by Susan Allott
“I withdrew all the savings,” Louisa says. “There was a lot of money in the account. Your dad had been saving for a car.”
“And he didn’t try to stop you?”
“I hid the savings book. By the time he found it we were gone.”
Isla stares at the rain. “I can’t believe you did that.”
“I felt like I had no choice.” She is quiet for a while. “I don’t suppose you can imagine what it’s like, to be dependent on a man for money.”
“I guess not.”
“I remember your dad had to write a letter, giving his permission to name me on the account. So I could pay money in from my wages,” Louisa says. “It was unusual back then. Bank accounts were for men, not their wives.”
Isla keeps her eyes on the back of the house. Next door, Carol Taylor slams her kitchen window shut.
“I betrayed his trust,” Louisa says, rubbing briskly at her hair with her towel. “He’s never quite forgiven me.”
“When did he start pushing you around?”
Louisa swings around to face her. Her towel falls to the ground.
“Is that why you left him?”
She picks up the towel and shakes it vigorously. “He’s never been an easy man.”
“I know that.”
She shakes the towel again. Dirt and wet sand cling to it. “I gave as good as I got,” she says.
“Did you?”
Louisa looks at her and nods. “I fought back. For a long time he was stronger.”
Not anymore, Isla thinks. She wonders when the power tipped. If her dad is nervous, in the house with a woman who harbors a grudge. She thinks of Dom tipping vodka down the sink, his back to her.
“There were happy times, weren’t there?” Louisa says.
You’re never happy, Isla thinks, and she wonders where that came from. “Of course there were,” she says. “But the bad times were really bad.”
The rain falls harder, the house barely visible. Isla watches her mum’s face, the stiffened tendons in her neck. She knows her mother won’t apologize or express her regret. It’s not her way. Isla spent her teenage years enraged over this: her mum would never bend or concede that she might be wrong. It had driven her ever closer to her dad; neither of them were ever in the right about anything.
“Do you believe him, Mum?”
“Believe who?”
“Dad. Do you believe his story, about Mandy?”
Louisa steps backward into the rain. She is immediately drenched, her hair flattened. “Do you want to see something?”
Isla can barely see her mother’s face. “Do I want to see what?”
“Something you ought to know about.”
Isla follows her mum across the grass, keeping her head down. She leaves her shoes on the mat. Louisa walks straight through to the main bedroom, throwing her towel over a chair. “Come on,” she says. “In here.”
Isla sits down on the bed. Rainwater drips down her neck. The room is warm, the window misted up. The ironing is piled high on a chair in one corner, the laundry basket overflowing beside it. A bunch of roses, long dead, droop from a vase on the dresser.
Louisa reaches around in the back of a drawer. “I found this a few months ago. Your father keeps it at the back of his sock drawer with the vodka we pretend I don’t know about.”
Isla pushes her wet hair out of her eyes. She has a suspended feeling, of curiosity meeting dread. “What is it?”
“It was Mandy’s.” Louisa holds a watch by its strap. “I recognized it the moment I saw it.”
Isla stands and looks at the watch. It’s long and narrow, gold-plated, with a thin, oblong face and notches instead of numbers. The time has stopped just after twelve-thirty.
“Your father didn’t bother denying it was hers,” Louisa continues. “I told him to get rid of it, but he refused.”
Isla turns away from the watch. The rain is heavy against the window. She has a trapped feeling in the airless room.
“I always had a suspicion about him and Mandy,” Louisa says. “You can tell, can’t you, when a man’s head is turned.”
“It doesn’t mean—” Isla can’t finish the sentence.
“She was an attractive woman,” Louisa says.
“It doesn’t mean anything.”
“For God’s sake.”
“You’re jumping to conclusions.”
“He’s admitted he was infatuated with her. Nothing serious, he claims.” Louisa closes her hand around the watch. “This was a while ago, of course, before the police turned up.”
Isla feels the shock in her body, the heat of it on her skin. “So he was infatuated with her and he kept her watch. So what?”
“He’s lying, Isla. He’s hiding something.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I can tell when he’s lying. He’s on edge. He’s drinking more. Something’s eating at him.”
“What are you saying?” Isla shouts it, to hide her fear. “Are you saying Dad killed her?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But that’s what you think?”
“I do think it’s possible. Yes.”
Isla turns to face her mother. They are feet apart and the room feels small, the air stifling. “Do you want to know what I think?”
“Sure.” She wraps the watch around her fingers.
“I think you’d like to see him arrested.”
“That’s not true!”
“He had an affair with your friend.”
Louisa puts a hand through her hair and holds her arm there, elbow jutting sideways. She shuts her eyes.
“She was your friend, wasn’t she?”
Louisa nods. “I thought so.”
“You’re taking it out on him, but they both hurt you.”
“That’s not what this is about.”
“When did you find out they’d had an affair?”
“Will you stop saying that?” She is red in the face, her body tense.
“Is that why you left him? Did you take all the savings and go to England because you found out—?”
“No!” She screams it. “No. I started to suspect it when we got home from England. I think it must have started while we were away.”
