4

 

For the next month, except for Sundays, I spent from noon to around eight o’clock at the Big House sheltered behind the yew hedge at the eastern end of the village. In the mornings Daniel worked alone in his study. Complications set in right away. Idleness, I found, didn’t suit me. Those first mornings at home I haunted Mam as she went about collecting eggs from the hens, feeding them, and making sure they had water, cleaning out their boxes and checking the run was secure against foxes.

“Why don’t you do something nice for yourself?” she asked more than once, tired of me traipsing around after her. “Or take up knitting, or something.” It wasn’t much different with Da. He was happy enough to have me around, but was content to tend the garden and milk the cows by himself. It did cross my mind to find some morning hours, maybe in the hospital in Limerick.

“Ah, take a bit of a rest,” Mam said when I mentioned it to her. “You haven’t really had much time off these last years.”

It was true. I’d worked every hour possible to pay for Maggie’s care and to keep Mam, Da and myself afloat. Sure, we earned some money from the meadows Da let out, and they had a small government pension, but it wasn’t nearly enough to cover our expenses.

At a loss, I took to walking out in the morning, sometimes across the fields near the farm, sometimes into the village. Once I wandered up the hill on the road to Killdeara. It was where Maggie and I used to lie on our backs and watch the clouds drift above us on summer afternoons when were growing up. It was where she told me she had decided to become a nun, and asked me if I thought it was the right thing for her. I didn’t, mostly because I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to be shut away in a convent and governed by the rules of a Reverend Mother. Maggie laughed when I told her that. “It’s not for everyone,” she said. Mam and Da would be ecstatic. There was nothing quite like having a son a priest or a daughter a nun to cheer up Irish parents, but the idea of not having Maggie around saddened me. She was older than me by a good few years, but we were fast friends as well as sisters. I idolized her. It was on this hill too that we talked when she left the convent. The rigours had proven too much for her. “A nervous disposition, not suitable,” the Reverend Mother said. She was packed home after three years, thin and pale, with nothing but the clothes she stood up in.

“What went wrong?” I asked her. “What happened?”

She shrugged, her eyes on the village that lay out below us. “Nothing special. I felt confined, just like you said. All that praying drove me mad, or very nearly. I want life around me, children someday.”

It didn’t quite work out like that for her. She had lived for over twenty years now in a nursing home for the mentally ill.

This morning a small freighter sailed into the harbour led by a pilot, and delivery vans trundled to a stop outside the main shops. A sudden shiver passed through me as I watched the village below me get into the swing of the day. What would people think of me if they knew the truth about me? About Maggie? I pulled my coat around me and started back down the hill.

 

Twice a week Mrs. Conway arrived bearing groceries and did whatever tidying up needed doing in the Big House. Our paths rarely crossed, or if we did meet it was only for ten minutes or so at a time. Some afternoons Daniel was shut away for a couple of hours again in his office at work on his book while I did some mending I brought from home. Boredom was weighing on me, and my mind roved too often over what might have been.

One afternoon I took a tour of the house, thinking that had Daniel stood by me after his wife died, I would have been mistress here. It was, by comparison to the farm, huge; two stories high and a basement that housed old furniture and boilers. The kitchen was large enough to seat a family of six or eight, and the dining room was twice that size. Besides these rooms the ground floor had a small toilet, a large draughty hallway, the parlour and two other rooms, one of which was Daniel’s office. Upstairs there was a bathroom with a six-foot long bathtub, and six bedrooms. The whole place was spotlessly clean, thanks to Mrs. Conway, but nonetheless had an unlived in air, except for Daniel’s bedroom. I didn’t go in past the door of that room. From what I could see it was tidy enough but clearly was a male domain, dominated by a double bed with sturdy brown posts. Examining it, I was suddenly lonely for the warmth and shabby comfort of our farm.

 

Any afternoon the weather was decent I took a cup of tea out back to a spot sheltered by the eaves. It overlooked the garden and offered some cover from the drizzling rain that fell at that time of year. Most afternoons Daniel joined me there.

“Can’t we be friends, Delia?” Daniel said to me one afternoon. We had been tiptoeing around each other for three weeks with exaggerated formality.

“I’m your employee, not your friend.”

