Thornwood House

by Anna Romer

  I smiled. ‘You have no idea how pleased I am.’

  But this time Samuel didn’t return my smile. A change had come upon him. My familiar Samuel was gone, the cold stranger had returned. His eyes were empty again, his mouth grim. Withdrawing his fingers from mine, he gripped my wrist hard.

  ‘You didn’t even know who I was.’

  I tensed. ‘Samuel, let go. You’re hurting me.’

  ‘Have you met someone else, Aylish? You have, haven’t you?’

  ‘No! Don’t be ridiculous, Samuel.’

  ‘That’s the real reason, isn’t it?’ He jerked down on my wrist. ‘That’s why you never wrote, why you never came to see me at Greenslopes.’

  ‘Stop it, Samuel, you’re hurting me!’ I tried to pull free, but he held firm.

  ‘And the little girl, she’s not mine, is she? She can’t be, I’ve been away for years . . . what do you take me for, Aylish, a bloody fool?’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ I cried, sensing curious looks around us, knowing that we were making a scene, but too upset to care. ‘I did write. I don’t know why you never got any of my letters! There’s no one else, Samuel. How can you say that? There’s only ever been you. And Lulu . . . of course she’s yours, she’s nearly four, why would I even tell you about her if she wasn’t your daughter? Please, Samuel . . . you’re not well – ’

  ‘Well enough to know a lie when I hear one.’ He released my wrist as if touching me repulsed him. Then he added quietly, chillingly, ‘You’ll be sorry for this. By God, Aylish, you’ll be sorry.’

  His mouth worked as if he wanted to say more, but instead he made an animal sound in the back of his throat. A snarl, a sob, I couldn’t be sure. Turning, he limped away along the street, his stick jabbing the pavement, his shoulders set; a tall emaciated bear of a man careless of the pedestrians dodging out of his path.

  11

  Audrey, January 2006

  The Lutheran church was on the airfield road north-west of town. It was perched on a plateau of threadbare brown grass, a tiny whitewashed chapel with a tall roof and twin cypress trees guarding the entryway. Under one of the cypresses was propped a gleaming vintage motorbike.

  Leaving my Celica on the verge, I hurried across the grass towards the little cemetery tucked away at the rear of the church. I passed a few modern plots – flat marble plaques implanted in the arid soil, invisible unless you were standing over them. The older gravesites occupied the furthest corner of the property, marked by a wire fence and shaded by red gums. On the other side was a paddock of dry lucerne inhabited by ghostly-white Brahman cattle. Behind them in the distance, a huddle of purple-blue volcanic hills.

  I took my time weaving between the graves, pausing here and there to crouch and touch my fingers to weathered names, dates, endearments. I’d brought along my old Minolta but now that I was here it seemed too intrusive to start shooting; even the barely-there whirr of my shutter would have been out of place. The morning was too serene, the graves too peaceful. Deep quietude cocooned the graveyard, occasionally broken by the slipstream of noise as a solitary car sped past. I might have drifted through a crack in time and into another world.

  The graves in this section were largely pre-war; many of the inscriptions were written in German, evidence of the immigrants who’d settled the area in the 1870s.

  One tiny marker begged a closer look. I knelt beside it and brushed at the flaking inscription until letters appeared: In Loving Memory of Mary Irene, Aged Eleven Years. Same age as Bronwyn. The blackened headstone struck me as too sombre a final home for the spirit of a vibrant eleven-year-old girl and I hastened away, only to stumble upon more children’s graves. One of them, surrounded by a collapsed iron-lace border, lured me back. Its unadorned headstone bore a single date – 21 April, 1907 – but there were two names: Edith, seven years, and Wilma, two days. Beloved daughters of Napoleon and Isabella.

  My breath caught. How had she fared, the mother of these two lost girls? Had she stood where I now stood, a bereft young woman hugging her ribs in an attempt to hold herself together, fighting a losing battle against the grief that would tear her apart? How could she have moved on, how could she have taken the first step back towards life, when life had betrayed her so cruelly?

