When Daddy Comes Home (26 page)

Stories were being told by men who had bypassed the tea in favour of the bar, stories of ‘Good old Joe’ and their memories of him. As the afternoon wore on, their voices got louder, their walks wider-legged and the gait more unsteady. The faces grew redder and the tales became more and more raucous. The life that my father had lived during the final years of his marriage gradually unfolded.

That day I learnt that not only was he a top amateur golfer and a brilliant snooker player but for many years before my mother had died, he had become a cup-winning ballroom
dancer. In his later years it was he who had led the women on to the dance floor at the British Legion Club’s monthly dances. I remembered my mother telling me of the night they had met; how he had literally swept her off her feet at a local dance hall. My mother had been bewitched and remained so for fifty years.

My shy mother, who had never felt attractive, was not the only woman my father had swept off her feet over the years of his marriage. I had guessed that but up until then I had not realized he had done it so close to home. In the buzz of conversation and the shouts of laughter and tall stories, my mother’s name was absent. Only three years after her death, she was not even a shadow on their memory.

The British Legion had always been his domain; Ruth had disliked alcohol and seldom gone there. That day, only Joe was spoken about and of his wife of over fifty years, not a mention was made.

I was introduced to his dance partner and now I had a name for the elderly woman I had seen at the service. I put aside the resentment I felt on my mother’s behalf at her exclusion and smiled politely.

She tearfully took my arm. ‘Oh, Antoinette, you don’t mind if I call you that? Your father talked about you so much I feel I know you.’

Minding desperately, I kept the smile on my face and replied, ‘Nowadays I’m called Toni.’

I could not tell her that only my father ever called me by that name and that Antoinette was the name of a small frightened child, not me.

‘I’m going to miss Joe so much,’ she continued. ‘I’m sorry, dear, you must be feeling his loss too.’ With that, she gave my arm a sympathetic squeeze.

I gave her his watch which the hospital had given me. Seeing her pleasure at this memento, I knew that to her he had been someone special.

She smiled at me, clearly wanting to prolong our conversation, perhaps because I was the last link to the man who had been so important in her life. ‘I’m a grandmother you know – my daughter has two little ones. They come to visit me nearly every weekend.’

I saw her face reflecting the joy that the frequent visits of those two small people gave her and felt an icy shiver through my body.

How well my father had kept his real self hidden.

Again she told me how much he would be missed, thinking I needed to hear those words for comfort. She was not to know that my loss was of those invisible bonds that had tied me to my parents. They were bonds undetectable to the naked eye but so powerful they might have been made of steel – and they were broken at last.

The day finally drew to a close and I could at last let drop the fixed smile that had been glued on my face for so many hours that my muscles ached.

I knew that my ghosts were almost put to bed and I went to talk the minister for the last time. Not only had he given me the support I so desperately needed when my mother was dying but he had eased my way through this difficult funeral. I thanked him for the hours of help he had given me.

‘Do you remember when we talked three years ago at the hospice before my mother died?’

‘Yes, Toni, I remember it well.’ He looked at me reflectively. ‘How do you feel now?’

‘Drained,’ I replied, ‘but relieved everything is over.’

He did not ask me what I meant by that. Instead he asked, ‘Will you come back? There are people here who care for you.’

‘No,’ I replied. ‘I’m finished here.’

And I knew he understood that I wanted a complete break from my past. I thought then what I had thought once when I had been in hospital: if the people where my parents had lived could forget me, then I could forget my years in Ireland.

Later that evening I searched for that peace that I had believed the death of my father would bring. But try as I might to force myself to feel joy at being set free, I couldn’t.

I tried to tell myself that no longer would I receive phone calls informing me that one of my parents was ill. No longer would I have to pretend to the people of Larne that mine had been a normal childhood and I was just a dutiful daughter returning to visit my parents in their old age. No longer would I have to listen to comments on how alike I looked to which ever parent they were talking about.

Instead, I felt emptiness, an unsettling feeling of something left undone. I picked up the car keys hoping a drive would relax me.

As though it had a mind of its own the car took me to the farmhouse which had been the last home where my parents had lived together. My mother had always been a woman who loved gardening. When she was seventy she had moved to her last home. It was an old farmhouse where not one plant or, apart from weeds, one flower grew. Once there she had spent the years up to her death creating a garden of beauty. My memories of my mother in her later age were always of her working there with a look of serenity on her face. Creating
such an object of beauty had brought my mother the peace that her marriage had failed to do. After her death, when I tried to picture my mother I always saw her in that garden.

I felt a need, one I had suppressed since I had been in Larne. I wanted to walk in the garden my mother had created for the last time. I wanted to knock on the door of her last home and ask the people who lived there for their permission.

At the graveyard I had felt nothing of my mother’s presence, but surely I would find it there. I did not give myself any reason for wanting to feel something from her. I just knew I wanted to picture her again as she had been the last time I had seen her there, the year before she died. She had grown frail then but on her face was a happy smile as she showed me the plants grown from seedlings she had so lovingly nurtured.

I walked towards the house with that picture foremost in my mind only to find myself looking at a freshly dug field. The builder’s sign was erected and then I realized they were replacing that magical garden, she had taken over ten years to create, with tennis courts.

Let it go, Toni, the voice of my past whispered. They have gone now. She has left.

Then I thought of the prison sentence given to my father, not by the law, but by my mother. Over the next thirty years, my mother had had her revenge. She had kept her husband in a cage with bars made of guilt, punishing him remorselessly for what he had put her through and all the suffering she had endured.

Every time a programme on abuse was on the television, my mother insisted that they watch it, knowing that he squirmed in mortification. Those were the years when she turned the tables and he finally danced to her tune. For she
had control at last – of the property, the bank accounts, and him.

So for thirty years he lived with guilt. For he believed to the day he died that she had never known.

And I never released him from the mental prison she created by telling him the truth. He never knew, that at six, I had told her.

No, I never revealed that. For that would have set him free.

Over the years, after I’d left Ireland as teenager, I’d found that office work did not pay well. I worked as a waitress, joined a sales force selling encyclopedias door-to-door and eventually owned my own business.

I had therapy for several years and learnt that when I confided in people I trusted, true friendship was never dented but stayed the course.

Over the years people have asked me the same question over and over again: did you forgive your parents? I neither forgave nor condemned them.

Did you hate your parents? My time in hospital and the waste of my mother’s life taught me many things and one of those was that hatred affects the person who feels it. Like a corrosive acid, it burns internally, destroying lives. But the recipient of it never feels its effect.

I did not let the evil that was my father or the weakness that was my mother win by allowing that emotion to enter my life.

And the last question. Did you find happiness?

Yes, I found happiness.

The soul of a childhood departs quietly without fuss or trouble.

The little girl it had belonged to did not understand where it had gone or why it had left her.

But she missed it, for with its absence she was lonely.

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First published by HarperElement 2007

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© Toni Maguire 2007

Toni Maguire asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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EPub Edition © January 2010 ISBN: 978-0-007-28003-2

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