The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart

by Holly Ringland

  Alice angled the truck onto Thornfield’s driveway and did a careful U-turn in front of the house. She pulled the handbrake up but left the engine running.

  ‘You going somewhere?’ June undid her seatbelt, an eyebrow raised. Harry’s eyes darted back and forward. ‘Everyone’s waiting to see you.’

  ‘I know, I’m just going to pick up Oggi,’ Alice said, beaming, ‘since I passed and everything.’

  The slightest shadow flickered across June’s face. ‘Of course. Plenty of pancakes for everyone.’ She smiled, but her eyes were cold.

  Alice drove through town, taking long, cooling breaths until all the things she wished she could say to June stopped burning inside her. Harry panted at her side. The more kilometres she put between herself and Thornfield, the calmer she grew. The closer she got to Oggi, the happier she was. As she’d been ever since she was nine.

  When Alice took the last left onto the dirt road just before the town limits sign, Harry started to bark.

  ‘Nearly there.’ Alice laughed. Sometimes she thought Harry loved Oggi even more than she did.

  She pulled up in front of Oggi’s house; he was waiting for her on the verandah. Emotion surged through her with such intensity that she almost expected sparks to fly from her fingers when she reached for the door handle.

  ‘I got it,’ she sang, grinning as she swung out of the truck with her licence in her hand. Harry followed.

  Oggi’s face lit up. Alice wanted to drink it down, that look, the light in his eyes because he loved her.

  ‘I knew you’d pass,’ he said, taking her face in his hands, kissing her deeply. Hair fell across his eyes and she drew back to brush it away, the bracelets on her wrist chiming. She’d deliberately picked them from her jewellery box to wear today. River red gum. Enchantment.

  ‘Wanna take a ride with me?’ she asked, smiling coyly.

  ‘Definitely,’ he replied, kissing her again. ‘But first, I’ve got something for you.’

  She raised an eyebrow at him before he put one of his hands over her eyes, resting the other on the small of her back.

  ‘Ready?’ His lips brushed her ear.

  ‘What are you up to?’ She held on to him tightly as he guided her off the verandah.

  ‘Okay. Open.’ Oggi took his hand away from her eyes. Alice gasped.

  The peeling, mint-green Volkswagen Beetle had a rusted bonnet and was missing one hubcap. Around the rearview mirror was a lei of fiery petals.

  ‘Oggi,’ Alice exclaimed. ‘How did you do this?’ She opened the door and sat in the spongy driver’s seat, running her hands over the big, thin steering wheel.

  ‘I worked extra shifts at the timber yard.’ He shrugged. ‘And … I might have gotten it for a good price over the bar.’

  She burst into laughter. Earlier that year Oggi had picked up night work at the local pub.

  ‘You swindled a drunk out of a car for me?’ She leapt up.

  ‘The very least I would do,’ he said with a half-smile as he pulled her close.

  ‘But what if I didn’t pass my test?’

  He ran a fingertip along the bare skin peeking between her singlet and skirt, hooking his finger over her waistband to graze the top of her knickers. Warmth tingled the inside of her thighs.

  ‘I just knew you would,’ Oggi replied.

  Alice kept her eyes open while she kissed him, wanting to remember everything she could about this moment, wanting to keep it in its wholeness forever; the bright, lucid light, the sound of the butcher birds singing, and the green river flowing behind them. The heat and hunger spreading through her body for the boy, the person, she loved most in her world.

  Alice drove home in her new Beetle with Oggi and Harry following in the farm truck. She couldn’t believe she was driving a car Oggi had bought for her. It was perfect. The peeling mint-coloured paint, and the solid thunk of the doors when she closed them. The big steering wheel, bouncy little seats and springy pedals. Most of all, the rumble and vibration of the engine, so loud she almost couldn’t hear the stereo. All the hours of work it must have taken for him to save enough money. All for her. A thrill rippled through her body as she relived moments from the hour they’d just spent by the river. She couldn’t get enough of him.

  When she pulled up at Thornfield Alice pressed the middle of the steering wheel, laughing at the cheery beep of the Beetle’s horn. Oggi pulled up beside her. The Flowers hurried down the path between the house and the workshop to greet them.

