It was Nora who had seen her off at Sydney Airport, for what they’d both thought then would be a gap year. Jess had a new travel wallet—a gift from Nora—with her boarding pass inside, a set of traveler’s checks, the name of the school friend’s mother’s aunt who’d agreed to let her stay in her attic room in Holborn, and a printed flight itinerary with a return date twelve months hence. She and Nora had waited together near the coffee shop at the International Departures gate, Jess too nervous and excited to drink more than a few sips of her cappuccino, Nora talking enough for both of them, happy chatter about various people they knew. Only when the departure board updated to show that Jess’s flight to London via Singapore was being called did Nora run out of things to say.
Jess checked her documents for a final time and said: “I guess I should get moving.”
“It wouldn’t be an ideal start to your grand adventure if you were to miss your flight,” Nora agreed.
They went together to the gate and hugged, and in that moment Jess was seized by a sudden impulse to tell her grandmother it was a terrible mistake, that of course she didn’t want to go all the way to London where she knew no one; she wanted to go home to Darling House instead, to sit together on the downstairs sofa with the BBC box set ofPride and Prejudice, and to take up Nora’s friend’s offer of a cadetship with theSydney Morning Herald.
Perhaps her grandmother sensed by the tightness of the hug that Jess’s excitement was balanced on a knife’s edge, liable to tilt at any moment into trepidation, because she took both of Jess’s hands and held them firmly between her own. “Someone I used to know a long time ago told me once that fear is the doorway to opportunity. And I can assure you, my love, that every good thing that’s happened to me since has come through actingdespitemy fears.” She wrapped Jess in a firm embrace. “Just remember,” she said softly, “no matter what happens, I’ll be here, and you can always, always come home.”
From her vantage point in the Heathrow Pret, as a new group colonized the table beside her, Jess jotted the memory in her notebook. She was glad that it had come to her. It would give the article she was writing a nice circularity if she were to include Nora’s advice from twenty years before. For all the trouble that she’d gone to and the angst she’d felt regarding her Well Walk idea, the “Home to Sydney” pitch, dashed off after her phone call to the hospital the night before, had been approved with great alacrity, the editor requesting delivery at the end of the following week. With a return airfare still to find, Jess had hastily agreed.
Truth be told, it wasn’t going to be difficult. Far from the heavily researched investigative reports she’d built her career on, this was a glorified travel piece about a place and person she knew well. She’d sketched out a rough outline on her way to the airport, asterisking a few spots where it would work to include some up-to-date color and detail. Now, she made a brief note of an experience all too familiar from previous flights back to Australia: the befuddlement of long-haul travel; how it felt to lose a day from the calendar; the dizziness and sea legs on arrival and the irresistible pull toward sleep when one was least expecting it.
Jess capped her pen and eyed the departure board. Her flight had been assigned a gate and there was only an hour and a bit until it was due to depart. She tucked her notebook in her carry-on bag, checked that she had her laptop, phone, wallet, and AirPods, and started making her way toward security. The man and woman from before were still there, she noticed, together and yet alone, each watching the empty departure door as if they expected their daughter to reappear at any moment. Perhaps they planned to stay until her flight had gone; maybe they didn’t know quite what to do next. It was possible, Jess supposed, that after being responsible for another human being for so long, to be released was not to be set free so much as to be cut adrift.
As she took off her shoes and loaded them with her computer intoa pair of security tubs, Jess wondered what Nora had done after she’d disappeared through the gates in Sydney. It must have been strange for her grandmother to return to Darling House. Jess had been living with her for a decade by then, and it was a very big house in which to find oneself alone. Jess was still struck every time she walked through her own front door in Hampstead by how inanimate the house had felt since Matt moved out; how quiet. Sometimes she found herself tiptoeing out of respect, at other times making noise to spite it. When she’d arrived home the night before, after her drink with Rachel, the air had settled slowly, silently, around her, and she’d quickly switched on the lights and the television to bring back some semblance of life.
She and Matt had rented the place when they moved to North London and been ecstatically happy; it sat in a quiet pocket by the small village green, in a street so short and secluded it was easy to walk past with no idea of its existence. When the landlady put it on the market, though, the open houses began to drive them mad. The idea that they might buy it themselves, if only to put a stop to the process, had been a joke between them at first. But the more they made it, the less funny it seemed, until finally Matt decided to cash in the shares his father had left him for a deposit and they found themselves putting together a lengthy mortgage application. “You can’t go wrong with London real estate,” they’d told one another nervously, frowning at the eye-watering figure on the loan forms.
Jess had taken over the mortgage repayments when Matt left, and they’d come to a complicated agreement giving her the option to buy him out in two years’ time if she was able. She had since lost her salary, gained a redundancy, and been getting by for the most part on savings. Jess had always felt lucky to live where she did; now she felt like a fraud, an imposter, going through the motions of a beautiful life that had once seemed strong and substantial, but had been revealed as tissue-paper thin.
“Do you think your family would help?” Rachel had asked one night, when Jess was agonizing over whether she’d be able to stay.