Isla steps back. She has always feared her mum’s temper. They have learned over the years to tread carefully around each other, to avoid clashing.
“You must have been angry with her,” Isla says.
Louisa’s eyes drop to the ground, where the ironing has fallen from the chair.
“When did you last see Mandy?”
Louisa raises her head. “I haven’t seen her in thirty years.”
“When exactly?”
“Before you and I went to England.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure.” Her mum stares levelly back at her. A bird calls out from the yard, a familiar cry.
Louisa turns and puts the watch back in the drawer. Her shoulder blades jut out as she lifts out socks and replaces them, pushes the drawer shut when she’s done. “Don’t mention this to your father,” she says. She keeps her back to Isla, watching the rain against the window.
24
Sydney, 1967
“When are you expecting Steve back?”
Joe stood in Mandy’s kitchen drinking coffee, dressed in his creased shirt and suit pants. The sun was only just up. No color in the backyard yet. Mandy knew he’d leave soon. She wished he’d get on with it. At the same time, she had to admit, she wished he’d stay.
“He went out to Ivanhoe,” she said. “Takes the best part of a day to drive it.”
Joe cut short a yawn. “He could be back anytime, then.”
“Relax.” She poured her own coffee and gave it a stir. “He’ll be back tomorrow at the earliest.”
“Mandy, I—” He put his coffee down on the countertop. “What if he cuts the trip short?”
“He won’t.” She sat down at the kitchen table. “He’s got to drive out to one
of the children’s Homes with this kid. Last time he was gone a week.”
He frowned back at her. “Is it a regular thing, then? Removing these kids?”
“It’s more regular than he’d like it to be. It’s been getting to him, lately. These families take it hard.”
“Do they?”
“He says they love their kids the same as the rest of us. And he reckons the Homes he takes them to are no good either.”
Joe’s eyebrows lifted. “So he’s not even solving the problem.”
“No.” She shifted in her chair. “He’s got to thinking he is the problem.”
“Why doesn’t he leave? Do something else for a living?”
“I think he might. It’s not easy for him, but. He comes from a long line of policemen, going back generations. He knew what he was taking on and he thought he was up to the job.”
“I didn’t realize,” he said. “I mean, I didn’t know it was that bad.”
“He doesn’t talk about it much.” She thought of Steve crying out in front of the house. “Louisa knows all about it. I’m surprised she didn’t tell you.”
He dropped his eyes and she wished she hadn’t mentioned Louisa. “Sorry,” she said.
“No. It’s all right.”
He drained his coffee and went back into the lounge room. She heard the rattle of his belt buckle and the armchair being shifted around as he looked for his shoes.
When he came back, his shirt was tucked in, his belt buckled. The bandage was unraveling from his arm. “Can I ask you something?”
“Go ahead.” She smiled. From his face, she thought he might want to know where he stood with her, if he could see her again.
“Did Louisa mention me when you spoke to her on the phone?”
She picked his shoes up from the floor and handed them to him, smarting a little. “She asked how you were. How you’d taken it.”
“Did she?”
“I told her she had a nerve, leaving me to tell you where she’d gone.”
He pushed his feet into his shoes. “Did she say anything else?”
“Just that it was good to be back in England. Like I said.”
She sat back down. Joe tightened the bandage, flexing his fingers, making a fist with his good hand. Maybe she shouldn’t have told him what Louisa said on the phone. He had a way of stoking himself up about things, she’d noticed. Like prodding at a bad tooth.
“My mum was from London,” she said, more to distract him than anything else. “Lou reminds me of her in a way. Just that she was homesick the whole time.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“She emigrated before I was born, and she spent the rest of her life griping about this country. The flies, the heat, the spiders. She never did get to like it here.”
“Did she ever go back to England?”
“No.” She took a cigarette from the pack on the table. “She ran off with the window cleaner when I was eleven. He was a Pom. Sorry. British, I mean.”
He leaned forward for a light. “He was her way of being closer to home, was he?”
She smiled. “Except he lived up the road in Pyrmont and drank schooners at the bar with the rest of them.”
“Well. A man’s got to fit in.”
Mandy hadn’t thought about Mikey Benson in a long time. He’d liked Mandy a bit more than she’d wanted him to like her. Wandering hands. Her mum had noticed and said nothing. Married the dirty bastard and wondered why Mandy never visited.
“Did your mum take you with her? When she left?”
“God, no.” She downed her coffee. “No. It was us kids she was running from.”
He visibly swallowed his shock. Disapproval too, just a hint of it. She looked away.
“My mother had four kids before she was twenty-five. Three boys and then me.” She heard herself defending her, as she always did. “She stuck with it as long as she could.”
“I’m sure you weren’t that bad.”
“I was the nail in the coffin.” She had an edgy feeling from the coffee. Out in the yard the cicadas were off-key. “My dad never let her back in the house. He took all her things to the thrift shop. And he cleaned his own windows after that.”
“I bet he did.”
There was the disapproval again. “None of us is perfect. I don’t blame her really.”
“Is she still with the window-cleaning bloke?”
“She died a few years ago. Cancer.”
