by Fiona Lowe
She walked into the bedroom, saying, ‘Hi, M—’ The greeting died on her lips and her blood swooped to her feet. Her head spun, her stomach roiled and she forgot to breathe. Oh. My. God. A silent scream tore across her mind. Her mother was in bed. With. A. Man.
Like a rabbit caught in headlights, Xara didn’t seem able to move. Or speak. Or close her eyes to block out the undeniable, uncomfortable and upsetting visual. ‘I … oh … God … sorry … I’ll … just …’
Too stunned to turn, she stumbled backward out of the room, knocking into the doorframe before running fast down the hall and back to Tasha.
She was just releasing the brakes on the wheelchair when she heard her name.
‘Xara. Wait.’
She looked up to see her mother approaching, wrapped in her ecru silk dressing gown with its intricate Chantilly lace trim; the robe Richard had given her for their fortieth wedding anniversary. The image of Edwina in bed with the unknown man flashed again in Xara’s head and she frantically blinked as if the action would be enough to remove it.
Edwina dropped a kiss on Tasha’s head. ‘Hello, Tashie, darling. I see you’ve got Tsar all snuggled up and cosy.’
The normality of the greeting added to the craziness of the moment. Xara gripped the wheelchair’s handles. ‘Mum, I should go.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Edwina said with uncharacteristic firmness. ‘You look like you need a good strong cup of tea.’
‘I need more than tea,’ she said, pushing down on the brakes of the chair.
Edwina switched on the kettle. ‘That’s a bit dramatic, darling. All you saw were two people sitting up in bed having breakfast. To be honest, it would have been a lot more disturbing for us all if you’d arrived half an hour ago.’
‘Mum!’ Her mother’s frankness disarmed Xara. She sat down abruptly on the couch, dropping her head in her hands, not knowing whether to laugh, cry or throw up.
‘I know it’s a shock,’ Edwina patted her shoulder sympathetically, ‘but you’re a mother of three. You know all about sex.’
Her head shot up. ‘Yes! But everyone knows their parents don’t have sex more times than the number of children they have. I’ve got away without thinking or being confronted by my mother doing it for forty years.’
Edwina had the audacity to smile. ‘Sorry, darling. I wasn’t expecting to see you before tonight.’
‘Obviously.’
‘This is why I taught you to call ahead.’
The kettle boiled and Edwina busied herself making tea. Xara heard the tap of a spoon against china and knew her mother had added sugar to her mug.
Edwina carried it over. ‘Here. Drink this. It will help.’
‘It comes with guaranteed memory loss, does it?’ She accepted the proffered Wedgewood mug with a slightly shaking hand. ‘So who is he? I didn’t recognise him. Not that I spent very long looking.’
Edwina, who’d taken a seat on the opposite couch, gazed into her mug, seemingly fascinated with her tea.
‘Mum?’
Edwina was silent for a few beats longer before blowing out a breath. ‘He’s an old friend.’
Friend? Right up until this moment, Xara thought she knew all of her parents’ friends. She wracked her brain, seeking a memory of this man, but she kept drawing blanks. ‘A friend of yours and Dad’s?’
‘No.’ She took a couple of sips of her tea before saying quietly and almost reluctantly, ‘I knew him before I met your father.’
Surprise rocketed over Xara’s shock, sending goosebumps rising on her arms. ‘But you always said Dad was your first boyfriend.’
The corner of her mother’s mouth knotted. ‘Your father’s generation didn’t like to be reminded that they might not have been the first friend.’
Something about the way her mother said the word ‘first’ made Xara’s head jerk up. She tried to catch the fleeting emotion racing across her mother’s face but she wasn’t fast enough and it faded quickly. Her thoughts jumbled together before separating and then jumping all over the place again. Had her mother just told her that her father wasn’t the first man she’d slept with?
No. The idea went against all the family stories she’d grown up hearing. Xara couldn’t even start to absorb an idea that hinted at her family folklore not being as she’d always understood it to be. And yet she’d just seen her mother in bed with a man who wasn’t her father. A man her mother had known before her father.
