When Daddy Comes Home
Toni Maguire

To Alison Pierce. For thirty years of love and friendship. Through the worst of times and the best of times.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Acknowledgements

Praise

Copyright

About the publisher

Chapter One

‘I’m an adult now, the past is dealt with.’

That was what I told myself as I stood at the desk where my mother had done her household accounts.

The voice of my subconscious mocked me then.

‘The past is never dealt with, Toni. It’s our past that creates us.’

No sooner did those unwanted words flit into my head than my treacherous memories began to slide back to when I was the teenage Antoinette.

Antoinette. Just the name filled me with sadness.

I pushed those thoughts to the back of my mind and opened the desk, the only piece of furniture that remained from the joint home my parents had shared. I found the deeds of the house and put them to one side ready to give to the solicitor. Next came an old leather wallet which, on opening it, I saw contained two hundred pounds in notes of various denominations.

Underneath them, I found letters yellowed by age and three photographs that must have lain there from before my mother’s death. One was of my mother and me when I was just under a year old, one was of my mother’s parents and there was a head-and-shoulder photograph of my grandmother when she was around thirty years old.

The letters aroused my curiosity. They were addressed to my mother in an old-fashioned copperplate hand and opening one, I found a simple love letter written by a young man who was separated from his family by war. He was overjoyed by the birth of their baby girl. He had only seen his daughter once when she was just a few weeks old. He had been back to Ireland on leave granted following her birth and now he was missing his wife and newborn child. The years had faded the ink but I was still able to decipher the words.

My darling, he had written, how much I miss you…As I read on, tears came to my eyes. Love poured off the pages and, for a few seconds, I believed it. He told her how he was in Belgium and, as a mechanic, he was placed at the rear of the advancing army.

No doubt surrounded by beautiful Flemish woman susceptible to his infectious smile and ready laugh, I thought sourly.

His closing sentences were: I think how much Antoinette must have grown. It seems such a long time since I saw her. I count the days till I can hold you both again. Tell her that her daddy loves her and can’t wait to see her again. Give her a big kiss from me.

I looked down at the words written on thin paper all those years ago and grief threatened to overwhelm me – grief for what could have been, and for what should have been. An intense pain flooded my body. I staggered to the nearest chair as strength left me and slumped onto it. My hands rose to my head and gripped both sides of it as though by doing so I could fight the images that were forcing themselves in.

It was as though a projector in my head had sprung into life. A stream of unwanted pictures from the past flooded my mind: I saw Antoinette, the plump toddler, smiling up at her mother with the innocence of babyhood. I saw her just a few years later as the frightened child she had become after her father had taken away the essence of her childhood; he had stolen the innocence, the joy and the wonder and replaced it with nightmares. Sunny days had been denied her. Instead she had lived with fear and walked in grey shadows.

Why, I wondered over thirty years later.

A voice came into my head and spoke sternly to me: ‘Stop looking for the actions of a normal man because he wasn’t one. If you can’t accept now what he was then, you never will accept it.’

I knew the voice spoke the truth. But memories that I had repressed resurfaced, cleared the protective mist from my mind and sent me back in time, to when one nightmare ended and another began.

I saw it as vividly as if it were yesterday: a girl, hardly old enough to be considered a teenager. I felt again her bewilderment, her despair and her feelings of betrayal. I saw her frightened and alone, not understanding why she had to suffer so much. I saw Antoinette, the victim.

Antoinette – the girl who used to be me.

Chapter Two

It was the day of her father’s trial.

Sitting on a hard and uncomfortable bench outside the courtroom, Antoinette waited patiently to be called as the only witness in the case. Flanked on one side by the police sergeant and on the other by his wife, she sat without talking between the only two people who were offering her support.

She knew this was the day she had been dreading. Today her father was to be sentenced for his crime – the crime that would send him to prison. The police had made that very clear to her as they told her that he had pleaded guilty. Because of that, she would not be cross-examined but the court would want to know if she had been a willing participant in what had happened, or a victim of multiple rapes. The social workers had explained those facts to her. She was a week away from her fifteenth birthday – old enough to understand what they told her.

She sat silently, trying to escape her thoughts. She concentrated on remembering the happiest day of her childhood. It had been almost ten years previously, on another birthday in another life, before all the horror began, when her mother had given her a black-and-tan terrier puppy called Judy. She had loved Judy immediately and the little dog returned her affection.

Judy was at home right now, waiting for her. Antoinette tried to conjure up her pet’s face and draw comfort from the one living creature that had always loved her, constantly and unconditionally. But try as she might, the image of the little dog faded, replaced by the memory of the day just after she’d turned six years old, when her father had first molested her.

Before long, he was abusing her three times a week, carefully when she was just a child and with more force as she grew older, though he helped her through it by giving her whiskey to numb her senses. Over the years it went on and she kept quiet, cowed by his violence and his threats that she would be taken away, reviled, disbelieved – blamed.

Then, when she was fourteen years old, she became pregnant. She would never forget the atmosphere of fear that hung over the house as she vomited every morning and her belly grew larger. Eventually, her mother, cold and uncaring, had told her to take herself to the doctor. It was the doctor who had told her she was expecting a baby. When he’d said, ‘You must have had sex with somebody’, she’d replied, ‘Only with my father.’

There was an awful silence before he asked, ‘Were you raped?’

She didn’t even know what rape was. The doctor visited her mother and, between the two of them, they arranged for her to have a private abortion. It was all to be kept deadly quiet, for the sake of the family – but Antoinette had let someone else in to the secret. In her distress, she’d gone to a teacher’s house and told her the truth. The teacher in turn had gone to social services. Then Antoinette and her father were arrested.

She had told the police everything, from that day when she was six and it had all started. She had also told them that her mother did not know about what had happened. She believed this because she needed to.

To an observer, Antoinette looked quite calm and composed as she waited to be called in to give her evidence to the court. She sat silently, alone apart from the police. Her mother had not come that day. She was neatly dressed in a grey skirt and her old school blazer which hung loosely on her slight frame. Her dark brown hair, styled in a page-boy cut, fell to her shoulders. She was an attractive teenager with a woman’s body and a child’s vulnerable face. Her pallor and the dark circles smudged under her eyes showed the sleepless nights she had endured and a slight tremor in her right eye revealed the stress that she was under – apart from that, she was expressionless.

The recent abortion of her father’s child and the subsequent illness that followed had left her weak and exhausted. Shock and depression had given her an artificial calmness that appeared to others to be the composure of a child mature beyond her years.

Her emotions, too, were numb after her recent ordeal and, as she waited to be called, she felt very little. She knew that after the trial she would be going home to a mother who no longer loved her and a town who blamed her for everything she had suffered. Nevertheless, the years had taught her how to separate herself from her emotions and she remained outwardly calm.

Her wait ceased when the door of the courtroom swung open to allow the clerk of the court to walk briskly through. She knew that he had come to fetch her.

‘Antoinette Maguire, the judge has a few questions for you.’ He indicated that she should follow as he turned and walked back into the court.

The police sergeant and his wife smiled their encouragement but Antoinette did not notice. She concentrated on following the black-garbed clerk into the courtroom. Once inside, the silent pressure of the courtroom made her stop walking and, without looking, she could feel her father’s eyes boring into her from the dock. Everything else around her appeared stern and forbidding: the dark sombre gowns of the barristers, the vivid scarlet formal robes of the judge, their wigs and their serious expressions.

She stood in the waiting courtroom, a small figure overwhelmed by her surroundings, with no idea what was expected of her. The formality of the court both bewildered and disoriented her as she waited for instructions. Then she felt someone touch her arm and show her where to stand. In a trance she stepped into the witness box where little more than the top of her head could be seen, as the judge spoke to her, telling her, as the clerk had said, that he had just a few questions to ask her. The clerk gave her the Bible and, in a voice that quivered, she repeated the oath.

‘I promise to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God.’

‘Antoinette,’ said the judge, ‘I just want you to answer a few questions, then you will be free to go. Just answer them to the best of your ability. And remember that you are not on trial here. Can you do that?’

She finally raised her eyes to meet the judge’s, for the tone of his voice when he addressed her made her feel, that in some way, he was on her side. She kept her eyes focused on his. Then she could not see her father. ‘Yes.’

The judge leant over, put his arms on the edge of his bench and looked at her in as kindly a way as he could. ‘Did you at any time tell your mother about what was happening to you?’

‘No.’ She almost believed it to be true, for she had still blocked out the memory of when she had told her. She clenched her fists, digging her nails into the palms. She had thought that all her tears were dried up and she had nothing left to cry with but now they threatened to return. Her eyes prickled and stung but she used all her strength to hold them back. Nothing would let her cry in public and allow these strangers to see her shame.

‘Do you know the facts of life? Do you know how women become pregnant?’

The atmosphere was tense as everyone waited for Antoinette’s answer. She kept her eyes locked on the judge and tried to make the rest of the courtroom disappear as she whispered, ‘Yes.’

She sensed her father watching her and felt the tension in the room increase as the judge asked the final question. She heard the intake of breath when it came.

‘Then surely you must have been scared of becoming pregnant?’ It was a question she had been asked so many times, by social workers and the police and she told him exactly what she’d told them. She replied carefully, ‘He used something. It looked like a balloon and he said that it would stop me having a baby.’

There was a collective sigh as everyone in the court breathed out. She had confirmed what they had all suspected, that Joe Maguire had calculatingly and systematically abused his daughter from the age of six and after she had matured to the point where she had her first period, he had worn condoms.

With Antoinette’s answer, her father’s defence disintegrated. He had tried to claim that his actions were those of a sick man who had been overcome by his impulses. His daughter’s innocent description of a condom, something she did not even know the word for, gave the lie to this. His actions were not impulsive, they were premeditated. Joe Maguire was completely responsible for his actions.

