They waited for another half-hour and still no one stopped. In fact, hardly any motorists went past at all. Finally, though, a man in a big black car did stop for them. His name was Doctor Fleming, he said, and he’d been into town to pick up medical supplies but was heading home. He lived on the road beyond Kenmore Station so he would be happy to give them a lift.
Violet climbed into the passenger seat and Sam hopped into the back, lay down and went to sleep immediately.
‘Come a long way, have you?’ Doctor Fleming asked. ‘I note you have an English accent.’
Violet nodded. ‘We arrived in Wellington yesterday morning, and caught the train straight to Napier.’
‘Oh, I see. I didn’t realise you’d come that far! You are a long way from home, aren’t you?’
He was curious as to the nature of the pretty young woman’s business at Kenmore, but refrained from asking out of propriety. On the other hand, there had been serious upheavals out there lately, and he didn’t want her to arrive without being forewarned. She had come a long way and it would probably be the decent thing to at least give her the essential details.
‘Visiting, are you?’ he asked casually.
‘Yes, we are,’ she replied, and left it at that.
He tried again. ‘Anyone in particular?’
The woman turned and looked at him directly in the eye. Her own remarkably blue eyes were full of weariness and something he suspected might be close to anxiety. Her lovely English face was drawn, and there was dust and grime on her smart but clearly inexpensive coat and hat.
‘Does it really matter?’ she asked.
‘I’m afraid it does, actually. The family have suffered a bereavement recently and, well, forgive my directness, but I’m not entirely sure who will be welcome at the moment and who will not.’
Violet closed her eyes. This was the last thing she had expected to hear. She fixed the doctor with her gaze again, and he saw that his news had upset her.
‘Did you know Billy Deane?’ she asked cautiously.
‘Billy? Of course, a fine young man. Killed on Crete, a hero apparently. Tragic.’ He glanced quickly into the back seat, then back at Violet again, and his bushy eyebrows shot up as he suddenly put two and two together.
‘I say, the boy, he isn’t …?’
‘He is, actually.’
‘Hell’s bells,’ Fleming exclaimed, ‘I didn’t even realise Billy was married.’
‘He wasn’t, we weren’t.’
‘Oh, I see.’ He shrugged, a man who had seen the ways of the world change markedly in the last six years. ‘And you’re bringing him home to meet his grandparents?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Do they know?’
Violet grabbed at the door handle as the doctor swerved to avoid a rabbit on the road. ‘No, not yet.’
Fleming straightened the wheel, then thought for a moment. ‘Well, I should tell you then that it was Drew Murdoch who died, James and Lucy’s son, and Billy’s cousin. He’d been in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Burma for several years and had developed a brain tumour, although he’d apparently taken it upon himself not to tell anyone else, not even me and I’m the family doctor. The tumour was progressive, and inoperable, and when it became unbearable he took all of his medication at once and wandered off up into the hills to die.’ The doctor was silent for a moment. ‘But he was a troubled lad, Drew, apart from the tumour.’ Then he reddened, as if realising he might have gone a little too far with the Murdoch family’s confidences. ‘But I suppose we’ll never know about any of that, and perhaps it’s not our place to know. Who’s to say?’
Violet declined his offer to drive them up to Kenmore’s front door, and he let the pair of them off at the gate.
They stood at the end of the long, tree-lined driveway for several minutes, staring in awe at the elegant, two-storeyed colonial house set in beautiful, manicured gardens.
‘Come on, love,’ Violet said as she hefted their suitcase. ‘Let’s go and meet your grandparents, shall we?’
Sam was feeling better after his nap, and he smiled, transforming himself into a miniature version of Billy. He held his hand out to Violet and she took it, and together they walked towards the house.
But before they reached the front entrance, Violet stopped. There was no sign of anyone about.
‘Let’s not knock on the front door, shall we? Let’s go around the side. I’d rather do that.’
