The Silence

by Susan Allott

  “Now, Mrs. Green.” He removes his glasses to look at Louisa. She puts her tea down on the table and sits. “Could you repeat what you told me on the phone, if you would be so kind.”

  Louisa clasps her hands in front of her. “I have reason to believe”—she looks down at her hands—“that my husband had an affair with Amanda Mallory, thirty years ago, while my daughter and I were in England.”

  He digs at his eyes and puts his glasses back on. “Can you remind me of when you were in England?”

  “The first three months of 1967. Between January and March.”

  He writes this down in his notebook. Isla watches her mother, who is nervously turning the gold stud in her ear.

  “And your husband was alone, here in Sydney, for that whole period?”

  “That’s right.”

  “When you got back to Australia, did you see or hear from Mrs. Mallory?”

  Louisa shakes her head. “Their house was empty when we got back. They’d moved to Victoria, I think.”

  “What makes you think they moved?”

  “That’s what Joe told me at the time.”

  “I see.” He pinches the knot of his tie. “So the last time you saw Mrs. Mallory was January 1967?”

  “That’s right.” Louisa watches him write it down, turning her earring at double speed.

  “Has Mr. Green admitted to this affair?”

  “Not in so many words.”

  “What makes you think he had relations with Mrs. Mallory?”

  “He kept something that belonged to her.” Louisa reaches down beside her, into her handbag. “He admitted this belonged to Mandy.”

  The cop turns a page in his notebook. There is an eagerness in his face as he looks up, a suggestion of a smile. Isla wants to turn the table over. She grips the underside of the chair until her fingers hurt.

  “I found it a few months ago,” Louisa says. She glances at Isla for the first time as she sets the watch down on the table. She has the bright-eyed look of the tattletale, the teacher’s pet. “Joe kept it hidden at the back of a drawer.”

  “And you’re sure this belonged to Mrs. Mallory?” He looks over his glasses at the watch.

  “Quite sure,” Louisa says. She sips her tea. “I remember Steve—her husband—gave it to her for Christmas, shortly before we went to England.”

  He writes this down, taking his time. “This is very helpful, Mrs. Green.” He takes a plastic glove from his pocket and uses it to put the watch into a specimen bag. “I’ll need to take this with me, of course.”

  Louisa nods. The color has gone from her face. “I don’t suppose you can prove it belonged to Mandy,” she says.

  Inspector Perry removes his glasses, leaving deep grooves in the side of his head. “You might be surprised. A lot of cases are being reopened from twenty or thirty years ago, now that DNA profiling has moved on. All it takes it a strand of hair, or the residue of sweat.” He nods at the specimen bag. “Or a drop of blood.”

  Louisa covers her mouth with her hand.

  “There’s no evidence that my dad and Mandy had an affair,” Isla says. The Inspector looks at her in surprise. “My dad hasn’t admitted to that.”

  “I think I’ve taken up enough of your time.” He goes to stand.

  “What about Steve Mallory? Mandy’s husband.”

  The Inspector pauses, half out of his chair. “What about him?”

  “Have you questioned him?”

  “I can’t tell you that, I’m afraid.” He puts his glasses back on. “I need to get going.”

  “Is he still with the police?”

  Her mother stares at her. The Inspector’s radio hisses at his belt.

  Isla stands. “Do you know him? He was a cop when he lived next door to us.”

  “Mr. Mallory no longer works for the police force,” the Inspector says.

  Louisa puts her hands flat on the table and goes to stand. “I’ll show you out,” she says.

  “One more thing.” Isla stands in the doorway, blocking his path. “Why is an Inspector involved in a missing person’s case?”

  He looks down at Isla with huge impatience. “Mrs. Mallory’s case is not straightforward.”

  “Is this a murder inquiry?”

  “We have a large number of records on file in New South Wales. Deceased persons who have never been identified, some of whom died in suspicious circumstances. It’s possible one of them is Mrs. Mallory.”

