‘I haven’t. My life is good.’
‘You could have met another man.’
‘I didn’t want to meet another man.’
‘Eliza, he’s married. He’s got two kids. What about you and kids?’
‘I’ve got Maggie.’
‘Maggie’s your niece, not your daughter. You don’t know what you’re missing. It’s the most incredible feeling, that bond with your own child. It makes me sad that you’ll never experience it. It’s what women are born for.’
‘So my life is worthless otherwise?’
‘That’s not what I’m saying.’
‘Yes it is. That’s exactly what you’re saying. I’ll need to break that news to my sisters too. All of us childless and pitiful, except for Clementine. Thank God Clementine decided to get pregnant at sixteen or we would all be truly sad old women.’
‘I’m saying it because I care about you. You have to see the situation as it is. You’re supposed to be the expert on living the ideal life. What if one of your clients came to you and said she’d been having an affair with a married man for years but there was no chance of them ever being together in any fulfilling way? What would you advise her to do?’
She and Louisa hadn’t spoken for nearly a month after that conversation. Eliza had been too angry about it at first. How dare Louisa make those judgements? How dare she assume that just because she wanted a life filled with children that Eliza wanted the same thing? Because she truly didn’t want children of her own. Perhaps Maggie’s sudden arrival all those years ago had fulfilled any maternal instinct she might have had. Perhaps it was the knowledge that her injured body might not be strong enough to bear a child. Or that even the mention of children might change everything she had with Mark. Whatever the explanation, she was sure of her decision.
It was Eliza who broke the silence. ‘I miss you,’ she said when she rang Louisa. ‘I miss you telling me off.’
‘You’re not going to take any notice of me, though, are you?’
‘No. So will you take me as I am?’
Louisa had. They were best friends again. But she still didn’t approve of Mark.
Eliza lay in bed now and watched as Mark dressed. A farewell kiss, a touch of his hand to her face, a ‘See you soon, my love,’ and then he was gone. She dressed slowly, made herself a coffee and then decided not to drink it. She’d go and get some air instead.
Usually she headed in the direction of the beach. This afternoon she took the opposite route, past the big houses and under the trees. She loved this area, the mixture of ordinary red-brick flats next to gracious old mansions, the snap of the sea in the air. She liked the fact there were cafés in one direction, restaurants in another and everything else she needed in between: a laundrette, a chemist, a bakery and a shoe-mender. There was also a Catholic church, a Jewish synagogue and a meeting hall for the Church of Seventh Day Adventists. As Mark had said once, if the end of the world was to happen, she had plenty of places to flee to.
She found herself outside the Catholic church today. Intending to walk further, perhaps even to the shopping village, she surprised herself by walking through the gate, up the gravel path and in through the side door. It was her first time in there. Inside it was cool and dark, the air still redolent of incense from a ceremony earlier that day. The smell was immediately familiar from childhood. She began to do the sign of the cross before catching herself just in time. It was hypocritical enough for her to be inside a church, let alone to start going through the rituals. She stopped at the back pew, lowering herself, with some difficulty, onto the wooden kneeler. There were other people in pews beside her. The priest was hearing confessions, she realised. She turned and saw the old-fashioned confession boxes, watched as a man her father’s age emerged, a short pause before a woman Eliza’s own age took his place.
It was a very long time since Eliza had been to mass, let alone made her confession, but all the prayers came to mind in an instant. She could join that queue, wait her turn, step into that box and say all the words.
‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It is about twenty-five years since my last confession.’
‘And your sin?’
‘I’ve been having an affair.’
‘Who with?
‘A married man. The love of my life.’
‘Are you sorry about it?’
‘Not one bit. I’d do it all again tomorrow.’
‘Any other sins?’
‘I’ve been lying to someone for the past twenty years.’
‘Who to?’
‘My niece.’
‘What about?’
‘My sister Sadie.’
‘Can you change that?’
‘Tell her the truth? And tear the family apart even more? No, thanks.’