The judge thanked her for her answers and told her she could leave the court. Still keeping her eyes averted to avoid her father’s stare, she walked back alone through the double doors into the waiting area.

She was not present when the judge handed down her father’s sentence. Her father’s solicitor, paid for by her mother, gave Antoinette the details half an hour later.

Joe Maguire had received a four-year prison sentence for a crime he had committed over a period that had spanned seven years. He would walk free in thirty months; one third of the time that Antoinette had suffered.

She felt nothing. For a long time, the only way she had kept her sanity was by not feeling anything at all.

‘Your father wants to see you,’ continued the solicitor. ‘He’s in the holding cells.’

Still trained to obey, she went to see her father. The interview was short. He stared at her arrogantly, still secure in the knowledge that he could control her, and told her to look after her mother. Unable to break the habit of being a good daughter, she said she would. He showed no concern as to who would look after his daughter.

As she left the cells, she was told that the judge wished to see her in his chambers. There, with his wig and scarlet gown removed, he seemed less imposing and more kindly. Seated in the small room, she took comfort from his words.

‘Antoinette, you will find, as I know you already have, that life is not fair. People will blame you, as they already have. But I want you to listen to me very carefully. I’ve seen the police reports. I’ve seen your medical reports. I know exactly what has happened to you, and I’m telling you that none of this was your fault. You have done nothing to be ashamed of.’ He smiled and then walked with her to his door.

She left the court with his words tucked safely into her mind; words that over the years she would take out for comfort, words that helped her face a family and a town who did not share his opinion.

Chapter Three

It was 1961 and Antoinette had just turned sixteen years old.

Two years had passed since her father had been sentenced to prison for what the papers called ‘a serious offence against a minor’. The trial had been held in camera in order to protect her identity but that hadn’t mattered – the details were an open secret and everyone in Coleraine knew what had happened. They knew, and they blamed Antoinette. She had been a willing party, they whispered, or why had she kept quiet for so long? It was only when she got pregnant that she cried rape, and brought this terrible disgrace on her father’s family.

Antoinette was expelled from school. Her father’s family told her never to visit them again. The town shut its doors on her and shunned her wherever she went.

Ruth, Antoinette’s mother, had been desperate to escape the disgrace of her husband’s crime and prison sentence, and she wanted to get away as soon as she could from the gossip and whispers in the town. Nothing could have persuaded her to remain. The family house was hurriedly sold, as was Joe’s black Jaguar car, but even after both sales had gone through, she had been left very short of money.

Undeterred, she moved herself and Antoinette from Coleraine to the poor district of the Shankhill Road in Belfast, and a small rented house. Antoinette, relieved that they had left Coleraine but with her dreams of an education in tatters, took jobs as an au pair so that she could help to contribute financially while Ruth got a position as the manageress of a coffee shop in the city.

But the fear pursued her. The terrible feelings of rejection by everyone she cared about would not release their grip on her. She felt lonely, unloved and worthless. The only solution, she thought, was to leave the world she no longer felt wanted by. It was then that Antoinette took pills, washed them down with whiskey and cut her wrists fifteen times with a razor. She survived, just, and spent three months in a mental hospital on the outskirts of Belfast. Because she was only fifteen, she was spared electric shock treatment and sedatives. Instead, intensive therapy helped to lift her depression and eventually she was well enough to leave and resume her life.

Ruth had managed to buy a home for them while Antoinette was ill, and it was to this new place that she went, feeling that perhaps her life might be about to improve for the first time in many years.

The gate lodge was a pretty Victorian building standing on the edge of the town. It had small, cramped rooms cluttered with cheap, shabby furniture; the plaster on the walls was old and lumpy and cracks of age ran across the window frames and marked the skirting boards. Curtains with large flowery prints designed for larger windows had been shortened and hung in ungainly folds half way down the walls while the clashing floral carpets were faded and threadbare.

‘Here we are then, Antoinette,’ said Ruth, as they went in for the first time. ‘This is our new home. A room for you and a room for me. What do you think?’

From the first moment she went into the old house, Antoinette began to feel safe. She didn’t know why this place should be where she began to leave the past behind, but it was. Here, the fear she had lived with for eight years, that had stalked her waking hours and invaded her dreams gradually diminished. Antoinette felt that the lodge was her nest, somewhere where she was protected from the world.

Together, she and her mother began to turn the place into their home. Bonded by their desire to create something homely and welcoming, they covered the bumpy old plaster with two coats of fresh paint, applied with amateurish enthusiasm. They made the tired old sitting room into a pretty individual room filled with books and ornaments. Ruth’s collection of Staffordshire dogs were placed in one corner while willow-patterned plates were displayed on a scratched oak sideboard, alongside the little knick-knacks and pieces that Antoinette and her mother bought from Smithfield market in the centre of Belfast. It was there, among the stalls selling bric-a-brac and second-hand furniture, that they found their best bargains.

It was on one of those days when they went out exploring the market that Antoinette discovered a green wing armchair priced at two pounds. Full of excitement, she called her mother over to see it and together they quickly made the purchase. At home, it became Antoinette’s favourite chair. She loved the soft velvet that covered it and the wings on the back that protected her from draughts.

As the weeks passed and they settled into their new home, the closeness with her mother that Antoinette had craved since she was six returned and the trust that she’d once had began to grow again. She cherished it so much that she never asked herself why everything that had gone before had happened; she firmly locked away the memories of how her mother had once been and refused to ask herself the questions that had haunted her. Instead, she looked to the future. At last she was in a place where she felt safe, and at last her relationship with her mother was beginning to blossom. She discovered that the satisfaction of being free to love far outweighed the happiness of receiving it. Like a flower in the sunshine, she began to bloom.

Ruth got Antoinette a job as a waitress in the coffee shop where she was the manageress. The work was not difficult and Antoinette enjoyed it. In the evenings, after they got home from work, she and her mother would eagerly scan the newspaper and choose from the two available channels a programme they both wanted to see. With their supper on a tray, they sat engrossed in old black-and-white films or quiz shows, kept warm by the coal fire burning away in the grate. The television was Antoinette’s pride and joy – it was the only piece of furniture that had been bought new and she had saved the money to purchase it herself.

At the end of the evening, Antoinette would fill the hot-water bottles and carry them up the steep narrow staircase that led from the living room to a tiny square landing. On opposite sides of it, separated only by a few feet, were their unheated bedrooms with their sloping ceilings and ill-fitting windows. She would wrap each pink rubber bottle in a pair of pyjamas and tuck them into the cold beds to create a welcome patch of warmth for later.

Then, back downstairs, a final cup of hot chocolate would be drunk companionably before Ruth would depart, leaving Antoinette to tidy up. Her last job was to damp down the fire with coal rubble and tea leaves so that in the morning, once prodded by the cast-iron poker that stood with its matching shovel and brush in the stand beside it, there would be a welcoming glow.

Antoinette would rise first in the morning and go downstairs for a quick sponge wash, taken hurriedly at the kitchen sink. The steam from the kettle would mingle with the mist of her breath as she boiled water for their morning tea. Once a week, a paraffin stove was lit. It gave off obnoxious fumes as well as a faint heat; while it warmed up, Antoinette dragged an old tin bath out and then filled it with saucepanfuls of boiling water. She would bath quickly and wash her hair, as the kitchen heated up; then, wrapped in a flannel dressing gown, she would clean the bath and refill it for her mother. Clothes were still washed by hand and hung on a line suspended between two metal poles in the small back garden. While still damp, they were aired in front of the fire causing steam to rise as the smell of drying washing filled the room.

On Sundays, when the coffee shop was shut, Antoinette would cook breakfast and she and her mother would share it together while Judy, now an old dog whose rheumatism was beginning to slow her down, would sit at Antoinette’s side, her eyes following their every movement hoping that both mother and daughter were going to stay at home and not leave her. On the days that Ruth and her daughter left for work together she would follow them to the door, a look of abject misery which the years had perfected on her face.

It was a quiet life, but a comforting and healing one, as the great fissure that had once existed between Antoinette and her mother gradually began to close. The one thing they never talked about was what would happen on that distant day when her father was released. In fact, Ruth never spoke about her husband at all and there was never a letter from him in the house – not for Ruth the indignity of a letter marked with a prison stamp – and never one written to him, as far as Antoinette saw.

Her father’s eventual release was a dark shadow on the horizon but that time was far off yet. There was no need to think of it now. Antoinette lived in blissful ignorance of Ruth’s future plans. It was just the two of them now.

Eighteen months after they moved to the gate lodge, Antoinette resolved to do something about the ambitions that she had quietly been nurturing inside her. Although she liked her job at the coffee shop, she wanted more for herself than a life as a waitress, and she wanted to make her mother proud. But the problem was that prospective employers would be put off by the fact she had left school at sixteen with no qualifications. Without proof of her education, there was no way she could begin to better herself. But Antoinette had worked out a way to get around that. By going to a secretarial college, she would not only get a formal qualification but also a certificate that stated she had left school at eighteen, giving her those precious two extra years. All she needed was the money to pay the fees and she was already planning how that could be done.

She had heard that lots of Irish girls went over to England or Wales during the summer to work in the holiday camps. The pay was good and the tips were lucrative, she was told. It would be a quick and relatively easy way to earn the money she would need to put herself through college, and the coffee shop would let her take some time off to work elsewhere and then take her back when she returned. Belfast was always full of students looking for temporary work, so it wouldn’t be hard to find someone to take her place for a while.

