“Didn’t he want a family?” she repeated disloyally.
Nora had been sitting on the wingback chair that looked through the bay window toward the harbor, and the afternoon light thrown off the water was so bright that her blue eyes flinched against its glare. “What one wants is rarely the point.”
“Jessica,” her mother said then, her voice surprisingly stern, “why don’t you go outside and enjoy the garden before the rain sets in?”
Jess frowned and cursed herself silently, because she knew she was being got out of the way, and that it was her own fault for pushing too hard, too fast. She did as she was told but took longer than was strictly necessary to leave the room, which was how she was able to hear her grandmother say: “She’s my granddaughter, Polly. We deserve to know each other.”
Jess stopped where she was on the other side of the door and held her breath, wondering what her mother would say to that. But without so much as a pause, her mother said only, “What about the funeral?”
And her grandmother, deflated, returned to the topic at hand. “It will be held here, of course, in Sydney. He’s a Turner and this is his home.”
The sun was beating in through the fan-shaped window above the front door now, perfumes and voices were mingling, and the hallway where Jess was standing was stifling. A lot of people had attended the wake. Another surprise, for how could a man who’d spent his life on the other side of the world have so many friends in Australia? “They’re your grandmother’s friends,” Jess’s mum had said when she asked.
“She’s very popular,” Jess observed.
“She certainly is.”
Jess wondered where her mother was now. Corralled into conversation somewhere, she supposed, or else hiding out in the kitchen with Mrs. Robinson and the two young waitresses who’d been paid to hand around plates of sandwiches and cake. She closed her eyes and listened. Polly had a sound. It came from the necklace she always wore: a long silver chain, from which she’d hung two pendants—one fine and shaped like a jacaranda tree, the other a sterling silver cat.The jacaranda tree had been a gift, and the cat had come from a secondhand shop; it had once been the top of a baby’s rattle, Polly said, back in the olden days, a “hey diddle diddle” cat with a ball inside that made a soft tinkle whenever she walked. Jess loved that sound. It always made her feel safe and warm and happy.
But she couldn’t hear it now. She opened her eyes again, taken with a sudden urge to be away from all these people. The day’s formalities were over and the wake, for all that its unexpected name had promised, had turned out to be nothing more than another tedious adult excuse to socialize. She had liked the velvet dress she wore very much when her grandmother gave it to her, but now the elastic in the puff sleeves was beginning to scratch and the seam across the velvet bodice made her feel sweaty and uncomfortable.
In other circumstances, she might have enjoyed exploring Darling House further while her mother was distracted. The house stood high on the peninsula of Vaucluse, three stories tall with a turret on one side. It had been built in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Jess’s great-great-great-grandfather arrived in the colony of New South Wales, and had been featured in several glossy books about architecture that her grandmother kept open on the display tables in the library. Inside it was entirely unpredictable: unexpected doorways led to hidden staircases that wound around brick chimneys and allowed a person to arrive in a vastly different part of the house from that which they’d left.
Jess wasn’t supposed to like the house. “Don’t you find it drafty?” her mother would ask, if Jess ever ventured to say after a visit that the halls were grand or the ceilings high. “Don’t you prefer our cozy little home?” And because the lovely, familiar face seemed crestfallen, Jess always quickly agreed that of course she far preferred their small apartment.
Today the house was too full, big as it was, and so she went outside to the garden, a place with which she was far more familiar, having been sent out by her mother “to play” almost every time they visited.The most prominent garden at Darling House had been designed and planted by Jess’s grandmother, but on the other side of the property, if one followed the path that led past the flagpole and the fountain, was a much older, more overgrown place of ferns and busy lizzies that formed a primordial mass around a mold-speckled summerhouse. Jess made her way through the greenery until she found a spot beneath the curving tendrils of a hulking great tree fern. Far from view of the house and surrounded by a curtain of foliage, she unzipped her fancy velvet dress and lifted it off, laying it down flat on the ground. She unbuckled the new patent leather shoes and stripped off her socks. Sitting cross-legged in her white singlet and knickers, Jess breathed freely for the first time in hours.
She wished she’d brought a book. Ordinarily, she didn’t go anywhere without one. She’d read through the entire children’s collection at the local library and, at ten years of age, had recently been granted special permission to borrow from the high school shelves, though many of the books there were of little interest to her. They seemed to focus on friendships and bras and boyfriends, all of which Jess found exceedingly dull. Recently, her favorite books were those she chose herself when her mother took her to secondhand shops on weekends. In a particularly grimy garage, in a part of Sydney she’d never heard of before, Jess had foundDavid Copperfield; she’d sat cross-legged on the floor with it, and when it was time to go there was no way she could leave the story behind. Since then, she always managed to discover at least one more treasure to add to her stack—unlike her mother, who, for all her love of looking, never managed to find what she was searching for.
