“It’s quiet with Iris gone, isn’t it?” he said.
I made some noncommittal noise in reply. It was quiet for me since she left, but not in the way Daniel’s tone suggested. With her gone I was better able to push down my worry at what she might find and to regain some of the peace I’d always had in Kiltilly.
“Still, she has to do what she can to find her family, I suppose. Don’t you miss her at all, Delia?”
“I’m too busy to miss her,” I said.
“Sometimes I think you’re right, no point dragging up the past, but I’ve been thinking about it during the past few months. Natural, I suppose, in the circumstances. I wanted to be a good man. A good man. I thought I was doing my best for Fran and Jude when their mother died, but I don’t think I was. Nothing I could do would make up for the loss of their mother. I was drowning in guilt, you know?”
“Guilt? About what exactly?”
My astonishment at what he said made my tone sharper than I’d intended. My own guilt had been so heavy over the years I’d not even considered how Daniel felt. He’d got to properly grieve his wife and hold up his head as a good father and husband.
“About Ellen’s death. We’d had a bit of a row before she left the house. I’d told her you were pregnant, that I wanted to do right by you. Afterwards I thought that the row had distracted her so wasn’t paying attention to the road.”
Once I would have assumed that ‘doing right’ by me was to marry me. That delusion was long dead.
“She and I talked that night too,” I said.
Daniel turned to look at me and half rose from his chair. I concentrated on the way the raindrops hit the ground and bounced back up a couple of inches.
“You did? You never said.”
I glanced at him and away. He puffed his cheeks and leaned back in his chair.
“You gave me no chance. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to see you so badly right after she died. I wanted to console you and, I suppose, get some reassurance myself.”
I’d gone to Maggie then too, as I’d gone to her about my all predicaments. When I confessed my feelings of guilt Maggie had snorted.
“Are you mad, girl?” Maggie had said. “It was the frosty road that killed her, not you. It would have happened whether you two spoke or not. Get that thought out of your head. You’ve enough to think about.”
I repeated her assessment to Daniel, now.
“I suppose so, but how did the two of you meet? I didn’t know you knew each other that well.”
“We didn’t. We’d met briefly at the hospital once. Apart from seeing her around the village now and again, that was it. She knew who I was.”
Walking home from work that night in 1967 I’d reached the half-mile mark between the edge of the village and our farm when I heard a car behind me slow. My heart leapt because at first I thought it might be Daniel. A Morris Minor pulled up beside me and Ellen Wolfe rolled down the window.
Even though she was no stranger to me, our paths didn’t cross very often. The two of us looked at each other that day on the dusky road, me standing almost in the ditch and she in her car, the yellow indicator extended. She spoke first.
“Delia Buckley, we need to talk.”
I didn’t say a word. Besides, my mouth had gone dry. A quick glance up and down the road confirmed that we were totally alone. I remember covering my stomach with my hands, as if I were protecting the child I carried from whatever was about to happen.
“Get in, it’s cold,” she said, gesturing toward the car.
“I’m all right here,” I told her and stood my ground.
We stared each down. All I could think of was that here was Daniel’s wife, the woman he had lived with for more than twenty years. Young and confident of Daniel’s love, it never occurred to me that he may have, probably did, say similar things to this woman once that he now said to me. Ellen was good-looking. Her blonde hair swung in an expensive, precise bob just below her ears. It was too dark to truly read her expression.
“Very well,” she said. I thought she would drive away. Instead she pulled the car off the road onto the verge. She got out. Shorter than me, she carried herself with a lot more self-assurance, a woman accustomed to getting her own way. I reminded myself that Daniel loved me and resolved not to be intimidated by her.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“Daniel told me he’s having an affair with you.”
I held my voice steady as I answered.
“It’s more than an affair.”
She looked me up and down, then folded her arms across her chest as if she were cold, which she probably was in her thin car coat.
“It’s not the first affair he’s had, and it won’t be the last.”
“He wants to marry me.”
Angry at how defensive that sounded, I shut my mouth. Ellen looked up at the sky and sighed. The frost crept through the soles of my shoes and I resisted the urge to shuffle my feet.
“He always says that. He can’t help himself. He might even believe it for a moment. But that’s not going to happen. You must know that. Men like Daniel don’t give up their life for girls half their age, who have nothing more to offer than a willing body. As soon as he remembers the reality of the social situation he would find himself in if he did, he forgets them.”
It was so calm, this dismissal of me and of the most profound experience I’d ever had. As a pure, simple reflex I slapped her face. “That’s what you think,” I said. “You think I’m some cheap shop girl who’ll crawl away because you say so. But I won’t. Daniel will stand by me and his child. You will see that.”
Her hand was on her slapped cheek. She removed it slowly. Her face was so white the imprint of my fingers showed clearly even in the dim light.
“Ah, yes, you’re having a baby. You thought to trap him in that time-honoured old way?”
“It’s not a trap. He knew it might happen. I’m a Catholic, you know.”
