‘Join in on the chorus,’ he said. ‘“No nay never, no nay never no more, will I play the wild rover, no never, no more”.’
He had just started on the second verse when a string broke.
‘That’s Dolly at work, I think,’ Maggie said.
‘It’ll take more than that for her to silence me,’ Gabriel replied. ‘I’ve got spare strings in my case.’ He glanced around. ‘I just need a bit more light. I can’t stop there, can I? Our poor hero’s heart is breaking and we need to get him into that boat and across the sea to Ireland before it’s too late.’
‘In a Spanish galleon?’
‘You’ve got it.’ Gabriel smiled.
‘My apartment’s just over there and I’ve got plenty of lights. If I make you a cup of coffee while you fix the string, will you sing the rest to me?’
‘That sounds like a fair deal. Is your apartment soundproof, though? I’d hate to upset your neighbours.’
She assured him it would be fine. As they crossed the busy street, he put his arm across her back to guide her. He didn’t take it away when they reached the other side.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
‘Can I get you anything else, Leo?’
‘I’m just fine, Ray, thanks very much.’
Leo finished reading the copy of the New York Post the doorman had loaned him, leaned back in the armchair, settled the briefcase on his lap and shut his eyes. He’d been waiting in the foyer of Maggie’s building for nearly two hours now. He and Ray had become quite good friends. In retrospect it would have made more sense to go to his hotel and ring Maggie every now and then from his room, but he was here now. Surely she wasn’t that far away. Ray said that a young man had called for her earlier. She certainly hadn’t mentioned anything about seeing anyone, not that she necessarily would have, Leo reasoned. She’d barely told her family what she was doing in New York in any case.
The sudden sound of a police siren on the street outside made him jump. He wondered what his daughters would say when they heard he’d made a trip to New York. Well, he’d find out soon enough. If his plan worked – if Maggie agreed to do what he was going to ask her – by the end of the week he’d be sitting around a dinner table with all five of them in Donegal, about to deliver some bombshell news.
How would he tell them? he wondered. Blurt it out as soon as they were all in the same room? Or wait a day or two for the usual meeting-up-again tensions to die down, for the clear, calm air of Donegal to have its usual soothing effect on them? That was probably the best approach, he thought. They’d all waited twenty years for this news, after all. What would a few more days matter?
He rehearsed several combinations before deciding he’d say it as it was. ‘Girls, I’ve got some news.’ A pause. ‘I’ve found Sadie.’
He pictured their reactions. Astonishment, amazement, disbelief. Where? How? What? When? All the questions he himself had asked the private detective when he’d rung with the news.
‘You’re sure it’s her? She’s alive and well?’
‘Alive and kicking,’ the man had said.
It was only the third time Leo had spoken to the detective. He’d felt foolish the first time he rang him, as he explained the situation. He’d kept it simple. He didn’t tell the whole truth. He said that his fourth daughter had made the decision to leave the family twenty years ago. They’d always assumed, he didn’t know why, that she had stayed in Australia. She never seemed to have a lot of get-up-and-go, you see, Leo explained. She was a homebody.
‘You’re sure she’s still alive?’
Leo explained about the annual birthday cards to Maggie. The most recent one had arrived just a few months before.
‘And tell me again how you found this photo that you think is of her?’
It had happened in a roundabout way, Leo explained. The thing was, he was an inventor. Well, a retired inventor.
That sparked genuine interest. ‘Really? What have you invented?’
Leo had toyed with the idea of giving the man the details of his two most successful inventions. The lawnmower fuel filter, which had gone on to earn him hundreds of thousands of dollars, though that had been chickenfeed compared to what its successor, his petrol pump invention, had brought him. The royalties the multinational oil company had paid him for the rights had made him extremely comfortable, wealth-wise. His daughters, and Maggie, would be left that way after he’d gone too. They’d be surprised, he knew that. They thought he was still living off the earnings from the lawnmower invention. He was happy for them to think that way. He liked the idea of his real wealth being a surprise.
Just as coming across the photograph of Sadie had been a surprise. More than a surprise. A shock. It had happened five weeks earlier. He’d been at Heathrow Airport, almost his second home, waiting for his plane to Rome to board. He was going to visit the museum devoted to the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, not just his namesake but, in Leo’s eyes, the original and best inventor in the world. As he sat, he’d watched a uniformed woman polish a nearby floor with an industrial cleaner. Back and forth, back and forth she had gone, missing sections each time. It was so inefficient, Leo thought. Not that it was the cleaner’s fault. It was the equipment she was using. The machine was the wrong shape, with that round tip. It meant it couldn’t get into the corners. It needed to be square. Possibly even diamond-shaped. Yes, diamond-shaped but with a brush attachment that could swivel if necessary.
He jotted a few points down in the notebook he always carried with him, then forgot all about it. Until a week later, one idle afternoon in his Rome hotel room, he came across his notes and sketches. His imagination was sparked. He went down to the hotel’s business centre, intending to while away a few hours on the computer investigating it further, checking to see whether anyone had had the idea before him.
