Thorn on the Rose

by Joy Dettman

  Gertrude was at the door. It was dark out tonight; she saw no sign of Jenny. She could have heard them talking and gone directly to Elsie’s house. The girls and Jimmy were over there. Gertrude hoped she’d gone over there. She didn’t want Jenny walking in on this.

  ‘Someone found it,’ he said. ‘By the look of this place — and the quality of your brandy — it wasn’t you.’ He’d taken a wallet from his breast pocket and as she walked back to the light she saw him slide a photograph free. ‘It was worth a small fortune,’ he said. ‘The brooch.’

  And the wire gate’s old hinge complained.

  ‘She’s just lost the father she loved.’ The poker was placed back on her hearth. ‘If you’ve got a shred of a heart left inside you, you’ll go.’

  ‘I’m all heart, Tru — as you know.’ He placed the photograph on the table and picked up his hat. ‘I’ll give you tonight.’

  He was standing in the doorway when Jenny walked in. She glanced at him once and saw an elderly man clad in a dark suit, glanced at him twice and saw Gerald Archibald, the Sydney abortionist. Her eyes widened.

  ‘Your voice was an angel’s today, my dear. It is a lucky father who has his own angel to sing him home to heaven,’ he said.

  She heard old Noah in his voice and looked at Gertrude, busy counting eggs into a brown paper bag.

  ‘Half a dozen, you said?’

  He played the game. He’d always enjoyed playing games. ‘Half a dozen will do very nicely. There is nothing so nice as an egg fresh from the hen, Jennifer.’

  ‘I saw you up in Sydney,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Such a pretty city. It puts staid old Melbourne Town to shame.’ He took a coin from his pocket, exchanged it for the half dozen eggs. ‘No doubt our paths will cross again very soon, my dear.’ And he raised his hat and left with his eggs.

  Jenny stood looking at the bottle of brandy, at the glass, while Gertrude stood in the yard watching the narrow beam of a torch move briskly up her track.

  He’d been twenty-three when she was nineteen, which meant he was now over eighty. He’d played the ageing stroke-affected destitute back in ’35 when she’d stitched up the second gash in his head. Tonight he was playing the sprightly old gentleman. A great performer had been lost to the stage.

  ‘Did he walk all the way down here for eggs?’ Jenny asked, joining Gertrude.

  A car motor answered her question, car lights glowed on the trees. They watched as the car turned around. He hadn’t walked from town.

  Back in the kitchen Gertrude picked up the photograph he’d left on the table. She held it close to the lamp, wondering why he’d left it — until she made out the brooch pinned to the woman’s hat.

  It was her. There was no doubting that. She put her reading glasses on and stared at the dark, foreign-looking face. Even without the brooch she would have recognised her. Juliana Conti, he’d said. Finally, after all these years, she had a name to fit the initials on the handkerchief.

  ‘Who is it?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘A ghost from the past, darlin’. Can you make me a cup of tea? My old legs feel worn out tonight.’

  She didn’t sit and rest her weary legs. She went to the lean-to, thinking to hide the photograph away in the shoe box with the rest of that woman’s possessions. But the time for hiding was past. He’d be back. He was probably staying at the hotel, signed in as Archie Foote this time. He’d be down here again tomorrow; obsession was that man’s middle name. Jenny had to be told tonight.

  Gertrude stood weighing the box in her hand, watching the shadows play on the curtain as the tea was made, as pots and pans were moved from the table to the floor.

  ‘It’s poured, Granny. I’ll go over and get the kids home.’ ‘Wait, darlin’.’ Right or wrong, it had to be done tonight. ‘Leave them there for a while. There’s something I need to talk to you about.’ She’d promised Norman she’d never say a word about what they’d done that day, but a promise can’t outlive the man it was given to.

  THE BROOCH

  Two large mugs of tea sat on the cleared end of the old table. Gertrude found space between them for the dusty old shoe box. How to start? Where to start? Once she removed that lid, it had to start. She wanted Jenny sitting at her side, wanted a mouthful of tea before she began. She added sugar, stirred, allowing Jenny to remove the lid of the box, to retrieve a bundle of letters, a bankbook.

