A Tangle Of Roots

Chapter One
July 1985
 

He stewed, his hands glued to the steering wheel, the engine still idling. Tension oozed through his body, a result from an intense argument with his business partner. And the unbearable heat all along the Dorset coast didn't help. Sweat dripped from his face and his shirt stuck to his back.

He killed the engine and exited the car in one decisive move. He cast a glance at the direct sunlight, which burned through the limpid air. "Damned heat," he muttered, grabbing his briefcase, and quickly stepped into the shade of two old, wind-blown elms that shaded most of his two-storey Victorian house.

Head down, he strode towards the Purbeck stone façade, pushed aside the half-open door and headed straight into his study. He slumped down into his leather chair, sliding his briefcase beside desk. A pile of mail sat right smack in the middle of his blotter, defying him to give it his whole-hearted attention. Ignoring the overdue bills and charity requests, he sighed deeply and selected Classic FM on his portable radio, catching the tail end of a newscast. The IRA had blown up yet another part of Belfast, aiming once again to enforce peace on earth. News that was anything but new.

He pulled out his handkerchief and, leaning back in his swivel chair, he mopped his brow, face and neck while the calming melody of Vaugan Williams’ lark began its blithe ascent towards the ceiling. He closed his eyes.

Just what he needed. He ran the handkerchief over his face one last time and put it away.

The last notes died off. He sat up straight and grabbed the wad of assorted envelopes. An envelope plastered with stickers like a passport of someone who'd travelled around the world caught his notice. On closer inspection, the Australian stamp begged his attention. He reached for his glasses.

Inside was a single, neatly typed page with a banner headline: Clarice Chelmsford. Professional Counsellor and Research Agent. An address in Adelaide, South Australia followed.

If he needed counselling, he wouldn't go halfway around the world to Australia for it! He lowered the page, about to toss it aside then paused. The opening line read: Dear Mrs Hadleigh…

He rechecked the envelope. Sure enough, the letter was addressed to Bridget, his wife.

Why couldn't she filter out her own mail from amongst his pile of junk? Hers was usually interesting and his painful or depressing. She should have dealt with this envelope herself.

A cursory glance caught the first line.

I am writing to you on behalf of my client, Miss Faith Rivers.

Faith Rivers?

He looked up, trying to trace an inkling of recognition. No. He shook his head in defeat. Never heard of her. He carried on reading, his curiosity now past its peak.

Miss Rivers is researching her family history and she believes you may be able to help her with some useful information. She has an association with the family name O'Driscoll, your maiden name. Her research confirms a Niamh O'Driscoll was born in Australia in 1959…

In one indefinable instant, the typing faded into grey misshapen shapes.

Niamh O'Driscoll. His stomach churned. Hell!

A shake gripped his hand. He released the letter. It fluttered down to his desk. Stunned, he slumped his head into his hands and cradled his forehead, fingers rubbing the space behind his eyebrows, where a dull ache crept across.

"Do you have to invite the O'Driscolls around here?" Rebecca's strident tone and her biased emphasis on the word have startled him.

He swung round in his chair, anger surging within him.. His daughter stood at the study door, her back ramrod straight and her arms folded defiantly across her naked chest.

He’d forgotten the O’Driscolls were invited to dinner. And not by his choice. He groaned.

"Yes," he hissed, embarrassed by her semi-nudity. Only a towel clung to her hips. "Get dressed." He returned to his mail.

The envelope came into sharper focus. He picked it up and checked the sender's address label on the back. It meant nothing to him.

“Daddy!” A discordant slap on the wooden floor reached him. "You know I simply hate them. You know that, don't you?"

Douglas whipped his head about. "Too bad." He stabbed a finger at her over a shoulder. "Go put some clothes on. You can't run around the house like that. I don't like it and your cousin gets embarrassed by it."

"Mum says it's all right." She threw him a look that said 'argue that one out if you dare'.

It was a lie.

He knew Bridget turned a blind eye, but she never condoned overt nudity. "Whatever you claim your mother said, I'm telling you otherwise."

"I'll tell her that!"

"Fine. Put your clothes on first."

She narrowed her gaze at him, chewing on her bottom lip. A memory of his own defiance at around Rebecca's age flashed before his eyes.

