There was also the unsaid battle over how Maggie wore her hair – her ears covered or uncovered. Such a small thing – Leo personally loved Maggie’s sticky-out ears – but he knew Clementine didn’t. He could always tell which of them had just been with Maggie when she came to visit him in Shed Land by whether her ears were showing or not.
There had been the incident with the mothers’ group, in the early days, when Sadie and Maggie turned up late. Clementine had been beside herself with worry. Leo thought nothing of it when it happened. It was easy to lose track of the time, but more recently Sadie had been telling untruths about something else, he suspected. Telling him she and Maggie were taking short trips across to the eastern shore or up to Mount Wellington. If that was the case, why was the mileage on his car so high? He’d started keeping a record. Sadie was travelling more than sixty kilometres every week. What could he do, though? Follow her? And wherever they were going, it certainly wasn’t doing Maggie any harm. He was a doting grandfather and completely biased, of course, but he’d never seen a happier, brighter child.
If Sadie was telling lies, there wasn’t much he could do about it. He hoped he’d brought them all up to tell the truth, but he was a realist. People told lies. He was guilty of it himself. He was reminded of it every time he came into this shed. Every time he opened the cupboard and saw the basket containing Tessa’s diaries.
He could still remember the day the girls asked him about their mother’s diaries. He’d told that lie so easily. Of course he hadn’t burnt them. But neither had he read them. It was enough to know they were there and that one day, if he wanted, if it felt like the right thing, he would read them. He didn’t need to yet. Tessa was still clear in his memory. He could summon up her way of speaking, the expressions she used, with ease and with pleasure. The diaries were his insurance policy against forgetting her. One day he would read them. But not yet.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
‘So are you feeling like Little Miss Stay-at-Home?’
Sadie turned. The question had come from Liz, Miranda’s friend, home from Perth for a week’s holiday. She was almost shouting in a bid to make herself heard over the noise. Every room in the Faraday house was filled with people. Leo had decided to throw a combined party to celebrate Juliet and Myles’s engagement, to congratulate Clementine on her Maria Island project and farewell Miranda and Eliza to Melbourne. People had begun arriving at six p.m. and now, at eleven, the chat and the music were boisterous. Leo made a beautiful speech and proposed a toast to everyone. Maggie insisted on making a toast too. It involved her saying ‘To the Faraday girls,’ and clinking her glass with everyone at the party. She was still doing it long after the formal part of the evening was finished.
‘I’m not sure what you mean,’ Sadie answered Liz’s question, though she knew exactly what the other woman meant. She’d heard different variations on the same theme all evening long: ‘No big news from you, Sadie?’
Liz had the grace to look a bit uncomfortable. ‘You know, all your sisters escaping out into the world. Are you tempted to do something yourself?’
Sadie realised she’d never liked Liz. She didn’t like any of Miranda’s friends much. They were all brittle and sharp-tongued. ‘No, Liz. I’m going to stay here and become Leo’s housekeeper. Pass the news around for me, would you?’
She walked off in the direction of the kitchen. Too bad if she seemed rude. She was sick of everyone. Between all the packing of Miranda and Eliza’s belongings and the constant phone calls with removal companies and friends in Melbourne sorting out accommodation, not to mention Miranda’s new and infuriating habit of carrying on the whole time as if she was already on a plane, prancing about in air hostess-mode… Sadie had had enough.
The one good outcome was that Leo had been so occupied that he was barely setting foot in Shed Land. Sadie seized every opportunity to slip in and read some more of her mother’s diaries.
It truly was fate that she had found them. They were the only thing keeping her sane at the moment. She was having trouble filling her days, now that Maggie had started school and she didn’t have an excuse not to be at university. She was spending hours in the library, hiding there in case any of her family got suspicious that she was hanging around the house so much. She’d started taking a risk, smuggling the diaries out of the shed. It was easier to do that than sit huddled on the shed floor, nervously alert for a noise from the house or the sound of the neighbour’s dog barking. Once she was in the library with them she could settle down properly. Her ten-pages-a-day ration had been cast aside long ago. She was reading as much each time as she could.