  ‘He looked so guilty at the funeral, Granny. He’s going to start again, isn’t he?’

  Gertrude looked at her without comprehension, looked at the letters. Vern. Maybe he was. He’d looked guilty — but he hadn’t been himself for months, had been keeping his distance. There was something going on with him, though what he was up to wasn’t important tonight.

  ‘Sit with me, darlin’. I’ve got something I have to tell you.’

  ‘He’s going to use what she did against me in court, isn’t he?’

  ‘If it comes to the crunch, I’ll join ranks with the devil to keep him from taking Jimmy. What I need to talk to you about has got nothing to do with Vern.’ She didn’t know where to start. There was no right way to make a start, so she started the wrong way.

  ‘It’s to do with you, darlin’. To do with your birth. You weren’t born to Amber. I know it’s the wrong time —’

  ‘I’ve had enough, Granny. Just because the whole bloody world has gone stark raving mad, doesn’t mean you can, too.’

  ‘It’s true, darlin’.’

  ‘Stop it!’

  ‘I should have told you that day when we were talking about Nancy Bryant following your cry across the paddock. She found you lying in the scrub with your dying mother. She and Lonnie brought you down here. That’s the woman who bore you.’ Gertrude held out the photograph. ‘I learned her name tonight. She was Juliana Conti. She died on my couch a few hours after you were born.’

  ‘You’ve gone senile and I’m going to get Elsie and Harry.’

  ‘Sit down, darlin’, and hear me out.’ She took the stranger’s purse from the box, opened and upended it, emptying its contents onto the table. ‘I’ve almost told you a hundred times but I never knew how to start and I had so little to tell you that was fact.’ She unpinned the brooch from the handkerchief. ‘Look. It’s the same as the one on her hat.’

  She looked at it, because Gertrude wanted her to, look, and because she’d seen that brooch before. She compared it with the one in the photograph, because Gertrude wanted her to. So it was the same. It meant nothing to her, as the photograph of the woman meant nothing to her.

  ‘All we found on her the night you were born was that little purse and these few things.’ She’d spread the handkerchief, folded too long, but the entwined blue J.C. still visible in its corner. ‘Norman named you for those initials.’

  That J.C. meant something. That J.C. meant the little grey tombstone at the cemetery. J.C. LEFT THIS LIFE 31.12.1923. The date was right, too. That’s why the twins had tormented her with J.C.

  She stood before Gertrude, holding that handkerchief, her eyes, his eyes, doubting, but waiting for more.

  ‘It was in the newspapers at the time. Remember that old bookmark you found in one of Archie’s books?’

  ‘I’m going to get the kids.’

  ‘It’s the truth, darlin’. Every word of it. ’

  ‘I don’t care if it’s the truth or not. Can’t you see what you’re doing with your truth?’

  ‘There’s a reason you had to be told tonight.’

  ‘You don’t understand, do you? You think you’re taking Amber away, but you’re taking everything away. You’re taking you away and you’re all I’ve got left.’

  ‘As if you could ever get rid of me.’ Gertrude was up, grasping her, kissing her. ‘Never, my darlin’ girl, never until the day you bury me will you get rid of me. And you won’t get rid of me then either. I’ll be out there somewhere nagging at your elbow all day long. You and Elsie and those little kids are my life. You know that.’

  They heard the goat
paddock gate open, heard Harry announce himself with his cough. Jenny stepped back to the table.

  Perhaps he felt the tension in the room. He didn’t come in. ‘Just letting you know we’ve put the kids down for the night,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks, Harry,’ Gertrude said.

  ‘Everything jake over here, is it?’

  ‘We’ll sort it out tomorrow,’ Gertrude said.

  Jenny was staring at Amber’s preserving pan, packed tonight with spices and sauces from Norman’s kitchen. She lifted the handle, wondering if a smear of blue dye might remain on it, might remain beneath the rim. She sorted through the spices. Cinnamon and cloves for Amber’s apple pies, mixed herbs for her seasonings. Curry powder and ground ginger for her soups and stews. Vanilla for her cakes and custards, nutmeg. Amber’s hand had been on every one of those containers. Amber, not her mother.

