She stood to leave, and he reached to take her hand in a gesture that was somewhere between the formality of shaking and the familiarity of holding. His grip was surprisingly firm. “You’re very like your mother,” he said. “It really is like seeing a ghost.”
He was being polite; Polly knew that she looked nothing at all like Nora. She smiled. “It’s been so nice to meet you.”
“Come back again, won’t you?” he said. “Please come and see us again.”
“I will,” she replied.
But she never did. He was a charming old fellow, and she’d fallen in love that evening with the whole Summers family. But Polly had no excuse to visit again.
38
Kurt drove him home that night. He was a good lad, and he’d been making an extra effort since Meg died. The run to Port Willunga from Tambilla was almost an hour long, and there were kangaroos to dodge in the late summer dusk, but Kurt wouldn’t hear of his dad driving himself. “I enjoy it,” he said. “Besides, you’ve seen the circus I live with—it’s the only quiet time I get.”
Percy had moved down to Port Willunga not long after Meg’s funeral. He’d have liked to do it sooner, but Meg wouldn’t countenance leaving Tambilla, and Percy didn’t have the heart to upset her. There were times in a long marriage for pushing and times when the victory of getting one’s own way was not worth the price. Knowing how to tell the difference was key.
Caring for Meg in those final months was difficult and sad, but he’d been determined to see it through himself. A married couple owed one another certain things; balance sheets drawn up over a shared lifetime. Toward the end, Kurt and Sally had organized a nurse to help part-time, and Percy had been grateful to take an afternoon away every now and then.
One day, he’d come down to the beach, for old times’ sake, and it was while he was walking back across the dunes from the water’s edge that he’d seen afor salesign in the front lawn of a wooden shack with a narrow balcony and big windows overlooking the sea. It had a rainwater tank and a vegetable garden and a big orange tree in the front. He’d known at once it was the place.
Percy had been born and bred in Tambilla, he’d raised his boys there, experienced love and loss, tragedy and joy; he knew the sights and sounds and smells better than anywhere else on earth. But he’d been glad to move away. He hadn’t a lot of life left, and it was good to try something new. He might not have made it to Greece or Canadaor Spain, but he’d left Tambilla in the end, just as he’d always said he would. He’d sold the shop, too, even though he’d made a promise to Meg. There was a place, Percy thought, for a white lie like that one.
“Make you a cup of tea before I go?” Kurt asked, switching on the kitchen light as Percy let them inside.
The day’s warmth had collected in the corners of the room, and Percy pushed open the window above the sink to let it out. A dragonfly was panicking against the glass pane, and he used his cupped hand to edge it free. “How about I make you a coffee for the drive home,” he replied.
Once he’d seen his son off safely, Percy took his cuppa out onto the balcony and sat in his old deck chair. The sea was calm tonight: tide rolling in and then pulling away again. It was his favorite sound.
He had always liked to come down here; some of his happiest memories were of bringing the boys to the beach to camp when they were small. Those long, sweet days when there was nowhere they’d rather be than by his side. Strange the way life went. It really did happen while you were busy looking the other way.
As the heady fragrance of native frangipani infused the warm night air, Percy ran back over the evening in his mind. When Kurt first told him about the young woman he’d met that day, and mentioned, so casually, that he’d invited her to dinner, Percy had almost keeled over.
He hadn’t known what to expect. The reality had been disarming. He’d wondered over the years, made some attempts to find out for certain, but when he saw her, he’d known instantly. She was Isabel’s daughter. The mannerisms were there, even if Polly carried herself with less confidence. Any remaining questions about what had happened that night when he’d taken the baby back to the house to be found were answered; what he’d sometimes suspected was now confirmed.
Time had a way of fading emotion out of memories, but Percy could still touch the terror and confusion of those days after he left the baby in the rose garden. As he’d waited for an announcementthat never came, he’d begun to reproach himself. In the absence of any other plausible explanation, he came to believe that wild dogs had pounced when his back was turned. That in trying to save the child, he had put her in harm’s way.
