You know what he’s like, tact’s like a foreign language to him sometimes.’
‘Who knows? Not me. Bye, Paul.’
Delia couldn’t act as if she and Paul still had that shared ground, and were confidantes.
She had considered Paul’s explanation already: that Aled, conscious he’d put his not-inconsiderably-large feet in it earlier in the phone call, was trying to win brownie points by making Delia think he’d disapproved enough to intervene.
Delia knew what she was doing. She was trying to knit the wound back together almost instantly: to find a way out, so Paul’s behaviour wasn’t as bad as she feared. Delia wanted to believe him, rather than Aled. She stopped herself, but not before she’d shown that her instincts to side with Paul remained in place.
Delia was going to have to subdue impulses like this. She’d trusted him absolutely, without question, and look where it had got her. Now, she had questions – and absolutely no trust.
Ralph was behind his closed bedroom door, rapping ‘Dis dat prime SHIT!’ to himself and bumping into furniture, so Delia decided he sounded quite caffeine-wired and was probably OK for a cup of tea.
She would’ve asked him to help her to track down Peshwari Naan, only Paul had always gently mocked her for thinking Ralph was an I.T. supremo. ‘He plays loads of games, Dee, he’s not an expert. That’s like expecting someone who has the telly on all day to write you The Sopranos, or fix the reception.’
As she turned to head back downstairs, she saw that their mum had washed his royal-blue-and-yellow-striped chip shop tabard and left it neatly folded outside his door.
Delia had tried to have motivational talks about seeking alternative employment with Ralph, but they always fell on deaf ears.
‘Do you enjoy work?’ was one tack she used. ‘No, that’s why they call it work,’ Ralph gurgle-shriek laughed.
‘Wouldn’t you like to use your brain more?’ Delia said, and Ralph shrugged. ‘Do you like your work?’
He had her there.
Delia wasn’t fired up by writing press releases about school litter-picking drives or changes to the traffic light signalling in Gosforth. Her job paid for her life when she wasn’t at work, that was all.
Ralph said he was doing the same, it was just that his occupation involved adding the green dye to vats of grey marrowfat peas, or dunking wire baskets of raw potato slices into bubbling fat.
From time to time, Delia appealed to her parents to help her cause. Their view was that Ralph wasn’t in any trouble, and seemed happy: he’d move out eventually. They weren’t ambitious for their kids, and Delia usually liked that.
On occasion though, she mildly resented it. A boot up the bum wasn’t always a bad thing, but hassling Ralph felt like prodding a gentle creature through the bars of its cage, and it’d never bite you back.
She plodded downstairs and headed towards the sticky-sealed UPVC back door, cup of tea in one hand – tea was the currency at her parents’; like Buddhists bringing gifts, you must always bear tea – and crossed the garden to her dad’s shed. It was more of a small summerhouse, and full of the forest floor smell of wood shavings.
Her dad was at his workbench with a piece of oak that had been smoothed and planed into a crest, presumably one day to be part of a bed or a wardrobe.
‘Thanks, love,’ he said, putting his goggles on his head and accepting a mug of milk-no-sugar with sandy hands.
‘Mum’s not home yet. I thought I might make spag bol for tea?’
‘Sounds nice. Are you OK?’ her dad said.
‘A bit sad,’ Delia said. ‘I’ll get better.’
‘You’re always so cheerful, usually,’ her dad said. He blew on his tea and paused. ‘Did he not want to get married?’
‘He said he’d get married,’ Delia said, then stopped. She’d only said she and Paul had been arguing and needed some space. (She’d told Ralph the truth, but Ralph wouldn’t pass it on, nor would they ask him.)
She was conscious that if she said Paul had been unfaithful, she might never restore his reputation in their eyes. It was one thing eventually deciding to forgive your cheating partner, but adjusting wasn’t so easily accomplished by your parents. Better to keep them in the partial dark until you’d decided. Once again, the scorned woman’s sour rewards seemed to be denied to her. ‘I don’t think he was very happy with me. Or as happy as I thought. I’m not sure.’
Her father nodded; perhaps he’d deciphered this code. ‘You make everyone else happy though.’
Delia nodded, smiled, and gulped down the threat of a sob.
‘You can stay here as long as you like,’ her dad concluded, fixing her with watery blue eyes, the pouchier version of Ralph’s. ‘No rush.’
‘Thanks, Dad. Good to know,’ Delia said, and she meant it.
Back in the galley kitchen, she chopped onions and garlic, fried mince, and slopped a tin of chopped tomatoes into the pan, rinsing the residue out with water and adding that too – a student ‘make it go further’ trick that had stuck. It occurred to her how reassuring cooking could be, even though she wasn’t hungry.
It was ironic: without her usually very healthy appetite, Delia could feel herself tightening and shrinking inside her clothes. As if she might end up disappearing entirely into a deflated dress, like the Wicked Witch melting at the end of The Wizard of Oz.
If she was still getting married, Delia would have been delighted: the corsets on some of the vintage gowns she’d admired looked worryingly constrictive. As it was, it didn’t matter. She could be any size she liked – Paul had still slept with Celine.
Once the Bolognese sauce had coalesced into something orange-brown instead of red-brown, she turned the gas down, put a lid on it and went up to her bedroom.
Delia hesitated, once she’d closed the door. She could hear Ralph’s singing and her dad’s saw. Her mum was at the allotment. She opened the wardrobe. There at the bottom, under the old clothes and mothballed coats, were flat, clear plastic storage boxes with handles.
She slid them out, hauling them onto the bed, and opened the top one. Delia was oddly anxious, excited, and self-conscious. It was so long since she’d looked at any of this.
Delia had started The Fox when she was a teenager. It was an idea borne of daydreaming at school, when life had been getting on top of her. She was teased for her red hair. She wasn’t an exceptional student, she wasn’t an athlete, or cool, or popular.
She was lonely. So she fantasised another life for herself. One where she was all the things she wanted to be in the real world – special, fantastic, heroic, brave, exciting, useful. As a child, she was fascinated by a fox that visited the family garden, and bombarded her parents with questions. Why did it only come out at night? Did all the foxes know each other? Where were they hiding
