5

 

“Heavens, we should have come in first thing,” Mam said. “The cakes will taste of smoke by now.”

We were in Peggy O’Shea’s café for a cuppa after our grocery shopping one Friday morning. Cups and saucers rattled among the voices and the air was thick with cigarette smoke. Peggy found us a table at the back.

“How’s the new job going?” Peggy asked after we’d ordered.

“Grand. It’s grand.”

“A nice house, is it? I hear it’s the lap of luxury.”

“Yes, it’s very nice. But quiet, you know.”

“Ah, yes, it would be. And is he keeping well? I saw him walking out the road last week. God help us, didn’t he look frail? We’re all sad at the news, you know.”

“I’m sure you are.”

“I suppose the daughter will be along any day now. From Canada, is it?”

It was always tricky to handle the natural curiosity of people and the confidentiality of my patients. The village was a world of its own, everyone knew everyone else and felt entitled to the details of their lives.

“Peggy, I’ve no idea really. That’s Mr. Wolfe’s private business. We don’t really discuss his family.”

Peggy’s shoulders squared, and she gave the table a vicious swipe.

“My tongue is dried up, Peggy,” Mam said. “I’d love one of your nice hot cuppas. And an apple slice. They’re fresh, aren’t they?”

“Indeed they are, Mrs. Buckley. I’ll be right with you.”

She stalked off without waiting to hear what I wanted.

“Nosey,” Mam said. “She’s always been like that. I suppose having gossip to pass along helps her business.”

She leaned forward and said quietly, “Is the daughter coming?”

“Mam, you’re as bad as she is.”

Mam laughed.

 

“She might not come, Delia, but I needed to ask her,” Daniel told me as we sat out in the late spring sunshine, wrapped in our coats against the cold.

It was on the tip of my tongue to add that he was a dying man and Jude would come, but I didn’t. He freely acknowledged that himself in speech, but I’d learned over the years that it can be very different when someone else says it aloud. The last couple of weeks, as we sat together in the afternoons as the weather warmed, the rhododendron put out buds and the birds cheeped and twittered in the trees and bushes, I’d softened to him. Oh, I had not softened to our history, but my compassion for him rose, as it would for anyone in his position. He was visibly going downhill, which I think was, in part, due as much to the bad news of his latest tests as to his actual health. My duties had turned more to nursing in the last week, a role I was much more comfortable in.

Perhaps it was our talk about the past that made me relent. Or maybe it was Mike’s joining us now and again that made me relax. Mike worked on Daniel’s land a few days a week. I knew him well because as an arborist he looked after the trees on our farm and had such a sunny and easygoing disposition that I thought of him as a lad, rightly or wrongly. Sometimes in the afternoons the three of us would have tea overlooking the garden. Today it was just the two of us, Daniel and me.

“Surely she’ll come. You’re her father.”

“She hasn’t forgiven me for having Fran declared dead,” he said. “But I had to do it. For Jude’s sake as much as anything. I thought it’d get her over her obsession with searching, but I don’t know, I think it simply made her angry with me.”

“You had her declared dead?”

All the ease I’d felt a moment before vanished. I didn’t want to talk about Fran’s disappearance, which happened about six months after her mother died. I was away in Wales then and full of my own troubles.

“Yes, about five years ago. With no body, what could I do? Life had to go on, Delia. If anything happened to me, the estate would be in turmoil.”

I sat and digested that news. It had never occurred to me that a person could just be declared dead.

“It was all such a terrible time, you know. Jude was out of her mind with worry. I got a private detective to search but nothing came up except that she took the train to Dublin the day she went missing. Jude spent years putting ads in the papers. She got her own private eye too. I thought we could put it all behind us, but that didn’t work. Jude hardly speaks to me now.”

“But she’ll come, surely, in the circumstances? She said she would.”

“I don’t know that she will until she’s here. We’ll have to wait and see.”

The prospect of Jude’s arrival filled me with apprehension. An unhappy, conflicted daughter could make life very difficult up at the Big House. Nor did I want to be embroiled in any way in tensions surrounding their family history. Dealing with my own past involvement was enough. On the bright side, though, it could free me from being a companion to him. Whether or not his daughter took over that role, I would not need to spend so much time at the house in the coming weeks. Yet the prospect of her arrival stirred anxiety in me and made me question again the wisdom of my decision to involve myself once again with the Wolfe family.