by Kate Morton
‘You mean like a detective?’
He nodded.
‘They really exist?’
‘Sure.’
‘But what would Nell have wanted with an English detective?’
Ben shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I guess she had some mystery she was trying to get to the bottom of. I dropped hints for a while, tried to draw her out, but all to no avail. I let it go after that, I figured everyone’s entitled to their secrets and Nell’d tell me if she wanted to. Truth be told, I still felt guilty for the bit of snooping I’d already done.’ He shook his head. ‘Got to admit, I’d love to know. It’s played on my mind a long time, and this—’ he waved the deed, ‘—this just caps it off. Even now your grandmother has the strangest ability to confound me.’
Cassandra nodded absently. Her mind was elsewhere, making connections. It was Ben’s talk of mysteries that had done it, his suggestion that Nell must’ve been trying to solve one. All the secrets that had materialised in her grandmother’s wake were beginning to knit together: Nell’s unknown parentage, her arrival as a child at an ocean port, the suitcase, the mysterious trip to England, this secret house . . .
‘Ah well.’ Ben tossed the dregs of his tea into a pot of Nell’s red geraniums. ‘I’d better head off. I’ve a man coming to see me about a mahogany sideboard in fifteen minutes. It’s been a bugger of a sale to make; I’ll be that glad to see the end of it. Anything you’d like me to do when I’m up at the centre?’
Cassandra shook her head. ‘I’ll come up myself on Monday.’
‘No rush, Cass. I told you the other day, I’m happy to keep an eye on your space as long as you need. I’ll bring you any money they’re holding when I’m finished this afternoon.’
‘Thanks Ben,’ she said. ‘For everything.’
He stood and tucked the squatter’s chair back where it had come from, left the deed beneath his teacup. He was about to disappear around the corner and down the side of the house, when he hesitated and turned back. ‘You look after yourself now, you hear? That wind gets much stronger you’ll blow away.’
Kindly concern lined his forehead and Cassandra found it hard to meet his gaze. It offered too clear a window to his thoughts and she couldn’t bear to see him remembering the way she used to be.
‘Cass?’
‘Yep, will do.’ She waved as he left, listened as his car engine faded down the street. His sympathy, though well intentioned, always seemed to carry with it an indictment. Disappointment, however faint, that she’d been unable—or unwilling—to recover her old self. It didn’t occur to him that she might have chosen to remain this way. That where he saw reserve and loneliness, Cassandra saw self-preservation and the knowledge that it was safer when one had less to lose.
She scuffed the toe of her sneaker against the cement path and shook away sad old thoughts. Then she picked up the deed. Noticed, for the first time, the little note stapled to its front. Nell’s aged scrawl, near on impossible to read. She held it close, then further away, slowly picked out the words. For Cassandra, it said, who will understand why.
8
Brisbane, 1975
Nell ran quickly through the documents again—passport, ticket, travellers’ cheques—then zipped up her travel wallet and gave herself a stern talking-to. Really, it was becoming compulsive. People flew every day, or so she was led to believe. Strapped themselves into seats within gigantic tin cans and consented to being catapulted into the sky. She took a deep breath. Everything would be fine. She was a survivor, wasn’t she?
She made her way through the house, checking the window locks as she went. Scanned the kitchen, made sure she hadn’t left the gas leaking, the freezer ice melting, power points switched on. Finally, she carried her two suitcases through the back door and locked up. She knew why she was nervous, of course, and it wasn’t only a fear of forgetting something, or even a fear of the plane dropping from the sky. She was nervous because she was going home. After all this time, a lifetime, she was finally going home.
It had happened so suddenly in the end. Her father, Hugh, had only been dead a couple of months and here she was opening the door to her past. He must’ve known she would do so. When he pointed out the suitcase to Phyllis, told her to deliver it to Nell when he was gone, he must’ve guessed.
As she waited by the road for the taxi, Nell glanced up at her pale yellow house. So tall from this angle, unlike any house she’d seen before with its funny little backward staircase closed in years before, stripy awnings painted pink, blue and white, the two dormer windows at the top. Too narrow, too boxy ever to be considered elegant, and yet she loved it. Its awkwardness, its patched-up quality, its lack of clear provenance. Victim of time and a succession of owners, each intent on placing their stamp on its enduring façade.
