Jess thought of the notebooks. Nancy’s doorbell had rung before she could ask her to include copies of Miller’s interviews with Reverend Lawson. She considered ringing back now, but a glance at the world clock on her phone told her it was after business hours in Vermont. She fired off a quick text instead.
Hi Nancy, just wondering whether you’d mind having a look for interviews with the reverend, too? Thanks so much—I really appreciate your help.
As she was pressing send, the reminder to call Polly appeared on her phone screen. Jess sighed. The conversation was going to require a gear shift, but she would simply keep to the basics: apologies for not ringing sooner, give an update on the patient, and suggest that Polly come down for a visit and a “proper catch-up” when Nora was out of hospital.
The phone had locked while Jess was thinking, and a new notification now appeared on the home screen. An email from Nancy. Jess opened it, noting the attachment at the bottom. The message read:
Dear Jess,
Please find attached, as promised, pages scanned from various points within the “Tambilla Notebooks.” As I mentioned on the phone, my uncle spent a great deal of time speaking with Nora. Quite asidefrom the project he was working on, they became friendly. They were a support to one another, I think, both having lost someone close.
My assumption, based on how the research presents, is that he met with her on many occasions, most of them without a notebook. From what I can gather, his practice was then to write up his memories of the conversation, his observations and impressions, when he returned home, in the form of scenes.
I’m not sure whether he planned or contemplated including them in the book, or whether it just became a useful way to synthesize information and build his narrative (even if only in his own mind), but regardless, I hope the pages help and look forward to speaking soon.
Wishing your grandmother a speedy recovery,
Nancy
PS: Just saw your message about the reverend. Will have a look, but I seem to remember Dan saying their conversations were “off the record” due to clergy privilege.
Jess opened the attachment and found thirty-three scanned pages of fine-lined paper covered with tiny handwritten scrawl. Too hard to read on her screen, she decided, and sent the document to the printer instead.
The day outside was beautiful, and Jess felt the restless excitement of someone on the brink of a possible discovery. She determined to sit in the garden, and with the pages tucked beneath her arm and a pen in her pocket stepped out into the sunshine, crunching across the gravel of the turning circle.
The phone in the house started to ring as Jess reached the edge of the tropical garden. She considered running back to get it, but in the end decided to let it go. It would be one of Nora’s friends and they would leave a message or call back.
When it began to ring again a few minutes later, Jess didn’t hearit; she had already reached the garden seat overlooking the harbor. The air was filled with the fragrance of star jasmine and the bell-like music of magpie morning song. A shiver passed through her body. It was the strangest sensation: when she was a child, they’d have said someone was walking over her grave. Now, though, she recognized it as an instinctive sense that something momentous had just happened.
Or was about to. Without another moment’s hesitation, Jess opened Miller’s notes, oblivious to the fact that deep inside Nora’s beloved house, the phone was ringing yet again.
Part VI
19
Brisbane, Queensland
December 12, 2018
Polly was in the kitchen when the phone started ringing on Wednesday morning. She had been standing with her favorite straw hat in hand, wondering whether to brave the sultry summer heat and walk up to the shops for a piece of fish to fry for dinner, or whether it was just too hot, and she’d do better to abandon the morning’s plan and wait instead until the afternoon shade came over and she could raid the garden for salad ingredients.
The phone, when it shrilled on the wall, had surprised her. Her palm leapt to her chest in apprehension, and her breath caught in her throat. Or had it? Perhaps it was only afterward, when she looked back on the day’s events, that she imbued her remembered self with the gift of presentiment. Because the news that came with the phone call had been momentous. Nora was dead. It had happened thirty minutes earlier; there’d been nothing they could do to save her.
Standing by the big windows that overlooked the steep, leafy Paddington valley, Polly had been vaguely aware that she was saying things, listening and responding, thanking the person at the other end for everything they’d done. She returned the telephone receiver to its cradle and let the air within the room settle around her.
She was motherless. Nora was gone.
“It’s all right,” Polly said softly. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
The structure of the day disintegrated after that. The question of dinner forgotten, Polly passed an hour or so in drifting. She found herself in one room after another, sitting first here and then there, straightening cushions and adjusting potted plants, making a cup of tea and then leaving it on the kitchen bench.
It had all happened so quickly; she’d only learned yesterday that Nora was in the hospital. Janey had let her know. No-nonsense, reliable Janey Robinson, Nora’s housekeeper, her tone so calm and matter-of-fact that before Polly could register how unusual it was to hear the other woman’s voice at the end of the phone line, she’d delivered two pieces of news, each of which alone would have been enough to cause dislocation: Nora was in the hospital, and Jess was back from London. And then she’d said something that had thrown Polly even further: “Jess has been asking about the business at Halcyon.”
It was this piece of information that Polly thought of now. She was standing in the doorway to the second bedroom of her modest worker’s cottage, looking at the single bed she’d made up the day before, when she learned that Jess was in Australia. A silly, sentimental thing to have done: Jess never came north to Brisbane on her trips back home; she stayed in Sydney. Truthfully, Polly had felt embarrassed the last time Jess came to stay. Not because she was ashamed of her house, which suited her very well, butbecauseit suited her so well. Through her daughter’s eyes, she could see how ordinary her life was. How little she had aspired to and how little she had achieved. More perplexing, how little it had taken to satisfy her in the end.
But: the business at Halcyon. How strange that Jess should be asking about it all again. She had first mentioned the house after the funeral and wake for Thomas Turner, when they were walking home together along the water’s edge. Polly had stopped on the shoreline, her thoughts focused on the move she was planning, away from Sydney, away from Nora, away from the ties of the past, and Jess had come and slipped a hand into hers (the way it had fit so perfectly! Polly had always been amazed and gratified by that fit) and asked, as a boat out on the horizon appeared to levitate, “What is Halcyon?”
Polly had been struck just as surely as if someone had fired a bullet nearby. She’d managed to say something—it was a house in the middle of nowhere, far, far away—but Jess was bright, and she’d pieced together a picture pretty quickly: Nora’s sorrow, her fierce desireto sell the property. “Was it her brother’s house?” she’d asked, and Polly had agreed that it was, but she hadn’t expanded. There’d been no need to say any more. Jess had been satisfied with the suggestion that Nora’s grief rendered her brother’s house something to be erased from memory, to be got rid of “at once.” The truth, of course, had been more complicated.
