‘I think you have to, you know. There’s only one small point, Mrs Lacy, if you could bear with me. I spoke to a colleague about this case – well, having a personal interest, I thought I better. You may remember I mentioned an outsider? Well, strangely enough my colleague raised an interesting question.’
‘Look, I don’t want to go on talking about any of this. I’ve told you I couldn’t even begin to contemplate what you’re suggesting.’
‘My colleague pointed out that it isn’t just Norma’s circumstances which have changed, nor indeed your own. There’s a third factor in all this, my colleague pointed out: this child is being brought up as the child of Irish parents. Well, fair enough you may say, Mrs Lacy, until you remember that the Irish are a different kettle of fish today from what they were ten years ago. How easy is it, you have to ask yourself, to be a child of Irish parents today, to bear an Irish name, to be a member of the Roman Catholic Church? That child will have to attend a London school, for instance, where there could easily be hostility. Increasingly we come across this in our work, Mrs Lacy.’
‘Betty is my child-’
‘Of course. That’s quite understood, Mrs Lacy. But what my colleague pointed out is that sooner or later Norma is going to worry about the Irish thing as well. What will go through her mind is that it’s not just a question of her baby being affected by a broken marriage, but of her baby being brought up in an atmosphere that isn’t always pleasant. I’m sorry to mention it, Mrs Lacy, but, as my colleague says, no mother on earth would care to lie awake at night and worry about that.’
Her hand felt hot and damp on the telephone receiver. She imagined the young man sitting in an office, concerned and serious, and then smiling as he tried to find a bright side. She imagined Norma in their newly decorated flat, needing her child because everything was different now, hoping.
‘I can’t go on talking to you. I’m sorry.’
She replaced the receiver, and immediately found herself thinking about Liam. It was Liam’s fault as well as hers that Betty had been adopted and was now to be regarded as the child of Irish parents. Liam had always firmly regarded himself as Betty’s father, even if he never came near her now.
She didn’t want to go and see him. She didn’t want to make the journey on a number 9 bus, she didn’t want to have to see the woman’s predatory lips. But even as she thought that, she could hear herself asking Mrs Haste to have Betty for a couple of hours one afternoon. ‘Hullo, Liam,’ she said a few days later in the newsagent’s.
She’d waited until there were no customers, and to her relief the woman wasn’t there. The woman’s old mother, very fat and dressed all in brown, was resting in an armchair in a little room behind the shop itself, a kind of store-room it seemed to be, with stacks of magazines tied with string, just as they’d come off the van.
‘Heavens above!’ Liam said.
‘Liam, could I have a word?’
The old woman appeared to be asleep. She hadn’t moved when Bridget had spoken. She was wearing a hat, and seemed a bit eccentric, sleeping there among the bundles of magazines.
‘Of course you could, dear. How are you, Bridget?’
‘I’m fine, Liam. And yourself?’
‘I’m fine too, dear.’
She told him quickly. Customers hurried in for the
He listened to her carefully, picking up the thread of what she told him after each interruption. Because once they’d known one another so well, she mentioned the intuition she felt where Father Gogarty and Mrs Winnard and Miss Custle were concerned. She watched the expressions changing on his face, and she could feel him nodding inwardly: she felt him thinking that she was the same as she’d always been, nervous where other people were concerned, too modest and unsure of herself.
‘I’ll never forget how pretty you looked,’ he said suddenly, and for no reason that Bridget could see. ‘Wasn’t everything great long ago, Bridie?’
‘It’s Betty we have to think of, Liam. The old days are over and done with.’
‘I often go back to them. I’ll never forget them, dear.’
He was trying to be nice, but it seemed to Bridget that he was saying she still belonged to the time he spoke of, that she had not managed to come to terms with life as it had been since. You had to be tougher to come to terms with a world that was tough itself, you had to get over being embarrassed when you were pulled out of the background. All that hadn’t mattered long ago; when Emir Ryall had stolen her atlas she hadn’t even complained. Being stolen from, she suddenly thought.
‘I don’t know what to say to them,’ she said. ‘The man keeps telephoning me.’
‘Tell him to leave you alone, Bridget. Tell him he has no business bothering you.’
‘I’ve tried saying that.’
‘Tell him the thing was legally done and he hasn’t a foot to stand on. Tell him he can be up for harassment.’
A child came into the shop and Liam had to look for drawing-pins. ‘I’m afraid I have to shut up now,’ he said when the child had gone, and as he spoke the old woman in the armchair stirred. She spoke his name. She said she’d fancy peaches for tea. ‘There’s a tin set aside for you, dear,’ Liam said, winking at Bridget. He had raised his voice to address the old woman. He lowered it again to say goodbye. ‘The best of luck with it,’ he said, and Bridget knew he meant it.
‘Thanks, Liam.’ She tried to smile, and realized that she hadn’t repeated the young man’s remarks about Betty being brought up in a hostile atmosphere. She almost did so, standing at the door of the shop, imagining Liam angrily saying that the man needed putting in his place and offering to meet him. But as she walked away she knew all that was make-believe. Liam had his own life to live, peaches and a sort of mother-in-law. He couldn’t be blamed for only wishing her luck.
