As If They Were Asleep
Daniel Miller
5
Nora Turner-Bridges had been aware since she arrived in Tambilla that her sister-in-law was suffering with insomnia. It was Nora’s habit to take a dawn walk around the rose beds, which was how she knew Isabel was spending the wee hours pacing the house or escaping into the garden. At first, she reasoned that Isabel was merely busy. It was a lot to manage—a new baby and three older children, all of them underfoot as the summer school holidays stretched interminably ahead—but something had niggled. More than once, Nora had come across her sister-in-law in a state of distraction, a distant unhappy expression on her face, as if she were thinking very deeply about something knotty.
Isabel had been unusually forgetful, too. They’d laughed together the day she put the milk in the cupboard and the sugar in the fridge, but there’d been other occasions that were less benign. One afternoon, she’d nodded off with the baby on her lap and a fresh cup of tea in her hand. It was only a momentary lapse—she’d blinked herself awake, embarrassed and apologetic, before any harm could be done—but for Nora, sitting on the facing chair, the episode had been disturbing.
Another time, Isabel had left the baby asleep in her crib beneath the walnut tree while she ducked inside to answer the telephone, only to forget completely to return. It had been simple good luck that Nora spotted the cockatoos assembling on the branch aboveand rescued the baby before they had a chance to swoop. “They might not have bothered,” she told police, “but they’re such big birds, it was unlike Isabel to take the risk.”
“Any idea what had been troubling her?” Sergeant Duke was to say, leaning back in the chair inside the interview room of the West Road police station, fan whirring on top of the filing cabinet. “Did she tell you?”
“Not in so many words.” Mrs. Turner-Bridges had concluded that her sister-in-law was missing her husband, perhaps even harboring some small resentment that he’d left on business so soon after baby Thea’s birth.
Thomas Turner was a man whose personality occupied an enormous amount of space; Nora knew firsthand how large and silent the hole left by his absence could be. When he’d gone to fight in the war, she’d been marooned in their family’s big house on Sydney’s eastern rim. Still but a child, she’d thought the loneliness would kill her. It didn’t matter how idyllic her life appeared, Nora could well imagine how Isabel—who had, after all, left her homeland behind—must suffer bouts of loneliness when her husband was away.
The policeman taking Mrs. Turner-Bridges’s statement had perked up at this. “Had Mrs. Turner said she felt lonely? Homesick? Did she talk to you about a desire to go back to England?”
Mrs. Turner-Bridges was adamant that she had not. “My brother often said that he could never live in England. He was Australian, that’s who he was. No, Isabel was under no misapprehension that they would ever be moving the family over there. And she wouldn’t have wanted to; she loved it here. We were her family. There is a difference between a romantic nostalgia and one’s real life.”
Although not yet overly concerned, Nora had nonetheless determined that the two women should spend some time together away from the children, away from the house. A nice day out, she reasoned, might be just the thing her sister-in-law needed to “pep her up.” Nora wasn’t sure that she, herself, was up to the hot, summerydrive down the steep and winding Greenhill Road, with its hairpin bends and dramatic cliff-edge drops, to visit a restaurant in Adelaide, but there was a neat little tearoom in Tambilla, and she’d spoken with the owner, Mrs. Diamond, to reserve a table beneath the window. They would get through Christmas—all of the family noise and hubbub—and then she’d sit Isabel down and have a good long talk.
In the days, weeks, and months that followed, Nora would reproach herself for putting off that conversation. “If only I had spoken to her sooner,” she was to say a couple of weeks later, pressing her hands together in her lap as her baby slept peacefully beside her in the parlor of her brother’s empty house, “might I have made a difference? Might I have grasped how low she’d sunk?”
On Christmas Eve morning, though, as the sun dawned pink behind the row of gum trees on the ridge to the east, Nora had no way of guessing that by the end of the day her family would be gone. Her biggest concern in that moment was the heat. The thick air presaged rain and induced her, at last, to ease out of bed and move to the window, and it was from this vantage point that she noticed Isabel in the vegetable garden at the top of the driveway.
