So they knew the worst of her. Or would the worst be that they have discovered that Janet Skellowski was no relation to Tommy Thompson? But I am, she thought. You and I are kin, old man, even if I am not your great-granddaughter.
She lifted her chin. ‘Your policeman told you that I was a liar and uncontrollable?’
‘No. He said . . . that was what . . . you . . . accused of being. Not a policeman . . . private investigator.’
‘Like Hercule Poirot?’
‘Chappie in . . . those detective novels? . . . No. Seems competent . . . enough. Tell me what really happened? But only if . . . you want.’
Tommy believed her. Would believe her. She wanted to cry, but she wouldn’t burden him with tears. ‘I want to tell you. Anything you want me to tell you.’ Because she was this man’s kin, and he deserved the whole truth, deserved whatever she could give him.
Tommy stretched out a feeble hand.
She took it. She had touched and been touched more today than she could ever remember.
It was surprisingly easy to tell him, once she had begun. He didn’t comment, though his hand squeezed hers gently at the difficult bits.
‘And so I came here,’ she finished.
‘I see.’ The word was almost as soft as the hiss of the oxygen. ‘What happened . . . to the . . . baby?’
She shut her eyes at the memory. ‘The baby was a little girl. I thought they’d bury her in a proper grave. But they just took her away and when I asked when the funeral was they said they’d . . .’ She swallowed. ‘That they’d already disposed of her.’
‘I see.’ The words were even softer. ‘I will see . . . if we can find what happened. But if we can’t . . . give her . . . a funeral . . . would you like . . . a memorial for her?’
‘Could you do that?’
‘There is a graveyard . . . behind the house . . . end of the garden. A family graveyard. No one . . . buried in it . . . for a hundred years . . . Could put a memorial there. Or a . . . grave . . . if that is possible.’ Could Tommy Thompson’s wealth find the body of her child? She didn’t know whether to howl in anguish or in joy. But this was not the place or time for either.
‘Would your wife agree? It’s her place.’ Her family in the ground.
‘She’ll agree.’ He spoke as a man who knew exactly what his wife would accept.
‘I was going to call her Alannah,’ she said past the boulder in her throat. ‘It means tree.’
‘Good name . . . I’ll tell . . . Matilda. We will plant . . . trees for her.’ A faint smile. ‘Matilda likes trees. What kind?’
Suddenly she knew with absolute certainty. ‘The ones with white arms, by the river.’ Because they were the trees of this land, and even if her child could not rest here, if those trees were planted for her she would be part of it.
‘Red gums,’ he said around the snake’s hiss of oxygen. ‘Matilda says . . . willow trees need . . . replacing. But red gums . . . replace themselves.’
Her child would have more than a memorial in a graveyard then. Trees that grew more trees, as long as there was earth and river. And she would be tied to them, to this land, by more than her love for Tommy and for Nancy. She realised with a shock that she already was.
‘Thank you. I . . . I don’t know how to thank you.’ She hoped she wasn’t tiring him. ‘Especially as you probably think now that I can’t be your great-granddaughter. Nancy said that your investigator said my mother’s name was Violet, not Rose.’
‘That was the mother’s name . . . they put on your birth certificate. Your mother . . . may have been trying to hide from . . . first husband. But . . . nothing linking Janet Skellowski . . . or John and Violet Skellowski . . . to Rose Zambriski.’
‘So you don’t think I am your great-granddaughter?’ It hurt even more than the story she had just told. She tried to push the hurt away, to deal with it later, when she was alone.
‘Jed!’ The fragile fingers tightened on her hand. She brought herself back to this room, the man on the bed. ‘You . . . are still yourself . . . related to me by blood . . . or not. Enormously . . . glad . . . you are . . . in my life.’
This family was good at taking in outsiders, she thought. But today they were rejoicing at the news of a descendant by blood. Acceptance was not the same as being truly family. But did she deserve any more, a girl who hadn’t even been able to keep her own baby safe till it was born? ‘Thank you. I . . . like you too.’
