by Kate Morton
And Nell was a most imaginative child. Lil often heard her describing long and involved games of make-believe. The flat, open yard became a magical forest in Nell’s imagination, with brambles and mazes, even a cottage on the edge of a cliff. Lil recognised the places Nell described from the book of children’s fairytales they’d found in the white suitcase. Lil and Hughie had been taking it in turns to read the stories to Nell of a night. Lil had thought them too frightening at first, but Hughie had convinced her otherwise. Nell, for her part, didn’t seem bothered a whit.
From where she stood, watching at the kitchen window, Lil could tell that’s what they were playing today. Beth was listening, wideeyed, as Nell led her through an imaginary maze, flitting about in her white dress, sun rays turning her long red plaits to gold.
Nell would miss Beth when they moved to Brisbane, but she’d be sure to make new friends. Children did. And the move was important. There was only so long Lil and Hughie could tell people that Nell was a niece from up north. Sooner or later the neighbours were going to start wondering why she hadn’t gone home. How much longer she’d be staying.
No, it was clear to Lil. The three of them needed to make a fresh start somewhere they weren’t already known. A big city where people wouldn’t ask questions.
7
Brisbane, 2005
It was a morning in early spring and Nell had been dead just over a week. A brisk wind wove through the bushes, twirling the leaves so that their pale undersides fluttered towards the sun. Like children thrust suddenly into the spotlight, flitting between nerves and self-importance.
Cassandra’s mug of tea had long grown cold. She’d set it on the cement ledge after her last sip and forgotten it was there. A brigade of busy ants whose way had been thwarted was now forced to take evasive action, up the mug’s edge and through the handle to the other side.
Cassandra didn’t notice them though. Sitting on a rickety chair in the backyard, beside the old laundry, her attention was on the rear wall of the house. It needed a coat of paint. Hard to believe five years had passed already. The experts recommended that a weatherboard house should be repainted every seven, but Nell hadn’t held with such convention. In all the time Cassandra had lived with her grandmother, the house had never received a full coat. Nell was fond of saying that she wasn’t in the business of spending good money to give the neighbours a fresh view.
The back wall, however, was a different matter—as Nell said, it was the only one they ever spent any time looking at. So while the sides and front peeled beneath the fierce Queensland sun, the back was a thing of beauty. Every five years the paint charts would come out and a great deal of time and energy would be spent debating the merits of a new colour. In the years Cassandra had been around it had been turquoise, lilac, vermilion, teal. Once it had even hosted a mural of sorts, unsanctioned though it might have been . . .
Cassandra had been nineteen and life was sweet. She was in the middle of her second year at the college of arts, her bedroom had morphed into a studio so that she had to climb across her drawing board to reach her bed each night, and she was dreaming of a move to Melbourne to study art history.
Nell was not so keen on the plan. ‘You can study art history at Queensland uni,’ she said whenever the subject was raised. ‘No need to drag yourself down south.’
‘I can’t stay living at home forever, Nell.’
‘Who said anything about forever? Just wait a little while, find your feet here first.’
Cassandra pointed to her Doc-clad feet. ‘Found ’em.’
Nell didn’t smile. ‘Melbourne’s an expensive city to live in and I can’t afford to pay your rent down there.’
‘I’m not picking up glasses at the Paddo Tav for fun, you know.’
‘Pah, with what they pay, you can put off applying to Melbourne for another decade.’
‘You’re right.’
Nell cocked her chin and raised a dubious eyebrow, wondering where such sudden capitulation was leading.
‘I’ll never save enough money myself.’ Cassandra bit her bottom lip, arresting a hopeful smile. ‘If only there were someone willing to spot me a loan, a loving person who wanted to help me follow my dreams . . .’
Nell picked up the box of china she was taking to the antique centre. ‘I’m not going to stand around here and let you paint me into a corner, my girl.’
Cassandra sensed a hopeful fissure in the once solid refusal. ‘We’ll talk about it later?’
