‘He knows.’
‘We left messages but he didn’t get back to any of us. I drew the short straw to drive out and tell him. I have photos,’ I said, patting the phone in the pocket of my skirt. ‘If he’s interested.’
She broke eye contact, looked down and scuffed her sneakers on the cement. ‘He went up to the shed. I’ll only clean if he gets out of the house.’
I didn’t know what to say. Was there any part of this that I should have known, or cared about? I’d had a hand in Tim leaving, but Doug’s housekeeping was something I’d defected from a long time ago.
As if reading my mind Carol looked up. ‘Whatever you do, Sarah, don’t you take any of Doug’s crap on board. If he’d treated people better in the first place, he wouldn’t be in the predicament he is.’
Once again I had the feeling there was so much more that Carol could have said, that I was missing something important. Was she alluding to Emma? Or was it something else entirely?
I gave my head a slight shake. ‘Have you finished up with the cleaning? Otherwise I’ll walk up to the shed, show him the photos of Christopher, and go.’
‘Nearly done. There’s only a load of washing left to hang out. But I’d love to see the photos.’
Proud grandma that I was, that’s all the encouragement I needed. Out came the phone.
‘They start from here,’ I said, and handed the phone to Carol.
There were twenty or more photos of the baby: on his own, with his mother, with his siblings, with his grandma, and one with his aunty Grace. That one amused me every time I looked at it. Aunty Grace looked positively uncomfortable.
Carol scrolled through them slowly, and back again. She passed the phone to me.
‘He’s a real cutie,’ she said, with a ghost of a smile.
‘Isn’t he.’ I pocketed the phone. ‘I’ll get out of your hair. See you at the gallery meeting tonight.’
She nodded. I’d only gone a few steps when she said, ‘You know, don’t you.’ There was a sadness in her voice that I’d never heard before. I closed my eyes briefly and then turned around. She looked all of her sixty-plus years. I didn’t pretend to not know what she was talking about.
‘We weren’t one hundred per cent certain. Faith was the one … She’d been looking through some of the photo albums Doug dumped in the front yard … Photos of them when they were young, and she’d seen Emma several times at the school, once with Liam and Amelia. Emma is the spitting image of Luke when he was the same age.’ It was such a relief to get that out in the open.
‘Times like this I could really do with a fag,’ Carol said. I laughed. We moved further into the shade before she continued. ‘I had wondered back when Luke was killed, but never knew for certain. When Emma was about five, they were all staying with me over the holidays and Louise and Shane had one helluva barney. In the heat of the moment he said something that got me thinking again. I asked Louise and she blew me off, in no uncertain terms.
‘Same as Faith, I saw the three kids together at school. You’d have to be blind Freddy not to see the family resemblance. I asked Louise again and she finally told me the truth. Luke was Emma’s father.’
I took an involuntary step back. My hand went to my throat and I felt the breath leave my lungs. Discovering something to be true has far more impact than speculating that it might be.
‘Did Shane always know?’
‘Oh, yes, Louise was up front with him right from the start. He was a good dad.’
‘What happened?’
‘Dunno. As I said to you before, he could be moody and Louise said she was over it. There’s probably more to it than that, but I’ll never know.’
‘It’s always a shame when a marriage doesn’t last.’
‘It is, and I wanted to tell you about Emma, especially when we became friends,’ Carol said. ‘But Louise asked me not to.’ She shrugged, a slow and fatigued lift of her narrow shoulders. ‘She’s my daughter …’
‘Of course,’ I managed to say, because I did understand those loyalties. In Carol’s position I’d have kept my daughter’s confidence too.
‘Louise can’t see, like we can, everything that Emma is missing out on.’
56
Neither of us saw or heard Doug until he cleared his throat. Then we both spun around to where he was standing in the shadows of the carport. I have no idea how long he’d been standing there.
When I flicked my gaze sideways it was to see Carol’s eyes narrowed and her mouth a thin, hard line. She’d folded her arms tightly across her chest.
