Unspoken

Chapter One

France, 2016

Sinéad’s funeral service was held just outside Bordeaux, in a pretty village surrounded by vineyards a few miles from the city. Although Sinéad had not been religious, she had insisted on having a proper service in a proper church. She had donated her organs for transplant ‘to make sure I’m really dead when they put me in the coffin’, a typical Sinéad remark. It was quite unlike any funeral Jack had ever been to before. In fact, it looked more like a wedding. Everyone was well-dressed, and he was surprised to see that nobody wore black – in fact everyone seemed to have donned their most colourful outfit. Some of the women, including Sinéad’s mother, wore extravagant hats, and there were white lilies and blue hydrangeas – Sinéad’s favourites – everywhere.

The service was in French and English and the speeches were simple and for the most part funny. He wondered if Sinéad had dictated them. The music was – he searched for the right word – challenging. One of her sons, clearly a talented musician, played excerpts from Schnittke’s Requiem on the cello.

‘Everyone knows the Fauré, the Mozart and the Verdi,’ she’d told her son only days before. ‘Let’s annoy the hell out of everyone and educate them as well.’

And of course there was Grieg, a nod to events best forgotten as far as Jack was concerned. A friend played a Bob Dylan song, Keep My Grave Clean, which made everyone smile. Afterwards, at the graveside, a rabbi friend of Sinéad’s husband’s family sang a lament in Hebrew which had everyone in tears.

Jack was in Dublin when he got the news that she had died. It was quite a shock, as they had met again recently and were planning to have lunch next time she came to the city. He went through the file of emails on his laptop before taking her letters from the safe in his office and reading through them the night before leaving for the funeral. He remembered that she had once sent him her obituary. With a successful career already behind her, she enrolled in a leadership course and was highly amused when the students were asked to write their obituary as they would like it to appear in the Washington Post. And naturally hers had been read out as an example to the class. She’d sent him a copy, and at the time it had left a bitter taste in his mouth.

He rummaged through the papers and finally found it, hidden away in a file marked Miscellaneous. Sitting there, re-reading it in his darkened office, he realized that what had irritated him at the time was that there was no reference to him, and only an oblique reference to the events that had shaped her whole life.

Sinéad Murray died last month, at the age of ninety-five, it began. In the company of her devoted husband, four children and countless grandchildren and great grandchildren, in the tiny village near Montpellier in France where she had made her home for some forty years.

Well, she’d certainly got that wrong, he thought. She was only sixty-five. And she had gone to live near Bordeaux, not Montpellier. Grief and anger welled up as he read on.

In accordance with her wishes, her ashes were scattered on the vineyard she and her husband had recreated with passion. ‘It will add a little je ne sais quoi to next year’s vintage,’ she had joked.

From her early childhood, Sinéad was a contradiction. She always wanted to do good, yet didn’t want to be associated with the ‘do-gooders’ she claimed to despise. In school she disconcerted her teachers by getting excellent marks while being punished for such misdemeanours as letting her pet mouse run wild in class and smoking in the toilets.

University in the late sixties proved to be a liberating experience and she threw herself with relish into student politics, being the first woman in her male-dominated faculty ever to be elected to the students’ representative council.

A painful crisis in her personal life led her to leave Ireland, resolving never to return, and she took up a position with an international organization at the age of twenty-two. She was the youngest, and one of the very few, women to be promoted to the organization’s senior ranks. While most of the officials around her aspired to a quiet life, she embraced challenge, pestering her superiors to let her take on new assignments. Her colleagues recall her persistence, and her dogged pursuit of goals. ‘Sinéad always got what she wanted in the end’, one of them told me later, ‘although she said herself that often when she got it, she wasn’t sure she still wanted it’.

Jack put the paper on his desk, stood and walked to the window. Had she got what she wanted in the end? Had he? He stayed there a while, thinking back to the times they’d spent together, then sat down again and continued reading.

The golden period of her career began when she joined the private office of the head of the organization, Gudrun Moller, a highly respected politician and the toughest woman she had ever met. ‘She taught me about power and how to make your mark,’ she said. Her work with Gudrun Moller took her around the world to meet heads of state, and she often regaled her grandchildren with scurrilous stories about some of the famous people she met.

By the late 1980s, however, the glamour was wearing off and her fascination with powerful figures was beginning to wane, so when an opportunity arose to return to Ireland to be part of a think tank on reform in the health sector, she jumped at it. ‘I knew absolutely nothing about such issues’ she said later. ‘My expertise, if you could call it that, was elsewhere entirely. That was the challenge!’ The transition to her new role was not smooth, and she soon missed the buzz of her former job and the multicultural milieu she loved. She became even more disillusioned with politics and politicians. ‘I want to run my own show,’ she said. ‘I’m tired of doing the politician’s job and letting them always take the credit’.

