by Ella Carey
“I wish you would see him.” Tess was surprised at the passion in her voice.
But Rebecca stood up. “It’s been . . . a revelation to meet you. It really has. But now I’m tired. This was all . . . another time, another place. I’ll drive you back into town. And I ask you this. Keep everything to yourself. Don’t tell anyone, not a soul. Promise me?”
“Rebecca, please.”
“No,” Rebecca said. “It won’t happen. Because you will keep quiet.”
“Of course I will,” Tess said.
Rebecca moved toward the front door and collected her car keys from a small dish on a side table. Next to the keys was a collection of shells. “So,” she said, “I’m able to cut and run; I always was.”
Tess rose from the sofa. “Forgive me, Rebecca, but you can be kind to yourself. There is no rule that says you must deny your heart what it wants.”
Rebecca turned to face her, narrowing her eyes. “That’s interesting, coming from a hardened New York businesswoman.”
Tess pressed her lips together. Was that how she came across? How little we seemed to know ourselves and how intimately we thought we knew other people.
“Well,” Rebecca went on. “Let me tell you a couple of hard truths of my own. I’m not going backward. It would be fatal. The past is some far-off place that only exists in our memories. In any case, I’ve come to think over the years that I read more into it than was ever really there.”
She opened the front door, holding it wide for Tess. The sea’s strange whispering sounds came through in the night.
“I can’t give you a happy ending, Tess,” Rebecca said. “This is not some story; this is not art—it’s real life.”
Tess followed the older woman out onto the balcony. A sea breeze whipped up Rebecca’s hair, sending it flying around her face.
Tess climbed into Rebecca’s car and then watched the older woman’s beautiful brown artist’s hands turning the steering wheel back toward the sea.
Tess stared out at the fathomless sea.
And asked herself one question.
Why?
Once she was back in her room, Tess knew what she wanted to do. She wanted to talk with someone as soon as she could, and if there was one person with whom she felt like discussing Rebecca, she was completely certain it was James.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Victor Harbor, 1946
The gunshot cracked, ricocheting into Rebecca’s dream. She opened her eyes, unsure for a moment whether she was asleep or awake. She lay still for a moment, the silent darkness eerie in the old beach house around her. Soon the sound of footsteps thumped in the hallway. There were hysterical voices—Celia’s and Vicky’s, and then Edward’s quieter response. A scream. A door closed. Rebecca brought her hand up to her mouth. Then, half shaking her head, fumbling for her dressing gown, she climbed out of bed and moved toward her doorway. She stood there a moment, suddenly unsure whether she should join them or not.
Silence loomed now, and the passage swirled around her. Pictures, side tables, tennis rackets against the walls, everything seemed to move. Rebecca’s footsteps echoed like heartbeats when she finally started to move.
Only one person owned a gun in this house. As she made her way down the hallway, Rebecca remembered how Edward had told her that Angus had shot a bullet through Celia’s bedroom window at Haslemere once. Celia had locked him in the billiard room because he was drunk, but he’d escaped through a window into the garden in the dead of night. Rebecca took in a shuddering breath and turned the handle of the sitting room door.
Celia lay on a chaise longue, one hand resting against her pallid face. Her cheeks were the texture and color of white silk and her pale dressing gown was wrapped tight around her body. Rebecca raked her eyes over Edward’s mother for bullet wounds. But there was nothing. Angus had not shot his wife . . .
Vicky knelt next to Celia, her pale hand stroking her mother’s head. Edward leaned against one of the French doors that led to the veranda outside, facing downward, his mouth drawn into a tight grimace. His body heaved as if every breath were a labor.
“Mother . . .” he murmured, but the word was wretched, the antipathy of its own meaning. “My brain has gone to pieces.”
Rebecca clutched the brass door handle, but her fingers were stiff.
“What was he thinking?” Vicky wailed.
“Edward.” Celia’s voice was deep, primal. “Edward,” she moaned.
Edward moved across the room toward her, only to turn halfway as if instinctively, as the wail of a siren rent the night air, the night that was only supposed to be punctuated by the sounds of the sea lapping in and out from the beach.
When the ambulance stopped outside the house, red light sent circular patterns over every piece of Celia’s carefully placed furniture, highlighting her comfortable sofas, the roses that had been brought in especially, as if making a mockery of it all before sweeping its red dart toward Celia, then Vicky, then back again over the ceiling, highlighting all the cracks on its surface.
Rebecca, suddenly desperate, only just resisted the urge to run to Celia and comfort her. In the grim seconds while the door of the emergency vehicle swung open and voices sounded in the velvet-soft darkness outside, it was as if the room drew in closer to cloak them all.
Edward moved through the open French doors to the veranda, parting the gauzy white curtains, flooding the room with red. Rebecca watched him, torn, wanting to run to him, too, to hold him in her arms.
Men’s voices filtered in from the night, stilted, practical voices.
Rebecca felt her breath coming in great shudders as they carried the stretcher up the veranda steps, wheeling in solemn procession past the sitting room toward Angus’s bedroom. The sound of it rattled through the room.
