Hopefully Lavinia will be able to climb the stairs again someday soon. Because if she can’t, they can’t stay here.
Margot can’t afford to put her in a home, so she will have to make another plan. It is not a prospect she relishes.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Daphne wakes up in the house she has known all her life and wonders how she can face the day. She has wondered this each day since she last saw Adelaide, and her answer each morning has been the same: she doesn’t know, but she will try.
Weeks have passed since she found out that her husband and oldest friend not only had an affair but created a child.
It would be ideal if Hector were still cognisant enough that she could rage at him and perhaps throw him out of the house. If he were capable of being made to pay for his transgression. Daphne thinks she would like to experience revenge, just once. Except there are times when she looks at him, with his lack of comprehension and his inability to do simple things alone, when she thinks that revenge is already here. It has visited him in the form of his drastic ageing, his helplessness. If only Daphne weren’t also paying the price, and her daughter along with her.
Poor Janet. She’s always adored her father. Now she has to rearrange her brain around the idea that he wasn’t who she thought he was.
Noel won’t come to the house at all. He’s outraged about the whole thing. So are Daphne and Janet, of course, but they don’t have the luxury of refusing to see Hector. In some waysDaphne thinks that Noel is being unfair to them, yet she can’t blame him.
Hector doesn’t seem to remember anything about his betrayal of them all, apart from his occasional random statements about Adelaide. He has asked about her a couple of times.
Daphne wants to call Adelaide and tell her she can look after Hector now. But at the same time she doesn’t want to call her. She doesn’t want to speak to her ever again.
Then her thoughts will careen in another direction, toward the son who was born and given away. Who is he now? She is curious. So curious. Does he look like Hector? Does he speak the same? Walk the same? It’s unlikely she will meet him, so these questions will not be answered, but she remains curious.
She has continued to sketch. Ideas pour out of her and she documents them, then takes them to the frock shop and lets Christina see them. To have something separate from this house and what’s happening in it, to have someone who doesn’t know Hector take an interest in her life, has been Daphne’s only respite amidst all this hideousness.
Christina loves the sketches, or so she says. It’s flattering, to have such a worldly young woman take an interest. Not that anything will come of them.
Today is one of Daphne’s days at home. No frock shop for her. She used to love being at home, in this space she has crafted over decades to be cosy and welcoming. Now she sees it as the location of the betrayal, and while it’s too comfortable to be called a prison, it does feel like a cell. She is trapped here as long as Hector is alive, because she won’t divorce him. She probably couldn’t even if she tried, given that he wouldn’t be able to consent.
Her saving grace is Janet, who maintains a quiet dignity in the face of it all. She helps run the household and still looks after Hector even though she is visibly upset by him.
It’s Janet who answers the phone when it rings downstairs, while Daphne is putting laundry away in the linen cupboard on the first floor.
‘Mum, it’s for you,’ she calls up the stairs. ‘Ian.’
Ian is Daphne’s contact at the charity that operates the frock shop. Every now and again he will call with news or an idea. The ideas tend to be bad and Daphne ignores them, knowing he forgets them quickly.
‘Daphne,’ he says curtly when she picks up the phone. He’s always curt, always busy, always with ‘a million things to do’.
‘How are you, Ian?’ She doesn’t know why she asks him, really, apart from it being the done thing.
‘Enormouslybusy.’
‘I’m sure.’
‘We have to close the shop.’
The sentence hits her like a slap. So typical of him to not ease into it. And she’s shocked. Enough that she puts a hand against the wall to steady herself.
‘How can this be?’ she says.
‘The landlord wants to double the rent.’ Ian sniffs. ‘Says he can’t give us a – how did he phrase it? – free ride any longer.’
‘The rent isn’t free!’
‘Quite. But it is cheaper than market rent.’
‘And probably a tax deduction for him.’
‘I don’t know how accountants work those things out,’ Ian says snippily.