It felt wonderful to have a goal to work towards. When Antoinette explained her plan to the owner of the coffee shop, it seemed that fate was on her side. He had a relative who owned a hotel on the Isle of Man and who was always looking for staff. Why didn’t she go out there over Easter and earn some good money as a combination of waitress and chamber maid? It seemed too good an opportunity to pass up and so within a fortnight Antoinette was on her way to the Isle of Man on the ferry.

It was not quite the enjoyable experience she had anticipated. The girls were treated as little more than glorified dogsbodies, kept on the run from the early hours of the morning till late at night. Antoinette found it exhausting and not as well paid as she had been led to expect. But with few opportunities and even less time for spending her money, her savings mounted up and she decided to come home a few days earlier than she’d originally planned and spend some time relaxing at the lodge before going back to work.

Excited to be returning home, she hurried back from the docks to Lisburn as fast as she could, wishing the taxi could go at twice the speed. But when she let herself into the lodge and dashed into the sitting room, her arms full of presents for her mother, she came to an abrupt halt, startled by the sight that she least wanted to see in the world.

‘Hello. How’s my wee girl?’

It was her father, sitting in the green wing armchair, smiling at her smugly, while her mother sat at his feet, her face alight with happiness.

Chapter Four

Antoinette lay in bed, unwilling to get up, trying to tell herself that the night before had just been a bad dream. But she knew it was real, hard though it was to accept it. She was incredulous – how could her mother have done such a thing? It was as extraordinary as it was cruel.

Unable to delay any longer, she pushed back the bedclothes, swung her legs to the floor and started to dress. Her whole body drooped as she pulled on clothes that had not changed in style since she had received her first pay packet. Her entire wardrobe consisted of pleated skirts and high-necked jumpers in muted hues; bland clothes that her mother liked. They were the uniform of a middle-class girl whose one wish was to conform and not to stand out from the crowd.

Antoinette waited in her bedroom until she heard her mother leave for work; she had no desire to confront her that morning and, besides, the hurt and anger were so great she hardly knew if she would be able to speak. Then Ruth called out, as she did every morning, ‘I’m off to work now, darling. See you this evening!’ Her voice was more cheerful than usual, no doubt because of her husband’s weekend visit.

When she had heard the door slam behind her mother, Antoinette went downstairs. Judy was waiting at the foot of them and, as she had done so many times in the past, she sat on the floor and put her arms round the old dog’s neck, resting her face against the warmth of the fur for comfort. Judy, sensing her despair, licked her face as though trying to offer consolation while Antoinette felt the tears come to her eyes then trickle silently down her cheeks.

She went into the living room. Her nostrils filled with the scent of an enemy – an enemy she had thought she would never have to face again. Like a small animal sensing danger, she stiffened.

She could smell him even in an empty room.

She knew then that she had not dreamt the events of the previous night. When she had seen her father sitting there, she’d been unable to speak. Instead, she’d fled the room, dropping her parcels, and taken sanctuary in her bedroom. There she had stayed until he had left, trying to understand what had happened and almost unable to believe her eyes. She had thought that she and her mother had started a new life together but now it seemed that Ruth had just been marking time until she could restart the old one. Antoinette had just been her companion while she waited.

Her father had left hours ago to return to prison when his weekend pass had expired yet that odour she remembered, of cigarettes and hair oil mingled with the faint smell of stale sweat, contaminated the room. Her eyes alighted on the ashtrays overflowing with the crumbled remains of her father’s rolled-up cigarettes; here was the physical proof of his visit. She opened the windows, took the ashtray with its cigarette butts and emptied it, but his smell still lingered, unleashing unwanted memories.

Now she had to face up to the fact that her father’s weekend pass, granted after he had served two years of his four-year sentence, had brought him straight to his wife, who had clearly been delighted to have him back. From what she had seen, Antoinette knew that the visit had not just been tolerated by Ruth – it had been warmly welcomed.

Her father had been in her home, he’d tarnished it. She felt as though she had suddenly stepped into quicksand and, struggle as she might, she was being sucked down, back to the past, back into that dark place she had been in for so many years. She tried to hold on to the fragile strands of the safety she’d known in the gate lodge, tried to push away the memory of the previous night and draw comfort from her familiar surroundings.

But, through the numbness of shock and disbelief, another emotion was breaking through. The realization of her mother’s total betrayal started to fuel her anger, and gradually it consumed her.

‘How could my mother still care for a man who has committed such a heinous crime? She knows what he did to me, her own daughter. How can she still love him?’ she asked herself repeatedly, as she paced about the room. ‘And if she has been able to forgive him, then what can she really feel for me? Has it all been a lie?’

Our hearts might belong to us but we have very little control over where they go and Antoinette was no different; one moment, she wanted to hate her mother and the next, she longed to be comforted by her and have her love returned.

But she couldn’t accept the answers to the questions she asked herself. She felt ill at the thought that just a few feet away from her bedroom, her parents had shared a bed again.

Had they had sex, she wondered. The idea that Ruth might have done willingly what she had been forced to do made her shudder. And worst of all, she knew that if her mother was willing to have her father back in the house even for a moment, it meant that in a few months’ time, when he was released, she would welcome him back for good into the home she shared with Antoinette.

The sense of security which she thought she had found disappeared; the bottom fell out of her world and she felt herself falling into an abyss of unbelieving despair. That morning the feelings of betrayal became firmly fixed in her mind and no amount of will-power could make them disappear ever again.

Chapter Five

During the weeks after her father’s return to prison, a barrier of distrust replaced the warmth of friendship between Ruth and her daughter. There was an invisible wall between them, this time constructed by Antoinette. The betrayal she had felt when she saw her father sitting in their living room was too much for her to overcome and she wanted to get out and run away as far as she could, but she knew that was not an option open to her.

Now that she had amassed some savings to put towards her dream of secretarial college, Antoinette still wanted to follow her plan of working away for the summer despite her experience on the Isle of Man. Hundreds of Irish girls would leave their homes to work the summer season at the holiday camps, hotels and guest houses of the mainland. With accommodation and all meals provided, along with high wages and good tips from happy holidaymakers, they could return with a substantial sum of money.

She’d already got a job at Butlins lined up for the summer season and her father’s date of permanent release, eighteen months earlier than the sentence handed down, was due before her departure. Could she bear staying at home after he had joined them there?

Up until now, she had not wanted to leave her mother, but faced with her perfidy and the prospect of having to share a house with her father, she longed to go. But if she left before she had earned enough money, she would use up her savings and have to say goodbye to funding further education. Without those all-important secretarial qualifications, she knew she was looking at a future of waitressing or shop work.

‘What choice do I have?’ she asked herself. She would be homeless. Nobody would rent a room to a girl who was under eighteen, even if she could have earned enough to support herself.

The money she could earn at the camp, though, added to what she had already saved, would pay for the secretarial course she so desperately wanted to take. With qualifications, she would be free to leave home, get her own flat in Belfast and be independent of her parents.

I’m frightened for my future, she told herself. I’ve seen too many middle-aged women trying to scrape a living by working long hours in second-rate restaurants, while the younger girls are given plenty of work at the better places where tips are high. Her jumbled thoughts scuttled around in her brain until she saw she had no option but to stay.

Every Saturday morning since Antoinette had lived at the gate lodge, she had seen the billowing white furls of the dance marquee being erected in an enterprising local farmer’s fields. On a Saturday night, she had heard the beat of a band as the music floated in the evening air. She would lean out of her bedroom window as far as she could, straining to hear more while she looked longingly at the huge tent. Lit up by the many lights inside, it glowed against the dark of the sky, looking for all the world like a giant illuminated marshmallow.

She knew that in there, young people entered their own world where they had their own music, wore their own fashions and had fun. As she craned out of her bedroom window, she remembered what her mother had to say on the subject.

‘Nice girls don’t go to such places, dear. If a boy wants to take you out then he comes to the house and collects you properly. You certainly don’t go looking for him in there.’ Ruth would always add her strange humourless laugh to her pronouncement and smile her bright, empty smile.

Whenever her mother said this to her, Antoinette always replied obediently, ‘No, Mummy’, and was content to stay in with her mother, spending the evening pleasing Ruth by keeping her company.

Thing had changed now, though. Now she wanted to be part of that world she could see through her bedroom window. She wanted to go to the marquee. Weekends were going to become party time for her; she was going to mix with other teens and live as they did. She was certain that other girls’ lives were not centred on their mothers but on fashion, makeup and weekend dances, and she wanted the same.

Antoinette looked at herself in the mirror, giving her reflection a cool, appraising look. She knew she was different. Even apart from her English accent, her clothes were old-fashioned and her dark brown hair, falling almost to her shoulders in a page-boy cut, was more suitable to a fourteen-year-old than a girl of seventeen. It was all down to Ruth’s influence.

Not any more, thought Antoinette wistfully. I want to be like other girls. I’m going to be fashionable.

She thought of the groups of happy, confident young people she often served at the coffee bar when she worked the evening shift. The boys with their neatly cut hair, dressed in jackets and well-pressed trousers, might look like younger versions of their fathers but the girls had created their own style, one that looked as though it had very little to do with their mothers. Their hair was teased into the new fashionable beehive, and their faces were coated in a pale pan stick that contrasted harshly with their black-lined eyes which peered out at the world through thickly mascaraed lashes.

Antoinette’s skin saw only a flick of powder, her lips wore a natural pink lipstick and her eyes were only enhanced by one coat of mascara. This set her apart from her contemporaries almost as much as her clothes did.

I’ll start at once, she decided.

The glamorous, swinging sixties had begun and with them came a new affluence. Blue-collar workers became part of the middle classes and housing estates sprung up everywhere, offering young couples the chance to own their box-like house, identical to all the others nearby. Cars were parked outside every house, television aerials decorated every roof and the words ‘hire purchase’ replaced ‘debt’. This was a boom time, and it brought with it a new youth culture that Antoinette longed to be a part of. Teenagers had found an assurance their parents had never known, and in their leisure time they danced to the new rock ‘n’ roll, went to cafés, drank cappuccinos and talked confidently together. They refused to be younger versions of their parents and instead invented their own fashions and attitudes.