A few minutes later—or was it seconds?—not long, a body passed by under a white sheet, and the sheer curtains flapped in the light sea breeze. They lifted Edward’s dead father down the steps to the garden.
Rebecca swallowed hard.
One of the ambulance workers reappeared, parting the curtains as if he were an actor on the stage.
These doors were designed to welcome guests, not herald the dead.
“Mrs. Russell,” he said. The man moved toward Celia and leaned over her, lifting her wrist and checking her pulse as she lay there not moving while her husband was carted away.
The man disappeared again, returning with something in a small paper cup. As he raised the older woman’s head and helped her to sip the liquid, she looked so much less intimidating, Rebecca thought, than the coiffed perfection that Rebecca had first seen at Haslemere. Here was a woman who had lost her son and now, in some gruesome turn of events, her husband. Death, it seemed, was a leveler for everyone. Celia was, after all, human when she was stripped of all the pretenses that great wealth tended to provide.
Rebecca felt her own eyes soften as she gazed at Edward’s mother. Just then, Vicky turned to face Rebecca, a flash of annoyance in her eyes. Edward appeared at the French doors again, and it was as if all the life force had gone out of him. His eyes were deadened.
Rebecca moved toward him, one hand stretched out. “Darling, Edward . . .” she said.
“Edward.” Celia moaned the word.
In one swift movement, Edward made his way past Rebecca to his mother and the ambulance officer who tended her. He knelt beside Celia and took her hand.
“What can I do?” Rebecca hovered in the background.
“Nothing, not now, Rebecca,” he murmured, as she stood there, helpless.
She brought her hand up to her mouth, catching Vicky’s gaze as it shifted toward her, but only for a second before Vicky, too, ran to her mother, and the three of them, all that were left of the once-great dynasty, huddled together like lost children on a rock.
Rebecca swayed, her heart thumping as if someone were pelting it like a drum.
“Best if we bring Mrs. Russell with us, sir. She’ll need observation.” The ambulance
officer spoke in measured tones.
Edward reached out, resting his hand on the emergency worker’s shoulder. “Thank you,” he said. And the ambulance officer ran out to bring in another stretcher.
Both parents then, one dead, one collapsed. A brother lost.
“I’ll go with them.” Edward spoke to Vicky. “Try and get some sleep, Rebecca.”
As Rebecca turned, she clutched at her stomach, her body wanting to bend double with both pain and guilt at her own circuitous, relentless thoughts. Edward had not wanted her. She was not part of the family. Could she ever really be part of his world?
The family’s manager arrived from Haslemere the next morning. Edward spent hours locked away with him in what was supposed to be Angus’s study. Another awful funeral. Doctors came and went once Celia was brought home, but she remained in bed. Vicky did not talk to Rebecca, except about the most rudimentary of things. Rebecca decided to talk to Edward when he came out of the hush that was Celia’s bedroom, closing the door silently behind himself.
“She is sleeping?” Rebecca asked, looking up from the book that she’d been pretending to read all afternoon.
Edward nodded, but he moved toward the front of the veranda, standing square and facing the lawn. Silently, Rebecca placed the book that she had lifted off the long wicker seat beside her, in the hope that Edward might come and sit with her, back down on the seat.
“I hate to see you like this,” she murmured.
“There’s nothing you can do,” he said, his words thick and hard.
Rebecca stared out at the gray sea. Thin layers of foam lined the island. She wrapped her arms around her waist. “I wish there was, darling,” she said.
She sensed his mouth set at her choice of words, even though she could not see his face. It was as if some silent, unspoken boundary had raised itself up between them. Would they ever be able to break it down? Did he want to?
“There isn’t anything to be done,” he said.
“Would it be easier if I left you alone with Celia and Vicky?” she asked, hating the question, hating the thought of the answer that she might receive back.
Edward still gazed out at everything and nothing. “We’ll talk soon,” he said. “Don’t go just yet.”
His final words wrapped around her like fog drawing in from the sea.
Rebecca fled to the beach. She spent hours out on the island, drawing. Then sent them all off to Sunday, hardly knowing what she’d sketched. Deep shadows came out from inside her. She drew faces, then went over them in brush and ink. They were distorted, both women and men, figurative, representative of something—she hardly knew what. Strange shapes emerged. Lost men, the soldiers she’d tended in the makeshift hospital, images from what she’d read and seen about the concentration camps. Then renditions that only she knew were Angus and Robert. The war was supposed to have ended when victory was announced, but it lingered long after all the dancing in the streets. And she wondered how little control they had over the way they dealt with their pasts, how they dealt with trauma.
Rebecca dealt with her own uncertainty and her own grief the only way she knew how—working at a furious pace, the turbulent sea a perfect companion for the storm in her soul. No side was the winner. All of them, all those young men and her father and Angus and Robert, had been sent off to both world wars at the very cusp of their young lives, at the very time when they should have been finding out who they were, not what they could cope with. Not what they could endure in the face of bullets and violence and pure hatred and greed over land and politics and control.
And yet women were supposed to rely on them, for food, shelter, everything. It was the way society was supposed to work.
The whole construct was tumbling down like a house of cards. And men were still expected to shoulder their grief alone. What worried her to the depths of her soul was that Edward seemed determined to do just that.
