The Missing Sister, page 69
‘Are you here to see me, or do you and Ambrose know each other?’ I asked.
‘Mary, Mr Hoffman is the lawyer of the dead father of all the sisters that have been trying to trace you recently,’ said Ambrose.
‘Please, call me Georg. I believe it was Tiggy you met here in Dublin.’
‘Yes, it was. But I’ve also met other sisters and their . . . partners around the world. That is, they’ve been trying to track me down.’
‘Yes, they have. And I’m here tonight because I now realise it should have been me who came to you in the first place, because I had more . . . details of your origins than my client’s daughters. But when the girls – as I call the sisters collectively came up with a plan to track their missing sister down, I took the decision to let them find you. They had been very successful in finding their own birth families, you see, and I had other matters to attend to. Let me now apologise for any inconvenience or worry I – and they – have caused you in the process.’
‘Thank you. The situation has caused me some distress, especially as I booked a Grand Tour to try to get over the loss of my husband.’
‘Mary, my dear, do forgive me, but that isn’t quite true, is it?’
I looked at Ambrose, wondering why on earth he was defending the behaviour of a set of sisters whom he knew had completely terrified me.
‘What I mean, Mr Hoffman, is that at the same time, Mary and I do hope you don’t mind me speaking for you,’ Ambrose continued, ‘was also on a search for her own past. Ironically, as the sisters were trying to find her, she was searching for someone too. Someone that frightened and terrorised her as a young woman. Unfortunately, the two lines of enquiry became confused. Do you understand?’
‘Not completely, but enough to know that you, Mrs McDougal, did not welcome the sisters’ pursuit of you.’
‘Please, call me Merry, and no I did not, but you still haven’t answered the question: why are you here tonight?’
‘Because . . . forgive me, Merry, if I sound as though I’m talking in riddles. To be honest with you, I never expected this moment to arrive. I have worked for the girls’ father—’
‘Whom they call Pa Salt,’ I butted in.
‘Yes. He’s been like a father to me ever since I have known him. I have worked for him for the whole of my career as a lawyer, and he has always talked of the fact that there was a missing sister, one he could never find, however hard he searched. I joined him in that search when I was old enough to do so. Occasionally, he would call me with a promising lead as to her whereabouts and I would employ a trusted team of private investigators to follow that lead up. Every time, they led to nothing. And then, this time last year, finally, my employer discovered new information, which he assured me was almost certainly accurate. I had very little to work on, but work on it I did.’
I watched the man pause for a moment, then lean forward to pick up the glass of whiskey on the table in front of him. He drained the glass, put it down and looked at me.
‘Merry, I could sit here and tell you the pains that I and the private investigators went to in order to discover who you had become, but . . .’
I watched him as he shook his head and put his hand to his brow, obviously embarrassed to be showing deep emotion.
‘Excuse me one moment . . .’
He fumbled in the file on his knee. Accepting and rejecting various pages, he finally drew one out and turned it round to face me.
‘If only I had known how simple the puzzle of identifying you would eventually be, then I could have spared you all you’ve suffered during these past weeks. After all this, we didn’t even need that emerald ring.’ Mr Hoffman pointed to it sitting on my finger, then handed me the sheet of paper. ‘Look,’ he said.
I did look, and once my brain had made sense of the image, I performed the cliché known as a double-take, because I looked again in disbelief.
On the page in front of me was a charcoal portrait of me.
I looked closer, and discovered that yes, maybe the shape of my jaw was heavier and my eyebrows were a little lighter than the drawing in front of me, but there was no doubt.
‘It’s me, isn’t it?’
‘No,’ Mr Hoffman whispered, ‘it isn’t you, Merry. It is your mother.’
