Daughter of Mine

by Fiona Lowe

  Harriet’s torso had straightened to ramrod stiffness and she’d gained a good two centimetres in height. ‘The two situations are not remotely comparable. One,’ she’d flicked her left thumb with her right index finger, ‘Charlotte and Hamish met at three parties, whereas Edwina appears to have—’ she’d shuddered ‘—known Doug considerably longer. Two, Charlotte is pregnant with a cluster of cells, not a baby, whereas Edwina went through an entire pregnancy. Three, a termination wasn’t easily available in 1968 so don’t go leaping to conclusions that Edwina had a choice about whether or not to have the baby. Four, medical studies have proven that postnatal depression is—’

  ‘Will you two shut up,’ Georgie had suddenly yelled, her voice filled with anguish.

  Xara and Harriet had fallen silent more out of shock that Georgie had actually demanded it, rather than obliging the request.

  ‘We’ve got a sister out there who’s almost forty-eight,’ Georgie had said into the hush. ‘Chances are she’s got kids. It’s not out of the realms of possibility that she’s a grandmother. Doug and Edwina are going to try to find her and then what? If she wants to meet us, are we going to have to just fall in line, no questions asked? And what about Doug’s kids? I’m so pissed off with Mum for dumping this on us and ruining my life.’

  Harriet, who’d recovered from her surprise, had rolled her eyes. ‘Now you’re sounding like a teenager.’

  ‘Oh, that’s rich,’ Georgie had sniped. ‘This from someone who walked away when she was told we have a sister. And what? Four hours later you’re suddenly fine with it?’

  ‘Oh, grow up, Georgie!’ Harriet had snapped as red-hot fury played across her face, deepening the lines around her eyes. ‘Of course I’m not fucking fine with it. Let me count the ways. Everything we’ve been raised to believe, everything I’ve built my life on, has collapsed around me like a house of cards. My marriage appears to have been a sham for quite some time without me being aware of it. James has buried my name in the mud and decimated my private practice. My daughter’s pregnant and planning on being a teenage mother. Now the icing on the cake is our mother has a working-class lover of dubious origin and a love child.’

  She’d dragged in a quick breath. ‘Edwina’s secret has festered inside this family all of our lives. For large tracts of time she’s been an emotionally absent mother and we’ve had to look after ourselves. When she did function, she parented by foisting duty and responsibility on us when the entire time she’d failed at it herself. This secret’s tainted us. Now it’s tainting Charlotte.

  ‘I have absolutely no intention of meeting the woman Edwina gave birth to just as I have no intention of acknowledging her relationship with that man. I loved my father and I intend to honour him.’ Pouring herself a glass of whiskey from the crystal decanter, she’d raised it to the ceiling, acknowledging Richard before downing it in one gulp. ‘I really don’t care if I never see Edwina again.’

  ‘You don’t mean that,’ Xara had said without thinking. Telling Harriet she didn’t think or want something was akin to throwing down the gauntlet.

  Harry’s beautiful eyes had hardened to navy slate. ‘Oh, I mean it.’

  For the first time Xara could ever remember, she had felt as though Georgie and Harriet had joined forces against their mother and, in a way, against her. The feeling had come with an unanticipated sense of isolation. That night when she’d gone home to Steve and crawled into the warm space beside him in their bed, she’d felt unusually needy. ‘Families suck.’

  ‘And yet we love them,’ he’d said in his usual unruffled way. ‘Doesn’t mean you have to like everyone in them all of the time.’

  ‘Yes, but aren’t you supposed to at least like one of them some of the time?’

  Now over a week later and standing on the oval where she’d once won the one hundred metres relay, Xara couldn’t accurately define how she felt about anyone in her extended family. After the disastrous evening, Georgie had stayed on with Harriet for a few days before returning to Melbourne for work. She’d told Xara she’d visit the farm before she left Billawarre, but she hadn’t made it out. Xara didn’t want to acknowledge the hurt she felt by the oversight but it was hard to ignore it. The last two years had brought her and her baby sister closer than they’d ever been so she’d tried telling herself that the lack of a personal goodbye from Georgie was immaterial. After all, they’d spent plenty of time with each over the holidays.

