Jess, disappointed: “But that’s got nothing to do with a dead body.”
“I’m not finished yet.”
Jess mimed zipping her lips.
“The other tradition I mentioned is much older. Long before the Christians came to Britain, an all-night vigil would be held over the body of the recently dead. Loved ones would mourn and chant and share stories of the person’s life. It was called ‘waking the dead.’”
Jess felt her eyes widen involuntarily as her thoughts went to Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, to Cathy’s ghost haunting Wuthering Heights. “You mean they brought them back to life?”
“Well, no.”
“But you said—”
“Back then, the word ‘wake’ didn’t mean to become alert; it meant ‘to watch’ or ‘to guard.’”
“But what were they guarding against?”
“There were those who believed the newly dead soul was at risk of theft by evil spirits.”
Soul theft at the hands of evil spirits had been almost as exciting as bringing the dead back to life. Which probably explained why the idea had stayed front of mind, while Halcyon, a dull old house in England where her grandmother’s elderly brother had lived for a time, slipped deep into a crevice of her memory.
It had never occurred to Jess to ask more questions about the house or to look further herself. Now, though, with time to kill and eager for distraction, she typed the word “Halcyon” into her search engine. The responding entries included a link to the word’s definition, a retirement village in California, and an organic skin-care range. Jess shook her head at the random list and cleared the field. This time, she added “Thomas Turner” to the search terms.
The first few links were ads for hotels and wotif.com, but farther down she spotted an archived article fromEsquiremagazine that piqued her interest. The date was January 1960, and the summary mentioned a house called Halcyon and a man with a passion for it.
A Lucky Man
The house on the hill, in the middle of the steep-rising fields at the end of Willner Road, belonged to Mr. Thomas Turner, a farmer neither by birth nor inclination. Mr. Turner was a man whose currency through life was not the gathering and application of expertise, but rather an unbridled enthusiasm for whatever it was on which he chose to shine his full attention. “Could’ve sold snow to the Eskimos,” came the considered opinion from beneath the hat of one old-timer on the bench in the Tambilla Centenary Garden; from the other: “Never knew a man to tell a story so well you could’ve sworn it happened to you.”
Business-wise, he was a speculator; more charitably, an entrepreneur. In a different country, at a different time, he could’ve made a fortune traveling town-to-town selling snake oil—or religion. But Mr. Turner was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1919, to parents whose wealth and class rendered them distant and disapproving. He was raised by a series of nannies in the company of a sister ten years his junior, whose adoration made him bold and charming. Like most children whose parents deny them attention in their early years, he learned to recognize and make the most of their limited shifting focus, to woo and cajole his child-weary carers, and to enlist the alliance of his devoted younger sibling.
To nobody’s surprise, he grew into a self-assured young man, hungry for adventure and keen to make his mark. What marvelous timing, then, that just as he was taking his first steps into adulthood, the faraway cogs of old empires turned, and the world found itself on a precipice. War was declared, and whatever frustrations Turner suffered initially—when it looked unlikely that the Australian Imperial Forces would be sent overseas—were quickly swept aside by the establishment of the Empire Air Training Scheme. He was among the first to sign up and was sent to England to fly with the RAF.
And no matter that his new-fashioned farming ideas and shiny city shoes raised eyebrows among the good people of Tambilla; no one could argue that he wasn’t a genuine war hero. “He had the Victoria Cross,” Mrs. Betty Diamond, the proprietress of Diamond’s Tearoom, confirmed. “He wore it on his breast pocket every Anzac Day.” A lean woman with sun-weathered skin and shrewd eyes, Mrs. Diamond was generally more inclined to listen than to speak, but having lost her young husband in the Great War, military conflict was a subject to which she warmed.
“Shot down over France, but he managed to get himself back toEngland to fly another four years until Germany surrendered. Rescued an English officer into the bargain, I’m told. Not that you ever heard him brag about it. He was a humble sort of fellow, not one to chase praise. But it wasn’t false modesty, either. ‘I’m a lucky man, Mrs. Diamond,’ was what he said to me. ‘A very lucky man.’”
Mr. Boris Braun, a teacher at the local school and spare-time history aficionado, was glad to supply more detail. He had invited Mr. Turner to speak to his year six class and still lit up with the glow of a starstruck child when called upon to recount the visit.
