Page 80 of All Our Missing Pieces

Again, the head shake.

‘Do you want to talk?’

I made the offer somewhat reluctantly. Any hopes I might have had of Beatrice and me becoming friends had come to nothing, and her behaviour over the past weeks had made my wariness of her sour into something more akin to dislike. But I couldn’t ignore someone so clearly distressed – especially since she was on my bed.

Beatrice nodded, and I stepped over and sat down on the end of the bed by her feet.

‘Did something happen at work?’ I asked.

‘No.’ She took a tissue from the box on the floor and blew her nose. ‘Well, yes, actually. I’ve been let go. Peter and Frances are leaving London.’

‘Oh, no. I’m so sorry. That’s awful. What are you going to do?’

‘Probably go back to the States and move back in with my parents.’

‘You’ll miss the kids, I guess,’ I hazarded.

That seemed to hit a nerve. Beatrice put her hands up to her face and started to cry again. I reached out and patted her knee in what I hoped was a reassuring way.

‘What about them missing me?’ she said, taking a couple of goes to get the words out between sobs. ‘They’ll think I didn’t want to be their nanny any more. They won’t understand.’

‘Oh, Beatrice. Of course they’ll miss you and they’ll be sad. You’ve been an amazing nanny.’ I had no idea if that was true, but I said it anyway. ‘But their mum and dad will explain why you couldn’t carry on working with them, right? They’ll understand. Maybe you can even visit them.’

‘That’s not how it works.’ She looked at me, her tear-stained face furious. ‘You can’t explain that shit to kids.’

Taken aback by her vehemence, I said lamely, ‘Well, they’ll try, I’m sure.’

‘Like my parents tried to explain to me.’

I had no idea what she meant, but I could tell that there was deeper hurt at play here. ‘Explain what? I’m sorry, Beatrice. I don’t understand.’

‘I’m adopted.’ She almost spat out the word. ‘I was the most wanted baby in the world ever, my mom and dad always said. But that wasn’t true, because before I was wanted, I wasn’t. And that never goes away.’

Her revelation blindsided me. Everything she had told me about her family – which admittedly hadn’t been a great deal – had suggested a life of adored privilege as the only child of doting, if overprotective, parents. But it made sense – of course it did.

Only child of doting parents and an adoptee – both things could be true at once.

‘I didn’t realise,’ I said gently. ‘I totally get why that would make leaving Slate and’ – I couldn’t remember the other child’s name – ‘leaving the kids harder. You poor thing.’

But it seemed like Beatrice wasn’t thinking about them any more – or not only about them. She lifted her face and looked not at me but past me at the wall, and carried on as if she was talking to herself.

‘My father worked in Ireland for two years, before I was born. He and Mom had been trying for a baby for ages but it wasn’t happening. There weren’t that many newborns you could adopt in the States by then – women were already keeping their babies if they could, or having abortions if they couldn’t. But in Ireland it was different. So Daddy found a baby in Ireland, through some nuns or something, and when they went back home they took me with them.’

‘Wow. You must have made them so happy.’

She grimaced. ‘When I started talking about wanting to track down my birth mother, not so much. But they kind of went along with it. I guess they thought I’d never manage it.’

Did you find her? Have you found her?

But before I could ask the question, I realised I already knew the answer: it had been there all along, right in front of my eyes. The only reason I couldn’t have realised was that, until now, I simply hadn’t been aware that Beatrice was an adopted child.

Still, wanting to give her space to tell her story in her own way, I kept my question vague.

‘Does Orla know?’ I asked.

‘I wanted it to be her, but also not. I imagined she might have had a sister – someone else, anyone but her.’

In spite of Beatrice’s distress, I felt a stab of jealousy. It took me a moment to work out why. If I could have exchanged my own mother for Orla, I would have done in a heartbeat. The squalor of the house where I grew up, my mother’s obsession with the piles of meaningless stuff that surrounded her which took precedence even over her own daughter, the way she passively let everything sink into chaos and decay – compared to Orla’s serene resilience, compared to this house emerging into its rightful beauty, compared to the certainty that, here, I was someone who mattered.