Chapter Forty-One
Daphne used to read a lot. Romance novels.
Westerns. Crime stories. She liked big books that could occupy her for a while.
When her children were little she’d read after they went to bed and Hector would listen to the wireless, usually sitting with her father.
Once both her parents died he still listened to the wireless and Daphne kept reading.
Since Hector started changing, though, she hasn’t been able to concentrate on books, although magazines are fine.
Funnily enough, she’s been listening to the radio more than she ever has, right at a time when Hector doesn’t.
Still, all those years of reading were good for her. Good for her vocabulary, which is large. Which is why she’s sure that the noun she’s been looking for – the noun that describes how it feels to find out your husband has had an affair with your oldest friend – doesn’t exist, or she would know it.
It’s a noun she wants, not a verb, because a noun would make it real. Give it some shape. A noun would be a shorthand term for a very large problem.
Betrayal doesn’t cut it.
Disappointment doesn’t come close. Not remotely.
Deception is getting there but implies something far milder than her situation.
No, there’s no such word. Which is one of the reasons, she thinks, that it’s been so hard to keep living with Hector.
If she had a word, she could tell herself ‘this’ is what’s happening; it’s real and you’re right to feel this way.
A word would indicate that other people have gone through ‘this’ too, so she’s not alone in it.
Instead, she goes through each day with a sense of not being able to articulate what her life has become.
She’s aware that Janet must feel the same. They are united in this state, closer than they ever were, and she finds that so comforting yet jarring too. This state also needs a word: something that describes the paradox of a diabolical discovery bringing two people closer.
Maybe paradox is the word.
These are the thoughts that occupy Daphne’s mind as she continues to care for the husband she’s now not sure she ever knew.
‘Dad’s acting strangely,’ Janet says as she comes into the kitchen, where Daphne is drying the breakfast crockery.
Daphne hangs the tea towel on its hook next to the stove. ‘How can you tell?’ she says, and means it sincerely.
‘The left side of his face …’ Janet swallows. ‘It’s not moving. And his breath …’
‘Yes?’
‘It smells like he’s been drinking.’
‘Alcohol?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, that’s ridiculous. He can’t –’
Daphne stops. Something is trying to emerge from her memory. The smell of alcohol … Daphne smelled it on a customer in the store once and knew her not to be a drinker, so she sat her down and called an ambulance. The lady had had a stroke.
‘Dial triple O,’ she says to Janet as she hurries to the sitting room, where Hector spends his life these days.
‘Mum?’ Janet calls after her.
‘Ask for an ambulance,’ Daphne calls back. ‘He may have had a stroke.’
Janet makes an undefined noise and Daphne goes to her husband’s side.
‘Hector,’ she says, taking his hand. ‘Love?’
There should be another word still, she thinks, that describes how you can continue to be worried about the health of the husband who had an affair with your oldest friend. How you can still care for and, yes, love him, even as you rage at what he’s done.
Hector says nothing, which isn’t unusual, but there’s something in his eyes. Since he started to deteriorate, his eyes have acted as a container for whatever’s going on inside him. Now they connect with hers and she sees fear.
‘It’s all right, love,’ she says. ‘I’m here.’
She continues to comfort him – there’s nothing else she can do – until the ambulance arrives.
The officers agree that he’s likely had a stroke and say they’ll take him to Royal North Shore Hospital. Daphne is welcome to travel with them.
Janet wants to come too, but she’d have to drive separately.
‘There’s nothing for you to do there, love,’ Daphne tells her. ‘Stay here. I’ll call you once we know more.’
At the hospital Hector is taken straight into the emergency ward and there are nurses and doctors and tests.
In the late afternoon, one of the nurses says to Daphne, ‘You need to eat. We can’t have you keeling over too.’
So Daphne goes in search of food. She finds the cafeteria and a sandwich, then rings Janet, who says she’s told Noel what’s happening.
All the while Daphne’s trying to sort through the emotions that are competing with each other inside her: fear, anguish, love, anger (non-specific), anger (specific, directed at Hector), confusion, sadness.
Once Hector’s moved to the neurology ward she sits by his bed, clutching her handbag – Janet had thought to give it to her so she’d have money for phone calls and food – and watching him breathe.
Around seven at night his eyes flutter open and she sits closer.
‘Da-Da-Daph,’ he says and turns his head toward her.
The fear is still in his eyes and now she feels something that is strong and defined and she has a word for it: heartbreak.
Is this how his life ends – here, in this ward, surrounded by strangers, with a cannula in his arm and a drip beside him, a chart on the end of the bed and the humming noise of machines she can’t identify?
That seems cruel. So cruel. Despite what she now knows about him, he took care of her.
Of their children. Of her parents. That has to count for something.
‘I’m here,’ she says, and she takes his hand in both of hers.
He squeezes her hand, and it’s such an encouraging sign that she feels something like hope.
Not that he’ll come back to her – not the way he was before he started to lose his mind, not the way he was before the affair with Adelaide, because that man is long gone – but that he’ll stay a while longer.
For she finds, despite what her rational mind may tell her, that she doesn’t want him gone.
They remain like that until a different nurse appears and tells Daphne that visiting hours are almost over.
Daphne bends over her husband and kisses his temple.
‘I’ll see you soon, love,’ she says, then she goes back downstairs to the hospital foyer, to the pay phone, and calls a taxi to take her home.