“Well, I think it’s the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen,” Matt said, and given that loving Darling House was the key to Nora’s heart, she’d given him her stamp of approval. Privately to Jess, though, she confessed she was confused as to why two successful people with enough money would choose not to have children. “The world’s overpopulated, Nora,” Jess answered, only half joking.
Nora had let the subject go, but only temporarily. With each year that passed, as Jess crept closer to forty, her grandmother grew more perplexed. “Is it Matthew? Is he putting up opposition? Because it’s different for men, you know. They can afford to wait. If you were simply to get pregnant he’d change his mind soon enough. And if he didn’t? Well, you’d have your baby, and I’ll promise you something—you won’t much care for anything else once you do.”
This advice had been delivered over the phone, so Nora wasn’t able to see Jess roll her eyes. Jess didn’t argue, though; she knew better than that. Nora was a person of great certainty, and on this subject she was intractable. She’d only had one child, Jess’s mother, Polly, and had told Jess more than once that it was the greatest sorrow of her life that she hadn’t been able to have more. “I always imagined myself the matriarch of a large family,” she said, “with cousins and in-laws and babies everywhere. But it wasn’t to be. Just your mother, and thank God for her, because through her came you.”
Jess found it impossibly sad that someone with as much to give as Nora should find herself with so few doting family members. Many times, she’d wondered how her own mother could have been so selfish as to abandon Nora—and Jess, too, for that matter, when she was ten years old. But she’d learned not to make the point out loud. Nora was not a wallower and she’d refused to let Jess wallow, either. “We can’t allow ourselves to be the victims of our childhoods,” she said. “One can’t blame one’s parents—or indeed one’s children—for everything. Most people do the best they can and sometimes, sadly, it’s not enough.”
Whether or not Jess’s mother had done her best was arguable. She had left her daughter behind when she went north to Queensland to start a new life. “It wasn’t that she didn’t love you,” Nora insisted, loyal to a fault and always ready to defend her errant daughter. “Polly just couldn’t cope. She wasn’t ready to be a mother. She was very young, and she fell pregnant so easily. It’s different when one has to wait and long and dream.”
“Easy come, easy go,” Jess said.
“Now, Jess, dear, cynicism is very coarse, and it wasn’t like that. She couldn’t be the mother you needed—and it was big of her, when you think about it, to realize the fact. Besides, things turned out for the best, wouldn’t you say? We’ve done okay together, you and me.”
They had done better than okay.
The plane had started boarding and Jess showed her ticket to the smiling flight attendant at the gate. “Welcome back, Ms. Turner-Bridges,” said the woman, her accent creating an instant bond. “Traveling all the way through to Sydney with us tonight?”
“I am.”
“Enjoy your flight home.”
Stepping onto the air bridge, Jess experienced a sudden wave of vertigo. The cold air from outside had crept through the metal cracks,and she was acutely aware of being in a liminal space: between terminal and plane, between countries, even between acts of her own life. The sensation reminded her of when she was a child, still living with her mother, and they had used to go to the park on the top of the peninsula. There was a seesaw that Jess would run to use. She liked to stand in the middle of it, shifting her weight back and forth in minute increments until she achieved perfect balance.
She glanced up at the large HSBC ad as she reached the end of the tunnel. On it was an enormous photograph of Piccadilly Circus. She thought of her house in Hampstead, the tapas bar, Rachel, and the houses along Well Walk, Judy Green’s, Waterstones, and the Heath. It was her neighborhood, her life, all of it vitally real only hours before, and yet somehow tenuous now, little more than an illusion—a lovely dream dissolving behind her as she stepped onto the plane.
Where everything was bright and busy, and smelled like travel, and existed outside the regular rules of time, and Jess was focused again, because at the end of this journey, still a whole twenty-four hours and several oceans and continents away, Nora was waiting for her. And the pull toward home was physical and Jess was impatient to be on solid ground again, on the other side.
4
Adelaide Hills
December 24, 1959
“Tell us again, Mr. Summers, what you were doing at the water hole?”
Percy had already answered all of their questions, but he understood they had a job to do, so he swallowed a sigh and told them again what had happened. He’d been at the police station on West Road for hours now. Over the course of time since he’d made the grim discovery, shock had given way to numbness and he found that he could now recount the details with some degree of separation—why he was there, what he’d found, the terrible hours that had followed as first one official and then another arrived at the God-awful scene.
He was distracted, though; bone-tired. The early rise, the long ride from the Station, the heat; his thoughts flitted and slipped like insects at dusk. As he reached the point in his telling that described his decision to walk up to the picnic rather than turn and head back into town, a low rumble of thunder sounded. Here, then, was the weather they’d been warned about.
“So, you went up to the Turner family’s picnic to what... to say hello?”
“That’s right.”
“Did you know the deceased personally, Mr. Summers?”
A flash of sheet lightning illuminated the world outside the window and Percy flinched.
“Did you know Mrs. Turner and her children personally?” the policeman repeated.
“My wife and I—Meg...” Percy began, before trailing off. Meg would be wondering where he was. He’d telephoned from the McNamara Station the night before, a lifetime ago it now seemed, andtold her he’d be leaving first thing.Don’t be late,she’d said.And don’t even think about stopping on the way home if you know what’s good for you.Percy had caught her meaning clear enough. He’d gathered that she was planning something; one of the boys had mentioned a birthday cake. “My wife—”
“Thing is, Sergeant”—this was Hugo Doyle, one of the local mounted constables, interjecting from where he stood against the wall by the open window—“here in Tambilla there aren’t many of us who don’t know one another.”
Across the desk from Percy, the policeman who’d asked the question—Sergeant Peter Duke was how he’d introduced himself when he turned up at the water hole at the Wentworth place—leaned back in the wooden spring chair. Not his own chair, mind; this wasn’t his station. Sergeant Duke had come from Adelaide that afternoon. Evidently someone on high had decided this was a situation requiring out-of-town help.
Percy wondered how Sergeant Kelly, whose desk it was, felt about that. Kelly was new to Tambilla himself, having only recently arrived from the Mount Barker station. He had a large pair of boots to fill. Until recently, this had been Ernie Staffsmith’s turf. Ernie had dominated the town for decades, as far back as when Percy was a boy. He’d been a big man, both in stature and reputation. Fair but tough, with a chest the size of a boulder and lines on his face as deep as the creases in an old saddle. As kids, they’d all lived in fear of Sergeant Staffsmith’s looming shadow.
A sudden wave of missing the older man came over Percy. Never mind the hidings he’d received, the stern warnings and reports made to his parents. This loss of a childhood institution suddenly felt like a metaphor for the impermanence of it all—sunny afternoons, happiness, a human being’s life. It was all so fleeting.
