The Girl In the Painting

by Téa Cooper

  ‘She must have been born in Liverpool, otherwise she wouldn’t have been in the workhouse.’

  ‘No, you can’t presume that. Close by perhaps, but not necessarily Liverpool. There’s nothing to back that up. You came from Ireland and ended up in Liverpool.’ Jane chewed the end of the pencil. ‘You said she didn’t speak until you arrived in Sydney.’

  ‘Until we crossed the equator on the eighteenth of November.’

  ‘Her birthday. There’s no specific date on these papers. Just female child, four to seven years. How did you know?’

  ‘I didn’t. I made it up. No one queried it. Why would they?’

  ‘Did she call herself Elizabeth?’

  ‘By then she answered to the name.’

  ‘Didn’t she know that Elizabeth had died?’

  ‘She called my sister Lizzie. We all did.’

  ‘The immigration papers say Elizabeth.’

  ‘Lizzie’s baptismal name. Da was outraged, naming his daughter after a Queen of England, but Mam insisted, said if it was a new life, we needed to shake off the shackles of Ireland. It was the last thing we did together as a family before Mam and Da left. He made such a show of it all—first her baptism, then a gathering. He called it a going-away gathering and promised another when our turn came and we arrived in Australia.’

  ‘And you called her Elizabeth and she accepted that?’

  His mind creaked and groaned as he thought back to the day so long ago when they’d boarded ship. ‘I told her we were going home. I think she believed we would find Lizzie.’

  While Jane shredded the end of her pencil, Michael poured himself another glass of whiskey. Like an old friend, it helped dull the ache in his heart. Now more than ever he regretted his foolishness; not in bringing Elizabeth to Australia—never that, they’d made a good life together—but for failing her, lying to her all this time.

  ‘Did she have an Irish accent?’

  Jane’s question brought him upright. ‘When she first spoke? No, now you mention it, she didn’t. Softly spoken, a lilt in her voice, but no, not Irish.’

  ‘You do, you still sound Irish. Elizabeth doesn’t. She sounds, well, nothing specific, a mixture of this and that, I’ve always thought. Cultured. Did Lizzie have an Irish accent?’

  ‘That she did.’

  ‘G’woam.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘G’woam. What does that mean? What does it sound like? Elizabeth cried out G’woam, G’woam when she saw the birds at the technical college and at the preview.’

  ‘I’ve not a clue what it might mean.’

  Jane wrote the word on the paper, drew a large circle around it. ‘We’ll have to find out. Is there anything else you can think of?’

  ‘Other than the birds? No. She’s never liked birds, didn’t like the pigeon tree at Hill End.’

  ‘Didn’t like the Tost and Rohu exhibits.’ Jane’s eyes narrowed and she continued the infuriating tap on her teeth with the pencil. ‘Didn’t like the preview of the paintings.’

  ‘Marigold Penter doesn’t paint birds. I fail to see the link.’

  Michael couldn’t keep up anymore, his head was hammering fit to bust. God, he was tired, and his heart was galloping faster than the favourite at Randwick. He rubbed at his chest, felt in his pocket for the bottle of pills, opened it under the desk and slipped one under his tongue, letting it dissolve, then washed the taste away with the remains of his whiskey. No point in alarming Jane; the pain would pass, it always did.

  ‘I’ve got to go down to the auction house,’ she said. ‘See if Timothy has everything he needs. I might talk to him. Maybe he’ll have some ideas why his mother’s paintings might produce a reaction.’

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t.’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘Because I’ve spoken to you in confidence. It’s not something that should be bandied around. Elizabeth would be devastated. In fact, I think better you let her tell you herself.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell her you’ve told me?’

  Perhaps. He ought to. He’d never kept anything from her before, except the most important fact—her identity. ‘Please, Jane. Help me find out who she is. She has to know.’

  When Jane arrived back at the auction house, Timothy was nowhere to be seen. It left her feeling annoyed; she’d hoped he’d be waiting for her.

  She lit the downstairs lamps and sat on the chair in the middle of the room. Despite the fact she’d helped hang the paintings, she still hadn’t taken a good look at them, nor did she understand what it was that had upset Elizabeth.