It should have been ‘I love you’. But she was too overcome to manage the word. Nancy’s baby. Admitting her story. Trees for Alannah, maybe even, possibly, a real grave. Most of all, that Tommy had accepted her story, and her. Despite everything that she was, he had accepted her.
It was what she had hoped for, coming here. Enough acceptance so she could tell them casually, ‘I want to finish my HSC,’ and have them arrange for her to go to school again.
But she didn’t want that now. She’d do her HSC part time, and if it didn’t happen this year, it would be the next, and she’d do it well enough to get a scholarship to go to uni and live with Nicholas.
Nicholas deserved more, she thought, than a girl like her. But for now, at least, he needed her, and she was all that was available. Later, when he had new legs, when he was stronger, could do his own shopping, when he could walk unaided, he would find the person he deserved to love . . . She shut her mind to that too. Later. Later.
‘You’re giving me . . . an extraordinary gift,’ the man on the bed whispered.
‘News from Honeysuckle Creek?’
‘That too . . . I mean . . . yourself.’ The eyes were kind above the mask. ‘At my age . . . someone new to love . . . is precious.’
‘You will have Nancy’s baby too.’
‘The baby.’ The smile grew even softer. Tommy couldn’t know how much it hurt her, even if she rejoiced for Nancy. A baby wanted. Its mother cherished.
Tommy liked her. Loved her, that hard word to say, to even understand. But when the baby came there would be less room in his heart for her. And when Tommy died, would even Nancy’s friendship remain? If nothing turned up to link her by blood to this family, would Jed always be the girl who tried to hoodwink the Thompson family, beguile an old man near his death?
She heard the rattle of the tray in the corridor. Tea. And the fresh-baked scones, cake, pikelets this family took for granted, just like they accepted their polished wood, the high-ceilinged rooms, security. Except Tommy had said they hadn’t always had it.
‘Tell me about . . . the tracking station,’ whispered Tommy as Anita carried in the tray.
And so she did, helping him to tea, to crumbs of pikelets and strawberry jam, while she spoke of the great dish deep in the bush that would help lead men to the moon and back.
Chapter 45
JED
3 March 1969
Dear Jed,
Hope these textbooks get to you okay. I went down to the high school and asked the headmaster about your doing the HSC. He was a bit dismissive at first, and said you’d need to come and have an interview etc. etc., but when I told him you were Tommy’s great-granddaughter and working on the Apollo program he changed his tune. The Thompson name is magic around here.
Anyhow, Mr Andrews says he can arrange coaching for you on Saturday afternoons. He didn’t quite come out and say so, but he more or less admitted that if you know the textbooks back to front, and do the extra reading, you should do okay in the exams, except for English and German. German’s not too bad, as it’s mostly just learning more vocab, but there’s pronunciation too so you might need help with that, depending on how much you’ve picked up already. You need to learn some specific things in English, but the woman who’s agreed to coach you says she’ll give you old exam papers to do during the week so she can see where you need help. Her name is Miss Thrush, and she’s about a hundred and fifty years old, but she knows her stuff. Don’t worry about paying her. I said I would, but later she called in to tell me that she’d rung Drinkwater �
� I reckon she wanted to check you were who I said you were — and Tommy said he’ll cover all the expenses. No good you protesting (or me either). Their name might be magic, but their word is law.
Matron Clancy told me to tell you that Michael will pick you up Friday night again. Hope that’s okay. They’ve asked me out to Overflow for the weekend too. We can have some time together.
Hope all is good up at the tracking station. Even if it is all part of the Cold War, I envy you, being where something is happening. It’s same old, same old here. With butterflies.
Love,
Nicholas
She put the letter down on the tattered sofa and opened the package of books. Ancient history, history, economics, German and biology textbooks, Macbeth and the novel Johnny Tremain. She imagined Nicholas carrying them around the shop in his wheelchair. Or did he give the money to buy them to one of the staff? Probably, she thought, to save manoeuvring through a bookshop. But he had gone to the school for her, despite the stares, asking for help getting his chair up kerbs and possibly steps. It was an extraordinary gift.
And yet . . . She looked at the signature again. Love, Nicholas. This was almost the letter you’d write to a sister.
