‘That woman was opening the drawers in my desk. She says I have until the end of December to move out. The family lawyers will serve notice this week.’
‘How did she get a key?’
‘My husband always had a key. He was the legal owner. And now the nephew is the legal owner and he has the key.’
‘I’ll have the locks changed tomorrow,’ Cap assured her. ‘She won’t be able to do that again. And the lawyers can’t make you leave. You have a legal separation agreement. You can stay here for as long as you live.’
They had moved into the salon and the countess sank into her cushioned chair. ‘But you see,’ she said sadly, ‘he left me no income at all. While he was alive, he paid the condominium fee and the utilities. That has stopped. I will have to sell some more paintings. I will have to try to sell the chateau.’
‘We can challenge your husband’s nephew legally,’ Cap said. ‘I’ll talk to a lawyer. If you have a legal right to stay here for as long as you live, then the necessary financial provisions must be made. Don’t upset yourself. I’ll look after this. Let me make you some tea.’
‘I think I’ll have cognac,’ the countess said.
In January 1995, the Vanderbilt family lawyers sued the countess for refusing to have her son declared dead. ‘I will not declare him dead,’ the countess said firmly, ‘because he is not. He is living. I have proof. I have a letter from someone who was in his platoon. He did not die in Vietnam and he did not drown.’ But the letter was missing from her desk. ‘I had it in one of the secret drawers,’ she told Cap. ‘That woman has stolen it.’
‘I made a photocopy,’ Cap said, ‘when you first showed it to me. I’ll give it to your lawyers. Don’t worry.’
4.
In October 1995, Cap found a message on her answering machine. Lilith, can you call me? It’s urgent. I have news that may change your life. The voice was that of Myriam Goldberg.
Cap had been in London, bringing together a seller and a buyer whose transaction was to be kept beneath the market’s radar. When she returned to New York, she listened to all her messages and returned Myriam’s call first. ‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘A package has arrived for you. It’s addressed to Lilith Jardine, in care of Aaron and Myriam Goldberg. You need to come and see it as soon as you can.’
‘Why? Where’s it from?’
‘It’s about the size of a chocolate box and it’s plastered with Australian stamps. There’s no sender’s name or address.’
Cap sat in the courtyard of the Goldbergs’ building for some time before she could summon the courage to take the elevator to the sixth floor, and then she sat in one of their armchairs for a much longer time, the package in her lap, before she had the courage to open it. She let her eyes rest on the Modigliani painting on the Goldbergs’ wall.
‘Years after we have lost them, things that belong to us do find their way back,’ Myriam said. ‘If we wait long enough. And sometimes people come back too.’
‘But are they the same people?’
‘No. You can never look at the same painting twice. You will always see something new.’
On the back of the package was a hand-inked warning: To be opened only by addressee. Otherwise to be destroyed.
‘Would you have done that?’ Cap asked. ‘Destroyed the package? If you’d lost track of me?’
‘I don’t think so. No, I couldn’t have done that. Imagine if someone had destroyed the Modigliani? But I would never have opened your package. I would have kept it in a safe deposit box.’
‘I think,’ Cap said, ‘if you don’t mind, I’d like to be sitting alone in your courtyard when I open this.’
The parcel was wrapped in coarse brown paper cross-tied with string. In the upper right quadrant there were several wildly colourful Australian stamps. One bore the stars of the Southern Cross on a cobalt field. Another showed a soft-furred aquatic animal against dark green water. The creature somewhat resembled a beaver but had a broad duck-billed mouth.
There was no return address on the package and the postmark was blurred and unclear.
Cap pulled off the string and the brown paper. Inside was a cardboard box, Cadbury’s Old Gold Chocolates, stuffed with tissue. The tissue was white and was scrunched into translucent layers that shivered like eggshells in hummingbird nests after the babies have hatched. At the heart of the nest was a cluster of beads, vividly blue, cobalt blue, strung on a silver chain. Cap gathered the beads in her right hand and pressed them against her lips.
A woman sitting on another bench in the courtyard looked up, startled. ‘Are you all right?’
