by Joy Dettman
‘Charlie White?’
‘You remember him?’
He shook his head. ‘She kept it? The money?’
‘He was dead. She’d been cooking his books for years to cover up his pilfering. She said that if she’d handed the money in, she would have ended up in jail. Charlie White,’ she repeated the name. ‘He was a little, old moth-eaten bloke. Very memorable.’
‘Some names ring bells,’ he said.
‘You would have known him. Georgie said he’d been around all of her life, that he and his wife were friends of your grandmother.’ She picked up a ten-pound note and smelt it. No whiff of mouse, a little fried chicken. ‘I met him for five minutes and never forgot him.’
‘Too many people have walked through my life,’ he said. ‘How much mouse money?’ he asked, as he kicked a can through the goalposts of the doorframe.
‘Thousands,’ Cara said, watching the two young dogs chase the can. ‘Old money. Pounds, not dollars. Australia was in the process of changing over to decimal currency so we had to get rid of it fast. It would have been in . . . in ’67.’
‘We had to get rid of it?’
‘Georgie and me,’ Cara said, and smiled at the memory. ‘She opened half a dozen bank accounts in different versions of her name. Then for the next twelve months, I did a weekly bank run, paid in the old money, ten pounds at a time. Remember that day you followed me to the racetrack and watched bug-eyed while I handed over ten-pound notes to place fifty cent bets? You asked me if I was money laundering?’
‘Your Mafioso fiancé’s drug money,’ he said.
‘Would it kill you to say his name, just once?’
She’d been engaged for a time to Chris Marino, a Melbourne solicitor. Her friend Cathy hadn’t approved. She was the one who’d started the Mafioso fiancé.
‘If I’d married him instead of you, I’d be living in a beautiful modern house in Doncaster now, instead of cleaning up after pigs. Home,’ she said, to Morrie and the dogs. They had three Border Collies, old Rufus patiently waiting at the door, the two young ones, not so patient, were sparring near the stream. They liked water. Liked to share it too. ‘Get!’ she said, copping a spray. They laughed at her word, barked at it. Only seven months old, they were still foolish pups. Rufus was twelve and ready to go home for his nap.
Those who’d known Cara Norris, the Melbourne primary school teacher, may have looked twice to recognise her. Miss Norris had dressed in suits and heels, had worn her hair functionally short. Mrs Grenville, rarely seen out of jeans and sneakers, wore her hair in a chin-length bob with a long, straight fringe. It covered her brow, covered her eyebrows. She was slim, had been measured at five foot eight before she’d stopped growing.
Morrie was taller. He’d inherited the Hooper hair, now their gunmetal grey. He hadn’t inherited their overly large ears and excessive height. His father had been taller. He remembered being taken to a hospital and being told to shake the hand of a long, match-stick man who’d lived there.
He had Jenny’s eyes, though his were more grey than blue. He had her nose, her brow.
He’d chosen to forget her.
PANDORA’S BOX
Altering the date of a wedding is fraught with problems. One of Elise’s bridesmaids, available in October, would be skiing in New Zealand in June. Leona, the flower girl, would have been closer to four than three by October. The church, too, was a major problem. They could get it in the morning, which meant that the planned evening reception would become a lunch and that created another problem. Cara had already bought an after-five frock for an evening wedding.
There were too many problems for Elise. She booked a flight to Spain and found a marriage celebrant prepared to say the words and get the papers signed at the airport. Cara could have lived with that. Laura, the groom’s mother, couldn’t. She phoned Cara.
‘Talk to that girl,’ she said. ‘It will kill Ian’s grandmother if they’re not married in a church.’
Tracy booked the church for an eleven o’clock wedding. She booked the caterers, photographer, waiters, waitresses. All they’d needed was a bride, so on the fourteenth of April, Cara drove into London to take Elise shopping for a wedding gown.
She didn’t want a gown or a wedding. She wanted a baby. She didn’t want the nausea that came with carrying it. ‘We’re getting married at the airport, Mum, and I’ll be wearing an elastic-waisted tracksuit,’ she said.
