Her sisters were appalled, of course. She’d given them enough information to whet their appetites and then turned the conversational tables. What they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them had always been her motto. She felt so much older and worldlier than them all. But she always had, hadn’t she? Juliet might be older in years but there had always been something innocent about her. Eliza and she had never really had much in common. Miranda found her far too humourless, when it came down to it. Judgemental too. Clementine was different, of course – as driven as Eliza, but Miranda had always had a soft spot for her littlest sister. And Sadie? What could she say about Sadie? If all of that business hadn’t happened, if Sadie hadn’t pulled that ridiculous stunt with Maggie and walked out on them all, if she’d stayed in Hobart, as Miranda had expected her to – would she have still found her as annoying?
She thought about Sadie often. She knew all her sisters did. She looked out for her on planes, in airports, in the different cities she travelled to. She tried to imagine what she’d look like these days. The idea of her being a hippy had become so entrenched Miranda often pictured her sister in baggy rainbow trousers, braless in a singlet – images she knew herself were long out of date.
She’d never told her father or her sisters, but she went looking for Sadie once, when she found herself at a weekend house party in Byron Bay, not far from where Leo and Clementine had discovered her and Maggie that time. If Sadie truly had become a hippy, she couldn’t have chosen a more beautiful place. It was all sky and sea and green hills, the light changing from hour to hour, the atmosphere relaxed, the shops on the main street dedicated to crystals, whole foods, chakras and chanting. Miranda couldn’t get out of the place fast enough. Not before making a few casual enquiries, though. She asked at four of the shops, in two of the pubs, in one of the caravan parks. No one had heard of a Sadie Faraday. Two people did ask her if she wanted a massage, though.
Miranda had been glad when the cards started arriving each year from Sadie. The unspoken thought in the family was that she’d done something drastic. Really gone off the deep end. Taken to drink or drugs, or fallen into some black pit of despair. The annual cards didn’t point to that, though. Brief as they were, Sadie’s tone to Maggie was always cheerful. ‘Things are going great with me,’ she often wrote. She never mentioned Leo or any of her sisters in her cards. It was as if she had wiped them from her life.
‘Excuse me, but may I take a look at your newspaper?’ It was the gentleman beside her.
She turned. ‘Of course you can. Help yourself,’ she said in what she liked to think of as her sexy voice, pitched just that bit lower than usual. She watched his smile widen. Honestly, all men were the same. She’d lost count of the times she’d been asked about her newspaper – the best on-board conversation starter, it seemed. This was a twelve-hour flight. No point in engaging in too much conversation with him yet, though. She’d read instead.
She picked up her book from the seat pocket in front of her. Maggie’s latest card was tucked inside as a bookmark. She thought of the last time she’d seen her niece, three months earlier. She’d been in France on holiday when she got the distraught phone call on her mobile, Maggie in such floods of tears it had taken Miranda some time to understand what she was saying. She’d almost made a joke about it: ‘Let me get this straight, Maggie. A man at work put a gun to his head and then you came home to find Angus and your best friend at it on his office floor. You’re sure you’re not channelling Days of Our Lives?’
Maggie had been serious. Miranda rapidly realised that. After assuring Maggie she’d be there as soon as she could, she called her sisters. She couldn’t get in touch with any of them. Miranda tried to get to London from Paris that night. Unfortunately there was bad fog. It wasn’t until late the next morning that she was able to get a flight. She caught a cab directly from Heathrow to the hotel Maggie had run to.
Maggie was waiting inside her room, her hair standing on end, her shirt and skirt crumpled. Her suitcase was beside the bed, unopened. She’d obviously slept in her clothes. Miranda pulled her straight into a long hug. Maggie began to talk, not needing any prompting. The whole story spilled out of her.
She was still in a state of shock, Miranda realised. She suggested they leave the hotel, go back to Maggie’s house. It would do her good to be surrounded by familiar things. Maggie said she couldn’t. It was all over between her and Angus.
Miranda moved across to hug her niece but Maggie recovered, sitting up, wiping her eyes. ‘I’ve decided to resign. I can’t go back there. I can’t be in that place every day.’
‘Maggie, slow down, please. You’ve had a big shock. You have to give yourself time.’
Maggie got off the couch. Only five foot three and slight in figure, pale-skinned and dark-eyed, she reminded Miranda of Clementine as a teenager. ‘I don’t need any time. My boss at work told me to take a couple of days off, Miranda. See the counsellor he hired. As if that was enough. As if everything goes back to normal after that. But it can’t go back to normal, can it? I’m not that same person.’
‘Maggie, you are.’
‘I’m not. It’s as if I let everything sweep me along before now. I didn’t stop to think about anything. I can change things, though. I can decide to get off the roundabout, can’t I?’
‘But what will you do? Stay in London? Look for another job?’
Maggie rubbed the end of her nose. ‘I don’t know yet. I need to think everything through. I can’t fix what happened but I can do whatever I can for that man’s family. I have to try and make amends. I’ve got savings. They’ll need it more than I will.’
‘Maggie, you’re moving too fast. Think things through some more.’