“He came down near the Channel but was able to free himself from the wreckage and find his way to Calais, where he made contact with members of the Resistance. With their help, he traveled south toward the border of unoccupied France, making it almost as far as the Free Zone before the Germans caught and imprisoned him in Saint-Hippolyte. They didn’t count on an Australian, though—that’s what he said, and you can imagine how the children loved to hear that! Australia was a nation founded on men who knew how to break free of prison, he told the class, and in the spirit of his forebears he managed to escape—with a British officer in tow—over the Pyrenees and into Spain. The pair of them arrived back in England aboard the HMSSheffieldand went on to win the war!”
A photograph that some of the local newspapers chose to run when reporting the deaths shows Mr. Turner some weeks after VE day, striding down a damaged city street with his pregnant young wife, wearing a pale, tailored suit, his fedora angled over one eye. And wasn’t it just like Thomas Turner, people said from behind their schooners at the bar of the Tambilla Hotel, an unmistakable glint of admiration in their exchanged glances, to somehow find himself both a well-fitting suitanda family in bomb-ravaged London? “And all while he was waiting to be sent back home.”
The man in the photograph is handsome by any measure, but Mr. Turner’s appeal was about more than his sharp jawline and devil-may-care smile. He was the sort of person to whom criticism did notstick; a man whom people longed to know, whose honor they leapt to defend, and whose innate charisma could no more be explained than it could be resisted.
“I’m a lucky man,” he said over and over, with the cheerful ease of an upstanding citizen stating his name for the record. “I can’t explain it, I almost certainly don’t deserve it, but it’s God’s own truth.” And thus, he learned what all truly charming people know: others would make allowances for any foibles he had. Theywantedto.
His decision to purchase the Wentworth place on the outskirts of Tambilla, a house he’d never seen in a town to which he’d never been, was a case in point. He caught his first glimpse of the property, or so the story went, after his Spitfire was shot down in July 1941. On his way south, he slept here and there in the farm buildings of dissenters, and it was in the loft of one such barn, on the back of a piece of newspaper he’d been using to wrap his tobacco, that his imagination was captured by the black-and-white image and loquacious description of a property for sale in South Australia. An element of homesickness recalled the faraway land of red earth and olive-green trees and shimmering azure-blue skies, and an idea lodged at the back of his mind. He nurtured that idea and, over time, it turned into a dream, and the dream kept him warm at night. When he suddenly came into money (“quite by chance,” as he was to say whenever the tale was told)—more on that later—he knew exactly what to do with it.
All change and happenings are notable in small towns, but Mr. Turner’s purchase of the Wentworth place attracted particularly avid comment in and around Tambilla. Outsiders did not often buy into the town—not because it wasn’t a pleasant place to live, but for the practical reason that there were limited employment opportunities. More to the point, there were next to no available dwellings. The same families had owned the same houses for as long as anyone could remember, passing them down, parent to child, generation by generation. Occupation was so settled that no one bothered with street addresses. Instructions were given to “the Landry residence” or “theMisses Edwards at the mill,” and sometimes simply “Old Stamp’s, out beyond the railway line.”
The Wentworth place, though both unoccupied and available, had been that way for so long folks had forgotten it existed. To some extent, it was a matter of being out of sight, out of mind. Mr. Wentworth’s garden of imported European specimens had come to envelop the house, and the overgrown property acquired an air of mythology. A few small parcels of land had been sold off around the edges, but local planning laws prevented the property being subdivided further, and not a lot of people were willing (or able) to pay the asking price.
The sale itself took place in February 1942, the same week the Japanese dropped bombs on Darwin, and may it stand as evidence of the importance of the transaction to the townspeople that the bombing to the north was only the second-most-talked-about event in Tambilla that week. News that the Wentworth place had sold traveled like bushfire through the Hills. Who was the buyer? residents wanted to know. There were only so many people in South Australia who could afford to make such a purchase. Confirmation that the new owner was from out of state pushed speculation to a fever pitch.
When Mr. and Mrs. Turner finally arrived in the autumn of 1945, fresh from London by way of Sydney, and affixed a sign on the gate that readhalcyon, the local grapevine was alight. Mrs. Marian Green at the telephone exchange reported that until the Turner tragedy, the reopening of the Wentworth place spurred the greatest switchboard “frenzy” she had ever seen.
“Having that house sit empty up there, well, it was like a bad omen,” she was to tell police, when she was interviewed after the deaths. “Houses are for living in, and a nice young couple like that, their little Matilda just a babe in arms—we were all of us so pleased to welcome them into the community.”
