The Last of the Bonegilla Girls

by Victoria Purman

  Frances raised her glass. ‘Let’s toast the Bonegilla girls.’

  Elizabeta managed a sad smile. ‘We are not girls any more.’

  Iliana patted her kaftaned stomach and grinned. ‘I don’t know about you all, but I still feel like a girl.’

  ‘To the Bonegilla girls,’ Vasiliki shouted.

  ‘To the Bonegilla girls,’ they called out together.

  Vasiliki looked at her friends and was grateful for each of them. Twenty years spun past her in a blur. Leaving Greece with her family. The voyage halfway across the world. Arriving at Bonegilla. The move to Melbourne and the years she’d worked at the Majestic Milk Bar. Meeting Tom. Marrying Steve. Keeping her secret. Four children. The new business.

  Andrew called across the backyard from the barbeque. ‘Dinner’s nearly done.’

  Frances slowly got to her feet. She pushed her hair from her face. ‘I’ll go and get the salads and plates. You all keep talking.’

  ‘Can I help?’ Elizabeta stood.

  ‘No, please. Stay here. I won’t be long.’ Vasiliki watched Frances walk across the lawn to where her husband and Massimo were at the barbeque. There was some discussion, then Andrew began loading the meat onto a brown platter. Frances flicked her hair and turned to walk into the house. Massimo followed her.

  Vasiliki didn’t know Iliana’s brother at all, really, but something had just passed between the two of them. She saw it, the moment Andrew’s back was turned. Frances had cocked her head just slightly towards the house and Massimo moved. Vasiliki looked around. Andrew seemed oblivious. Iliana was deep in conversation with Elizabeta and Frances’s daughters were still splashing in the pool.

  There was a curiosity she couldn’t quell. She picked up her empty glass. ‘Anyone for a refill? I think I’ll go get a bottle.’ Her wedge heels sank into the long grass as she walked to the kitchen. She stepped inside and looked over to the island bench.

  A man turned to her.

  Vasiliki dropped her glass.

  It was Tom Burley.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Vasiliki couldn’t find her breath. It had been sucked from her lungs as if she’d stepped into a vacuum.

  ‘Ta da!’ Frances emerged from the hallway. Massimo was behind her, lugging a large suitcase. ‘This is my other surprise! He’s just landed and come right here from Mascot. Oh gosh, Vasiliki. You’ve dropped your glass.’

  Vasiliki looked at the ground. ‘I’m so sorry. I got a shock.’

  Tom approached her, looked down at her sandals. Frances and Massimo were next to each other, his hand on her arm holding her back from the splintered shards. They had scattered all over the slate-tiled floor, and the stem lay askew by Frances’s bare feet.

  Vasiliki couldn’t speak. She looked up at Tom, Frances and Massimo. This was too much of a surprise. She wasn’t ready for her past to come slamming at her at a million miles an hour.

  ‘Vasiliki. I mean, Vicki,’ Frances corrected herself. ‘It’s okay. Don’t worry, really. I’ll go fetch a dustpan and broom.’

  ‘Not with bare feet. Stay right there,’ Massimo stepped in front of her, holding out an arm to keep her back. ‘Where is the broom? I will get it.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Massimo. I’m used to tiptoeing around here avoiding every piece of Lego ever made and all those tiny little Barbie shoes.’ Frances shrugged. ‘Kids, you know.’

  Massimo turned to Frances. He slipped one arm under her knees and the other around her waist and lifted her. Vasiliki and Tom exchanged glances and laughed.

  ‘How damn chivalrous of you, Massimo.’ Tom raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Now take me to the broom. And let’s find a pair of shoes for you. You and your stupid bare feet,’ he muttered.

  Frances laughed too. She pointed in the air as if she was directing a convoy of tanks. ‘Laundry. That way.’

  Frances and Massimo disappeared down the hallway. When Vasiliki turned back to Tom, he was watching her.

  He held out a hand. Vasiliki shook it. It seemed very formal but it was appropriate. She had to resist the compulsion to throw her arms around him and hold him tight, the way she would have if he was any other long-lost friend. But they weren’t friends anymore, no matter what they once had been to each other.

  ‘Well,’ he chuckled. ‘Wasn’t that all rather dramatic.’

