Jess heard Leo Friedman’s words—Nora’s request—in her head. They had been very clear. And yet. Here, finally, was the answer to the question Jess had been chasing since she’d arrived back in Sydney; surely Nora had gone to the attic after receiving Marcus Summers’s letter to hide or remove something from this trunk.
If she had not heard the tape, if she had not learned that Nora had kept an enormous secret from both Polly and herself, if things were as they had been a fortnight ago, Jess liked to think that she’d have done as Nora instructed and destroyed the trunk with no questions asked. But shehadheard the tape, and she knew now what Nora had done, and these actions were not without consequences. This trunk had belonged to Polly’s birth mother, and her mother before that; what business was it of Nora’s to determine that such a precious inheritance should be destroyed?
She didn’t have to think about it for long. With a determined intake of breath, Jess opened the lid.
36
The first thing to hit her was the smell; not awful, just different, of another place, another time. The trunk was full to the brim, its contents packed tightly. Jess started pulling them out one by one. She was overcome by thoughts of Isabel as a young woman in London, all those years before, receiving her mother’s precious keepsakes.
Jess had expected to find personal items that had once belonged to Isabel; she hadn’t considered that the trunk would contain tributes to an entire family. Neither had she anticipated how easily she would recognize them. Here was Evie’s handwritten book, self-importantly titledFlora, Fauna, and Fungi of the Adelaide Hills; piano sheet music for beginners, including “Long, Long Ago,” embellished with instructions and advice as to notation and finger placement in the persnickety but patient handwriting of the Misses Edwards; the rolled-up posters of John Coltrane and Ella Fitzgerald that had once adorned the walls of Matilda Turner’s bedroom; a saxophone; a cricket ball signed by Donald Bradman; a pink wool matinee jacket for a baby, beautifully knitted with neat, even stitches.
Jess had to pause there, feeling unexpectedly moved. She had been too quick to cast judgment; this was a sentimental collection, after all. She pictured her grandmother alone at Halcyon after the deaths with only baby Polly for company, walking from room to room selecting the objects that had meant the most to her nieces and nephew and sister-in-law. And she wondered how often Nora had made the sad, solo pilgrimage to the attic of Darling House to unpack and inspect this shrine to her lost family.
She fingered the edge of the sheet music. The paper at the right-hand bottom corner was softer and smoother for having been frequently handled, and Jess let out a long, complicated sigh before returning to the remaining objects in the trunk. Any lingering guiltat having opened it against Nora’s wishes had disintegrated and drifted away. These keepsakes were important. Polly, especially, had a right to see them. These were the possessions of her siblings—the pink garment had been knitted especially for her.
Here, wrapped carefully in silk, was an assortment of boxwood and ivory miniature sculptures, the netsukes that Isabel had inherited from her mother. Beneath that, another soft fabric parcel revealed shattered pieces of porcelain: Isabel’s teacup, Jess realized. Finally, at the very bottom of the trunk, was a book, leather-bound. Jess took it up, searching as she did for a title or name or some other distinguishing feature.
Later, when she related the story to Polly, Jess would say that she’d known instantly what it was, and perhaps she had. For here was Isabel Turner’s journal from 1959, its lined paper covered with beautiful handwriting that told the story, in her own words, of the last year of her life. Time had faded the ink on the journal’s pages, and Jess had to move to stand beneath the window to make out what was written.And so, a new year dawns,read the first line.I wonder what it holds?Pictures came to mind of Isabel sitting on the verandah at Halcyon that Christmas Eve morning, of Nora waking in the storm late at night to find the journal on the bed beside her, of Daniel Miller receiving the journal gratefully as he started to research his book. And now, here it was, almost sixty years later at Darling House, in Jess’s own hands. She had a sense of history concertinaing, the present touching the past.
Slowly, carefully, Jess turned the pages, reaching in time the stubs that Miller had noted, where Isabel had torn out entries. Like Miller before her, she ran her finger along their length, and, as she did so, the journal teetered. Jess reacted quickly to stop it from falling, and the action caused something to dislodge from the back. A sheet of paper, she realized; more than one.
On a couple of occasions in her professional life, Jess had experienced the sensation of several disparate pieces of knowledge coming together in an instant, as if by alchemy, to form a complete picture. So, now, at the very same second that she realized there were loose pages stashed at the back of the journal, an echo sounded in her mind, Nora in the hospital worrying about “the pages,” and Jess knew that these were the missing entries that Daniel Miller had wondered about in 1959 and that her grandmother had sought to retrieve after the letter arrived from Marcus Summers. Nora had wanted them destroyed, she realized: that was the reason behind her attempt to climb to the attic, and the purpose of the special request in her will.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Jess angled the top sheet to the light, scanning quickly, gleaning what she could. Something of interest, tucked within the rest of the entry:
I know I must learn to live without him. He has a wife, he cares for her, they have known one another since they were schoolchildren. And I, too, am married. Such as it is.