These were the people Antoinette wanted to mix with and to do so she knew she would have to change. She could do little about her English accent but she could certainly change her appearance.

A very different Antoinette began to emerge. She bought tight dresses and hid them at the back of her wardrobe, along with stiletto-heeled shoes and new underwear. A hairdresser recommended by one of her youthful customers worked his magic and made the neatly cut dark brown hair disappear. In its place was a back-combed beehive. Plucked eyebrows now accented eyes that had grown harder, and a loss of appetite turned her once-plump shape into a more fashionable slim one.

Ruth watched the transformation, puzzled and displeased. She was used to unquestioning obedience from a child that had always sought approval, and she was taken by surprise by this sudden rebellion. While she did nothing to stop it, she fought back subtly, using her skill with words to manipulate her daughter and provoke the reaction she wanted. She used words full of hurt and bewildered anger for her emotional blackmail.

‘I don’t know why you want to make me unhappy. Don’t you think I’ve suffered enough?’ she would say plaintively.

But Antoinette refused to listen.

As the new, fashionable Antoinette took shape, she found that the girls who frequented the coffee shop now chatted to her. Her new friends’ main interests were make-up, teenage fashion and how to get a boyfriend, and these interests took up most of their mental energy. Antoinette was grateful for this, as it left them with little curiosity about Antoinette’s home life, so she didn’t need to use the false one she had created: a happy home, a loving mother and a father who worked away.

The weekend when Antoinette decided she was going to complete her transformation arrived. The process took hours. First, a bright orange dye was washed through her hair and then she set about drying it and teasing it into that fashionable shape so loved by teenage girls and despaired of by their parents: it rose high above her hair, stiffened into place with a generous squirting of lacquer. It was so thickly coated that a comb could hardly penetrate it.

Then, her face. She took a pan stick and covered her skin with it so that she was strangely pale. She ringed her eyes so heavily in black liner that they appeared to have shrunk in size. Then she took up the latest addition to her fast-growing make up collection: a small plastic box complete with mirror containing a cake of black mascara. Generous gobbets of spit turned the black cake into a gooey mess which she carefully applied to her lashes. After each coat, she added another until the thickened lashes nearly weighed down the lids. Finally, the natural colour of her mouth was obliterated by the palest of gleaming pink lipstick studiously applied to puckered lips as she practised pouting in front of the mirror.

She looked at her reflection, pleased with what she saw. She pursed her lips and smiled. Much to her satisfaction, the mirror showed no sign of the shy studious teenager her mother knew, nor of the old-fashioned girl that worked at the coffee bar. No, this was a modern girl, one who shared the assurance of the people she admired.

She felt as though she had emerged from a cocoon, and had shed the safe skin of ‘obedient daughter’. Deep down, she still lacked the confidence to be completely sure of the outcome of her metamorphosis but she tried to put that out of her mind.

Instead, she welcomed her new image. She pouted at the girl in the mirror.

‘Goodbye, Antoinette,’ she said. ‘Hello, Toni.’

Her new self was born and she was a girl ready to party on a Saturday night.

Chapter Six

Now that Antoinette looked the part, the girls she’d met at the coffee bar invited her to share Saturday evenings with them. They would meet in groups and descend in a pack on the local dance venues, spending the evening dancing, giggling and flirting with the boys.

At last, Antoinette felt herself accepted. More than anything else, she wanted friends and the companionship of other young people. She needed desperately to be part of a group, to giggle companionably with them and to have what she had been missing her entire life: fun.

One Saturday morning, she excitedly watched the beginning of the conversion of the nearby field from muddy site into a magic place. At last she was finally going to enter that secret world, the one where teenagers dressed in the height of fashion, danced the night away, passed cigarettes around to appear sophisticated and drank smuggled-in alcohol. She couldn’t wait.

She watched as coils of electric cables were run from large, noisy, diesel-fuelled generators to provide the sparkling lights that shone on the dancers. She saw a huge glitter ball, something she had only seen before on television, being carried into the tent.

Sections of wooden floors to be laid over the damp earth were taken in and then, once that was in place, the furniture followed. A small army of helpers carried in folding tables and an assortment of chairs was placed in groups around the hastily erected wooden dance floor. She had been told that there would be a bar inside, but that it only offered soft drinks. Anything stronger had to be smuggled in but that wasn’t difficult. Customers with bulging pockets were given a cursory search by good-natured security guards as they looked for forbidden alcohol they seldom found. The walls of the marquee were easily raised and small bottles full of spirits slid under its folds to the eager hands of their co-conspirators.

Antoinette liked drinking. Ever since her father had first introduced her to the intoxication of spirits, she had enjoyed the sensation of numbness and relaxation that alcohol brought. While most teenagers were just discovering how to drink, Antoinette was a practised hand. Even now she liked to keep a bottle in her room so that she could take fortifying sips when she needed them. As soon as she had looked old enough, she had been able to buy it herself from off-licences, pretending it was for her mother.

At the moment, Antoinette had a small bottle of vodka, her chosen spirit, hidden in her room, in the belief that her breath would not be tainted by its smell. She did not know how easily available spirits were at the dances, so she decided to have some before she left, and poured herself a generous helping.

Fuelled by a double-vodka-induced confidence, she put on her American tan stockings, pinning them to her pink suspender belt. Then she slithered into a dress so tight that it nearly bound her knees together and forced her feet into high white stilettos. She teased her hair as high as it would go, then sprayed it with a coloured lacquer, turning it into a bright orange halo. As she applied her make-up, her face lost its glow and became deadly pale. Two black-rimmed eyes, more panda than doe-like, looked into the mirror one more time and she was delighted with what she saw. Now she was ready to hobble the short distance from the gate lodge to the marquee.

As she went downstairs and into the sitting room, Antoinette gave scant thought to what her mother’s reaction would be when she was face to face with her daughter’s transformation. But she heard the shocked intake of breath as she entered, and quickly averted her eyes from Ruth’s horrified face as she made her way towards the front door. She didn’t care what her mother thought. At last she was going to swing her tightly encased hips on the dance floor and that evening that was all that mattered to her.

For once Ruth was speechless and before she could regain her voice, Antoinette made her hasty exit.

‘I’m off now!’ she called unnecessarily as she closed the door firmly behind her.

A pack of girls, all dressed in similar attire to Antoinette, was waiting for her in the queue that had already formed outside the marquee. Once admitted, they made their way to the ladies’ toilets where, giggling and chattering, they preened in front of the mirrors. Handbags snapped open for the teenage ritual of repairing make-up. They did not give a thought to the fact that a ten-minute walk from their homes to the tent was hardly likely to have disturbed their hours of work. Hair was once again tweaked and teased then sprayed liberally, filling the air with a cloud of cheap perfume. The tail end of a comb was inserted into the construction, lifting it even higher, and only then were they satisfied there was nothing more that could be done to it.

The girls carefully inspected their faces to make sure that enough make-up had been applied to mask their young complexions, and slicked on another coating of lipstick. Then, once content with the apparition in the mirror, the girls turned their attention to pinning, helping each other insert strategically placed safety pins into the long zipper of their dresses.

‘Come on,’ said one pert blue-eyed blonde to Antoinette. ‘I’ll fix you. Where are your pins?’

‘I’ve not got any,’ she replied. ‘What are they for?’

There was a peal of girlish laughter at her naivety.

‘Well, if you don’t want to end up with your dress down to your waist, you have to pin. The boys will have been drinking at the pub and you know what that does,’ said the girl, and she exchanged knowing smiles with her more experienced friends.

Until that moment, Antoinette had been completely unaware that zippers presented such irresistible temptation to the youths at the dance hall. She had only thought as far ahead as dancing and hadn’t given any consideration to what the boys might expect. She gulped as a picture came into her mind of a horde of drunken youths with sweaty hands and ‘one thing only on their minds’.

Sally, the blonde-haired girl who was the oldest in the group, saw the look of fear that had crossed her new friend’s face.

‘Don’t look so scared,’ she said, trying to reassure her. ‘Most of the boys are just here for the crack. Oh, they won’t say no to a chance but you’ll be all right. Anyhow those pins put them off and stop their sweaty hands from climbing. I’ll lend you a couple.’

Antoinette obediently turned round and Sally carefully inserted the safety pins on the inside of her dress, placing them along the zipper until the last one was pinned at the top of the dress. Once their dresses tugged back into shape, the girls made their way into the main part of the marquee where the band was already playing a fast number.

Antoinette found her feet were tapping to the music and felt her nervousness evaporate as she saw groups of youngsters all around her sitting, chatting or swinging their bodies on the dance floor.

The girls bought soft drinks and then talked nineteen to the dozen to each other while their eyes scanned every male present. The group took their seats. Boys dressed in sports jackets and trousers with firmly pressed centre creases walked in front of them before approaching to ask for a dance. When they were asked, the girls would look up, smile an acceptance and then, holding their dance partner’s hand, allow him to lead her on to the dance floor.

Suddenly, Antoinette heard a voice ask, ‘Would you like to dance?’

Looking up, she saw the smiling round face of a boy not much older than she was. She took his outstretched hand and did as she had seen her friends do, following him to the floor. She tried to remember the steps she had practised at home; then the rhythm of the band took over and she felt herself being swung into a jive.

It was a wonderful feeling and she was so happy that she remembered the moves of the new dances which she had only tried before in front of the mirror, with Judy as her only audience.