‘I don’t need to. It all couldn’t be clearer. Do you know what my boss said the man was? Collateral damage. “Put him out of your mind, Maggie. You’ve got a great job. We’re grooming you for even bigger things.”’ She broke down again. Miranda held her close.
‘It’s all right, Maggie,’ Miranda said, smoothing the dark hair away from her niece’s face. ‘Don’t worry about him or about Angus or about anything. None of that matters at the moment.’
‘It does matter.’ Maggie sat upright. It was as if she’d just had a series of revelations. Out it poured. She’d been having doubts about Angus for months. She’d been seduced by the side of life he’d shown her, she confessed. Tickets to Covent Garden, to West End plays. It had been like playing dress-ups. It had been fun. Until she realised that all the things that mattered to him didn’t matter to her.
‘He was the one who wanted to live in that expensive area, who insisted we had to have this brand furniture and wear only designer clothes, and I went along with it. How can I have been so weak?’
‘You’re not weak. The last word I would ever use to describe you is weak.’
‘But I have been, Miranda. I’m twenty-six. I should have had more sense. What was I doing going out with someone like him?’
Miranda bit her tongue. She’d thought exactly those things the first time she had met Angus but had decided to say nothing. She had been so pleased that Maggie was finally going out with someone. Her long-term single status had been a source of much discussion between her mother and aunts. She’d hoped Angus would grow on her. In fact he had become more annoying each time they met. He didn’t like her either, Miranda knew. She’d been pleased with that fact.
Miranda tried again to advise caution, to take things slowly. As she reported to Clementine in one of their many phone calls, she might have been trying to stop a landslide with a broom. ‘When that daughter of yours makes her mind up, there’s no stopping her, is there?’
By the time Miranda and Maggie met for lunch the next day, Maggie had handed in her notice. She’d also written a large cheque and arranged to have it sent anonymously to the man’s family.
Miranda herself had come up with a solution to Maggie’s living arrangements. Racking her brains, trying to decide on a good bolthole for her nie
ce, she remembered her friend Ramona’s apartment in New York. She and Ramona had flown together for years, until Ramona finally married the American businessman she’d been having an affair with for nearly a decade. The Greenwich Village apartment was the smallest of nearly a dozen investment properties the pair owned in Manhattan. Ramona rarely let it, offering it instead to close friends for their personal use. Miranda herself had stayed in it many times. Fully furnished, secure and private, it would be perfect. It had taken only two phone calls to determine it was available and that Maggie could have the use of it for at least three months, possibly longer. Maggie accepted the offer immediately.
Miranda left London the next day to fly back to Singapore for a new training intake. Maggie flew out to New York three days later. It had all happened with speed and ease.
‘As if it was meant to be,’ Juliet had said in some wonder when Miranda filled her in.
‘No, it’s not,’ Miranda had said. ‘It’s about knowing the right people.’
In Miranda’s opinion, and she knew her sisters agreed, the one good thing to have come out of the whole tragic episode was Maggie’s break-up with Angus. None of them had ever liked him, from the moment they first met him in Donegal two years earlier. One look at Maggie’s well-dressed, good-looking boyfriend and Miranda had thought of five words: spoilt, opinionated, arrogant, ambitious and stupid. Maggie had appeared blind to all five qualities. Her first serious relationship, it was no wonder.
Angus only stayed in Donegal for two days. By the time he left, Miranda’s face hurt from smiling so falsely. It hurt as much to lie to Maggie, when Maggie asked her within minutes of him leaving whether she liked him.
‘He seems to treat you very well and that’s all that matters.’ Miranda winced inside at her own priggish tone. She waited until Maggie had gone inside before she turned to Juliet. ‘I’m lying. I don’t like him one bit. He’s using her.’
‘I don’t like him either, but it’s her choice who she goes out with.’
Miranda canvassed everyone else’s opinion. ‘Do you like him, Leo?’
‘I only talked to him for a moment. He certainly has a keen business mind.’
‘Eliza, did you like Angus?’
‘If he’s good to her, I’ll like him.’
‘She can’t marry him, though,’ Miranda said.
‘Why not?’ Eliza asked.
‘I came across this last night.’ Miranda produced a scrapbook with Flotsam and Jetsam written in her own writing on the cover. She hadn’t come across it. She’d gone looking for it. She knew Juliet had shipped all the recipe books and scrapbooks from Hobart to the holiday house. It was the only time they all got the chance to look at them. ‘See, on page fifteen. She can’t get married unless she gets permission from all of us. And she’s not getting my permission.’
‘That would really hold up in court.’
‘What would?’ Maggie had come back into the living room after waving Angus off.
‘That little document we made you sign eight years ago. You do know you can’t marry him unless you get permission from us all?’
Maggie laughed. She’d forgotten all about that, she said. She leafed through it, before finding the page Miranda mentioned. They had drawn it up one winter’s evening, when everyone happened to be home in Hobart. There had been a lot of teasing that Maggie was growing up too quickly, getting out of their control. There’d also been a lot of red wine drunk. Miranda, or perhaps it had been Eliza, said it was time they laid down some ground rules. She asked Maggie to fetch one of the scrapbooks, opened it to a blank page and scribbled down ten points. In a flash of wine-fuelled wordplay, she dubbed them ‘The Ten Comm-aunt-ments’.
