He’d had no idea what she was talking about, but the nurse said that was to be expected. That she’d speak nonsense and it was kindest just to go along with whatever she was seeing in her head. So, “That’s good, love,” he said.
“I took it from him, but I didn’t throw it away. I made it for her specially. Take Mrs. Turner her Christmas gift, I told him. You must make sure she gets it. He came back to the house and told me she was so happy with the gift. I only found out later that she’d given it to all of them. She never shared my fish paste—she told me a hundred times. ‘My one pleasure, all for myself,’ she said. She wasn’t meant to share it.”
Percy climbed into bed. When he moved to the house at Port Willunga, he hadn’t brought any of the old furniture. Kurt and Sally had raised their eyebrows and ribbed him gently for his extravagance when he told them he wouldn’t need a moving truck, that he was going to buy what he needed new. They hadn’t meant anything by it; it was just the way young people treated the old when they didn’t intend to be condescending but were nonetheless.
He had bought himself a twin bed. He didn’t need more, and he liked the idea of taking up only the amount of space that he required. With the extra room he’d installed bookshelves on three walls. In the spare room, he put two sets of bunk beds so his grandchildren could come and visit whenever they wanted. He loved it when they stayed, watching them scramble over the dunes toward the beach, boards under their arms, kicking sand at one another and laughing as they went.
Most of the time, though, Percy was alone. Being old, he had come to realize, was like being stuck inside an enormous museum with hundreds of rooms, each crammed full of artifacts from the past. He understood now why the elderly could sit, seemingly still and alone, for hours on end. There was always something else to take out, to look at from a fresh angle and become reacquainted with.
He tried not to let his thoughts pull him back to the night he left the baby in the rose garden. She’d disappeared so fast, too fast. It was almost as if Mrs. Turner-Bridges had been told to watch out for her. But the only person who knew was Meg, and Percy couldn’t believe it of her. That would’ve meant she knew where the baby had ended up all along, and had let him go on believing himself responsible for the little one’s death. She could never be so unkind.
Percy had blamed himself for a lot of things over the years. But he hadn’t caught the puffer and he hadn’t put it in the fish paste. He hadn’t taken the baby from her crib, and he hadn’t kept her. He had fallen in love and betrayed his wife. He had tried to be a good father. He had tried to make things up with Meg and had pledged to her the single thing he had to give: his service. Life was a journey, and it wasn’t always smooth, and sometimes terrible things happened. Percy was under no illusions: he was aware of what he’d done, and of what he hadn’t.
Tonight, Percy was tired, and he knew that he would sleep. He lifted his sore old legs into bed and straightened the sheet over the top, and as he closed his eyes he let himself into a room that was oneof his favorites. He was a younger man, slipping through the fence on the hidden side of the Turner property, crossing the paddock toward the willow that stood by the water hole. Isabel, he could see, was already waiting for him. Beside her was a small pile of books; he carried the one he’d borrowed in his knapsack. She must have sensed him, because she looked up and saw him, and when she smiled, he felt that everything was right with the world and always would be.
39
Adelaide Hills
December 24, 2018
The Banksia Bookshop occupied a stone building on the main street of Tambilla that, according to the real estate agent, had once been home to the town’s only grocery shop. The bookseller, Margie, was new to the area, and took the information as an interesting but insignificant piece of local trivia of the sort often shared by real estate agents hoping to make a sale. She had a romantic view of history, though, and enjoyed the fact that if you looked hard enough, in a certain light, you could still see the old font beneath the new paint showing a pair ofs’s wheresummers & sonshad been written.
On Christmas Eve morning, the bookshop was doing a roaring trade. Carols piped through the sound system, children wearing Santa hats and reindeer ears slipped among the shoppers, and a staff member dressed as an elf was handing candy canes to people when they left. As Jess stepped out of the shop and onto the pavement, she was filled with the lightness of spirit and free-floating sense of possibility that always claimed her when she had a brown paper bag containing new books under her arm.
Across the road, she spotted a narrow path running through the grass away from the street between two buildings. She recognized it from Daniel Miller’s book as the path that Becky Baker must have taken on her walk from the brewery to the Turner house each morning, when she left the narrow river that ran parallel to the town and appeared in the main street to greet Meg Summers and claim her morning apple.
Becky had enjoyed the tunnel of oaks and elms that grew along the street, and almost sixty years later, Jess was similarly struck. Thetrees were enormous, their deep green leaves as big as dinner plates, casting the road—which would otherwise be baking—into complete shade.
“You ought to visit in autumn,” the woman behind the counter in the organic market had told her when she’d picked up a coffee earlier. “The color of those leaves, you’d think you were in Canada.”
