Gifts of the Peramangk

by Dean Mayes

  Ruby’s expression became somewhat pained then, until Virginia dug her fingers gently into her ribs.

  “Patience, young lady. All good things come to those who wait.”

  Chapter 19

  The house stood solitary on the top of a hill overlooking a quiet stretch of Australian Pacific coastline. The sea rolled and undulated toward the sandy shore, coaxed along gently by an evening sea breeze. Down a sloping meadow to a secluded shore, small whitecaps broke on the sand, a softly spoken background song that lulled the crisp white weatherboard house and its occupants inside. Soft lights glowed in the large windows that looked out on the beach and the sea.

  Those occupants were relaxing in the spacious, partially renovated living room of the house. A young couple, lying together on a leather sofa, were winding down after a particularly busy day. The pungent odours of Asian cooking wafted through from the kitchen. The glow from television bathed both their faces, but neither one were really concentrating on it. Rather, they were content just to be together.

  Sonya Llewellyn reclined in the arms of her lover, her bare feet intertwined in his, luxuriating in the warmth from his body. Andrew DeVries held an open beer bottle in one paint flecked hand while gently caressing Sonya’s auburn hair with the other, smiling softly, watching how the glow from the TV bathed her soft features. Sonya’s eyes were closed and she was drifting in and out of sleep, but visibly happy, as evidenced by a faint smile that tugged at her lips.

  Sonya Llewellyn was a lawyer in a sleepy seaside village where she had practised for several years. Having resurrected a moribund practise that had once belonged to her grandfather as well as retiring a mountain of debt left by him when he died, Sonya Llewellyn now served the wider rural district surrounding the town of Hambledown and had earned a reputation as a tough and determined litigator.

  Her partner, her lover, Andrew DeVries was a renowned recording artist, a classical guitarist—an American who had moved to Australia, having met and fallen in love with Sonya during an international competition for up and coming classical guitarists in Melbourne a year ago. Having won that competition, Andy had become a celebrated musician both in Australia and in his native United States though he now called Hambledown his home.

  On the floor at the foot of the couch lay a sleeping dog – a black and white cross breed cattle dog, himself completely tuckered out after a long and happy day with his companion Andy.

  Sonya had been in court all day down in the nearby rural centre of Merimbula, an hour’s drive south from Hambledown. It had been a gruelling day and she was thoroughly exhausted. She hadn’t even changed out of her work clothes yet. Instead, she’d kicked off her heels upon arriving home, untucked her shirt and removed her bra. Meanwhile, Andy had spent his day working on the house, which they had spent the past year or so renovating. Armed with plaster filler and paint brushes, he’d nearly completed the walls of the once poky lounge room, which was now an open and spacious living area offering them an uninterrupted flow through from the kitchen to where they were relaxing presently.

  Andy shifted on the sofa, causing Sonya to groan softly. He smiled, planting a kiss on the top of her head.

  “I gotta check the stove,” he said, preparing to get up.

  “No,” Sonya replied languidly. “Let me go. I need a refill.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut then craned her neck toward Andy and kissed him long on his lips. She got up, clutching at a half empty wine glass on an adjacent coffee table. Below her, the dog stirred and lifted his head momentarily then went back to sleep with an audible sigh.

  Sonya rose to her feet and sauntered slowly past the dining table. Andy watched her go, then turned back to the TV. Picking up the remote, he thumbed the volume, casually watching the news bulletin even though much of it passed over him as he took another mouthful of beer.

  Sonya leaned over the wok on the stove top and breathed in the aromas from it.

  “Mmmm, this is gonna be good,” she mused as she gave the contents a gentle stir.

  “I hope so,” Andy replied. “I haven’t tried it before so we’re taking a leap of faith.”

  A leap of faith.

  Where had she heard that before?

  Turning down the gas knob, Sonya decided that it could simmer for a few minutes more. Placing her wine glass down on the counter that looked out over the dining room table and the living room beyond, Sonya went to the fridge and took out an open bottle of white wine.