This document constitutes a formal agreement that Maggie Tessa Faraday must hereby and henceforth obey her all-seeing, all-knowing aunts (and, okay, mother) and undertake the following commandments to the best of her ability for the rest of her life:
1 Floss her teeth daily.
2 Eat her greens.
3 Exercise.
4 Read a lot.
5 Sleep in occasionally.
6 Smoke only for appearances, not out of habit.
7 Help old people across the road whenever possible.
The last three were more serious.
8 Work in a field she enjoys, for love not money, though if the money’s good that’s a bonus.
9 Always be prepared to drop everything and rush home if any of her family calls.
10 Only marry for love and with the express pre-approval of her mother and aunts.
All four of them had signed their names underneath. Juliet, Miranda, Eliza and Clementine.
‘I’ll sign for Sadie. I’m sure she’d agree,’ Maggie had said.
It had been a fun night, Miranda remembered. Even Leo joined in. They’d all had bad hangovers the next day.
She wished again that Maggie was joining them in Donegal this year. It truly wouldn’t be the same without her.
A low snore sounded beside her. Her neighbour, the businessman, was sleeping. He was quite handsome, now she looked closely at him. Perhaps she would have a little chat with him later on…
She decided it was time to stretch her legs. She went upstairs to first class and moved elegantly down the centre aisle. She was turning when she saw the man seated in 2A. All the details registered in an instant – the stocky figure, the still-dark hair, the tanned face. Twenty-six years had passed, but she knew him straightaway. Her heart began to beat faster.
She moved silently up the aisle past his seat again, glad of the dim lights, sure her reaction would be obvious on her face. She’d been expecting this moment ever since she’d started flying. He was a businessman, after all. He surely flew all the time. Once she thought she’d seen him in Sydney airport. She’d felt a quickening of her pulse that time too, but then the man turned and she realised it wasn’t him.
She took another look, willing him not to glance up from his newspaper, to give her the opportunity to study him closely. Was it him? She was uncertain now. A quick word with the steward in charge of the first-class cabin and the passenger list was handed over. Her pulse slowed again. She was mistaken. The gentleman in 2A was a Mr Richard Foster, not Mr Tom Hanlon.
She returned downstairs to her own seat. How ridiculous that her legs were shaking, after all this time. She hated the fact she kept doing this to herself. For all she knew, he was long dead. Or as good as dead, stuck in some dull suburban life in Sydney, in the same house he had lived in all those years ago, with the same wife, the same job selling cheap cosmetics to bored pharmacy assistants…
But if that man upstairs in first class had been Tom Hanlon, what would she have done? What would she have said to him? Shouted at him, even? He probably had no idea of the legacy he’d left her.
Miranda remembered sitting across the desk from her doctor, in the bright surgery office on St Kilda Road. It was the day after her thirty-fifth birthday. She’d been having problems with her periods. At first she thought it was because of all the flying that she did. Her doctor thought it might be early menopause. He ran tests. Then more tests. He arranged for her to have scans. He’d finally called her in to tell her the news. She had bad scarring and blockages in both fallopian tubes.
‘How could that have happened? I hardly even know where my fallopian tubes are.’
He explained. He used terms she remembered from booklets in the pharmacy. She’d never cared about them back then. She had pelvic inflammatory disease, he told her, most likely caused by undetected and untreated chlamydia.
She tried to joke about it. ‘Chlamydia? What is that, a Greek island or a disease?’
‘A bacterial infection. A serious infection, I’m afraid. You catch it by having unprotected sex.’
‘But I’ve never had unprotected sex.’
‘Are you sure? It’s the only way the infection is transmitted.’
She remembered then. Yes, she had had unprotected sex. Once. That night with Tom, in the Hobart w
aterfront hotel…
Miranda felt the colour rise in her cheeks. ‘There was one time —’
The doctor didn’t ask for more details. ‘It only takes the once, unfortunately.’
She needed to deal with this quickly, move on, put it behind her and then forget all about it. ‘So what do I take? Tablets? Medicine?’
She sat in disbelief as the doctor explained that pelvic inflammatory disease was incurable. Not only that. She stared as he explained the legacy of the disease. ‘But how can I be infertile? I haven’t even tried to have children.’
‘It may be possible. We make medical advances all the time. IVF might be an option. But that’s the heartbreak of this disease. By the time you find out you have it, it’s too late to do anything about it.’
One night in a hotel room and her life had changed.
She didn’t tell anyone. Three weeks after the doctor’s appointment, she broke up with Benedict, her boyfriend at the time. They had always used condoms, so she could at least be certain she hadn’t passed it on to him. It was scant consolation. She never told him the truth about why she finished it. He worked in the industry too and the last thing she wanted was word to go around.
She’d had to break up with him. She decided she could cope with this news, but she wasn’t going to drag Benedict down with her. A year after she finished it between them, she heard that Benedict was getting married. A year later she heard that he and his wife were expecting twins. They now had three children, she thought. Possibly even four. He’d left the travel industry now.
Those Faraday Girls Page 26