Nell rolled her eyes skyward. ‘I fear we will. And then again and again and again.’ She huffed a sigh, signalling that the subject was, for now at least, closed. ‘Have you got everything you need to do the back wall?’
‘Check.’
‘You won’t forget to use the new brush on the boards? I don’t want to stare at loose bristles for the next five years.’
‘Yes, Nell. And just to get things straight, I dip the brush into the paint tin before putting it on the boards, right?’
‘Cheeky girl.’
When Nell arrived home from the antique centre that afternoon, she rounded the corner of the house and stopped still, appraising the wall in its shiny new coat.
Cassandra stepped back and pressed her lips together to stop from laughing. Waited.
The vermilion was striking, but it was the black detailing she’d added over in the far corner that her grandmother was staring at. The likeness was uncanny: Nell sitting on her favourite chair, holding aloft a cup of steaming tea.
‘I seem to have painted you into a corner, Nell. Didn’t mean to, I just got carried away.’
Nell’s expression was unreadable.
‘I’m going to do me next, sitting right beside you. That way, even when I’m in Melbourne, you’ll remember that we’re still a pair.’
Nell’s lips had trembled a little then. She’d shaken her head and set down the box she’d brought back from the stall. Heaved a sigh. ‘You’re a cheeky girl, there’s no doubt about that,’ she’d said. And then she’d smiled despite herself and cupped Cassandra’s face in her hands. ‘But you’re my cheeky girl and I wouldn’t have you any other way . . .’
A noise, and the past was chased away, dispersed into the shadows like smoke by the brighter, louder present. Cassandra blinked and wiped her eyes. Far above her a plane droned, a white speck in a sea of bright blue. Impossible to imagine there were people inside, talking and laughing and eating. Some of them looking down just as she was looking up.
Another noise, nearer now. Shuffling footsteps.
‘Hello there, young Cassandra.’ A familiar figure appeared at the side of the house, stood for a moment catching his breath. Ben had once been tall, but time had a way of moulding people into shapes they themselves no longer recognised, and his was now the body of a garden gnome. His hair was white, his beard wiry, and his ears inexplicably red.
Cassandra smiled, genuinely pleased to see him. Nell was not one for friends and had never hidden her distaste for most other humans, their neurotic compulsion for the acquisition of allies. But she and Ben had seen eye to eye. He was a fellow trader at the antique centre, a one-time solicitor who’d turned his hobby into a job when his wife died, his firm suggested gently it might be time to retire, and his purchase of second-hand furniture threatened to squeeze him out of home.
When Cassandra was growing up he’d been a father figure of sorts, offering wisdom she’d appreciated and disdained in equal measure, but since she’d been back living with Nell, he’d become her friend too.
Ben pulled a faded squatter’s chair from beside the concrete laundry tub and sat down carefully. His knees had been damaged as a young man in the second war and gave him grief aplenty, especially when the weather was turning.
He winked over the rim of his round glasses. ‘You’ve got the right idea. Beaut spot this, nice and sheltered.’
‘It was Nell’s spot.’ Her voice sounded strange to her ears and she wondered vaguely how long it had been since she’d spoken aloud t
o anyone. Not since dinner at Phyllis’s place a week before, she realised.
‘That’d be right. Count on her to know just where to sit.’
Cassandra smiled. ‘Would you like a cuppa?’
‘Love one.’
She went through the back door into the kitchen and set the kettle on the stove. The water was still warm from when she’d boiled it earlier.
‘So, how’ve you been keeping?’
She shrugged. ‘I’ve been all right.’ Came back to sit on the concrete step near his chair.
Ben pressed pale lips together, smiled slightly so that his moustache tangled with his beard. ‘Has your mum been in touch?’
‘She sent a card.’
‘Well then . . .’
‘Said she would’ve liked to make it down but she and Len were busy. Caleb and Marie—’
‘Of course. Keep you busy, teenagers.’
‘Not teenagers any more. Marie just turned twenty-one.’
Ben whistled. ‘Time flies.’
The kettle began shrilling.
