Tell Me No Secrets by Julie Corbin Read Free Book Online Page A

twenty-four years I have known them all but now, with Orla’s phone call yesterday, I am mostly afraid. Afraid of being found out. I try to come up with a prayer but God and I have never been close and I don’t feel I have any right to call on Him now. Instead, I speak directly to Rose. Please, Rose. Please. I have done my best. Please. It’s not much but it’s all I can think of to say to her.
    Orla’s voice is still in my ears and I find myself going over and over what she said. And the more I think about it, the more I realise that she was leading me in the direction she wanted, keeping me talking until I agreed to meet her. I am disappointed with myself for falling in with her plans but at the same time I am not sure what else I could have done. She wasn’t about to give up. If I hadn’t answered her yesterday then she would have called back today and tomorrow and the day after that until I spoke to her. All I can do is listen to what she has to say and hope that she will leave again without causing any damage. One thing is for sure: I don’t want her to meet Paul and the girls. I have a life, a good life, and there is no place for Orla in it.
    On the way back to my car, I pause in front of Euan’s mother’s gravestone.
    Maureen Elizabeth Macintosh
    1927–1999
    beloved wife, mother and friend
    It strikes me, as it always does, that the dash in between both dates says nothing about the life that was led. Mo was the original earth mother, universally loved and as much involved in my upbringing as my own parents were.
    She gave birth to six children of her own: four boys and two girls. My own parents, on the other hand, tried for a baby for almost twenty years and when their marriage approached the end of its second decade with still no sign of the longed-for baby, they quietly gave up. Each month had become a time of mourning, a curse, and they couldn’t live that way, my mother said, so they let go of their dreams and immersed themselves in work – my mother in the university library, my father as a carpenter with the local firm of builders.
    Mo and her husband Angus lived next door and their children, a healthy, happy brood, spilled over the fence and into my parents’ lives. A balm of sorts, perhaps. My mother would bake cakes with the girls while my father taught the boys how to work with wood, how to measure and use the electric saw, how to join and sand, how to make bird boxes, wooden spoons, letter racks and shelves.
    So it was in the giving up that somehow I came into being and I was born on my parents’ twenty-first wedding anniversary. But what with all the waiting and the hoping and the praying and then the letting go, my mother found that the reality of a child was often more than she could take. So when I refused my dinner again or ran away from the potty only to wet myself, Mo scooped me up and took me next door where I was absorbed into the crowd. I was propped up in the pram alongside Euan, her youngest and just three months older than me, or in the playpen in the kitchen where she talked to us while she chopped vegetables or prepared a chicken.
    When I started nursery school my mother went back to work. Every day I escaped the intensity of parental interest that shadows the only child and walked home with Mo and Euan to spend the afternoon with them and any other stragglers who needed a place to go. Often I stayed for tea, Euan and I bolstered with cushions until we were tall enough to hold our chins above the level of the table.
    I wish I’d brought two sets of flowers: one for Mo’s grave too. Instead, I have to be happy with brushing spots of earth and stray leaves off the stone. She’s been dead almost nine years but I can still remember her voice. Some things we’re not meant to know, Grace. Some things we’re meant just to accept .
    I wonder at the things I accepted and the things that I didn’t and I hope that wherever