As her eyes meet Daphne’s she knows what her friend will see: the truth. Because Adelaide can feel it pouring out of her, surrounding them all, sucking them back into the crevasse in time on that day in this house, so many years ago, when she and Hector both made a decision that would affect everyone in this room and everyone they knew without them realising.
Because those moments together were perfect. They were grace. They were splendour. They were escape and salve and communion. And she has never been able to believe that they were wrong, not truly, not when they’ve been her sustenance ever since.
She has tended to the memory of them as if they were a religious relic; evidence that she was loved and lovable, that she meant something. What she didn’t see then – what she needs to understand now – is that on every altar there needs to be a sacrifice. She sacrificed Daphne. They both did. And they didn’t consider the cost.
Falling into that crevasse, they took Daphne with them. She just didn’t know it at the time. Now she does. Adelaide can see it. She can feel it.
Her oldest friend – who loves her, who has kept faith with her – is realising what has been kept from her. Not just an affair, but a human. A boy. Hector’s son.
‘No,’ Daphne says, and there’s force in it.
Adelaide’s heart is beating rapidly.
‘No,’ Daphne repeats.
Adelaide knows that her silence is the reply Daphne doesn’t want.
‘Mum?’ Janet looks at each of them in turn.
Adelaide can’t look at her. Because it occurs to her, for the first time, that she’s also betrayed Janet. And Noel, her brother. She is the cause of what is about to become ruin, even though it has taken so long to arrive.
‘I have to go,’ she says, for Janet’s benefit, because surely Daphne doesn’t need her to say it.
Although she needs to say something. The end can’t be wordless.
‘Daphne … I want to –’
‘No,’ Daphne says again. Simply. With no anger in it.
And that’s worse, Adelaide thinks, because it suggests she’s already dismissed her.
‘Mum?’ Janet repeats.
‘Adelaide’s leaving,’ Daphne says, pushing herself up off the sofa slowly but strongly. ‘As she said.’
Adelaide puts down the plate, picks up her handbag from the floor and clutches it to her. Barely aware of how she gets out of the house, she finds herself on Beaconsfield Road, gasping, unable to remember how to get home, or what day it is, or anything at all – except how the time she left this house on that day she and Hector found each other should have been the last.
And now, today, it finally is.
JANUARY
1992
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The view from the top storey of her home is all that has remained unchanged for Daphne since Adelaide’s visit three days ago. She can come up here, look across to North Head and believe for a few moments that everything in her life is as it ever was. Except it is not, of course. And it hasn’t been for many, many years. Daphne just didn’t know it.
Which is perhaps the worst part: that this secret – this lie that Adelaide and Hector have been telling her about themselves, namely that they are upstanding, loyal people who care for her – has been sitting in the bedrock of their lives for so long and she had no idea.
If she’d known about it at the time, she could have made decisions for her life accordingly. Maybe it wouldn’t have turned out any differently. She might have stayed married to Hector. Adelaide might still have gone overseas and had a brilliant career. Or it could have been profoundly different. Daphne could have left Hector, knowing she was risking social opprobrium and financial difficulty, but also knowing that she was resourceful enough to cope.
All of their lives would have been different. Janet’s and Noel’s personalities might have been shaped by their parents’ divorce – which could have been good or bad. Daphne might have pursuedthings that interested her rather than being the dutiful wife who supported her husband and gave most of her waking hours to her family. She will never know.
She’s never been someone who indulges in what-ifs, but they’re all she can think about now. Worse, there is no one she can talk to about them.
She can’t even have a conversation with Hector – although she tried as soon as Adelaide was out of the house. Janet had been in the room, pale and aghast, staring at her father as if he was someone she had no wish to know.
Daphne had wanted to shout – she very, very much wanted to rage at him – but it would have no impact. He didn’t understand variations in tone. He didn’t understand much at all. So she just said, ‘Hector’, more loudly than usual.