by Tessa Lunney
June 17, 1921
I have seen him. John Russell.
I will never see him again.
The light is… I can’t do it. I can’t write about the sun and the sea, the people as they slip along the streets.
I can only write what is.
I was not wrong; I was not a fool.
I worried that, when I saw him, the love I had carried for so long would disintegrate; would, when we could finally live in the same place, be shown as dust. It was not dust, it was not illusion, it was as strong and healthy as ever. It was as right as ever. And John, John, was as he ever was.
He didn’t need to say it.
It was in the way he called me Delie, Delie to his Roo, took my hand, showed me his painting in detail. In the way he broke off listening to me to pick up his sketchbook and draw my face, once again. The way his pencil stilled, the sounds of the harbor outside the window, as he gazed at me.
It was in the way he talked about the rhythm of his days, of his life, of his children. Twenty-eight years and none of them included me. I am fifty-one, he is sixty-five. I could see, in his gaze, how he wanted me, how he still worshipped me, how he still saw me as unreachable, untouchable, unknowable. Our love wrapped around us like the salt air, it was in his breath and on my skin. It was the wood cracking in the humidity, it was the song of the tide outside.
And I knew—how, I don’t know—but I knew, then, that we would never be together. It would always be like this: stolen moments, outside of daily life, outside of the social world. Our love was everywhere but I could see, in his face, that he could not conceive of it as other than it had been for the last three decades. It was a secret and always would be.
I promised to see him next week. I will not go.
I will not be his secret, his stolen moment, his hidden fire. Not anymore. I will not reduce myself and be his friend, his deniable muse. I will follow the example of my darling Katherine and live every moment out loud, proud and honest. I may even move back to Europe to be with her. Who says I can’t live in Paris once more?
Only Reginald, perhaps, but our agreement is at an end. I have done as I promised. I never told Katherine about John. I never told Katherine about my life before Australia. I never gainsaid Reginald when he scolded her—much as I wanted to, he was so ridiculous and pompous and blind to the fact that his scolds were useless, they always drove her to do the very thing he forbade. I kept my promises and, to be fair, Reginald kept his too. But now Katherine is in Europe; thank heavens.
I was right, to stay for her, not to leave Australia completely. I know Reginald and his vulgar sister. If I hadn’t been here, they would have locked her up, on the property and then in marriage, while she was still a girl. I insisted on her going to school, on her boarding in Sydney, on her being taught by those women who, while not nearly modern enough for me, were better than most of what was on offer in this small-minded city. Then, when she finished school, I got her out of Australia. Of course, she couldn’t see what I was doing. I have Reginald to thank for that; he was always so bombastic. He oversalted every dish so Katherine could never taste the subtler flavors.
She survived the war and the pandemic. I was so worried for her. I wanted her home, then, when war was declared. My brave nurse. Did she know, I hope she knew, how proud I was of her, how scared and proud at once? Her letters were never frequent enough for me to be able to tell. I could tell, however, that something was off. Her surgeon, Dr. Fox, was mentioned far too frequently, not as a lover but as… well, he seemed like some kind of tormentor. She was clearly afraid of him, even as she wrote of him with lines of Keats. As soon as the war ended, I boarded a ship, intending to meet up with her, only to find her already on her way back to Sydney. Then Edvard got the Spanish flu, then I got the Spanish flu, then Petunia took charge of my convalescence until I ran away again. I only saw my lovely Katherine for a few months before she headed back to Europe. She was so vibrant, all her liveliness grown sure and strong, she was witty and able and in control. She was just as she should be. I know she thought I was sending her back for a husband, but that charade was only so Reginald would give her some money. My last charade.
That Dr. Fox was never mentioned. I only hope he was left behind with the war. Maybe she left him behind in London, just as I left behind Petunia and all the rest of them. That woman! Still trying to punish me more than two decades later. She was right in only one thing: I should never have come to Australia. Roo seduced me, I thought it would be bright and breezy and full of men like him. No, Roo went to France because there was no one like him in Sydney. Maybe one day this colorful country will adore itself, will let artists flourish, will provide good coffee and good conversation. Maybe one day, this country will not think of itself as an outpost of England (which it is not) or Empire (which it will be for some time) and embrace its true history in the songs and stories of its first peoples. That time is not now, alas, and I won’t be around to see it…
But none of that matters. Now I can join Katherine in Paris, I can explain why I acted as I did. Money, always money, always the fear of the workhouse or prostitution. There were not many other options for women like me, if we didn’t marry. I hope her generation, with their wartime experience and schooling and short skirts, can do better than we did, that they don’t have to submit to some form of bondage, that they don’t have such gorgons as Petunia breathing down their necks. I hope my darling Katherine can meet all the special people that one can find in Paris, all the artists, all the ambassadors, all the dodgy dukes, and beautiful beggars.
Why am I thinking like this? Why am I talking as though she is gone from me forever? I’m going to join her, I’m going to show her Maxim’s and Angelina’s. We’re going to tour Montmartre and stroll the Champs-Élysées. She can live in her dingy garret and I’ll stay in my gilded hotel, and we can meet up for gossip when she isn’t too busy with all of her wonderful people. I can be myself, my true self, whom I have only been in patches for the last twenty or so years, and she can see it, and she can see how it was worth it, for her. It was worth it for her.
