She put on a bright voice whenever any of her family phoned. They’d been speaking to each other about her, she could tell. They kept using the same phrase, as if they’d agreed on their approach.
‘It’ll do you good to have some time out, Maggie.’
‘You mustn’t blame yourself, but everybody needs some time out now and again.’
It wasn’t time out Maggie needed. It was time over. How far back would she go, though? Had everything she’d done in her life been leading up to that awful moment in London? If she’d failed one exam at school or university, been late for one job interview, done one thing differently, would she somehow have stopped it happening that day?
‘You can’t go over and over it, Maggie,’ Clementine had said. ‘You’ll drive yourself mad.’
But she had to go over and over it. She couldn’t stop herself. That’s what she’d been trained to do in her professional life: go over and over details; analyse graphs and spreadsheets; find the missing link, the rogue figures, the incorrect numbers. She did it in her own life too much, she knew that. Reviewed each day, wished she’d said things in a different way, worn different clothes, reacted in a more mature fashion. She proofread her life. It wasn’t something she could just turn off.
She had never thought doing something she loved would lead her to this. She, Leo and Clementine had often spoken about how lucky they were to work in fields they loved: Leo with his inventions, each one more successful than the last, even though he should have long retired; Clementine with her groundbreaking research into more than a dozen rare bird species and their habitats. She had been all around the world, had set up studies in islands off the coast of Australia and in some of the most remote places in the world. For Maggie it was a love of numbers. She had been that way for as long as she could remember. She’d looked forward to maths classes at primary school. She had topped the class at high school. She was fast-tracked into university when an alert teacher recognised she had a rare gift. ‘The world is your oyster,’ a careers advisor said. ‘You can go into research, economics, teaching, business…’
She’d chosen business. Big business, specifically. Miranda had been disgusted, of course. ‘So dull, darling. I had such high hopes for you. Why don’t you set up your own company?’
She didn’t want to. She liked the security of working for a big organisation. She liked having her own office, being left alone to pore over balance sheets, to review budgets, to analyse sales figures and projections. She liked knowing she was close to the humming heart of a business.
‘You are getting enough exercise, aren’t you?’ Eliza would always ask. ‘I don’t like to think about you holed up in an office for hours and hours every week.’ That was before Eliza had her accident, when she was running five kilometres every day and making sure her personal training clients ran twice that distance. Even after the accident, when Eliza’s focus changed, she took a close interest in Maggie’s wellbeing. Maggie still couldn’t walk past a gym without feeling guilty. She was just grateful she’d inherited her mother’s slight frame.
‘You just do whatever you want to do, Maggie,’ Juliet would say. ‘It’s your life. As long as you make sure you’re eating properly and come and visit Myles and me as often as you can.’
Opportunity had followed opportunity for her. After graduating top of the class from the University of Tasmania, she’d done postgraduate studies in Sydney, been headhunted by a large firm in that city who sent her on training courses all over the world. She became used to frequent air travel, business-class – but then she’d been travelling on planes since she was a child, flying interstate once a year to stay with her aunts. She went home to Tasmania to visit Leo and Clementine as often as possible, and joined the whole family for at least one, sometimes both, of their annual Christmas celebrations.
Three years earlier, her Sydney company had taken over a London-based company specialising in wholesale supplies for supermarkets. She’d been offered a relocation package. An extraordinary relocation package. They had high hopes for her future with them, the managing director told her. She’d rung her mother, her grandfather and all her aunts.
‘Of course you have to take it,’ they all said. ‘What an opportunity for someone your age.’
She’d liked London immediately. Her employers found her a house in a good part of the city, gave her a car, rewarded her long hours with an excellent salary. They also introduced her to Angus. He was the stock control manager for a subsidiary company. They met at a staff Christmas party and he pursued her romantically and persistently from the following day. They had moved in together three months after that. It was Angus who encouraged her to work even harder, apply for promotion, network with the heads of the company, his ambition so much stronger than hers.
