Page 45 of All Our Missing Pieces

Her father nodded. ‘Sometimes they lied. With the best intentions, of course. Or sometimes incorrect information might just have been supplied in error. But that culture of secrecy is changing. It has changed. Now, adopted people can place themselves on a register, and if their birth family is on the register too, details can be exchanged.’

‘I know.’ Beatrice felt like screaming, but her voice came out quite calm. ‘I did put myself on the register. I haven’t heard back.’

‘These things take time, honey,’ her mother soothed. ‘She may still⁠—’

‘Or she may not,’ her father said. ‘You have to keep that in mind, Beatrice. It may very well be that she… that her circumstances mean she’s not in a position to reach out to you.’

She got married and had lots of other babies and she kept all of them.

‘She may have passed away,’ her mother said, as if that was the comforting conclusion.

‘Is there anything else?’ Beatrice pleaded. ‘Anything else at all you can tell me about her that you haven’t already?’

Her parents exchanged a glance. Her mom raised her eyebrows and her dad nodded almost imperceptibly.

‘Not about her,’ her dad said, ‘but about you.’

Beatrice clenched her fists, her nails digging into her palms. ‘Go on.’

‘Before we brought you home to our apartment in Dublin,’ her mom said, ‘we’d already decided the name we wanted you to have. I wanted to name you after my best friend in college. She was the smartest, kindest, prettiest girl I’ve ever known, and she died in a car accident. I wanted to honour her – and you – with her name.’

Beatrice felt a lump come to her throat. ‘I’m glad you did. I like my name.’

Her dad nodded. ‘But they told us the name your… the name you were given at birth.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s an Irish name,’ her mom said. ‘We didn’t want to take it away from you but we thought – it’s hard to pronounce. We didn’t want you growing up having to spell your name all the time. We thought it would make you different from other kids, and⁠—’

‘I was already different enough.’

‘It’s Aisling,’ her dad said, and patiently spelled it out, the way Beatrice had never had to.

Not long after that, they ended the call. What was said in those last few minutes before they hung up was a blur to Beatrice, but she did remember how it felt to walk back down the stairs, through the silence of the house on Damask Square, the past unfurling like the wooden balustrade that curved gently downwards, thick with coat upon coat of paint at the top, then with the paint stripped away by Luke, then freshly sanded on the first floor and finally newly varnished at ground level.

When she’d walked up those stairs, she’d been Beatrice. Now, she was someone else.

TWENTY-NINE

5 AUGUST 2005

Somewhere in one of these notebooks, in one of the crates in the cellar where they are stored, are the pages I wrote after I discovered Adrian’s affair. They were not easy to write – I felt as if my pen was vomiting out the words, so shuddering and ghastly was the process.

We’d barely been married two years. I felt everything anyone would have felt in the circumstances: shock, betrayal, devastation, helplessness. In hindsight, of course, I can see that we were never right for each other: he cared far more about his work in the struggle against Apartheid than he did for me, and I cared more for him than I did for the struggle, passionately though I’d thrown myself into both.

It was for the best, I can tell myself now, all these years later and miles away.

But I still remember the sick, churning fear I felt when I wrote down what I knew, as if writing would make it real.

That is how I feel today. Yesterday something happened and I have barely been able to think of anything else since, yet also until I put it down on paper, in black and white, I can allow myself to pretend – to deny – that it has happened at all.

It happened yesterday, in Imran’s shop. Although of course it didn’t – it has been happening over the course of months and years, across the sea in Ireland, in committee rooms and in the chamber of the Dáil Éireann, where Brian Lenihan and his colleagues have been discussing and debating, holding the fate of thousands of women like me in their hands.

Women like me and women like her – because she will be a woman now, an adult. My portraits over the years have charted her growth from babyhood through childhood and adolescence and now she is twenty-two, old enough to drive a car and vote and make decisions about the course her life will take.

A few years ago, they were proposing to make it a crime for adopted people to attempt to make contact with their birth parents. When I read that, I wondered whether she had read it too and how she felt. I felt fear for her, but for myself… relief, I suppose. But also a terrible, aching sense of loss.

Now it has all changed. I went into the shop to buy a copy of the Guardian, and I don’t know what made me pick up the Irish Times as well. The story was tucked away on an inside page, because it is no longer new news. She can put her name on a register and so can I, and if we both do so we will be put in contact with each other.