by Liz Byrski
*
‘These are really good,’ Kerry says, tucking into a pastry topped with custard and apricot. ‘Where did you get them?’
‘Just down the road,’ Andrew says. ‘Brooke was charged with selection – consensus is that I can’t pick good ones.’
‘That’d be right,’ Kerry says through a mouthful.
She looks so good, Connie thinks, so very different from the Kerry who, for longer than she can remember, has stared at her with those hurt and accusing eyes. I could have helped her, Connie thinks now, I could have helped her years ago; all that longing for Gerald’s approval, the endless disappointment. Perhaps I could have saved her, saved them both, from that.
They are watching her now, waiting, curious, impatient.
‘Come on then,’ she says. ‘I know you’re all wondering what’s going on.’ And as they settle down she has a terrible moment of panic that this is not, after all, the right thing to do, that she had been right in wanting to hide the truth, to protect them from it. But they are waiting now and there is no turning back.
‘I have a lot to tell you,’ she says, and she hears the wobbliness in her voice and clears her throat to get control of it. ‘It’s a long story …’
‘Just start at the beginning, Mum,’ Kerry says gently.
‘Actually,’ Connie says, ‘I think I might begin at the end, with the most important thing of all, and work back from there.’ She pauses, heart pounding. ‘What I have to tell you all, but particularly you, Kerry and Andrew, is that, when I was in London, I met some of your father’s old friends, and … and I discovered that … that he had a child with someone else; a daughter born just before he and I married, and so you … you …’ her breath disappears quite suddenly and she gulps, hesitates, ‘… you have a half-sister.’
There is a moment of such pristine silence that Connie stops breathing. Kerry gasps, her hand flies to cover her mouth. Andrew darts a fierce look at Brooke, who lifts her shoulders and shakes her head furiously. Chris gives a wry smile, clears his throat and looks away, and outside in the silent garden Ryan hurls a ball for Scooter and he runs after it barking furiously.
*
Brooke looks from one member of her family to the other and finally at Connie, sitting rigid and upright in her usual chair, hands twisting nervously in her lap. She sees the movement of her throat as she swallows and takes a deep breath as though in readiness for the storm to break. Brooke slips down from her spot on the window seat and sits decisively on the broad arm of Connie’s chair, leaning into her so that their arms touch and she can feel her grandmother’s tension.
It’s Andrew who speaks first, shaking his head, looking across at Kerry, raising his eyebrows. ‘Well, there you go, proof of something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the last couple of months – that I never really knew him. Perhaps none of us did.’
The colour is returning to Kerry’s face. ‘A half-sister,’ she says. ‘And you knew nothing of this before?’
Connie shakes her head. ‘Nothing at all.’
‘And those people you met … ?’
‘Yes, Phillip and Bea, university friends. Bea was with Gerald, they were about to move in together. Then for some reason Gerald changed his mind and shifted himself into my life. He dumped Bea, and six weeks later she discovered she was pregnant. He had moved back to live with his parents, but she managed to find him. He gave her money for an abortion and told her to go away, not to contact him again. She took the money but kept the baby, and she sent him a copy of the birth certificate. He never replied and she never heard from him again.’
‘Did you meet her?’ Brooke asks. ‘The daughter, I mean, I know you met Bea.’
Connie looks up at her, her colour deepening, and Brooke sees that she has asked an awkward question. ‘I sort of did,’ she says. ‘I’ll explain that later.’
‘So what’s her name – our sister?’ Kerry asks.
And Brooke, still leaning against Connie, feels her tension increase.
‘Her name is Geraldine.’
Kerry gasps. ‘But that was what you wanted to call me.’
Connie nods. ‘I wanted to call you Geraldine, but your father was against it. I could never understand why. I thought he’d love to have his daughter named after him. We argued, he stormed out of the house and came back three hours later with the certificate showing that he’d registered you as Kerry Ann.’
Brooke watches as conflicting emotions cross her aunt’s face. Kerry sinks her head into her hands and Chris, sitting beside her, puts his arm around her shoulders and pulls her to him.
Kerry looks up, looks around at them all. ‘It’s all right,’ she says, ‘I’m not crying. It was just exasperation, disgust … well, everything really.’ She sits up straight. ‘Andrew’s right,’ she says, looking across at him. ‘There is so much that we didn’t know about Dad, and so much that we should have challenged and changed years ago. All that stuff about what we weren’t allowed to talk about.’ She shakes her head. ‘It doesn’t mean I don’t love him, I just wish I’d … oh well, it doesn’t matter now.’
