‘No. Nothing about her life at all.’ Nicholas’s tone didn’t quite hide his hurt. He looked down at his letter again. ‘She says she’ll write soon. She will, won’t she? Nancy?’
‘What?’ Nancy made herself focus on him again. ‘Yes. Yes, she probably will.’
‘I don’t understand why she didn’t tell me herself. We talked just yesterday.’ He flapped the letter in frustration. ‘Why does it have to be a secret?’
‘I suppose we all have secrets,’ said Nancy lightly.
Nicholas said nothing. Ah, she thought. That’s touched a nerve. She had long suspected this young man had secrets of his own. But wars did that. The war had left her secrets she had never told Michael, not because she was ashamed, but because then he too would have to bear the memory of what had happened.
She made herself smile. ‘See you at lunch.’
She walked down the ramp, her mind bruised with worry. Damn the girl! Now she had to give Scarlett her letter — Nancy had read that first, just in case there was something in it that might hurt her — and tell Tommy, who would be hurt, and worry, and Matilda, who might say, ‘I told you all so.’
Maybe she could just make an excuse for why Jed wasn’t with her today, and hope the girl would write again soon, before Tommy could worry about her. Surely she wouldn’t vanish entirely, as suddenly as she had come into their lives?
She’d let Michael decide. Michael would know what would hurt his father least. But Jed . . .
Who was she, really? Not the family connection . . . that mattered least of all. But what had made this girl into someone who hadn’t known how to hug, who’d thrown up at the touch of a baby on Christmas Day, who would chatter about what life might be like in fifty years’ time but not say a word about any Christmas in her past, nor ever mention any friends or family at all. A girl who claimed she saw ghosts and almost looked like one at times.
A girl who thought she could survive but who, thought Nancy, looking back at the war years that at last she could see with love, as well as pain, had no idea how much survival cost herself and others. Yet.
Chapter 38
TOMMY
14 JANUARY 1969
‘Mail, Tommy.’ Matilda sat by his bed and began to open the envelopes: only half a dozen of them. The boys looked after the business mail now. Good to have sons you liked, you trusted, but it made one feel extraordinarily old to have every burden so carefully lifted from your shoulders. Yet after all, Tommy thought with a flash of amusement, he was extraordinarily old, and so was his still extraordinary wife.
Matilda glanced at the first letter. ‘A postcard from Jean Sampson. They’re loving Venice, blah de blah blah . . .’ His Matilda had made it clear early in their marriage that she had no wish to be a tourist. A long weekend in Sydney, or Melbourne for the Cup or to see Anna, was as far as she was prepared to travel. ‘One from Jeffries and Sons.’ Matilda slit the envelope expertly, then glanced up at him.
The solicitor’s letter could only be about Jed. Jed, who had not visited for five days. And nor had Nancy. When he’d asked Michael why they hadn’t been to Drinkwater his son had said, ‘They’re busy with something or other,’ in the tone of voice that meant, ‘I am carefully not worrying my frail father.’
Damn the boy. Evasions took more energy to unpick than he could spare.
Was something wrong with the girl? If so, they should tell him straight out.
‘Read it,’ Tommy whispered, cursing the lack of breath that made communicating with even those he loved so hard.
Matilda still read letters with the clarity and carefulness of a girl reading an essay at school. ‘Dear Mr Thompson, Regarding the matter of “Jed Kelly”: Mr Derek Henderson of Henderson Investigations has some material that we think it best to present to you in person, so he may answer your enquiries. Would it suit you to see us on the morning of 15 January . . .?’
She looked up. ‘Tomorrow. Would it suit you, Tommy?’
‘The sooner . . . the better. Phone him . . . and say we’ll pick him up . . . at the station. Though . . . he may motor down.’ Hard to get used to these new cars, new roads, new speed. Everywhere reachable in hours or days, right across the planet. Horseback to rockets, and all in his lifetime . . .
Matilda sat, still looking at the letter, as though it might tell her more. He knew his wife believed Jed was lying.
He didn’t. He also knew Jed hadn’t told the entire truth.
