‘I waited and waited for that boat to come.’
Emma’s anticipation peaked. ‘Yes, which boat, Grandma? Who was on the boat? Who were you waiting for?’
Gwendoline made a small sound as a trickle of sweat slid from her temple down her face. ‘Goodness, that sun is warm.’ Her shoulders went slack and Emma gripped her elbow.
‘Let’s get you out of the heat.’ She guided her towards the shade of the autoclave building and retrieved a bottle of water from her bag.
Gwendoline took slow, shaky sips. ‘Thank you, Catherine. That’s better.’
Emma ignored the slip. ‘Shall we take a walk to the wharf?’
‘Yes, let’s do that.’
With Emma on one side and Matt on the other, they led Gwendoline towards the museum and wharf. The sun was on them again as soon as they left the shade of the autoclave.
‘We used to jump off here at high tide all the time,’ Gwendoline said, pointing towards the end of the wharf. ‘Straight into the water! Oh, it was such fun.’
‘Did you see many boats come, Grandma?’ Emma said, trying to steer them back on track.
‘Yes, though from what I recall, they slowed down a little after 1924. The Spanish Influenza threat was over by then and medical research had improved. The boats still came with the sick, don’t get me wrong. But we weren’t bursting at the seams.’ She gazed towards the end of the wharf. ‘Those poor souls. They were completely ravaged by the time they walked off those ships. Sometimes death was kinder.’
‘Was there any particular boat you liked to come down here and wait for?’ Emma urged.
Gwendoline turned to her. ‘As a matter of fact, yes,’ she said, as though it was the first time she’d been asked the question. ‘I used to come down here all the time to wait for it. The big naval ship, the one with the Union Jack flag.’
‘The Union Jack flag?’
‘It was a lovely boat.’
‘Did it have anything to do with the duke?’ She suddenly wanted to shake the answers out of her grandmother.
‘The duke?’ Gwendoline said thoughtfully, as though she could sense the answers close but couldn’t quite reach them. ‘What do you know of the duke, dear?’
‘Not enough. Tell me!’
‘Emma,’ Matt said.
‘What?’
‘Calm down.’
‘I’m calm!’
He gave her a look. ‘We need to get your grandmother out of this heat.’
Emma bit down on her lip, flushing at her bad behaviour. ‘Of course. You’re right. Come, Grandma. Let’s get back on the bus where it’s cooler.’
They guided Gwendoline towards the bus, Emma berating herself for letting her impatience bubble over. It wasn’t Gwendoline’s fault that she couldn’t remember. Her mind was deteriorating and these events had taken place almost a century ago. It just seemed that whenever Emma was close to some kind of answer, it was snatched out of her hands before she could grasp it.
Back on the bus in the air-conditioning, they started to cool. Gwendoline looked tired but insisted she wanted to keep going. She stared out the window as they bumped back up Wharf Road towards the former female staff quarters.
‘This is where I believe you lived, Grandma,’ Emma said, helping Gwendoline down from the bus where a cluster of cottages could be seen through the trees.
‘This is all guest accommodation now,’ Matt said, ‘so it probably looks a little different from when you lived here with Rose.’
‘Did you know Rose’s friend, Bessie Briar?’ Emma asked.
‘Bessie Briar. Yes, I’d never met her but I knew her name. I saw it often in stone.’
Emma looked at Matt. ‘In stone?’
‘Maybe she died.’
‘I also didn’t live here in these cottages,’ Gwendoline said.
Emma gave her a double look. ‘What do you mean you didn’t live here in these cottages?’
‘I didn’t live in these cottages.’
Emma frowned. ‘But this is where Rose lived, at the female staff quarters. We read so in her diaries. She shared lodgings with Bessie Briar.’
‘She may have done so at one stage, Emma dear, but for as long as I can remember I lived in another cottage with her. I didn’t live here.’
Emma frowned. It was like connecting one piece of the puzzle only to have another piece removed. ‘Okay, so where did you live?’
