Chapter 19 – Where has Sophie Gone?
Marie was working in the kitchen peeling vegetables. An image of Sophie’s face flashed before her, coming with a jolt, followed by a fragment of a glimpse of Sophie and Matty, hands linked. Standing near but apart, watching on, was her Mum, Alison. It was as if they were all in another place. Then the picture was gone. She felt suddenly empty and very scared.
She sensed that something was missing from the thread of invisible connection to her daughter. It had always lived deep down inside her; now it felt like it had been torn away. She shivered and decided to block the thought out. She looked at the clock. Sophie really should be home soon, it was getting late. She really wanted to give her a hug and tell her she was sorry about this morning. She hated what she had done and knew this was the limit; she had to pull herself together and stop moping around and getting angry for no reason.
She went out to the front verandah. Alexander was playing there with Rachel. “Alex, did Sophie come home with you?”
He shook his head. “She always walks with Matty now. But I saw them together just after school finished. They were standing and talking near the gate. Then I started home with my friends.”
Another half hour passed. The sun was falling below the horizon. Surely they should be home by now. Deep fear gripped her, a superstitious dread.
She decided she would walk down to the McNeil house. Perhaps they had gone there first and forgotten the time. But Mrs McNeil said she had not seen them either, She thought Matty must have stopped behind with Sophie for a while.
Then Mrs McNeil turned to her and said. “I have this bad feeling. I so wanted to say sorry to Matt for being cross this morning. It’s Dan you know, too much drink and a temper. So I push things onto Matty and I get cross when he can’t do it all or forgets. He is a good boy, really. Half an hour ago I suddenly see his face and then it’s gone. Now I have this scared feeling, sick in the pit of my stomach with dread.”
Maria nodded, “Me too!”
Their fear was palpable. They both walked up to Maria’s house. When they were almost at the gate, Maria saw Jimmy walking towards her along the footpath. She felt a second of relief; he would know what to do. He was always so practical. But the dread hit her again, like walking into a wall. Jimmy knew, before he reached her, that something was badly wrong.
Quickly she told him what she knew; how Sophie and Matty had not come home, even though it was almost dark. Mrs McNeil added in her bit. Maria did not say anything about the bad feeling, desperate not to let it into her mind.
“Right, well we must go and find them” Jimmy said. “Perhaps they got lost or one has fallen and is hurt. They are always going off traipsing together.
“Let’s take our children to Betty, across the way, and ask her to mind them. Then I will go to the West End Hotel and ask the men I know there to come and help us look. In the meantime you can start knocking at the doors of the neighbours along the street to ask if anyone has seen them.”
Three hours of fruitless searching followed, first with the men from the hotel, then with the police and all the other neighbours.
The only thing that anyone knew was that a couple of children from the school had seen Sophie and Matt going off together, walking along the path, the opposite way from home. The search party door knocked all the people who lived near the school that way. One person had seen the two children walking together, along the road past their house, about a hundred yards from the school but, after that, nothing.
Finally, late in the night, a policeman brought them back to their home. “You must collect your children and rest now. We can do no more tonight. In the morning I have organised for over a hundred men to help us search, once it is light enough to see.”
Jimmy and Maria collected their two small ones and brought them home to bed. Then they sat, side by side but not touching. Finally Marie reached out to him, took his hand and gave a big shuddering sob. “If only I had not slapped her and shouted at her this morning. I so wanted to see her this afternoon and say sorry and tell her I would never do it again. But now I am so scared I will not have the chance.”
She told Jimmy about her awful premonition that afternoon. He sat in silence and looked at her. As she spoke she watched his face. It was as if all the light went out in his eyes. He really, totally, believed her premonitions; remembering finding her crying in the late afternoon on that day when her mother’s boat hit the rocks. It was days later before the news of the storm and the wreck had come to them.
He suddenly sobbed and put his face in his hands. “Oh not my Sophie, please let it not be true.” But, although he knew neither how nor what had happened, in his heart of hearts he knew it was so.
His dearest little girl, with the big bright eyes and shining dark hair, was forever gone from him. How he ached to hold her and see her smile, but yet he knew it would not happen again.
He cried until he could cry no more. Maria held him, trying to feed him her strength, and give him back the comfort he had so often given her. Her heart ached so much, but his need and grief were stronger.
Finally he stood up, a grim look on his face, saying, “Still we must find her, even if it is so.”
In the morning the police and neighbours offered words of hope and comfort and he pretended to believe. One hundred and fifty men scoured every place where they thought they might find them, around the shores, in the gullies, on the hilltops, around all the wharfs and vacant lots, but nothing. They said they would check the bars, interview and ask questions of sailors and anyone who might know, but still nothing. So they checked for all the ships that might sail or were just gone, nothing again.
Jimmy could not bring himself to join in all of this other inquiry. For him all that mattered was to find his little girl, even if only to discover her broken body. So he searched and he searched, he searched in sunshine and he searched in rain, crisscrossing the peninsula and all the other places nearby, rowing the shores, using his dog to search for scent. But there was no trace, nothing, nothing, nothing.
