Secret Shores

by Ella Carey

  Edward gazed out the window, the expression on his face unreadable.

  Tess sat stock-still.

  When he finally opened his mouth and spoke, there was nothing arrogant or angry in his tone.

  “It was what the Heide group were all about,” he said, his well-modulated voice ringing out into the room. “Getting to the heart of things. Those artists, those writers, they knew what mattered. We were young moderns, that’s right, Tess. Class, money, race, color, background, none of these things make any difference when we die.”

  Tess resisted the impulse to reach out, to take the old man’s hand.

  “I guess I have been searching for that again. I thought I might find it in Rome,” he said. “You know, I never settled with Edith. It was hopeless. But I would never have left her, could never have hurt her.”

  “I know that,” Tess whispered.

  “After my brother died, then my father, I had to look after my mother and Vicky. They had no education. Not like you. Not like today. I’m only grateful that Rebecca survived. Goodness, she didn’t just survive. She thrived. No thanks to me.” He let out a shuddering sigh.

  Tess waited.

  Edward reached down and brought out Rebecca’s three sketches of the young moderns, of Max Harris, Joy Hester, and Edward. “Take these to her,” he said, running his hands over the old drawings. “Tell her they are hers. And Tess . . .”

  Tess took the small sketches, careful not to let her fingers run over the black brush and ink on the top one. The one of Edward.

  She looked at him.

  “Tell her I will always be hers, no matter what. Even if we are not together. I want her to be happy because I adore her so much. It’s not . . . a selfish thing, my love for her. That was the point . . .”

  “I know,” Tess said. “It’s the very best sort there is. You wanted what was best for her. You wanted her to be happy and you wanted her to be whole.”

  “Edward,” James said, his voice soft and low, but causing Tess to startle a little. “Tess lost her job because you fired her.”

  Edward raised his hands in the air. “And yet you are still here, trying to help me with my life?” he asked. There was a silence for a moment. “In that case, I want you back editing my book. But only on one condition.”

  Tess looked at him.

  “The only thing that matters is that the story is to remain true to itself.”

  Tess leaned forward in her seat and picked up her coffee spoon for a moment, the steel cool against her fingers.

  “Well. We don’t know the ending yet.”

  “I’m leaving that to you.”

  “Thank you!” Tess rolled her eyes.

  James tightened his grip on her hand.

  Tess shot a look at Edward, saw the old man’s face break into a grin.

  “Carmel-by-the-Sea, Tess?” James asked.

  Tess turned to him and nodded. “Absolutely.”

  But she had a feeling that Rebecca might be a little harder to crack.

  Edward tapped his fingers on the table. “Tess, I’m going to ring that boss of yours and have a wee chat. Nice chap. But a bit conventional, stuck in his ways, not open to our way of thinking, don’t you feel?”

  Tess laughed, and as she stood up, James stood right behind her and placed a hand in the small of her back.

  “We’ll be in touch, Edward,” he said, shaking his hand as if this were the end of any professional business meeting.

  James stood aside for Tess to leave first. And she made her way out of the café into the timeless Roman sunshine.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Carmel-by-the-Sea, 1987

  The boldness that had overwhelmed Tess in Rome dissipated the closer they got to Rebecca’s house.

  “You know that simply turning up at her house is the only way to approach her,” James said.

  Tess smiled, liking that he was reading her thoughts. She drove the rental car out of Carmel-by-the-Sea onto the long road that ran along the sea’s edge. They swept past rocky shores and beaches with tumbling surf, the vibrant colors clear in the daylight, unlike the time she’d come out here in the dark with Sunday.

  She slowed the car as they rounded a bend that seemed a little familiar. And there it was. The white mailbox that had flashed in the sheen of Sunday’s headlights last time. Rebecca’s mailbox.

  Rolling fields spread out on either side of the gravel track. What Tess hadn’t noticed in the dark on her last visit was that the driveway was lined with Australian eucalyptus. She shot a glance across at James’s handsome profile, unshaven after another night spent on a plane.

  Tess pulled up in front of the modern house and climbed out of the car. She took in the front garden that Rebecca had planted. Fruit trees were arranged in rows. Beyond this, to the side of the house, was a vegetable garden, and a wild sort of flower garden stood just in view beyond.

  It was a complete replica of the way Edward had described Sunday’s garden at Heide. She took a few steps toward the wild garden. And stopped. There, on its edge, cut into the lawn, was a garden bed in the shape of a heart.

  A heart garden.

  She turned to James. “Sunday Reed planted exactly such a heart garden at Heide after Sidney Nolan left her in 1947, finally leaving her to her marriage with John after he realized she’d never leave John for him. Sunday, in her grief at the end of the affair with Sidney, poured all her love for him into a garden shaped in a heart, planted with chamomile and lavender. She tended it as a memorial to her love for him, and as a reminder that like life, a garden always renews itself. The earth may be emptied, the soil replenished and turned over every now and then, but eventually new plants always grow to replace the old ones.”

  It was so very Sunday. So very Rebecca—the real Rebecca Swift.

