The Art of Preserving Love

by Robbi Neal

  Gracie and Paul looked at him wide-eyed and open-mouthed and finally Paul said, ‘I think that you just said more than you have said in the entire rest of your life.’

  ‘And in all that time you didn’t think to let anyone know you weren’t dead?’ snapped Edie. She could barely look at him. How could he have let her, let his mother, think he was dead all these years?

  ‘I couldn’t, Edie,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think I had anyone to come back to.’

  ‘Maybe Gracie and I have something to do inside,’ said Paul.

  ‘Do we?’ asked Gracie. ‘Because I want to hear what happened to Theo.’

  ‘Yes, I think we do,’ said Paul and Theo helped Paul up from the step and Paul patted Theo on the shoulder like he would a son who was just leaving after his weekly visit, as if Theo had never been away all these years, as if they hadn’t thought he was dead. As if he’d merely popped down to Melbourne for a spot of business.

  Edie sighed crossly. Paul raised his eyebrow at her and handed her the water glass and she gripped it tight as if it might hold her up, or as if she might throw it at Theo or at her father for patting him like the prodigal son returned.

  ‘I invited him in. He says he won’t come inside,’ said Paul. ‘He says he can’t come inside until he’s spoken with you. So speak with him, will you, because it’s getting dreadfully cold out here.’

  ‘So, Papa …’ Gracie said when they got to the kitchen, leaving Theo and Edie outside. She knew more was happening than Theo simply appearing from the dead, that was a miracle in itself but she had expected it and wasn’t surprised and didn’t know why Paul and Edie were surprised. Lilly said she had seen him.

  She put the kettle on. ‘There’s obviously a story here. Why hasn’t Beth come with him?’

  ‘It’s a long story, Gracie.’ Paul sat in the kitchen chair. ‘It’s a love story but not one about a man and a woman, though that’s part of it — it’s a love story about two sisters and a father.’

  She put her hands on her hips and stared down at him. She wanted more and she would get it.

  ‘All right, judge,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what he’s doing here without Beth. Yes he married her but it was always Edie he loved, but you were too young to know that.’

  ‘Did Edie love him?’

  ‘Immensely, but she didn’t want to marry him and Beth did and that’s what happened.’

  ‘Why didn’t she want to marry him if she loved him?’

  Paul thought for a moment and said, ‘Because Beth loved him too, and you know your sister, she always puts everyone else’s needs first.’

  ‘Well, we must find out what he is doing here and where he has been. Perhaps something has happened to Beth and he’s come to tell us, did you think of that? We can’t leave Edie out there alone.’ Gracie started towards the door and Paul reached out and stopped her.

  ‘Alone is exactly what they have never had and need,’ said Paul. ‘So make me that tea you promised.’

  Theo stood in front of her, his hat in his hand. The cold wet air settled on his greying hair, the moisture turning it silver. Edie looked hard at him, trying to see if he was the same person. His hair was longer than he used to have it and more wayward, there was no oil in it to hold it down and it looked as though an old aunt had ruffled it. His moustache was gone and his chin was sturdier; the lines on his face were weathered. His eyes and mouth had fine lines around them as though they were always ready to smile. He stood there tall and proud, almost challenging her to reject him, and she realised he was much stronger than he had been when he was young, and he had the face of a man who had worked hard. She looked at the ground, then back up at him, and it was as if she was nineteen again and she began to melt into him. Then she remembered she was nearly twice that age now and there was Virgil.

  ‘I am old,’ she said. Her voice was barely there.

  He didn’t laugh at her.

  ‘You have never been more beautiful,’ he said, and the quietness was theirs.

  They stood in it for some time. His eyes were still the kindest eyes she had ever seen. He was fuller, though, and she laughed.

  ‘You’ve actually put on some weight.’

  He looked down at his belly and smiled at her. It was the same smile she remembered, the smile that knew all about her stubbornness and her desire and her loss and loved her anyway.

  ‘Edie, I always have and always will love you with every part of me.’

  ‘I have met someone,’ she said slowly and cautiously, so he could hear all that she meant by it. He seemed completely untroubled by this. A fly landed on his arm and he brushed it away along with her words.

  ‘We belong with each other,’ he said. ‘It turns out I am a farmer and quite a good one. I am also good at saving money and I have bought a small plot at Scarsdale. I’m thinking raspberries and herbs. I want you to come and live with me in Ligar Street. I’ll give the house a lick of paint.’

  ‘Yellow?’

  ‘Yes, if you like.’

  She thought about how far she had travelled and who she had become. She wasn’t that nineteen-year-old girl any more.

  ‘I can’t,’ she said.

  ‘The girl I know can do anything,’ he said. ‘She can make her dress ridiculously short despite all the busybodies, despite Missus Blackmarsh and Vera Gamble gossiping about it.’ She smiled and he went on, ‘She can turn her back on her desires because her love for her family is all that matters to her, and she can save a man’s life with a cup of Bovril.’

  He waited.

  ‘Have you seen Beth?’ asked Edie.

  ‘I have. I had to — it was the right thing to do.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Edie, and everything inside her began swirling.

