But Adelaide doesn’t ascend the stairs straightaway. Instead she faces Daphne, who sees in her face the girl she met when they were so very young. She wonders if Adelaide sees that in her too, or if she sees only an old lady, marked by time and circumstance.
‘I don’t know how I managed to make all of this so messy,’ Adelaide says.
‘We don’t ever know.’ Daphne smiles sadly. ‘I think …’ She closes her eyes briefly. ‘Any one of us can make a decision in a flash and we don’t know what effect it will have. I decided to marry Hector because he asked. What if I’d said no? My children wouldn’t exist. I can’t fathom it. And yet … It was one word that decided they would. I said yes. Not no.’ She shakes her head. ‘Our lives turn on nothing, Addy. Nothing but a whim.’
Adelaide nods, then leans forward and kisses Daphne on the cheek.
‘I’ll go up,’ she says.
Daphne goes back to the kitchen, where her children are sitting around a pot of tea and some biscuits. They each take one of her hands and she sits with them, waiting for Adelaide to join them. For the business of this death to be done.
After a few minutes – Daphne isn’t counting how many – they hear footsteps.
Daphne looks at Janet then at Noel. She stands and walks to meet her at the foot of the staircase.
The woman facing Daphne is not the woman who ascended those stairs: she looks as if someone else has taken residence within her.
It seems strange that Adelaide could be so shocked that Hector is gone – but then, Daphne and her children have been watching him leave for years. They’ve become used to him not being here, not the way they knew him. To Adelaide he would probably still have been the Hector she knew. Her idea of him wouldn’t have changed.
‘You must be devastated,’ Daphne says. As their eyes meet she can see that this is true.
‘I can’t …’ Adelaide turns away and brings her hand to her eyes, as if she wants to erase what she has just seen.
Then her hand drops and she says, ‘I am devastated, about what I did to you. I’m devastated by how much one decision can affect so many people so badly.’ She gulps in a breath and puts a hand to her chest. ‘And it’s not over. His death doesn’t mean it’s over.’
‘No, it’s not,’ Daphne says, and she knows there are two roads for her to take now: the one where she maintains her froideur with Adelaide, knowing she can’t trust her again; and the one where she accepts that the past can’t be changed but the future can be, and it’s in her power to change it.
Her own life is mostly gone. The road she chooses will determine how she travels through the rest of it. So it is also a question of which sort of person she wants to be in this last part of her life. Such questions should probably have been answered long ago. But this has been one of the harder lessons of old age: for every answered question gone past, there is a new one about to arrive.
She sighs quietly, feeling the responsibility of this moment, this friendship, of all her connections, all of her life. So many timesshe has hoped someone would take some of that responsibility from her, that she wouldn’t have to be the one to take care of so many people and situations. But that is not her lot. It’s time she accepted it.
‘It’s not over because your son is alive,’ Daphne says softly and puts a hand on Adelaide’s arm. ‘He’s not a bad outcome. He’s a person. He wants a relationship with you. And I think my children should have a relationship with him too,’ she goes on. ‘If they want one.’
Noel and Janet have expressed some curiosity about their half-brother, so she knows this isn’t an unreasonable suggestion.
‘Oh, Daphne,’ Adelaide says, her voice breaking. ‘Really?’
She nods. ‘We’ll talk about it another time, though,’ she says. Enough has been done for today and she feels exhausted now, her jaw aching suddenly, her shoulders tight. ‘I need to get back to them.’
Adelaide sniffs and smiles quickly. ‘Thank you.’
Daphne offers her a quick smile in return. ‘I’ll see you out.’
She walks Adelaide to the door, closes it gently behind her and makes her way back to her children and the changes that lie ahead of them all.
THE
1980s MIDNIGHT-BLUE VELVET SKIRT AND JACKET
At the time the woman bought the midnight-blue velvet jacket and matching skirt, it was the smartest outfit she owned. The jacket had six small buttons down the front. She wore it with the top two undone, although that didn’t reveal anything. The jacket had shoulder pads and fitted her snugly without clinging. The skirt was full and fell to her mid-calf. She found it in a boutique in the city and thought it would be perfect for her first day at her new job as a secretary in barristers chambers in the city.
Her father was a lawyer; so were her brothers. She’d worked for them since leaving school. No point her going to university, her father said, when she could earn a good quid working for him. She wanted to tell him that she’d have liked to study law herself. She’d helped her brothers study for their exams and always knew the answers to things before they did. Case law was easy for her to remember. Ask her which case set a precedent for which tort and she could tell you. But she was never given the chance.
After a while she grew tired of doing all the work for her father and brothers, so she decided to leave and found a new job. Her mother told her she was breaking up the family. So be it, she said.
At that point she was thirty-six years of age. She knew she was on the shelf – her friends told her so. They were married with youngchildren, and all said she should have married the young lawyer who had worked at her father’s practice for a couple of years. He was keen on her and they’d gone out for a while. But she wasn’t attracted to him, and the promise of a comfortable lifestyle in a nice house wasn’t enough for her to get past that, no matter what her friends told her about how marriage had to be a compromise.
Just because she was on the shelf, though, didn’t mean she couldn’t try her best. The midnight-blue suit was modest and feminine, but striking enough that it signified she cared about her appearance. She just hadn’t been allowed to express it before.