‘The Dragon,’ said Jed, without thinking, then opened her mouth in horror. How could she have said that to a woman who had been so kind, and who had just lost her husband?
‘I’m sorry —’ she said, then realised that the Dragon was laughing: the first laughter in this house since Tommy’s death. Michael began to laugh too, clapping his hands with delight. Even Jim grinned, looking for the first time like his parents, and not a cut-out of a Sydney businessman.
‘I love it. It’s the perfect name for you, Mum. Just wait till Nancy hears it.’
Matilda fished out a small white lace-edged hanky. Suddenly she looked ‘there’ again. She wiped away tears as well as a small smear of what Jed was certain was mascara. ‘I wish you had met my great-grandfather. Now there was a dragon indeed. I will wear the name proudly.’
‘You really don’t mind?’
‘Good advertising,’ said Matilda, almost her former self. ‘It appears to amuse the family,’ she added, looking at Michael’s and Jim’s grins. ‘I wish Tommy could have known.’ Her smile faded. ‘Did you ever tell him?’
Jed shook her head.
‘I wish you had. I wish you could . . . Never mind that now.’ She turned briskly to the solicitor. ‘Mr Jeffries, would you mind reading Tommy’s will?’
‘Of course.’ He opened the folder and took out a sheet of paper.
Jed looked around the room. There was a strange sense of expectancy. But surely they all knew what this will contained?
‘The first part doesn’t concern you directly, Miss Kelly. Eight years ago Mr Thompson finished gifting his factories to his sons, a fifty-five per cent share to Mr James Thompson, a forty-five per cent share to Mr Michael Thompson. The rest of his estate was left unreservedly to his wife, Mrs Matilda Thompson, who, of course, also owns the Drinkwater properties.
‘Mr Thompson did, however, make an amendment to his will four months ago.’
The family were looking at her, Jed realised, not the solicitor. What was happening here?
Mr Jeffries began to read. ‘To Miss Janet Skellowski, also known to me as Jed Kelly, whom I regard as my great-granddaughter, even if it is proved we are not blood relations, I leave the sum of nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents, accepting her protestations that she does not wish to be a millionaire, this sum to be free of death duty, to be held in trust for her by my son, Mr Michael Thompson, until she is twenty-one.’
A million dollars, minus one cent . . . ‘But Tommy had given all his property away!’
She looked at Michael, who was grinning; at Matilda, looking as if she were trying to cope with both a smile and tears, and almost managing to force back the latter; and at Jim, protectively watching his mother.
‘Mr Thompson had given the businesses away. But he remained a director, and received ten per cent of the profits for his lifetime. Mr Thompson also had considerable other holdings. May I continue?’
Was there more? Jed looked at the faces around her. They had known about this, probably since before Tommy changed his will. They had not objected, even then, before she was proved to be a relative. And now . . .
‘I also leave Jed Kelly the house and property held in trust for her by my wife, Matilda Thompson, or, if my wife shall predecease me, my sons James and Michael Thompson. If Jed Kelly shall predecease me, all interest in my estate reverts to my wife, Mrs Matilda Thompson.’
She was floating again. Or they were ghosts and she was a ghost because the whole room had the shimmering feeling of being not quite there . . . ‘House?’ she managed.
‘We felt it best,’ said Matilda, in her dragon voice that meant ‘I thought it best’, ‘not to specify in the will which house was to be yours, as it took a month for the sale to go through. If it hadn’t been finalised by the time Tommy —’ she left an almost imperceptible pause before continuing ‘— died, then the gift might not have been valid. I think you will like the house.’ Her tone made it quite clear that Jed would like it.
‘I . . . I don’t know what to say.’ ‘Say thank you, like a good girl,’ said the Dragon. But it didn’t sound like a rebuke.
‘Thank you.’ Not just for the money, she thought. For accepting me. Even before all the details had been teased out and explained to you, you all accepted me. Even Matilda, she realised.