Nora experienced a strange, unsettled feeling as she watched. Her sister-in-law wore a pensive expression, and there was no verve or purpose to her bearing. She was standing as still as a statue until suddenly she flinched, as if in shock, and the teacup she’d been holding dropped to the ground, shattering. When she knelt to gather the broken pieces, the scene, bathed in morning light, was so pretty and deliberate, so much communicated by the actor’s delicate, curved shoulders, that Nora had the oddest sense that she was viewing a stage tableau.
A hissed admonishment disrupted the quiet inside the house then, coming from the landing outside her bedroom door where the telephone sat on its smart new laminate table. “Stop it, you little creep!”
Nora placed her hands against her swollen belly, as if she might that way block her little one’s ears from the sibling animosity of the older cousins.
The voice belonged to her eldest niece, Matilda. “If I’ve told you once,” the girl continued, “I’ve told you a thousand times: leave me alone.”
There followed a delighted boyish laugh and a scattering of footsteps that then slapped down the stairs. At last, the door to one of the ground-floor rooms slammed shut.
Nora eased the window open a crack and a breath of warm air took the opportunity to sneak inside the sleeping house. The merry, thumping strains of “Long, Long Ago” started up on the piano downstairs, and she closed her eyes briefly before lowering the window again. She kept forgetting that she wasn’t by the coast. To open the window at Darling House, her home in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, was to admit whatever sea breeze happened to be skimming by. Here, though, she was landlocked in the heat.
Movement on the other side of the glass caught her attention. Isabel was coming toward the house, the scrap bucket in one hand, shards of white porcelain in the other.
Nora would later recall noticing what she took for a pleasing resurgence of purpose to her sister-in-law’s gait. Perhaps, she thought, the requirements of the festive season would be all the medicine Isabel needed. It was Christmas Eve, after all, and there was much to do.
Afterward, she was to view the moment differently. A switch had indeed been flicked, but the new vigor she observed in her sister-in-law’s advance heralded an ominous shift. For with it, the day’s progress had been set on its awful path.
While Mrs. Turner was returning to the waking house, Becky Baker was making her way along the main street of Tambilla. Every morning, she set out on foot from her home at the brewery and followedthe river until she reached the narrow path leading through the bush to the back of the shops. She liked to pass beneath the tunnel of towering oaks and elms that grew in the town center before veering off the road again and moving across the paddocks toward Willner Road.
If she was on time, which she almost always was, she would see Mrs. Summers bringing in the newspapers and milk bottles to sell in the grocery shop. Becky found Mrs. Summers easier company than some of the other ladies in town, who made her feel embarrassed or clumsy. They would exchange cheerful greetings and Mrs. Summers would duck inside for an apple to send with Becky as she walked. Sometimes Becky ate the apple, but other mornings she kept it in her pocket for when she reached the fields at the end of Willner Road where Mr. Hughes, the local solicitor, kept his horses.
Today, she was earlier than usual. She wasn’t expected at the Turner house until eight, but she didn’t want to waste a minute. Mrs. Turner had insisted that Becky take a break over Christmas. “You’ve worked so hard for my family this year,” she’d said firmly, when Becky ventured that she’d rather keep up her duties. “You ought to spend some time with your own.”
Becky had been crushed. Working for the Turners up at Halcyon—she refused to call it “the Wentworth place” when Mr. and Mrs. Turner had given it such a pretty name—was a dream come true. She had been engaged in the beginning to help Mrs. Pike with the cleaning, but when the baby came, and Mrs. Turner seemed so worn out with it all, Becky had stepped in. She had four younger siblings and knew a thing or two about minding wee ones, and baby Thea was just the sweetest little child, content to watch the leaves blowing on the trees with a look of utter wonder on her small, perfect face.
Becky had started to think she might not have any babies of her own. There was only one boy she could imagine wanting to marry and do that with, and he had never looked twice at her. Why wouldhe? Half the girls in Tambilla carried a torch for Kurt Summers. He was the sort of boy who ought to be lifesaving down at Glenelg Beach on the weekends. Strong German build, blond hair, but a kind nature that showed on his face. He was smart, too, one of the smartest boys in class. Far too smart for her.
“Morning, Becky,” Meg Summers called from across the street. “Happy Christmas Eve.”
Becky crossed to the front door of Summers & Sons Grocers, where Mrs. Summers was sweeping the walkway.
