Stone Castles

by Trish Morey

  She said nothing for a while, just lay there thinking. She didn’t want everything, if that’s what he was suggesting.

  She just wanted to be back in her apartment with Carmen and for things to settle down and be normal again.

  She wanted to get that promotion.

  And she wanted this tangled heavy feeling in her chest to unravel itself and go away.

  And as she lay beside him feeling the steady drumbeat of his heart beneath her ear, she thought, what was so wrong with a girl wanting a few stars?

  Chapter Twenty-six

  The sapphire waters of Moonta Bay sparkled under the December sun. Pip breathed in the fresh salt air and drank in the view, the wide white expanse of sand, the belt of ruddy shore dotted with rock pools, and the long crooked jetty. It was the perfect day, the temperature in the high twenties, with not a cloud in the sky, and there were ripples rather than waves at the water’s edge, so the foam looked like rows of lace edging along a pale blue border to the deep blue coverlet of the sea.

  Tracey’s boys were busy trying to herd the twins around the rock pools, and there were shrieks and whoops and laughter as Turbo barked happily in pursuit, while Tracey and Sally packed what was left of the picnic back into plastic containers. They’d dined on sandwiches and cold chicken and cake and washed it down with lemon cordial and soft drinks under the big beach shade and now there was little more left than crumbs and chicken bones. Even the squawking seagulls had finally given up fighting for scraps and flown off in search of new horizons.

  Fi was sitting in a corner, sipping on a flask of ginger tea and setting Chloe’s rocker gently rocking with her toes, giving wan smiles and generally doing her best to look more cheerful than she felt, while Luke was doing a run to the rubbish bin.

  Pip sat on the rug, feeling the peace of the ocean and the warm air wrap around her as she took it all in. Tomorrow she would get back on that plane, and this place would once again be relegated to her past. Strange how once she couldn’t wait to get back on that plane, while now . . .

  She felt a pang inside her chest. She’d miss it more than she’d realised. She’d miss the dry air and the endless sky and the wide open spaces. Miss the awe-inspiring night-time display of stars. Miss Trace and Fi and the gorgeous bundle that was Chloe.

  And then Luke returned and bent down to pop the lid on the esky and pull out a cool drink and she got a glorious view of his tight butt and the play of muscles in his arms and back.

  ‘Pip?’ he said, catching her staring, and adding a smile. ‘Anything you’d like.’

  She blinked and shook her head. She looked at her watch, realised it would be twelve in Perth and sprang to her feet. ‘I have to make a phone call. Excuse me a minute, guys. I’ll be right back.’

  ‘Who’re you calling?’ asked Tracey, as Chloe started fussing for a feed.

  ‘That woman in Perth – Marlene Armistead. The one who asked me to call her back.’

  Sally looked over, a crease in her brow. ‘Who?’

  Tracey explained the note Luke and Pip had found as she picked Chloe up from the bouncer and sat down in a chair to feed her. Sally’s troubled eyes swung to Pip. ‘This is what you were talking about at the funeral. You think this person paid your mother off because she was expecting you.’

  ‘It looks that way. Trouble is, this Colin died a few years back, so I’m not sure what she’s going to be able to tell me. Anyway . . .’

  Sally nodded, her features pinched. ‘You better go make that call. I think I’ll take a walk,’ she said, and headed towards the water’s edge, her long maxi skirt floating around her legs in the gentle breeze.

  Luke watched Pip strolling across the sands, holding the mobile to her ear, coming to a stop when someone at the other end picked up.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Fi asked, coming to stand next to him.

  ‘She’s just making that call.’

  ‘No. Not that. Between you and Pip. Are you guys back together?’

  His head swung around. ‘What gives you that idea?’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, come on, Luke. I might be pregnant, but I’m not brain dead. The fact you’re even here suggests something is going on. Not to mention the way you guys can’t keep your eyes off each other.’

  Or our hands.

  He looked at Tracey, who knew, and who was listening as she fed Chloe, and he figured Fi was going to find out one way or another, so what would it hurt to tell the truth now? ‘You ever hear that expression, “making hay while the sun shines”?’