  “To Adelaide now…” the news reader on the TV began. “And a story that will surely warm the heart of music lovers everywhere. An eight year old Aboriginal girl is causing a sensation this week after being discovered performing a near flawless rendition of a legendary violin concerto at Adelaide’s Elder Hall. The previously unknown violinist, Ruby Delfey, has been nurtured by a celebrated music professor who, it has been reported, discovered the child practising her violin in a garden bed just outside a window of the historic auditorium.”

  As the image of the young girl performing flashed up on the screen, Sonya looked up and frowned curiously, tilting her head to one side.

  “Andy…turn that up,” she said, coming around the counter and into the living room glass in hand.

  Her voice startled Andy, who had nodded off again. He blinked, fumbling with the remote in his hand until he found the volume button and was able to turn it up. He sat up, rubbing his eyes. The dog too awoke and looked up at Sonya wearily.

  The news reader continued.

  “She has since surprised everyone with her prodigious talent which has been described as a revelation by seasoned music critics. There is talk now that Miss Delfey may qualify to perform in the upcoming Lord Mayor’s Malley-Joyce Scholarship concert at Adelaide’s town hall. The concert, which will feature the Australian String Quartet, is set for Friday July 6th at the town hall.”

  On the screen, Sonya watched the pretty young girl as she played her violin in front of a sizable audience. The sound of the violin clearly had everyone entranced. Andy’s eyes flicked from Sonya to the screen and back to Sonya again. She too, was clearly struck by the presence of the child but he sensed something more from Sonya. It was something akin to a flash of familiarity in her expression.

  “What is it, honey?” he pressed gently.

  Sonya shook her head, as if unsure of how to answer.

  “Hit record,” she said finally.

  Suddenly she marched toward the front door of the house as if gripped by a sense of urgency.

  Andy complied, looking down at the dog who whimpered softly at the front door. Andy shrugged his shoulders in confusion.

  “What’s with her, fella?” he quipped breathlessly.

  Andy clambered up from the sofa now and set his beer bottle down on the coffee table.

  “Come on, Simon,” he said. “Let’s go see what’s gotten into Momma.”

  Outside, both Andy and Simon looked up the driveway that snaked down from the main road to see a glow coming from the garage. They found Sonya in there, just out of view behind the Volkswagen sedan that sat in the middle of the garage, rummaging furiously through some boxes in an old wardrobe. Rounding the vehicle, Andy came up beside her.

  “Sonya, what is it? What’s wrong?”

  “N…nothing.” She winced as she struggled with a recalcitrant plastic storage crate. “I’ve…just gotta find something.”

  Andy watched her with mounting concern. She seemed possessed.

  Abandoning the floor of the wardrobe, Sonya stepped back and she looked up. Her eyes went wide and a laconic smile crossed her lips. On top of the old wardrobe she spied a battered leather suitcase, just peeking out from underneath an old travel blanket.

  “There you are,” she said, then nudged Andy. “Give me a hand will ya?”

  Together they wrested the suitcase out from under the blanket. Andy was surprised at how heavy it was and he wondered what the hell was inside it. Lowering it to the floor, Sonya blew a puff of air. She looked at Andy with a g
rin and bent down once more to appraise the suitcase.

  “Shall we get it inside the house?” Andy suggested, gesturing to the single light globe that hung over the car. It cast a barely adequate halo of light throughout the garage.

  “Good idea, honey,” she agreed with a distracted smile.

  Together they ferried the suitcase down the path toward the house, negotiated the set of steps and eased it inside with Simon following close behind.

  “What in God’s name is in this thing?” Andy asked breathlessly as they set it down on the living room floor.

  “Secrets,” Sonya replied with a grin. “Heavy secrets.”

  Appraising the locks on the suitcase, Sonya was relieved to find a small key hanging by a length of fishing line from the tattered handle. She immediately snapped the line, freeing the key and tested it in the rusty locks. She had to jiggle it at first but eventually the key slipped home and both locks snapped free with a satisfying click.

