She paints Connie, tall and thin and worried, jabbing away with her stick in the sand as she came up with the idea about Alice and Jack, while Rose lay back and closed her eyes and let her take care of everything. 'One day,' Connie had said, 'we'll be sweet little old ladies and we'll forget it didn't happen the way we said it did.'
She paints her mother, before she got sick, in a beautiful silk dress, with a bell-shaped skirt and an embroidered neckline, the sort of dress she could never afford to wear, the sort of dress Rose would have bought for her from David Jones in the expensive designer part if she could have her back for one day, to show her how lovely life can be when you've got enough money.
She paints the river, green and still and mysterious and unrolling into a ribbon of lustrous turquoise crepe de Chine. She paints the shoes she was wearing the day she went to visit Mr Egg Head to show him their baby. Connie would have had an absolute fit if she'd known her plan. Rose had told her she would take the baby for a walk around the city while she looked in the shop windows, and Connie had wanted to go to the pictures with Jimmy, so she never knew about Rose's idea to catch a train to his house in Annandale, where Mr Egg Head was at home alone while his wife was out cleaning houses. He'd been retrenched from his job at the department store and he was unshaven and unsmiling, his trouser braces dangling over his shoulders, a stained white collar. It was a bit of a shock after his dapper appearance at the store. Rose followed him into his unpleasant-smelling kitchen and he sat back down and kept shovelling spoonfuls of horrible sludgy porridge into his mouth, and Rose said, 'I just wanted you to see your daughter,' and held her up under her armpits. Rose had dressed Enigma in her very best outfit and curled up her hair around her fingertips. The baby gazed around with placid interest, while Mr Egg Head flicked her a sneering glance, snorted, and said with his mouth full, 'Bloody ugly thing, isn't she?'
Rage hit her knees so hard and so unexpectedly it was as if she'd been crash-tackled. She put Enigma back into her pram and then she turned to the messy bench-top and she didn't even look at what she was picking up with both hands until after she'd swung it against the back of his head. It made a loud 'thwack' and he tipped forward face-first into his porridge and then there was silence, except for the sharp high hum of a blowfly.
'She's a beautiful baby,' said Rose, to the back of his head. She'd put the bread board back down and pushed the pram out onto the street and caught the train back into the city and met Jimmy and Connie after their movie, and said she and the baby had had a lovely time walking around the city, and in all the years to come whenever people talked about the Bread Board Murder Mystery, all Rose could hear was the hum of that fly.
She very carefully paints a fractured egg dripping blood. It takes up one whole tile.
Finally, she puts down her paintbrush and gets to her feet and stands with her hands on her hips looking at her life and her family spread across the kitchen floor, before she finds the mop and washes it all away, while she steadily eats her way through an entire packet of chocolate biscuits.
The next day, when Sophie comes to visit with an invitation to her fortieth birthday party, there is a sweet smell in the air that Rose explains must be the nutmeg in her sponge cake. The floor is white and pure, and Rose looks just like a dear little old lady whose only secrets are recipes.
Acknowledgements
A special thank you to my friends Petronella McGovern, Marisa Medina and Vanessa Proctor for the time they spent reading and commenting on drafts of this novel. I'm also in debt to my sisters Nicola and Jaclyn Moriarty for all their suggestions and wonderful encouragement. My Grandma, Lily Dennett, provided lots of helpful information about the Depression, and my parents, Diane and Bernie Moriarty, helped with research and ideas and excursions on the Hawkesbury River! Thank you to my agent Fiona Inglis for being such a great supporter of my writing career. Finally, I am so lucky and grateful to have Cate Paterson as my publisher and editor-she made it a much better book.
About the Author
Liane Moriarty is an advertising copywriter turned author who grew up in Sydney, Australia. The Last Anniversary is her second novel. Her first novel, Three Wishes, was published in seven countries.
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Also by Liane Moriarty
Three Wishes
Copyright
THE LAST ANNIVERSARY. Copyright (c) 2005 by Liane Moriarty. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Moriarty, Liane.
The last anniversary / Liane Moriarty.--1st Harper pbk. ed.
p. cm.
ISBN-10: 0-06-089068-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-06-089068-1
1. Family--Australia--Fiction. 2. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PR9619.4.M67L37 2006
823'.92--dc22 2005055047
EPub Edition (c) March 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-200867-1
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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