Copyright 2023

Chapter 9

At this time I was only in my mid-twenties, so there is a lot more to my story. Ross and I chose a three-bedroom house for us to live in after we were married. Fortunately it was already vacant, so my first move was to give up my flat in Dublin and move all my possessions and furniture to Belfast. Ross kept his flat for the time being, since, as a lawyer at the start of his career, he could not risk scandal, but of course he visited me frequently. Now I was no longer earning money, I had to rely on my savings, which fortunately were quite substantial, and when they were exhausted, from the generous allowance which Ross gave me. Such was the arrangement for a married woman in those days.

We were married in Belfast six months later, in the presence of Ross’s family. Mammy and all my brothers and sisters attended the wedding and we paid for them to stay in a hotel overnight before returning to Dublin by train and then back to Kilcarnie. I was so pleased that Mammy was prepared to attend a service in a Presbyterian church at a time when the Catholic Church frowned upon its members attending other church services. Thank goodness things have changed for the better. Ross took a week off so that we could honeymoon by touring around Northern Ireland in his motor car. He would have taken longer but I knew that the development of his career was at a critical stage, so he needed to be in Belfast. Now we were able to live in the house we had bought, and I took up the next stage of my life, this time as a housewife. I thoroughly enjoyed it, looking after Ross,

We had deliberately cast aside the prophylactics and as a result I once again proved my fertility by becoming pregnant within four months. This news I greeted with a mixture of joy and terror, being reminded of what had happened to my first pregnancy. Ross was very kind and booked me an appointment with the best obstetrician in Belfast. He was a kindly man, and after examining me, when he asked, as I knew he would, if this was my first pregnancy, I had no qualms about telling him of that unhappy time.

“No doctor can guarantee the success of every pregnancy, my dear, but I see no physical reason why you should not carry this baby through to a successful birth,” he said. It was a great relief to me. Then he asked if I had any questions for him. I did of course but was too shy to voice my thoughts.

However Dr O’Reilly was very experienced, and he said: “Many married women ask me if it is safe to continue with marital relations while pregnant, and I tell them that provided it is not too vigorous there is no problem. Later in pregnancy, the size of the baby makes relations difficult, so at that stage most couples voluntarily stop until some time after the birth. I am able to offer you advice when relations can recommence.”

“Thank you doctor,” I said. Ross was also relieved to get the doctor’s advice, and we found great pleasure in uniting in a gentle way for some months.

Everything developed the way I hoped it would, and in the fullness of time, I was delivered of a fine young boy, whom we named Ross after his father. It might surprise you to learn that our second boy was named Joseph after my father. Two girls, Marie (named after my mother and aunt), and Niamh followed before two more sons Padraic and Sean. At this point, we decided that enough was enough and took steps to avoid any more children, though not our intimate relations of course.

As the children arrived, so we moved to a larger house and again to one even bigger one in Malone Road, one of the nicest areas of the beautiful city of Belfast. Those were wonderful times, with the house full of the happy laughter of children and sometimes their uncles and aunts too. Ross and I were very happy.

You may wonder if I ever saw any of the clients I met while at the Agency? The truth is that I saw a total of three over the years. One, I am sure did not recognize me, a second one I think did but hurriedly looked the other way since he was with his wife. Finally, there was one stupid man who insisted on coming up to me and asking if he knew me from somewhere? “Have you ever been to Kilcarnie?” I enquired and when he admitted that he had not, I said that it seemed very unlikely that we had ever met. He seemed to accept that, or maybe he was just sensible enough to realise that he was getting into an area of his life best left alone.

Ross’s career blossomed. In time he became a King’s Counsel and later still he was knighted, which meant I now had the courtesy title of Lady O’Connor, I could hardly believe that of a girl who started life as the daughter of a tenant farmer. Mammy was very proud.

The final stage of Ross’s career was to be appointed a judge, a position he filled with distinction for five years. I was so proud of him, but alas it was not destined to last. For some time I had been worried that the stress and responsibility was taking its toll on him. He was only sixty-five when one morning after a particularly stressful case which he to adjudicate, he failed to awaken from sleep.

I was bereft. During my period of mourning, I decided that his early death might have been due to my former life and was a well-deserved penance for all I had done. I started going to the Catholic Church again like so many ‘lapsed Catholics’ and praying for Ross’s soul as well as my own. Whether it will have any effect I do not know.