Gwendoline looked around at the cluster of trees. Emma could see her brain trying to work it out. ‘Third class. The male staff quarters.’
‘You lived in the male staff quarters?’
Gwendoline shook her head and closed her eyes. ‘No, no, not in the male quarters, but near there. Oh, my useless brain.’
Emma threw her arm around her and held her close. She felt shameful for pushing her again. ‘Let’s go back to the bus. We can have a rest and a cold drink.’ She guided her to the waiting shuttle and helped her back up the steps.
Once Gwendoline was seated, Emma turned to Matt. ‘I think we should take her home. It’s hot and she’s had enough.’
Matt walked to the back of the shuttle and pulled a cooler bag from a seat. ‘Joan packed us lunch. What if we eat and then Ted drives us around for a bit? We could take a look around third class and the former male staff quarters. Gwendoline wouldn’t have to leave the bus.’
Emma looked from the cooler bag to her grandmother, who was staring vacantly out the window. ‘Okay. Maybe just one more hour, then I’d like to get her back to Eastgardens.’
‘Sure.’ Matt passed her the bag and he moved to the front of the bus to confer with Ted.
Emma unzipped the bag and pulled out neatly wrapped sandwiches, fruit, slices of vanilla cake and bottles of juice and water. She sat beside Gwendoline and they ate in silence, her grandmother still staring out the window.
After lunch, the bus rumbled to life again and Gwendoline turned to Emma.
‘I’m sorry I have trouble remembering. I know how interested you are.’
‘It’s fine, Grandma. I didn’t mean to push you.’
‘Your young man is lovely,’ she said softly. ‘What’s his name again?’
‘Matt.’
Gwendoline looked out the window. ‘He looks exactly like him.’
Emma was about to ask like who when Matt came shuffling down the aisle. ‘Ted’s going to drive us up to third class. After that, we’ll take you back to the car.’
‘Okay.’
Lunch perked Gwendoline up. On the drive to third class, she pointed at the window at things that triggered her memory. When they passed the post office peeking through the trees, she burst into a story with complete lucidity.
‘If you were from third class doing a transaction at the counter and someone from first class entered, you had to drop everything, leave the post office and allow them to enter and complete their business. Only once they left were you allowed back in to finish. It was a terrible bother if it happened four or five times in a row.’
Emma’s mouth fell open and Matt laughed.
‘Segregation,’ he explained. ‘I’d heard of that happening in the post office. Third class and Asiatics weren’t allowed in the same room as first class.’
‘They took that sort of thing very seriously in those days,’ Gwendoline said.
The bus rolled past the former Asiatic dormitories and the outdoor dining rooms.
‘Those poor little Chinamen,’ she said, face up against the glass, coherent, as if time itself were hurtling her back. ‘They would shiver through winter having to eat outside with their bowls of rice. They were the lowest of all classes. Terrible children we were. We would poke fun at their bamboo coolies and pointy beards.’
The third-class accommodation and dining room rushed by and the bus pulled up along a cluster of trees at the end of the Former Third Class Precinct.
‘Male staff quarters,’ Ted announced cheerfully.
Gwendoline was already rising.
‘Are you sure?’ Emma
said, grabbing her elbow. ‘We can just watch from the window.’
Gwendoline gave her a look. ‘I don’t want to watch from the window. I want to walk.’
They stepped down from the bus as a breeze whipped through the headland. The wind rattled the eucalypts, filling the air with the medicinal smell of their leaves.
Through the trees, Emma spotted a cluster of cottages and Matt explained that they were the former male staff quarters and, like the female quarters, they’d all been converted to guest accommodation.
‘Is this where you lived with Rose?’ Emma asked.
Gwendoline peered through the trees. She took one step, then another and suddenly her legs were moving with surprising vitality. She led them around broad-leaved paperbarks and Port Jackson figs, past the cottages and to the rear where the perimeter of the station lay; a border of snow white flannel flowers and beyond it, thick bush.
‘I lived in there,’ she said, pointing towards the trees.
Emma was perplexed. ‘You lived in the bush?’