  ‘I wouldn’t have come if we couldn’t be completely free,’ he said. ‘Beth has her own life and it doesn’t include me. We’re having the marriage annulled. We never consummated it after the ceremony.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Edie.

  ‘Beth wanted a divorce — she thought it sounded more exotic.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Edie, ‘she wants to be a divorcee.’

  ‘But it turns out an annulment is quicker and easier with the judge. The hardest part was proving I’m still alive.’

  ‘Couldn’t you just walk in there and show them?’

  ‘I had to get the army to write that they had made a mistake and to list me as not dead and the army doesn’t like to admit to mistakes.’

  ‘Would we be … companions?’ Edie asked, looking down at her feet.

  ‘Good heavens no,’ he laughed. He took her face in his hands. ‘Edie, I want you good and proper as my good and proper wife and no other way.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Edie, her mind cluttered with images of Virgil.

  ‘I’ll wait,’ said Theo. ‘You know I can do that. You know I will wait for you forever, Edie.’

  Everything she had felt for him as a young woman came pouring back into her soul. But she didn’t know if it was real or a memory.

  Forty-Six

  The Room

  Wednesday, 27 August 1924, when ghosts are faced.

  When John Appleby Junior appeared for his morning visit he found Lilly sitting up on the bed dressed in a sunflower dress that looked like spring, a straw hat on her head with a ribbon and that old Mister Cottingham sitting on the chair beside her.

  ‘You can discharge me now, young man. There is nothing wrong with my heart,’ she announced.

  ‘Maybe not, but you’ll catch your death if you go out in that thin dress,’ he said. Blast these old patients of his father’s who never treated him like a full-grown man and a doctor in his own right. ‘I’m the doctor,’ he said. ‘I’ll decide if you go home or not.’

  The old woman smiled at the old man as though they would humour him if he insisted on it. He pulled out his stethoscope and listened to her heart over and over, from the back and from the front to make sure.

  Finally he said, ‘Well, it’s a miracle bey
ond my understanding. You can go home if you can find something warmer to wear.’ She started to get up from the bed and he said, ‘And provided you have someone to look after you every hour of the day.’

  ‘Where is Theo?’ Old Cottingham asked her.

  ‘He’s coming and going, he says he has things to arrange and that he doesn’t know when he will be here or there,’ said Lilly.

  ‘Well,’ said Paul, ‘the doctor’s right.’

  ‘Thank you at last,’ said John but they merely looked at him as if he had rudely interrupted an important matter and continued without him.

  ‘You can’t go to your own home where you’ll be alone. You can have Lucy’s room and I won’t hear a word about it.’

  John thought the old man must have been a formidable force when he was younger. The old lady submitted immediately to his decision and John would have too had it been required.

  Paul wondered if he had just made a mistake. He had removed the boards from the window and doors many years ago but still none of them ever went into Lucy’s room.

  When Paul arrived home with Lilly, Edie and Gracie had a day bed ready for her in the sitting room beside the fire.

  ‘She has to have plenty of rest,’ Paul said and he looked sternly at Lilly and said, ‘Doctor’s orders.’

  Then he took Edie and Gracie into the hallway and Edie wondered what he needed to say that couldn’t be said in front of Lilly.

  ‘Now I need you girls to clean out your mother’s room for Lilly to stay in.’

  Edie didn’t think she’d heard properly.

  ‘Edie, I need you to get your mother’s room ready for Lilly.’

  Edie could feel herself staring at him like an idiot, as though she didn’t understand the question.

  ‘Sure,’ said Gracie and she pulled Edie down the hallway to the room that was never opened. Gracie had grown up with that room boarded up and had just accepted it. When she had asked about the room she had seen Paul’s and Edie’s faces stricken with pain and she soon realised it was better not to ask and just let it be. If she asked Beth about the room Beth would also become quiet and tell her that it was not her place to tell her. Her father had taken down the boards on peace day but still no one went inside.

  Edie stood at the door of the room as if afraid to go in.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Gracie asked her.

  ‘I haven’t been in here for nearly nineteen years,’ said Edie. ‘It was our mother’s room and I think Papa was just so broken and sad at losing her that he couldn’t cope with the thought of anyone coming in here till now. I feel that when I walk in there I will find all the ghosts I don’t want to see.’

  ‘Well,’ said Gracie, ‘maybe you will find ghosts you do want to see, ghosts that will bring you comfort. But I will go first and scare all those horrid ghosts away so only the benevolent ones are left.’

  Gracie walked in and pulled back the curtains and sunlight filled the room. It shone on the perfume bottle on the dressing table and on the gold thread in the bed cover and Gracie was overcome by the thought that here were all the things that had belonged to the mother she had never known. Her mother had touched and loved these things. Gracie smelt the perfume and opened the cupboard and buried her face in the clothes and she realised that they didn’t really mean anything to her because Edie was her mother.

  ‘Come on, Edie,’ she called. ‘It’s quite lovely and not at all scary.’

