The Daughter's Promise (ARC)

by Sarah Clutton

  ‘We all have secrets, my lovely. Lillian was a good person, but she was tortured by her past. I think that now she’s gone, her soul deserves some rest.’

  Willa nodded slowly and gave Annabelle a sad smile. ‘Tomorrow at eleven then, for coffee?’

  ‘Wonderful.’

  Willa stopped at the door and turned. ‘And… what you said. I don’t know, Annabelle. The living have to live. The dead are already at peace. It’s the not knowing – the not understanding – that breaks you.’ Her voice had become thin and tremulous. ‘It’s the living who are tortured.’

  There was a thread between them. Annabelle felt it. A glistening, unbreakable thread.

  Willa broke it. ‘Hugo and Hamish have come out because it’s the two-year anniversary this week. Our beautiful Esme was still alive two years ago.’ She was staring back out of the window now, to The Old Chapel and across to the ocean. With a quick motion, she turned her head and fixed Annabelle with a look filled with loss and longing. ‘And if you tell me that not knowing things is better, you’re wrong. It just prolongs the pain. I’ll think about what you both said about the diaries, but I can’t promise I won’t read them. I’m sorry, but I just can’t.’

  Eighteen

  Sylvia

  Sylvia woke to the sound of the ocean crashing onto the rocks. The window of her bedroom was slightly open and the sill was wet. It had rained during the night, but now the rising sun was throwing a weak silver glow across the rolling surface of the water. What was she doing back in this place?

  In searching for her identity, her sense of home, she’d broken her family even further. She’d spent decades questioning her own stupidity, and living with the guilt that she’d run away all those years ago. She had still loved Dan then, but now she knew she’d made the right decision to leave. She’d spent all this time pining for a man who was deeply flawed. And it seemed he’d only gotten worse. She flicked her bare legs over the side of the bed, and in that one liberating moment, she realised that the hold Dan had had over her was completely gone. Hearing his anger on the phone, and his attitude to Annabelle, had made something inside her die.

  Still, coming back to Sisters Cove had been good for Indigo. Given her a place to call home. And now Sylvia realised that Indigo would be fine whether she herself stayed or not.

  She went into the front room and rolled out her yoga mat in front of the glass doors so she could see the ocean, grey-green and vast under the overcast sky. The froth and tumble of the waves calmed her. After her stretching session, she walked towards the kitchen to make spicy oaten porridge to pacify her aggravated vata. All this stress was terrible for her system.

  Annabelle had laughed when Sylvia had tried to explain the principles of Ayurveda, and how her doshas were out of balance. It had been months ago, when they were chatting about her diet, but Sylvia remembered what she had said. I’m all out of balance everywhere. Of course I am, silly billy. I don’t need a funny name for it! She had laughed and flicked her hand at Sylvia as if the Ayurvedic words – dosha, vata, pitta, kapha – were hilarious snippets of mumbo-jumbo. It had irritated Sylvia, but she was resigned to it. Her sister wasn’t especially emotionally evolved. Still, Sylvia knew she didn’t deserve to have an opinion on the matter. She was a little shabby in the emotion department herself.

  The box of diaries caught her eye as she padded through the living room, and the feeling of peace that had descended during her stretching session vanished. The diary marked 1977 was on the top. She specifically hadn’t opened that one. Couldn’t face what she might find. She knew she had broken Lillian’s heart too when she left, not just Dan’s. Worse still, she had abandoned Annabelle when she needed her most, and broken the promise she made to her mother just weeks before she died; her promise to be there if ever Annabelle needed her. Sylvia couldn’t bear to read Lillian’s judgement – see her battered feelings – right there on the page. She was aware that her abrupt departure all those decades ago had been inexcusable, but she had felt there was no other way out.

  Ginger tea. That was what she needed. Warm ginger tea to restore her balance. She opened the fridge and took out the knob of ginger. As she pulled a knife from the block on the bench, she heard the growl of a motorbike up on the road, and some sense of foreboding told her it would be Dan.

