Allie slid down out of the tree and stood at the open window looking in. The old woman was wearing a pink dress and her shoes seemed too big for her thin legs. This was Mae’s beloved grandmother, putting down her worn handbag and picking up the wooden casing of an old clock Julia had taken apart. ‘I’ve been waiting for you to ring me about coming down for lunch so I could see my great-granddaughter but I have to take things into my own hands, obviously.’ She smiled and put the clock down. ‘Where is she?’
Julia put the kettle on the stove and said, ‘I don’t know. I think she’s grumpy at me.’
‘Why doesn’t that surprise me, Julia?’
Julia dropped the burnt match into the bin. ‘Do you want Earl Grey or Orange Pekoe?’
The old woman walked up close to Julia and adjusted the kettle on the stove. ‘It’s as if you don’t want to be part of the family anymore, Julia. Something about you has changed. And I wouldn’t bring it up except for Allie. She needs to feel her whole family around her.’
‘She hasn’t asked to see you, Grandma. And no, nothing about me has changed.’ Julia turned to face her. ‘Actually, who I am now is who I’ve always really been.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense Julia, I’ve known you since you were born. I’ve known you since before you knew yourself.’ She sighed. ‘Look, I can see you sacrificed for your mother and father, for the farm, but that didn’t mean you had to relinquish all ideas of marriage or family. Now it’s like you are just going on being deliberately contrary and difficult.’
‘This is what I want.’
‘This?’ she waved her hand around. ‘This is something to aspire to? The farm is falling apart. This house needs a family. Joe Hogan wanted you.’
‘Joe Hogan wants his meals cooked and laundry done…like Dad wanted from Mum and then from me. Didn’t we already have this discussion several times when Joe was scouting for a wife?’
‘It’s not just about you anymore. If you want to reject your family that’s one thing. But now Allie’s involved too. She’s part of Mae that’s come back to the valley.’
Julia sighed and reached for the tea canister.
‘Where is she Julia? I’ll go and find her.’
Allie stepped inside the door as the old woman turned and saw her, ‘Oh. There you are. Yes.’ She pulled something out of her bag and passed it to Allie. For a second Allie thought it was a photo of herself, then she saw that it was Mae, with long dark plaits, standing unsmiling and straight-backed in front of a white paling fence, a skinny fair kid beside her.
The old woman came close, the sweetness of her perfume overpowering. ‘That’s Julia with her, believe it or not.’ She tapped on the photo with a short fingernail. ‘Mae’s twelve here. Just started high school. You know she was the brightest girl in the school. She really could have done anything. The teachers all said that.’
There was a seriousness in her mother’s face that Allie had never seen, and her eyes were wide open, as if searching for all the possible futures that lay ahead.
The old woman reached for Allie’s hand and stroked it with her papery fingers. ‘Did she ever talk about coming back to the valley? This farm is half hers you know. Half yours now, I should think.’ She raised her voice. ‘Isn’t that right Julia? Allie has a right to half this property.’
Julia shrugged and prised open a tin of shortbreads. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t looked into the legalities of it.’
‘You’d better. Allie may not like what you are doing to the place. It doesn’t even look like a farm anymore.’
‘That’s the idea.’
‘So you say.’ The old woman started getting down china teacups and saucers from the kitchen dresser. ‘Let’s drink from these, Julia. I can’t abide those thick cups you use.’
Julia nodded as she slipped a knitted cosy over the teapot.
Allie moved close to the old woman and spoke quietly, so Julia wouldn’t hear. ‘She always read the National Geographic you sent.’
She tilted her head and smiled, ‘I thought so.’
Julia put a jug of milk on the table. ‘What National Geographic?’
‘I used to send Mae magazines when we’d finished with them.’
‘You did? I didn’t know you had contact with her.’
The old woman shrugged her shoulders and sat down at the table. She patted at her short white hair.
Julia said, ‘So how often did you send magazines to her?’
‘Often enough. But you’ll no doubt be pleased to hear, Julia, that she only ever wrote back to me once.’ She tipped the milk jug to look inside. ‘Who are you getting your milk from these days?’