“We were more than friends once. We can’t pretend the past didn’t happen. I should have stuck by you. I know that now. I did care about you, but when Ellen died, the girls needed me. That’s what I thought.”

I studied him there in the afternoon light and saw how his skin had become looser and duller even in the few weeks since I’d been here. I had forgotten his charm, his easy warm manner, the way he focused on you as if you were the most important person in the world. In spite of myself I was drawn to him, and so as not to show it I was more reserved with him than I usually was with people I nursed.

“I’m sorry, Delia,” he said.

There was no pretending it all didn’t happen for me. I’d lived with it day in, day out for over twenty years while he was oblivious to the consequences. I could have told him everything then, or part of it.

The breeze brought the scent of lilac on the wind now and again. The sweetness in the air reminded me of those days long ago when Daniel and I were in love.

We were in love, no matter what happened later. I was over the moon, lost in the utter wonder of first love. I knew he was married. Of course I did. And it was never that I pursued him, rather he did me. I was flattered and enjoyed his company. By the time of our first kiss I already loved him. Maggie had a flat in Dublin then, in Ranelagh, and my visits to her doubled as time to spend with Daniel.

“He’s married, you know,” Maggie said when I first told her I wasn’t staying overnight with her.

“Only a Protestant one,” I answered.

Maggie gave me a look from under her brows.

“No matter what the Catholic Church has to say about it, it’s still a marriage.”

Carried away with my feelings, I didn’t think of it that way. I chose instead to tell myself it was no true marriage so it was no sin to be seeing him. The no-sex-outside-marriage bit I ignored. Wasn’t life opening up in 1967, the old ways going? It was all free love and women’s lib.

It seemed a long time ago now.

“Sorry about what?” I asked Daniel.

“That I didn’t marry you when Ellen died. I should have done that.”

The wind whipped up a bit. I drew my cardigan from the back of the chair and put it on. I said nothing. What could I say that I hadn’t already said? I didn’t want to talk about Ellen’s death, the day that brought an end to my dreams of life with Daniel.

 

Ellen Wolfe died one cold December night in 1967. About eleven o’clock at night a friend of Da’s, seeing the light still on in the house, dropped in to tell us that there had been a terrible accident about ten miles down the road. Mrs. Wolfe’s car had been on the wrong side of the road and swerved to avoid hitting Bob Kenney’s van head on. She went straight into a telegraph pole. Bob went to help her, but she was, he said, killed dead instantly.

I wanted to call Daniel right away. The nearest phone was at a neighbour’s on the edge of the village, but I couldn’t call from there. It would have to be the phone box in the high street. It was near midnight by then so I put off phoning until the next day.

As soon as I could I slipped out of work to the call box down by the bus stop. I’d never called him at home before. Most of our contact was prearranged on our dates or he’d call Maggie if there was a change of plan and she’d let me know. My hands shook as I dialled. The phone rang eight or nine times.

One of his daughters answered, the older one, Fran, I thought. I listened to her footsteps go in search of Daniel, through the silence that followed, and more footsteps, growing louder this time, before Daniel’s voice came on the line.

“I’m so sorry, Daniel. So very sorry,” I said.

“Thank you.”

The stark formality of his tone shocked me. He could have been speaking to a complete stranger.

“Daniel?”

“There is nothing to say, Delia. This has been a terrible shock.”

He didn’t sound like himself at all. I wanted to be there, hold him, comfort him.

“It has, indeed. Can we meet, even for a moment? I would love to see you, make sure you are all right.”

Silence stretched out across the line. For a moment I heard voices in the background, then silence again.

“Please, Daniel?”

“Yes, later. I’ll pick you up at the usual spot. About ten, okay? We’ll talk then.”

The day was agony to get through. I swear all the clocks at the hospital were slow. Twice I went to fetch something from the supply room and forgot what I was looking for. I got off my shift at eight o’clock and went home. All the talk in the house was about the accident. Speculation about what had happened, and what would happen to the house and the family fortune, pity for Daniel and her daughters. It was almost unbearable.

He was late, in the end. I waited, wrapped in my warmest coat in the dark under the big pine at the turn of the road, the place he had stopped for me the first night we drove in to Limerick. It had become the spot we’d meet now and then when time between meetings became unbearably long. By the time he arrived I was chilled to the bone. He didn’t lean over to open the door for me, so I opened it myself and got into the passenger seat. Before I could say a word, he spoke.

