A granddaughter,thought Lou blindly. Angelo might be there with his wife and his children and his grandchildren. Scads of relatives, all the family he’d had after he’d become her father. People who were in his life after he’d abandoned her mother.
Buthadhe abandoned her mother? Had he known? The thought roamed round and round in her head. She wished she knew. He might take one look at them and send them packing. Lou wished she’d had the presence of mind to have asked Gloria more about Angelo. Gloria must have been there when he was around, after all. She’d know.
‘Can we phone Gloria?’ she asked Toni, who looked at her with horror.
‘No!’ hissed Toni. ‘We’re here.’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Lou, mind racing.
What if he didn’t like her? What if he denied everything? What if he said, you’re not my child? What if she looked at him and saw absolutely nothing of herself in him? And what if he looked totally different? And then what if he looked the same? What if she finally found someone who looked like her?
She was unconsciously rubbing her fingers together, and now she glanced down and looked at her own hands. Her mother’s hands were big. And she had strong fingers, which were amazing when it came to her work with the metals she used in her sculpting.
Toni’s hands were like Gloria and their father’s: long and slender. But Lou’s hands were different to everyone else’s in the family. Her forefinger and her ring finger on each hand were the same length, both very long, very slim, with quite large knuckles.
Toni had always loved her sister’s hands. ‘They’re unusual. Different,’ the young Toni had said.
Maybe his hands would be like hers.
The three of them drove into the driveway, Toni parked and then they got out.
A woman of perhaps thirty opened the wooden front door and smiled at them. ‘Welcome,’ she said.
Lou looked her up and down curiously. The woman had very black hair, olive skin and freckles. She didn’t look like Lou, but still, Lou began to do insane birthday maths. If this woman was in her thirties and she was fifty, and Angelo was ...
‘Come in,’ said the woman.
‘Sister?’ whispered Lou to Toni out of the corner of her mouth.
Toni poked her with an elbow in return.
‘Not now.’
They entered the cool house and the woman brought them to a large low room designed with Moroccan influences, with low archways, the subtle waft of air conditioning and the pale stone walls covered with giant canvases. There was no doubt that this was the home of an artist.
‘Hello,’ said a deep, gravelly voice and Lou stared up.
This was him. Finally.
Chapter Twenty
Angelo Mulraney was tall and thin, although he’d once clearly been a large muscular man because his shoulders were still broad. He must have been Gloria’s age, Lou realised – eighty something – and he wore his age well. Despite the thinness, there was a sense of vitality in him. She looked up into his face and saw a spark of excitement in dark eyes as brown as her own. Without thinking, her hands flew to her face and she could feel her own eyes brimming up with tears.
Her father, she thought. Her biological father.
‘You look like me,’ she said breathlessly.
His face was masculine but he had the same high cheekbones as she did, the same full lower lip and their eyes were identical: deep set, seeing everything, the rich colour of old wood.
‘You look like me,’ he agreed gently in a voice that said he spoke English rarely now.
He moved forward with tanned and gnarled hands, very like her own with the large knuckles. He reached out to take Lou’s hands, holding them gently, tenderly.
‘It is wonderful to meet you,’ he said.
Lou knew there were other people in the room, but she could barely feel them. She knew that Trinity and Toni were behind her, was aware that the woman who’d brought them into the room was there and over in a corner sat another woman, an older lady, who was watching it all.
But they were all in her peripheral vision. Angelo was really all she could see, all she could feel.