  A minute later, there was a quick knock and she heard the door open. I could have locked it! she thought. Why didn’t I lock it?

  ‘Morning, Syl.’

  She kept chopping the ginger methodically, not looking up. Not giving him the satisfaction. How dare he come in here uninvited?

  He cleared his throat and remained at the door, presumably waiting for a welcome.

  She put the ginger peelings into the worm bucket.

  ‘I’m here because I want to talk about The Old Chapel.’

  She let out a heavy sigh. That again. It felt so unimportant. So secondary, now that Annabelle was sick and knew about their affair.

  ‘There’s a thing called text, Dan. And anyway, I have no desire to talk to you. How dare you threaten me?’

  ‘I don’t understand why you won’t… I love you, Syl, I—’

  ‘The Old Chapel?’ said Sylvia forcefully as she put the ginger pieces into the teapot.

  Dan walked across the kitchen and stood with his hands in his pockets, as if he didn’t quite know how to proceed.

  ‘What if I buy it – I mean, if I can convince Wilhelmena to sell it – and let Indigo rent it from me? But really cheaply. I don’t want to be at odds with you over it.’

  ‘Why do you want it so much?’

  He pulled out a chair from the kitchen table and sat down, staring out at the ocean for a moment. The familiarity irritated Sylvia. She deliberately remained standing as he ran his hands through his hair and nodded twice before he spoke, as if giving himself permission.

  ‘A couple of years ago, I made some bad investments. One was a property development I’ve had to prop up. It’s all having an impact now, Syl, and I’m at retirement age. I want to be able to sell Merrivale when I finally get the title. But I need to get a good enough price for it. And as you can probably imagine, the value is a lot less without waterfront access, especially if this wedding business venture takes off. If I owned The Old Chapel and could sell them together, it would at least double Merrivale’s value. That ocean frontage is priceless, but only with Merrivale in the mix to add the scale to it. It isn’t worth much on its own. Together, though, they’d be an amazing site for development. Much better than the site the council rejected the other day for the resort down near the beach. And more chance of getting development approval.’

  Sylvia stared at him, processing this information. Property values, investments, developments. They were just so uninteresting to her.

  ‘Is that why you didn’t push for the other development? Because you had this in mind all along?’

  Dan shrugged and gave her a wry smile. ‘Well, you’ve got to admit it’s a good idea. I assumed I’d have no trouble buying The Old Chapel. Until Wilhelmena came along.’

  Sylvia considered him for a minute. She was flabbergasted that he would assume that the idea of transforming this beautiful little backwater into a tourist hotspot would appeal to her. Did he know her so little? But more importantly, what about her sister’s life’s work in that garden?

  ‘What does Annabelle think?’ She was allowed to mention Annabelle’s name if they were together. It was her rule after all.

  ‘I haven’t really discussed it with her. You know what she’d be like about selling Merrivale. But the truth is, I can’t afford to retire comfortably if I don’t sell. Not with my share portfolio the way it is now.’

  ‘I can’t believe you’d even think about it.’

  ‘It’s just a house, Syl.’

  ‘But it’s been in your family for generations.’

  ‘There is no next generation. Well, I guess there’s Indigo, but—’

  Sylvia waved him away and poured herself a mug o
f tea. She didn’t want to discuss Indigo with him. Indigo had her own father. She was just fine on the father front, thank you very much. Not that Sylvia knew where the useless man was, or whether he was even still alive, but she was sure Indigo had his email address and could find out if she really needed to.

  But a bigger thought had entered her mind now. She knew she should just blurt it out, but something made her pause. She hadn’t yet read the diary and she knew it might clarify things, but really, what else would she learn?

  She stirred her tea and took a breath.

  ‘What about Willa?’ She pulled the teaspoon out of her mug and watched the little bits of ginger floating in a whirlpool.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I suspect she’s your daughter.’ She looked up at him, perversely interested in how he would take this news if he didn’t already know it. ‘I don’t know if Annabelle has told you, or if she even knows it herself actually, but… Willa – Wilhelmena, I mean – she’s adopted, and I assume she’s yours. Yours and Annabelle’s.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You should probably talk to Willa about it. I think she wants to know how it all happened. Talk to Annabelle too.’

  ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ His voice was strained, hard-edged.

  Sylvia sighed and sipped her tea. Dan’s face was creased with questions, and for a moment she saw him as a younger man, her lover, an ambitious man with twinkling eyes and a smile that could melt her heart. Then anger flared in her, so quick and unexpected that she swallowed too much tea and felt the ginger burn her throat. He had slept with her sister and gotten the poor girl pregnant, and all the while he’d been banging on about how Sylvia was the only woman in the world for him. She turned and looked out the window at the ocean, not trusting herself to speak. The rain began again suddenly, thin, sheeting waves of it, blowing across the face of the sea in powerful gusts.

  She took a breath, raising her voice over the noise of the rain. ‘When I tried to confront you about Annabelle that night, you were out of your mind about what happened with… well, about Andrew, and I didn’t know what to do. The Andrew thing, it just seemed so much worse, and it took over my mind. But you never apologised about Annabelle. You never apologised for being a smarmy arsehole. She was so young, Dan. How could you do it?’ The words had rolled around, boiling and spitting in her mind for so many years, and now they were out. Just a few little words, but they defined her life; defined everything she’d done since that night when she had seen Dan and Annabelle in the car, locked in that awful embrace.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t! Don’t you dare. I deserve to know, Dan.’

  ‘Sylvia, please.’ His face was creased; pleading.

  ‘You slept with a child, Dan. She was fifteen!’ She spat the word at him, the hard sound of it vibrating in her throat. The accusation sounded worse now that she’d voiced it. Disgusting.

  Dan stared at her. He got up from his chair, and shook his head at her slowly. ‘No.’

  Sylvia clenched the mug tightly, wanting to slap him. Annabelle had been days away from turning sixteen, and no doubt it had been consensual. She had been following him around like a lapdog for years before that. But the age of consent was seventeen in Tasmania. She’d checked, because she knew that the detail mattered. And she mattered too. She needed to know what had been going through his mind on the day he shattered so many lives.

  He stopped in the middle of the lounge room, his back to her. Then he turned around slowly to face her.

  ‘Are you telling me you walked out on me not because of the things we did that night… Andrew and…’ he stopped, shook his head again, ‘but because of Annabelle? And you think we had a child?’

  ‘That must have been the night she got pregnant. Around then anyway. And no, it wasn’t the only reason, but it was part of it. The whole thing was a nightmare. But the main reason I left was you, Dan. You really expected me to stay after what you made me do that night?’

  She let her eyelids droop and close. She was tired of this already. Her emotions were like birds, gliding above the cliffs, then swooping down low to skim the cold blue water.

  ‘Sylvia?’

  ‘What else could I have done except leave, Dan? You betrayed us all, and now you have the gall to threaten me with exposure.’

  Dan shook his head again and raised both hands to cover his mouth and nose. When he dropped them, Sylvia expected to see shame, but she didn’t. In the squint of his eyes and the movement of the muscles around his mouth and nose, she saw something hard and disbelieving. She saw disgust.

  ‘Why would you even think that? Annabelle’s never had a baby. We couldn’t have children,’ he said, anger showing now in the flare of his nostrils, the clenching of his jaw.

  ‘What would you know?’ hissed Sylvia. ‘What would you bloody well know? What you did was horrific, and Annabelle is the one who came off worst. I can’t believe she cared for you, married you, after the way you treated her!’

  He stood silent, breathing heavily, Sylvia’s words hanging like daggers between them. Eventually he spoke, coldly. ‘I know I made some big mistakes, but you were the one who abandoned her.’ He opened the front door and began striding up the driveway.

  ‘A mistake?’ she screamed. ‘Is that what they call it these days? A mistake!’

  The rain had eased to a pattering irritation. Gum leaves were clumped, dark and slippery, on the driveway.

