by Nicole Trope
In the garden I get down on my knees and go back to inspecting the carrots, but I find myself unable to see anything except her face. I don’t know why it is so clear in my mind since I have not seen her for more than twenty years and by rights it is her sister that I should remember. I saw a picture of her sister twelve months ago. Twelve months ago on the night I killed my husband. There she was, standing in front of Birdy and calling herself Isabel. But her name isn’t Isabel, her name is Lila. Lila Adams from next door. Lila Adams, daughter of Ellie Adams, and sister to Felicity.
Lila’s smile and Lila’s eyes and Lila’s golden hair. Lila from next door, whose sister was Felicity. Felicity, whose picture lay on Simon’s desk and whose solemn little face is now the stuff of my nightmares. The greatest question mark of all exists around Felicity. She and Simon spent so much time together, and he had, among all the other photographs, only two of children taken in the garden. All the other pictures he showed me on that awful night twelve months ago were taken in his office at the studio. He posed them in front of the painting of the sailboat riding the crests of rough white-capped waves, its sails filled with wind and movement. For twelve years it hung on the wall of his office at the studio. I remember going with him to choose that painting. We both loved how the blue of the water behind the boat was reflected in the blue of the sky above the boat.
Instant, now-fading snapshots of girls in their prettiest outfits, hoping to find themselves in front of a camera on the studio floor, but instead finding themselves alone with Simon in his office.
Every night until the day I came here I thought about destroying that painting. I would stand in front of it in his study at home, where it has hung since his retirement, scissors held tightly in my hand, and wait for the courage to slice through the canvas—but it never came.
The photograph of Felicity was taken in front of the aviary. She is dressed in a blue corduroy skirt and ruffled pink top. Her brown eyes squint at the camera and her head is cocked to one side. Half of her mouth seems to be attempting a smile as though someone has told her to ‘smile for the camera’.
There is nothing sinister about the picture, nothing sinister about any of the pictures, unless you were there that night, as I was, unless you had heard the words he said. They are all just pictures of girls, ordinary everyday pictures. In most of the pictures the girls look quite happy.
Felicity doesn’t look happy, but then I don’t think she ever did. Surely, I have said to myself many times since that night, surely he cannot have done anything to Felicity. I believe she is seven or eight years old in the photograph. He wouldn’t have, he couldn’t have, I have said to myself whenever I am woken by a racing heart from stifling dreams that I cannot remember except for the appearance of Felicity and her hand reaching out for mine.
Lila only came with her sister to visit every now and again. Mostly Ellie kept her at home and sent Felicity over, but sometimes she would send them both. If both children appeared on the step I knew that Ellie was having a bad day. I should have gone next door to talk to her, to help her. I was not, in the end, a very good friend to her. Her desperation and despair cut a little close for me, I suppose. She had gone from being a woman who took great pride in her appearance and the immaculate condition of her house to someone whose sink was piled with dirty dishes, her grey roots showing.
‘After everything I’ve done for him,’ she said when she recounted the story of Albert’s leaving. ‘After everything, he just walks out to begin a new life. He has no interest in seeing the girls, you know. He wants me to sell the house so he won’t have to pay the mortgage. I don’t understand how it came to this. I don’t understand at all.’ Ellie persisted in her state of confusion and anguish for months, taking to her bed or yelling at her children. I shook my head along with Simon at her deterioration, but I could not look too closely at her failures. I was aware that should Simon decide to leave me, I would be in exactly the same situation as she was, scraping together money to get through the week, fighting with her ex-husband for support, and fending off the bank, who wanted the house.
Beautiful moths fluttered around my husband all the time, and in my most self-critical moments his endless reassurances meant nothing to me. I could not fathom his interest in me when I compared myself to the women he saw at the television studio. Sometimes I would go through weeks when every day was a question. Is this it? I would think. Is this the day he’s going to tell me that he’s leaving me? It wouldn’t take much to set me off on one of those self-defeating spirals. I would see a woman look him over at a party or he would be declared the sexiest man in Australia by some women’s magazine, and it would be enough for me to question everything about our marriage.