  ‘You did it, sweetpea!’ Candy squealed, a streak of batter on her chin, wrapping her in a cinnamon-scented hug. The others huddled around, exclaiming over the Beetle.

  Twig came up behind them. ‘Hey, you did it,’ she said. ‘Congratulations, Alice.’ She kissed Alice’s cheek.

  ‘Thanks,’ Alice said uncertainly. She searched Twig’s eyes. ‘What is it, Twig?’ she asked.

  Twig looked at Oggi and then to Alice. ‘June’s, um, she’s –’

  A backfiring motor interrupted them. June drove a restored Morris Minor truck out from behind the house. It was painted a bright and glossy yellow, with white inner rims on polished hubcaps. As June turned to park, Alice read the lettering on the door.

  Alice Hart, Floriographer. Thornfield Farm, where wildflowers bloom.

  Her heart sank. When Alice turned seventeen, June had started talking about her taking a managerial role at Thornfield once she’d finished school. It wasn’t the idea that bothered her as much as the fact that June never asked if it was what she wanted. And it wasn’t lost on Alice that June always ignored Oggi in any talk of her future.

  ‘A gift from us all,’ June said as she got out of the truck. ‘Everyone chipped in.’

  ‘Oh, it’s … it’s …’ Alice faltered. ‘It’s amazing, June. Everybody. Everyone, thank you so much.’

  June met her eye. ‘And what’s this?’ she asked, gesturing to the Beetle.

  ‘You won’t b-believe it,’ Alice stammered. ‘Oggi saved up and bought it for me.’

  June’s smile didn’t waver. ‘Oggi,’ she snorted. ‘What an extraordinary gift for you to give Alice, when you can’t afford a car of your own. How lucky we both had the same idea! So, Alice can have the Morris, and Oggi, you can keep the VW. Everyone wins.’ She clapped her hands together. ‘Well, Candy’s spent all morning making a veritable feast …’

  ‘Yes,’ Twig said, too loudly, rushing forward. ‘Yes, everyone, let’s eat.’

  As the group turned towards the path, Twig sidled up to Alice. ‘Just give her some space,’ she cautioned. ‘She’s been planning that surprise for six months, and she’s just taken aback a bit, that’s all.’

  Alice forced herself to nod. But why is it always about her? She wanted to scream.

  When Oggi came to her, Alice couldn’t bear to look at him. He took her hand and gave it a squeeze. Kept squeezing until she looked up. Despite the humiliation she knew he must be feeling, he winked at her. After a moment, she squeezed his hand in return.

  Following a tense brunch, Alice and Oggi slipped out of the house and ran to the river. They sat on the bank. She made a chain out of wildflowers. He polished white river stones on his shirt and skipped them across the water. She felt the intensity of his sidelong glances but she couldn’t bring herself to speak. She didn’t know what to say. How to apologise for June’s behaviour. How to apologise for not standing up for him and his beautiful gift. How to apologise for not standing up for herself. Eventually, he broke the silence.

  ‘She can’t get away with it, treating you like this. Like you’re just something in her garden that she can tell when to bloom or not.’ Oggi didn’t look at her.

  Alice knotted daisy stems together.

  ‘Sometimes it feels like that,’ she said. ‘Like I’m just one of the seedlings in her glasshouse. I’ll never get out from the protection of her ceiling. My future is written.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It feels like my destiny is decided. You know? Like, this is it
. I’m where I’ll always be.’

  ‘Is that what you want?’ He studied her face.

  She snorted. ‘You know it’s not.’

  After a long time, he cleared his throat. ‘So, I’ve got another surprise for you.’

  Oggi reached into his pocket and took out a dog-eared postcard. Offered it to Alice. She took it from him, and recognised a scene from his stories. The Valley of the Roses.

  ‘The thing is, by the time you turn eighteen next year, we’ll have enough saved up for our flights.’ He rubbed his thumb over her ring finger, sending warmth up the underside of her arm and into her heart. ‘We could fly into Germany and catch the train to Sofia. We could camp under the stars. Drink rakija to keep us warm, and make pear stew from the tree in my grandmother’s garden. I could farm roses and you could sell them at the markets. We could be different people and live different lives. We could be together, just us.’ He held both of her hands in his. ‘Alice.’ His eyes searched her face for her answer.

