Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found by Allegra Huston Page B

do with it, but I didn’t blame her. I couldn’t picture her at St. Cleran’s, with its rainy skies and headscarf-wearing women and a butler banging a gong to announce lunch. I didn’t know much about her, other than that she was from Los Angeles, and she was clearly at home in Daddy’s world of money and famous friends. She wasn’t an actress; it didn’t occur to me that she might “be” anything other than herself. I understood why Daddy was entranced by her. I was. Somehow I had the sense that she knew who I was, too. Maybe she had convinced Daddy that I was better off in Long Island with my cousins than as a solitary Irish princess with the groom’s children for friends. Fleetingly I wondered whether I should have put more effort into becoming friends with the other girls at the convent school in Loughrea.
    Still, after a second summer collecting beach glass with mycousins, I wasn’t unhappy with the change. I sensed that Daddy was starting off on a new life and leaving the old one behind. It seemed natural that I would be left in his wake. Other people had been found to look after me, and nobody seemed to think I would have any feelings about it at all—so, conveniently, I didn’t. If Daddy and I weren’t both living at St. Cleran’s—which had happened only in short bursts, anyway—I had no conception of what life with Daddy could possibly be.
     
    Great chasms shivered the cliff below Nana and Grampa’s house, scoring its surface into deep wrinkles like tissue paper that’s been used too many times. It was, visibly, falling away. When Grampa had built the house—when Mum was a girl and first living on her own in California—he’d built a bocce court between the house and the cliff edge: a long narrow rectangle of sand rimmed with boards. Now it was half gone, and the cliff edge crept closer to the house every day. The wooden staircase that led down to the beach ended in midair.
    The certainty that one day the house itself would tumble too fascinated me, the way disasters do in a country you’ve barely heard of. It was neither sad nor frightening, just inevitable and satisfyingly dramatic. I didn’t like the house much. Despite all its windows, it felt dark, and it was flimsy after the thick stone of St. Cleran’s. The Irish windows that I loved were set deep, so that looking through them felt like looking through a telescope or a peephole, and the golden-gray light ran liquid through the old, swirling glass. The Long Island glass was as flat and featureless as plastic, and marred by ugly screens. I was offended by the miserly shallowness of the windowsills.
    Nurse and I slept in the guest bedroom—she in the double bed, which I soon joined her in, and I, theoretically, in the single one beside it. The white candlewick bedspreads were thin, like the windows: worn and saggy by nature, they pulled my spirit down. I’d grown accustomed to rooms Mum had furnished with deep colorsand strange objects enriched by the marks of age. Here, old things were just old: tired and visibly ready for their end.
    And here too there was talk of selling up. The place was too big; Grampa couldn’t support all these households. I bridled inwardly, on everyone’s behalf but my own. Uncle Nap worked hard running the restaurant in the city, and I didn’t see how it could be his fault that its heyday was past. Uncle Fraser didn’t have a real job—but Grampa required a flunky, and if it wasn’t Uncle Fraser, who would it be?
    I didn’t miss St. Cleran’s, in the sense of longing to be back there. There was no point. That temporary move to the Big House had shut me down. I was to be housed where convenience dictated; I had felt, in the heart of my family, like a guest. I would always stay in other people’s rooms, so I might as well get used to it. I’d just been moved on again—and somewhere in my mind I knew it wouldn’t be the last time. I didn’t think of asking for a poster or a bright bedspread, or