After the first dance, her partner requested a second and then a third. Then the band took a break and, buoyed up with confidence after her dances, she thanked her partner and rejoined her friends. Their group was a popular one, for they were vivacious girls out for a night of fun and their heavy make-up had not succeeded in masking their natural prettiness. Dance after dance was asked for, smuggled vodka spiked their drinks and Antoinette felt her confidence grow as, with flushed cheeks, she swung in time to the beat of the band.

Her first dance partner reclaimed her for the final dance. As the lights were dimmed, the slow music of the last waltz was the only sound she could hear. Alcohol made her body relax and she gave herself up to the pleasurable feel of being held, laying her head against his shoulder as they circled the floor. She raised her head while the music still played and felt a damp cheek with its light fuzz pressing against hers. Hands climbed uncertainly above her waist until they rested only a fraction below her breasts. Antoinette instinctively arched her back to avoid body contact. She removed one hand from around his shoulders as she covered his hand lightly, smiling as she gave a slight shake of her head. With that, she established that she liked him but was not easy.

She knew that if she wanted to be accepted by her group of new friends, she had to learn the games played by the sexes and the unspoken codes they communicated with.

Her dance partner was not ready to recognize defeat. Even with her hand still keeping his in place, he lowered his face to hers and she felt his lips searching for her mouth while the other hand tried in vain to mould her body to his.

Antoinette threw back her head, looked him in the eye and gave a light laugh while her body tensed against his manoeuvres. Seeing that she was a nice girl even if her appearance belied that fact, he slackened his hold and smiled back sheepishly. Boys of that age, as she was to learn, dreamt about finding easy girls but they very seldom succeeded.

Then the band played the last notes and the lights came on again. Happy and tired, Antoinette said goodbye to her girlfriends and returned home, the smell of cigarettes still clinging to her hair and the tang of alcohol still on her breath.

The smell lingered until the following morning when she came down to find her mother sitting in her armchair, waiting for her. She saw the look of disapproval on her mother’s face as she recognized the familiar odour of stale alcohol and tobacco.

‘Well, did you enjoy yourself last night?’ asked Ruth, in tones that said she hoped for the contrary.

Her daughter, still wrapped in the glow of happiness from her first dance, refused to rise to the bait. ‘Yes, thank you, Mummy,’ she replied calmly.

‘You know you looked a complete spectacle last night. Of course I can’t stop you spending your money on what you like. But you’re never to come out with me like that. I don’t want to be embarrassed.’ Ruth stood up and went to leave the room, but before she did, she delivered her parting shot. ‘I don’t know what your father will say about all this when he gets home.’

Too dazed by what she’d heard even to gasp, Antoinette stood staring after her mother. The pleasure from the night before drained away, replaced by a seed of panic. She never thought she would hear her mother say such a thing to her and it terrified her.

Over the next few weeks, the seed would take root, spreading until it invaded her dreams, making her nights restless as the panic rose, threatening to suffocate her.

Chapter Seven

Antoinette was soon going to dance halls every week. Soon, when she returned from the dances, another smell lingered on her breath: the smell of vomit. She had become unable to say no to another drink, even when the room was spinning and her stomach churned with nausea.

It became a familiar routine. As soon as she had hurriedly left the dance hall or marquee, the cold night air would hit her full face on but she had consumed too much alcohol for it to sober her. Instead, waves of queasiness would rise in her throat, making her gag. Holding a handkerchief to her mouth she would stagger to the shelter of the shadows cast by parked cars, hoping that she was hidden from view. Then, placing one hand on the boot of the nearest vehicle, she would try to keep her balance whilst, with eyes streaming, she would bend almost double as her body heaved with the effort of rejecting the alcohol. Hot bile would spurt out of her mouth, burning her throat as it did so until she felt there was nothing left inside her.

Then depression, the natural successor of alcohol-fuelled elation, would always swamp her as she wiped her mouth with a scrap of handkerchief, straightened up and resumed her wobbly walk home.

Her experience of alcohol when she was younger had shown her that it could help to dull mental anguish as well as physical pain. But she did not realize that she had crossed the narrow boundary that lay between a drink-fuelled party girl and an alcohol-dependent teenager. Even if she had realized that she had a problem, she would not have cared. All she knew was that with each sip she took, the better she felt: her fear receded, her misery disappeared and her confidence grew. She could tell stories that made people laugh, feel she was accepted as part of a group and, once in bed, escape her thoughts in a drink-induced stupor.

But there was a price to pay. On Sunday mornings, she wakened reluctantly, unwilling to face the results of the previous night’s excesses. Her head pounded. From behind her eyes and across her head, waves of pain shot into her skull. Her tongue felt swollen, her throat dry, and all she wanted to do was stay under the bedclothes for the remainder of the day. But she refused to give her mother satisfaction by giving in to her self-inflicted misery; she knew that Ruth already thought she had enough reason to complain about her daughter’s behaviour without Antoinette giving her fresh ammunition.

Instead, she tried to recall the night before. She would see the dance hall where groups of girls sat chattering and giggling as they studiously avoided the looks from groups of boys walking around them. Antoinette was beginning to understand how the game worked now. This was a competition between Antoinette and her friends of who could look the most nonchalant and the prize was to be asked to dance by the boy they’d already selected. As he approached, a blank look would replace the animated expression shown to her friends and coolly, almost reluctantly, she would accept his invitation to dance with a stiff nod of her beehived head.

Both sexes knew what they wanted: the girl wanted to be pursued and courted and then to win a steady boyfriend. The boy wanted to show his friends he could have any girl he wanted.

But for all their bravado, the boys knew the rules. They might try to get further but there was no surprise when they couldn’t. They knew that a passionate kiss in the back of a car and a quick fumble would only lead to a soft but firm hand holding him back. In the early sixties, before the birth pill had led a sexual revolution, a pregnancy would result in either marriage or disgrace; both sexes knew that, and for different reasons, wanted to avoid them.

Antoinette, though, was playing a different game. She wanted vodka. She longed for her world to blur; she embraced the dizziness, then ran her wrists under the cold tap and splashed water on her pulse points to steady herself before looking for a refill. She smiled sweetly at the nearest boy whom she knew had a smuggled bottle. Mistaking her motives, he would hastily top up her glass and when she knew that no more would be forthcoming unless she parted with more than a smile, she would drain the glass and make a rapid departure.

Not for Antoinette a hasty grope in the back of a car, or the struggle to maintain her modesty as some youth, looking for a return on the free drinks he had given, tried to hoist her skirt up. She had no interest in that particular barter system and always made her escape before it could begin. Her friends were too young to be aware that drink not boys had become her obsession. But Ruth knew only too well.

It was drink that stopped her facing the fact that everything between them had changed. The trust and friendship that was so important to her had now slid away. Ruth had finally shown her plans to her daughter and Antoinette felt that any chance of survival was to exorcise that love that still remained.

Antoinette knew that her mother had begun to see her daughter as a problem, just as she had during those terrible years when she had refused to acknowledge what was happening. Now, as Antoinette slipped away from her control, Ruth obviously thought of her daughter as yet another burden she had to bear in a life strewn with unfulfilled expectations. Antoinette sensed that Ruth had begun to believe that her daughter was the cause of her problems.

Now she had made it clear that she would welcome her husband back into their home as though nothing had ever happened, she began to undermine Antoinette as much as she could, bullying her with subtle and skilful manipulation until she forced her daughter to accept the situation.

Ruth wanted control and she knew very well the words that would always make her daughter dance to her tune.

‘You are such a worry to me, dear,’ she would begin. ‘I can’t get to sleep until you come home. That’s why I’m so tired in the mornings. Do you really want to worry me so?’

When she tired of making Antoinette feel guilty, there were her attacks – ‘You’re such a disappointment to me’ – and her accusations – ‘I don’t know who you’re with or what you and your friends get up to at those places but I know what you smell like when you come home.’

Antoinette tried to ignore her as she defiantly watched Juke Box Jury and, with a mirror propped in front of the television, applied make-up ready for another big night out. Then Ruth would play her ace.

‘You know I love you.’

Antoinette longed for it to be true; underneath the anger she felt at her mother’s betrayal, she still loved her and craved to be loved in return. Over the weeks that fell between that visit and her father’s release, she tried to shut out the sound of her mother’s voice as Ruth tried to seek her compliance in rewriting history. Her mother jerked the strings harder over the next few weeks until obedience, that integral habit of her daughter’s childhood, started to win out. She demanded that Antoinette play the game of happy families, that she pretend that she was looking forward to her father’s return and that nothing had ever happened that might make the very idea monstrous to her.

‘Daddy will be home soon, dear,’ Ruth would say to her daughter, her voice happy and untroubled, as though she expected nothing less than a delighted response.

Antoinette would feel her stomach clench, her fists tighten and the fear rise, but she said nothing.

Ruth would say in sharp tones that forbade any argument, ‘I want you to try not to upset him, dear.’ Then add in the patient voice of the martyr she seemed to believe she was, ‘I’ve suffered enough! Nobody knows how much I’ve suffered. I can’t take any more.’

Antoinette believed in her mother’s suffering – she had heard that refrain ‘I’ve suffered enough!’ so often that she had to – but she didn’t see it in her mother’s eyes. Instead, she saw in Ruth anger at being thwarted, coldness and an implacable need to cling on to her own version of reality.

The day her father was expected home loomed on the horizon. For years, she had tried to block the date of his release from her mind but now it was impossible. The image of his face and the derisory tone of his voice haunted her sober hours – hours that were becoming fewer and fewer.

The week before his arrival Ruth triumphantly produced a packet containing a brown hair rinse.

‘That red beehive has to go. If you want to do your hair like that when you are with your friends I can’t stop you, but while you live here you are going to leave the house looking decent,’ she told her daughter firmly.