  A raucous cry interrupted my reverie, drawing my gaze skyward in time to see a pair of grey-green dollarbirds swoop from the branches of a gnarly old red gum at the furthest end of the cemetery. Tumbling and rolling around each other, their coin-like underwing markings flashed white as they hawked for butterflies. They swept off across the paddock, diving over the Brahmans before riding an updraft back to their tree. I found myself following them, curious for a closer look. The sunlight warmed my arms, I grew languid. It was peaceful here, I hadn’t heard a car for more than five minutes. There was just the dollarbirds’ barking cries, the murmur of cattle, and the ever-present whisper of windblown leaves.

  I loitered beneath the dollarbirds’ tree, gazing up. It was a pristine day, the sky a cobalt dome, the sun gloriously hot. Everything seemed so alive. It was an odd observation to make in a graveyard, but I could feel the energetic hum and thrill in the air around me, like swarms of invisible insects. I felt alert, in the grip of a sort of vertigo, as though I was standing on a precipice with one foot lifted in the act of striding out over the edge . . .

  Reflex made me look down.

  The grave at my feet was neglected. Weeds struggled through cracks in the masonry slab, and the headstone – a massive granite cross engraved with a Celtic knot – was pitted by what looked like bullet holes. As though someone had used it for target practice.

  I brushed at the flaky stone, and when that failed to clarify the ravaged lettering, I sat back and pondered it. Regarding it through narrowed eyes, I could just make out the ‘S’ at the start of the inscription, and the ‘R-I-O’ that I presumed were the first three letters of the name Riordan. Everything else was chipped away – dates, epitaphs, loving memories – as though the elements had seen fit to wipe all trace of him from the face of existence.

  I knelt closer. Not the elements; I’d been right first time. Someone had taken pot-shots, probably with a small calibre rifle, and from a fair distance. Not enough to shatter the headstone, but adequate to pit the granite surface and spoil it with rings of shallow chipping. I glanced around, puzzled. I hadn’t noticed that any of the other graves were vandalised. Just this one.

  Who would bother to deface a gravestone – bored kids, local louts with nothing better to shoot at? And why this grave? Was it coincidence, or had resentment and suspicion followed Samuel into death and beyond?

  ‘That’s the nature of tight-knit communities like Magpie Creek,’ Corey had told me. ‘People know each other’s business, and they have long memories – ’

  Gravel bit into my knees. The sun had burned a heat rash on my shoulders and a headache had begun to gather behind my eyes. The liveliness of the morning seeped away. I was limp with exhaustion again, or maybe it was defeat. I entertained the idea of stretching out on the sun-warmed slab among the shards of powdery rubble and weeds, laying my head above the place where – six feet below – Samuel’s bones nestled in the dark earth.

  Foolish thoughts.

  I stood, brushing grit off my jeans legs. The dollarbirds had flown away, leaving the Brahmans to snore in peace. Silence reigned supreme, there was only the creak of windblown eucalypt branches and the distant drone of a plane.

  Whatever I’d hoped to find here – a sense of communion perhaps, or a touching of spirits that might validate my belief in Samuel – eluded me. My quest to prove Samuel’s innocence had turned up little in the way of absolute truth. At least, not the truth I wanted. Hearsay, innuendo, prejudice, unfounded accusations; and now the senseless destruction of a gravestone. All fragments of a larger story whose ending I was beginning to dread.

  Since I wasn’t really looking, I found her easily. She’d been laid to rest at the edge of the old section that slumbered in closest proximity to t
he church – nearer to God, perhaps.

  I stopped, my heart squeezing out a few extra beats in confused surprise. Aylish’s final resting place would have been impossible to miss. It was a humble affair, elegant in its simplicity, uncluttered with sentiment. The grave itself was protected by a masonry slab, cracked and pitted by the passage of years, not so different from any of the other graves that surrounded it, apart from a glaring absence of weeds and rubble.

  And a vase of fresh roses.

  The headstone was traditional, a simple arch with a circle engraved at its heart. Inside the circle was a relief carving of a wildflower: a delicately stylised waratah. I bent to read the inscription.

  Aylish Lutz

  Beloved of Jacob

  Taken to God, 13 March, 1946

  Aged 22 years

  Once again I had the giddy sense of falling forward. Taken to God. They were only words, but they spoke in a chill whisper of that distant night. I could see her so clearly in the eye of my mind. She was curled in the shadow of a tall boulder, her limbs skewed under her, black trails of blood leaking from her wounds, her face hidden from the moonlight. As she waited.

