Matilda Next Door

by Kelly Hunter

  ‘How many children can you see yourself wanting?’

  His question came out of nowhere. Her answer did too. ‘Oh, another few.’

  Such a presumptuous answer given the baby at her elbow wasn’t even hers. ‘I mean—’

  ‘I know what you mean.’

  Oh, she was so screwed.

  ‘You don’t mind that Rowan wouldn’t be your flesh and blood?’

  ‘Love doesn’t sweat the small stuff.’ She believed this with every beat of her heart. ‘I’d love all my children with a full heart.’

  ‘We’re leaving early in the morning. Come over later, for dinner. Spend the night with me. I’ll cook.’

  ‘You cook?’ Because, seriously, she’d seen no evidence of it.

  ‘For you, I do.’

  Chapter Ten

  Henry had never learned to cook. Not in his younger years, when his mother’s idea of cooking was thrusting a packet of rice cracker biscuits in his direction; not in his later years, when sitting at his grandmother’s table. Certainly not in London when income was plentiful and there were a couple of hundred restaurants within a few blocks of where he lived.

  It therefore made perfect sense to him that he’d be at Maggie’s Wirralong station at four that afternoon, daughter in tow, as he threw himself on her dubiously tender mercy.

  He didn’t remember her from school, because she’d been educated out of town. He remembered her from the school bus stop, on occasion, crazy uniform on and straw hat in hand as she attempted to get to her aunt’s house for the holidays, her aunt, like as not, having forgotten she was due to arrive. Maggie Walker had been another orphan for the town to look down on and the other kids to mock. Solidarity and all that.

  Which was why her bemused advice to keep it simple, stupid—while wrapping two smallish potatoes up in alfoil and handing them to him and then going back to the cool room for two enormous pieces of fillet steak, which she told him on pain of death to keep out of the fridge until he was ready to cook them, and then give them three hot minutes either side and then put them in a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree oven for another ten, then rest them beneath alfoil for another five before serving—made mostly good sense.

  ‘What’s a hot minute?’ he wanted to know, because details were his business.

  ‘Do you have a gas hotplate?’ she demanded.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, you poor, poor soul. I’ve had a change of heart.’ The steaks went back in the cool room and she emerged with a yoghurt-and-herb covered slab of meat that she put in some type of see-through plastic bag and tied off with a twist. ‘This is butterfly Greek lamb from here on the farm. Tilly will know it’s from here, but you’ll still get brownie points for cooking it right. This entire bag goes on a tray in a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree oven for twenty minutes, and then you take it out and pierce the bag and leave it for another ten. What does your grandfather still have left in his garden? Any snap peas?’

  It was as if she was talking a different language. ‘There’s a few striped tomatoes left.’

  ‘Perfect. Put them in the oven, on a tray, as soon as you take the meat out. Salt and pepper them first. And by that I mean get the grinders out and don’t be stingy.’

  ‘Lacking grinders,’ he confessed.

  She added nearby salt and pepper grinders to his growing pile. ‘The things I do to make sure romance blossoms.’

  ‘You’re a saint.’

  ‘You’re going to need something green on that plate.’ She added asparagus, and then looked at him and took them straight back. ‘No, we’re going to go with shelled peas.’ A ziplock bag of fresh peas appeared. ‘Boil them for a minimum of five minutes. The mushier you like them the longer you boil them.’

  ‘I’m on it,’ he said. Confidence was his friend. ‘Tilly said you had wine here.’

  ‘You are pushing our friendship.’

  ‘We have a friendship?’ He was beginning to like this woman with the girlish face and the razor-sharp tongue. ‘I thought at this point it was my limitless credit card and your fondness for Matilda that was making you so helpful, but my bad.’

  ‘No, I’m doing it for you, Henry Church, because I remember you from the bus and you never made fun of my stockings and shiny shoes or the fact that no one was ever there to pick me up. Again.’

  Why the hell would he make fun of that?

  ‘That look there,’ she murmured. ‘That’s why I’m helping you woo my fabulous sous chef.’

  ‘She’ll tell you she’s just a cooker of cakes. Nothing special.’

