Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found Read Online Free

emerging from it, come to conquer us.
    One warm day she piled us into the car. “We’re going to the beach,” she said.
    We drove for hours. There were few cars on the roads. Mostly we saw tinkers, their horse-drawn wagons parked by the side of the road, sometimes a woman cooking on a fire and lots of red-haired, dirty-faced children staring stonily as we passed by. In Connemara, wild ponies leaped across the craggy outcrops, and the few fieldswere as small as rooms, dug in among the rocks. Betty drove fast around the corners, and we girls flung ourselves from side to side on the back seat, in fits of hysterical giggles.
    We drove down a lane so narrow that a car could barely fit through, and stopped at a thatched cottage. An old couple were waiting for us, with a pot of tea and fresh bread. They spoke only Irish, a craggy language that matched their faces, so lined and weathered and toothless that I could only tell which was the woman and which was the man by their clothes.
    We put on our bathing suits and walked on down the lane—and there, hidden in an inlet of the rocky shore, was a perfect little beach of yellow sand. Seaweed-shrouded rocks shielded it from the waves. The water was icy cold but we got in anyway, and Betty put her hands under my stomach and taught me to swim. I have a photo of myself from that day, sitting on a rock, pointing at something far in the distance.
     
    There were no family photographs at St. Cleran’s, nothing tangible to recall Mum, just the half-understood relics of her presence here sometime in the past. Nobody at St. Cleran’s spoke of her: not the Lynches nor Paddy Coyne with the wild black hair, not Betty O’Kelly, not Mrs. Creagh. Even Nurse rarely mentioned her. Nurse knew the sadness that had dogged Mum when she lived here, and she knew that Mum hadn’t wanted this for me. She was, I know now, privately angry at Betty for enchanting me, for taking my mother’s place. Old-fashioned as she was, she thought it wasn’t her place to say anything, so she fumed silently and avoided the subject.
    In the long slanting light of that Irish summer, Mum became a kind of ghost to me. Not a real ghost like the one that paced the Big House at night, which Betty told tales of to scare us; nothing so definite as a warmth or a presence nearby—more like a whisper that you’re not sure you’ve heard. She became my secret. I knew that theback bedroom in the Little House, at the top of the stairs, had been hers. The door was always closed. Every time I passed it—every time I went to my room—the sensation of her washed through me. Sometimes, if Nurse wasn’t there, I put my hand on the doorknob and pretended to turn it. One day I did turn it, and opened the door. My heart pounded as if I was doing something forbidden, even though I knew I was not.
    Inside was a sunny room overlooking the beautiful garden I loved; a bed with a beige bedspread, impersonal and, if anything, masculine; and shelves of books. I felt silly for fearing, or hoping for, something that I couldn’t even name.
     
    Back in London when the summer ended, I climbed the stairs of Leslie’s house to the room that was to be mine. There was my pink-striped bed, the paint nubbly on the iron rods. The blue-striped bed was in Nurse’s room, as it had been in Maida Avenue. Instantly I felt resentful. I didn’t want to live here. I wanted the blue bed, and nobody had cared enough to know that and give it to me. I had lost my mother. I deserved the blue bed, but I wouldn’t expose my hurt by asking for it. Anyway, nothing would make me feel better enough.
    Aged five now, I was one of the big girls at Stepping Stones, in the Dolphins class upstairs. When I was younger, I had gazed up those right-angled stairs to the heights where the Dolphins and the Eagles were, and longed for the day when I would be important enough to climb them. Now that I had made it, I didn’t care. Aside from the blue-striped bed, I didn’t care about