by Joy Dettman
Paul said it was more media hype, their latest fear campaign. ‘Got to keep the viewers’ adrenalin pumping or they’ll stop tuning in for their daily hit,’ he said. Hype or not, Jenny was making copies of her files – that’s why she’d come in here tonight, to copy, not to worry about Angela Luccetto.
Then the phone rang. It would be Georgie. No one else rang her at ten o’clock at night. Busy Georgie, getting to where she wanted to go – and playing literary agent in her spare time, of which she had none.
‘What do they want now?’ Jenny greeted her.
‘Do you want the good news or the bad first, Jen?’
‘Angela Luccetto’s been at it again?’
‘Worse. The release of The Winter Boomerang will be delayed until November. They’re doing a reprint of your earlier books to release at the same time.’
‘Is that the good or the bad news?’
‘Good. I’m working my way down. There was a ton of stuff on the computer when I came home tonight, a ton of stuff from your publicist too.’
‘Juliana Conti does not do publicity.’
‘Get off your soapbox, mate,’ Georgie said. ‘The bad news is some literary coot has got hold of a copy of The Stray and he’s accusing Juliana of plagiarising C.J. Langhall’s Angel at My Door . . .’
‘Angel at My Door?’
‘By C.J. Langhall,’ Georgie repeated. ‘I told you she was Cara.’
‘I’ve never read it. How did I plagiarise it?’
‘I read it, years ago, and I think it could drag you out of the closet, Jen.’
‘I’ve had enough whispering behind hands and fingers pointing at me to last me until 2099. What’s her book about?’
‘From what I remember, it’s about an unmarried girl who has four kids and gives the last of them away to her landlady.’
‘We cut the Sydney baby out of The Stray. What are they on about?’
‘Lots of things, Jen. When I read that book I saw a few similarities to your life.’
‘Can you post it up to me?’
‘I need to read it again. Give the Willama library a call and see if they’ve got a copy – it will look good to have it on record when I have to defend your plagiarism charges in court.’
‘That’s not funny, and my library card is in Jennifer Hooper’s name. They’re accusing Juliana.’
‘At the moment.’
‘Has Langhall responded?’ Jenny asked.
‘Not yet,’ Georgie said. ‘But I’ll guarantee if she does, she’ll name Jennifer Hooper as her inspiration for Jessica.’
‘The photograph in her latest book looks nothing like Cara.’
‘I hate to tell you, mate, but you don’t look a lot like you used to look thirty years ago either,’ Georgie said. ‘It’s her, and I know it now. She knew the ins and outs of your life story. She used to pick my brains for details back in the sixties – and I know she spent half her life writing and posting off bits of her book to publishers.’
‘That Angela Luccetto brought me out into the open with her magazine story.’
‘She’s the reason they’re reprinting your early books.’
‘Not Sent in Chains?’
‘All three, Jen, and you need to get on the internet. I’ve got a pile of stuff down here I need to send you.’
‘They have viruses on the internet that eat your computer’s brains.’
‘They have virus killers too. I got an email from Trudy tonight.’
‘Where is she?’
‘Back in England.’
‘Can you read it to me?’
‘I’ll post it up with the rest. She said in it that if Mum and Dad would come out of the dark ages and connect up, it would make life a whole lot easier – and it would.’
‘If I did it, it would have to be connected to one of the old computers. I’m not putting anything odd on my new one.’
‘They’re too old for the internet. Get yourself a little laptop and we’ll connect you up when we bring Katie for the holidays. She’ll teach you how to use it.’
‘What else did Trudy say?’
‘That a while back she found out her mother’s name was Margaret Morrison and that she lived in Vroni’s street in Frankston, and was she some distant relative?’
‘My God.’
‘Are you going to come clean, Jen?’
‘It’s too late.’ Jenny lit a cigarette. ‘It would be Vroni’s old address. They changed the street numbers when they continued her street through.’
‘She also wants to know the names of the people who adopted Jimmy. She said she’d see if she can find him while she’s there. How come she doesn’t know?’
