The toast popped and Jess gave both pieces a thick coat of butter before spooning lavish lumps of strawberry jam on top. She carried the plate and her tea to the sofa in the sitting room, meeting The Family’s gaze as she sat down. Her roving attention landed on the framed school portrait of her mother in year twelve, in which Polly was wearing the same deep green tunic and blazer that Nora had worn before her and Jess after. Here was the serious, vulnerable young woman, barely finished being a girl, who had mistaken lust for love and found herself pregnant at eighteen.
Jess had sat with the information for a few moments after Noratold her, her thoughts shifting from her mother to the young man who had shown Polly “a little attention.” Who was he, Jess wondered, and how had he felt when he found out she was on the way? Perhaps her grandmother had intuited Jess’s next line of questioning, or perhaps she’d just been down the same path with Polly in the past, because she continued without prompting: “It’s not that he didn’t want you. He didn’t even know that you existed. He was visiting from overseas, and by the time your mother realized what was happening, he was gone.”
Rachel thought that Jess should join ancestry.com—“I read about a woman who discovered her father wasn’t actually her father and she had fifteen surprise cousins, one of whom worked in the office on the floor below!”—and Jess had considered it. But she balked at the idea of sending a sample of her DNA to a mysterious address in the States. She’d written a series of investigative reports about online privacy and wouldn’t even share her thumbprint with her phone anymore. When Jess mentioned it to Nora, her grandmother had concurred: “Aghastlyidea! And to what end? You’re you, a Turner through and through.”
Jess took a big gulp of tea. She was aware of being alone in the house. She could hear the ticking of the metal roof expanding as the sun warmed it. She tried to calculate what time it was in London. One, perhaps? On Monday morning? She was uncomfortably aware that she was still wearing the same jeans and T-shirt that she’d dressed in on Saturday. Her head swirled and she felt an urge to curl up on the couch just for a minute. The sun had crept across the floor to reach the far cushion and she could just imagine the warmth upon her feet...
But she knew from experience how dangerous that would be. Jess made herself stand up, return her plate and cup to the kitchen, and collect her suitcase from the hall. She started up the stairs. She needed to shower, to wash the travel off her, and then she planned to get toSt. Vincent’s for afternoon visiting hours. First, though, she was going to reacquaint herself with the house. Once she started moving around, she was sure the rooms would no longer feel so deathly still.
Small pleasant moments of recognition were everywhere. The smooth oak banister of the staircase was familiar beneath her hand, its satin luster hinting at recent waxing. On the hallstand at the top, an antique washstand jug held another of Nora’s Christmas bush and flowering gum arrangements. The jug was Nora’s favorite, despite the chip in its spout. “I’ve always found perfection tiresome.”
Jess stopped in the open doorway of the library, the first room off the landing. Aside from Nora’s bedroom, this was the place in the house she associated most closely with her grandmother. No matter how long Jess had been away, no matter the season she returned, Nora’s library always smelled the same—of furniture polish, mock-orange blossoms, and, despite Mrs. Robinson’s best efforts, legacy dust. The northern and southern walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and Nora’s wingback reading chair was angled to face the window, a large fern in a brass pot balanced on the wooden stand beside it. The leather chesterfield sofa had faded, but Mrs. Robinson was keeping it in good condition. The housekeeper was almost as much a feature of Darling House as Nora herself; she’d been there for as long as Jess could remember, having started as a young woman before Polly was born. The room bore the look of a recent visit—the cushions had been plumped and straightened, and the curtains neatly gathered.
In the middle of the library stood one of Nora’s most prized possessions. Her parents had sold off all of the heirlooms when they hit financial strife, and as soon as Nora’s business started turning a profit she’d made a point of tracing and reclaiming every piece she could. “History is important,” she’d said on the morning the movers negotiated the hefty mahogany gentleman’s desk back into place before the bay window. “My great-grandfather loaded this very desk onto the ship in Edinburgh when he set sail for the colony of New SouthWales. He had no idea whether he was going to find fortune or ruination at the other end of the voyage. Imagine the optimism it must have taken to transport a desk like that across the seas. He wrote every letter home on that blotter and kept his papers in those file drawers.”
The surface of the desk, Jess noticed, was this morning covered with papers. Such untidiness was highly unusual for Nora, who made a point of returning everything to its place at the end of the day. Patrick had left her grandmother sitting at the desk on the afternoon she fell: Nora had either left in a hurry or intended to come back. Possibly both. But why on earth had she gone from here to the attic stairs?
Despite her grandmother’s rule, Jess had spent half of her adolescence in the attic and couldn’t for the life of her think of anything Nora might have wished to retrieve so urgently: an assortment of shabby once-treasured toys, plastic tubs of remnant fabrics and blankets and curtains, some of Jess and Polly’s old schoolbooks, and a beaten-up steamer trunk that had belonged to Nora’s brother, long rid of any personal effects. Jess had been at Darling House the day the trunk arrived from London. “Isn’t it extraordinary,” Nora had said, “that a human being’s entire life can be reduced to a container this size?”
Jess didn’t have many thoughts back then about life and death and the melancholy progress of physical artifacts. She’d nodded agreement, aware that it was required, but her thoughts were instead with the travel label on the side of the trunk. London. Jess was already well acquainted with the city through her favorite books, but here was an object that had been recently in the very place.
