“I thought I might walk up and take a look.”
“I don’t think anyone around here’s going to mind. Like I said, the owner’s overseas.”
“Thanks,” said Polly, but she didn’t leave. She heard herself say, “Actually, the owner was my uncle. His name was Thomas Turner. Maybe you knew him? I’ve never met him. He died last year. My mother—his sister—is the one selling the house.”
The man looked at her from beneath his hat, and she saw something change in his face, almost like recognition. He wasn’t recognizing her, per se, she knew, but establishing a context. At last he said, “I mow the grass here because I used to love the girl who lived inside that house.” And then, almost immediately: “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that. I’m not usually one to talk about myself. Kurt.” He held out a hand to shake hers.
“Polly.” Behind him, a duck had glided onto the creek, and ribbons of sunlight were sent rolling up the trunk of an overhanging willow. “You were talking about Matilda Turner,” she said, struck by his admission.
He shrugged. “It was a long time ago. We were kids. And yet I sometimes feel that everything in my life might have been different but for what happened to her. Probably sounds stupid.”
“Not to me it doesn’t.”
He smiled, and then shook his head. “I’m sorry. It’s just... you remind me of her. Your voice—something.”
“She was my cousin, I guess. Not that I knew her. My mother didn’t talk about them. Too sad.”
He nodded. “I suppose you’ve read the book?”
“Only recently.”
“What did you think of it?”
“On its literary merits, it was fine. I had mixed feelings about the subject matter.”
He laughed.
“It must be strange to have been written about?”
“It wasn’t published here. Only in America. Most of us didn’t get our hands on a copy until sometime later. By then, life—people—had moved on.” He shrugged again. “The event itself was far worse than the book. My brother was really thrown by it. He’d had a falling-out with his mate.”
“John Turner?”
Kurt nodded. “He was out of sorts at home, too. It’s a tough age, fourteen. Fifteen and sixteen weren’t much better, to be honest. He got itchy feet and left as soon as he was able. He’ll come home one day, though. People always do. I wish he were around more—I’d like my kids to know their uncle a bit. He’s a good guy, Marcus. Always helping people. And not just by offering them his ute when they’re moving house. Proper help. Fighting for justice, protecting the disenfranchised. He’s a lawyer. It’s funny—when we were kids, I was the ‘bright one.’ I was good at school, bound to go on to bigger and better things; Marcus was the ‘outdoorsy one.’” He gestured toward the mower and grinned. “Funny how things turn out.”
“But you’re not unhappy.”
“Not at all. This is my calling. Stewardship. After Matilda died, I lost interest in school. There were other ways to learn the things I wanted to know—I didn’t need the formal parts. I found that I didn’t hold much with religion, either. I would sit in church, listening to Reverend Lawson, trying to feel something, to feel God, I guess...” He lifted his hands, indicating the garden canopy, the silver-grassed mountain on the other side of the valley, the white-trunked gums. “This is my church. My dad used to talk about places overseas, like St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, the Notre-Dame in Paris—places he’d read about in books and wanted to see. But I always felt mostconnected when I was outside; not just surrounded by nature, but intrinsic to it, a tiny part of a system much larger than I was. Reverence. Grace. Meaning. Purpose. I feel those things when I’m working. Nature is my cathedral.” He frowned and shook his head bemusedly. “Sorry—I didn’t mean to rattle on. You staying in town tonight?”
Polly didn’t have any plans at all. She hadn’t intended to come here in the first place. “Is there somewhere local you’d recommend?”
“The hotel’s nice. New owners; they’ve done a good-looking reno.”
Polly remembered the Tambilla Hotel from Daniel Miller’s book. She liked the idea of staying in one of the town’s oldest buildings. “I’ll give it a try.”
“Hey, listen—I don’t want to be too forward, but my family and I have dinner there most Friday nights. You’re welcome to join us if you don’t have other plans. My kids are as mad as meat ants, but they tend to clear off after they’ve scoffed their fish and chips.”
Polly was accustomed to thinking of herself as a shy person, so it was a surprise to hear herself agreeing that she’d be glad to join them; not only that, but meaning it. She liked Kurt Summers; she found him easy to be with, and she wanted to know more about this place, its past.
“Great,” he said. “I’ll see you later. Around seven. We try and nab an outside table when the weather’s this good.” He tapped the brim of his hat and started back toward the mower. He was almost there when he turned to call over his shoulder. “My dad’s coming tonight, too. Mum died a few years back, so we try and keep him busy. You’ll like him.”
Polly knew who Kurt’s father was—Percy Summers, the man who’d found the Turner family that afternoon and, in his description of the bleak scene, given Daniel Miller the title for his book. She was curious to meet him; he had known her aunt and uncle and would be able to give an adult perspective on Halcyon as it was back then. As seveno’clock drew nearer, though, Polly experienced her customary evaporation of confidence, anticipation turning to anxiety.
She showered and dressed and went down the broad, carpeted stairs of the Tambilla Hotel at five minutes to seven, pulling on her sleeve cuffs nervously. She was glad she’d thought to throw in a halfway decent blouse. She told herself that if she didn’t see the Summers family in the first lap she did of the restaurant and its outside tables, she would keep walking down the street and grab herself a bite to eat at the little Thai place she’d spotted farther along.
As it turned out, the Summers family was not only expecting her, they’d set a place at the table and taken the liberty of ordering her a drink.
Within seconds, Polly knew that she’d been worrying about nothing. She had spent a lot of time observing families. Coming from a group of two, she’d always found the dynamics mysterious. The way siblings could fight tooth and nail, only to turn around and defend the other furiously if anyone else were to criticize them. But it turned out being with the Summers clan was easy. Kurt’s wife, Sally, ran a stone fruit nursery, and their children, two sets of twins a year apart, went to high school in Adelaide. They had come to dinner straight off the bus and were still wearing their uniforms. Kurt’s dad, a gentle-faced man in his early seventies, sat at the end of the table watching it all take place, his smile, Polly thought, tending toward the philosophical. She felt she understood that smile. It was how she felt sometimes: on the edge of things, but not unhappily.
