Bernice stood there, her face pinched. Sam had her over a barrel. She would have to state plainly that she wanted Sam to leave and that wasn’t how Bernice did things. She preferred to pick away at the scab than rip it off and expose the wound to the light.
‘I was just making tea. Would you like a cup?’ said Bernice, changing tack and saving face in one fell swoop.
‘Thank you.’ Sam followed her mother into the kitchen. Bernice flicked the switch of the kettle and opened a cupboard door for cups.
‘So, how was yesterday? Did you have a good Christmas?’
Bernice shrugged. ‘It was quiet. Isabella had no one to play with.’
‘I’m afraid that couldn’t be helped. My kids wouldn’t have been here regardless.’
‘So now Jeff is dictating when he has the children?’
‘No,’ Sam said firmly. ‘It was his turn this year. In fact he was kind enough to wait till Christmas morning to pick them up.’
‘Hm, happy families!’ Bernice smirked.
‘I hope so, Mum. I hope we can all still manage to be happy despite what’s happened.’
‘Well, good luck with that,’ muttered Bernice, pouring water into the teapot.
Sam leaned forward on the bench, considering her. ‘You’ve never been very happy, have you, Mum?’
Bernice was clearly taken aback. ‘I beg your pardon, Samantha?’
‘I’m just saying, life doesn’t appear to have made you very happy.’
‘Well, what do you expect? It wasn’t so easy being left on your own with three children, thirty odd years ago.’
‘You think it’s easy for me, Mum?’ Sam raised an eyebrow. ‘This is the hardest thing I’ve ever been through.’
‘Well, imagine what it was like for me,’ she said squarely.
‘I’d like to. Why don’t you tell me?’
Bernice breathed out. ‘I feel like I’m on Oprah,’ she muttered.
Sam folded her arms, waiting.
‘When your father left, Maxine was only tiny, I cried all day, every day, I couldn’t stop.’ Her voice was brittle, guarded. ‘It seemed to be beyond my control. I was certainly not normally predisposed to tears.’
‘It sounds like postnatal depression.’
‘Oh, for the love of . . . why does everything have to have a fancy label these days?’ Bernice shook her head. ‘I was upset. Of course I was, your father had walked out and left me with three small children.’
‘You should have got help, nowadays you can get counselling –’
‘I saw a counsellor. The sister at the hospital clinic arranged it after I cried all the way through my postnatal check-up.’
‘That’s great. That you saw a counsellor, I mean.’
‘Oh, please!’ she frowned. ‘It was a complete waste of time. I had to do all the talking to keep the conversation going. He just sat there, nodding, repeating things I said straight back at me. The man was a fool. He gave me a prescription for some pills, but I tore it up when I got home.’
Sam wondered whether their childhood would have been better or worse if Bernice had ended up addicted to Valium, which was probably all they were offering back then.
‘Why did Dad leave, do you think?’
Bernice looked up abruptly. ‘Maxine was another girl. Three strikes and he was out the door.’
‘Do you really think that’s all it was?’ Sam asked carefully.
‘What are you suggesting?’
‘I’m not suggesting anything. I was just asking a question.’
‘Well, then, what are you implying, Sam? That it was somehow my fault?’
‘I didn’t say that, I wouldn’t say that,’ she said levelly. ‘He left you with three kids, there’s no excusing that.’
‘Exactly,’ Bernice agreed. She handed Sam a cup of tea. ‘I did everything for that man. I washed and cooked and cleaned and cared for his children. He couldn’t have asked for more in a wife.’
Sam felt a chill right through to her heart. She was her mother’s daughter.
Bernice reached for a tin on top of the refrigerator. ‘I know you don’t make Christmas cake any more, but do you still eat it?’
Sam didn’t take the bait. ‘Yes, thanks Mum, I’d love some.’ She watched her mother cut the cake and arrange the pieces on a plate. ‘So, if Max was a boy, he would have stayed and we would have been a happy family,’ Sam suggested.
Bernice bristled. She didn’t look at Sam. ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ she said, dismissively. ‘Let’s sit down, shall we?’