‘Tommy, look.’ Matilda had opened another letter, all too obviously trying to distract him. He loved his wife, but wished that she too wasn’t beginning to treat him like a child, just because he must be fed like a child, put on a chamberpot like a child.
‘It’s from Philip.’ Jim’s youngest, six years old.
She handed it to him. He grasped the drawing carefully, tired of his hand’s trembling. ‘What . . . is it?’
‘I think it’s a tiger. Or it might be a train.’
‘Tell him . . . I love it.’ Tommy let the paper flutter to the bed. Jim called every evening, ‘checking in’. Once it would have been to discuss business. Now it was a quick routine of, ‘How is Dad? How are you bearing up?’ with Iris taking the phone to pass on some snippet of the boys’ doings.
He loved Jim, was proud of him, was more glad than he could say that the factories and all he’d built were in good hands. But each call made him feel as if another part of him had died. Useless old man, stuck in a bed. The world would not alter one jot now when he left it . . .
‘Don’t know who this is from.’ Matilda held the envelope up, examining the handwriting.
‘Well, open it.’ It would be another neighbour, probably, writing from Surfers Paradise or Timbuktu, saying the same things: How is Tommy? How are you bearing up?
We should send out a radio bulletin, he thought. Tommy is the same as yesterday, the same as tomorrow, and Matilda is still Matilda.
‘It’s from Jed,’ Matilda said in a strange voice. ‘It’s addressed to you, not to both of us. Do you want me to read it out?’
‘Yes.’ His glasses steamed up with this damn mask and, anyway, it was hard to focus these days.
‘Dear Great-Grandpa question mark, question mark, or should I just call you Tommy as Nancy does? Her handwriting is atrocious,’ added Matilda.
And yours is no better, thought Tommy. Matilda could never sit at her desk long enough for neat handwriting. He still wrote the copperplate he’d learned at school, though for most of his life he had had secretaries to take dictation and type for him.
What would the girl say? Somehow he couldn’t see her writing the familiar litany: How are you? I am thinking of you. But he did not expect his wife to read: ‘I started work at the Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station today.’
‘What?!’ Tommy peered at Matilda over the oxygen mask.
‘That’s what it says here. But it can’t be true.’
‘Easy to . . . check up. Keep . . . reading, woman.’
‘I’m not a woman, I’m your wife.’ It was an old joke. Matilda bent to the letter again. ‘No, I’m not a computer boffin or a rocket scientist, not yet. I wash up and clean the tables. But that is better than working in one of the offices, because everyone is quiet there, but they talk in the dining room. Oh, Tommy, do they talk. You’d love it.
‘Mr Sullivan and Mr Turner came in at lunchtime, talking about Mr Sullivan’s trip to America. They laughed when I said I was interested and explained it all to me. They’d realised that as the missions get more complex, the data is more complex too. You will see how I have learned the jargon already!
‘So Mr Sullivan wrote software to simulate the spacecraft’s digital command functions — I hope I have that right. One software package is called Aristo and one is called Sabre, and he was invited to the Goddard Space Flight Centre to talk about them, and to attend a course on Apollo software and UNIVAC computers all the way in America! And it is spelled “software”, not “softwear”. I have learned that too. It is how you speak to co
mputers, but also how you can make them do what you want.
‘I have even seen the station computers! Mrs Clissold lets me take the tea trolley down the corridor, for the men who can’t leave their operating positions to come down to the canteen for morning or afternoon tea. Some of them come out with their headsets on and the cord still dangling behind them, which looks hilarious, but they are all very serious about it.
‘When I look through the door I can see lots of grey cabinets with little flashing lights and these big tape things spinning around, but I don’t know how this makes the computer think. I am going to ask Mr Sullivan to explain it to me. It all looks like one big computer from the doorway, but they talk about “the computers”.
‘The tracking station itself smells very new, even though it’s a couple of years old now: new machinery is arriving all the time. I asked one of the technicians about the smell and he said it’s a “technical smell”, because all the equipment is warm, and wiring and plastic heat up. You can hear all the cooling fans in the backs of the cabinets going, so it sounds as though there are a million bees trapped inside.
