This Has Been Absolutely Lovely

by Jessica Dettmann

  Molly hadn’t been into the study since Pa had died. She wondered if she would feel his presence in there. Probably not. She didn’t feel his presence anywhere else in the house. Besides, she didn’t believe in that sort of thing.

  The study door was ajar. It was always left open so Richard V could get in and out. Since his master’s death, Richard V had carried on with their shared daily routine. He still sat in the sun in the right of way each morning, scowling at Ray’s kitchen window. It would be poignant, Molly thought, if he weren’t such an unpleasant animal. By eleven o’clock most days he was curled into a comma, asleep on top of a pile of papers on the filing cabinet in the study, which is where she found him now.

  ‘Hello, Richard,’ she said, closing the door behind her. ‘We meet again.’ Richard opened his eyes a crack, stood up and turned his back to her. ‘I admire his discretion,’ her grandfather used to tell people enigmatically if they asked what the appeal of this animal was.

  ‘Well, up yours,’ said Molly. She placed the laptop on the desk, pressed play and lay down on the worn Persian rug. She closed her eyes.

  A woman’s voice came through the speaker. ‘Welcome to your Birth World,’ she said in a voice that immediately rankled. How could someone sound smug and judgemental in five words? How was such a voice supposed to keep her calm and relaxed while she was pushing a baby out of her vagina? This was a mistake. For almost five hundred dollars there really ought to be an alternative to such a self-satisfied smuggo, like with sat nav. Maybe there was a Phoebe Waller-Bridge option. Or Emma Thompson. Molly reached up and pressed pause again.

  Richard stared down from the filing cabinet. Not breaking eye contact, he slid a piece of paper off the top with his paw, and they both watched it float down to the floor.

  ‘Don’t do that.’

  Richard turned away again and with his back feet sent more paper down.

  ‘Richard, you’re such a dick.’ She gathered the papers and looked at them. They were ancient invoices from her grandfather’s work, from the previous decade. She missed him, suddenly and hard. It was Pa who had taught her how to file. As soon as she knew the alphabet he’d shown her how his system worked. He’d shown Naomi and Simon as well, but they were not good at it. Molly had spent hours in there as a little girl, searching for the right client’s folder, ordered by surname, then placing documents inside by date. It was, she realised, not dissimilar to the work she did now.

  She stood and looked at the first invoice, addressed to Sara Heyward. She opened the top drawer of the filing cabinet, leafing through the folders until she found the hanging file marked Heyward, and placed the invoice in the front of the manila folder within. The other invoices were for Maiden, Tory, Kersey, O’Donnell and Bard. All the files were where they should be. This was definitely an improvement on listening to someone telling her to picture her cervix opening like a flower.

  The last invoice was for Parikh. Third drawer. She thumbed through the folders until a word caught her eye. Penhaligon. Right-of-Way Ray was Ray Penhaligon. She never knew Pa did any work for him. Why would Ray have used Pa as an accountant when they were, as far as she’d always been led to believe, mortal enemies?

  Curious, she removed the file, which was twice as thick as any other, and flicked through the documents inside. They were all letters, handwritten on decorative paper. Some had scalloped edges; some had gilt trim. Many had some sort of floral embellishment printed at the top and bottom. None of them were invoices.

  She plucked one out at random. The writing was open and bold, with grandiose looping descenders on the gs and ys. At once it was clear it was a woman’s hand, and a young woman’s at that. It had none of the cramped scratchiness that comes with age. The letters were round and upright printing, taught after the cursive of her grandmother’s generation and before the triangular Foundation Style that Molly and her brother and sister learned.

  At the bottom of the page it said: All my love, I am yours, Heather.

  There were twenty-five letters. They weren’t dated, and they were all from Heather Penhaligon, Ray’s long-vanished wife. They were love letters. As Molly read them, sitting cross-legged on the floor, she realised she’d never read a love letter before. Not in real life. Outside a book. She’d seen plenty of dick pics, but never a love letter.