Sam followed her out to the living room and they sat opposite each other, across the coffee table. She wasn’t going to get anywhere talking about their father. Bernice had a black and white view of her marriage, which the passing of so many years had set in stone. It was impossible, and perhaps even unreasonable, to expect her to have a different perspective now. But there was something else Sam had always wanted to ask.
‘What happened with Nan and Pop?’
‘You have a lot of questions today, Samantha.’
She shrugged. ‘I just always wondered why you didn’t speak to them.’
‘We spoke.’
‘Come on, Mum. I was young, I wasn’t stupid.’
Bernice sighed. ‘They never liked your father. They tried to talk me out of marrying him.’
‘Well, they had a point,’ said Sam.
‘Would you be sitting here right now if they’d succeeded?’ Bernice returned sharply.
Sam blinked. ‘No, of course not. You’re absolutely right,’ she said quietly. ‘What happened?’
Bernice shrugged. ‘I got on with my life and they moved up to Taloumbi after your pop retired. When your father left, they wanted to help, give me money, take care of us. But I wasn’t about to give them the satisfaction,’ she said smugly, sipping her tea.
‘But you let them take us in the holidays?’
‘When I started working I had no choice. But that’s the only thing I ever let them do for me.’ She replaced her cup in its saucer. ‘I showed them.’
Sam felt a pang in her heart. Just exactly what had she shown them? Whatever it was, it wasn’t worth the estrangement that persisted between them all those years. Nothing was worth that.
What an awful place to inhabit all that time. Lonely and self-righteous, proving her mettle to who knew any more? Who cared? She looked at Bernice, and suddenly she was no longer the formidable mother of her childhood.
There’s the sad woman whose husband left her, and she never, ever got over it.
Sam made a silent vow that her life was going to add up to more than just surviving. Maybe she was her mother’s daughter, but she wasn’t going to repeat her mistakes. She didn’t need to prove anything to anyone, she just wanted to be happy. She got to her feet and picked up the bag of gifts from where she’d left it earlier. She moved around the coffee table and sat on the couch next to her mother.
‘Why don’t you look at your presents, Mum?’ said Sam. ‘Ellie made something for you at pre-school.’
Palm Beach
‘Maybe it’s that one!’ Jessica exclaimed, pointing towards a huge white mansion on the hilltop.
‘I doubt it.’
They had arrived at Palm Beach and were winding their way slowly up to the crest of the hill, the kids getting more excited and unrealistic by the minute.
‘It’s number fourteen, isn’t that right, Josh?’ Sam asked.
He was navigator for the trip. Sam was annoyed that the stereotype about women and maps had proven true, at least for her family. But she wasn’t giving up on Ellie yet. She just had to learn to read first.
‘That must be the place over there,’ said Josh, pointing ahead.
‘I can’t see any house,’ Jessica declared.
On the eastern side the houses dropped down away from the road, so there was often only a garage or carport visible at street level. Sam spotted the number fourteen on a rickety mailbox next to a small weatherboard garage with a faded olive-green d
oor. She steered the car onto a driveway paved with flagstones, stopping in front of the garage door.
‘Are we here, Mummy?’ said Ellie excitedly.
‘I think we are.’
‘Where’s the house?’
‘Let’s go and find it.’
They got out of the car and made their way down an overgrown path, past a twisted wisteria vine, banana and pawpaw trees and, to Sam’s delight, a frangipani in full bloom. The back wall of the house came into view across a small patch of lawn.
‘Is this it?’ said Jess, turning up her nose.
It was a simple, single-storey cottage, clad in the same dirty green weatherboards as the garage.
Sam smiled. ‘It’s perfect.’ She found the key in her handbag. ‘Just wait till you see inside, I bet the view is spectacular.’
They followed her into a darkened hall. The atmosphere was slightly musty, as if the house had been closed up for a while. Sam couldn’t wait to throw open all the windows and doors to catch the breeze coming up from the ocean. The end of the hallway opened into a large room with a kitchen at one end. The opposite wall was apparently almost entirely windows, but they were concealed by a run of drab beige curtains. Sam found the cord to open them and as they swept aside, a view across the whole of Palm Beach was revealed. As she had predicted, it was spectacular.
