her bags and gone? As an adult I knew the answer. Intense grief debilitates the mind so strongly that it is temporarily paralysed. Stripped of free thought, the mind is then incapable of making even the simplest decisions, far less planning an escape. Antoinette was simply frozen with despair.
If only she had been capable of walking away and never seeing them again, but she was not yet seventeen in an era when teenagers did not leave home to live in shared flats. She had only felt safe over short periods of her life and tiptoed round her parents shackled with a lead weight of dread at the thought of displeasing them. But however unhappy she felt her home life was, the unknown frightened her more.
She believed she needed whatever remnants of normality that being part of a family gave. None of the girls she knew lived away from home and at that stage not only did she want to blend in with her peers, she still had plans for her future. She hoped that if her father was working and contributed to the household, then surely Ruth would not be so dependent on her income.
Antoinette thought if that responsibility was lifted from her shoulders, then she could take her secretarial course. The three months working away in Wales at Butlins for the summer season would add to what she had already accumulated in the post office. That would cover her for a year while she took the course and once qualified she would be free to leave home forever.
Remembering the past, I pictured her agonizing over her future.
My adult hands shook with the desire to knock on the window of that gate lodge. I wanted to travel back through the years to protect her and change the direction of where Antoinette’s confused thinking was taking her. My mind walked through the door and I was in the room standing next to her; the decades fell away as the adult and the teenager I had once been shared the past.
I looked into her eyes, haunted now, as she felt the home she had loved entrap her and her choices narrow. And through the chasm of years that separated us I tried to make her hear me.
‘Don’t stay!’ I pleaded silently. ‘Listen to me! Leave now! While your mother’s at work, pack your case and go! You don’t know what will happen if you stay, but I do.
Put your education off; pick it up when you are older. If you stay they will destroy you, Antoinette. Your mother will never protect you. Believe me, there is worse to come.’
Antoinette bent to fondle her dog’s ears. She had failed to hear the voice of her future. I heard the ticking of the mantle clock as it moved relentlessly forward. Clocks very seldom move backwards and, knowing that, I wept for her.
Again I saw the picture in my mind of Antoinette being sent to meet her father. I felt her struggle for survival as she clung on desperately to her individuality. She refused to be completely controlled by her parents and I heard, again, the uncouth tone of her father’s voice as he constantly belittled her attempts.
I felt a rueful smile cross my face as I pictured those dances that had the innocence of another time. I remembered with nostalgia the emerging youth culture that my generation was part of and then felt sadness at the thought of the teenager I had once been trying to establish a normal life.
And once again I felt her loneliness.
She had invented a new persona to hide behind: the party girl who had fooled her friends, but not herself. All the time she hid her fear that she would be asked questions about her family life and her past. If that happened, she was sure to be unmasked as a fraud. They were fears that no normal teenager should have had. She had turned to drink, embracing it as a friend that could allay her worries, then, when it had turned into her enemy, fought a battle to banish its power over her.
My attack of depression was replaced by a burst of anger at two people who had destroyed the childhood of a third. I drew deeply on a cigarette, angrily flicked ash on the growing mound of butts that was now piled in the ashtray and then another thought entered my mind.
My father was dead. He was not going to return to his house. In the desk I had found that wallet with his emergency fund. A smile crossed my face as an idea entered my mind. What good use could I put it to? Now what did he hate spending money on? Meals out was certainly one. I remembered how much my mother had enjoyed going to a smart restaurant and how he had given a derisory snort at what he said was a total waste of his hard-earned cash.
‘Well, today he can pay for one!’ I exclaimed. I picked up the phone to dial my friend’s mobile. She had come with me to Ireland to help support me as I confronted my father’s death and dealt with the arrangements for his funeral, and was staying at a hotel nearby. As I called her, I searched my memory for other sacrileges which would have driven my father to fury. Any woman driving his gleaming red car which was parked outside would certainly have outraged him. So we’ll go in that, I thought with glee.
When my friend answered her mobile, I said, ‘How do you fancy going out to lunch? Somewhere nice and expensive. It’s on me. I’ll collect you in twenty minutes.’
Then I called my insurance broker in London to arrange cover on the car and the last call was to the restaurant to make a booking for two. Then, picking up the keys of my father’s car which had been conveniently left on top of the desk, I strode out of the house, inserted the keys triumphantly in the ignition, turned the radio on to full blast and drove off.
After I’d collected my friend, we cruised slowly along the windy coast road that leads to the Giants Causeway. Unlike so much of England, the landscape of Ireland had not altered much since I had first arrived there as a small child. There weren’t acres of new houses or high-rise flats. Instead, it was as beautiful as ever. As we drove along the coastal road, a breathtaking scenery of green hills stretched away to our left, while miles of unspoilt beaches lay on our right. There I could see a few warmly wrapped figures walking in the bracing air from the Atlantic Ocean, while greedy seagulls, in their everlasting quest for food, swooped overhead.
I opened my window to smell the salty air and to hear the crash of the waves as they met the shore. This was the Ireland that I enjoyed, a country that without my past, I could have felt part of.
We drove through tiny hamlets with their small, squat, single-storey houses lining the streets. Instead of the raggedy-dressed children with their red, wind-chapped legs showing above Wellington boots that I remembered from my youth, I saw ones dressed in mini teenage outfits, riding gleaming bicycles or cruising along on skateboards.
Hanging baskets decorated the freshly painted pubs, proclaiming that they were no longer only a male domain.
We arrived at our destination, a small seaside town that boasted not only window boxes and hanging baskets, but blackboards placed on pavements advertising ‘pub grub’. Northern Ireland had moved into the twenty-first century.
We pulled up outside an old grey stone double-fronted Victorian house. Although its austere exterior had not been altered, it had been converted several decades earlier into a smart restaurant.
We entered and stepped back into another time. With its dark wood interior and heavy furniture, it had hardly changed since I had first visited nearly thirty years ago. Then I had been escorted by a boyfriend who had hoped to impress me as he had ushered me in. Unused to such splendour, I had searched the menu looking for a familiar dish to order, then sat in an agony of indecision as I wondered which cutlery to pick up first. Then I’d ordered chicken Kiev and a bottle of Mateus rosé wine, which I’d thought then was the pinnacle of sophistication. Now I was used to expensive restaurants and menus no longer frightened me.
I walked in with confidence and looked about. Regency-striped wallpaper, moss-green carpet and black-and-white clad waiters added to the old-fashioned ambience but those who knew the excellence of the innovative menu were not there in search of metal and glass interiors.
We went up to the receptionist and asked for a table.
‘Certainly, ladies, this way please. I’ll take you to the restaurant,’ she said.
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘could you show us into the bar?’
‘Are you lunching with us?’ the receptionist asked frostily. ‘Would you not be more comfortable