‘Dad,’ she had said again, looking directly at him. He had tried to get out of his chair but had sat back again, gesturing to the television.
‘Turn it up please.’
Ellis had pressed the button. She decided she would have to get him a remote control, to make it easier.
She always suspected there were things in the tin box that would reveal the truth about her mother. She knew where it was kept and could have fetched it herself and had a quiet look. Indeed she could have taken it away and kept it and he would never have known, except she could not do that. It remained in its place in the sideboard cupboard, the cupboard that would have contained cork-backed placemats and the collection of wax fruit, except she had thrown all those things out years back.
The memories of all those old things. The house and its contents, for years so dark and dreary, was, until she was sixteen or seventeen, the only kind of home she had known existed. And all that her father had known too, apparently. It had never struck her, until now, reaching into the box and its cool musty contents, that when she redecorated that front room, moving out the dark brown carpet and covering the lounge seats with plain light fabric, how much that must have disturbed him. Her father had agreed to it but not approved. Now she understood that the place must have been exactly as it had been when her mother disappeared, when she was just a baby, and that he needed that house to remain like a wax bouquet under a glass dome.
The first photo was of a woman seated in that same room, taken decades ago but the room, uncannily, appeared just as it was when she had lived there as a girl. It was like a still from a black and white film of her childhood. There was the same oak planter she remembered, but containing a madonna lily. Beside it the woman was seated on a ladder-backed chair, her body partially turned to her left where there was a small round table containing the tea service. She faced the camera, but her features were fuzzy. It was as if she were about to pour tea and someone had persuaded her to pause for the camera. She was not smiling. The curtains behind her had been pushed aside, causing the light coming through the window to obscure half her face. Ellis had removed those velvet curtains and the ecru lace ones behind them. They always smelled of dust. There was a wooden window seat, one of her favourite places to sit when she was a child, watching out for the baker or the postman.
She sat back in her chair. Now she remembered Nell Wood’s polishing of the same silver tea service that was never used, the weekly dusting ritual of the dining room, which they used on Christmas Day and never any other time. The ugly dried flower arrangements that Nell had done her best with, taking them outside and shaking them upside down to shift the dust, before spraying them with VO5 to hold the delicate petals and feathery stems in place, to make them last as long as possible. In her cleaning and redecorating frenzy Ellis had taken them and tossed them into the bin one afternoon while her father was at bowls. When he came home and saw the bare mantelpiece that she was painting with undercoat he turned on his heel at the door and went to his sitting room with the Sunday paper.
Holding the contents of the box, she let the reel of memories scroll across her mind, and it was just like she was watching a film, albeit a surreal one full of odd leaps and vacant chunks of the narrative. She saw herself sitting hunched on her bed all that awful afternoon, before striding down the backyard to burn the photographs, then returning to start cleaning the kitchen. She remembered how dinner was late that day since she had lost track of time. She had cooked potatoes, new ones, in their jackets, and fried sausages with onion gravy, which she hated but her father loved. She had emptied the vegetable bin and taken it outside and scrubbed it. And after dinner and all the next day she had continued cleaning, getting down on the floor again to scrub the lino upon which years and years of floor polish had yellowed the pale green and pink rose pattern like a thick layer of varnish. As she scrubbed she saw Mrs Wood mopping with a cotton cloth tied with string to an old flat broom, which gave a better result, she said, than a usual mop. Before Mrs Wood, who would have cleaned this floor? Her mother maybe, and her grandmother certainly. Perhaps before that a maid or the weekly help. The idea of all these women on their knees like her scrubbing away grime then layering on floor polish, only to have to strip it off again with yet more scrubbing, filled her with a sense of outrage. She determined she would have the lino taken out as soon as she could and replaced with something more practical. In one corner where it wouldn’t show she turned back a section to discover layers of newspaper stained the colour of tea. Under that were floorboards, oiled and black with age.
In the event, she had not, but instead had turned her energies to the front room, which she had transformed, ensuring that whatever she did she would make it as different to the way it had always been, for as long as she remembered. But after all that she had not used that room very much. She had sat there and played records and painted her nails on weekends, or tackled her various craft projects at nights after work. Not so long afterwards she had married Vince and moved out. In her head she could hear a single forever playing ‘Eleanor Rigby’ on her white portable record player, while seeing herself seated beside the front window making macramé placemats from burnt orange string.
All the photos in the tin box were grainy. There were no more of the woman in the first photo seated in the front room. Her dress suggested it was taken in the 1920s, and although her hair was piled on her head she looked to be quite young. Perhaps it was her grandmother. The next photos were group shots of people she did not know. She recognised the front verandah of the house, and the back garden. There was one of three young men standing on the lawn in cricket whites. Inspecting one closer, she was sure the middle man was her father, his hair clipped close at the sides and brushed to one side of his forehead, rather than combed straight back as he had always worn it. Another photo showed two boys, no more than eight or ten, again seated in the front room, this time in the matching ladder-backed chairs that she had removed to the dining room. Here again was surely her father, who was slightly older, and beside him a much darker version but some of the features were similar. Her father had had dirty blond hair and fair skin, and he was always returning from bowls with a burnt nose despite his hat. It was definitely him, with the solemn mouth that rose slightly higher at one side than the other. The boy next to him had the same shaped eyebrows and full-lipped mouth, though his smile seemed forced. But his brows were dark and somehow he was frowning at the same time he had produced a sneering sort of smile for the photographer. He was seated on the edge of the chair and everything about his attitude suggested he did not want to be there.
