The Devil's Feather - Minette Walters [60]
It didn’t to Dan either, but he fought my corner as he’d promised he would. My only leverage was the fact that we’d known each other for years. I’d first met him in South Africa when I joined the Cape Times as a rookie sub-editor from Oxford, and he was a columnist. We overlapped for a year before he moved abroad to join Reuters, but we knocked into each other regularly when he was sent to cover an “Africa” story. He came from Johannesburg, but his primary place of residence—according to his tax returns—was County Wexford, Eire, where he “lived” with his Irish wife, Ailish, and their daughter, Fionnula.
It was a strange relationship. His visits to Ireland were even more intermittent than the occasional postings that brought him and me together. I asked him once how he came to marry an Irish girl, and he said it was a shotgun wedding when she fell pregnant. “She was a student in London and was frightened to go home without a ring. Her father believes in hellfire and brimstone. He’d have kicked her out to fend for herself.”
“Why didn’t she have an abortion?”
“Because Ailish believes in hellfire and brimstone more than her old man does.”
“It didn’t stop her sleeping with you.”
“Mmm…except some sins are smaller than others”—he grinned—“and my charm might have had something to do with it. It’s worked out for the best in the end. Fee’s a grand kid. It would have been a crime to abort her.”
“If you feel like that why don’t you make more of an effort to see her?”
He shrugged. “It causes too many problems. The only time the family argues is when I’m there. They all approve of the monthly cheque but not the lodger.”
“Does she live with her parents?”
“Not quite. Three houses down. They’re a close-knit bunch. She has three brothers within a two-mile radius who turn up in force every time I visit to make sure I’m not going to renege on my responsibilities. I feel a bit like Daniel entering the lions’ den whenever I go there.”
It all seemed very peculiar to me. And rather sad. “Do you still sleep with Ailish?”
His eyes crinkled at the edges. “She lets me stay in the spare room, but that’s about as far as her hospitality goes…apart from keeping her lover at arm’s length for the duration.”
“You’re crazy,” I said in disbelief. “Why don’t you get a divorce?”
“What for? There’s no one else to marry…except you…and you won’t have me.”
“You can’t cook.”
“Neither can you.”
“Precisely, which is why we’d make a lousy couple. We’d starve.” I bared my teeth at him. “Are you sure it’s not a scam to avoid paying income tax? Everyone knows writers and artists are zero-rated in Ireland.”
“Only creative writers…and you have to spend six months a year in the country to qualify. Journalists are excluded.”
I couldn’t see that stopping him. He’d worked on a Reuters financial desk at one stage in his career and claimed to know every tax-dodge going. “Are you planning to live there when you write the great novel?”
“It’s crossed my mind.”
“With Ailish?”
Dan shook his head. “I’d rather have a cottage in Kerry, overlooking Dingle Bay. I took Fee there the last time I was over, and it was beautiful. We walked along the beach.” He paused. “By the time I take the plunge—if I take the plunge—she’ll be a grown woman. What do you think she’ll make of her father then? Will she still want to walk in the sand with me?”
It was said in the same amused tone that he’d used throughout, but the words suggested something else. A feeling for his child that he wanted reciprocated. It surprised me. I thought he was like me, determinedly unwilling to commit as the only way to stay sane in a life that was nomadic. Perhaps his daughter had given him roots. I envied