The Ladies' Midnight Swimming Club(18)

‘It’s only for two weeks, but…’

‘Initially. Let’s see how it goes first,’ Jo said softly and of course, Elizabeth knew her friend would love nothing more than to have Lucy here full-time. ‘But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.’ She stopped now, as if assessing Elizabeth for bad news.

‘What is it?’ Elizabeth felt her stomach turn over with the inevitable nerves that come before hearing the very worst.

‘Oh, it’s nothing bad, it’s just…’ Jo bit her lip for a second. ‘Don’t say no immediately, but I was wondering, if you’d like to come swimming with me tonight. It’s…’ Her voice trailed off, perhaps registering the look of horror in Elizabeth’s eyes.

‘It’s rather cold for that sort of malarkey for me, but…’ God was there any way out of this? ‘I…’

‘Of course, of course,’ Jo said quietly, ‘it was silly of me. I just thought you might really enjoy it – something to knock off a bucket list, if you had one.’ She was laughing now, but Elizabeth could see that she’d let her down somehow.

‘Maybe next month? When it gets a little warmer. You know what they say: never swim when there’s an R in the month!’ Elizabeth said lightly, but the thought of going into the freezing waters now didn’t particularly appeal to her. She didn’t even have a swimming suit for heaven’s sake.

‘Right, that’s a date. We’ll make it May Day, or rather night,’ Jo said, happy now that she’d tied her down to a specific time.

‘Right.’ Elizabeth agreed, a little shocked. Dear God, what had she let herself in for?





7


Dan


Dan’s parents never made a secret of the fact that he was adopted. Mind you, his mother was such a typical English rose and his father still burned to a freckle if he so much as looked at the sun, it wouldn’t exactly have come as news to anyone, with Dan’s dark skin, pitch-black hair and heavily lashed brown eyes. Being adopted had never been a thing for him. Even at that stage, when other kids rebelled, Dan just counted himself lucky. He was an only child, lavished with love and he adored his parents. If he’d wondered at other kids, searching for their birth parents, he’d have probably supposed that they mustn’t have had the same happy home he’d had.

So why on earth did this gaping hole seem to have opened up in him now? Just when he needed it least? It woke him in the early hours of the morning. Of course, he knew it probably had a lot to do with the fact that he’d booked his ticket, sublet his flat and he was headed for the one place that might be able to give him an answer to this question, that for so long hadn’t meant as much to him as he supposed it should have.

He should be getting a new job, well, probably a new career once the media had finished with him. He should be finding a partner to settle down with, getting his life sorted, looking forward rather than looking back for parents who clearly didn’t see themselves in his future. He told himself these things a million times, during the night, when sleep had played a game of chase he wouldn’t quite keep up with. He tried his best to talk himself out of the notion, that out there somewhere, there was a connection like no other to him – his mother. Perhaps he had siblings, or half siblings, perhaps he could find his father.

The more the notion niggled at him, the more reasons he seemed to come up with for finding out who he actually was. He could list backwards a dozen inherited diseases that could show up in the next generation. Didn’t he want to know if there were markers there before he set off on a road that might be too painful to consider once he’d stepped on it?

There was another thing too, and it was probably this that really worried him the most. The notion that his mother could be alive today, but by the time he found her, it could be too late. He’d seen too many documentaries, people just missing each other by the thinnest thread of time. The more the idea festered, the more he realised he didn’t want that to be his story.

The only problem was, he had nowhere to start. It wasn’t that his parents were being evasive, he knew them too well for that, but rather it was the whole system that seemed to be in place in Ireland for when it came to tracking down anything to do with a parent who simply did not want to be found.

It could drive him crazy if he thought about it too much, and so, by the time he was sitting on the ferry, he’d already talked himself out of making this trip all about tracing his roots. Instead, he would prioritise clearing his head, maybe settling into writing something so he could at least pretend to have been productive and then, if there was the time, or the inclination left, he might just see if there was anything he could learn about his past.

Dan surprised himself by actually falling asleep on the crossing over. He’d woken to the sight of land, the sun driving slowly towards the west and it filled him with a giddy optimism, something that he realised he hadn’t felt in a very long time. He hadn’t been fully sure about the journey on unfamiliar roads to the other side of Ireland before he’d left, so he’d booked a room in a small B&B on the outskirts of the city.

It was a tired little house on the deep end of an estate that looked as if it was on its third generation of occupancy, having become unfashionable for the bright young things. He noticed the houses here looked as if they were owned only by the elderly or inhabited by people who couldn’t afford something better.