‘The house was my idea.’ Matilda smiled in memory. ‘I lost my parents when I was young, like you, but my father left me a house. Not much, but I thought it was wonderful. It is Blue and Joseph McAlpine’s now. Bigger — you can hardly see the original building. But it’s still there. It needed to be loved and cared for, and my life was at Drinkwater by then. All girls should have a house they know they can go to when they need it. Yours is between here and Gibber’s Creek, on the river. It has ten acres of land with it too. If you like, we can go and see it this morning.’
There was another tone in Matilda’s voice now, an almost yearning. She wants to do this, thought Jed. She’s looking forward to showing me the house. No, not me. Tommy’s great-granddaughter. I am a link with him. Tommy is dead and she is stricken, but she is getting on with life.
‘I’d love to see it.’
‘Please stay at Drinkwater as long as you like, of course.’
‘Or Overflow,’ added Michael. ‘We don’t expect you to want to live in the house straight away, by yourself.’
Matilda nodded. ‘You might like to just stay there occasionally for a night or two, for a few years. When you are away during term time at university we’ll make sure it’s maintained. But your house will always be there for you. Or to sell, of course, if you choose, once you have turned twenty-one.’
‘I won’t ever sell it,’ said Jed gently, and saw Matilda’s face relax back into gladness.
‘You’re welcome to stay with Iris and me in Sydney if you go to university. Or while you find a place of your own.’ The latter part of Jim’s offer sounded more enthusiastic than the first. ‘Though the university’s full of long-haired hippy layabouts these days, if you ask me. And after all there’s no reason for you to get a job now.’ Jim shrugged. ‘Leave the jobs for men who need to support their families.’
‘You seem to forget I ran Drinkwater for decades by myself.’ Matilda Thompson’s voice was deceptively mild.
‘Mum, you know that’s not what I mean. I’m proud of what you did.’ The words were slightly too emphatic. ‘You did what you had to do. I’m just saying that Jed doesn’t need to go to university and then to work like some bra-burning women’s libber —’
‘Thank you,’ Jed spoke quickly. ‘But I do want to go to university. I’d very much like to stay with you till I find a place of my own in Sydney.’ Time enough to tell them that she’d be sharing the house here, and any place she bought in Sydney, with Nicholas.
It was all a bit overwhelming. Wonderful of course, but too vast to cope with too. How did families work, now she was going to be part of one? But she’d have Nicholas to help her, she realised. And if it got too much, she and Nicholas could build themselves a world of two. Two people who had been hurt and survived, protecting each other.
She had a feeling that no one in her new family was going to approve of her living with a man before marriage. At least Nicholas didn’t have long hair and could in no way be described as a hippy. But even if they stopped her using the money till she was twenty-one, which she didn’t think Michael for one would, she and Nicholas had Nicholas’s money and pension till then. And a house . . .
‘Shall we see it now?’ asked Matilda, and for the first time since Tommy’s death, there was a hint of eagerness in her voice.
It felt as if she and the Dragon had driven along this road a thousand times together as friends. Perhaps they would, thought Jed. Maybe all those future times were floating back to her now, just as her life with Nicholas . . . what must be her life with Nicholas . . . had been there that first extraordinary moment.
‘I apologise for Jim.’ Matilda ac
celerated around a corner.
‘He’s very kind. Just a bit . . . old fashioned.’
‘I’m glad you didn’t call him a male chauvinist. He’s a little defensive about university. He’d planned to go, but Tommy was exhausted after the war — sorry, World War II. Jim felt he needed to step in. Did need to, I suppose. But that meant he was never able to go to university himself.’
‘What does his wife think?’
‘Iris is a wonderful wife and mother,’ said Matilda in a tone that said that she was not going to criticise her daughter-in-law, even to her step-great-granddaughter.
‘What about Nancy?’
Matilda smiled. ‘You know, I’ve always been intimidated by Nancy.’
‘I can’t imagine you intimidated by anyone! Why? She’s been incredibly kind.’
‘Oh, she’s kind. I love her dearly. But she’s as unswerving as a rock. Nancy always, always gets where she wants to be.’
‘Like you,’ said Jed, without thinking.