  The letters began tentatively, flirtation hinting at desire. They developed into outright longing. By the tenth letter Pa was sleeping with Heather, that much was clear. Heather mentioned sharing her bed with Ray after Robert had left it only hours earlier. She longed for Robert’s wife to go out more often, and made suggestions for when they might meet again. After twelve letters Molly put the stack down.

  What was Pa thinking, leaving these in the file with all his business invoices? Had he forgotten about them before he got too sick to get rid of them? Had the letters been there for forty years? Could anyone have come across them at any time? Could her grandmother have? Her mum? She, as a child, alphabetising accountancy invoices in the summer holidays?

  Her stomach turned. She reached for Pa’s woven wastepaper basket and retched. Nothing came up, thank god, because what kind of madness was a wicker bin?

  She took a deep breath. There were more letters to read. Maybe she should stop. What good could come of this? This was her grandfather’s business. Her granny must not have known, nor her mum. Mum, she thought. She remembered her mum talking about Heather, about their friendship. Ray must have mistreated her. That was what Mum always said about why Heather went away. That’s what Pa used to say too — Ray couldn’t even keep a wife.

  There was a knock at the door. ‘Molly? Are you in there?’ It was Simon. ‘Can I come in?’

  From deep within her came a teenage impulse she hadn’t felt for a long time. ‘Get a warrant,’ she shouted. For years that was how Simon and Molly answered the door to each other. Back before he married Diana, moved to Germany and forgot he even had a little sister. She hadn’t thought of it for a decade and that it had burst out of her now was absurd. She started to laugh.

  ‘Are you drunk, arseface?’ he called through the door. ‘Are you in there getting pissed with your foetus?’

  The laughter wouldn’t stop. Molly couldn’t speak. Tears streamed down her face.

  Simon opened the door and came in. He looked at her on the floor, leaning against the filing cabinet, convulsing with laughter and wiping tears away with the hand in which she was still holding a sheaf of Heather’s love letters.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  She couldn’t begin to think where to start. ‘Shut the door,’ she said. ‘I think Pa might have been a bit of a bastard.’

  * * *

  By the time Simon and Molly finished reading the letters, it was clear their grandfather had been more than a bit of a bastard.

  In Heather’s thirteenth letter she announced her pregnancy. It can only be yours, she wrote. The fourteenth letter revealed that Pa’s response had not been what Heather hoped. There would be no running away together. He would not be leaving his wife and child for her. Heather was, understandably, Molly thought, very, very angry.

  Heather called him ‘Robbie’ in her letters, a name Simon and Molly had never known their grandfather to use. He was always Robert to their grandmother. Robert to his colleagues. Dad to Annie, and Pa to them. This man Robbie was a stranger, except for the way in which he seemed to have dealt with the inconvenient consequence of sleeping with his neighbour’s young wife. Simon and Molly both recognised their no-nonsense grandfather in Heather’s responses. He was a fifty-year-old man — Heather made reference in one early letter to the way he danced with her to ‘Concrete and Clay’ at his milestone birthday party down at the bowling club. She mentioned his hand on the small of her back, and the way she shivered when he looked at her. The cake Jean had made for the occasion, Heather remarked, was very good.

  Heather was half his age — a mere five years older than his daughter.

  Simon finished reading and put the
letters down. ‘Well, who would have fucking thought?’

  ‘Do you think she kept the baby?’ Molly asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Mum said something about Heather leaving Ray after they had a kid. Was it this kid? Do we know when that was?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve never had any reason to ask.’

  ‘Well, we can’t ask her now, can we?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Molly, obviously this information isn’t going any further than this room, is it?’

  ‘But Mum might have a sibling. She has a right to know that. As much as I mostly hate you, I’m glad I know you exist. And Naomi.’

  Simon cast his eyes up. ‘Moll, if Mum knows she might have a sibling, then that changes everything.’

  ‘Everything what? What are you talking about?’ And then it dawned on her. Money. Of course. The house. Would another child of Pa’s be entitled to part of his estate?