  ‘Is that what you’re doing, then? Making hay?’

  He smiled, though his gut twisted at the thought of Pip leaving and the sun turned cold. ‘More or less.’

  ‘But she’s still going tomorrow?’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’

  Fi flung the rest of her ginger tea on the sands. ‘Well, that just sucks.’

  Doesn’t it just?

  ‘You should talk to her, Luke,’ Fi said, sounding determined. ‘Make her see that she belongs here.’

  He huffed. ‘You think that’d work?’

  ‘You have to try.’

  He was about to shake his head and tell her it was pointless and that she’d never listen to him anyway, when suddenly he thought about the emptiness of tomorrow after she’d gone, and all the empty tomorrows to come, and thought, dammit, he didn’t want them empty.

  He wanted Pip in each and every one of them. Because damn it to hell and back, he still wanted her. God!

  Pip was still on her call when Sally wandered back from her walk, looking troubled. ‘You okay, Mum?’ said Tracey. ‘You should have brought a hat.’

  Sally smiled. ‘I’ll be fine.’

  ‘I think we’re all a bit down,’ offered Tracey. ‘Not knowing when we’ll see Pip again. Especially if she gets this new hotshot promotion of hers.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sally, as she sat down on the blanket. ‘That’s it.’

  Luke straightened. ‘She’s coming,’ he whispered, and every face turned to Pip’s, searching for any hint in her expression. ‘Well?’ Luke said, when she got close.

  Pip flung her phone down on the blanket and herself after it, running her fingers through her hair. ‘That was twenty minutes of my life I’ll never get back.’

  ‘You talked for ages and you got nothing?’ said Fi.

  ‘What did she say?’ asked Tracey.

  ‘Everything. Nothing. I heard about her bridge club every Wednesday, and what Meals on Wheels serves from Monday to Friday, and what her neighbour thinks of the new skirt she bought yesterday at Millers. She’s lovely really, but she’s lonely. She had the chance to tell someone her life story and she took it.’

  ‘But what did she say about her husband? What did he do in Adelaide all those years?’

  ‘That was useless too. He was with some church. Pretty high up by the sounds. Moderator or something. Not that it matters.’

  ‘What church?’ asked Sally softly.

  ‘It’s pointless. I just have to accept that I’m never going to find out who my father was.’

  ‘What church?’

  And everyone looked at Sally, sitting on the blanket with her elbows on her knees and her face a tightly drawn mask.

  Pip shook her head, thrown. ‘Um, the United Christian Church or the Christian Unity Church. At least I think it was something like that, but my folks were never religious. We never went to church.’

  ‘Hey,’ piped up Fi quietly. ‘Wasn’t the old church in Paskeville a Christian Unity Church? The one that’s now a gallery?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Tracey. ‘Yeah, it was. Wasn’t that the one where Dad’s father was the minister? Mum?’

  But Sally had slumped her shaking head into her hands. ‘Oh my god, I am such a fool. Such a damned fool!’

  ‘Mum!’ said Tracey, thrusting baby Chloe in Fi’
s direction before dropping down on her knees and putting her arm around Sally’s quaking shoulders. ‘What is it?’

  ‘A happy coincidence,’ she said through lips stretched tight, ‘when you two girls were born three weeks apart. A happy coincidence.’

  And Pip felt her blood run cold. ‘What? Tell me.’

  ‘Only it wasn’t a coincidence. I always wondered, you know, always there were questions in my mind, but if I ever broached the subject, if I even hinted that our girls could almost be sisters, Deidre insisted the baby was Gerald’s. It was like she’d been sworn to secrecy or something.’

  What?

  Pip and Luke exchanged glances. He came and stood next to where she kneeled on the rug and put his hand to the back of her head, just to let her know he was there, and she leant her head back against the welcoming warmth and the strength of his touch, grateful he was there, because right now the sands beneath her were shifting and she needed something solid and safe to lean against.

