He took an envelope out of the wallet and held it out.
“He asked me to bring you this today. It was the last thing he arranged.”
And he went. Down that path and into a car, before I had got one question out.
I came back into a kitchen with about thirty people in it and everything stopped.
Maud took the tea towel out of my hand. Somebody turned the radio off.
They all came round me. Ten grown adults, and two of them have grey in their hair now, and they stood round a woman of fifty-seven holding an envelope.
I got it open.
One page. His handwriting, which I had not seen since a kitchen table in 1995 and which I knew instantly.
And the first line is:
By now Maud will have told you. If she hasn’t, don’t be angry with her — I made her promise when she was eleven.
PART 2 — THE FORMS
In the November of 1995 there was a thing at my parents’ house. Somebody’s anniversary. About twenty-five people.
I had the adoption forms in my bag because I had collected them that week and because I was going to ask my mother a question about my father’s address history for one of the sections.
I got them out at the end of the table.
And my mother came round and took them out of my hands.
She squared them off on the sideboard and put her hand flat on top of them.
And she said, to twenty-five people:
“Give me that. Put those forms down, Oona. They’re not yours and everyone in this room knows it. Sit down.”
There was a sound from round that table. Not laughter exactly. Agreement.
My aunt said something about how it was very good of me but there were limits.
Twenty-five people. My own father. My sister.
Nobody said one word for me.
And I said, “All right, Mum,” and I sat down, and I ate a pudding, and I took those forms off that sideboard at about ten o’clock when everybody had moved into the front room.
I filled them in that night at my own kitchen table with three of them asleep on the sofa behind me.
My mother did not come to the hearing in 1998. Neither did my father.
She met the children properly for the first time in 2002 and she was, by then and for the last eleven years of her life, extremely good to them, and I have never once brought that November up with anybody in my family.
