Trails in the Dust

by Joy Dettman

  The front pews weren’t empty. The bride and groom had their backs to her. Not so a small, dark-headed pageboy. He’d caught her sneaking in and was staring at her. A dot of a girl in pink had little interest in anything other than the removal of a coronet of flowers, pinned to a mop of dark, spring-coil curls, row upon row of familiar dark curls.

  Blue scrap of a hat in the front pew, on the bride’s side. Not many hats there. A scattering on the groom’s side. One large and grey, and a Queen Mother’s pink flowery hat next to it. Jenny’s interest returned to that blue hat. It was between two male heads, one was the gunmetal grey of the Hoopers, the exact shade of Jim’s before he’d gone white. The other male head was a nest of golden curls. She knew that hair.

  She saw half of the bride’s face as the groom lifted her veil; saw him when he kissed his new wife. Neither one resembled Jimmy or Cara.

  Then the blue hat and the gunmetal grey hair rose. It was them. She couldn’t see their faces and she had to get out before they saw hers. The taxi driver’s business card still clenched in her hand, her feet readied themselves to make a quick getaway. She knew the marriage service well. It would be over soon. The new couple would sign documents, then Jimmy and Cara would follow the bride and groom down the aisle, the groom’s parents behind them.

  If I stay where I am, they’ll walk close by me, she thought. Once they’re out that door, I’ll find a back way out. There was always a back way out of a church.

  Cara was wearing a tailored, midnight-blue frock. It would make her eyes look more blue. Her curls had gone, as had the gold of her hair. She’d be fifty-nine on the third day of October – and never once in those fifty-nine years had Jenny got through October the third and not thought of Sydney.

  Hadn’t been allowed to. Donna Palmer had been born on that same day. When she’d taken her first toddling steps, Jenny had known that Yankee baby was walking. When Donna commenced school, Jenny had known that Cara was at school. She’d known her at fourteen, at eighteen – because of Donna Palmer.

  She’d built many mental images of Myrtle’s daughter, a thick-necked girl, like Hank, or baby-faced like Billy-Bob, or long and lean like Link. She hadn’t known the names of the other two rapists. One had a broken Jew’s nose. Her every image had been wrong. Given too many choices that night, the seed of Cara had grown from the cells of the victim. She’d grown taller.

  Jenny’s vision blurring, she blinked behind her dark glasses. This was her one day and Jimmy had turned around. She could see his face. He’d never looked like the Hoopers. He had her brow, her nose and maybe a suggestion of Jim’s jaw and mouth.

  Pooling tears stole her view of his face, still the face of that beautiful little boy she’d lost, she swiped at the tears as the organist began playing the introduction to Ave Maria.

  How many times had she sung that song? She’d sung it at weddings and funerals, with Itchy-foot and at Mary Grogan’s funeral so recently.

  You can sing that one at my funeral, Jim had said. Then he’d ridden his gopher out to Monk’s and drowned himself so she hadn’t sung for him. The organist had expected her to. He’d repeated the introduction three times before playing on alone.

  No second introduction necessary today. No flower-bedecked coffin waiting to be put into Hooper ground. A bride and a groom today – and Itchy-foot’s rich tenor voice filling the church.

  She could see him, standing behind the organist, the light from a stained-glass window glowing on his golden curls. Granny’s angel Gabriel. Not Granny’s. Cara’s son was the singer, Jenny’s nameless grandson. Her voice and Itchy-foot’s had always admitted their relationship, and with eyes only for her grandson, she joined her voice with his. Didn’t see the bride, groom, Cara or Jimmy walk by her pew. She sang that song to its end, and only then was aware that she’d stood. They would have seen her.

  A woman in lilac frills smiled at her. A dark-headed girl stared. Jenny released her grip on the pew and moved across to the far side. Then, one hand within reach of the wall, she walked unsteadily towards the back of the church.

  He cut her off at the pass, the angel Gabriel.

  ‘You’re Jennifer Morrison King, Dad’s biological mother,’ he said, and he offered his hand.

  ‘I’m his mother,’ Jenny said.

  JIMMY’S HOUSE

  Should have said she was a tourist who’d stepped inside out of the wind. Should have said she was an escapee from a funny farm. Should have said anything but what she’d said. Uncensored words once spoken can’t be erased by a backspace key. Uncensored words once out of the mouth are free to do what damage they will, and in the taxi on the way down here, she’d sworn to do no damage.

