On the last day, while they were sitting on opposite sides of a splintery wooden table on the grass verge by the beach, Jess glanced at her mother, whose hair was wound into a bun at the nape of her neck and who was backlit by the sun so that the fine strands around her face were lifted by the sea breeze, glinting golden. Her skin crinkled near her eyes as she gazed out to sea and Jess felt something in the moment that was almost religious; her heart was full to exploding with happiness and she said, “I want to stay here.”
Polly didn’t answer at first. Her attention was still on the horizon and for a moment Jess thought she hadn’t heard. The only sign that she was thinking was the slight movement of her jaw. Eventually, she said, “You’re better off down there with your grandmother.”
“But I want to stay here. I want to be with you.”
“You’ve seen my tiny place in Brisbane. One of us would be sleeping on a roll-out bed.”
“I will. I’ll sleep on the roll-out bed.”
Polly smiled, but Jess could see that the smile didn’t reach her eyes, and she knew then that her mother didn’t feel the same way she did. She knew, even before her mother spoke, that the answer wasn’t going to be yes.
“We’ll have fun together when you come and visit,” Polly said, turning at last to meet her daughter’s gaze.
Jess felt like crying then, but she didn’t. She gathered the angry, sad, burning feelings and pushed them all together in a hot little knot inside her chest. And when her mother took her to the airport and gave her a big hug goodbye and told her that she loved her and would think of her every day and see her as soon as possible, Jess returned the hug and screwed her eyes tightly shut, but she didn’t say anything back, because she was too busy concentrating her attention on that knot, forcing more of her feelings into it, rolling it up as tight as it would go.
Jess climbed the few stairs to the landing. There was a stoneware pot with an assortment of umbrellas in it and, she noticed, a walking stick. Nora’s, she supposed, with mild surprise; her grandmother hadn’t mentioned that she’d been using a stick. It had been a bone of some contention between them last time Jess was at Darling House: Nora had insisted that she didn’t need one. Perhaps Patrick, in his capacity as her nurse, had actually managed to convince her there was no shame in making her daily stroll around the gardens a little easier on herself.
Jess picked up the spare set of keys from beneath the mat and pocketed them, digging into her handbag to find her own. She wondered sometimes in which ways her life might have turned out differently had her mother not left her behind with Nora, but only abstractly, and with a keen sense that right had prevailed. She could hardly remember the time before. It shocked Jess sometimes, how little detail she recalled from the first decade of her life. She had gleaned enough from Nora to know that the period had been marked by uncertainty and change and a lack of money, though she had no memory of feeling insecure at the time.
“Children forget, thank goodness,” Nora said when Jess admittedas much. “There were a few times when I really did worry.” Jess had caught something in her grandmother’s tone when she said that and pushed for more; even then, she’d had a journalist’s instinct for secrets. But Nora demurred. It was some years before she finally told Jess about the incident she’d witnessed when Polly was just a new mum. In the meantime, Nora took great care to make sure Jess knew she was not the same as her mother. Where Polly had been a nervous child and an anxious teenager, prone to disorganization and indecision, “You’re the complete opposite,” Nora said. “You’re far more like my side of the family.” Once, when Nora accidentally let slip that Polly had suffered something like a breakdown when she was finishing high school, she went on to explain: “She never did well with stress. She was all right if everything was managed very carefully around her, but life can’t always be controlled like that. You know what Peyton School is like. There’s an expectation that girls will take advantage of the opportunities on offer. Polly couldn’t handle it. I was deeply worried for a time. Thank God I knew a fine doctor who specialized in anxiety. I try never to let myself wonder what might have happened if not for Dr. Westerby.”
Jess had met Dr. Westerby at one of her grandmother’s many parties. Nora was always fundraising for this charity or that, lending her name and the wonderful setting of Darling House to “help make a difference.” She valued connection and community, and had the gift of making everyone she met feel that they were singularly important to her. That was the power of her personality. It was what had enabled a young, divorced woman with a small baby not only to survive the 1960s, but to build an empire. Because although she’d been born to a wealthy family, Nora’s parents had died with empty bank accounts and several mortgages on Darling House.
“I’d lost so much by then,” Nora said, whenever the story was told. “My whole family was gone, and I was all alone. But there was no way I was going to let the bank take my home. I’d made myself a new family—tiny though it was—and I decided then and there thatI would do whatever it took to keep my daughter safe and to secure her future.”
Nora’s firm ideas were never firmer than when describing what it meant to be a good parent: the sacrifices required, the elevation of one’s child’s needs above one’s own. As far as Jess knew, it was the only subject that could bring her grandmother reliably to tears. She refused to read books that featured instances of child abuse and would change the channel on the television if a news story even skirted the subject. “Some people aren’t meant to be parents—I accept that,” she’d said more than once. “What I can never forgive, and will always fail utterly to comprehend, is how a person could ever bring herself to harm her own children.”
It struck Jess now, as she turned her key in the lock, that it was the one act of human behavior for which her grandmother did not have a ready explanation. Nora had tried to understand, especially where her own daughter was concerned, and certainly in relation to the incident, but the best she could come up with was: “Stress.” She’d lift her hands up hopelessly whenever she said it: “Stress can make even the most loving mother lose control.”
7
Darling House seemed to know itself unoccupied. It was the opposite of a haunted house; without Nora it was a house without a spirit. Morning sun streamed through the stained-glass fanlight above the door to land on the dark flagstones of the hallway, the beams thick with listless dust.
Although the house was empty, Jess couldn’t help but send a tentative call of “Hello?” up the elegant curved staircase. When she received no answer, she left her luggage by the door and made her way across the hall. Now that she had finally arrived, a wave of intense tiredness washed over her. The Florence Broadhurst floral wallpaper appeared to swim.
