A Price Worth Paying(14)

‘There’s no family to speak of. Not now.’

‘But your father’s family?’

She shook her head. ‘I know it sounds odd, but I never met them. Dad discovered he was adopted when he was thirteen and he never forgave his adoptive family for keeping the secret from him for so long. And he never met his birth parents but he hated them for abandoning him in the first place. I think that’s why he and Mum got on so well together. They understood each other. They were alone in the world and they were all each other had.’

‘Surely they had you?’

‘They did but …’ She raised her head, searching the night sky through the clear glass roof for the words. How did one go about explaining such personal things to someone who was a virtual stranger, and yet who should not be such a stranger, given they were now engaged to be married? How much did he need to know? How much did she need to tell him?

And yet there was something liberating, too, about sharing something about your family with a total stranger, knowing that it would never matter. After all, it wasn’t as if he’d ever have to meet her parents. Not now.

‘I always thought Mum was all Dad ever wanted or needed.’

He looked her way and she caught his frown.

‘Don’t get me wrong, he was a good dad, sometimes great,’ she said wistfully, remembering a particular father and daughter three-legged race on the one primary school sports day. They’d come last but it didn’t matter, because at least that year he’d actually bothered to turn up, despite the fact he’d never had a job to go to like the other dads and had always made excuses and she’d spent every year watching her friends run with their fathers. But he’d turned up that year and she’d been beside herself, bursting with pride.

He’d done it for her, she’d realised years later, because she’d pleaded for the weeks and days before with him to go, and finally she’d worn him down, but at the time it had felt like Christmas.

‘Really, it was okay. I just got the impression he would have been perfectly happy never having kids. I guess I always just felt a little surplus to requirements.’

‘You have no other family? No brothers or sisters?’

‘No.’

He didn’t reply and she didn’t mind because she was more than content to look out of the window, looking at the rows of vines trellised so high above the hillside that you could walk beneath them, so different to the style of vineyard she was used to seeing at home. And it was easier for a moment to think about the tangle of vines than the tangle of families.

For a moment. Until she remembered another tangling thread.

‘Dad didn’t want Mum to come back to Spain, you know, when she heard that her mother was dying. He didn’t want her to rebuild any bridges and reconnect with a father he said had abandoned her. In all honesty, I think he only let her come in the end because he figured Felipe was old and it might result in an inheritance that might pay off their debts.

‘What he didn’t figure on was Mum and Felipe actually getting on okay. He expected they’d pick up where they’d left off last time and they’d shout the house down, but this time was different, I think because her mother had died. And Mum had grown up a bit and Felipe had mellowed and both she and Felipe were starting to realise all the things they’d missed.’

‘He must have been happy to have you around, after losing Maria.’

He shouldn’t have had to wait that long. She clamped down on a boulder of guilt she’d felt, heavy and weighted inside her from the day she’d heard Maria had died. Sometimes she could lock it away and almost forget it was there, and other times it would escape and roll awkwardly through her gut, crushing her spirit and making her remember a promise that she’d made to herself so many years ago.

A promise she’d broken.

She dragged in air. But she was here now. It wasn’t too late to make things better; to make up just a little bit for all that had gone before.

‘He was. We all were, all apart from Dad. He resented Mum talking in a language and laughing at jokes he couldn’t understand.’ Tears once again stung her eyes and she clamped down on the urge to cry. He was her father and she’d loved him but there were times she’d wanted to shake him too, and make him see that he didn’t have to take on the whole world to enjoy it. ‘And now they’ve both gone and Felipe is dying too.’ She turned her head away as two fat tears squeezed their way from the corners of her eyes, swiping the wetness from her cheeks.