‘But my darling, have I ever given you cause to worry?’ he would say if I confessed the turmoil I found myself in.
‘No,’ I answered every time, because he never did. Clearly, obviously now I know I was looking in the wrong place.
As far as I had known growing up, once you were married you were married for life. Divorce was never discussed in our home, it wasn’t even discussed when it happened to someone else; but watching Ellie I was all too aware that it could and did happen.
I had no qualifications and no way of supporting my children. They and I existed in our luxurious home thanks to Simon’s largesse. The girls attended private school and took ballet and piano and even riding lessons because Simon wanted them to have everything, to be everything they could be. ‘I want them to be at home in even the highest society,’ he told me when we discussed what other activities the girls might be able to do.
‘What societies are those?’ I asked.
‘Oh, my darling girl,’ he said, ‘sometimes you are so delightfully naive.’
Watching Ellie, I saw how quickly everything could disappear. Simon put money in my account and paid all the bills. He and Eric discussed investments and interest rates and I smiled and poured the drinks. With a snap of his fingers he could take everything away. He never said anything to indicate he thought like that, but I was always aware that he had given me everything I had. My life was entirely different to my mother’s life, entirely different to my childhood. When she was alive, my mother would come to visit and sit, looking like an uncomfortable stranger, on the living room sofa. She was awed by the size of the house and the expensive furniture. She had no idea how to treat the cleaners and found it difficult to talk to her privileged grandchildren once they were old enough to be aware of her accent and cheap clothes (she adamantly refused anything I offered her until after my father died). The thought of trying to take my girls back to the place I had come from was at once laughable and terrifying. ‘I will make your dreams come true,’ he had said. ‘I will give you everything. You will be the envy of everyone you know.’ And he did, he did and I was. He had given it all to me, and by default he could also take it all away.
Ellie was my worst-case scenario, and so I looked after her child or children a few afternoons a week and convinced myself that I was doing my best as I maintained a polite distance from her tragedy. Lila only started appearing on my doorstep with her sister after she turned three and Albert left. She was a gorgeous child, with blonde hair and blue eyes and a delicate fairy grace that made her seem lighter than air.
Felicity wasn’t so beautiful, more interesting looking, with her thick straight hair and brown eyes. But Simon adored her . . . adored her. ‘She’s so sensitive to everything around her,’ he told me. ‘She wants to learn so much, and she listens so carefully to everything I say.’
It doesn’t seem possible that he saw her as anything other than a little girl, younger even than his daughters. She was a child when they spent time together, just a little girl. All the women who came forward to accuse Simon of wrongdoing were older when he met them. They were thirteen and fourteen and fifteen, young women already.
Those who supported Simon when the allegations began—and there were many, many people who did—would often point to the age of the
‘victims’ as possible proof that either nothing had happened and it was more fantasy than fact or that if something had, it was most likely mutual. He was a famous man who could get them onto the show—a show that could possibly change their lives, one man wrote on a blog that had been set up to query every accusation. Is it not possible that these young women used their sexuality to persuade Simon Winslow to give them what they wanted? Have we moved so far into the arena of political correctness that we cannot even entertain the possibility that a fifteen-year-old girl is aware of her own attractiveness? Teenagers are having sex earlier and earlier. We must allow for the fact that Simon Winslow may have been the victim of circumstance. It is very difficult for a man to resist the invitation of a beautiful girl. Certainly his behaviour may not have been morally correct, but it was not illegal in the truest sense. In 1942, the age of consent in Australia was fourteen for men and twelve for women. This has changed over the years, even though teenage girls reach puberty earlier and earlier and their exposure to various media from a very early age gives them a greater level of sophistication.
‘I don’t understand this,’ said Simon when Portia alerted us to the blog. ‘I don’t know who this man is. I don’t know why this is happening.’
