I had begun to take it in. For a second time, a sudden and shocking revelation had exposed a family secret. For a second time a bolt from the blue had revealed a half-sister about whom I had no prior knowledge. Once again an adjustment in the family line-up was necessary, another changing of places in the game of musical chairs.
I have never been one for gambling, and have little understanding of probability, but the odds against two such coincidental exposés must be pretty high. What’s more, the odds against both occurring after the respective parent was no longer around to explain the circumstances must be at least above average. And even higher that each should be exposed after exactly the same amount of time had elapsed after each parent’s demise. Not to mention the odds of both newly revealed siblings bearing the exact same relationship to me, albeit from different sides of the family. No, the whole thing was uncanny, too weird to fully take in.
* * *
What neither Lil’s letter nor the birth certificate had revealed was the identity of the father – a blank was left in the space allotted for the other parent’s name. Unlike Gilbert’s daughter Catherine, this half-sister was not the offspring of an earlier marriage. She was an illegitimate child, born to my mother out of wedlock, fathered by an unidentified lover. It is much easier to see why the existence of this particular daughter had been concealed.
But one thing was clear – and it was a relief. This was not any sort of false identity fraud. From the start there had been confusion as to who this person might be. When I had called my brother to inform him about the shock phone message, he had initially thought I was referring to Catrina.
‘But why would she need to leave a message like that?’ he asked. ‘And who is this husband anyway? Has she got married?’
‘No, no, this is an entirely different person,’ I explained. ‘It’s not Catrina at all. It looks like we’ve got another half-sister.’
‘I don’t believe it! It’s too much of a coincidence! Who in God’s name is she anyway?’ he responded.
‘It seems this one’s Mum’s daughter, not Dad’s. Let me play you the answerphone tape again and you’ll see.’ And so we had continued until we were both able to accept the revelation as fact.
Our genealogist was also able to allay my brother’s more practical concerns that this might some sort of attempt to make a claim on our mother’s legacy. As this half-sister had been adopted at birth, she had, our friend told us, no legal claim on Bea’s estate. It seemed that the particular timing of the phone message, and hence of this disclosure, had been purely coincidental. Thus from the start, give or take a couple of weeks, all our concerns were dealt with. The opening gambits had been made. It was time for the more serious moves.
* * *
In the passage of a fortnight a further development had taken place. While my wife and I had been away on holiday, a letter had arrived in which my new half-sister introduced herself. Using a variation on the Christian name entered on her birth certificate, as Maria she wrote:
I was very distressed, and could not believe it, when I found out that my mother had died in March this year. It was so sad and it was too late. I do feel for you losing your mother. Please accept my sympathy, you must have been very close. I only found out that you were my half-brother, after reading the death certificate. I was meant to find you, there was some meaning to it all.
Dated a couple of days after the initial phone message, the letter was presumably a response to my not having returned her husband’s call. It confirmed the details on the birth certificate we had received and told me that she was on holiday near Aberdeen. She hoped to meet me while she was in Scotland. She reiterated the phone number left in the answerphone message and let me know how long she would be up north. Unfortunately – although in retrospect, possibly for the best – she had already returned home to the south of England by the time I got back from our holiday and received the letter.
At this point though, my brother became increasingly eager to meet up with Maria. This was not my preferred course of action.
‘The sooner the better,’ my brother thought. ‘We could get a flight next week. I’m dying to meet her.’
‘But why?’ I asked. ‘I think it’d be better to take this cannily. Don’t you?’
‘It’s an amazing opportunity. She might look just like Mum.’
As he explained, he was convinced she would closely resemble Bea. This seemed to be the principal reason he wished to arrange a meeting. He was, I now realise, channelling his sense of loss at the death of our mother into a desire to meet someone who could be some sort of surrogate. This was understandable, the death of our only surviving parent having been followed by a revelation so startlingly similar to the one that had occurred after the death of our other parent. All of which may well have motivated him in his impulse to meet Maria – and to meet her right away. Strangely, he is the brother less frequently in touch with our sister Catrina, but I have no reason to doubt his sincerity in wishing for a meeting with Maria at the earliest possible juncture.
But I preferred a more measured approach, as I had too with Catrina in the ’70s. Since my wife and my brother’s wife, both of whom were as wrapped up in this state of affairs as we were, also favoured holding off for at least a while, this course of action was agreed upon. Caution had prevailed. My brother rapidly dropped the idea of an immediate flight down to the south of England, avoiding what we all thought was likely to be an even greater emotional upheaval had he met our new half-sister while his feelings were so raw. A letter first, it was agreed. So, having got hold of an address, my role was once again to write and make the initial contact.