Unmistakably his daughter, they shared the same brown eyes, five foot ten inches of height, long and narrow faces, sandy hair with a touch of grey. His grey streaks were real, hers from a bottle.

Douglas shook his head. They understood each other too well. She used Bridget more as a weapon against him than a source of support.

She huffed and stomped away. He heard the lounge door slamming shut in her wake. He ground his teeth; her nasty temper had worsened.

Douglas leaned back, closed his eyes and swung himself around with the balls of his shoes. In the space of one day, he'd had a blazing row with his business partner, Niamh O'Driscoll, had crawled out of the woodwork and Rebecca was up to her usual tricks. As for Bridget: what grief would she cause when she learned about Niamh? He didn't need this.

Niamh O'Driscoll. He rubbed his face in one long sweep.

He'd first heard that name at the end of a long, glorious evening of listening to a summer symphony concert in the park. Six months into their relationship, Bridget and he were in love, at a peak of confidence that promised nothing could ever come between them.

The name had been but a whisper from Bridget's lips. He remembered her every word, just as she had murmured them to him. The revelation had shaken him because he had never before dated an unmarried mother. He'd filed away the story into the dark recesses of his mind. History. Not forgotten, but stored away in a folder labelled: No Immediate Action Required.

Was Niamh O'Driscoll now called Faith Rivers?

Almost certainly. She might have changed her name but there could be no doubt about it, Niamh had finally found them.

Strangely, Douglas had always known she would, one day. It was almost inevitable and he had long been one to spot the inevitable. But a big difference existed between spotting a problem and acting on it. He hadn't prepared himself for this, hadn't worked out how he would tackle it.

So, what the hell was he going to do now?

Hell and damnation! He leaped up and paced his study, his mind overwhelmed by the dilemma. Why now? Then a titbit of buried history resurfaced, he half turned to a frame, a scroll depicting each name in the Hadleigh family tree. His gaze flickered down to Thomas Hadleigh. His Grandfather Tom had tackled just such a situation as this.

His headache steadily worsened, dulling his vision. All he wanted to do was to throw the letter aside and pretend it never existed.

Instead, he picked up the letter with shaking hands and blinked, forcing himself to focus on the words. He reread the names: Faith Rivers and Niamh O'Driscoll. They leaped out from the white stationary, leaving the surrounding words in soft focus. He shook his head, brushing at a trace of dampness in the corners of his eyes.

Faith —a nice enough name— but for the moment, he chose to think of her as Niamh O'Driscoll. He returned to his seat. How old was she anyway? Born in 1959, his brain struggled with the calculation: 1985 minus 1959. She was twenty-six years old, a young woman.

What would he say to Bridget? How would she react? She wasn't exactly the epitome of tolerant understanding these days. What if she insisted on bringing Niamh into their home? How would he cope? How would he explain Niamh's presence to his own family and friends?

Hell. He cradled his head. He had to think this through. Right now wasn't the best moment to rush into the kitchen and announce ... Announce what? That the past had caught up with them?

No. He slipped the letter back into its envelope. The whole situation needed further thought; time to come to terms with the matter before discussing it. Time to compose himself. He tucked it away in a desk drawer and went in search of Bridget. She expected him to tell her he was home.

He trudged through the lounge and wiped a backhand across his brow. He heard the lethargic drone of his neighbour's lawnmower floating across the high beech hedge. He glanced out through the gaping French doors towards the rear lawn.

Rebecca was again sunbathing nude. Her pale skin glowed under direct sunlight, stark against the lush green grass.

At least the blood pressure of the old boy next door didn't seem to suffer on account of Rebecca.

Douglas gritted his teeth. He'd lost track of the number of warnings he'd gave her. It embarrassed him and his nephew, Mark Lomax.

Mark had never voiced a complaint but kept out of the way whenever Rebecca indulged herself.

Rebecca looked up, a dark expression of defiance across her face. Her hands clasped an empty wine glass. His gaze found the claret bottle propped up against her left buttock. Youth laying claim to a maturity that just wasn't there, he surmised.

He marched through to the kitchen and drew back at the culinary battlefield before him. Scattered about the worktop, bowls of uncooked food waited for a mass assault on the gas hob.