It was a dragon’s smile. ‘Perhaps. And like you too.’
‘No. I . . . I lost my baby. I lost myself, for a while.’
‘But you survived, didn’t you? Even if you’d never found us, you’d have got yourself to university eventually.’
‘Yes.’ It startled her to realise that it was true. ‘Of course I would have.’
‘And made a good life for yourself. We are a shortcut, that’s all.’ Matilda shot her a glance. ‘That’s worth remembering, if you ever doubt yourself. That you would have made a good life regardless of us.’
‘I couldn’t keep my baby safe.’
‘That was not your fault,’ said Matilda gently. ‘Either you were too young or there was something wrong. I very much doubt that anything you did made any difference to what happened.’
And just like that she could breathe again: there’d been a rubber band around her chest even though she’d never known about it, and it was gone. ‘I never thought of it like that.’
‘Nothing was your fault,’ said Matilda. ‘Not losing your baby, not your stepmother betraying you, not the brute who hurt you. None of it was your fault at all.’
‘How did you know I thought it was?’
‘Because when my mother died, and then my father, and, years after that, my fiancé, I blamed myself for each of their deaths. But none of them was my fault. It just took me a long while to accept it.’
‘You don’t understand,’ said Jed quietly. She had to say this. Confess it both to herself and to this woman she had come to love and admire. ‘I . . . I didn’t want my baby. Not at first, at all. Even once she began to move inside me, there were times —’
The Dragon’s voice was even gentler. ‘My dear, you were a child. Even if you didn’t feel you were — and I suspect, like me, you never really did have a childhood — you couldn’t be expected to manage a pregnancy alone, much less cope with a baby by yourself. And this was a child of rape. Naturally you felt contradictory things about it.’
Jed stared at this woman who, somehow, miraculously, understood. ‘I don’t mean I didn’t love her. I did! More and more as she grew. I’ll cry for her every day of my life. But I hated having her too. I wanted to stay at school! To keep the life I had, then make it better. The home was going to force me to have her adopted. Sometimes I . . . I was even glad. There was no way I could’ve looked after her and gone to uni. I didn’t even know how to get a job that would keep us both.’
‘Widows get pensions, but not unmarried mothers,’ said Matilda. ‘One day that will change.’ Her look said that she would help it happen too. ‘But you left the home. Was that just because you hated it there?’
‘No. I knew finally I couldn’t give my baby up. But anywhere else that might look after me would make me have her adopted. I had to steal, just to get food. I’d got so I only thought about one day at a time. If I can just get through today and through tonight, I’d think. Because there weren’t any tomorrows I could think of, not that I could bear. And even then, sometimes, I didn’t want her. And then she died.’
She looked at Matilda, so calmly driving, as if birth and death were so familiar she could keep her hands on the steering wheel and keep driving in the middle of all of it. Which made sense: that was exactly what the old woman’s life had been like.
‘All I could think of then was that my not wanting her sometimes had killed her. But I promise, I did everything I could to keep her safe. I ate the best food I could —’
‘I know, my dear.’
‘But it wasn’t enough, was it? My love wasn’t enough?’ She covered her face with her hands.
The car swerved gently, then stopped at the side of the road. She felt Matilda gently take her hands. ‘It was enough,’ she said. ‘And one day — dear child, look at me — one day you will realise you were a child too, far too young to bear all that had happened to you. Of course you wanted it all to go away, even your baby.’
She didn’t say, ‘Of course you must have remembered who her father was as well, and that must have been almost impossible to cope with too,’ because Jed could not bear it if she had. But Matilda’s look said it all.
The hug was warm, the old woman’s arms strong. At last Matilda pulled back and looked at her. ‘I am glad you are in my life. Not just because you are Tommy’s great-granddaughter.’ She took a deep breath. ‘You are the only person I have ever told this to. I didn’t like Tommy’s daughter. Nor did she like me. I didn’t like your mother either. I’m glad you are yet another link to the man I love, but even before that, I liked you and admired you. And I’m glad of the chance to get that right.’ Her tone was a little shaky as she added, ‘But if you were to ask me if I love you for yourself, or as Tommy’s great-granddaughter, I couldn’t tell you. Nor do I think it matters.’ She sniffed, and reached into her handbag on the floor for yet another of those pristine handkerchiefs. ‘Are you ready to hear something else?’