‘The Philips.’
Allie wanted to tell her great-grandmother that Mae used to stack the magazines in the toilet outside, the pile of yellow spines growing higher and higher over the years. Mae would tear out articles and leave them on Allie’s pillow. In the dust under her bed was a tangle of screwed-up stories about Antarctic adventurers and African tribes. Mae’s grandmother also sent tea towels, fine Irish linen that Mae would carefully iron and stack in the kitchen cupboard. She pressed all their sheets and pillowslips. She even took on an ironing job for a little while but they said she was too slow. Allie looked down at the photo of her mother, to see again that clear light in her face.
The old woman poured the tea. ‘I saw you talking to young Saul Philips the other day. I guess you heard about him and your mother, how they were sweethearts?’
Allie nodded. ‘She told me.’
‘So who is this Tom that Julia mentioned? I notice he didn’t turn up for the funeral.’
Allie glanced at Julia as she spoke. ‘Maybe he didn’t hear about it.’
The old woman raised her eyebrows. ‘Just like Mae never heard about her own mother’s funeral?’
Julia’s voice was low. ‘How was I supposed to get in contact with her if I didn’t have a phone number or street address? It’s Mae’s fault for being so bloody secretive and for not checking her post box for days! The only reason she made it to Dad’s funeral was because I insisted she give me her actual address after she never turned up to Mum’s. I had to wring it out of her like…’ She flapped her hands into the air as she stood up and went to the bench.
‘Just the same, she should have been here for her mother’s burial. We needed her here.’ The old woman gripped Allie’s hand again, ‘So was Tom going to marry her? She could have had any man she wanted you know. She was like her father in that, he had all the women in the valley after him. What was he like, this Tom?’
Tom who had bent to wipe the drops of blood from the floor, the very last traces of her mother. She hated that she had let him hold her that morning when Mae disappeared. Right there at the bottom of the stairs he had hugged her to his pale flesh. She looked down at the photo on her lap.
Julia said, ‘Grandma…I don’t think this is quite the time…’
‘I hardly need your instruction on social etiquette, my dear.’
Julia stood up and poured more hot water into the teapot.
‘I’d like you to come and visit me in town, Allie. We have a spare room, your great-uncle Dan and I. You can stay with us as long as you want. Anytime, for as long as you want. There was always an open invitation to your mother too, you know.’
Allie remembered when she and Mae came up for Allie’s grandfather’s funeral. Early the first morning, Mae had walked out into the paddock, her shadow stretching behind her, her black shoes wet from the grass, and she had suddenly dropped to the ground and pressed her hands into the earth. ‘I never thought I missed it. Not like this.’ And she had gripped her stomach and doubled over as she waved Allie away. ‘Leave me alone. Go back to the house.’
The old woman put down her teacup. ‘Don’t fill the pot for me Julia. I’ve got to keep going, I happened to be out here delivering a meal to the Lachlans and I’m due back in town. I just wanted to drop that photo off to Allie.’ She stroked Allie’s hair. ‘Keep it. And come and visit me soon
, eh?’
Allie followed her aunt out to the old woman’s car. Julia waved as the car disappeared down the driveway, then she turned and walked briskly down the paddock, pulling her gloves back on.
Allie went inside and picked up the half-eaten shortbread left on her great-grandmother’s plate. She put a piece on her tongue and let it dissolve into a sweet paste. She remembered that at her grandfather’s funeral, Mae had sought out the old woman and hugged her a long time, her eyes squeezed tight.
Mae hadn’t wanted Allie to go with her to the funeral. She had arranged for Allie to stay with a neighbour but when she took her down there with her bag, the neighbour came to the door and said her husband was sick and there was no way she could look after Allie as well, so the two of them ended up catching the afternoon train north. Allie knew from the way Mae stared out the train window that she didn’t want to talk.
