CHAPTER 55
‘It was after my mother died,’ Franz began. ‘Maria’s death made everyone remember the past and rake up the whole history again. Rachel got the brunt of it. She’d lost the only mother she’d known and people kept talking as though Maria wasn’t her real mother so she didn’t need to grieve. Suddenly everyone was talking again about who her parents might be, and she started to doubt everything she’d ever been told.
‘My father assured her again he’d never slept with her mother, Yolande, or had anything to do with her. He promised her. Then when Rachel contacted her mother, Yolande swore to her the opposite. Rachel was in a bad way. One minute she believed my father; the next she believed her mother. I think she needed to believe her mother. Maria was gone and she was too young to be motherless.
‘It must have seemed a romantic ideal to have this unknown, long-lost mother living in some exotic location, willing to meet her and welcome her. Rachel saw it as her chance to escape from the gossip and hate campaign that had blown up against my father again.
‘Anyway, she made the decision to find out once and for all who her father was, by having a DNA test and asking Father Francis to do the same. He agreed to go along with it.’
Pat took a sharp breath. He sipped his drink but his eyes never left Franz’s face.
‘I was at home,’ Franz said, his voice deepening and becoming slower, ‘when Rachel got the result of the paternity test. She came in and handed me the paper with the result printed on it, and a handwritten note the doctor had added, saying that although such tests couldn’t be a hundred percent accurate, it was possible to say with certainty when a result was definitely negative. There was no possible match between Rachel’s DNA and Father Francis’.
‘Rachel had asked for it in writing, officially – I guess to use as ammunition against whichever parent turned out to be lying, but she never showed it to either of them. I thought she would send it to her mother but she gave it to me.’
‘Why to you?’ Ella asked.
‘I don’t know. I wondered that, at the time. She went to her room and closed the door and I could hear her crying. I looked at the letter and I guessed she wanted me to do something. I sat there reading it over and over, for a long time.
‘I should have phoned my father and talked it over with him. That was clear in my mind at the time. It was probably what Rachel assumed I would do. I was equally clear that I wasn’t going to. What I did was …’
His voice dried, and he poured himself another brandy and gulped it, without enjoyment.
‘What I did was work myself into a towering rage over all the gossip that had gone on and all the damage it had done, over the years. Then I took the letter and started knocking on doors. I went round to every home of every gossip and name-caller in the neighbourhood, mostly people who lived in my father’s parish.
‘I waved the letter under their noses, I shouted the results over their doorsteps, I did everything except ram it down their throats. I yelled and swore and said I hoped they were satisfied, now they knew all these rumours were groundless, that they’d jeopardized the happiness of a young girl and a dying mother and a good man. I left myself out of it, you notice. But it was all about me, really.’
‘Weren’t you defending them? Your father and mother and Rachel?’ Ella asked.
‘I convinced myself I was – well, told myself; I wasn’t really convinced. My mother had always kept a low profile; her response to gossip was to say nothing and wait till it passed. Anyway, she had died: she was beyond being affected by it.
‘My father had told me not to retaliate. He would hate what I was doing, and I knew that before I started. And how was it going to help Rachel? I was creating more of a stir, fuel for more gossip about her and now about her crazy brother.
‘I didn’t know what to do with the rage. I thought I’d dealt with it, or at least suppressed it, over the years, and suddenly it was there, all of it. It all came out.’
Franz went quiet for a moment. ‘There was something else. Something in me wanted everyone to know that I was his – I alone. I was the son, the only child. It was like saying, "He never loved Yolande. He never loved Rachel as only a father does. He loves me. Me!"
‘And Rachel knew that. She could see it, when I came home. Even before she heard from the entire neighbourhood what I’d done, she took one look at me and knew she’d been betrayed.
‘And I took one look at her face, when she came out of her room after hours of crying, and I knew I’d got it as wrong as I possibly could. I’d misunderstood why she had the paternity test. It wasn’t to prove to everyone that he wasn’t her dad and all the rumours were false. It was because she hoped he was.’
‘She wanted him to be her father?’ Ella asked.
‘Yes. Sure, she wanted her mother to be telling her the truth: that was part of it, but it was only part. After all, she hadn’t met her mother yet and she’d known my father all her life. She loved him and she wanted to be his.