‘Not in the bush. I lived in a cottage through there.’
Emma looked at Matt. ‘Are there any more cottages out there?’
He shook his head. ‘Not that I know of.’
‘Grandma,’ Emma said gently. ‘Perhaps you’re mistaken. There’s nothing out there but bushland.’
Gwendoline shook her head defiantly. ‘I grew up in a cottage through those trees. There was a path that used to take us straight to the cliff on the other side. I lived there with my mother and father until we left in 1926.’
Matt scoured the ground. ‘I can’t see any path. Maybe it’s grown over.’
‘Gran, Rose was a first-class housekeeper. She would have lived in the female staff quarters back up near first class. I don’t think there’s another cottage out here.’
‘There is and I grew up in it,’ Gwendoline insisted. ‘And my mother wasn’t a housekeeper.’
‘What was she then?’
‘A nurse.’
Emma heard Matt gulp audibly behind her. From the corner of her eye she saw him sway. ‘Are you okay?’ she asked. ‘You don’t look well.’
He averted his eyes. ‘I… I just…’ He swallowed several times before speaking. ‘Gwendoline, did you say Rose became a nurse?’
‘Yes she was a nurse.’
‘She didn’t just help out in the hospital from time to time? She actually became a nurse?’
‘And I thought my hearing was bad,’ Gwendoline remarked. ‘Yes, dear. She was a nurse until the day she died.’
Matt went white. ‘Yes, she was.’
‘Matt, what’s wrong?’ Emma asked.
He shook his head and ran a hand through his hair. ‘I just remembered. I have some work I need to get done before I finish today. Is it okay if I leave you with Ted and he’ll take you back to the car?’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What’s going on?’
‘Nothing, I just…’ He was still pale. ‘I’ve got a heap of stuff to do. I’m sorry. I have to go.’
‘Do you want to come to my house after work? We can order some food.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Why?’
‘I’ve got to go, Em.’
She reached out to kiss him goodbye but he turned his face and gave her a small, awkward peck on the cheek. He apologised to Gwendoline and hurried away from them, back through the trees and male staff cottages to third class, until he disappeared completely.
On the drive back to Eastgardens while Gwendoline slept, Emma was alone with her thoughts. Worried, shifting, rattled thoughts that circled her brain relentlessly.
When she reached the aged care facility and delivered Gwendoline safely back to her room, she tried calling Matt, but his phone went to voicemail. She texted him once, twice then a third time but with no response.
She had a gnawing feeling in the pit of her stomach that he was avoiding her but she didn’t know why.
Something had transpired down by the male staff cottages, when Gwendoline had revealed that Rose had given up her housekeeping role to become a full-time nurse on the station. Matt had reacted strongly to this and it had stirred up a fragment of a memory for Emma too, but she couldn’t recall why. She and Matt had ploughed through an enormous amount of content in the past weeks and frankly, those pieces were becoming a jumble to reconstruct.
Over the next few days, Matt steadfastly refused to answer her calls and Emma wondered what this mystery had cost her. He wasn’t talking to her, Gwendoline was more unsettled than ever and Emma had opened a Pandora’s Box to a world that seemed to want to be left alone.
Clearly the people of 1918 didn’t want their secrets revealed, otherwise they would have left a trail of breadcrumbs easier to navigate, rather than a pile of diaries, an old suitcase in the back of a museum and a mysterious cottage that possibly existed, according to a one-hundred-year-old woman with early-stage dementia. And how the duke fit into it was possibly the greatest mystery of all.
Gwendoline had said she was waiting for the boat with a Union Jack flag. Had she been waiting for the duke? Had he been so in love with Rose that he couldn’t keep away? But why would Gwendoline have been waiting for him? And who was her father, the kind and gentle man Rose had fallen pregnant to? What had become of him? What had become of them all?
After three days of agonising silence, Emma’s phone rang. She’d stayed back one night at The Coffee Bean to descale the coffee machine when she saw Matt’s name light up the screen.
