by Kate Morton
Cassandra dunked her hands into the sink and moved the contents about some more.
‘Well I think that went splendidly,’ said Phyllis, the eldest after Nell and the bossiest by far. ‘Nell would’ve liked it.’
Cassandra glanced sideways.
‘That is,’ Phyllis continued, pausing a jot as she dried, ‘she would’ve once she’d finished insisting she hadn’t wanted one in the first place.’ Her mood turned suddenly maternal. ‘And how about you? How’ve you been keeping?’
‘I’m all right.’
‘You look thin. Are you eating?’
‘Three times a day.’
‘You could do with some fattening up. You’ll come for tea tomorrow night, I’ll invite the family, make my cottage pie.’
Cassandra didn’t argue.
Phyllis glanced warily about the old kitchen, took in the sagging range hood. ‘You’re not frightened here by yourself?’
‘No, not frightened—’
‘Lonely, though,’ said Phyllis, nose wrinkling with extravagant sympathy. ‘Course you are. Only natural, you and Nell were good company for each other, weren’t you?’ She didn’t wait for confirmation, rather laid a sun-spotted hand on Cassandra’s forearm and pressed on with the pep talk. ‘You’re going to be all right though, and I’ll tell you why. It’s always sad to lose someone you care for, but it’s never so bad when it’s an oldie. It’s as it should be. Much worse when it’s a young—’ She stopped mid-sentence, her shoulders tensed and her cheeks reddened.
‘Yes,’ said Cassandra quickly, ‘of course it is.’ She stopped washing cups and leaned to look through the kitchen window into the backyard. Suds slipped down her fingers, over the gold band she still wore. ‘I should get out and do some weeding. The nasturtium’ll be across the path if I’m not careful.’
Phyllis clutched gratefully the new string of purpose. ‘I’ll send Trevor round to help.’ Her gnarled fingers tightened their grip on Cassandra’s arm. ‘Next Saturday all right?’
Aunt Dot appeared then, shuffling in from the lounge room with another tray of dirty teacups. She rattled them onto the bench and pressed the back of a plump hand to her forehead.
‘Finally,’ she said, blinking at Cassandra and Phyllis through impossibly thick glasses. ‘That’s the last of them.’ She waddled into the kitchen proper and peered inside a circular cake container. ‘I’ve worked up quite a hunger.’
‘Oh Dot,’ said Phyllis, relishing the opportunity to channel discomfort into admonition, ‘you’ve just eaten.’
‘An hour ago.’
‘With your gall bladder? I thought you’d be watching your weight.’
‘I am,’ said Dot, straightening and cinching her sizable waist with both hands. ‘I’ve lost half a stone since Christmas.’ She refastened the plastic lid and met Phyllis’s dubious gaze. ‘I have.’
Cassandra suppressed a smile as she continued to wash the cups. Phyllis and Dot were each as round as the other, all the aunts were. They got it from their mum, and she from her mum before. Nell was the only one who’d escaped the family curse, who took after her lanky Irish dad. They’d always been a sight together, tall, thin Nell with her round, dumpling sisters.
Phyllis and Dot were still bickering and Cassandra knew from experience that if she didn’t provide a distraction the argument would escalate until one (or both) tossed down a tea towel and stormed off home in high dudgeon. She’d seen it happen before yet had never quite grown accustomed to the way certain phrases, eye contact that lasted a mite too long, could relaunch a disagreement started many years before. As an only child, Cassandra found the well-worn paths of sibling interaction fascinating and horrifying in equal parts. It was fortunate the other aunts had already been shepherded away by respective family members and weren’t able to add their two cents’ worth.
Cassandra cleared her throat. ‘You know, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask.’ She lifted her volume a little; she’d almost got their attention. ‘About Nell. Something she said in the hospital.’
Phyllis and Dot both turned, cheeks similarly flushed. The mention of their sister seemed to settle them. Remind them why they were gathered here, drying teacups. ‘Something about Nell?’ said Phyllis.
Cassandra nodded. ‘In the hospital, towards the end, she spoke about a woman. The lady, she called her, the authoress. She seemed to think they were on some kind of boat?’