I have been riding this ferry, back and forth to Watsons Bay, for hours. I feel extremely weary, the sun is setting, the cold wind bites my ankles. My head aches, my heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense. I feel hollow and worn; I suppose a new heart sense will do that to one. I need to rest, to recover from the end of this affair, before I set off for my new life, my renewed life, in Paris.
I turned the pages, but that was it, just three little entries. June 17—that was only a few months before she died. Perhaps the extreme weariness never left her, perhaps the headaches and heartaches (oh, she quoted Keats, my mother) only increased and she never wrote another diary entry. She never joined me in Paris. I looked out at the water, the sky darker now, the clock hands had slipped toward afternoon. Would I have listened to her, even if she had explained in person? Would I have wanted any part of her “renewed life” in Paris, or would I have thought of her as an interloper, a spoilsport, a spy from my father? A boat rowed past with a grizzled waterman in the bow. I didn’t know, but I suspected that I could only listen now because her death had left such a silence, and in that silence, I could finally hear her. I could hear how she loved me—how she interpreted Fox precisely, how she understood that my father understood nothing—I could hear how she valued her sacrifices as they were made because she loved me. She loved me. It started to drizzle, rain spotting the window, a drop slipping down the frame onto the sill.
In one year, I had lost my mother and found her again. The finding was incomplete but it was mine, more completely mine than anything else in my life. I stroked the black canvas cover of her diary. It was an artist’s sketchbook—as were all her other diaries—I had only just noticed. She was an artist, I decided, an artist of the heart. And I knew because Fox had rescued, stolen, the diary. Was I grateful or annoyed about this? As always, with Fox, I teetered on a tightrope between the two.
59
> “goin’ home”
“Button! I’ve been waiting all day to hear from you!”
“I got caught up… her final diary…”
“You have it?”
“And read it. Can we meet?”
“Can we ever. Victoria? Half an hour? I have to be back there anyway.”
“Why? Have you even been home?”
“No. I’ll explain when I see you.”
In just over half an hour we were in another pub, our pint glasses lined up in front of us. Tom wasn’t lying when he said he hadn’t been home. Not only had he not changed, his suit still smelling of the cleaning product they used on the Blue Train, he hadn’t even opened his suitcase. I could see the string around it still knotted tight, doing the work of the busted locks. The pub was dark, stuffy, and warm, old wooden benches and frosted glass that looked like it had been around when Shakespeare was a boy. It was quiet, even at lunchtime, occupied only by a few old men muttering into their stout.
“As soon as I walked in to the office, Old Buffer told me to get my arse back to the former Ottoman Empire, there was still revolution to report on. And I got a telegram—I get them sent to the office—”
“I know.”
“Of course, right, well, it’s Sissy. Here.” He pulled the telegram from his pocket. “ ‘SERAPHINA GRAVELY ILL COME HOME AT ONCE PA.’ It doesn’t really leave any room for argument.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. There’s no telephone on the property.”
“Still?”
“Pa’s too cheap to pay for the line all the way out there.”
“Call my father’s property. He’ll know.”
“Regardless, Pa wouldn’t send a telegram unless my sister was already walking down the aisle to Death, waiting with a flower in his buttonhole. If I want to see Sissy alive again, I have to go home.”
“You do.” Then his heart-rent look crashed over me like a wave and I realized. “No. No, you can’t go. I just got back. You can’t…”
He grabbed both of my hands and kissed them hard, eyes closed. I must have kept murmuring “No, no,” as he did so, because that’s all I was thinking. He couldn’t leave as I had done, for another family death, to be caught up in family business for months and months. When would he return? Would he return at all?
“You have to come back, Tom.”
“Wild horses et cetera…”
“I mean it. You can’t let your father persuade you to stay on the property and become a farmer. He’ll try, you know.”
“Oh, I know. But all my memories of that place have you in them and you won’t be there. If I lived there, it’d be like you had died.”
“Good, that means you’ll return. Bring your sister with you.”
“Sissy…” he frowned. “Why?”
“I told you, when I was there last year, that she was bored to tears. Now it seems she’s bored to death. I have a feeling her illness can be cured by a trip on a ship, galleries in London, and cafés in Paris. Promise to look after her, promise your father I’ll look after her, sneak her out in the middle of the night if you have to. Just come back. Leave nothing behind.”
He had kept hold of my hands, playing with my fingers as he considered my words.
“You know, I was never as anti-home as you.”
“Do you miss it?”
“A bit.” He looked around at the dusty lithographs of Regency London on the pub walls. “When the sky’s gray once again and London costs too much, when the memory of pineapple makes me cry, when so-called ‘open spaces’ don’t even reach the horizon, when I’ve seen too much blood and heard too many dying children—then yeah, I miss home, I miss the warm sea and the big sky and the fresh fruit and the sun on my skin and hearing nothing but the warble of magpies. I can’t get any of that here.”
“That big sky, so deep blue it’s almost purple.”
“Sunshine that is actually hot.”