  Waited for death. Or for Samuel. Whichever came first.

  I was on my knees, though I didn’t recall making the decision to move. Reaching for the roses, I bruised a petal between finger and thumb, disturbing its dark-red perfume. Not a dream, then. Real. The great blowsy roses were plump and unwithered, their stems erect, the water in the vase clear. They’d been placed here late last night or early this morning.

  Minutes crawled by.

  In the privacy of my secret mind, I was coming to feel that I knew Aylish intimately. Out here – in the dust and sunlight and baking heat of reality – I had no claim on her. She was a stranger to me, a faceless young woman who had died sixty years ago.

  Yet someone remembered her. Someone cared enough to clear the detritus of time from her grave, remove the weeds. Bring roses. I touched the crimson-black petals again, drank in their scent. In this heat, they’d be dead by nightfall.

  It could only be Luella Jarman, I reasoned. But after all I’d learnt about Luella – the elusive hermit who drove an hour and a half into Brisbane to avoid being seen at the local shops, and who refused to open her door even to old friends – the image of her tending her mother’s grave seemed unlikely.

  I looked over my shoulder at the church.

  I couldn’t see the entryway from here, just the tall siding with its leadlight windows. The door had been ajar when I arrived, and I hadn’t heard anyone’s car arrive, nor had I heard the old motorbike rumble to life and roar away. The place looked deserted, but there was a slim chance that the pastor or church attendant might be skulking about inside.

  It was a long shot, a wild gamble; a wager thrown forward by a brain in the grip of unhealthy obsession. Of course, I could stake-out the cemetery for the next week in the uncertain event that Aylish’s visitor would return, but that seemed insane. Wasn’t it easier to ask?

  Before I could talk myself out of it, I was weaving my way back through the gravestones towards the little church, my heart set on beating the odds.

  The darkness was cool, a relief from the scorching sun. Muted light filtered through the stained-glass windows, drenching the gloomy interior in crimson and green, gold and subterranean blue. The dry air smelled of furniture polish, turpentine, candle wax, musty books . . . and curiously, of chocolate.

  I could still hear the barking chant of the dollarbirds, but their calls were distant now, subdued and otherworldly. As my eyes adjusted to the dimness I began to make sense of the topsy-turvy shadows. Pews draped in white, a stone basin on a pedestal, a bookshelf crammed with hymnals.

  Beneath my feet the floor was gritty. I noticed that the sheets covering the pews were splattered in paint, as though a renovation was in progress. I’d assumed correctly: further along I spied paint tins and a dusty old ladder, boxes of cleaning gear.

  At the far end of the central aisle was a tall rose-glass window, its details obscured by a shadow that seemed out of place. I studied the shadow for several heartbeats before I realised what it was.

  A man.

  ‘Hello?’ I called. ‘The door was open, I hope you don’t mind me coming in . . . ?’

  No answer. He must be praying, I decided. I would wait.

  My feet rasped on the dusty floor. Looking around, I wondered where I should sit. Close to the front, to facilitate an effortless introduction; or tucked in at the back to appear more respectful? In my indecisiveness I bumped into a pew corner, my knee banged sharply and I muttered a profanity.

  The man shifted, half-turned as if listening. The light from the rose window struck his profile.

  For one heart-stopping moment I thought I was seeing a ghost. The features silhouetted in the pink-lit window might have been chiselled from solid shadow. The swooping brow and straight nose, the strong jaw and sensual mouth . . . I found my thoughts flying to the photo of Samuel in the rose arbour, but then instantly dismissed it. While Samuel’s hair was close-cropped and sleek, this man’s shock of unruly curls appeared on the brink of mutiny.

  He shifted again and came more fully into the window’s ruby light. The illusion broke apart. He was no longer otherworldly, just a man of flesh and blood in faded Levi’s and a brown T-shirt. He looked around and saw me. Not surprised, just curious. Silently poised, as though waiting for me to speak first.

  Which of course, we both knew was inevitable. Danny Weingarten customarily refused to utter a word.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘It’s you.’