‘Honeysuckle Creek is the most amazing place, like a fairy-tale palace in the middle of the bush. I wish you could see it. The gardens are lovely. The grass is kept short by the kangaroos — there was a mob of six grazing when I arrived — and there are shrubs flowering, but I don’t know what they are. A little man in a funny hat sits on a ride-on mower, going around and around in circles all day. But I don’t suppose you want to know about gardens.
‘I hope I can find out more for you soon. Everyone is very nice and will answer questions if they have time. I’m not sure whether I will be at the place where I am staying in Queanbeyan very long, but if it turns out that I can stay, then I’ll send you the address so you can write to me if there’s anything you’d like me to find out about, or describe.
‘I love working here, even though Mr Clissold drives here at one hundred and twenty kilometres an hour. I am not kidding! Mrs Clissold says the men all drive like bats out of hell as there are no cars coming the other way except at the end of shift, but once somebody met a cow on the Tharwa Bridge and it poked its horn through the car’s mudguard. They all think that was hilarious.
‘I should end this by saying “I hope you are well” but that would be dumb, because you’re not. But I know you are reading this because you said you would live to see man walk on the moon. Well, now I am going to be here to see it too. Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station didn’t seem quite real when you first told me about it. But now it does and I am part of it, even if it is only washing up stew pans and wiping down tables and filling the coffee pots. And now you are part of it all too, so don’t you dare die while I am away, because this is for you.
‘I think I send you my love too. I am still a bit wobbly about this love stuff, as I have never done much of it. But I am pretty sure I love you, even if it turns out you are not my great-grandfather, and it’s not just because you dream of a good world, over the horizon.
‘Jed.
‘PS I really do think you might be my great-grandfather. I have never lied to you. I just didn’t tell you that I am not really sure. But I want to do this because I love you, and because you feel like my family, even if it turns out I have no right to think you are.’
Matilda looked up at him. ‘Well, well, well. She’s quite a girl! Able to inveigle her way into all sorts of places.’
Tommy peered at her over his mask. There was that, of course. Jed’s venture at Honeysuckle Creek could be seen as a gift to an old man — an attempt by a lonely child to make contact with the man she hoped was her only living relative. It could also be the careful work of a clever con woman who had worked out a way to make an old man claim her as family, even if the private detectives discovered that she wasn’t.
‘Why didn’t . . . you tell . . . me she . . . had left Overflow?’
‘I didn’t know.’ Matilda’s voice had a faint tone of reproach. He relaxed. No, his wife would not keep something as important as that from him. But his children had. Youngsters always thought they knew what was best for the old. Sometimes they were even right.
‘It will . . . be interesting to see . . . what Henderson . . . has found out about . . . her.’
‘It will indeed,’ said his Matilda.
Chapter 39
MATILDA
15 JANUARY 1969
She dressed carefully for the visit by the lawyer and the investigator. She dressed carefully every day, partly for the joy of clothes, ever since she’d been able to indulge her love of lovely things to wear. Others bought paintings, but as far as she was concerned the view out her windows was finer than anything on canvas. Why shouldn’t art be wearable?
But today she dressed for the visitors. Or perhaps for herself, because sometimes she was still Jim O’Halloran’s orphan daughter, twelve years old in the dust of a drought and with a sheep, a dog and a paralysed, adopted auntie to feed and care for. There were still days when she wondered if Drinkwater, Tommy, her sons and grandsons might not vanish if she shut her eyes. When you have everything you have ever dreamed of, there is always the fear that it might, indeed, be just a dream.
A crisp white linen dress, because Mr Jeffries knew that she was one-eighth Aboriginal — enough in parts of Australia, even these days, to have her confined on a reserve ‘under protection’, needing official permission even to leave, wages kept by the state for ‘safekeeping’, but never given back to let you buy a house or — almost unthinkable — help your kids go to high school or university. This white dress showed not just her dark skin that was part tan, but mostly her great-grandmother’s heritage. It also showed that she was proud of it.
Nylon stockings, sheer and expensive. She had reluctantly given up silk stockings ten years earlier, when they became almost impossible to buy, but she still refused to countenance pantyhose or, even more repellent, step-ins. She had rebelled against stays more than half a century before. She was not going to start imprisoning her body again. White shoes — her Aunt Ann still whispering after seventy-five years, ‘Shoes must never be darker than your hem.’