She’d bought it in 1961, after Al died and she and Lesley returned from America. The house had been neglected, but its position on the Paddington slopes behind the old Plaza theatre had felt about as close to home as Nell could get. And the house had rewarded her faith, had even provided her with a new income. She’d stumbled upon the room of broken furniture locked up in the dark underneath and spied a table that took her fancy—barley-twist legs and a drop-leaf. It was in pretty bad nick but Nell hadn’t thought twice, she’d bought some sandpaper and shellac, and set about bringing it back to life.
It had been Hugh who’d taught her how to restore furniture. When he came back from the war, and the baby sisters had started being born, Nell had taken to following him around on weekends. She’d become his helper, learned her dovetail joints from her box combing, her shellac from her varnish, the joy of taking a broken object and putting it back together. It had been a long time since she’d done so, though, and she’d forgotten, until she saw that table, that she knew how to perform such surgery, forgotten that she loved it so much. She could’ve wept as she massaged the shellac into the barley-twist legs, breathed the familiar fumes, only she hadn’t been the weeping kind.
A wilting gardenia near her suitcase caught Nell’s attention, and she remembered that she’d neglected to arrange for someone to water her garden. The girl who lived behind had agreed to put milk out for the visiting cats, and she’d organised a woman to collect mail at the shop, but the plants had slipped her mind. Just went to show where her head was at, to forget her pride and joy like that. She would have to ask one of her sisters, phone from the airport, or even the other side of the world. Give them a real shock, the sort they’d come to expect from their big sister Nell.
Hard to believe they’d all been so close once. Of the many things her father’s confession had stolen from her, their loss had left the deepest wound. She’d already been eleven when the first of them came along but the instant bond had almost knocked her over. She’d known, even before Ma told her, that it was her responsibility to look after these little sisters, to make sure they were safe. Her reward was their devotion, their insistence that Nell cradle them when they were hurt, their firm little bodies pressing against hers after they’d suffered a nightmare and crept into bed beside her to pass the long night.
But Pa’s secret had changed everything. His words had tossed the book that was her life into the air and the pages had been blown into disarray, could never be put back together to tell the same story. She found she couldn’t look at her little sisters without seeing her own foreignness, and yet she couldn’t tell them the truth. To have done so would’ve destroyed something in which they believed implicitly. Nell had figured it was better they thought her strange than knew her to be a stranger.
A black and white taxi turned into the street and she held out her arm to wave it over. The driver loaded her suitcases while she climbed into the back seat.
‘Where to, love?’ he said, slamming his door closed.
‘The airport.’
He nodded and they set off, weaving through the maze of Paddington streets.
Her father had told her when she turned twenty-one, the whispered confession that rob
bed her of her self.
‘But who am I?’ she’d said.
‘You’re you. Same as always. You’re Nell, my Nellie.’
She could hear how much he wanted it to be so, but she’d known better than that. Reality had shifted by a few degrees and left her out of sync with everyone else. This person she was, or thought she was, did not really exist. There was no Nell O’Connor.
‘Who am I really?’ she’d said again, days later. ‘Please tell me, Pa.’
He’d shaken his head. ‘I don’t know that, Nellie. Your mum and me, we never knew that. And it never mattered to us.’
She’d tried not to let it matter to her either, but the truth was it did. Things had changed and she could no longer meet her father’s eyes. It wasn’t that she loved him any less, only that the easiness had disappeared. The affection she had for him, invisible, unquestioned in the past, had gained a weight, a voice. It whispered when she looked at him: ‘you’re not really his.’ She couldn’t believe, no matter how vehemently he insisted, that he loved her as he said, as much as he loved her sisters.
‘Course I do,’ he’d said when she asked him. His eyes revealed his astonishment, his hurt. He took out his handkerchief and wiped it across his mouth. ‘I knew you first, Nellie, I’ve loved you longest.’