I could hear a vehicle change gears at the turn beyond my house in the silence that followed. She turned her head and I saw a small sparkle from the pendant that lay on her throat. She laughed, a sneering, sad sound in the dark.
“Catholic indeed.”
She turned then and got back in her car. The tires squealed and kicked up gravel as she pulled out onto the road. I remained standing there, waited for the small van I heard to pass, then continued my walk home.
When I finished my account Daniel and I sat in silence for a good long while.
“How terrible for you,” he said finally. “Terrible. It was a bad, bad time all around.”
He reached out and patted my arm, his fingers shockingly bony against the flesh of my arm. I stifled the retort that rose to my tongue.
“I was lost when she died,” he sighed. “Such guilt and remorse. Then Fran disappeared. Jude tried to get me to search almost right away, but I told her over and over that Fran would be back any day. When she didn’t come, I tormented myself about that, too. Maybe if I had responded sooner we’d have found her. Over the years I felt so helpless watching Jude grieve and search. I had to declare Fran dead not only for the estate, but to try to put a stop to it. It didn’t work, though. She kept right on searching for years.”
He let his breath out in a long exhale. This time I patted his hand. The temperature had dropped with the rainfall and I was overtaken by a shiver.
“At least you were all right. I consoled myself with that. I did, Delia. At least I’d taken care of you.”
“It’s cold now, we should go in,” I said and stood up to help him to his feet. We shuffled into the house leaning on each other. It had never been my intention to tell him about the meeting with Ellen. Clearly I needed to guard my tongue better. I might or might not tell him what became of our child that he assumed I had aborted, but other secrets I would keep and take to my ow
n grave. Everything depended on my silence.
17
The day after our talk about Ellen, Daniel decided to throw a dinner party.
“It’s time to have a gathering, a really good dinner,” he announced. This after he had refused to eat a morsel for breakfast.
“Who’ll you ask?” Jude inquired.
“All of us.” He indicated the house in general. “And Oliver and Lil.”
Oliver Pike was his agent and Lil Rainsford had been his editor for many years. I’d met Oliver a couple of times when Daniel and I were together. In fact, I’d been to a party at his house once, a very tony affair where people drank buckets of alcohol and threw famous names around like confetti.
“When is Iris back?” he asked.
“She’s staying a bit longer. There’s someone she’s to meet who might have known her mother. She’ll be back in a few days,” Jude said.
“Well, the sooner the better, right, Delia? I don’t want to leave it too long or you’ll all be partying without me.”
He settled on two weeks away, hoping to make it a Friday night if Oliver and Lil could manage it. It was usually my night off, but I wasn’t taking much time off at the moment, in part because of Daniel’s condition. He needed more care as he got weaker, and although being around Iris irked me, I wasn’t that relaxed anywhere else, either, and at least being here meant I had some hope of hearing of any developments. Since she’d gone away, my nerves jangled every time the phone rang. I was beginning to think it would have been easier to tell her what I knew and take the consequences. Times had changed, after all. These days having a child outside marriage wasn’t such a big thing. But I had made a promise. Besides, I couldn’t imagine what Mam and Da would think about my silence all these years.
“Mike will come, and you’ll come, Delia, won’t you? You’re almost family now, really.”
Almost family, indeed. Maggie’s face rose in my mind. Not the Maggie I’d seen yesterday, but from when she was fully alive and vital, planning for the baby’s arrival reading Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care.
“I’ll be here,” I said to Daniel.
He and Jude spent the next few hours organizing the dinner. They discussed which caterer to use. Jude insisted that she and Iris would deal with the preparations so there would be no need to get someone to do that. Daniel disagreed. By mid-afternoon they had agreed, at least in principle, on how to proceed. Daniel went to rest and left Jude to call Oliver and Lil.
Over the next few days I saw that the rich don’t plan dinners like the rest of us. Their work is consulting with caterers, getting advice on wines for each course, ordering flowers, and hiring people to do things like clean the house before guests come, set the table, and create the general ambiance. It was an eye-opener for me. When we had neighbours in for holiday meals, the house was cleaned, the ingredients were bought, the meal cooked and served all by my mother and myself. Given my druthers, I preferred our way. Still, it was hard not to get caught up in the general excitement. A date was reached. Friday night two weeks away it was. I wondered whether Oliver would recognize me, and if he did, what he would think of my presence in the house.
Jude took to the dinner arrangements like one born to it. She and Daniel had a spirited discussion on which caterer to hire. Jude wanted to give most of the work to locals and Daniel wanted to use a “proper” catering company from Limerick.
“You know, that’s why the locals don’t like us much up here in the village. We spend our big money in the city, not here.”
“Of course they like us,” Daniel said.
“Well, yes, but we’re not really villagers, are we? We don’t support the businesses here when we could.”