  She took in the sight of him, older but still the Tom she had known. ‘Listen to you. You don’t sound like Melbourne anymore. You sound like Prince Charles or something.’

  Tom laughed and she recognised it, deep and full of fun, the same sound she’d held in her heart for twenty years.

  ‘And listen to you. You’re not the Greek girl I remember. You sound sort of, well, half Australian, half Greek. Is there such a thing?’

  ‘Yes, there is.’ That’s how she felt these days. Half and half. She’d lived longer in Australia than she had in Greece and, although she was still part of the culture, part of the family, spoke Greek every day, there were things about her life that were distinctly Australian now.

  ‘And you’ve finally convinced people to call you Vicki, I see.’

  Vasiliki laughed. ‘I tried for so many years but my family still call me Vasiliki.’

  Tom held his arms wide. ‘Whatever your name is, you’re still as beautiful as ever.’

  Her face felt hot. ‘Thank you. And you haven’t changed either.’ Tom was wearing simple navy trousers and a short-sleeved white shirt, as if Carnaby Street and modern London hadn’t rubbed off on him at all.

  ‘What are you doing back in Australia? Are you on holidays?’

  ‘No, not holidays unfortunately. I have a legal conference here in Sydney next week, and when I mentioned to Frances that I was coming home, she planned this whole reunion around my trip. She was rather sneaky about the whole damn thing, actually.’

  ‘She didn’t say anything about it. About you being back in Australia. Not a word.’

  Tom took a step closer, searched her face. ‘Do you think you would have come if you’d known?’

  How could she know that? Would she have been able to prepare her heart in advance for the pain of seeing him, for the longing that had suddenly emerged about what might have been? Could she have imagined what seeing him would still do to her? Because as she stood in Frances’s kitchen, taking in the sight of Frances’s respectable-looking brother with his hair cut short, his warm smile still moved her as much as it always had.

  And with a jolt that hurt her heart, she saw her daughter in his face. Aphrodite had the Burley eyes, caramel brown, she could see that now that she had the real-life Tom to compare her with. The hair colour, a dark brown rather than the black of her sisters; the pert nose and the thin top lip that her daughter always complained about. If Aphrodite and Tom Burley were ever to meet, they would know with one look. Everyone would know about Vasiliki’s lies and the truth she’d hidden from the world.

  ‘Yes, of course I would have come,’ she lied. ‘It’s so good to see you after all these years. You enjoying your married life?’

  ‘Yes, very much. Sally’s a lawyer, too. We have a house in Green Park and two corgis.’

  ‘Just like the queen,’ Vasiliki said. ‘Do you and your wife have any children?’

  Tom’s eyes dipped to his brogues. ‘Rather unfortunate, that. It seems that we can’t. But, you know, life is good. We travel. Florence is nice at this time of year and in July we’re going to the Greek Islands for a week.’

  ‘You’re going to Greece?’

  His eyes softened. ‘Yes. I’ve always wanted to go. Everyone is raving about Mykonos.’

  Tom couldn’t have children. And he was going to Greece. Perhaps, just maybe, he’d never forgotten her either.

  ‘You still in Melbourne then? How are all your daughters?’

  Her daughters? Your daughter.

  She swallowed hard. ‘We’re still in Oakleigh, living next to my parents. We have two greengrocer’s shops now, which are doing well. Our daughters are gr
owing up. Aphr …’

  Say her name. Tell her father her name.

  ‘Aphrodite is eighteen and a hairdresser.’

  ‘Oh, charming. There’ll always be work in that sort of job. Everyone’s hair grows, doesn’t it? Unless of course you’re like Frances and Andrew who never seem to cut theirs.’ He laughed.

  She laughed too.

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘My other three daughters? They’re good girls, too.’

  Tom cleared his throat and studied his shoes for a long moment. ‘You’re very lucky indeed, Vasiliki. Very lucky.’

  Over the years, she had wondered what she would do if she saw Tom. And each time she thought about that possibility, she’d counted the hearts that would be broken if she told the truth. Tom’s. Aphrodite’s. Her parents. Steve. Her lovely Steve. How could she live with herself if he found out she’d been lying to him for almost twenty years?

  ‘Vasiliki,’ Tom murmured.

