Two Fridays in April (34 page)

‘First of all,’ she says, ‘I haven’t exactly been looking after you like I should. When your dad was alive I was happy to leave the parenting to him – he was so much better at it. I hadn’t a clue. I had no experience of looking after anyone. When he died I tried, I did try, to pick up where he’d left off, but I still didn’t know what I was doing, and he wasn’t around to ask. So I told myself you were almost grown-up anyway, and you probably didn’t want me trying to be a parent, so … I made sure you had enough to eat, and I bought you clothes when you asked for them, and I gave you money when you needed it, and I hoped for the best after that.’

She stops. Una remains silent.

‘It’s become clear to me tonight,’ Daphne goes on slowly, ‘that I messed up. I was grieving, of course. I was shocked and sad and completely lost without your dad, just like you were – but that’s no excuse. I was the adult, and you were in my care and I failed you, and I’m sorry.’

Una begins to speak, but Daphne lifts a hand to stop her. ‘Hang on a minute,’ she says, so Una hangs on.

‘My car was stolen this afternoon,’ Daphne tells her, in so matter-of-fact a tone that the words take a few seconds to register with Una. When they do, her mouth drops open and her eyes widen.

‘No, but listen,’ Daphne says earnestly, as if she’d been interrupted, ‘I was valuing a house at the time. It took about … oh, about an hour, I think, I can hardly remember, and it doesn’t matter anyway. When I finished, I went back to where I’d left the car, but it had disappeared. Naturally, I was very upset. I was late getting to the cemetery as a result, so I never visited your dad’s grave – and in all the fuss I forgot to collect the cake I’d ordered for your birthday. That’s why we have this one. I picked it up in Mulligan’s.’

They both turn to look at the remains of the cake, sitting forlornly in the centre of the table.

‘My point,’ Daphne goes on, ‘is that lots of things went wrong today, and I was feeling really
rotten
when I got home, but none of that mattered –
none
of it – when I discovered that you were missing. When I realised that you’d been gone all day, it just, I just – I don’t know, it just … took over. It was the only
important
thing, you know? I was so completely terrified that something might have happened to you, I could hardly think.
And when I saw you in the shop, looking so miserable, I was just so—’

She breaks off, pressing her hands into her thighs and shaking her head, trying to banish the image of her hysterical outburst in the bicycle shop. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘anyway … you saw how I was.’ She attempts a smile, but isn’t sure how it comes out.

She leans forward. ‘Listen, I’ll help you to look for your birth father, if that’s what you want, but don’t do it because you think I don’t want you here because I
do
.’ She finds both of Una’s hands, and captures them between her own. ‘I
do
,’ she repeats. ‘OK?’

A beat passes.

‘OK?’ she asks again.

‘OK.’

‘OK,’ Daphne repeats, nodding several times, holding Una’s gaze. ‘Now,’ she goes on, ‘I need you to listen carefully to this next bit. Are you listening?’

‘Yes.’

‘What happened to your dad was not your fault,’ she says steadily and gently, watching the girl. And again: ‘What happened was not your fault.’ And again: ‘It was not your fault.’ Three times she recites it, all the while holding Una’s gaze, keeping Una’s hands tight in hers.

‘I want you to tell yourself that every day,’ she says. ‘You must keep on telling yourself that until you believe it. Your dad died, and it was a terrible thing, but it was nobody’s fault, least of all yours. You have to let yourself believe that.’

And she sees Una listening to the words, she sees her wanting to believe them. Maybe one day she will.

Silence falls briefly in the room, and then Daphne speaks again. She has to speak of it, she has to speak of him. ‘As to your meeting the lorry driver,’ she says slowly, ‘that’s certainly a bit of a surprise.’ She pauses. ‘I do think it’s a good and courageous thing you did. I don’t think I would have been as brave if someone had asked
me
to meet him.’

She stops again, her gaze roaming around the table, the almost-eaten cake, the neat piles of cups and plates, washed and dried by Isobel while Daphne and Una were talking to the guards. The milk jug, the fanned-out spoons.

‘I’m not sure that I can forgive him, you see,’ she says, in the same deliberate way, ‘even though I know he didn’t do it on purpose. I do know that. That’s awful, isn’t it?’ She looks back at Una. ‘That I wouldn’t want to meet him.’

Una shakes her head. ‘It’s not awful. I didn’t want to meet him at all. I hated him. I didn’t feel a bit brave, I was really scared. I felt sick, I was so scared. I nearly didn’t go.’

‘But you did.’

‘Yes …’

Daphne feels her face relaxing, feels the tightness of the day falling away. ‘I hope Finn knew,’ she says softly, ‘what a very good job he did with you.’

Una gives her a wobbly, watery smile.

‘Mo’s picking up your cake tomorrow,’ Daphne goes on, ‘the proper cake. I told her to bring it to the charity shop – I didn’t think anyone here would want it – but maybe I should ring her in the morning and ask her to keep some for us. I think,’ she says, ‘we deserve some chocolate, both of us.’

‘I hope it wasn’t too dear,’ Una says.

Daphne flicks her head to dismiss the comment. ‘There’s one more thing,’ she says, releasing Una’s hands to push her fingers through her hair. ‘It’s about the bike shop. There’s something you should know about that.’

And then she tells her about her earlier conversation with Mo. This whole day has been so strange, so full of frights and surprises and revelations, she may as well throw another one into the mix. It won’t commit her to anything if she runs it by Una – and there’s the tiniest chance, isn’t there, that Mo’s completely ridiculous idea just might have something in it?

Una lifts her head, turns her pillow over and sinks back into its cool cottony softness. So much to think about, not a hope of getting any sleep tonight – but she’s on Easter holidays, no getting up for school tomorrow, so who cares?

