Time Will Tell

by Fiona McCallum

  I really hope he comes back soon.

  Opening another cupboard, Emily ran her hands over a set of thick forest green Egyptian cotton towels that had never been used. She looked forward to relegating her parents’ thinning mismatched hand-me-downs to rags for washing Grace and wiping her muddy paws, and mopping up spills.

  Every now and then she got quite excited about finding something she’d completely forgotten about. But the feeling was always bittersweet; brief bursts of pleasure replaced soon after with guilt. How dare she enjoy this when a life had been lost?

  Well, it wasn’t like she’d offered to pick through the spoils; Thora had practically insisted, Emily mentally countered. More than that, she thought, pausing while wrapping a lovely white oval platter with raised, scrolled detail around the edge, she’d expected her to do it; like it was her duty.

  A heavy, slightly nervous sensation settled in her stomach. Did Thora and Gerald really not know they had split up, or was Thora perhaps just in denial like her own mother seemed to be? Could she, like Enid, have spent the past month or so assuming it was just a tiff and that they’d be over it and back together soon? She might even be pretending nothing had happened at all.

  Surely John had called them. Surely he’d been in touch with them for Christmas. He must have told them then. Or in the unlikely case that he hadn’t, surely they would have heard something on the grapevine. If not about their separation, then about John’s dalliance with another woman. No, they had to know. Emily tried to shake aside the sickening feeling of disbelief. Talk of the split had gone through the town like wildfire. She sighed. They absolutely had to know.

  Suddenly slight relief swept through her as she realised how ridiculous she was being; Thora knew she wasn’t living at the farmhouse because she’d asked her how she’d settled in. Hadn’t she? Now, what had she said exactly? Emily racked her brain.

  No, she had said it was nice to hear from her – nothing about settling in. She took a few deep breaths.

  If Thora thought she was living there still, there would be a message for her about John’s death on the landline’s answering machine. Shit! She had seen a red flashing light when they’d been in the kitchen. She’d ignored it. Emily’s heart rate suddenly increased.

  She unfolded her crossed legs, got up, and rushed back out to the kitchen. Her finger shook as she pressed the button to play new messages. She waited for the twangy female American voice to tell her there were five new messages and to get to playing the first. The wait was excruciating and she was rocking on her feet, urging the machine to hurry up when Barbara appeared beside her.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  The first message began to play. Emily put her hand up to silence her friend. As they listened, their mouths dropped open and they stared from the machine to each other and back again:

  ‘Emily, it’s Thora here. We’ve just had the police here about John. I’m calling to make sure you are all right; I’m sure them turning up must have been a shock for you as well. You must be devastated. Please let me know if there is anything we can do. We’ll contact the funeral director first thing in the morning as he’s a family friend, so please don’t worry about that, or the death certificate or anything of that nature. But if there’s anything specific you would like to include in the service, please let me know.’ At that she let out an, ‘Oh Gerald,’ and whimpered for a moment before the message ended with a click, the phone clearly disconnected.

  The American voice came back on saying the message had been left on Sunday at 7:00 p.m. The second message was from Enid and said she would try her mobile. At this Emily shook her head and wondered if it was wishful thinking or forgetfulness on Enid’s part, or if she might in fact be showing the first signs of dementia.

  The third and fourth messages were just hang-ups and the fifth message was again from Thora. She sounded concerned, but said that she presumed Emily had gone to stay with her parents, that she and Gerald were there for her if she needed anything, but that they would give her her space. Oh God, poor Thora. Emily put her hands to her cheeks.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Barbara said quietly. ‘She does think you and John were still together.’

  ‘Now what am I supposed to do? How could she not know – it’s been right around town and back again?’

  ‘And he’s had at least one other woman staying out here since you left,’ Barbara said, staring at Emily with disbelief. ‘Haven’t you spoken to her at all in the last month and a half?’

  ‘No. We never saw much of them.’

  ‘So John wasn’t close to his family?’