As time passed by, the children grew up, found their own loves and married. Most of them moved to the four corners of the world and my contact with them suffered accordingly, with only occasional letters, mostly on my birthday and Christmas. This was before the internet and overseas phone calls were terribly expensive. Finally, I was left on my own, and it was then that Orla, cousin Agnes’s youngest child came to stay with me and be my companion. Originally it was on a temporary basis but as the years rolled by, it became obvious that she was content to stay. Why she did not marry I will never know; she was so pretty when she was young, and the image of her mother, perhaps she too has a secret she cannot share? She cooks and does the washing, and this leaves her plenty of time to pursue her hobbies of music and art. She is a fine harpist and has a sweet singing voice. She is much in demand as an entertainer. A woman comes in twice a week to clean the house for us and we are very content.

Some people leave a house because they cannot bear the memories it holds; I stay here because I cannot bear to lose them. After I am gone, Orla may stay or leave as she wishes. I have made sure she is well provided for.

Why have I written this document? I cannot bring myself to confess to a priest my past wickedness, and so I have decided to confess to the pages of this little book, hoping that through it I will be absolved of my many sins.

I leave it to be found by some relative in the future and for them to decide what to do with it, perhaps even show it to an understanding priest, something I cannot bring myself to do.

When I am gone, I have made arrangement that I will lie beside Ross for all eternity.

And now - Into Thy hands oh Lord I commend my spirit, counting on Thy Great Mercy to forgive a sinner as you did the Magdalene.

Marie O’Connor

Epilogue

After I finished reading this amazing document, I sat back for a while, staring at the fire deep in thought. Isn’t it strange how we think we know someone and yet we really don’t know them at all, and when we find out it is often too late. Certainly her revelations didn’t make me feel any less affectionate towards Aunt Marie. If I had known of her experiences with women, I might have shared with her the fact that I too have taken women as well as men to my bed, so I perfectly understood how she had felt about Agnes.

As for the way she had chosen to make her last confession, I understood that too. Her story was far too long and complicated to relate to a priest in five or ten minutes, sitting in one of those claustrophobic little confession boxes in her church. How could he, a celibate man, possibly understand her story? I knew that priests are sworn never to reveal what they learn during a confession, but the fact remained that despite the illusion of anonymity, the priest would know who she was and would inevitably look upon her differently afterwards. There is no way he could help it. How could she bear that humiliation? No, in writing her story down she had made her confession to a Higher Being and I have little doubt that He forgave her long ago.

So now it came down to a decision. Should I just destroy the little notebook? No, the story was too interesting to do that, so the conclusion I have come to is to tell Aunt Marie’s story but change all the names including hers and mine. While Belfast and Dublin exist, you will not find a village called Kilcarnie in Ireland, and while ‘The Agency’ and ‘Ace Films’ existed, they were under totally different names. Even the name under which I publish it is a ‘nom-de-plume’.

That of course leaves a problem – with no means of verifying the story you may chose to think it is total fiction, and I don’t propose to leave you any clues to prove that is not the case. Nevertheless, I hope you find it interesting to read.

Oh, one final thing, having now copied and completed my revision of the story, one evening, after kissing its cover, I placed the little notebook carefully on the flames in my fireplace, and watched until they had entirely consumed it.

Acknowledgments: My sincere thanks to an Irish reader who goes by the name of BelfastCity for providing me with so much information and also answering any questions I had about the Ireland of the early twentieth century. Without that assistance I’m sure the story would not have been nearly so accurate. Any errors are entirely my own responsibility.

Many thanks to all those readers who gave kudos and even more to those who took the trouble to write comments – they are gold to a writer.

I will take this opportunity to mention a wonderful book called ‘Charlotte and Arthur by Pauline Clooney, which I think inspired me to write a story about Ireland, as perhaps did my two Irish grandparents about whom I know so little. While it is a fictional record of the honeymoon of Charlotte Bronte and her husband and father’s curate Arthur Bell Nichols in his native Ireland and to which he returned in his final years, it relies heavily on the real correspondence of Charlotte for its factual base, and is brilliantly written. Alas Charlotte succumbed to a prenatal disorder, probably hyperemesis gravidarum, and died about nine months after her marriage, without writing any more stories and never visited Ireland again.