“Please.”
“Yeah, okay.”
He shrugged and held my arm as we went through the trees to where he kept his van. We rattled our way out to the small cottage on the road to Knockdeara.
“You all right to make your way in?”
“Yes. I’m fine. Really. I just need time to...just time.”
Mike stood aside to let me in the door ahead of him. Warmth from the big range that dominated the room wrapped around me. It was a good-sized room with a big window that overlooked a garden. Bird feeders hung on the clothesline, and sparrows, finches and tits flitted back and forth and clung to the feeders, filling up before night fell. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. From behind me came the squeak of a tap turned and the sound of water hitting the metal of a kettle.
“We think it cures everything, don’t we?” I said.
“What? Oh, the tea. Yeah, we do. Sure it’s been keeping our heads above water for generations.”
We didn’t say much until we’d had our first cup. As Mike poured the next he asked me if I wanted to talk about whatever it was.
“I do, and I don’t. It is something that shouldn’t matter now, that took me by surprise. I think I’m being oversensitive, is all.”
I was being no such thing. Daniel’s words had hit me right in the heart. Clearly our child and I had meant little or nothing to him or he would never have said that. Whatever idea I had to tell him about the birth was gone, and I wondered whether my urge to tell him was an attempt to shame him. Or maybe to pass off some of my own guilt.
“Well, you seemed pretty upset. Anytime you want to talk, I’m here.”
I almost told him then. Most of it, anyway. Until I remembered he and Jude were in love and he would naturally want to share whatever I said. He certainly didn’t deserve the burden of keeping my secrets, so I thanked him and held out my cup for a refill.
The light was on over the front door of the Big House. At the bottom of the step my feet stopped of their own volition and I had to make a real effort to walk up and open the door. As soon as I was inside, Jude came out of the kitchen, took a few steps forward, then stopped. My own steps faltered. The hallway stretched between us, filled with the cloying scent of the lilies in their vase on the table.
“Hello,” I said finally.
Embarrassed by my earlier flight from the place, and with no real idea of what to do now, I shut my mouth. Had I not had my professional persona to worry about, I wouldn’t have come back at all. As it was, I was weighing the cost of quitting against that of staying. In my heart I knew I would stay for the sake of the farm. I didn’t like that feeling at all. The only consolation was that my time at the Big House would soon be over.
“Delia, I’m glad you’re back. I’ve got Daniel into bed for the night. Sort of, anyway. Come on and have some tea.”
Jude came forward and helped me off with my coat. Tea was the last thing I wanted, as I was ready to float away, I’d had so much at Mike’s.
“Thanks. I don’t need tea. Sorry I wasn’t here to help Daniel.”
The disembodied feeling I’d had by the rhododendron bush was back. Was this what had happened to Maggie, she just disconnected and couldn’t get back?
“On second thoughts, tea sounds good,” I said.
Jude ushered me into the kitchen. I sat in Daniel’s usual chair, then got up and went to the other end of the table. I’d turned down Mike’s offer of a lift and walked back. I was once again cold to the bone from the evening air.
“I put your dinner in the oven, if you’re hungry,” Jude said as she put a mug of tea in front of me.
“Maybe later. Look, I’m sorry I rushed off. I...I read something in the paper that gave me a shock.”
It was the best explanation I could come up with, certain that Daniel hadn’t told her why I might be upset. He hadn’t, apparently.
“Oh, poor you. Do you want to talk about it?”
“No, no need. It was foolish of me to run off.”
We sat together and sipped our respective teas. I wanted to say something to her about Iris but couldn’t come up with the right thing. Aware that Jude was studying me when she thought I wasn’t looking, I tried to keep my face neutral.
“Delia, there’s something I want to talk to you about. Look, I’m not trying to be nosey here, but one of the people Iris talked to in Cardiff said that you were married. You never mentioned it, and no reason why you should, but she also said you had a baby. I… well, I’m curious, that’s all.”
I put my cup down carefully on the table, glad that most of my emotional coin had been spent earlier, such that I had no energy left to react with either much alarm or surprise.
“It didn’t seem relevant. Is it?”
“No, no. I don’t suppose so. It’s just that I know your husband died, and I was wondering about your child.”
“Is this because of Iris?” I asked.
A flush rose up her neck to her forehead. She dropped her eyes, shrugged one shoulder, then very quietly said, “Yes.”
It was my turn to sigh. The clock chimed the half-hour and one of the kitchen cupboards settled with a creak.
“Jude, I have told all I can about Iris. There’s nothing more to say on that score. My private life doesn’t need to come into it.”
Jude nodded.
“Well, to be honest, I don’t think Iris has anything to do with your private life. I think she’s probably Fran’s child.”
“Do you really think your sister would have said not a word to you all these years if she were able to?”
As I spoke the words I realized that this was exactly what Adele did with her family. That Adele and Leigh were close was certain, yet because of the danger Adele was in, she cut off all connection with her family.
“I believe she would have. I want to believe she would have. But the similarities are uncanny between Iris and Fran. Uncanny. The more I get to know her the more I see it.”