Nobody was surprised when she announced out of the blue that she was leaving Ireland again to go and live in France, to run a vineyard and maybe write a book or two.

The rest is in the public domain. The move to France, where she wrote her first book. The success of the book and its film adaptation enabled her to set up a fund to help people who had had similar experiences to hers. In order to raise money for her fund she drew on the extensive network of political contacts she had built up over the years, never hesitating to ‘call in a favour’ when one of her protégés was in need of help.

The vineyard – a rubble-strewn piece of ground in the Languedoc-Roussillon – was bought on a whim after a leisurely lunch. A Californian wine supremo tried to buy some land in the area but was voted down by the local council. Sinéad’s mixture of Irish blarney and fluent French won them over, and she never stopped delighting in her acceptance there. With her husband’s business acumen and the goodwill she built up among the locals, the vineyard became profitable and most of the money went to her fund.

She referred to these latter years, spent mainly writing and managing the fund and the vineyard, as the most productive and satisfying of her life. She was finally ‘doing good without being a do-gooder’. I think the many parents and children she reunited would agree.

It was quite uncanny that she appeared to have achieved so much of what she had set out to do, although she had never actually written the book, and there had been no film. In better days, they used to joke that their story would look good on the big screen, but she always said that she would only agree to sell the rights if Robert de Niro could play the male lead, so she could meet him.

He folded the paper and put it back in the file, with all the letters, photos and post-it notes he had so carefully kept. It was unlike him to be sentimental, and he had to get ready for the flight the next morning.

Chapter Two

Dublin, 1970

‘There’s something I need to tell you.’ The words hung limply in the air, and Sinéad saw surprise and then growing apprehension, on her parents’ faces. What was it they said about reactions – first shock, then denial, then grief and finally acceptance? But that was for bereavements and this most certainly was not bereavement. If anything it was quite the opposite.

Sinéad began to suspect she might be pregnant in early April 1970. It took her a fortnight to pluck up the courage to see a doctor – a random doctor, whose plate she had spotted from the bus on her way to college, too terrified to go to the family GP. It took another week for the test result to come through. The doctor was kind, but said there was nothing he could do and that she needed to tell her parents. Yet another week passed before she felt able to tell them. Her father sat motionless as she spoke.

‘Pregnant?’ Her mother went pale.

Sinéad began to shake, and her father went to her. He made her sit down and put a blanket around her shoulders.

‘Oh Sinéad, how could you?’ Her mother almost shouted. ‘And you a medical student? How could you be so stupid?’

Sinéad shook her head, unable to speak, tears streaming down her cheeks.

‘And who is the father?’

‘Michael,’ said Sinéad. ‘Michael Daly.’ She wiped away the tears and blew her nose. ‘You don’t know him. He’s in the class ahead of me and we just went out for a few weeks. We’re not even seeing each other anymore.’

‘A few weeks! Oh Sinéad.’ her mother said. ‘And your exams coming up.’ She turned to her husband. ‘God, Noel, what are we going to do?’

‘We’ll need to meet this Michael,’ her father said. He turned to Sinéad. ‘I take it you’ve told him?’

‘Yes Daddy. We’ve talked about it. I don’t want to marry him and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t want to marry me either. And his father has just had a major heart operation so he can’t tell his parents. They’d be devastated.’

‘Would they now,’ said her mother, the colour coming back into her cheeks. ‘And what about us? Are we not devastated? Why should he get away with it and leave you to take the consequences? Oh, Sinéad, how could you be so…Why didn’t you use one of those…you know…?’

‘Hush, Jane love,’ her father said. ‘Let’s stay calm and think about how we’re going to deal with this.’

‘You’re not thinking of keeping it?’ said her mother, looking at her husband who just shook his head. She thought for a moment and then said, ‘But if you did want to, I suppose I could give up work and look after it…’

‘We need to decide what’s best for Sinéad and the child,’ said her father.

They reassured her that they would stand by her no matter what decision she took – which was all very well, but she hadn’t the faintest clue herself as to what it was exactly she wanted. It wasn’t something she had ever dwelled upon or discussed with anyone – why would she? And in her nice middle-class surroundings, her expensive convent school and her university frequented by well brought up young women like herself, she had never heard of this happening to anyone she knew.

*****

Michael came over the next day and he and her father talked at length in the living room while Sinéad and her mother made tea in the kitchen. When he left, they all sat around the kitchen table.