Lilith nodded and gave a reassuring wave of her hand.
‘You were making strange sounds. I was afraid you were choking.’
Lilith shook her head vehemently, no, no, and summoned up a minor coughing bout by way of explanation. She wanted to say, ‘Please, please. Really. It’s nothing,’ but she found she was unable to say anything at all.
‘You’re crying,’ the woman said. Cap shook her head vehemently, no, no, I’m not. She induced another coughing fit. Just the flu, eyes watering, she implied.
‘Well, if you’re sure,’ the woman said uncertainly.
Cap had no idea how long she sat there, but once the low-voltage courtyard lights came on and the sky turned dark, she thought to examine the chocolate box more closely. Under all the layers of tissue was a two-page letter, sealed in an envelope, handwritten. She recognised the writing. There was no salutation, no greeting.
I don’t know if this will ever reach you. I don’t know where you live, which name you are using, or even if you are still alive. I don’t know if the Goldbergs still live at this address but it’s the only place I dare send this gift because there’s something I know the Goldbergs understand: they know that when you disappear from your life in order to save your life, it’s essential to leave no trace. I am counting on them, and on you. Don’t betray me.
The last time I saw you, you were right about me and you were right to be angry. Expiatory suicide is exactly what I had in mind, but expiation never comes cheap and easy. I thought my past had been severed from my now as absolutely as a cleaver slices shoulder from rib. Quite literally, I had no past. I could not remember it.
My sense of smell and my hands remembered things before my brain did. I remembered the smell of fresh-slaughtered meat. I found myself in the Northern Territory of Australia, couldn’t remember why I was there or how I got there, but I did remember animal smells. I worked on cattle stations for a few years and loved the life. I herded cattle, I forked hay, I learned to ride a horse. On the homesteads they kill and hang and cut their own steers and my hands remembered what to do with a boning knife.
So why am I making contact (possibly making contact) after all these years? I’m told it’s been years, but my sense of time is unreliable. It’s gone haywire. Bits and pieces come back and float away. It’s like putting a jigsaw together, except the pieces are dandelion puffs and they won’t stay where I put them. And recently, I’ve been rattled. I’ve been tricked. I’m spooked. Suddenly people with cameras keep showing up at the local pub and asking questions about a man who no longer exists.
Why and how are they asking these questions here?
The pub owner and the local people don’t like strangers any more than I do and they won’t answer nosy questions or give me away. But I was tricked into an interview. There were TV cameras. I don’t know where and how this interview is going to be used. The interview was given under false pretences. I understood I was to talk about natural farming and the humane slaughtering of beef.
Even before all this happened, you’d begun to show up in dreams. In the dreams, you beckon then disappear under the stone bridge. When I follow, you have vanished and what I see is Ti-Christophe’s butchered body. Sometimes I dream I am covered in blood. I wake in a sweat and I’m afraid to go back to sleep.
Not all the dreams are nightmares. In one you floated out of an apple tre
e. Another time, you were roasting rabbits and when I woke I could smell them and I felt hungry. I felt hungry for you.
I don’t expect the feeling to be mutual but I thought you should know.
Other things began to come back to me. What came back next were names, the names on the dog tags that were too dangerous to keep, so dangerous the villagers had to destroy them. Vanderbilt and McVie. I remembered what they meant. And I remembered that I had a son and I remembered his name. I remembered Grand Loup and Father JG. Fragment by fragment, other things came back. Simon Cabot. The Modigliani painting. The Goldbergs, whose address came back in a dream. I mean that quite literally. I saw the envelopes they sent to Dryden, the envelopes I never opened.
I will not tell you what my name is now, and the ones by which you have known me mean nothing here.
I will pretend that you want to see me and so I am sending directions in case you do.
You should fly to Brisbane, Australia. At the airport, you should rent a car and drive to Dayboro, a small town in the hinterland, up on the slopes of the Great Dividing Range, in a loop of the North Pine River. It will remind you of the valley of the Vienne, except for alfalfa pasture instead of vineyards and cattle instead of goats and chateaux. Dayboro is even smaller than St Gilles, though it has more churches, three churches, built not of stone but of wood. They won’t last beyond the next bushfire. Each church is no bigger than Grand Loup’s cottage.