  “Are you looking outside of New South Wales? If Mandy moved to Victoria—”

  “I suggest you leave the police work to me, Miss Green.”

  “But if she moved away—”

  “It seems she did not.” He glares at her, rattled. “Steve Mallory claims his wife didn’t go with him when he sold the house and moved away.”

  “So you did question him.”

  He moves to push past her. In the corner of her eye, Isla sees her mother shake her head.

  “Do you think Mandy’s alive?”

  He shuts his eyes. “I hope so.”

  “But you think it’s unlikely?”

  “I think thirty years is a long time to live with no record at all.”

  Isla waits in the hall while her mum shows the Inspector out, shuts the door behind him, and stays there, watching through the peephole. They hear the chink of the gate.

  “Did you have to do that?” Louisa turns her back to the door. “Did you have to cross-examine him?”

  “Someone had to fight Dad’s corner.” Isla shuts the kitchen door behind her, darkening the hallway. She steps closer to her mother, pausing at the door to her parents’ bedroom, where the laundry basket is disturbed and the drawers stand open. “Sorry to spoil your plan.”

  “I don’t have a plan,” Louisa says.

  “Oh, really? It looked to me like you were planning to land Dad in jail.”

  “I thought it might be important. The watch. After I showed it to you, I started thinking—”

  “What?” She is just about keeping her voice steady. “What did you think?”

  “I’d have been withholding evidence,” she says.

  “We could have gotten rid of it.”

  “I thought they should know.”

  “You thought it might make Dad look like he was obsessed with her,” Isla says. “Like he killed her and kept a memento.”

  “It does look like that, doesn’t it?”

  “Not to me.” She feels a swell of rage and she is glad for it, its familiar heat. “I think you’re deflecting attention from yourself.”

  She laughs. “Don’t be absurd, Isla.”

  “I don’t think it’s absurd. Mandy betrayed you. I think you’re sucking up to the cops so they don’t look too closely at you.”

  “I would never—”

  “I think you would,” Isla says.

  The house is still and quiet. Isla hears her mum breathing, her own breath and her blood in her ears.

  “I haven’t told you much about Mandy, have I?”

  “No,” Isla says. “Maybe you should.”

  Louisa meets her at the bedroom door. She eyes Isla apprehensively. “Mandy saved me when you were a baby,” she says. “She was the only person who understood I wasn’t coping. I didn’t have to tell her; she took one look at me and she knew. She helped me with you. When you wouldn’t settle, she picked you up and calmed you down. She took you out in the pram so I could have a break. She stopped me going under.”

  Isla finds she is mirroring her mother, her stance and the tilt of her head. She stands up straighter. “Go on.”

  “I came to rely on her. She looked after you when I went back to work. I took her for granted, although it took me awhile to realize that.” She turns into the bedroom and squats down by the bed. “The Mallorys’ house was empty for months after we got back from England. Your father was working long hours and I had no help with Scott when he came along. I’ve never been so lonely.”

  “Sounds tough.”

  “That’
s one word for it.” Louisa reaches under the bed and pulls out a suitcase. “If Mandy had walked through the door back then, I’d have forgiven her anything. I’d have fallen at her feet and begged her to help me.”

  Isla sits down on the bed. The rage has passed. She feels a prickle of shame, of foolishness. “Why didn’t you ever talk about her?”

  “It was easier not to.” Louisa takes clothes from their hangers and throws them into the case. “Your father jumped out of his skin when I mentioned her name. I tried to put her out of my mind.”

  She’s leaving, Isla thinks, as her mum takes sweaters and T-shirts from the drawers, barely pausing to look at them. She folds them briskly, and Isla remembers her in a yellow dress, patterned with daisies. A hot day and a taxi with vinyl seats that burned the backs of her legs.

  “I can’t protect your father anymore,” Louisa says. “I know you love him.” She takes her nightdress from under the pillow. “I know you don’t want to believe it.”

