Too late; Jean was speaking. ‘Two present now – dead within two years; the two bound by a love that should not be shared. The fires of hell enveloping more guests. And one other in this house has blood covering their hands. Blood I could see and smell from the moment I entered. The bloody hands will escape the noose but not the wrath of the Red Dragon.’
‘That’s a relief,’ Pearl drawled, stubbing out her cigarette. ‘I’d hate to think a murderer who was a friend of mine gets off scot free.’ None of us joined in her laughter. Jean gave Pearl a long hard look and smiled slightly, as though someone had said something in her ear. Then she wrapped up her crystal ball once more, stood and left the room in a dignified silence.
‘What a bloody bore she was!’ Pearl moaned after she had seen Jean out. ‘Scaring poor old Violet and acting like a total damp squib. Telling my friends they’re either going to die or commit murder. And, far worse, did you see she actually had a moustache? Wouldn’t you think she’d do something about that?’
‘Pearl, do shut up. You’re the one who invited her. I told you it was a filthy idea,’ Maxwell said. It was the first time I had seen him rebuke Pearl in public.
But she was irrepressible. ‘And you’re a bore too, Maxwell. Your idea of a good evening would’ve been me listening to you reminisce to your little Birdie about the good old days as tiddlies.’
‘I think it’s time we left.’ I stood up. ‘Victor? Are you coming with me?’ My heart sank when I realised that Victor had barely heard me. He was staring at Pearl with an undisguised expression of yearning.
You were my date. You were interested in me.
Mrs Bydrenbaugh took in my predicament and her eyes glittered with malicious pleasure. I hated her in that moment – for her money, for her delight in the betrayal served to both Maxwell and myself, and for producing such a pretty but cosseted and spineless daughter.
‘Time to go, pal.’ Maxwell took the lead and addressed Victor. He too had sensed my pain, my humiliation.
I said my goodbyes to the assembled room. Mrs Bydrenbaugh dipped her head with a sly smile. ‘Your pearls are charming,’ she said. ‘And your dress is also very sweet. I wish Violet would dress like that.’ Violet ignored us; ever since Jean’s prophecy she had been looking around the room with a fearful expression, as if trying to guess who the victims would be. The Stephens boys were also preparing to depart, claiming an early morning start on their boat, despite Pearl’s protestations that they stay longer. Both of them looked at her with the same heavy longing I could see clearly upon Victor’s face. All the men there desired Pearl. I despised them for it even as I understood why. As drunk and obnoxious as she was, she was still the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
‘Well, goodnight you two lovebirds.’ She leant against the front door to farewell Victor and me. ‘Don’t stop for any late night hanky-panky.’
‘Goodnight,’ I said coldly, walking down the path ahead of Victor.
The rain had cleared, and we walked home under a full moon. The wind hadn’t abated, though, and my navy skirt threatened to blow over my head, revealing my slip in the gale. Victor attempted a few words of polite conversation but I answered in sullen monosyllables and we parted awkwardly at my front door.
He wants her. He wants her. Not me. Oh, what a fool I was not to listen to Mother!
The much-anticipated evening had been shattered into pieces. I couldn’t wait to climb into bed and sob myself to sleep in the privacy of my childhood room.
‘How was your evening?’
I stopped in the hallway. Mother was lying awake waiting for me, of course.
‘It was fun,’ I called out. ‘Go to sleep, Mother.’
I could never fool her, though. She knew instantly that something was up, and ordered me into her bedroom to divulge what that something was. One look at my tearstained face and she was after every last detail like a bloodhound sensing truffles. I spared her nothing. I was weary, heartbroken and betrayed. Not by Victor – I could cope with his abandonment – but by the woman I had thought to be my friend. Pearl.
Mother listened to my tale and wiped my tears with a handkerchief. ‘When will you listen to me, my darling?’ she said. ‘That woman is a jezebel. Fancy having the hide to invite the Stephenses as well. You know she’s been carrying on with both of them at once? Poor Maxwell.’
This time I had to agree. Poor Maxwell.
‘You mark my words,’ Mother said, settling herself back onto her lace pillow. ‘She will come to a bad end. That type always does. The trollop didn’t need to employ a godless fortune teller to tell her that. I could have done it for free. Pray with me, my darling. Give the pain to the Creator who knows and sees all. Not charlatan mediums who speak the devil’s words.’