  ‘No. So what do I do?’ Emily said, dragging a chair out from the nearby table and plonking herself down on it. ‘I can’t exactly tell her now – she’d be devastated.’

  ‘Well, maybe she knows, but was telling herself you’d get back together.’

  ‘But we did the financial settlement – that’s pretty final.’

  ‘That’s true. Maybe they didn’t know about that either.’

  ‘But John was tied up with the family business – surely they would have discussed it. He would have had to, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘He was pretty underhanded with you; perhaps he was with them too.’

  ‘I wonder what Thora and Gerald would make of it all,’ Emily said.

  ‘You’re going to have to tell them, you know,’ Barbara said solemnly. ‘Not now, though. Not before the funeral. It would be too much.’

  Emily looked at her friend.

  ‘God, I’m going to have to stand up there beside them at the funeral and pretend to be the dutiful wife, aren’t I?’ Emily put her head in her hands.

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘And just when I’ve decided to finally get a backbone and stop kowtowing to my damned mother.’ The implications began to sink in. ‘Not to mention the whole town thinking I’m a complete bloody hypocrite and that I’m sidling up to Thora and Gerald to benefit from his death or something.’

  ‘Well, you’ll know the truth. It doesn’t matter what everyone else thinks. You’ll be doing it for Thora and Gerald, and that’s all that matters. After the funeral, when things have calmed down a bit, you can tell them.’

  ‘I just don’t understand. How is it that the whole town can know we’d split up, and about his floozy, but his parents didn’t?’

  ‘Same way the wife is usually the last to know her husband is having an affair.’

  Chapter Twenty-one

  They laid Barbara’s plastic-backed red and black tartan picnic rug out on the patch of overgrown lawn under the Hills Hoist rotary clothes line. I suppose I’ll have to mow the bloody lawn as well! Emily thought as she sat down heavily.

  She watched Barbara methodically unpack the large esky and lay everything out. She was trying not to look across at the bones of the new shed and at what lay beyond. Every time she saw the pile of rubble where the old cottage had been, she felt a stab of disappointment and annoyance. This patch of lawn had once been her favourite place to sit at the house, but she’d forgotten the enormous changes to the landscape that had recently taken place.

  Soon they were feasting on egg sandwiches – straight from the square plastic box, because thanks to the long grass they were sitting on, the only way to keep their narrow-bottomed cups of apple juice upright was to stand them on the plates.

  Emily remembered the once breathtaking scene; a pale stone cottage with red-brick quoins, topped in blemished corrugated iron speckled with rust and pinholes.

  It had been flanked across the back and on the western side by a selection of tall, thick-waisted gum trees, all the same species and possibly hundreds of years old. Beyond the trees to the west, a safe distance away, snaked a creek. It now only ran in the wettest of winters or during summer flash floods, thanks to dams which had been dug in the nineteen fifties in the small range of hills at the back of the property. Even still, it was a gorgeous setting. Emily sighed. Well, it had been.

  Now there was no cottage. Instead
the gums flanked an unfinished steel structure – the damned hayshed – which without its cladding looked more like an uninspired first-year industrial design student’s sculpture.

  ‘It’s neither here nor there, is it?’ Barbara said, following Emily’s stare.

  ‘No. I guess he did need the space to build on after all. I must say, I feel a bit guilty about thinking what I did.’

  ‘Why? Because he’s dead?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Not that it really matters now, but he clearly didn’t need the space. Look where he’s started the shed. It’s right next to the road. There’s about fifty metres between it and the cottage.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Emily frowned. Barbara was right. ‘Perhaps he really did pull it down out of spite.’ She remembered her scrapbook, her dream of turning the little place into a B&B, a studio or gallery. And John’s smirking words, the afternoon he’d knocked it down: ‘Maybe now you’ll stop with all this bed and breakfast nonsense.’

  ‘Well it doesn’t matter now. You can forget all about it. You’ve got a great new house – well, an old one, but you know what I mean – that you’ll one day turn into a showpiece.’

