But instead all she managed was to put her hands over her face as her shoulders began shaking with sobs.

Fifty-Two

‘I can’t make it up to you, I know that,’ he said later, when she was calmer and they were on their third cup of coffee. ‘I can’t change the past. But we can start with something – can’t we?’

Katie stared at him, then nodded. She sat back, feeling tired from all the emotions inside her.

They had talked for a long time, as others around them came and went. He had told her that he had set up home with another woman soon afterwards, in Coventry, and that he had two more children, a son and a daughter.

‘But, did you marry her?’ Katie asked.

‘No – how could I? At first, I didn’t feel I could tell her what the situation was. And then I saw a long line of twisted lies following me throughout my life, if I didn’t own up early on. By then we were ready to get married, if it had been possible. She took it badly at first – you can understand it. But in the end, when I’d tried to get across what Vera was like – is like – we had to find our own way. We set up as Mr and Mrs O’Neill . . . and are so, except under the law and in the eyes of the Church. She wore a ring, but we’ve never had a ceremony.’

‘So,’ Katie said brutally, for those children had had their father all this time – her father, ‘your children are bastards – like mine.’

Michael O’Neill looked shocked, but had to concede that this was the truth. ‘You’re very straight-talking, aren’t you?’

‘I suppose I’ve learned that I might as well be.’ She leaned towards him. ‘Could you not have come – just once? Or got a message to me, let me know somehow that you were alive? All these years . . . And then you turn up out of the blue.’

He looked away for a moment, then back at her. ‘It wasn’t that I didn’t think of it – to start with. But . . .’ He made a helpless gesture with his hands. ‘At first it was too tricky. You were so young: how could I see you without her being there? And then time passes – there’s a distance. It seems better not to disturb things: you, them . . . There’s shame in it – it’s all difficult. Our situation was already so irregular. A clean break seemed the best. I left you alone. I mean, you might have—’

‘Made trouble for you?’

Again he shrugged, uncomfortable. ‘It was a possibility . . . So you leave it, year after year . . .’ He did not meet her eyes.

‘What’re their names?’

‘My, er, wife’s name is Anne. Our son Thomas is twenty-one now and apprenticed. And our girl is nineteen: her name is Josie. She’s soon to marry. That was part of it, I suppose – seeing her now, wondering about you . . .’