  Simon saw her realise. ‘Do you get it? What happens if this kid was Pa’s? She might have to give him half of the house. It would have to be sold. Down the track we’d get barely anything.’

  Molly thought about her mother. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like, growing up as an only child. She tried to picture her own childhood with Naomi and Simon erased. Her parents’ undivided attention. How glorious that would have been. No calm easy-going Naomi to be compared to. No stupid annoying Simon to butt heads with. But she understood that wasn’t how everyone’s sibling relationships went. Jack was great mates with his sister, Amy.

  Footsteps passed the door and they froze. Whoever it was didn’t stop, and they heard the heavy front door open and click closed again. Simon crawled over to the window and looked out at the path.

  ‘It’s Dad.’

  ‘We should put these away. Until we decide what to do,’ Molly said.

  ‘Where? Where can we hide them?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe the place they have been successfully hidden in plain sight for forty years? I’m pretty sure no one is going to go looking in there. It was a fluke I even found them.’

  ‘Pretty ballsy move,’ Simon said admiringly. ‘Filing the evidence of an affair in with your business records.’

  She stared at him. ‘It’s not impressive. Don’t be impressed by this, Simon. What Pa did was awful. Be horrified. Be appalled. That’s what you ought to be feeling about this. Not impressed by his duplicity.’

  ‘I’m not,’ he said unconvincingly. ‘Anyway, I don’t think you should judge Pa too harshly, just based on these.’ He waved the letters at her.

  ‘What? Why on earth wouldn’t I? He wasn’t who we thought he was, Simon. Is that not clear to you?’

  ‘Just because he did something wrong, once, doesn’t mean everything we knew about him was a lie.’

  ‘But it was all a lie. It was built on lies. Everything everyone did, after this point, was based on people not knowing what he’d done. Granny living with him all those years, Mum coming back and nursing him when he got sick. Simon, they didn’t know who he really was.’

  There was a tap at the door and Diana’s voice interrupted them. ‘Simon?’

  ‘Shit.’ Molly stuffed the letters back into the filing cabinet and slammed it shut. Richard leaped down, sending the remaining papers flying, and trotted to the door.

  Diana knocked again. ‘Simon, you have to take the next tray of pfeffernusse out of the oven in five minutes. I’m going to the beach with Naomi and the children.’

  Simon clambered to his feet and opened the door. ‘Yep, right, no worries, love. Five minutes. Gotcha.’

  Diana looked past Simon to where Molly was still sitting. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?’

  ‘I don’t know. Because you’re sitting down on the floor?’

  ‘No, I’m fine.’

  ‘Good.’ She closed the door.

  ‘She doesn’t like you much, does she?’ said Molly.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ he said. ‘Of course she likes me.’

  ‘She seems annoyed with you all the time.’

  ‘We’re fine,’ he said, and he offered her a hand up. ‘Oof, you’re fucking heavy.’

  ‘I’m nine months pregnant, loser.’

  Their momentary connection had slipped away. As she passed him, he put his hand on her arm. ‘Molly, remember, not a word.’

  She shrugged him off and walked back to her room.

  Chapter 11

  Patrick Penhaligon sat next door at Ray’s kitchen table, counting out tablets for the next day. It was just like his dad to have left it so late to tell him he was dying.

  When the email had arrived, Patrick was in Chile, working with a documentary crew filming Humboldt penguins. He’d only read the message five days later when they returned to La Serena, the nearest city. It was the end of the shoot, so two days later he was back in Sydney, where all the roads were impossibly smooth and the faces weirdly pale.

  He’d come straight to his dad’s house in a taxi, with his backpack, a panic-purchased bottle of duty-free Champagne, a huge Toblerone and a badly screen-printed T-shirt with a picture of penguins on a gravel beach. The perfect gifts, really, with which to say, ‘Sorry you’ve got incurable pancreatic cancer.’ Now the two Champagne glasses from the previous night sat upside down on the draining board.