  There were steps down to the back exit, dark steps. He held her arm and his touch made her eyes leak and he saw their leaking when they walked into the light, into wind, and he released her arm so she could turn her face and wipe away her tears.

  ‘I’m Robin,’ he said. His accent was English with overtones of Australia still clinging to his vowels.

  ‘My father loved the robins.’ Such silly things we say at such times. She wiped her eyes with a crumpled tissue. She blew her nose. ‘He was a birdwatcher,’ she said.

  Then that dark-headed girl came at a run down the side of the church, the mop-topped flower girl on her hip.

  ‘It’s her,’ she said.

  ‘Jennifer Morrison King in the flesh,’ Robin said. ‘Tracy, my sister. She’s been helping me search the internet for you.’

  Tiny Tracy? Found on that God-awful night, drugged and sealed in a cardboard carton beside Joe Flanagan’s fence. Raelene’s daughter? That Tracy. She’d been Cara’s foster child.

  She was offering a free hand. Jenny had the tissue in her right hand so offered the left.

  Doctors fear permanent brain damage for tiny Tracy.

  Raelene King, natural mother of tiny Tracy was found dead . . .

  Nothing natural about Raelene King, but not a lot of her had seeped into her daughter. Her colouring, her height maybe, but not her snake-pit eyes or her accent.

  ‘Our sister Elise, the bride, found your name for us when she was down here two weeks ago. And here you are,’ Tracy said.

  ‘I’m with a tour,’ Jenny said. The business card, curled and damp, was still in her hand. She had to call that number. She had to go. She’d found Jimmy. He was well. She had to go.

  ‘You’re touring our part of the country today?’ Robin said.

  ‘They’re in London,’ Jenny said, and as soon as the words came out of her mouth she wanted to draw them back and lie about a bus full of tourists waiting for her around a corner.

  Tracy had more pressing concerns than tours. ‘I have to go back to the house and redo a couple of the tables,’ she said. ‘I can’t take Leona. They want her for the photographs.’

  ‘What’s happened now?’ he asked, as the pink flower girl changed arms.

  ‘Maryanne and Rod had a run-in with a bus five miles out of London. His mother just phoned. They’re okay but they won’t get down here, nor will two more of Ian’s lot. I can’t have anyone sitting at half-empty tables. You know that Pete and Kay didn’t make it?’

  Names flying, like in a novel when the author hits you in the eye with a bunch of names and you don’t know if they are important to the plot or not. They gave Jenny a chance to back away and to take her mobile from her bag.

  She had a watchdog. Robin moved to her side. ‘How did you find us, Jennifer?’

  ‘I didn’t know about the wedding. I’m sorry I . . . I disrupted it.’

  ‘It’s been disrupted since she told us she was pregnant,’ Tracy said. ‘It was supposed to be in Scotland in October. Dad and Robbie would have looked good in kilts – and I have to go. They’re not going to stand around in this wind for long. What time do you have to rejoin your tour, Jennifer?’

  ‘We’ve got a banquet tonight,’ Jenny said, and why couldn’t she think fast enough to lie, to say a picnic lunch?

  ‘Can you
spare us an hour?’ Robin asked.

  ‘I’ve got sixty-four guests to seat and when I did the tables last night, I had seventy-two. Come back to the house with me.’

  ‘I’d love to talk to you, Jennifer,’ Robin said.

  ‘He’s tracking the family history,’ Tracy explained as she fixed the flower girl’s lopsided coronet. ‘You be good for Uncle Robin – and for the man with the camera.’ She repositioned a pin holding the coronet, told the infant to stop messing up her curls, then turned to railroad Jenny into her car.

  ‘We found umpteen Jennifer Morrisons but without your parents’ Christian names or your date of birth, we didn’t have a hope. One hour,’ Robin said.

  ‘You look as if you could use a stiff drink,’ Tracy said.

  ‘Half an hour,’ Robin said.

  She’d come here to find Jimmy and been found, and if she didn’t sit down, she’d fall down. She allowed herself to be kidnapped by her grandchildren, to be buckled into a small red car.

  Saw the bride’s veil flying in the wind as they drove out. Saw Cara, her arms folded against the wind. Didn’t see Jimmy.

