Once in a Lifetime (39 page)

She understood it, all right. Her father stayed at the end of the bed, as if he could sense the armour-plating Dara had put around herself and the baby.

‘I meant to bring you flowers or something, but I forgot,’

he said.

‘That’s fine,’ Dara said calmly. She had the gifts she wanted, a card and roses from Des. She’d told him he shouldn’t have bought her anything, they needed to keep the money for the mortgage, and then he’d come in with beautiful white roses, twelve of them, and she’d loved him for it.

Bernard sat on the end of the bed and Dara instantly pulled her feet away. Even though she had stitches and it was uncomfortable, she sat up straight; she wanted to be formal with him, move away from him, not lie there and relax. Worse, Natalie would wake up soon and need to be fed, and there was absolutely no way Dara was going to breast-feed her baby with her father watching.

‘She’s the image of your mother,’ Bernard went on, peering mistily at the baby in the little crib. ‘The image of her. And what a great head of hair she has. It’ll be lovely to have a baby around the house again.’

Dara felt a wave of absolute revulsion hit her. It would be lovely to have a baby around the house. A baby who would grow into a child, a little girl, to be touched and used in the same way she’d been used? Was he crazy? Did he not remember what he’d done to her? Had he managed to put it out of his mind so easily, or had alcohol sodden his memory so much that it was as if the abuse never happened?

A bell rang, the warning that only fifteen minutes of visiting time remained.

‘That’s it, Da,’ she said. ‘You’d better head off, they’re very firm here.’

He didn’t need any more urging. ‘I said I’d go back to the pub and meet the lads - they want to buy me a few rounds for the baby. What are you going to call her, anyway?’

‘I haven’t decided,’ Dara said, which was a lie, but giving her father the baby’s name was like giving him a bit of her soul, and she didn’t want to do that, not just yet. He lurched forward for a kiss and Dara felt her stomach curdle. She moved her head so his unshaven cheek cracked against hers.

‘Bye,’ she said and he staggered off, no doubt happy with himself. Everything was fine in Bernard’s world.

Her grandfather had no sooner gone than Natalie woke up with an adorable mewling noise, like a kitten, waking and stretching.

‘How are you, my darling?’ Dara said, picking her up, wincing only slightly at the pain from her stitches. Natalie’s rosebud mouth settled around her mother’s nipple and she began to suck. Breast-feeding was incredible, Dara thought; nobody had told her it would be like this. She knew it could be difficult and that some people couldn’t manage it and that other people shuddered at the thought, thinking their boobs would end up around their knees. She’d been lucky: Natalie had latched on instantly and even though her breasts could be sore and the baby’s little gums hurt sometimes as she squirmed around trying to get a good hold, there was something primeval and amazing about it. It was like this was what her body was made for. This sense of an animal minding her young was the most powerful, intense feeling she’d ever had in her whole life. She cradled Natalie’s dark head, closed her eyes and let the sense of Tightness ripple through her body.

But her father’s visit kept rattling back into her brain. He had to come in, he had to come and ruin every feeling of goodness and happiness.

No matter what she did, he’d always be there. She hated

him sometimes. Even though she was supposed to let go of the past, not blame anyone, she did blame him. She couldn’t put the light of forgiveness around him because what he’d done to her was so appalling. When you had a child, it was your duty to love them and protect them. That was her instinct with her beautiful little Natalie in her arms. Her father had betrayed all that parental love and had done the most unparental thing there was. How could he come in here and talk about how wonderful it was to have a baby around the place again and not remember what he’d done to his baby when she’d grown up to be a little girl?

Dara stroked Natalie and vowed that she’d never let that happen to her darling baby. She’d never forgive her father for what he’d done.

Natalie was the most amazing baby in the whole world; Des and Dara told everyone so. She slept through the night at five months and moved on to solids with absolutely no problem.

Pureed carrots were her favourite and she squealed with delight when she got the first spoonful of pureed apple.

She was crawling around the room at high speed about a month before the books said she’d be and both her parents hovered protectively as she crawled, making sure she didn’t bang into things or hurt her head on something. The only slow bit of her development was the fact that she loved sleeping in her parents’ bed and refused to move into her own cot.

