‘Whoops, caught in the act.’ She smiled.
‘How’s Isabelle going to cope without you?’ Jack sat down near her on the verandah, leaning his back against the wall of the house. He quietly watched Rosanna, her face infused with love and light as she gazed upon the baby in her arms, and a hazy feeling of contentment settled on him.
‘She’ll be fine, Jack.’ Rosanna said gently. ‘Dr Spock will be her guiding light.’
Jack found his cigarettes in the pocket of his trousers and lit one.
‘I’ll have one of those, thanks.’
‘Didn’t know you smoked,’ said Jack. He put another cigarette between his lips, lit it from his own and passed it to her.
‘I don’t mind one, I might even take it up – I can do anything I like now. I’ve done my duty by the family. You and Bella have your daughter, and she is my daughter too – what could be better? She’ll own this farm one day. You should probably know that my only condition for doing this was that Bella never sell the farm. I know she’ll honour that. In fact, I’ve already made over my share to Adrienne so it can never be sold without her permission. And when you and Isabelle have gone, it will be hers.’ She inhaled and blew a jet of smoke into the night. ‘I’m free now – no one can tell me what I can or can’t do any more.’
‘Is that why you say you won’t marry?’
‘Maybe. My parents’ marriage probably put me off. They started off young and in love and ended up practically hating each other.’
‘You’re exaggerating,’ said Jack.
‘I don’t really know how they felt about one another, but they used to have some fearsome rows in the night. Bella and I invented a game where we would rock ourselves into another land where it was peaceful and quiet and everyone loved each other. I vaguely recall there were sweets involved too.’
Rosanna wrapped the rug firmly around the sleeping baby and pulled her robe together.
‘What if I could promise you a peaceful, quiet place, where everyone loved one another – with as many sweets as you could ever want?’ His voice was a hoarse whisper. He watched her, his heart thudding.
‘Jack, don’t. Please don’t wreck everything.’ She held Adrienne to her chest and closed her eyes tightly. ‘Don’t say any more.’
‘I have to be with you, Rosanna. I love you. This is our child – we belong together.’
She was silent, her eyes closed. In a moment he was on his knees before her. His face was so close to hers that he could feel the warmth of her skin. He could see the silver trail of a single tear on her cheek.
Jack slept fitfully the rest of that night, his conversation with Rosanna replaying itself over and over in his dreams. He dreamt that he woke and Rosanna had gone, taking baby Adrienne with her. He was relieved to be woken by the hungry mewing of the baby and the sounds of Isabelle in the kitchen preparing the 6 a.m. bottle. He slipped out of bed, pulled on his trousers and padded quietly down the hall. Rosanna’s bedroom door was shut. He turned the handle slowly and gently pushed the door open a crack. Feathered dawn light framed the curtains and the room was dim, but he could see she was there. He slipped silently inside and closed the door. He wanted to watch her sleeping. He wanted to watch her dream. He wanted to know who Rosanna was when she was truly alone.
Still in her blue cotton robe, she lay sprawled face-down on the bed, arms hugging her pillow, her hair a tassel of black silk against the white fabric. The covers had slipped half off the bed and one side of her body lay exposed from ankle to shoulder, her robe twisted around her. In the grey light she was a charcoal landscape of woman, rolling plains of curves and shadows. His knees felt weak and he knelt for a moment beside the bed. He brushed her hair aside and kissed her neck. Rosanna lifted her head and turned sleepily to face him. She looked as though she had not slept at all, her face puffy, dark shadows under her eyes. Her eyes filled with tears. She pulled him to her and kissed him. Wrapped in her arms he felt immersed in love. Her vehement kisses contradicted everything she had ever said to him. Spilling tears told him everything he needed to know.
Jack slipped silently from Rosanna’s room, his bare feet making no sound on the timber floor. Isabelle sat on the couch feeding Adrienne and he could feel her eyes on him as he crossed to the kitchen. Not for the first time, he realised that he was somehow afraid of her. Afraid in the way a child fears an adult who never loses their temper but grimly devises complex, devastating punishments. Rosanna, on the other hand, was volatile. It was sudden and wild but it was just anger, raw and real, and he almost envied her ability to give it a voice. He didn’t enjoy it being directed at him but neither did he fear it. Isabelle was different – she never acted without thinking long and hard, and she had an uncanny way of quietly, covertly, getting her own way.
