“God. Her own brother?”
“Tess told Seán he had notions. She said he was far more concerned about protecting the rich Protestant family than his own. Sure, you couldn’t blame her for not having anything to do with him after that.”
I uncrossed my legs, accidently kicking Dev who yelped beneath my foot. I leant over and patted his silky coat then sat back and exhaled loudly.
“Despite all that, Dad stuck by her. He really loved her, didn’t he?”
“He was besotted. Mammy was livid when she found out they were getting married.”
“And what happened to Tess’s parents? They didn’t die before we were born, like she told us, did they?”
Julia shook her head slowly. “They both lived well into their seventies. Nancy Corley, a nurse who worked beside me at the hospital in Westport was a neighbour of theirs. She told me when they passed away and I rang Tess and told her. But Tess never came home to either funeral.”
“She never forgave them.”
“No, she didn’t.”
I got up and stood in front of the fireplace, my hands behind my back, the fire warming the back of my legs. Julia sat forward on her chair and put her head in her hands.
“I know what it’s like to lose one child, Carmel. But your poor mother. To lose two sons. And to find out one of them had been neglected in that home and died and not had any kind of burial. It devastated her.”
I knelt down beside her and stroked her thinning hair.
“None of it is your fault, Julia. The Church and State and Tess’s own family are to blame for what happened to her, not you.”
I stood up and picked up a photo from the mantelpiece. Dad, Mikey and me were standing in front of the whitewashed wall of Grandma’s old house when I was six or seven. Dad was dapper in an orange floral wide collared shirt and bellbottom jeans. He was grinning down at Mikey in his arms and I was leaning into him, shyly, in a lemon summer dress.
“Dad was a very good man, wasn’t he?” I said.
“One of the finest that ever walked in shoe leather,” she replied, picking up the poker, leaning over and poking the fire again.
Chapter 20
Kathleen Slevin asked if we could sit outside so she could smoke, which she did heartily. The fine weather had held and it was a tepid afternoon with a pleasant breeze. The Breaffy House Hotel was just a few miles from Bohola, the village where Kathleen had lived alone since the death of her husband the previous year. Set in wooded grounds, the impressive Victorian grey-stone building boasted turrets and gargoyles. Once the ancestral home of an Anglo-Irish family, it was easy to imagine the tinkle of upper-class English accents, the flurry of a pheasant shoot and the yell of a hunt. Nowadays the place was known for its GAA training ground, its golf course and as a key wedding venue in Mayo.
“I missed the vaping boat.” Kathleen lit her second cigarette in five minutes then smiled, revealing a jaundiced set of teeth. She was hobbity, barely five feet tall, with small green eyes and dressed in a pale-blue summer dress that hung off her bony shoulders. She shook two packets of sugar into a large coffee cup that was almost the size of her face.
I had almost cancelled our meeting. There didn’t seem much point. My baby brother was long dead and buried. Why would I want to torture myself further by learning about Tess’s time in the home? It wasn’t going to be good. But I changed my mind for two reasons. The first was meeting Louisa Schulz. She’d made me stop and think about the courage of all the survivors who were telling their stories and reliving the painful episodes of their past. Tess was also a survivor. I felt I owed it to her to find out exactly what happened in the home and tell her story too. I also wanted to find out more about the baby’s father. Tess and Kathleen were friends in the home. I was hoping Tess had confided in her about James. Who was he? Was he still alive? Maybe she knew more about Tess’s brother, Tadgh, too. I had to grab my chance to find out these things when I had it. Kathleen wasn’t going to be around forever, especially if she carried on smoking at that rate.
“It all happened such a long time ago,” I said to her. “I expect you don’t remember much.”
“Oh, I remember it all very well. I’ve often thought about your mother over the years and wondered how she was going on. I tried to contact her a couple of times after she left the home.”
I sat up. “You did?”
“I wrote to your father’s lodging address in Manchester where he was staying when she was in the home. I knew he’d moved on but I hoped they might forward the letters on. I never heard anything back.”
“I see.” I stirred my latte. “Do you mind if we