Now, though, without a book between whose covers she could disappear, Jess fell to exploring her surroundings instead. She followed a line of ants making their way through the undergrowth, noticed a curled leaf that hid the white-webbed nest of a caterpillar, made a teepee of lichen-coated twigs. She was observing the surprisingly tightcoil of a tree fern frond, examining it between her fingers, prodding the little black hairs, when she realized she was no longer alone.
She could hear voices: her grandmother, she realized, in conversation with a man. Their footsteps on a hard surface informed her that they’d entered the summerhouse. She tried to hear their words so she could decide whether their conversation was going to be of interest.
“I take it the paddocks will be sold?” This was the man.
“I can hardly tend them myself. Thomas was the one with all the dreams...”
“And Halcyon?”
There came then a terrible sound, a guttural, groaning noise, that caused a tightness to form instantly in Jess’s stomach. She was so surprised and intrigued that she risked lifting her eyes above the top of the ferns. She couldn’t see inside the summerhouse from where she was, and so, as quiet as a mouse, she crept closer.
Her grandmother was seated on the bench, but something about the looseness of her posture, the curve of her shoulders, made Jess think she’d collapsed onto it rather than chosen to sit. She was trying to hide her face from the man with her hand, but Jess could see from where she was crouched that her grandmother’s mouth was open in a silent wail. To witness an adult in such distress was shocking. A word came into Jess’s mind and the word was “bereft.”
Nora stayed like that for what seemed an interminable length of time, the man making an awkward pretense at not seeing her anguish, until at last she spoke. She was trying to sound calm and collected, Jess could tell, but her voice was strained to the point of threadbare. “Please, Mr. Friedman,” she said, holding her fine hand up against the possibility of further hurt. “I cannot bear to hear that name. Of course, it must be sold at once. He should have sold it himself years ago. It is nothing to me now but an awful, awful millstone.”
10
The death of Nora’s brother in 1988 had represented a demarcation in Jess’s own life. Before his death, Jess had lived with her mother in a small first-floor apartment with a narrow, tiled patio and no back garden; afterward, she had lived with her grandmother at Darling House. There was no clear corollary between the two events, it was just a matter of coincidence and timing, and yet the first and firmest human addiction is to narrative. People seek always to identify cause and effect and then arrive at meaning, and so it was for Jess: Thomas Turner’s death was linked forever after with her own change in circumstances.
At the time, though, the day of his wake was notable for a smaller, more specific reason. Ten-year-old Jess liked words. She collected them. In her favorite books, it was always in words that true power lurked, whether the enchantments and curses of the fairy tales she’d devoured when she was small, or the wills and deeds and legal loopholes she’d discovered in Dickens. The day of the wake had thrown up multiple new treasures. First there’d been the “wake” itself, and its chilling premise that a party for the dead might be known by such an emphatically active name. Then came “prodigal,” a term previously heard only during religious instruction classes at school, but applied now, most intriguingly, to a mysterious man from her own family. And what of “halcyon,” a warm, honey-colored word that met her ears like an incantation, but whose warmth was almost immediately doused by the bleak deployment of “millstone”?
Back in the shade of the tree fern frond, in the aftermath of the eavesdropped conversation, Jess pondered what she’d heard. It presented quite a predicament. “Millstone” was a word with which she’d thought herself familiar, courtesy of Thomas Hardy, but why would her grandmother be in possession of a circular stone used togrind corn? More to the point, why would she describe the stone as “awful” and be so insistent about the need to sell it “at once”? Jess decided it could only mean one thing. A synonym! Clearly “millstone” had another meaning. Words, Jess had observed, could be as tricky as people: seeming to say one thing, when all the while another, secret meaning lay beneath the surface.
As soon as the coast was clear, Jess shimmied into her dress and ran barefooted back to the house. She slipped between the groups of adults in the shadowy hall and hurried upstairs into the dark library where the cool, still air enveloped her. Walls of books lined each end of the room, but Jess knew where she was going. She’d glimpsed the old blue leather–coveredOxford English Dictionaryset on previous visits with her mum. She took down the “L–M” volume and located the entry for “millstone,” skimming past the familiar, literal meaning until she came to “2. Fig. A heavy burden; an oppressive force.”
Jess was at once deeply satisfied and further intrigued. Her grandmother’s behavior in the summerhouse had certainly accorded with that of a person shouldering a heavy burden, but what sort of burden was a “halcyon”? She replaced the “L–M” volume of the dictionary and pulled out “H–K,” leafing through the pages until she found the entry she was after. According to theOED, the word “halcyon” could be both a noun and an adjective, the former describing a type of kingfisher bird, the latter meaning “calm, peaceful; happy, prosperous, idyllic.” But neither suggested itself as particularly burdensome. The latter, in fact, seemed to connote the opposite.
She and Polly walked home together after the wake. Their apartment wasn’t far from Darling House, but they went on foot because they didn’t have a car. This was an ongoing bone of contention between Jess’s mother and grandmother. Nora wanted to buy them a “nice little runabout” and said it was perverse to go without the necessities of life, but Polly claimed to prefer public transport. The truth, Jess knew, was that driving made her nervous. A lot of things made her mother nervous.