Bridget was up to her elbows in a dough mixture, a white splodge smearing the side of her nose. Barely five foot tall, his wife looked vulnerable even in her own kitchen. Vulnerable: the word stuck in his mind. He had to keep silent about the letter and reveal its existence when the time was right.

He grunted, jabbing a thumb towards the back lawn. "Have you seen—?"

"You're early," she muttered, her gaze focussed on her cookery book then she drew out a long elastic tongue of dough and eyed it sceptically.

"I know." He thumbed the air again. "Have you seen—?"

"You should have called." She released the pressure on the dough and it recoiled. "Dinner's going to be late tonight. I could have made you a sandwich if I'd known you'd be early."

"You still can. Have you seen—?"

"Willie and Maggie are coming to dinner for around seven or half past. You did remember, didn't you?"

Her deep blue eyes shunted from the dough mixture back to her book. Not once did she look towards him and talk straight at him. He let out an impatient sigh.

Go on, take a look at me, I'm only your husband. The words had been festering inside his mind for quite some time. I'm the one who goes out to earn a decent crust so that we can live here! I'm the one who fathered Rebecca, the daughter who treats me as if I'm some sort of dogshit. His eyes bored into her.

He drew a breath and let it out slowly, shedding his animosity. "Why don't you look at me, Bridget?"

"I do." She darted a glimpse at him and returned to her duties. "Don't be silly."

He sighed heavily, his shoulders slumping. The same old reply left him feeling worse than if he hadn't raised the question. It was almost as if she didn't like the look of him.

Oblivious to his annoyance, she wiped her hands on her apron, reached for a stray shoulder-length, black curl, still shiny though speckled with grey and hooked it behind an ear.

He sighed again and followed it with audible groan. "Willie and Maggie, you say?" He breathed. "No, I’d forgotten till Rebecca told me how much she hated them."

She looked up through dazed, unfocussed eyes. Then she snapped her gaze back to her cooking.

He grimaced. The situation couldn't be worse. If the O'Driscolls were coming, a depressing evening lay ahead. He shuffled towards the door.

Bridget checked the wall clock. "You might as well pour yourself a drink and relax for an hour. Have a bath." Her tone suggested she'd quickly forgiven his oversight, even if she couldn't face him square on.

Eyes firmly focussed on the damn book, she shooed him out of the kitchen with a wave. "Go and leave me in peace"

Douglas stopped at the doorway. "I thought Rebecca should be at college getting her exam results. And she shouldn't be—"

"She's had a row with her boyfriend."

The relevance escaped him.

He trudged through the lounge and valiantly avoided a sidelong glance at the back lawn. He failed miserably, pausing with the idea of objecting to Rebecca' self-gratification. She raised her head and glowered at him.

What was the point?

He soaked in the bath, allowing the warm water to smooth the passage of uneasy reflection. Thoughts of the distant past replaced his anger.

After twenty-three years of marriage, he should be able to pinpoint what happened during their courtship. But time clouded his memory.

In 1960, glad to be released of his army national service and now an apprentice accountant, he'd been hospitalised for treatment of an acute in-growing toenail. Not exactly a major operation but painful and he played it for all it was worth with his nurse, shy and a bit awkward, Bridget. When she spilled his dinner tray all over the floor, he lied to the ward sister, claiming he'd had a spasm in his bandaged foot. Bridget had paid the price with the promise of a date.

Her Irish accent had betrayed her six months stay in England. Bridget hadn't settled down yet, having fled the mountain village in the Mourns where her mother raised twelve children on little more than home grown potatoes and water from a peat bog. Her quiet father was a squat man with bright red cheeks and blown-back hair permanently head-on to a fifty mile an hour gale. Bridget claimed his stories were published in their local newspaper for a pittance and attracted a mound of publisher's rejections. He had their postman hold them at the post office so Bridget's mother would never know how unsuccessful he was as a writer.

Bridget's mother, for all her sharp tongue, was a shrewd sort who sent her husband to the pub each evening. She preferred him drunk and limp when he came home to her bed. Douglas hoped Bridget would never grow into her mother's shoes.

Raised as a Catholic, it took a great deal of courage for Bridget to talk about contraception. He was less reticent, having grown up with the sixties hype. When Douglas first met her, she was almost cold with the fear of sex and that night in the park she explained why. He long remembered that night.

