Trails in the Dust

by Joy Dettman

  Norman may not have been born to the job but he’d done his best, and done it alone for seven years, seven happy years. They’d eaten a lot of fried sausages, boiled a lot of potatoes – and made the best fried cheese sandwiches. From the age of three to ten, Jenny had lived happily with Norman and Sissy. Then Amber came home, and sausages and fried cheese sandwiches and happy went out the window.

  Jenny hadn’t gone to Amber’s funeral. She’d sung at Norman’s. She’d sung at many funerals. Her first, when she’d been fourteen, at little Barbie Dobson’s. Twenty-two when Norman died. She’d gone straight from the cemetery to the railway house to pack Norman’s life away, then to ride his bike home to Granny.

  And he’d been there, Archie Foote, Granny’s philandering husband, buying eggs.

  He’d known Juliana Conti – in the biblical sense, a foreign woman who’d come to Woody Creek on the evening train, given birth to Jenny, then died before telling anyone her name or where she’d come from. Amber, Granny’s daughter, delivered of a second dead son the next day, the living infant had been swapped for the dead.

  Born a Conti, turned Morrison by default, became Mrs King for all the wrong reasons, then forty years ago she’d become Mrs Hooper. Jim had wanted Trudy, but only if they could legally adopt her. Adopting couples had to be married in those days. They’d used the wedding ring he’d bought for Jenny in Sydney.

  Elsie and Harry Hall had named Trudy for Granny. They’d registered her birth. Jenny hadn’t expected that tiny baby to live. Cut two months early from Margot’s swollen belly, Trudy had spent two months in a city hospital.

  Elsie and Harry had planned to raise her. Jenny hadn’t, or not until that call came from the hospital. Harry and Elsie couldn’t get down to Melbourne to take delivery of their granddaughter until the weekend. Jenny, working in Frankston at the time, had agreed to collect Margot’s baby and care for it until they arrived.

  She’d never loved Margot. She’d done her duty by her and little more. She’d felt no instant rush of grandmotherly love for that undergrown infant. To this day, she didn’t know how, where or when it had happened, only that somewhere on the road between that city hospital and Frankston, as a ewe in the paddock will recognise the scent of its own lamb, she’d recognised Trudy as her own.

  She and Jim had changed the Gertrude Maria Hall-Morrison to Trudy Juliana Hooper, and the night her new birth certificate arrived, Jim burnt the original. There’d be a copy of it sealed away in some dusty file. Those files were now being opened to the flood of babies given up for adoption before Gough had made unwed motherhood a viable career choice. Only two times in her life had Trudy mentioned her adoption – when she’d inherited Lorna’s house and money she’d said she’d felt like a fraud, then when she’d been carrying the twins, she’d been concerned about possible genetic issues. Sooner or later she’d apply for her birth certificate.

  She wouldn’t like what she found. She’d known Margot and been afraid of her. She liked Teddy Hall, her blood father.

  He was as tall as Harry but had Elsie’s colouring. Trudy had inherited his colouring and enough of his tall genes to cancel Margot’s stumpy frame. At times, when she cried and clenched her jaw, Jenny saw the shadow of Margot in her face, only a brief shadow.

  There wasn’t a whisper of Jenny in her, though perhaps a smidgen of Itchy-foot – Archie Foote – had leaked into her character. He’d spent his life travelling the world, never thinking of tomorrow, and like Trudy, had returned to his native shores with little more than his well-travelled luggage.

  The voices outside the window had grown louder, and Jenny stilled her mind to listen. The neighbours would be listening. She stood and walked over to hide behind the sheer curtains.

  They were at the car, removing the boys’ car seats.

  ‘You’re a self-obsessed, thoughtless pig of a man, and if you leave today, then don’t bother coming back.’

  ‘I said I’d be back for the funeral!’

  The phone was ringing in the hall. Paul took the call. ‘Jen’s resting,’ he said. ‘Thank you. I’ll tell her you called.’