‘He seems like a nice enough young man,’ said Sinéad’s father, ‘and he’s willing to do whatever is necessary, but I can see that he’s in a difficult situation too, what with not being able to tell his parents. I suppose if neither of you wants to get married, we can’t force you.’

Sinéad’s mother looked as if she was about to say something, but he stopped her with a raised palm. ‘In any case, I don’t think that would be right,’ he finished. ‘But you’re going to have to decide what you’re going to do, and we need to act quickly.’ He leaned across and patted her shoulder. ‘I’ll talk to Father Brophy tomorrow. He’ll know what to do.’

Once the initial shock had subsided, things happened really fast. Father Brophy, the parish priest, came to the house. There were more cups of tea and whispered discussions in which Sinéad had little or no input. She would go to a mother and baby home, have the baby, have it adopted and then get back to college as quickly as possible before anyone noticed. The question her mother raised about keeping the baby was never mentioned again. Then it was the social workers at the adoption agency, with its funereal atmosphere, tut-tutting, frowning and averted eyes. There were two of them. An older woman, Miss Brennan, who seemed to be in charge, and another, younger one.

As Sinéad waited in the ante room while her parents talked to Miss Brennan, the younger woman, who had been silent up to that point, said, ‘You’re lucky, you know. Your timing is perfect. Your body shape will only begin to change after college breaks up for the summer holidays, and the baby will be born just after classes begin in the autumn so nobody will notice anything.’

Sinéad wanted to slap her. Lucky? How could she be so unfeeling? All they seemed to care about was that no-one should know.

An abortion was completely out of the question, especially now that her parents were involved. Her aunt Catherine, the only other person in the family who knew about her pregnancy, had been surprisingly supportive, even taking her aside one day.

‘Look, I know it’s supposed to be wrong,’ Catherine said, ‘and I probably shouldn’t be even talking about this, but if you want to have an abortion I’ll pay for it. I suppose in a few years’ time it’ll have become common practice, and that’ll certainly solve a lot of problems for lots of young girls like you.’

Looking back, Sinéad thought it was an extraordinary position for her aunt to take, but it wasn’t an option that they explored any further, as neither Sinéad nor her aunt had the faintest idea how to actually go about doing such a thing. Despite her brief show of liberal thinking, Aunt Catherine made it quite clear that Sinéad should on no account keep the baby, as it would be totally unfair on her mother. She wasn’t the only one to stress this point. In fact any suggestion that she should keep the child was greeted with shock and horror by everyone involved.

‘It would be selfish to do such a thing. It would destroy the lives of your child and your parents,’ said Miss Brennan on one of the rare occasions she was alone with her. ‘Think of the child,’ she said, ‘who’ll be sneered at in school for having an unmarried mother. Think of your poor mother, the shame of it, shunned by the neighbours. Think of yourself, too, Sinéad, having to give up all hopes of a proper career, never mind the fact that nobody would ever want to marry the mother of an illegitimate child.’

Illegitimate, unmarried, all these words thrown at her made her feel dirty and shameful. But she didn’t know how to react. She was sure of only one thing – she didn’t want to be locked up with disapproving nuns in some gloomy convent in the back of beyond.

She’d read or heard somewhere that unmarried mothers in the UK fared better, and that there was some sort of arrangement in place where you could work as an au pair with a family during the pregnancy until the baby was born. What would happen after that wasn’t clear, but it sounded a lot better than anything on offer in Ireland. ‘England?’ her mother had said when she broached the subject. ‘But you don’t know anyone there.’

‘I don’t know anyone in the mother and baby homes here either,’ she said. ‘But at least in England I could live a fairly normal life. Can we at least try and see how it works?’ What she didn’t tell them was that it would also give her the space to think about other options – keeping the child, for example. She needed to be able to think this whole thing through without all the pressure, and she knew that if she stayed in Ireland she would never be allowed that luxury.

It took a while, but after much pleading and tearful discussion, her parents agreed. Her father knew someone who knew a priest in the south of England, who in turn put them in touch with an agency in London. This was all much to the annoyance of the Dublin agency, who undoubtedly saw a potential adoptee slipping from their grasp, but to Sinéad’s surprise her parents stood up to them, and the next thing she knew they were on the boat to England.

Her aunt Catherine made her two ‘good’ outfits in case she had a day off from whatever work she would be doing. When she heard Sinéad was going to London, she immediately began to pore over her smartest patterns.

‘We can’t have you wandering around London looking like an unmarried mother,’ Catherine said with a wink.