My Mother's Children: An Irish family secret and the scars it left behind. Annette Sills (free e books to read online txt) 📖

at the theatre and finding it hard to hold my gaze. He coughed and his voice became wheezy. “I’ve thought an awful lot about your mother over the years. It doesn’t excuse what I did but I was nineteen and barely more than a boy myself when it all happened.” He coughed again. “When your grandparents found out about the pregnancy they were beside themselves. Then when they learned that the baby’s father was James and a Protestant who had no intention of marrying Tess, they were broken. Daddy was incandescent. I was forbidden to go to the Lodge but I used to sneak up there all the same. One day I was with James in his room when we heard the sound of gunshots outside followed by a dog yapping. We peeped out from behind the curtains and there was Daddy, standing at the end of the dirt track with a shotgun and Jack our sheepdog by his side.” Dempsey sighed and shook his head. “I’ll never forget it. He had on his best suit. His daughter was pregnant out of wedlock, he was humiliated and heartbroken but he still put on his Sunday best to come up to the Lodge. It was his last vestige of dignity.”

He leant forward, overwhelmed by a bout of wheezing that lasted for some time. He reached into his pocket, produced a perfectly ironed white handkerchief and covered his mouth.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “It’s my asthma. It plays up in this weather and I came out without my inhaler.”

I asked the passing waitress to bring some water and waited for him to recover.

He drank the water. “So where was I?” he said then, dabbing his mouth and carefully folding the handkerchief.

“Tess was pregnant and your father turned up with a shotgun.”

“Yes. My parents wouldn’t speak to James’ family after that so I became the messenger between the families.”

“He didn’t shoot the messenger, then.”

Dempsey laughed. “Very good. No, he didn’t. Anyway, your grandparents pushed for marriage but James said no. Dorothy and Ronald said Tess and James and the baby could go and live at the Lodge anyway, but they didn’t know what Tess was like or how difficult or erratic she could be. Everyone, myself included, didn’t think she was mentally strong enough to bring up a child.”

I sat back and sighed. “She brought up two. She had her moments but she was a very loving mother.”

Dempsey covered his face with his thin mottled hands.

“With hindsight I know what we did was very wrong, Carmel. But it was a different world back then.”

“That’s what I keep hearing. It was a different world back then. Seems like an excuse for appalling cruelty to me. Some families actually allowed their daughters to keep their babies.”

“In rare cases, yes. Usually by keeping it a secret and pretending the grandmother was the mother. But in a lot of cases it was the local priest who made the final decision. Father Tobin told your parents Tess had to leave the village because she’d brought shame on her family. He came to the house one morning and he and I took her to Tuam. There was no questioning his word and even if we’d fought for Tess to keep the baby, we’d have been powerless against the will of the Church. I know now we were wrong but we genuinely thought we were acting in her best interests.”

He bent down and scratched the back of his calf.

“You acted in the best interests of you, your parents, James, his family and the Catholic Church, I wanted to say. Tess and her baby didn’t enter the equation. You handed Tess in to the nuns knowing they would sell on her baby to strangers so people wouldn’t point at you in the street and talk behind your back at Sunday Mass. Tess wanted to keep her child as did most of the women in those homes. She suffered crippling mental health problems because of it. You played a part in ruining her life.

But I said none of it, turning my head to the window and looking out instead. The sun had started to melt the snow sculpture and water birds were flocking to the boating lake where the ice was starting to break.

When I turned back Dempsey was looking at me closely.

“How did you find out that James and I took the child from the home?”

“I traced a woman who was working there as a maid. She saw you. She remembered James’ sports car.”

A coffee machine whirred in the silence that followed.

“Were you and James together at that point?” I asked.

Dempsey blushed and fiddled with the polo neck of his jumper.

“Not at that point. I had feelings for him but it took James longer to come to terms with his sexuality.”

“So Tess was his trial run?”

“It wasn’t that simple. We were all very young and ignorant and confused.”

He started to splutter and gasp for breath again and I handed him the glass of water. He gulped it down.

“I need to go home for my inhaler,” he said, taking out his handkerchief again. His wheezing was worsening and he looked distressed. “Would you mind coming with me? It’s only a ten-minute walk.”

“Not at all.” I said, helping him put on his coat. And I didn’t mind. I could get a later train if necessary. I wasn’t going anywhere until he told me the whereabouts of my brother.

Chapter 37

Dempsey and Stefano lived in a three-storey town house behind Battersea Park. Tucked at the end of a quiet road, it had a moss-dappled facade and a gravelled front garden lined with flower beds. Green-and-rust mosaic tiles lined a decent-sized porch with hanging baskets on either side of a butterscotch front door. Estate agents would have gushed about its secluded but relatively central location and slapped a price tag on it close to a million.

Dempsey and I had shuffled through the melting snow for over half an hour to get