Sam shrugged — he couldn’t care less, as long as there was a lav when they got there. He was dying for a wee.
So they went around the side of the house and into the garden that lay beyond the French doors of the parlour. And then they stopped.
A tall young man was working in the rose garden, wearing scruffy trousers and an old shirt, the sleeves rolled up to above his elbows. His head was bare and his curly blond hair flopped over his forehead as he bent over, hoeing the soil around the roses, stopping now and then to pick up a weed and toss it onto the lawn, and humming to himself as he went.
Violet knew the tune. It was ‘Blue Smoke’.
Oblivious to the woman and child standing quietly next to the big, fragrant daphne, he started singing. He managed, ‘Blue smoke goes drifting by into the deep blue sky’, and then, to Violet’s shock, he burst into tears.
Dropping his hoe, he wandered over to a bench under a tree, sat down and put his head in his hands. After a minute he looked up through bleary eyes, and it was at that moment that he saw them.
If Violet was shocked a moment ago, she was mortified now.
What he saw was a young woman with the bluest eyes he’d ever seen, and long, fine hair the colour of eggshell that lifted in the breeze and settled again on her shoulders. She was holding Billy’s hand, except it was Billy when he’d been a little boy, not Billy as he had been when he’d gone away.
‘Which one are you?’ Violet asked gently.
‘I’m Liam.’
Violet nodded, because she’d already known that — he was exactly as Billy had described him, although perhaps a little older-looking than she’d expected.
‘Who are you?’
‘I’m Violet Metcalfe. This is Sam, Billy’s son.’
Liam nodded, for some reason not at all surprised at the appearance of the woman and her child. He opened his arms, and when Billy’s son shyly approached, he hugged him close and felt his tears starting again. If there was nothing left of Drew, then at least it seemed they would now still have a part of Billy.
He held out his hand to Violet, and she came forward, took it and hung on tight.
Philadelphia, July 1946
In all likelihood, it was never going to work, and she could see that now, quite clearly.
Leila moved her breakfast tray off her knee, set it on the floor and walked over to the window, where she sat in an upholstered chair and gazed out at the gracious trees and gardens surrounding the Hartmans’ house. She and Daisy were going home to New Zealand in three days’ Time, and she was grateful to the Hartmans for allowing her to spend her last week in America in peace and comfort.
It had not been Jake’s lies that had destroyed it, because they hadn’t really been lies. His family did have land, and he was a farmer. What he had not said was that the Kellys were sharecroppers who merely rented their small patch of dirt on which to grow cotton. He also hadn’t mentioned that they hadn’t had a successful harvest in almost a decade, and that his family were dirt poor, although his father, Roscoe Kelly, refused to load everything into the truck and leave, as many other sharecroppers in the north-western reaches of Oklahoma had done. He was a stubborn man, and a patriarch, and apparently would rather see his family starve than admit defeat.
It had not even been that his mother, Wynne Kelly, who after years of trying unsuccessfully to scratch out a living and feed her family from the mean and sterile soil, was an embittered and angry woman. She had resented Leila even before they met, and made no pretence about the fact that she had not wa
nted Jake to marry a foreign woman — especially one with such ‘airs and graces’, as she put it. As she had bluntly said on the morning following Leila’s arrival, there were enough single young girls — all of whom would have given their right arms to marry a handsome, virile buck like Jake — for him to have had the luxury of being able to pick and choose. But no, he had to go and get himself a fancy girl from New Zealand, who didn’t know the first thing about cotton farming, had a funny accent no one could understand and who didn’t look capable of having produced the child she already had, never mind five or six more, which was the number of grandchildren Wynne had set her heart on. And although Leila could understand her disappointment, she could not condone Wynne’s offhand treatment of Daisy. It was almost as if Wynne did not believe that Jake was the little girl’s father, even though her parentage was patently obvious when you looked at them together.