  A smile passed across Tess’s face. James stood beside her, an arm around her shoulders. She lingered a moment, taking in the perfect heart shape, the testament, Tess knew, to Rebecca’s love for Edward, to two souls that should never be apart. Tess moved toward Rebecca’s house and knocked on the front door. James was right behind her. Nothing, no response. She knocked again.

  “Her car isn’t here.”

  James had his hands in the pockets of his jeans. His blue shirt hung loose. “What next? It’s your call.”

  She fixed her gaze on the spot where the car should have been. Only one person would know where she was. “We find her daughter, Sunday,” she said.

  James nodded. “Sounds sensible.” He scratched his unshaven chin. “Tess, how the heck do we do that?”

  An hour later, fueled by instant coffee and a hasty sandwich in one of the town’s cafés while scouring the owner’s phone book for Sunday Banks, Tess pulled up outside a green-painted wooden house in one of the town’s tree-lined streets. Heat pounded down onto the sidewalk, blistering through the crevices that shimmered between the leaves.

  “Ready?” Tess turned off the engine.

  “Craziest thing I’ve ever done, Tess.”

  Tess grinned as she opened her car door. “Slight aberration for me, I must admit.”

  His head was tilted to one side. “Really, Tess? The tough businesswoman, going on a chase across continents to bring two former lovers together? Who would have thought it?”

  She tipped her sunglasses down on her nose and looked at him. “Watch it, Cooper.”

  “I’m watching, don’t you worry.” His voice was warm butterscotch and he leaned over to drop a kiss on her lips.

  Tess averted her gaze to the sidewalk as James held open Sunday’s picket gate. Neat mowed grass lined each side of the pathway that led up to the wooden house.

  Tess took the steps up to the front door. She knocked, then stood and waited.

  It was a little while before Sunday opened the door. “Tess?”

  “Sunday . . . could James, this is my . . . friend, and I come in for a moment?”

  Sunday nodded, but a myriad of other expressions passed across her face. Tess stepped into t
he house, hoping she at least looked more confident than she felt. Sunday offered them a seat in her bright kitchen. Tess told her, without faltering, what Edward wanted her to say to Rebecca.

  Sunday picked up her car keys. “I know about Edward,” she said. “But I’m the only person who does. I’ve always thought he let her go only because he knew her life with his family would be impossible.”

  Tess took in a breath. “It would have been awful for her. He knew that. He was protecting her. And he couldn’t abandon his responsibilities no matter what his life philosophies were. He did the right thing. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “Let’s go. Let’s go and talk to her,” Sunday said. “I have no hopes that we’ll convince her, though.”

  And yet, as Tess followed Sunday out to her car, Tess pictured Rebecca’s heart garden, because it had given Tess hope.

  When Sunday drove up Rebecca’s long driveway, Tess chewed on her lip.

  “But she’s not here,” Tess said.

  “Just wait,” Sunday murmured. “I know where she is.” Sunday followed the driveway around the house until it became a rough track that dipped down a hill. The sea spread in front of them, a blue, endless curtain.

  Tess saw Rebecca before Sunday said a thing. She was silhouetted, seated on a rock looking out to sea. She wore a wide-brimmed straw hat and a white dress. Sunday stopped the car.

  Rebecca did not turn around as they approached. Didn’t react to the sound of three car doors slamming. The only accompaniment to their footsteps crunching on the dry soil was the roar of the ocean and the whip of the wind.

  Tess’s gaze fell on the sketching things that were laid out next to Rebecca on the flat rock. Rebecca sat on a red-and-white checked rug—perhaps the cold, hard rock was not comfortable for her anymore. A car was parked ahead of Sunday’s, and next to Rebecca there was a thermos and a coffee cup, along with a plate on which a slice of fruitcake sat. Sunday placed a foot on the line of boulders that edged the sea.

  “Mom?”

  Rebecca turned around slowly, the expression on her face as clear as a translucent lake. And the moment she caught Tess’s gaze, she held it.

  Tess reached into her bag and pulled out the sketches. The sketches Rebecca had done on the night that had changed her life.

  Rebecca reached out, taking the sketches from Tess. The older woman’s hands were speckled with age spots now. She held a hand up to her mouth as she slowly studied each one in turn.

  After a while, Tess spoke. “Rebecca,” she said. “He let you go because he knew how burdensome it would be for you to deal with all the responsibility that had been heaped upon him. After Robert’s and his father’s deaths, Edward had to take over. It would have stifled you. You could never have had your career while living in that world with all its rules. He set you free. But he loved you. And he always will. I’m sure he never stopped.”

  Rebecca remained focused on the sketching paper that she held against her knees. Her face was obscured by the wide picture hat. After an interminable while, she laid down the pictures and stared out to the sea.

  “How is he?” she asked, finally, her voice low.

  “Still in love with you,” Tess said. “His writing is honest. He can’t hide from the truth when he writes.”

  There was no point in leaving things unspoken. There had been more than enough of that.

  Rebecca leaned back on her hands, stretching her legs out in front of her, and she didn’t turn back from the sea.