  ‘Yes, Tom?’

  He stepped closer, spoke more quietly. ‘I honestly wish things had been different for us. I look around these days and see the freedoms young people have, especially in London, for goodness sake, and I can’t help but think … well, I can’t help but think about what might have been. Between the two of us. The time just wasn’t right, was it?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t.’ Vasiliki put her arms around him and held him. Slowly, his arms went around her too, tight and strong. She could tell him this secret because this much was true. ‘I never, ever stopped thinking about you, I promise.’

  ‘It’s just down here on the left.’

  Massimo strode down the hallway, Frances still in his arms, and stopped at an open doorway. He glanced inside and met Frances’s eyes, a question in his.

  ‘This isn’t the laundry. And there are no shoes in here.’

  ‘No.’ Frances quickly looked over her shoulder. ‘Quick. Go inside.’

  Massimo swung her right then left so he didn’t knock her legs on the door frame. She reached back for the door handle and pulled it quietly closed. He looked around the room. There was a desk by the window with a sewing machine and a messy pile of clothes next to it. An open sewing box displayed rolls of brightly coloured cotton, scissors, pins and needles; and a dressmaker’s dummy was half-undressed, one hard foam breast exposed.

  She couldn’t take her eyes from his face. ‘Please, Massimo. Just a few minutes alone.’

  He didn’t loosen his hold on her. Her arms around his neck, her fingers clasped together, holding on to him. His face was so close, she could see the shadow of his stubble, the depth of his dark, almost-black eyes, and the small laugh lines by his mouth.

  ‘Frances,’ he began, then stopped. He slowly put her down and turned towards the door.

  Please don’t go. Please don’t open the door and leave me. ‘I couldn’t bear seeing you after all these years and not being alone with you. If only for a few minutes.’

  ‘Francesca.’ He stopped. ‘All that was so many years ago. You made your choice.’ He took a deep breath. ‘And then I made mine. There’s no point looking back, is there?’

  ‘Yes, there definitely is.’

  ‘You’ve been drinking,’ he said, looking at her mouth.

  ‘Yes. And the spumante has made me brave. I want to tell you something, about what happened between us all those years ago. There are things I understand better now. There are things I didn’t know how to say back then. My life was such a mess.’ Frances was close now, and she trailed a finger down his forearm, slowly, across the dark hair there, into his hand. She slipped her fingers into his. ‘I want you to know that I did love you, you know. Not just at Cooma, but at Bonegilla, too.’ Frances shivered, her body tense and on edge.

  ‘At Bonegilla?’

  Frances nodded. ‘Oh, how could I have not been in love with you? You were as handsome as you are today and my sixteen-year-old heart melted at the sight of you. Do you remember the dance at the Tudor Hall?’

  ‘You were wearing a yellow dress.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I loved you from that day. At Cooma, when you asked me to marry you, I wanted to say yes. So much. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell you then because of my situation, but I can tell you now. It wasn’t because I didn’t love you.’

  His voice was gruff, demanding. ‘Then why, Frances?’

  There were so many secrets in the thick and humid air that Sydney Saturday afternoon. ‘Because I didn’t want to keep the baby.’

  He pulled back.

  She gripped his hand tighter. She couldn’t let him walk away now. ‘I didn’t want to remember anything about the man who was his father. Can you understand that? And I didn’t want you to look at the baby and be reminded every day that it wasn’t yours. I knew your family by then, Massimo. They were so proud of you, the oldest child and the first son. How would your parents have felt about any marriage between us, knowing that the child you had claimed as your own, their first grandson, at least in everyone else’s eyes, wasn’t yours?’

  He swallowed hard. ‘It was a boy?’

  ‘Yes. And you are Catholic and I’m not and it would have been too hard, Massimo.’

  ‘I didn’t give a shit about any of that, Francesca. You know I didn’t. I meant it when I asked you.’ His words were quiet, forceful, full of sadness.

  Frances pressed her breasts against his shirt, laid her hands on his shoulders. She was so relieved when he didn’t back away this time, when he stayed close, when he lost his breath at the nearness of her. There was a moment of guilty hesitation, and then he slipped a warm hand inside her top, covering her breast, and then his lips were on her neck, pressing there.