In the following twenty minutes, I couldn’t remember much about what I’d said or what I’d done. That face, which was mine yet wasn’t, stirred in me some primeval reaction I’d been unprepared for. I wanted to stroke the drawing, then I wanted to tear it into shreds. I accepted a whiskey that I didn’t want but drained the glass, and then I cried. Torrents of tears for the mess my life seemed to have become. Whatever I thought I had solved, each time a new puzzle had appeared in its place, along with a gamut of emotions that ended with me in Ambrose’s arms on the sofa, and the lawyer watching from the leather chair.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ I kept saying as I dripped tears all over the charcoal drawing of the me that was my mother.
Eventually, I stopped crying and with Ambrose’s handkerchief, dried my eyes, my cheeks and then patted the photocopy of the face that had apparently borne me into the world. Which was now smudged and ugly.
‘Please, do not worry about that. It is a facsimile of the original,’ said Georg.
As my senses began to return to normal, I moved out of Ambrose’s embrace and sat upright.
‘Merry, if you please, could you give me a little tug upwards?’ Ambrose asked. ‘I think some tea is in order for all. I shall go and make some.’
‘Ambrose, really—’
‘My dear, I’m perfectly capable of making a pot of tea.’
Georg and I sat together in silence. There were so many questions I wanted answers to, but I struggled to know where to start.
‘Georg,’ I managed as I blew my nose for the umpteenth time on Ambrose’s sodden handkerchief. ‘Could you please explain why, if you knew which year I was born, you pursued or the sisters pursued – my daughter, who is only twenty-two?’
‘Because I had no clue that your daughter would be called Mary too. And that you would have passed the ring on to her on her twenty-first. During the past two weeks when the search for you was continuing, having established that they had found Mary McDougal, I was then . . . unavoidably detained elsewhere. Out of contact with them.’
‘I’m very sorry, Georg, but there are so many things I don’t understand. You say that this charcoal drawing is of my mother?’
‘Yes.’
‘How do you know this?’
‘Because of the drawing that has hung on the wall at Atlantis, my employer’s house in Geneva, for many years. He had told me who it was.’
‘Did she die? Giving birth to me, I mean?’
Yet again, I could see the man’s indecision at revealing what he knew and didn’t know.
Just as Ambrose brought the tea in, Georg stood up and went to retrieve his leather case. I watched as he removed a padded brown envelope from inside it. He sat down in Ambrose’s chair and laid the package on his knee.
‘Do you take sugar, Georg?’ Ambrose asked.
‘I do not drink tea, thank you. Merry, this package is for you. I believe it will answer all the questions that I cannot. But before I give it to you, I entreat you now to come with me and join your children and the sisters on the Titan. You will be fulfilling their father’s long-held dream, and I cannot leave here without begging you to come. A private jet sits on the runway at Dublin airport, waiting for us to board and fly to meet the boat.’
‘I’m so tired,’ I sighed. ‘I just want to go to bed.’
I turned to Ambrose as I sipped my tea, at nearly fifty-nine years of age, still looking to him for guidance.
‘I know, my dear, I know,’ Ambrose replied, ‘but what is the price of a night’s sleep, as opposed to discovering your true heritage?’
‘But it’s all so surreal, Ambrose.’
‘That is simply because so far, your experience of the sisters has been so fractured. Plus the fact that you have had so much to contend with recently, but even your own children are on the boat. They are sailing towards Greece, the land that you never visited, but always wished to, and from what Georg has said, where you may find the answers that you seek. I too, as the man who first laid eyes on you at only a few hours old, then watched you grow into a remarkable young woman with a passion for philosophy and mythology, beg you to go and discover your own legend. What do you have to lose, Mary?’
I stared at him, wondering how much had been discussed between him and Georg before I’d arrived. Then I thought of my children, already ensconced in this strange, disparate family, somewhere on the sea sailing towards Greece, the land that had always held such a special, magical place in my mind . . .
I reached for Ambrose’s hand. And took a deep breath. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’ll go.’