Phyllis’s lips tightened. ‘Her mind was wandering, she didn’t know what she was saying. Probably a character from some television show she’d been watching. Wasn’t there some series she used to like, set on a boat?’
‘Oh Phyll,’ said Dot, shaking her head.
‘I’m sure I remember her talking about it . . .’
‘Come on, Phyll,’ said Dot. ‘Nellie’s gone. There’s no need for all of this.’
Phyllis folded her arms across her chest and huffed uncertainly.
‘We should tell her,’ said Dot gently. ‘It won’t do any harm. Not now.’
‘Tell me what?’ Cassandra looked between them. Her question had been asked to pre-empt another family row; she hadn’t expected to uncover this strange hint of secrecy. The aunts were so focused on one another, they seemed to have forgotten she was there. ‘Tell me what?’ she pressed.
Dot raised her eyebrows at Phyllis. ‘Better to have it come from us than for her to find out some other way.’
Phyllis nodded almost imperceptibly, met Dot’s gaze and smiled grimly. Their shared knowledge made them allies again.
‘All right, Cass. You’d better come and sit down,’ she said finally. ‘Put the kettle on, will you Dotty love? Make us all a nice cuppa?’
Cassandra followed Phyllis into the sitting room and took a seat on Nell’s sofa. Phyllis eased her wide rear onto the other side and worried a thread loose. ‘Hard to know where to start. Been so long since I thought about it all.’
Cassandra was perplexed. All of what?
‘What I’m about to tell you is our family’s big secret. Every family’s got one, you can be sure of that, some are just bigger than others.’ She frowned in the direction of the kitchen. ‘Now what’s taking Dot so long? Slow as a wet week, she is.’
‘What is it, Phyll?’
She sighed. ‘Promised myself I’d never tell anyone else. The whole thing has caused so much division in our family already. Would that Dad had kept it to himself. Thought he was doing the right thing though, poor bugger.’
‘What did he do?’
If Phyllis heard, she made no acknowledgement. This was her story and she was going to tell it her way and in her own sweet time. ‘We were a happy family. We hadn’t much of anything but we were happy enough. Ma and Pa and we girls. Nellie was the eldest, as you know, then a gap of a decade or so on account of the Great War, then the rest of us.’ She smiled. ‘You wouldn’t credit it, but Nellie was the life and soul of the family back then. We all adored her—thought of her as a mother of sorts, did we younger ones, especially after Ma got sick. Nell looked after Ma so carefully.’
Cassandra could imagine Nell doing that, but as for her prickly grandmother being the life and soul of the family . . . ‘What happened?’
‘For a long time none of us ever knew. That’s the way Nell wanted it. Everything changed in our family and none of us knew why. Our big sister turned into somebody else, seemed to stop loving us. Not overnight, it wasn’t as dramatic as all that. She just withdrew, bit by bit, extricated herself from the lot of us. Such a mystery, it was, so hurtful, and Pa wouldn’t be drawn on the subject no matter how we needled him.
‘It was my husband, God rest him, who finally put us on the right path. Not intentionally, mind—it wasn’t like he set out to discover Nell’s secret. Fancied himself a bit of a history buff, that’s all. Decided to put together a family tree once our Trevor was born. Same year as your mum, 1947 that was.’ She paused and eyed Cassandra shrewdly, as if waiting to see whether she had somehow intuited what was coming. She had
not.
‘One day he came into my kitchen, I remember it clear as day, and said he couldn’t find any mention of Nellie’s birth in the registry. “Well of course not,” I said. “Nellie was born up in Maryborough, before the family pulled up sticks and moved to Brisbane.” Doug nodded then and said that’s what he’d thought, but when he’d sent away for details from Maryborough they told him none existed.’ Phyllis looked meaningfully at Cassandra. ‘That is, Nell didn’t exist. At least not officially.’
Cassandra looked up as Dot came in from the kitchen and handed her a teacup. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Of course you don’t, pet,’ said Dot, sitting herself in the armchair beside Phyllis. ‘And for a long time, neither did we.’ She shook her head and sighed. ‘Not until we spoke to June. At Trevor’s wedding, that was, wasn’t it Phylly?’