His soul raged at the emptiness. But still he continued, gone before dawn and returning far into the night to fall into a restless sleep of exhaustion. Two months had passed with still nothing. His will was broken. He could search no more. Now he sat silently, alone in the chair in her room, and stared. He did not talk to Maria, other than a grunt. He barely talked to the children; even when they came up to him and tried to tell him things, their special stories of the day, he only half looked. His eyes were somewhere else. After a minute or two they would walk away looking crestfallen.
From the first day Maria and Mrs McNeil told police of the arguments of the morning; not that they themselves believed this was more than a passing flash. But it was the only thing left for others to believe. It became the story; that the children had run away, to who knows where. So they all waited, with a small and diminishing hope. Departed ships came to next ports, telegraphs were sent ahead and all were checked, but nothing.
Finally Rosie and Michael talked to the priests at their church and to Maria’s brother and sister and to Mrs McNeil who went to the Presbyterian Church. It was agreed, they must all pray, if not for their safe return, at least for the safe passage of their children’s souls.
So, on an early summer’s day the two congregations gathered. For an hour they sat, as one, in prayerful silence. Their priests, standing together, led them in prayer for their two beloved children. Then they all said their communions and sang a hymn of praise to their Gods for his deliverance of these two children.
It was the only time anyone could remember a joining of the churches. They all sat together, in the big new Catholic Church, alongside the school to which the children had gone, and with the steeple of the Presbyterian Church to their side and its bells ringing to call them all to prayer. When it was over people stood outside for hours; whispering words of hope and comfort. In their common anguish they came together as never before.
Jimmy had
sat beside Maria in the church, alone together at the front. Their children were with his parents behind them. Mrs McNeil sat with her family, together at the other side.
Jimmy could cry no more, and could feel no goodness in the prayer. But all other hope was gone, so he sat there with a numb empty mind, drawing a small comfort from all these people and their care. He remembered how they had greeted him in the streets as he walked with Maria and a small Sophie holding his hand. Then, of the days and nights when all these good people had helped, searching for his daughter and the boy.
He saw the children in his mind now, as he had last seen them on that day; two small children walking past his house together, holding hands and deep in conversation as they made their way to school. He knew, with an absolute certainty, that they had not run off together.
Maria dabbed her eyes and tried to draw her God to her, and reach out her soul to him. She grieved greatly for her daughter, but even more she grieved for the hurt and broken man beside her; her husband and the rock of her life these past nine years; but now so lost, so desolate. Now she must try to heal him as he had helped to heal her all those years before.
When the service was done the others got up to leave. Jimmy went with them; he could sit no longer still in the silence. He had to do something, but he knew not what. So he walked and kept walking. That night, when he fell to the ground asleep, he found himself in a place far from all he knew. The next day still he walked. As he walked blueish mountains rose in the distance, he felt they were drawing him towards them
Marie stayed still, sitting in the church, long after the others were gone, and let the silence enfold her. At last, in the faded light she felt the whisper of her daughter’s breath and the music of her laughter. She saw her now, walking hand in hand with her mother and Matty. With this vision came an understanding that, for them, all was well. But for her, she must go on; to tend to her family and give hope to the living.
She went home and sat in Sophie’s room, just herself with her daughter’s invisible presence wrapped around her. She picked up Sophie’s framed communion picture, carried it to the priest and askd him bless it and say a prayer over it, as a mass card for the safe passage of her daughter’s soul. She returned to her home, still alone, and picked up Sophie’s treasured blue and silver perfume bottle and held it. She breathed in Sophie’s scent and warmth one last time.
For a minute she thought that perhaps this bottle should pass to Rachel for it to continue with her family. But she knew the link was broken. It had to pass on to another life in another time. So she reached into the fireplace and placed the bottle and the picture side by side on a small ledge, as high up as she could reach. Perhaps they would end in a flaming fire, or perhaps, in a time yet to be imagined they would be found again, and the image and memory of her daughter could live again.
She closed the door of her daughter’s room and walked again to the church to bring home Alexander and Rachel, waiting with their dear Gran Rosie. Of Jimmy there was no sign.
She walked home with Mrs McNeil and told her of her vision. Mrs McNeil seemed comforted.
A month passed and still no Jimmy, then two, then six, then twelve months were gone. Maria forced herself to continue with her life, getting up each day, taking her children to school, working at the shop, calling to Mrs McNeil. But sometimes, deep in the night, she felt as if the loneliness and pain would overwhelm her.
Her strongest comfort was the help of Jimmy’s friends. Those rough men of the docks and pubs gave her more kindness than anyone else she knew. At least once a week a couple of them would call, often with cakes from their wives or other gifts that they had bought, things she knew they could ill afford. There were presents for her children, repairs for the house and at odd times just a word of encouragement. She remembered back to those long days and nights when they had helped Jimmy maintain the search. Long after all hope was gone, one or two would row with Jimmy around the headlands, or stumble alongside him across the hills and gullies, not believing, not even hoping, but helping anyway.