On the next page:
I think back sometimes to the day we met. I write it that way, because although we had known one another for the many years that he had been coming to the house, that day was like a new meeting, the real meeting.
And the one after that:
He will never leave his wife. And how would I live with myself if I urged him to? He is a carer by nature. His sense of worth is determined by the fulfillment of his duties. He has sacrificed so much already to her needs. He would resent me if I encouraged him to forsake his responsibilities—he would hate himself. And so, an impasse. Thereare times when no solution can be found that suits everyone. But is it too much to admit here, unashamedly, greedily, that I have needs, too?
And then:
He saw the baby today, his baby. I could see it in his face, all the words he could not say. But I observed them. I knew. His love for me, for her. Oh, but I agonize sometimes, seeking a solution! It does me no good, but every so often I let myself daydream along the lines of what might have been, if we were the only people whose happiness mattered, if neither of us had responsibilities elsewhere.
Followed by:
I met with a solicitor in Adelaide today, a gentleman who is not known to Thomas, who has promised me discretion. He is going to put things in motion. Now that I have made the decision, I am impatient to get it done. I will require a new passport—it has been so long since I arrived here, and I haven’t traveled since. The children, too, will need official documents. They will hate to leave, but after much soul-searching I know that it is the only reasonable path. I cannot bear to stay here, so close to him, and yet unable to be together. I need to go home—I feel so far away, so alone, so separated from my past. And how could I ever leave them behind? I am their mother; we belong together. Do I flatter myself that their home is surely wherever I am? They will learn to love England, my little Australian children. In time, they will make a new home, we will make it together, and all will be well.
And on the final page:
I am going to give the netsuke rabbit to Becky. She is not the person whom I will miss the most, but she is the person who will, I think,miss us the most, especially the baby. I like the idea of leaving my small precious rabbit with the person who so loved my small precious child.
Jess stared unseeing through the attic window, lost in thought. In the space of a few minutes, the landscape of everything she knew had changed yet again. Some of the words in Isabel’s second last entry resonated especially; she had heard them before. She had read them in Miller’s book, she remembered, when Reverend Lawson made his report to police. The morbid assumption had been that Isabel meant to “take the children with her” into death. But the journal suggested something very different. She had been planning to leave Australia to return to England; that’s why she had sought the reverend’s advice.
Why would someone planning to start afresh in her home country decide instead to kill herself and her family? Had there been a problem getting the passports? Had the solicitor changed his mind and refused to help her? Had Isabel become overwhelmed by the hurdles and lapsed into hopelessness?
Or had the policemen, the coroner, Daniel Miller—history—got it all wrong? What if Isabel hadn’t meant to kill herself? What if their deaths had been a terrible accident after all? The blue-green algae came once more to mind. Rowena Carrick, the university professor, was confident that the coroner would have tested for it, but there were other possibilities on the list of toxins. She needed to finish going through it—maybe something else would jump out and announce itself the culprit.
Jess experienced a vague, distracting feeling, almost as if she were remembering something she wasn’t aware she’d forgotten. It was like catching a glimpse of a fluttering moth on the very edge of her vision. Irritating, sly, impossible to ignore; but every time she tried to look at it directly, it disappeared... When she couldn’t pin it down, her thoughts cycled on to something else that was bothering her: Why had Isabel removed the pages? It was possible that she consideredthem too sensitive to leave to chance and the eyes of snooping children, but then whykeepthe pages? Why not destroy the evidence? And where had she put them? Somewhere that Nora had been able to find them, evidently.
Unless... Jess felt the electricity of knowing she was right—it wasn’t Isabel who had torn the pages out. Who else but Nora would have removed the entry about Becky Baker and the netsuke?
Nora had given the journal to Daniel Miller to prove to him that Isabel was a loving wife and mother with a happy life who wouldn’t have dreamed of killing herself and her children. The last thing she’d have wanted him to see was that Isabel was having an affair, and that Thomas Turner wasn’t Thea’s father. It was such a Nora thing to have done. To remove the pages that contradicted the rosy picture she wanted the journal to paint. Nora, with her gift for positive thinking, for certainty, for looking forward and never over her shoulder...