I knelt beside Mother’s bed as instructed, and when I stood up again I vowed to myself that I would never speak to Pearl again. I remembered Victor’s eyes darting away from mine. I went to bed convinced that I hated Pearl and that our friendship was over.
The dentist
Pencubitt, present day
The Monday morning that Betty was due to start at her new school was bleak and overcast. A storm seemed to be brewing and the atmosphere inside Poet’s Cottage matched the weather. Sullen with nerves, Betty refused to eat, making Sadie fraught with worry. Then, as she bit down on a slice of vegemite toast, Sadie felt something snap.
‘Damn!’ She had broken a back tooth. Betty forgot to sulk as they surveyed the chipped piece together. ‘Oh no!’ Sadie wailed. ‘I had a check-up not that long ago and there was nothing wrong. Besides, I don’t even know if there’s a dentist in Pencubitt.’
The telephone directory soon revealed that the town did have a dentist, Gary Karilla. While Betty packed her schoolbag, Sadie called the number. A recorded voice told her that the surgery didn’t open for another hour. She left a message requesting an emergency appointment.
‘Hurry up, Betty!’ How she had always hated the early morning rush trying to get Betty to school. Mother and daughter always accused the other of tardiness.
‘I’m coming!’ Betty called, and joined Sadie at the front door. They ran to the car through the rain. Neither noticed Thomasina standing beside the front of Poet’s Cottage, watching them go.
Fortunately it was an easy run down to the main street.
‘Au revoir, darling. For heaven’s sake, cheer up! You might actually enjoy the school and make some new friends.’ Sadie kissed Betty on the cheek when she dropped her off at the Burnie bus stop.
‘Please, Mum, don’t embarrass me,’ Betty said in a low voice. ‘Those people are watching us.’
‘So what? Let them watch. They’re probably thinking what a hot mother you’ve got.’
‘In your dreams, Mum. Just go – go!’
As Sadie watched her daughter board the school bus she felt the familiar sense of relief at having some time to herself, mingled with anxiety for her daughter. She hoped Burnie High would follow through on their zero-tolerance bullying policy and that Betty wouldn’t have to suffer any more stress from bitchy classmates. She waved at the bus, blowing kisses. Betty gave a stilted wave back and then sat down in an empty seat, looking very vulnerable and alone.
Shit, thought Sadie, now for the dentist.
‘New patient?’ The pleasant-faced woman sitting behind the desk looked up and smiled. ‘Oh yes, you’re Sadie Jeffreys. I got your message. If you don’t mind filling out this form? You can take a seat over there.’ She gestured to a row of chairs in the waiting room.
Another woman was already sitting there; she glanced up from her magazine to stare. Sadie couldn’t help staring back. The woman was one of the most eccentric-looking characters Sadie had seen in Pencubitt; she wore a purple hat with a large feather, and a bright yellow artist’s smock tied at the side with a black bow. Her dyed platinum-blonde hair framed her round, childlike face and her feet sported gold sneakers. She reminded Sadie of an oversized doll. Even before the woman spoke in a strong Canadian acc
ent, Sadie had guessed who she was.
‘Excuse me,’ the woman said with a smile. ‘I couldn’t help overhearing. Are you the Tatlow who’s returned to Poet’s Cottage? Sadie?’
‘Yes, I am. You must be Gracie.’ Sadie smiled back and held out her hand.
‘No secrets in Pencubitt. It’s dirty weather, isn’t it?’ Gracie said, shaking Sadie’s hand, then proffering a sinful-looking bag of candy. ‘Toffee? No, not the best idea, is it? Considering where we are! I’m addicted, alas. Have you come to perv, or be checked?’
‘I’m sorry?’ Sadie wasn’t sure if she’d heard correctly.
‘Checked, by the sound of it!’ Gracie unwrapped a toffee. ‘I tried to buy Poet’s, you know. Not for me – my youngest girl, Bambi. The last thing I need is another old damp house by the sea. My Bambi’s got three little ones and so I thought she might be tempted to move to Pencubitt if she had a lovely romantic historic house to live in. But because of you I didn’t get it.’ She stared at Sadie sadly and Sadie had to resist the urge to apologise. ‘Bambi said she’d never leave Sydney. They’re in the inner west in a converted terrace. I got Mr Whatshisname from the newsagency to email a link to her but she never replied.’
