Free What She Never Told Me by Kate McQuaile

of the blue? And what if the man I’m seeking hadn’t been her boss, but someone from another part of the company? No, I have to do this a different way, a more inventive way.
    I delete what I’ve written and I set up a new email account in the name of Sandra Munro. It’s not very imaginative, but I need something I’ll remember, and Sandra Munro is as close to my husband’s name as I can get. Then I write that I’m carrying out research for a book on the impact on local communities in the British Isles of philanthropic companies and their approach to employee welfare and housing. In particular, I say, I’m interested in talking to any former senior staff who worked in the Dublin plant in the 1960s and 1970s, before it closed down. I add my address, my mobile number and my London landline, read over the entire message several times and click send. I can feel my heart pounding against my chest.
    It’s unusually mild and dry for early April and, when I go to White Nights for something to eat, I sit at one of the tables outside so that I can listen to the fast flow of the water and the squawking of the gulls as they circle and swoop. It’s a strange kind of music, discordant yet harmonious. It matches my mood. I have the Irish Times with me, but I can’t concentrate on it; my nerves are strung too tightly.
    What would my life have been like had I remained in Ireland? Apart from those years of being married to Sandy, when I was happier than I had ever thought I could be, would it have been so much less of a life than the one I have in London? Would it have been so very different? I might have ended up giving piano lessons to children who didn’t want to learn and to adult beginners with little hope of ever becoming even competent, let alone good. But every now and then there might have been a child or adult whose delight in music made my efforts worthwhile.
    I might have married Declan.
    My nerves are jangled, too jangled to face the mess of papers that waits for me back at the house. A different plan forms in my head: I’ll go to Crumlin. I know from my internet research that the brewery has been redeveloped into offices and film and recording studios. The building also houses a little museum devoted to the history of the company’s operations in Dublin and its place in local history. I tell myself it’s unlikely that I’ll accomplish anything useful by going there, but at least I’ll see the place where my mother worked and – maybe – met my father. There may even be someone in the museum, a former worker, who may have known her.
    I could take the car, but I know that Dublin traffic is a nightmare, so I leave it outside the house and walk to the railway station. For a station on the main line between Dublin and Belfast, it looks pleasantly old-fashioned. I don’t have long to wait for a train and, as it moves out of the station, I close my eyes and think back to those excursions my mother and I made all those years ago, in trains with compartments that we often had all to ourselves.
    The train is one of those commuter trains with long open carriages, but at least it’s not crowded. There’s a flutter of excitement in my stomach as we pass through the stations at Laytown, Balbriggan, Skerries, Rush and Lusk, Malahide, Portmarnock, the sea on our left, shimmering in the sunlight that refuses to stay behind the clouds for long. I have a good feeling. Finally, I am doing something that may or may not lead me to David Prescott, but at least I will have tried.
    Leaving Amiens Street Station – I still think of it by that name because it’s what my mother always called it, even though its official name is Connolly – I hail a taxi. Twenty minutes later, I’m standing outside the brewery, a low-level but striking redbrick building that dominates the surrounding area.
    Inside, there’s a central lobby with signposts indicating the way to the various studios and even a theatre. What I’m looking for is the