Читать книгу When Daddy Comes Home - Toni Maguire - Страница 5

‘I’m an adult now, the past is dealt with.’

That was what I told myself as I stood at the desk where my mother had done her household accounts.

The voice of my subconscious mocked me then.

‘The past is never dealt with, Toni. It’s our past that creates us.’

No sooner did those unwanted words flit into my head than my treacherous memories began to slide back to when I was the teenage Antoinette.

Antoinette. Just the name filled me with sadness.

I pushed those thoughts to the back of my mind and opened the desk, the only piece of furniture that remained from the joint home my parents had shared. I found the deeds of the house and put them to one side ready to give to the solicitor. Next came an old leather wallet which, on opening it, I saw contained two hundred pounds in notes of various denominations.

Underneath them, I found letters yellowed by age and three photographs that must have lain there from before my mother’s death. One was of my mother and me when I was just under a year old, one was of my mother’s parents and there was a head-and-shoulder photograph of my grandmother when she was around thirty years old.

The letters aroused my curiosity. They were addressed to my mother in an old-fashioned copperplate hand and opening one, I found a simple love letter written by a young man who was separated from his family by war. He was overjoyed by the birth of their baby girl. He had only seen his daughter once when she was just a few weeks old. He had been back to Ireland on leave granted following her birth and now he was missing his wife and newborn child. The years had faded the ink but I was still able to decipher the words.

My darling, he had written, how much I miss you…As I read on, tears came to my eyes. Love poured off the pages and, for a few seconds, I believed it. He told her how he was in Belgium and, as a mechanic, he was placed at the rear of the advancing army.

No doubt surrounded by beautiful Flemish woman susceptible to his infectious smile and ready laugh, I thought sourly.

His closing sentences were: I think how much Antoinette must have grown. It seems such a long time since I saw her. I count the days till I can hold you both again. Tell her that her daddy loves her and can’t wait to see her again. Give her a big kiss from me.

I looked down at the words written on thin paper all those years ago and grief threatened to overwhelm me – grief for what could have been, and for what should have been. An intense pain flooded my body. I staggered to the nearest chair as strength left me and slumped onto it. My hands rose to my head and gripped both sides of it as though by doing so I could fight the images that were forcing themselves in.

It was as though a projector in my head had sprung into life. A stream of unwanted pictures from the past flooded my mind: I saw Antoinette, the plump toddler, smiling up at her mother with the innocence of babyhood. I saw her just a few years later as the frightened child she had become after her father had taken away the essence of her childhood; he had stolen the innocence, the joy and the wonder and replaced it with nightmares. Sunny days had been denied her. Instead she had lived with fear and walked in grey shadows.

Why, I wondered over thirty years later.

A voice came into my head and spoke sternly to me: ‘Stop looking for the actions of a normal man because he wasn’t one. If you can’t accept now what he was then, you never will accept it.’

I knew the voice spoke the truth. But memories that I had repressed resurfaced, cleared the protective mist from my mind and sent me back in time, to when one nightmare ended and another began.

I saw it as vividly as if it were yesterday: a girl, hardly old enough to be considered a teenager. I felt again her bewilderment, her despair and her feelings of betrayal. I saw her frightened and alone, not understanding why she had to suffer so much. I saw Antoinette, the victim.

Antoinette – the girl who used to be me.