But then, a week or so later, a strange thing happened in the main street. He was loading boxes at the shop when he glimpsed Isabel’s sister-in-law in town for the first time since the community meeting. She was dressed again in mourning black, but this time, rather than carrying her baby, she was using the old-fashioned perambulator that belonged to the Turner family. It was a dislocating sight. The pram—purchased from London and shipped to South Australia, unlike anything made or used here—was synonymous with the Turners, and new life, and it was jarring to see it in action after what had happened.
Percy was still processing these thoughts when he sensed fierce motion in his peripheral vision. Becky Baker came flying out of the side door of her aunt’s teahouse, letting the screen door slam angrily behind her as she barreled over to the perambulator and snatched up the baby.
Mrs. Turner-Bridges screamed—“My baby! She’s stolen my baby!”—as Meg ran out from the shop. “Becky, love,” Meg was saying, “let the child go. Let her go, love. That’s not young Thea; it’s Mrs. Turner-Bridges’s baby. It’s Mrs. Turner-Bridges’s baby, Polly.”
By now there was quite a scene. Betty had come out of the teahouse, closely followed by Eric Jerosch and Hugo Doyle, who, as good luck would have it, had stopped in for their tea break. The police officers helped bundle poor Becky away. Everyone knew how much she’d adored Thea Turner. The gossips said she’d liked to pretend the baby was her own, that she’d become too close to the family, and everyone knew she was slower than most, more apt to get confused.
Afterward, Percy couldn’t get the episode out of his head. He started to wonder; he remembered Isabel telling him that her sister-in-law was coming to stay. She had a long-held dream of becoming a mother, but to date she’d had a lot of trouble in that regard. “Theworld isn’t fair,” Isabel had said. “But does it have to be so often cruel? Poor Nora has suffered so much, and she would be the most loving mother. If there were any justice in the world, she would have four or five children of her own by now. She doesn’t have any problem falling pregnant, it’s just that her babies don’t seem to cling to life.”
What if Becky were right? Percy wondered. What if Mrs. Turner-Bridges’s baby hadn’t survived, if the sad occurrence Isabel feared had come to pass? The child that he’d left in the rose garden, Isabel’s baby, had been alive and well. It was not inconceivable that one might have been switched for the other.
But when he asked Meg, she’d put him straight. “I’m sorry, love,” she said. “I know how much you want it to be true—I’d have liked that, too—but I had a good look, and it wasn’t Thea. It was Mrs. Turner-Bridges’s baby.”
Meg ought to know. Percy had woken Christmas morning and found her up and about already, in the shop putting together a parcel of food. “It’s for Mrs. Turner-Bridges,” she explained. “I kept thinking of her, all alone in that big house. Pregnant and grieving—she must be in utter misery. I can’t bear to imagine her by herself.”
Percy had urged her to wait, even just a day. In the circumstances, he wondered whether she oughtn’t to let someone else take a turn at being helpful. But Meg was having none of it. She had always been among the first to lend a hand when it was needed, and she was determined that this occasion should be no different. The more he tried to reason with her, the more agitated she became. “She’s all by herself, Perce.”
And so, Percy had agreed to keep an eye on the baby while Meg went to check on Mrs. Turner-Bridges and deliver some supplies. That’s when she learned that Nora had given birth.
“She was struggling,” Meg reported later that night. “I had no choice but to stay and help her. She’d handled it as well as could be expected in the circumstances—a natural mother—but the house was a mess—the kitchen still covered in food from the day they left.And the baby had come too early. She was tiny. Perfectly formed, but oh, so small and feeble. I had to stay and help. What else could I have done?”
The moon was the finest of fingernails tonight. Nothing more than a ghostly sliver. High above him, Percy located the Southern Cross and the two pointers: entry-level star-spotting, but old habits die hard. Isabel had told him once it was the night sky that caused her to feel the farthest from home. “To look up and not see the Great and Little Bears—it makes me lonely at a cosmic level. It’s all wrong.”