* * *
There was a long wait for a reply, nearly two months. But this was a relief to me as the time elapsed gave me the opportunity to consider the situation and get used to it and its implications – ‘to get my head round it’. Having experienced a similar, though not as shocking, exposé once before, I was well aware of the fragility such an experience could induce. Tracing and being traced, in the context of an earlier adoption, is an increasingly common experience. The poet and writer Jackie Kay, who herself has located ‘lost’ family members, is only too aware of this. ‘Tracing suddenly asks someone who has had one life to have two,’ she says in Red Dust Road, ‘and you can’t have two lives; you can only have one.’ I was feeling as if I was being asked to have three.
Maria’s reply, when it came in late December, began by clearing up one of my concerns – why the revelation had been made via what I considered to be the inappropriate method of a phone message. In fact, the message had been left in the belief that I would already know about this half-sister. As Maria wrote:
The first thing to say is that I am so sorry to have given you such a shock. I had built up this story in my head that Mother had told you about me in her later years and that she was hoping I would make contact. I am afraid it was a big shock to me to find out that you did not know. I had just assumed that you knew of my existence.
It puzzles me to this day that Maria should have been so convinced that I was aware of her existence. But that certainty draws me back to contemporary understanding of how thought processes can turn impression into memory, assumption into certainty. In an Observer article on amnesia, Tim Adams wrote of ‘fascinating, unsettling impulses … that sense of [our] identity being a bundle of all of the stories we tell ourselves’. Maria had evidently built up a picture in her head of her continued presence in her birth mother’s life, and it was a blow to her to find that this did not match reality.
She had already spoken to my friend the genealogist on the phone but at that stage had still not grasped the situation fully. She continued:
When I spoke to your friend on the phone, I thought it was a ‘bolt from the blue’ because I had got in touch after Mother had died. I thought you had given up hope after all these years and now it was too late. It was a shock to me to find out that you didn’t even know of my existence.
My letter though had explained our total lack of knowledge and Maria now realised that Bea had never breathed a word about her birth. I feel for Maria in this – it is almost a denial of her very existence to find that her birth mother should have told absolutely no-one. But Maria could not have been aware of the circumstances of her birth, nor of the reasons for her adoption. The rest of her letter was replete with details of her childhood and upbringing.
Maria told me she had been adopted by a childless couple. They had also adopted a boy who became her brother. They had lived on the south coast of England where she had had a secure and happy childhood. Although her adoptive father had died when she was five, a relative of her adoptive mother had moved in with the family and the two children had been brought up in a safe and loving environment. They had lived in an old rambling house surrounded by a wild garden and only a few miles from the sea, which made for a wonderful childhood. She described her adoptive mother as a ‘kind and sweet person’ who gave her and her brother ‘a lot of love’.
Maria had known for a long time that she had been adopted as a baby. She had acquired a copy of her birth certificate a good while before making contact with me, though nothing had come of that then. She began to fill in the details:
I was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1941. I was adopted, but my adopted parents are no longer alive. About 2 months ago I had a very strong urge to find out about my birth family. I had not attempted to try and find Mother before. I sent for a copy of my birth certificate 9 years ago but did not go further, I kept meaning to, but something kept stopping me, and the time did not seem right.
In her letter she told me that she had been very close to her adoptive mother and was greatly distressed at her death some years previously. Whether it was because of this or not, I don’t know, but she had only very recently made up her mind to look for her birth mother. Living so far away from Scotland had been partly the cause of the long wait but, as she said, she felt the time was not right. These feelings, she stressed, I should take into account.
On top of this, there are many deep-seated emotions attendant on adoption also to take into account. There is what Adam Mars-Jones, writing in the London Review of Books, describes as the ‘negative algebra’ of adoption to consider. Life in a world consisting largely of families with their own children is difficult to accommodate for the adopted child. It is possibly even more complicated for such a child than it is for the birth mother and for the adoptive parents. The whole condition can be a maelstrom of conflicting feelings and interactions.