Andrew lets out a short dry laugh. ‘Bastard!’ he says, shaking his head. ‘Oh! I mean Dad,’ he says, ‘not her, not our sister.’
And Chris throws his head back and laughs, and Kerry joins him.
Brooke leans forward to Connie. ‘You were incredibly brave, Nan,’ she whispers, ‘really cool.’
Connie softens, leans towards her, grasps her hand. ‘It was you really, Brooke,’ she says, ‘you made me see sense.’
‘A half-sister,’ Kerry says again, still laughing, her eyes bright with curiosity. ‘Well, what’s she like? It’s quite exciting, really. D’you have any photos, Mum? When do we get to meet her?’
Thirty-four
Sandy Bay, Hobart, October 2012
Flora stands at the bottom of the garden, staring out across the river. Home at last, she thinks, after all these years and so much angst, but it’s not home at all, not anymore. She had wondered how it would be, whether she would feel alienated and ill at ease, or able to experience it for what it was: her birthplace and a part of her childhood. Her memories of it as an adult are always overhung with the pain of her leaving in the seventies and the events leading up to it.
Two days ago, before she’d left England to fly here, she had walked down to Holy Trinity Church in Shepherds Bush and slipped quietly into a pew to have a chat with God. ‘Please help me, help us, all of us, get this right,’ she had asked. ‘Don’t let us mess it up. Give me patience and generosity if the going gets tough. Let Connie’s courage not fail her at the last minute. Let us be the family we really are.’
Any priest, she thought, would have been shocked by the direct requests, arrow prayers shot up in panic, selfish instructions and demands. But Flora has never managed to adhere to the rules for a relationship with God as set down by the church. She remembers it now and looks automatically skyward. ‘Thanks,’ she says, ‘I think it’s going to be okay. Thanks for listening, and I really will try to do better, be a better person in future.’
‘Is it as you remember?’ Connie asks, appearing alongside her now.
‘It seems more beautiful,’ she says, ‘and almost unchanged.’
Connie nods. ‘Up here you really could be back in the old days, but you’ll see a difference when I take you into the city.’
‘It’s really good to be here, Con. I was starting to think it was all over for us.’
‘Me too,’ Connie says. ‘Without Brooke giving me a good shaking I might still be floundering in self-righteous indignation. But it’s over now, thank goodness.’
‘Mmmm. It can’t have been easy for you but I kept believing that your generous spirit would work it out eventually. And look at them now.’
They turn in silence, watching the family gathered around the table on the deck, Kerry, Andrew and Chris talking animatedly with Geraldine. And on the lawn nearby Brooke, Lala and Samira sit cross-legged with Geraldine’s eldest dau
ghter Lucy, pulling at blades of grass and falling around with laughter.
‘She’s a lovely woman, Geraldine,’ Connie says. ‘I feel terrible …’
‘It’s all over,’ Flora says, ‘really it is, for all of them – Geraldine, Bea, Phillip … they understand, there’s nothing more to say.’ She can see the relief in Connie’s face but suspects that she will continue to live for some time with the emotional aftermath of her behaviour.
‘It’s our family, Flora,’ Connie says, ‘as it should always have been. And angry as I am at Gerald I’m still sad that he’s not here to see how it could have been, how it will be.’
Flora nods. She understands the sentiment but can’t bring herself to wish that Gerald were there. ‘All we have to do now, all of us, is to take careful steps towards keeping together a family spread across continents. I think it’s pretty exciting.’
Connie nods. ‘Bea says she’ll come after Christmas, maybe bring little Molly with her.’
‘And what about Farah?’
‘Farah has me on trial,’ Connie says, smiling. ‘She says we need to see how we manage sharing the house when everything has calmed down. The New Year, she says, we’ll make formal arrangements about money and the division of labour.’
‘Quite right too,’ Flora says, ‘it’s a way to avoid misunderstandings in future. Trust me, without that Suzanne and I would never have lasted as long as we did.’ She sits down on the low rock wall above the steep edge of the escarpment.
‘What I can’t understand,’ Connie says, joining her on the wall, ‘is why, after the way Gerald treated her, Bea named her daughter after him.’
‘I asked her that, and she said that when she did it she thought he would come back to her. In fact she kept hoping that he’d turn up one day, cap in hand. It was years before she finally stopped believing.’