  At first sight, Jenny had liked Paul. She’d known she would. Georgie had taken her time in choosing him, taken so much time, Katie had been lucky to be born. She was a mixture of her parents. She had Paul’s eyes and his freckle or two, Georgie’s copper hair but Jenny’s curls. A perfect mix, Katie Dunn, or to a grandparent’s eyes she was perfection – and to Lila’s eyes. Her return silenced the arguing pair in the driveway. Nick got into the car, and the way he threw himself into the driver’s seat didn’t suggest that he had a bad back.

  Gone then, and Jenny hoped he didn’t return on Monday.

  There’d be a crowd at the funeral. She’d have to wear her black suit, have to wriggle into pantihose, wear shoes with heels –

  And after the suit and the pantihose and shoes came off, what then? Book myself on a cruise and jump overboard between some place and the next? she thought.

  Me and my dog walk together, in cold weather or hot. Me and my dog don’t care whether we bloody well live or not, she thought. I probably wouldn’t drown. Someone would toss me a lifebelt and I’d grab it with both hands.

  She’d taught the twins to swim before they could walk – as she’d taught Georgie, as she’d taught Jimmy.

  What would Nick teach his sons?

  In their wedding photographs, he’d looked like a beautiful boy, his hair as dark as Trudy’s but longer. He was losing it. He wore it short now. Give him a year or two more and he’d be as bald as his father. He had his father’s heavy-lidded eyes, very dark, impossible to see behind.

  ‘A law unto himself,’ Jim had said.

  Hadn’t been around when the twins were born. Jenny had been in this room writing when Trudy crept to the door. ‘My waters have broken, Mum,’ she’d said. ‘They’re coming.’ She’d been at a lot of births. She’d had no fear.

  Jenny had feared. All the way to Willama she’d feared that she’d have to pull over and deliver a pair of Macdonalds beside the road, but they’d made it to the hospital. She’d been gowned and masked before Ricky’s head of black hair emerged and she’d howled with relief. Every Macdonald ever born had looked like a hairless grub at birth. Jamey arrived minutes later, as dark and with the same amount of hair.

  They were out there now with Katie, cupping their hands to the window glass, spying on Nanny, calling to her. She waved to them. They responded by slapping at the window until Katie took them away.

  I should be out there enjoying them, Jenny thought, but they’d leave again on Monday.

  She’d never wondered what she’d do if she lost those boys. They’d been her own from the instant of their birth. She’d lost them, as she’d lost Jimmy.

  Lost.

  Wrong word. It was too small to describe the empty agony of loss.

  She used to search the crowds of Melbourne for Jimmy, used to search the ‘Births, Deaths and Marriages’ columns in the Herald Sun for James Hooper, James Morrison, James Grenville-Langdon, then two days before Trudy and Nick flew home from London, she’d found her boy when she hadn’t been searching. Found him at a television studio.

  Georgie and Katie had talked her into playing Juliana Conti on a morning show. They’d bought her a dark brown wig that covered most of her face, bought her a lolly pink suit from an op-shop. Makeup plastered on thick, a pair of dark-framed glasses that blurred the world.

  She’d been spaced out, clutching a packet of cigarettes and looking for an exit when Georgie caught her eye with a wave. She’d wanted to introduce her to a tall grey-headed chap.

  ‘Juliana, meet Morrie,’ she’d said. ‘He’s Cara’s husband.’

  Jenny, who’d spent that last hour in front of cameras with Cara had been running from her, but her husband had offered his hand.

  She’d known him the instant she’d shaken his hand. It was Jim’s hand. She’d known his little Jimmy boy smile when she’d looked up at his face, then dropped his hand and run
from him and the realisation of what he’d done. Until that day she’d had no secrets from Georgie, but how could she tell her that she’d introduced her own brother as Cara’s husband? She couldn’t.

  She’d caught the bus home to Jim, and when she’d arrived back here she couldn’t tell him. She’d told her computer. Computers don’t accuse.

  I’ve searched for him for fifty years and I find him when I’m not searching, when I can’t tell him who I am. I can’t tell Georgie. She spent an hour talking to him and she didn’t have a clue who he was.

  Margaret Hooper and her husband would have changed his family name when they adopted him, but for some reason they allowed him to keep the Morrison. Morrie he calls himself, a shortened version of Morrison . . .

