She stopped herself; now she sounded like one of the fussy eaters who came to stay at the Haven.
Another memory arrived, this one the mini movie of the three of them—Maria, Enid and Florrie—playing in the creek one hot summer’s day and disturbing a huge red-bellied black snake. Maria screamed, Enid wet herself, and Florrie fainted, and the two older sisters had to carry her back to the house, slowed down by her small frame flopping between them, terrified the snake was chasing them the whole way, waiting for the feel of its fangs in their ankles.
There was the day Maria grievously sinned, altering her own life forever, her mother’s ashamed face by the light of the lamp in the corner of the lounge, telling Maria what she would need to do to atone.
And there was the day Mother Superior told Maria that her mother had died suddenly of a massive stroke. And Maria, then in her forties, had wept in the grotto with the convent beehives buzzing nearby.
A sliver of sunlight fell through the window onto Maria’s hand and brought her back to the present. She checked the time. She needed to go and set up the trestle table in the dining area with tea and coffee things for the group’s arrival and then start making ginger and honey scones for morning tea. (The vegans and the dairy- and gluten-free people would be having nuts and dried fruit while everyone else drooled over her delicious-smelling fluffy hot scones, topped with melting butter and honey.)
Outside, she shrugged into an anorak and stepped into boots. To the left of her little kit home were the shower blocks, and then the beginning of the arc of six Tara cabins (starting with Blue Tara), the dining hall, the small car park that doubled as an unloading bay and the meditation room to the right of her cabin completing the circle. Within the circle formed by the buildings was a lawn, with a wishing well for donations at the centre.
She headed across the dewy grass to the dining hall, basic in structure but filled with colourful artworks and photographs from Cambodia, many made by the children themselves, and some by the monks who regularly visited the orphanage to impart traditional cultural values.
Her breath misted in the air; she’d have to turn on the heaters in the hall today. But just as she stepped onto the first of two stairs (flanked, like the steps to the cabins, with pots of brightly swaying daisies, for the bees), she stopped, confused. On the top step sat a blank envelope.
She stared at it. It was nothing special, just an ordinary envelope with the four empty orange squares at the bottom right corner for a postcode. But there had been enough surprises in the past few days to make her hesitate. She looked around at the nine other buildings, but every one of them sat silent. There were no footprints in the dew other than hers, and the birds were barely stirring in the trees.
A chill ran down her spine. As far as she knew the envelope wasn’t there before she went to bed and she’d been the only person here overnight, with no guests and Petrice not due to come back until the lunchtime rush today.
But someone had been here while she slept.
She stared at the envelope for so long that she got a cramp in her foot from the cold.
Should she call the police? No, that would only lead to questions she didn’t want to answer. Questions like: Is there anyone who would have cause to want to frighten you?
Should she jump into the Haven’s yellow Citroën and leave the place until the corporate group arrived? Should she lock herself in a cabin? Search all the cabins? Go and arm herself with the machete she used to clear lantana from the property?
She was being melodramatic. She deliberately straightened her shoulders and turned to face the open space, cleared her throat, took a deep breath and called out, ‘Hello?’
She waited, but the only thing she heard in response was her pulse in her ears. She could feel the beats of the arteries in her neck.
Gathering more courage, she called again, louder this time, with more authority, ‘Is anyone there?’
Still nothing.
Eventually, she bent down as quickly as she could to pick up the envelope. Perhaps it was from someone in need, she told herself. The Haven employed people down on their luck—homeless, low income, people with disabilities (like Petrice, with post-traumatic stress syndrome as a result of a violent childhood), ex-prisoners, refugees, non-English speakers. It went out of its way to exemplify the values of Michaela’s Buddha and Maria’s Christ. Working to serve that clientele brought challenges, but it also brought rewards and surprises. And the Haven was far enough up the mountain that anyone who wanted to get there had to be determined to do so. She hadn’t heard a car groan up the steep access road to the temporary loading bay, so whoever had left the envelope must have come on foot, and that took some effort. It was most likely someone looking for help.