  “I don’t believe it.” She shakes her head.

  “He was the last one to see Mandy alive.” Louisa nods toward the kitchen, as if the cop were still there with his notebook and his radio. “Steve Mallory left without her.”

  “It’s Steve’s word against Dad’s as far as I can tell. And Steve was a cop. They’re bound to believe him.”

  Louisa tuts and throws a hairbrush into the case, followed by a framed photograph of Isla and Scott, taken by the school photographer: Scott with a neat row of baby teeth, Isla with her hair teased into plaits.

  “Steve was one of the cops who carried out the forced removals. The Aboriginal kids who were taken from their families.”

  Louisa stares at Isla. A cloud passes over the sun and the light flattens. “How did you know about that?”

  “Dad told me.”

  She snaps the suitcase shut. “I don’t see how it’s relevant.”

  “A job like that could send a man off the rails.”

  “You’re clutching at straws.” She lifts the case from the bed. “Steve adored Mandy.”

  “You’re ready to think well of a man who was involved in that? But not your own husband?”

  “You seem ready to suspect anyone but your father.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “I think it is, darling. I think you want to lay blame on anyone but him.” The sun comes out. Louisa stands in a slant of light from the window, lit up with dust motes. “Come with me, Isla.”

  She finds she is crying. “Where are you going?”

  “Scott and Ruby’s.”

  She thinks of the taxi, the hot seats, the hurriedly packed suitcase. She feels captured, complicit again in a huge betrayal. “I’ll stay here,” she says.

  “There’s plenty of space at Scott’s.”

  “Is he expecting you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You planned this?”

  Louisa looks at her feet. “Yes.”

  Isla wipes her face with her sleeve. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “I can’t force you.”

  “No, you can’t.”

  A bird screeches, a rasping cackle, close to the window. Isla stands, and Louisa steps backward, flinching.

  “Are you scared of me?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You look scared.”

  Louisa picks up the case. “It’s just you remind me of your father sometimes.”

  She waits for Isla to step aside before she leaves the room.

  26

  Sydney, 1967

  Mandy put her shopping down and took a breather. She wished she’d gotten the bus instead of walking home under this hard, hot sun. She’d only made it worse for herself. Now she’d have to face Steve with a headache on top of a guilty conscience. The shopping was hardly essential. She could have gone later, once she’d given him a bit of a welcome home. Bit of grub and a cup of tea. That would have been the right thing to do.

  “G’day, Mandy. How’s it going?”

  Douglas Blunt was smiling at her from beneath his sun hat, holding a pair of garden shears. She nodded hello. “Not too bad,” she said. “Bit hot.”

  “Roasting,” he agreed, nodding at his veggie patch. “Me tomatoes have cooked in their flamin’ skins. Didn’t get ’em under the shade cloth in time.”

  He looked like a big baked tomato, she thought, with his hat pulled down low over his hot face. Poor Doug. They’d laid him off at the port and his wife died a few months later. He didn’t know what to do with himself.

  “You should get yourself in the shade, Doug.”

  He pointed his shears at her house, where Steve’s truck was parked up on the curb. “Saw Steve drive past a while back.”

  She managed a tight smile, which made her head throb. “I was hoping he’d be home already. I never know when to expect him.”

  “Haven’t seen Louisa lately.” He leaned backward, better to see her under his hat. “Or the little girl.”

  “No. Me neither.”

  “Gone back to England, I reckon.” He snipped a few leaves from his hedge. “Didn’t settle.”

  “No. It’s a shame. We were fond of them.”

  Doug stepped away from a bottlebrush that shuddered with bees near his shoulder. “Lovely girl, Louisa. Have you heard from her?”

  “Can’t say I have.” She picked up her shopping. “Cheerio, then.”

  She took two steps and stopped. The sound of a baby’s cry met the pain in her head, sending fingers of shock down her back. She dropped her shopping, heard the eggs crunch as they hit the footpath.