It was so strange to read descriptions of her own father and her uncle as young men. That had been the biggest shock so far – to discover that her mother had gone out with Uncle Bill before she met Leo. If the others were to know that!
Tessa hadn’t been that impressed with Leo at their first meeting. The puppy dog, she called him in the first diary entries about him. Bill’s shadow in later ones. Tessa had guessed Leo had a crush on her early on. He blushes whenever I talk to him. So sweet.
There were pages about her feelings for Bill and their on–off relationship. Sadie was embarrassed to read some of them. She really shouldn’t know these intimate things about another person, especially when the other person was her uncle and the narrator was her own mother. What must Leo have thought when he read them? Sadie wondered. Of course, he would have already known about Bill and Tessa, but even so…
Tessa certainly hadn’t been bowled over by love-at-first-sight for Leo, Sadie was just as uncomfortable to discover. She started going out with him only as a way of getting back at Bill. It worked in the early days. Bill had been jealous and he and Tessa had a short, disastrous reunion. A weekend away to Manchester together. So wonderful to feel Bill’s arms around me again. But they had fought all weekend. I would be crazy not to stay with Leo. He’s so devoted. It’s so nice to be loved so much by someone. There was an engagement followed weeks later by a wedding. A honeymoon in Paris. Romantic, Tessa wrote. I didn’t tell Leo, of course, but Bill and I once stayed in the same hotel. Once again, Sadie winced as she imagined her father reading these same words.
While Clementine continued to make preparations for her Maria Island study and Juliet, Miranda and Eliza finalised their packing, Sadie kept reading. The diaries were turning into an addiction. Her mother had a very sharp wit, Sadie was discovering. A nasty wit, even, now and again. Sadie had been reminded of Miranda more than once. Tessa wasn’t just dismissive of Leo occasionally, but about some of their friends too. Sadie was fascinated all the same.
Juliet noticed something was going on. She surprised Sadie one afternoon as she was sitting in the living room, thinking back to the entry she’d read the week before – Tessa’s description of being pregnant with Juliet, as it happened: I feel so full, in an odd but good way, as if every part of me is made from cream, all rich and smooth.
‘What are you sitting here all daydreamy about?’
Sadie jumped. She’d been so deep in thought, imagining her mother pregnant, imagining that same feeling in her own body, that it was almost a shock to see the grown-up Juliet beside her. ‘Nothing,’ she said.
The next time Sadie was in the shed she was tempted to skip past several diaries, to get to her own arrival into the family. How many people got to read what their mother thought about being pregnant with them? Or what they were like as children? Especially in this sort of detail.
As the family began to grow, there were comments about Juliet, and Miranda, as infants, then toddlers. The funny things they said. Observations about how different they were to one another, how Juliet reminded Tessa of Leo, how she saw more of herself in Miranda. In the last entry Sadie read, Tessa had just discovered she was pregnant again. She wasn’t completely happy about it, complaining of tiredness and nausea already. I’m like clockwork, one baby every two years. Leo barely needs to look at me and I’m pregnant. It must be the Catholic in him.
She mused over whether she wanted a boy or a girl and what names she might choose. She had decided all the names would come from books or songs. I loved knowing my own name was from Tess of the D’Urbervilles so I’m carrying on the tradition. Leo can choose their middle names. If this one is a boy I think I shall call him Darcy. Sadie had to stop herself saying to the page, ‘It’s a girl! You’re going to call her Eliza!’ It meant Sadie’s own birth was only one diary – two years – away now.
Occasional feelings of guilt still crept up on her. Not just about reading the diaries, or going in and out of Leo’s shed without asking, but about keeping what she knew from her sisters. She nearly told Clementine one afternoon, when they were sharing a peaceful moment together in the kitchen. It didn’t happen often these days.