  ‘And every last soul who’s ever tasted one of those cakes knows better.’

  ‘You’re quite the authoritarian.’

  ‘It’s this job. Running a destination wedding venue is not for the faint of heart. Would you like a Cadillac with that? Because we have one out the back.’

  ‘I’m a little bit scared of you. Just so you know.’ Truth and nothing but.

  Maggie smiled and it made her beautiful. ‘She’s going to love whatever you serve up.’

  She took him and Rowan down into the hidden cellar beneath the homestead and started pulling dusty wine from racks and standing them on a scarred and spotlessly clean bar.

  ‘You are so full of surprises.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Who collected all this wine?’

  ‘Best guess, my great-grandfather, and some of it’s no good anymore so I suggest we open a bottle and try it before you take it home. It can breathe on the way. And hand over that fancy credit card, Londoner. I’ll not charge you for the food, but the wine is worth a small fortune.’

  ‘You can have the keys to my London apartment if you want.’

  ‘The one that has babies turning up on the doorstep? No, thanks.’

  He handed over his credit card, tasted wine with Maggie until he found a winner, and couldn’t ever remember Wirralong being so cosmopolitan. New blood in town, with money, vision and goodwill. Creating opportunities for people, ways to make them shine. Who’d have thought it of the tired little country town he’d lit out of all those years ago?

  It made him start wondering what he could give back and whether think tank face-to-face thrashing sessions had to take place in London. They often lasted a week or more. People rarely saw anything but four walls, computer screens and takeaway containers. What if he could get a crew to work, sleep and feed at Wirra Station? ‘They’d never go for it,’ he told his daughter as he hauled her and all the fixings for dinner into his grandmother’s kitchen. ‘I’d have to bribe them.’

  He was tracking okay on the cooking front by the time Matilda arrived. She wore a pretty yellow sleeveless dress with wide straps, and tan leather sandals. She had a dash of lipstick on. Little bit of eye make-up too, just enough to make her remarkable eyes glow silver in the right light. Pretty woman with her flawless skin and ready smile that widened as she saw the meal fixings on the bench.

  ‘You had help.’

  He was ready for her. ‘No idea what you’re talking about.’

  She pointed towards the open wine bottle.

  ‘A fine drop. Want some?’

  She took a glass from him and sipped and shrugged. ‘You kept good wine in your London place too. I went to replace the bottle I drank, and it was out of stock and wildly expensive.’

  ‘I likely didn’t buy it when it was wildly expensive.’

  ‘Good, cause I got you lilac socks instead. With sparkles.’

  ‘Evil, yet oddly reassuring. Feel free to wear them any time.’

  ‘Henry, do you think I’m unsophisticated and dumb?’

  ‘Excuse me?’ Where had that come from?

  ‘I understand your work only in the broadest terms, I’ll drink whatever wine you put in front of me, and thank you for it, but beyond that I can’t really discuss it. I watch the cricket at Christmas, but only under duress, so that’s it for sport. I watch next to no TV, but if I did I’ve a soft spot for whodunits and sleepy English village mysteries starring
grumpy old inspectors. I’m trying to figure out what you might see in me.’ She reached for her wine and did a terrible job of trying to appear nonchalant. ‘That I don’t see.’

  Her sense of self-worth had always been shaky as a young teen. He’d expected her to grow out of it.

  Leaning across the counter, he drew her closer with the crooking of his finger, and then kissed her very, very thoroughly.

  She smiled wryly, but her kisses had been as heartfelt as his. ‘Okay, so there’s that.’

  He stole another kiss, because her lips were still right there. ‘Glad you agree. As to whether you can do the Times crossword in under three minutes, neither can I. I like the way you filled my grandparents’ freezer for them because you wanted to. I like the way you go to bat for my daughter and challenge my assumptions about why her mother did what she did. I like your honesty, your integrity, your generosity. Would you like me to go on?’

  ‘And on and on.’ She nodded vigorously.

  ‘You make me believe good people exist.’

  ‘Pretty words.’

