Lying in Wait(39)

Many years later, when I met Andrew and he enquired about the girl sitting beside me in the old photographs, Daddy explained that my sister Diana had drowned tragically when we were children, and abruptly changed the subject. When Andrew and I became more intimate, he questioned me about the incident and I lied and said it had happened on a day at the beach. He hugged me tightly to console me on my loss.

I became pregnant with Laurence over three years after our marriage. Andrew and I were so happy when I finally conceived, and Daddy opened a bottle of vintage wine to celebrate the news when I told him.

‘About time,’ he said.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, having no sister or mother to advise me. My sister-in-law, Rosie, the queen of fecundity, descended upon me with advice and booklets and potions and lotions, but I preferred to work things out for myself. The pregnancy was uncomfortable and exhausting, and childbirth was excruciating, but when the midwife placed my newborn child at my breast, I felt complete for the first time since Diana’s death. Laurence being born on Christmas Day was fate intervening. My most treasured gift. I adored my little boy. He was mine. Andrew left us to our own devices, certainly for the first few months, but I wept when he was ten months old and Andrew insisted that we move the cot into the bedroom next door to us, which had been carefully prepared as a nursery. ‘We must have our own room back.’ Daddy agreed with Andrew, and the matter ended there.

In the summer time, I would bring Laurence’s pram outside. It soothed him when he was teething to be outdoors. He would stop crying then. I would lie on a rug on the lawn beside the pram and listen to his soft gurgling, feeling like I didn’t deserve such happiness.

When Laurence was nearly a year old, Daddy died, on the same day as John F. Kennedy. He had been sick with cancer for many months. Still, Daddy’s death shocked me as much as the American president’s. Andrew was of course sympathetic, but I had lost Mummy, Diana and Daddy, and now I clung to Laurence, the only one left of my blood.

I wanted to home-school Laurence, but Andrew put his foot down again, arguing that our son needed to be socialized. I kept him home as long as I could, so that when Laurence did eventually start school, he was one of the oldest boys in his class. That first week, I stayed outside the school every day, trying to spot him through the classroom window. Other mothers tried to inveigle me into conversation when the school bell rang, but I didn’t want to talk to anybody except my cherub. I swooped him up into my arms and carried him all the way home.

Gradually, Laurence began to talk about other children and his teachers, and I felt the first pangs of jealousy. As he grew into an independent little boy, I got used to it, but the deep bond we had shared was fading. Shortly after his seventh birthday, Laurence refused to sit in my lap any more, encouraged by Andrew. ‘You are far too attached to that boy. Let him off.’ We had been trying for another baby. I told Andrew that I wanted to have five children. He baulked at five but thought a sibling or two would be good for Laurence. We tried, and failed, and failed, and failed, and continued to fail. Laurence was to be my only child.

Forty years after Diana’s death, I echoed my father’s words to my son. ‘We must start again, you and I. We are all we have.’ The poor boy has had so much to deal with, and he has handled it all with such consideration and discretion. And he has done it all for me.

The months following my confinement after Andrew’s death were strange times. I let Laurence take charge of everything. It took quite some time for me to realize that we had no money. Laurence went to deal with the bank manager and the solicitors. I wasn’t able for it. The news was grim. Andrew had at some stage mortgaged Avalon to make investments with Paddy Carey. Although thankfully Andrew’s death meant that the mortgage was redeemed, there really was very little left over. Carey had told Andrew that he was investing his money in a gilt-edged fund, but it turned out that he had been siphoning it off into his own pet projects, hoping in vain for a hit to cover his losses. Because Andrew had been a judge for only three years, his state pension was small, and the portion of it that I was entitled to as his widow was even smaller. The payments that Andrew had made into a private pension plan and life insurance over twenty years had been gambled away by Paddy Carey. There was a delay with Andrew’s will going through probate, because Andrew had been in the process of suing Carey when he died. The solicitor had told Laurence that suing Carey would be a futile exercise. He’d tried to persuade Andrew not to bother. Carey himself had gambled with the stolen money and was now rumoured to be destitute somewhere on the west coast of America.

I really couldn’t process all this information at the time. My medication dosage was quite high. I told Laurence that he would have to ask Andrew’s mother, Eleanor, for money. She would have to keep us. But when he approached her, she almost went into shock because it turned out that Andrew had been supporting her for the previous years also. He had persuaded her to sell her three-storey four-bedroom Victorian redbrick on the Merrion Road and buy a cottage in Killiney. Andrew had promised her he was making good investments on her behalf. She had no idea that he had lost it all. At the time, he had told me that his mother was getting too old to manage a big house, and at the back of my mind I had thought that our money worries would be over when Eleanor died, because she had to be sitting on a large pile of cash. At the beginning of our financial woes, I had urged Andrew to go to Eleanor and borrow from her. I had thought he was too proud. In fact, he knew she had nothing except her cottage because he had gambled it all. All Eleanor now had was her pension. Finn and Rosie sent us a few cheques, but they reminded us (as if they needed to) that they had eight children to feed and that we must find a way to support ourselves. They got together with Eleanor to suggest that she might sell her cottage and move in with us. We have six bedrooms and so couldn’t argue that we didn’t have the room, but I made it clear that I would not countenance the idea. Eleanor took umbrage. Finn advised Laurence that we must sell Avalon immediately to free up the equity, but we couldn’t do that: first, because it is the only home I have ever known, and second, because we could never take the risk of the new owners discovering what is buried beyond the kitchen window.