There is no other way to get here except by road, some of it unpaved, much of it steep with hairpin turns. From Samford Village, on the north-west edge of Brisbane, you should take the Mount Samson Road and after thirty minutes of climbing you’ll reach Dayboro. For a good part of the way you’ll be hugging the western shore of Lake Samsonvale. Where the Mount Samson Road ends you will be facing the Dayboro pub. It’s a sprawling wooden colonial building with a wide front veranda. A massive Moreton Bay fig tree shades the veranda like a vast green umbrella, more than welcome under the Queensland sun. Prepare for more heat and humidity than you have ever known.
You should ask at the bar inside for the Man from Nowhere, the one who’s a butcher and breeds cattle. The pub owner’s a friend and he knows I’m rattled by strangers asking questions. He’ll be suspicious. He’ll check you out. You should say only, ‘He’s expecting me,’ and you should show by way of proof the rosary (this one, the lapis lazuli one, which by rights should be on the floor of the South China Sea, and would be, except for a chain of miracles in which neither of us could believe. If you are reading this letter, you will have that rosary in your hands.) After you’ve told the pub owner that I’m expecting you, you should order a beer (you should ask for whatever’s on tap; you will blow my cover forever if you order wine) and you should sit at one of the tables on the veranda, under the Moreton Bay fig, until I join you.
Bring no one with you and don’t bring a camera. If you do, the pub owner will warn me and I won’t show up. Whatever you do, don’t say anything about your past or mine.
To be honest, I don’t know if I hope you’ll get this or not. I don’t know if I hope you’ll show up in Dayboro or not. If you knew the grief I feel at casting your rosary into the unreliable currents of the postal service – I feel like a shipwrecked sailor throwing an SOS in a bottle into the surf, and since I am a shipwrecked sailor, that is not a metaphor I use lightly – perhaps my panic will earn me some clemency. I am, after all, tossing a precious relic into the ocean of the world and praying that it will come back to me.
Who could possibly have believed I would become so superstitious? Not me.
How Father JG would be amused!
The letter was unsigned.
5.
At Brisbane airport, the man at the Budget car rental desk traced out the route with a red felt marker on the map. ‘After Samford Village,’ he explained, ‘you’ll be climbing through rainforest country, D’Aguilar Range, foothill spur of our Great Divide. Not the Rockies, but we think it’s impressive. Third-longest mountain range in the world, as a matter of fact. Hugs the east coast for more than two thousand miles, from the northern tip of Queensland to the Grampians, west of Melbourne.’
‘And I’ll be surrounded by jungle?’
‘I wish. Used to be. Once upon a time this was all rainforest, including where we’re standing now. When I was a kid, the road you’ll be taking was nothing more than a green tunnel, trees and lianas like walls on each side, canopy thick as a roof. Sunlight was always green.’ He sighed. ‘Now? The rainforest shrinks every week. Cleared for subdivisions and farming. But what can you do? The city spreads, the population grows, people have to be housed and fed. My dad had one of the earliest farms and I grew up there. Rainforest used to press right up against our house.’
‘Can you show me your farm on this map?’ Cap asked.
‘Right here.’ The man made a small X. ‘You’ll pass it ten minutes after Samford Village, twenty minutes before you get to Dayboro.’
‘Do you go back often?’
‘Can’t bear to. Breaks my heart. Some bloody developer from Melbourne bought two hundred hectares, demolished the houses and the farms. It’s a yuppie village now, Cedar Creek Chalets, all swimming pools and driveways and lawns. Still –’ he smiled bravely – ‘they can’t ruin the D’Aguilar Range or the lakes or the Pine River Valley. And the developers haven’t got to Dayboro yet. Gorgeous country. You’ll find it will be love at first sight. Stop at one of the lookout points and you can see all the way to Moreton Bay.’
‘Which means I’ll be seeing the Pacific?’
‘You will. Yes. You’ll be seeing what Captain Cook saw in 1770, except in reverse.’
