Page 1 of All Our Missing Pieces

ONE

Beatrice looked down at the notebook on the open seat-back table. She had always loved stationery; as a little girl, she’d had a huge collection of sparkly notebooks, sheets of stickers and erasers in every shape, colour and scent. Every birthday had brought a new pencil case, set of luminous markers or notecards with matching envelopes. Later, she’d begun to accumulate a collection of sketchpads, sticks of charcoal and enticing, plump tubes of oil paints.

Her current notebook was bound in scarlet leather with her name embossed on the front in silver foil, a present from her mother for her twenty-first birthday, and she had hoarded its pages so that now, over a year later, it was still only half full. On the open page in front of her was just one word, which she had noted down in the teal-coloured ink she currently favoured in her Montblanc fountain pen before leaving home.

Clonmara.

She craned her neck to look past the woman on her right, who was engrossed in a book and apparently indifferent to the excitement of flying. Her flight from Philadelphia to Dublin had been a night-time one, and Beatrice had hoped that now, on the journey from Dublin to London, she would be able to see the world from above, stretched beneath her like one of her mother’s handmade patchwork quilts. She’d imagined drawing it – the blocks of fields, arcs of rivers and sprawls of cities – even if all she had to hand was her fountain pen and notebook.

But through the window she could see only grey cloud.

She turned back to the page. Clonmara. That was all she’d had to go on. Over the years, the word had acquired a kind of mystique – she’d pored over it in atlases, tracing the route from Dublin out into the surrounding countryside, looked it up on Wikipedia, even attempted an unsatisfactory watercolour landscape based on a photograph she’d found on Flickr. It had all felt impossibly distant, the words she’d read describing a small village surrounded by farmland, forty miles outside Dublin and twenty from an industrial area that apparently specialised in the manufacture of wool and linen cloth, seeming to have little connection to reality.

Now she had seen it for herself, and come away disappointed.

But Beatrice wasn’t one to give up. She had persuaded her parents to pay for her flight from Philadelphia to Dublin without disclosing the true reason for her trip – although they must surely have guessed. Eventually, their objections overcome, they’d agreed, encouraging her to see the city where she’d been born and explore Trinity College, where her dad had worked all those years ago.

She hadn’t mentioned Clonmara to them.

The first time she’d said the name out loud had been to the receptionist in her Dublin hotel, the morning after her arrival.

‘Sure, you’ll need to get the bus there,’ he told her, noting down where it would depart from and what time it left, then smiling the way men always smiled at Beatrice before adding, ‘Mind you don’t miss it. There’s not another until tomorrow.’

‘Thank you. I’ll leave in fifteen minutes, then.’

She took a seat in a brocade armchair and flipped through the glossy tourist brochures on the varnished table next to it, glancing around at the other occupants of the lobby with idle curiosity.

At a table by the window, sipping a cup of tea, Beatrice noticed a woman on her own. She was middle-aged, dressed in navy trousers, a cream polyester blouse and black shoes with a low heel. She looked uncomfortable in this upscale hotel lobby – like she had never been in a place like this before, except perhaps to work as a waitress or housekeeper. When her teaspoon clinked against her saucer she looked around anxiously, as if she’d committed some faux pas.

Then the woman’s eyes lit on the door, her face suddenly alight with hope.

Beatrice watched as a couple walked into the lobby from the street: a bearded man in chinos and a jumper, a think manila folder tucked under his arm, and a slim young woman in jeans and a trench coat. She was unmistakably related to the older woman – they had the same slight figure, the same curly almost-black hair, the same brilliant blue eyes.

Her daughter? Perhaps the young man was her fiancé, meeting his mother-in-law-to-be for the first time? But fiancés didn’t carry folders bulging with documents to meet prospective mothers-in-law.

As Beatrice watched, the older woman stood, almost knocking over an occasional table in her eagerness. She turned towards the door and took a step forward, her arms outstretched, then let them fall awkwardly by her side. The younger woman had no such hesitation. She hurried over, reaching out, smiling radiantly, and took her mother’s hands – of course she was her mother, who else could she be? – in hers.

‘Well, I don’t need to introduce you two,’ the man said, smiling. ‘But that’s my job. Mary, Bronagh.’

Introduce? Beatrice’s curiosity shifted from idle to intense. She stood up and walked casually to the door, pausing with her back to the group and pretending to admire a flower arrangement as she listened.

‘We’d never have recognised each other otherwise,’ the younger woman – Bronagh – laughed. ‘Would we, Ma-Mary?’

‘Sure it’s like looking at myself in the mirror,’ Mary marvelled. ‘Or like myself twenty years ago. I knew you’d be beautiful, but not…’

Mary’s voice trailed off, and Beatrice glanced over her shoulder to see her fishing a tissue out of her sleeve at the exact moment Bronagh fished one out of hers.

‘I’ll leave this with you, ladies’ – the man handed over the folder to Bronagh; Mary was vigorously blowing her nose – ‘and let you get acquainted. Please feel free to get in touch with me or any of my colleagues if there’s anything at all we can do.’

The two women thanked him – their voices identical – and he walked past Beatrice with a satisfied smile, raising his hand in a wave then pushing out through the door.

‘Would you—’ Bronagh began, then started again. ‘I mean, would you like another tea here, or shall we go somewhere else?’

Beatrice strained to hear Mary’s voice, lowered to a whisper. ‘I’d just as soon go somewhere else. This place is… it’s…’

‘I know what you mean,’ Bronagh agreed, adding decisively, ‘We’ll be off to Bewley’s then.’

‘Bewley’s.’ Mary blew her nose again, then laughed. ‘Haven’t I waited twenty years to buy my daughter tea and scones at Bewley’s?’