Edward sat on the veranda a few days after his father’s death, his ears picking up the night whispers in the garden but his mind locked in chaos. He walked around during the day as if on automatic pilot, tending to Celia and Vicky while his thoughts tore at him, thoughts that utterly flooded his mind during the long, still nights. And only one thing was clear—change was going to happen, within the very heart of everything he knew. And the only person who could make those changes was him.
But how was he going to pull his family back together and run all their interests, and how was Rebecca supposed to continue with her art, have the career she deserved, while being chained to the Russell empire, chained to a husband who now owned half the darned state? The last thing he wanted was for her to be viewed simply as his wife. Marrying him would stifle any chance of her living in the way they’d both dreamed about, now that he had no chance of living away from his family. And yet his family in turn would lose every ounce of their legacy with no one to run it. His plans with Rebecca seemed to have drifted away.
And yet he returned to one thing. An authentic life lived without him would be far better for Rebecca in the long run. No matter how much he loved her, more than life itself, he had to let her go. To do anything else would be selfish on his part. He’d seen enough of what marriage to a man who was weighed down with his inheritance could do to a woman. Rebecca would die a slow death, were she expected to be a lady of the upper classes. He flicked a gaze back to the closed screen door that led to his mother’s room.
At least one of them deserved to be happy. And that person was going to be Rebecca. Angus’s death was the last nail in the coffin that was his relationship with Rebecca. He and Rebecca were not meant to be. What would become of Celia and Vicky if he abandoned them now? He was all they had. If he walked away from his family and pursued his dreams of writing and living with Rebecca in the manner that Sunday and John Reed lived, it would be abdicating all his responsibilities. It would be cruel. He could never live with himself if he did such a thing.
And Rebecca needed to see where her art would take her, because Edward was sure it would carry her a long way if he didn’t hold her back.
As he stood up and made his way out into the garden under the vast Australian sky and the Southern Cross, Edward raked his hands through his hair. What was more important? Love or family?
How could anyone possibly choose between the two? Perhaps the only choice was Rebecca herself. Perhaps the only choice was to give her the freedom that she so rightly deserved. He loved her. No matter how tormented he was, no matter how much uncertainty broiled in his head, he knew that the only kind thing to do was to let her go.
A wallaby emerged from the bushes, grazing on the lawn and looking up at him before pricking its ears and hopping away again. All he felt now was guilt for bringing Rebecca here. His chest hurt with the knowledge that he should have known better.
Edward walked back to the chair on the veranda, slumping down in it and staring out at the blackness again. He reached for the coffee that had become his constant companion during these lonely, sleepless nights. It was cold.
He thought about the sum of what he’d inherited—Haslemere, two beach houses, the house in Melbourne, not to mention the two stations in South Australia, vast tracts of sheep country, all employing managers, household staff, and farm workers with families, for goodness’ sakes. What was he supposed to do? Sack all the employees? Men who’d returned from the war to the only safe haven they knew, their jobs with the Russell family. If he gave Rebecca the life she needed, what was he supposed to do? Tell everyone else he was selling out? His family was responsible for so many livelihoods.
He couldn’t afford to be selfish, not for anyone’s sake.
There was no turning back to last week, or a few days ago. He was here. This was now. Everything had gone wrong.
Edith was born to the role of a station owner’s wife. Edward set his jaw as he marched into the house, pausing a moment outside Rebecca’s bedroom. Light sent a thin golden ribbon under the door. The temptation to go to her was so overwhelming f
or a moment that he had to drag himself away from the door.
He had to let her go.
As he made his way to his bedroom, he knew what the grim answer was. Edith. He’d make arrangements to marry her, soon.
Rebecca was sitting out on the veranda the following evening rather than going to bed. She’d seen Edward sitting out here at night. She couldn’t bear him being alone, couldn’t bear another night of lying awake in her room while she heard him pacing around outside, as she had done the night before and the nights before that. The lemon glow of the lights from the sitting room highlighted the novel she was not reading. Enough was enough. She would keep him company.
Surely enough, he appeared through the sitting room doors, a worn, gray version of himself. His green eyes were streaked with red, and his forehead was crinkled with new lines.
“Rebecca.”
She looked up at him.
His gaze was averted. His mouth was drawn downward, reminding her of the expression on his face when Angus had been wheeled away. She placed her book on the side table next to her chair.
“It’s not going to work out,” he said, looking at the floorboards, shifting his feet. “You and I.”
Rebecca’s gut dive-bombed as if a flock of birds inside her plunged down, down. White shock clamped over her. She reeled backward in the chair as if she’d been pushed. Or hit. No matter how much she’d been expecting it, the shock was relentless and hard. Rebecca clutched at the armrests of the old wicker chair and thought suddenly that she would never come here again. Would not see Haslemere again. His life would go on without her; she’d never know what happened to him next.
“You don’t mean that,” she whispered. He couldn’t mean it. Their love was stronger than this, stronger than battle lines or practicalities, or anything that anyone could throw at them. He was the one person on this earth whom she loved above all others. He was her family.