Trails in the Dust

by Joy Dettman

  She was a talker, but not of Hoopers. She spoke of the groom’s mother. ‘That big woman in grey with the big grey hat.’ She spoke of kilts and bagpipes and Ian, the groom, Laura’s only offspring. She spoke around a savoury pastry. ‘Yum,’ she said. ‘Try one.’ She mentioned a Cathy and Gerry, who’d flown over from Australia, a Pete and a Kay who had to cancel. ‘Their middle son is in hospital with serious head injuries. A motorbike accident. I loathe motorbikes. Think I caught it from Mum. She had a crazy boyfriend once who rode one and even today, every time she hears one coming, she flinches.’

  She spoke of her children, Tristan and Leona, pageboy and flower girl, then asked about Jenny’s children while more cars drove by that window and voices filtered through.

  ‘We have parking down the back. We do a lot of weddings,’ she said. ‘And conferences, and guided tours. The upkeep on this place is astronomical. Heating, lighting, fixing stuff that breaks down. I promised Mum and Dad I’d have it paying its way before Tristan started school. He starts next year. There’s no actual labour involved, or not for us.’ She sipped the coffee. ‘Just a case of rallying the right troops, caterers, photographers, marriage celebrants, musicians.’ She bit into another pastry. ‘Our first wedding was chaos. We ended up giving them a twenty per cent discount.’ She stared outside. ‘We’ve got it down to a fine art now – unless the guests start dropping like flies, which they’ve been doing since last night. We’ve got two in town with food poisoning. They chose the wrong place to eat on the drive down . . . from Scotland.’

  Jenny tried a pastry. She drank her coffee, her mind wandering Jimmy’s house, aware he had a room in it capable of seating seventy guests, a kitchen large enough to prepare meals for seventy. No clatter of pots and pans, no rattle of china infiltrated this room. She heard knocking from above.

  ‘That’s old Henry,’ Tracy said. ‘Our resident ghost.’

  Her eating done, her coffee cup empty, Tracy retracted her footrest and put on her shoes. ‘Don’t go anywhere. Robin will be back in a minute and Elise said she’d disown me if I let you get away.’

  Alone again, Jenny considered escape. She’d find her way back to those stone steps, then open doors until she found the room where the dogs had led the way in. Her directional instinct had always been good.

  Go, she urged.

  Jimmy might come – if she gave him time. He was the father of the bride. He couldn’t leave his guests.

  Make her comfortable in the library, he might have said.

  Cara might come. She’d caught a bus to Woody Creek to find Jennifer Hooper Morrison.

  Couldn’t believe it when Georgie had phoned that night and told her that her past had come looking for her. Couldn’t believe what she’d seen standing in Georgie’s kitchen. Anyone with eyes would have seen the resemblance. She had, and it had shocked her into silence. She didn’t want to see her today – she would be the last person in the world Cara would want to see.

  Male footsteps approaching, Robin’s. He was carrying two glasses of wine, one red, one white.

  ‘Your choice,’ he said offering both. She chose the white and hoped it was fruity.

  He spoke of Cathy and Gerry, his mother’s Australian friends. ‘They’re from Ballarat,’ he said. ‘Where do you live, Jenny?’

  Nowhere, or not after the eighteenth. She said Melbourne. Melbourne was a big place.

  ‘We lived there when I was a kid, in Ferntree Gully,’ he said. ‘We used to play cricket in the street.’

  ‘Your father lived with you?’

  ‘They were separated at the time. We lived with my grandfather. Robert Norris. Did you know him?’

  ‘I met him once.’ He’d been Captain Norris in 1942. Jim only a lowly private had almost knocked his hat off saluting him.

  Memories. Where does the brain store such detailed images?

  ‘I was nine when they got back together, when we moved over here. I still think of myself as Australian. Sally would move to Sydney tomorrow. She has two sisters over there. I’ve got cousins, Mum’s cousins. At times, I’m tempted, though to date I’ve settled for digging up dead relatives – speaking of which,’ he said. ‘You mentioned your father, the birdwatcher. What was his Christian name?’

