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 pursued things 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.
He turned his eyes to hers and she saw incomprehension there.
‘Daphne,’ he said, then smiled.
‘You had an affair with Adelaide,’ she stated flatly.
She was saying it for her own benefit, not because she thought he would respond – but it had to be said out loud so it felt real. Once it was real she could deal with it. Or try to.
Hector giggled and she was disgusted by the sound.
‘Adelaide,’ he said, smiling to himself. ‘My love.’
Daphne felt ill. As if she could regurgitate not just the biscuits she’d eaten and the tea she’d drunk but all the decades of love she believed Hector had given her. He had cared for her. Loved their children, kept them safe. Made her feel protected. It had all been a charade.
There was also the knowledge that there was a child.
Daphne was now sure that this was the reason Adelaide had disappeared overseas.
Or did she go overseas? Maybe she’d stayed in Australia for a while?
The rave notices for Adelaide’s musicianship first came in her forties, which meant she could have been in Australia before that, raising the child.
Had this child – this son – been in Adelaide’s life the whole time? In Hector’s life?
Were there others? After Adelaide, did Hector find other women to target with his misplaced affections?
So many questions, so many layers of complication. Daphne couldn’t bear to think of them.
Instead she turned to her daughter and they stared at each other, and Daphne was suddenly and deeply grateful that they had the sort of relationship that didn’t always require words. She could see in Janet’s eyes how devastated she was, and how worried for Daphne.
They hugged while Hector giggled again, and Daphne whispered into Janet’s ear, ‘I’m all right.’
She wasn’t, but it was what a mother needed to say to her daughter at a time like this. No matter how old your children were, they wanted your steady reassurance.
‘I’m not,’ came the reply, and Daphne hugged her tighter, feeling Janet’s slight frame juddering with sobs.
Daphne kissed her cheek and looked into her eyes once more. ‘We will manage this,’ she promised. ‘I just need time to think.’
She’d come up here then, to the top floor, to look at the view.
The unchanging view. And every day since, she has stared out of this window, holding herself steady by gazing at North Head.
At the harbour she has seen all her life.
At Dobroyd Head in Balgowlah, covered in trees.
Staring at this view, she can believe it is 1952.
Or 1976. Or any other year but this one.
Except the view has changed, she knows. Houses have been built and knocked down.
Trees planted and grown. The harbour is, itself, changeable, not just from day to day but minute to minute.
The Manly ferry comes and goes. Boats are at sail.
So if she’s relying on this view to reassure her that the world can be steady, she has to reconsider.
Or embrace the idea of the change. Which is not the same thing as accepting the betrayal of two people she has loved.
But it will help her understand that she has been more exposed to change than she realises, and she has survived.
With a sigh, she turns away from the window. For someone whose life has been quite safe and stolid, she is now in freefall. At seventy-one years of age.
The straightforward course would be to ‘forgive and forget’, as people say. Forgive Hector and Adelaide; forget about their affair; keep life as it was.
It’s the path of least resistance, and very appealing because it would cause the least disruption.
Except ultimately it would kill her. She would have to push down all her hurt, her anger, her sadness at what has been revealed and it would take root somewhere, sprouting dark shoots that would overwhelm her eventually.
No, she needs to live – in the world, in this house, in her family.
One day soon, she and Janet and Noel will have a proper conversation about the revelation, because it would be odd not to, but before then Daphne needs to have her own reckoning.
These past few days, that has involved drawing. When she felt, so strongly, that she needed to guard against the darkness taking root in her, she picked up her pencils and paper.
What came out of her in the first drawing made no sense, but she felt the urgency of it. Then threw it away.
Next came trees – spiky and hard. She kept those.
Then flowers. Some prettier than others.
Today she is drawing what she has always loved to: clothes.
Ideas are flowing out of her onto the page.
Ideas that she’s stuffed down for years, she realises.
Clothes that were in fashion in the 1940s and fifties, sixties, seventies.
Designs that have miraculously emerged from some compartment in her brain.
There is no reason to all of this – to why the revelation of a grand betrayal should unleash this torrent of creativity – but she is grateful for it. Time passes quickly, and she doesn’t think about anything but the clothes.
‘Mum?’ she hears at one point. She looks up and sees the light outside has softened. Late afternoon is arriving.
‘Yes, darling?’ she says to Janet, although her hand keeps moving on the page.
‘I need help with Dad.’
Now Daphne stops. She has left all the care of Hector to Janet these past few days. It isn’t fair, but she hasn’t been capable of anything else, and in Janet’s eyes she has seen understanding.
‘All right,’ she says, standing up slowly, feeling stiff because she’s been sitting for too long.
She descends the stairs to find Hector on the couch in the sitting room. Almost as if he’s been there since Adelaide’s visit. Trapped in that day.
‘Time for dinner, Dad,’ Janet says, patting him on the arm.
His vague eyes lift to hers. ‘Oh,’ he says.
Janet nods to Daphne, who goes to his other side and takes his arm.
‘We’ll help you up,’ Daphne says, and she and Janet tug on his arms as he pushes down on his feet to stand.
‘You’re a good girl, Daphne,’ he says, then kisses her cheek.
He hasn’t kissed any part of her for a long while and it makes her want to punch him.
Because she suspects that he knows exactly what he’s saying: that she, his wife, is a good girl for not making a fuss.
That Daphne being a good girl was what let him and Adelaide get away with the affair back then because they knew she wouldn’t make a fuss if she found out.
What a curse, to be a good girl. A curse for herself, mainly.
As she helps Hector to the dinner table, however, she knows the curse hasn’t lifted, and likely won’t ever be, because the incantation for that is beyond her.