Mae had embarrassed her by crying when she hugged Julia on the station platform. Allie could see people glancing sideways as they walked around the two women to collect their luggage. She had been surprised that Julia was so much bigger than Mae. She was taller and broader in her blue work pants, her face clean of make-up, her fine pale hair long and loose down her back. In the front seat of Julia’s old ute, Allie sat between her aunt and her mother, Julia’s thigh pressed against her leg, tensing then softening as her aunt changed gears.
Mae smoked a cigarette, half-leaning out the window, her voice whisked away with the smoke as they drove across the river flats towards the hills. ‘So how did it happen?’ She spoke to Julia the same way she spoke to Allie, straight down the line with none of the lightness in her voice that she used with Tom.
‘Just like that. It just happened,’ said Julia. ‘I went in after milking and all the blankets were off, he’d thrown them on the floor, and his arms were out, like this.’ She stretched one arm along in front of Allie and Mae. ‘He was so thin in the end, you could see where the bones had been broken in the accident, they’d all…calcified,’ her voice dropped. Allie was afraid she would cry again. ‘He was so thin, Mae…and just completely cold when I went in. He must have been like that all night. I should have checked on him before milking.’
There was silence as the car climbed the escarpment, the engine churning slowly around the steep hairpin bends, up and away from the plain and wide river. As they drove along the ridge in the fading light, Allie peered out at the dark forest reaching over the road. She spoke into the silence. ‘What accident?’
‘What?’ said Mae.
‘What accident broke his bones?’
Julia flicked on the wipers, as light rain sprinkled the windscreen. Allie waited for her mother to speak but it was Julia who said, ‘Dad had a tractor roll on him.’
‘How? How did it roll on him?’
‘He drove it wrong, made a mistake.’
‘Did he go to the same hospital I was born in?’
‘Yes,’ Mae sighed, exhaling smoke. ‘The very same. You were born there and he ended up there a few weeks later.’ She threw her cigarette butt onto the road and wound up the window against the rain. She rubbed Allie’s thigh and her hand pressed too hard.
Allie shut her eyes and turned her head from side to side to smell one and then the other sister—the cigarette smoke, the perfume and the mustiness. As they descended into the valley, the forest opened out into wide paddocks, vivid green in the last light of the day. Allie leaned into her mother and whispered, ‘Where’s he live? The First Love?’
But Mae pursed her lips and shook her head.
chapter thirteen
It was difficult for Allie to see him in the dark but there was the faint smell of incense and the soft intake of his breath. It was the most intimate sound of him, the breath moving in and out of his body. Creatures rustled in the big mango tree beside his house. She liked being in the forest at night, the sounds of other life going on all around her, the clickings and scurryings of small animals.
Her eyes found the outline of his body where he lay on his back, his hair dark on the white pillow. People’s faces were naked while they slept. Mae seemed sad when she was asleep, the corners of her mouth pulled down, a faint crease between her thin eyebrows. Allie wanted to shine her torch onto Saul’s face. What she was looking for might be written on his face.
She put her hands on the wooden windowsill and pulled herself up so she could lean her body into the air of his room. The sill creaked under her and he stirred. She dropped to the ground and heard the sheets rustling and then his footsteps through the house.
His front door banged shut and he was coming down the steps, pulling a T-shirt over his head. ‘Allie?’
The pulse in her neck ticked as he walked across the wet grass towards her. How inevitable it felt, this circling to the truth, like the stars wheeling their way across the sky. She and Mae used to lie back and watch the night sky turning around them.
He stood in front of her, his voice sharp. ‘What are you doing here?’
She looked up at him. ‘I can’t sleep.’
He turned to look out at the forest, his hands on his hips. ‘So what are you doing here, at my house?’
Her mouth was dry. ‘I don’t know.’
He squatted beside her. There was the fuggy smell of sleep on him. ‘You frightened me. I don’t want you looking in on me in the middle of the night. Come and visit me during the day but not like this.’
‘I was just walking. If I walk then I can go back and sleep.’
He was silent for a moment. ‘You know that Mae used to walk at night? She’d come to my window and chuck stones at it and I’d go out and we’d sit on the verandah under my mum’s old mosquito net.’
