‘And …?’ I manage to get out, overwhelmed by the tidal wave of guilt at not being there for her. At not even knowing about this before now.
‘I was too late. My birth mother had passed away about two years previously. She’d had breast cancer and apparently died very young, in her early fifties. She was only sixteen when she had me and it turned out my biological father, her boyfriend, had been killed by a drunk driver in a car crash shortly before I was born, which was why I was put up for adoption in the first place. She was grieving, I imagine, and felt she couldn’t cope with a new baby on top of everything else she was going through. I don’t even blame her either – chances are I’d have done exactly the same thing in her shoes. She was only sixteen for God’s sake, she was still a kid herself.
‘But please listen to me on this Eloise,’ Helen says gently, leaning forward and looking at me intently, ‘I now have to spend the rest of my life living with the fact that I was too late. That if I’d gone about tracking down my birth mother years ago, I may have been able to meet her, might even struck up some kind of a relationship with her. Maybe I could even have seen her before she passed away. But I kept putting it off and now I have to live with the what-ifs. All I’m saying is, don’t put Lily through what I’ve been through. She’s obsessed about finding her real dad just like I was and it’s not going to go away. So please, for her sake, deal with this now, while there’s still time. She has a right to know, just like I did. And our mum supported me when I went digging for the truth, so why not do the same for Lily?’
Oh God, I think, looking sympathetically across at her. I feel so awful for Helen, for what the poor girl had to go through. And could she have a point? Is this whole thing turning into an obsession for Lily that won’t go away until she finally finds out who her father is? Then one awful mental image after another starts to crowd in on me; of the child sitting on a bus today and asking the driver if he is her dad. Of her not even being able to enjoy a harmless TV movie without fantasising about who her real dad is … Drawing pictures of him …
Who knows what’s going through her little mind?
Helen knows me well and must sense that I’m wavering, because next thing she’s sitting cross-legged on the sofa in the Lotus position, looking serenely calm, fair hair neatly flicked over her shoulder.
‘Aren’t you in the least bit curious yourself,’ she puts it to me, ‘to know anything at all about him? I mean, he must come from good stock, he’s got to be intelligent, because Lily couldn’t just get it from you and you alone. Sure, just look at her. She’s so alert and advanced for her age, don’t you think so?’
I nod, tears of pride surprising me by stinging my eyes. Lily is incredibly bright; I’ve no doubt about that. She never even had baby-talk, she started speaking words clearly and distinctly at eighteen months and by aged two, she was talking in whole sentences, like a proper little lady. Already she’s learning to read and can assemble all her own toys and even more impressive, can amuse and entertain herself for hours without getting bored. She even surprised me by being musical at a very young age and when I bought her a piano, she took to it like a duck to water. She’s too young for proper lessons yet, but the second she is old enough, I’ve been intending to hire private tuition. To be perfectly honest, I’m only itching for her to turn three so I can get a proper IQ test done on her. Because I know she’ll score high, just know it.
‘I’ll bet her father turns out to be … A senior consultant cardiologist in the Blackrock Clinic,’ Helen chips in dreamily. ‘Or because she’s so musical, maybe a conductor. With the Philharmonic at the New York Met. Or maybe he’s a physicist well on his way to winning the Nobel Prize by now. One thing’s for certain though, he must be really good looking, because she’s such a gorgeous little fairy.’
‘Hmmm,’ is all I can say, getting intrigued now in spite of myself.
‘Either way,’ she goes on, still in her fantasy world and I think barely even registering me now, ‘if you were him, and if you had a little girl this special, wouldn’t you want to know about it?’
The funny thing is that when it boils down to it, I actually know so little about Lily’s father myself, it’s ridiculous. And I’m surprising myself by wondering about it now, as it’s something I rarely do. Once I had Lily, I banished all thoughts about whoever he might be completely out of my mind. She’s mine, I thought. Mine and no one else’s. One thing is for certain though, whoever he is and wherever he is, he’s got to be someone very special – because isn’t Lily the living walking proof of that?
Oh, sod this anyway. You know something? It’s curiosity that’ll be the death of mankind. Not all this crap about climate change.
No, it’s curiosity, plain and simple.
The fertility clinic I attended went by the unlikely name of the Reilly Institute, which at the time, appealed. It sounded like a place where you do night classes, I remember thinking at the time, not somewhere you’ve to reveal all about your private life and your full medical history, get totally undressed, then undergo possibly the most mortifying medical procedure ever devised by man. I’ll spare the details, but all I’ll say is that it involves lying on a sheet of freezing metal naked from the waist down, while being prodded with a load of ice-cold spatulas, and I’ll leave the rest to the imagination. Trust me though, no torture meted out to witches in medieval times could have been more excruciatingly painful or mortifying.
You know me by now; I did my homework and did it thoroughly. Firstly I found out from the concerned, mercifully sensitive nurse who was looking after me, whether or not the bank recruited, let’s just say, a certain type of donor? Because I was fussy; I wanted someone intelligent, talented, from ‘good stock’, as Helen put it. I bombarded this poor, patient nurse with a thousand questions – on average how old were the donors? (Under age forty apparently is preferable, I knew from my own exhaustive research on the subject. Higher sperm motility.) How and when did donors sign away legal rights to any child conceived using their sperm? And most importantly of all, how exactly was confidentiality maintained?
I must have driven her nearly insane with my inquisition; I requested a full list of donor profiles, then asked for information about each donor’s physical characteristics; ethnic background, educational background, occupation, general health, and hobbies and interests. Some banks will even provide photos, which I took a lightning-quick scan though, then dismissed. Somehow it made the whole mortifying process far simpler not to attach a face to a number on a donor profile.
Made me feel a bit more in control, if that makes any sense.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that the whole process took weeks. I trawled through each and every profile on offer, knowing that this was probably the single biggest decision I was ever likely to make in my life. And finally, finally finally, I found The One. No name, just a number, but this one seemed to tick all the right boxes. Blue eyes, fair hair and fair skin, just how I imagined my little baby would look. Supermarket genetics come to life.
The Chosen One seemed sporty and athletic too: he’d won gold medals for the two hundred metres and was a member of the Trinity College rowing team. This appealed; if I had a boy, I reasoned, he’d have great biceps and would look like he rowed everywhere. And he’d grow up with shiny skin and cheekbones you could grate cheese on, like all athletes seem to have. His profile also claimed that he’d written a thesis on Ireland’s economic meltdown and the subsequent road to recovery, which immediately gave me a mental picture that maybe he worked as a high-earning TV economist, one of those young preppy guys who look straight to camera and gravely tell us we’re all doomed, but do it with such persuasive charm that you end up not really minding that much at all.
What swung it for me though, was that his profile claimed he was musical as well as everything else and played classical piano right up to concert grade. That alone made me almost able to picture him; tall, gifted, clean shaven, articulate and an all-rounder. A real renaissance man. The type that if I ever happened to meet him in a bar in real life, most likely wouldn’t give someone like me a second glance, but would be surrounded by tall blonde modelly women with caramel skin and perfect Hollywood