Each step leading her, unaware, closer to that moment in London.
‘It wasn’t your fault, Maggie.’
It was her fault. They hadn’t heard what the man said.
‘You read the police report, Maggie. He was seriously unbalanced.’
Perhaps he was. But it was her work that had sent him over the edge.
A spirited ringing of synthesised church bells made her jump. The CD of Christmas carols had come to an end. She pointed the remote control at the stereo system, setting the CD playing for the third time. It had been playing all morning as she wrapped her presents. She sang along with Perry Como, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, taking the occasional sip of mulled wine. She was nearly done. One more ribbon for Eliza’s present, a few more layers of protective wrapping around Juliet’s present and everything would be ready for the post office.
She did her best to ignore the spike of sadness that she wouldn’t get to see her presents being unwrapped this year. That was her second favourite part of Christmas. Her favourite part was the looking. She had never been one to race out the night before. She bought presents all year round, tucking them away until the time was right. This Christmas was different. The early presents she’d bought had been left behind in London. Angus had probably thrown them out by now.
Now the wrapping was done, she took down a large carry bag from the top of the fridge and began to load up the parcels, saying goodbye to each of them as she put them into the bag.
Her grandfather’s parcel was first. She gave it a pat. ‘Happy Christmas, Tadpole.’ His gift was a gold cardboard box filled with a hand-picked selection of chocolate. For a thin man, he had an enormous appetite for sweet things. He savoured his chocolate, making one block last for days. He’d always kept a store in his inventing shed too. He liked to produce studies that showed the ingredients in chocolate had a direct impact on the working of the brain, as well as stimulating the hormone that produced a feeling of happiness.
‘That’s in mice, Leo,’ Miranda would say. ‘Not mad inventors.’
Maggie got into the habit of sending her grandfather regular parcels of souvenir chocolates as a child, when she first started going away to stay with her aunts. She’d kept it up into adulthood. He received regular parcels of chocolates from Sydney when she was studying at university there. She sent him parcels from Canada when she was there on six months’ work experience. From London he received monthly parcels: boiled lollies, traditional creamy toffee or the quirkily named sweets from Marks and Spencer that he loved: Fantastically Fizzy Fish, Squealingly Fizzy Piglets.
She’d been assembling his bumper Christmas present for the past six weeks, trawling the United Nations of sweet shops New York offered. In Little Italy she came across a small delicatessen that imported rich dark Venetian chocolate, shaped like hearts and wrapped in red cellophane. The twenty-four-hour supermarket across the road from her apartment sold Hershey’s bars, the American chocolate Tadpole loved. He said it had a different texture, rougher to the tongue and therefore more interesting. But he also loved smooth Swiss chocolate. She found bars of that beside the counter of a small restaurant called Edelweiss, on 59th Street, two blocks back from Broadway. There were chocol
ate-covered brazil nuts from a Spanish deli in 34th Street; sugary almonds from Chinatown; and homemade Turkish delight, pink and smelling of rosewater and icing sugar, from a crammed, brightly lit delicatessen off Orchard Street. The final addition was a small box of square fudge decorated with Aboriginal artwork in gold paint that she’d unexpectedly found in an equally unexpected Australian-themed ice-cream shop in the East Village. Seven different countries for you this time! she wrote on the card, before signing it as she always did, love from your Maggie xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Twenty-six kisses for her twenty-six years. Another longstanding tradition between them. Leo kept his to one X with his age beside it in brackets, 78 at his last birthday. He said it would take him a year to draw all the kisses otherwise.
She touched the second parcel. ‘Happy Christmas, Juliet.’ After ten years in Sydney, Juliet and her husband now lived in Manchester, running their chain of cafés from a purpose-built office in the back of their big three-storey terrace house, the walls covered in shelves piled high with cook books, organised into alphabetical order. It led into a test kitchen, sleek and stylish, stocked with the best saucepans, cookware, ovens and baking equipment. Maggie had seen several magazine articles featuring photos of Juliet against a backdrop of the kitchen. She looked just like a cook should, Maggie thought. All curves and smiles and twinkling eyes, like her picture should be on a box of custard powder or a carton of cream. Wholesome and good for you.
