Peeling Oranges Read Online Free

is keeping some secret from me. It is New Year’s Eve and she is not happy. Maybe she is homesick.
    6 January 1948:
    Martha is with child. The day of the Magi. If she would only confess that she was unfaithful I would forgive her, but she just bursts into tears and says she wants to go to London to see Marie Stopes. She saw her poster there on our honeymoon on our way to Spain. It became fixed in her mind. She doesn’t realise that what she is saying is, Close the stable door after the horse has bolted. She is unpredictable, irrational. As days and weeks pass, I watch her stomach rise like yeast. I am perturbed. She is melancholy – so unlike the girl I first knew. She will not confide in me.
    18 June 1948:
    A baby boy was born at 4.05 a.m. It was a difficult birth – Caesarean. Martha lacked the will needed to push the child into the light. She kept saying she wished she were dead. Both baby and mother were nearly lost, very nearly lost.
    ***
    On the same day a telegram was sent from Madrid to Dublin to record the birth of Derek Foley . It didn’t record the long travail which the birth entailed. Telegrams don’t record marathons. Letters of congratulations arrived from Muddy and Peg and some friends from the Liberties on the occasion of ‘ the happy event’.
    Some of the letters in the desk drawer are from a Gearóid MacSuibhne or from my mother. (Did she keep copies of her letters or were some of them ever sent?). I open one of my mother’s letters to Gearóid MacSuibhne: faded writing on yellowing pages. An initially neat hand succumbing to a spidery scrawl. A gush of words, impatient for ink, flying in many directions, trying to find something to stab. Written in Irish. Accent marks land randomly, surprising letters not used to stress. She speaks of ‘watching this mountain growing inside me ’ , while back in the Liberties Muddy was knitting me a blue matinée coat, and Peg bought a pram, and the rocking cot that went back in generations in the Woodburn family was made ready for me. It was enough to break a heart.
    July 1948:
    Martha weeps and weeps and weeps. I ask her if she wants Peg or Muddy over for company, but she says she doesn’t want to see anybody. I ask her why she is so sad. She says, ‘Sadness! Some seek it out (I’m sure she is referring to me), ‘and others have it thrust upon them.’ She won’t explain what she means. I am nearly at my wits’ end. I thought I could adapt. Isn’t it a child I wanted all along? But not like this. Do they know the circumstances back home? She says they don’t. They’ll make a laughing stock of me or stone her to death with their big white stones.
    ***
    I read these entries over and over. ‘Unfaithful?’ Where does that leave me? How can one confront an ailing mother about a past infidelity, even if it led to the spawning of oneself? A child is not the moral guardian of his parent.
    I write in my own diary:
    Who was my father? I walk in a fatherless world. Can one parent rear a whole child? Am I maimed?
    December 1949:
    My indigestion is bad today – severe pains in my chest. I must eat less red meat.
    August 1950:
    There is such heat. It rebounds off the pavements with its muscle, trying to fell one with its blows. There is no ventilation anywhere. The buildings are so high, they contain the heat within the streets like an oven. Outside the city the orange trees have dried up. The fruit is withered and sickly. It is so difficult to breathe. I must get to the sea. I must contact L. I have not been for some time. She is agreeable to do what I ask. I must write to JB and make all the arrangements. With M here it is very difficult. I am losing my grip. How suddenly it can happen. And yet, when one looks at all my neat files, one could say this man led an ordered life.
    That was Patrick Foley’s last entry in his diaries.
    ***
    ‘Who was L?’ I ask at breakfast.
    ‘L? L is for the..’ Saliva appears around her lips.
    ‘Why didn’t you move long