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.