‘Take Adrienne, please,’ she said suddenly. ‘She’s almost finished.’ Isabelle handed him the baby and left the room. He stood, startled, in the middle of the living room holding his daughter. What did Isabelle know? What would she do? What could she do? He waited. He heard her open Rosanna’s door and softly close it behind her. He heard the key turn in the lock. Then it was silent.
Jack held the swaddled package of baby while Isabelle settled herself fussily in the front passenger seat. Rosanna stood back and refused to meet his eye. She looked ruined, her robe pulled tightly around her, her hair a tangle of knots. Jack was confused. He had imagined some sort of confrontation between him and Isabelle. He longed for her to force his hand. To make him say the unsayable. Yet there was no confrontation. Nothing had changed, apart from the sparking current of anger he could feel arcing between Isabelle and Rosanna. He felt weakened and bewildered by the force of it and by his ignorance of what had passed between them.
Ignoring Rosanna, Isabelle lifted her arms towards Jack to receive the baby but, on the spur of the moment, Jack turned and handed her to Rosanna.
‘Say goodbye to your Aunty Rosanna, Adrienne.’
Rosanna’s face sagged. She avoided Jack’s eye and, with trembling hands, took her daughter. She gazed intently into her face and sang softly, ‘Ninnaò ninnaò, questo bimbo a chi lo do…’ Her voice cracked. ‘Goodbye, my darling, darling, darling …’ Soft kisses were sprinkled like tiny blessings over the child’s face. She gently handed the baby back to Jack, her eyes gilded with tears. ‘Please go now. Please.’
She turned and walked up the steps to the house. As Jack drove slowly down the driveway he watched her through the rear-vision mirror. She stood in the shadow of the doorway, her arms wrapped around herself. He could see her shoulders heaving as she slowly sank to the floor. He could feel the thread that bound them together grow tighter and more painful by the minute, like a slow constriction of the heart. Two tears forced their way out and dried on his unshaven cheeks.
Over the next few weeks Jack planned it all. He planned it backwards and forwards and inside out until he became confounded by his own contradictory emotions. He would wake one morning, determined to ask Isabelle for a divorce; the next, he would plan to leave without telling her. But with each passing day it somehow became more difficult to extract himself from the life they had together.
He spent most evenings brooding on the back porch, a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of beer for company, flicking one glowing butt after another into the darkness. Absorbed with her daughter and her new identity as a mother, Isabelle seemed indifferent to his restlessness. It seemed to him she was too happy to notice, or care, how unhappy he was.
While Adrienne napped, Isabelle wove her magic with gossamer fabrics and tangles of threads in rich creams, butter-yellow and pale pink that coalesced into christening gowns. Her skills quickly elevated her to the sweetheart of the Church guild mothers. They came to Isabelle to have their babies’ gowns made. They stayed for tea and biscuits and began to learn the finer points of embroidery, the joys of cross-stitch. Soon mothers with bundles of babies, bunny rugs and bags full of nappies and bottles tripped in and out of the house all day long.
In the company of her new coterie Isabelle was social and jovial; she had a quiet sense of confidence about her. If Jack arrived home to find a group of women in his living room they would invariably fall silent and Isabelle would say, ‘Ah, here’s my husband. It must be dinnertime!’ And they would all laugh and begin to pack up their babies and bags. It irritated him that she always referred to him as ‘my husband’ as she always referred to Adrienne as ‘my daughter’.
Adrienne was his daughter, yet he felt no connection with her. She seemed to be perpetually wrapped in a tight wad of blankets, transported from bed to bottle to bath and back again. Occasionally she was placed in his arms to free Isabelle for some other chore but he invariably spent these precious moments searching her tiny face for a glimpse of Rosanna.
