by Joy Dettman
‘It’s Lorna,’ she said. ‘She’s not coming in here, Jim.’
Raelene smiled. Payback time. She opened the door before the visitor knocked.
‘Jim Hooper,’ the dame said.
‘Someone wants you, Jim,’ Raelene called.
*
Lorna’s eyesight was good enough to recognise the Morrison tramp at fifty paces. There were only six or eight good paces between them in the entrance hall. Lorna spun on her heel to vacate the premises, and collided with an infant coming at a run from the opposite direction.
Children have good reflexes. The infant stumbled, then continued her run. Lorna’s reflexes, slowed by weariness, by speechless disgust, didn’t save her. She spun into the wall, one narrow ankle connecting with the leg of a Queen Anne table. Grasped for the table. It was too low. Grabbed at the wall. Photograph in the way, and unstable. Then her feet went from beneath her and she hit the floor, hard, and for the first time since her sixth birthday, exposed her knobbly knees.
The shock of a fall to those of average height is . . . shocking. Lorna had more height than most and no flesh to cushion scrawny hips. She stayed down.
*
Jim approached to within three feet of that length of wrinkled-lisle-stockinged leg. He didn’t offer his hand. Jenny had backed off to the kitchen doorway, Trudy now hiding behind her. Raelene leaned against the open front door, eyeing an aged black handbag. It had flown, landed at her feet like an offering from God. Wondered how much might be in it. Wondered if she dared. With her foot, she moved the bag behind her.
‘Can you get up?’ Jim asked.
Lorna’s driving spectacles, jarred from her hawk’s beak of a nose, had retained their grip on one ear. She had large ears. A talon-tipped hand felt for the spectacles, slid them back into place, then seeing her disarray, she drew her skirt down.
Raelene picked up the handbag.
Watch-dog Jenny saw her. ‘Jim.’
Jim stepped around his sister’s feet to claim the bag. He placed it on the hall table.
‘Can you give me a hand to get her up, Jen?’
‘She can rot where she is,’ Jenny said and disappeared from the scene, Trudy gripping her hand.
The rear door slammed. Raelene left via the front door.
*
Having satisfactorily cleared her father’s house of the unmentionable, Lorna got down to the business of why she’d come.
‘Your father’s properties are on the market,’ she accused, gathering her limbs, reaching for the Queen Anne table and gaining her feet.
On one leg or two, Jim was the taller. She rarely looked up to men, preferred to look down on them.
‘You need to leave, Lorna.’
‘Are you in touch with our cretin sister?’
He had not previously heard Margaret referred to as the cretin, but was familiar with earlier similar references. He offered her handbag. ‘You need to leave now, Lorna.’
‘Were you informed before our father’s land was placed on the market?’
Monk’s land had been on the market for months. They were asking a ridiculous price for it and, according to Paul Jenner, wouldn’t budge an inch. Jim answered her question with a question.
‘Are you in a fit condition to drive?’
‘I have driven,’ she said. ‘The will states that the land will not be sold. I ask again, are you in touch with the cretin?’
Raelene opened the front door. ‘Her car is blocking Jenny’s in.’
‘She’s leaving,’ Jim said.
*
Not soon enough for Jenny. She drove forward, ran over a rhododendron, over two azaleas, spun the wheel and backed up, nudged a large elm. Forward again, back, twice, three times before she had space enough to drive across the lawn, between two trees, around Lorna’s car and out to the road.
‘Wait,’ Jim called.
He had fifty years of John McPherson’s photographs and negatives on the dining-room table which he wasn’t prepared to leave at risk. Jenny waited, the motor running, until he emerged with a large carton. Carton in the boot, Raelene forced from the front passenger seat to the rear, they drove towards town, their meal left in the oven to burn. Roast chops and vegetables. Raelene liked chops.
*
As did Lorna. The smell of a roast drew her out to the kitchen, to the oven. She hadn’t eaten since leaving the city and hadn’t eaten a roast since Jenison, the female, had deserted her. She found a plate, helped herself from the roasting pan, found a teapot, a cup and saucer, found tea and brewed a pot. She found bread in the bread tin, cut two slices, buttered them liberally, then sat down and ate.
