Chapter Twenty-Five
Adelaide couldn’t avoid Daphne any longer. Especially since Daphne turned up on her doorstep and insisted on seeing her, then insisted she come over one day in the lull between Christmas and New Year, when half of Sydney is at the beach and the days stretch out with heat and cicadas and humidity.
So Adelaide’s on the sofa in Daphne and Hector’s sitting room, with Janet fluttering in and out bearing trays and crockery.
Adelaide feels like this is a reckoning.
Or an execution. Except Daphne has no idea why Adelaide’s been avoiding her, and there’s no plausible excuse Adelaide has been able to come up with other than she’s been feeling unwell.
Which is probably why Janet’s fussing about whether the tea is the right temperature and the biscuits are satisfactory.
‘So how are you feeling?’ Daphne says.
‘Better,’ Adelaide says.
The story she came up with evolved into her suffering from migraines, which are convenient because they leave no visible trace and are temporary afflictions, and their unpredictability means she could say she was suffering on the same days she was meant to be at the frock shop.
But she’s realised that if she doesn’t start to ‘improve’ Daphne will likely start calling specialists and making appointments for her.
No, it can’t go that far. She’s accepted that she has to find a way to be around Daphne while keeping the secret that is very much to the forefront of her life at the moment.
For now that she’s met her son, and realised that she very much wants to see him again, she doesn’t know if she can keep him secret from the friend who has known her the longest. Nor does she want to.
Desmond – George – is too important. The problem, of course, is how can she reveal to Daphne that she’s been lying to her since they were young women.
First lying about why she left Sydney for a while, then concealing something so huge that she left Australia to try to get away from it.
Round and round she goes, thinking about what to do, and she’s certainly given herself headaches over it, so the migraine story wasn’t far off the truth.
Daphne’s forehead puckers. ‘You don’t think you should see a doctor?’
‘No,’ Adelaide says forcefully, then smiles to soften it. She’s not a good enough actress to catch herself sometimes – the truth sharpens her edges, cutting through in her tone.
It’s possible that she won’t have the wherewithal to keep the lie up around Daphne, and she doesn’t know yet what that means. Will she have to leave Mosman? Sydney? Australia? Leave her past – and Desmond – behind one more time? For the last time.
‘I’m worried about you,’ Daphne says.
Hector makes a noise and Daphne turns to him, patting his hand. ‘It’s all right, love.’
Janet appears. ‘Should I take him?’
‘No, he’s fine. It’s good for him to see Adelaide. Just like old times, isn’t it?’
Daphne smiles but it’s weary, and Adelaide can only imagine what it’s like to manage him – this man who used to be so strong and capable, now so diminished.
Janet nods and disappears again. She’s a loyal daughter.
Daphne has earnt that. And Adelaide can’t help feeling jealous of it.
She doesn’t have anyone to see her through to the end.
Not even Louis, because she wouldn’t impose on him and his family like that.
There will be no loyal daughter tending to her in her dying days.
Or even her infirm ones. It’s a truth that takes her breath away sometimes: she has no one.
Nobody in those dark hours in the middle of the night.
There’s just the space in her life where there might have been a son, and his father.
‘Adelaide,’ Hector says.
‘Yes, love.’ Daphne pats his hand again. ‘You remember Adelaide.’
His eyes soften and he says it again, more gently. ‘Adelaide.’
Janet walks back in holding a jug of water and places it on the table.
‘Our baby,’ Hector says, looking pained.
Adelaide starts, then realises he’s looking at Janet.
‘Yes, our baby girl,’ Daphne says soothingly. ‘That’s Janet.’
Hector shakes his head slowly. ‘Our baby,’ he repeats.
Now he’s staring at Adelaide, who feels a cold flash of fear.
‘Our baby.’ Hector seems quite upset, and Daphne puts an arm around him.
‘Sorry, Addy,’ she says. ‘He’s really so confused.’
Adelaide swallows slowly. ‘That’s all right.’
‘Adelaide,’ Hector says, staring at her.
‘Love …’ Daphne jiggles his arm. ‘Calm down.’
‘Adelaide. Our baby.’ Hector makes a sound like a sob.
Adelaide looks away, her hands gripping the plate she’s holding so hard she thinks she’ll snap it. She can’t look at Daphne. She mustn’t. Her eyes will give her away.
Daphne hushes Hector, who starts to move in his seat, almost like he’s trying to shrug her off.
‘Adelaide,’ he cries. ‘Our son.’
Adelaide can’t help it then. She looks at him, because she has to, because this is the father of her only child, and as they stare into each other’s eyes she feels it – that hook he has in her heart, tugging her toward him.
That’s the thing about loving someone over the course of decades: their eyes may change with age, but what’s in them – really in them – does not. The connection you make with each other, the recognition by one soul of another, that is always there.
Adelaide remembers the day it happened for the first time. She’d come to the house to drop off some fabric for Daphne that her mother wasn’t going to use. Daphne wasn’t home, but Hector was.
He made her tea. They talked. He asked if she was lonely. She said she was, surprised by her own candour.
‘I am too,’ he confessed, and their eyes met.
For years afterward she would marvel at how that look between them said so much.
They didn’t utter another word until after he had taken her to the guest bedroom – mindful, she supposed, of not wanting to be in the marital bed – and she hadn’t hesitated, for even one second, as he undressed her and kissed her all over and made love to her, and made love to her again.
She doesn’t know why they weren’t worried that they would be discovered, but she remembers that everything seemed to be in its right time, unhurried, almost like they had slipped through a crevasse in the day where no one else could reach them.
She didn’t feel guilt; not straightaway. That came later, when he started visiting her. It found her, full force, when she became pregnant.
Hector kept visiting her until she had to go away. They didn’t say goodbye. She couldn’t bear to; she didn’t know what he thought.
It was so tempting, of course, to think of this as her grand love story.
Because she loved him, and believed he loved her.
But they were only star-cross’d in the sense that they had pulled the planets out of alignment themselves by betraying Daphne.
Adelaide knew she didn’t deserve to think of herself as wronged by the situation, but she couldn’t help feeling abandoned by everyone when she gave birth to George alone and gave him up, alone.
How is it that she can still feel all of this as forcefully as she felt it then?
Her body has aged, but the feelings – the way she feels for Hector – haven’t.
They exist in her body but are also like an aura around her.
Or a shadow. She’s never been able to decide if her love for Hector was of the light or of the dark.
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.