  Sure, they’d traded a couple of texts this week but something was different; the banality of the messages wasn’t enough to hide the new and uncomfortable distance that had entered their relationship. It sat between them, bulky and with sharp edges that jabbed. It was as if Georgie was actively pushing her away.

  And then there was Harriet. In complete contrast to Georgie’s reaction, Harriet’s response to everything that had happened was totally expected. Knowing that, though, wasn’t enough to lessen her frustration with Harriet or protect her from its effects. All week her gut had burned from acid overload and ached from the associated bloat. She was chewing so many Mylanta tablets she should take out shares in the company. Although Xara agreed with Harriet’s decision to distance herself from James, she strongly disagreed with her decision to cut herself off from Edwina and Charlotte. Why couldn’t her elder sister see this was the road to a permanent fracture in family relations? That she’d lose more than she gained?

  Xara had happily stepped up to have Charlotte stay with her and Steve while Edwina and Doug were in Mildura meeting Doug’s daughters. Xara had met his son briefly at Glenora on Easter Sunday. Apparently he’d been in town and his father had obviously told him the news about his new sister, because by the time Xara had been introduced to him, he was ashen-faced. He’d refused the offer of a drink and something to eat and had excused himself, saying it was a holiday V-Line timetable and he couldn’t miss the last train of the day back to Melbourne. Edwina and Doug hadn’t urged him to stay or offered to make other arrangements to get him back to Melbourne. Her mother’s lack of hospitality had been odd but then again, everyone had been off their game that day. Trying to digest the facts of a sister given away almost half a century ago had distracted all of them.

  It wasn’t until much later that the thought had occurred to her that if Ben had stayed the night all four of them could have talked together. He was as much affected by this news as they were. Georgie could have easily driven him back to Melbourne the next day. She wondered how Ben’s sisters were dealing with the news. At least the Chirnwell sisters had known for a week that Doug existed and recognised the signs that he was going to be a part of their mother’s life. The Pedersons may well be suffering from a double whammy of shock. She felt for those unknown people who were now connected to her in such a random way.

  Her phone beeped twice as two messages came in back to back. She pulled the device from the pocket of her denim jacket. The first text was from Charlotte. At car . The second was from Steve. She’s in recovery. All good. Be here in 15 to meet her when she’s out Sx.

  Xara released a breath she’d been holding all day. Tasha’s health was hardly robust and any procedure came with extra risks compared with a healthy kid, but they’d cleared another hurdle. Their gorgeous girl was okay. Everything to do with her daughter was part compromise, part hope and part heartbreak. She hoped the trade-off of Tasha no longer tasting much food but receiving the parenteral nutrition would benefit her immune system.

  Tasha had taught Xara and Steve that nothing in life was perfect and that expecting and demanding perfection only led to heartache. Xara immediately thought of Harriet as a case in point. Her sister’s quest for perfection in all things was costing her a relationship with her daughter and her future grandchild. Xara didn’t want to speculate if perfection had played a role in Harriet’s marriage. Even if her high standards had contributed—compelling James to consider stealing all that money—he’d been the one to make the illegal choice. Harriet’s life had spectacularly crashed and burned an
d she’d reacted by cutting herself off from family. Xara wished her sister could see that the family was her one safe place.

  She didn’t consider herself religious, in fact she’d spent a lot of her school years dodging compulsory church services, but as she walked around the school chapel on her way back to the car park, she ducked in and sat briefly in the quiet, feeling the cool air swirl around her ankles. Shafts of light, infused by the red, blue and yellow fragments of glass in the rose window, danced on the stone pillars, giving colour to the sombre grey. She gave thanks for Steve and the kids before sending up a plea that her mother, her sisters and herself would find a way through this devastating mess and come out the other side with their family still intact.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER

  22

  Georgie stepped back from the easel and bit down hard on her bottom lip, not quite certain if she was doing it to stop the tears that threatened or if she welcomed the pain. She stared at the canvas, dismayed at what she saw. What had started out as an abstract representation of fluffy white clouds high above the old trestle railway bridge was now a mess of violent colour: a shocking red bleeding heart hanging off a wooden beam and surrounded by dark pewter skies. So much for art taking her mind off things.