  The interrogation continued, and the note taking. She fed him names. She spoke of growing up in a railway house, with train lines running alongside the back fence. She mentioned Sissy. ‘Cecelia Louise,’ she said then washed that name from her tongue with wine, and as the hands of her watch moved around its face, the day took on a dreamlike unreality. Thames Ditton and Langdon Hall had been little more than names in the grim tale of her life. Now here she was, sitting at her grandson’s side, sipping a fruity white wine. She felt like an actor, dropped onto a movie set and expected to play the role of family matriarch with no script to follow. How that movie would end, she didn’t know, only that she’d applied for the role and must play it out to the end – and censor her every word before speaking her next line.

  His mobile buzzed. He glanced at it. ‘What’s the latest we can get you back to your tour, Jenny?’

  ‘The bus leaves for the banquet before six,’ she said. Should have censored that line. Should have said it left at four.

  ‘Elise and Ian have to be at the airport at five. You could drive back to London with them.’

  Locked into a car with the bride who’d found her name on a document Jenny could quote. Vern Hooper’s solicitor had posted her a copy of it.

  ‘I’ll get a taxi back,’ she said.

  And Tracy came, unheard until she appeared in the doorway, the pink-clad flower girl clinging to her hand. She’d got rid of her problematic coronet. Both mother and daughter had got rid of their problematic shoes.

  ‘We’ve had enough of playing dress-up,’ Tracy said. ‘Say hello to Jenny.’ Like her grandfather, Leona was not interested in the uninvited guest. ‘She needed a bathroom and I forget to tell you where to find one,’ Tracy said.

  ‘I’m fine, darlin’,’ Jenny said.

  ‘We both need a nap,’ Tracy said, and they were gone.

  ‘Tracy was a dancer until Tristan was on his way,’ Robin said. ‘She started very young. Her feet were ready to retire. What age were you when you began you singing career, Jenny?’

  ‘It wasn’t much of a career,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Dad said once that you sang on stage in a musical.’

  ‘I sang on stage from when I was a kid.’

  ‘I was in a school production when I was fifteen, and on the way home after the first night, I got it into my head that Dad was embarrassed because I sang a love song. I told them I wasn’t doing the next show. He told me that night that I’d inherited my voice from his natural mother, that he’d seen you in a stage show in Melbourne.’

  ‘Snow White,’ she said. He hadn’t forgotten her. He called himself Morrie so he wouldn’t forget her. She coughed, cleared her throat before replying. ‘A pantomime. He saw it twice.’

  She’d been four months pregnant when the final curtain fell, and in hospital a few days later, police standing over her bed – but no longer pregnant. She would have jumped off the roof of Melbourne’s tallest building to get rid of Ray’s babies.

  ‘How long was he with you, Jenny?’

  ‘Until he started school.’ No censor’s pen there. Think before you answer, she warned. Be careful. Be very careful.

  ‘We always knew he’d been adopted by an aunt and her husband. Elise was two years old when she joined our family. I always imagined Dad would have been a similar age. Both of my sisters are adopted. Like Sally, having one near ten pounder was enough to put Mum off of childbearing. I believe that I’m the reason she and Dad separated –’

  His mobile vibrated and he glanced at it. ‘Apparently, I’m required again,’ he said.

  ‘I should go.’

  ‘I know he wants to see you. I can read him like a book. He recognised your voice in the church.’ Robin said. ‘Can I ask why you didn’t marry hi
s father after the war ended?’

  ‘He was taken prisoner by the Japanese. His father . . . believed he’d been killed in action. I waited for him until the war ended and when he didn’t come home, I married Raymond King.’

  ‘He made you give up Dad?’

  She censored that reply. ‘Ray had problems. I left him less than two years later and went home to Granny. That’s when I lost your dad. Women had few rights in those days and those who left their husbands had even fewer. Jimmy was the only grandchild Vern Hooper was ever likely to have, and he was determined to raise him and legitimise his birth.’

  ‘Jimmy?’ Robin said. ‘He was James Morrison –’

  ‘James Hooper Morrison,’ Jenny corrected.

  ‘For as long as I’ve known him, he’s been Morrie Grenville. Until two weeks ago, we didn’t know that Morrison was your maiden name.’

  His mobile buzzed again. ‘I’m the entertainment as well as master of ceremonies. Fifteen more minutes,’ he said. ‘Please.’