‘She would have heard the Langdon name – or was she at school that time Lorna came up? Maybe she was. Tell her, Georgie. Tell her that the last we heard Jimmy was in Thames Ditton.’
*
Ask most of the Thames Ditton locals if they knew the Langdon family and they’d admit to knowing the name. Get some of the old chaps talking, and they’d tell how there’d been Langdons living at The Hall for five hundred years. Trudy and Nick had a well lubricated octogenarian bailed up in the local pub; he was a gold mine of information.
‘They owned half the county at one time. Henry Langdon was the one who started the breaking up of the estate when he come into his inheritance.’
‘Is he still living?’
‘Old Henry? No. He passed on in ’52, the same year as King George. Leticia, his good lady, made old bones, then the young Langdon come into it. He sold off all bar twenty acres then spent the lot on putting the old place into good repair. He had workmen out there for twelve month. They did a grand job on it.’
Trudy paid for a shampoo in Thames Ditton. Her hair was long; it took the hairdresser some time to dry it. She learned that Mrs Langdon didn’t frequent the salon, though the youngest girl came in when she needed a trim.
‘She’s a cripple,’ she said.
‘She’d be the daughter of James Langdon?’ Trudy asked.
‘Morris Langdon,’ the hairdresser said. ‘My mother knew him, or she knew the girl he was engaged to at one time. Mum worked in the girl’s father’s office. They had a big wedding planned, the dress bought and all, then less than a month before the wedding, this Australian girl turned up, and the next thing everyone knew, the wedding was off and Morris was squiring the Australian around.’
‘Is her name Karen or Carlene?’
‘I wouldn’t know. She’s Mrs Langdon to me. She’s been living out at The Hall since the late seventies. They say she writes books. One of the girls who served her apprenticeship here told us she was in London one day with her mother and they saw this crowd in one of the big stores’ book departments. They went over to see what was going on and there was Mrs Langdon, sitting signing books. They bought one, thinking it would be about our area, but it was about Australia. Full of violence and murder and whatnot, she said. To look at her, you wouldn’t think she’d know about such things.’
‘You don’t know of a Jim or a James Langdon?’ Trudy asked.
‘I’ve never heard of Jim or James,’ the hairdresser said.
Nick had more luck. He learned that the Langdon family had no living offspring to carry on the name, and that Morris was an offshoot of Henry Langdon’s sister.
‘His mother’s maiden name could be on her tombstone. He said she’s buried in the local graveyard.’
They walked the graveyard that afternoon, searching for Margaret Langdon, née Hooper. They didn’t find her. They found umpteen Langdons. They found a Margaret Grenville-Langdon, beloved wife of Bernard and mother of Morris, but no mention of Hooper.
It was a perfect autumn day in a land where perfect days were few and far between. Their sweaters were off.
‘Mum used to call a day like this an ice-cream day,’ Trudy said, so they drove away from the graveyard and bought ice-cream, then drove on to find Langdon Hall. With no gates closed against them, they drove in and up to the house.
‘Wow!’ Trudy said.
‘Ye olde family estate, yer ’ighness,’ Nick said.
‘It could be Jimmy’s. Georgie’s email said that Jimmy was adopted by Margaret Hooper and her husband.’
‘You never met him?’
‘He was gone long before I was born, and they never spoke about him. I’ve seen baby photographs of him. From what I’ve been able to glean, his grandfather claimed him when he was a tiny kid.’
‘How come?’
‘Mum and Dad weren’t married when he was born. It was during wartime and Dad was away in the army, then a prisoner for years. They never talk about that either.’
‘The house of secrets.’
‘It seems like it at times,’ Trudy said.
Nick knocked on a massive front door. No bustling maid came to open it. They looked for a bell they might ring. No bell. Only the power wires feeding into that old building gave away the fact that they hadn’t stepped through a hole in time and back into the seventeenth century.
They knocked again, then walked to the corner and down the eastern side to knock on a smaller, more utilitarian door. No bell. No maid.
‘The hairdresser said they have an open day in spring. I wish I’d started searching earlier.’