Although desperately drawn to the farm, his plans seemed to stagnate; his courage deserted him daily. He was afraid of the repercussions for Rosanna and for Adrienne if he left Isabelle. He was afraid of the censure he would bring down on his own head from the moment he set any one of his plans in motion. He realised that scandal could become for him the same snake that had chased his father from one small town to the next.
His father had presented to the world as the perfect husband and Isabelle presented as the perfect wife and mother. Unlike his father, she tried to live up to this behind closed doors. Even when Jack was short with her, which he often was, she was unfailingly polite and solicitous. But there was one thing he knew she would never move on. She would not allow cracks to appear in the facade. She would never agree to a separation, let alone a divorce. And he knew that Rosanna would not consent to be with him without Isabelle’s approval. Rosanna would never ask for it and Isabelle would never give it. These problems bumped around noisily in his head like fairground dodgems, colliding recklessly out of control until they periodically ground to a halt only to start again, around and around.
He moved through each day in a daze and felt a pang of guilt when Wally tapped him on the shoulder one morning and told him he was wanted upstairs in the manager’s office. He was even more concerned when he saw Henry Mackie, one of the more senior pen-pushers from head office, sitting talking to Sid Evans, the site manager.
Henry stood, greeted Jack affably and shook his hand, gesturing for him to take a seat. The manager’s office sat high above the site so Sid could watch the workings below from relative comfort. Being summoned up to the bridge was rarely a treat. Jack sat down warily, trying to gauge the mood.
‘I won’t beat around the bush, Jack. We’ve got a proposition for you,’ said Henry. He took his pipe out of his jacket pocket and inspected the contents for a moment. Jack waited impatiently while he struck a match and huffed and puffed until satisfied it was lit. Sid rolled his eyes and glanced at his watch for Jack’s benefit.
‘You know we’ve been carrying out a joint exploration with Minearch out at Mount Zizan, near Broken Hill – your old stamping ground,’ Henry said between puffs. Jack nodded and began to relax a little in his chair. ‘We’ve found some lead intersections and sunk a shaft to 450 feet. We’ve put in a pump station at 300 feet and begun to extract the ore.’ Henry paused and relit his pipe. Finally he said, ‘We need a good mine manager, Jack – someone with your sort of experience.’
The drone of Henry’s voice as he discussed the details was overtaken by a heraldic trumpeting inside Jack’s head; the clear, clean note of freedom. His own mine. Something he couldn’t turn down. Suddenly he had permission to cut loose and be free of the suffocating life he was living. He saw himself running the mine, being his own boss. Isabelle wouldn’t want to come but Rosanna would; she too craved the freedom of the bush and the desert, the anonymity of a new start. He almost laughed with relief.
‘Yer better sleep on it, Jack,’ said Sid. ‘It might be a good career move but it’s not much chop for a bloke with a young wife and baby.’
‘I have to be honest with you, Jack, it’s a difficult site,’ added Henry. ‘It’s in a limestone valley, so it’s as wet as it gets. We’ll fly you out for a look-see, if you like.’
‘I need a few days to sort out some … family matters,’ said Jack. ‘Then I can give you an answer – oh, what the hell, yes! The answer is yes.’ He leapt up, shook Henry’s hand and then was out the door, sprinting down the rickety wooden stairs, two at a time, feeling a rush of energy and clearness of mind he thought he’d lost forever.
Isabelle accepted the news gracefully, relieved she was not expected to go. The company would pay his key money and rent for a house in Broken Hill and there would be a substantial pay increase to send home.
‘Mine manager – it sounds impressive, doesn’t it?’ she said, rocking the baby in her lap. ‘Your daddy’s going to be a mine manager, little one. We’ll be able to pay off our house and move a little closer to town, I should think.’
Jack ignored her comment. This new way of indirectly communicating her wishes through Adrienne simply exasperated him.
‘I’m going to spend a few days down in Sydney at head office,’ he lied. ‘I’ll drive down tomorrow and be back on Sunday. I might call in and check on Rosanna on the way. If you like.’
She looked up at him for a moment and then gazed down at the baby in her lap. A smile played around the lips of the good wife. ‘Please yourself,’ she said.