She’d been a determined two-year-old when they’d brought her home from foster care. She hadn’t changed since, but without that determination she may not have survived her first year of life. Her leg had been crippled by abuse when she’d been found abandoned in a park. The day Cara saw her determined little face on the front page of a London newspaper, she knew she’d been destined to raise her.
It had taken a year to get her. It had taken years of operations to repair the damage to her leg. She still walked with a limp, still wore sensible shoes, one heel a little higher than the other, but otherwise, she was a very modern, determined girl – determined to be married by a celebrant.
Cara was as determined. ‘Everything is booked. Ian’s grandmother is delaying her funeral to be there, and you’ll be there, in a wedding gown.’
It was two o’clock before Elise agreed to hire a gown. It may have carried the odour of dry-cleaning fluid but it had no waist, just in case. She said she didn’t care whether the caterers served chicken, fish or rabbit stew at the reception. She wouldn’t be eating it. She had no interest in wedding bouquets or in what her solitary bridesmaid wore, but did agree to cancel the marriage celebrant.
Back to the car park by three, another address to find and the London traffic had given Cara a headache. Elise, more familiar with the city, drove to the art restorer’s address, where she double parked while Cara ran in to reclaim and pay for what she had no desire to claim or pay for.
There’d been a large gap on the ballroom wall while old Henry Whitworth Langdon’s leer was being given more attention than it deserved. His frame’s restoration may have been worth the money.
She and the money man manoeuvred Henry sideways into the rear of the car, then Elise gave up the keys to catch a bus back to her unit. Cara drove home, old Henry Whitworth’s frame blocking her rear vision all the way.
Tracy was in the courtyard waiting for Henry. Morrie got him out of the back seat, then together they carried him in through the house, up the front stairs and back to his place in the ballroom.
‘Did you buy an outfit?’ Tracy asked.
‘I’ll wear my blue linen,’ Cara said.
They hung Henry, Morrie up the ladder, Cara holding it steady, Tracy directing, to the left or the right.
‘He’s straight enough,’ Morrie said.
‘No doubt straighter than he was in life,’ Cara added. His appearance suggested he’d deserved to be hung, though not on a ballroom wall.
‘The bottom needs to go a smidgen to the left,’ Tracy directed, and patient Morrie adjusted until Tracy said, ‘Perfect.’
There wasn’t a perfect face amongst the lot of them. The Langdon women were long-nosed and haughty, their males sly- eyed and leering. A few had value. Henry Whitworth Langdon’s artist had paintings hung in high places. In Leticia’s time that illustrious signature had hung uninsured and forgotten.
Tracy, who’d spent months sorting through curled-up history, had unearthed the receipt for that portrait and been on his paper-trail since. Old Henry Whitworth was the Langdon who’d won, stolen, or wed money enough to build on the front section of the Hall, in 1739. She’d found the name of the architect who’d designed it. He’d designed the ballroom’s ceiling to impress, had designed multiple impressive bedrooms for guests, but hadn’t concerned himself with their hygiene. Through the years, various renovators had done what they could to rectify the bathroom problem, but not until Morrie went into the B&B business had he realised that guests were prepared to pay more money to spend a night in a manor house if the rooms offered private
bathrooms. His renovators stole space enough from the larger rooms for small ensuites, and where there’d been too little space to steal, they’d knocked holes through walls and turned two lesser bedrooms into four full bathrooms. Under Tracy’s supervision, the B&B business was now making money.
Her current research into architects who may have been working in the area during old Elizabeth’s reign was doomed to failure. The rear section of the Hall, standing since Elizabethan times, had no architectural input. To Cara it appeared to have begun life as a couple of old stone cottages that grew into one, then decided to climb higher. There were three levels to it, the lower level, a rabbit warren of passages leading to where they were required, with steps where no steps were expected, and staircases not far removed from ladders. The second level was smaller. The third, where Morrie and Cara slept, consisted of four rooms, squeezed in beneath the roof.