  Jenny wriggled free of the chair when he left. She walked through to the pool room, where she ran her hand over the green baize surface of the table, smelt the age of a sideboard. It didn’t smell of Lorna. She wondered why Langdon Hall hadn’t been willed to Lorna. Her mother was raised in these rooms.

  A tall, narrow-hipped, bitter-faced woman, Granny had described Lorna Langdon. She’d said that Vern had wed her for her five hundred pounds a year. She’d said, too, that Vern hadn’t mourned her passing and that he’d shown no interest in the female baby cut from her. He’d needed a son.

  His grandfather, Old James Richard, who’d arrived in Australia with a few pennies in his pocket, had become a moneyed landowner by the time his grandchildren had been of marriageable age. Determined that they would forge him connections to the upper class, he’d arranged both Vern and Gertrude’s marriages. Both failed.

  Vern’s failure had turned a gentle youth into a man as hard as his grandfather. Granny had never hardened. She’d seen the worst that life could dish up and grown wise enough to dodge its pitfalls.

  Had Jimmy grown hard?

  When the bride and groom left for the airport he might come. She could wait until three. She turned on her heel and walked back to the library to study the books filling the shelves.

  An entire shelf had been given over to C.J. Langhall’s novels and with her fingers, Jenny counted them. Twenty-three. She was familiar with half a dozen titles.

  Sent in Chains was there, on the shelf below that row of Langhall books. She recognised its spine and her hand darted to claim it.

  I’m here, she thought, looking at the cover, at Juliana Conti’s name. I’m here. They know. Cara must have recognised me that day at the television studio. Jenny glanced over her shoulder, feeling the ghosts of this place watching her, and quickly she placed the book back into its space. There was a book beside it she’d heard of but hadn’t read. She removed it, opened it.

  One evening, in the spring of 1936, I was a boy of fourteen . . .

  In the spring of 1936, Jenny had been three months away from thirteen and she hadn’t doubted that she’d become a famous singer and live happily ever after in Paris.

  ‘You’ve got the world at your feet, Jennifer,’ Norman used to say.

  ‘You’ll buy and sell this town before you’re done, girlie,’ Vern Hooper had once said.

  On an evening in the winter of 1938, she’d been a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl and the world had been stolen from beneath her feet –

  From what I hear, you weren’t always so fussy, Nick had said.

  Hadn’t been given a chance to be fussy. They’d held her down on old Cecelia Duckworth’s tombstone and told her they were sacrificing her for a bit of decent weather.

  Did you bring a dagger?

  I’ve got something that will do the job.

  One after the other, the Macdonald twins had ripped out her every dream. Macka was long dead. Bernie was still pushing his walking frame around Woody Creek.

  Used to play in the cemetery. Used to read the stories on the old tombstones. Hated that place now. Her mind was back there with Jim when a door slammed back against the wall. Expecting an irate Jimmy, an angry Cara, she had to look lower to see the dark-eyed pixie pageboy and tiny Leona. Both barefoot.

  The pageboy wasn’t shy. ‘Why did you come in here for?’

  ‘To read a book,’ Jenny said. ‘You look very handsome in your suit.’

  ‘I’m a pageboy, and I got cordigal on my pants.’

  ‘Mummy will wash it out,’ Jenny said.

  ‘She can’t, ’cause it’s from the hire shop. What’s your name?’

  ‘Jenny. I’ll bet you’re Tristan?’ There was no doubting it. Raelene was in his wide pixie mouth.

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘Your mummy. She said you were four.’

  And the second pageboy came, but only as far as the doorway. He was wearing shoes and still neat in his hired white suit. He had the blue eyes but not the golden curls. There was something of goblin boy Jim in Robin’s son.

  ‘You’re not allowed to come here,’ he told his younger cousins.

  ‘We can so too because it’s our house,’ Tristan said, and he turned again to Jenny. ‘You don’t know his name.’

  ‘Rumpelstiltskin?’ she guessed.

  ‘You’re silly.’

  ‘Is it Richard?’

  ‘Why did Mummy tell you everything for?’ Tristan asked.