Adoption never operates by a simple formula. It is not a case of one baby extra filling a gap neatly created by the lack of one baby elsewhere. The emotions involved rarely add up, rarely come to a neat solution. It is easy to recognise, even expect, that an adopted child can feel abandoned by a birth parent. But for those without direct experience of adoption, it is seldom understood that such negative feelings can be replicated in the child’s attitude to the adoptive parents. After all, the child they have got is not the child they actually wanted – a child born of their own union. The baby they’ve got is just the baby they have settled for – almost the best of a bad job. Happily, this seems not to be the case in Maria’s upbringing.
In extreme instances, such as those quoted in Jane Robinson’s In the Family Way, adopted children could be made to feel almost responsible for the act – perceived by the self-righteous as sinful – through which they had arrived in the world. There are examples of children having the fact that their parents weren’t married constantly rammed down their throats; others of them being regarded as a sort of ‘trophy owned by the adoptive mother.’ There is even one instance of a child never being referred to as the family’s son, but always being introduced as ‘my adopted son’. As Robinson says, such terminology is ‘redolent of detachment and the sort of qualification no “real” child would ever be subjected to.’ Even in less strained relationships, there are always instances of adoptive parents more taken with the idea of having a baby, than with the often messy reality of the situation. And from the adopted child’s point of view, on being made aware of their status, there must often be a fear that they could be ‘un-adopted’, sent back as not up to snuff.
While my half-sister’s letter told me of a happy childhood, one can never be sure. In her circumstances, there could have been further factors in play, particularly in relation to her adoptive parents. The death of her adoptive father when she was very young; the more recent death of her adoptive mother which she had taken several years to get over. Her resolution to wait for what she felt to be the right time to look for her birth mother could also have had an impact. This delay may well have been governed by her closeness to her adoptive mother, and by the sense of betrayal that such a search could well have induced. Or it could equally have been a result of over-dependence on the adoptive mother and a fear of letting her go. We can speculate, but who can say what was working its way through her mind, what internal pressures she was under?
* * *
Maria stressed that the moment to make contact with her birth mother had at last seemed right when she and her husband came up to Aberdeenshire on holiday. Such emotionally charged things often do seem to have their own specific correct time and the visit to Scotland would have reinforced this. But is it possible to argue that this feeling of ‘rightness’ had any connection with my mother’s almost simultaneous death? I’ll have to leave that open to the reader to decide. But, whether it did or not, being in the country of her mother’s birth enabled Maria and her husband to do the necessary research in the National Archives here. They soon picked up the trail of my mum as her birth mother.
My half-sister’s long letter to me expressed both surprise and sadness that Bea had died. Maria had been convinced – again through the stories she had told herself – that, while Bea would have been of relatively advanced years, she would still be alive.
I imagined Mother had given birth to me when she was a young girl of 17 or 18, so thought there was a good chance that she would still be alive. In fact, I was convinced of it, especially after feeling strange and restless earlier this year and then having a feeling of urgency. I thought at last the time had come.
This conviction, she said, was based on her assumption that the bearer of an illegitimate child in 1941 – during the War, and its attendant loosening of morals – was more than likely to be a young girl.
Far from being the case, it would appear that all age groups had, understandably, been freer with their affections amongst the stresses induced by wartime conditions. My mother – her mother – had, in fact, been twenty-eight at the time she had given birth and so the calculations behind Maria’s conviction had let her down. Let her down badly. It was doubly sad for her that her birth mother had died so recently, only a matter of months before she had begun to seek her out.
Maria told me she had only learned of my own existence during her search in the archives. As the elder brother, I had signed my mother’s death certificate, entering my address as the signatory. So, it was a simple matter for Maria to look me up in the phone book and for her husband to make that call.
As to meeting up, Maria’s letter suggested, to my relief, that we take things slowly. While both my brother and I had agreed that we would arrange a meeting if one was suggested, I was particularly relieved that this did not need to be any time soon. Reeling from the coincidence of discovering, at almost exactly the same interval after the death of each parent, that each of them had been a parent previous to our births, we were too stunned to think straight about the situation.
The Venn diagram that had expanded in 1976 to include a new name in my father’s field had now expanded symmetrically on my mother’s side to include another new name there. The old security of our ‘family of four’, which had been so unexpectedly knocked off its pedestal once before had now been further challenged. While my brother and I had made a good attempt to bring our sister Catrina into some sort of close relationship with the family circle, here now was another ‘person unknown’ with whom it seemed likely we’d have to make a similar accommodation. The old game of musical chairs I had evoked back then had truly started up again.