Robin, a Grenville Langdon by birth, had no interest in the estate. He referred to it as a money-guzzling fire hazard. Since his marriage, he’d spent more time in Australia than at home. Nine years old when they’d moved to the UK, he’d been too old to change his core allegiance, he said.
Tracy’s research into the Langdon history had sparked Robin’s interest in his Australian forebears. He’d tracked the Norris family back to the sixteenth century. He knew the port the original James Richard Hooper had sailed from and the name of the boat he’d sailed on. He’d delved into more recent Hooper history, had details on Lorna’s murder. He and the girls had been raised on tales of Lorna, the family witch – the reason Morrie’s parents left Australia.
Cara had met her once, on the day of Margaret’s funeral – and one meeting had been enough. She’d met Jim Hooper, the last James Richard Hooper. She’d been sitting across Georgie’s kitchen table from him the night half of the police in Victoria had been in Woody Creek, searching for Raelene and Dino Collins. They’d broken into Cara’s Melbourne home and taken Tracy from her bed. Morrie had questioned her about Jim but not about Jenny. He remembered her, but when Robin asked if he had any recollection of his biological mother’s name, Morrie said no.
He had good reason to forget her. When he was a six-year-old boy, she’d sold him to his grandfather for two thousand pounds, and to this day he carried his bill of sale in his wallet. He’d shown it to Cara twenty-odd years ago. ‘What with inflation, who knows how much I’m worth today. Want to put in a bid?’ he’d said.
It was a legal document, couched in legal jargon, signed, witnessed and dated. Morrie could quote both pages. Cara could quote the opening sentence.
I, Jennifer Carolyn Morrison-King, without coercion, and being aware that it is in the best interests of my son, James Hooper Morrison, do hereby relinquish my parental rights to his father, James Richard Hooper . . .
Her signature was on it, twice. He knew his mother’s name.
Years ago, Cara had suggested he have his bill of sale framed before it disintegrated, that he hang it on the family-room wall. Its folds had begun their erosion. As with most of life’s problems, time wears them away to dust, and eventually they blow away.
He and Tracy were studying the cleaned-up Henry Whitworth Langdon and discussing the painting next to it, a woman who may have been the wife with money. The artist had put a lot of work into her jewels. They’d found no receipt for that one and no record of her artist. Tracy called her Regina, the wife of Henry Whitworth Langdon, when she led her tour groups through the front section of the Hall. She never showed them through the rear section. It was family only there. Cara and the children went missing on tour-group days, or hid in the family room from peering eyes.
The ladder folded, they carried it downstairs and out through the front door, where Morrie lifted it to his shoulder to take it back to where it belonged. Their garage had housed a coach and horses in another era. Like the house, it had received its renovations, and today housed two modern vehicles and a ride-on mower. Morrie rode it. They had acres of lawn to mow.
In Leticia’s day, there’d been no lawn and only nature’s garden. She’d been in her eighties when newly divorced Cara had come here to spend one night. She’d stayed for three months. If not for Myrtle and Robert, her parents, and Robin, she may have stayed forever. She’d seen the Hall at its worst, had become lost in its maze of passages – had stepped over fallen ceilings too – and never been happier in her life.
She entered the house today via the dog’s door, or the door with the doggy entrance cut into it. They had their own room, but preferred the family room – long, low-beamed, in another lifetime it may have been a dairy. Today it had a modern kitchen at one end, Cara’s desk at the other, and between kitchen and desk the family lived, ate and watched television. Not one Langdon disgraced its walls. Photographs of the children and the dogs graced its one long wall.
As an infant Cara had wanted a black and white puppy. Myrtle and Robert bought her a fine fluffy dog with a key in its tummy. She’d named him Bowser. He’d barked, wagged his tail and nodded his head until she’d wound his key once too often. A silent Bowser then, he’d guarded her bed until he’d gone mangy and semi-bald with loving.
Aged thirteen when they’d moved from Sydney to Traralgon. Thirteen too old to cling to worn-out toys, Bowser had been disposed of.
She’d been a mother, a foster mother to Tracy, when Robert and the children presented her with a wriggling black and white puppy that required no key. Of course, his name had to be Bowser. Raelene King and Dino Collins murdered him the night they stole Tracy.
