Although not in the business of composing poetry, Mrs. Turner nonetheless had thoughts to order, plans and preparations to make. She had written numerous times about “the little coil of tension” in her chest that needed frequent easing. Walking had long been her habit, but motherhood, with its constant interruptions, had tested her, and the hobby had become a salve.
Her own mother had also been a keen walker. Mrs. Turner had remembered her to Mrs. Pike “pulling on her boots and heading out alone each day, come rain, hail, or shine.” She had called it her “daily constitutional”; Isabel’s father had called it “your mother’s medicine.” Only on the rarest of occasions had Isabel been permitted to go with her, and she had soon learned that it was not a time for idle conversation. Her mother had walked with purpose, striding across the moors or hills or clifftops (depending on where they were stationed) as if she were hastening toward something. Or else, as Isabel had later considered, away from it.
Mrs. Turner had adopted the habit herself devotedly in the dwindling months of the war after D-Day. Returned to her Bloomsbury bedsit in autumn 1944—spared, miraculously, by the bombs that fell around it—she had struggled. Four years had passed, Paris had been liberated, she was back where she had started, but everything was altered. As she would record in her journal, the view from the window had changed. There were rows of vegetables in the back gardens, and mounded air-raid shelters. Her landlady’s rabbits were gone. People were leaner and meaner than when she’d left, and a curious form of cultural amnesia gripped everyone. They had all seen and done things in order to survive. Everyone had secrets now.
She was changed, too. She had stilted conversations with people in the streets and at the greengrocer’s in which she heard herself say mundane things about ration cards and the likelihood of German surrender, as all the while a voice inside her head was screaming,Run!At night, her mind raced as she tried to sort through events of the past, sought to envisage a future. Rather than lie in bed as the minute hand dragged itself around the clock face, she had begun to walk instead, street by street in the dark as the gasping city lay in shambles around her. Her mother had been right: to walk was to think, to think was to breathe, to breathe was to stay alive.
If not for her walking habit, Mrs. Turner might never have met and married her husband; she might never have set eyes on Mr. Wentworth’s big house at the end of Willner Road nor given birth to her brood of bonny Australian children with loud voices and freckles across their noses. For it was on such an evening, in October of 1944, that she encountered Thomas Turner on Blackfriars Bridge. Itwas a foggy night and Isabel had already walked from Bloomsbury through Holborn and around St. Paul’s.
She was to describe the meeting to Mrs. Maud McKendry, the wife of Tambilla’s only doctor, at a Country Women’s Association Saint Valentine’s Day cake stall.
“She told me she’d been standing in the middle of the bridge when she heard a voice behind her. He asked her for directions, and by and by she offered to walk him where he was going. She said she couldn’t for the life of her remember why she’d made such an offer to a stranger in the dark. We laughed about that. If you knew Mr. Turner you’d understand why. He’s not an easy person to say no to.”
During his interview with London officers, carried out on behalf of the South Australia Police Force, Mr. Turner was to confess that for many years he had forgotten the circumstances of the night he met his wife. He had spent the better part of an hour answering questions as to whether she had any enemies and if he thought there was anyone who, for whatsoever reason, might have wanted to hurt his family—or, indeed, in doing so, hurt him.
“No,” he had answered to each and all, repeatedly. Mr. Turner was not the sort of man to brook suggestion that anyone would wish to do him harm. He loved the world and expected it to love him in return.
Toward the end of the session, DI Harris, who had drawn the short straw to be working Christmas Day, leaned back in his chair, folded his arms across his chest and asked if there was “anything in your wife’s past that might have led you to suspect that she could commit such a heinous act herself?”
Mr. Turner was so thrown by the question that he found himself at first unable to reply. “Opened and closed his mouth like a goldfish,” DI Harris was to type in his report to the South Australian police later that evening.
“Your wife, Mr. Turner,” the police officer prompted. “Has she ever, to your knowledge, fallen victim to depressive thoughts?”
At which point, Mr. Turner’s mind went unbidden to his farm manager, Mr. Drumming, whose wife was known to be resident in an institution down in Adelaide. He had heard talk about Mrs. Eliza Drumming and her “episodes” and felt great sympathy for his farm manager, as, he knew, had his own wife. Henrik Drumming was a good man who did a good job. In Mr. Turner’s world, bad things happening to good people was an assault on natural law and the essential doctrine of fairness to which he held firm.
Sitting in the cold interview room of Charing Cross police station, Mr. Turner’s inclination was to deny the association of his wife with any such condition. She became frustrated with him sometimes, certainly, her tension obvious by the grim set of her features, the close-lipped smile that he saw more often lately than any other kind. But depressive thoughts? Hardly! She was happy. She had a wonderful life, didn’t she? A beautiful house, healthy children. The new baby. What more could a woman want?
But then he recalled their meeting on the bridge. The image came to him, he was to say later, “like a vision—spiritual, almost like a message.” That foggy night in ’44, he had been too stunned by her beauty in the filtered moonlight to wonder what she was doing there. Afterward, he had been too distracted by the thrill of the chase to ask—a month after they met, they were married. Now, under the scrutinizing gaze of DI Harris of the Metropolitan Police, he remembered the way she’d been gripping the rail, standing right there on the edge, and he realized, with a certain element of bewilderment, that yes, he supposed he might have seen evidence of his wife’s propensity to depressive behavior.