Her second treasure was her children, though it grieved her to see them made adults before their time. Alexander was always the first to help, to do the extra jobs. Rachel, who she now understood had a great place of pain inside her too, with Sophie gone, would come to her sometimes in the small hours, when she felt as if her own world was falling in and hug and hold her. So together in these darkest hours they would rebuild their strength.
She knew too she had to continue to bring light to her children’s lives. So she taught them to sing songs she knew. They would sing together as they worked, joining voices and choruses. In these moments a strange ethereal bond of joy arose from their music.
Finally, as it came around toward the end of the second year, the day before it would have been Sophie’s birthday of ten years, with her children much grown and with her singing with them as she worked away, out the back, Maria heard the front gate swing.
Jimmy stood in the door and listened. It was the singing that he knew so well and at once there was lightness in his soul. She waited for him yet! There she stood, her light undimmed, her hair flaming in the afternoon sun. She turned and smiled, unsure. A stranger stood before her, hair gone gray, back bent from toil. And yet it was him. Her heart sang so loud to burst.
She opened her arms. After a long time, so still, holding together, bodies touching like gossamer, they talked, first to their children and then at last to each other.
He told her of his travels and of the empty years, and how, only in the sunsets, looking far across the empty horizons, could he find some solace for his soul. How he worked out there shearing sheep, from dawn till dark and until his back could barely straighten. How he got up one day and knew she again had great need of him and how he must be there again for his wife and his children. Then of being driven to cross the miles and miles to reach her before she would sit alone on Sophie’s next birthday, with the slow tears of loneliness rolling down her cheeks. His mind had seen that picture of her so clearly and could not bear for it to be.
She told him of the children and his parents, and then of her vision of Sophie with her own mother and her knowledge of it being well for them.
Jimmy knew she told the truth, that her heart did not lie. He felt the lifting of a great weight. She told him of her loneliness without him and her need for him, that often she lay in bed in the small hours and longed so much to hear his voice and feel his touch. Sometimes in her half sleep she would reach out for him only to find the empty place where he should have been.
It was truly good that they were together again, to be two broken parts, together made whole.
Next day they walked to the point at East Balmain and stood next to the graves, so many lives. There she told how her sister had moved to a big house across the water in Sydney town and of her brother, who had taken Tom and Mary’s house when her parents died, but had now gone to London to live with his English wife.
So now both houses lay empty and she did not know what to do with them. She could sell them if she chose but they were too dear to her.
Soon it was agreed. Tom and Mary’s house would be theirs. The other two they would rent and, when their children were grown, if they had need of them they would be theirs. For themselves, they wanted to live in the big sandstone house with the view, where they had first truly met. They also wanted it again to be a house of children and laughter; those they had already and with luck more yet to come, a whole tribe please God.
In three more years three more children came and then they knew it was enough. On quiet summer nights they would walk down to the beach, and sit staring out across the harbour, watching as stars rose in the east, sitting on the rock where they first had made their promises to each other.
The first war came and went and all their children lived still. When their daughter Rachel was grown she moved to the house across the way, the first Balmain house, Roisin. Soon she had children and they had grandchildren, and again t
hey thrilled to the patter of small feet.
The hard years of the Depression came. Now there was barely money to buy food and customers stayed away from their shop of exquisite things. But Jimmy, ever resourceful, found new ways for them to live. He bought and sold furniture, often broken and needing repair, but sold for a pittance as families were forced out of houses and could not take it with them. With skill and care and his masterful hands, he would fix the locks and hinges, polish the wood, fix the legs. When he was finished it was as good as new; and those with the money would desire it. So their lives continued.
The house in Smith St now had McNeil’s living in it. First they rented it to her second son Robert and his new wife. Robert was young, hard-working and with the manner and looks of Matty. Then Dan McNeil died in a pub brawl. Ruth McNeil had worked hard all her life. Now she was old and tired. She found Dan had almost drunk their family house away.
When her house was sold and the debts were paid Ruth McNeil had barely a pittance remaining. Robert was determined his mother would come and stay with him, even though he had two small children of his own.
Jimmy and Maria knew help was required. So they determined their precious house, Casa Ardwyn, in Smith St should go to Robert. He was so like Matty, the son in law they might have had. They found a way he could afford it that did not seem like charity. So now the title deeds were his. They knew Sophie would be well pleased.
As the years rolled on Robert’s family grew up and Mrs McNeil died. The house was sold again, forgotten whose first it had been. Still the new owners clearly loved it and cared for it. Sometimes Maria and Jimmy walked along Smith St and came past it. In the front they would stop and admire the pretty roses and daises in the garden. Most years they walked past in the summer, when the frangipani tree was in bloom, stopping to smell its fragrance. Sometimes Jimmy would pick a flower and place it in Maria’s hair. Just rarely they would see a person there, glimpsed through the window.
Once a little boy came out, pushing a red tricycle, perhaps a year of two younger than their Sophie had been. They smiled at him and he smiled back, just a happy boy with his toy. They did not say anything, but their hearts tore with the remembrance. After that they did not come again.
The Old Balmain House Page 23