Antoinette knew better than to protest. Having her mother furious with her a few days before her father was due home was not, she knew, a good idea. Sighing, she took the rinse, brushed her hair until it was straight and then applied the dye. One hour later, when she had given her hair its final rinse, then towel-dried it vigorously in front of the fire, she looked in the mirror and was faced with the reflection of a drab Antoinette. Of Toni, who, with all her mistakes, had courage, there was no sign. In her place was a frightened teenager that looked like the victim she had once been.

Her mother had won – she had destroyed the confidence that Antoinette had managed to build up since her father had vanished from their lives. And now, as his return loomed, she felt more than ever that she was being sent back to the place she had started out from.

Her mother looked at the new hair colour. ‘Very nice, dear,’ was her only comment, said without warmth. It was not meant as a compliment.

The night before her father was due to arrive an uneasy silence hung between Antoinette and her mother. Antoinette just wanted to escape to her room and block the thoughts of her father and his arrival from her mind, while Ruth was determined that the charade of a happy family would be played out in full.

When her mother was silent, Antoinette knew that it was only the prelude of worse to come and as the evening wore on, her nervousness increased.

‘Well, I think I’ll go to bed now,’ she said eventually. ‘I’m feeling very tired tonight.’

It was then, knowing she had won and that her daughter’s short-lived rebellion was firmly under control, that Ruth delivered her coup de grâce.

She looked up at her daughter and said, ‘Tomorrow, dear, I want you to meet Daddy and bring him home. I have to work in the morning and I know you are on the evening shift so you have the day free.’ Opening her purse, she drew out a ten-shilling note and thrust it into her daughter’s hand, giving a smile that showed more steely determination than sincerity. Then, as though she had planned a special treat, she said, ‘Here’s some money so you can buy him afternoon tea at that coffee shop you like so much.’

Stunned into obedience, she said, ‘All right, Mummy.’

As she spoke, Antoinette felt her mother’s power over her slip back into place and saw the gleam of satisfaction in Ruth’s eyes as she smelt victory. As she had done every night before her brief rebellion, Antoinette kissed her mother quickly on the cheek and went to bed.

She knew in her heart that she had been successfully sucked through the looking glass into her mother’s fantasy. She understood somehow that her mother needed to believe that she, Ruth, was a good wife and mother and that Joe was the handsome Irish husband who adored her. Between them, they had a daughter who was nothing but trouble and Ruth suffered because of it. She had been the victim of her husband’s disgrace, but as long as Antoinette behaved herself and did not annoy her father when he came home, everything would be all right.

In Ruth’s universe, Antoinette was the difficult daughter who had caused all the problems. Although she tried to fight it, it would not be long before Antoinette began to believe that perhaps her mother was right.

Chapter Eight

The coffee shop where Ruth had arranged for Antoinette to meet her father was one of the many that were rapidly springing up in the centre of Belfast. These forerunners of wine bars sold cappuccino coffee to the youth of Belfast and this one was Antoinette’s favourite. It was there that she and her friends met before going to the dance halls, where they would sip their frothy drinks as they made plans for the evening ahead.

That afternoon, on the day of her father’s release, she felt no pleasure in the familiar surroundings; the darkness of the interior looked gloomy to her while the large silver and black coffee machine, usually alive with a friendly hissing and gurgling, stood silently on the bar.

It was too early in the day for the hordes of people who frequented it in the evening to be present, while the lunchtime crowd, a mixture of smartly dressed businessmen and sophisticated women, had returned to their offices.

Her father’s imminent return had sunk Antoinette into a depression. It was like a black hole that she had sunk into, where she could not even think about tomorrow. Even the simplest task seemed impossible and anything was liable to make her panic. All her responses shut down and she became the robot she had once been, secure only when obeying orders.

And then there were her other worries. What could she say if she met one of her friends? How could she explain him away? Why had her mother arranged for them to meet on what Antoinette saw as her territory? It was as though any independence that she had gained, any life that she had forged out for herself, had been taken away from her.

All those thoughts were running through her head as she walked to one of the wooden tables and took a seat. His bus was due to arrive at 3 p.m. She was grateful for this as she knew that the chances of bumping into anyone at that time of day were slim.

Which father was going to greet her, she wondered. Would it be the ‘nice’ one, who eleven years ago had met his wife and daughter at the Belfast docks; the father who had made Ruth glow with happiness as he hugged her and made his daughter giggle with pleasure when he swung her five-year-old body in the air, and then kissed her soundly on both cheeks? That father, the jovial man who had chucked her under the chin as he presented his wife with presents of boxes of chocolates after one of their many rows, was now only a dim memory. Or would it be the other father, the one with the bloodshot eyes and the mouth that quivered with rage at the very sight of her? Her childhood fear of the man she remembered most vividly, the one she had tried to force out of her mind, came back to her.

Antoinette arrived early. She was dressed as her old self: her newly washed hair now hung to the collar of her navy jacket and a grey skirt and pale-blue twin set had replaced the teenage uniform of jeans and shirt. Her mother had come into her room early that morning. She had made preparations to see her husband again and was dressed in a grey jacket with a fur collar that framed her face, softening it. Her hair was freshly permed with a copper rinse to hide the grey that had appeared in recent years and once again fell in soft waves about her face. Her mouth was painted a bright red, a colour she had always favoured, while rings sparkled against the hands tipped with scarlet-lacquered nails. She had opened the wardrobe and selected the clothes she wanted Antoinette to wear.

‘That looks so nice on you, dear,’ she had said. ‘Wear that today.’

‘I don’t like it,’ Antoinette had muttered. ‘It’s old-fashioned.’

‘Oh no, dear, it makes you look very pretty. It’s your colour blue. Wear it to please me, won’t you?’

And she had.

Antoinette wanted to arrive before her father so that she had the advantage of being seated at a table with a clear view of the door. She wanted to see him before he saw her.

Hanging lamps cast soft pools of warm light on the wooden tables. A cup of coffee had been brought to her and she needed both hands to hold it to her mouth because her palms were damp and slippery with the moisture that fear brings. Her stomach fluttered with nervous tremors and her head felt light from a sleepless night.

She felt his presence a split second before she saw him. Looking up at the door, she could only make out a male form. With his back to the sun, he was a faceless shadow but she knew it was him. She felt the short hair on the back of her neck bristle and she placed her hands on her knees to hide the shaking.

It was not until he reached her side that his features came into focus.

‘Hello, Antoinette,’ he said.

As she looked into his face, she saw someone she had not seen before: the remorseful father. He’d been in prison for over two years and apart from that weekend leave, when she’d only seen him for a few moments, she had not spoken to him.

‘Hello, Daddy,’ she replied. Not wanting to hear any words from him she blurted out, ‘Mummy’s given me some money to pay for your tea.’

Such was Antoinette’s conditioning to behave normally, she did. To any outsider the two of them presented a perfectly ordinary spectacle – a man taking his daughter out to tea.

The moment she said her first words to her father, Antoinette took another step further into her mother’s world. It was a world where her sense of self-will disappeared, where she danced to the tune that Ruth sang. She had no choice, she had to comply. She acted her part in the charade that everything between them all was normal.

But it was far from normal. This was a man who had been sent to prison, and it was her evidence that had placed him there instead of in the psychiatric ward that her mother had hoped for, the lesser of two evils. She had wondered ever since what his reaction to her would be when they faced each other again and now she was about to find out.

She forced herself to hide her fear and look at him. She expected to see changes, even infinitesimal ones, in a man who had been incarcerated for a sexual crime. Even though the papers had not stated that the minor he was reported to have abused was his own daughter, the fact that his victim was an underage girl should have had some effect. Surely the other prisoners would have shown disapproval. Surely his popularity with other men would have disappeared. Surely not even his skill with a snooker cue could have saved him.

But to Antoinette’s mystification, he looked no different than he had on the day of his trial. His tweed suit, which he had worn then, still fitted him perfectly; his tie was knotted firmly under the collar of his smoothly ironed pale-blue cotton shirt. His hair, with its auburn lights glinting in its thick waves, looked freshly barbered and his eyes reflected not a care in the world as they returned her gaze with a warm smile.

He took the seat opposite her and leant forward and placed his hand lightly over hers. She felt her fingers stiffen as they recoiled from his touch, then felt them tremble. She wanted nothing more than to rise from her seat and run. She didn’t even have the strength to avoid meeting his hypnotic stare.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, as though those words carried a magic formula that would make his deeds disappear in as many seconds as it took to utter them.

But she wanted desperately to believe in him. She wanted to have her faith in the adult world restored, and to enter a time machine where those awful years could be rewritten. Most of all, she wanted to be a normal teenager with two loving parents and a happy childhood, laden with memories that she could take with her to adulthood. She wanted to be able to smile at her recollections of the past, to be able to share them with her friends. She knew that the stories of our past, our families and of our friends create the structure of life but hers were too terrible to recall, let alone to tell other people.

She looked at the remorseful father and wanted to believe him – but she didn’t.

Joe believed he had won. He smiled and ordered tea and scones. Antoinette watched him wash down his food with cups of tea but she was unable to eat. She just stared blankly at him and felt the familiar fear return. When she was little, it would make her glassy-eyed with terror while sickness swirled in her stomach.

Eventually he put down his cup and smiled at her. ‘Well, my girl, if you’ve finished we might as well make a move.’ He made no comment at her lack of appetite, just told her to call for the bill and settle it. Then he took her arm in imitation of a caring father and held it firmly as he led her from the café.

Antoinette and her father sat side by side on the bus that took them on their short journey from the centre of Belfast to Lisburn where the gate lodge was. They had taken seats upstairs so that he could smoke. She watched him roll a cigarette, saw the tip of his tongue slowly moisten the paper before he lit it, then felt him relax as he contentedly blew curls of smoke into the air.