To be honest about how I was viewing this, I must return to the expression ‘once bitten, twice shy’. But in this case with reference to myself, not to Gilbert. In saying that, I have to be absolutely clear that it was the occurrence itself, the shock of the unexpected disclosure, that made me shy of taking any precipitate action this second time round. I wouldn’t wish my citing of the proverb to seem as if I was being unfair on my sister Catrina. She is entirely innocent in this matter. No, what was exercising me was the unforeseen and coincidental nature of these two revelations, all of twenty years apart. The jolt they induced in me – that was the ‘bite’ I was fighting shy of second time around. The proverb is apt. As my father must have been shy of putting his second marriage at risk by defying Bea in revealing his ‘long-lost’ daughter, so I was shy of putting my relationship with Catrina – that very daughter – at risk by contacting this new half-sister.
* * *
Maria and I exchanged a few more letters over the next couple of years but never got any closer to fixing up an occasion to meet. Eventually she sent me a request for a brief outline of our mother’s background and some photographs of her in her younger days. This was a request that could easily be acceded to but, due to circumstances that my brother and I had inadvertently caused, proved a bit more laborious than I’d anticipated.
Unlike my father’s youth, my mother’s is extensively documented in photographs. Partly this is a result of my grandfather’s cousin being an enthusiastic amateur photographer, and a film-maker to boot. Though it is to be lamented that none of his film work survives, I have a number of his stills which engagingly document the goings-on in his and my mother’s families. The immediacy and relaxed feel of his shots sets his work very much apart from the stiff, posed images from the early part of the century and distinguishes it from the often random and arbitrary snap shots of other family members.
Bea’s well-off, solidly middle-class family was one to take snaps of each other on almost any occasion of note. While not approaching today’s smartphone levels of photography, the images are there in considerable quantities. This plethora of holiday shots further documented Bea’s life – in particular the carefree times she spent on her annual summer holidays and on the round of social gatherings she attended. At least, that’s the tale they appear to tell.
There are, of course, other stories, darker stories, absent from the happy scenes these photographs portray. Other scenes that lie hidden like badly exposed shots, their images barely discernible. Or like that now virtually obsolete occurrence, the double exposure – where the ghost of something not quite revealed is lurking in the background of a different image, compromising its validity, freighting it with disquiet.
The constant reference points such photographs provide for Bea’s life – and, in particular, her youth – make the discovery of a roll of film, still in place within the Box Brownie unearthed after her death, emblematic of the personal discoveries made six months later. That film, which I accidentally exposed to light in my eagerness to check out the workings of the camera, has come to symbolise the secret Bea hoped to take to her grave. What had been on that film, I’ll never know. In all probability, some banal late family snap shots – if indeed it had even been exposed. But the secret that came to light – and I use that phrase deliberately – was an exposure of a different sort. One that doubtless would have shocked so many of the douce matrons and stolid father figures in all the early snaps of Bea’s life; one that would have sent a worrying thrill, a caution, through the younger family members – an exposure she had done so much to prevent, to keep tightly wrapped in its light-proof roll.
Opening the back of the old box camera was not our only mistake. Bea had kept large numbers of family photographs – from her childhood right up to ours. Aware that adding dates and locations to the back of the prints could damage the image, she had catalogued them all neatly in dated chemist’s envelopes. However, the over-excited carelessness with which my brother and I had approached them after her death, made the task of making a selection for Maria somewhat harder.
Snap Shots
Knowing you’d best not write on the backs – despite
that enticing space – in case of making indents in the image,
ink leeching through to cloud the black and white,
you took the time to sort each summer to a separate pack,
mark them up with year and place, ready to pass on, the way
your old Box Brownie would be passed on too,
left on its allotted shelf, the only missing element:
yourself. Two things conspired against your careful plan
and we confess them now. One son, too keen on cameras
by half, undid the back, finding not an empty spool
but unexpected roll film still in place – ruined by his action,
lost to light. The second damned this gaffe, and loaded up
the snaps, life story for the telling, so he thought. Forgetting
to secure the box was his mistake. Back home, he found the lot
slid out, undated, rearranged – a car boot sale
of jumbled histories – as random as the memories
we somehow try to save, the present always just too bright,
its glare obscuring everything we thought was black and white.
But, despite this mishap, we managed to reorder the snaps as best we could. Before long I was able to send off a series of old black and white prints, of which I had duplicates, so Maria could build up her own picture of Bea’s life.
