“She’ll sleep now,” said the nurse. “Visiting hours are over and she’ll be able to have a nice long rest.”
The last thing Jess wanted to do was leave Nora alone, but shecould take the hint. “Sleep well, Nora,” she said softly. “I’m not going far. Rest, and get better, and then we’ll spend Christmas together at the house.”
“Halcyon.” The word on Nora’s lips was no more than a mutter from the very rim of consciousness. “Christmas together... halcyon.”
9
The afternoon was clear and hot, and Jess craved movement after being in the hospital. She asked the taxi driver to leave her at the intersection at the top of the promontory so she could walk back along the cliffs toward Darling House. The fresh, salty air was the balm she needed. She was rattled. Dr. Martin might have been able to list several perfectly valid reasons to explain Nora’s confusion, but Jess had a creeping sense that there was more to it.
Jessy, help me.The diminutive was not one Nora used, and while Jess had been touched, it had been disconcerting.
Jess crossed the playground and made a brief detour past the apartment complex where she and Polly had lived before her mother left for Queensland. The sight of the Art Deco building on this bright, sunny day almost three decades later made her wistful. She used to balance along the fence at the front, she remembered. Her mother had picked posies of lavender from the garden and put them in jam jars on the windowsill.
Jess turned away and headed toward Nora’s place.
Patrick said that Nora had been out of sortsbeforeshe fell, and Jess felt certain now that whatever had sent her grandmother to the attic was related to that earlier disquiet. She refused to believe that Nora was in a state of general mental decline. Jess had spoken to her on the phone every week and she’d been fine. Far more likely she’d been upset by something specific. If Jess could figure out what the something was, she might be able to help.
Mrs. Robinson’s note said that she intended to drop by Darling House later that afternoon; Jess would see whether she could shed any light on Nora’s state of mind. Also: Patrick had reported hearing Nora say, “I’m not going to let him take my baby,” and just now Nora had repeated, “He’s going to take her from me.” It spoke to Nora’scentrality in all of their lives that it had never occurred to Jess to wonder about the custody arrangements put in place when Polly was a baby. She had just assumed that her grandmother would have been granted full custody. Now, though, she wondered if there was more to it; perhaps there’d been greater animosity between her grandmother and Mr. Bridges than Nora let on.
And there was something else, too. Deep within Jess’s memory, a bell was ringing. Halcyon. She let the soft word slip from her lips, and felt somehow that she was small; sensed heat on her bare arms and saw the glinting blue glare of the harbor, her grandmother’s anguished face... But the memory was elusive, darting away like a slim shimmering fish in an ocean pool.
Jess reached Nora’s place and keyed in the gate code, then made her way along the shaded driveway. The house rose into view, but she didn’t cross the gravel turning circle to reach the front door. Two decades of London living had cured her of the Australian nonchalance toward good weather. This was an afternoon too glorious to waste indoors.
She followed the narrow path toward the ferns and busy lizzies that grew in a grove beneath the palm trees. This was the oldest part of the garden and had been her favorite place to read when she was a child. On the hottest days it was reliably cooler. She had eschewed the nearby summerhouse, preferring to burrow down deep into the dark spaces between the leaves, where she could smell the rich soil and—
Halcyon. Jess smiled to herself. She remembered now precisely where and when she’d first heard that word...
It was a special party called a wake, which seemed odd to Jess because the guest of honor was decidedly un-awake. She’d asked her mother about the discrepancy before they left home that morning, but Polly had only shaken her head, given a slightly anxious smile, and said shewasn’t sure. Jess had sighed and her mother, who never could stand to be a disappointment, had promised to find out, and then she’d pressed her hands together the way she always did when she was worried and said that it was not the sort of thing Jess should be asking her grandmother, and certainly not today. Jess had sighed again (to herself, this time) and said, “Of course I won’t.” She knew the rules.