‘Sort of like history has repeated itself, hey Doug,’ she said.
He mumbled something unintelligible, and moved closer to where we were standing. His belligerent expression remained firmly fixed on Carol.
My heart lurched once, twice, three times. Then came the full feeling in the back of my throat. I coughed, and put a hand out to steady myself against the back wall of the house. Neither Doug nor Carol glanced my way, they were too busy looking daggers at each other.
‘I’m going to get a glass of water,’ I said, but they didn’t hear me.
I went inside, the air redolent of Pine O Clean and Mr Sheen. There was a clean glass upside down on the draining rack beside a spotless sink.
The tap water was tepid but I felt marginally better after a long drink. Sinking down onto a kitchen chair, I dropped my head into my hands, willing myself not to think about anything.
Raised voices drifted in through the back door, the words indistinguishable. Minutes later I heard the slam of a car door and then the spit of gravel. It seemed the washing wouldn’t be hung out just now.
I braced myself for the slap of the screen door, and Doug’s presence in the room.
‘Tea?’ he said, already halfway across the room, attention focussed on the kettle.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Just tell me what that was all about. Then I’ll show you the photos of your newest, or should I say youngest grandchild, because your daughter requested that I did. Then I’ll be on my way.’
He huffed and puffed and sat down on the opposite side of the table.
‘Well?’ I said and leaned back in the chair, aiming for cool and collected but feeling anything but. His stared at a spot somewhere over my left shoulder.
‘Carol has always been a trouble-making bitch—’
‘She’s my friend,’ I said, sitting up straighter. ‘And it appears we have a grandchild in common. What did she mean by history repeating itself?’
His shoulders slouched and he folded his hands on the table in front of him. ‘You might remember that Carol had three other sisters. One of them was called Linda. She was vivacious, attractive, and she knew it. She flirted with all the blokes. I thought I was in love. She played along, pretty convincingly I might add. I was barely twenty, and she was seventeen … Then Linda got pregnant.’
‘Which she wouldn’t have done on her own!’ I said. He glared at me and I held up my hands. ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Promise I won’t interrupt.’
‘She swore it was mine. Her family insisted that I marry her—remember we’re talking the sixties here—and I would have if Mum hadn’t paid her to go away, and get rid of the baby. Linda couldn’t get away fast enough, and Mum said the cheque cleared in record time. I didn’t ever see Linda Fulton again.’
His gaze met mine for a nanosecond, then flitted away again. He cleared his throat. I began to understand what Carol meant about history repeating itself.
‘I heard years later that she’d eventually moved to America,’ he said, conversationally. ‘California of all places. Married a Yank.’
‘And the Fultons blamed you for one of their daughter’s virtual disappearance.’
‘Something like that,’ he said. ‘But we were too young. Too young to have a clue.’
‘Your mother was a forceful person. I can fully understand how a seventeen-year-old girl would be intimidated by her.’
Doug snuffed a breath out through his nose. ‘She
might have been a tough old bird but she had to be, and she always had my best interests at heart.’
I let that one go. On the subject of his mother, we were destined never to agree.
‘But your experience is what predicated the argument you had with Luke the day he was killed,’ I said in a flat voice. ‘And you’ve known all along who Luke’s girlfriend was.’
‘I didn’t know the girl was pregnant, Sarah. Not until I heard you and Carol talking about it before.’
‘What, you didn’t even suspect? Going on your own experience? And if you had, would you have tried to pay her off the way your mother did for you?’
He blinked, began shaking his head from side to side. ‘You don’t think much of me, do you?’ he said. ‘All I was trying to do that day with Luke was to make him see some sense. He was only twenty-one, and a young twenty-one at that. I promise you I didn’t know the girl was pregnant.’
‘But Louise was pregnant, and Luke would have wanted to do what he believed was the right thing. But Luke died, and I’ll bet that somewhere along the line Carol had recounted the story of her sister to Louise. Any wonder the girl didn’t want to have a thing to do with the Fairleys!
