A Fling with Mrs McQuillan

Some of the stories I wrote were drawn from my own life. There were real details in them, but they were made up. The product of my imagination. Or were they?

‘Did you know that your dad had a fling with Mrs McQuillan?’ my aunt said, as we sat at her kitchen table preparing vegetables. My jaw dropped, and I just about uttered the word ‘No.’

‘She made my wedding cake,’ Auntie Kathleen said. ‘She came recommended by someone I worked with. I already had someone lined up, but Mrs McQuillan came in cheaper. That’s how your father met her.’ When Mrs McQuillan died, Kathleen was sent by her mother to tell my dad. ‘Mum said, “Don’t tell your brother if Mary is around.”’ So my grandmother knew about the ‘fling’, and my aunt knew; but did my mother know? Somewhere, deep down, did I know?

Auntie Kathleen’s and Uncle Jack’s wedding. Maria looking grumpy, next to the bride and her sisters. She wanted to be a bridesmaid like her sister.

 More than ten years ago, I published a collection  of linked short stories, As Long as it Takes. All the stories can be read alone, but are linked by recurring characters and situations, the overall theme being Irish migrant women and their daughters living in England. Some of the stories were drawn from my own life, from family stories, from things I overheard as a child when the women gathered in my mother’s kitchen. There were real details in the stories – the layout of houses, uncles coming over from Ireland to look for work in England, living with us until they got settled. The stories, though, were made up. The product of my imagination. Or were they?

My story, ‘A Tea Party’, is from the point of view of a child. She is the middle of five children, as I am; her uncle comes to stay, and gives her a tea set for her birthday; as my Uncle Jerry did; she stops off at the sweetshop on the way back from Mass, as I did every Sunday, and chooses a sugar mouse. The rest is fiction. Here is an extract:

The day of Maggie’s first Holy Communion was the first time I’d seen Dad all week. The Sunday before, I’d had him all to myself at 11 o’clock Mass, as Maggie and Kieran had been to the 8 o’clock, and Brendan was playing up so he stayed home with Mum and the baby. The leaves were piled up in the park on the way to church, and Dad lifted me high so that I could kick the top of the hills of leaves and feel like I was walking on them, like when Jesus walked on water. Mum doesn’t let me kick the leaves in my good shoes; I’m surprised she lets me walk in them at all.

After Mass he took me to Stebbings. I chose a pink sugar mouse and he said not to tell the others, it’s our secret. I sucked the sugar until all that was left was the string tail, and then Dad wiped my mouth with his my hankie.

Mrs Roberts caught up with us – she had been to the 11 o’clock too. We walked her home, even though it was out of our way. She laughed every time Dad spoke, like she’d heard a funny joke.

‘You’ll come in for a cuppa and a slice of cake,’ she said as we reached her gate. She offered me Victoria sponge, fondant fancies and iced fairy cakes with little silver balls on top. Her long red fingernails curled round the plate as she held it out to me, and as she leant over I could see the line where her bosoms met. I chose a fairy cake, but the silver balls were too hard to crunch, so I spat them out onto the plate. There was no silver then, just white.

She let me play tea parties with her big teapot and cups and saucers: her best china. She said I could play with what I liked as long as I didn’t tell anyone that we’d been there. ‘Is it a deal?’ she said; I couldn’t speak because I had cake in my mouth.

Dad and Mrs Roberts went away to talk about grown-up things. It was a bit funny as men and ladies don’t usually talk together; the men talk to the men and the ladies talk to the ladies, especially after they get married. I think they talk and hold hands before they get married, but all that stops after they get babies.

Mrs Roberts came back into the kitchen, smiling with her bright red lips. She looked at me and laughed. ‘We can’t send you home like that,’ she said, and she wiped my face with a tea towel, her face close to mine. Her mouth is too red. I can see it when I close my eyes. It’s like the felt pen that Brendan got on the living room carpet that wouldn’t come out.

At readings to promote As Long as it Takes, and in one review of the book, people assumed that the stories were autobiographical. I said that some of the details were drawn from life, but confidently asserted that my father didn’t have an affair.

Mum never went to Sunday Mass. She said that she was too busy with a roast dinner to prepare, and she was extremely busy with so many young children and a husband that didn’t help in the house at all. But Mum also had an uneasy relationship with the Catholic church, with the priesthood and with the nuns that had taught her at school in rural Ireland in the 1930s and ’40s. So, when we were young, and before we could make our own way to Mass, Dad would take us children. I do remember instances of going to church alone with Dad; the child in the story kicking the autumn leaves, holding onto her father’s hand, is me.

How did I come up with Mrs Roberts and the cakes in ‘A Tea Party’? Did I summon the idea out of the ether, or had I indeed been left with ‘Victoria sponge, fondant fancies and iced fairy cakes with little balls on top’ while my father and Mrs McQuillan ‘went away to talk about grown-up things’?

My aunt and uncle Jack have been married for 61 years. I would have been three or four at the time Mrs McQuillan made the wedding cake. I can remember many things from when I was that age, but I don’t remember a Mrs McQuillan. If she made wedding cakes, I bet she made other lovely cakes.

John, my older brother, once told me that Mum and Dad had separated for a while, that Mum left the house, left us children to be looked after by Dad. As with many of the stories he told me in the last year of his life, John added: ‘You would have been too young to remember, Cookie’. Dad sent John to wherever Mum was staying with a message: ‘Ask your mother to come home. The children are missing her.’

Could this have been to do with Mrs McQuillan? Is that why Mum left?

At first, when Auntie Kathleen told me, I thought it was hilarious. ‘A fling with Mrs McQuillan’ sounds like something out of Father Ted. But looking at the time frame, if the affair was around the time of my aunt and uncle’s wedding, Mum and Dad were the parents of four children with another on the way. And my brother John would have been just eight years old when he was sent to ask our mother to come home.

This is not the first time that life has reflected fiction. I based the narrator of the title story of As Long as it Takes on my Auntie Joan, my mother’s closest friend. I gave the character the same name, and the layout of her house and her appearance are in the story, but the character’s experiences are not – were not – those of Joan. Fictional Joan has had multiple miscarriages and a stillbirth. Auntie Joan had two healthy children. At Auntie Joan’s funeral, it was revealed that, after her first child was born, she was warned not to have any more pregnancies, that both she and any babies she carried would be in danger. Auntie Joan ignored the advice, and went on to give birth to a daughter, Karan, who became my best friend, .

I wondered, as I listened to the eulogy, if I had known about Auntie Joan’s ‘women’s problems’. If it was something I had heard as I sat in the kitchen as a child, listening to the women that gathered there. If, like my father’s fling with Mrs McQuillan, it was something I unconsciously stored until I came to write the stories forty years later.

In the photo of my aunt and uncle’s wedding, my father stands behind his sister; my sisters and I are in the front row with our grandparents. I scan the faces: Dad’s cousin Nellie, Auntie Chris, Kitty Conlon. There are some faces I don’t recognise. I wonder if one of them is Mrs McQuillan. I wonder if the wedding cake tasted good. I wonder if I took a DNA test and searched for matches there would be a half-brother or sister waiting to be found.