Page 73 of All Our Missing Pieces

Beatrice didn’t believe her. ‘Why did you do it? Why did you give me away?’

‘I had no choice. It’s hard to understand now, I know. But for women who – women like me – there was so much disgrace, so much shame. All we were left with was the possibility of pretending it had never happened. And the only way to do that was to give the – to give my baby away.’

‘But you wanted to. You must have wanted to.’

Orla tucked her hands under her arms, hunched against the cold. ‘I wanted you to have a good life. Better than you could have had with me. That seemed like the only good choice there was – the best thing for my baby.’

‘But I didn’t get to decide what the best thing was for me!’ Even as she said the words, Beatrice realised how irrational they were.

‘Well, no. You didn’t.’

‘What about my father?’ Beatrice demanded. ‘Couldn’t you have married him? Isn’t that what people did then? Or didn’t he want you, same as you didn’t want me?’

‘He never knew. But even if he had, he wouldn’t have married me.’

‘Why not?’

‘Beatrice.’ Orla sighed. ‘It’s cold. Why don’t we go inside and have a cup of tea, and try to talk about this more calmly?’

Beatrice looked at her, blazing with hurt and anger. ‘I don’t want a cup of tea. I don’t want to talk to you. I’m going out.’

She turned and ran into the house, through the kitchen and the hallway and out of the front door, slamming it behind her. She ran – but not fast enough to miss hearing the first sob break out of Orla’s throat. With every step, she felt her anger abating, shame and regret replacing it.

So now she knows, she thought. Now she knows what it’s like to have me as a daughter.

FORTY-FIVE

31 OCTOBER 2005

Beatrice. Aisling. Beatrice. Aisling.

The names have been spinning through my mind all night, robbing me of sleep, and so now, still awake, I find myself writing them down. But however often I do so, I can’t reconcile myself to them being the same person. My fingers are so numb I can barely hold my pen, my mind so blasted by shock I can barely think coherently.

Beatrice. The girl who came into my house with an agenda – How? How did she even begin to find out, to guess? – violated my privacy, shut my cat in the cellar. The girl I tried to like but barely tolerated.

Beatrice. The vulnerable young woman I knew must be inside there somewhere – a woman only just finding her way in the world, deeply conflicted, uncertain of who she was and doing her best to find out.

Beatrice. My baby, who I have thought of all these years with pain and longing and worry, whose face I have tried to capture on paper year after year. Aisling – my child.

I tried so often to imagine how she would turn out – what kind of woman she would have become. But how could I? I never knew her. I never even saw her. And now I know. Now things make sense: Beatrice’s prying through the house. Beatrice’s antipathy towards me. Beatrice’s paintings, so similar to my own work in so many ways.

How she must hate me. Down in the garden, yesterday afternoon, when she confronted me, when she confronted me, she was so filled with rage. I understand her anger. Ever since she found out she was an adopted child, however carefully those parents of hers couched it, she must have carried that with her.

But I am angry too and I have also been angry for a long time – furious at the injustice of a system that forced women like me to abandon babies in their thousands and put secrecy above all else. Anger at my grandmother for colluding with it, refusing to countenance any other possibility. Anger at Declan and all the other men who carried on with their lives untouched by the devastation they had caused.

Yes, anger at Aisling – at Beatrice – too. Indignation that she could be there in my body in the first place, unasked for and unwelcome, sharing my blood, making me sick, having to be cut out of me when she was good and ready.

We aren’t supposed to feel anger towards our babies, we women. I wonder if I am the only one? I think I am not.

And what did Beatrice want, anyway, when she came to me in the garden? Some moving, emotional reunion – an instant recognition, an embrace, tears of joy? Oh, Beatrice. So did I. But life is not like that, not a fairy tale where we go off together into a happy-ever-after future.

I know that I am the adult in this situation – I am the mother. I am the one who is supposed to make it all okay, dry her tears and heal her wounds in the way I never could when she was a little girl. But what about my wounds?

And what will I do now?

I feel I must get rid of this house. Beatrice and I surely cannot live under the same roof as things are now, and I cannot possibly ask her to leave. A second rejection would be too much, too cruel. I must tell her that finances dictate it will have to be sold. I must call the young estate agent in the cheap suit.

I must move out and move on.