By “family,” she meant, of course, Nora, but Jess had shaken her head so vehemently that Rachel had taken it no further. The truth of the matter was that Nora would almost certainly have been willing to help; she’d have been glad, even. She loved houses—she’d built a business out of restoring them—and had been delighted when Jess announced that she and Matt were taking the plunge, demanding photographs and descriptions and all sorts of specifics. But asking would have meant admitting to the two things Jess was determined Nora should not know: that she had lost both her job and her partner in remarkably quick succession. And so, she’d committed herself to making the loan repayments herself.
Jess didn’t like keeping secrets from Nora, but she was embarrassed by her current plight, and she didn’t want her grandmother to think less of her. Besides, the situation wasn’t permanent. Any day now she was going to turn the corner. In the meantime, she was doing everything she could to reduce her costs. A trip back to Australia wasn’t something she’d factored into her budget, but she’d been left with no choice. When she’d called the hospital a second time and asked the doctor for an update, he told her Nora had been confused upon waking. “It’s not unexpected after suffering a trauma,” he explained. “The MRI and CT showed some swelling.”
“I’m calling from London,” Jess said. “I’ve held a flight, but I wasn’t sure whether I should take it now or wait until Nora’s back at home.”
The doctor’s advice had been blunt. “Your grandmother’s eighty-nine years old,” he said. “If you’re thinking of coming home to see her, I wouldn’t leave it any longer.”
While this might have seemed obvious to anyone else, it had struck Jess hard. She had always known there was a chance she’d receive a call in the night, the voice of a stranger delivering bad news. It was a reality of expat life. For some reason, though, she’d imagined that the message would pertain to her mother. It was far easier to picture Polly weakened by accident or illness than to accept that Nora was subject to the frailties that afflicted the rest of humanity.
But the doctor’s meaning had been clear, and on ending the call Jess had gone straight to the Qantas website to confirm her seat on the next evening’s flight.
With her shoes back on, and her laptop and other items gathered from the scanning machine, Jess emerged into the Terminal 3 departure hall. At the best of times, there was nothing remotely appealing or comforting about the place; in December, it was bedlam. Ordinarily, Jess operated outside school holiday rhythms, and it was always a mild surprise to head out the door and find children in her usual spaces. But on a Saturday this close to Christmas, naturally enough, they were everywhere, dragging miniature suitcases into the paths of unwitting adults, sporting light-up Santa hats and novelty sunglasses—even a blow-up swimming ring with a Rudolph nose in one instance.
She eventually joined the line at the final passport check for her flight, and then made her way into the glass-walled waiting room. She preferred it here. Unlike the departure hall, which was no-man’s-land masquerading as your local shopping mall—shops and restaurants as a way of stopping people from realizing they were now officially nowhere, between customs zones, on the edge of terrestrial existence—the boarding gate didn’t pretend to be anything other than what it was: a holding room for human beings who were only going in one direction from here.
Jess found a spare seat overlooking the tarmac. On the other side of the window, in the dark London evening, she could see the big white bird that was going to fly them through the night back to Sydney. A fog had come in and the ground crew were using orange torches to signal as they carried out their routine tasks.
Four years ago, almost to the day, she’d taken Matt back with her to spend Christmas with Nora. Nora had liked Matt, and he’dlovedNora. He had also adored Darling House. “It looks like it should bestanding on the banks of the Mississippi,” he’d said one day. They’d been sitting together at the wrought-iron outdoor setting in the shade of an enormous jacaranda, sipping mint juleps and looking back across the garden toward the tall, weatherboard house.
“You’re practically in the subtropics,” Nora reminded him. “My grandfather built Darling House five years after he’d arrived from Scotland. He knew by then that the climate was going to require something different from what he’d been used to as a boy.”
“She’s a grand old lady,” Matt said of the house. “Dressed up in an iron-lace shawl, looking out over her harbor.”
Nora smiled. “That’s exactly what she is. It’s the reason she and I get on so well together. We’re two of a kind.”
Nora had lived in Darling House all her life and was as much a part of the building as the pair of lions guarding its entrance gate and the brick chimneys punctuating the sparkling blue sky. It was almost impossible to imagine her anywhere else. Jess had only to close her eyes now to invoke a vivid picture of her grandmother standing on the wide concrete steps that led to the front door, both arms lifted in welcome.
Countless people had tried to buy the house from her over the years: celebrities, socialites, and developers. She’d been offered a small fortune, but Nora had remained resolute. “I’m going to die in this house,” she’d said, time and again. “What do I care for money? Far more important to me are the memories in these walls.”
Not that all of Nora’s memories were good ones. Her childhood had been less than idyllic, Jess knew; her parents had been away much of the time, and she’d been left behind with a series of nannies and governesses—some of them intent, it seemed, on making the small girl’s life a misery. But Nora had been blessed with a powerful imagination and a gift for make-believe and had created a whole world for herself in the garden and the hidden places of the house. It occurred to Jess that her grandmother would have been an excellent writer, had she not parlayed her love for stories into rescuing and restoring houses.
Nora had explained her passion for buildings to Matt in the same terms Jess had heard her use when she was interviewed for a Women in Business story on local radio some years before: “People who grow up in old houses come to understand that buildings have characters. That they have memories and secrets to tell. One must merely learn to listen, and then to comprehend, as with any language. The language of houses is my mother tongue. This house taught it to me when I was a very small child.”
Jess wondered sometimes whether the house had meant so much to Nora because it was solid and reliable where her absent parents were not. Jess could certainly relate to that.