Xara focused on the word ‘friend’, reassuring herself that it was the friendship with another man that her father wouldn’t have liked. That made far more sense than thinking something may have happened between Edwina and this man way back in the day.
Sure, her mother had been a teenager in the late 1960s but her life had been far, far removed from flower power, Vietnam War demonstrations and free love. She’d done what was expected of her: she’d attended The Hermitage School for girls before being sent to Switzerland for finishing school. She’d returned home, met Richard, fallen in love and lived the life that was expected of the wife of a respected country doctor.
There wasn’t a single photo in the family album of her mother dressed in flowing, tie-dyed dresses or anything else that even hinted at rebellion. The closest her mother came to looking like a swinging sixties starlet was a black and white print of her wearing a Mary Quant mini, though the expression of taut reserve on her face didn’t exactly scream sexual revolution. It was more of a tight-lipped I don’t think so, thank you very much. It tied in with a very clear memory Xara had from when she was fifteen and her mother had caught her in the woolshed at Murrumbeet kissing Ricky Switkowski. Edwina’s face had gone ashen white before flaming bright red; her reaction so shocked and horrified that Xara had been convinced her mother had never kissed anyone until she’d met her father. Given she’d married him at nineteen, that assumption wasn’t so outlandish. Her father had been outraged at Xara kissing Ricky but for a totally different reason. Apparently, if she’d been kissing sons of established graziers in the district that would have been okay—kissing the son of the farm manager was decidedly not okay. The incident had set off a decade of her deliberately choosing boyfriends that made her father’s blood pressure rise, although it had become far more challenging at a school where she’d been surrounded by boys her father considered suitable.
Now her mother—that formerly prudish woman—had a man in her bedroom. A stranger. Although obviously not a stranger to Edwina, because somehow he fitted into her mother’s life.
‘What’s his name?’
‘Doug.’
The name didn’t summon up a single memory. ‘You’ve never mentioned him before.’
Edwina shrugged but there was a line of tension running across her shoulders. ‘We lost contact. It was all a very long time ago.’
I knew him before I met your father.
A thousand questions peppered her. Where had her mother met this man? Why had they lost contact? How had they met again? When had they met again? How long had they been having sex? Nope. Don’t want to know the answer to that question.
‘Did you meet him overseas?’
‘Is there a cup left in the pot, Eddy?’ A very broad Australian accent broke the silence that hung between Xara and her mother.
Eddy? Another mini shock detonated inside Xara. No one called her mother Eddy. Certainly, no one with such a strong diphthong had ever been so familiar with her.
Her mother started to rise. ‘I’ll pour you one.’
‘I think I can manage it,’ he said with a wink. ‘You take a load off.’
It was hard to estimate his age but he looked a little older than her mother, although that may have been due to a life lived outdoors. He had a tanned, weather-beaten face but kind, dark eyes that twinkled with a glint of mischief. Thankfully, he was now fully dressed in pressed blue jeans and a collared shirt, which was tucked in over a slightly protruding belly that hinted at a possible fondness for beer. In looks, he was the polar opposite of her father,
although he carried himself with similar confidence.
He obviously knew the layout of the kitchen, because he walked to a drawer, removed a bone china mug and handled the old-fashioned swinging silver tea strainer—a device which confused many—like a pro as he poured the tea. It was all done with a minimum of fuss and devoid of any embarrassment. It was as if being discovered in bed by his lover’s—no, no, no—friend’s daughter was an everyday occurrence.
Xara glanced at her mother, whose lips had lifted into a smile of wonder as if she couldn’t quite believe Doug was in her kitchen. Edwina’s glowing gaze was fixed on the straight-shouldered, salt and pepper–haired, jowl-faced man. A flicker in her compelling blue eyes hinted that she was worried that if she looked away he might vanish. Had he vanished on her once before?
We lost contact.
Doug took a seat next to her mother and Xara couldn’t help but notice he had extraordinarily large hands, the backs of which were pigmented with half-a-dozen scars. They were work-worn hands with the faint remnants of black oil ingrained in some of the creases. The only thing they shared with her father’s long, lean surgical hands was neatly clipped nails.