  ‘Did she tell you that I’ve got a little boy called Richard? We call him Ricky.’

  ‘Why? And you’re too old,’ Tristan said.

  ‘I’m his grandma.’

  ‘We have to watch the other television,’ the neat pageboy said.

  ‘We like this one best.’

  ‘Nana said the family room.’

  Nana’s word must have been law. They scuttled away to watch television.

  All of My Lost Children, Jenny thought. I could write about this day, though its writing might break my heart. And they haven’t been lost. I’m the one who was lost. I’ve spent most of my life lost.

  She sat again, adjusted the footrest, then opened the book and forced her eyes to follow the words through that first page. Its content didn’t penetrate. Twice she returned to the beginning but gave up when she reached ‘intensive study of the Japanese language’. Jim had known the language of a Japanese prison camp. He’d yelled alien words in his sleep, then refused to admit any knowledge of their meaning when she’d questioned him the next day. He’d forgotten too much. He’d closed the book on Jimmy . . . and walked away when she’d opened it.

  Wine in the afternoon wasn’t a good idea, nor was attempting to read when her eyes wanted to close. She allowed them to close, just for a moment.

  She was playing Canasta with Granny and Queen Lizzie, and they’d needed a fourth but couldn’t find Jim . . .

  ‘He needs to see her like this.’

  ‘What age would she be?’

  Women’s voices. Jenny didn’t open her eyes.

  ‘She had Dad with her in Sydney. He’ll be sixty-two this year. She has to be eighty.’

  The muffled beep from Jenny’s handbag gave her an excuse to open her eyes.

  ‘We caught you nanny-napping,’ Tracy said with a pointing finger. She introduced her sister, Elise, no longer in bridal white but dressed for travelling in jeans, black shirt and sneakers.

  ‘Thank you for singing at my wedding,’ that Nordic blonde said, offering her hand. ‘You have a beautiful voice, Jenny.’

  ‘You were a beautiful bride,’ Jenny said.

  They spoke about a honeymoon in Spain, about the heat of Rome, and when they left, Jenny followed them out to the passage where Tracy offered directions to the nearest bathroom. Then they went one way and Jenny went the other.

  She found the bathroom, a haven of tiled modernity in a house groaning with old age. She used the facilities then read a text, from Georgie.

  Lost your mobile. Battery flat
?

  Jenny didn’t reply. She combed her hair, added a touch of lipstick. The bride was leaving. A few of the guests would make their excuses and go. Jimmy might get away. She didn’t dally there but found her way back to the library. Then, mobile in hand, she attempted to find a reply for Georgie.

  They’d envisaged terrible futures for tiny, brain-damaged Tracy. They’d seen her existing in a home for retarded children, as Ray’s son had existed when Jenny could no longer handle him. They’d seen tiny Tracy as a second Raelene, an addict, selling herself on the streets. She’d been raised by Cara, loved by Cara. She’d grown into a kind and beautiful girl – and Georgie could never know it. And what was she doing, texting at this time of day. It would be midnight in Australia.

  Go to bed. I’m at Langdon Hall. Will talk in the morning. I board plane early.

  What’s he look like?

  Couldn’t tell her she hadn’t spoken to him, that she’d spent most of the afternoon with his son. She didn’t lie.

  Not as tall as Jim. Same hair, Jim’s hands, his smile. Go to bed.

  I’ve been trying to get something finished. Heard from Trudy? Nick still missing. House being sold. She’s staying with Tonia. You’ll hear more when you get home. Don’t miss your plane.

  Her mobile back in her bag, bag over her shoulder, Jenny stood at the window, watching the bride and groom pursued down a gravelled driveway. They cast no shadow. The sky was blanketed now by heavy clouds, and the pursuing women in their wedding finery looked cold. No rain yet.

  She’d waited for five minutes, waited another five before phoning the taxi company. ‘Langdon Hall, Thames Ditton. Returning to London,’ she said, then walked to the shelves to replace the book. She was standing, staring at the spine of Sent in Chains when she heard the tinkle of children’s laughter, then footsteps approaching, many footsteps on bare boards.

  And he came, marched under guard through the pool room, Tracy and Robin behind him, their army of chuckling little people leading him by his hands and his coat-tails.