  She wanted one thing from this man. Another kiss. But not like the chaste one they’d shared when she’d been eight months pregnant with another man’s baby. ‘Kiss me, Massimo. Please. Just one more time.’

  He pulled back, taking her face in his hands. His chest rose and fell and she could feel that he was hard, pressing against her. She needed him, to close the book on the longing she’d had for him all these years. For the memories that wouldn’t fade, for the life she sometimes wished she had.

  ‘We can’t do this,’ he murmured. ‘It’s not right.’

  Frances stood on her toes and put her mouth on his, slowly, hesitantly, tasting him, feeling the soft fullness, the desire for her. She undid his belt.

  ‘I know,’ Frances whispered into his lips.

  ‘The snags and patties are done.’ Andrew stood at the back door, waving his tongs in the air, beckoning the guests outside. Beside him, Vanessa and Lyndall were finally out of the pool, their hair long wet strings down their backs, towels wrapped around them as tight as pastry on a sausage roll.

  ‘Cheers, Andrew,’ Tom called out from the kitchen. ‘Just refreshing some drinks here. Can I get you anything?’

  ‘Cheers mate, I’m right.’ Andrew looked over to the kitchen. ‘Where’s Frances?’

  Vasiliki held out a hand. ‘Don’t come in. I dropped a glass and there are bits everywhere.’ She exchanged glances with Tom warily. ‘Frances is finding a broom to clean it all up.’

  ‘No worries. Tell her the food’s on, will you?’ Andrew turned and walked out across the yard. ‘Who’s up for a sausage?’

  ‘Why don’t I go and find that broom, hey?’ Tom said. ‘You should go outside and grab something to eat.’

  ‘I will.’

  Before she could move, Frances and Massimo reappeared in the kitchen. Frances took in the scene and slapped a hand to her red cheek. ‘Damn it. The broom.’

  ‘I was just on my way to get it,’ Tom said. ‘In the laundry, did you say?’

  Without a word, Massimo walked past Vasiliki to the sliding doors.

  Frances and Vasiliki were alone. They searched each other’s faces. Vasiliki guessed what had just happened without one word of an admission.

  ‘Frances,’ she exclaimed in a fierce whisper. ‘How could you?’

  ‘Don’t judge me
,’ Frances said quietly. ‘And please, whatever you do, don’t say anything to Iliana. Her family have been so good to me.’

  ‘He’s married. And so are you.’

  ‘You don’t understand, Vicki. You see … I’ve loved him since Bonegilla.’ Frances cast her sad eyes to the ground, tiptoed around the glass in her bare feet and went outside.

  A moment later, Tom was back with the broom. ‘Be careful there, Vasiliki.’

  Vasiliki couldn’t take it all in. Her head spun. How had she not known about Iliana’s brother and Frances? How could she have done that to her own husband, who was a few feet away in the backyard?

  And then the realisation hit.

  She was no better. In fact, she and Frances were more alike than either of them knew.

  Did anyone know about her and Tom?

  She grabbed his arm. ‘Tom,’ she whispered. ‘Did you ever tell Frances?’

  He looked stricken. ‘Of course not. I didn’t ever tell a soul.’

  She loosened her grip and from deep within her sobs exploded. She covered her face with her hands and let them wrack her chest.

  ‘Oh, hell. Vasiliki. Don’t cry.’ Tom stood by her side, holding on to the stupid broom like it was a shield of armour.

  In that moment, Vasiliki envied Frances. Her friend was free to do what she pleased. To love who she wanted.

  Why couldn’t she do the same?

  Chapter Forty

  The only light in the backyard was the glow cast by a mismatch of candles in the middle of the table. Scattered around it were wine glasses with dregs of red staining their bowls, an empty bottle of vodka that Andrew had retrieved earlier in the evening from the cocktail cabinet in the living room, and a platter with scatterings of chopped cabana sausage, a few pickled onions and cubes of cheese impaled on stray toothpicks, limp parsley sprigs and two lonely devilled eggs.

  Andrew was putting Vanessa and Lyndall to bed, and Frances and the rest of the Bonegilla girls were at the table, with Massimo and Tom at either end. The humid evening was filled with half-drunk conversations and promises and the scent of jasmine.