The Baby Bond

‘Angel?’

Angel’s heart stilled as she heard her name, the single word spoken in a voice at once so strange and yet so shockingly familiar that it struck her like a blow. Disorientated, she gripped onto the receiver, the white knuckling of her fingers the only outward sign of her distress. She opened her mouth to speak, but no words came.

There was a long pause, and then the low, masculine voice growled out the word again, so that it rang deeply in her ear. ‘Angel? Angel? Are you still there?’

‘Y-yes,’ she gasped, her lungs feeling oxygen-deprived, her legs like lead as her memory played tricks on her. ‘That—that isn’t you, is it, Chad?’

‘No. It isn’t Chad.’ The denial was emphatic, but something rather odd coloured the speaker’s reply. ‘It’s Rory.’

Angel swallowed. Of course. Didn’t they say that siblings’ voices always sounded remarkably similar on the telephone?

Rory Mandelson. Chad’s brother. And her brother-in-law. A man she had scarcely known, whose self-contained exterior she had never got close to penetrating, no matter how many times they had met. A man she had felt distinctly uncomfortable with, for reasons she had never quite got round to exploring—other than the fact that he had not approved of her marriage to his only brother. He had made that very plain.

And yet Rory had been the person she had turned to when she’d wanted to track down her missing husband—knowing that if anyone could find Chad then Rory could. She hadn’t wanted to involve the police, unwilling to have her life put under the microscopic scrutiny that a police investigation would entail. Though she was uncertain why she’d had such blind faith in her brother-in-law.

Instinct, perhaps. The older she got the more trust she placed in instinct. And, in her more lucid moments, Angel acknowledged that maybe Rory’s so-called arrogance—which Chad had complained about so often—had in fact been an unshakeable strength of character. Oh, yes—it had been all too easy to feel ambivalent about Rory Mandelson.

But that had been in another age, another life.

Now she needed to know one thing, and one thing only. Then she could go and live out the rest of her life in some kind of peace.

Cases like hers were well documented—her odd feeling of detachment nothing unusual. Why was it, Angel wondered, that those left behind by people who disappeared without trace always seemed to have a huge chunk of their life missing?

‘H-have you found him, Rory?’ she stumbled. ‘Have you found my husband?’

Another pause, but this time a silence so uncomfortable that Angel could almost feel the awkwardness fizzing its way down the telephone wires, and she felt herself swaying with awful premonition.

Rory’s voice was heavy. ‘Yes, I’ve found him—’

‘Where is he?’ she demanded quickly.

There was uncharacteristic hesitation, as though he was momentarily lost for words. ‘Angel, I need to see you, to talk to you—’

‘Tell me!’ she insisted. ‘In the name of God, Rory Mandelson—will you please tell me where my husband is?’

‘Angel—’

Something in the way he said her name this time forewarned her. It was a tone of voice she had heard used before, a tone which conveyed both compassion and condolence. And when someone spoke that way, it could mean only one thing….

‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ she choked out in disbelief. ‘Chad is dead?’

‘Yes, he is,’ he told her, more gently than she had ever heard him speak. ‘I’m afraid that Chad was killed in a car crash eight days ago. I’m so very sorry, Angel.’

Dead?

The vibrant, crazy Chad Mandelson, snuffed out like a candle?

Angel shook her head frantically from side to side, so that the thick black hair beat heavily against the slender column of her neck. ‘No,’ she whimpered, in shocked and dazed denial. ‘He can’t be dead!’

‘I’m so sorry, Angel,’ he said again.

The part of her which wasn’t frozen in disbelief wondered why Rory Mandelson of all people was offering her sympathy, when she was nothing more than an estranged wife. And a deserted wife to boot. A wife he had never approved of Chad taking in the first place.

She shook her head once more, as if trying to clear the fuzziness which seemed to have descended on her like a dank, oppressive blanket. Surely she should offer some words of kindness to him. His only brother. His last living relation. Shell-shocked, she forced her lips to utter conventionally, ‘I’m sorry, too, Rory.’

‘Yes.’ But he clipped the word out, as though he doubted the sincerity of her condolences.

Angel swallowed, forcing herself to ask the question she knew must be asked. ‘And when…when is the funeral?’

There was another pause. ‘I’ve just come back from the funeral,’ he told her, his words seeming to be drawn out of him reluctantly. ‘It took place earlier today.’

‘You’ve already had the funeral?’ she asked, still shocked and bewildered.

‘Yes.’

So. No time to pray for the repose of his soul. And no opportunity to say goodbye to her husband properly, either. For wouldn’t a funeral have provided the natural and complete cutting of ties, in view of everything that had happened between them?

‘I wasn’t invited, then,’ she observed dully.

‘I honestly didn’t think you would want to come, Angel. I can’t think of another woman in the same situation who would have.’

‘And shouldn’t I have been the one to decide that?’ she cried. ‘Couldn’t you at least have asked me?’

‘Yes, I could.’ His voice seemed to come from a long way away as he answered her accusation slowly. ‘Of course I could, Angel. And you’re right—I should have done. I just presumed that you would find it too—’

‘Too what?’

‘Too distressing. After everything that had happened between you.’

‘You mean that people would have been laughing at me?’

‘That isn’t what I meant at all!’ he growled. ‘I just thought that you had been through enough with Chad, and I couldn’t think of many estranged wives who would have wanted to be there—given the circumstances.’

Angel pressed her nails painfully into the palm of her hand, as if to reassure herself that she was still alive, because she felt as colourless and as transparent as a ghost. ‘What circumstances?’ she intoned. ‘Tell me, Rory!’

‘Not now!’

His words rang out powerfully, broaching no argument, and Angel remembered Chad’s words drifting back to her—that what Rory wanted, Rory usually got.

‘I’m coming over to see you,’ he continued inexorably.

‘That won’t be necessary,’ she answered stiffly. ‘I can see little point in that now! And it’s pointless your coming all the way to Ireland, when I can speak to you on the phone. Why don’t you just rejoice that my association with your family has come to an end, that your wish has finally been granted?’

‘I’m coming over to see you,’ he repeated, as if she hadn’t objected at all. ‘I need to talk to you, Angel.’

She opened her mouth to suggest that he said whatever it was he wanted to say right now, but she closed it almost immediately. Something about the way he spoke made her realise that to argue with him would be futile, but then hadn’t Chad always told her that Rory never took no for an answer. ‘When?’ she asked, wishing that she had the strength to put up a fight. And win.

‘On Monday. I’ll be with you on Monday.’