Unravelling Oliver(36)

The day after my father’s funeral, my mother told me that Oliver Ryan was my half-brother. She had desperately wanted my father to be the one to tell me, but right to the end he was deeply ashamed. Mum said he had got a woman pregnant while a priest back in the 1950s. She may have been a nurse, or even a nun. My mother doesn’t think she was a prostitute like my father told me, back when he was maintaining that Oliver was a cousin. My father never revealed the mother’s name. Mum says the woman abandoned her baby and disappeared, never to be seen again. My father told my mother about it in the early days of their relationship. He insisted on starting their marriage with a clean slate and had Oliver shipped off to St Finian’s to be raised by the priests. Mum thought Dad was wrong to do that.

My mother was not the reason why Dad left the priesthood. They met some years later. She says that he was resistant to their relationship in the beginning; she thinks that they eventually bonded over their shared faith and that it was only when her uncle, Dad’s former bishop, gave his approval that Dad allowed himself to actually fall for her. He still kept extremely close links to the church and ultimately worked for them.

My mother insists she would have raised Oliver as her own son, if Dad had let her. Mum says that it was the only thing that caused heartache in their marriage. It was simply a part of my father’s life that he refused to acknowledge or discuss. She says he passionately and irrationally hated the boy, and she never knew why.

I was stunned to hear this, of course. How could the father I knew have abandoned a child so cruelly when he had always treated me with such warmth and affection? How could he have denied me a brother? Regardless of what Oliver’s mother was like, how could he have hated an innocent child? My mother couldn’t give me answers and nor could the priests of my father’s acquaintance who might have been contemporaries. They either had no knowledge of the tale or had heard something of the story back in the day, but none could add further information. Shockingly, Oliver knew that we shared a father. How jealous must he have been of me? The staring and the spying in my schooldays finally made sense. Oliver Ryan was only watching his family. If the betrayal I now felt was so great, how must Oliver have felt his entire life? Earlier the previous day, I had accepted condolences from my brother on our father’s death. I knew that at some stage in the not too distant future, I would need to seek out this stranger. Perhaps it was not too late to welcome him to the family.

When I did seek him out some months later, our meeting did not go well.





16. Oliver


I was intrigued by Father Daniel’s cryptic words at my father’s funeral. I wondered if my father had left me a bequest or a message of some kind, and I was conflicted about whether I wanted to receive it. But Father Daniel had always been good to me and I wanted to see him.

Father Daniel was a great age at this point, but his mind was still sharp and the years had not dulled his compassion. I know my current circumstances would be a great disappointment to him if he were still alive, but perhaps, of all people, he might have understood my desperation.

I was led into the priest’s parlour, familiar from the few occasions of my father’s visits in school days. It had not changed at all. I could see at once that Father Daniel was agitated, and he began by telling me that he was not sure if he was doing the right thing.

‘Your father was a … strange man,’ he stated, and got no argument from me. ‘I wanted to … I’m not sure if …’ There was his hesitancy and uncertainty again.

It seemed there was no bequest. I was not upset about that. It was not as if I needed money at that stage. Father Daniel explained that my father’s estate had been left entirely to Judith and Philip. I was not mentioned in the will. Judith had subsequently given Father Daniel a box containing some gold holy medals that she asked him to pass on to me. I examined them in their box. They were engraved with crucifixes.

Father Daniel tried to apologize on my father’s behalf. I brushed off the apology and accepted a small glass of Jameson to lessen the priest’s embarrassment.

‘Did he ever mention to you …? About your mother?’ He looked nervous as he said it.

I sat up straight. ‘My … mother?’ Even the words felt alien on my lips.

He shifted position in his chair. ‘I see, I thought not. It’s not easy …’ he began, ‘we don’t have to … if you don’t want to.’

I asked for a minute and left the room, and had the strongest urge to smoke as my hands began independently to reach for my cuff buttons. I paced the corridor outside and was tempted just to walk away. Did I need this, did I really need to know? Of course I did. Every boy, regardless of age, needs a mother. If he can’t have her, he must at least know something about her. It is the natural order of things. Whether I needed to know was not the issue. I wanted to know. I paused before I re-entered Father Daniel’s room, wondering if I would be a different man when I emerged. I asked Father Daniel to tell me everything.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but I can only tell you what was said at the time. I have no proof of any of it, but I had friends out there at the time and they told me.’

‘Out there?’ I didn’t know what he meant.

‘Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia,’ he said. ‘There was an official report, but it was all hushed up. I tried to find it over the last month so that I would have something to give you, but it has disappeared. There are no records.’