Cassandra went back inside and drowned the teabag, watched as it bled the water brown. An irony that Lesley had turned out to be such a conscientious mother second time around. So much in life came down to timing.
She dribbled in some milk, wondering vaguely whether it was still okay, when she’d purchased it. Before Nell died, surely? The label was stamped 14 September. Had that date passed? She wasn’t sure. It didn’t smell sour. She carried the mug out and handed it to Ben. ‘I’m sorry . . . the milk . . .’
He took a sip. ‘Best tea I’ve had all day.’
He eyed her a moment as she sat down, seemed about to say something but thought better of it. He cleared his throat. ‘Cass, I’ve come on official business, as well as social.’
That death should be followed by official business was no surprise, and yet she felt dizzy, caught off guard.
‘Nell had me make out her will. You know how she was, said she didn’t like the idea of divulging her personal affairs to a stranger.’
Cassandra nodded. That was Nell.
Ben pulled an envelope from the pocket inside his blazer. Age had blunted its edges and turned white to cream.
‘She made it some time ago.’ He squinted at the envelope. ‘In 1981, to be exact.’ He paused, as if waiting for her to fill the silence. When she didn’t, he continued: ‘Pretty straightforward for the most part.’ He withdrew the contents but didn’t look at them, leaned forward so his forearms rested on his knees. Nell’s will dangled from his right hand. ‘Your grandmother left you everything, Cass.’
Cassandra was not surprised. Touched perhaps, and suddenly, perversely, lonely, but not surprised. For who else was there? Not Lesley, certainly. Though Cassandra had stopped blaming her mother long ago, Nell had never been able to forgive. To abandon a child, she had once said to someone, when she thought Cassandra couldn’t hear, was an act so cold, so careless, it refused forgiveness.
‘There’s the house, of course, and some money in her savings account. All of her antiques.’ He hesitated, eyed Cassandra, as if gauging her preparedness for something yet to come. ‘And there’s one thing more.’ He glanced at the papers. ‘Last year, after your grandmother was diagnosed, she asked me to come for tea one morning.’
Cassandra remembered. Nell had told her when she brought in breakfast that Ben was visiting and that she needed to see him in private. She’d asked Cassandra to catalogue some books for her, up at the antique centre, though it had been years since Nell had taken an active role in the stall.
‘She gave me something that day,’ he said. ‘A sealed envelope. Told me I was to put it with her will and open it only if . . . when . . .’ He pressed his lips together. ‘Well, you know.’
Cassandra shivered lightly as a sudden cool breeze brushed across her arms.
Ben waved his hand. The papers fluttered but he didn’t speak.
‘What is it?’ she said, a familiar kernel of anxiety heavy in her stomach. ‘You can tell me, Ben. I’ll be okay.’
Ben looked up, surprised by her tone. Confounded her by laughing. ‘No need to look so worried, Cass, it’s nothing bad. Quite the opposite really.’ He considered for a moment. ‘More a mystery than a calamity.’
Cassandra exhaled; his talk of mysteries did little to relieve her nervousness.
‘I did as she said. Put the envelope aside and didn’t open it till yesterday. Could’ve knocked me down with a feather when I saw.’ He smiled. ‘Inside were the deeds to another house.’
‘Whose house?’
‘Nell’s house.’
‘Nell doesn’t have another house.’
‘It would appear she does, or did. And now it’s yours.’
Cassandra didn’t like surprises, their suddenness, their randomness. Where once she’d known how to surrender herself to the unexpected, now the very suggestion heralded a surge of instant fear, her body’s learned response to change. She picked up a dry leaf lying by her shoe, folded it in half and in half again as she thought.
Nell hadn’t mentioned another house, not in all the time they’d lived together, while Cassandra was growing up and since she’d been back. Why not? Why would she have kept such a thing secret? And what could she have wanted with it? An investment? Cassandra had heard people in the coffee shops on Latrobe Terrace talking about rising property prices, investment portfolios, but Nell? Nell had always poked fun at the inner-city yuppies who shelled out small fortunes for the tiny timber workers’ cottages of Paddington.