She had no idea her father had had a brother, but then she had no idea about any of the family. The final photograph was in a cream envelope, discoloured and foxed with age. She held it up to her nose before slipping her fingers inside. There was a faint smell, stale and floral. She was sure it was the scent of violets. She drew out a photo of herself with her father. Except it was not she, not unless she was clad in a formal wedding dress. And she had never worn her hair as long as that. Nor was she as petite as this woman. But her own eyes, however – striking, dark – stared back, the face directed straight at the camera with a bold, almost ironic, smile. Beside the woman her father seemed a good deal older. And it was the only photograph of him where he was smiling, indeed his face was half turned to the woman beside him as if he had never seen anything more beautiful in his life. In the second or two it took her to realise the truth she dropped all the contents of the tin box onto the table.
29
The Grange was in Strathfield. She took the bus and train, then walked up from the main shopping centre to Redmyre Road. The streets here always reminded her of Ashfield, except they were even wider, and the properties – at least the ones that hadn’t been subdivided – were enormous. The houses were mostly flanked by trees, and shrubs protected the front gardens from the street beyond. The Grange was like many of the houses, set back from the road with a curving drivew
ay. This was spread with white gravel which crunched agreeably as she walked along it. At the entrance only the stainless steel handrails and security cameras betrayed the fact it was a nursing home. Ellis supposed out of all the aged residential care facilities, if that was their correct term, this would have to be one of the nicer. Once a vast house, it still maintained the appearance of a family home. The sign out the front could have been for a wedding reception place or a particularly exclusive club. The receptionist opened the door when she buzzed. On her desk was an oil burner lit by a tea candle and the air was suffused with the scent of lemon verbena. Aside from the introduction of the oil burner, nothing had ever changed since Ellis had first started visiting.
Nell Wood was expecting her. She welcomed her in to a small but airy sitting room.
‘Why don’t we sit here?’ She gestured to a spot next to the casement window that opened on to the side of the house near the back. The gravel drive stretched past the window, and beyond it was a narrow bed of azaleas against the fence. Tradesmen and delivery vans used the driveway on the other side of the house that ran around to the rear of the property, but here, aside from the gardener or the occasional patient, it was quiet and private. The Grange suited Nell Wood’s cloistered life, which had always been conducted as an adjunct to others. Moving from her flat, when the stairs became too much, to this small residence had not proved difficult for her pragmatic nature.
Nell set out cups and Ellis drew out the packet of almond biscuits – the older woman’s favourites – she had bought at the delicatessen on the way. Then she reached into her bag again and pulled out the tin box. Nell took the biscuits into her kitchenette and returned with them on a plate, and the coffee pot. The box seemed very large and dark there on the tea table.
‘So you finally opened it?’
Ellis nodded. ‘You knew what was inside?’
‘Vaguely. I’ve never looked myself. Only photos?’
‘Yes.’ Ellis opened the box and pulled out the photos, turning them over one at a time until she reached the final one. Nell regarded each of them without changing her expression, until the final one was placed before her. She took it up and stared at it for a long time, then placed it down and looked at Ellis.
‘They were married, then? But when did she leave? And why?’
Nell Wood sighed and gazed out the window for a long time before turning to face Ellis again. Her eyes were still clear and bright, unfaded by age.
‘Her name was Catherine.’ She paused, looking around and gesturing as if still after the cigarettes she had finally given up, before settling back in her seat and holding her hands together. ‘And I do wish your father had told you all this,’ she said.
‘But you knew he never would. I need to know what happened.’
Nell Wood poured the coffee and handed Ellis her cup.
‘You were just a baby. So he contacted me. I moved to that flat closer to your house, and came around every day, sometimes from early morning. I continued to look after you and the house until you went off to high school.’
‘I remember all that,’ Ellis said. But she knew she didn’t. She only remembered Mrs Wood from later in her childhood, when she was five or six, fetching her from primary school and taking her home to mind her while she prepared the evening meal. She took her shopping, and for a while to ballet lessons once a week, and sometimes she helped Ellis with school projects, or got her into the bath early, but mostly as soon as Edgar walked in the door from work, she put on her hat and coat and picked up her bag and left.
‘Did you know him, before?’
‘Yes, we did. Frank and I. We were all friends, as it happened. When we were younger.’
‘All?’
‘Your father and your mother, my husband and I.’
Nell Wood had never been anything but kind. She had helped her out when she was in the greatest need. But she was not warm, not kindly, Ellis realised. She could be telling her so much more. She could have told her things years ago. Ellis longed to ask but the woman seemed to have an effect on her, making her tongue remain trapped. She persisted.