Talking sternly to herself, she tore open the envelope and pulled out a single sheet of lined paper, folded into three. She expected to read a plea for work, or a bed, or even a meal.
Instead, she found four words.
Silence is a virtue.
4
Tansy snapped off the elastic band that held her diary shut. She’d been meaning to check those dates for days. She flicked back, scanning the past month. Trying to remember.
A deeply tanned waitress with fluorescent pink hair interrupted her to deliver her order.
‘Thanks,’ Tansy said, pushing her diary aside to make room for it. A thick slice of toasted banana bread with butter, and an almond milk and honey chai latte were Tansy’s lucky combination. She liked to bring her sketchpad, concept book and iPad here to Peregian Beach, to the Raw Energy cafe, one of her favourite places to sit and plan new designs. The warm banana bread was particularly yummy at this time of year when the mornings were fresh. And this little nook of Peregian, this humming little corner of life, was so much a part of what she and Dougal loved about living at the coast. It was so easy to be healthy here, with delicious, nourishing food on every street, beaches that cried out to be run on and oceans that begged to be swum in, all manner of water sports, a variety of walking trails, and fit swimwear-clad bodies at every turn. The weather was warm almost all year round, so there was simply no excuse not to live life outdoors.
Tansy hadn’t always been like that; as a teenager she could wolf down an upsized Macca’s meal with the best of them. It would only take a couple of friends to suggest a food hoedown and she’d be there. If you put a slab of chocolate in front of her—no matter how cheap it was—she’d eat it.
The thing was, though, that she’d somehow forgotten to maintain those friendships. Her only real friend left was Belle. Belle was family, really, in her life since primary school. But other than her? Tansy had only been at university for one semester and hadn’t made any lifelong friends there. She’d had friends, usually colleagues, while working as a barista. But they’d drifted apart when she relocated to the coast, and fallen away over time, busy making babies and up to their ears in nappies, playgroups and mothers’ groups.
And now Belle had joined the ranks, overwrought with a baby that screamed with reflux for hours each evening. Understandably, Belle was a big basket of weepy emotions herself. When Tansy and Dougal had visited her, Belle’s hair was hanging all over the place, in need of a trim, and she kept getting cranky with it and pushing it away from her face, or plaiting it to keep it out of the way, only to have it loosen and dangle in her eyes again. Finally, she said, ‘Do you have a hair elastic, by any chance? I can’t find a single one.’
‘Here, take mine,’ Tansy said, pulling it free from her neat ponytail.
Belle’s eyes welled with tears. ‘You’d give me the elastic from your hair?’
Tansy laughed and hugged her. ‘I’d give you anything. I’d give you my bra too. You know, if you needed somewhere to put your lipstick.’
That had cheered Belle up and she’d smiled. ‘I’d give you my bra too. You know, if you needed sails for a boat or something.’
Tansy should put a packet of hair elastics in with that care package, when she got around to making
it.
The almond milk in the chai had separated and she stirred it vigorously. Adding honey, she wondered: maybe she’d just adopted these healthy eating habits because of where she lived and the culture that surrounded her. Maybe, if she had close friends here who loved marshmallows dipped in chocolate sauce and covered with condensed milk and sprinkled with hundreds and thousands and then rolled in butter cream, that would be what she ate too.
She loved to sit in this cafe and watch the people come and go, or come and sit with their groodles, spoodles, moodles and shmoodles on leads under their chairs. Peregian as a whole was super dog-friendly, with buckets of water set out for thirsty canines to rehydrate.
Those without dogs came with their laptops and sat under the pandanus tree in the courtyard. The joggers and the cyclists in their Lycra, with their tanned muscles, stopped for beetroot juice. The beachgoers came up from the sand, draped in towels, or sometimes in nothing other than board shorts or bikinis, and ordered smoothies. The holidaymakers and loved-up couples, with their newspapers and sunglasses, soaked up the sun in companionable silence. The fashionably dressed women past their baby years came for the delights of the French patisserie next door. And the bleary-eyed mums, with prams and sleeping babes in arms, came for coffee and the buzz of cutlery and chatter and signs of life. No one ever seemed in a hurry on the coast. Nothing bad ever touched this part of the world.