An hour and a half later, I was on the kind of private jet I’d only ever seen in movies or magazines, sitting in a leather-covered seat, with Georg opposite me on the other side of the slim aisle. At the front of the plane, I could see the two pilots getting ready for take-off. Georg was on his mobile, speaking to someone in German. I only wished I could understand what he was saying, because it sounded urgent.
A male steward appeared and asked us both to fasten our seat belts and turn off our mobiles. The plane began to taxi, and then within the space of perhaps only a few seconds, the jet picked up speed and we were suddenly airborne. I gazed out of the window, wondering what madness it was that yet again, I was abruptly leaving the land where I had been born and raised. The lights of Dublin twinkled below me, and then almost immediately there was darkness as we began to cross the Irish Sea. I closed my eyes and tried to focus on the fact I was flying to my family – Jack and Mary-Kate – and not away from it, like the last time I had left Ireland.
There was a ding from above me, then the steward arrived and told us we were free to take off our seat belts.
I watched Georg as he reached for his leather case. He pulled out the brown padded envelope.
‘This is yours, Merry. Inside, I hope you will find the answers to the questions you have asked me. For now, I will leave you to take some rest.’
As he handed it to me, I saw the glimmer of tears once again in his eyes. He then summoned the steward. ‘Mrs McDougal wishes to have some privacy and sleep. I will move forward.’
‘Of course, sir.’
‘Goodnight, Mary. I will see you when we land,’ Georg nodded.
The steward duly pulled out two panels from either side of the cabin, which formed a partition between the back and front of it. He then handed me a blanket and a pillow and showed me how to form the seat into a bed.
‘How long is the flight?’ I asked him as he placed a glass of water in the holder beside me.
‘Just over three hours, madam. Would you like anything else at all?’
‘I’m fine, thank you.’
‘Please press the bell beside your seat if you need anything. Goodnight, madam.’
The panel doors slid closed behind him and I found myself in total privacy. I experienced a moment of sheer panic, because I was flying to God knows where and had a brown package on my knee that apparently contained the secret of my true heritage.
‘Ambrose trusted Georg, and so must you, Merry,’ I murmured to myself.
So here I was, suspended somewhere between heaven and earth. The Greek gods had chosen Mount Olympus, the highest mountain in Greece, as their home, perhaps wishing for the same feeling. I looked out of the window at the stars, which seemed so much brighter up here, shining down like astral torches.
I turned my attention to the parcel on my lap and stuck a finger under the seal to pull the large envelope open. I reached inside and took out a thick and somewhat battered brown leather book, and an accompanying cream vellum envelope. Placing the book on the little table in front of me, I looked down at the envelope and read the three beautifully scripted words on the front of it:
For my Daughter.
I opened it.
Atlantis
Lake Geneva
Switzerland
My darling daughter,
I only wish I could address you by your given name, but sadly I do not know what it is. Just as I have no idea where in the world you might live. Or if you still live. Nor do I know whether you will ever be found, which is an odd thought for both of us if you are reading this, because it means you have been, yet I am gone from this world. And the two of us will never meet on earth, but in the next life, which I believe in with all my heart and soul.
I cannot voice or begin to explain the love I have felt for you since I knew of your imminent arrival. Nor can I tell you in this letter the lengths I took to find you and your mother, who were both lost to me so cruelly before you were born. You may well believe that you were abandoned by your father, but that is far from the truth. To this day – and I write to you as I have written to my six other daughters, because I am close to death – I do not know where your mother went, or whether she lived or died after you were born.
How I know you were born is also a story that can only be explained in more pages than I have the energy to write here.
However, write it I did, many years ago, in the journal that I have instructed my lawyer, Georg Hoffman, to give to you. It’s the story of my life, which, if nothing else, has been eventful. You may well have had contact with my adopted daughters and I would ask that, once you have read it, you share my story with them, because it is their story too.