She’d been thinking about Sadie a great deal recently. She knew it was partly to do with the time of the year, the run-up to one of their Christmas gatherings. She went through it every year around this time. Something else had sparked it this year, though. Five months ago, while shopping in Bourke Street Mall, Eliza thought she saw Sadie. It was a woman of the same height, the same build, with dark-brown hair. She looked as Eliza had imagined Sadie to look, twenty years on. She called her name. ‘Sadie?’
The woman didn’t turn. Eliza started to follow her, cursing her bad leg. The old Eliza would have been able to catch her in a minute. The woman turned a corner and Eliza briefly lost sight of her. Mercifully, she had stopped to browse in a shoe store.
‘Sadie.’ She put her hand on the woman’s arm. She turned. Close up, she looked nothing like Sadie. ‘I’m sorry. I thought you were someone I knew.’ Someone I knew. The sister I haven’t seen for twenty years.
If it had been Sadie, what would she have said? ‘Hi, how are things? Fancy a coffee? And by the way, sorry for all of us ganging up on you like that all those years ago. You were right to cut all ties. But what about we let bygones be bygones?’
That would make for a lovely Donegal gathering, if Eliza was to turn up with Sadie by her side.
She had never told the others, but she had tried many times over the years to track Sadie down. She had to respect Clementine’s point of view – that awful time when Maggie was missing had affected her more than anyone else, after all – but the simple truth was she missed Sadie. Yes, it had been terrible what she had done. But also understandable. Hadn’t they all fallen in love with Maggie?
Eliza had often wished she’d been there when Leo and Clementine found Sadie and Maggie in that caravan park. In the endless post-mortems when they were all back together in Hobart, Leo had gone over what had happened and his conversation with Sadie, all of them still trying to make sense of it.
Leo said he had tried to talk to Sadie. Tried to make her understand how worried everyone had been, that leaving brief messages on the answering machine hadn’t been enough. Tried to make her understand why Clementine was so upset. It was like talking to a wall, he kept saying. She wouldn’t explain; just kept asking to be left alone.
He did as she said, left her there. He, Clementine and Maggie returned to their hire car and drove to a motel in the nearby town. Maggie was perfectly normal, happy and chatting away as though it was also perfectly normal that Clementine and he should have just turned up like that.
The next morning Leo went back to the caravan park. He was too late. Sadie was gone. He checked with the man in the office. Sadie had left nothing but Maggie’s belongings crammed into a plastic bag.
They had all been worried that she’d done something drastic. Killed herself. Leo had spent days on the phone to police stations and hospitals in the area. They’d been mildly sympathetic but not helpful. A domestic dispute, they inferred. Young women had fights with their family members and headed into the unknown every day of the week.
When the card arrived from her for Maggie’s birthday, Eliza had been as relieved as everyone else. The following year, another card arrived for Maggie. The year after, another. Even though t
hey never contained any news, they gave them all some solace. Leo always asked Father Cavalli, and in later years the other priests, if they had any more news of her. They obviously knew where she was. Surely the priests understood what her absence was doing to the family. The priests had been understanding but unhelpful. They had to respect Sadie’s decision, they always said. Over the years Leo and all of Sadie’s sisters had written letters to her, enclosing them with Maggie’s letters and Christmas cards. They’d never been acknowledged.
Eliza still often tried to picture Sadie, to imagine where she might be and what she might be doing now. She did it with all of her family. She pictured Leo on his travels, Juliet working hard in England, Miranda clinking champagne glasses in some sophisticated bar, Clementine out in the bush or perched on a rock by some coastline. She thought of Maggie – until three months ago – in a glossy office in London. But Sadie? The picture was always blank. Where could she be? With whom? What state of mind? Happy? Sad? Disappointed? Fulfilled?
Eliza could ask herself the same questions. She knew the answers. She spent enough time thinking about it. She was all of those things at the same time.
‘Can I help you?’ An elderly man in a dark suit and white collar was standing at the end of the pew.