“Did you ever visit him in London?” she asked, eager to hear more about the city and her grandmother’s exotic, faraway brother.
But Nora shook her head. “I would have loved to go,” she said. “He was my best friend when I was growing up. He had a wife over there and a lovely house, I’m told. But I have a morbid fear of flying; I could never have made it that far.”
The idea of an old person being frightened of something—especially Nora, who was otherwise larger than life—astonished Jess. “Have you never been on a plane?”
“Only a couple of flights within Australia, a very long time ago. That was enough for me. I had a horrific journey back to Sydney once when your mother was just a tiny baby. There was severe turbulence, and she was crying, really screaming, and I was convinced that the plane was going to crash. I looked down at her precious little face and made a deal with God that if I made it home, I would never, ever leave again. And I haven’t.”
The seriousness with which Nora said it, the unexpected religiosity, and the high stakes of her promise, all impressed themselves on Jess. She was awed, although she couldn’t then have found the words to explain what she was feeling, by the perfect paradox of the proposition: that only by remaining separate from her beloved brother, her favorite person in the world, could Nora keep her longed-for daughter safe.
Nora had held true to the deal she’d struck with God. She didn’t see her brother again in all the years that passed between that day on the plane and the morning the steamer trunk of personal effects arrived from London in the wake of his death. The effects themselves had been removed and dealt with at some point, for by the time Jess came upon the trunk in the attic, it was just a storage container for clothing that was no longer needed or wanted but was too good to discard. Even now, the strong nostril-cooling smell of mothballs brought back warm feelings, the legacy of countless illicit hours spent beneath the A-framed roof, trying on fancy dresses and high-heeled shoes...
Jess was confident that Nora hadn’t risked the attic stairs to play dress-ups, but perhaps the answer to whathaddriven her up there lay among the papers and notes on her desk. Jess went to have a closer look. A large stack of torn envelopes sat in a pile at the back and several open letters, invitations, and résumés were spread across the blotter. Nora was a renowned mentor, frequently in demand to speakat women’s events and girls’ schools, and a little over a decade ago she had started a scholarship program offering support to businesses run by young women, often mothers, with big ideas. It had taken off in recent years and she was now inundated with requests for assistance.
“Our Nora was never one to walk past a stray,” Mrs. Robinson had said, when Jess made delicate inquiries as to whether it was all becoming too demanding. “You know how much she likes having young people around. She misses you dearly; there was a huge absence in her daily life when you left. The silver lining is that your decision to stay over there has helped a lot of other women.”
At the back of the desk, Jess recognized the distinctive pale blue pages of her grandmother’s current Smythson. “My little gift to myself,” Nora said of the leather-bound diary she ordered annually from London’s Bond Street. “If a woman doesn’t take herself seriously, she’ll have a difficult time convincing anyone else to bother.” Jess moved the papers that were obscuring the week-to-view and scanned Nora’s cursive script. Nothing leapt out at her. Friday’s entry, in common with every other weekday, contained a list of people her grandmother had intended to telephone, a box to tick beside each indicating whether the call had been made.
Nora was a telephone person. “With all due respect to the written word, if people would only pick up the phone more often, we’d save ourselves an awful lot of time and misunderstandings.” Even when Jess was in London, Nora had refused to keep in touch by email, preferring a lengthy telephone conversation every Sunday to catch up on the week gone by.
Last Friday’s call list included a solicitor in Rose Bay; the initials “M.S.,” which likely noted a charity event Nora was involved with; and someone named Professor H. Goddard. None had been ticked off, and it was impossible to tell from sight alone whether they were important. There was nothing else on Friday’s diary page except a note to pay for the Christmas turkey and a reminder that Patrick would be finishing early.
Jess knew Patrick a little because she’d helped to engage him last time she was back in Australia. Nora had been characteristically indignant at the idea. “I don’t want some bossy woman glowering at me and telling me what I’m not allowed to do,” she said, to which Jess answered, “Think of a carer less as a nurse and more like a PA.” After that, Nora had consented to meet with a shortlist of candidates—“although I’m not promising anything,” she warned.
Her ultimate acceptance of the idea had everything to do with Patrick himself. With his six-foot-four-inch frame, long blond hair, and dazzling smile, he confounded any preconceptions Nora (and Jess, for that matter) might have had. “He’s a delight,” Nora still said each week when they had their phone catch-up. “Such a zest for life, so many amusing stories—he makes me laugh and he’s teaching me a tremendous amount about houseplants. He has a very green thumb.”
Bit by bit, he’d filled the rooms of Darling House with baskets of devil’s ivy and pots of ridiculously healthy fiddle-leaf figs. Jess had been shocked to hear that her grandmother had allowed him to grow philodendra up the Broadhurst in the dining room, but Nora only laughed and said that he amused her.
Jess pulled her phone from her pocket and scrolled until she found his number. Patrick picked up on the third ring.
“Jess!” he said. “How is she?”
“I haven’t seen her yet; I only just got in this morning. But I’ll be heading to the hospital soon.”
“I’m so sorry, Jess. My sister was in town for a wedding dress fitting and I’d promised to go with her, so I took the afternoon off. I feel dreadful about it now.”
“It’s not your fault. No one expects you to work seven days a week.”