‘Wish in one hand and spit in the other, Tru,’ Nick said.
They walked back to the car then, and turned its nose towards London.
*
A rare day, and not many more such days to look forward to, Morrie and Cara were walking their dogs. He too was craving an ice-cream. He too had removed his sweater.
Cara didn’t share his craving, or his idea of warmth. Her conditioning to England’s chill having commenced later than his, her cardigan was buttoned to the neck today.
‘Will you go?’ he asked.
‘I’m considering it,’ she said. ‘They’ve been at me for years to do a book tour over there.’
They hadn’t been back to Australia since Robert’s funeral and had no desire to sit on a plane for twenty-four hours, but publicity sold books and the tour would coincide with the release of her latest novel.
She picked up and tossed a stick towards a tiny streamlet and the two dogs, still arguing over an earlier stick, bounded after the new. They followed the dogs and caught a view of the distant house, at its best from this angle. He’d spent a fortune on removing the rot of generations, along with generations of renovations. He’d brought in an architect and a building supervisor, but had personally supervised the removal of every stone, had watched every ancient wall reinforced, every rafter in the old section replaced.
There was no garden when Cara had arrived with the children, and neither she nor Morrie gardeners they’d hired professionals. The present grounds might not have been as the old Langdons had known them, but who was alive to say if they were or not? They were pleasing to the eye.
They rarely opened the front door, rarely opened the front rooms, other than on open day. They lived at the rear of the house, spent most of their days in the long flagstone-floored eastern room, their living area – sitting room cum study cum kitchen – modern enough to work in, but not obviously so. They’d replaced ancient windows with new, paying a fortune to make the new look exactly like the old. At seventeen, Morrie had fallen in love with the age, the immovability of Leticia’s house. He loved it still. Cara had fallen in love with its sanctuary.
They’d fallen in love with each other before learning that their love was forbidden, though not in Leticia’s house. In Thames Ditton no one had heard of Woody Creek.
On two occasions letters posted in Woody Creek had found Morrie, and shaken him to his core. For a time he’d considered replying, but a man is who life makes him, not who he’d been born to be. These days, if he looked back too far, if he remembered Jenny’s frizzy lemon-scented hair beside him in a dark theatre, remembered the photograph of the man with big teeth who’d painted the rainbows in the sky, he shook himself and turned to Tracy, conceived during a business transaction, born in jail to a drug addict, but now Tracy Langdon, a ballet dancer in London. He looked at pretty Elise, born with a crippled leg and dumped at birth at a Romanian orphanage. She’d never dance like her sister, nor sing like her brother, but she’d teach like her mother.
Robin could have, perhaps should have, been taking his bows on stage. His voice was a musical instrument. Place any instrument in his hands and he’d make music on it, but he preferred a surgeon’s instruments. He’d married two years ago and now had a three month old son – and for the nine months their grandson had been growing in the dark, Cara had feared he’d be born imperfect, that Robin would be punished for his parents’ sin against God. Their grandson was perfect – but Cara would continue to suffer that same torment if there were more grandchildren.
‘When are they suggesting we go?’ Morrie asked.
‘November, Hillary said.’
‘For how long?’
Cara shook her head. ‘A book tour. That’s all she said. I told her I’d think about it and get back to her.’
They walked on then, admiring the land, the trees clad in their autumn garb. It was a day when Morrie wished himself an artist so he might capture the trees and the sky and the laughing dogs, rolling in fallen leaves.
‘My father must be around eighty now, if he’s still living,’ Morrie said.
‘Jenny will be seventy-six on New Year’s Eve,’ Cara said. ‘If you ever plan to see him or her, the time to do it is now. It won’t be much good wishing you had when they’ve gone.’
‘No,’ he said.
‘If we go, I’d want free time in Sydney with Pete and Kay, and a few days with Cathy – and I’m going back to the house, Morrie. I’m cold.’
‘You’ve got ice in your blood,’ he said.