‘No, thanks, Father.’ She gave him the briefest of smiles, then got up and walked as quickly as she could out into the bright sunlight.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Clementine wasn’t prone to whoops of delight, especially when she was home alone, but the letter that had just arrived called for something special. She’d been waiting six months to get her research grant approved and today she’d had the confirmation. She automatically went to ring Maggie in London to tell her the news, stopping herself just in time. Maggie wasn’t in London any more and, in any case, Clementine was trying not to ring her too often at the moment.
She imagined a conversation instead. ‘Maggie, I got it!’
Maggie wouldn’t need to ask what ‘it’ was. ‘That’s fantastic! When do you leave? How long this time?’
She’d be away for fourteen months, her longest stint yet. The previous three times she’d been to the Antarctic had been for summer trips, heading down in early November and coming back in February.
‘You’re sure you don’t mind, Maggie?’ She’d been asking her daughter that same question for as long as she could remember. At first it had been about local trips, when Maggie was just a child. ‘You’re sure you don’t mind me going to Maria Island?’ ‘You’re sure you don’t mind me going to Devonport?’ The locations had changed each year as Clementine’s field of study widened, as more opportunities opened up and as her reputation grew. ‘You’re sure you don’t mind?’
She’d asked the question of Maggie three years before, when she first applied to go down south. It wasn’t as if she was just a plane trip away if something happened. It wasn’t as if Maggie could nip down and visit her. It wasn’t as if email and telephone calls were always the most reliable.
‘You have to go,’ Maggie had enthused. ‘Mum, it’s brilliant.’
Clementine knew Maggie meant it then. Most of the time she called her Clementine. Mum was just for special occasions.
Clementine had loved her three trips there so far, from her first sight of the continent, like a massive white dome on the horizon. It had been hard to tell whether it was cloud or land. It had taken two weeks to get there on the ship from Hobart, longer than that on one of the journeys when the ice had been so thick they’d had to slowly break their way through it. She’d been based at Davis Station, studying Adélie penguins. Her first encounter hadn’t been encouraging: lots of them running around the base, looking bedraggled and grumpy. The second trip she’d spent weeks off station at the rookery, studying their breeding habits. It had been so comical to watch them building the nests. They would waddle off, pick up a stone, waddle back, place it in a pile, then waddle off for another one. In the meantime, another penguin would waddle over and steal one of those stones. There had been plenty of serious research too. She’d worked with a team of people from the UK, Germany, Spain and Sweden, as well as Australians.
The trip was months off still, but Clementine couldn’t resist it. She started to make her checklist. As she wrote down the different items, she absentmindedly reached back for her plait, getting that familiar dart of surprise to find it gone. She’d had it cut off earlier that year, the same week she’d submitted the application for this research trip. She’d decided it was time, now she was in her early forties. It would also make sense from a practical point of view, if she was to go to Antarctica again. Showers on station were limited to three minutes each, barely time to wash her body, let alone a head of long hair. She liked the new short cut, a cap of dark locks, with a slightly longer fringe. Maggie loved the new look too. Leo said she and Maggie could pass as sisters. He’d been saying that since Maggie was a teenager.
Clementine kept at her list for twenty minutes before deciding to take a break. If someone else had been home, she’d have opened a bottle of champagne. Instead, she settled on a cup of green tea and one of Beethoven’s piano sonatas. She liked to play it loudly, and these days she could do whatever she wanted in the house. She’d had it to herself almost all year. Leo was rarely in Tasmania these days. He was marvellous. A man in his late seventies, still so active and engaged with the world. In all her years, the only occasion they’d ever fought was the terrible time with Sadie. It had broken both their hearts. In the end, they’d made a mutual decision not to talk about her.
As the kettle boiled, she stood in front of the noticeboard by the fridge. The housework rosters that used to cover it were long gone. It was now covered in Maggie memorabilia. Over the years it had held school reports, notices about sports days and drawings. Articles in the Tasmanian newspapers about the various statewide maths competitions she’d won. A clipping from one of the Sydney newspapers when she graduated with perfect marks, the youngest to do so in the university’s history.
