Trails in the Dust
Page 29
‘Granny used to say that Georgie’s hair was like a shower of new-minted pennies. Do you remember Granny?’
‘Her chooks laid baskets full of eggs. Her goats gave buckets of free milk.’ He shook his head. ‘She wore knitting needles in her hair, and men’s trousers, and working boots.’
‘She died with her boots on. We buried her in them,’ Jenny said.
‘A crushed leaf from a lemon tree or a lemon verbena bush was you,’ he said. ‘I used to sit beside Lorna at the movies, a leaf or two in my pocket. She smelt of mothballs. I watched a lot of movies with a leaf held to my nose – counting gun shots on my fingers.’
‘I used to watch late-night cowboy movies, hoping to see the one where the cowboy in the black hat shot the good guy with his seventh bullet. “That’s seven, Jenny,” you said, and everyone in the theatre laughed,’ she said.
‘While the hero in the white hat lay dying,’ he said, and he smiled that little Jimmy boy smile, and a moan escaped Jenny’s throat.
She’d never been a public bawler. That wine would help. Too late now to call a taxi, and she had to sit down, so she made her careful way back to the blue chair and near fell into it.
He passed her wine, and as she took the glass from him, her smallest finger touched his hand and a painful, aching ecstasy travelled up her arm to her heart, jolted it, made it jump in her breast. She didn’t drink but gripped the glass to her heart because he’d touched it.
‘For years I counted names instead of sheep when I couldn’t sleep,’ he said. ‘Jenny, Georgie, Granny, Elsie, Harry, Margot, Lenny, Joany, Maudy. I forgot most of their faces but not their names.’
‘Harry’s still alive, and his kids. Elsie died.’
‘Mum told me you were dead. She said you’d gone to live with the angels.’
Jenny couldn’t reply, but her heartbeat settling down, she moistened her mouth with wine.
‘You used to tell me that my father died in the war, but like Jesus, he rose from the dead. For years I believed you’d rise and take me home,’ he said.
Tears leaking. The time for tears had passed, but that’s who she was, who she’d always been, fighting strong until the emergency was behind her, then as weak as water.
‘You took me to a hospital once to visit a man with one leg, one slipper.’
‘You knew who he was that day.’
‘I remember you saying, “Jim. Jim. Jim”. I don’t know if I knew him or not, but I did when my grandfather and aunts took me to a different hospital to visit the same man. He had two legs by then, two slippers and crutches. The visit ended badly. I never saw him again.’
‘He loved you when you were ten months old. He saw you take your first step.’
‘Mum used to say he was shell-shocked.’
Mum. That word hurt, but Jenny had never been Mum to any one of her three, just Jenny, always Jenny – and that hurt was only envy that Margaret Hooper had watched him grow.
‘When did you marry my father?’
‘A year after Ray died. You would have been seventeen.’
‘We moved over here when I was seventeen.’
He questioned her then and she replied, and her tears dried. She told him of Margot’s daughter, of Trudy’s twin boys she’d named James Hooper and Richard Hooper for Jim. She told him of fourteen-year-old Katie. Then she put her mobile away and took her camera from her bag. Flipped by all that she’d seen of the world and showed him the photographs taken of Georgie and Katie at the airport.
No one disturbed them, or not until seven, when Robin came in with his wife, his son and the offer of a lift back to London. Then minutes later, Tracy came with coffee, more savoury pastries and her two bathed and pyjama-clad pixies – and her camera.
‘Don’t point that thing at me,’ Jenny said.
WHEN THE PARTY IS OVER
Cara had woken that morning with a mild headache. She’d swallowed two aspros. The ache had been under control until that female voice joined with Robin’s in the church, until she’d seen Morrie’s face pale. She hadn’t recognised Jenny’s voice. Had never heard her sing.
Should never have met her. Should never have gone near Woody Creek. Shouldn’t have gone near the library today. Curiosity or some unfulfilled need had sent her there. Shouldn’t have said what she’d said.
‘You’re Myrtle’s daughter,’ Jenny had said, so easily wiping their history from the record books.
