Maria swallowed audibly, and released her handbag to the floor beneath her legs. She had on a thick cable-knit cardigan that Tansy had seen several times. Maria certainly didn’t have many worldly possessions. ‘Given that I might be in jail soon, yes. It’s time we tried to make amends.’
‘Do you want to tell me what happened between you to cause this rift in the first place?’ Tansy had been dying to ask. Now, with a couple of hours alone together in the car, and given the pending legal crisis, it seemed as good a time as any.
After their father had died, the Lindsey family struggled. The sorrow left in their home and hearts was one that could never be truly healed. And then there were the practical matters—the family’s income was gone, and there was no man around the house to take care of the leak in the roof or fix the wobbly step. It was the fifties; the welfare safety net that Australians would come to rely upon was rudimentary and not sufficient to support a family of four. People had to fall back on their extended families for support, and if that wasn’t possible, the church was usually their next port of call. In this respect, the Lindsey family was no different.
Their mother worked, of course, doing whatever she could to bring in an income to buy the necessities of life and pay the electricity bill. The nuns at the girls’ school made sure they always had uniforms and books, even if they were second-hand. If more than the most basic maintenance was needed around the home, a member of the church community would come to lend a hand. Elyse felt a great debt to the church, and to the nuns especially. She never sent her three girls off to school without a flower from the garden and a reminder to be humble and thankful towards all the nuns, even the cantankerous ones. ‘We couldn’t get by without them,’ she said often, kissing the girls goodbye at the door.
On her instruction, the girls offered to do extra chores for the nuns—staying back after school to wash the blackboard, carrying piles of books for them, or sweeping the verandah outside the classroom. They gave up time on school holidays to clean classroom windows and pump up the balls in the sporting equipment shed.
Enid, in particular, relished these jobs, humming and skipping as she worked and following the nuns around like a devoted puppy. At home, she would place a handkerchief over her hair when she prayed at night, and wore rosary beads around her neck. Her most prized possession was a statue of the Virgin Mary in her long blue robes, roses at her bare feet, her eyes cast to the heavens. Everyone knew that Enid wanted to be a nun.
For Maria’s part, she had great respect for the nuns and was a committed Catholic girl who willingly cleaned the church between services, running the carpet sweeper down the aisles, dusting the holy water fonts and polishing brass. But for Maria, family came first—family, then church. In the end, it was this very order of values that saw her enter the convent.
It began one evening in 1960. Her younger sisters were already in bed, but Maria was studying for her end-of-year exams. She got up from the dimly lit desk in the corner of the lounge room to fetch a glass of water, and found her mother sitting at the dining table. Papers were laid out in front of her, her reading glasses were on her nose, and she was resting her forehead in the palm of her hand.
‘Mum?’
Elyse started. ‘Oh, I’d forgotten you were still up,’ she said quietly, rubbing at her eyes. Dark shadows fell beneath her lower lids. ‘What time is it?’
‘About eleven. What are those?’ Maria tried to see the papers, read what was on them. Elyse gathered them together quickly, but not before Maria spied a red rubber-stamped Final Notice warning across one.
‘Nothing,’ Elyse said, trying to smile. ‘Everything’s okay. How’s your study going?’
‘It’s fine. I think I’m ready.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ her mother murmured, rising stiffly from the wooden chair. She tucked the papers under her arm and kissed Maria on the cheek. ‘I’m off to bed. Don’t stay up much longer. You’ll need to be wide awake to answer those history questions.’
‘Goodnight,’ Maria said, watching Elyse walk down the darkened hallway, waiting for the soft close of the door, the turn of the handle and the click of the latch, listening to the squeak of the metal bedframe as her mother sank into the mattress.
With a wave of shame, she realised that she should be doing more to help the family and take some of the pressure off her mother. She made a decision right then that this term of school would be her last. She would finish her exams and then she would find a job to help her mother get the other two girls through school. Her father was already gone. She didn’t want to lose her mother too under the strain of being the sole provider.
She went to school the next day lighter of heart now that she had a plan, and flew through her exam. Walking home, she ate an apple, sure that life would be easier for all of them very soon. But when she reached their letterbox, she stopped. A man was standing on the front step, talking to her mother. He held a clipboard in his hand and was pointing at the page on top. Maria couldn’t hear his words, but her mother’s shoulders were hunched, her arms folded protectively across her body, and she was nodding and apologising, appeasing the man as he continued to lecture her.
Maria knew straight away that he must be a debt collector. She hung back as he trotted down the path and got into his car. Her mother waited until he left and then began to cry, closing the front door quickly to conceal herself from curious neighbours. Maria stood still, watching until the man’s car was out of sight, then waited longer still, burning with ignominy, anger, and most of all resolve. But she didn’t say anything to her mother of what she’d seen or of her decision to leave school.
Two days later, she was cleaning the church after Sunday morning mass. Needing to burn off the excess energy generated by her anxiety about her mother, she vigorously polished the wooden pews. When she’d finished, there was a smidgen of wax left in the tin. It seemed a shame not to use it up, so she went into the vestry, a place she didn’t normally go. She knew the altar boys went in here and she’d seen the wooden shelves through the open doorway. It would be a nice surprise for the priest to come back to the smell of linseed and beeswax polish.