She breathed in the fumes, letting them mask the familiar smell of his body that had always repelled her. She tried to make herself as small as possible. His arm pressed against hers and the heat from his body scorched her side at the point of contact. She turned and looked out of the window. His reflection was staring back at hers and on his mouth he wore a smile of insincere warmth, the one she remembered from her childhood.

When they arrived at their destination, Joe and his daughter alighted almost in tandem. He held his small suitcase in one hand and her elbow with the other. She tried not to flinch as the pressure of his fingers on her arm left her with no choice but to walk swiftly by his side. With every step, she felt an overwhelming desire to shake his hand off but the years of having her thoughts controlled had stripped away her will power and she could do nothing.

Once inside the small hallway, he dropped his case on the floor. Judy appeared to greet Antoinette and, seeing her, Joe dropped down and ran his fingers roughly over the little dog’s head as a way of greeting. Judy didn’t respond with the rapturous welcome that he felt was his due, so Joe pulled her ears and forced her face towards him. Unused to such rough treatment, Judy wriggled to escape and then crept to her mistress’s side. She hid behind Antoinette’s legs and gave a suspicious look at the interloper.

Annoyance flashed across his face. Even dogs had to like Joe Maguire.

‘Judy, do you not remember me?’ he asked in a jovial tone that barely covered his displeasure.

‘She’s old now, Daddy,’ said Antoinette quickly, hoping that would shield her pet from his irritation.

He seemed to accept the excuse. He walked into the small living room, sat on the most comfortable chair and surveyed both her and his surroundings with a satisfied smirk.

‘Well, Antoinette, aren’t you pleased to have your old man home?’ His voice was laden with mockery. Taking her silence as acquiescence, he said, ‘Make me a cup of tea like a good girl, then.’ Almost as an afterthought he pointed to the case carelessly dropped by the door. ‘First take that up to your mammy’s and my room.’

As she stooped to lift it, she saw through lowered eyelids a smug smile cross his face. He knew now that two years of absence had not undone the years of training that had suppressed her normal emotional growth. Antoinette was no rebellious teenager – he had seen to that.

She saw the smile and understood it. She picked the case up without a word. His authority remained unbroken and she was aware of it, but she knew she had to conceal the resentment that was rising in her. As she took the case and went back to the stairs, she could feel him watching her every move.

She dumped the case inside the door of her parent’s room, trying not to look at the bed she knew he would now share with her mother. Then she went back down to the kitchen where, robot-like, she filled the kettle and placed it on the hob. Memories of other occasions, when she had used that ritual of tea making as a delaying tactic, sprang into her mind.

It was her mother who came to mind. Inwardly, Antoinette railed at her and asked the questions she was longing to hear the answer to. ‘Mummy, how can you put me in danger like this? Don’t you love me at all? Don’t those years with just the two of us mean anything to you at all?’

But she knew the answers to those questions now.

The whistle of the kettle interrupted her thoughts as she poured boiling water over the tea leaves. Remembering her father’s temper if he was kept waiting, she hastily set a small tray with two cups, poured milk into a jug and placed the sugar bowl beside it, before carefully carrying it through to him. She placed it on the coffee table, and then proceeded to pour out the tea, remembering to put the milk in first, and then two teaspoons of sugar, exactly as her father liked it.

‘Well, you still make a good cup of tea, Antoinette. Now tell me, have you been missing your old man then?’

She flinched as she recalled the many times he had tormented her with similar questions, questions that she could never answer correctly and that eroded her confidence and confused her.

Before she could answer, a loud knock on the front door started Judy barking and pulled Antoinette out of her misery. Her father made no effort to leave the comfort of his chair, clearly expecting her to answer it.

Grateful that she had been saved from replying, she went to the door and opened it to find herself facing a slightly built man in his middle years. His sparse sandy-coloured hair was parted at the right side and his light grey eyes, framed in gold-rimmed glasses, showed no spark of warmth. His dark suit was partly obscured by a three-quarter-length cream gabardine mackintosh but she could see his striped tie knotted with precision under the collar of his gleaming white shirt.

She had never seen him before and, being unused to strangers calling at the house, gave him an uncertain smile and waited for him to state his business. She received a cool stare that looked her up and down and, in response to her curious expression his hand flipped open a slim wallet. He held it in front of her eyes to show the identity card inside then finally spoke.

‘Hello,’ he said in a cold tone. ‘I’m from social services. Are you Antoinette?’

Again that name she hated. That name with its associated memories was the name of someone she no longer wanted to be. A name that had hardly been heard since her father had gone to prison was now constantly repeated on the day of his release. Every time she heard it she felt the identity of ‘Toni’ slip further away. Hearing her name on her father’s tongue was making her regress into that frightened fourteen year old she had been when he left. Now this stranger was using it. She felt a sense of foreboding as she looked at him uncomprehendingly. Why would social services call now, she wondered. They had done very little to help her before.

‘May I come in?’ he asked. The words might have been couched as a question but his attitude turned them into a command. ‘I have to speak to you and your father.’

She nodded and stood aside to allow him to walk through the door into the sitting room. The social worker glanced at what he saw as a cosy scene with evident distaste. Antoinette recognized his reaction and was instantly aware of his aversion to her but her ingrained politeness made her offer him tea, which he disdainfully refused.

This man had not come to help her, she knew, but had already passed judgement and found her guilty, of what she did not know.

She sat on a hard-backed chair, clasping her hands together in her lap to control the slight shake that always betrayed her nervousness, as the visitor seated himself on the only other comfortable chair. He carefully hitched his trousers at the knee to protect their creases, allowing a glimpse of pale ankles to show above his socks, as he did so. Antoinette noticed that his fussy manoeuvre did not prevent his bony knees making little sharp points against the fabric. His feet, neatly placed together, were encased in black shoes so shiny she wondered if he could see his face in them when he bent to tie his laces.

His pasty face, with its nondescript features, turned to her father as he made pleasant small talk to Joe while ignoring her. He seemed on the surface a harmless little man but there was something about him – the coldness of his eyes, his fastidious appearance, the finicky way he opened his briefcase and placed a paper on his lap – that made her twitch with apprehension. She knew that his eyes might be turned to her father, but in the moments they had alighted on her, they had assessed her and found her lacking.

It only took a few minutes for Antoinette to understand the reason he had come to the house. He turned the conversation to the purpose of his visit: he wanted to know what plans Joe had made for the future. He was a recently released prisoner and, after all, prisons were meant to rehabilitate. A conscientious social worker’s responsibility was to ensure that sufficient help was given on the outside to follow that principle through.

‘So, Joe, have you any job interviews lined up?’ he asked.

Joe said that yes, his interviews with the local army offices were already arranged – they were hiring good mechanics from the civilian sector. With his old references and the fact he had volunteered for active service during the war, Joe was confident he would be offered work.

All the time Antoinette knew, by the covert glances that were thrown surreptitiously at her, that somehow she was another reason social services had called.

Seemingly satisfied with Joe’s answer, the social worker looked sternly at her, although he aimed his next remark at both of them.

‘You are to behave yourselves, do you hear me?’

Antoinette saw the flicker of her father’s temper in his eyes, and saw him quickly hide it.

‘Yes,’ he muttered. He realized that something more was expected of him and he flashed the social worker his charming smile and said in a rueful tone, ‘I’ve learnt my lesson and all I want to do now is make it up with my wife. She’s not had it easy while I’ve been away and I want to make amends.’

‘Well, Joe, stay off the drink, won’t you?’

To Antoinette’s amazement, her father rose from the chair, crossed the few feet that separated him from the visitor, stretched out his hand and clasped the man’s hand. ‘Oh, I will, don’t you worry,’ he said, and again his smile appeared.

Feeling his duty was done, the visitor rose from his chair, clutched his briefcase and prepared to leave. Then he turned to Antoinette, fixed her with a look of disdain and said, ‘And you, Antoinette, you’re to be good, do you hear me?’

Seeing he was waiting for her reply, she stuttered, ‘Yes.’

Satisfied with her mortification, he walked towards the door. She followed him into the hall to see him out and, as the front door closed behind him, she felt the last scraps of her hard-won new self-confidence disappear. The two years since her father had been sent to prison fell away and once again she was the teenager of fourteen who had been both blamed and shunned because of her father’s crime.

As she heard the social worker’s footsteps retreat, she lent against the hall wall and tried to regain her composure before she faced her father. She made herself recall the judge’s words that day in his chambers: ‘People will blame you…and I’m telling you that none of this was your fault.’ But she had always been besmirched by the dirt of other people’s opinions and today the judge’s words had lost their power to comfort her.

She felt that, yet again, she was at the mercy of the adult world and that it had betrayed her again, just as it had when her father’s crime had come to light.

She went back to the sitting room, wondering what mood the social worker’s visit might have put her father in. He showed no reaction to the unwanted caller but held his cup out for a refill. Then he said, ‘Don’t be talking about that man to your mother, Antoinette. She’s had enough worries.’

To press his point home, he gave her an intimidating glare, and then resumed slurping his tea. The visit was never mentioned again.

Chapter Nine

The past receded and I was back in the sitting room of my father’s house.

I blinked my eyes shut against those memories from a different era but still felt the depression left by Antoinette’s ghost.

She had felt so unloved and that fact alone made her feel worthless; vulnerable people, lacking in confidence, see themselves through other’s eyes.

One thought played on her mind: if my parents love me so little, some part of me must be to blame.

Whatever the mirror showed her, it was not what she saw; instead of an attractive teenager, she saw an ugly one. Instead of a victim, she saw a guilty party. Instead of a likeable girl, she saw someone who deserved rejection.

