Page 237 of The Missing Sister

‘Goodnight, Jack.’

Grabbing the milk bottle from the table to take upstairs in case she needed to supplement for Bear, and switching off the kitchen lights, Ally headed for bed. As she lay down, ready to sleep, she thought about her conversation with Jack.

I’m really looking forward to seeing you...

Ally felt a little bump of excitement at the fact Jack had said that, but then squashed it immediately when she heard Bear give a tiny snore from his cot.

‘Even if he does seem to have forgiven me for not coming clean on who I was, he’s hardly going to be interested in a single mother, is he?’

Doing her best to push down any silly flutters in her stomach, Ally fell asleep.

I sat in the back of the taxi next to Mary-Kate, with Ambrose on the other side of me. We’d offered him the front seat, but he’d declined, saying that Niall might talk him into an early grave, so that honour had gone to Jack. Yet again, my children had tried to persuade me to come on the cruise, but given that the meeting I had waited thirty-seven years for was only hours away from happening, I had yet again declined.

‘Another time,’ I’d said, ‘but you both go and have a wonderful holiday. It all sounds very glamorous.’

Reaching Merrion Square, Jack helped Ambrose out of the back of the taxi, as Niall collected my own and Ambrose’s luggage from the boot.

‘’Tis a pleasure to have met both of you,’ Niall said. ‘You have my card now, Ambrose, so any time you’re wanting to come down to West Cork again, you be giving me a ring, so.’

‘I will, and thank you again,’ Ambrose said as he turned and, using his walking stick, manoeuvred his way up the steps to the front door.

‘Bye, Mum.’ Both Jack and Mary-Kate hugged me – they were going straight off with Niall to Dublin airport – and I felt tears prick the back of my eyes.

‘You two keep in touch, won’t you?’

‘We will,’ said Mary-Kate. ‘And if you’re down in West Cork when the cruise is over, I might come back and join you.’ I saw the faintest hint of a blush appear in my daughter’s cheeks and knew immediately the meeting with her new musician friend, Eoin, had obviously gone well.

‘If you change your mind, Ally says there’s plenty of room on the boat,’ Jack urged for the last time.

‘No, Jack. Now, you’d better get back in that taxi or you’ll miss your flight.’

I said goodbye to Niall and stood on the pavement waving them off, then followed Ambrose inside.

‘Cup of tea?’ I asked him.

‘My goodness, I could murder one,’ he said.

Fifteen minutes later, we were in his sitting room drinking tea and eating a slice of a very good fruitcake his daily had left for him.

‘So, are you still set on selling this, Ambrose?’

‘Absolutely. Even though I love the dear old place, and whether or not James will join me somewhere new, it’s time.’

‘I’m sure he won’t take that much persuading, Ambrose. It was wonderful to see the two of you reunited after all this time.’

‘It felt wonderful, too, Mary. I’d forgotten what it was like to laugh. We did an awful lot of that. So, I shall invite some auctioneers to come and value this and up for sale it shall go. Now then, and far more pressingly, are you sure you want to go tonight? You’re most welcome to stay here, Merry.’

‘I know I am, but I’ve never been to Northern Ireland before and I feel I’d like to see it.’

‘As you are aware, the last time you were in Ireland, Belfast wasn’t a safe place to visit, but recently, I hear there’s been major regeneration in and around the city.’

‘You know,’ I said quietly, ‘if any Provisional IRA bombings were reported on television or in our New Zealand newspapers which, as you know so well, happened a lot in the seventies and eighties – I wouldn’t look. Or read. I just... couldn’t. But then in 1998, I actually sat in front of my television in Otago and cried my eyes out when I saw theTaoiseachsign the Good Friday Agreement. I couldn’t believe it had finally happened.’

‘It did indeed, but of course, it will never be enough for some republicans, who won’t stop until Northern Ireland is reunited with the South and back under our Irish governance, but Idobelieve the next generation have been brought up to define themselves as human beings first, rather than Catholics or Protestants. That certainly helps, and a broader education too, of course,’ he added. ‘I find it quite amusing that I’m one of those rare old people who doesn’t look back to the past and think how perfect it was, and despair of the world we live in now. In fact, quite the opposite. The human race has taken quite remarkable strides in the past thirty years, and I rather envy the young, who live in such an open society.’

‘Both of our lives would have been very different if we were young in this generation,’ I agreed, ‘but, well... I’d better be thinking about leaving soon. I’ll pop downstairs and get changed.’

In the basement, I opened the door to the bedroom that had once been mine. And felt choked when I saw that Ambrose had not removed my books or the bits and pieces I’d collected as a teenager. The wallpaper – which he had had sent over from England for when I began to stay with him – was of the flowery pink variety, and the same lace counterpane lay neatly across the bottom of the wrought-iron single bed. I remembered that when I’d first seen the bedroom, I’d almost cried in pleasure, not only because it was so very pretty and feminine, but because it was all mine. Certainly through all those years of boarding school when I had a short weekend exeat and it was too far to travel home to West Cork, this bedroom had provided a refuge. Then I’d moved in fully when I’d started my Masters, which I’d never completed...