She was immeasurably lucky.
In her notebook were her scribbles from the meeting yesterday with Genevieve and Isabelle at their home in the hinterland mountain town of Montville. Isabelle was the lucky recipient of a bedroom makeover to celebrate her birthday. She and her mother lived in an impressively large white Hamptons-style home, with topiaries and manicured lawns and a view from the curved balcony over the most breathtaking vista of green mountains, stretching all the way out to the ocean.
Soon after Tansy got there, a slender young girl had arrived on the balcony, wearing three-quarter pants and a pink singlet identical in hue to her mother’s, her long hair in plaits. ‘Hi,’ she said, smiling.
‘This is Isabelle, my daughter,’ Genevieve said.
‘Hello, Isabelle. It’s lovely to meet you.’ Tansy held out her hand for the girl to shake. ‘Thanks for agreeing to talk to me.’
‘That’s okay,’ Isabelle said, shrugging. She sat down on one of the lounge chairs and tucked her feet up.
Tansy pulled out her notebook. ‘So, you’re turning ten. Happy birthday.’
Isabelle smiled, a tooth missing from the bottom row. ‘Thanks.’
‘And your mum tells me you’d like a bedroom makeover. Do you have any ideas of what you’d like?’
Isabelle cast a look towards Genevieve, who nodded for her to speak. ‘Well, I like Paris.’
‘Paris?’ This was new. Tansy hadn’t had a Parisian request before. ‘Paris the city or Paris Hilton?’
Isabelle giggled. ‘The city. In France.’
Tansy made a great show of writing down France in her notebook. ‘And what do you like about Paris?’
‘I like the Eiffel Tower, and the river, and croissants, and the music, and Audrey Hepburn.’
‘Audrey Hepburn?’
‘She was in Paris in lots of her movies,’ Genevieve explained.
Tansy wrote down Audrey’s name, feeling a touch inferior that she had never seen a single Audrey Hepburn movie while this ten-year-old was an avid fan. She’d have to download some to watch. Maybe it would be a fun date night with Dougal.
‘I like pink,’ Isabelle continued. ‘And poodles. And makeup and Moulin Rouge—the movie,’ she added helpfully, pointing to Tansy’s notebook so she would write it down.
‘And if you had to choose between black and pink, or white and pink, which would you prefer?’ Tansy asked, some images forming in her mind.
‘Hmm . . .’ Isabelle gave this due consideration. ‘I think white and pink.’
‘Good, you know what you like. That will help me a lot.’
They continued to talk for a while, then Tansy asked to see her room, and Isabelle took her up a spiral staircase to the last bedroom on the top floor. It was currently themed with princess and mermaid images.
‘I’ve outgrown this.’ Isabelle waved her hand dismissively at the passé decorations around her. ‘It will all have to go.’
Tansy bit her lip to stop herself smiling and took out her tape measure to record the room’s dimensions and the position of the two large windows and the power points.
‘I think I’ve got everything I need for now,’ she said, finishing up.
‘Okay, I’ll walk you to the door,’ Isabelle had said. Then she’d bellowed, ‘Mu-um! Tansy’s going now,’ undoing all the grown-up-ness she’d just been displaying. It had touched Tansy’s heart. Isabelle was a little girl and a little woman all at once, standing in the doorway between two worlds.
Apart from loving to work here in this sun-filled courtyard, Tansy had come today because Dougal was working from home, busily making plans for their relocation to Canada in two months’ time; if she’d stayed, she would have been constantly interrupted by his voice, raised a few decibels into the mobile phone. Leo had a late start this morning at the trendy surf-themed cafe in Hastings Street where he waited tables and washed dishes between uni lectures. Right now he’d be lifting weights, sweating to the soundtrack of whichever band he was into this week. Sometimes she felt quite old around Leo.