‘We should have been tougher when she was little,’ Des said ruefully, when yet another attempt to get Natalie to sleep in her cot was met with outraged screams.

‘But she’s so little,’ said Dara, who felt almost physically sick when her baby cried. ‘She’ll learn, she will.’

‘You’re making a rod for your own back, letting that child sleep with you,’ said Mrs McGuinness, who lived in the flat downstairs and whom they often met in the morning when they went out for a walk. Mrs McGuinness was an Expert

on Everything; the government, taxi drivers, the price of food, those noisy lads who lived next door and had wild parties … Des and Dara had discovered that asking her opinion on anything was a mistake as she would usually respond with a PhD-length lecture.

‘I know,’ said Dara hastily. ‘It’s just she’s so happy when she’s in with us and she goes back to sleep, and at least we get to go to sleep. If we put her back in the cot she screams for ages. Just like her dad, I say,’ Dara laughed, smiling down at her adorable daughter and tickling her under the chin.

‘When she decides she wants to do something, that’s it.’

Mrs McGuinness looked sagely at Dara. ‘I’d say she takes after her mother as well,’ she said. ‘Something tells me that when you make up your mind, Dara, you don’t like to change it.’

‘I used to be like that,’ Dara said softly. ‘But not any more.’

Saturday mornings were the best, when Des didn’t have to get up early for work and the two of them could lie snug in the double bed, with Natalie between them, squirming and wriggling, happy being adored by her parents.

When Natalie was seven months old, Dara’s breast milk dried up and she decided to get a tattoo. When she checked with the GP that it would be safe, the GP had said, amused:

‘What are you getting? A butterfly?’

‘Something like that,’ Dara agreed.

It was a tiny tattoo, at the inside of her wrist, and was actually made up of three dates written in a spiral. They were three of the most important dates in Dara’s life: the day she’d stopped drinking, the day she’d met Des properly, and the day Natalie had been born. Natalie was fascinated by the tattoo and rolled her fingers around the delicate tracery of the writing on her mother’s narrow wrist.

‘Where would I be without you, darling?’ Dara murmured to her daughter, stroking her, touching Natalie’s soft cheeks, holding her fat little hands, watching the light in her

beautiful eyes. ‘You’re everything to me, my love, you and your dad.’

They were so happy, the three of them, it was a golden time. Dara had never known so much happiness.

Des hated working in the furniture shop. Dara knew he’d like nothing more than a bit of land somewhere, for he was never happier than when he was mucking around in the fields in Pinewood, the farm his uncle owned in Wicklow.

Whenever he visited Uncle Phillip, Dara brought Natalie to visit Star.

Natalie loved crawling around on the floor, reaching up to grab all the fascinating objects in Star’s house. Dara followed her anxiously, worried things would break.

‘Stop worrying,’ Star would say. ‘It’s all replaceable.’

Dara laughed. ‘Nothing in this house is replaceable; it’s all so special or old or priceless.’

They sat on the verandah, let Natalie sit on the grass and wriggle her bare feet, and talked.

Dara wanted Star’s opinion on how to convince Des to move to Wicklow.

‘He loves it here, but he says he knows I’m a city girl. I don’t care where I live, Star,’ she added. ‘As long as I’m with Des and Natalie, I could happily live in a box on the motorway.’ She rushed down to pick a fat juicy worm from Natalie’s grasp. Natalie, who’d been considering eating the worm, squealed with temper.

Star laughed. ‘Tell him that,’ she said.

Two short years later, Star knew there was somebody in the house before she unlocked the door. Everything looked the same, but she just knew.

She walked quietly into the kitchen and out on to the verandah before she found her visitor. It was Dara, sitting on the swing seat, wrapped in the old cream woollen blanket, holding a cup of tea loosely in one hand. A small teapot was on the table beside her.

In one glance, Star knew everything was very, very wrong.

She sat down on the other side of the seat and looked into Dara’s face. She was deathly pale, her lips bloodless.

‘What’s wrong?’