The photos allowed me to go right back to my mother’s rather privileged upbringing – to her school days, through her youth of sport and parties – then up to her late marriage and the arrival of her two boys. I was conscious that these snaps, at least the early ones, would present a rather glamorous image to Bea’s ‘long-lost’ daughter. But I sent them off. Then it all went quiet.
Having had no acknowledgement of the parcel of mementos, I was reduced to wondering why for over a year. Eventually, I began to worry that it had got lost in the post and so wrote again to Maria to ask whether or not the package had arrived. My thoughts as to Maria’s reply are principally ones of sadness for her sake. She wrote back in the end, saying that the whole thing had been just too overwhelming for her.
I have been having great difficulty coming to terms with the fact that Mother never said anything about my existence to you or your brother. I more or less put your letters and photos away and tried to forget about the whole thing and get on with my life. I should have written to you before but every time I thought about doing this, and facing up to the past situation, I found it too distressing.
While she didn’t rule out a possible meeting at some unspecified time in the future, she seemed to prefer that our correspondence should lapse. Despite replying to that letter, I have heard nothing from her since.
This is an ending I am inclined to regret, but now feel I might have played a part in precipitating myself. Why did I not see that a lifetime of photographs would be too much for her to bear? Was it not the shock of seeing a whole life that, if attitudes had been different, she could have known, could have been part of, that caused Maria to stop writing? Could Bea’s patently privileged upbringing have made any such sense of regret even more poignant – induced a feeling of jealousy, of envy? Thinking about it now, I can’t help wondering whether a single snap shot – or just a brief selection – would have been enough? A studio portrait maybe? Or a few shots of Bea as a girl?
But at the same time, Maria had built up her own idiosyncratic notion of her birth mother’s situation, her own story as to how she thought she must have been present in Bea’s life. Her discovery that this in no way matched the actuality must have been a harsh blow to her. The fact – of which I am now aware – that my mother had done everything in her power to conceal Maria’s existence would have been an even crueller blow. Looked at from that perspective, I doubt whether there is anything more my brother and I could have done. Even had we met up in the immediate follow-on to her initial contact, I suspect the end result would have been the same. As a person who believed in destiny, perhaps Maria is now consoled by believing that we were never destined to meet.
It is well over a dozen years since we were last in touch and still we have not met. Nor does it look likely that we ever will. So, why did the letters cease? Once again, here is another mystery, albeit a small one. Once again, something I’ll never know.
* * *
Time has produced a more realistic take on this. I doubt whether any meeting with Maria could ever be based on anything other than a sort of genetically inspired, but nonetheless idle, curiosity. Maria had never known her mother – never known my mum. Barring the genetic coincidence of us both having shared the same birth parent, what was there connecting us? Apart from the likelihood of some physical resemblance and the possibility of some shared character traits, what would be the basis of any relationship?
To me, it’s not the ties of blood that count. Families work not because they are related to each other – at least, not just because they are related. There are plenty of instances of the exact opposite being the case, Maria’s own adopted family seeming to be such a one. My own belief is that if a family sets about creating an identity for itself, inventing its own reality, that – rather than any genetic link – will put it on the road to cohesion, to success. This can be worked at. But there is always a large element of luck about it.
With my sister Catrina, on the other hand, I had Gilbert in common. She could be – she is – my sister in that context. We had both known our father as an individual at different and at overlapping times in his life. Although this was independently of each other, we could still fill in gaps in each other’s knowledge of the man. Together we could empathise with his joys and worries throughout his sixty-eight years. We knew our father as a real person, not as just a genetic link, and on that we have built a relationship, a warmth and a love for what we saw of our father in each other. Each of us can illuminate and expand that period of our father’s life to which the other was not a party. We can add flesh to the bones of supposition and guesswork. My writing this memoir and discussing its content with Catrina has brought us, I sense, closer than ever before. Although we never knew each other before Gilbert’s death, we have connections that can span his place in both our lives, can even at the best of times almost seem to abolish that death.
While blood patently is thicker than water, it is not as dense as flesh. As the poet Vicki Feaver says, ‘care is not for the flesh of our flesh / but flesh itself.’ And it is flesh that makes contact – flesh that hugs and supports, that grasps hands, that puts an arm round a shoulder, gives a pat on the back – flesh that binds heart to heart. Every time I embrace my sister Catrina – as I do with my brother – I embrace not only my father’s flesh, but the flesh that knew him, that held him by the hand, that hugged him, enfolded him.