Moreover, he remembered something else he’d forgotten, because he did not, as a rule, dwell on unhappy matters. “Her mother,” he said, surprising even himself.
“Her mother?”
“Her mother suffered with depression and, in the end, she shot herself.”
The last hint of fog in the valley was gone now, and down in the township of Tambilla folks were waking. Mrs. Pigott at the post office was already cursing in her back room as she sorted last-minute Christmas parcels, and Mrs. Diamond, in the kitchen of her tearoom, was mixing curried eggs in the large ceramic bowl her grandmother had brought to South Australia from Staffordshire. Mrs. Diamond was expecting a big day, what with people bustling about in town chasing the final provisions they needed for Christmas. Along with the usual trade, she had assured Reverend Lawson at St. George’s that she could supply ten trays of sandwiches to be shared after the Christmas Eve service.
Some fourteen miles away as the crow flies, Mr. Percy Summers was also on the move. As he loaded up his old horse, Blaze, and prepared to leave the McNamara farm, known locally as “the Station,” he had little idea that by the end of the day he would be inextricably linked to a tragedy on the cusp of unfolding at the big stone house at the end of Willner Road.
Percy’s wife, Meg, ofRoggenbrotfame, had started her day, too. As the proprietress of Summers & Sons, the only grocery shop in Tambilla, this would be her busiest morning of the year. She had a number of orders ready to go and was waiting on her two strapping lads, Kurt and Marcus (acknowledged by all in town to be “her pride and joy”), to finish breakfast so they could start making deliveries. On top of her already heavy workload, Mrs. Summers had a cake to get in the oven. Her husband’s forty-first birthday had passed while he was down at the Station, and she was determined to surprise him when he got home that evening, before Christmas rolled into town and swept everything else aside.
Of all this, Mrs. Turner, still standing in her vegetable gardenwith fragments of porcelain in her palm, was unaware. A hot wind swept up the driveway at the Wentworth place, sending a flock of dry leaves skimming across the gravel. A metal gate creaked in the distance. Mrs. Turner glanced down at the shards. Remarkably, the painted violet was still intact. Mrs. Pike would later tell police that she was shocked to see the broken pieces on the kitchen bench when she arrived for work that morning.
“It was one of the first things I noticed. I gasped out loud when I realized what it was. I knew how important that cup was to her, and it’s not just retrospect that makes me say I felt a deep sense of foreboding when I saw it.”
But Mrs. Pike’s arrival was still a couple of hours off yet. It would be eight o’clock before she rode her bicycle along Willner Road, alighting at the bottom of the driveway to walk the steep ascent. She would appear, as she always did, just in time to help clear up the mayhem of the Turner family’s breakfast. The first “outside” person to arrive at the Wentworth place that day would be Becky Baker, who, at eighteen years of age, was the eldest of the five flaxen-haired children belonging to Mr. Cliff Baker at the brewery.
Miss Baker had been engaged initially to help Mrs. Pike with household tasks. Truth be told, Mrs. Turner had been uncertain that they needed a “housemaid,” but she’d taken the girl on because Mrs. Pike had made a case. It was envisaged that Miss Baker would come in at noon each day to help with the housework and the dinner preparations, but after the baby was born she’d proved herself such a capable nursemaid that by the end of her trial period Mrs. Turner had declared her indispensable.
“It came as no surprise to me,” Mrs. Pike was to inform police in her first interview. “Becky’s been looking after those younger brothers and sisters of hers all her life. Slow she might be, but she’s not lacking in good sense. Loyal, too, and caring. Why, the way she took to that baby! Shedoted...”
The piano started up inside the house and Mrs. Turner all butjumped out of her skin—those nerves again. Certainly, that was John. She had often remarked (and sometimes lamented) that he took after his father in almost every way. It didn’t seem to matter how many times she reminded him there were other people in the house (including a small baby who had kept her mother up half the night), and that societies functioned best when their members considered one another; he only offered a good-natured apology and a broad, genuine smile and stopped what he was doing. Until the next time.
It wasn’t just that he was playing the piano in the library so early, it was thewayhe was playing it. Loudly, merrily, with so muchvigor! Leaping up the octave to play the same cheerful round of “Long, Long Ago” yet again. Like her husband, his tastes ran from sea shanties to Russian folk songs to rousing military marches. The jaunty tune’s notes and spirit spread out in reels across the early morning garden. It was exhausting, all of it, the never-ending burden of being in charge, the repeated disciplinary conversations, the wearying explanations, but it fell to her to stop him—hopefully before he woke them all.
With a last regretful glance at the gums on the ridge—there was no choice but to skip her walk today—Mrs. Turner closed her hand around the broken pieces of her teacup and headed back toward the house. The black cockatoos were in the walnut tree again. They traveled as a group, swooping down in pairs, their black quiffs cocked, to strip the tree of fruit, and as she crossed the rose garden lawn, the dew-damp ground was littered already with shell remnants as sharp as glass.
***