  Carefully, she opened the dusty leather suitcase and peered down to see inside.

  There were a number of albums, photo albums that were full to bursting, along with a myriad of envelopes, papers, cards and photographs, even some army service medals. Many of the items had spread themselves around inside the case over the years, having come loose from the perished remnants of rubber bands that once held them secure.

  “Sooo…do you want to fill me in on just what this is, sweetie?” Andy queried, growing ever more curious about his lover’s strange behaviour.

  “This case…” Sonya began wistfully as she fingered gently through the contents. “It belonged to my grandmother. It’s been sitting around for years, ever since Harold died.”

  “Her husband?” Andy said in acknowledgement. “Your grandfather.”

  Sonya nodded.

  “I remember this case. When I was a little girl, I remember Grandma putting all her precious things inside it and she used to show me all the things she’d collected over the years.”

  As Sonya spoke, she pulled out first day issue envelopes with newly released postage stamps on them. She shook her head slowly with wonderment as a flood of childhood memories washed over her.

  “Agatha was a total bower bird. She loved to collect…things! I mean, look at these.”

  Andy took one of the elaborately decorated envelopes and appraised it with a smile.

  “Anyway…” Sonya continued. “The thing I remember most, was that she was an avid photographer – prolific you might say.”

  Andy raised a brow.

  “Sounds as if she might have given Ruth Broadbent a run for her money.”

  Sonya gathered up as many of the loose photographs as she could and set them aside on the coffee table. Simon, sitting beside her now, gently sniffed those photographs.

  “There was a set of photographs though, I remember seeing…” Sonya’s voice trailed off as she lifted one of the heavy albums out of the case and set it aside. Underneath that, on the floor of the case, Sonya spied a single larger document envelope, with a single word written in ink on its front.

  “Carbelrow”

  Sonya knew right then she had found what she was looking for.

  Lifting the bulky envelope out of the case and turning on her knees to the coffee table, she set it down. Picking up the remote, Sonya navigated the DVR recording of the news bulletin backward until the footage of the young violinist came up again. Looking for a particular moment on screen, Sonya played the footage, then hit pause. She smiled at the freeze frame of the girl playing as she was looking directly at the camera.

  Opening the envelope, Sonya took out a bundle of old black and white photographs that had been secured with a thick ribbon of paper. Both Andy and Simon watched her intrigued, as she loosened the photographs and thumbed through them, handing them over to Andy one by one. She was looking for something in particular.

  Andy studied each photograph in turn. There was an old farmhouse, flanked by two tall palm trees in the middle of some sort of wheat field; a pair of horses being held by their bridles by two women riders; a group of shearers hard at work in a shed shearing sheep; a pair of Aboriginal girls working in a flower garden. Andy paused momentarily at that particular photograph and flicked his eyes upward at the TV screen but was distracted when Sonya handed him another photograph, tapping it with her finger as he took it.

  The faded sepia photograph was old but the image on it was still clear enough for him to discern the face of the child in it.

  It was a young Aboriginal girl, taken in close up, holding a violin in her arms. Her raven hair was clipped neatly to one side and had a shine to it that, even in the old photograph, was brilliant. Her soft, angelic face was turned toward the camera so that her deep, large eyes looked directly at Andy. Her gaze was affecting. There was untold wisdom in those eyes but they were characterised by a silent sadness that echoed across time and touched Andy here and now.

  He held the photograph up and out in front of him, comparing it to the frozen image on the TV screen. The same hair clipped to one side, the same soft face, the same deep and worldly eyes.

  They were almost identical.

  “Okay…” he ventured. “You have my interest. Who is this?”

  The light from the TV hit the back of the photograph creating a hint of transparency in which Andy could just see something written on the back of the image from the front of it.

  He flipped the photograph over and read the single inscription there.

  “Virginia.”