He set his mug down on the coffee table and slid his left hand into her mother’s before stretching his other hand out to Xara. ‘I’m Doug.’ His tone was serious but his lips tilted up in a smile. ‘I’m a friend of your mother’s.’
A friend with benefits, apparently.
Shut up! We’re not thinking about that.
‘Xara,’ she managed to say as she accepted his firm handshake. She held his intelligent dark-eyed gaze. ‘The middle daughter. The difficult one who caused the most grief.’
‘Your mother didn’t mention that so you can’t have been too terrible. It’s great to meet one of Eddy’s girls. I hope you’re not too traumatised about before.’
Xara smiled despite herself. ‘Just traumatised enough.’
Her mother laughed; a merry sound devoid of any awkwardness. ‘And this is Tashie,’ she said, reaching out her free hand to stroke her granddaughter’s hair, ‘Xara’s daughter.’
Xara was used to the full gamut of reactions from people when they met Tasha. Responses covered everything from acute discomfort and intensive glances at the floor to gushing baby talk. Despite years of practice in preparing herself, she still couldn’t stop anticipatory nerves shooting along her spine.
Doug fixed his full attention on her child-like teenager and said, ‘G’day, Tash. You’re obviously pretty special if you can get Tsar to sit on your lap.’ He gave her a rueful smile. ‘He won’t have a bar of me.’
Tasha’s eyes brightened and she smiled, sending saliva dribbling out of her open mouth and onto her bandana. At that moment, despite the fact that Doug had obviously been having sex with her mother—don’t think about it, just don’t think about it—Xara decided that this guy was okay.
‘Darling, was there a reason you dropped in?’ Edwina asked, her hand still nestled in Doug’s beefy paw. ‘Something you needed?’
With the shock of discovering her mother in bed with Doug, Xara had totally forgotten the plan of whisking her out of town for the day. ‘Um, yes, of course. I wanted you to come out to the farm and give me some garden advice.’
Her mother’s brows rose. ‘Xara, you don’t really have a garden.’
‘Exactly,’ she said, agreeing before she realised what she’d said. ‘Actually, Mum, that’s not fair. I have the bones of what could be a fabulous garden if I had the time and the—’ She swallowed the word ‘money’. It wasn’t something she ever discussed with her mother or Harriet. ‘I thought today was the day to start planning the resurrection.’
‘It’s moving into autumn, darling, a time when you put gardens to bed. I suppose you could mulch and plant some bulbs …’ Edwina suddenly sighed. ‘We’re not having family dinner tonight are we? Harriet’s gone and organised a party.’
‘What?’ Xara tried to look convincingly perplexed. ‘No. Why would you think that?’
Edwina’s head tilted sideways and her blue-on-blue eyes shone in sympathy. ‘Because you’re not a gardener, Xara, and you’re not very good at acting either. You’d have kept me off the scent better if you’d asked me to come out and mind the twins.’
Xara’s hands rose and fell and she silently cursed herself and then Harriet. ‘Okay, you’ve got me. Harriet sent me to keep you away from Miligili and out of town for the day. She was worried you might call in to see Charlie even though I told her that was unlikely. I can now see it’s totally improbable.’
Her mother’s lips pressed together at her acerbic tone. ‘Actually, I was planning on visiting Charlotte this afternoon. The reason I hadn’t rushed over yet was because I was giving her some time to sleep in. She’s exhausted after a huge term.’
Visiting with or without Doug? The question spawned a hundred more. Xara suddenly wanted to know exactly how long her mother had been seeing Doug. Hell, she wanted to know way more than that but asking now, with Doug sitting right there next to Edwina, was impossible. She leaned forward.
‘Well, I’m hardly going to force you out to the farm. Just promise me you’ll avoid town today. Oh, and to make my life easier, if Harriet calls, please say you’re with me?’
‘I can do that.’ Her mother touched her nose with her forefinger. ‘And while we’re talking favours, please don’t mention Doug to your sisters.’
The request hooked into her like a leech, making her feel both uncomfortable and strangely disloyal as it sucked at her. Words clanged together as she tried to formulate a reply that was neither rude to Doug nor upsetting to her mother. She struggled with the sticky point of Edwina asking her to lie by omission.
