in particular. This is why I am writing. It is greatly on my conscience what happened all those years ago, and I wanted to write and tell you that. There is no need, indeed I believe no likelihood, that you will forgive me, but I am writing to you in order to tell you that I regret it enormously, and hardly know what to make of it as an event in all our lives. I suppose it is all long long ago, but not so long ago that it does not seem like yesterday, and is often in my thoughts and in my dreams. I wanted to tell you that Tom married again and had children, but maybe you will not want to hear this. Tom died about ten years ago of a stomach complaint, he died in Roscommon General Hospital, his second wife by then also having died. We never spoke of you though we saw each other often, and yet I felt it was always there unspoken between us when we met. The truth is, it was something in his life that changed him forever, he was forever just a different man after that, never again the easy-going old Tom we knew.

Maybe you will say, proper order, I don't know. Maybe you would be right. I want to say a few words now about my mother, who as you may know was the chief instrument in all that time of difficulty. I want to tell you things about her that I could only tell you as a dying man, and maybe only like this, faceless, behind the cover of a letter. Because it is also true that she treated your -1 was going to write 'case' but you know what I mean – with uncharacteristic hardness.

About twenty years ago when she was dying herself, she told me the story of her birth. It was sometimes whispered in Sligo that she was illegitimate, though you may not have heard this whisper. As it happens, she was adopted, her real mother having died young, and her family, being wealthy, and not approving the marriage in the first place, then contriving to give her away. Her mother was a Presbyterian woman called Lizzie Finn. Her real father was an army officer, and it seems she was given to his batman, a Catholic of

course, to be reared as his own. It is a shadowy story, but I saw with my own eyes the marriage certificate of her parents in Christ Church some years after she died. How relieved she would have been to know they were married I can't say. Perhaps in heaven these are small matters.

Before Tom died, he also had occasion to tell me his secret, which in some ways is more pertinent to you, and may make you wonder why she did not show more compassion to you. For he confessed to me that he and I only shared a mother, his own father being other than Old Tom, though who he was he did not know, though he tried to find out, not least from my mother. My mother never shared this with anyone and brought the man's name to her grave. We must remember that my mother was only sixteen when I was born, and not much older when brother Tom came (or half-brother I should say).

Why am I telling you all this? Because of course it might explain if not excuse her enormous desire that Tom should not endure so confused a life as hers, and was a slave to her own ideas of rectitude, as only a person who thinks they have fallen can be.

Eneas? In the sixties I traced him through the War Office to an hotel on the Isle of Dogs in London. I went there one evening, was told he was out, and to come back the next day. The following morning when I approached the dosshouse, I found it a smouldering ruin. Perhaps alarmed at the news that there was someone from Sligo to see him, thinking it was his old enemies and he was to be assassinated, even after all those years, he may have burned the hotel himself, to cover his tracks. Or maybe some men had been shadowing me as I searched for him, and did the poor man in. Whatever happened, I could never pick up his trail again. He disappeared utterly. I suppose he is dead and may he rest in peace.

This is my letter and maybe it is of no good to you. It is all greatly on my conscience. Roseanne, the truth is, Tom did love you but failed in his love. I am afraid we were all more than a little in love with you. Forgive us if you can. Goodbye.

Respectfully and sincerely,

Jack

By any mark a strange and unexpected letter. There were things in it that I didn't quite understand. Suddenly of course I hoped and prayed that it was the damp had closed the letter again, and that she might once have opened it. Certainly, she had kept it, unless she had put it unopened in the book and forgotten it. Maybe it was the only letter she had ever received. Christ. I was certainly very pensive as the plane set down in Gatwick.

Bexhill is only about fifty miles from Gatwick in that part of England so English it is almost something else, unnameable. The names reek of candyfloss and old battles. Brighton, Hastings. It is on the coast that ironically holds the sites of a million childhood holidays, though I do not think the orphans of long ago would concur. Looking up flights on the internet, and directions for Bexhill, I found a discussion site, contributed to by survivors of those days. The raw pain flared up from the words. Two girls were drowned there in the sea in the fifties, the other girls trying to form a human chain to save them, while the nuns prayed bizarrely on the beach. It is like a painting stolen from the museum of inexplicable cruelty. I confess I wondered about Mrs McNulty's daughter, and confess also that for some reason I hoped she was not among those praying nuns. If Roseanne's child had ended up there in the forties…These were my muddled thoughts as I took the train from Victoria.

It seems I am fated to record the dismaying bleakness of institutions. It is a constant, unwaveringly. Nazareth House Bexhill was no exception. Their stories seem to be in the very mortar like those ancient seashells, the very redness of the bricks. You could never wash them out, I thought. The very silence of the place suggested other silences. I rang at the front door feeling suddenly very small and strange, as if I were myself an orphan arriving there. Soon the door was opened, I stated my business to the woman, a lay person, and I was led up the long hallway, with its darkly shining linoleum, and items of solid mahogany furniture, one of them graced by an Italian statue of St Joseph. I know it was St Joseph because his name was on the plinth. The woman stopped at a door, and smiled, I smiled, and I entered the room.

It was a sort of little dining room, at least the table had plates of sandwiches and cakes, and a setting for one, with a teacup ready. I hardly knew what to do, so sat down, wondering if I was in the right place, or the right person in the right place. But soon a tall smiling nun glided in, and filled my cup from a ceramic pot. It had I noticed a picture of the Bexhill seafront on it.

'Thank you, Sister,' I said, for I knew not what else to say.

'I'm sure you are very hungry after your journey,' she said.

'Well, I am, thank you,' I said.

'Sr Miriam will see you afterwards.'

So I ate in some bemusement and when I was finished – the nun seemed to have a sixth sense for this, because no one person could have cleared that spread – I was led deeper into the convent and shown eventually into a smaller room.

It was a room of the usual filing cabinets. I immediately had a sense of hush and history. I suspected there were some things in these cabinets that people would need lawyers to get at, if even then. And presiding over this was a neat, doughy-faced nun.

'Sr Miriam?' I said.

'Yes,' she said. 'You are Dr Grene.'

'I am,' I said.

'And you have come I believe to consult certain records?' 'Yes, I have some documents with me also, that may help us identify…'

'I received a call from Sligo and I've been able to make a start before you came.'

'Oh, I see, she did ring then, I thought she said…'

'This file has a dual reference,' she said, opening a slim folder. 'The child you are seeking did not stay with us long.'