  She’d poured her heart out in the dead of night, had got her word count up to thirty thousand. Then Trudy at the door, needing to get to the hospital. She’d closed the Jimmy file mid-sentence.

  A full stop had been added later, but little more. She’d saved it to disc then deleted the Jimmy file from her laptop.

  SUNDAY NIGHT

  Nine-fifteen and no sign of Nick. Trudy texting, phoning his number, his mother’s number, his sisters. They hadn’t seen him.

  He’d be back. His wife was only one small step away from becoming a wealthy woman. Years ago, Jenny and Jim had made wills, each of them leaving their all to the surviving partner unless they died together, when the lot would go to Trudy. Georgie, always too independent, hadn’t needed money, and there’d been no thought of a son-in-law or grandchildren when they’d made those wills.

  There was one item Jenny had never intended leaving to Trudy. She could fix that tonight.

  Her jewellery box was on her dressing table – her box via Granny, Granny’s via Archie Foote, his via Juliana. The first time Jenny had seen it, she’d wondered at the patient hands of its craftsman. He’d inlaid its dark wooden lid with ivory and mother of pearl. Jim, who’d had some knowledge of antiques, believed that box could have had an earlier owner than Juliana.

  It contained little of value, other than the brooch. Only once had Jenny worn it, and all day she’d kept grabbing at her lapel, afraid she’d lose it. Her pearl in a cage pendant was kept with the brooch. It wasn’t junk but wasn’t the original pendant either. Raelene had got away with the original. A Willama jeweller replicated it. It matched the earrings that were never far from her lobes, but the knowledge that Juliana had never worn that pendant devalued it in Jenny’s eyes.

  Also in the box was a blue glass necklet, which had no value, other than sentimental. Norman had given it to her for her twenty-first birthday. She used to wear it with a blue linen frock. She’d worn Granny’s amber necklace the night she’d come third in the radio talent quest – and many times since, when her hair had been gold. Amber didn’t match beige–grey hair. Jim’s letters from the war years were in the bottom of her jewellery box. They had value, as did three old bankbooks. She glanced at them. They told the story of Vern Hooper’s blood money, from 1947 to 1976, when Jim had suggested she invest it in a term deposit. She flipped through the letters, seeking an envelope that was new. He’d known where she’d kept his old army letters. He could have added a new one.

  He hadn’t.

  She’d searched the house this morning for his final letter, had flipped through every one of their favourite books, expecting his note to fall out. She’d found old bookmarks but that was all.

  Her handbag was on the floor between the bed and dressing table. She unzipped it, unzipped its inner pocket and removed her diamond rings. She wouldn’t wear them again. He’d decided that he’d had enough of her and life, had waited until the coast was clear, then crept away like a thief in the night, never giving a thought as to how she was going to survive without him. She looked at her wedding ring and at the engraving on its inner circle, then dropped it back into the pocket and zipped it in safe. The other two rings she took with her jewellery box to the kitchen.

  ‘See if these will fit your finger,’ she said, placing the two rings on the table in front of Trudy, who put her mobile down to look at them.

  ‘They could use a clean,’ she said.

  ‘They’re yours. You clean them,’ Jenny said, and handed the gold filigree bauble to Katie, who placed her playing cards face down on the table to take it.

  ‘I love that,’ she said.

  ‘It’s yours, darlin’,’ Jenny said.

  ‘It’s too precious, Nanny. I’ll lose it.’

  ‘You won’t lose it,’ Jenny said and Trudy passed the rings back. ‘Your dad would want you to have them. Try them on.’

  ‘He bought them for you. My wedding ring is in a drawer, Mum.’

  ‘Then put them in a drawer – or sell them. Your father paid fifteen hundred for one of them and damn near as much for the other, years ago,’ Jenny said, as she delved deeper into the box for Juliana’s brooch.

  It was worth more than fifteen hundred. She held it to the light, watching fire flash from the stones, and as Georgie placed a mug of coffee beside the jewellery box, Jenny handed her the brooch.

  In her mind it had always gone to Georgie. She knew its story, had heard as an eight-year-old how that brooch had fallen from Juliana’s coat the night Granny washed blood from it in her old wooden wash trough, how for years it had lain in the dirt beneath the trough.