‘It’s not quite as it sounds,’ Doug said as though reading her mind. ‘Eddy wants to introduce me to your family tonight when everyone’s together.’
A rush of protective love for her mother engulfed her and she suddenly needed to know if Doug was forcing Edwina to do this. ‘Is this true, Mum? Are you sure?’
‘Yes, darling. We’ve discussed it at length and that’s the plan.’
It’s not just dinner. Xara found her thumb had migrated to her mouth and she gave in to chewing the edge of the nail. She levelled her gaze intently at her mother, blocking out Doug. ‘Do you want to rethink this? It’s not just family dinner anymore. Hell, Mum, it’s not even just your close friends. James and Harriet will have added in anyone they feel may be useful to James’s tilt at preselection. It’s everyone who’s influential in town and the rest of the shire.’
‘I know exactly what sort of party it will be, Xara,’ her mother said quietly. ‘Remember, I’m the one who taught your sister how to entertain.’
‘So you know what I’m talking about,’ Xara said in a low voice, desperate to add, And if you bring Doug tonight you’re making a very public statement you can’t back down from.
‘Xara’s right,’ Doug said, rubbing his jaw. ‘It might be better for you to go to the party alone. I’ll meet your girls tomorrow.’
Doug shot up another notch in Xara’s estimation. ‘Good idea.’
‘This isn’t just about me,’ Edwina said vehemently as she turned to face Doug. ‘It’s about us.’
Xara’s heart rate picked up. Us sounded far more together than ‘just sex’. The sex she wasn’t thinking about.
‘There’s no hurry to do this, Eddy.’ Doug patted her knee. ‘Think about it. You sure you’re ready to introduce me to the who’s who of Billawarre?’
Her mother nodded slowly, her blonde bob swinging gently. ‘I think it’s long past time.’
Had Edwina wanted to introduce Doug before? The thought dug down into Xara like a burr and for the first time she wondered if she really knew her mother.
‘Well, if you’re fair dinkum,’ Doug said, his face serious, ‘I’ll be there.’
Xara pictured Doug and her mother walking hand in hand through the balloon-festooned entrance of Miligili. It was immediately followed by a 3D image
of the look on Harriet’s face. She grinned. If her mother was determined to do this, then it was a real shame she had to wait eight hours to see it.
CHAPTER
6
‘So thrilled you could come, Primrose.’ Harriet greeted her honorary aunt with a brief kiss on the cheek, while looking over the older woman’s shoulder and scanning the room. Where on earth was James? A steady stream of guests had been arriving for the last ten minutes and both Charlotte and James should have been standing with her in the time-honoured tradition of hosts. However, despite her constant urging, neither of them had been ready when the old Victorian doorbell gave its long, loud ring. In fact, when it had rung, she’d been talking to Charlotte through a closed bathroom door. Talking was probably a stretch—she’d been yelling.
How could such a bright young woman be so infuriating? When she’d realised Charlotte wasn’t even close to being dressed and ready, despite a day of spending more time in her room than out of it, Harriet had stalked into her daughter’s walk-in robe and started pulling clothes off hangers. If too much choice was the cause of Charlotte’s tardiness then Harriet would speed things up by giving her three options.
She’d just finished laying out the clothes and accessories on the bed when Charlotte had appeared from her bathroom.
Her daughter had taken one look at her, stopped short, dropped the towel in surprise and gone ballistic. As she’d crossed one arm over herself and scrambled to retrieve the towel from the floor, she’d screamed at Harriet to get out of her room. She’d ranted about the invasion of her privacy and rights of the child before retreating back into the bathroom and slamming the door shut behind her.
Frustrated and furious, Harriet had rattled the doorknob. ‘For pity’s sake, Charlotte. We’re expecting a hundred people in ten minutes and you’re behaving like a child. Get dressed and come downstairs.’
Charlotte’s sulky reply had barely penetrated the heavy door. ‘It’s your party, Mum. Not mine.’
Why did everyone keep saying it was her party? ‘No, it’s your grandmother’s party and you owe it to her and to Gramps to behave in an appropriate manner.’ She’d almost said, You owe it to me too, but she swallowed the words.