Nora’s antique blue-and-white plate collection covered most of the kitchen wall, and this year’s Art Gallery of New South Wales calendar was hanging on its hook by the pantry, open to December. There was a fresh arrangement in the majolica vase on the sideboard, Christmas bush and silver gum from the garden, and Jess could picture Nora in her wide-brimmed straw hat, clippers in hand, carrying in the annual haul. She loved to “dress” the house and observed all the festive points throughout the year (“What have we left if we don’t honor our traditions?”), but made an extra effort in December because Polly’s birthday fell at Christmas. The evidence that routines of twenty years before were still being followed was reassuring. It was also briefly crushing: a reminder for Jess that it had all been going on without her.
In the middle of the pine table was a welcome message from Mrs. Robinson, its corner tucked beneath the fruit bowl. Evidently, the housekeeper had also remembered the customary return breakfast, noting that she’d left supplies on the bench.
Jess went to the sink to wash her hands and then filled the kettle.She dropped a couple of pieces of bread into the toaster but didn’t start them browning. Tea and toast were the rule after long-haul flying. It was one of the great mysteries of the universe, that a person could be fed continuously over the course of a twenty-four-hour transit only to arrive at her destination ravenous. Science was also yet to explain the unique humanizing properties of strawberry jam and butter on warm toast.
As she waited for the kettle to boil, Jess’s attention drifted to the wall of the adjoining sitting room. The portrait of young Nora looked down on her from the center, surrounded by an assortment of framed photographs. Polly as a little girl, wearing a smocked pinafore and a serious expression, as if she were counting down the seconds until the shutter closed around her image and she was free to slip out of frame, and a number of Jess—including one, she noticed, that she’d emailed from London a couple of years ago, she and Matt with their heads through the cutout holes in the Fenton House and Garden Apple Weekend welcome sign.
There were also several photos of The Family: Edwardian tennis parties of women in long dresses and men with boater hats; garden lunches and cricket games; children with wooden hoops and toy engines. It had taken Jess some years to realize that her grandmother’s use of the term “The Family” denoted a schism in time. The Family had lived Before, the stories about them were historical, even those in which Nora herself featured. These were tales viewed through a lens of loss; Nora was the last surviving member of this large, robust clan. She was forever trying to bridge the gap with anecdotes, determined to foster a sense of continuity for Jess, whose experience of family was limited to Nora and Polly. “You remind me of my Scottish grandmother,” she would say firmly. “She was curious about the world and stubborn when she had to be. She’d have loved to be a writer—her journals were quite scandalous.” And then: “Did I ever tell you about your great-great-aunt Beatrice? She was a live wire, like you, but quite naughty with it. She used to throw her crusts beneaththe chair where her cousin Jamie sat. The poor little boy would cry and cry when his mother scolded, but he never did say who’d done it. They used to dress him up in a bonnet and drag him around the garden in a buggy. How I wish you’d met them.”
One of Jess’s favorite family photos was of Nora as a young woman, sitting on a wrought-iron bench in the garden of Darling House with a man in a jauntily cocked trilby hat, the two of them looking at one another, caught in a moment of laughter. This photo was not on the wall with the others, but in a quaint bronze frame in Nora’s room. When she first saw it, Jess had assumed that this was “Mr. Bridges,” the man to whom Nora had briefly been married, who was hardly ever mentioned, and always in quotation marks. It was only later, after she learned that Nora had once had an older brother, that Jess realized the laughing man beneath the hat wasn’t Mr. Bridges at all but Thomas Turner, soon after he returned to Australia from the Second World War.
The kettle began to shrill, and Jess poured boiling water over the tea bag, watching as it began to steep. She started the bread toasting. There were no photographs of Mr. Bridges at Darling House. Early on, Jess had figured that the marriage must have been so terribly unhappy that Nora had banished every image of her former husband, but when she finally gained the courage to ask, her grandmother had only laughed. “Oh, darling, you’re dramatic! The truth is far less exciting. We married young and the marriage didn’t last. It happens sometimes. To be honest, I barely remember the man. Why on earth would I hang his picture on my wall?”
“Because he was Polly’s father,” Jess had ventured. (And my grandfather,she’d thought.)
But Nora had been unmoved, meeting the statement with a shrug. Yes and no, the gesture said: “Parenthood is more than the supply of a bit of DNA.”
How quintessentially Nora it was to claim her daughter as hers alone. Jess had wondered what Polly thought about the erasure of herfather from her heritage, before reminding herself that not knowing much about fathers was something of a family tradition. Polly had told Jess very little about her own. She’d said certain things when Jess was a little girl—that he was kind and clever and good—but by the time Jess was old enough to recognize such assurances as fairy tales for the young, her relationship with Polly was no longer of the sort to encourage intimacies and confessions.
Jess had turned instead, as ever, to Nora, who’d asked what Polly had told her and then said plainly, “I’m sure your mother’s right. He had to be kind and clever and good, because look at you. Though of course,” she couldn’t help adding, “it’s just as likely that you got those traits from my side of the family.”
Determined not to be put off, Jess had pushed—“But you must be able to tell me more”—and eventually Nora sighed and gestured to the seat beside her. “I’m afraid I simply didn’t know him. Your mother was barely out of school and young for her age, very unworldly. I’ve told you, I think, that she suffered with low self-esteem. She all but starved herself for a year or so during high school. We were starting to make headway—she managed to graduate with her classmates and even won a place at university—but she was vulnerable. This fellow, this young man, showed her a little attention and she mistook it for something else entirely.”