Read it, my darling girl, and know that there hasn’t been a day that has gone by without me thinking and praying for both you and your mother. She was the love of my life . . . everything to me. And if she has passed on to the next life, which some deep instinct tells me she has, know that we are reunited and looking down on you with love.
Your father,
Atlas x
To be continued in
To be published Autumn 2022
Click here to find out more about the series
I’d always known that I would set The Missing Sister predominantly in my home territory of West Cork, Ireland. Given the coronavirus pandemic, it was as if it was meant to be: I’d already secretly visited Central Otago in New Zealand and Norfolk Island before Christmas 2019. Then, only a few weeks later, I was locked down in West Cork with the research I needed for once at my fingertips. I’d believed I knew quite a lot about the past turbulent one hundred years of Irish history, but as I began to do my usual in-depth research, I realised that I’d only scratched the surface. I also noticed that the scarce personal accounts of those who were directly involved in the Irish War of Independence were written by men, and mostly penned many years after the fact. I decided that, to get as true a picture as possible, I’d need to turn to my family, friends and neighbours, whose ancestors had fought for freedom at the time. Out of this, a picture of wartime West Cork and the huge contribution its brave volunteers nearly all rural farming people, mostly aged between sixteen and twenty-five, with no fighting experience and outnumbered in their thousands by trained British soldiers and police officers – made to winning what, on paper, was an impossible fight.
It is only due to all the locals prepared to give up their time to help me that I was able to write what I hope is a relatively accurate portrayal of what happened in West Cork back then and throughout the rest of the twentieth century. My biggest thanks must go to Cathal Dineen, who (when we were ‘unlocked’) drove me all over, into the back of the back of beyond to meet men like Joe Long, who Cathal had heard still had Charlie Hurley’s original rifle, which he did! Then up to the remote Clogagh graveyard, to show me the vault beneath an enormous Celtic cross sitting on a gravetop, 65 reportedly been placed when he was held hostage for two weeks. My spine tingled when I looked around and saw bones visible in the eroded coffins still lying on the shelves around me. Nothing was too much trouble for him or anyone he contacted, and if they didn’t know, normally there was a grandparent or older relative available to ask who’d had parents alive at the time or had kept newspaper cuttings. Tim Crowley, who runs the Michael Collins Centre at Castleview, is a relative of the Big Fellow himself. He and his wife Dolores were not only able to help factually, but actually let me hold the very briefcase that Michael Collins had used for his papers when he journeyed to London to negotiate the long and rocky road to eventual Irish independence with the British.
I’d read of Cumann na mBan, but again, there were and still are few books/papers published on the organisation, and they didn’t relate specifically to West Cork. Through my friend and owner of my local bookshop in Clonakilty, Trish Kerr, I contacted Dr Hélène O’Keefe, an historian and lecturer at University College Cork, who put me in touch with Niall Murray, a long-time journalist with the Irish Examiner, historian and current PhD candidate at the university, researching the Irish Revolution in urban and rural districts of County Cork. He suggested visiting the Irish Government’s War Pension Files website to discover who from Cumann na mBan in my local area had applied. This opened the door not only to how many local women were involved in providing invaluable support to their men, but also to the real and present danger they were prepared to encounter, while still working on their farms and in the local post office or dressmaker’s. I can only pay tribute to each and every one of these unsung heroines.
My wonderful friend Kathleen Owens also went in dogged pursuit of the smallest details, aided by her Mammy, Mary Lynch, her husband Fergal, and her son, Ryan Doonan. Mary Dineen, Dennis O’Mahoney, Finbarr O’Mahony and Maureen Murphy, who wrote to me from New York where her family had emigrated after the Civil War, are just some of those in my kind local community who contributed so much colour to this book. However, this book is categorised as a work of fiction – but peppered with real historical figures and set against an all-too-real fight to the death to achieve freedom from the British. As always, history is subjective, being reliant on human interpretation and, in many cases throughout this book, memory. Any ‘mistakes’ are mine and mine alone.