Not just articles. It held so many photos that there were triple layers in some places. The most recent one showed Maggie and Angus on holiday together in the Yorkshire dales. Clementine took it down. Then she changed her mind. It was a lovely photo of Maggie. She got the kitchen scissors, cut Angus out of the photo, put him in the bin, then stuck Maggie back on the noticeboard. The dozens of Maggies pinned all over the board smiled out at her, as if in approval.
The noticeboard was a pictorial history of Maggie’s life. Photos of her on holiday in Bicheno as a two-year-old next to photos from trips to Sydney to stay with Juliet and Myles. As a teenager in Melbourne with Miranda. A baby photo next to one of her with Eliza at the MCG in Melbourne on the day of the AFL grand final. Dozens and dozens of snapshots of her life.
All that was missing were photos of Maggie and Sadie together. Clementine had taken them down twenty years ago. Even after Maggie had been found and brought back home, no one had ever put them back. Perhaps they didn’t dare to. Or perhaps they didn’t need to.
The truth was they all probably thought of Sadie more since she’d been gone than they had when she was with them. As much as they could think of her without knowing any true details.
Maggie had only occasionally questioned the whole situation. Why was it that Sadie never told them where she was? Why didn’t she ever come and visit? It had been frightening in a way how easy it had been to keep the lie going, year after year. Equally frightening that a person could just step out of their life and start a new one. Leave their family and everything they knew behind.
They didn’t talk about it much any more. Hints over the years, occasional mentions and careful reactions to innocent comments by Maggie about Sadie. Maggie had asked once why her aunt never rang her, and without missing a beat, Miranda explained that Sadie believed all modern technology was immoral.
‘So she wouldn’t watch television? Go to the cinema? What would she do?’
‘Dance, mostly,’ Miranda said.
>
Maggie started to laugh. ‘Sadie can’t spend every day dancing. She must have a job. How else would she buy food and clothes?’
‘They grow a lot of their own food. And they only wear second-hand clothes, so they’re quite cheap.’
Clementine told Miranda off about it later. It was like water off a duck’s back.
‘As I’ve always said, if you want to come up with a better story, go right ahead. God forbid we should ever tell Maggie the truth, after all.’
Many times Clementine had wanted to tell her the truth. She wanted to tell everyone the truth, get it all out in the open. Sadie had done a stupid, dangerous thing, but everything had turned out okay in the end, hadn’t it? Wasn’t it as simple as that?
She’d talked to Leo about it, but his response surprised her. ‘There are two sides to this, Clementine. Sadie isn’t away from us just because of what happened with Maggie. She wants to be away.’
‘But if we told her we wanted to see her again —’
‘We have. I have, at least. In every letter I’ve ever sent with Maggie’s. She’s never replied to any of them.’
‘It’s my fault. It’s all my fault.’
‘No, it’s not, Clementine. It was no one person’s fault. You’re not to blame yourself.’
She would never have believed it possible, but Clementine missed Sadie. She wanted to see her again. She would welcome her back into the family. She had felt that way for years now. That terrible time so long ago had almost faded from her memory. It almost felt unreal, as if it hadn’t ever happened. Maggie hadn’t been harmed. She had still grown up bright, happy and confident. All that remained from that time were questions. Clementine wanted to know why Sadie had done what she’d done. She would be able to ask her about it in a calm way now, she knew. Out of genuine curiosity, without any of the rage and fury that had surrounded any thought of Sadie in the early years.
She often tried to picture her sister and wondered whether she had ever been back to Hobart. Had they been sitting in the house unaware that she was outside, observing them? Had she and Maggie walked down to the Salamanca market, or enjoyed a coffee at one of the cafés looking over the water, without realising that Sadie was sitting nearby, watching them?
Those Faraday Girls Page 28