The gate to the farm was locked and Jack had to leave his car on the road. He had a sense of foreboding as he walked up the driveway, barely hearing the chime of the bellbirds. He began to run and stopped suddenly as he came around the bend and emerged from the trees. The house was closed up and the windows boarded over. He walked around the verandah. Every window was covered in old planks badly nailed into the window frames; Rosanna’s handiwork. He could see through the cracks in the boards that the house was still full of furniture. He walked slowly down the back steps to the patio now enveloped in the verdant green of the grape. The vine-leaf table and chairs had gone and the bricks of the patio had recently been swept clean. In the centre was the outline of a heart laid out in olives.
Fifteen
MY NEW ROOM is like a cell, three floors up, with bars on the windows. It has an ensuite and is utterly pristine. No spider could survive in here. I have views over Lavender Bay and a ten-minute train ride to work. Diane has left a note apologising for not being there, but she’ll bring dinner. The apartment doesn’t actually look as though anyone lives here. It was a display unit for the block and Diane bought it as a job lot with elegant furniture and even a stack of Der Architekt magazines (I’m almost certain she doesn’t speak German and wouldn’t have a clue about architecture) on the coffee table. With its sleek furnishings in this season’s flavours of vanilla and cocoa it looks as though it has been airlifted straight out of a catalogue. I sit tentatively on the chocolate faux-suede sofa feeling as though I’m in a specialist’s waiting room.
If I wasn’t so sure that this is how my life is meant to be I could easily get back in the ute and scurry home to Duffy’s Creek. I’m saved by the swish of the lift and Diane coming in through the door.
‘I’ve brought you a few of the joys of city life; some handmade wood-fired sourdough, and look! Organic pâté de foie.’ She plonks down a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and heads into the kitchen. ‘Now, I know how you love your toast, Adrienne.’ She pulls up a roller cupboard and slips a gleaming appliance out onto the black granite bench, where its brushed steel armour glows under the low-voltage lighting.
‘This little baby cost me $700!’ she says in a stage whisper. Even I am a little shocked. ‘You need to preheat it before you put the toast in. It’s not easy to operate – you have to know what you’re doing,’ she says importantly as she flips out a breadboard and knife and switches on the toaster. The aroma of crisping bread gives this sterile little kitchen the kiss of life.
We stack our golden slabs on outsize white dinner plates, set out crystal flutes for the champagne and settle down on the sofa.
‘Welcome home!’ says Di as our glasses collide w
ith a satisfying ding.
I want to tell someone about Rosanna. There are so many things I need to get clear in my own mind before I see her again. Every time I think of her I feel a little tug at my heart. I just don’t know where to start. I have brought both Jack’s letters with me. Mine is still unopened but the one to Rosanna has new meaning for me. It’s now a letter from my father to my mother. It’s become precious. I’d like to tell Di but I’m worried she’ll say something trite. Even if Lauren were here I’d be afraid to expose my parents to her harsh judgement – the judgement of youth and of someone who hasn’t seriously stuffed anything up – yet. It’s too tender for me and in the end I say nothing.
I’m awake early on my first day of work. I dress carefully and have to borrow Diane’s reading glasses to make up my face; the closer I get to the mirror the softer I look. I blowdry my hair and splash a little Diorissimo behind my ears. I’d forgotten how long all this takes to do.
Out on the street I can feel my sap rising as I join the people with purpose striding to the train, heads down as they determine their strategies for a challenging day ahead. This is more like it. I can’t help but feel smug as I look down at my charcoal shot-silk suit, although it is a little tighter than I remember. The heels of my Brogelio Armidi sling-backs tap out a rhythm I remember well. This is me. This is definitely me.
My confidence sags a little as I enter the foyer of DGS and the receptionist ignores me while she takes several calls. Two people walk through the reception, neither so much as glancing at me. Finally the receptionist looks up and acknowledges me with an enquiring eyebrow. I ask to see Warren.
‘Do you have an appointment?’ she asks coolly. A flush that emanates from somewhere in my belly whooshes up my chest and neck and seeps hotly over my face. I feel like tearing my clothes off to escape it. I can hardly think what to reply.
The Olive Sisters Page 20