She unlocked the doors and slid them back as a fresh gust of sea air flooded into the room. They stepped out onto a wide deck that appeared to be suspended above the tree line of Norfolk Island pines. From here they could see the full curved sweep of the beach below them, from the rocky outcrop at the southern end, all the way to where it mushroomed out to form the Barrenjoey Headland to the north.
‘Wow,’ murmured Jess.
‘Awesome,’ Josh added.
‘Look Mummy,’ cried Ellie. ‘There’s a lighthouse!’
Sam picked her up, perching her on one hip. ‘So there is.’
‘Can we go and see it one day, Mummy?’
‘I don’t know. We’ll have to find out if it’s open to tourists.’
‘What’s a toowist, Mummy?’
‘Well, that’s what we are,’ Sam laughed. ‘We’re “toowists”!’
‘I bags first dibs on a bedroom,’ Josh blurted suddenly, dashing back inside.
‘That’s not fair!’ Jess whined, following him.
Sam set Ellie down with a sigh and walked back into the living room.
‘I bagsed, Jess!’
‘But you’ve got a room to yourself at home, and at Dad’s. I should get first choice here.’
‘Says who?’
‘Listen to me, you two,’ Sam said loudly enough to get their attention. ‘This is my holiday too, and I don’t want to spend it refereeing your arguments. Now, can you please try to be reasonable for a change?’
‘But Mum, I should get to choose. How come he gets everything?’
‘Why don’t you check out the rooms before you start arguing over them?’
As it turned out, there were six bedrooms in total and the issue was resolved. The house was deceiving from the outside. It was one of those places that had been tacked onto over time, rooms added according to need, resulting in a rabbit-warren floorplan that the kids proclaimed ‘heaps cool’. There had been few other changes, though Sam was pretty sure a wall had been knocked out in the large room facing the deck. The bathroom was the original 1950s pink and grey, but clean and well kept. The floors had been stripped back to timber throughout, the furniture was dated, the kitchen basic but adequate. Sam loved it. There was something right about a holiday cottage that was slightly daggy. You wouldn’t want to live in it, but it was a nice place to visit.
‘How many sleeps will we be here for, Mummy?’ Ellie was perched on the kitchen bench, munching on an apple while Sam packed the food away.
‘You’re staying for two whole weeks! That’s fourteen sleeps, which takes up all your fingers and thumbs on both hands, and more.’
‘How many more?’
‘You have to count four toes as well,’ said Sam, tickling Ellie’s feet.
She giggled. ‘When are we going to the beach, Mummy?’
‘As soon as I pack away all this.’
Ellie climbed down off the bench and wandered out to the balcony. Sam watched her staring out to sea, her chin resting on the handrail. She turned around to look at her mother.
‘It’s so pretty, Mummy,’ she called. ‘Are we going soon?’
Sam looked at her watch and then at the boxes of groceries. Bugger it. They would still be here later, and it was already after two.
‘Go tell your brother and sister to get ready.’
Two weeks later
‘I wonder what the poor people are doing today?’ pondered Maxine, peering out from under an enormous straw hat, her eyes shielded with dark glasses.
Sam laughed lazily from her deckchair. ‘At least two of them are sitting on a balcony overlooking Palm Beach, sipping margaritas.’
‘To handsome Hal,’ said Max, raising her glass. For providing the location.’
‘And to Dan, Dan, the Margarita Man,’ added Sam.
‘Dan makes a mean margarita, I’ll give him that.’
‘Dan is perfect,’ Sam insisted. ‘Especially since he volunteered to take the kids down to the beach for a game of cricket.’
‘The thing is, he’d rather be down there playing cricket. He’s a bigger kid than the lot of them. I think he might be hyperactive, he always has to be doing something. He wears me out.’
Sam glanced across at her with a wicked grin.
‘Shut up you.’
‘I didn’t say anything.’