Although she and Leo were both in their twenties, there were moments when she felt as though she belonged to another generation—particularly when his grating music was playing. It made her wonder if marrying a man twelve years her senior had aged her faster than she should have. But she wasn’t in Dougal’s generation either. They were definitely different. He was born in 1974; Tansy, 1986. And Leo was born in 1994. Almost a decade between each of them. No wonder she felt marooned between them.
It was weird at first, dating ‘Daddy Dougal’, as Belle had once unkindly called him early in the piece. But Belle was going out with someone who was ‘practically in nappies’, Tansy had retorted, at which Belle had sheepishly changed the topic. With their ages ranging from twenty to mid-thirties the possibility of double dates was quickly dismissed. Dougal was well past the stage of getting drunk simply because it was a day ending in y, and Tansy, back then, found arts festivals and property discussions tedious in the extreme. Actually, she still wasn’t a big fan of ballet, but whenever she had to decorate a little girl’s bedroom in a ballet theme she somehow found the enthusiasm and lived and breathed tutus and toe-crippling pointe shoes. And pink. Always loads of pink.
Much as she was doing for Isabelle today. The key challenge was always to find some sort of balance in the colour wheel, a hue pink enough for the small client but not too garish to the larger client, whose home was undoubtedly tasteful and stylish and carefully decorated in its own right before it had been invaded by the small person with ideas all of her own.
Tansy searched the web for images, collecting ones she thought Isabelle might like. She would ask her to rate out of ten how much she loved each one. That would give Isabelle a sense of involvement in the process and at the same time provide Tansy with lots of useful feedback. She had also set Isabelle a project for the next two weeks of taking photos everywhere she went, capturing any item, toy, piece of furniture, picture, colour or pattern she loved, then printing off her absolute favourites and collating them into a collage, ready to hand over at their next meeting.
‘You’re great with kids,’ Genevieve had said after Tansy had outlined the art project to Isabelle. ‘Do you have any of your own?’
‘No,’ Tansy had said, smiling.
It was a question that she fielded frequently, asked by everyone from family members to perfect strangers. She was in her late twenties and married: it was assumed she would be reproducing. But saying that she didn’t have any children created an awkward moment when Tansy didn’t know what would follow. Some people said, ‘Oh, I’m sorr
y,’ and changed the subject immediately, likely imagining all sorts of devastating scenarios—miscarriage, infertility, infant death. Some people would ask outright, ‘Why not?’ Some told her that she’d ‘better get cracking, tick tock and all that’. Others eyed her carefully, perhaps judging her for putting a career over a family. Some let the silence hang there, a space Tansy generally felt compelled to fill. ‘My husband already had a son when we met,’ she’d say breezily. ‘He didn’t want any more.’ And she’d finish with a casual shrug and a wave of the hand to reassure the questioner that she was in fact okay. Some people tried to joke it off: ‘That’s a good thing—they cost too much and you never get a good night’s sleep again.’
Whatever the response, it was never easy and always left Tansy feeling needled and uncomfortable.
Yesterday, Genevieve had said, ‘Well, I’m sure you’d make a great mum if you wanted them.’
Tansy thought about that now, watching a pair of immaculately groomed golden retrievers come smiling and trotting into the courtyard as though they owned the place, taking their people for a walk rather than the other way around.
Did she want children?
As far as her marriage was concerned, it was a done-and-dusted debate. Dougal had been upfront with her right from the start and she’d been too young to care much at the time. And after a couple of years of being together she knew she could never end it with him. He was her person. Simple. If being with him for the rest of her life meant no children, then so be it. Nothing was perfect.
Finishing off the banana bread, she focused on her diary again. The thing was that she didn’t keep track of her periods anymore. She’d been on the progesterone-only pill for years now and her periods were so light and unobtrusive that she didn’t need to keep track of them as she used to, marking the expected date with an asterisk and planning her life around migraines and heavy bleeding. The pill had taken care of both, and life was much easier. So she looked back at events and appointments and tried to remember. But she was drawing a blank.
The Beekeeper's Secret Page 4
