The Ghost by the Billabong

by Jackie French

  ‘I know.’ Good luck with that, Jed thought. None of you managed to find out what happened to Rose over all these years. Even with the clue that she might have had a daughter, it would surely take months to go through the birth records, at least long enough to get what she needed no matter what they found — or didn’t find. ‘What happened to the other girl who pretended to be me?’

  ‘She arrived after Tommy first collapsed. I didn’t want him bothered, so I paid her off.’

  ‘What if you’d been wrong? If she really had been his great-granddaughter and you’d kept her from him?’

  The Dragon smiled. ‘I had her investigated. She had a full set of great-grandparents, and none of them were Tommy. By then she and the money were well away. I didn’t mind paying to save the upset her presence might have caused. I had already paid off two so-called “Roses” too.’

  Jed forked lettuce and cheese into her mouth and chewed.

  The Dragon raised an eyebrow again. ‘You’re not going to ask how much I paid them?’

  ‘No,’ said Jed.

  ‘Five hundred dollars.’

  Jed forced herself to keep chewing, swallowing. Five hundred dollars would keep her for at least a year, maybe more, if she got a part-time job too. She could rent a room, study full time to do her Certificate, well enough to get a scholarship. Five hundred dollars would give her back her life . . .

  ‘Well, Miss Kelly? Will you take five hundred dollars to walk out that door and not come back?’

  If a girl who hadn’t even got to see Mr Thompson had been given five hundred dollars, they’d offer her more. And if they didn’t, she could accept the five hundred later.

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Jed politely. ‘May I see my great-grandfather again when he wakes up?’

  ‘One thousand dollars. That is my final offer. If you don’t accept it now, the offer is withdrawn.’

  Clever, thought Jed. But you’re bluffing. You’ll offer the money again later. And maybe even more, just to make sure your husband isn’t bothered. But a thousand! She wanted to dance around the room, climb onto the roof and sing like a magpie. She’d done it!

  She kept her face expressionless and looked at Mrs Thompson. The old woman’s face showed as little as her own. Was the Dragon bluffing?

  She shouldn’t risk it. She should take the thousand dollars now. Because if she didn’t, and the old man upstairs died that night, she’d get nothing.

  The old man upstairs. The one who dreamed of flying through the black of space, finding worlds and life and wonder. The old man who had talked to her, shared his dreams with her, as no one else had ever done. How would Tommy Thompson feel when his wife told him the girl he’d thought might just be his great-granddaughter had taken a thousand dollars to leave?

  ‘No, thank you,’ she said quickly, before she could change her mind. Because once she had that thousand dollars, there’d be no more conversations with Tommy Thompson. Was it worth risking a thousand dollars just to feel, for a little time, that she belonged to someone?

  It had better be. And surely Mrs Thompson or one of her sons would pay her something to go away quietly, even when Tommy Thompson died . . . Strange that thought made her feel a bit sick.

  ‘I see.’ Matilda Thompson poured the tea.

  What did she see? The wrinkled face showed nothing, but her tone seemed softer, more relaxed. She had done the right thing in refusing the money, and not just for Tommy Thompson. Maybe the offer had been a trap. If she’d accepted, she might have been out the door with nothing.

  ‘Milk? Sugar?’

  ‘Yes, please.’ Jed poured in milk, sugared it well. The tea looked strong enough to dissolve the teaspoon. The silence was as hard as toffee. She had to say something. About sheep? But ‘How many sheep do you have?’ might sound as if she wanted to know how much money they had.

  ‘How long have you lived here?’ That was safe, she thought, especially as it was Mrs Thompson’s property, not her husband’s.

  ‘Since January 1902, though I’d lived next door at Moura for eight years before that.’

  ‘What happened that January?’

  The old woman looked out the window. ‘The man who owned Drinkwater had a heart attack when his son died. I came to look after him and manage the property. I bought him out over the years.’ She stopped, her face frozen.

  Jed stared at her, shocked. Was the Dragon crying?