When they didn’t return, she walked the house. No heavy furniture, no Hooper photograph on the walls. Pale blue curtains in the sitting room, a lounge suite, tapestry upholstered in blues. She scoffed and walked on by to the rear of the house, to the bedroom she’d named her own for forty years.
The furnishings were new. They’d provided the occupier with a comfortable chair. She sat on it, perusing a large river scene hung over the fireplace, artist unknown. Never fond of gum trees, Lorna rose to test the bedsprings.
*
Jenny bought fish and chips for dinner. Mrs Crone now retired, a Greek couple had moved into the café and turned it upside down. They did a roaring trade with their fish and chips and hamburgers.
Six o’clock was not a good time to go looking for sanctuary. Margot would throw a screamer if they took Trudy and Raelene down to the old place. They couldn’t take a mess of fish and chips to the McPhersons’. Jenny drove by the park, considering a picnic, but Maisy lived over the park fence. She’d want to know what was going on. Jenny turned left at Charlie’s corner, considering his storeroom. He didn’t trust Raelene as far as he could kick her, which wasn’t far these days. Drove on over his railway crossing and back to Three Pines Road, which she followed over the bridge.
‘What does she want?’
‘She heard Monk’s land was up for sale,’ Jim said. ‘I told her to leave.’
‘Our fish and chips is getting cold,’ Raelene said.
‘It’s well wrapped.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘We’ll have a picnic,’ Jenny said.
‘Where?’
Anywhere but that house.
They’d painted Vern out of it, where they could. You can’t paint bathroom tiles and their condition was too good to justify ripping them out. They’d ripped out the kitchen and modernised it. It was her own now. They’d altered the back garden, dug up the lawn for a vegie patch, but Vern’s big trees were still standing, and his rosebush hedge. As a kid she’d loved his roses. She’d never rip them out.
Eight miles is not far in a modern car. They were driving by the old Hooper land when Jim asked her to slow down. Back in the thirties, the early forties, he’d spent a lot of time out at the farm – most of it on the Monk section. He’d planned once to live in Monk’s old mansion. Until a few months ago, the property manager and his wife had lived in it. They’d moved into a new brick house, built on the original Hooper land. Monk’s old house was crumbling, or so they said in town.
It appeared solid enough from the road.
Always a classy-looking property, Monk’s, with its section of curved brick fence supporting fancy iron gates. Jenny parked the nose of the car a few bare feet from the gates and turned off the motor.
Granny had known this property when those fancy gates had been new. A proud man, old Maximilian Monk. He’d immortalised his property’s name, Three Pines, in the ironwork, then on top of each gate, held high with swirls of iron, were a pair of large and ornate M’s, so no one might forget his name.
The bank had sold up his grandson during the depression. Vern Hooper, who had shared a fence with Monk, put in a bid at the auction and walked away owning the property. Got it for a song, he’d always said. He’d got a lot more properties for a song during the first years of the depression. To Jim’s knowledge, he’d owned fifteen houses and ove
r a thousand acres of good river land.
Rick Thompson, Vern’s first farm manager, had cared about that land. Tonight it looked lonely, neglected, a fading For Sale sign wired to one proud gate; a few sheep wandering up to look at the green car – maybe hoping for a taste of green or of grain.
Jim’s eye turned to the house, set well back from the gate, his mind wandering to Sissy Morrison, to a cancelled wedding, to the old root cellar, to Jenny – and to Jimmy who had been conceived in that cellar.
Back before the war, he’d loved this place, loved the way dusk crept in from the forest, how the land had fought against it. How many times had he stood on Monk’s veranda, watching the sun sink down between the trees?
‘If I had the sort of money they’re asking, I’d buy it,’ he said.
‘They say the house is being eaten by mould. Eat your fish before that pair of locusts get it,’ Jenny said.
‘We had a crop of mushrooms growing in the corner of the dining hall back before we did the renovations,’ he said, but he ate his slab of fish. Most are partial to fish and chips out of paper.