  For one minute or five, Harry leaned in the doorway, speaking of inconsequential things. He gave Jenny time, time to realise she might have been given the answer to why Amber had loathed the sight of her, gave her time to pick up the photograph of Juliana Conti, to look that stranger in the eyes — and have her look back.

  Maybe it was true. Stray bitch, Sissy had called her. And Vern’s ‘hot-pants little half-dago bitch.’ Even Jim had suggested she hadn’t been born a Morrison.

  A foreign face. Juliana Conti. A foreign-sounding name . . .

  Norman, too. ‘You are a golden songbird, hatched into a nest of grey sparrows. You are a classical portrait, framed in gold and hung in a gallery of fools.’

  The shape of that woman’s face was familiar, the shape of her eyes. If she could see the hands . . . But there were no hands to see, just the head and shoulders.

  Itchy-foot’s bookmark. The dead woman in the coffin had her hands folded across her breasts. Which book? What had she been reading?

  Itchy-foot’s book.

  Archibald Gerald Foote . . .

  ‘No.’

  This was madness. What she was thinking was madness.

  Harry was leaving.

  ‘Thanks, Harry,’ she said, placing the photograph down, picking up the brooch.

  ‘Those stones are real,’ Gertrude said. ‘It’s worth a king’s ransom.’

  ‘Finish your story, Granny,’ Jenny said, and she sat down.

  Gertrude told her of Nancy Bryant and her old dog, told of the constable’s boy coming to her door and telling her that Amber was in labour.

  ‘Elsie was twelve years old at the time; she had broken her leg. I didn’t know how long I’d be in there that night so I loaded both of you into the cart and took you into town with me. We lost little Simon that night. Amber heard you crying and thought you were him come alive. She screamed for you and your Uncle Charles gave you to her.’

  The brooch in her closed hand. Jenny pressed its edges into her palm, wanting it to hurt, to imprint her hand, wanting to force some connection to it. Just metal and stones; it meant nothing.

  ‘It must have been pinned onto her coat that night. That old black coat behind the door belonged to her.’

  ‘Your coat?’

  ‘She was wearing it over the gold crepe frock you wore to the talent quest. The shoes you wore that night belonged to her.’

  Jenny turned to the coat which hung summer and winter behind the door. Rarely worn. Rarely off her back during the months she’d spent in Melbourne with Laurie. A nun’s habit, he’d called it. It had kept her warm. Her mother’s coat had kept her warm. Her mother.

  ‘I put the coat and frock into my wash trough with a bundle of blood-stained towels. The brooch must have fallen off. Joey found it under my wash trough when you were three years old. It belongs to you. The constable gave it to me to keep for you when he left town. He said there’d come a day when you wanted to own something that belonged to your mother.’

  ‘She’s dark.’

  ‘You’ve got the Mediterranean complexion.’

  ‘I’m more like . . . him.’

  ‘There’s a reason for that, darlin’.’ Gertrude unfolded the sheet of writing paper, placed years ago into that purse. She passed it to Jenny. ‘You’d remember that name.’

  Jenny had seen the sheet of paper. Albert Forester. No fixed address. Inquired after identifying jewellery. She’d seen Albert Forester tonight, or Gerald Archibald, or Itchy-foot —

  ‘He’s Itchy-foot. He’s your husband. Jesus Christ, Granny.’

  No chastisement tonight for her blaspheming. ‘He’s your father, darlin’. He went missing in Egypt a few months after you were born. I thought he was dead until the night Denham charged Albert Forester with murdering those two little girls. They took me up to the jail to put a stitch in his head, and even in the state he was in I recognised him. I’ve never told another living soul — other than Vern.’

  Jenny lifted a hand, knowing now why old Noah had given her that pendant, why he’d posted the matching earrings. She knew why he’d come down here tonight. It hadn’t been to buy eggs.

  Ice crystals creeping into her brain. Ice water trickling down her spine, and Gertrude speaking about an antique luggage label.

