Unravelling Oliver(41)

We started ringing round hospitals on Friday morning. How often does it happen, I wonder, that a person turns up in hospital amnesiac and unidentified? Not often enough, I imagine, for those of us looking for them. On Friday afternoon, the guards came to take statements. They wanted to put her photograph in the newspapers. The most beautiful photo I had was one I’d taken in France with my Agfa Instamatic. We had all been drunk. Laura was leaning her head on Oliver’s shoulder. He was naked from the waist up. Her eyes were closed, and about one quarter of her face was hidden behind several wine glasses in the foreground. But she was smiling in the photo, as if she knew a secret that nobody else did. We agreed it was not suitable for publication, and Dad found a photo from Christmas the previous year, where she looked happy but serious. My parents were terrified of the glare of publicity that was about to descend. We are private people and to them, my sister’s breakdown was dirty laundry.

The sun continued to rise and set, the grandfather clock ticked its metronome of misery in the hallway, cars drove past, and children could be heard laughing as they passed our gates, but there was a gaping hole in the centre of our lives, a huge question mark without an answer. The photo was due to be published in the newspapers and broadcast on TV on Monday, but on Sunday afternoon the guards called and asked Dad to come down to the station. We knew there had been a development, but Dad refused to let Mum accompany him. I waited with Mum while he was gone, and we speculated on what the breakthrough might be, both of us terrified of uttering what we already knew, as if by saying it, it made it real.

Dad returned a relatively short time later with Mum’s brother, my Uncle Dan, and a young garda. I don’t know why the garda came with him. Maybe it was policy. Maybe it was courtesy, to make sure Dad got home all right.

Laura’s body had washed up on the Tragumna beach that morning in West Cork. A dog walker (why is it always a dog walker?) had seen someone the previous night from the cliff-side and had alerted the guards. Apparently she had walked into the sea fully clothed. We protested that it couldn’t be her. Why would she go there? But really we knew that was exactly where she’d go. It was the beach we had played on as children when we visited my maternal grandmother in Skibbereen. The guards had found her handbag nearby. There was no note, but enough in her bag to indicate her identity. We all travelled together to Cork that night to make the formal identification. Dad and Uncle Dan tried to persuade Mum and me that we didn’t need to see her. I agreed, God forgive me, but Mum insisted, so Mum and Dad went in together through the swing doors and I was left outside with Uncle Dan to wait. I could hear their footsteps echoing over the tiled floor, and then there was no other sound but that of the hum of industrial refrigeration and my breath and Uncle Dan’s breath. Once again, time proved useless in the face of tragedy as we waited, maybe minutes, maybe hours, for the news that was not new at all. At one stage Uncle Dan suggested that we say a Hail Mary. I did not understand what possible difference it could make to the outcome.

I think my parents died of grief eventually, although it took a few years. Madame Véronique could shed no light on why Laura had killed herself when we contacted her. She maintained that Laura had been an excellent worker and had noticed nothing strange about her. She said we should be proud of such an intelligent and capable young lady. We took solace from that.

I go over and over what I knew of Laura in the final years of her life. Before we went to France, Laura was a brilliant, flighty, flirty girl with a bright future. During that summer of 1973 she began to show signs of change. I was surprised by Madame’s commendation of her. Surprised, but somewhat comforted.

The funeral was devastating. Oliver sent us his regrets in a beautifully written card but could not attend. I was mildly angry about that, amid all the other anger and sorrow I felt. I thought it was discourteous to my parents and me, and to Laura’s memory. What could be so important that he would stay away?

With the help of the guards, we had managed to stop the broadcast of the photograph, and kept it out of all but one of the newspapers. The funeral was private, and afterwards condolence cards started to arrive slowly, over many months. Suicide was not discussed then, and people didn’t know exactly how to sympathize with our loss, so we dealt with it on our own mostly so as not to embarrass our friends. I don’t think attitudes to suicide have changed since then. When somebody dies of cancer, the course of the illness is openly charted and the stages of deterioration catalogued afterwards, but with suicide there is no public discussion and nowhere to bring your grief. It is just the dirty little secret of the bereaved family.

I knew that Laura’s decline had started before we left France, and I wondered if Oliver held the key to the mystery of Laura’s depression. After all, he was the person who knew her most intimately. I even considered that she might have been pregnant when we left her there, but I know Laura and I can’t imagine she would have had an abortion, or given up a baby, regardless of the disgrace it might have brought in those times. The only other theory was that she might have been pregnant and miscarried. I floated the notion to Oliver, but he was stricken by the suggestion. It had not occurred to him. I was sorry I suggested it then, because it must have seemed like I was trying to blame him.

Years later, Oliver named a particularly heroic character in one of his story books after Laura. I appreciated that. He only got in touch again sometime in the early eighties to ask delicately if we could host his wedding reception in L’étoile.