The last chip eaten, Raelene prowled, rattling gates, lifting the lid of a makeshift mailbox. Every farm along the road had one of sorts. Monk’s was a twelve-gallon drum, fixed to a pole, large enough to accept mail, newspapers, bread and sundry, though unused since the farm manager had moved.
Raelene found something of interest. She returned to the car jangling two keys on a ring.
‘You’re a Hooper,’ she said, presenting them to Jenny.
Jenny didn’t feel like a Hooper and never would. Jim was, and he wanted one last look at that house he’d once watched brought back from the near dead.
The smaller of the two keys fitted the gate’s padlock. He and Raelene pushed the gates wide.
‘Drive through, Jen.’
She drove down a long track, tree-lined once. Dead trees interspersed now with the living, the track to the house overgrown and potholed. Three tall conifers sheltered the western walls of the house. Jenny didn’t remember them being there.
‘I planted them,’ Jim said. ‘They were a foot tall the last time I was out here.’
‘Three pines,’ Jenny said.
‘That was the idea. They’ve done well.’ Before the war he’d planned to turn this place into an oasis of green. For a time he’d convinced himself he could live with Sissy Morrison on this piece of land.
They walked the verandas, peered in through windows. Not much to see by twilight, only an old, old house, defeated by time. Not much to say, Jim’s mind away with that crop of mushrooms, with hand-painted tiles, that big old fireplace – and the cellar.
Raelene, set free to roam, came at a run from the far side of the veranda. ‘There’s an old-fashioned door around that side with a new lock in it. I bet that other key fits it.’
‘We’re trespassing already,’ Jenny said, but Jim followed Raelene to the west side where he unlocked the door, the old servants’ door once leading to an outside kitchen. He’d known the history of this old house before he was sixteen years old.
Raelene was first in, Jenny last, Trudy clinging to her hand.
‘It’s scary, Mummy.’
‘It’s just an old empty house, darlin’. Daddy and Mummy used to come out here a long time ago.’
Wallpaper peeling from passage walls, looking ghostly in the half-light, might be scary to a little kid. Jenny tried the light switches. The electricity had been disconnected.
‘It smells like ghosts,’ Trudy said.
It smelled of mould. ‘There are no such things as ghosts,’ Jenny said. ‘It smells stale because all of the doors and windows are closed.’
‘There’s a torch in the glove box. Could you fetch it for me, Raelene,’ Jim said, and for once she ran to do his bidding. She was enjoying herself, and when Raelene was having a good time, she was compliant.
They toured then by torchlight, studying ceilings, floors, flashing the torch beam over fallen tiles in the bathroom, across ornate ceilings, over the huge fireplace, and later in the room with the trapdoor.
Still there. Its rusty hinges groaning their complaint as it lifted. They propped it back against the wall, hooked it back. New ropes had been attached to it and to hooks beneath the floor which offered something to hang on to until searching feet found the top step, and hands, the handrail.
‘The steps could be rotten, Raelene,’ Jim warned. Raelene, who heeded few warnings, went down anyway, and hearing no crunch of falling timber, Jim followed her.
‘They’re solid as a rock,’ he called up, the earthen walls swallowing his voice – as they had way back when . . .
Jenny got her feet onto the first step, then helped Trudy down, holding her hand until Jim reach up to take her. It wasn’t a staircase. Always too steep to be named stairs, always too wide to be named a ladder. She was halfway down when an overwhelming scent from the past rose up to engulf her, as if the air she’d breathed out twenty years ago had remained unmoved. Scent of earthy love in that cellar. Memory of the flight of butterflies in that scent.
And for him, and she knew it.
‘I used to think my way back here when I was away,’ he said.
Away, in the army, in the Jap camp. He rarely mentioned the war – had told John McPherson once that he’d seen the worst of mankind and the best of it in that Jap camp. Whatever he’d been through had stolen enough of his life. He was back now, and looking more like the suntanned soldier she’d waved away at Sydney’s Central Station.