Leila was expected to pull her weight in the house and around the farm. She stood for hours in the kitchen baking and cooking in the near-primitive conditions, and in almost continual silence, as Wynne and her daughter Faith would not talk to her unless they had to. There was no electricity or running water — the stove was powered by wood, and water had to be collected in buckets from a pump in the yard and then heated on the stove. Laundry day was a nightmare, because although Wynne Kelly was a fairly basic sort of a woman she was a very clean one, and insisted that every piece of household linen, threadbare as it was, be laundered once a week without fail. It was a job that took all day, and almost broke the back of the woman allotted the job of scrubbing and rinsing, which usually turned out to be Leila.
Jake had done his best to act as a buffer between Leila and his mother, but it was very difficult when they all lived in a house that was only the size of Kenmore’s kitchen and parlour put together. Faith and her two children lived there too, Faith’s husband having disappeared some time ago, as well as Wynne’s mother, an ancient woman who, in Leila’s opinion, was even nastier than her daughter. It was extremely crowded, and although Jake and Leila initially had the luxury of a bedroom to themselves, they were soon sharing it with Daisy, who refused to sleep in the front room with the other children because they were mean to her and teased Ginny.
Poor Daisy had perhaps been affected most of all. She had spent all her short life waiting to meet her father, whom Leila had built up to be such a hero, such a wonderful, capable, larger-than-life person, that the reality had fallen well short of any expectations. Jake liked Daisy, and was very kind to her and took her out into the fields each day, teaching her about cotton farming and all the little field animals and the ways in which the weather changed and what it meant, but the bond that should have developed between them simply had not. He was aloof at times; Daisy could not understand why and naturally thought she was the cause of it, and became upset herself, and grizzly and difficult. Leila assured her day after day that things would get better, that Daddy had to get used to having a wife and a daughter after such a long time by himself, but as the weeks then months passed, even she stopped believing that.
Jake knew it was not going well, and would become upset himself and drink at night to cover his disappointment. He was not a violent drunk, and never once shouted or raised his hand to them, but he often came to bed reeking of the dreadful moonshine he consumed by the pint, and would subside into what seemed closer to a coma than natural sleep. It gave them little opportunity to talk, and even less to make love, which Leila found extremely frustrating and disappointing. The lover who had once transported her physically and emotionally to unimaginable heights of pleasure and passion had gone, and in his place was a tired, sad man barely able to sustain an erection even if he managed to produce one. At first Leila had thought it was her fault, that she had lost her appeal, and went to great lengths to tempt him sexually, but nothing had worked, and then Daisy had moved into their room, and the opportunity had been lost. But finally, and in spite of the fact that her ego was taking an immense battering, she had decided that the problem lay not with her but with Jake, and she stopped telling herself that she was responsible for the failure of her marriage.
There was no chance of her, Jake and Daisy packing up and going to live somewhere else: there was simply not the money. Leila could have asked her parents for help, but she wouldn’t, and Jake never asked her to. And he made it quite clear that he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, leave his father to run the farm on his own. Leila had accepted this, and even reluctantly admired him for it.
She opened the window and lit a cigarette. A scent wafted in — she thought it might have been magnolia. In spite of everything, it might have worked if Jake had not changed so much. Physically he had been the same, except for his problems in the bedroom, but mentally, or spiritually, he was a different man. The essential, vibrant, New Zealand Jake had gone, leaving behind only a person who looked like him. Because of her Uncle James, she knew that the root of the problem lay in what had happened on Okinawa, but he flatly refused to talk about it. Every time she cautiously raised the subject, he either changed it, or simply walked away. His face would close over, and his eyes would take on a distant, disconnected look, and that would be that. It had been hurtful, and terribly frustrating.
So after three months, she’d come to a decision. When she told Jake, he had not argued and had not defended himself. He had cried, but he hadn’t tried to stop her. The next day, he’d driven her and Daisy into Alva, where she purchased tickets for the train back to Philadelphia. They said goodbye and he’d driven off. Leila stood on the platform and waited and waited, but the plume of dust rising up behind the truck had not faltered, and finally it had disappeared altogether.
