And then he found me.
Afterwards, the police wanted to know how he’d managed to locate the shelter, because not that many knew where it was, but when he was in a rage, Antonio was capable of anything.
It was nighttime when he came. It was cold and I was sitting up with another girl in the big room with the fire. All of a sudden I heard him screaming my name, and I thought I must be going mad.
‘Danae, you bitch, where are you?’
Then he was there, and the other girl ran to get help, and I was on the floor with him on top of me, choking me.
‘I’m going to kill you, bitch,’ he said. For a moment, I thought: let him. And then I remembered the baby coming out of me and I reached for the coal shovel.
I kept hitting him until his hands fell away from me.
Mary came running into the room with a baseball bat, but she didn’t need it. Whatever I’d done to Antonio was well done by then.
Mara was waiting for the sound of Danae’s car on the drive. It was evening when she finally arrived. She approached the door uncertainly, looking at Mara with anxiety in her eyes.
Mara threw herself at her aunt and enveloped her in a hug.
‘Oh, Danae,’ she said, ‘I wish I’d known. How awful it must have been to live with this for so long.’
‘I shouldn’t have tried to defend myself,’ Danae said, closing her eyes with relief. Mara didn’t hate her after all. ‘The police would have come, he’d have been put in jail.’
‘Only to get out again and hurt you again,’ said Mara angrily. She couldn’t bring herself to say Antonio’s name. ‘You did the only thing you could have done. And that’s why you’ve been punishing yourself all these years, isn’t it? Living alone, keeping away from people …’
Danae nodded. ‘The guilt kills me. Guilt over not having left him sooner, so my babies would have stood a chance. Guilt over what I did to Antonio. No matter what he did to me, I was alive and he was as good as dead. I couldn’t live with that.’
‘Have you never considered counselling?’
‘Apart from six weeks in a psychiatric hospital because I went into a numb state – catatonic, they called it – no,’ Danae said. ‘They were kind to me in there, but nobody could understand. I had as good as taken Antonio’s life away. His family never forgave me. Never. It was all my fault, they said. Your father and mother have always been wonderful. They understood my need to be left alone.’
Mara hugged her aunt even tighter. ‘You poor darling, Danae. You’ve got me now, I’ll do my best to help you from now on. You shouldn’t have to cope with all this pain on your own.’
There was no protocol for meeting your husband’s newly pregnant girlfriend. No book of handy hints. Tess had thought of doing a little Internet surfing before the meeting, but what keywords would she type into the search engine?
Forty-something bitterness versus twenty-something nubile happiness?
What to wear rather than how to behave would have been on her sister Suki’s list for sure.
But then Suki always knew how to dress for the occasion.
Tess was the opposite. When in doubt, she inevitably wore the wrong thing.
And so it was that Sunday afternoon. Tess found herself wearing old fawn corduroy trousers and a dark brown turtleneck sweater that somehow leached all the colour from her face, apart from the two spots of high colour on her cheeks. She took down her hair, realized she hadn’t washed it that morning and her roots were greasy, so tied it up again. What was the point in looking good? Kevin and Claire were a done deal.
But Tess had recently wondered if it was time to make an effort. She had a few grey hairs in the blonde now, and stress had given her purple shadows under her eyes.
Downstairs, she caught sight of herself in the hall mirror. In this ensemble and with tied-up hair, she felt like the picture of a dried-up old prune who’d let her husband out of her sight and then watched him run away to sunnier, more youthful climes. Was there a fairy tale about that? The Stupid Older Woman? All older women were stupid or evil in fairy tales. Only the young and pretty females were treated kindly. Tess was theorizing whether this could be an idea for Suki in her new book when Kitty appeared with her woollen winter coat on, a purple furry handbag in one hand and an excited expression on her small face.
‘We’re having marshmallows, aren’t we?’ Kitty asked for at least the fifth time that day. The marshmallows were very important. Kitty liked to try to melt them into the hot chocolate on her teaspoon, drowning each one until it was a puddle of pinky-brown sludge and then sucking it up.
‘Yes, with marshmallows,’ said Tess cheerily, because no matter how many deranged thoughts were going through her mind, she wouldn’t expose her children to them.
‘Goodie,’ said Kitty happily. ‘Do you think Claire will have hot chocolate too? The baby might like it.’ Despite Tess’ horror at having to tell Kitty about the baby, Kitty was delighted with the news and told everyone.
‘That’s a very good idea,’ Tess said evenly. ‘Milk is good for babies. I drank lots when you were in my tummy.’
She managed a smile. It hurt like hell even to think about it, but this baby would be Kitty’s half brother or sister.
Which made her feel mean and nasty. She wasn’t the sort of person who felt anger towards an unborn child, was she?
Yet somehow, she did feel upset about it all in ways she didn’t even want to think about.
She quashed those feelings. Today wasn’t about her, it was about Kitty and Zach.
It fell on Tess’s shoulders to make sure Kitty and Zach saw the baby as a good thing and not as a child who could conceivably get more of their father’s love because he would be living with the baby’s mother.
On the Internet, she had read scads of information on blended families and on welcoming new brothers or sisters into a complex mix. She was determined she wouldn’t wreck it all with bitterness. She had separated from Kevin. She could not blame him for finding someone else or having a baby with that person. Exactly how she was to achieve all this was another matter entirely.
She checked her watch. It was a quarter to five. They should be leaving.
‘Zach,’ she yelled up the stairs. ‘It’s time to go.’
Zach, Kitty and Tess were to meet Kevin and Claire in the hotel coffee shop at five.
She put the white knitted hat on Kitty’s head.
‘Coming,’ mumbled Zach, taking the stairs two at a time.
Antiques