  ‘He lay in that room where Tommy is now,’ Matilda Thompson added quietly. ‘He recovered, more or less. Had another dozen years. Good years. But Tommy won’t.’

  ‘I . . . I’m sorry.’

  Mrs Thompson wiped her eyes angrily. ‘I never cry. And love doesn’t die. Not really. I’ve known that since I was twelve years old. Every time I walk these acres I feel my ghosts with me. Auntie Love — she looked after me when I first came here. Gave me . . . everything, really. Sometimes I look around and there’s something I need to see, ants building castles because they sense it will rain, and know that Auntie Love has nudged me to see them. Every time we get top price at the sales I can feel old Drinkwater grinning. Even my father’s here, sometimes.’ Mrs Thompson stared out the window again. ‘Tommy won’t leave me. Not really.’

  She sounded desperate, and certainly not confident she was right. Suddenly, unexpectedly, Jed wanted to hug her. But she’d never learned how to hug, much less how to hug a dragon. ‘The past stays with us,’ she said instead. ‘Truly. I know.’

  Matilda Thompson stared at her. ‘How can a child like you know?’

  Jed spoke without thinking, without calculation. Somehow this morning’s conversation had stripped away part of the Jed Kelly shell. ‘I . . . I see people from the past. Like you feel them, but I see them as well.’ She waited for derision, laughter. It didn’t come.

  She had been four years old when she had told Dad about the ‘imaginary’ boy she’d met, and been spanked for lying. She didn’t know why she admitted it now, except it wasn’t right to see a dragon cry. And this woman knew, as she did, that the past and its people were still around, even if she had never glimpsed the future too, like Jed did.

  She bent towards the older woman. ‘The people you loved, who you can still feel, I’m sure they’re there. We experience time in one direction, but really, it’s all around us.’

  Mrs Thompson blew her nose on a lace-edged handkerchief. ‘You know, that almost makes sense. Do you really see people from the past?’

  ‘And the future too, sometimes.’

  Matilda Thompson smiled, her first true smile, not a dragon showing her fangs to intimidate. ‘If you are trying to make someone think your claims are believable, telling them you see ghosts isn’t a good idea.’

  ‘Probably not. But it’s true.’ Jed met Mrs Thompson’s eyes. ‘I tell the truth.’

  ‘Do you now? When did you last see a ghost?’ The words were curious, not dismissive.

  ‘This morning. I saw a girl and a sheep.’ Jed smiled, hoping to make the old woman smile too. ‘It was so funny. She wore this old-fashioned black dress, far too big for her. She was scratching the sheep behind the horns and then her father said she could feed it — I’m pretty sure he was her father — and she gave it this blobby white-and-brown thing out of their swag. You should have seen the sheep nibble it . . .’

  Mrs Thompson’s face was suddenly expressionless again. The Dragon had returned. ‘Where was this?’

  ‘By a billabong, about six miles down the road. I’d —’

  The Dragon stood, her face alight with rage. ‘Get out of my house. Get out now!’

  Jed stared at her. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You really have done your homework, haven’t you? Found out every detail to take us in? A swagman by a billabong? Well, it hasn’t worked. You’re not getting a penny from me. Get out or I’ll call the men to throw you out.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.’ What had happened? The Dragon had been beginning to trust her. And Mrs Thompson liked sheep — m
ust like sheep if she had a photo of one on the piano.

  ‘Are you leaving or do I call the men to throw you out?’

  ‘I’m leaving.’ Jed picked up her shoulder bag.

  ‘I’ll inspect that, if you please.’ The Dragon held out an imperious hand, trembling slightly with anger.

  ‘You think I’ve stolen something of yours?’ Jed handed the bag over, finding her own hands were shaking too.

  The Dragon inspected it. Pushed aside the book, the musty jeans and T-shirt and unwashed underpants, the fruit knife with distaste. She looked up. ‘Nothing from here. But you are a thief, aren’t you?’