‘Yes, but you were having impure thoughts.’ Max sat up, looking at Sam. ‘Speaking of which, when are you expecting Hal?’
‘I’m not sure. I haven’t heard from him since Christmas.’
‘Well let’s hope he’s not too far off, so you two can make the most of the time alone.’
Sam had invited Max and Dan up for a few days, and in return they’d offered to take the kids to Jeff’s, saving her the trip back and forth.
Max considered the frown on Sam’s face. ‘What’s up?’
She shrugged. ‘I’m still a little squeamish at the idea of being here all alone with him, for an extended period of time.’
Max laughed. ‘It’s a hell of a job, but someone’s got to do it, right Sherl?’ She sat up and faced her directly. ‘Would you please get over yourself for a while? I’m not going to give you a lecture, I’m on holiday. But drop the defences, Sam, you’re on holiday too. When Hal shows up, just relax and enjoy yourself. Go with the flow.’
‘But what if it’s like on TV, that as soon as the unresolved sexual tension is, well, resolved, the show always flops?’
‘What?’ Maxine screwed up her face.
‘And remember, we’re in rebound territory,’ Sam continued breathlessly. ‘We’re both just out of painful break-ups, which is probably what drew us to each other in the first place, but is that enough to sustain a relationship? I have to wonder. And anyway, sustaining a relationship is a whole other problem, given that second time around it’s even more likely to fail. I mean, you’d know the statistics, Max – isn’t the divorce rate higher for second marriages, not that I’m talking about marriage, I mean, that’s not even on the cards, talk about jumping the gun. But what if –’
‘Sam!’ Max cried. ‘What if the friggin’ sky falls in!’
Sam looked at her, startled.
‘Would you stop being so full of doom and gloom? Quit worrying about what might or might not happen in the future. Life’s not that certain. God, anyone would think you had some kind of terrible ordeal ahead of you, instead of a couple of weeks at Palm Beach with a bloody gorgeous man. What is your problem?’
Sam took a deep breath. ‘You’re right. Of course, you’re absolutely right.’
Max swung her legs onto the deckchair, leaned her head back and pulled her hat down over her face.
<
br /> ‘You would have saved me a lot of trouble if you’d realised that a long time ago.’
Wednesday
The kids had been gone for three days and Sam had finished the only book she’d brought with her. She might have to drive out tomorrow to find a bookshop or at least a newsagent, or she’d go stir crazy.
It wasn’t that she was bored all the time. During the day she went for long walks, swam in the ocean, took unbelievably self-indulgent naps and read. But at night she would start to feel edgy. There was a TV, but no video player, and there was never anything decent to watch over summer. Sam would turn on mindless programs and next thing her thoughts would wander. What day was it? How long had she been here? How long did she have left? How long had Hal said he’d be away? He hadn’t been specific, but she thought he’d mentioned mid-January. Wouldn’t that mean he’d be back by now? Maybe he had to go straight back to work here? Maybe he’d call on the weekend? Maybe she would go crazy if she kept on this train of thought? Train? Trains ran to schedules along a single track. Her thoughts were more like dodgem cars, careering all over the place out of control.
Sam was startled by a loud knock at the door.
‘Yoohoo! Mr Buchanan, is anyone there? It’s the agent for the house.’
Sam hurried up the hall to the flyscreen door. A smiling, middle-aged woman stood on the other side, wearing a neat navy blue suit and carrying a handbag and a clipboard.
‘Oh, hello! Mrs Buchanan, I presume?’ she chirped.
‘Um . . .’ Sam didn’t really want to have to go into complicated explanations. ‘How do you do?’ she said as she opened the door and offered the woman her hand. ‘Do you want to come in?’
‘No, no, I don’t want to bother you. We just like to check in with our tenants after a couple of weeks, make sure everything’s okay, they aren’t having any problems.’
‘Oh no, everything’s fine,’ Sam nodded. The woman just looked at her, smiling. ‘Mr Buchanan’s not around, unfortunately,’ Sam added. ‘He was called overseas for work. But he should be back any day now.’
Wife for Hire Page 44