‘That poor child. She loved our son and lost him, the same as we did. She had a child by him, and all these years we could have been sharing in the joy of that.’
Doug sat there, stony-faced. I stood up and took out my phone.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m going to show you the photos of your new grandson, and implore you to at least ring your daughter. She hasn’t had an easy time of it. Then I’m going home.’ I almost said, And I hope I never see you again, but doubted the possibility of that.
I opened my phone and slid it across the table to him. Surprisingly, he knew how to scroll through the pictures.
From his glassy-eyed expression when he’d finished, I assumed Doug was moved. He didn’t say. Would it be enough to prompt him to get in touch with the one child who’d always been on his side? Who knew? I was finally past trying to fathom what besides the damn farm motivated him.
Clutching the phone in one hand, I pushed the kitchen chair into the table with the other, preparing to leave.
‘I have tried ringing Faith,’ he said. ‘She was feeding the baby. I spoke to Ben.’
‘Will you drive down and visit?’ I said, slightly mollified.
‘I’ll see them when they get home.’
‘Fair enough.’ I turned to go.
‘Tim rang,’ he said, before I’d made it to the kitchen door.
‘Good for him,’ I said, reluctantly facing Doug again. ‘Believe it or not, doing what I did for Tim wasn’t ever meant to drive a wedge between you and him.’
‘Sounds like he’s having a good time,’ he said grudgingly. ‘Met some woman … Said she hails from Jamestown.’
‘She’s a nurse,’ I said. ‘Let’s hope history doesn’t repeat itself there.’ I couldn’t hold back the edge of bitterness accompanying the words. It was going to take me some time to reconcile everything that I’d learned that day, on top of everything else.
‘I know you probably don’t believe me,’ he said. ‘But I regret things didn’t turn out differently.’
‘They might have if you’d done some things differently.’
‘I’m thinking about leasing out some of the land. No point me trying to keep it going on my own, and Jerry Bretag has always been interested in a chunk of it. I might still run a few sheep.’
With an audible sigh, I said, ‘Why are you telling me this? You’ve made it abundantly clear that the farm is none of my concern anymore.’
‘I suppose it’s my attempt at doing things differently.’
I sagged.
‘You were right,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t fair on Tim. He needs to make the life he wants, and if he ends up wanting to come back here, well and good.’
‘It’s a relief to hear you say that, Doug,’ I said. ‘You realise Grace is home, but only for another nine days.’
He pushed back his chair and lumbered across to the electric kettle. ‘Sure you won’t have a cuppa?’
‘No, thanks. I need to go.’
‘No worries,’ he said, and put one of the mugs back into the cupboard. ‘And I talked to Grace this morning. We’re having a meal at the pub tomorrow night.’
‘Really?’ Grace hadn’t said anything. But then, why should she, I reminded myself, putting aside the painful little stab that came with feeling left out.
I wanted all of my children to have a healthy relationship with their father. And for them not to feel as if they needed to run everything by me. Harden up, I told myself.
‘And I will ring Faith again,’ he said. ‘The kid’s a little corker.’
My lips lifted in a smile before I’d thought about it. ‘Yes, he certainly is.’
The kettle boiled and Doug poured water onto the tea bag.
‘I’ll walk you out,’ he said. He always let his tea brew until he couldn’t see the spoon.
I slid into the driver’s seat and pulled the door shut, turned on the ignition and buzzed down the window.
‘Goodbye, Doug,’ I said. In the rear-view mirror he made a lonely figure, standing in the barren driveway.
On the drive into town I reflected on everything Doug, and Carol, had said. Part of me wanted to be angry: at Doug for his stubborn thick-headedness and at Carol for the role she’d unwittingly played. If only Doug had talked to me after Luke’s death, shared his grief and remorse. If only he’d been able to lean on his family and let them lean on him.
Or was I looking back through rose-coloured glasses, imagining something that never was or never could have been?