‘I’ll look into it,’ said Eric. ‘I think he’s doing you more harm than good, despite his intentions.’
‘I think he’s just trying to justify his own perversions,’ said Portia.
Simon cannot have had any interest in Felicity, I have said to myself over and over again. Because if he had an interest in Felicity, I’m aware that there is another young child he may have had an interest in. It cannot be. I cannot think it. Too much, it is too much.
I pray that he didn’t touch her, that she was only his friend, that his paternal side came out and all he did was teach her about the finches. I pray but I do not know, and now I will never know. I should have protected her, kept her close to me, and then the question would never have to play on my mind. I shouldn’t have let him spend so much time with her, but she wasn’t an easy child to be with. Rosalind grew tired of the friendship because Felicity wasn’t bright enough to keep up with her, especially with the age gap.
‘She’s stupid,’ she pronounced one afternoon when I asked her to play with Felicity.
‘That’s a very unkind thing to say, Rosalind, and very unlike you.’
‘But, Mum, she can’t even read yet and she’s seven. I could read at seven. If we play school and I draw an A she doesn’t know what it is.’
I don’t know if there was anything wrong with the child, but her speech was slower than I thought it ought to be at that age and she had a curious way of staring at me as if trying to absorb the movements of my mouth as I spoke. She rarely spoke herself, just watched. I never asked Ellie about it and she never mentioned it. We weren’t close enough for me to bring it up.
After Felicity’s father left, she acquired a desperate look of her own. She would stand next to me, almost as if she was trying to feel the heat from my body, but if I touched her, her thin shoulders would stiffen and she would pull away. I let her spend time in the kitchen with me, but I was always aware of being studied. I felt claustrophobic, caught in her unwavering gaze. She didn’t have that easy chatty spirit that most children have. She was older than her years but able to understand less. I never knew what to say to her. She grated on my nerves and so I was glad to be rid of her. I was always grateful when Simon came to find her to take her down to the aviary.
And she seemed to love the finches and spending time with Simon. She went with him willingly enough and always returned to me with some new fact about the silly little birds. ‘Do you know they need shell grit to di . . . di . . . digest their food?’
‘Don’t you find her a little strange?’ I asked Simon. ‘I mean most of the time she doesn’t say anything at all. I think there may be something wrong with her.’
‘I suppose she is different,’ he said. ‘She’s certainly slower than the girls were at her age, but I don’t mind the fact that she doesn’t talk much. I feel that she is listening to me with her whole being. She’s very restful to be around. She doesn’t interrupt me or argue with me, she’s just quiet. I think if we were the same age we would be great friends.’
‘God, can you imagine her at our age?’ I said.
‘Life is very difficult for her at the moment. Ellie is not coping very well.’
‘I know,’ I sighed. ‘I feel like I should do more.’
‘Rose darling, our door is always open to her children, and I’m helping out a little as well. There’s no more to be done.’
How was I to know? How was I to know?
Unlike her sister, Lila was a delightful little girl, all smiles and energy, and when I was with her I was pulled back to the days when my girls were toddlers, but without the worry of sleepless nights. (After Rosalind turned two I had toyed with the idea of having another child, but Simon was against it. ‘I could not bear to have you turn into one of those blousy women with great cow udders and stretched skin,’ he said, ‘and there is little enough money as it is.’) I loved being with Lila. My girls were independent. They chose their own clothes and did their own hair. Portia would roll her eyes at most of my suggestions and Rosalind was fond of saying, ‘you have no idea . . .’ about everything. Sometimes I felt a little like my mother—uncomfortable and out of place when talking to my spoilt children. ‘Make me pretty,’ Lila would chirp, demanding my time without thinking about it, safe in her certainty of being adored.
When we heard Ellie yelling next door, her voice stretched to breaking point, it was mostly at Felicity. Lila was too little, but I’m sure Felicity understood that her father was gone forever and her mother was desperately unhappy.