  ‘I knew he and Dee were going out and that she was crazy about him,’ Sally continued on a hiccup, ‘I knew it and so when he told me that she’d turned him down, that if she really loved him, she’d make love to him, I thought . . . I was so stupid and naive and foolish . . . I thought it was my chance to show him that I loved him too. That I loved him better. And he was so charismatic and so handsome. He was the minister’s son and he was in charge of the church youth group. All the girls wanted him, but I had him that night. I really thought he was mine.’

  ‘Mum,’ Tracey soothed.

  Sally put her head up then, staring blindly out towards the sea.

  ‘I guess he must have told her, because she didn’t speak to me for a month, by which time I’d found out I was pregnant and my parents had demanded he marry me.’ She sobbed. ‘It was all arranged and the next thing I knew, Dee and Gerald were getting married too – though he was ten years older than us all and we thought she was mad. Until she started to show not long after the wedding, just about the same time I did. That was when I started to suspect.’ She turned her distraught face to Pip. ‘Oh Pip, my darling, can you ever forgive me?’

  And Pip thought of her mum telling her, ‘Be careful who you fall in love with,’ and suddenly understood what she had meant.

  She looked across at Trace and Trace looked at her and a throwaway line of Luke’s zapped through her mind – Tracey’s got blue eyes – as numbly she got to her feet and staggered to where her friend was similarly rising. ‘We share the same father,’ she said, in awe and wonder, and even the knowledge that their birth father had been a useless womanising bastard didn’t matter right now, because . . . ‘You’re my sister.’

  ‘Half-sister? We’re half-sisters?’

  Pip burst into tears as they fell into each other’s arms. ‘I have a sister!’ They hugged and laughed and cried until Pip looked up with a start, her hands over her mouth as she realised. ‘Oh, my god, I have a niece! And two nephews! And a brother-in-law!’

  She dropped down to where Sally was still hunched over, and threw her arms around the woman. ‘Thank you, Sally,’ she said, and squeezed her tight.

  Sally blinked up at her, all puffy-eyed and tear-streaked. ‘You don’t –’ she licked her lips, ‘– hate me?’

  She laughed. ‘How could I? I thought I was alone, but now I have family. How could I possibly hate you?’

  Sally wrapped her arm around Pip’s forearm and squeezed. ‘I always said you were the daughter I never had.’

  She had too. Pip looked back over the times they’d been together, the times she’d seen her watching the two girls, almost as if she’d been studying them. And who could blame her if she’d wondered all these years?

  ‘You’ve always been there for me,’ she said, giving her another squeeze. ‘Always.’

  The boys ran up in a spray of sand and squeals. They took one look at the hugging women and the stunned faces in the group, and stopped dead. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Come on, boys,’ said Luke. ‘Let’s go get an ice-cream.’

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Back at the house the mood around Tracey and Craig’s big dining table was reflective, everybody still shell-shocked, still trying to absorb the news and come to terms with this new paradigm.

  Pip cuddled Chloe, wondering why it should feel so different holding her now that she knew she was her aunt – a blood relative – and not just her godmother. ‘All this time I thought my family had never had anything to do with church.’

  Luke was leaning against the sink, his hands on the bench at his sides. ‘This might explain why.’

  She blinked, because it did make a kind of sense. ‘It might. Gran loved her hymns. She watched Songs of Praise every Sunday. She must have missed going to church terribly.’

  ‘The church closed not long after that,’ said Sally, staring blindly at a mug of coffee she was clutching in front of her like a lifeline. ‘Jacob and I were married faster than you can say shotgun wedding and then they shipped Reverend Everett back to Adelaide. They said the congregation was shrinking, which was true, but it all seemed very hasty. Maybe they were worried that something else would wriggle out of the woodwork. Maybe they wanted to cut and run before another scandal hit.’

  ‘Wow.’ Fi drained her tea and put her cup down on the table with a thunk. ‘I don’t know how you did it, Sally. How did you ever manage to keep this to yourself all these years?’

  Sally shook her head. ‘What could I say? I didn’t know, not for sure. Dee always maintained that Gerald was Pip’s father.’ She sighed glumly. ‘Besides, I was too ashamed. I’d betrayed a friend’s trust. I’d tried to steal my best friend’s boyfriend away from her and for one selfish, blinkered moment, I thought I’d succeeded.’ She gave an ironic laugh. ‘What an awful, bitchy thing to do. What a fool.’

