“For heaven’s sake, Cyril,” she said, “that was seven years ago. How on earth would I recall? Your mother was a girl, I know that much.”
“And what happened to her?” I asked. “Is she alive?”
“How should I know?”
“Don’t you even remember her name?”
“It was probably Mary. Aren’t most Irish country girls called Mary?”
“So she wasn’t from Dublin?” I asked, seizing on this piece of information like a tiny nugget of gold discovered at the heart of a placer deposit.
“I really couldn’t tell you. I never met her, never communicated with her and never knew the first thing about her other than the fact that she had allowed a man to engage in carnal relations with her, resulting in a child. That child being you. Now look, Cyril, can’t you see that I’m writing? You know you’re not supposed to come in here when I’m at work. I lose my train of thought if I’m interrupted.”
I always called them Charles and Maude, never “Father” and “Mother.” This was on Charles’s insistence as I wasn’t a real Avery. It didn’t bother me particularly but I know it made other people uncomfortable and once, in school, when I referred to them thus, a priest punched me around the ears and told me off for being modern.
I faced two problems at an early age, one of which might have been the natural result of the other. I was cursed with a stutter that seemed to have a mind of its own—it would be there some days and disappear on others—and it had the ability to drive both my adoptive parents to distraction. It stayed with me until the age of seven when, on the same day that I met Julian Woodbead, it vanished forever. How these two events are connected remains a mystery to me but the damage to my confidence was already done and I found myself painfully shy, nervous of most of my classmates, with the exception of that one child who had been squashed beneath the wheels of the number 16 bus, horrified by the prospect of speaking in public and simply incapable of conversing with anyone lest my affliction rear its head and cause people to laugh at me. It bothered me greatly, for I was not by nature a solitary person and I longed for a friend, someone to play games with or share my secrets. Occasionally, Charles and Maude would host a dinner party where they would come together as Husband and Wife, and on such occasions I would be brought down and passed around from couple to couple like a Fabergé egg they’d purchased from a descendant of the last Russian Tsar.
“His mother was a fallen woman,” Charles liked to say. “And we, in an act of Christian charity, took him in and gave him a home. A little hunchbacked Redemptorist nun brought him to us. If you ever want a child, the nuns are the people to call, that’s what I say. They have plenty of them. I don’t know where they keep them all or how they get them in the first place but there’s never a shortage. Introduce yourself to our guests, Cyril.”
And I would look around the room, at six or seven couples dressed in the most extraordinary clothes, bedecked with jewelry, each of whom stared at me as if they expected me to sing a song, perform a dance, or pull a rabbit out of my ear. Entertain us, their expressions said. If you can’t entertain us, then what is the point of you anyway? But in my anxiety I would be unable to utter a word and I would simply look down at the ground and perhaps start crying, and then Charles would wave me away and remind the room that I wasn’t his son at all, not really.
When the scandal broke, I was seven years old and became aware of it due to the comments of my classmates, most of whose fathers worked in similar environments to Charles and who took great pleasure in telling me that he was for the high jump and would surely be jailed before the year was out.
“He’s not my father,” I would point out, unable to look any of them in the eye and clenching and unclenching my fists in anger. “He’s my adoptive father.” I had been trained well.
Intrigued by the things that were being said about him, however, I began to scour the newspapers for information and, although they were careful not to publish a libel, it was clear that Charles, like the Archbishop of Dublin, was a man much feared, much admired and much hated. And, of course, there was no shortage of rumors. He was regularly to be found in the company of both the Anglo-Irish aristocracy and the ne’er-do-wells of the city. On any given night, he could be discovered throwing ten-pound notes down on the tables of illicit gambling halls. He had murdered his first wife, Emily. (Was there a first wife? I asked once of Maude. Oh yes, now that you mention it, I think there was, she replied.) He had made and lost his fortune thrice over. He was an alcoholic and had cigars sent on a cargo ship from Cuba by Fidel Castro himself. He had six toes on his left foot. He had once had an affair with Princess Margaret. There was an endless supply of stories regarding Charles and there may even have been truth to some of them.
So perhaps it was inevitable that one day the services of Max Woodbead would be required. Things had to be in a bad way for that to happen and even Maude had begun to emerge from her study occasionally to wander around the house muttering dark asides about The Man from the Revenue as if he might be found hiding under the stairs or stealing her emergency supply of cigarettes from the bread bin in the kitchen. On the day that Max showed up, I hadn’t spoken to a single person in eight days. I’d kept note of it in a diary. I hadn’t raised my hand in class, hadn’t said a word to anyone in school, had eaten my meals in perfect silence, which was how Maude preferred it anyway, and generally hid away in my bedroom, wondering what was wrong with me, for even at that tender age I knew that there was something about me that was different and that would be impossible ever to put right.