  It was obvious they were all by the same artist; not that she knew much about art, she’d been too tied up in more interesting subjects, unladylike subjects by some standards. Bookkeeping, the study of the planets, Darwin’s and Freud’s theories, Fibonacci and da Vinci. No one had taken much notice of the girl who sat at the back of the room behind all the men, providing she remained inconspicuous.

  The paintings all showed simple outdoor scenes. No fine detail, touches of bright colour giving a fleeting impression, a glimpse of everyday village life portrayed with great intimacy. As though she was peeping into someone’s innermost thoughts. Bright, and vibrant and, as Timothy had told her the first time they’d met, they were better viewed from a distance.

  Taking one step at a time, Jane moved along the line of pictures. A similar sky, stone walls, the same thatched cottages and winding paths. In one painting, a young man and a child walking hand in hand through a tunnel of overlapping leaves; in another, a series of covered wagons, fine dabs of red paint giving them an almost festive air, and the church, with the village in the background.

  There had to be something else. She threw herself down on the seat and stared at the paintings. There had to be a pattern. Something that linked them, something that had upset Elizabeth. Then she noticed the one common factor. Somewhere in every picture was the wistful young girl in the pale dress.

  She glanced at the clock; it didn’t look as though Timothy was going to keep his promise. It was time she went home. Maybe Elizabeth was feeling better and they could discuss the pictures.

  Twilight bathed the town. A fine mist rose from the river, bringing a chill to the air as she cruised along Church Street on her bicycle. She was late, but maybe if she was lucky, Bessie would have saved supper for her, otherwise she’d have to make do with bread and cheese.

  She tucked her bicycle inside the fence, taking great care not to disturb Elizabeth’s roses, and reached for the door handle. Locked! Bloody Lucy, making sure that everyone knew she was late. Damn her. Jane lifted her hand to thump on the door and her fist fell away.

  An ominous black satin wreath hung in the centre of the door. It was a trifle faded, as though it had been there a long time, yet she’d never seen it—not on the day Michael had first invited her to tea, not in all the years she’d lived with the Quinns.

  A flight of bats swirled out of the fruit trees next door as she slipped around the side of the house to the kitchen. Curtains were pulled across all the windows at the back and upstairs, and the kitchen door was firmly locked. It was never closed. Bessie went off at half cock if it wasn’t kept open, still reckoned an inside kitchen was an abomination.

  The bats skimmed over the house, making her muscles tense, so she slammed the palm of her hand against the door. It opened a crack. Lucy’s hand shot out and pulled her into the dim interior, and her stomach turned to lead.

  To steady herself, she leant back against the wall. Bessie sat at the table, her head in her hands, making some sort of retching sound. Then she saw Lucy’s face. ‘What’s going on? Why are you crying?’

  ‘It’s the master, Mr Quinn.’ Lucy wiped her index finger under her nose, then down her dirty pinny.

  The bats, still roosting in the back of her mind, took flight. ‘What about him?’

  Bessie lifted her head, her face the colour of uncooked pastry and her hands shaking. ‘Dead.’ She buried her face again and
her sobs rose to a crescendo.

  ‘Dead? Where is he?’ She pushed past the table and headed for the door. What a load of nonsense, she’d only been talking to him a few hours earlier.

  ‘In his study.’ Lucy tugged at her arm. ‘You can’t go in.’

  ‘Of course he’s not dead, he needs his pills. Have you called Dr Lethbridge?’

  ‘He’s with Miss Quinn now.’

  ‘Why’s he with Aunt Elizabeth? Why isn’t he with Michael?’

  ‘Because he’s dead!’ Bessie hissed the words. ‘Holy Mary, haven’t you got an ounce of compassion in you. Stop asking questions. It’s all you ever do.’

  ‘He’s fine. I was with him earlier …’ She bit off the words. If no one was going to take care of Michael, she’d simply have to. A little pill from the small brown bottle in his top right-hand pocket, under his tongue, chased down with a nip of whiskey, would see him right.

  A strange buzzing filled her ears. She shook her head and shot through the door into the morbid dusk blanketing the house.

  Creeping along the hall, hand on the dado rail, she barrelled straight into Dr Lethbridge.

  ‘Ah, Jane. Elizabeth is going to need some help. I’ve given her something to make her sleep, however it will be a while before it takes effect.’