  Alice’s lungs expanded with longing for lands covered in snow, cobblestoned cities, and rose gardens that grew from the bones of kings. She didn’t understand why Oggi was laughing until she realised she was nodding.

  ‘Yes,’ she said as he drew her close. ‘Yes,’ she laughed, into his ear. He wrapped his arms around her, shaking slightly. The sun speckled Alice’s face with warm light. Oggi kissed her forehead and her cheeks and her lips. He named more places they would go and things they would do in their new life. Together.

  Candy put the last of the brunch dishes away and made herself a black coffee. She drank it watching the Flowers milling in the fields, checking the new blooms. Their usual babble and laughter was thin. Something frosty had settled over Thornfield. After brunch, Oggi and Alice had slipped away, thinking they’d gone unnoticed. June had stalked into her workshop, slamming the door behind her. Twig went to the seedling houses to tend her trays of desert peas. And Candy scrubbed the dishes with steel wool until her knuckles were raw.

  It was no longer ignorable: the days of Alice’s childhood were long gone. Neither Twig, Candy nor June talked about how difficult it was to see Agnes’s hopefulness and Clem’s wildness in the depths of Alice’s eyes. Sometimes, when Alice passed her in the house or in the fields, Candy’s first instinct was to look to the sky for smoke; she could swear she smelled something catching alight.

  Even though she’d never heard from Clem after he’d left with Agnes, Candy had never broken their promise. She was there, her life sewn to his, only now through his daughter, who was fast becoming a woman with her own mind. A woman who didn’t seem to have inherited Clem’s demons, who seemed to be breaking free of Thornfield’s story. Something Candy had never managed.

  She drank the last of her coffee, grimacing as she swallowed the bitter grinds. She might be thirty-four, but she was still nine, the girl in a cubby house made of sticks, bound to a shadow that was never coming home.

  When the afternoon began to soften, Alice ran home from the river. Her fingertips tingled for her pen and journal. How would she write about this day? Everything was luminous: the yellow wings of Cleopatra butterflies as they fluttered over the bushes and flowers; the air sharpened by the smell of lemon-scented gum leaves crushed under her footsteps; the golden quality of the light. Oggi’s voice rang in her ears. We could be different people and live different lives.

  As she ran, June’s face filled her thoughts. What would her leaving Thornfield do to June? Guilt pinched hard between her ribs.

  Alice slowed to catch her breath and tried to push June’s face away. When she picked up her pace again, her heartbeat and footsteps were back in sync.

  15

  Blue lady orchid

  Meaning: Consumed by love

  Thelymitra crinita | Western Australia

  Perennial spring-flowering orchid. Flowers are intensely blue and form a delicate star shape. Does not need a bushfire to stimulate flowering, but can be smothered by other vegetation, so periodic burns to restrict taller-growing shrubs are beneficial.

  That year, leading up to Alice’s eighteenth birthday, Twig saw what no one else at Thornfield did. Night after night she sat in the shadows and watched as the back screen door swept open and Alice, with her long hair streaming behind her, crept across the verandah, down the steps, and into the blooming flower fields under the moonlight. Twig sat smoking long after Alice’s silvered silhouette disappeared into the bush. Although she knew June wanted Alice to be different, to be immune, the truth was on the path that led to the river for anyone to see: Alice was deeply, wildly, blindly in the thick of first love.

  The night Alice turned eighteen, after the fancy roast and second helpings of the tiered vanilla lily cake that Candy baked, everyone went to bed tipsy from the crate of Moët that June ordered in specially. Twig sat on the back verandah rolling a smoke, grateful for the silence of the winter stars. Things were changing. You could smell it in the air like a new season. Alice was unsettled. As was Twig over the lies she’d told Alice every time Alice had asked about her family. Although she’d fought against June’s dishonesty, Twig was complicit; she too had kept secrets from Alice for nearly as long as June had.