  ‘We knew that you sang. Mum told us you used to entertain the troops during the war, that her mother knew you and Dad when he was a baby. Her parents would have known your name, but they died years ago – whoops!’ Tracy said.

  They were in that narrow, hedged lane and had almost come to grief with a horse rider. The horse and rider, accustomed to cars, gave way. Then, moments later, Tracy swung her car between those stone gateposts. She didn’t park where the taxi had parked, but drove down the side of the house, turned left onto a cobblestoned courtyard and parked inches away from an aged stone wall.

  No flat face at the rear of Langdon Hall. It was a series of slate roofs, of diamond-paned windows, of old chimneys.

  Ms Langhall lives with her partner in a five-hundred-year-old manor house forty miles from London . . .

  In Jimmy’s house.

  ‘Your dad won’t want me here, darlin’.’

  ‘Don’t worry about him!’ Tracy said. ‘He’s a big pussy cat.’

  Those black and white dogs came running to renew their acquaintance with the stranger, to sniff at her flying skirt as she stepped from the car.

  ‘Scoot,’ Tracy said. They rushed in ahead when Tracy opened a door, then stood barking, blocking the stranger’s way. ‘Scoot,’ Tracy repeated. She took Jenny’s hand then and led her through a second doorway, along a passage, up worn stone steps to a longer passage, through a large old room furnished with a full-sized pool table, then through twin doors to a small room, furnished with two large smoky blue leather chairs, a television and walls of inbuilt bookshelves. It reminded Jenny of Vern Hooper’s library, or of what that room could have been.

  ‘You’re cold, Jennifer,’ Tracy said. Perhaps she’d seen her shudder.

  ‘Just Jenny or Jen. No one calls me Jennifer.’

  ‘Jenny suits you. Cup of tea, coffee or something stronger?’

  ‘Wine, darlin’. White.’

  ‘Sit down and put your feet up,’ Tracy said, then her high-heels clicked away.

  Sunglasses swapped for bifocals and Jenny walked to the better light at the window where she read the taxi company’s phone number. She didn’t call it but keyed it into her contacts then began a text to Georgie. She’d seen tiny Tracy on the night of the fire and said she’d looked more dead than alive. She’d want to know about her. Jenny had picked out five words before realising she couldn’t mention Tracy, or Robin. They were Cara’s children, not Jimmy’s. Georgie knew Jenny’s every secret but would never be told that Morrie Grenville, Cara’s husband, was Jimmy. For years, Georgie and Cara had been close friends. Until the fire. She’d waited beside the telephone for a week, expecting Cara to call. Georgie was a strong woman but losing Cara and Margot had almost broken her. She could never know about Cara and Jimmy’s marriage.

  The words wiped away, Jenny dropped the phone back into her bag, and walked to the window where she stood staring through diamond panes at the gravelled driveway and green lawns, and behind those lawns and trees, to rooftops. She stood staring out at Jimmy’s world until clicking heels told her Tracy was returning.

  She’d brought white wine, a flat white too dry for Jenny’s tastebuds. ‘Sit down and relax. I could be a while,’ she said and was gone. Jenny didn’t sit. She was at the window when an old red MG drove by. She couldn’t see its driver but knew that car or its close relative. Cara had driven an elderly red MG. Georgie had ridden in it.

  Her mind was full of Georgie and Cara when she heard male footsteps approaching. She turned as Robin entered.

  ‘Were you in that old car?’ she asked.

  ‘Dad’s owned it since near new. I drove the bride to church in it. She wanted to drive back with me too, but they wouldn’t let her,’ he said with a smile, then gestured towards one of the chairs. ‘It was Elise who found your name on Dad’s adoption documents.’

  Cara knew her name. She knew her life story, had damn near written it in Angel at My Door. Her children knew nothing, but today Robin was planning to rectify that. He had a notebook and pen, and he asked her husband’s Christian name.

  ‘I married Jim Hooper in 1959. My first husband died young.’

  ‘You mean Dad’s father? James Richard Hooper?’

  Jenny nodded and sipped the hard wine. ‘We would have married before the war if I’d been old enough.’ She sipped a little more. ‘Jim died in March,’ she said. ‘On the twenty-sixth.’

  She sat then, or perched, on the edge of a too-deep chair.

