she was just fobbing us off with ‘Nigerian KFC’. But alongside her traditional dishes, she was also a great fan of pesto pasta and Greek salad. And we had a church practically next door to us, so I couldn’t see how that aspect of Victor’s life would be so difficult to manage. But nothing I said seemed to convince Patrick.
Throughout spring, Ginny pressed me for an answer, then, as she got weaker and weaker, seemed to take it for granted that I’d agreed. Meanwhile, Patrick and I batted the same arguments backwards and forwards without reaching a conclusion, old hurts resurrected and aggravated.
‘You were prepared to spend a fortune on IVF trying to have a sibling for Phoebe and now you won’t accept one that’s ready-made and, in case you hadn’t noticed, an orphan. It might be good for our daughter to have another child in the house. She might behave a bit better if all of our attention isn’t on her.’
He’d looked at me. ‘Jo, there was no obvious reason why you couldn’t get pregnant again, I thought it was worth a try. Anyway, a baby of our own or an almost adult from a completely different family, and bereaved to boot, are two entirely separate things.’
And when I tried to discuss the idea with Phoebe, she just dismissed it as one of my crazy notions, a passing whim, before standing back in horror when she realised I was serious. ‘Have him live here full-time and go to my school? That would be so embarrassing.’
But when Ginny died more quickly than we expected, I’d put my foot down. ‘He’s coming here. We can’t let him down.’ Reluctantly and with an attitude of ‘on your head be it’, Patrick agreed, as long as I promised to review the arrangement after six months. Phoebe greeted the news with a sulky ‘don’t expect me to entertain him’ and slammed out of the room every time I tried to reassure her that I’d do whatever I could to make it as easy for her as possible. It took me all my strength not to yell that it wasn’t what I wanted either, that, shamefully, I wished there was someone else who could step in. The fact remained though that I couldn’t live with myself if I let a boy who’d already lost so much forgo the best chance he had of being happy.
It was the right thing. It had to be. We were past the point of no return now.
I pulled my attention back to Victor, standing there at the front, his face contorting with the effort of not crying. I was willing him – willing him – to say what he’d planned to say. That she’d been everything to him, that he’d never missed having a dad because his mum had so much personality that he only had to close his eyes to hear her great big booming laugh.
Ginika Yaro would not be going gently into that good night. I tried to imagine her bursting through the gates of heaven, a swirl of magenta and turquoise scarves: ‘Here comes the main event,’ scooping up the shy and the reticent. Just as she had when she’d burst onto the graduate journalism programme at the magazine where I worked as the editor’s PA nearly three decades ago. She’d only been there five minutes, in contrast to my three years, but she was always scooting me down the stairs at lunchtime, introducing me to people, bounding through life as though she expected everyone to love her.
But right now, I couldn’t fill my mind with those images. I could only see her, gripping my hand, her big brown eyes pleading, ‘Take Victor for me, Joanna. He’s not even eighteen yet. He needs someone to rely on.’
I steadied myself on the back of the pew, my eyes flickering from the emerald shawls to the bright orange shirts dotting the congregation as my misgivings swirled in and out. I still couldn’t see what else I could have done. He deserved a chance, this boy, whose voice was thick with tears but still strong, still audible, still all those things that Ginny had instilled in him – never thinking that the world owed him, a grafter like her, proud to be who he was.
If Ginny hadn’t had the bad luck to die of breast cancer, I would have been properly jealous of her relationship with Victor. I didn’t know where I’d gone wrong, because on paper I felt like