‘Why did she leave?’
Nell shrugged. ‘She was unhappy. Very unhappy. Only the unhappiest of women leave their beautiful babies.’
Ellis’s chest heaved. She was not prone to lung problems but every time she was distressed her chest felt like it was being crushed. She breathed in deeply.
‘You need to tell me everything!’ She had not meant to speak so loudly.
‘Everything?’ Nell raised her eyebrows. ‘Whose story is this? Have you never asked yourself that?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, have you not considered that there are other people who have suffered?’
Ellis realised she was referring to herself. Nell Wood had moved to her flat to be closer to Ellis and her father, which must have been a great step for her. And they had all been friends when they were young, the four of them. The meagre facts were studded in her mind against a greater more persistent image that formed the background to her childhood: Mrs Wood departing as soon as her father arrived home. They were never in the house together for more than a few minutes.
*
What, Dove wondered, had she done? Or had she done it? Maybe it had happened exactly like this and she was merely recording the facts. The two women seated in Nell Wood’s small flat in the nursing home were both staring out the window, saying very little. She wanted them to keep speaking, she wanted to hear Nell Wood tell her story and explain to Ellis all that she knew, and yet here was Nell herself providing a glimpse into her own past, and indicating the story was not nearly so simple as she – and Ellis – had assumed.
Nell Wood was the only person who could provide a key to Ellis’s past and it was clearly Dove who had placed her there, once more visualising the journey she took, involving a bus from Potts Point and then a train, and the walk along the strip of shops from Strathfield station up to and then along Redmyre Road. Through Ellis she had seen the pleasant properties, their gardens lush with rhododendrons and cabbage tree palms. She had noted that already many of them had been subdivided, and understood that some of the beautiful old homes had been destroyed to build home units and what were now popularly being called villas, a developer’s term to impart a bucolic mystique to places that in reality crammed ten or more dwellings into blocks that formerly only held one. But yet again all that she could see was merely a small part of the picture. She sensed that a great deal was happening out of her line of sight and that no matter how hard she twisted her head there would always be things running across a screen well past the corner of her eye.
At what point she had begun thinking of these characters as women and not characters she could not say. All she knew was that they had so effectively developed into real creations, ones whose waking moments were punctuated by the same pain and frustration as hers, and whose dreams were as potent as any she had ever experienced, that their inability to discuss what she felt they should be discussing was almost too much for her to bear. The thick glass wall to which she was now accustomed when viewing these characters was firmly in place, so she was not surprised that yet again she could not hear a thing. She saw them sitting there drinking their coffee in an infuriatingly reserved manner, refusing to speak, and no matter how much she pummelled on the glass or shouted, they were oblivious to her presence.
She could have cried with the frustration and with the shocking burden of all that she understood, details of both their pasts she had never known before. Here they were, now leaning forward to pick up the photographs again, then Ellis replacing them in the tin box. Then Nell was walking into her kitchenette while Ellis went to the bathroom. The bathroom was beige. Dove noted its distinct institutional décor, undisguised despite Nell Wood’s efforts to personalise it with a raindrop-patterned shower curtain and thick dusty-pink towels. Ellis patted her hands on
the guest towel and replenished her lipstick in the mirror. She wore a red shade which contrasted strikingly with her dark blue eyes. She was capping the lipstick and putting it back in her shoulder bag. She was going to leave soon and still they had not said all they needed to say. If Dove could have hammered on the bathroom door and hauled Ellis out and sat her down again and instructed her to stay while fetching Nell Wood back from the kitchenette, she surely would have done so. But there Nell was, coolly rinsing the cups, then tipping the coffee grounds into a small plastic bucket under the sink. She could have taken her by the shoulders – and shaken her, really, she was that incensed with the composure of this woman – and made her face Ellis and said to her, ‘Look at her, look at the pain this woman has undergone all her life, and all she wants is the truth.’ There was so much to be said.
Then it struck Dove how much Nell Wood’s reticence masked her own suffering. As frustrated as she was, she began to see that both these women were full of memories swollen with pain, and for Nell in particular they were ones that had been contained for so long that speaking was a near impossibility.
The tragedy of an entire family threatened never to be revealed, let alone resolved, and once more in the writing of this narrative she was powerless to fix it.
30
The Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages was tucked in behind Railway Square. As soon as she crossed Quay Street she could smell the brew of scents emanating from Chinatown. It was a mix familiar yet hard to identify. Star anise seemed to be at the centre of it. Just after opening time, there were no other customers about. She took a blank form from the clerk at the counter and sat down to fill it out. It required her full present name, her full former name, and her place and date of birth. She could only guess at the place. She wrote a question mark in square brackets and the date, then underneath her mother’s first name and her father’s full name: Edgar Ernest Shaw. By the time she dated and signed the form and took it back, the clerk had a queue of several people. Ellis waited in line, then pushed the paper over. The clerk frowned.
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