“No,” I said. “But you should probably know, Maude was my adoptive mother, not my birth mother.”
“Yes, I know that,” she said. “Where did they get you from anyway? Were you found on the doorstep one day? Or did you just wash in on the tide at Dun Laoghaire pier?”
“The family legend has it that a little hunchbacked Redemptorist nun brought me to them,” I told her. “They wanted a child, or they said that they did, and here was a child.”
“And your birth parents? Have you ever tracked them down?”
“I’ve never even tried. I’m not that interested, to be honest.”
“Why not?” she asked. “Are you angry at them?”
“No, not at all,” I told her. “I had a reasonably happy childhood, which is rather strange in retrospect, as neither Charles nor Maude showed any particular interest in me at all. But they didn’t beat me or starve me or anything like that. I wasn’t a Dickensian orphan, if you know what I mean. And as for my birth mother, well I daresay she did what she had to do. I assume she was unmarried, that’s where adopted babies usually come from, isn’t it? No, I don’t feel any anger at all. What’s the point?”
“That’s good to hear. There’s nothing more tedious than a grown man blaming his parents, birth or otherwise, for all the things that have gone wrong in his life.”
“You’re assuming that things have gone wrong in my life.”
“There’s something in your face that tells me that you’re not happy. Oh I’m sorry, that’s a very personal remark. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“No, it’s fine,” I said, although I felt a little crestfallen that she could read me so well.
“Anyway, Fergus was quite like that. Always blaming other people for issues that were his own to solve. It was one of the few things that I didn’t like about him, if I’m honest.”
“So are you still angry at him?” I asked, conscious that this too was a deeply personal question but it balanced out what she had said to me.
“Oh I hate him,” she said, and I noticed a flush of color come into her cheeks and the manner in which the fingers of her left hand dug into her palm, as if she wanted something to take away her pain. “I absolutely detest him. Afterward, I didn’t feel very much at all for a week or two. I suppose I was in shock. But then the fury rose and it hasn’t subsided since. Sometimes I find it difficult to control. I think it was around the time that everyone stopped asking me whether I was all right, when lives went back to how they had been before. Had he been in Dublin I might well have gone over there, broken down his door and stabbed him as he slept. Fortunately for him, he was in Madagascar with his lepers.”
I snorted some of my drink through my nose and had to retrieve my handkerchief from my pocket to wipe my face. “Sorry,” I said, unable to stop laughing. “It’s just the way you put it. I’m not mocking you.”
“It’s fine,” she said, laughing now too, and I could see that it did her good to make light of it. “It is quite comical when you think of it. I mean if he’d left me for Jane Fonda then that would be one thing. But for a bunch of lepers? I didn’t even know that there were lepers anymore. I only knew what they were because Max’s favorite film is Ben-Hur and I’ve been forced to watch it with him numerous times.”
“Well, it was his loss,” I said.
“Oh don’t patronize me,” she snapped, turning serious again. “People always say that, you see, but they’re wrong. It wasn’t his loss. It was mine. I loved him.” She hesitated for a moment and then repeated the phrase, with added emphasis on the crucial word. “And I still miss him, despite everything. I just wish he’d been honest with me, that’s all. If he’d told me a few days before that he didn’t love me enough to marry me, if we could have just sat down and discussed things, then even if he’d still wanted to call it all off, it would have been difficult but at least I could have been part of the decision. I wouldn’t have had to suffer such deep humiliation. But the manner in which he left me? Simply telephoning when I was already in my dress to tell me about his ridiculous ‘cold feet’? What sort of man does that? And what sort of woman does it make me that if he walked in here right now I’d probably throw myself into his arms?”
“I’m sorry that happened to you, Alice,” I said. “No one should have to endure such cruelty.”
“Fortunately for me,” she said, looking down and wiping her eyes, where the tears were threatening to break over the banks of her eyelids, “I had your mother to console me. Your adoptive mother, that is. I simply threw myself into my work. Her work. I’ve lived and breathed Maude Avery since then and in her books I’ve found great solace. She was a wonderful writer.”
“She was,” I said. I had at least read most of her novels by then.
“It’s as if she understood completely the condition of loneliness and how it undermines us all, forcing us to make choices that we know are wrong for us. With each successive novel, she explores the theme even more deeply. It’s extraordinary. Did you read Malleson’s biography of her?”
“I glanced at it,” I said. “I didn’t read it cover to cover. The woman he presented seemed very different from the woman I knew. As if she was a fictional character, not a real person. Or one of them was. The Maude I knew or the Maude who comes through from the pages of her books. Or both of them, who knows?”
“You feature in it, you know.”
“Yes, I know.”
We were silent for a few moments until Alice spoke again. “I still find it astonishing that I live in the house that was once hers,” she said. “And yours, I suppose. It was a nasty thing that Max did, buying it out from under Maude’s feet when your father went to jail. And at such a knock-down price.”
“Well, Charles had it coming,” I said with a shrug. “If he hadn’t seduced your mother, then Max wouldn’t have wanted revenge.”
“My mother likes to play the innocent victim in that story,” she told me. “But she was equally culpable. No woman is ever truly seduced. It’s a mutual decision on the part of the seducer and the seduced. Ironically, the only person who really suffered was the one who had done nothing wrong.”
“Maude.”
“Exactly. Maude. She lost her home. She lost her writing room. She lost her sanctuary. To have a place where you feel safe, where you can work, is more important than anyone can realize until it’s gone. Especially for a woman. And of course, she died not long afterward.”
“Yes, but that was the smoking,” I said, beginning to feel a little upset by the turn the conversation was taking. The grief and pity that Alice felt for my adoptive mother had never been equaled by me in the twenty years since her death and it shamed me that this was the case. “It wasn’t as if she died of a broken heart or anything.”