“God. Sorry.”
“It’s all right.” She hadn’t meant to get into this. “The whole family’s scattered since she went. My brothers don’t keep in touch. Last time I tried calling my dad the number had been disconnected.”
Joe sat down across the table from her and tapped his cigarette over the ashtray. “Can I ask you something else?”
She nodded. “Just so long as it’s not about your wife or my mother.”
“You don’t have to answer. It’s just.”
She sat forward. “Go on.”
“Have you done this before?”
It took her a moment to get his meaning. She shook her head. “Steve’s the only other man I ever went with.”
“Right.” He cleared his throat. “Same here. I mean, I’ve never. Not since I met—”
“It’s all right.” She didn’t want him to say her name. “I know what you mean.” She ran her bare foot over the linoleum, then spoke before she thought better of it. “It was never like that. With Steve.”
He looked up at her. “No?”
“No.”
They smiled at each other, and the room filled with light as the sun broke through the tea trees. Mandy wondered if she could ever forget what she’d done with Joe Green on her kitchen floor.
“You’d better get off home.”
He held his good hand out and she took it, stood up, and leaned in against him. She liked the way his chin met the top of her head. The gait of him, loose and upright. She liked that he was not her husband.
He kissed her and turned for the door. She didn’t watch him go.
25
Sydney, 1997
Isla is lost in thought when the police car passes her on her way back from town. She looks right at it, watches it make its way up Bay Street, but she doesn’t see it. She looks into the gardens of her neighbors and sees Douglas Blunt crouched on his lawn, deadheading his roses. He has a concentrated look, which tells her he has seen her and is not planning to say hello. She pauses beside his gate.
“Mr. Blunt.” She coughs. “I wanted to apologize.”
He takes a moment to shift his gaze in her direction. His face is blank.
“I shouldn’t have spoken to you that way. At the party. I was out of line.”
“You were.”
“I’m sorry.”
He points his pruning shears at her parents’ place, where the police car has stopped. “Looks like you got company.”
A uniformed policeman gets out of the car and slams the door. Isla watches him open the gate and climb the steps to the veranda. She tries not to run. Her dad is out; he won’t be home for hours. If they wanted to arrest him, they would have come later in the day. They know where he works. The door shuts behind the cop and she stops, holds on to a fence post in a spike of fear. The watch. She tries to think. Behind her, Doug snips at his roses.
She lets herself into the house and stands in the hallway. The door to the kitchen stands open and the house is bright, flooded with sunlight. She hears the cop talking to her mum.
“I came as soon as I could,” he says. “If it’s not a good time, I could come back later.”
“No,” Louisa says. “Don’t do that.”
There is a pause, a scraping of chairs. The kettle starts to boil. Isla steps quietly into her parents’ bedroom. She opens the drawer where she saw her mum hide the watch and reaches around inside. It’s not there. She checks twice, lifting out the quarter bottle of vodka and the balled-up pairs of socks. It’s gone. Sweat runs under her arms. She t
ries the other drawers, quickly, shaking out T-shirts and shorts, checking the pockets. She checks the laundry basket, the base of the wardrobe, under the mattress. Nothing.
From the kitchen, her mum’s voice reaches her: nervous, polite small talk. Isla creeps from the room. The cop’s boots are visible from the hallway, and the edge of his jacket, hanging from the back of his chair.
“You mentioned an item when you called,” the cop says. “Something that might help our inquiries.”
“That’s right,” Louisa replies.
Isla stops where she is. Shock passes through her: a band of heat that moves along her limbs.
“We appreciate your help, Mrs. Green. It all helps to build up a picture.”
“Of course,” Louisa says.
“Perhaps you could repeat what you told me on the phone. And you could show me the item you mentioned.”
Isla pushes the kitchen door open. The room is a white box of light, two faces turned toward her, openmouthed. Her mother drops her teacup on the floor at her feet.
“Isla. Dear God.” Louisa stands among the shards of china with her hand at her throat. “I didn’t know you were home.”
“I got back early,” Isla says. Her voice is crisp in the bright room. “Just a moment ago.”
The cop looks from Isla to Louisa and back. “Everything all right, ladies?”
“This is my daughter,” Louisa says.
Isla throws the cop a smile. He is tall and stooped, gray-haired, with a dense white mustache. Behind his glasses his eyes are small and hard. Isla takes in the three stars on each of his shoulders and the radio at his belt. “Isla Green,” she says, shaking his hand.
“Inspector Perry,” the cop replies, taking his seat at the table. “Are you happy to continue, Mrs. Green?”
Louisa stands by the sink, holding the pieces of the broken cup in her hands.
“Go ahead, Mum,” Isla says, sitting down. “I’m fully in the picture,” she says to Inspector Perry. “Don’t mind me.”
He hesitates. “We could continue this down at the station, if you’d rather—”
“It’s all right,” Louisa says, without turning around. She drops the shattered cup into the bin. “Let’s carry on.” She takes another teacup from the cupboard. They wait for her in silence. The Inspector takes a notebook from his breast pocket and opens it to a blank page. From his belt, his radio blurts wordless noise.