the room and curled on the Indian rug at my feet. He was called after Eamonn de Valera. Not that Julia was a fan of De Valera’s politics. Far from it. It was because of the aquiline nose and pinched expression.
“I’m not here to talk about Karen though, Julia,” I said. “I want to ask you about something else.”
I took a quick slug from my glass and cleared my throat.
“Did you know Tess had a baby before she had me?”
Julia swallowed and placed her own glass on the side table with a trembling hand.
“I did,” she said in a whisper.
“And about the Mother and Baby home in Tuam and the mass grave?”
She nodded. “I wanted to tell you, Carmel. I really did. But your mother made me swear not to. How did you find out?”
“From an old letter Dad had sent her when she was in the home. I also found a list of the children buried in the mass grave. Tess had underlined the baby’s name – Donal. I was gutted. I thought he’d been adopted. For a while I thought he was alive and well. I hoped I had another sibling out there in the world somewhere.”
She looked down at her feet. “I was the one who sent her the list.”
“You?”
“She rang me after she read about the mass grave. She was in a bad way. She said she needed to know if her son had died in the home. I saw that the list had been published in a newspaper, so I sent it to her.”
“God!”
“I thought she had a right to know, Carmel. I know what it feels like to lose a child and I’d want to know in her situation.” Julia put a hand to her face like she was about to cry. “But then she died so soon afterwards. If I’d known the effect it would have on her I’d never have done it.”
“Don’t go there. You’re not to blame.” I leant over and put my hand on hers. “But there’s one thing I can’t get my head around. Why did Tess and Dad give the baby up? I just don’t get it. They were devoted parents. Why didn’t Tess just join Dad in Manchester, get married and keep the baby?”
“Because it wasn’t his.”
“What?”
“Tess and your father split up then Tess met someone else. That’s when she fell pregnant. Seán wasn’t the baby’s father, Carmel.”
Julia poured us both a brandy. The wind was whistling outside and the night sky was clear. I sat back in the Chesterfield and listened.
“Mammy wrote to me in America saying Seán had suddenly upped and left for England. I was living in Cleveland at the time with your Aunt Nancy. No one knew why he’d gone. He returned for a couple of weeks in the summer when Nancy was home on holiday with her boys. He and Nancy were always close growing up and Seán told her everything. He was eighteen, your mother only fifteen when they met at a dance. He was stone mad for her. Tess was beautiful until the day she died but at fifteen she was like a film star. She was a natural blonde and she had this child-like way about her that made men want to protect her. She was ditzy, a little like Marilyn Monroe. Anyways, after his long shift in the bacon factory your dad would bike fifteen miles just to sit with her on the wall outside her house for an hour. He spent every penny he had buying her gifts and taking her to the dances. Mammy told him he’d lost his head. Then one day, completely out of the blue, Tess told him she’d met someone else. Seán was broken-hearted. He found out it was a friend of Tess’s brother. I forget the brother’s name now.”
“Tadhg. Tess rarely spoke about him. She told me once he’d ended up on the streets in London.”
“I didn’t know that. I just knew they were estranged. Anyway, the baby’s father was called James – she never told me his surname. He was a Protestant from a wealthy Anglo-Irish family who lived in the big house outside the village. Apparently he was