In the dining room, Douglas was setting the silverware, half his mind on the task in hand, when Mark arrived home. Douglas returned to the kitchen in time to hear Mark announce to Bridget he had a business dinner and he wouldn't be able to enjoy a meal with the O'Driscolls.

"Sorry about not telling you sooner, Aunt Bridget," he said, brushing his lips against her cheek. "This BBC man is in the area. It's my opportunity to interest him in a project we've got on hand."

Bridget gave him a look. full of consternation. "But I'll have food left over." He knew it to be only a mild protest. She loved Mark as if he were her own son.

Douglas picked up an assortment of pickles in one hand and relishes in another. Slipping past Mark, he raised a brow at his tall and fair-haired nephew, smelling a put-up job to avoid the dinner guests.

Orphaned at the age of five, his parents having met their death in motorcar accident in Adelaide, Mark continued to live in the Hadleigh household and seemed content. Born an Australian, he'd shed his drawl along the years and spoke with a remarkable clear English accent. At age twenty-five, he did nicely for himself already, which filled Bridget with pride.

Mark resembled his father with his broad shoulders and muscular build of a fighter except he was born with an even temperament and an intellect neither of his parents could have matched.

Though Bridget would never admit it, Douglas knew she held a desperate interest in not wanting him to leave. Mark was her link with the place where Niamh was born. He was the surrogate for the child she had lost in Australia. She never discussed it, but her actions told their own story.

"What's the project?" Douglas asked, walking around Mark to fetch more items for the table. Bridget put a half-pound of butter in his left hand and sour cream in the other.

"Mulberry." Mark beamed "The story of the Mulberry harbours. We've found one of the original designers and acquired quite a bit of historical details from the Ministry of Defence. How the Americans quickly erected their harbours but cut corners so they broke up in storms. How the Brits took longer to put them together but they all stayed together. Fascinating stuff."

"Sounds interesting. What's your dinner about?"

"We seek financial backing."

"Good luck, then." Douglas nodded.

Mark had borrowed heavily on Douglas's expertise to set up his half share in a Southampton film production company, but it had prospered without further help. He was happy to see his nephew doing well for himself.

The O'Driscolls arrived less than an hour later. Rebecca avoided them by hiding in her room until Douglas ordered her downstairs to the dinner table. Decently dressed, she held her swearing in check while the visitors remained in the house. Douglas hoped no one noticed his thoughts occasionally drifting away from ongoing conversation.

A full moon hung high in the sky when Willie and Maggie finally rose to leave. Bridget and he waved the O'Driscolls' car down the driveway then Willie turned his vehicle in the direction of Bournemouth.

He shut the front door and bolted it. Bridget stifled yet more yawns as she trudged up the stairway. Douglas was well aware of their significance. If he allowed it, she would be fast asleep before he got into bed. But he had come to a decision. It had crept over him during the evening –words and strategies forming in his brain –and now he was determined. And no amount of tiredness was going to detract him from the task ahead. It was time to face up to Bridget, resurrect her old ghosts.

He was quite certain the existence of the letter couldn't wait until morning. He dug the letter of his desk drawer and tackled the stairs one at a time, one hand rubbing at his forehead; the stress headache had returned.

While Bridget brushed her teeth and changed in the bathroom, he placed the letter on his bedside cabinet, in plain view. He stripped off and climbed naked into bed. The sheets felt cool, a marked contrast to the heat of the day, but not entirely unwelcome. He snuggled down, mentally rehearsing his words. Glances at his cabinet unnerved him, the letter daring him to deal with it.

His determination remained, but worry drained him of coherent thought. How do you tell your wife a bygone nightmare has returned?

Bridget entered the bedroom, wearing her flowery pink nightie, her underwear neatly folded across one arm. She averted her gaze, looking as shy and demure as when they were first married.

"You tired?" he asked, initiating the conversation.

She crept beneath the sheets. "Uh, huh."

"Mind if we talk for a while?"

"I'm very tired?"

"It's important."

"You mean Rebecca? I told you—"

"It's not about Rebecca."

She half turned in his direction, a frown marring her face. He cleared his throat. "It's Niamh O'Driscoll."

Bridget stiffened. Her hushed voice reached him, breaking an appalling silence. "What about her?"