Wendy laughed and flicked the towel at him. ‘I wasn’t talking about you, big-head. What do you reckon, Siobhan? If he was any more of a doughnut … sure he’d be eating himself.’
Siobhan laughed. ‘He’d be an apple doughnut.’
Delaney fixed her with a serious look. ‘Why apple?’
‘Because they’re my favourites,’ she said, with a musical laugh, and hugged him around the waist.
Wendy cast her gaze around the room. ‘Seriously, though, Jack. You’ve done a good job here. It actually feels like a home here now.’
‘Thanks. But, like I say, I had help.’
‘And like I say, just as well.’
‘Are you saying I haven’t got good taste?’
‘Only in women, Jack, only in women.’
Delaney looked around the kitchen himself, a slight smile playing on his lips as he realised how far he had come since meeting Kate. It was furnished now with a range of styles: a sturdy wooden farmhouse table, a Scandinavian rocking chair in the corner with a tapestried cushion on it, an antique dresser. Some original framed watercolours on the wall. If it had just been down to him he would have gone to IKEA and got the lot from there, but Kate had put her foot down and made him take his time to work at finding the right pieces of furniture. In just a few weeks he had the whole house decorated and furnished and his sister-in-law Wendy was right, he realised. It did feel like home. In a way he was sad to have finished. He had really enjoyed hunting down pieces with Kate: from antique shops and auctions, from bric-a-brac stalls – photos and prints and original watercolours, sofas, chairs, sideboards, cutlery, crockery, glassware, wine rack and wine, whisky decanters and – most important of all – a big sled-style rubberwood bed they had bought from John Lewis that sat in the middle of Delaney’s wooden-planked master bedroom with antique mahogany pot-cupboards either side like a statement that Jack Delaney was back and open for business.
Delaney realised that his daughter had asked him a question. ‘Sorry, darling, what’s that?’
‘I was saying … can I stay the night? Aunty Wendy said it was all right.’
‘Sorry, darling, not tonight.’
‘Oh please.’ Siobhan pulled her most pleading expression, her beautiful big eyes plucking at his heartstrings like Segovia on a banjo. She reminded him so much of her mother. At least he could see the resemblance now and take comfort in it. Months back and he’d have been in pieces, but things had changed. Kate had done more than just help decorate his house; she was helping him rebuild his life.
He ruffled his fingers though his daughter’s curly dark hair again and felt the guilt.
‘Sorry, poppet, I’ve got a really early start tomorrow. But soon, I promise.’
‘What about a fairy story? You haven’t told me a story for ages.’
‘Just a quick one, then.’ Delaney sat at the table and picked Siobahn up, plonking her in his lap.
‘One with magic in it.’
‘All stories have magic in them, darling.’
‘Proper magic. Not just silly words. Anyone can make up silly words.’
‘All right then, I’ll tell you the story of the desert rose.’
‘Okay.’
‘Once upon a time, long, long ago, in a time before man had taken metal from the earth and cracked the bargain they had made with the ancient gods—’
‘What bargain?’
‘They gave us fire so long as we burned only wood. When we took the metal from the earth and burned it we broke that bargain.’
‘You can’t burn metal, silly.’
Delaney’s voice softened, his childhood brogue creeping back in with a sad and lyrical cadence to it. ‘But you can, darling. That magic wasn’t man’s to take, however, and the gods have been angry with us ever since. You see that anger in the melting of the icecaps so the polar bears have nowhere to go, and the angry seas rising in New Orleans and across the world to punish the poor and the defenceless.’
‘That’s global warning.’
Delaney chuckled. ‘It
Siobhan cuddled back comfortably against Delaney’s chest, listening, her eyes wide.
‘Long, long ago and far away’ – he began again – ‘there blossomed a single red rose. It grew in the middle of the never-ending desert within a ring of sharp-edged rocks in a bed of bleached white sands, and the rocks sheltered her from the biting winds that would spring up as suddenly as a sneeze. Cutting, swirling, hissing winds that raged and howled and danced across the desert like a swarm of angry killer wasps.’
Siobhan frowned. ‘I don’t like wasps.’
‘But although they rasped and scraped and laid low all before them … the winds also carried the little rose seed hundreds of miles from the fertile lands of Araby and left it in the little hollow in the middle of the desert, before vanishing again, in the way of all winds, as suddenly as they appeared. Like a candle being snuffed out. So the little seed was safe where it had been placed, and the tears of the moon in the cool night sky watered it, and the sheltering rocks that ringed her were like stone guardians, so the rose grew tall and proud and beautiful. And the desert loved her. Never in his vast regions had he ever seen something so lovely. So that when the storms raged and the sands blew, the desert stood with the rocks and made sure there was an oasis of calm around the lovely