Resisting the temptation to comment that anybody christened Bambi probably had very good reason to keep well away from her mother, Sadie tried to imagine a future where Betty lived an independent existence apart from her. It was an unexpectedly painful feeling.
‘You own quite a few of the houses locally from what I hear,’ she said in a bid to distract Gracie.
‘Oh yes, I do!’ Gracie said. ‘I own, let me see . . .’ She counted on her large, ring-encrusted fingers. ‘The old vicarage, Smugglers Rest, the Bakery, Daffodil Cottage, the Old Gaol. What else? Oh, I can never remember them all! I live in Blackness House, of course, so I own that too! My son Oscar died last year. A plane crash in New Mexico. Toffee? Whoops, I forgot.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Sadie said, feeling her heart open to this woman.
‘I wanted him to come and live in Pencubitt but he always laughed at me. Mummy, he’d say, I’d rather cut off my own balls than move to that backwater. Tasmania is for lovers of convicts and seafood. America is for the man of the future. Well, some future my baby turned out to have. Oh, it’s a cruel thing to outlive your own child. Do you have children?’
‘Yes – a girl, Betty.’
‘That’s lucky. A girl is more likely to stay near you, not take off on safaris or flying in small planes. Mind you, my Trixie-Belle lives in Paris and I never see her either. And their poor daddy, he’s dead and cold in Canadian soil too.’
‘Gracie?’ An attractive dark-haired man stood in the doorway. ‘I’m ready for you.’ His eyes went to Sadie’s. ‘I won’t be long, Mrs Jeffreys,’ he said.
‘See?’ Gracie whispered at Sadie before gathering her possessions and trooping into the surgery. See? most likely translated to See why I come? Sadie realised. She didn’t have to wait long and soon she was staring up at the handsome dentist’s face from a disconcertingly close distance.
‘Open now.’ Gary’s hands felt gentle on her jaw. He peered inside her mouth and began poking and prodding. ‘Yes, you’ve definitely chipped your back molar but I think I can fill it. I’ll have to give you some local but it shouldn’t be too uncomfortable.’
Just brilliant, thought Sadie. Can nothing go right?
A young fair-haired assistant prepared a tray and Gary withdrew anaesthetic from a glass vial. ‘Small prick now.’
Sadie lay back and shut her eyes as she felt the needle slide into her gum.
‘Is he married? Gay?’
Sadie had to smile at her daughter’s questions that evening – the same two questions every woman in Sydney asked upon meeting a member of the opposite sex. ‘I don’t know and I’m not interested. Men are the last thing in the world I care about right now. How was school?’ She looked up from the lettuce she was rinsing, hoping to catch her daughter out if she lied.
‘Okay. Bit weird to have boys in the class. The teachers seem alright. There were a couple of other new students in my form. Another Sydney girl was there. It’s different from St Catherine’s.’
‘Well, that’s good, hey?’ Sadie tried to keep her tone casual. Don’t set her off. Keep it normal and cool.
‘I suppose. It’s a bit strange. Nearly everybody there has known each other since they were kids. Some of them even played together as babies.’
‘You seem to have found out a bit about them. Did you make any friends?’ Nice and casual, Sadie, she reminded herself as she sliced tomatoes for the salad.
‘They were friendly enough. A couple of girls were talking to me at lunchtime. One was really fat, but she didn’t care at all about her weight. She said men prefer voluptuous women anyway. I just thought she looked fat.’
‘What was her name?’ Sadie eyed her daughter’s slender frame, sighing inwardly.
‘Dunno, forgot.’ Betty picked up a stick of celery and crunched on it. ‘She had a pretty face and enormous breasts. Men would find her attractive, I think.’
As they always did now, they ate in the formal dining room, brightened up with a vase of pink roses from the garden. Back in Sydney Sadie had preferred to eat in the kitchen: she believed this was the soul of any house, perfect for congregating. The kitchen at Poet’s Cottage, however, had a sinister atmosphere with its tiny cellar door and the dank steps leading down to the mystery that the house nursed.