Her eyes were pleading. I tried desperately to find some way out of my dilemma.
“You’re seeing what you want to see. Well, there is one way to be sure. You could try one of those paternity tests, but they’re expensive. They’re not perfect but could tell you if she is related to you.”
“Do they do it here, in Ireland?”
“I’m not certain. You could find out easily enough, I should think. Mind you, Iris will have to agree.”
Jude got up and paced the length of the kitchen table, then turned abruptly and made her way back.
“I haven’t said anything to Iris about who I think her mother might be. You know, I didn’t think of a test.”
She stopped and leaned across the table to me. Her eyes tried to crawl inside my skull to find what I thought.
“Well, just don’t raise her hopes too high. Or your own, either,” I said. “I very much doubt she’s Fran’s child.”
“I’ll think about it. Thank you. Thank you for suggesting the test. It would ease my mind to know.”
“And if she isn’t? What then?”
“Then I’d know. At least that.”
I stood up myself, bone weary and longing for my own room and my own company.
“Yes, you would. But if she’s not related to you it wouldn’t do much for Iris, though, would it?”
23
“I’m sorry, Delia. For what I said earlier about new life in the family. I’m a fool,” Daniel said.
It had taken all my discipline and self-control to go into the room and check on him before I went to bed. Outside the door I had to pause to set my face in neutral and to still the tremble in my hands. He lay on his pillows, tense as a board, his eyes glued to the doorway when I finally went in. Before I could get a word out he blurted out his words of apology. I had no answer to them.
“Are you all right for now?” I asked.
“Delia, really, I’m sorry. I spoke without thinking. Can we talk about it?”
“About what?”
“What I said that made you run off like a scalded cat.”
His room was perfectly tidy, but I made a display of straightening his shoes by the bed and resettled his clothes on the back of the chair. There was not a word I could think of to say on the matter. Torn between the desire to take his head off, to tell him exactly what I thought of him, and the desire to walk away out of the house, never to come back, I said, “Are you settled now? Do you need anything?”
“Ah, Delia, please. I am sorry. I really am.”
My arms folded themselves across my chest. I uncrossed them and let them hang by my sides. “Daniel, I’m unsettled by all this harping on about the past that goes on in this house, that’s all. What does it matter in the end? Fran is gone; Iris’s mother is dead. Nothing is going to change that. The likelihood of Iris being Fran’s daughter is remote at best. Let these things go. Stop all this bloody talk about it.”
His eyes were on me all through this tirade. When I was done he reached out to touch me. I took a few steps back.
“It’s not so easy to let it rest. Jude could be right; Iris could maybe be her niece, my grandchild. That’s not what I am saying sorry about. You know that. It’s not what sent you running from the room.”
“No. It isn’t. ’Twas hearing you say that our child, my child, was nothing to you. It was a shock to hear the words from your very mouth, even though it was not news to me. I knew it the day you mailed me that cheque. What you said, that simply confirms it in no uncertain terms. All that too is in the past. I’ve nothing to say about it. Now, if there’s nothing else you need for the moment, I’m off to bed.”
That night I decided never to say a thing to Daniel about our child. Not even if Iris and Jude came up with proof positive that I was pregnant. Adele’s indifference to who her child’s father was came back to me and I finally, thoroughly understood it.
Adele had her feet up on an ottoman in my living room in Cardiff. Try as I might not to think about how weird it was that we had become friends, every now and again it got to me. Yet friends we were. Truthfully, it was a relief to have her to talk to. No pretense was necessary with her, and to a fair extent she understood everything I was going through, as she was pretty much in the same boat. The one big difference between us was under discussion this particular day.
“Which one of them is the father doesn’t bother me all. It will make no difference to how I feel about the child,” she said. She munched on a custard cream biscuit and a small scattering of crumbs sprayed out as she spoke.
“What if it’s Jimmy’s? Won’t it drive you crazy to know he’s the father?”
“Not at all. It’s not the child’s fault. Will you resent yours because of the father?”
Of course my answer was no. But I wasn’t as indifferent as she was to the matter of the father. Perhaps in asking her all these questions in my own way I was trying to think how much Maggie and I would tell this child later. Although I supposed Maggie would have the main say in that, at least while the child was a minor. While I took Adele’s point that it wasn’t the child’s fault, and it wasn’t, there seemed to me to be a difference between telling a child who its father was and not knowing.
“Well, anyway, I want my child to have nothing, absolutely nothing to do with that Jimmy McCann. Not ever. Promise me, Delia, you will say nothing about my child to anyone.”
It was a promise she extracted from me on a regular basis. I agreed, as usual.
“If anything happens to me, will you look out for my baby? Make sure she never has anything to do with him? Will you?”
That too was a familiar promise. And I promised. We agreed that somehow she would send word to me if anything happened to her.
“Nothing will happen to you.”
I said this regularly, too, and I even believed it. I understood her need to keep her child safe from this Jimmy. Somewhere in the middle of all these discussions I managed to persuade myself that the child she carried was not Daniel’s.