  Elizabeth! Why was it all about Elizabeth? What about Michael? She’d never liked Lethbridge, especially after her bout of chicken-pox when he’d made her bathe in potassium permanganate. It had turned her skin a strange brown colour and made all the blisters itch and pop. She scratched at the small hole in her forehead where the first blister had erupted. She hadn’t been able to resist picking off the scab.

  ‘Michael needs his pills.’ She tilted her head towards the study door, firmly closed as always, but a waft of tobacco and whiskey seeped out.

  She raised her hand to the doorknob.

  ‘No!’ Lethbridge’s fingers tightened around her hand.

  A sinking feeling sent her stomach plummeting.

  ‘Go and sit with Elizabeth, she needs you. The undertakers, Mr Fry and his brother, will be here soon, and when they’ve finished you can see Michael.’

  ‘I want to talk …’ To her horror her voice cracked and her eyes overflowed, tears streaming down her face.

  ‘He’s gone, my dear. There’s nothing you can do. His heart.’

  ‘What about his pills?’ There was nothing wrong with Michael’s heart, except perhaps it was too big, full of a compassion she didn’t always understand. ‘He wasn’t sick.’ She couldn’t remember Michael ever taking to his bed, not even when he was laid low by the chills and fevers the previous winter.

  ‘He wasn’t a man to complain, but he was suffering from chest pains, indicative of congestive heart failure. I had prescribed amyl nitrate, which he reported reduced the severity. He was not a young man.’

  ‘He was not an old man.’

  ‘I’m so sorry. He was a good man, one of the best.’ Lethbridge gave her shoulder a squeeze. ‘Go to Elizabeth, she needs you.’

  She counted every one of the stairs, and the fifteen paces along the landing to Elizabeth’s bedroom. Her knock wasn’t answered so she opened the door and eased inside.

  As in every other room in the house the curtains were pulled, but a sliver of moonlight breached the darkness, showing a mound in Elizabeth’s bed. What was she supposed to do? Jane knew her failings—she never said the right thing at the right time. She was the last person Elizabeth would want. Settling for the safety of silence, she dragged the chair closer to the bed.

  Now what? Comfort. Soothing pats. That’s what Timothy had done for her.

  She reached out her hand and tentatively touched Elizabeth’s shoulder. Once, twice. The mound under the blankets didn’t move. Was that a good sign, or bad? For want of anything else, she continued the pats a little longer.

  Elizabeth made some sort of a noise, halfway between a hiccup and a sob, and her head appeared above the eiderdown, her face devoid of colour. Nothing like the real Elizabeth, whose upswept chignon never had a hair out of place. Her brilliant eyes were opaque with grief. Her pupils dulled to a sort of storm cloud colour, the whites lost in a puddle of reddened tears.

  ‘No one to hold my hand now.’ Her gaze remained fixed on the window as she spoke, but the fragility in her voice touched Jane and when Elizabeth lifted her hand from beneath the sheets she reached out and took hold of it.

  Elizabeth’s fingers tightened around hers, squeezed hard.

  ‘Dr Lethbridge said you’d fall asleep soon.’

  Elizabeth let out another heaving sigh and her eyelids fluttered.

  Jane sat as the moon rose above the tree tops, the bones in her hand grating against each other, until Elizabeth’s grip loosened and her mouth became slack.

  For a moment, Jane feared it was all too much for Elizabeth and she too might die, but the odds on that seemed more outlandish than John’s race-day favourites. Finding some sort of consolation in the familiarity of the form guide, she re-ran the odds in her head while Elizabeth’s hand rested in her own and her regular breaths continued. It wasn’t until the door creaked open a fraction and Lucy’s tear-streaked face appeared that she extricated her hand and tiptoed away from the bed.

  ‘Bessie said you’re to come down and have a cup of tea. There’s work to be done before morning and she needs everyone’s help. The doc said Miss Quinn’d sleep ’til morning.’

  It wasn’t until the following morning when Jane entered the dining room that reality finally hit. Instead of a neatly laid table and breakfast on the sideboard, Michael’s body lay in an open casket on the table and the cloying scent of lilies filled the room.