  It was five years since he’d been back there. Too long. But in his business, you took the work when it came up, and so for five years he had been everywhere but Sydney. There were no endangered species there. Well, his poor old dad was looking pretty endangered. Weeks to months was what he’d been told when he’d asked the oncologist how long he had left. Patrick thought that was too vague, but the palliative care nurse who had visited that morning said she thought it was more in the days than weeks category. They didn’t lie to you, nurses. They were good like that.

  His father was sleeping a lot. Patrick wasn’t sure if it was the drugs or the illness. It probably didn’t matter. Satisfied that he had the medication correct, he filled the kettle and took a mug from the cupboard. His dad wanted tea quite often, but he never managed more than a couple of sips.

  A child’s voice, surprisingly close, shouted ‘Marco!’ and a sudden stream of water shot in through the open window, drenching Patrick’s shirt and leaving him spluttering. What the hell was that? Excited shrieks and the flash of two small naked bodies past the window answered his question. Those kids next door were loud. He’d asked his dad a few times if their noise bothered him, but he insisted he liked it.

  Another shout came along the right of way. ‘Be careful with that hose, you’ll — oh.’ A woman stopped outside the window. She looked up at the dripping Patrick, standing at the sink.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said simply, with an apologetic smile. ‘I told them not to run with the hose, but they’re playing Marco Polo and they’re also out-of-control arseholes.’ Her face was tanned and her smiling eyes were creased. Her light brown hair hung down to her waist.

  ‘Don’t you play Marco Polo in a pool?’ Patrick said. ‘I thought it was played in a pool.’

  ‘Ideally, it is. But we haven’t got a pool, so they just run around with the hose. The one holding the hose has to keep their eyes shut. It’s a reasonable substitute. Shocking waste of water, though.’ She paused. ‘Sorry about your shirt.’ She saw him look down and seemed to intuit the large puddle on the lino. ‘And your kitchen. Let me come in and mop it up.’

  Before he could say that wasn’t necessary she was gone, and she reappeared shortly after at the front door, holding a mop and a bucket.

  She beamed at him. ‘Hello! I’m Naomi, by the way.’

  ‘Patrick,’ he said. ‘Really, the kitchen is fine. I can mop it up myself.’

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘I’d like to. If you’re okay with me coming into your space.’

  ‘Um, sure, I guess that’s fine.’

  ‘Great!’ She walked past him down the hall to the kitchen and
began mopping up the water before he was even back in the room. ‘This’ll take five seconds. There. Done.’ She reached into the pocket of her baggy sleeveless smock. It was made of woven fabric the colour of sand. It reminded him of the clothes everyone wore back in the Community in Shropshire. He hadn’t seen an outfit like that for almost two decades.

  She held up a tiny brown glass bottle. ‘Rosemary oil? Can I, while I’m here? If I pop a couple of drops in some water and whiz it over your floor, it’ll prevent mould, fungus — any bad bacteria really. It’s a wonder herb. Fixes anything.’

  ‘Pancreatic cancer?’ He spoke before thinking. ‘How is it on terminal pancreatic cancer?’ It was the first time he’d said it aloud.

  Naomi’s bright expression clouded with so much sympathy Patrick had to look away before he began to cry.

  ‘You’re so young,’ she said.

  ‘My dad, not me.’ His voice caught.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Oh is right.’

  ‘I’m very sorry. Ray’s your dad, is he?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘My grandfather lived next door. Robert. He died last week. Heart failure, though, so, you know, we don’t have to worry about this being a cancer cluster from power lines or anything.’

  Patrick frowned slightly, and didn’t speak.

  ‘It’s not much of a bright side, is it?’ Naomi noticed the mug on the counter. ‘Were you making a cuppa? All right if I add one more?’

  Patrick couldn’t think of any reason not to, so he nodded.

  ‘You sit down,’ she said, and started opening cupboards. She opened the one where the mugs lived first. ‘Aha. Undefeated. It’s my superpower — I instinctively know where things are in people’s kitchens. And tea bags will be —’ she held her arms out in front of her like she was divining for water ‘— here!’ Her hand landed on the canister marked Tea, sitting beside the kettle.