Chapter Twenty-One
Working with Daphne at the frock shop has provided Adelaide with a good diversion in one sense – it prevents her thinking about the letter, and her son, every minute of the day – and a dilemma in another.
She doesn’t want to tell Daphne what’s going on – she doesn’t want to tell anyone, including her brother – but she also doesn’t want to lie any more.
And isn’t the not-telling a lie by omission?
Daphne knows something is wrong – she has remarked on it more than once – and Adelaide isn’t chatting to her the way she used to, worried she’ll say something inadvertently, as one can do with old friends.
The rhythms of communication are so established and fluid that a confession can slip out.
Which it absolutely cannot do in this case.
There is too much at stake: her whole life, and the way she’s constructed it.
Eventually, after yet another sleepless night, she decided there was only one way to resolve it all – by doing something about the letter.
She called the government department and gave her phone number to the case worker there, saying it could be passed on to Desmond so he could ring her.
Desmond. How will she call him that? He has always been George to her. Does he know he was a George? Will she ask him? She doesn’t know. And she doesn’t have long to decide, for he is about to arrive at her home.
There is no word in the English language – or perhaps any other – to describe what it’s like to wait to meet a child you gave up at birth. She feels nerves, yes, but this isn’t nervousness. It is beyond that. Its shape is different.
Excitement may be part of it; except the unbearable sadness of what she did – not just giving him up, but the affair that led up to it all – acts as a weight that means she can’t feel purely excited at the prospect of meeting someone who was part of her flesh for nine months.
Because meeting him – the phrase, the idea, the prospect – is ridiculous. They should never have been apart.
Or perhaps, seen in another light, he should never have existed.
He does exist, though. And it is his knock on the front door she can hear now.
As she approaches the door she feels as though her cells are vibrating at a frequency she can’t identify. They feel as though they are shifting in and out of time. She is here and not here. She is giving birth to him and she does not know him. They are connected and they are severed.
The impossibility of the situation makes her stumble, and she steadies herself with a hand against the wall. Then she opens the door.
In front of her is a man in his late forties who looks like her brother Louis at that age. He has the same bright blue eyes. The same slightly thinning salt-and-pepper hair. The same stoop. The same chin and nose. He is the same height.
How is it possible to be meeting for the first time a man who is so clearly her kin? It is not, she understands now, she and her child’s father who have been mocked by fate, which is what she has thought all these years. It is her and her son. Fate has kept them apart. No – she has kept them apart.
All this goes through her mind in the half-second it takes George – Desmond – to smile and show straight teeth just like Louis’s.
‘Adelaide?’ he says, and the word feels like a stab in her heart. She is not Mum; not even Mother. She will never be.
‘Desmond,’ she says.
Should she offer a hug? A kiss on the cheek? What is one meant to do in this circumstance?
‘I don’t know whether or not to hug you,’ he says, his accent broad, as if he grew up in the bush. Maybe he did.
‘I was just wondering the same thing.’ She smiles and opens her arms.
He hugs her, and she smells her son for the first time. When he was born, they took him away before she had the chance. His scent is a mixture of soap and aftershave, although she can’t place either, and of Fabulon. He has ironed his shirt. Or someone has done it for him.
Seconds pass; maybe it’s longer. She really can’t tell.
Then she lets him go and feels as though she is falling through space.
‘Come in,’ she says, and she stands back for him then closes the door, gesturing for him to walk toward the sitting room.
As she follows she sees that he even walks like Louis, with a slight bow to his legs.
‘You look exactly like my brother,’ she says, because why not say it? She shouldn’t hold things back from this stranger-son.
‘Really?’ Desmond turns and smiles. ‘What’s his name?’
‘Louis.’
They sit, her on a chair, him on the sofa.
He nods. ‘Louis, eh?’ More nodding. ‘And what was mine?’ His eyes seem to go an even brighter blue as he looks into hers.
‘Yes, I suppose you’ve wondered,’ she says, although his name feels like the last part of the secret she is keeping to herself. Letting it go may mean … what? That the secret is uncontained? It already is. There is nothing more to lose now. She lost this boy years ago.
‘George,’ she says. ‘George Louis.’
‘Righto,’ he says and shrugs. ‘Could be worse.’
‘Ask me anything you want to know,’ she says. It would be such a relief to tell him. To tell someone. But especially him.
‘My father,’ he says. ‘Were you …’ He makes a face. ‘Were you together? Did you have other children?’
Adelaide frowns, not sure she understands. Has he been worried all this time that he has siblings he doesn’t know about? It didn’t occur to her that he might have been.
‘No,’ she says. ‘Not together. It was …’
Oh. Here’s where she has to stop. Here’s where it’s going to hurt her. Here’s where he may judge her and walk out of her life. So maybe she does have something to lose, after all.
‘It’s okay,’ he says. ‘Whatever it is, I don’t mind. I just want to know.’
He smiles kindly and she believes him.
‘It was an affair,’ she says. ‘I’m not – I wasn’t – proud of it. We shouldn’t have done it. Except …’ She breathes. ‘You exist because of it. I can’t regret that.’
Desmond laughs. ‘Nor can I.’
That laugh causes something in her to uncoil, as though she was the most tightly wound of springs wanting to launch itself.
‘Thank you for taking it well,’ she says.
‘That’s okay. You seem like an all-right sort of person.’ Then he reaches over and pats her hand. As if he is the parent and she is the abandoned child.
It makes her want to weep, but she can’t. That would be an imposition – so much emotion from a woman who is still a stranger to him. So she sniffs back her tears and smiles her broadest smile for him.
‘Would you like something to drink?’ she offers.
He laughs again. ‘Maybe a Scotch? I’ve been nervous as hell.’
At this revelation she sighs, feeling her shoulders relax. ‘Me too.’
They sit staring at each other for a few seconds.
‘It’s an odd situation,’ he says at last.
‘Yes. And I do have Scotch.’
‘Great.’ He stands. ‘How about I help you with it?’
They move around the kitchen as if they know each other, yet they don’t have the familiar rhythms of family. Adelaide feels jarred again and leans against a counter for support. But then he smiles at her once more and she believes everything will be all right.
And then one Scotch turns into two and she finds out about his childhood – yes, on the land – and his three siblings – one adopted, two not – and his strict mother and relaxed father; and he marvels at her career and says he thinks his parents saw her perform once, and how about that?
Their lives have been so different. He is a stranger in all respects except this one: he is her child.
Hours pass as they converse, and when he finally leaves he promises to keep in touch. She doesn’t believe him this time. She thinks he may have found out all he wants to know. If she never hears from him again, she would never blame him.
It’s just that she loves him. Has never stopped – except for decades that love has existed in the vacuum of not knowing what sort of person he turned out to be.
Now she knows, and she’s proud of him, and proud of the parents who raised him.
She’s not proud of herself, but she hates herself a little less than she did, because he is a good man, she feels it, and she doesn’t believe it’s all because of his environment.
She must have had something to do with it.
That night she replays their meeting. Goes over his face in her mind. Thinks about those bright blue eyes, and his smile.
Her boy. Not her boy.
With her eyes open, she lets herself cry, and keep crying, and eventually she falls asleep.