  She bolted, slamming the door behind her, and skittered out to the kitchen. There was some bread and jam on the table, next to a cold teapot. Where was everyone? She lifted the curtain and peered out into the yard where Lucy stood over the boiling hot copper—one of Macbeth’s witches, stirring a horrible dark brew.

  ‘There you are.’ Bessie appeared, arms full of shiny black material. ‘I’ve got a job for you.’

  ‘What’s Lucy doing?’

  ‘Tsk, tsk. For someone so smart you can be mightily stupid sometimes. Dyeing. Here. Take this.’ She pushed the material into Jane’s arms. ‘I want you to thread a new wreath for the front door. Had to borrow that one from the good Father.’

  ‘Can’t we get one from the auction house, or ask the undertakers?’ She hadn’t the vaguest idea how to thread a wreath.

  ‘Would have thought you knew they didn’t sell things like that at the auction house, you spend enough time down there.’

  The comment didn’t merit an answer. Her mind whirled faster than Lucy’s evil brew. She’d never had anything to do with death, never thought much about it. More to the point, she wanted to ask Dr Lethbridge about this amyl nitrate—perhaps it had caused Michael’s death. He hadn’t seemed the remotest bit sick; preoccupied by the conundrum of Elizabeth’s identity, not sick.

  ‘You get on with that wreath. None of us can set foot outside until we’ve got something respectable to wear.’

  God, she hated black, and she was sure Elizabeth did too. But she was nowhere to be seen; her door had been firmly closed when Jane had tiptoed past.

  ‘I’ll be back in a moment.’ She scooted down the hallway and eased into Michael’s study. The familiar aroma brought tears to her eyes. Papers covered every surface, books stacked in piles on the floor, rolls of maps … a treasure trove. She stayed for a while absorbing the essence of the man, of the room, so different from the ruthless organisation of Elizabeth’s desk. So much about him she’d never appreciated.

  She snatched back a sob, and picked up the manila folder, containing the papers Michael had shown her, in confidence. The phrase settled in her mind. Better these weren’t left lying around for everyone to see. She’d keep them safe until Elizabeth saw fit to tell her secret. It was the least she could do for Michael. He’d done so much for her. If only she hadn’t t
aken off to find Timothy, who hadn’t even bothered to appear, Michael might still be alive.

  Closing the door behind her, she scooted up the two flights of stairs to her attic bedroom and pushed the folder under her mattress.

  On the way down she stopped outside Elizabeth’s bedroom, hovered for a moment, spotted the breakfast tray sitting untouched outside the door. She picked it up and took it back to the kitchen, where Bessie shook her head and exchanged the tray for a pile of slippery black satin.

  For two days silence enveloped the house, thick enough to slice. No one spoke. Numerous cups of tea were handed out but nothing much to eat. Not a breath of fresh air. Nothing but the all-enveloping cloud of misery. It couldn’t go on forever, wouldn’t, because when Bessie finally permitted speech, she informed them the funeral was scheduled for two days hence and would be a huge affair. The auction house would remain closed—even for receiving goods, which Jane wasn’t too sure Michael would be pleased about. Two of the bigwigs from the Labor party were coming by train from Sydney, never mind the constant stream of people who had been in and out of the house for the prayer vigil. Father Cochran had as good as moved in, and still Elizabeth hadn’t made an appearance.

  It wasn’t until the morning of the funeral that Elizabeth finally came downstairs. Jane walked past the dining room and instead of Michael’s casket, found Elizabeth sitting at the head of the table, swathed in black, with a piece of toast in front of her and a cup of her favourite perfumed tea.

  She had no idea what to do or say, so she buttoned her lip, helped herself to the most symmetrical eggs she could find, and remembered to use her napkin. Elizabeth didn’t speak. Not by so much as a twitch did she acknowledge Jane’s presence.

  As the funeral procession wound its way along the High Street towards the cathedral, Jane kept her eyes firmly latched onto Elizabeth’s die-straight back. Nobody walked beside her, and when Bessie encouraged Jane to go and take her arm, Elizabeth’s withering look as good as singed her. After all, she wasn’t family. She might live in the Quinn’s house but she wasn’t family. Neither she nor Elizabeth had a family, no matter what the rest of Maitland Town believed.