But it wasn’t enough. She was a lie, had been living a lie, and she refused to do so any longer.
Over the course of a few months, a life that had been twenty-one years in the making was systematically dismantled. She gave away her job at Mr Fitzsimmons’s newsagency and found a new one as an usherette at the new Plaza theatre. She packed her clothes into two small cases and arranged to share a flat with the girlfriend of a girlfriend. And she broke off her engagement to Danny. Not right away; she’d lacked the courage then to make a clean break. She’d let it fall apart for months, refused to see him much of the time, behaved unpleasantly when she did consent to meet. Her cowardice had made her hate herself more, a reassuring self-hatred that confirmed her suspicion that she deserved all that was happening.
It took a long time to get over, splitting up with Danny. His knock-about face, the honest eyes and easy smile. He’d wanted to know why, of course, but she couldn’t bring herself to say. There were no words to tell him that the woman he loved, whom he hoped to marry, no longer existed. How could she expect him to value her, still to want her, once he realised she was someone disposable? That her own true family had discarded her?
The taxi turned into Albion and sped east towards the airport. ‘Where you headed then?’ the driver asked, eyes meeting Nell’s in the rear-view mirror.
‘London.’
‘Family there?’
Nell looked out of the smeary car window. ‘Yes,’ she said. Hopefully.
She hadn’t told Lesley she was going either. She’d thought about it, imagined herself picking up the telephone and dialling her daughter’s number—the most recent in a line that snaked down her index file and curled into the margin—but each time she’d dismissed the idea. In all likelihood she’d be home before Lesley even realised she was gone.
Nell didn’t need to wonder where the problems with Lesley had started, she knew well enough. They’d got off on the wrong foot and never found the right one. The birth had been a shock, the violent arrival of the screaming, bawling parcel of life, all limbs and gums and panicked fingers.
Night after night Nell had lain awake in the American hospital, waiting to feel the connection people spoke of. To know that she was powerfully and absolutely tied to this little person she’d grown inside her. But the feeling had never come. No matter how hard she tried, how much she willed it, Nell remained isolated from the fierce little wildcat who sucked and tore and scratched at her breasts, always wanting more than she could give.
Al, on the other hand, had been smitten. Smote. He hadn’t seemed to notice that the baby was a holy terror. Unlike most men of his generation, he was delighted to hold his daughter, to nestle her in the crook of his arm and take her walking with him down the wide Chicago streets. Sometimes Nell would watch, bland smile plastered on her face, as he gazed, love-stung, at his baby girl. He’d look up and in his misted eyes, Nell would see reflected her own emptiness.
Lesley had been born with a vein of wildness running through her, but Al’s death in 1961 ruptured it. Even as Nell broke the news, she’d seen the film of jaded dissolution settle in her daughter’s eyes. Over the next few months, Lesley, always something of a mystery to Nell, withdrew further into her cocoon of adolescent certainty that she despised her mother and wanted nothing more to do with her.
Understandable of course, if not acceptable—she was fourteen, an impressionable age, and her father had been the apple of her eye. The move back to Australia hadn’t helped, but that was retrospect talking. Nell knew better than to allow exhibits of hindsight into the court of self-blame. She’d done what seemed best at the time: she wasn’t an American, Al’s ma had died a few years earlier, and to all intents and purposes they were alone. Strangers in a strange land.
When Lesley left home at seventeen, hitched her way over Australia’s east hip and down its thigh to Sydney, Nell’d been happy enough to let her go. With Lesley out of the house, she figured she might finally get shot of the black dog that’d sat on her back for the past seventeen years, whispering that of course she was a terrible mother, of course her daughter couldn’t stand her, it was in the blood, she hadn’t deserved children in the first place. No matter how warm Lil had been, Nell came from a tradition of bad mothers, the sort who could abandon their children with ease.