Jess had agreed to meet Polly at midday, which gave her fifteen minutes to fill. Her mother had been very mysterious at dinner the night before. She’d taken a phone call and, from what Jess could hear, made plans to do something this afternoon. She’d then asked Jess if she was free.
Polly had been very careful since they’d arrived—they both had—not to make any assumptions as to the type of trip it was, and what it meant that they’d decided to travel to Tambilla together over Christmas. In the wake of Nancy Davis’s tape and the unearthing of Isabel’s journal, each had her own reason for wanting to return to South Australia. Still, they’d agreed, it was a nice idea to have dinner together on the first night, and so they had.
It had been an unexpected event all around. From the first, Polly had been very particular about where they sat, choosing a table outside, in a corner overlooking the street. Only then had she revealed, somewhat sheepishly, that she’d been to Tambilla once before. “I wanted to tell you the other night,” she said, “after the funeral, but everything got a bit... confused.” As it turned out, by some sort of coincidence Jess was yet to understand, Polly had wound up eating dinner with the man she now suspected of being her father.
“You had no idea at the time?” Jess asked.
“None, though I liked him. I liked all of them. I remember driving away the next day and being struck by how comfortable I’d felt in their presence. At the risk of sounding ridiculous, I was changed in some way by that dinner; I became lighter, more resolved. Less constrained by the somewhat limited idea of myself I’d been carrying around.”
Polly said she’d already decided by then that she didn’t want to live a life defined by secrets. “That’s why I’d left Sydney,” she explained, “six months before I came down here.” She told Jess then about the night Daniel Miller had come to Darling House: she’d discovered her mother standing over Jess’s crib in the dark, and Nora had turned and made her promise never to tell Jess what had happened at Halcyon. Jess saw now that it had provided a pivot point: Nora, Polly, Jess, and their acidic family secrets, joined together in that moment.
“I agreed,” Polly said, “and I shouldn’t have. By keeping my own secrets, I did the same thing to you that Nora did to me—withheld important parts of your identity. But I want to do things differently.” Her fingers went to the jacaranda pendant on her chain. “I want to talk to you about something important—I should have done it a long time ago. I want to tell you about your father.”
Jess had experienced the slowdown of everything around her then. The noise from the other tables had sucked away as into a vacuum, replaced by the ocean of her own pulse in her ears; there were instant pins and needles in her fingers. She had imagined this conversation a thousand times but given up hope of ever having it. In the end, her mother’s story of love and wasted opportunity, of secrecy and shame, was simpler than she’d guessed, and therefore somehow sadder.
Perhaps because the story was sad, Polly sought to balance it by rolling into happier anecdotes of Jess’s early years. “Once,” she said with a laugh, “when you were only about three or four, I took you to a local funfair. We went on the rides together, and bought fairy floss and a toffee apple, and later, in the evening, found a spot on the oval to watch the fireworks. Your little face was all lit up, your eyes as wide as I’d seen them, and as we left, you looked up at me in wonder and said, ‘But how did they know it was my birthday?’
“Another time, you must have been about five, and you and the other children at school were spending recesses racing around the sandpit. You were upset, because there was another girl—Fast Mary, you called her—who always managed to beat you. You never likedbeing beaten. You’d outgrown your sneakers, and when I took you to buy new ones, you asked me if they’d make you fast. It was such a sweet thing to say, and you were so eager and earnest, that I answered, ‘Yes, of course,’ without really thinking about it. Well! The look on your face the next afternoon when I collected you from school and you told me indignantly that they were not fast shoes at all—you’d come second once again to Mary—I’ve never forgotten it. I never again answered your questions glibly.”
The memories were sweet and funny, and Jess could see that for Polly, who had been keeping them to herself for so long, it was a relief finally to share them; but for Jess, it was like being told stories about someone else. She didn’t remember any of it. She’d been a child, of course, but there was more to it than that.
There was a truth observed by all good preachers, leaders, and salesmen: tell a good story, tell it in simple language, tell it often. That’s how beliefs and memories were formed. It was how people defined themselves, in a reliance upon the stories about themselves that they were told by others. Nora had been the chief storyteller in Jess’s life, which was how she came to know herself as strong, smart, and determined, as Nora’s much-loved granddaughter, a true Turner.
Except that she wasn’t a Turner at all.
Listening to Polly’s fond memories of a little girl from decades ago, reflecting on everything her mother had said earlier about meeting Jonathan James and Nora’s reaction to their engagement, the months and years that had followed, Jess had a lot of questions: about her father, the past, her history. But when there came a lull in Polly’s stream of consciousness, she surprised herself. She was more aware than ever of how few memories she and her mother had in common; it seemed suddenly vital to repeat and celebrate those they did: “I remember the crabs,” she said. “On the beach that day? I remember them. I was terrified, and then I felt safe.”