Daniel muttered under his breath. Jude was right. The village businesses always needed support, and though we didn’t have a catering company as such among the businesses, we had some really great organizers and cooks. Peggy O’Shea certainly knew how to organize and provide good, tasty, first-class dinners and desserts. Whenever the Bishop had a dinner or parish event, it was Peggy who provided the food, and the Bishop certainly liked to set a fine table. The Wolfes didn’t understand how scrupulous the villagers were to spread their spending evenly among all the local businesses, shopping here one week, there the next. Most of us went to the city only for things the village didn’t provide much of, like trashy fashion clothes, or when we had heavy-duty Christmas shopping to do. When all the clatter of argument died down, Jude and Daniel reached a compromise: wine, decor, and the main dinner from a caterer in Limerick, desserts home-cooked from Peggy’s café, and flowers from Mary Ryan.
“She’ll do well here,” Daniel said to me as I doled out his medications. “I think she’ll actually live here as a base at least. As much as I did, anyway. She has a good head on her shoulders.”
“Was this an exercise to get her involved?” I asked.
“In part. In part. I really do want to have a nice do here, gather the few people around that I want to be with. I don’t have too long left, do I?”
“It’s impossible to be sure about these things.”
What I said was true, and all this fuss about the dinner had clearly already taken a toll on his energy. This past week, he had stayed in bed the whole day. When he was up and about, his shrunken flesh was hidden by bulky clothes, as he was perpetually cold. Naked, his bones showed clearly through his skin. The excitement of the dinner gave a gleam to his eye, so on balance it was likely doing him good. I took his pulse. When I was done he reached out and caught my wrist.
“Delia, will you help me at the end?”
“I’ll be here. I promised you.”
He lay back on the pillows and turned toward the window. His chest rose and fell, then paused before rising again in a way I didn’t like. He turned back to me and raised himself on the bed.
“I mean, will you not let me suffer? I don’t want to lie here, helpless, suffering. You know these.” He indicated the drug bottles lined up on the table. “You can fix it for me, can’t you?”
He wasn’t the first of my patients to ask this of me, so I gave him my standard answer. It’s against the law and against my profession and against the Church to do this.
“I can mediate your pain. I will do that,” I said.
“Delia, nobody will know you helped me. Please?”
He whispered “please” again. His eyes never left mine as he begged me. I thought of all that had happened between us, his betrayals, the devastation I visited on his family with my silence over matters I could have spoken up about, even Maggie with her tangled mind. All the misery I’d endured and caused lay out before me. No matter what had happened, what was owed or owing between us, I couldn’t do this thing, no more than I could have aborted our child. For the first time I realized it wasn’t the Church that dictated my actions; it was some innate belief that human life was sacred and was not mine to end. I kissed Daniel on the forehead.
“I’m so sorry, Daniel, but I can’t. I just can’t.”
“Then tell me what to do myself. Show me how much of what I need to take. Some combination of these damn drugs must be able to end it.”
The telephone by the bed rang. We let it ring for Jude to pick up. It rang about a dozen times so I answered. It was Iris. She would arrive back the next day.
18
My own shout woke me. I had been dreaming of something terrible, the particulars of which fled as soon as I woke up, but the hard bang of my heart in my chest took some time to subside. I fancied the dark crawled inside me with every breath, and even switching on the light didn’t help. I needed to get outside.
The chill in the night air signalled summer was coming to a close as I paced barefoot hither and yon on flagstones, hardly noticing the cold. It was well past midnight. Sleep was impossible. I would have gone for a walk but for needing to be there in case Daniel wanted help in the night. Jude would never h
ear him ring from her room upstairs. News of Iris’s return, Daniel’s plea for help with ending his life, and memories of Wales rubbed me raw inside.
What Daniel asked of me was not an unusual request. Many of my patients asked the same thing of me. They were not really looking to avoid physical pain but the emotional and mental anguish of death, yet most of them didn’t know this. They would be in very little physical pain; medication could take of that. I saw it as part of my work to try my best to take care of the rest of it, by being close by, available to take their minds off things when that was called for. I would do the same for Daniel when he needed it. If he needed it. He did, after all, have his daughter there, but often people talked more freely with non-family members, so I would be on hand. No, his request didn’t bother me all that much.
What Iris might have discovered in Wales plagued me much more. Names of those I’d worked alongside scrolled through my mind. Would she meet them, would my name come up? They would have no need to mention me at all unless Iris brought it up. Would she? Worry would not change what she found, but worry gnawed at me all the same. The lies I’d told to cover my unmarried state there, and the omissions since chased each other through my mind. If the farm, Maggie’s comfort and my professional reputation weren’t on the line I would have sneaked off in the dark. Far, far away from the Big House. As it was, I was outside wrapped in a blanket. The wind rose and fell. It troubled the leaves, their rustle growing louder as the breeze approached the house and died away when it passed. It gathered and approached all over again, much like long breaths drawn in and out.
I thought to move inside and try for sleep again. As I turned for the house the wind shifted and carried a faint scent of decay. The rustle of leaves turned into the sound of waves in my mind, and the trapped feeling I’d had all those years ago, a feeling I swore I would never allow again, was back in full force, and my early days in Cardiff were as present to me as the wooden boards I paced on.
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