Dara shook her head. ‘Can’t talk,’ she whispered. ‘Can’t.’

‘Tell me.’

Dara’s eyes flickered to the teapot. It was the oldest teapot in the house, one that had been passed down from Bluestone woman to Bluestone woman for over three hundred years.

Dara knew what it was, for Star had told her. Tea drunk from it could tell you your future, if you knew how to ask it correctly.

‘Why did you use it?’ asked Star.

‘The mark on my arm, the funny black spot,’ Dara said.

‘Remember it? The tattoo guy said I should get it looked at, but I didn’t get round to it until I was in with Natalie over that little cough she had and the GP said he’d best remove it. He did, and he phoned me, said it’s skin cancer, a malignant melanoma. It’s been there for so long … I didn’t know, Star. I didn’t know it could be dangerous ‘

‘How dangerous?’

Star daren’t touch her yet in case something terrible sprang from Dara’s soul into Star’s mind, something that meant bad news.

‘I went to the hospital for a scan. It’s everywhere. I have spots on my liver. Des doesn’t know yet, I couldn’t tell him.

The doctors want me to come back with him so they can talk to us …’ Dara bent her head. ‘I kept thinking it was something to do with my drinking and I couldn’t tell him. Like I’d done it to myself, like it was my fault. I thought if I came out here, you’d be able to tell -me it was going to be all right. Then I could tell him, because I knew the ending.’

Star knew what she’d say next.

‘You weren’t here and I was desperate to know.’

‘You used the teapot.’

‘I used it. I don’t have six months, Star. They said I might, but I don’t, not even that. It’s cold at the funeral, you see. I saw it and everyone’s in winter coats.

‘I can’t leave Natalie. I love her so much. I’ve a pain in my heart now,’ Dara said quietly. ‘It’s like an ache, a dull, huge ache that spreads from my throat down.’

‘There must be treatment,’ Star said, and even as she said it, she knew it wasn’t true. The magic of the Bluestone teapot didn’t lie. What Dara had seen was the truth.

But Dara shook her head. ‘It’s not cancer pain,’ she said.

‘My heart is broken. That’s what the pain is. Natalie will grow up and I’ll never know her. All I can think is that I’m damaged, dangerous. All I bring to people is pain - pain to poor Des and now pain to Natalie. Perhaps, if I’m gone, the pain will be gone from my family, it will all be wiped out and Des and Natalie can start again.’

‘How can they start again without you?’

‘They can move on, forget me and find a new life,’ said Dara fiercely.

Star took her hands then and she could see that Dara meant it.

‘I want her to be happy, and my history never made anyone happy. She deserves a fresh start, with good parents. With Des and somebody else. Not me with my darkness. What sort of a dead mother would I be? A crazy one that no child would want to be like. Who was your mother, Natalie? Oh, an alcoholic, the daughter of an alcoholic, who was abused, raped and tried to self-destruct? That’s no role model for a person.

No, better she has a fresh life without me.’

‘But you got better.’

‘I tried,’ Dara said quietly. ‘I did my best, but it’s still in me, the darkness, why else would this happen to me? I love them both so much, my love will always be there for her,

whether she knows about it or not. I’ll be with them in spirit, somehow.’ She half-laughed. ‘You’ll feel me, Star, although nobody else will.’

‘Natalie has a right to know about her past.’

Dara shook her head. ‘Some pasts are best left buried.’

Thirteen

Only one person can change your life, and that’s you. Don’t wait for anyone else to do it, prince charming or otherwise. Be your own prince.

Morning rain had lashed Ardagh with floods of water, but now, as evening light turned the sky opalescent pink, it was mercifully dry. The rosy rays of the dying sun looked for all the world like a medieval painting and Natalie reflected that all the scene needed was the figure of an angel hovering over the coast for the look to be complete.

She was silent as her father drove his old pick-up truck out past Ardagh on the road to the Black Abbey. He might have thought she was locked up in darkness and confusion, yet it was merely that she felt unnerved and other-worldly. After all this time, she knew something about her beloved mother, Dara. What a story it had been, even if that was just a short version of it.