Stop it, she told herself. He’s said he wants to live with you. Went all the way to the school for you, which either meant an hour in his chair or the humiliation of being helped in and out of the River View van.
Did she really think Nicholas was ever going to say, ‘I feel like I’ve spent my life with you, twenty thousand days of seeing you at breakfast, talking about the news and friends and children’? That he’d say, ‘You are my soul mate. I will love you till the stars burn black. Marry me!’? Lots of people lived together these days to see if they were suited, then got married later, though she didn’t think any of the girls she’d known at school would. And if living together didn’t lead to marriage, she would have had that time with him, even if she later lost him, just as she could remember Alannah heavy below her heart, when she was part of her. She would have the memories in the china cabinet of her heart, to take out and dust and to cherish.
Getting her these books showed Nicholas cared for her. That was enough, she thought, as she arranged them on the mantelpiece, where hopefully the rat couldn’t get them if it found a way into the study. It had to be enough.
Summer’s heat vanished in a thunderstorm that collapsed even more of the living-room roof under a heap of blue-white hail, blocking the way to the front door. But the hallway to the back door still seemed sound, and only a trickle of rat droppings and dark water seeped down the wall into the study. She foraged for bricks and planks among the debris to keep the floor of the tent and her bedding out of the water. She had felt guilty, hammering the tent pegs into the wooden floor, but it was little enough damage compared to what had already been done.
The weeks had fallen into a pattern. She knew the rhythms at work now: fill the coffee pots, peel and chop the vegetables.
‘I’ve even learned the secrets of pastry,’ she told Tommy the next Saturday morning. Outside men yelled and women directed. The daughter of Drinkwater’s manager, Cheryl McAlpine, was getting married that afternoon and the reception was being held in a giant marquee in the garden.
‘There’s . . . more than . . . one?’
‘Hundreds! Pastry is more complicated than astrophysics. The rules of the universe don’t change with the weather, but the rules of pastry do.’
He raised an eyebrow. He seemed younger suddenly, more in command. ‘Elaborate.’
‘It depends on the heat, the moisture in the air. If it’s hot, you have to chill the pastry, or the butter turns into oil and the pastry turns into lead.’
‘Alchemy . . . not physics.’
She wrinkled her nose at him. ‘But if it’s humid, the flour will have absorbed more water, so you’re better off not adding an egg yolk.’
The door opened. A woman with Chinese features and her hair in curlers under a silk scarf poked her head in. ‘Sorry about the noise, Tommy. Oh, I beg your pardon.’
‘Mah, this is . . . my great-granddaughter, Jed. Jed . . . this is Mrs Mah McAlpine. Her daughter Cheryl . . . getting married . . . this afternoon.’
Jed felt her breath leave her. It was the first time that Tommy had matter-of-factly referred to the relationship between them. Did he still believe that somehow she might be his relative? Or was it an honorary title, to save her from being scorned as a pretender?
‘Pleased to meet you.’ Mah McAlpine seemed preoccupied with other things. ‘Tommy, are you sure the music’s not going to disturb you tonight?’
‘Quite sure . . . will disturb me. Good . . . thing . . . too.’ He paused to replenish his breath after the long speech. ‘Jed . . . telling me about . . . physics of pastry. She believes . . . pastry is more complicated than . . . getting men to . . . moon.’
‘I didn’t quite say that . . .’ began Jed.
Mah McAlpine looked at Jed properly, and with approval. ‘Quite right too. Too few people understand the science behind baking. Will you be at the reception tonight? You’re very welcome. I’d say come to the church too, but it’s going to be packed to the rafters. Bring your young man to the reception though.’
Everyone knew everything around here, thought Jed. ‘I’d love to, but I don’t have anything to wear.’
‘Goodness, Matilda can find you something. You’re about the same size. I’d better run. Do you know that stupid deliveryman put the wedding cake in the sun? A hundred and twenty-four marzipan roses wilting. I’ve put it in the old dairy, but it’s going to take at least three hours to get the decorations right again . . . See you tonight, Jed.’ She vanished out the door again.