  When the form Twig had filled out and returned to the state adoption services led to nothing, she’d gone back to the Yellow Pages and picked up the phone. She gave the first private investigator to answer her call the name of the woman Agnes noted in her will, and the name of the town where Alice grew up. Not long after Alice had started school the investigator’s report arrived by mail. Twig had to walk all the way to the river before she calmed down enough to read it. Alice’s baby brother was healthy and well, in the care of the woman Agnes instructed should be the guardian of her children if June was not fit or able to raise them. Alice and her brother were living without each other, unaware – were Nina and Johnny the same? Contrary to common belief, Twig knew that not even Thornfield could save a woman from her past. She’d made a good life there, raising Candy, and she’d done her best with Clem. She’d cared for Agnes and the rest of the Flowers, managing the farm and running a good business. But the truth was that no amount of second chances, not even at Thornfield, could change the past, no matter how much June wished it were so. Twig’s relationship with June had never been the same since June came home with only Alice in the truck. I’m the executor of the will, Twig, she’d drunkenly hissed over the years, more times than Twig could count. I made the hard choice that was in everyone’s best interests. Twig hid the investigator’s report and a secret copy of Agnes’s will in the seedling house. She’d waited nine years for the right moment to give them to Alice. Still they stayed hidden, among desert pea seedlings.

  When the screen door opened, Twig shrank into the shadows, watching Alice creep into the flower fields, a faint trail of champagne in the air behind her. Alice had drunk flute after flute at dinner. Something was brewing in her life, Twig could sense it as well as any shift in the weather. She counted silently, waiting a whole minute to be sure Alice wouldn’t hear her footsteps, before she hurried down the path to the river, following her.

  Oggi was waiting on the riverbank, with a small fire burning by the giant river gum. He’d been especially quiet at dinner. Twig crouched behind a cluster of skinny iron bark trees. Alice flung herself at him as if she’d not seen him for years, their skin painted bronze by the firelight. They kissed tenderly. The look on Oggi’s face at the sight of Alice caused Twig’s eyes to well. She’d loved someone like that once. She remembered how it felt to be so clearly seen by another person, to be so unbroken.

  They drew apart and Alice sat leaning against him, cradled in his arms. ‘Tell me the plan again.’

  He kissed the top of her head. ‘We meet tomorrow at midnight, right here. We bring one suitcase each. That’s it. We travel light.’ He kissed her temple, her cheek, her neck. ‘We catch the first bus to the city airport, and pick up our tickets. We fly for so long you’ll think we’re never going to land, but we will, in So
fia, where we’ll go to my grandparents’ house, drink rakija, eat shopska salata, sleep off our jet lag, wake up and catch the cable car up Mount Vitosha, to stand on the lake of stones and look out over the world. We’ll walk the goats in the mornings. The bells on their collars sound better than Christmas Day. On the weekends, we’ll take my grandfather’s truck and drive across the border to Greece, where we’ll swim in the sea, and eat olives and grilled cheese.’

  ‘Oggi,’ Alice whispered dreamily, turning to him. ‘Do you have your pocketknife?’

  They carved their names into the trunk of the gum tree, then fell into one another, kissing with the hunger of adolescence. The child who came to Thornfield, so silent, so wrought with horror, was more alive than Twig had ever seen her.

  Twig stood silently and shook out the cramps in her legs, then crept back to the path and followed it home. Inside the seedling house, she unearthed the plastic pouch of yellowed papers holding the truth of Alice’s life, then went into the house to wait for Alice to return.

  She sat on the couch. Thought about making a coffee. Closed her eyes for just a minute.

  It was a regret Twig would carry from that day on, sinking into a sleep so deep that she didn’t hear the floorboards creak when Alice came in.

  The next morning, Alice was out running a delivery into town when June came downstairs. Twig was in the kitchen making her mid-morning cuppa and turned to offer June one, but stopped short. June stood in the doorway, Alice’s journal dangling open in one hand.

  ‘June?’ Twig eyed the journal, its pages filled with the loops and curls of Alice’s handwriting.

  June walked slowly out the back. For a while she sat on the verandah staring into the flower field. Twig set a cup of tea down beside her. Cockatoos screeched overhead. June didn’t speak.