  What did it matter now? ‘Only when I have to be. I stole a packet of biscuits last week. And some cheese the day before that. Only one thing from any shop and only when I can’t find anything else to eat. All right? And I have taken something from you, but you won’t find it in that bag.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Toilet paper to make a sanitary napkin. My period’s come. Would you like it back again?’ Jed’s hand hovered at the hem of her skirt. ‘I’d be glad to give it to you.’

  The Dragon shoved the bag back at her. ‘Just get out.’

  ‘I’m going. Would you tell Mr Thompson I’m sorry not to see him again?’

  The old woman said nothing, her hands gripping the back of the chair so hard the knuckles were white under their age spots.

  Jed left.

  Chapter 8

  MATILDA

  Matilda moved to the sitting room to get her trembling under control before Anita came in to clear the lunch plates, to ask if she’d like peaches and custard for dessert. She sat down on her tapestry-upholstered chair, looked at her Persian carpets on the polished floor, and at the photos of her children in silver frames.

  Once, now more than seven decades earlier, a desperate and shabby Matilda had stood where that girl had stood. The man who lived here then had been her own great-grandfather, though Matilda hadn’t known it, nor had the old mule ever acknowledged her as family. She had been his enemy, and then his neighbour, and finally his business partner, closer to him than a daughter. The blood tie had been a secret discovered only after his death.

  She had been cast out of this room too. Penniless, trudging along the dusty road. But she’d had, at least, a house to go. That girl did not.

  I owe her nothing, Matilda thought, closing her eyes at the pain the memories of that billabong still held, even after seventy years.

  But she did. Plain human compassion, which she would have offered to any girl in Jed’s position, would have offered to Jed too if she had not been angered first by the girl’s claims, and then by the temerity, the cruelty, of using the long-ago events at the billabong to trap her . . .

  For it had to be a lie. A snare. Even if Matilda’s link to the billabong where her father died had never been published to her knowledge, half the district knew of it. ‘Waltzing Matilda’, the song about the swaggie who died at a billabong. It never mentioned his daughter had been there too. History so rarely bothered to mention children or women.

  The girl could have heard the story anywhere. Her tale had to be a lie.

  And yet . . .

  Matilda had sat by that billabong only eight times in her life, despite its closeness. The first, with her father, the day the troopers and his grandfather had killed him, hunting him into the water so he drowned among the water-lily tangles. The billabong had vanished in the big flood of 1903, reappearing years after, when the river changed its course yet again.

  She had gone to the billabong to cry, to howl where no one could hear her, the day the doctors said Tommy would live, after his stroke. She had gone there during the war when Jim had been sent overseas, and again when Michael had left for basic training.

  She had ridden there the evening after Michael had married his Nancy, so long lost in the prison camp in Malaya — Malaysia — whatever it was called now. Her horse had cropped the grass as Matilda sat below the stars after the wedding party, weeping for happiness with her ghosts.

  Not real ghosts. Not shapes or voices. And yet, sitting there, she could feel them about her — her father and old Drinkwater, Auntie Love, those she had loved and who had loved her, and whose feet had once walked that land.

  She believed in her ghosts with a depth that went beyond logic. Believed Flinty too when Flinty talked of meeting people from both the past and future on the rock below her farm. Flinty’s books might be created from her imagination, but Matilda would trust the younger woman’s judgement above anyone else’s, as if her whole capacity for fantasy was held between the covers of her fiction.

  But she had told the girl to go. Why, and with so much vehemence?

  Because Tommy is mine, Matilda thought. And I am losing him. Days, weeks, months . . . I don’t want to share him with a stranger. Only family, by love or blood, was welcome in the house now.

  Yet the girl might — possibly — be his great-granddaughter. Unlikely, verging on impossible. But still . . .

  So little time. It had taken her ten years to truly know her own great-grandfather. How much longer could Tommy’s will force his body to breathe?

  The second world war had poured old age upon them. They had still been young, all through that war. And then their sons were home, and they were old. What was old age? Weariness, that’s all. And the knowledge that their path together, merging once, then slashed apart and then together once again, was almost finished. All this would end.

  She could live without her husband. Had, for years, before their marriage. But that woman would not be her, entirely, despite her brave words to the intruder, for part of her was him.

