Angel of Darkness

‘Chance would be a fine thing, the shape I’m in.’

‘Are you sure it’s him?’

‘Who else?’ Kelda said wryly. ‘I taxed him with it and of course he denied it, but he hates being thanked for anything. It has to be him. He was really quite put out with me when I told him I wouldn’t accept any financial help from him and Mum.’

Later, as she lay sleepless in Russ and Gina’s guest-room, the tears trickled silently down her cheeks into her hair, making her skin burn. As fast as they came, she scrubbed them away. Angelo was getting married. That was not the end of her world. She could get by without Angelo...hadn’t she been doing so for months? Angelo’s marriage was merely the last act in a grotesque black comedy.

Why should it upset her? Even if she had told the truth and Angelo had accepted that he was the father of her child...even if he had asked her to marry him, she would have turned him down. She had no doubts about that reality. She might love Angelo in that insane, unreasoning way that women sometimes loved, but she did not like Angelo, and literally cringed from the idea of living with him as an unwilling and no doubt unfaithful husband. No, much as it might hurt, Kelda was convinced that her future was far safer solely in her own hands.

The pain in her abdomen came back midway through Russ and Gina’s wedding breakfast the following morning. She had to leave the table to be ignominiously sick but she managed to conceal her pallor with judicious use of cosmetics before she returned.

‘I think you should go home to bed,’ Gina scolded none the less when she was changing out of her unconventional scarlet designer wedding-gown. ‘All that standing around for the photos has exhausted you.’

By then, Kelda was feeling pretty awful and just a little scared. The pain was worse. She knew she needed to see a doctor but she was determined not to cloud her friends’ wedding-day. Half an hour later, she waved them off and walked back into the hotel, intending to call a cab, but without warning a sliver of absolute agony pierced her. With a stifled cry, she pressed a hand to her stomach. A red mist rose in front of her eyes. She took a staggering step in the direction of a chair but she didn’t make it. She collapsed in the foyer.

* * *

‘If she dies, I’ll never forgive you!’ Daisy launched across the waiting-room, her pretty face swollen and distraught with tears. ‘Have you any idea how dangerous acute appendicitis is at this sta

ge of her pregnancy? They have to operate but she might lose the baby! And if she loses that baby, Angelo, I’ll never forgive you for that either!’

‘Daisy...Daisy,’ Tomaso soothed, tugging his almost hysterical wife into his arms. ‘Angelo didn’t come here for this—’

‘Why did he come?’ Daisy sobbed into his shoulder. ‘What’s he doing here now?’

‘Today Kelda’s two closest friends got married,’ Angelo informed her tightly. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

Daisy surveyed him with blank incredulity. ‘What has that got to do with anything?’

* * *

Kelda came back to consciousness in a strange room. Her throat was unbearably dry and her head ached and she was dully aware that she could feel a different kind of pain now. Thankfully no longer severe, the pain had been reduced to throbbing discomfort instead. There was a nurse bending over her. She focused on her with difficulty. ‘Where am I?’

‘The recovery-room.’

‘Am I recovered?’ she mumbled ungrammatically.

‘We hope so.’

‘My baby?’ Kelda whispered shakily, suddenly terrified.

‘Hanging in there like a Trojan.’ The nurse smiled and blurred again.

The next time Kelda surfaced, she felt a little less removed from the world. Her mother was holding her hand and a nurse was taking her blood-pressure. ‘What happened to me?’ she whispered.

In a voice thickened by tears, her mother explained. ‘Why didn’t you go to the doctor?’ Daisy scolded finally.

‘I meant to.’

‘Tomaso wants you to see Angelo,’ her mother volunteered reluctantly.

‘A-Angelo?’ Kelda echoed, attempting to sit up and being firmly pressed back down again by the clucking nurse. ‘What’s he doing here?’

‘Do you want to see him?’

Kelda shut her eyes tightly, an expression of weary pain crossing her drawn features. ‘No...please, no.’

Kelda turned her face to the wall when she was alone again. Angelo? The very last person she had any desire to see when she was weak and in pain and quite frankly at the end of her tether. What was he doing here? And how dared Tomaso ask her to see him! In the cause of family unity, she supposed and she could see the point of that, even agree with his motivation but now was not the time to expect her to rise gracefully above selfish human feelings.