  “He loved you so much that he set you free. It was that sort of love,” Tess said. “He wrote about you the very moment he could because he had to. The moment he was free to do so, he came home, he came home to you.”

  Tess felt now as if she were whispering some old sea song as the waves swept in and out from the shore. “He did everything that was expected of him for forty years, Rebecca. But now,” Tess chose her words with great care, “it’s time for him to go full circle, to come back to you, to where he belongs, to his real home. And he has done so. He has, Rebecca. And now, I can also see that he had great faith in your talent, that he knew you could thrive, but that you needed freedom of the spirit to do so.”

  Tess took a step closer to Rebecca. The sea was burnished with sunlight, shimmering on the surface of the water.

  And then Rebecca did something that surprised even Tess. She reached out her hand to Tess, and Tess took it, and sat down with her, watching the sun fall toward the horizon.

  The end of something.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Haslemere, 1987, two months later

  Richard gazed out at the vast gardens from the veranda at Haslemere, shading his eyes as the sun threw its last light over the old house. Sometimes he wondered if he had the word “idiot” blazed across his forehead. Most of the time, he knew that his love for the old station was irrational. The moment he and Phil had walked onto the property, he knew they had to have it. It was almost as if the place were calling out to them, to restore the old mansion, to live here, to try to run sheep on what was left of the once-fertile wool station.

  Now the old wool sheds sat, cathedral-sized monuments filled with echoes of the hard work that characterized the pioneering spirit of those first Russell men. Countless cottages remained abandoned on the property, dense with weeds that clung to their old walls, their windows streaked with red dust and neglect. The colossal conservatory had collapsed in on itself, and a few scraggy peacocks were all that remained of the great Russell family’s once-splendid stock.

  Long days, backbreaking work; the painstaking replacement of leadlight panels in the conservatory bit by bit, all done by hand, according to the rules of preservation; meetings, endless meetings about heritage requirements; poring over nineteenth-century garden plans in an effort to be true to the illustrious past; searching for long-lost photos of the place; talking to neighbors, the council, the local townspeople—all of these things had replaced his life in merchant banking in Sydney.

  But slowly, after four years of hard slog, the old house and garden had started coming back to life again, and their lives had turned from endless work to something that Richard now found rewarding. Hints of beauty had started to peek through the decay, rendering his and Phil’s efforts worthwhile. The seedlings they’d tucked into the soil thrived now, replacing the remains of what had been extravagant gardens. They raised funds to restore things that could not be thrown away—the velvet curtains in the formal sitting room that had been laced through with pure gold silk. They engaged a local student who redesigned the wild rockery garden outside the old guest wing as part of a school project.

  Every tree had been heritage listed, every room restored to its original colors, wallpapers matched, carpets replaced, bathrooms renovated according to heritage guidelines. Phil had even found an old painting that had been in the family for generations, of two children whose eyes seemed to follow you wherever you went. Now it hung where it always had, where it would remind any guest who visited that this place had something both eerie and beautiful about it.

  The story of the land and the house was only the start. The family, those long-gone characters, was what loomed large in Philip’s and Richard’s heads. They became entranced with the tale of the pioneer who had walked three hundred sheep across Australia from New South Wales over the course of six months in 1841, who had built up the farm, to be followed by his son, who gentrified the entire estate.

  And then, double tragedy, mired by the alcohol that wrecked so many lives after the wars. And a younger son who tried but was unable to fund the vast old station.

  Guests, friends, swore that the place was haunted, swore that the old matriarch of the family, Celia Russell, wandered the hallways at night. One of the housekeepers swore that Celia had appeared in front of her and threatened to drop the old grandfather clock on her head while she was dusting, announcing that everything was wrong. A young girl was supposed to haunt the bedrooms, one of the many Russell daughters who’d been married
off to some colonial family and always yearned for home.

  But in spite of the lingering stories, and in spite of what Celia Russell might say, everything seemed just right to Richard. He and Phil had found a new lease on life in this old place.

  Richard wound his way through the immaculate garden paths. The suit he’d put on for tonight felt strange since he was so used to getting about in the old dungarees that did duty for clothes these days. His smart suits hung mostly neglected in the main bedroom of the house. Apparently it had been a ballroom once, built for a state visit for the Prince of Wales. He moved past the fountain that played again, toward the peacock house that was filled with white doves and the descendants of those original proud, jewel-toned birds that the Russell family had once bred.

  He went through his favorite green wooden door that was set into the old brick wall that surrounded the garden, made his way past another derelict cottage that once housed the master of dogs, its late nineteenth-century facades built in grand Tudor style.

  Then, on toward the vast stable yard, the clock on the northern wall told the right time now. The stables were warm once again and horses poked their heads out of the immaculate stalls. The stable cat stretched out in the sun.

  As he moved toward the old Clydesdale Pavilion in which he and Phillip hosted weddings, a smile passed across his features.

  He stopped at the entrance, taking in the long tables that sat under the myriad fairy lights. Roses tumbled out of crystal vases that had once belonged to Haslemere—Philip was the one who adored antiques. He’d scoured the local area, offering to buy back pieces that had been sold at auction when Edward and Edith had to give up.