  “That child’s been bawling for hours.” Doug stared accusingly up the street. “Somebody needs to put a plug in it.”

  It was the strangest feeling: shock without surprise. As if it were right that she should hear a baby crying from the direction of her house. As if she should have known.

  “The Walkers are expecting,” she said. “Their baby must have come early.”

  Doug shook his head. “Saw Abigail not ten minutes ago. Still the size of a house.”

  Mandy swallowed. Must be thirst, putting strange thoughts in her head.

  “Sounds like a kiddie that’s getting its teeth, Abigail reckons.” Doug went back to pruning his hedge. “Got some lungs on it.”

  Andrea Walker shot past on her bicycle, rang her bell as she reached the end of Bay Street, and turned out of sight.

  Mandy’s limbs were heavy as she climbed the stairs of her veranda. Behind the closed curtains of her lounge room she could hear the uneasy whine of a baby not quite asleep. She let the shopping fall at her feet and stood for a minute in the shade with the key in her hand.

  27

  Sydney, 1967

  Joe opened his eyes and shut them again. He hadn’t closed the curtains properly last night and now they were letting in the sun. The room was hot and bright, and he was a dirty grub, a waste of space, lying in bed half the day, hiding from work when there was nothing wrong with him except the usual blinding hangover and the mess of his life. He turned in the bed and the pain rolled around the base of his skull, darkening. He held on to it, let it fill his head.

  No matter how much he drank, he woke up knowing that Louisa had left him and taken his daughter. The hangover curdled it in his head, turned it bad before he had a chance to make any sense of it. It doubled his agony. Of course it did. He knew that, and he drank anyway, because his old man was winning. His dad was always right, in the end.

  He forced himself to sit up, to swing his legs over the side of the bed. God, his throat was rough; he must have smoked most of a pack last night. His fingers were yellow, brown in places. He reached into the top drawer of the bedside table for his headache pills and crunched two, dry-mouthed. Nausea passed through him and he closed his eyes against it, let it pass. He thought of Louisa then, with a towel wrapped around her head, holding a plate of toast, asking if he wanted any. He had to watch himself, getting sentimental over her. She hadn’t made him toast in years. She spent t
he mornings running around after Isla, trying to find something clean to wear for work.

  The phone started ringing as he got in the shower. He let it go. If he didn’t answer, he could imagine it was her, calling to apologize. To explain. He could think of her waiting for him to pick up, nervous and hopeful. She could ring as long as she liked; he wasn’t giving in that easy. He lathered up the soap. Let her sweat. The ringing stopped and he washed the soap from his face, holding his breath as water streamed from his nose. That wasn’t her on the phone. It was the middle of the night in England. If she was going to call, she’d wait till it was evening here, morning there. Around nine.

  He was always drunk by nine.

  The towel stank. He threw it to the ground and walked naked into the lounge room, stood on the carpet, dripping. He’d shrunk all his shirts in the washing machine the day before and wasn’t about to try it again. The machine must be faulty, or else he didn’t have the setting right. He’d never used it before. He suspected Mandy might know how it worked, but the thought of asking her made the sweat prickle in his hair. It was humiliating, this whole situation. He’d rather drip-dry naked than let Mandy come around and see his smalls on the floor and his whisky tumblers in the sink.

  He’d have to be careful with Mandy. She was taking the edge off, helping him through a dark time, nothing more. She wasn’t even his type. Maybe that was the attraction. She was an antidote to Louisa: fair-haired, curvy, knowing. She’d been there at the edge of his vision for years, of course she had, and he’d never expected to do more than wonder about her. Knowing she was next door, catching sight of her sometimes, was distracting, a bit of an itch. But she was married. And life was complicated enough.

  The stink in the kitchen was horrible. Stale smoke and something rotting somewhere, a blocked drain maybe. He opened the back door and straightaway heard a baby crying, loud and close. It still got to him, that sound. Hard to ignore it when a baby was crying like that, the way Isla used to when she was tiny.