She had sat down and put her arm around her daughter.
‘I’m sorry, darling, I’m so sorry it hasn’t worked out the way we wanted it to.’
Daisy had Ginny on her knee. ‘It’s all right, Mummy,’ she said as she stroked and stroked the soft, sleek fur. She looked up. ‘But we tried, though, didn’t we?’
Leila blinked back tears. ‘Oh, yes, sweetie, we tried.’
‘That’s all right, then.’
The train had pulled in an hour later, and Leila and Daisy had been very pleased to see a familiar face waving at them from the engine.
They boarded and found themselves an empty compartment, and Leila had to physically restrain Daisy from tearing through the cars to find Jackson, whom she was sure would be busy at the moment. But he appeared five minutes later, knocking on the compartment door and waving through the glass.
‘Jackson!’ Daisy cried, and bounced out of her seat.
Leila’s heart hurt a little as it occurred to her that Daisy had never greeted her father with such enthusiasm.
Jackson came in and took off his brakeman’s cap. ‘Mind if I sit, Missus?’
‘Not at all, Mr Phelps, please,’ Leila replied, indicating the seat opposite.
He sat down, elbows on his knees and hands dangling, and watched Leila thoughtfully. Daisy was busy extracting Ginny from her box to show her friend how much the cat had grown.
After a moment Jackson asked, ‘Heading back to Philly for a vacation?’
Leila knew full well that he knew, but was grateful he was too polite to let on.
‘No, we’re going home. My sister in Philadelphia is getting married in a week’s time, then we’re going back to New Zealand.’
Jackson nodded wisely. ‘Best time for a wedding, summertime.’
‘Yes, my sister’s future mother-in-law thinks so.’
‘Hope it works out for her. Your sister, I mean.’
‘I’m sure it will. Her fiancé is a very nice man. Very decent.’
Jackson sat back and stretched his old legs out in front of him. He was wearing one black sock and one grey one, which Daisy thought was hilarious.
‘Sometimes, though,’ he said eventually as he patted Ginny’s grey head, ‘it don’t make much difference. Even if the man and the woman is both decent, it still ain’t going to w
ork. Sometimes, it just ain’t meant to be, no matter what.’
Leila stared at him.
He went on, softly but surely telling her what she so much needed to hear. ‘And when that happens, according to my old momma any way, and she did know about these things, there can’t be no blame. The things that was there to start with just ain’t there after a while. No one’s fault, it just is. So you just got to pick yourself up and keep on going, ’cause there’s always something better around the corner. For them that wants to believe that, anyway.’
‘Thank you, Mr Phelps,’ Leila said in a wobbly voice, then burst into tears.
Jackson extracted a large, meticulously folded mauve handkerchief from his uniform pocket and handed it across to her.
He sat with her for an hour, occasionally saying something quietly to Daisy who was amusing herself by trying to put a nappy on Ginny made from her own handkerchief, and simply waited.
Then he asked Daisy to go along to the dining car and order a cup of coffee for her mother and a soda for herself, and to say it was to go on Jackson T. Phelps’ tab, and it had all come out.
Leila felt immensely better afterwards, mainly because it had been the first opportunity she’d had to talk to anyone who hadn’t actually been involved. Hearing the story out loud in her own words, it all sounded quite hopeless and naive, and in retrospect doomed to failure, but she understood that what she knew now she hadn’t known then, and that made it a little easier to accept.
Jackson went away after a while, but he made sure that no other passengers encroached on Leila’s compartment, and over the next seventy-two hours she had plenty of time to think. By the time the train reached Philadelphia, she was feeling somewhat better. Still desperately sad and bereft, but a little less raw.
Bonnie and Danny were at the station to meet them, although they’d had to wait for some minutes while Daisy went to look for Jackson to get his address so she could send him a postcard from New Zealand.
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