‘Do you still wish you could ask Mum what it was like to have children?’ she asked.
‘Of course,’ Clementine said. ‘It still hurts when I see other mothers with their own mothers. I wish it for Maggie as much as for me. I’d love her to have known her grandmother, to have heard all her stories.’
Sadie was surprised by Clementine’s honesty. A little shamed too.
As she kept reading, Sadie came across snippets she knew Clementine, of all her sisters, would liked to have heard. The fact that Juliet hadn’t slept properly through the night until she was four years old. That Tessa had been beside herself with tiredness, caring for a small girl and a new baby – Miranda – at the same time, not to mention two years later, after Eliza’s arrival, when she had three daughters under the age of five. Days had gone by without diary entries. Sadie took special delight in reading that Miranda had been a bad-tempered baby, slow to learn to feed and covered in milk-spots. She also produced the most evil-smelling nappies. In the diary Sadie was presently reading, Eliza was two months old. She was already active, Sadie had been amused to read. This baby kicks and wriggles all day long, Tessa wrote.
Leo was barely mentioned. He seemed to work a lot, come home for lunch and help Tessa with some housework, return to work, then come back home again before six for his tea. She hardly referred to his job with a tree nursery based outside London. She wrote about the weather, about snowfalls and about new recipes she had tried. Juliet a great help in the kitchen. Sadie smiled at that too. Mentions of Bill turned up occasionally in the pages, a report that he had phoned, or that a letter had arrived. Sadie was trying to read between the lines as much as she could. She was sure she wasn’t mistaken. Her mother still carried a torch for Bill.
Clementine, Juliet, Miranda and Eliza would love reading all of this too, Sadie knew. And they would get to read it. Not just yet, though. In a month or so. She wanted to read all the diaries first. And as soon as she had, she would tell her sisters she’d found them. She wondered how they would react. Whether they would decide to ask Leo if they could read them, or if it would happen in secret? They’d have to decide that among themselves.
For the time being, Sadie would keep reading. The really good stuff was about to happen, after all, she thought with a smile. She was about to arrive.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Maggie was used to hearing voices filtering down the hallway while she tried to get to sleep. Usually it was her mother and her aunts. Sometimes her mother had friends over from the university. Sometimes she could hear Tadpole’s voice too, the nights he wasn’t out working in his shed.
She loved the sound of their voices. It made her feel happy. Tonight she knew all the voices well and could get a picture of each of them in her head. She also knew she was the one they were talking about. Her mum had told her earlier she was going to discuss it tonight, while the five of them were still together. She had cleared it with Maggie first. That was how she put things. ‘It’s just the two of us, Maggie, so I want to clear it with you first, to make sure you know what I am going to talk about. I know you’re only five years old, but it affects you more than anyone.’
Maggie really liked it when her mum talked to her like that. She liked lots of things about her mum. The fact they looked really alike: dark-brown straight hair and dark-brown eyes. The way her mum would tuck her into bed, stroke her hair and say, ‘Tell me about your day, Maggie.’ The fact her mum was only seventeen years older than her. She liked how clever she was, the way she had found out all these things about birds before anyone else did and the way she was in the magazines sometimes. Not pop magazines or magazines with recipes in them like her friends’ mothers had in their houses. Science magazines from the university, with photos of the birds she studied, and the thing she had discovered that was happening to their feathers because of too much dirt in the air, and the research she wanted to do.
‘Won’t it be boring?’ Maggie had asked when her mum said this study could last at least twenty years.
‘That’s the fantastic thing about it, Maggie. I’ll be able to really test my research, make sure what I am saying is true, not just guesswork. And I’ll be there on the ground, not getting other people to do my work for me.’
‘And tell me again what will happen tonight?’ Maggie had asked.
‘We’ll decide who you go to stay with while I’m away on Maria Island in two months’ time. And who it will be the next time and the time after that. It’s going to be a battle, Maggie. Your four aunts will fight about who gets you first.’