  She shifted her gaze from her mug to Pip. ‘My actions nearly ruined our friendship. It wasn’t just that first month Dee didn’t talk to me, it soured things between us for a long time. I think it was only when she saw how unhappy I was with Jacob, what a jerk he was being, that she extended the olive branch. She didn’t have to say anything, but I could see she felt sorry for me. That she forgave me.’

  She sighed. ‘And later, after he was gone, we slowly got back to a place like where we’d been before. Not that things were ever the same. How could they be, after what I’d done?’

  Pip nodded, the pieces of the puzzle that had mystified her for so long slowly fitting together. Her earliest memories of Tracey were at playgroup, and there’d been no hint of friction between their mothers that a toddler might notice. They’d always been the best of friends. Or so she’d assumed.

  ‘And my dad? I mean Gerald. How did he get roped into all this?’

  ‘He was a widower. A friend of the family. I guess it was convenient for all concerned. At the time I was horrified – he seemed so old to me back then – but as time went by, and especially after your brother, Trent, was born, I could see how good he was for her. She deserved a good marriage. She deserved to be happy. And he loved her.’

  Around the table there was silence.

  ‘You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself,’ said Luke gruffly, though he was looking right at Pip and there was something churning in the depths of his blue eyes.

  ‘You deserve to be happy too,’ agreed Tracey, with a sniff.

  ‘Yeah,’ Luke said. ‘You do.’ But he was still staring at Pip, and she didn’t like the way his turbulent eyes made her feel. Like she was the one who’d done something wrong way back then.

  Sally shook her head. ‘Reap what you sow,’ she quoted. ‘I think we get what we deserve.’

  Ben wandered into the kitchen from the lounge room where the boys were all playing video games. He glanced over the empty stove and opened the oven door. ‘What’s for dinner?’

  ‘Spaghetti bolognese.’

 
; ‘Yeah?’ said Ben, frowning. ‘When?’

  And Tracey looked at the clock on the wall, and said, ‘Oh god, is that the time?’ and headed for the fridge.

  The party broke up after that, Fi taking the twins and giving a drained-looking Sally a ride home. Tracey and Luke stood by the gate as Pip hugged both women for a long time. ‘Will we see you tomorrow?’ asked Fi.

  She shook her head. ‘My flight leaves at nine-thirty in the morning. I’m going to be leaving pretty early to get to the airport in time as it is.’

  Fi’s face pulled tight. ‘So this really is goodbye, then.’ And Pip pulled her close and hugged her again. ‘It’s been so good having you back with us,’ Fi said, ‘I wish you weren’t going. I wish you could stay. I wish . . . Oh, I just wish . . .’

  ‘I know. You take care of yourself.’ She looked down in the direction of Fi’s still flat tummy, ‘All of you in there, okay!’

  ‘You will come back? And not stay away so long next time?’

  ‘Of course I will.’

  Fi threw a look over to Luke and said, ‘Luke?’ And he nodded but before Pip could ask what that little exchange was all about, Sally reached out and put a hand to her arm. ‘Take care, Pip. I’m really sorry – about everything.’

  Pip pulled her close for another hug. ‘Don’t be. It’s a relief to know the truth at last.’ She nodded. ‘I hope you feel better about it now.’

  Sally shrugged and gave a weak smile. ‘Right now, I’m just relieved it’s finally out in the open. And that you can forgive me.’

  ‘Please, there is absolutely nothing to forgive.’ And the older woman nodded and gave her a final squeeze before climbing into the front seat.

  The twins piled rowdily into the back as Tracey gave her mum a hug goodbye with a promise to call later, and then they waved Fi’s Subaru off down the driveway.

  Pip felt something tug tight inside her, and an all too familiar prick of tears as the car disappeared in a cloud of dust. ‘Do you think Sally will be okay?’ she asked over her shoulder, to give herself a chance to get her leaky eyes under control.