Tommy reached for the bell at his bedside, his eyes amused. ‘You are going . . . to a party,’ he said.
She didn’t really want to go to a party. A mob of strangers, asking her questions. ‘You’re Tommy’s great-granddaughter?’ ‘Where’s your home?’ Even ‘What are you doing now?’ was one she didn’t want to answer. Honeysuckle Creek was between her and Tommy, with bits shared with Nicholas and Nancy. Nor did she want to tell the crowd that the Thompsons’ great-granddaughter was reduced to washing dishes. Not that she was ashamed of the dishes, but it would raise questions.
And she certainly did not want to wear the Dragon’s cast-off clothes. I’ll look a freak, she thought, as Matilda Thompson silently led her along the corridor and opened a door.
Three walls of the room were built-in closets. The fourth had a dressing table and a window looking down to the river. Matilda Thompson looked at her expressionlessly. ‘What colours do you like?’
‘Look, really, it doesn’t matter.’
‘Tommy wants you to go.’ The voice was expressionless too.
‘Nancy can find me something then.’
‘Nancy is four inches taller than either of us,’ said Matilda dryly. ‘Unless you want to wear something way down past your knees.’
‘No . . .’
‘I didn’t think so.’ Matilda raised an eyebrow, suddenly looking disconcertingly like Tommy. Did husbands and wives learn each other’s expressions? ‘You think I am going to give you something dowdy and middle-aged, don’t you?’
Middle-aged? Matilda was kidding. It had been decades since the Dragon was middle-aged. Jed said nothing.
‘Your generation thinks you’ve invented mini skirts. We showed our knees AND our stocking tops back in the twenties. Long hair for men? Most males in my childhood had hair down to their collars. But not those Beatles fringes, except on the cows. As for the step-ins women wear now . . . far too like the corsets of the 1890s. How can women do that to their bodies? Let’s see: 1922, I fancy. I had my dresses sent from Paris back then.’ She opened a cupboard and pulled out a hanger. ‘Try this one. Modern underwear will give it a modern shape. You’ll see,’ she added as Jed still hesitated.
The dress was green silk at the top, shading subtly till its skirt was bright pink, edged with gold. No slee
ves, a scoop neckline. It was the loveliest dress she had ever seen.
‘I . . . I might get a spot on it.’
‘It can be dry-cleaned. For goodness’ sake, try it on, girl. Do you think I am ever going to wear it again? My legs may still be good, but my knees are an old woman’s.’
‘Your daughters-in-law . . .’
Matilda laughed. She looked human when she laughed. ‘I’m glad you appreciate the worth of a good dress. This wouldn’t even make a mini skirt for my daughters-in-law. Tall strapping wenches, Tommy calls them, and he’s right. If Nancy gives me a granddaughter, she’ll probably take after her parents. Well fed when they were small, the both of them, with mutton and a house cow. I was half starved till I was twelve and I suspect you weren’t properly fed either, though the Twiggy starvation look is fashionable now. Try it on.’
Jed shed her own dress quickly, glad she had on her newest bra and knickers, then slipped the dress over her head. She turned to the mirror. ‘Oh.’
‘I thought it would suit you.’ Matilda’s voice was matter-of-fact.
‘It . . . it’s incredible. I can’t believe how it looks like a modern dress.’
‘A good dress — no, a brilliant dress — never goes out of fashion, or not for long. You’ll need stockings.’ Matilda opened a drawer full of unopened packets, many shades. ‘What shoes do you have?’
‘Just these sandals, and a pair of thongs. My other shoes are back in Queanbeyan.’ And included a pair of saddleback shoes she’d found in a clothing bin, and could wear to work.
‘Thongs? Good grief. How anyone can wear those things I do not know. No protection for the feet, flap, flap, flap.’ She eyed Jed again. ‘What size shoe do you take? Six?’
‘Seven.’
‘A size larger than me. You were meant to be taller. Try these.’
‘These’ were saddlebacks too, open at the toe and heel, but very different from the ones she’d found in the dumpster, pale gold leather. She tried them on.
The Ghost by the Billabong Page 27
