My Mother's Children: An Irish family secret and the scars it left behind. by Annette Sills (epub e reader .TXT) 📗

High Street, I stopped and tucked Dempsey’s business card into my purse next to Tess’s old bus pass that I carried everywhere. I pulled it out and looked at her photograph under the streetlamp.

“I’m close, Tess,” I whispered. “So very, very close.”

Chapter 36

“Tess was a nervous child, very sensitive and hyper-vigilant. She cried a lot and had trouble sleeping. She’d wander around the house at all hours. My mother and father hadn’t a clue how to handle her.”

Timothy Dempsey and I were sitting on a low leather sofa in the café in Battersea Park. Two cappuccinos and a couple of half-eaten croissants lay on the glass coffee table in front of us. Elegant in a black polo-neck, well-cut trousers and tan leather ankle boots, he rubbed his right eye. He had dark shadows under his eyes, like he hadn’t slept much either. I felt very relaxed in his company, like pulling on an old jumper I thought I’d lost but found again at the bottom of a drawer. His smile, his laugh, the rhythm of his speech, they were all disturbingly familiar. I asked him to tell me Tess’s story from the beginning. But the more I listened, the more I realised he was choosing his words carefully. Instinct told me he was holding something very important back.

“When she was twelve or so she started mitching school. She’d take off down the woods with magazines she stole from the village shop. Mammy despaired and Daddy beat her. One time when she was fourteen she went to Dublin for the day without his permission. When she got back Daddy took off his belt and laid into her. I tried to step in but my father was a big man. She ended up in a terrible state. The poor girl was black and blue.”

I flinched. “She never told me any of that.”

“That was just the way it was back then, Carmel. There was a lot of ignorance about rearing kids. The strap or the stick featured highly. Tess was difficult and I suppose it was the only way they knew how to deal with her.” He picked up his coffee and sipped. “Last night you mentioned that your father passed away when you were young?”

I nodded. “A freak accident at work. He slipped and fell into a pit and was buried under an avalanche of concrete. I was ten and Mikey was four.”

“Jesus. I’m so sorry. I met him a couple of times when he and Tess were courting. He used to call at the house. He was mad for her. Awfully nice and he had a calming influence on her.”

“Dad was the best. She went to pieces when he died.”

I pictured her the day the police came round to tell us. She was sitting in his chair next to the radiogram with Mikey perched on her knee. She blanched with shock then told the officers to get out of her house.

“So tell me. When did she meet James, the baby’s father?”

Dempsey shifted in his chair then crossed his legs to reveal a pair of bright yellow socks under his boots. He cleared his throat.

“At a party in the village. She was as crazy about him as your father was about her. James was nineteen, three years older than her. He was my best friend. Tess looked much older. She was a well-developed girl but very young in the head.”

“I haven’t any photos of her as a child.”

“I have a few you can have. Oh, she was a beauty. A natural blonde. She had great style too. She worked in the drapery store and made all her own clothes with the discounted material she got there. I remember the table in our front room was always covered with taffeta and other kinds of material in bright colours and balls of wool. She knitted too.”

“She always loved her clothes and her knitting.”

“As soon as she and James hit it off she told your dad it was all over. James and I had been friends since we were small boys in the national school. His family were Anglo-Irish and they lived up at the Lodge, a big house on the edge of the village. His parents were lovely people. They were a lot nicer than the anti-English crowd in the village would have you believe. Most Protestants at that time wouldn’t let their offspring anywhere near the local children but Dorothy and Ronald sent James to the local Catholic school early on. They were eccentric, liberal, easy-going types. I spent a lot of my childhood up there at the Lodge. James was an only child and Dorothy encouraged our friendship. She treated me like a son. She was a sprightly woman, twenty years younger than Ronald. She loved the outdoors and she was always out and about walking or fishing.” Dempsey shook his head. “At home my father had me grafting on the farm and cutting the turf. I wasn’t cut out for that kind of work. I hated it. Tess and I feared him. Your grandmother was awfully cold and very religious. She showed us no affection. Dorothy was much kinder. I much preferred being up at the Lodge. She understood the way we boys were.”

Dempsey blushed then stared out of the window like he was locked in a dream. Three inches of snow had fallen on the park overnight. The blue-tinged morning light filtered through the branches of the trees lining the footpaths and a snow sculpture of a man dressed in a school tie and nothing else sat cross-legged on a bench opposite.

“So Tess got pregnant,” I said, interrupting his reverie. I immediately regretted the impatience in my voice, remembering that I had to tread softly.

Dempsey turned back. “Sorry. Yes, yes. It was a huge shock. She and James had only known each other a couple of weeks.

“God.”

“It only ever happened once.” He spoke quickly, circling his foot nervously in the air like he had done