‘I’ve got Australia in it. Summer will be coming over there. I’d like to feel its heat, just once more. I’ll give Hillary a call and see if she can find out exactly what they’ve got in mind, then we’ll decide whether we’re going or not.’
Still a good-looking pair, both tall, both slim. Cara’s hair, once cut like Jenny’s short spring-coil gold, was shoulder length, bleached a few shades lighter, tamed by a brush and blow dryer. Wasted effort when the wind blew and fine English rain fell, when that hard worked for smooth style reverted to spring coils, when she still looked a little like Jenny around the brow, around the eyes. No wind, no rain today, a long fringe covered her brow, sunglasses hid her eyes, and her mouth and chin had never been Jenny’s.
His brow was. His nose was Jenny’s in male form, and his ears. He had the Hooper hair, steel grey like his father’s, his grandfather’s. Jenny’s lack of height had saved him from the excessive height of his forebears. He’d made the six foot two inch mark, then no more. He had his forebears’ double-jointed thumbs and hands, which he clapped now. The dogs stopped rolling to lead the way down the track that would take them home.
THE LADY IN PINK
The Winter Boomerang, released the first week of November, made the bestseller list and Jenny’s publicist was tearing out her hair, according to Georgie, who came to Woody Creek with Katie two weeks after the book’s release. They’d brought a bundle of emails from the publisher. Jenny gave them only a cursory glance before placing them down.
‘Juliana doesn’t do publicity!’ she said.
‘The days have passed when writers sat in their cold garrets and wrote with a quill, Jen, and hiding from this plagiarism thing isn’t making it go away. She suggested that you write something for one of the women’s magazines stating that you hadn’t read Angel at My Door, and include a bit about your personal knowledge of Sydney during the war.’
‘Let them talk. It’s selling books,’ Jenny said.
‘They’re talking about it on the ABC now. It’s growing, not dying down,’ George said.
Jenny’s pile of free books was also growing. Georgie had a boot full of things. Every time the publisher did a reprint Jenny had to find space for another carton of their fre
e copies. She used to want to move to a smaller house but had stopped nagging about that. The bedroom they used as a storeroom was full. They loaded the new cartons in a corner of the small sitting room.
‘If you keep this up, I’ll end up a kept man,’ Jim said.
‘If you’d see a doctor about your hip, you might be worth keeping,’ Jenny said. He’d been having trouble with his hip for months – and refused to see a doctor about it.
‘Your publicist wants you to go on television, Nanny,’ Katie said. Now a leggy eleven year old she’d had her spring-coil curls cut short like her nanny’s and looked older with her mop of hair gone – a beautiful kid with a beautiful nature.
‘That will be the day, my Katie,’ Jenny said.
‘Mum said in the car that you could wear a wig and that no one would even know it was you.’
‘How old are you, Jen?’ Georgie asked.
‘You know how old I am, and don’t bother waking it up.’
‘You’ll turn seventy-six on New Year’s Eve. That’s four years away from eighty, Jen. What have you got to lose?’
‘Twenty-four years. I’m going to live to a hundred, aren’t I, Katie?’
‘A hundred and ten,’ Katie said.
‘You’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain, mate,’ Georgie said.
‘It’s bad enough now. Maisy’s Patricia read The Stray and she sent it to Rebecca and I had both of them up here the other day telling me that someone in town wrote my life story.’
‘I’ll make you up so Jim won’t recognise you,’ Georgie said.
‘Do it, Nanny.’
‘Enough,’ Jenny said, her hand raised as Norman’s hand had been raised when he’d commanded ‘enough’.
‘It’s a morning show, not some literary thing. You could handle the host.’
‘I said no, Georgie.’
‘You’ve got no outstanding features.’
‘Thanks.’
‘That’s to the good. Cover up your hair, dress in some way-out writer’s gear, plaster on the makeup and no one would have a hope of recognising you. It would shut your publicist up, and Patricia and Rebecca.’
‘You put the wig on and do it. Or Jim can,’ Jenny said, and Katie giggled. ‘He’d look good with a long ponytail and a fake beard, wouldn’t he, darlin’?’