  ‘It was in her purse. Destination Three Pines Siding, Via Woody Creek — there was enough of it left to work it out. The only answer I’ve ever been able to come up with is that your mother followed Archie up there and got off the train at the siding. The Monk family and their visitors had always used the old siding. They had a sawmill and general store out there when I was a girl. By the time you were born there was nothing left but derelict buildings. A stranger offloaded there at night would have found herself out in the middle of nowhere, wheat fields stretching for miles and not a house in sight. She was probably trying to follow the lines back into town when you came.’

  ‘A rabbit wearing white gloves just went running by your door, Granny. I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date.’

  ‘Had I known any real facts, I would have told you sooner. He told me tonight . . . that you were his.’

  ‘My mother is no longer a murderess, but my father is a conscienceless monster.’

  ‘If I told you any different now I’d be lying. He gave you the only good he had in him to give. You’ve got his voice. He was good enough to be on the stage. His family pushing him into doctoring could have been his undoing. When they work with drugs all day I dare say it’s easy to start using the things.’

  ‘Elsie knows?’

  ‘Not that he’s your father. She was here the night they carried you in. Maisy knows you weren’t born to Amber. Your parson uncle, Ernie and Mary Ogden,’ Gertrude said. ‘There’d be others. We kept thinking that you’d be claimed by your own people. When no one came forward, Norman said it was God’s will that they raise you. Amber agreed at the time. She looked after you well — for months. But we did the wrong thing. Ernie Ogden was the constable up here then, and was the nicest chap you’d meet in a month of Sundays, but no stickler for the law. He thought you’d be better off with Amber and Norman than growing up in an orphanage. He said the easiest way to go about Norman adopting you would be to register you in place of Simon.’

  ‘You fiddled my birth certificate?’

  Gertrude nodded. ‘You couldn’t do it nowadays, but back then Woody Creek was so cut off from everywhere. I was the midwife, he was the law . . .’

  ‘Oh, you could do it,’ Jenny said. ‘Where there’s a will, there’s always a way.’ She walked to the door. ‘You just wrote the perfect story,’ she said. ‘Born beside a railway line, raised in a railway house by the stationmaster and his mad wife, and so the heroine grew to adulthood with her unwed mother’s lack of morals and her father’s lack of conscience — and I’ve already written the ending.’

  ‘You’ve got strength enough to write any ending that you want to write, darlin’.’

  ‘All done,’ Jenny said. ‘It’s out of my hands — gone to the publishers.’

  Her heartbeat had gone wild. It was pounding the air from her lungs as fast as she drew i
t in. She stepped outside into the dark, needing more air than could be had in Gertrude’s kitchen.

  And so goes the continuing saga, the convoluted circle of life, the ripples within ripples, forever circling out and going nowhere.

  She walked fast up the dark track, seeing that toddling little girl growing up in Sydney, growing up with a stranger’s hands and wondering forever where she’d got those hands.

  Where there was a will, there was a way. She’d had the will. She’d found the way.

  Through the boundary gate and across the road to the track leading down to the creek, down to Gertrude’s water pumping log. She stood on it, watching the flow of dark water while the reed beds gossiped about what she’d done, and sleepless fish plopped up to stare and to make their own ripples in the slick dark water.

  I made another me, she thought. I made another outcast. Cara Jeanette Norris. Jennifer Carolyn Morrison. We don’t exist. We’re nothing. We belong nowhere.

  She’ll belong. Myrtle’s not Amber. She’ll make a fairytale life for Cara. She’ll grow up in that beautiful old house with two adoring parents. She’ll go to the best schools, wear the prettiest dresses. She’ll be the me I was supposed to be. No sister to —

  Sissy isn’t my sister. Sissy isn’t my sister.

  She laughed then, and her laughter was a howl in the dark and the creek picked it up and carried it. Sissy wasn’t her sister, but Amber was. She couldn’t shake off that murdering bitch; she was joined to her by his blood.

  She laughed and howled while her mind raced in circles, and she could find no way out of those circles. Had to get away from her mind. Walk.

  She turned away from the creek and walked back to the road.

  Amber had walked in the night and done terrible things.

  Jenny spun on her heel and ran back to Gertrude’s water dipping log, the broad trunk of a tree long fallen, worn near white by the years. Walked out to where the log disappeared beneath deep water. She could go no further.