  After the Hoopers stole Jimmy, Granny had brought that brooch out to her kitchen and suggested they sell it, that they use the money to chase Vern Hooper through the courts. They’d passed it around the table that night, and when Jenny had handed it to Georgie, she’d known it was too precious to hold and allowed it to lie on her open palm – as she held it now, her eyes flashing that same green fire they’d flashed by lamplight.

  It was a golden oval with a ruby the size of a five-cent coin at its centre. The diamonds and rubies surrounding it weren’t small. In 1948 it would have been worth enough to pay a top Melbourne barrister, but the Hoopers would have won. Back then, no court in the land would have returned Jimmy into the care of a woman known to have aborted her husband’s baby. She would have lost Jimmy, lost Juliana’s brooch and Granny’s respect, though maybe not her love.

  ‘It’s worth a fortune,’ Georgie said.

  ‘It’s been hiding in the dark for too long. Wear it on your lapel the next time you have to go to court. It will dazzle the magistrate.’

  ‘You’ll be sorry later,’ Trudy said.

  She was sorry about a lot of things. She was sorry she had to go to that church tomorrow, sorry she’d agreed to sing Ave Maria, but sorry about giving what she loved to those she loved? Not likely.

  Katie was attempting to open a grey leather drawstring pouch, worn grey by the hundred years it had protected Granny’s amber beads, its leather drawstring stiffened by those years. She got its knots undone and poured the necklet to the table.

  ‘Were these Juliana’s?’

  ‘Granny’s,’ Georgie said, reaching for the beads. ‘Itchy-foot bought it for her somewhere in Africa. There’s an insect trapped in one of them.’

  ‘It’s near the centre,’ Jenny said.

  Georgie found it, and Katie and Paul were as enthralled by that prehistoric mozzie as Jenny had been the day Granny showed it to her.

  Katie wanted to see the insect under a magnifying glass. She ran to get it. Trudy wanted her mobile to ring.

  ‘He could have had an accident.’

  ‘He could be driving too and can’t answer his phone,’ Georgie said.

  Trudy took her turn with the magnifying glass, then used it to study the lid of the box.

  ‘Remember the day Raelene almost got away with it?’ she said. ‘I saw her creeping out the glass door with your box under her arm and you took off like the cavalry when I told you.’

  ‘I wore a bruise the size of a football on my thigh for weeks after,’ Jenny said. ‘She was wearing my new boots, but I got my jewellery box. That’s how the lid was chipped.’

  It was after
ten when Trudy gave up waiting and went to bed. The boys would be up and running early.

  ‘Canasta, Nanny?’ Katie asked.

  ‘Why not, darlin’?’

  They played then, Jenny and Katie against Georgie and Paul, Georgie wearing Juliana’s brooch on her black sweater, Katie wearing her pendant. The rings remained on the table. They remained there until Paul called it quits and he went to bed. Jenny, who didn’t want tomorrow to begin, sat there fiddling with the diamond rings Trudy had left behind until Katie fetched Woody Creek’s centenary book, a coffee-table book that was kept on a radiogram in the sitting room. There were small photographs of Jim and John McPherson on the back cover, John, the town photographer. He hadn’t taken that photograph. He’d taken the one of Granny’s house on the book’s front cover and every photograph inside it. The mills were in it, the schoolchildren, and child Jenny, child Jim – and bloody Vern Hooper and his daughters.

  ‘I should have married Jim in ’42,’ Jenny said, and she opened the jewellery box and took out his parcel of love letters.

  ‘You’re supposed to tie them with blue ribbons, not old wool,’ Katie said.

  ‘It’s from an old spinster lady’s cardigan,’ Jenny said. ‘It brings back memories. Everything brings back memories.’

  ‘Have you still got the letter Pa left for you in your bankbook?’ Katie knew what Jenny had been searching for in odd places.

  ‘Every letter he wrote to me during the war is in there, darlin’.’

  ‘Wasn’t your first husband jealous of you keeping an old boyfriend’s love letters?’

  ‘He couldn’t read,’ Georgie said. ‘Go to bed, Katie. It’s late.’

  ‘I didn’t get up until afternoon. Can I read them one day, Nanny?’