  Edie walked in and looked about her. The room wasn’t at all musty, it smelt of her mother, she could hear her mother’s voice singing. Or was it Gracie? She realised they sounded exactly the same. She touched the perfume bottle and held it to her nose and memories of her mother’s smell flooded into her, then she opened the drawer and touched the silk underwear, now so incredibly old-fashioned, and remembered how soft her mother’s skin was.

  ‘She loved you, Gracie,’ she said.

  Gracie said, ‘I know,’ and believed it because Edie said it.

  Edie sat on the bed with a plop and a dust cloud filled the room. They both ran out laughing.

  ‘Oh, we have some work to do,’ said Gracie, but Edie grabbed her and held her tight and whispered that she loved her over and over. When Edie finally let her go, Gracie said, ‘What do we start with? The dusting or the floors?’

  ‘The bed.’ They both agreed and within hours the room was clean and fresh. It still had Lucy’s things in it, and when Edie touched them she thought how right her mother had been to make her promise to care for Gracie.

  Forty-Seven

  The Notebook

  Sunday, 31 August 1924, which isn’t as pleasant as expected.

  Edie couldn’t think straight about anything at all. Theo had said he would see her at his usual time, which she took to mean three on Sunday afternoon, when he used to come each week with his rose. Which was the exact same time she usually went for a drive with Virgil and she just couldn’t bring herself to tell Virgil not to come around because that would make him curious and she would have to answer a lot of questions about Theo. She and Paul and Gracie were sitting in the kitchen. Lilly was resting in Lucy’s room.

  ‘Look at this, Edie,’ Paul said, holding a rolled-up newspaper in the air so she couldn’t see anything at all. ‘Not only did Reverend Whitlock spout all that rubbish from the pulpit this morning but he has a piece in yesterday’s Courier claiming that those — and we know here he means me — fighting for a forty-four hour week for workers are extremists attempting to undermine the economic stability of the state. He only got the piece printed because he’s retiring, and for that reason alone I am going to be the bigger person and let him have the last word.’

  ‘Well, there is a first time for everything,’ said Edie.

  Edie heard the knock on the door at three and went to open it, not sure which man she would find. It was Virgil. He stood hat in hand and looked at her hopefully.

  ‘Virgil, hello,’ she said, as though he was a friend she hadn’t seen in months. ‘Why don’t you come in for afternoon tea?’ Why was she talking to him like that, sounding so formal?

  ‘Afternoon tea? Why not.’

  So she took him into the dining room and left him there while she went back to the kitchen and asked Paul and Gracie if they could entertain him for a moment. Edie went to her bedroom and paced and took out her notebook and flicked through the pages and put it back in her pocket.

  Gracie came in and said, ‘Are you going to come and see him? He’s come for you, after all. Why aren’t you going for your usual drive?’

  ‘Ohhh,’ said Edie. ‘You’re right.’ And she followed Gracie back into the dining room and was relieved to find that Paul had engaged Virgil in a one-way conversation about the working week.

  Ten minutes later the next knock on the door came and she rushed to make sure she got to it before Gracie.

  ‘You’re late,’ she said to Theo.

  He smiled. ‘Am I? Late for what?’

  She didn’t know and motioned for him to come inside.

  ‘I’ll just see my mother first,’ he said.

  Edie watched from the door of Lucy’s room as Lilly, who had been having a rest, got up and threw her arms around Theo, saying over and over that she never once believed him to be dead.

  She left them and went back to the dining room where Virgil was waiting for her with Gracie and Paul. She had no idea how they filled the next fifteen minutes until Theo walked in.

  Edie saw Virgil’s face darken when he saw Theo.

  ‘Virgil Ainsworth, this is Theo Hooley,’ said Edie and Virgil stood up and the two men shook hands too vigorously.

  ‘Virgil is staying for tea and cake too,’ Edie told Theo.

  Theo didn’t react. To Edie he seemed calm and unreadable — or was he so sure of his future with her that Virgil was just a hiccup to him? She couldn’t tell and it bothered her because as far as she was concerned she hadn’t made any decisions.

  She looked to Paul and Gracie for help but they were trying to wipe
the grins from their faces. Paul pulled himself together first. ‘We should go to the kitchen,’ he said. ‘It’s more friendly.’

  So they all sat around the kitchen table — Gracie, Paul, Lilly, Theo, Virgil and Edie. Gracie kept looking at Edie and then at Theo, then at Edie and then at Virgil, trying to see which coupling worked best and Edie scowled at her to stop. But Edie found herself gazing at Theo and then Virgil and then Theo, trying to compare the two men and realising she couldn’t because they were cut from different cloth and it would be unfair to try.

  Gracie made tea and put out scones and got the good china. Paul kept grinning at Edie and she knew it was because he was enjoying every minute of her discomfort at being stuck between these two men.

  Virgil talked about automobiles, and when it became obvious Theo knew nothing about automobiles, Virgil got fired up and talked about drum brakes and ignition starters. Theo talked about Africa and coffee beans and growing raspberries that do well in the frost, unlike most things, which Virgil knew nothing about. Paul and Gracie watched on, raising their eyebrows at Edie every now and then as if this was all her fault. Edie was indignant. She hadn’t done this at all, she hadn’t made Theo come back eight years too late.