Why had she not protested, then? Why had she simply not packed 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 in the restaurant?’

Ladies at these establishments I knew ordered drinks, preferably a sweet sherry, at their table as they perused the menu. That wasn’t for me.

‘I want champagne and oysters first,’ I declared. ‘We’ll have the meal later.’

The receptionist hesitated for a moment over this breach of etiquette but then showed us the way to the bar where we could sit at a small table in the window and enjoy our treat. ‘Are you and your friend celebrating something?’ she asked with a slight sniff of disapproval; she might not have been overloaded with charm but she still had her curiosity.

I could have told the truth and said, ‘Yes, I’m celebrating my father’s death.’ But, not wanting to shock her, I took pity and said, ‘We’re just enjoying our holiday. And this place was very highly recommended to us. We’re looking forward to sampling the menu – I’ve heard it’s excellent.’

Her face softened. She obviously assumed that we were tourists from ‘across the water’ who knew no better, so she forgave our lack of decorum and showed us to a window seat.

For once my diet was to be forgotten, indulgence was the name of the game. The barman brought over the ice bucket holding the champagne and poured out two glasses. I raised my glass in a toast to my father.

‘Thanks, Dad, for the first meal you’ve ever bought me!’

‘To good old Joe,’ murmured my friend and, grinning at each other, we clinked glasses conspiratorially. She knew the truth. It was why she had offered to come with me to Ireland and help me. An hour later the champagne bottle was empty, the oysters eaten and it was time to go to the restaurant. We had already ordered a Chateaubriand steak for two with all the accompaniments and a bottle of full-bodied red wine.

‘Will one bottle be enough?’ I asked my friend and saw with some amusement the look of consternation that crossed the waiter’s face. Another thing that ladies do not do is get drunk in smart Irish restaurants. He was not to know that we were no strangers to wine and champagne. I was not bothered. I had already decided that we would get a taxi back and leave the car for later.

‘Yes,’ she replied firmly but relented when I ordered the cheese board. Afterwards we both agreed that Irish coffees were a must.

Three Irish coffees later, after we’d talked as old friends do when the hours seem like minutes, we suddenly noticed the day was fading and the restaurant was about to set up for the evening’s customers.

‘Time to pay the bill,’ I said, and signalled for the waiter.

A look of relief crossed his face when he realized we were leaving and not ordering more drink. The bill was presented with discreet speed on a silver salver.

The receptionist reappeared complete with her original look of disapproval.

‘Would that be your red car parked outside?’ she asked.

I took the hint. ‘Yes. Would it be all right if we left it here till the morning? We’ve enjoyed our meal so much we might have overdone it a little.’ I could see that she heartily agreed. Still, my sensible caution, not to mention the generous tip, seemed to mollify her slightly and with a gracious nod she walked off to order a taxi.

She held the door open for us as we were leaving. Before we could go, a group of men entered. I knew them – they were members of my father’s golf club.

‘So sorry for your recent loss,’ they murmured when they saw me. ‘A terrible thing to lose your father.’

Behind me, I heard the shattering of illusions.

I went back to my father’s house that evening. The funeral was the next day and the quicker the house was sorted out, the quicker I could leave town.

Only then would the past recede and free me from the thoughts of Antoinette that were flooding my mind. The pictures of her came one by one and unwillingly I felt my adult self being pulled back through the years.

Chapter Ten

Antoinette tried to ignore him, but she was aware that her father’s eyes followed her every movement. Whatever she was doing – tidying her room, making the tea, watching television, going out to work – he was watching her.

When she was in the house, Joe expected his daughter to wait on him like an obedient little servant. Outwardly compliant, Antoinette was continually counting the hours until she could leave the house.

Meanwhile, her mother continued with the game of ‘Daddy’s been working away’. She acted as though he’d only been gone a week. The reality of what had led up to her husband’s absence was a closed book. Ruth was determined that not only would there be no mention of the truth, but that the past was completely rewritten and her part in it whitewashed out. She had never stood by, wilfully blind and silent, as her husband abused their daughter over a period of years. It simply hadn’t happened.

For Antoinette it seemed that the last two and a half years had vanished. Once again she had become a girl with very limited control over her life. Now that her parents were reunited as a couple, they had become powerful again while she was locked outside their magic circle, floundering on her own and completely at their mercy.

The lodge no longer felt like the home that Antoinette and her mother had created. Joe’s presence had invaded it: overflowing ashtrays were left by the side of the wing armchair for his daughter to empty; newspapers, open on the sport pages, were tossed to one side while his cup stained with the residue of his numerous cups of tea, made for him by either Antoinette or her mother, sat on the coffee table. There was now a shaving mug in the kitchen and a grubby towel that Antoinette could not bear to touch lay on the draining board.

Just as two and a half years ago Ruth’s happiness had been dictated by her husband’s moods, so it was now. Her happy smile gradually faded, to be replaced by either frowns of discontent or the expression of the long-time sufferer that Ruth believed herself to be. Antoinette hardly ever heard her humming the tunes of her favourite songs now. Why couldn’t her mother see it, she wondered. Had she forgotten the simple pleasures of the quiet, harmonious life that they had shared before he had come back? Why would she wish to be back in his control, the whole house governed by his moods and the aura of grim power that surrounded him? It seemed impossible to Antoinette that anyone would want to choose this existence over the one that they had enjoyed together before her father’s release.

It wasn’t as though there had been any material gain, either. Although her husband got a job as a civilian mechanic working for the army, and was given hours of overtime, somehow his contribution to the housekeeping did not appear to make Ruth’s finances easier. In fact, with one more mouth to feed and the forty-cigarettes-a-day habit that Joe had, money seemed even scarcer.

Four weeks after he returned home, he announced that he had to work at the weekend. ‘Leave early and back late,’ he had said with his jovial smile.

‘Oh Paddy,’ she had protested, using her nickname for him, ‘not on a Saturday. You know I’ve the weekend free.’

The coffee shop where Ruth was the manageress catered to the professionals who worked a five-day week and without their custom the owner had decided to close after lunchtime on Saturdays, a decision popular with both Ruth and her daughter.

Seeing the suspicious look that his wife was giving him, Joe’s good-humoured expression changed to one of irritation.

‘Well, we need the money, don’t we? Sure, and aren’t you the one who’s always saying you want to move into a larger house in Belfast?’

Antoinette saw her mother’s face take on the resigned expression that had become familiar over the last few weeks as she replied, ‘Yes, dear.’

‘Well, then, what’re you complaining for? It’s time and a half at the weekend. Maybe if that big daughter of yours contributed more instead of spending it all on those clothes and that damn stuff she puts on her face, I wouldn’t need to work so hard.’

Antoinette waited for her mother to contradict his accusation. She had contributed to the running of the house ever since she had been able to. But Ruth said nothing.

Although she knew that Ruth had always yearned for a house similar to the one she had grown up in, a gracious Georgian three-storey building, it was the first time Antoinette had heard that plan voiced. It seemed to her that her father wanted to control everything, even where they lived.

The gate house was comfortable enough for us before he turned up, she thought resentfully. Working overtime is just another excuse to keep his wife quiet.

She mistrusted his story and, as she saw the triumphant look on his face as he won the short argument, she believed it even less. Knowing that her mother only pretended to accept his reasoning fuelled her resentment even more.

‘Going to the greyhound races more like it,’ she muttered under her breath.

Seeing the expression which had crossed his daughter’s face and reading it correctly, Joe glared at her as he snapped, ‘What are you doing standing there? Help your mother while I’m out – make yourself useful for once.’

With that parting shot, he left. The noise of the door slamming behind him vibrated in the now-silent room.

Ruth and her daughter glanced at each other and Antoinette could see the unhappiness on her mother’s face. She hardened her heart to it, for she felt past trying to cheer her mother up. Just for once Ruth could have stood up for her daughter and pointed out that she contributed more than her fair share. She felt the injustice of his remarks and hurt by the usual lack of support from her mother. If she wouldn’t stand up for her, who would?

Antoinette went to her room hoping that her father would win enough from the dog races to keep him away from the house until she had left for the evening. She knew that she had contributed as much to the housekeeping as he had. With her tips, she earned as much as he did – a fact that fuelled his simmering anger towards her.

She thought of how he commandeered the television she had bought and sat watching the sports programmes that she detested; how her mother cooked his favourite food, never asking Antoinette what she wished for; how, when her daughter had offered to cook an evening meal, he had jeered at her efforts calling it ‘that dammed fancy muck of yours’. Since his return, except for that one unsuccessful attempt, she was reduced to doing the more menial task of washing up.

Antoinette had no wish to meet her father when she was dressed for her night out. She knew he would mock her attempts to look nice and knock her fragile self-confidence even further. If he was in a bad mood, she would be his target, a mental punch bag for him to unleash his anger on, anger that now always seemed to simmer close to the surface. Nor did she want to see the sadness on Ruth’s face, though she could not help feeling that her mother had brought her misery upon herself. Antoinette could see no point in having someone in the house who created such a feeling of discord, and she could not understand why her mother had allowed him to return to his old ways in such a short space of time. She heard Joe’s evasions, saw his smugness and watched her mother pandering to his wishes. She felt an increasing contempt for her parents as she saw his dominance and Ruth’s acquiescence.

When her father was out, her mother would seek her out, keen for company and an ear she could complain into, but this time Antoinette was determined she would not relent and give in to her. Instead she spent the afternoon in her room deciding on which outfit she was going to wear for her night out and finally made her selection. She neatly laid out on the bed a pale yellow dress with a low-cut neck and a straight skirt that had a small back pleat which enabled her to walk freely while emphasizing her slim legs. The broad belt that she had chosen was covered with a darker fabric, which would encircle her waist tightly and make it look slimmer.

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