  ‘Yeah in about a million years,’ Emily said, rolling her eyes before taking another triangle of egg sandwich from the plastic container.

  ‘You just have to have faith.’

  ‘In what; the universe, you reckon?’

  ‘And yourself. It’ll all work out, somehow, sometime.’

  ‘As in: “It won’t happen overnight but it will happen”?’ Emily said, raising her eyebrows at her friend.

  ‘Something like that. So, how was it having Jake stay without Elizabeth?’ Barbara asked, abruptly changing the subject, as she topped up their drinks.

  ‘Good. He really is such nice, easy company.’

  ‘Any idea when he’s coming back?’

  ‘No, I think he’s pretty busy.’

  ‘You sound disappointed.’

  ‘I am a little, to be honest. I don’t know why,’ she said with a dismissive wave of her hand. She gazed back over at the steel structure. ‘It was nice to talk to someone who lives an interesting, different sort of life,’ she said wistfully. ‘Someone who doesn’t just see me as John Stratten’s ex.’

  ‘So what did you talk about?’

  ‘The house mainly – he’s got some great ideas. If only I had the money. Jake reckons it would make a perfect B&B.’

  ‘I agree – and you’d be a great host.’

  Emily turned quickly to look at her friend. ‘Do you mean that, Barb? Seriously?’

  ‘Of course. You’re warm and friendly and welcoming. You love to cook and you’re good at it – you could run jam-making classes to entertain visitors.’

  Emily chuckled. ‘That’s what Jake said.’

  ‘It’d be a good drawcard. I can just picture it; city people coming for weekend cooking getaways. Sort of like the Thai cooking schools that have become so popular. Yours could be The Authentic Country Cooking School,’ Barbara said, now with her hands stretched out high above her as if holding up a banner.

  ‘Yes, well, I don’t know why I’m getting all worked up about it, it’s not like I’ve got the money to do anything.’

  ‘You’ve got the diamonds.’

  ‘I wish I hadn’t found them. I can’t do anything with them.’

  ‘Why not? You were clearly meant to find them when you did. And the timing was pretty spooky – right when the offer of the house appeared. You can’t just dismiss them.’

  ‘If, as you say, I was meant to put them up for collateral or something, wouldn’t this universe you’re always going on about have me feeling better about it all?’

  ‘Fortune favours the brave, Emily.’

  ‘It’s not brave, it’s disloyal.’

  ‘Emily, I’m sure your gran would admire your sentimentality, but I think she’d prefer you to be happy – certainly not freaking out about money all the time.’

  ‘I just can’t, all right? Please don’t let’s fight over this, Barbara.’

  ‘Okay. Fair enough.’ Barbara backed off.

  ‘God, I wish I had your optimism.’

  ‘Just takes practice – and a few things going right. Don’t forget I was raised by a mother who taught me I could be anything I wanted to be.’

  ‘Hmm, lucky you.’

  ‘Though, really, what difference did it make? Here I am, just a farmer’s housewife,’ Barbara said with a shrug. ‘A pretty happy one, granted, but a housewife nonetheless. Not much ambition here, I’m afraid, but I’m fine with that. And so is my mother, for the record,’ she added with a wry smile.

  ‘You’re lucky. Why do you think people have kids if they don’t want them to be happy?’

  ‘Perhaps to shine a light away from their own inadequacies, to compensate for some kind of loneliness inside them, or maybe to try and rewrite their own lives to be better.’ Barbara shrugged. ‘Any number of reasons.’

  ‘Do you and David want kids?’

  ‘We’ve actually been trying since we got married. I guess it will happen when and if it’s meant to,’ Barbara said with another shrug. Emily thought she saw her friend’s features cloud slightly and wondered if she wasn’t as nonchalant as a moment ago. But she couldn’t be sure she hadn’t imagined it.

  ‘I think you’d be a great mother.’

  ‘Thanks. You would too, you know.’

  Emily didn’t know what to say. Instead she changed the subject. ‘Gosh. I’m full; I’ve been stuffing my face with your gorgeous sandwiches and not even thinking how many I’ve had.’