They sit in silence, kicking their heels against the wall as they had so often done on the harbour wall in Port d’Esprit.
‘We’ve had some of our best conversations sitting on walls,’ Connie says.
‘We have, and never an argument; those we save for cafés and hotel rooms.’ Flora has been thinking for weeks that she needed to talk about the fact that Connie never put any pressure on Gerald to change his mind. But now she’s here she knows that the future is more important than the past. And perhaps, after all, Connie simply knew best – Gerald was not just unlikely but unable to change.
‘Remember Port d’Esprit, the couple kissing on the wall, and what you said about love?’ Connie asks.
Flora looks puzzled, shakes her head. ‘Sorry, no I don’t.’
‘Well, I asked if you thought that when people fall in love they love each other like that forever. And you said that if you really love someone, you can also hate them and different things will tip you one way or the other. And, you said, perhaps if you love someone you just can’t keep it up all the time.’
Flora raises her eyebrows. ‘Really? I said that?’
‘Really. I’ve thought of it often and wondered how you knew that then – after all, we were only about thirteen at the time.’
Flora turns to her in amazement. ‘Are you serious? I haven’t got a clue. It would be bullshit that I made up on the spur of the moment. Honestly, Con, I can’t believe you’ve been thinking about that all this time, taking it seriously. No wonder it was easy for Gerald to talk you into things.’
‘But you seemed so sure of yourself … and I’ve always believed …’
‘No,’ Flora says, ‘don’t say that, I was just a kid …’
‘But how did you … ?’
‘Connie, are you really telling me that you have thought seriously about something I said about love when I was thirteen?’
‘Well, yes, because …’
‘Because nothing. I knew nothing then and I know even less now. Do you know anyone who knows less about love than I do? Give me a break.’
There is a pause.
‘Is this going to be our first argument sitting on a wall?’
‘Maybe,’ Flora says, grinning. ‘I think I quite like it.’
Behind them two younger generations talk and laugh, sounding as though they have always known each other, and Connie feels the shadows of the years lifting on their laughter and floating out and away over the sunlit river.
‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘I just wanted to tell you that you were right. Everything you said about love that day was right. I understand it now.’
Acknowledgements
Family Secrets was born on a wet afternoon in Hobart when I read Vita Sackville West’s wonderful novel, All Passion Spent, and began thinking of a novel about a woman who had just lost her husband. So thank you, Vita – I can barely believe it took me so long to discover it. Special thanks, too, to Imelda Whelehan and David Sadler, for not only making me so welcome in your lovely house in Sandy Bay, but also allowing me to steal it and make it (with minor adjustments) into Connie’s family home.
My sincere thanks are due to those people who generously made time to talk with me about the writing of this book: Lynnley McGrath, Mary Rawlinson, Robin Lawrence and Kennan Taylor. Your help was valuable in assisting me to bring credibility to various aspects of the story and I appreciate it greatly.
I am so lucky to work with the wonderful people at Pan Macmillan who are now friends as well as colleagues. The amazing Cate Paterson has guided me through eight novels – I can’t imagine how I would do any of this without you, Cate. Emma Rafferty has once again brought her extraordinary insight to bear on the editing of this novel and helped me to make it very much better than the draft she first read.
And Jo Jarrah’s forensic attention has now, as always, saved me from my own mistakes of which there are always many. Special thanks, too, to publicity whiz Jace Armstrong for getting me into all the right places – in all sorts of ways. And finally, thanks to the terrific sales and marketing teams, who get the book into all the right places, and to all staff at Pan Macmillan whose consistent support, efficiency and goodwill make publishing with them such a pleasure.
About Liz Byrski
Liz Byrski is the author of seven other novels and a number of non-fiction books, the latest of which is Getting On: Some Thoughts on Women and Ageing.
She has worked as a freelance journalist, a broadcaster with ABC Radio and an advisor to a minister in the West Australian Government.
Liz has a PhD in writing from Curtin University where she teaches professional and creative writing.
www.lizbyrski.com
Also by Liz Byrski
Fiction
Gang of Four
Food, Sex & Money
Belly Dancing for Beginners
Trip of a Lifetime
Bad Behaviour
Last Chance Café
In the Company of Strangers
Non-fiction
Remember Me
Getting On: Some Thoughts on Women and Ageing
MORE BESTSELLING FICTION FROM LIZ BYRSKI
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