‘She’s aged,’ he said, and for an instant Jenny thought he was referring to the house, for an instant she’d forgotten why they were out here.
He meant Lorna. ‘I’m not going back while she’s there, Jim.’
‘I told her to go.’
‘Your cousin said Margaret and her husband told her to go a hundred times.’
‘Who is she, Mummy?’ Trudy asked. She hadn’t liked that black-clad, wicked-witch lady at their house and didn’t like this house. She hadn’t left the steps, nor had Jenny. Raelene, who had claimed the torch, was investigating the depths of that hole in the ground.
‘She’s Daddy’s big sister,’ Jim said.
‘Is she sleeping at our house?’
‘Yes, and she’ll creep into your bedroom tonight and kidnap you,’ Raelene said.
‘That’s enough out of you. And no, she’s not sleeping in our house, darlin’.’
‘It’s too late for her to start back tonight,’ Jim said.
‘There’s a hotel on the corner,’ Jenny said.
Raelene’s concentration span brief, having found nothing of interest in the cellar, she was going back up. Trudy raced ahead to the top, afraid she’d close the trapdoor and lock them in like she’d locked her in a wardrobe one day.
Jenny was on the second step when Jim took her arm and, just for old times’ sake, kissed her in the dark. She shared his bed each night, passed him his leg some mornings, watched him strap it on. She was forty, he was forty-five, and kissing him in the dark still made her want more than his kiss.
The torch beam found them. ‘It looks ridiculous when old people kiss like that,’ Raelene said.
‘It looks more ridiculous when twelve-year-old kids do it,’ Jenny said. They went up, Jim first, his missing leg making the climb up more difficult than the down. They closed the trapdoor, left the way they’d come, via the servants’ door. They locked it, and the gates, and returned the keys to the drum mailbox.
‘Did you live in this house when you were a little boy, Daddy?’ Trudy asked.
‘I lived in our house, but I slept in that cellar on a few hot nights, and even on the hottest nights it was never hot down there.’
‘If she’s still at the house, we’ll bring our mattresses out here,’ Jenny said.
‘I’ll second that motion,’ he said.
They expected Lorna’s car to be gone. It was still blocking their drive. Jenny parked on the street where they sat for minutes. Not Raelene
. She wasn’t into sitting still. They watched her walk to the door.
‘Would it kill us to give her a bed for the night?’ Jim said.
‘It would kill me.’
Trudy needed her bed, and curtains were being lifted at the house next door. They had to go in. Jenny took Trudy to the bathroom. Jim went down to the kitchen.
Used plates and cup still on the table, with the teapot; their visitor had helped herself but was no longer in there. Raelene was, and gnawing on a still-warm chop. Like her father, she ate too much meat and not enough vegetables.
Jim found Lorna seated in the lounge room, and in that pretty room they’d created she stuck out like a black bandaged sore toe.
‘The hotel has rooms,’ he said.
She turned, offered him a copy of their father’s will. ‘Your illegitimate son inherits all on his thirtieth birthday. As he now appears to have a legitimate sibling . . .’
Her voice carried down the passage to where Jenny was tucking Trudy in. She kissed her, then crept out to listen.
‘I intend to prevent the sale of the land and expect you to join me in the suit against those cretins.’
‘I thought I’d made it pretty obvious that I want nothing to do with you, or Pop’s estate.’
‘You have an obligation to see that there is something left of the estate for your daughter . . . or your son to inherit.’
‘You stole our right to have any say in the life of our son the day you kidnapped him. Get out of my house now, or I’ll have you put out,’ Jenny said.
Lorna’s hearing was selective. She didn’t turn to the passage. ‘My own funds are somewhat limited –’
‘There are motels in Willama,’ Jim said.
‘My sight is inadequate for night driving.’
‘The constable has bunk beds in his cell,’ Jenny said, and she went out to the kitchen. Jim followed her as far as the wall-mounted telephone. The telephone books lived in a small cupboard beneath it. He retrieved the local book, but requiring a better light, took it out to the kitchen’s fluorescent glare where Jenny had begun clearing away the remains of Lorna’s meal.