  She lay back on the blanket and stared up at the cobalt-blue sky and the fluffy clouds skipping across it. She hoped that one day she’d be as happy and content as Barbara seemed to be.

  ‘I keep dreaming about Jake,’ Emily said suddenly, breaking a lengthy silence.

  ‘Erotic dreams?’

  Emily detected Barbara’s broad grin distorting the question, and reached out and playfully slapped her arm.

  ‘No, but we’re together, at some sort of function. I’ve had the same dream – well, variations of it – three times now.’

  ‘It must be going to come true then,’ Barbara said with a laugh. ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘I’m not really sure. I can’t tell where we are, but we’re all dressed up. Pretty vague, I know. But every time we’ve been in the same outfits. I’m wearing a smoky blue-grey wraparound shirt and black pants and he’s in a dark grey pinstripe suit with a tie that matches my top. And does he look gorgeous in a suit…’ Her voice trailed off as she thought about how he’d looked in her dream and how he’d felt kissing her cheek and hair the other morning when he’d left.

  ‘Someone sounds a bit smitten.’

  ‘Hmm. It’s bound to end in tears. He’s probably got a string of women hanging off him in Melbourne – my cousin Elizabeth for one. Beautiful, sophisticated city women…’

  ‘He’s not with Elizabeth,’ Barbara said. ‘Actually, he’s not with anyone,’ she added quietly.

  ‘Really?’ Emily said, propping herself up on her elbow. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘He told David the other day when they were off taking photos in the scrub.’

  ‘And…?’

  ‘Sorry, that’s it. David said he tried to quiz him, but he clammed up.’

  ‘Hiding something?’

  ‘No, David thinks he’s just a private sort of person.’

  ‘Yeah, he is quite quiet about most things except architecture and photography. I love how he’s so passionate, but without being arrogant. I just wish he didn’t live so far away – I could see us being really good friends.’

  ‘You’d be more than friends.’

  ‘Maybe, probably, in time.’

  Mere days ago, Emily would have added that right now another relationship was the last thing she needed, but she was no longer feeling that so strongly. It was as though her grief over the separation had begun to ease with John’s death. Sh
e was still cautious about getting involved again, but something had changed. It felt almost like she’d been vindicated for her decision to leave her marriage.

  ‘If it’s meant to be, it’ll be.’ They both said the words at exactly the same time and then chuckled at their synchronicity. Emily smiled at hearing one of Gran’s well-used quotes come out of Barbara’s mouth.

  ‘Come on, let’s get back to it. The sooner we start, the sooner we finish.’

  Chapter Twenty-two

  The last room to be cleaned was John’s office. Emily hadn’t gone in there earlier because she assumed the window was still nailed shut as it had apparently been since before John had moved in. Now she stood in the doorway, shaking her head at the scene before her.

  There were piles of paper on every available flat surface – the spare double bed, desk, swivel chair, and the two grey filing cabinets.

  Loose pages were scattered like crazy paving across the multi-brown swirling pattern of the 1950s carpet.

  ‘Bloody hell.’ Barbara said, appearing beside Emily in the doorway and peering over her shoulder.

  ‘I’ve been standing here for five minutes trying to figure out where to start.’

  ‘So if all the papers are out here, what’s in the filing cabinets? Surely he can’t have had enough paperwork to fill them as well.’

  ‘They’re probably almost empty. I set up a filing system with labels and everything when I first moved in, but I wasn’t allowed to actually file anything. John never let me touch his papers – he said they were private.’

  ‘What a mess. How the hell did he do his tax returns and GST Business Activity Statements?’

  ‘Bundled everything up, stuck it in a box, and sent it off to the accountant’s poor office drudge to deal with.’

  ‘Would have cost him a fortune.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Now there must be some sort of system here in all this chaos,’ Barbara said, stepping around Emily and into the room. ‘Let’s start with the desk. A lot of it seems to be in piles, which suggests at least some form of collation.’