Besides, Nell’d reached retirement age long ago. If this house were an investment, why hadn’t she sold it? Used the money to live on? Dealing antiques had its rewards but financial remuneration was not chief among them, not these days. Nell and Cassandra made enough to live on but not much besides. There’d been times when an investment would’ve come in pretty handy, yet Nell had never breathed a word.
‘This house,’ Cassandra said finally, ‘where is it? Is it nearby?’
Ben shook his head, smiled bemusedly. ‘That’s where this whole thing gets really mysterious. The other house is in England.’
‘England?’
‘The UK, Europe, other side of the world.’
‘I know where England is.’
‘Cornwall, to be precise, a village called Tregenna. I’ve only got the deeds to go by, but it’s listed as “Cliff Cottage”. From the address, I’d guess it was part of a larger country estate originally. I could find out if you like.’
‘But why would she . . . ? How could she . . . ?’ Cassandra exhaled. ‘When did she buy it?’
‘The deeds are stamped 6 December 1975.’
She folded her arms across her chest. ‘Nell hasn’t even been to England.’
It was Ben’s turn to look surprised. ‘Yes she has. She went on a trip to the UK, back in the mid seventies. She never mentioned it?’
Cassandra shook her head slowly.
‘I remember when she went. I hadn’t known her long, it was a few months before you came on the scene, when she still had the little shop near Stafford Street. I’d bought a few pieces from her and we were acquaintances if not yet friends. She was gone just over a month. I remember because I’d put a cedar writing desk on lay-by right before she left, a birthday gift for my wife—least it was s’posed to be, didn’t turn out that way in the end. Every time I went to collect it, the shop was closed.
‘Don’t have to tell you, I was ropeable. It was Janice’s fiftieth and the desk was perfect. When I paid the deposit Nell didn’t mention that she was going on holidays. In fact, she made a point of outlining her lay-by terms, made it clear she was expecting weekly payments and that I’d need to collect the desk within a month. She wasn’t a storage facility, she said, she’d have more stock coming in and needed the room.’
Cassandra smiled; it sounded just like Nell.
‘She was absolutely insistent, that’s what made it so odd when she wasn’t there all that time. After I got over the in
itial irritation I became quite worried. Even thought about calling the police.’ He waved his hand. ‘Didn’t have to, as it turned out. On my fourth or fifth visit I bumped into the lady next door who was collecting Nell’s mail. She told me Nell was in the UK but became quite indignant when I started asking questions about why she’d left so suddenly and when she’d be back. The neighbour said she was just doing as she’d been asked and knew no more than that. So I kept on checking, my wife’s birthday came and went, then one day the shop was open, Nell was home.’
‘And she’d bought a house while she was away.’
‘Evidently.’
Cassandra pulled her cardigan closer around her shoulders. It made no sense. Why would Nell go on holiday like that, out of the blue, buy a house then never go back? ‘She didn’t tell you anything about it? Not ever?’
Ben raised his eyebrows. ‘We’re talking about Nell. She wasn’t one for volunteering confidences.’
‘But you and she were close. Surely at some point she must have mentioned it?’ Ben was shaking his head. Cassandra persisted: ‘But when she got back. When you finally collected the writing desk. Didn’t you ask her why she’d left so suddenly?’
‘Course I did, a number of times over the years. I knew it must’ve been important. She was different you see, when she got back.’
‘How?’
‘More distracted, mysterious. I’m sure it’s not just hindsight that makes me say so. A couple of months later was the closest I came to finding out. I was visiting her in her shop and a letter arrived, postmarked Truro. I arrived at the same time as the postie, so I took the mail in for her. She tried to act casually but I was getting to know her better by then; she was excited to receive that letter. Made an excuse to leave me as soon as she could.’
‘What was it? Who was it from?’
‘Must admit, curiosity got the better of me. I didn’t go as far as to look at the letter itself, but I flipped the envelope over later, when I saw it on her desk, just to see who’d sent it. I memorised the address on the back and had an old colleague in the UK look it up for me. The address was for an investigator.’