Betty was mostly silent during the meal. Sadie hoped she was just tired from her first day at the new school. Had the change been too much for her daughter? Would she make friends at Burnie High and be able to break into its cliques? Or was Jack correct – would she have been better off staying at St Catherine’s, even with its pack of bitchy girls who ran the school? It was so difficult being the mother of an only child. Siblings meant instant playmates. Sadie had lost count of the times over the years she had agonised over whether or not Betty would be accepted by other children.
Jack, in contrast, had never been overly concerned. ‘You worry too much,’ he had said. ‘She’ll make her own way. You hovering like a nagging mother hen just reinforces her belief that she can’t make friends. She’s a beautiful, talented girl. Of course people will like her! Anybody would want to be her friend.’
Jack didn’t realise that beautiful, talented girls were ostracised for possessing exactly those attributes. Betty had often been preyed on at St Catherine’s because of her beauty and the fact that she didn’t hail from the same social sphere as most of the others. She was a scholarship girl, a stranger in a world where Daddy was a member of the yacht club and Mummy spent her days browsing boutiques, having spa treatments and volunteering for charity committees. How Sadie had loathed the P&C meetings at St Catherine’s, where nobody seemed to care what you thought or felt about the school. All that mattered were your shoes, your haircut and where you had been educated – whether, in fact, you were one of their crowd. Sadie and Betty hadn’t belonged, and they were forced to pay a price for that. Sadie knew that she would never hear a toilet flush after a meal without wondering if Betty’s eating disorder had returned. She blamed herself for the bullying at St Catherine’s, and for not picking up on the warning signs immediately. She had been so caught up in the stupid magazine she freelanced for and its endless deadlines that she’d missed what was happening right under her nose.
Old habits die hard and after dinner, when Betty had gone upstairs to do her homework, Sadie found herself dialling Jack’s number. She could hear his television in the background when he picked up. Cosy. Domestic. She imagined him lying on the couch with Jackie in his arms watching the ABC.
‘She’ll be alright,’ he said reassuringly after Sadie had reported on Betty’s day. ‘You’ll worry yourself into an early grave, Sadie. Bet’s a fighter. She’ll hang in there.’
‘I just . . .’ Sadie took a deep breath. ‘I just feel a bit guilty for dragging her away from all her familiar routin
es in Sydney. The culture, her friends . . .’
‘Her friends? That pack of stuck-up little tarts nearly hounded her to death! Anyway, don’t forget that I did warn you against moving down there. I should have put my bloody foot down. Having second thoughts now, are we? When will you learn I’m always right?’ There was a brief pause. ‘Sadie? What’s really going on? Has something happened?’
‘No! It’s just that everything is so different. I miss Mum so much.’
‘Sadie, are you okay? Do you want me to fly down?’
‘No! I’m fine. We’re fine.’ There was a pause and Sadie heard the sound of children squabbling on the television. ‘How’re things with Jackie?’ Jack and Jackie. They were made for each other.
‘Good. Great! We’re doing a motivational cruise together in a month. She booked it.’
‘A what?’
‘Motivational cruise. Where you learn positive thinking. You know, like The Secret.’
‘The Secret?’ Sadie said in disbelief. Had she ever really known this man?
Jack sounded terse. ‘Okay, it’s not really my cup of tea. Load of old cobblers. But Jackie’s a great girl and she’s really into that sort of thing. Do you know, she had a visualisation board outlining her perfect mate and then she met me and I fitted it exactly.’
‘Really?’ Sadie couldn’t help herself. ‘What did it say? Wanted: married man with teenage daughter. Slight paunch, greying on top. A womaniser, opinionated and with an inflated view of himself?’
There was a pause. ‘You rang me, Sadie. You haven’t changed, have you? Always ready to put the boot in.’
‘You cheated on me, Jack. Don’t forget.’ It was incredible how quickly the conversation went back into its old groove.
‘Oh, for Chrissake. Look, I want to see Bets. Why punish me by taking her down there? I miss her terribly. I shouldn’t have let you do it. Agreeing to see my bloody daughter only on holidays! Bets needs to see her father too. It’s not all about you, Sadie. And I can tell you regret going down there. Admit it was a mistake and come back to Sydney. Jackie and I will help you find a good school for Bets. You don’t have to live in the inner city. Move out to the suburbs – the Blue Mountains, even.’
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