  Off Ben.

  It was late April and a fortnight had passed since her world had fallen apart in the garden at Glenora. Her memories of exactly what had happened that day were hazy. All she could recall was the barrage of shock that pummelled her and the accompanying gross feelings that now tainted every memory she had of Ben. He’d called and texted her solidly for two days but during that numb period, every time she saw his name, she’d flinched. No matter how hard she screwed up her eyes or chanted om, om, om, it wasn’t enough to stop disturbing images flashing through her mind. Sometimes it was her mother and Doug having sex. Other times it was a baby. Once it was Ben, her mother and a baby. These flashes appalled her and if they were her mind’s way of processing the shock, it wasn’t helping. Nothing was helping, not even teaching the terrors of 2C, whose demands had always been a challenging distraction from her out-of-school life.

  A swift volcanic rage suddenly hit her, quickening her pulse, shortening her breath and sending a bolt of heat across her skin. Drenching sweat immediately followed. Hot, cross and despairing, she set down the paint palette, stomped into the kitchen and ripped open a family-size block of Dairy Milk Chocolate. The velvet confectionary melted on her tongue, the sweet flavour giving her a moment’s relief.

  This is so freaking unfair. Meeting Ben was supposed to have been the turning point away from eighteen months of heartache and sadness, only now he’d come to embody exactly what she wanted to leave behind. All of it was Edwina’s fault. Her ineffectual mother had created this unholy mess and cast her adrift in a sea of contrary emotions that left her lurching between feeling utterly bereft and hellfire–hot fury.

  She hated being at the mercy of such savage feelings. Wasn’t it enough that she’d lost Eliza? Why did the universe think she should lose the first man she’d met since Jason who she’d dared to dream about sharing a future with? She’d never been a daughter to have particularly strong reactions to either of her parents, mostly because in so many ways they’d always seemed to be on the periphery of her life, but these surges of wrath against her mother struck her out of the blue with the same crushing intensity of that awful moment in the garden at Glenora. There, in a place she’d always experienced peace, her newly minted happiness had been brutally hacked at like a machete wielded against a thick and tenacious rainforest vine.

  She leaned heavily against the bench as the exhaustion that always followed the rage arrived. It left behind an immense sense of desolation. The intensity of these episodes made the resentment she’d experienced toward Edwina after Eliza’s funeral seem inconsequential. But her fury wasn’t restricted to Edwina—it extended to include Doug and Ben. All of them had plunged her into a daytime soapie.

  Without her knowledge, she’d been sleeping with her mother’s lover’s son and they shared a sister. Oh God. Yet again, her mouth dried and her skin crawled. She wasn’t that type of person. Those people ended up on appalling and sensationalist television shows airing their dirty linen in public and screaming abuse at each other. An overwhelming urge to scrub herself clean with a loofah hit her and she turned to the bathroom. She stopped. Over the past two weeks she’d succumbed a few times to the need to scour herself clean but the only thing it had achieved was red and stinging skin. It hadn’t done a thing to prevent the uncomfortable feelings of shame, humiliation and indignity from rushing straight back and settling deep inside her.

  Fear she was losing control of everything gripped her. She’d got close after losing Eliza and she didn’t want to go there again. Glancing over at the easel, she considered adding more drops of red paint to the pulverised heart but how would that help her? It just made her horror and heartache more real.

  Talk to someone. Xar?

  She brought up the number on her phone, stared at it then put it down. Again. The idea of telling someone wasn’t new. Her educated brain knew talking about it might help her but her reptilian brain’s survival instincts overruled her the very moment she tried to think of what would she say: ‘Oh, by the way. The guy I’ve been dating and having amazing sex with is Doug’s son. Possibly our future stepbrother. Who’d have thunk it?’