  But for that girl, of all girls, to claim she was Tommy’s great-granddaughter . . . So obviously manipulative, at least to a wealthy woman who fools had tried to manipulate over more decades than she liked to count. That dress! That bulging bosom. And talking openly about sanitary products. Impossible crassness.

  And yet it was then that she was most believable. Still almost entirely unbelievable, but there was that ‘almost’, that faintest shred of doubt.

  She got to her feet, proud it was still a smooth movement, walked quietly up the stairs and opened his door. Moira looked up with a silent smile. Thank goodness for darling Moira and her regiment of nurses. The matron just as silently left, touching her shoulder comfortingly as she passed.

  Matilda looked at the sleeping man on the bed. Time hung, as she watched him, his breathing still even, in the old man’s face still the outline of the boy she had loved at twelve, the man who had fathered her children. His eyes opened at last. He smiled at her, with none of the confusion of waking. ‘Well,’ Tommy whispered. ‘What do . . . you . . . think?’

  ‘She doesn’t look like Anna. Or you.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean . . . much . . . after so many . . . generations. Get Jeffries . . . onto it.’

  Jeffries, son of Jeffries, the family’s and firms’ solicitor. ‘I rang him as soon as I went downstairs. He’ll get the private detectives onto it. The girl must have a birth certificate, somewhere. She said she was at a selective school too. There aren’t many of those. Someone will recognise her, and know her real name. That should solve it.’

  She didn’t say: I tried with Anna. I really did. I wanted to love your daughter. Wanted her to love me.

  Anna had never accepted that her father could forsake the city for Drinkwater, that he could love and marry again. Never accept, either, that Tommy loved Drinkwater and Gibber’s Creek for themselves, not just for Matilda; that the years in the city when Anna was small and her mother alive had been the outcast years for him, away from the land he loved.

  Matilda had never been jealous of Tommy’s first wife. Never had reason to be. Tommy was hers with a depth they had never discussed. But that too must have been hard for Anna to see.

  Anna had never come to Drinkwater after she married. Rose had never even visited. She and Tommy met her only in Melbourne, where Anna lived after her marriage.
Anna had even made it clear that she preferred her father and stepmother to stay at the Windsor, not with her, meeting only for a dinner, or for afternoon tea or at the races.

  It hurt, still. Matilda was not used to being disliked, or at least not by someone she wanted to charm. But only selling Drinkwater and moving to the city would have mollified Anna, and even then, perhaps, Matilda would not have been forgiven for marrying her father, or even worse, for being loved by him first and longest.

  More than half a century had passed. The Anna who’d been a girl in a white dress, long dead. Her daughter too. There hadn’t even been requests for money from either of them. Tommy had established a generous trust for Anna, who had in turn set one up for Rose, with her inheritance and her husband’s money too.

  Rose’s trust fund had been cashed and transferred two months before she vanished, and there was no evidence her husband had taken the money, nor that he needed to. His wealth was far greater than his wife’s. That — and the lack of a body — was why she was still listed as ‘missing’ and not ‘presumed dead’, even now after so many years had passed. Her husband had even attempted to have her declared dead, so he could marry again.

  For years he had been the obvious suspect: a rich man who had paid someone to murder his wife, rather than have to pay her half his wealth, or more, in a divorce. But he had been in England on business when she’d vanished. If he had paid for her ‘disappearance’, there had been no proof the police, nor the family’s private enquiries, could find.

  Was Jed Kelly’s account really what had happened to Tommy’s granddaughter? Matilda wondered with a stab of guilt if they’d suspected an innocent man all these years. Had the mystery that had anguished her husband now been solved? Yet if it had been, it had given them Jed to deal with. How like Anna, she thought, with yet more guilt, to still haunt them, to taint Tommy’s last days.

  Matilda had met Rose’s then fiancé only once, towards the end of the war, an American Colonel about to return to America with the other troops, before Rose followed as a war bride. Because of the war neither she nor Tommy had been able to get to Melbourne often or for long, and Anna had held that against them too.