“What will you tell him later, or her? Later, what will you say when they ask?”
“I’ll worry about that then. For sure I’ll say nothing until I know we’re safe from Jimmy. So I suppose I’ll say I’ve no relatives, which in its own way will be true, won’t it?”
In that moment I felt completely lucky that I had Maggie to step in. The child would be surrounded by true blood relatives.
“Hey, you still won’t tell me who the father of yours is?” Adele asked.
“What possible use could that serve? He’s not involved, and maybe we’ll tell later, when the child is all grown up, or maybe we won’t. Right now, I don’t care about all that.”
Adele was entering her eighth month and I was just over seven. My exile was weighing on me, and so were the stories I had to maintain, both the one in Cardiff and the different one for my mother and father across the sea. Time had begun to drag, and without Adele, with whom I could simply be myself, I don’t know how I would have managed. The following week I was going to visit Maggie, and with every passing day I grew more and more impatient to see her, to make sure everything was ready for the baby, to catch the scent of turf in my nose and readjust my ear to the rapid-fire gab and lilt of home accents.
“Do you want me to take a letter for you to Leigh?” I asked Adele.
Whenever Maggie visited or I went to Ireland, we took a letter to post there to Leigh from Adele, whose paranoia about Jimmy was so profound that she wouldn’t even send a letter from where she lived. Leigh’s letters went to Maggie, and Adele’s went to Maggie, who posted them on. They were carried back and forth across the sea by whichever one of us was making the trip. It was her only contact with family. Adele figured she could keep on with this after she went into hiding, get a post office box somewhere and use Maggie to post the letter from Ireland. We had it all worked out, even though Adele would still not tell me the full extent of her plan, or where she intended to live.
So I took the letter that time, but it wasn’t posted until much later. Things happened. Terrible things that changed everything for Maggie, Adele and me.
24
The next day, plans for the dinner on Friday were in full swing. Mike had to be dragooned into dealing with the dining room table, which hadn’t been used for so many years the runners were too stiff to be moved without serious manhandling and oiling.
“It’s a fine room, isn’t it?” he said to me when the table, two leaves inserted, was sitting in the middle of the room waiting to be polished.
“’Tis. Pity it’s not used much. Look at the light, and the views.”
The dining room had windows on two sides, one facing west out over the meadow and the other facing south, framing the tree-lined path that led deep into the estate.
“I guess this will all be Jude’s when her father goes. Funny, I hadn’t really given it much thought until recently.”
“’Til your friends remarked on it, is it?” I said. I gave him a smile to show I meant no harm by the question.
“Oh, you heard, so? I suppose I’m reaching above myself a bit, but I truly care about her, Delia, not her money.”
I patted him on the shoulder.
“Well then, don’t be listening to drunken rubbish. Show her you care for her, that’s the best you can do. Daniel Wolfe had barely two ha’pennies to rub together when he married Ellen.”
A quick dip of his head to one shoulder was his only answer. We surveyed the room again. Mike ran his hand over the smooth finish of the teak.
“It’ll be lovely when it’s oiled, so it will. A thing like this needs care.”
We stood in contemplation of the table for a few minutes before he asked me how I was doing.
“You know, after the other day?”
“Su
re I’m fine, Mike. I am. Just had a bit of a shock, you know. But I’m all right now.”
Before either of us could say more Jude arrived with the teak oil.
I was far from all right. My nerves were in bits thinking about the dinner coming up. Of course I could always not go, but what explanation would I give? And what was I to do, hide in my room? Take the night off and get in a relief nurse? Any more talk of Fran or Iris’s parentage and I’d go right round the bend. It was a relief to go meet Mam at Peggy O’Shea’s for an hour in the afternoon. She’d been up to see Maggie again and I met her off the bus.
“She’s fine since she’s back in St. Mary’s. Still a bit sore after the appendix, I think, but no worse than usual in herself.”
I was glad to hear it. Since Maggie’d been sick, something of the nightmare quality of the time of her breakdown had been invading me, along with worry for her.
“You don’t look like yourself, Delia. Is everything all right?”
My first impulse was to snap at her. If people didn’t stop asking me if I was all right I was bound to snap at someone. I took hold of myself and managed to answer mildly enough, “I’m fine, Mam. Fine. How’s Da?”
Mam wouldn’t be put off. “I’m not sure working up there is good for you.” She gestured with her thumb in the general direction of Daniel’s place. “It’s great that the mortgage got settled and I’m grateful to him for that, but not if it means you running yourself down.”
“I’m not running myself down, Mam. Sure I’ve less to do there than most places. Jude is there and now Iris is there too.”
“Iris? She’s moved in there? It’s nice of them to take her in, isn’t it?”
I could have kicked myself for mentioning it. The last thing I wanted was to bring all that up again.
“Yes. She and Jude are great friends. She’s no bother to me and she keeps Daniel amused.”
Peggy arrived with our scones and by the time we’d exchanged pleasantries with her and Mam had praised her baking, I’d thought of other things to talk about. Mam wasn’t about to let things go, though.
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