Bird of Passage (32 page)

But she was reaching out to him, a tiny hand, red and rather rough. She put her hand on his. Her fingers were cool and dry. And then the hand was withdrawn, tucked safely back inside her sleeves again.

‘Oh, Finn!’ she said. ‘Is it really you? Can this really be you, all grown up?’

He was a whirlpool of feelings: sadness, resentment, regret. He had no words. No words at all

‘Mammy?’

‘It
is
you. But I can hardly believe it. Look at you, Finn. Look at you.’

She sat down on the couch, and he sat beside her, but then moved away from her a little, old habits dying hard. You never touched a nun. Never. Was she really his mother? She didn’t attempt to touch him again, didn’t even take his hand. ‘This is difficult. I know.’

‘Difficult?’ he echoed.

‘Well.’

‘When did you... ?’

‘Take my vows? Years ago. Years.’ The fingers suddenly emerged from the voluminous sleeves and she counted on them. ‘It must be nine years now.’

‘But why?’

‘Because I wanted to.’

‘Why would you want to? After all they put you through? And what about me?’

It came out as a wail, the yelp of a miserable little boy. Still she didn’t touch him.

‘I hated it.
Hated
it. I could only think about getting out and getting you back.’

‘I wish you had,’ he said, but she didn’t hear him, too intent on explaining.

‘It was appalling, Finn. Just appalling. Worse than prison. But there was nothing I could do about it. Well, I did run off once. Me and another couple of girls. We got out one night, and then we got over the wall. The three of us had some idea of getting to England and I thought I would try to get you back. I might have some rights over here. But it was winter, and it was foggy and the
Gardai
caught up with us before we’d gone more than a mile or two... oh you don’t want to know what it was like.’

‘I do know what it was like. It was like that for me too.’

Worse, he thought. It was worse. He hated himself for his sudden resentment but he couldn’t help it.

She hesitated. ‘Do you remember anything about that day? The day they took you away?’

He shook his head. ‘Not much. I don’t like to think about it. I remember Mrs Maguire from the Legion of Mary. I remember being taken to the school. It seemed like a very long way. I fell asleep in the car and when I woke up I needed a pee. They had to stop the car and let me do it by the road.’

Where had that come from? How had he forgotten that, until now? Mrs Maguire, studiously averting her gaze. The little stream of piss in the road. His embarrassment.

‘I couldn’t bear to think about you...’

He interrupted her. ‘They said you weren’t fit to look after me. That’s what they told me. They said I was a bad boy, and a charity case...’

‘You were never a bad boy. Never. I wasn’t the best of mothers but you were such a lovely little boy...’

‘There was nothing wrong with you.’

‘But you’ve done alright, haven’t you? Look at you. You’ve done alright!’ She wanted to believe it, wanted to persuade herself of the truth of it.

‘I’m alright.’

‘They told me you were living in Glasgow. Is that right?’

He gave her a sketchy account of his recent history without going into too much detail.  He told her he had been doing evening classes, had just sat his exams. The results would be coming out in the summer. His teachers were pleased with him. They thought he might go far. But it felt as though he were recounting somebody else’s story.

‘So you’re alright. Thank God for that. You’re alright, so. And this priest. The one who contacted our Mother Superior. He’s helped you?’

‘He’s been kind, yes.’

‘So it hasn’t all been bad?’

‘I wanted to come and find you. I wanted to get you out. But they wouldn’t tell me anything. They wouldn’t tell me where you were. I thought you were dead!’

There was a muted knock at the door, and a lay sister came in, wheeling a trolley with china cups, home made biscuits, a big pot of tea. There was nothing, Finn thought, so momentous, that it couldn’t be cured or at least alleviated by the generous application of quantities of tea. That was the way it was in the Church. And perhaps they were right.

When they were alone again, balancing cups, he asked, ‘But why did you do this? Was this the only way out? ’

She gazed towards the high window, drank a mouthful of tea.

‘I always intended to get out. And to find you. If ever I prayed at that time, it was only to find you. To save you from wherever they had you. But years passed, and nothing changed, and then something did change. The Mother Superior, she was such a bloody ould dragon, God forgive me, Finn, but I hated her, if ever I hated anyone.  Anyway, she died. Quite suddenly. Took a stroke and keeled over in her cell one night. And there was a new regime, and things changed. It was gradual. But things changed. The new one was a good woman, and I think she was appalled by what she found, and needed to manage the change somehow. And there was one day, in church, when we were singing, we did a lot a singing there, and I found myself thinking that I was happy. I was content. It was a feeling in myself that I couldn’t ignore. I told Mother Anne about you and she said she would make some enquiries, but years had passed, and you were gone. You were gone from that school and they said you were gone from Ireland and nobody knew where you were. Grown and gone. And I thought, well, you’d made a life for yourself, and why would you want me interfering?’

‘How could you think that?’

‘Because it’s true.  It seemed to me that if I pursued you it would have been an imposition on you. I’d have been this long-lost mother, appearing out of the blue. I couldn’t do that to you. I was like somebody who has fallen asleep for a hundred years and finds everything changed when she wakes. Like those people in the old stories who are taken by the fairies, but when they come back they find that years have passed and nothing is the same...’

‘But... this?’ His gesture took in the room, the statue, her habit.

‘It was what I wanted to do. I looked in my heart and saw that it was what I wanted.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘It doesn’t matter whether you believe me or not. It’s the truth. I found my vocation. I found my faith again in the strangest of places. A candle in the dark. Mother Anne was my spiritual advisor and counsellor, and she put me through the mill. She didn’t believe me either, just at first. She had to be sure that it wasn’t false. Wasn’t all some illusion. It took a long time. But I took my vows at last. And then, I was sent over here. There’s a nursery school attached to the convent. We go out into the world from time to time. But on the whole, we stay still and people come to us. We sing. I love the singing. And we pray.’