Pearl earrings, pearl necklace (diamonds are only suitable after five o’clock, said her Aunt Ann, who had never worn diamonds but would have known what to do with them if she had ever had the opportunity). Her hair had been permed by Gibber’s Creek’s Goldie’s Glitter, who came to her, rather than requiring her to go to the salon. Each day with Tommy was too precious for her to waste one at a hairdressing salon.
She ate breakfast as usual at the side table in his bedroom. He ate so slowly she was able to feed him and herself too. Six spoonsful of porridge; a boiled egg; three stewed prunes. So little but possibly enough, for a man whose main task each and all day was to breathe.
The solicitor’s car arrived so promptly at eleven that she suspected they had lingered on the road until the hour Jeffries had selected as appropriate for a call on one of Australia’s wealthiest couples, especially a wealthy and elderly couple. She led them upstairs at once, instead of offering them refreshments in the sitting room first. It was important, these days, for Tommy to know that wherever he was was the heart of the house.
Once the two men had shaken Tommy’s fragile hand and were ensconced in armchairs, she rang the bell for Anita to bring up tea and pikelets spread with apricot jam and butter; discussed the weather — hot; the state of the paddocks — green; the road — the new highway saves so much time now; before Mr Henderson, the investigator, cleared his throat, and got down to business.
‘You know I’m based in Brisbane?’ He was a large man, his stomach almost but not quite confined in his white shirt, sweat glistening on his forehead.
‘Why Brisbane? I mean, why choose a Brisbane investigator?’
‘Because the girl gave you one clue about where she’d been living, a selective school. Some of the private schools have exams you need to pass to get into them, but “selective school” usually means a state school, and
there aren’t many of those. Your Mr Jeffries hired me to find out if this Jed Kelly of yours had been at the one in Brisbane, State High.’
Surely the man could afford a decent suit, thought Matilda. ‘You specialise in missing persons?’
‘Not enough call for it to be a specialty, not in a place like Brisbane. I mostly do divorce work, process serving, but yeah, some missing persons.’ He grinned. ‘You can track most of those down in the phone book. Not one client in ten years ever thinks to check the phone book. The rest are usually on the electoral roll. It’s been good to get my teeth into something different.’
She raised an eyebrow at Mr Jeffries.
‘Henderson’s is the largest investigation agency in Brisbane,’ the lawyer said. It was partly an apology for not hiring someone in a properly tailored suit, partly tactfully pointing out that someone in Brisbane would know the city better than an ex-detective from Sydney or Melbourne with more investigative experience and a better-fitting shirt.
Henderson caught the glance. She revised her opinion slightly. No fool, this man. ‘And you found her?’
‘No. There is no Jed Kelly. No record of one at Brisbane State High, nor did any of the other investigators come up with one in any other selective school in Australia. But then I always reckoned it was an assumed name.’ He gave her a slightly cheeky grin of triumph. ‘But I did find a Janet Skellowski who attended Brisbane State High in the same year that your Jed Kelly may have. I also found a friend of hers who recognised the photo of her you sent.’
‘How did you find the friend?’ asked Matilda, flushing slightly at the mention of the photo. Michael had taken it while Jed had played with Scarlett on the flying fox. The girl never knew it had been taken. She knew that bothered her son too. But he knew as well as her that they needed to find out who this girl truly was, and, if possible, before his father died.
‘I’ve got a first-year uni student who serves summonses for me.’ Henderson grinned. ‘No one expects a girl in jeans and a straw hat to be serving summonses, so they open the door to her. Best process server I’ve got. She’s only seventeen too. I got her to ask around uni, see if she could find any State High girls. Bingo. One of them knew this Janet Skellowski, and recognised the photo. Seems that this Janet Skellowski left school suddenly at the end of her sub-senior year. And get this,’ Matilda suppressed a shudder at the Americanism, ‘Janet Skellowski always told them she’d been born in America. And her mum and dad had died, just like the girl told you.’
The Ghost by the Billabong Page 21