The other part of me didn’t have the energy to be angry. The last few days had been an emotional rollercoaster. I felt totally drained.
That night was the monthly gallery meeting and the next day was my half-day with Aaron’s books. In an hour and a half I needed to be at the school to collect Liam and Amelia.
Instead of going straight home, I surprised myself by turning left at the cemetery turn off. It wasn’t long before I was pulling in under the mantle of a huge and ancient gum tree on the edge of the car park. There was only one other car there.
Somehow, I knew I needed to talk to my son, to tell him how dreadfully sorry I was that I hadn’t paid more attention in those last days and weeks.
If I had I might have heeded his obvious preoccupation, sensed that there was something tumultuous happening in his life and not put it down to the excitement surrounding his twenty-first birthday party.
Out of the shade, the sun was unbearably hot and the flies an immediate nuisance. Up and down the rows I went, taking a circuitous route to Luke’s grave.
As I passed them I scanned the headstones, some of the names familiar. That’s why I was almost upon my son’s grave when I noticed Louise, perched on the headstone, her head in her hands.
Horrified to be intruding on a private moment, I stepped back, and turned my ankle on a stone. I went down like a sack of spuds. The last thing I remembered was my head connecting with something hard. There was a crack, blinding spots of light, and then nothing.
57
Grace
She and Aaron were back at Walt’s wall. They’d started early, in the coolest part of the morning. Grace had quickly got the knack of choosing the right rock to pass to Aaron, and the low, dry-stone wall was almost done.
‘You’re a natural at this,’ Aaron said, and Grace beamed. ‘That might be true, but even with the leather gloves, my hands will never be the same.’
‘Don’t be a pussy,’ he said, and winked.
They stopped for lunch and sat under a pergola draped by a gnarly wisteria vine in the remnants of its spring glory.
‘You know what? I bought a framed photo at Walt Bancroft’s exhibition back in April, and I reckon it’s of this wisteria. I had it sent to Mum after the exhibition was over. She’s never mentioned it, and I’ve
never seen it,’ she said, unpacking the sandwiches made earlier. Aaron poured them both a cool drink. ‘I must ask her what happened to it.’
Aaron picked up a sandwich and sat back on the grass, taking in the view.
‘I keep telling Walt that with a few more changes, this garden could be a lot more water efficient.’
‘It is lovely, and so green, but you’ve got to wonder about the water it uses, whether he can afford it or not.’
‘I’ve replaced some of the flowers and bushes with succulents and natives. And I have lots more ideas.’
‘That’d be fun! Reorganising someone else’s garden. I’d hoped to get to say hello to Walt while we were here.’
‘Should I be jealous?’
Grace bubbled with laughter. ‘He’s an attractive man, but old enough to be my father. I like my men younger,’ she said and nudged him. Aaron shook his head but couldn’t hide his amusement.
‘Good to know, because Walt’s away. Back this evening. Do you want to visit Faith and the baby this arvo?’
‘Nah. Mum said Faith’s exhausted. Ben’s there. We’ll pop down tomorrow. I hope Dad as least rings her.’
‘He will. He rang you.’
‘Yeah, I suppose he did.’
After lunch Aaron finished off the wall and they loaded the tools and wheelbarrow onto the ute. Grace tidied up, returning the leftover rocks to what was left of the original pile.
When they got home Grace was surprised to see her black SUV parked in the carport where they’d left it that morning.
‘Mum must have decided to keep Faith’s car until after she picks up the kids from school.’
Grace had her phone out and was tapping in her mother’s number before Aaron had brought the ute to a stop behind the BMW.
‘I hope nothing’s wrong,’ she said, pressing the phone to her ear. Aaron turned off the engine. ‘No answer,’ she said. ‘She doesn’t use message bank or anything.’
‘Do you want to drive to her place?’ he said and started the ute again.
Ten minutes later they’d returned to Aaron’s. There’s been no sign of Sarah at hers. ‘She was going to go out to the farm. I wonder if she’s still there?’
When Grace Went Away Page 35