He checked the web sites he knew that other inventors used to register early ideas. Nothing there. He checked the major cleaning equipment manufacturers’ web sites. No, they were all sticking with the traditional design. He keyed ‘industrial cleaning’ into Google and watched as more than twenty million possible findings appeared. He laughed. Well, he didn’t have much else to do that afternoon. He looked at sites based in the UK. A subject heading caught his eye. A conference held eleven months earlier in Oslo. ‘Industrial Cleaning: The Future Is Green’. He clicked on that.
He read the conference program. He looked at the list of speakers. He scrolled through the abstracts. Then, out of sheer curiosity, he clicked on the page marked ‘Delegates’. There were dozens of shots of groups of people, smiling at the camera and dressed in their best, for the conference dinner, Leo guessed.
He spotted her immediately. She was in the third photo, in the front row, dressed in a red gown. She looked older than the last time he had seen her – of course she did, she was twenty years older – but it was her. Sadie. Sadie’s face, Sadie’s expression. Sadie’s slightly uncertain smile. It was his missing daughter, his apparently hippy daughter, standing in a group of delegates concerned about the future of industrial cleaning products at a conference in Oslo.
He turned away from the computer. He went to the refreshments area of the business centre, made himself a cup of tea, brought it back to the computer. He pressed the refresh button and the same photograph came up. He tried to enlarge it and was able to make it just slightly bigger.
He stared at her face again. He wasn’t mistaken. It was Sadie smiling back at him.
There were no captions on the photograph, beyond a one-liner: ‘Delegates pictured prior to the conference dinner. A great night was had by all’.
He didn’t say anything or do anything about it for a week. Then he rang the number of the conference organisers. He thought he knew someone pictured on their web site, he said. Could they give him the person’s name and address? He was told that the person who had organised that particular conference had left the organisation.
He contacted the Industrial Cleaners’ Association itself and asked
the same question. The woman who answered the phone was very unhelpful. They had more than two thousand members across Europe, the woman told him. It would take an age to find out who he was talking about.
‘The woman in a red dress on the web site,’ Leo said.
‘I wore a red dress to that dinner,’ the woman said. ‘You’ll have to do better than that.’
On the phone to his lawyer three days later, he posed a hypothetical question. How would you track someone down if all you had was a photo from a web site?
‘The way smart people get anything done in this world. Pay someone else to do it.’
It wasn’t the first time the idea of a private detective had come up in regard to Sadie. In the early years, Leo had actively considered it. It was Juliet who had talked him out of it. ‘We write to her with Maggie’s cards every year, Dad. She knows we want to see her. If she doesn’t want to see us, we can’t make her.’
‘But what if she needs our help? What if she’s in trouble?’
‘She doesn’t want our help. I don’t think she wants anything to do with us.’
This felt different, though. Seeing Sadie’s photo out of the blue like that seemed like a sign, from Tessa, or perhaps even from Sadie herself. Maybe things had changed by now. Maybe she was ready to see them?
His lawyer recommended the names of several firms. Leo chose one in London. If Sadie was a member of that association, she obviously was based in Europe somewhere. That narrowed it down to forty-seven or so countries.
Leo rang the agency, agreed to a fee and briefed the investigator assigned to him. He sounded young. Confident. Smooth-talking. More like a salesman than a detective, Leo thought. Perhaps that’s what was needed in his job. Smooth-talking skills to prise information out of people who didn’t want to give it.
Leo left him to it. He heard nothing for three weeks, rang to enquire and was told investigations were underway and they’d be back to him with a full report as soon as possible.
A week after that, he’d got the call. The woman in the red dress had been found, alive and well and living very successfully in Dublin. Not only that – the woman Leo had thought was Sadie Faraday now called herself Sally O’Toole.
Leo had been shocked at both pieces of news. ‘A new name? And she’s in Dublin? Dublin, Ireland? How did she get there? What is she doing? Is she all right?’
‘I’m going there as soon as I can to find out. I’ll be back to you with a full report.’
Leo was expecting the report any day now. He’d had to stop himself from ringing the detective too often to check on his progress. It seemed crucial to keep everything moving. He glanced at his watch. He would wait until twelve for Maggie, he decided. If she hadn’t come home by then, he’d have to leave a message and come back in the morning.
He was longing to see her, he realised. They weren’t just grandfather and granddaughter. They were friends. Allies. He thought back to the hours they had spent working together in Shed Land in Hobart. Everything revolved around numbers for them, even back then.
‘I want you to find out five things about the moon landing for me, Maggie.’
‘Get me the names of six explorers.’
‘Tell me seven things about the early days of Australia.’
‘Who were King Henry VIII’s six wives?’
She would go off to the library with Clementine or in later years on her own, returning with her little notebook – a copy of his own – filled with facts.
She’d always loved those games. Anything to do with numbers. They’d tricked her into doing household chores by the same method. Clementine would give her a list of tasks to be done. 1. Tidy bedroom. 2. Weed garden. 3. Sweep front verandah. It turned it into a game for Maggie. She always did it in the right order too.
Perhaps that would be the best approach here. Explain that he had three things that he needed doing. Three very important things. And she was the only person in the whole world who could do them.