  He walked towards me, slowly, as though this dusty capsule of a church with its kaleidoscopic light and eerie stillness was immune to the passing of time. He had the sort of build that was both brawny and fleshy, which could go either way: with neglect, it could turn to fat . . . or with concentration of effort, be converted to ironman muscle. The face, however, was a different story. No matter how his body fared, his features would remain about as close to perfect as those of any face – any living face, I amended – that I’d ever seen.

  He moved his hands. I got as far as ‘you thought’, then had to guess the rest.

  ‘I . . . uh, no. Well actually, yes – ’

  I slumped with the realisation that if I’d been talking to anyone else I might have gotten away with it. The tilt of Danny’s head and his narrowed eyes told me that I’d failed the lip-reading test and already lost him.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  His lips moved as he watched mine, then he made a gesture with his hands that I missed. When I stared in speechless confusion, he took out his notepad and pencil.

  Enjoying the silence. You?

  I shrugged. ‘Being a tourist.’

  It was disconcerting to have a man pay such close attention to my mouth, especially when I was talking.

  He scribbled again and passed me the leaf.

  Lutheran church big attraction?

  ‘Not bad, though I prefer the Presbyterian. Don’t you have enough silence?’ I added, then cringed the moment the words were out. Wasn’t that a tactless thing to say to a deaf man?

  Danny lifted a brow and scribbled. Not all silence is created equal.

  I blinked. ‘I thought all silence was . . . well, silent?’

  Depends on state of mind. Absence of sound is not necessarily silent.

  I smiled. Twisted as his logic was, it made an skewed sort of sense. ‘Do you always speak in poetry?

  He scratched out another note. Give me more time, a bigger page, I might write novel.

  ‘Don’t you get tired of writing all these notes?’

  He tucked the notebook under his arm and made a lazy motion with his hands.

  ‘Signing is . . . easier,’ I interpreted painstakingly, and that made him smile. Slowly, knowingly. Then into high beam. He wasn’t watching my lips now; his gaze was direct, straight into my eyes.

  It had been such a long time since anyone had flirted with me �
�� openly or otherwise – that at first I missed the obvious: the prolonged eye contact, the big warm smile. Anyone would think I’d have been flattered, glad for the boost to my self-esteem. After all, Danny was a fine-looking man. And yet when the penny finally dropped, all I felt was panic.

  I took a step back. Groped for something to say, a way to lighten the sudden intensity: an offhand comment, a witty remark, or perhaps a polite enquiry about Jade. A chain reaction had begun in my chest and was travelling downwards, getting warmer on the descent. The shock of it rendered me mute.

  Danny’s fingers wound out another sentence, but my gaze was stuck on his face and I missed what his hands were saying.

  I cleared my throat. ‘Didn’t quite catch that one.’

  Back came the notebook. Sorry about before, didn’t mean to startle you.

  I could see by the enjoyment radiating from his eyes that he wasn’t sorry at all. I shrugged, glancing at the door, wondering how abruptly I could make a getaway without offending him – then decided that maybe he deserved offending. I was a friend of his sister’s, after all; wasn’t there an unspoken law against flirting with family friends?

  Something touched my fingers. Another note.

  You thought I was someone else. Who?

  I tried to appear distracted by glancing at my naked wrist, but was betrayed by the warm glow I could feel creeping up my neck. ‘Actually,’ I told him offhandedly, ‘I thought you were praying.’

  A crooked smile, the merest glimmer of a laugh. He made a rapid sign in explanation, most of which I missed, apart from one word right at the end that might have been ‘chocolate’. Seeing my confusion, he motioned for me to follow him and, without giving me the chance to decline, strode off along the narrow aisle towards the rear of the church.

  I hesitated, then reminded myself that if Danny had been here for a while – enjoying the silence, as he claimed – then he may have seen the person who’d put flowers on Aylish’s grave.

  We entered a tiny office at the back of the church. Sunlight streamed through a large window, making the room pleasantly warm. Shoved against the far wall was a battered old desk. Next to that, a bookshelf of dusty Bibles and atlases, stray hymnbooks. A rickety trestle table was laid out with tea things: electric urn, piles of cups and saucers, canisters of tea and coffee. In the corner, the smallest fridge I’d ever seen.