  ‘I mean every one of them. And unless you want to watch me burn your dinner, I suggest kicking back with your wine and telling that baby about your busy day. I think she missed you.’

  ‘Missed grabbing my cake scrapers, more like, and then putting her sticky fist in her mouth. Hey, Rowan? You want to clap your hands? Show the big guy what you can do.’

  She helped him get the food on the table in the end. Set the table, put some music on and rocked a little baby to sleep and then quizzed him about the things he loved about living in London, and this time he made the effort to remember those moments that had shaped his time there.

  He took her outside beneath the sky afterwards, because he remembered what she’d once said about London and rooftops and chimneys, and he couldn’t offer her a rooftop, but the top of the concrete water tank, three-quarters buried in the ground with only a step up in order to be standing on it, made a fine dance floor and the Milky Way looked extra fine without clouds to hide its true form.

  He wanted this. All of it. The woman, the instant family, the simple pleasure of dancing beneath the stars on a hot summer night after a meal he’d had a hand in preparing. No tailored suits to make him look the part. No takeaway meals eaten in a library chair while trying to convince himself he wasn’t unutterably lonely in London.

  ‘I missed you, all these years,’ he murmured and drew her close. ‘I’m not sure I realised how much.’

  ‘But you hardly called.’

  ‘Easier not to, or I’d have missed you more.’ He closed his eyes and took a leap of faith in her and in himself. ‘If I gave you a ring, would you wear it?’

  She stiffened in his arms and he kept his arms loose and kept right on moving.

  ‘What kind of ring? One that would signify serious intentions, if I wore it on a certain finger?’

  ‘If you like.’

  She searched his face as if suspecting a lie. ‘You don’t think we’re moving a little too … fast?’

  Not after the nights they’d spent together in his bed and all the hefty conversations they’d already had. About having more babies, about parenthood, about learning to love. ‘Feels about right. We’ve known each other a long time.’

  ‘But our romance is very new.’

  Clearly, he’d misread her enthusiasm for him. ‘Would you like me to backtrack? Because I can.’ There wasn’t much he wouldn’t do for this woman. ‘Doesn’t have to be an engagement ring. You could wear it on any finger.’

  ‘But I want an engagement ring from you. I love that idea and all that goes with it.’

  ‘So …’ Now he was just plain confused. ‘Not moving too fast for you, then?’

  ‘I do have one more question.’ She tilted her head to one side and the light from the house caught the curve of her cheek and the bow of her lips. ‘Do you love me?’

  ‘Would I be wanting to give you an engagement ring if I didn’t?’

  ‘You need to say it.’

  He never had. Not to the mother who’d barely spared him a glance. Not to the grandparents who’d never quite known what to do with him. Never once to any woman of his acquaintance.

  She shook her head at his hesitation, not censure. Knowing. ‘Those three little words scare you senseless, don’t they?’

  ‘Little bit.’

  ‘Have you ever said them before?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Want a lesson?’

  He nodded and remembered to breathe again when she reached up to draw his head down so she could rest her forehead against his.

  ‘Here we go, now repeat after me. I.’

  His ‘I’ was rough, but he inhabited it fully, and poured all that he was into the kiss that followed.

  ‘Love.’ Her eyes glowed grey and he’d never seen any more beautiful.

  ‘Love.’ Just because he had trouble saying it, didn’t mean he couldn’t feel it, deep down beneath the barriers that had protected him for so long. ‘Love,’ he said again, more certain that he had so much to give and that with patience, and this woman beside him, he would find a way to let it flow to her more easily. ‘I love.’

  ‘Such an overachiever,’ she mocked gently. ‘Already ahead of the teacher.’

  So grateful to have her as his teacher.

  ‘Last word,’ she whispered. ‘You.’

  ‘You.’ It had always been her. ‘I love you.’

  ‘I love you too.’ A quiet kiss, brimming with unspoken promises. ‘And you don’t have to say it all the time, you big, gorgeous still river of a man, but every now and again I’m going to want to hear it.’

  ‘Practice makes perfect,’ he muttered. ‘I’m on it.’

  Another kiss. His heart in her hands. Then she pulled back and smiled up at him in the moonlight. ‘Yes, I’ll marry you. Whenever you want. How ever you want.’