There were no record books to wipe it from. Cara Jeanette’s birth certificate stated that she’d been born to Myrtle and Robert Norris on the third day of October 1944, and until she’d turned fifteen, she’d known no different.
She’d seen her difference. Her cousins had been short and dark. They’d had brown eyes and not a curl between them. She’d had blue eyes, yellow curls, and at twelve had been taller than her mother. By the time she’d turned fifteen, she’d stood eye to eye with Robert and most of her male cousins. Five foot eight when she’d stopped growing, not tall, except in the Norris family.
Christmas Day, 1959, when old Gran Norris had spilled the beans. ‘Motherless babies were two a penny during the war. Why Myrtle would go and do a thing like that with your father away fighting a war, I don’t know,’ she’d said.
A thing like that.
Cara had forced a partial truth from her parents by threatening to leave home. They’d told her a pretty story of a young war widow’s brief love affair with an American sailor, of a baby she couldn’t take home to her dead husband’s family. Ten years later Jenny reduced that brief love affair to pack rape. ‘There were five of them,’ she’d said. ‘You can’t fight five.’
At the time it had explained how a baby could be left behind in a boarding house like so much war debris. Cara had attempted to follow her surrogate’s example after Robin’s birth. She’d left him at the Sydney hospital, caught a bus back to Melbourne and returned to work, determined to forget she’d given birth to her half-brother’s baby. But she’d returned for Robin. Jenny had never returned to claim her war debris.
‘Anyone for tea, coffee?’ Cathy asked. She’d taken over the family room. She’d taken over the dogs, the children and grandchildren. That’s what she did. At eighteen, she’d taken over Cara’s life when fate flung them together in a shared room at teachers’ college.
Cara shook her head and wished she hadn’t. This morning’s headache had become a migraine. She needed a dark room and her migraine pills, needed Morrie’s uninvited guest gone and for him to come out here and take charge of his invited guests. Since four o’clock he’d been holed up in the library with the unmentionable one, the forgotten one, the bitch who’d dropped her pups and walked away from them, or so Morrie had said and more than once.
That wasn’t the Jenny Cara had known. She knew every detail of her life, had told Morrie every detail. Hadn’t told the children – or Cathy.
‘Make it coffee – if you want me to stay awake,’ Gerry said, and Cara glanced at Cathy’s tolerant mate, at two tolerant males, Tom, the groom’s father, was seated with Gerry on the couch watching television. Had they been born tolerant or taught tolerance by their wives?
They’d carried a boot load of flowers into the church this morning, then hung around until their wives had done their decorating. Cara hadn’t hung around. She’d kept an appointment for a shampoo and blow dry, then had her nails done.
The talon, the claw of the female carnivore, designed to drip gore, Cara thought as she studied her ten perfect, almond-shaped nails. They looked a little like Myrtle’s tonight, though she’d been born with her own iron-hard, almond-shaped nails – one of their many differences.
The house would be her own tomorrow. Laura and Tom had the keys to Ian and Elise’s London flat, and an hour ago Tom had invited Cathy and Gerry to join them there. How long would they stay there? Cara hoped long. The newlyweds would be away for ten days. The tolerant male halves of that unlikely foursome would make it through six months on a desert island and be well mannered and smiling wh
en their rescuers arrived. Cathy and Laura could be hard pushed to make it through a day.
They were discussing the refugee situation and not discussing it quietly when Robin came in to say a final goodbye. He’d started leaving an hour ago.
‘See you in Australia, Aunty Cath.’
‘We’ve got spare beds – or we mightn’t have if you’re there during the school holidays, but Mum will,’ Cathy said, as Cara rose to lead the way out.
‘Where are you parked?’ she asked.
‘In the driveway.’
‘How is your father?’
‘He’s good, Mum. She’s an interesting lady,’ Robin said. He and Sally were driving that ‘interesting lady’ back to her London hotel. ‘She flies home in the morning. I told her I’d look her and her daughters up at Christmas time.’