Heat and space seemed very far away in this late autumn London pub.
“To be honest, Tom, apart from the heat, I couldn’t have got much of the rest at home. Not as a woman, and particularly not as a married woman, which is what I would be if I’d stayed.”
“And the pineapple?”
“I do miss the pineapple. And mangoes.”
“And bananas.”
“And days so balmy you don’t need to get dressed… I can’t live on sunshine though. Almost, but not quite.” I untangled my fingers and slid across the diary. “Neither could my mother.”
“What does it say?”
“Read it, and the letter, and the photos. I’ll get us some food and another pint.”
I stood at the bar and watched him read for a moment, emotions flitting across his face, but soon I couldn’t bear to look. I took to studying the beer taps, the blackboard with its chalked-up specials, taking my time as I selected some local pale ale, pork pies, pickles, and a chunk from the enormous wheel of cheese that sat on the bar. The barman was gruff and spoke mainly through his moustache, but he took care to load everything onto a tray for me to carry it over to the table. Tom sat with the documents in his hands, staring at me, seemingly too stunned even to pick up his beer.
“I don’t know whether to speak about Fox first or your mother first.”
“Fox isn’t important.”
“He’s very important. That man… he’s unbelievable! How long has he been spying on you, trying to bully you into… what, being his wife? Being his slave?”
“Same thing, I think, with Fox.” Thank God the pint was delicious, it saved me from tears. “How long? Ah, this will almost be the eighth year, give or take? I met him in 1915, when I first got to France.”
“He even follows your mother on the other side of the world. He spies on your mother when you aren’t there. Because you didn’t know she was ill, did you? You didn’t know you were going home. You had no idea you’d want this diary.”
I could only sip my beer.
“I didn’t realize the lengths he would go to control you.”
“He doesn’t control me.” That thought gave me hope, which gave me strength. “Yes, that’s right, he tries to control me and he fails. Unless you’re suggesting that he killed my mother…”
“He could have.”
“He could have, but I would say that was one step too far, even for him. He needs a reason to be brutal, and I’ve never known him to be vicious. No, he goes to these lengths because I left him behind. He can knock at the door, he can make noise outside the window, but he can never again take up residence in my head.”
“Are you sure?”
“How can you doubt me?”
“I don’t doubt you.” He held my hand. “But I need to know you’re sure.”
“So sure. Because… because I have Paris, because I have Maisie and Bertie and Harry. Because I have you. Because…” I took a deep breath to steady my voice. “My mother loved me. I need never be prey to a surrogate parent again.”
Tom looked at me softly. “Is that what it was?”
“In part. The war… it was a strange time, I was free and yet restricted, in ways that were so new I felt giddy. But when I first arrived in France, the sense of being alone in the world was very strong. I had Maisie, but we weren’t always on the same shift, and we couldn’t exactly chat when we were. I only saw you and Bertie sometimes and I worried about you all the time. I guess… I was scared—you know, soft and vulnerable and naïve under my bluster—and ripe for someone, a powerful commanding-officer type someone, to exploit.”
I looked him in the eye; I saw him and he saw me. I raised my glass.
“Never again.”
“Never again, Button. I promise you that.” He finally sipped his beer, licking the foam off his lips, leaning back against the wall of the booth. He lined up the photos in front of him, but I could tell he wasn’t really looking at them.
“Cordelia sounds like she was a pretty special person.”
“Doesn’
t she?” I couldn’t help smiling, at this idea and all that went with it. “Doesn’t she though.”
“You’re not sad? I thought you’d be full of regret.”
“I was, I am… but how can I not also be glad? I’m not only Button, Kiki Button, Katie King. In Paris and London, I’m also Cordelia’s daughter, imbued with her… what do people say, her expression, her essence? This special woman lives on in me. How can I not also be glad?”
* * *
We finished our beer and snacks, we walked back across the road to his platform at Victoria Station. We were side by side, then arm in arm, then hand in hand. We didn’t talk about anything in particular, just details of our upcoming days, musings on the weather and the other travelers, the various merits of English versus French beer. Then we were at his train, at his carriage, the horn sounded and it was time for him to board.
“I can’t believe you’re going.”
“I can’t believe I’m going. We were going to take in the town.”
“And the suburbs and the country and everything in between. Hurry home.”
“Is this my home?”
“Unless I’m in Paris.”
The train whooshed steam and Tom jumped aboard.
“Give me something,” he said, “some token, some memento, to help bring me back.”
The guards were yelling. I had nothing in my purse but a pencil, a lipstick, and some loose coins. The guards were checking all the doors and waving their little flags. Tom leaned down, hand out, holding on to the rail, his face wide open. The guards yelled, I took his hand until the train wheels started to move and we were pulled apart. In the dim, drizzly dusk I watched him look at me stunned, then elated, then gutted, because as the train moved away, I kissed him.
acknowledgments
I would like to thank the team at Pegasus Books, in particular Claiborne Hancock and Tori Wenzel, for their work, help, and forbearance in getting this manuscript to publication.
I would like to thank my agent, Sarah McKenzie, for her unflagging support of Kiki in her adventures around the world.