And it hadn’t turned out so badly. Twelve years later and Lesley was closer to home now, living on the Gold Coast with her latest fellow and her own daughter, Cassandra. Nell’d only met the girl a couple of times. Lord knew who the father was; Nell refrained from asking. Whatever the case, he must’ve had some sense about him, for the granddaughter showed little of the mother’s wildness. Quite the opposite. Cassandra was a child whose soul seemed aged before her time. Quiet, patient, thoughtful, loyal to Lesley—a beautiful child really. There was an underlying seriousness, sombre blue eyes whose edges turned down, and a pretty mouth that Nell suspected might be glorious if she ever smiled with unwary joy.
The black and white taxi came to a halt outside the Qantas doors, and as Nell handed the driver his fare she pushed all thought of Lesley and Cassandra aside.
She’d spent enough of her life waylaid by regret, drowning in untruths and uncertainty. Now was the time for answers, to find out who she was. She hopped out and glanced skyward as a rumbling plane flew low overhead.
‘Have a good trip, love,’ said the taxi driver, carrying Nell’s suitcases to a waiting trolley.
‘Yes. I will.’
And she would; answers were finally within reach. After a lifetime of being a shadow she was to become flesh and blood.
The little white suitcase had been the key, or rather its contents had. The book of fairytales published in London in 1913, the picture as its frontispiece. Nell had recognised the storyteller’s face immediately. Some deep and ancient part of her brain provided the names before her conscious mind caught up, names she had thought belonged only to a childhood game. The lady. The Authoress. Not only did she now know the lady was real, she also knew her name. Eliza Makepeace.
Her first thought, naturally enough, was that this Eliza Makepeace was her mother. When she’d made enquiries at the library she had clenched her fists as she waited, hoping the librarian would discover that Eliza Makepeace had lost a child, spent her life searching for a missing daughter. But it was, of course, too simple an explanation. The librarian had found very little on Eliza, but enough to know the writer going by that name had been childless.
The passenger lists had offered little more elucidation. Nell had checked every ship that left London for Maryborough in late 1913 but the name Eliza Makepeace appeared on none of them. There was a chance Eliza had written under a nom de plume, of course, and had b
ooked passage under her real name, or even an invented one, but Hugh hadn’t told Nell which ship she’d arrived on, and without that knowledge there was no way of narrowing the list of possibilities.
Nonetheless, Nell was undeterred. Eliza Makepeace was important, had played some role in her past. She remembered Eliza. Not clearly, they were old memories and long repressed, but they were real. Being on a boat. Waiting. Hiding. Playing. And she was beginning to recall other things, too. It was as if remembering the Authoress had lifted some sort of lid. Jagged memories began to appear: a maze, an old woman who frightened her, a long journey across the water. Through Eliza, she knew, she would find herself, and to find Eliza she needed to go to London.
Thank God she’d had the money to afford the flight. Thank her father, really, for he’d had more to do with it than God. Inside the white suitcase, alongside the book of fairytales, the hairbrush, the little girl’s dress, Nell had found a letter from Hugh, tied up with a photograph and a cheque. Not a fortune—he hadn’t been a wealthy man—but enough to make a difference. In his letter he’d said he wanted her to have a little something extra, hadn’t wanted the other girls to know. He’d helped them out financially during his life but Nell had always refused assistance. This way, he figured, she couldn’t say no.
Then he’d apologised, written that he hoped some day she might forgive him, even if he’d never been able to forgive himself. It might please her to know he’d never got over his guilt, that it had crippled him. He’d spent his life wishing he’d never told her and if he’d been a braver man he’d have wished he hadn’t kept her. To wish that would be to wish Nell out of his life, though, and he preferred to keep his guilt than give her up.
The photograph was one she’d seen before, though not for a long time. It was black and white—more rightly brown and white—taken decades ago. Hugh, Lil and Nell, before the sisters came along and stretched their family with laughter and loud voices and girlish shrieks. It was one of those studio shots where the frame’s inhabitants look a little startled. Like they’ve been plucked from real life, made miniature, then repositioned inside a doll’s house full of unfamiliar props. Looking at it, Nell had the surest feeling that she could remember it being taken. She couldn’t recall much from her childhood, but she sure as hell remembered the instant dislike she’d taken to that studio, the chemical smell of the developing fluids. She’d put the photo aside then and picked up her father’s letter again.