  She laughed when he gathered her up in his arms and spun her around and headed for the house. Was still laughing as she reached for the buttons on his shirt. It landed in a white puddle on the grass, somewhere between the water tank and back steps. Her dress got flung over the verandah chair to the right of the back screen door.

  She lost her underwear and her inhibitions somewhere in the hallway.

  He lost his trousers a short time later and if this was love he’d take all he could get, because it lit him up in a way he’d never felt before. He wasn’t broken. Tilly believed in him, and through her he became a believer too. He wasn’t a lost cause when it came to love.

  He could do this.

  Henry left at the crack of dawn, with Rowan in the back and a long drive ahead of him, but it felt right to be going to see his grandparents, and it didn’t feel wrong to be leaving Tilly in Wirralong.

  He would be back.

  And she would be there for him.

  *

  Melbourne proved challenging, but not for the reasons Henry expected. It was good to see his grandfather coping well in the apartment near the hospital. The fridge was full of food. The washing machine was on. The morning paper lay on the bench, open at the crossword. His grandfather appeared happy to see him.

  It was good to see his grandmother sitting up in bed. She had her speech back, for the most part, but some paralysis on her left side. Her vision could have been better and her memory wasn’t the best. But she’d had memory issues before the stroke. She knew who he was, even if she didn’t seem to remember why she’d asked for him.

  She had no idea who Rowan was.

  ‘This is your daughter?’ she said for the umpteenth time, as Joe rubbed at his temple with the heel of his hand and Henry prepared to launch into another careful explanation, but what would be the point?

  In the end he settled for, ‘Yes. Her name’s Rowan.’

  ‘Strange name for a girl.’

  ‘Her mother chose it.’

  ‘Have I met the mother of this baby?’

  ‘No. Rowan’s mother died recently. It was very sad.’r />
  ‘And the baby’s yours?’

  ‘Yes.’ By law and by choice. He was doing this. Bonded, heart wide open to her now. ‘She is.’

  ‘And you were married to the baby’s mother?’

  ‘No. I’m engaged to Matilda.’

  Possibly not the best time to drop that bit of news. His grandfather’s expression widened and then hardened. His grandmother just looked even more confused. ‘Our Tilly?’ she said. ‘Tilly next door?’

  ‘Yes,’ he murmured.

  ‘Oh, she’s a lovely girl, isn’t she, Joe?’

  ‘Yes.’ Henry wasn’t the only one with a liking for single word answers. ‘We should let you get some rest. Don’t forget to eat some of the apple custard cake Tilly sent you.’

  ‘Tilly? From next door? Oh, she’s a lovely girl, isn’t she, Joe?’

  ‘Yes,’ her husband of many years said gently. ‘For sure.’

  *

  His grandfather waited until they were back at the car and Henry had settled the baby in the car carrier, before laying in. ‘So, you and Matilda Moore are engaged now. Since when?’

  ‘Last night.’ He still needed to get her a ring. Something flawless. Not too ostentatious. Had to be a diamond. He hoped she liked platinum. ‘It works for us. Why question it?’

  ‘Son, you question everything. It’s what you do. And now I’m questioning you. I thought you weren’t going to take advantage of Matilda.’

  ‘I’m not taking advantage of her,’ he grated. ‘Why are you automatically discounting the thought that I have feelings for her?’

  His grandfather clamped his lips shut and stayed stubbornly silent, and it was this … this silence … that cut at Henry like the sharpest of knives. He never knew what the other man meant.

  Was he agreeing with his wife when she said Henry would never make good? Silence is consent?

  Was he too disappointed in Henry’s behaviour for words?

  Wondering, in the absence of sloshing sounds, whether the washing machine had clicked off?

  What did all that silence ever mean? ‘Shall I answer for you?’ he offered, and then went right ahead. ‘Henry’s intellectual pursuits are all consuming—he doesn’t have time to understand people. Henry doesn’t trust women. Henry doesn’t know how to love. God help whoever marries him, because they’ll have their work cut out for him. Have I missed any?’