No, thought Jed. My brain is full. My heart is full. My body feels like it is being nibbled to death by ducks, not knowing whether to feel happiness or grief, love or pain. But Matilda must be feeling all of that, and more. ‘Hear what?’ she forced out.
‘You have the support and resources now to discuss your case properly with the authorities. You will find they pay very different attention to a Thompson’s story. Debbie was derelict in her duty. There are laws about that sort of thing. The police could even see her actions as deliberate — attracting men for herself with her beautiful young charge. And while Merv’s paternity of your baby cannot be proven, mud sticks when thrown with the right aim.’
Jed stared at her, suddenly very glad indeed that the Dragon was on her side. Must have been, on some level, all along, apart from those few minutes when she had ordered her from Drinkwater. This woman was as ruthless as she was kind, and decades of having the money to get her own way had made her very good at getting it. Always for good of course — or what Matilda Thompson thought was good.
If you had really wanted me gone, she thought, you’d have managed it.
‘I’d have to go back up there? Speak to the police? Perhaps go to court?’
‘I would say so, yes. And I would not blame you for even one moment if you decided to leave the past where it is.’
Matilda reached into her handbag again, took out a powder compact, and swiftly erased the tear marks on her cheeks. She looked back at Jed. ‘In any case, some weeks ago Mr Henderson had a word in Merv’s ear, at Tommy’s and my request. Mr Henderson has spoken to friends in the police force too. Merv knows he will be very carefully watched indeed from now on. Even if you do not approach the authorities about either him or Debbie, he knows that if he attacks another child or woman, our people will know, and report him, and the police will believe them. You have been very brave. Few people are as brave as you. You don’t have to be brave about this business any longer.’
‘I’m not brave.’
‘You looked after your child until it was impossible to do so, and y
ou survived. Both took incredible courage. Will I tell you what else you have achieved?’
Jed nodded.
‘A life without bitterness,’ said Matilda softly. ‘That is the hardest thing of all, and you have managed it. You blame yourself, easily enough, but not others. Trust me, my dear. I know how hard it is to keep bitterness away. And how necessary. I’ve seen so many people define themselves for the rest of their life by the harm that was done to them. But I have seen others — including my miraculous daughter-in-law — who find their own lives again, and their tomorrows. And now you have tomorrows too. Because here we are.’
She started the car, then almost at once swung down a newly graded driveway through the bush. Jed held her breath as the trees opened into a clearing and the car stopped once more.
The house stood there, square, white. No, not a house. A home. For it was as if she had always known this house, even this land and these people, had needed to free herself of the shroud of fear she had lived in most of her life to see it. What had drawn her to read that newspaper, so many months ago, with the article on Tommy that had led her to think that she might just be his relative — or at least that his family might believe it, for long enough for her to finish school? For fifteen years she had never asked where her mother had come from, were there cousins, second cousins, some family beyond that hot Brisbane house. But why would relatives have wanted Janet Skellowski, unlovable, too intelligent and slightly strange?
But this was now, and here. And it was right.
Matilda was still speaking. ‘Jim thought you’d be better off with a place in town, or even in Sydney. But Tommy and I thought that by the river . . .’ Matilda closed her eyes for a fraction of a second.
‘You were right,’ said Jed hurriedly. ‘You and Tommy.’ She wanted to hug the older woman again, a different kind of hug, but wasn’t sure how to start. Instead Matilda reached over and embraced her, and it was indeed different. It felt like a mother holding her, even though Jed had no memory of what a mother’s arms felt like.
And then the arms were no longer around her, but the warmth remained. Matilda handed her still another hanky, clean and ironed neatly. How many hankies did this remarkable woman keep about her person?
The Ghost by the Billabong Page 38