  ‘Don’t you dare walk away from me, Dan Broadhurst! You owe me more than an apology!’ Every moment of Sylvia’s broken life had boiled down into a delicious, hot, seething sea of rage. It was a revelation, this anger, the white-hot loss of control. It was something she never gave in to, but it felt so right! She was ablaze with the thrill of it. ‘You’re a cruel, dishonest man!’

  He didn’t stop, or slow, and she ran after him, barely noticing the water falling on her bare arms. He had parked in the little bay fifty metres down the road on the ocean side, and as he strode towards his bike, Sylvia followed. ‘Answer me, Dan!’ she screamed.

  He ignored her.

  ‘Go on, then, you coward. Run away! Screw me, then run back to Annabelle! There’s a pattern there, you faithless bastard! Can’t you see it?’

  She stood panting in the middle of the road. As the noisy rush of anger finally quelled in her ears, she became aware of her surroundings: the bending of the trees in the breeze, the movement of surfers below the cliff in the pounding storm waves, the sound of a car idling behind her on the road. She turned.

  Rita Perotta had pulled up at the entry to her driveway and was staring at Sylvia through the open window. A throaty revving suddenly filled Sylvia’s head, and as Dan’s motorbike roared past them, back up the hill, she folded her arms to cover her breasts, which were showing through the wet fabric of her fitted white singlet. Rita’s mouth was hanging open in a comic display of disbelief. Sylvia looked down at herself. Her eyelids fluttered closed. She was standing in her underpants.

  Nineteen

  Willa

  The banoffee pie sat in the centre of the table. Hugo had suggested it, so she had been into town yesterday to buy the ingredients. There wasn’t a proper baking dish in the rental house, but she had found one in The Old Chapel, and yesterday she had spent a happy, dreadful afternoon baking. Because that was what Esme would have wanted. This morning she had taken the pie out of the fridge after breakfast and placed it on the table to make Esme the centre of their day.

  She was tempted to take a slice of it now, even though she was afraid that when the caramel hit her tongue, she would break apart. But at least the grief would then be physical, and it would bring Esme back for a moment. That sickly-sweet taste that Esme had adored would be hers. And she would adore it too. She would eat it and adore it. Even though she would hate it.

  Willa raised her finger and let it hover over the pie. Grief was a little bit like labour. It swept through you in waves. Sometimes she needed to hold her breath for fe
ar of dying with the pain, and then it was gone and she was all right. She was fine. She felt Esme talking to her, walking with her, living inside her, and she was absolutely okay. And then it would come again the next day, or the next week. Or when she saw a girl with long blonde hair, or when she heard someone singing a song by Adele. Don’t, she would think. Stop it! That was Esme’s song. You have no right to sing Esme’s song so tunelessly!

  This morning, Hugo and Hamish were braving the frigid waters of Sisters Cove Beach to do some surfing. It had been raining earlier, but it had stopped now and the sky had magically cleared. The huge sea swells continued, though. Willa looked down through the picture windows of the house to the beach below. They were the only two in the water. Neither of them seemed to be able to stand up on the board for very long. Three years ago, all four of them had had surfing lessons when they were on holiday in Majorca, and yesterday they had sat down to watch YouTube videos about surfing techniques. Hamish had been confident that it would all come back to him. They had borrowed boards and wetsuits from one of the gorgeous little painted beach huts that sat on the sand next to the surf club. Annabelle knew someone who owned one, so she had arranged it for them. It was very sweet of her.

  Willa pulled her eyes from the ocean and let her finger drop onto the centre of the pie. Once, she wouldn’t have dreamed of dragging her finger through the cool, thick, creamy decoration, ruining her own hard work, but now she was tempted. She would wait to actually cut the pie and eat it with the boys for morning tea, because it was their special celebration of Esme, but the cream called to her now. These days she didn’t really care what people thought. It was liberating. She scooped up a blob of cream and touched it to her tongue and closed her eyes. Darling girl.

  Tears ran down her face and she let them. She scooped up another blob and smoothed it over her lips, then licked it off.

  ‘Yoo hoo!’ There was a tapping at the open door and she turned without wiping her face.