She thinks about the man who attacked her. She thinks of rushing from his car across town, in the darkness and in her bare feet, all the way to the bike shop, never even considering going home instead, which would have been nearer. She closes her eyes and remembers the surprise of Daphne’s embrace, and how it felt every bit as warm and real as Judy’s.

She recalls Daphne’s tears, her almost incoherent tumble of words as they stood entwined in the shop as Una realised, to her utter amazement, that she was cared for –
is
cared for – after all.

She thinks about how she lied to her best friend, and how she involved her in another lie to Daphne, and the trouble that lie caused. She thinks of the visit she’ll have to make to Ciara’s
house tomorrow in an effort to explain, and hopefully to be forgiven.

She thinks about the dark, dusty space that is the bike shop and imagines them bringing it to life again. Scrubbing it and painting it and filling the shelves with … well, anything. She pictures a new name on the outside, and a bell that gives a musical tinkle when someone opens the door, not like the old one, and her standing behind the counter, maybe in a cool uniform in a colour that suits her. Maybe she could design it.

She thinks about Kevin and Judy, how they’d fed her scones and made her feel welcome, and invited her to their daughter’s wedding. She remembers the day she met Kevin, remembers him saying her father would be proud of her. And while the thought of that doesn’t come close to mending her broken heart – she still wants Dad back, she’ll always want him back – there is some comfort in it. There is.

She thinks about Daphne, and the thing she said three times, each time like she believed it:
What happened to your dad was not your fault
. She imagines how great it would be if it really were true.

Maybe it is true.

She thinks about racing across wet grass in a silk dress, the string of a kite pulling in her hands as she flew straight into the arms of a boy who picked her up and whirled her around and kissed her. She thinks about him ringing her tomorrow like he said he would, and her insides do a happy little flip.

She thinks about Daphne, who hugged her again when they were finally saying goodnight on the landing, who whispered,
We’ll try to get it right from now on, OK?

She thinks about the father she’s never met, the French father she will probably never meet, even with Daphne’s help. She thinks it’s sad that he’ll never know he has a daughter, but her sadness is soft, and manageable. Anyway, she’d had all the father she needed: she just didn’t have him for long enough.

It wasn’t much of a birthday, was it?
Daphne asked at one stage, and Una shrugged and told her it wasn’t all bad.

And Daphne assumed, no doubt, that she was talking about the wedding.

A
s soon as she enters the kitchen she sees it, a yellow paper carrier bag that sits in the centre of the table.

She closes the door softly behind her and sweeps the curtains back. The morning looks promising, the sky an uninterrupted expanse of palest blue. She tiptoes across the floor so her heels won’t clack on the tiles. She stands by the table and regards the bag, not touching it yet. Wanting to draw out the sight of it.

Poking from the top is a wooden skewer, a triangle of white card stuck to it like a flag.
Happy birthday
, it says, in Una’s round handwriting, in green ink.

Happy birthday, Mrs Darling
, Finn said. It was five years ago today, she was thirty-two, and she had just married him. His left arm encircled her waist, her upraised palm resting against his. They were waltzing, or trying to, around the floor, with forty-seven people looking on.
I love you
, he told her, and she echoed it back to him, never happier than at that moment.

Two years on his absence is still an ache inside her. The memory of his voice, his smile, can still bring occasional late-night tears. But it’s getting better: the piercing sting of his loss is softening. Time, it would appear, is not without some healing power after all.

Of course, it’s had a little help.

She pulls out the flag, parts the top of the bag. It’s filled with tissue-paper packages of varying shapes and sizes and colours: lilac, lemon, pink, peppermint, blue, apricot. Every package has been secured with several strands of thin white ribbon.

One by one she unwraps them.

A pair of lavender and green striped gardening gloves.

Two chunky wooden bookends painted orange, one a giant A, the other a Z.

A set of four cookie cutters – star, crescent moon, palm tree, gingerbread man.

A small, soft, blue leather coin purse – and, squeezed inside, a bag of Daphne’s favourite Maltesers.

A silver bangle, slender as piano wire.

The final package, the apricot one, is the shape and heft of a thin paperback book. She removes the ribbon, opens the folds of tissue – and looks down at herself and Una.

Finn took the snap: she remembers the day clearly. It was
the weekend, it was autumn, a few months into their marriage. The three of them travelled in Daphne’s Beetle to a forest a few miles outside the city, with a picnic Daphne had prepared as sunshine streamed through the kitchen window – but they’d hardly reached the outskirts of the city when the sun slipped behind a bank of cement-coloured clouds that had loomed out of nowhere.

They unpacked the picnic – chicken wings, carrot salad, flapjacks, apple juice – and they ate it sitting in the Beetle, listening to the rattle of rain on the roof, feeling the car shudder every now and again when a sudden gust caught it, watching the trees thrash and shiver outside. Afterwards the three of them played Twenty Questions in the car, in no hurry to turn around and go home again, happy to wait all afternoon for a sun that didn’t bother reappearing.

Finn, sitting in the back seat, caught both of them in mid-laughter. It’s slightly blurry – he wasn’t a great photographer – but their good humour is almost palpable. They were happy that day, all three of them, despite the weather. It was a good day, storm and all.

She hasn’t seen the photo in ages, in years; she’d forgotten all about it. It’s been framed in plain, bone-coloured wood. Did Una search through albums for it? Did she look for the happiest photo she could find of the two of them?

Daphne places it on the windowsill behind the sink, next to the caddy that holds the washing-up liquid, the rubber gloves and the pot scraper. She slips on the silver bangle. She folds the sheets of tissue, rolls up the ribbons and replaces them in the yellow bag, then transfers the rest of her presents to the
worktop. She sets the table and makes tea, and as she drops bread into the toaster her phone beeps.