They’d lose him to Australia one day. Cara didn’t want to think about that day. ‘Drive carefully,’ she said, kissed him, then turned and walked back to Cathy. She’d followed them out.
‘Where’s Morrie?’
‘Saying goodnight,’ Cara replied, shepherding her friend inside.
She hadn’t lied about the uninvited guest, had explained Jenny away as the wife of the black sheep Hooper son. At the reception she’d warned Robin and Tracy not to feed Cathy more grist for her mill mouth.
A stressful day. A stressful week, but tomorrow there’d be peace on earth – and freedom.
Morrie knew what was waiting for him in the family room. For fifteen minutes they listened for him, Cathy geared up to give him the third degree. He could have gone for a walk – or crept in through the front of the house and gone to bed.
I should have stayed away from the library. I shouldn’t have said what I said, Cara thought. But since seeing Jenny in the church, Cara had been determined to speak to her. Before the children pressured Morrie into talking to his mother, Cara had been waiting for her chance to go down and ask after Georgie. They were half-sisters, but more than that, they’d been friends with never a secret between them, or not until Cara’s first wedding night.
Three men had shaped Cara’s life. She’d used Dino Collins to fight her way free of suffocating parents. A rabid wolf would have been a safer choice. He’d killed her interest in the opposite sex – until Morrie, an English boy, in Australia only for a month or two.
They’d met when she’d been fresh out of teachers’ college and holidaying in Ballarat with Cathy. She’d allowed herself to like him for the few weeks she’d been in Ballarat, but it hadn’t ended there. For five years they’d had an airmail love affair.
She’d told Georgie about her English boyfriend, had told her parents less. He’d never met them. They’d lived in Sydney. She’d lived in Melbourne, and his visits to Australia had been brief.
Had she taken him to Sydney, would he have remembered Myrtle or the boarding house he’d called home for two years? Would Myrtle have seen in the adult the little boy she’d loved?
They’d married at Morrie’s dying mother’s bedside. Myrtle and Robert hadn’t been there. To them, a marriage was no marriage unless sanctified by the Church.
Eight hours that marriage had lasted, long enough to conceive Robin, long enough for Cara to spill her biggest secret to her brand-new husband.
‘I’m sort of adopted,’ she’d said, then laughed while she’d explained how middle-aged, barren Myrtle and a pregnant lodger had pulled a swiftie. ‘She was twenty years old and already had three illegitimate children,’ she’d said. Then she’d spoken Jenny’s name. He’d got out of bed, dressed, picked up his case and car keys and left his brand-new wife vomiting her heart out in the bridal-suite bathroom.
She’d been asleep when a surgeon had cut the lump of incest out of her. She hadn’t looked at it, hadn’t touched it. Myrtle had. Robin was eight months old before Cara had been forced to handle him, and born of incest or not, he’d been perfection.
As a tiny boy he’d had the voice of an angel. When he was fifteen she’d suggested voice training. He’d wanted to be a vet. He was eighteen when his interest turned to human patients.
Poor old Rufus needed to see a vet. He struggled each time he got to his feet and seemed to consider that struggle when he heard the back door open. The young pair ran to greet Morrie. Cathy got to her feet, eager to question him.
And he knew it. Cara lowered her head to hide a smile as his footsteps diverted to the rear stairs, the servants’ staircase in some distant era. It led directly to their master bedroom beneath the roof.
‘He’s not going to bed at this time of night,’ Cathy said.
‘We’ve all had a long day.’ Gerry yawned.
‘It’s not much after eight!’
‘Some of us don’t have your reserves of energy, Cath,’ Cara said.
No one had Cathy’s reserves. At her weight and age, her blood pressure should have been sky high. She should have had diabetes, arthritis in her knees. Cathy swallowed no pills, suffered no aches and pains – or migraines. She could go from daylight to dawn, and as she had when they’d roomed together at college, she exhausted Cara, who felt like old Rufus when she rose to follow Morrie up those stairs.