‘I know you’re wondering what’s going on,’ he said simply when she answered.
It was an understatement and she kept quiet for fear she would say something regrettable.
‘I had some things to sort out.’
‘You’ve been ignoring me.’
There was silence down the line, a small sigh, then, ‘Can you meet me at the Q Station tomorrow? There’s something I have to show you.’
‘Like what?’
‘Can you come?’
‘I finish work at two. I can come after that.’
‘I’ll see you then. And Em?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m sorry.’
The next afternoon, Emma turned her car into the Q Station carpark and walked across to reception where Matt was waiting for her. He didn’t reach out to take her hand or kiss her.
‘Thanks for coming,’ he said with crisp politeness.
She didn’t know what to say. He looked uncomfortable and tired like he hadn’t slept. ‘Is everything okay? I don’t know what’s happened in the last few days, but you’ve got me worried. Did I do something?’
He didn’t offer any reassurances. He just stared at the ground and her heart dropped into her stomach.
‘Ted’s waiting in the shuttle,’ he said. ‘He’ll drop us near third class.’
‘Why third class?’
‘There’s something you need to see.’
They climbed into the bus and Ted greeted them cheerfully. They sat on opposite seats in silence, Emma staring blankly out the window as the familiar sights of the station rolled by, careful not to look at Matt in case she burst into a torrent of frustration. She was over the games and the heartbreak, had had enough of it to last her a lifetime and yet here she was again with life refusing to be anything but complicated.
Ted dropped them in third class at the former male staff quarters.
Emma watched him pull away and rumble back down the road. ‘Isn’t he going to wait for us?’
Matt was already walking. ‘We’re going to be a while.’
Emma jogged to catch up. ‘Why did you bring me back here?’
‘Because I have something to show you.’
‘What?’
‘There’s so much to this story we don’t know yet. We haven’t even begun to scratch the surface.’
‘Matt! Stop talking in riddles and tell me what’s going on.’
They had reached the back of the male s
taff quarters and he led her to an opening in the bush, close to where they had stood with Gwendoline only days earlier.
‘I came back here yesterday to look around again and I found the remnants of an old path. It was overgrown but I could just see it. I spent all day cutting my way through it.’
‘And?’
‘About a hundred yards to the east, the path emerges onto a clearing; a clifftop that overlooks Sydney Harbour.’
Emma stared at him.
‘Em, there’s a cottage up there.’
‘Just like Gwendoline said?’
‘Yes. I looked through the windows. I could make out beds and furniture. I think a family used to live there.’
‘A family who left in 1926?’
‘Possibly.’
Emma released a breath. ‘Gwendoline wasn’t confused. She knew exactly what she was saying.’
‘It’s the cottage she lived in with her parents.’
‘Can you take me there?’
Matt reached for her hand but then seemed to think better of it. He indicated for her to follow and they started down the path he had cleared the day before.
It was still wildly overgrown. Saplings and thick weeds had sprung up to push and weave their way across the track. Tiny furry animals scurried away at the sound of their approach and the smell of sunshine wattle and eucalyptus infused the air. A kookaburra gave a discordant laugh somewhere in the treetops and beyond the solitary tempo of the bush, Emma was distinctly aware of civilisation—ferry horns on the harbour and the chug of a seaplane.
They walked for five minutes while Matt led the way, pushing branches aside to allow Emma clear passage. The afternoon sun was hot, bearing down on them so fiercely she felt sweat gathering on her brow.
Finally, after climbing over, dodging and sidestepping a thousand branches, she found herself at the top of a cliff overlooking Sydney Harbour. A splay of bright blue ocean swept below her, dotted with ferries and tilting yachts. Across the water, on headlands lined with colourful mansions were Vaucluse, Rose Bay and Double Bay.
‘Wow,’ she said.
‘It’s some view, isn’t it?’
‘It must be the best of the station.’ She felt Matt beside her and wanted to reach out and touch him, to share in the beauty together, but something told her he would pull away if she tried.
The Quarantine Station Page 25