Only Simon wanted to spend time with the child. Only Simon. I thought he liked her because she was interested in the birds, whereas Rosalind and Portia never even wandered down to look in the cage. I thought their friendship was good for both of them: he loved being able to tell someone about his passion, and her father was gone, seemingly never to return even for a visit. How was I to know?
Today, I was the one who noticed the sick bird. Mina and Birdy were spending the day in the mother and child unit, so I was in the garden with Maya and Jess and a woman named Paula. I walked over to the cage just to look at the birds and saw the little one sitting on the floor of the cage. Birds will not sit on the floor if they can help it. I know that much. They like to be up high on perches and they move continually.
‘One of the birds is sick,’ I said to Jess.
‘Fuck,’ she said. ‘Birdy will be upset. What do we do?’
‘Well, it’s just . . . you have to get to them quickly or they’ll die. It needs help.’
‘I have no idea what to do,’ said Jess. ‘Don’t you know? You said your husband used to keep them. Allison won’t get the vet. He only comes for the cows.’
‘I never really had much to do with them. Perhaps I should go and tell Birdy. Maybe she’ll know what to do.’
‘You can’t leave your allocated spot unless you’ve been given permission. I’ll ask Allison, but we have to wait until she comes around. It shouldn’t be too long.’
‘Yes, but . . .’ I said, and then I saw Allison. She was on her way to a meeting but said that I could go over and speak to Birdy. It wasn’t that I really cared about the bird, but I didn’t want to leave it suffering if there was something I could do for it. Sometimes Simon used to have the vet out almost every week for months. He once spent a whole night sitting in the kitchen feeding a sick bird sugar water with a dropper to keep it hydrated. It didn’t survive. They rarely did, but Simon was always devastated when he lost one.
I was glad that Birdy agreed to come, and I wanted to meet her little girl. Birdy shoved her behind her legs as if to keep her away from me, but the child wasn’t having any of that. She reminded me a little of Portia, who was also unafraid of strangers.
I only gave her a cursory glance a
t first, but when she spoke to me I looked at her properly and I felt the world start to spin. It’s not the same child, of course. It’s not Lila, but oh, how much she looks like her.
Ellie and the girls moved away when Lila was four years old, and that would be around twenty-five years ago. Felicity was eight by then and she was a sad, grim little girl. Was it just the divorce and the change it wrought in her mother? Or was it something else?
‘We’re moving,’ Ellie told me one night, standing on my doorstep with both her girls’ hands clutched in hers.
‘Oh, Ellie,’ I said, ‘I’m so sorry, so sorry that . . . I couldn’t . . .’
‘Please don’t worry about it, Rose. You’ve done enough, and Simon has been so kind, but it’s time for me to make it on my own. I have no choice in the matter.’
I knew that Simon had given her money a couple of times. ‘Just to tide her over and pay a few bills,’ he told me. He was generous like that. ‘My darling girl, we have so much,’ he always said. ‘I need to share it with those who have less.’
He wanted them to stay next door. He didn’t want to lose the child—Felicity. I shouldn’t call her ‘the child’. That diminishes her and I shouldn’t do that. He didn’t want to lose Felicity. I can see that now.
But I can’t think about that. If I begin to think of the things he might have done, I find myself hating him with such a passion that if he were here I would put my hands around his neck and squeeze. I want to kill him over and over, and then I want to kill myself.
That child is so familiar, so definitely her. So not her.
There have been times lately when I’ve been busy with my hands and just thinking about my grandchildren and I’ve managed to forget why I’m in here and what I’ve done. The face of that child brings it all back. I would have liked to ask Birdy about her, but I know better than that. I go over and over the child’s features, trying to remember and compare it with the picture in my head, until eventually I don’t know what I have and haven’t seen. I want to have another look at Isabel, but Birdy is in and out of the birdcage quickly, and gone before I get the chance.