In the case of Maria, my more recently discovered half-sister, there is no such link at all. Any similar empathy would seem to have been impossible. While my father had expressly wished for – pleaded for – his children to be brought together, in my new half-sister’s case, it was abundantly clear that my mother hadn’t wanted anyone to know about her child. She had, indeed, done everything in her power in order to keep the existence of her illegitimate daughter hidden. Perhaps Maria herself realised this and decided to cease communications. Perhaps it became clear to her that, while the mother who gave birth to her was someone she could have bonded with, a pair of brothers connected to her by no more than genetic chance weren’t worth the upheaval any direct contact might have caused.
But, while I have never felt the draw of blood relationships to be paramount, I cannot for a minute deny that others will not take the opposite view. What, of course, I can never refute is that my thinking here ‘has form’. I am every bit as much a product of my upbringing as the next man. My own hands-off childhood, coupled with the stiff-upper-lip mores of the time, is bound to have influenced my thinking. Equally so, the many enduring friendships I have been privileged to enjoy throughout my adult years have inclined me in their favour, rather than towards family ties. Others have had different experiences, different upbringings, different family interaction. It is inevitable that their conclusions – their instincts even – will differ.
It is clearer to me in retrospect than it was at the time that my half-sister Catrina had a real need for a family connection. Her dissatisfaction with the state of her relationship with her mother – indeed her alienation from it – was a prime driving force in her seeking out her father. It drove her too in her hopes of being welcomed into a family. Vain hopes, as it turned out, but hopes nonetheless firmly predicated on blood relationships.
That my half-sister Maria waited so long before seeking out her mother is an indication of her closeness to her adoptive mother, a deeply founded but clearly non-genetic relationship. But she did search for her birth mother. And she also thought long and hard about it over many years. The blood relationship was clearly working away at the back of her mind. While I am still not clear about what exactly she hoped would be the outcome of the connection she was too late to make, she was obviously driven to attempt to make it. And had a sufficiently strong belief in it to gamble on a positive result.
As the numerous and often anguished personal histories that proliferate in memoirs, biographies, tv series, articles and blogs all seem to tell, that urge to seek out and connect with a blood relative – especially a parent – is an enormously powerful one. Am I deficient in not responding to it? Is there something in my make-up that holds me back from its pull? I am, of course, privileged in my background – a stable, two-parent family, a secure and largely steady middle class life. So the need – the sheer craving – for a missing blood relation is one I have never felt. But undeniably, others have.
It would be completely crass of me to reject their experience out of hand. The numerous accounts I have read in researching the background to this narrative, and to other stories of a similar nature, have convinced me that the genuine need for a blood relationship is only too real.
But not for me. That’s all I am saying really. That it just doesn’t do it for me. And the irony of that is clear.
It was my own family background, its hands-off, get-on-with-it nature, that formed that opinion. My own extended family, its distant and remote relatives, seen rarely if at all, that contributed to my point of view. My own parents’ twin objectives of keeping each of their secrets – at least initially – that threw up an invisible barrier to deeper affection, closer ties. It’s in my blood. I cannot escape that.
I still feel, therefore, that neither my brother nor I are in any way constrained to pursue further contact with my second half-sister. The circumstances differ hugely from my father’s case. While I don’t deny that there was dragging of feet and much wasting of time in making initial contact with Catrina, and that I was resentful of my mother’s insistence that we ‘owe it to Dad’ to get in touch, ultimately we did meet up and have kept in touch to this day.
In my mother’s case there is no-one telling us that we ‘owe it’ to them, no-one insisting that a duty must be done. My brother and I are not under any obligation to a parent to make a connection with Maria. The precise opposite, in actual fact. Were we to exactly honour our mother’s efforts during her lifetime, there should be no contact whatsoever. Nor, if I am honest, am I sufficiently inquisitive to initiate a meeting with Maria. Had she been eager for such a meeting, things would surely have been different. But it seems clear she was not.
Circumstances do change, of course. One day a letter may arrive. One day another phone call may be made. Maria could change her mind. Sadly, she seemed to be more troubled than consoled by what little contact we did have. But nonetheless, the possibility that she may wish to revisit her decision and take steps towards renewed contact is always at the back of my mind. But for now it seems unlikely.
It was Maria’s choice to let things lie. It was my decision not to force the pace. She still has my address; I’m still in the same house. I still have hers; assuming she is too. Maybe one day she will write again; maybe one day I will. We do share a parent – I can never forget that. But maybe one half-sister – one sister, as I think of her – with whom I share a parent we both knew and both loved, is all I should wish for.