  Xara could be oddly prudish about sex and Georgie immediately pictured the look of horror that would tug at her sister’s face before she made a nauseated gasp. No way could she talk to Xara about any of it. What about Harry? Harriet’s reaction on the ick scale was an unknown quantity. What was predictable was her reaction on the I-hate-everything-to-do-with-Doug scale. Her eldest sister would shriek down the phone, ‘Have you lost your freaking mind?’

  Ruling out Harriet left talking to friends, but she was leery of that. No matter the friend, it was the sort of information that made people goggle-eyed and eager to know all the salacious details. The moment the conversation was over they’d immediately share the sordid story with others to garner gossip cachet. If she made them promise to keep it a secret, it would be the first thing to come out the next time they got drunk. Oh, my God! Wait until you hear this. You will not believe what happened to Georgie!

  Colleagues at school? Never ever. She didn’t have to imagine the chatter in the staffroom if they found out. The gossip about her and Ben would topple the football, The Biggest Loser and Masterchef as the favourite lunchtime discussions. They’d be the hot topic, providing both delicious titillation and sheer relief it hadn’t happened to them. At some point, someone would be bound to break into song with a rendition of the hillbilly classic ‘I’m My Own Grandpa’.

  Harriet had become embroiled in a social scandal that wasn’t of her own making and Billawarre was using her as both its entertainment and its scapegoat. Unlike her sister, Georgie planned to keep control over her story and she’d move heaven and earth to prevent becoming anyone’s amusement. She doubted Ben wanted their situation made public, but where did that leave her? The only person she could possibly talk to about it was Ben, but every time she thought about doing that she died a thousand deaths.

  Her almost hysterical pleas at Glenora for him to ‘just go’ made her shudder in mortification. She missed him desperately. If Ben was experiencing the same acute embarrassment that she was whenever she thought about their situation, how would they get past hello? How would she survive hearing him say, ‘You blew it, Georgie’? The only saving grace in this entire mess was that he wasn’t working at her school this term.

  Her phone beeped with a message and despite knowing it was unlikely to be Ben, her heart leapt. She checked the name—Melissa, her fellow grade two teacher—and disappointment flooded her. Hope was a bastard.

  Want to see the new James Cameron film with me and Jacob?

  Georgie’s entire body sagged and she gave in to the desolation for an indulgent moment before rolling her s
houlders back. Why not go to the film? At least it would get her out of the house and break up the agonisingly slow weekend. It would be a relief to concentrate on the storyline of the movie instead of the endless loop of her life.

  Feeling good about being proactive, she typed back: Sure. Where & when?

  We’ll meet you at the Nova at 2.30 pm.

  She knew Melissa and Jacob would have gone shopping together this morning at the Queen Vic Market, sipping great coffee as they bantered with the stallholders and debated over which feta cheese would work best in their spinach and feta lasagne. Right now they’d be having brunch in one of the Lygon Street brasseries, reading the paper and debating the current political crisis and feeling good about throwing her a bone.

  A sob broke over her lips as she texted back, Great. She was thirty-four years old, single and back to accepting charity dates from married friends.

  * * *

  There are days when magic happens and the imagination soars to tantalise with the promise of glorious and endless possibilities. Days when all the elements line up to reassure you that life is more than good: it’s extraordinary and wondrous. Harriet’s day hadn’t come close. Hell, it had struggled to reach fair, let alone mediocre. Now, at eight o’clock on a Thursday night, she was desperately seeking a win.

  After four weeks of losing more patients than she’d gained, she’d taken Debbie’s sage advice and let her receptionist go. Nicki had worked with Harriet for a long time and this afternoon’s conversation had been both difficult and excruciating. None of it had been made any easier by the fact that Nicki’s sister had been James’s PA.

  ‘Um, I thought because I worked for you my job would be safe,’ Nicki had said, her fingers shredding a tear-dampened tissue. ‘What if I cut back my hours?’