Away from the kitchen, Juliet collected delicate glass vases. Maggie had bought her dozens over the years. Since arriving in New York, she’d browsed in curio shops and homeware stores in Manhattan. Two weeks previously she’d caught a train to Boston from Penn Station. In a side street near the Boston Common she stopped in front of an antiques store. In the window was a beautiful pale blue vase. She knew Juliet would love it. Maggie had gone in, deciding on the spot to go beyond the budget she had set herself. The woman behind the counter barely smiled a welcome, assessing Maggie from top to bottom, clearly finding her wanting, with her faded chainstore jeans, her long-sleeved T-shirt, her ordinary bag, her shoes made for walking, not parading. She’d not said ‘Hello’ or ‘Can I help you?’ or responded to Maggie’s smile and greeting, merely watched her closely, half shop assistant, half store detective.
If it had been three months earlier, if Maggie had come in wearing something from the wardrobe of clothes she’d had in London – a sleek designer suit or shift dress or even her casual clothes from that time: expensive jeans, a tailored, handmade shirt, a cashmere cardigan, leather boots – she knew there would have been a very different welcome. She left within seconds, not looking back at the shop or the vase. She always needed to like the shop assistants from whom she bought presents. Especially if the present was for Juliet.
As it turned out, she found the ideal vase in a homewares store back in Greenwich Village, only three streets away from her apartment. The woman who sold it to her was the woman who had made it. She explained how she produced the dramatic effect in such a delicate piece of work, shimmers of red against deep strokes of green. Maggie liked her as much as she liked the vase. She wrapped it very carefully, choosing paper that matched the vase’s colours. Perfect Christmas colours. Juliet would love it.
The third parcel was much smaller. ‘Happy Christmas to you too, Eliza.’ It was easy to buy presents for Eliza. Maggie got her the same thing every year: a necklace. Eliza had dozens of them and she wore one every day: long strings of beads, heavy dramatic pendants, delicate gold chains. Maggie loved buying or finding them for her. As a child, when she was staying with Eliza, she’d even made necklaces for her, carefully threading wooden beads onto cotton, stringing papier-mâche shapes onto yarn or making her own beads: tiny strips of coloured paper wound tightly around matchsticks, left to dry and then glazed.
On Maggie’s last visit to Melbourne, over two years ago now, she’d been touched to see those homemade necklaces on a specially made board in Eliza’s bedroom. Her aunt had a place for everything in her Art Deco flat, on the ground floor of an old house in the beach-side suburb of Elwood. Her decorating style was minimalist – bare floorboards, white walls, carefully positioned paintings. Eliza’s own fashion style followed similar lines – straight silhouettes, mostly in black, always in linen, cotton or wool, never man-made fibres. Her make-up was similar – simple, understated. She wore her hair in a sleek, short crop. It was about looking in control, she’d said to Maggie. It’s what people expected from a life coach.
Maggie knew Eliza would love this year’s present. She’d found it in a students’ gallery on Lafayette Street. The girl behind the counter had bleached hair and a big smile. She told Maggie stories about each of the students as Maggie looked at their work. The one who had made Eliza’s present (ten shades of blue beads on three strands of thin wire) had grown up by the sea. The necklace was called ‘Oceanscape’. Maggie had written all of that on Eliza’s Christmas card. She knew Eliza would like the fact her necklace had a name.