‘Are you sure you expect me to bring this car back to the airport?’
‘Yeah. I’ve got your credit-card imprint, don’t I? But do I expect you to tell me you’ve bought some land and that you’ll be coming back as soon as you can? That won’t surprise me. Happens all the time, especially when Americans visit. They get embarrassingly excited. It’s the frontier, they tell me. It’s the last frontier, it’s virgin forest. You’d think they’d seen Adam and Eve at the Dayboro Pub.’
‘So you’re Cap,’ the publican said, emerging from the shadowy interior of the bar and crossing the wide veranda.
‘How do you know my name?’
‘That’s what the Man from Nowhere calls you.’ He placed a large mug of pale golden ale on the wooden table, not very delicately, sloshing the beer on the pocked wooden surface and on his customer’s lap. ‘Hey, Sean!’ he called back into the bar. ‘You can go now. All clear.’
He went inside and came back with a towel and wiped the spill off the table. ‘Sorry about that.’
‘I have never seen such an enormous tree in my life,’ Cap said, awestruck, looking up into the vast spreading boughs and the dark leaf ceiling.
‘Yeah. Moreton Bay fig. Native to our neck of the woods.’
‘It doesn’t just cover your veranda, it covers your whole building. Your pub’s a tree house.’
‘Yeah. Keeps us cool. Some newspaper bloke measured the crown, edge to edge, and reckons she’s forty-five metres.’
‘What’s that in feet?’
‘Gee, I dunno. Roughly multiply by three is the rule, I reckon.’
‘So about a hundred and forty feet?’
‘Whatever. If you say so. And she’s fifty metres tall, this tree is. She’s a lot older than the pub, which has been here since before Adam lost a rib, and she’s mucked up our foundations and our plumbing more than once. She’s a bit of a bitch. One day her roots’ll just topple us over or swallow us up. So. Cap. Pleased to meetcha. I’m Brendan O’Sullivan.’ He extended a damp and not entirely clean beery hand. ‘Since you’re a fellow Mick, drink’s on the house.’
‘Thank you for the drink. What did you say I was?’
‘Another Mick. Aren’t ya?’
‘I don’t know what a Mick is.’
‘The rosary. Catholic, aren’t ya?’
‘Oh. Yes. Well, so
rt of. Baptised and confirmed, but I don’t, you know … I’m not exactly …’
‘Enough said. Bet I’ve stayed away from mass longer than you have, even though Father Pat comes here for a drink or three every day. But once a Mick always a Mick, eh? Where’re you from? Well, obviously America. You sound American. Don’t they call Catholics Micks over there?’
‘No, they don’t. At least, I’ve never heard the expression.’
‘Not even Irish Americans?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Where’d your family come from?’
‘Oh. From all over.’
‘So how do you know the butcher, our mystery man?’
‘It’s a long story,’ Cap said.
‘All his stories are long,’ Brendan O’Sullivan said, ‘but we don’t know if any of them are true. We do know he did his stint in Vietnam and came back with a scar on his face and a gimpy leg, but he won’t talk about that. He won’t talk about what he did when he first came back. He just showed up one day out of nowhere, out of Channel Country or somewhere, maybe the Birdsville Track. But he’s a genuine Aussie and a regular Queenslander, that’s for sure. Claims he’s worked every cattle station from Darwin to here and back and I believe him. He knows beer and he knows beef, so we let him buy a bit of land even though we suspect he might have been born in Darwin. The thing is, we don’t like foreigners here, and by foreigners I mean anyone who isn’t born and bred in Queensland, so we don’t often let foreigners buy land. And we don’t even much like having foreigners visit, so count yourself lucky that he’s vouched for you.’
‘I am counting myself lucky. Is it always this hot and steamy?’
Brendan O’Sullivan laughed. ‘You call this hot and steamy? It’s only October, for God’s sake. Better not stick around for January and February. That’s when it gets hot.’
Cap pointed to a road sign with an arrow, not far away. It said MT MEE ROAD. There was a dogleg turn just beyond it. ‘Where does that go?’ she asked.
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