She carefully shifted items to the side, polishing the shelves in sections. As she worked she hummed one of the hymns they’d sung this morning. It had been a huge congregation today, with full voices and earnest attitudes. She moved further along the shelf and there in front of her was a wooden box; she polished it too, and it jingled.
Money. The box held the collection plate money, waiting to be counted and banked. She paused, staring at the lid, noting that it wasn’t locked, and wondering how much money was in there. She’d seen quite a number of pound notes go into the plates that morning.
She looked over her shoulder. Listened. All was quiet.
Her heart galloped. It would be an unspeakable sin to steal the money from the collection plate, to take money given in generosity of spirit to the church and to the clergy. That money supported the priest and the nuns. That money probably helped pay for her schooling and the schooling of her sisters.
But family was her highest priority. Her family needed this money now if they were going to keep their heads above water.
She reached out a hand and opened the box and gasped. If this was an indication of what the church collected each week, they wouldn’t miss a handful of notes that could change her family’s life right now.
With a blinding bolt of adrenaline, she snatched as many notes as she could hold in one hand, shoved them into the pocket of her dress and closed the lid, terrified now and desperate to leave the building. With a quick look over her shoulder, she rearranged a few items on the desk, and fled out through the echoing space.
Over the next several weeks, Maria continued to lighten the clergy’s box of pound notes. Every time, her hands trembled, her chest hurt. Still, she forged on, buoyed by the astonished exaltation in her mother’s eyes when the debt collectors sent notices of cleared accounts.
‘Something mir
aculous has happened,’ she confided in Maria. ‘I’ve not wanted to burden you girls with my problems, but I’ve been praying so hard and now something has happened that I have to share with you. An anonymous person has been clearing our debts. Praise be to God,’ she said, laughing with relief. ‘I dare not ask how or why. I only know that my prayers have been answered.’
Maria agreed that it was indeed mysterious but wonderful. Soon, thanks to her thorough cleaning of the church after mass on Sundays, their debts were all but gone.
And then, inevitably, she was caught. Her hand was literally in the collection box, her fist balled around the notes, when a voice spoke behind her. ‘What are you doing?’
Maria jumped, dropped the notes, and spun to face Sister Eugene, who carried a basket of washing and must have come to collect the priest’s robes. Eugene looked at the box, looked at Maria, turned bright red and thundered, ‘You wicked girl! Stealing from the church. What on earth would your good mother say?’
‘Please, please, Sister, you can’t tell her.’
‘You are very mistaken if you think you’re getting away with this. Of course your mother must know what a lying, cheating, thieving girl you’ve become. You’ve brought shame on your family’s name, not to mention the stain on your own soul.’
Eugene dropped the washing basket and lunged for Maria, snared her wrist and dragged her out of the church and all the way home to let her mother know what a shameful sinner her daughter had become.
That night, Elyse sat Maria down in the lounge. Enid and Florrie had been banished to bed early. Elyse’s face was drawn, pale. She looked physically sick.
Maria explained why she’d done it, that she was trying to help their family, that she thought the church wouldn’t miss a few pounds but that it would change their circumstances so dramatically and that they could make it up to the church in the future when they were better off. She said that she would not be returning to school in the new year and that she would get a job soon—then they would be able to pay back all the money. It was a short-term sin for the long-term good.
But her mother silenced her. ‘Maria, I understand that you thought you were doing the right thing, that the end justified the means. And I can forgive you because you are young and I know your heart was in the right place. But we have a very big problem now. The nuns and Father Murphy will see this as a transgression of enormous magnitude. We have been relying on their mercy for many years and will likely need to for many more to come. This is not something we can easily recover from. This story will spread; things like this always do. And the community—especially those who gave money—will want to see recompense.’
Tears welled in Maria’s eyes.
‘Unless . . .’ Elyse held up a finger. ‘Unless we can offer an act of contrition so great that all will be forgiven and forgotten. We must act quickly to ensure that this story doesn’t spread. No one else must know. So here is what I need you to do.’
Maria braced herself, waiting.
‘I need you to go to confession tomorrow.’
‘Yes, of course I will.’
‘And then I will drive you to the convent, where we will meet with Mother Veronica. You will tell her you have no plans to return to school and that you want to join the convent immediately.’
‘But, that’s—’ Maria couldn’t understand. ‘That doesn’t make sense. They won’t want a thief in their midst.’
‘That’s exactly why you will have to explain that you have held a lifelong desire to join the order but that, through a misguided impulse to serve the poor, you took a wrong turn. You will be humble and penitent, and you will ask her to accept you because you’ve been an exemplary pupil and member of the faithful up until now.’
That was true, she had.
‘And you will tell her that you need the guidance of the order to channel your zealous need to serve into appropriate action.’
‘But what about you? What about Enid and Florrie? You need me out there working to earn money for the family. That was the whole point.’ Maria was panicking now.
‘I believe that a sin of this nature, however well intentioned, needs a significant sacrifice in recompense. I believe God, the church, the nuns, will accept your willing service as more than enough compensation. And’—Elyse held up her hand to silence Maria’s protests—‘and God will provide for our family in return.’