‘Did you pray for me?’ It came out as a croak. An ugly sound.

‘Oh Finn, all the time.’

‘How can you still believe? How can you believe any of it?’

‘But you go to church don’t you? I heard you went to church in Glasgow. That priest, the one who contacted me. He told me you still had the faith.’

‘Kevin’s been a good friend to me. But I don’t believe in anything!’

 He wanted to curl up and become small again and tuck himself in close to her. But he wanted his real mother, not this small stranger, her hair hidden by wimple and veil. She made him feel big and clumsy. He wanted to run away from this smooth, beeswax scented place, and forget that any of it had happened. He wanted her to be dead, so that he could mourn her in peace and move on with his life.

‘I can’t mend the past,’ she said. ‘None of us can. I thought I would die without you.’

‘You couldn’t beat them, so you joined them.’

‘No. I found myself. I’m Sister Dominica now. Ah God, let me look at you. I know this is too much, too soon. You need to think about all this. Sort things out in your head. I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to go away and turn your back on me. But you can come and see me you know. If you want to. There’s a guest house.  You could come and stay. We could spend a little time together. There’s so much to talk about. Things you should know. About that time. About what happened...’ She frowned. ‘There are things you don’t remember, Finn.’

‘I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to remember it. I’ve spent all these years trying to forget and I don’t want to dredge it up again. There’s nothing you can tell me that I want to know. Nothing!’

She gazed at him, anxiously. He couldn’t be angry with her but he was disappointed. He knew that she had been helpless, as helpless as he was, in the face of inhuman and intractable cruelty. But she had capitulated when she should not.

He thought, I wouldn’t have done that! I wouldn’t have given in! I wouldn’t have joined the enemy! The words came into his mind with such fierceness that they tumbled over one another and made him dizzy with the venom of them.

When he was on the bus on the way back to Glasgow, he remembered the sudden sadness that had shaded her serenity. Things we should talk about, Finn. About that time. About what happened.  What things? But he hadn’t wanted to talk about it and he didn’t want to think about it any more. He had spent his life so far blaming himself for the seismic shift that had destroyed his world and his mother’s world too. But she was alright. And he was alright, wasn’t he? He was free now. He would follow Kirsty’s advice and make something of himself, but he would do it alone and unaided. When he was rich and successful, he would go back to Dunshee. He would go back and see Kirsty and say ‘Look. Look at what I’ve done! Did you think I couldn’t do it? Look at what I’ve made of myself!’

And then she would see. They would all see. All the doubters. They would all see just what Finn O’Malley could do. 

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

Three years later, Kirsty gave birth to another daughter, Flora, a tiny red-headed replica of herself.  During this second pregnancy, she found that she and her work had vastly outgrown the bedroom, and Nicolas made a studio for her in one of the old outbuildings at the back of the house. She still liked to walk about the island, sketching, taking photographs or just observing the layers of light and colour, the subtleties of each season. Whenever she could, she would take India with her, admiring her daughter’s energy as she toddled along on sturdy legs, covering three miles for her mother’s every mile. Sometimes, Alasdair would come down to the beach below Dunshee with them, and make sandcastles or sand boats. India could be an obstinate and fractious little girl when she chose, but she would always smile for Alasdair.

Kirsty had already exhibited in galleries in Edinburgh, including the one where she had worked as a student, and in a couple of small galleries in London, where her island studies were greeted with enthusiasm. They were vivid, original, very beautiful, but also, as one critic put it, ‘curiously detached – as though the artist were an observer from another planet, seeing the place for the first time.’ A journalist came to the island, and wrote a piece about Kirsty’s work. She was even featured in a couple of glossy, rural life magazines. She had a few sales, but she didn’t much care whether she sold her pictures or not. For Kirsty, the exploration was always more important than the end product.

 Flora’s birth, smooth as it was, seemed to cast her into a kind of despondency. ‘I just sit here and lactate,’ she said to Nicolas.

‘But I love to see you feeding her.’

‘I know. And I love doing it. I keep looking at her and thinking, I’ve done all that! It came out of me, not some bottle. But I can’t seem to string two sensible words together, never mind thoughts.’

India, meanwhile, was going through a stage of saying ‘no’ to everything. She would do anything to oblige her grandfather, but nothing for anyone else, not Kirsty, not even Nicolas. She would stamp her foot and put her hands on her hips and defy everyone, her forehead creased in a frown. It drove Nicolas mad, but whenever he saw her standing, arms akimbo, like an outraged adult, it made him laugh so much that he would have to leave the room.

Kirsty knew that she was lucky. She had help in the house and no money worries, but she felt as though she had become mother to the whole world and found it impossible to watch films or television programmes where children were hurt or injured. It was too painful and would reduce her to tears in a moment. Just occasionally, the thought of Finn would come into her mind: what he had told her about his mother, and his enforced separation from her. How could they have borne it? She felt it more acutely now that she was a mother herself. She knew that she would have killed to protect her children. But the thought of having either of them taken away from her by force was so appalling that it made her stomach churn. Poor Finn. Poor Mary.

The following year, Kirsty made an extended visit to her in-laws in London with the two children and, while she was there, had her hair cut very short. Afterwards, she gazed at herself, wondering what Nicolas would say, missing the weight and the warmth of it, running her hand tentatively over the back of her neck. She felt very strange and vulnerable without it and drew a whole page full of trembling shorn sheep in her sketch book.

 ‘My God, what have you done?’ said Nicolas, when she got back to the island.