It had been startling, after the artificial dark of the cabin, to see the rising sun like liquid gold on the horizon. Down below, silver shards flecked the surface of the rippling ocean, and as Jess squinted through the glass at the expanse of deep blue, she’d felt a pull within her chest of sudden yearning. The Pacific: ocean of her childhood. As she watched, rays of light had reached the distant coastline, visible first as a haze, then as a scribble, until eventually, as the plane drew closer, it had resolved into the familiar landscape of coastal suburbs. Streets and parks and buildings, among them the very place where she now stood: Darling House, tucked within its lush garden on the cliff-edged promontory of Vaucluse.
Jess typed her grandmother’s security code into the keypad, hoping it was unchanged, and breathed a sigh of relief when the gates swung open. She pulled her suitcase behind her, following theagapanthus-lined driveway through the palm grove, and a memory came of the first ever time she’d dragged a small piece of luggage through this copse of trees. Her mother had been walking beside her that day. Jess had thought she was coming for a visit, but it ended up being the start of a new life.
As she rounded the last bend, Nora’s house appeared at the other side of the gravel turning circle, arresting as ever. It was an irony—and perhaps, even, a foreshadowing—that she had been struck especially by the majesty of the house that long-ago day. It had looked to ten-year-old Jess like something from a fairy tale, standing tall with its gleaming weatherboards and elaborate tangle of wisteria branches. The longest boughs of the tallest trees arched together to form a proscenium around the house at center stage, the sweep of green lawn fell away on all sides, and the round pond was just visible on the western slope, with its glossy lily pads and graceful stone statue. The effect was of a place set apart from the rest of the big wide world.
And at the heart of it, always, Nora.
Jess’s gaze went directly to the wide concrete steps that led to the large front porch, as it did each time, but there was no Nora standing there today to meet her.
Mrs. Robinson had said she’d left a spare key beneath the doormat, but Jess didn’t need it. She still had the one she’d carried with her in high school and then at university; she’d kept it on her key ring after she moved to London, even though it was a large Victorian number with a series of loops at one end and big brass teeth at the other. Nora had been pleased to hear that. “Good girl,” she’d said. “Keep it close always. A person should never have to knock to come home.”
Jess had received an inordinate number of such small homilies when she was growing up. Her grandmother was unwavering in her convictions. There was a portrait of young Nora hanging above the downstairs sofa, in the sitting room that adjoined the kitchen, and Jess had gazed up at it sometimes when she was doing her homework at the bench, wondering whether the wide-eyed girl with the shockof thick woolly hair and toss of pale freckles across her nose had been just as clear-minded then as she was now.
After she’d come to live at Darling House, Jess had tried to match Nora’s certitude. Even as a ten-year-old, she’d recognized it immediately as one of the starkest differences between her mother and grandmother. Where Polly wore a constant frown of concern, examining each proposal—even the most insignificant—from all angles and then agonizing incessantly that she’d made the wrong choice, Nora had an answer for everything, waving away doubts. “I’m ninety-nine percent right, ninety-nine percent of the time.” Once a decision was made, she was unflappable. “There’s no point looking backward,” she’d say. “Just make a choice and then trust yourself to have chosen correctly.”
It was advice that Jess tried to live by. Lately, though, she’d found herself seeing more and more shades of gray. And while it was her job, as a journalist, to keep an open mind, to take a nuanced approach and to report what she saw and heard, not what she thought and felt at the outset, the tendency to question had been creeping into her personal life, too. She’d developed a habit of weighing decisions so carefully that the scales never tipped, and she often lay awake relitigating those she’d already made. It was a worry: ability to self-critique was one thing, but the analysis-paralysis of overthinking was quite another.
From somewhere in the garden came the sound of a magpie singing, and a thousand days of childhood arrived with it. Jess glanced to her right and spotted the black-and-white bird perched atop the statue in the middle of the pond. There were magpies in England, too—Jess had seen them often on the Heath—but although they shared a name, they were different from their antipodean cousins: smaller, neater, prettier, and without the eerily sublime song. This magpie was looking directly at her. Jess tilted her head, watching the bird as he watched her. Suddenly, he spread his wings and flew away.
She crossed the turning circle toward the lawn. The grass was still damp with dew, even though the sun was rising fast, and cool shadowsstretched toward the harbor. Jess reached the edge of the pond and followed the line of its curved rim until the elegant stone lady was directly before her, kneeling as she always had, arms folded above her head, face bowed to gaze down at the goldfish and lilies.