There’d been no more dogs, or not until she’d moved her family to the UK. She’d had a few since. Old Rufus celebrated his twelfth birthday before she’d bought the pups. He’d spent the last six months evading them. She found him today under her desk, when she sat at her computer.
Half a dozen emails came through, two from Cathy. She read a few lines of the first before printing both, to read at her leisure. Cathy’s emails were long-winded. She’d been contacted about the new date for the wedding.
She and Gerry had flown over for Robin’s conventional wedding, and for Tracy’s unconventional woodland nuptials. Her groom had worn the white. Tracy had clad herself in a gown of filmy green and pinned flowers in her hair. She’d looked like a woodland nymph, had climbed trees and perched on branches, playing hide and seek with the photographer. No reception, no speeches for Tracy. She’d wanted a picnic on the lawns.
Cathy hadn’t approved. She’d said they’d have beautiful children if they survived long enough to reproduce. They’d produced a pair of dark-headed, dark-eyed pixie children who adored their father, who flew in and out like a migrating bird.
One of the emails was from Cara’s agent. She’d included half a dozen brief sentences, in German, with translations and phonetic pronunciations. She printed it and was practising when Morrie came in.
‘Guten Morgen. Ich bin . . . glücklich . . . dass ich mit dir sprechen kann.’
‘It’s dinner time,’ Morrie replied.
‘Vielen Dank . . . für dein Wilkomm,’ she said.
‘Do you know what you’re saying?’
‘My readers will. According to Hillary, they’ll appreciate any halting attempt I make to speak their tongue,’ she said, then offered him Cathy’s pages.
Cara’s latest book was selling well in Germany, just a boy-meets-girl, set before, during and after the war, an English girl, a German boy, with a large, braying mother who looked a lot like Laura, Elise’s soon-to-be mother-in-law.
She was a mare of a woman . . .
‘You told her we’d arrive home from Germany on the eleventh? She says she’s changed her booking to arrive on the eleventh,’ he said.
‘She’ll decorate the church,’ Cara said.
She’d decorated the Ballarat church with big white bows and flowers and blue cardboard love birds the day of Cara and Morrie’s second marriage. They’d been in Australia for Robert’s funeral and made the mistake of asking Cathy to be their witness at a civil cerem
ony. She was eight months pregnant and unable to travel, so she’d said, and like the fools they were, they’d allowed her to talk them into a marriage celebrant in her back garden. She’d railroaded them into hired and borrowed outfits and a wedding in her church.
‘This time it’s going to stick,’ she’d said. A control freak, an organiser, Cathy, given little more than a week’s notice, she’d managed to round up a crowd, her friends and relatives, a teacher or two, half of Cara’s multitudinous Sydney cousins.
If anyone present knows just cause why this couple should not be joined in holy matrimony, let them speak now or forever hold their peace.
Just cause had dissolved their first marriage. Just cause had kept them apart for eight years. No one present in that church to stand up and protest. So it was done.
Pandora’s Box, Robert had named Woody Creek. He’d called Jenny Pandora. How many times had he warned Cara not to open that box? In her youth, she’d heeded few warnings. At fifteen he’d warned her to stay away from Dino Collins – and for fifteen years she’d paid for ignoring that advice. He’d warned her to wait for a month or two when she’d broken her engagement to Chris Marino to marry Morrie. She hadn’t waited. Their first marriage had been a few words spoken at his dying mother’s bedside.
Not a day for happiness, but she’d been so happy. After years of their pen and paper romance, he’d finally been at her side and would be at her side forever. She’d been so happy she’d started telling secrets in their bridal bed.
Neither bride nor groom slept in that bed. Morrie had picked up his case and car keys and left her howling on the bathroom floor. She’d caught a taxi home to her dogbox unit, unaware that night that their lovemaking would result in Robin.
Had never expected him to be born alive. Had refused to look at him and demanded the papers be brought to her bed so she might sign him away. Myrtle and Robert took out a court order to prevent her giving their grandson up for adoption.