‘Mum, no, please.’
‘Enid will withdraw from school. She’s old enough to find work now.’
‘But she’s the one who’s had the lifelong dream of joining the order, not me. She’s the one who should be going to see Mother Veronica.’
‘She’s not the one who stole from the church.’ Elyse let her words hang in the air around them while she recomposed herself, lowering her voice once more. ‘Please, Maria, this is not . . . this isn’t easy,’ she whispered, her voice cracking and her eyes filling with tears. She wiped them away quickly. ‘This isn’t what I wanted for you.’
‘Then don’t make me go,’ Maria pleaded. ‘Enid can go in a couple of years’ time.’
‘There’s no other option.’ Elyse was resolute once more. ‘We need to fix this now or we’ll be ostracised. Enid can join the order after she’s helped to support Florrie to the end of school. It’s only a short time before they’re both working and, perhaps, marrying. It will go quickly. Enid will get her chance to follow her dream, if that’s what she still wants. But right now, we need you to repair the family name by demonstrating an unquestionable commitment to the church.’
Maria dropped her head into her hands and cried.
‘Do you understand?’ Elyse said.
Maria nodded.
Elyse used the armchair to lever herself up and stood there for a moment, clasping Maria’s shoulder while she cried. Then she went to bed, leaving her eldest daughter alone in the lounge, preparing to say goodbye to everything she knew.
33
Tansy lifted a hand to her throat. ‘It must have broken your heart.’
Her aunt raised her steel-grey brows. ‘Not as much as it broke my mother’s. Or your mother’s, for that matter. Enid couldn’t forgive me. She was the one who wanted to join the convent.’
‘But she could have joined as well, surely.’
Maria raised a shoulder and let it drop. ‘From the little I know, she got a job to help Mum keep the family going and get Florrie through school and, lucky for her, university.’ She smiled then, proudly. ‘She’s the only one of us that got to go.’ She suddenly perked up. ‘Did you go to uni? Did Rose?’
‘Rose studied art history and was a curator at the Queensland Art Gallery for a while, but then she had a baby, and then three more, and now she seems to be pretty happy as a mum.’ Tansy paused and bit her lip. ‘Well, she did seem happy, but things have taken a turn for the worse lately.’ Poor Rose. She’d disappeared one day from Tansy’s life—too busy with her lover, ashamed, or fearful of being discovered—and now she had a whole new type of life Tansy knew nothing about. She’d have to make a time to go and sit down with her and talk it all through.
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Maria said.
‘I’ll have to fill you in on that one later. As for me, I started uni but it wasn’t for me so I pulled out.’
‘But it all worked out? What you wanted to do?’
‘Yes, absolutely. I love my job. And I love my life.’ And then her enthusiasm was instantly trampled by the knowledge that she’d have to leave it all behind soon to follow Dougal to Canada. ‘Dougal says he wants a baby now,’ she ventured.
‘That’s good news, isn’t it?’ Maria asked gently.
‘I guess so. Except I’d decided I’d changed my mind, and now it’s all confusing.’
Did she just want too much? She had made her choice long ago that she wasn’t going to have a baby. Other women had choices made for them by people or circumstance. Like Leo’s mum. Rebecca had dropped out of uni to care for Leo while Dougal continued with his studies. And then
the marriage ended and things got even tougher for her as a single mother while Dougal’s career went from strength to strength. Rebecca had returned to university some years later, embarking on a gruelling eight years of part-time study to qualify with a civil engineering degree. (Both of Leo’s parents had engineering degrees; Leo was a lot more like Tansy, interestingly.) Tansy had always admired Rebecca for that and couldn’t help but feel a dash of guilt when in her presence, because she was now the lifestyle beneficiary of Dougal’s career success, while Rebecca had so much ground to make up in her progression. There were years of lost wages and superannuation that Rebecca would never recover. She’d put all the hard work into Leo, too, shaping him into the gentle, compassionate and funny young man he was, and Tansy and Dougal got to enjoy him now because of it. Tansy’s life was already so very blessed.
Now, Dougal was offering her exactly what she’d thought she wanted, even though he probably didn’t want it himself. It was all very unfair to Dougal, who was wonderful and loving and, okay, always left the top drawer of the bathroom cabinet open and it drove her a little nuts, but otherwise pretty perfect. He always picked up bananas for her whenever he saw them because he knew how many she used to make her smoothies. And he loved romantic comedies just as much as she did (though he was a Transformers tragic as well). These things made up for the cabinet drawer. And his offer to have a baby probably made up for a million transgressions in the future.
She mulled this over in silence and Maria left her to her thoughts, perhaps distracted by her own. Before she knew it, she was parking outside her parents’ house, under the large leopard tree, its beautifully spotted trunk reaching high above the house. She pulled on the handbrake and cut the engine. ‘By the way, just so you know, the last time I saw Mum she slapped me across the face.’
Maria gasped. ‘Because of me?’
Tansy grimaced. ‘Yes, and also because I lied about seeing you.’
‘I never meant to cause such conflict.’
The Beekeeper's Secret Page 27