Phyllis nodded. ‘Yes, 1975. I was that mad at Nell. We’d only recently lost Pa and here was my eldest boy getting married, Nellie’s nephew, and she didn’t even bother to show. Took herself off on holiday instead. That’s what got me talking that way with June. I don’t mind saying I was having a good old whinge about Nell.’
Cassandra was confused, she’d never been great at keeping track of the aunts’ extensive web of friends and family. ‘Who’s June?’
‘One of our cousins,’ said Dot, ‘on Ma’s side. You’d have met her at some point, surely? She was a year or so older than Nell and the two of them thick as thieves when they were girls.’
‘Must’ve been close,’ said Phyllis, with a sniff. ‘June was the only one Nell told when it happened.’
‘When what happened?’ said Cassandra.
Dot leaned forward. ‘Pa told Nell—’
‘Pa told Nell something he never should’ve,’ said Phyllis quickly. ‘Thought he was doing the right thing, poor man. Regretted it the rest of his life, things were never the same between them.’
‘And he was always partial to Nell.’
‘He loved us all,’ snapped Phyllis.
‘Oh Phyll,’ said Dot, rolling her eyes. ‘Can’t admit it even now. Nell was his favourite, pure and simple. Ironic, as it turns out.’
Phyllis didn’t respond, so Dot, pleased to take the reins, continued. ‘It happened on the night of her twenty-first birthday,’ she said. ‘After her party—’
‘It wasn’t after the party,’ said Phyllis, ‘it was during.’ She turned towards Cassandra. ‘I expect he thought it was the perfect time to tell her, beginning of her new life and all that. She was engaged to be married, you know. Not your grandpa, another fellow.’
‘Really?’ Cassandra was surprised. ‘She never said anything.’
‘Love of her life, you ask me. Local boy, not like Al.’
Phyllis spoke the name with a lick of distaste. That the aunts had disapproved of Nell’s American husband was no secret. It wasn’t personal, rather the shared disdain of a citizenry resenting the influx of GIs who’d arrived in World War Two Brisbane with more money and smarter uniforms, only to abscond with a fair whack of the city’s womenfolk.
‘So what happened? Why didn’t she marry him?’
‘She called it off a few months after the party,’ said Phyllis. ‘Such an upset. We were all of us so fond of Danny, and it broke his heart, poor fellow. He married someone else eventually, just before the second war. Not that it brought him much happiness, he never came back from fighting the Japs.’
‘Did her father tell Nell not to marry him?’ said Cassandra. ‘Is that what he told her that night? Not to marry Danny?’
‘Hardly,’ Dot scoffed. ‘Pa thought the sun shone out of Danny. None of our husbands ever matched up.’
‘Then why did she break it off?’
‘She wouldn’t say, wouldn’t even tell him. Nearly drove us round the bend trying to figure it out,’ said Phyllis. ‘All we knew was that Nell wouldn’t talk to Pa, and she wouldn’t talk to Danny.’
‘All we knew until Phylly spoke to June,’ said Dot.
‘Near on forty-five years later.’
‘What did June say?’ said Cassandra. ‘What happened at the party?’
Phyllis took a sip of tea and raised her eyebrows at Cassandra. ‘Pa told Nell she wasn’t his and Ma’s.’
‘She was adopted?’
The aunts exchanged a glance. ‘Not exactly,’ said Phyllis.
‘More like she was found,’ said Dot.
‘Taken.’
‘Kept.’
Cassandra frowned. ‘Found where?’
‘On the Maryborough wharf,’ said Dot. ‘Where the big ships used to come in from Europe. They don’t now, of course, there’s much bigger ports, and most people fly these days—’
‘Pa found her,’ Phyllis interjected. ‘When she was just a wee thing. It was right before the Great War started. Folks were leaving Europe in droves and we were only too happy to take them here in Australia. Pa was the port master at the time, it was his job to see to it that those that were travelling were all who they said they were, had arrived where they meant to. Some of them had no English to speak of.
‘As I understand it, one afternoon there was something of a kerfuffle. A ship came into port after a shocking journey from England. Typhoid infections, sunstroke, they’d had the lot, and when the ship arrived there were extra bags and persons unaccounted for. It was all a mighty headache. Pa managed to get it sorted, of course—he was always good at keeping things in order—but he waited around longer than usual to be sure and let the night watchman know all that had happened, explain why there were extra bags in the office. It was while he was waiting that he noticed there was still someone left on the docks. A little girl, barely four years old, sitting on top of a child’s suitcase.’