Her aunt Miranda’s gift was in the next parcel. There was never any need to buy her jewellery, perfume, make-up, scarves, bottles of gin or sweet-smelling soaps either. Miranda had spent her life awash in personal beauty products and luxuries. She’d been flying the world for twenty years. She now lived in Singapore, the home of duty-free shopping. Her luxurious apartment on the thirty-fifth floor of an upmarket block overlooking the bay had felt like a department store to Maggie the one time she visited. Miranda’s jewellery box was piled high with pearls and gold chains, her bathroom cabinet lined with bottles of perfume, below it a large basket of guest soaps from all the high-class hotels she’d stayed at over the years. On the shelves were enough skincare products to stock a dermatology clinic.
Five years earlier, at the age of forty-three, Miranda had accepted a lucrative invitation from her employer, one of the more exclusive Asian airlines, to stop flying full-time and become a training manager instead. Still based in Singapore, she’d swiftly moved up five floors in the same building to an even more luxurious penthouse apartment. She announced cheerfully to Maggie during one of their regular phone calls that she didn’t miss the early starts or the dry skin for a minute and she was much happier on the ground. More time to socialise too. Singapore was filled with airline pilots with time on their hands, she declared.
The arrangement was perfect for Miranda. If she wasn’t travelling, she was socialising. She was certainly too busy to do something as time-consuming as browse in bookshops. The task of finding good books had been handed over to Maggie many years before. When she was young, she’d chosen the books either by their covers or by explaining to bookshop assistants that she was there on behalf of her aunt and what could they recommend? (Miranda had coached her on the speech.) She still did it, relying more on newspaper reviews than bright covers these days. This Christmas parcel contained three books, with explanatory notes as ordered by Miranda. Maggie had spent hours in New York’s new and second-hand bookshops. She’d found a debut novel from a young Mexican writer, a rising star in the literary world, earthy and exuberant storytelling, Maggie had written. There was a book of quirky facts about manners: the author is the sister of one of the English Royal nannies and seems obsessed with the proper use of a fork, and a nonfiction study of the impact of cotton-growing on the world: stand-out fact: cotton = pollution – a third of the world’s pesticides are used in its cultivation. Maggie knew Miranda wouldn’t read all of them. She could almost hear her aunt’s amused voice. ‘Read them? Darling, when will I get time to do that? But I have to know about them, that’s far more important. And pick ones with smart jackets that will look good on my shelves, won’t you?’ It was an act, of course. Miranda was very well-read. Scarily well-read, sometimes. Or perhaps just scary.
Maggie touched the fourth parcel. ‘Happy Christmas, Sadie.’ She was the hardest of her aunts to buy for. You couldn’t buy a gift for a person’s house if you didn’t know whether they had their own house. Or make-up or jewellery, if you didn�
��t know whether they wore any. Or luxurious hand creams in case it went against all they believed in. Or even a jumper or a nice scarf if you hadn’t seen them in twenty years and didn’t know what colours they might like or even what size they were. The only thing you could buy someone who you now knew only through her annual cards was notepaper and beautiful pens. The Christmas present contained both, as it had done every year for as long as Maggie could remember. Hope to see you soon. Lots of love, Maggie, she’d written in the card. She’d written the same thing in every card for the past twenty years. A quick summary of what she’d been up to that year and then the farewell message.
‘Are you sure Sadie gets all my news?’ she used to ask when she was much younger. ‘How do we know when we don’t hear any back from her?’
‘She passes a longer message through Father Cavalli at the church,’ Leo said. ‘He lets us know how she’s getting on. He says she loves your news reports, you know that.’
She’d been the only girl at her school in Hobart with an aunt who’d run off to join a hippy commune. It had been quite a novelty. Not as good as her classmate whose uncle was a newsreader on one of the TV stations on the mainland, but worth something. Maggie had often talked it over with her friends.
‘What do hippies actually do?’ one of them asked once.
Maggie hadn’t been too sure. ‘They look after dolphins,’ she’d said, thinking of the necklace Sadie sometimes wore.
‘Really? How do you look after dolphins?’
‘Feed them, wash them.’
‘They don’t need washing, do they? They’re already in the water.’
‘That’s salt water. Sadie washes them in nice soapy water.’ She’d changed the subject quickly after that.
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