Maggie turned in the flannelette sheet, hugged the hot-water bottle in its cuddly penguin-shaped cover against her body and smiled a little secret smile. She didn’t mind which of them won the fight. She was happy whichever way it went.
‘It’s all organised, Maggie,’ Clementine said to her the next morning at breakfast. ‘You’ll stay with Miranda in Melbourne when I first go away, then Juliet and Myles in Sydney, then Eliza in Melbourne again, then Sadie here in Hobart. We did a draw and that’s how it came out. What do you think?’
‘I love it,’ Maggie said simply.
There were lots of things going on in the house after that. Eliza and Miranda packing up their suitcases, putting other things away in boxes in the attic. Maggie went halfway up the ladder once but then got a bit dizzy and came down. She’d go all the way up the ladder when she was seven, she decided.
There were three trips to the airport. The first time to say goodbye to Eliza. The second time to say goodbye to Myles and Juliet. The third time to say goodbye to Miranda. Maggie was put in charge of making the farewell cards. She drew a picture of herself with an unhappy mouth and tears coming out of her eyes. The amazing thing was that everyone else had tears coming out of their eyes too these days. Especially at the airport.
‘Is the airport always a sad place?’ Maggie asked Sadie on their third visit. ‘All we do here is cry.’
The house went quiet then. Maggie found it strange at first that Juliet, Eliza and Miranda weren’t there any more. They rang all the time though. She talked to each of them every week.
‘Is Juliet Myles’s wife now?’ Maggie asked Leo one morning at breakfast.
‘No, not yet,’ Leo said.
‘Is she allowed to live in the house with Myles if she isn’t his wife?’
Leo coughed. ‘It’s not an ideal situation, Maggie, but they are adults.’
Maggie liked the words ‘ideal situation’. She said them as often as she could over the next few weeks until Sadie, and then Clementine, asked her to stop.
Eliza and Miranda were both in Melbourne, but Eliza was living with a friend near the beach and Miranda was staying near the airport with lots of other people from her work. Clementine explained that Miranda had talked to her bosses and they had told her she could have a break between her training finishing and her real job starting. ‘And that’s when you’ll be there,’ Miranda said. ‘It’s worked out perfectly for everyone.’
Maggie liked those words too. For the next week she said, ‘it’s worked out perfectly for everyone’ as often as she could.
She started visiting Tadpole in his shed more often. Apart from Clementine, Tadpole was the cleverest person she
had ever met. He knew the answers to everything. She had a question she wanted to ask him. She’d asked her mother about it a long time ago but she had forgotten the answer. She did the special knock to let Tadpole know it was her – five little raps on the centre panel of the shed door, one rap for each of her years.
He put down the small silver tool he was holding. There was a little roll of wire beside him and next to that, a pin-cushion with what looked like hundreds of pins stuck in it. ‘Yes, Maggie?’
Her attention was captured by the pin-cushion. She got that feeling, like an itch, to count them. She was like that whenever she saw lots of things in a row. Trees in a park. Birds on a wire. Sometimes her mum was patient about it and would wait until she counted them, but sometimes not. Sadie always let her count things.
‘Maggie?’
She turned her attention away from the pins. ‘Tadpole, where did I come from?’
‘Let me guess. The kitchen?’
‘No, where did I come from to be here, in this family?’
‘We all got together and decided it was too quiet so we got you to make things noisy for us.’
‘Really?’
‘Not exactly. What’s brought this on, Miss Maggie?’
‘A boy at school told me I grew in Mum’s stomach like an alien and then she vomited me up.’
‘What a silly boy. Of course that’s not where you came from.’ He stepped away from the stool and with a groan crouched down until he was at eye level with her. ‘Do you remember me talking about that dog we had once? When your grandmother was still here with us and your mum was a little girl?’
Those Faraday Girls Page 18