‘She’d already lost my mother, who’d brought her up as though she was her own daughter, and now, with this test result being negative, she’d lost the only father she’d ever known: lost the hope she’d had, deep down, that she might really be his. All she had was this unknown mother, who’d lied to her in the only important question Rachel had ever asked her, and a biological father she was never likely to meet.
‘And now her brother had betrayed her, by making her loss of my father public knowledge, delivered personally to every single household or individual who least wished her well. And I’d publicized the fact that my father had agreed to a paternity test, which tarred him with guilt regardless of the result.’
Ella didn’t know what to say to him. The wound was so raw she couldn’t see how it could be healed.
‘Once I’d seen Rachel’s reaction I went straight out of the house again,’ Franz continued, ‘and went looking for my father, to tell him what I’d done. I didn’t want him to hear it from anyone else – and there were a number of people whose first priority would be to go and throw the news at him of his violent son.
‘I wanted to explain why I’d done it, say that I still loved him, that I hadn’t meant to hurt him or Rachel. But I was too late.’
‘He’d already heard?’
It was Ella who was asking the questions; Pat was silent and still, listening intently.
‘Yes.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Nothing. That was the worst of it. I started to explain but I couldn’t go on. He listened: it wasn’t that he turned away or walked out. He stood there looking at me, with this incredible compassion. I couldn’t meet his eyes. I was the one who walked away. Ran.
‘Rachel was gone, within a couple of days. She rang her mother to say she was coming to live with her. Her mother paid for her ticket, which seemed a good sign that Rachel was wanted. As far as I knew, she was going there to live. For ever. Happy ever after. I suppose I wanted to believe the myth.’
‘Did she stop speaking to you?’
‘No. She was polite. It was terrible. She thanked me for everything I’d done for her – thanked me, can you believe it? I’d stopped being her brother. I was some stranger, no blood relation, who’d been kind enough to let her share my home and my mother, though I’d made it clear my father was mine alone.
‘She let me go and see her off at the airport. She promised to write to me, which she did, faithfully, telling me nothing at all that would upset me – as we found out when we met her in Ireland.
‘I left the next week. I wrote to my father from England, saying I had gone to make a new life there and he needn’t worry about me; I wouldn’t embarrass him ever again. I apologized for disappointing him. I was polite, as Rachel had been with me.
‘I omitted my address, and I never sent it on. I appointed a solicitor in England for the one in Ireland to keep in touch with, the one who would administer the terms of the trust when I was twenty-five.
‘Rachel had the
address of my flat when I moved into it and she probably thought I’d sent it to my father at the same time. He could have asked her for it at any time but I knew he wouldn’t put her in that position. If he didn’t receive it from me, then he wouldn’t know where I lived. Ever.’
‘Did you go on writing to him without sending the address,’ Ella asked, ‘or did you not contact him after the first time?’
‘I wrote every week. And every week I told myself that this time I would post it. Then I’d think of the parish priest at the breakfast table, handing my father the letter with the English postmark, knowing it was from me, and I thought, just let it go now; let him off the hook. As time passes, they may forget or at least lose interest and treat him like any other priest; why go on putting him through this?’
‘So, he had that one letter and that was it, and only Rachel knew your address. Is that the reason you never moved from this flat, even when you could afford to?’ Ella asked.
‘Not consciously. It may have been. I was hardly there anyway, so it never seemed worth moving. Till recently, with you and the news of the baby.
‘When Rachel wrote and told me that after a month with her mother she’d come back to Ireland, she said it was only temporary, to give her time to finish her education, then she’d go back to her wonderful new life. She seemed happy living with Tina’s family in the meantime. I thought it was the best thing for her.
‘I thought about going over to see her in Ireland. She invited me. So did the O’Connells. She said she’d like to see me. But I thought she stood a better chance if I wasn’t around; let all the gossip die down. She was all right. And I didn’t want to run into my father, couldn’t face him or anyone who knew him – knew us. So I kept saying I was busy and couldn’t make time to go. I had the excuse of work, study, more demanding jobs, more courses of study – or more likely I worked and studied so that I’d have the excuse not to go.’
‘Isn't that a bit hard on yourself, to say that, Franz?’
‘I don’t think so. I knew what was real in those days. I knew that despite all the problems we had as a family, what we had was precious and rare. And I blew it – sold out to the gossips.'