‘That’s bribery. Emotional blackmail.’ He could hear Miranda saying it to him. She had accused him of that sort of behaviour in the past. He’d been hurt by that. It had made him sound manipulative, cunning. That wasn’t how it was. He couldn’t help it if his favourite thing in the whole world was to be surrounded by his daughters and his granddaughter. It wasn’t a selfish thing, either. Not completely. He felt it was the best way of honouring Tessa’s memory. The only way left to him.
He hadn’t told his girls, but in his mind’s eye, Tessa had been at every one of those family gatherings. Afterwards, he had held imaginary conversations with her, the way they used to do when they’d been to work dinners together or parties. He had always enjoyed those chats, often more than the outings in question. He’d loved sitting up with Tessa in the kitchen, knowing the girls were all fast asleep in their bedrooms. They would talk about the evening, he would ask her who she had spoken to, who she had danced with, what she had thought of every moment. She always had such a turn of phrase. A bit wicked, sometimes. Miranda had inherited that, Leo knew. Tessa was always particularly scathing about some of his colleague’s wives, Leo remembered now, with a guilty pleasure. She’d make him laugh, even while he told her to be kinder.
See, you can still remember her, Leo said to himself, sitting up straighter in the chair, the relief giving him an extra burst of energy. He was panicking unnecessarily. All because of one silly incident a few months back, when for the first time ever, he hadn’t been able to bring an image of Tessa to mind. It had set off a domino effect. He’d tried to recall her voice. Nothing. Her laugh. Nothing.
That’s what had given him the idea of putting together a Tessa memorial. It was the perfect solution. Thoughts and memories and photographs of her all in one place. And what better way to do it than in scrapbook form, which she herself had loved? The more he’d thought about it, the more the idea appealed. He’d follow the same approach, he decided. Fill the Tessa scrapbook with memories of conversations, with impressions of her, photographs, recollections. If the worst thing happened, if he ever found himself struggling to recall her, all he would need to do is open the pages and there the memories would be.
And what better time and place to gather all those memories than during the July Christmas celebration in Donegal? He’d thought it all through. He would put Maggie in charge of it. It would be a perfect job for her. He’d ask her to interview him, Clementine and her aunts; ask them for all their memories of Tessa, write them all down, bring them together into one place. It was important. Time was slipping away and he wanted there to be a record of her, for after he had gone, after his daughters had gone. He wanted Maggie’s children to know as much as they could about their great-grandmother. He also wanted to have a record himself, just in case his worst fear happened and he began to forget her.
That sudden blank moment had frightened him. He’d actually made an appointment with a doctor about it. He’d told him he was concerned he was losing his mind. When the doctor asked what the symptoms were, he hesitated only a moment. ‘I can’t remember my wife as much as I used to.’
‘You’re a widower?’
Leo nodded.
‘How long since she passed away?’
‘Thirty-five years,’ Leo said.
The doctor almost laughed. Leo noticed. It got his back up.
‘Mr Faraday, that’s perfectly natural, I assure you. Time passes, memories fade, especially after such a long time.’
‘I know about other people. I don’t want it to happen to me. I don’t want to forget about her.’
‘But thirty-five years on? You haven’t met anyone else since?’
‘I haven’t wanted to.’
The doctor didn’t understand. Leo left the surgery soon afterwards.
He’d never wanted to get married again. Tessa’s memory sustained him. As he knew the memory of her sustained his daughters. She was still a part of all their lives, remembered through all the beautiful traditions she had started: the birthday chair, the Ju
ly Christmas. They had adapted them, as they should have done – Tessa would never have imagined their July Christmas celebrations taking place in Donegal, he was sure of that, but it kept her memory alive. Each of them had their own memories of her, special ones. He didn’t want to change that. Any more than he didn’t want to change his own memories of her. Precious, beautiful memories that had kept him going after her death. Kept all of them going.
Leo reached down and put his hand on the briefcase beside him, checking once again it was there. It barely left his sight, not since he had carefully packed all nine of Tessa’s diaries inside. He always travelled with them these days, cumbersome as they were sometimes. When he lived in Hobart it had been enough to know they were in the shed beside him as he worked. Thirty-five years and he still hadn’t read them. He hadn’t needed to.
But things were different now. He needed to know what was in them, before he went to visit Sadie.
He had never told the girls all that Sadie had said to him that day in the caravan park, when he and Clementine had found her with Maggie. It had been a terrible time, and that had been a terrible day. He had never seen Clementine lose her temper, never seen her hit anyone, but that day he thought she would have killed Sadie if she could.
Sadie had stood, unmoved, as Clementine hit her. She had been as unmoved when Leo had taken her inside the caravan, begged her to tell him why she had done what she’d done, to explain herself. She had stared at him as if he was a stranger.
‘We love you, Sadie. If you’re unhappy, if something’s wrong, tell me, please. Your mother would have hated to see you like this.’
She had put her hands over her ears. ‘I can’t listen to this any more. No more lies.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Don’t pretend you didn’t know. It’s all there, in black and white.’
His expression must have been blank.
‘In Mum’s diaries. The ones in your shed, remember?’
Those Faraday Girls Page 33