“Delia, we’d better not see each other for a while.”

I turned in my seat to look at him. He stared straight out through the windshield.

“What do you mean, a while? Until after the funeral?”

I touched his arm, desperate to get him to look at me so I could read his face. He kept his eyes fixed dead ahead on the night outside. Silence stretched between us, rubbing my nerves raw.

“You must see, Delia, it’s not right for us now. The girls just lost their mother. They need time. We all do. I can’t be marrying as soon as she’s in her grave. I need to do the right thing here.”

“The right thing? Are you suggesting we break it off? What about your child I’m carrying? That one needs you to do the right thing too.”

Thoughts tumbled around my head. We had planned to spend the next weekend in Galway, three whole days together, to celebrate the baby and plan our life. I knew we needed to change plans now, we did, but his attitude suggested a bigger change. He sat back in the seat and slapped his hands against his knees, the sound sharp enough to make me jump.

“Jesus! Don’t you know we can’t have a baby now?”

Afraid and angry, I began to babble.

“We can’t stop it now, it’s too late. It’s already here inside me. I know this is a terrible event that’s happened and the timing is terrible but we can’t not deal with this.”

“Hush, Delia.”

He finally turned towards me, really looked at me for the first time. He caught my hand as he tried to calm me down.

“Shhh. Don’t worry. I’ll arrange things. I know a man in London.”

“What does a man in London have to do with it?”

“He’ll fix you up. You must see, Delia, we can’t get married now. Not for a year or so at least. I’ll take care of it all. You have nothing to worry about.”

Comprehension dawned on me. It would never have occurred to me that Daniel would want to kill his own child, or that, after all the talks we’d had about the rules of the Catholic Church, he’d think I would agree to an abortion.

“Daniel, I can’t. I’m a Catholic. Besides, I want your child, our child.”

“And I do too. Later. After Fran and Jude settle down. You must see I can’t land a wife on them now. It wouldn’t be fair. Nor on you either.”

I never thought of myself as something that could be landed on anyone. A chill settled in my bones.

“You can’t mean that, Daniel. What will happen to me? To our child? You can’t just turn away from us now.”

He reached inside his overcoat and took out a pen. Then after another root around in his jacket pocket he produced a chequebook. I snatched it out of his hand and tossed it into the back seat.

“You can’t buy me off.”

Daniel flinched, but wouldn’t meet my eye. I was too shocked to cry, but could feel the choke of tears.

“Look at me, Daniel. Look at me.”

The words echoed around inside the car. Daniel didn’t look at me. Instead he said the words that ended everything.

“Delia, be reasonable.”

I waited a minute. When he said nothing else, I yanked open the car door, got out. I have no memory of getting back home.

A week later I got a big cheque in the mail from him along with the name and address of a doctor in London. There was nothing else in the envelope. We never spoke again until a month ago when he found me in the café.

 

So Daniel’s apology didn’t warm my heart much all these years later.

“Too late for regrets now,” I say.

“Delia, I know. I know. But I want you to know I’m sorry. Sorry too that I pressured you to get rid of the child.”

“No point in harking to the past,” I told him. “It’s gone.”

He reached out as if he would touch me, but I stood up and gathered up the cups. He crammed his hands into his pockets.

“It is indeed. That’s the thing, Delia. Time is very short. Let’s not waste it with grudges.”

I couldn’t forgive him. Yet some small thing thawed in me all the same. He wasn’t too long for the world. We’d got that news with his latest tests. The cancer was galloping through him faster than anyone thought it would.

“We can be civil, anyway,” I said.

 

I got broody for a few days after that talk with Daniel. Seeing him again in the café reawakened the resentment and anger I’d carried inside for all the years. Yet I had an understanding that this dying man was not the Daniel who had betrayed me, any more than I was the naive girl who thought love could win out over everything. I hung moodily around the farm on my time off over the next few weeks. I even fed the hens and milked a cow now and again. Da continued to weed and control pests in the kitchen garden and even Mam thawed out about my working with Daniel. I tried to put the past away again as best I could, but some hard, rough thing settled in me like a thorn, and I squirmed away from it and came back to worry it in turn.