This was the same spot she’d been drawn to on the day her mother left her with Nora. It had been August, late winter, but still warm enough for Jess to have been sent out into the garden “to play.” She hadn’t had much heart for playing and had instead sat on the edge of the pond watching the fish swim through her reflection, breaking small twigs into pieces and setting them to float on the surface, keeping her hands busy while her thoughts ranged across recent events and conversations. She’d known that Polly was planning a move, that there was a new house and a new job up north, but somehow, Jess had got it into her head that they would be leaving Sydney together. She’d even convinced herself, with a childlike love of conspiracy, that she and her mother were planning a cloak-and-dagger escape. As the day drew nearer, though, her mother had explained to Jess that she needed a bit more time to get things organized; she—Jess—would be happy staying with her grandmother, wouldn’t she, in that lovely big house? It was nice and close to school, so she’d be with her friends each day, and she wouldn’t miss any of her lessons. Jess had agreed cautiously that she’d be okay, and Polly had promised it would only be for a little while. But when they said goodbye, Jess could sense something was happening that she didn’t understand. It was a familiar, unsettling feeling of adults keeping secrets while they pretended everything was fine.
Nora had come outside to find Jess that afternoon. There was an evening chill in the air, and she’d wrapped a wool shawl around her shoulders. She hadn’t spoken right away but had sat beside Jess on the pond’s stone rim. Eventually, she said, “Did your mother ever tell you that you were born in this house?”
Jess had shaken her head.
“It’s true. You both lived here with me for the first three years ofyour life.” There was a pause and then, in a slightly puzzled voice: “Have you really never seen any photographs or heard any stories of back then?”
A glance at her grandmother’s expression told Jess that Nora’s feelings were hurt, even though she was trying not to show it.
“You used to love this fountain even then,” Nora said. “I used to bring you out here on the hottest days, and you would splish and splash and dangle your little legs over the edge and laugh when the goldfish came to nibble at your toes. I don’t suppose you remember, but you gave our lovely lady here a name.”
Jess glanced up at the statue. “Grace,” she said suddenly, the word coming from nowhere.
Nora smiled. “That’s right. Grace. I’m not sure where you got it. Divine inspiration, I’ve always thought, because of course that is her name. What else could it be?”
Jess had looked up at the statue then, taking in her features as if for the first time. Lichen had grown along the coils of her hair and across her face and down her naked torso, but no matter her exposure to the elements, there was something transcendent about her expression and her pose.
“You know,” Jess’s grandmother said, “my mother and father used to go away a lot when I was young. I hated being alone, until I realized that this was more than a house.”
Jess looked sideways at her.
“You’ll see what I mean. It’s a house that rewards the curious. Have you explored the nook under the east stairs yet? I used to love playing in there. I daresay it’s been lonely all these years, just waiting for a child to claim it as her own.”
“Mum said she’s going to send for me,” said Jess.
“Well,” said Nora, “until we hear from her, you have free run of the house. Aside from the attic, of course—the stairs are steep and quite unsafe.”
Her grandmother was being very kind to her, which had the effect,as kindness often does, of making Jess feel terribly sad and lonely. She nodded, because she didn’t trust herself to speak, and then her thoughts leapt away from the net she was trying to keep them in and she realized that she couldn’t remember being without Polly, not even for a night, and her bottom lip began to tremble, and then: “I miss my mum.” The awful, naked words tumbled out in a single gulp, and Jess began to cry.
“I know you do,” said Nora, putting her shawl around Jess’s shoulders. “Do you know what I do when I feel sad? I remind myself that Grace stands out here in the wind and the rain and never complains, and I feel better at once. Bad things happen to the best of people, and we cannot let them overwhelm us. Life doesn’t always work out the way we plan, but it does work out in the end.”
Jess made her way toward the house, the sun warm now on her shoulders. Understandable, she supposed, that the memories of back then were waiting for her here. She rarely thought about it all in London. It seemed irrelevant there. A couple of times over the years, when the subject came up in conversation, Rachel had shaken her head and said something along the lines of: “But how could she leave you? She’s your mother.” Jess had merely shrugged. She’d worked hard over the years not to feel animosity toward Polly. It wasn’t as if she’d been aterribleparent. She hadn’t been cruel or abusive, not as a habit anyway—and by leaving, she’d given Jess the gift of Nora.
Because Polly hadn’t come back for Jess. She lived in Brisbane still, in a suburb called Paddington, not far from the city, where ramshackle wooden houses balanced on stilts across a rippling run of terrace-topped valleys. It had taken Jess a while to realize that the arrangement, their separation, was to be permanent. It had never really been announced. The “little bit longer” turned into “until the end of the school year,” and by the time the September school holidays came around and Nora put Jess on a plane so she could fly upto Queensland as an unaccompanied minor, there was no more talk about staying or moving. Instead, Polly kept referring to Jess’s being there as a “holiday,” saying how much she’d been looking forward to the “visit,” that she’d been counting down the days. This had troubled Jess, who even then paid close attention to the words people used, but she hadn’t wanted to spoil their time together by asking awkward questions.
She and Polly had gone to stay on the Gold Coast for a week, a short walk from Main Beach. Polly had splurged on a little holiday apartment a few streets back from the water and found a boogie board at a secondhand shop. They played together in the surf each day, and ran along the sand, and ate hot chips with tomato sauce as the sun went down and the cooling night air brushed their burnt shoulders.