  ‘They weren’t meant to be sat on but lolled in,’ he said. ‘Sit back and lift your feet.’

  She did as she was bid; he pressed a button and a footrest eased away from its moorings. Then he sat to continue his questions, to ask about old Hooper documents, old photographs. He spoke about the original James Richard Hooper. He knew the date he’d sailed away from England and the name of the ship he’d sailed on.

  ‘He had four wives,’ he said.

  ‘He married the last of them when he was well into his seventies,’ Jenny said. ‘She was thirty-three.’

  She told him of Granny then, born Gertrude Maria Hooper, how she and Vernon Hooper had shared a grandfather but not a grandmother. She told him how Hooper babies had a bad habit of killing their mothers in childbirth.

  ‘Sally, my wife, is an authority on that. She’s not eager to do it a second time. We have a son we named Richard James. He’s the blond pageboy.’

  ‘I have twin grandsons, James and Richard,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Vernon had three wives,’ he said. ‘His first, Lorna Langdon, forged our connection to this relic. She was the older sister of the last Henry Langdon. She died in childbirth but her daughter, also a Lorna, survived.’

  ‘She was cut alive from her dead mother,’ Jenny said. ‘My grandmother knew Lorna Langdon. She was nine years older than Vern – forty, or close to it, when she died.’

  ‘You’re a walking history book,’ Robin said.

  The Hooper family, a safe topic, no censoring was necessary. Granny and Jim were safe topics. He told her that he’d obtained a copy of Jim’s war-service record two weeks ago, that he’d applied for copies of Jim’s birth and marriage certificates.

  ‘I would have found you,’ he said, and his pen busy again, he double checked the year of her marriage to Jim and the date of her first marriage.

  She told him of Jim’s half-cousin, Ian Hooper. Georgie had contacted his daughter after Jim’s death. She told him how Jim had died, or the accidental drowning version.

  ‘What was his occupation?’

  ‘A farmer before the war.’ She shrugged. ‘Investor, historian, writer – after the war. He lost a leg in it.’

  ‘Mum writes,’ he said.

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘I’m a surgeon,’ he said. ‘I’m on call tonight – or from midnight.’

  ‘There’s more to genetics than we’ll ever know
in my lifetime,’ she said. ‘Your great-grandfather was a doctor – and a singer. You look so much like him – though not in height.’

  ‘I thought that height ran in the Hooper family?’

  ‘It didn’t run in the Foote family. Archibald Gerald Foote, physician, was my . . . grandfather. I knew him only as an old man, but he had an incredible voice.’

  ‘F-O-O-T-E?’ he spelt as he wrote.

  ‘Archibald Gerald,’ Jenny said. ‘We sang together. When I was young.’

  ‘I’ve found no mention of Foote.’

  ‘He married Gertrude Maria Hooper. They separated before Amber . . . my mother was born.’ Jenny turned to the window as another car drove by and she wondered how many years had passed since she’d last referred to Amber as her mother – but he didn’t need to know Amber’s details.

  Cara and Jimmy could have been in that car, or in the car following it, or the one behind it. They kept coming, crunching gravel beneath their wheels, and Robin stood.

  ‘I’ll have to get up there. I’m master of ceremonies today. You’ll stay a while longer, Jennifer?’

  ‘Jenny,’ she said. ‘I should go.’

  ‘Elise will get away when she can. She wants to meet you.’

  ‘Does your father know I’m here?’

  ‘They both know, Jenny.’ He left in a hurry to rejoin the wedding guests.

  Jimmy might come – if only to evict her.

  She’d told Georgie she’d squat on his front doorstep until he let her in. She’d been led inside via a back door, and when she was alone again, she took her camera from her bag to photograph Jimmy’s library and his pool room. She was lining up that old window when she heard the staccato click of heels and the rattle of china. She took the photograph quickly, turned then and put her camera away as Tracy entered with a tray. She’d brought a coffee pot, cups and a plate of hot savoury pastries.

  ‘I deserve this,’ she said. The tray placed down on the coffee table, she flopped down on Robin’s vacated chair. ‘I spent weeks working out harmonious tables. Harmony, I fear, just went out the window.’ She removed her shoes. ‘If I wasn’t so short on inches, I wouldn’t punish myself with those,’ she said, then poured coffee.