  “I’m not entirely sure who she is,” Sonya admitted. “Grandma hardly ever spoke about her…or the farm. All I do know is, she was married once—before Harold—and whenever she did begin to speak about that place, she became very upset. I only ever saw that photograph once or twice. Grandma especially became inconsolable whenever I asked her about the girl.”

  She looked down into the suitcase again and gently nudged another photo album aside to reveal a leather bound book underneath. Gently lifting it from its resting place, Sonya brushed aside a fine layer of dust. On the cover, embossed in gold lettering, were the words “Diary.”

  Underneath that, was a name: “Agatha Liesel Penschey”

  Opening the dusty journal, Sonya carefully turned the pages, gazing down upon a flowing cursive handwriting. Sonya was familiar with her grandmother’s handwriting and her love of journaling, recording her thoughts and memories. After she died, Sonya had been given a number of Agatha’s diaries which charted an otherwise happy life with her grandfather Harold. It was only after Agatha had died that Harold Llewellyn seemed to lose his grip on the bottle and fall apart in a destructive miasma of alcoholism.

  Clutching the journal, Sonya got to her feet and transferred to the sofa where she sat cross legged next to Andy.

  This was a diary Sonya had never seen before. And the tone of the entries contained herein were altogether different. There was happiness and wonderment recorded in the earlier pages—the musings of a young woman who saw the world as her oyster. There were photographs too—the Eiffel Tower in winter, sprawling vineyards in the south of France, soaring snow-capped mountains in Austria, a group of young men and women—couples posing leisurely by the sea—the men in soldiers’ uniforms, the women in swimming costumes.

  In all of the photographs, a young Agatha posed happily alongside a handsome young man—one of the soldiers from the seaside photograph. Sonya had never seen this man before and deduced, both from the photographs themselves and the entries in her diary, that this was Agatha’s first husband.

  Flipping forward several pages, Sonya saw a definite change to the tone. Her eyes crossed over the words “Cherbourg,” “A long sea journey to Australia,” “the dust and the isolation of this place.” The photographs too captured an altogether different Agatha. Gone was the carefree young woman portrayed earlier. Agatha had always been a beautiful woman with a radiance and smile that affected across time. Here, in the place described as Carbelrow, her smile was absent or barely there
.

  Turning a page, Sonya’s eyes fell across a photograph of her grandmother sitting on the ground under a tree next to the same Aboriginal child featured in the photograph Andy held. It was an increasingly rare image among all the others—one where Agatha’s smile radiated as did the smile of the young girl sitting beside her. Again, the violin featured in the photograph and was resting in the lap of the child.

  Andy, meanwhile, was shuffling the DVR recording of the news item back and forth, looking for a close up of the child in the footage on screen. Holding the photograph up in his hand so that he could compare, Andy slowly shook his head.

  “It’s like…looking at a ghost,” he mused softly.

  Sonya nodded without looking up from the journal.

  “It’s too much of a coincidence…don’t you think?”

  Andy played the footage and zeroed in on the instrument the young girl held in her hand. Switching to the photograph, he compared the two violins. His eyes drifted across the upper bout of the violin, where the finger board sat over the timber.

  In the photograph, he spotted a shallow indentation in the wood high up on the right hand side of the instrument. Referring back to the DVR, he moved the footage forward frame by frame, until he paused on a clear image of the violin.

  “Look,” he said, nudging Sonya’s arm gently and handing her the photograph.

  In the footage on the screen and the photograph Sonya held, the violin featured the same shallow indentation.

  It was unmistakable.

  Andy and Sonya exchanged a smile.

  Late into the night, in the soft light of her bedside lamp, Sonya sat huddled in the bed with her grandmother’s journal in her lap, while Andy slept beside her and Simon lay curled up in his basket at the foot of the bed. The curtains billowed from the breeze that filtered through the open window.

  Holding her glasses between her teeth, Sonya wiped tears from her eyes then placed her glasses back on. She had carefully and meticulously read the journal from cover to cover with a practised eye and was now reading it a second time.