The funeral itself was her first. Jess watched wide-eyed as the shiny coffin disappeared and the curtains closed behind it. It reminded her of a magic show she’d seen down at The Rocks during the previous Christmas holidays: the pastor’s serious ministrations, the incantating lines, the involvement of the congregation before the portentous puff of smoke. Just as she had then, Jess tried very hard not to blink as the coffin slid away on its rails. She couldn’t shake the feeling that something important was going to happen. She sat right on the edge of the pew so she couldn’t possibly miss the magical moment, but alas there was nothing of note. Just the curtains jerking shut, followed by a hymn and the distraction of her grandmother’s perfume tickling her nose as they sang.
Her grandmother, she noticed, was not crying, though from where she was sitting Jess could make out the hint of a linen handkerchief in the closed palm of her hand. Nora’s face had the look of someone who was far away with her own thoughts. It was a proper mask to her feelings, Jess decided approvingly; at least, that’s how she’d have described it if this were a story and her grandmother a character in it. She looked the picture of a dignified older lady of meticulous manners, attending a funeral on the occasion of her only brother’s death.
For that’s who was in the coffin: her grandmother’s mysterious, secret-until-recently older brother. Jess liked the look of the man in the black-and-white photograph that sat atop the casket during the service. He didn’t resemble her grandmother, not exactly, but there was something familiar about him nonetheless. She had never met her actual grandfather, and she didn’t have a dad of her own, so shewas often curious about what it might be like to have a kindly older gentleman in her life.
Sometimes Jess pretended that the man who gave the finance news on TV was her father. He seemed sensible and informed, his voice was good-humored, and he had a twinkle in his eye that made her feel he would be kind. She had nominated Charles Dickens as her grandfather. She’d collected all of his novels—exceptMartin Chuzzlewit, a copy of which she was yet to find—and had decided, after finishingDavid Copperfield, that they’d have got on very well. He enjoyed walking, as did she; he was curious about people, ditto; and he had a very well-developed sense of justice. This, Jess knew, was also true of her: she had heard her mother say so the last time she was called to school to see the principal. (It was on the same afternoon she learned that charges of “impertinent” (Mrs. Taylor) and “perspicacious” (her mother) were in the eye of the beholder.)
Interestingly, Jess’s benign, pleasant feelings about the man in the photograph were not shared by all. Before the funeral began, when people were still arriving, a smooth-faced woman had commented quietly to her companion, “The prodigal brother returns,” to which the other woman replied, “No sign of the English rose,” causing the original speaker to add, “He certainly could pick them.” Jess had wondered what she meant, and why the statement had merited such an arch, knowing tone.
Someone had brought the photograph from the funeral home to the wake, and it was propped now in the middle of the mahogany chiffonier at the end of the long entrance hall of Darling House, taking pride of place among other black-and-white photographs of The Family. Jess spent a while examining it, her nose almost touching the rim of the chiffonier as the other attendees passed back and forth behind her, trailing wafts of hushed conversation. The man’s wide smile and jaunty hat, his trousers and knee-skimming coat, his long stride along an unfamiliar city street. There were ruined buildings and the great white dome of a cathedral in the background.The photograph had been trimmed to fit the frame and the hint of another person crept in on one side: the edge of a darker sleeve, the hem of a coat or skirt.
By chance, Jess and her mother had been visiting Darling House on the afternoon that Nora took the phone call informing her of her brother’s death. The unexpected news had caused her to drop her teaspoon.
Jess had felt a thousand unknowns bubbling up inside her: “Where?” she asked. “Where did he live?”
“A place called London,” said Jess’s grandmother. “Beside an ancient river called the Thames.”
“Why did he live so far away?”
“He was born with wanderlust.”
Jess turned the unfamiliar term over in her mind. Whatever it meant, she liked the way it felt.
“He loved to travel and was never one to settle,” her grandmother explained. “Not for long, anyway. When he was a young man, our mother used to despair: ‘My only son,’ she would say. ‘What will become of the family line?’”
“Didn’t he want a family?”
Jess’s mother, sitting on the sofa by the curtain, made a throat clearing noise then, and Jess didn’t need to glance her way to know that she was signaling a warning. When they visited Darling House, Polly insisted that Jess wasn’t to pry and should speak only when spoken to. Jess found this confusing, as her grandmother enjoyed supplying answers and didn’t seem to find her questions tiresome at all. Sometimes, it seemed to Jess that the rules were more for Polly’s sake than Nora’s.