Queen Anne in the front and Mary-Anne at the rear, Morrie had said once of Langdon Hall, a crumbling, neglected Mary-Anne until old Leticia died and he’d inherited the estate. He’d hired a team of restoration fanatics more obsessive than he about the saving of crumbling history.
They’d dismantled and rebuilt most of the back walls. They’d rebuilt the servants’ staircase but hadn’t improved on its original design. It was steep and narrow, angling as it climbed.
Every rotting window had been replicated and replaced, every new beam carefully aged by those fanatics, and when they’d packed up their tools and gone on their way, only an expert eye might pick where the original ended and their restoration began.
The master bedroom had received its own improvements. Four rooms on the third level, low-beamed servant quarters squeezed in beneath the roof. The room Morrie had long claimed as his own could have slept six maids. It opened into a small room, perhaps the housekeeper’s. The restorers had gutted it and transformed it into a bathroom. They’d done little to the bedroom and to the untrained eye it looked as it ever had. Its replicated windows now opened. Its floor now felt secure. A few of the massive beams supporting the roof were new, though not obviously so.
Light from the open doorway and the sound of splashing water told Cara that Morrie was washing his day away. She walked through the long room and into the bathroom, where she made a beeline for the cabinet that held her packet of migraine pills, which she preferred not to swallow. Tonight she washed down two.
‘What are you taking?’ he asked.
‘If I thought it would work I’d take strychnine,’ she said.
‘She’s Juliana Conti,’ he said, water splashing.
‘What?’
‘Robin inherited her voice, you got her writing. She’s Juliana Conti.’
‘You’re joking, Morrie,’ she said, turning so fast her head threatened to fly from her shoulders.
‘You said after that interview that she was a relative.’
‘Her name,’ Cara said. ‘I’ve told you about Juliana and Itchy-foot.’
‘You said she had your fingernails.’
‘She did, and you’re not serious, Morrie.’
‘She writes as Juliana Conti. She spoke to Tracy about that convict woman book, which has now been autographed, For Cara, with love, Juliana. She said she’d posted a new manuscript to her publisher before she flew over here.’
‘She’s got to be eighty years old!’
‘There’s no retirement age for writers,’ he said. ‘That’s why I married you – to keep me in my old age.’
‘You sound . . .’ She sighed, then turned to the vanity unit. ‘I expected you to be as wiped out as me.’
‘I feel spaced out,’ he said. ‘Did I know that Margot had a daughter?
‘I didn’t,’ she said.
‘What happened to it, to Margot’s baby?’
‘Jenny and my father adopted her. Trudy. She’s got twin boys Leona’s age.’
‘I’ve met Trudy!’ Cara said. ‘The first time I went to Woody Creek she was a little pigtailed Alice in Wonderland. I thought she was Jenny’s.’
‘She’s her granddaughter. My father is dead. He gave up his licence a couple of years ago and bought one of those electric trolleys. She said he lost control of it near the creek and rolled in. We used to swim in that creek. We used to harness a horse to an old barrel on wheels and hand-pump it full of water then pump it into Granny’s tank –’
‘That’s why she’s over here,’ Cara said. ‘Because Jim died.’
‘She said he’d refused to travel.’ He was beside her, a towel wrapped around his waist.
‘A pity about the kilt,’ she said. ‘You’ve got the legs for it.’
He wanted the basin, wanted to brush his teeth. She stepped away.
The mirror over the vanity basin was long. She stood studying her face while cleaning away cloying makeup. ‘Do I still look like her?’ she asked.
‘You never did,’ he said, spitting toothpaste. ‘Apart from your hair.’
‘Can you see any resemblance?’
‘Your hairdressers use a similar dye,’ he said and spat again.
‘The first time Georgie saw me, she guessed why I was in Woody Creek asking about a Jennifer Hooper. I used to be able to see what she’d seen.’
‘Jenny told me that she recognised me in Melbourne by my father’s hands,’ he said, and he looked at his left hand, at his right. ‘I remember a tall matchstick man – and his crutches but not his hands.’
‘You look nothing like him,’ Cara said.
‘Did I know that Margot was dead?’