‘She never told me that.’
‘I thought that was why you’d come.’ He smiled. ‘So, maybe she didn’t tell you everything after all.’
‘She told me everything important.’
He looked at her for a moment, then said, ‘Did she tell you that I went to Sydney?’
‘What?’
‘I went looking for her, I tracked her down.’
‘No! I don’t believe you. She would have said.’ She swayed a little on her haunches and reached back to the warm brick pier behind her.
‘It’s true. She’d been gone two years and I was on my way back down to Tasmania and I just got off the train in Sydney and went looking for her.’
‘You found her?’ Allie sat down and the damp ground soaked through her thin cotton dress.
‘Yeah. I found you both. You were little, a toddler. I waited at the post office and eventually she came to pick up her mail. She was unwrapping a package on the steps and I sat down next to her.’
‘And?’
‘And we went and had a milkshake at a place just down from the post office.’
‘The Parthenon.’ She shook her head. ‘I was there?’
‘Yeah.’
‘But I don’t remember! I’d remember.’ He had come to find her, actually come to claim her and Mae never said anything.
‘You were only little.’ He threaded his fingers together. ‘Maybe she never told you because it was kind of awkward. We ended up arguing, there in the bloody milk bar…while the guy cooked hamburgers and chips five feet away.’
‘What did you argue about?’
He lifted his hands into the air. ‘It just wasn’t… I just wanted to make contact with her, you know.’ He was measuring his words. ‘I thought I could put something to rest, I guess. But she was kind of nervous. I think that the guy, what’s his name… Tom, must have been on the scene and I guess she was worried about getting home to him. She kept saying she had to get home, that she was expected. Then she just stood up, and said that I was crazy and that she couldn’t just pick up and try again somewhere else, it was just too hard and I should go off and find myself a good wife.’
‘What was too hard? What did she mean, it was too hard?’
He shrugged. ‘Things hadn’t exactly been easy.’
�
�But Tom wasn’t around then. She didn’t meet him till I was like five or six!’
‘I don’t know, then. I didn’t understand it.’ He stretched one leg out in front of him and leaned back against the house.
Allie was silent, looking up at the clouds scudding across the sky, letting moonlight leak through. ‘Don’t you think she would have been a good wife?’
He nodded slowly, ‘Yeah.’ He emphasised each word, ‘She would have. She was a good woman.’
‘Is that what you wanted? Did you want her to be your wife?’
He took a moment to reply. ‘Not then. Not when I went to Sydney, that wasn’t what I was trying to… I just wanted to see her, that’s all.’
Allie shielded her face as a flying fox swooped low in front of them, its black wings buffeting the air. It landed in the dark shape of the tree above them. How could Mae have not told her? Day after day, Mae had let her wait for him.
A mango dropped to the ground in front of them. Saul reached over to pick it up. ‘Not ripe yet. Iris always wants me to pick them for her but I prefer to leave them for the bats and the local kids. This tree has been here at least eighty years, the original homestead on the property was down here. All the kids come every summer. These are the best mangoes in the valley.’ He tossed the fruit into the bushes. ‘Once, when I was little, maybe in second or third class, I came down here one day and there was a group of boys teasing this little kid. They started beating him up, pelting him with rotten mangoes and stones. He was a scrawny little guy, from a poor family up the valley. He’d come down with an old carry bag to get mangoes. And I did nothing, I just stood and watched. They wouldn’t let him run away, so he just curled up in a ball while they pelted him. And a few times he looked over at me, while I just stood there. He works at the co-op in town now, he’s a big guy with a beard and beer gut. I tried to apologise to him once. I started, you know, describing the incident and saying how sorry I was. And he just laughed and said I was confusing him with someone else.’
Allie stood up. He was worse than Mae, holding out on her, distracting her with stories. It was up to him to say it, she wasn’t going to extract it from him as if it were some terrible confession. She spoke abruptly. ‘Goodbye. Sorry I frightened you.’
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