‘No one else for miles,’ said Dot, shaking her head. ‘She was all alone.’
‘Pa tried to find out who she was, of course, but she wouldn’t tell him. Said she didn’t know, she couldn’t remember. And there was no name tag attached to the suitcase, nothing inside that would help either, not as far as he could tell. It was late though, and getting dark, and the weather was turning bad. Pa knew she must be hungry, so eventually he decided there was nothing for it but to take her home with him. What else could he do? Couldn’t just leave her there on the rainy docks all night, could he?’
Cassandra shook her head, trying to reconcile the tired and lonely little girl of Phylly’s story with the Nell she knew.
‘As June tells it, next day he went back to work expecting frantic relatives, police, an investigation—’
‘But there was nothing,’ said Dot. ‘Day after day there was nothing, no one said anything.’
‘It was as if she’d left no trace. They tried to find out who she was, of course, but with so many people arriving each day . . . There was so much paperwork. So easy for something to slip through the cracks.’
‘Or someone.’
Phyllis sighed. ‘So they kept her.’
‘What else could they do?’
‘And they let her think she was one of theirs.’
‘One of us.’
‘Until she turned twenty-one,’ said Phyllis. ‘And Pa decided she should know the truth. That she was a foundling with nothing more to identify her than a child’s suitcase.’
Cassandra sat silently, trying to absorb this information. She wrapped her fingers around her warm teacup. ‘She must have felt so alone.’
‘Too right,’ said Dot. ‘All that way by herself. Weeks and weeks on that big ship, winding up on an empty dock.’
‘And all the time after.’
‘What do you mean?’ Dot said, frowning.
Cassandra pressed her lips together. What did she mean? It had come to her in a wave. The certainty of her grandmother’s loneliness. As if in that moment she had glimpsed an important aspect of Nell that she’d never known before. Or rather, she suddenly understood an aspect of Nell she’d known very well. Her isolation, her independence, her prickliness. ‘She must have felt so alone when sh
e realised she wasn’t who she’d thought she was.’
‘Yes,’ said Phyllis, surprised. ‘Must admit, I didn’t see that at first. When June told me, I couldn’t see that it changed things all that much. I couldn’t for the life of me understand why Nell had let it affect her so badly. Ma and Pa loved her well and we younger ones worshipped our big sister; she couldn’t have hoped for a better family.’ She leaned against the sofa’s arm, head on hand, and rubbed her left temple wearily. ‘As time’s gone on, though, I’ve come to realise—that happens, doesn’t it? I’ve come to see that the things we take for granted are important. You know, family, blood, the past . . . They’re the things that make us who we are and Pa took them from Nell. He didn’t mean to, but he did.’
‘Nell must’ve been relieved that you finally knew, though,’ said Cassandra. ‘It must’ve made it easier in some way.’
Phyllis and Dot exchanged a glance.
‘You did tell her you’d found out?’
Phyllis frowned. ‘I almost did a number of times, but when it came down to it I just couldn’t find the words, I couldn’t do it to Nell. She’d gone so long without breathing a word of it to any of us, she’d rebuilt her entire life around the secret, worked so hard at keeping it to herself. It seemed . . . I don’t know . . . almost cruel to tear down those walls. Like taking the wool out from under her a second time.’ She shook her head. ‘Then again, perhaps that’s all claptrap. Nell could be fierce when she wanted to, perhaps I just didn’t have the courage for it.’
‘It’s nothing to do with courage or its lack,’ said Dot firmly. ‘We all agreed it was for the best. Nell wanted it that way.’
‘I suppose you’re right,’ said Phyllis. ‘All the same. It’s not like there weren’t opportunities, the day Doug took the suitcase back for one.’
‘Just before Pa died,’ Dot explained to Cassandra, ‘he had Phylly’s husband drop the suitcase over to Nell. Not a word as to what it was, mind. That was Pa, as bad as Nell for keeping secrets. He’d had it hidden away all those years, you see. Everything still inside, just as when he found her.’
