Angie had been digging. The speculative way she’d looked at Polly when she commented had made that clear. Perhaps she’d noticed the high chair when Polly moved in. Polly had only smiled without offering any further details.
She’d found out she was pregnant two weeks after Jon left for America. She’d been frightened to tell her mother. She’d felt so stupid and blighted. But in the end, Nora had surprised her. After she recovered from the shock, she’d been elated. “But how could you have thought I’d be anything other than delighted?” she’d said, wrapping Polly in an embrace, stroking her hair. “Babies are a blessing, no matter the circumstances.”
And while Polly was at a complete loss, Nora had known exactlywhat to do. She’d swept into action, buying vitamins and booking an appointment for Polly with a doctor friend of hers. “Dr. Bruce is the best. He’s the one who helped me when I was pregnant with you.”
It was in Dr. Bruce’s chilly rooms, as Polly lay rigid beneath the stiff sheet within the curtain-lined cubicle, and Dr. Bruce asked quietly after “the father,” that she first heard Nora match his low voice and say, “Unknown, I’m afraid.”
The coldness of the lie had struck Polly hard. She reasoned that her mother was simply being discreet; there was no reason to share all of the private details with her doctor. Later, though, when Polly was wondering what she should write to Jon about the baby, Nora had looked aghast. “Why on earth would you even consider it? Don’t tell him anything—and later, tell your child you don’t know who the father is. It’s far safer that way. You’ll never have to share her.” (Nora had been convinced from the start that the baby would be a daughter.)
Polly hadn’t wanted to lie about the father. She didn’t want her baby to think she didn’t know who he was. It seemed a gross betrayal of the truth. She was angry with Nora for suggesting it, and hurt by the implication of promiscuity and carelessness. She was frustrated, too, because the more she cogitated on it in the dark of night, the more she saw that the reasoning behind the idea held some merit—if you looked at it in just the right way.
There was a lot of time to ruminate that summer. As the heat dragged on outside, Polly stayed in bed. “It’s not your fault,” Nora had soothed as Polly struggled to keep down her food. “Some people are built for pregnancy, others aren’t. I had a miserable time, too. You’ll feel better soon.”
Not soon enough. In February, Polly realized she had no choice but to defer her return to uni. The nausea was constant. She struggled to stay upright. There was no way she could haul herself to lectures, let alone concentrate on her studies. Everything made her sad; she worried that the baby would be born sad.
Nora began to worry, too. She cut back on her work and socialcommitments, dedicating herself to Polly’s care. During the day, she hovered; in the evenings, she positioned herself in the armchair in the corner of the room and made bright one-sided conversation about people she knew from her work, girls Polly had gone to school with—all moving ahead with their lives—and gossip from the neighborhood. But the one topic in which Polly was interested, Nora refused to broach. Polly had found her thoughts returning again and again during those interminable weeks of confinement to Halcyon. To Isabel in particular: a woman so bereft, so out of place and distressed, that she could take her own life and those of her children. The story had become the locus for her own tragic narrative, and she wanted to know every detail.
Finally, sometime in April, Polly started to feel less bilious, and her thinking became more focused. But far from stepping back, Nora’s attention tightened: she watched what Polly ate, she made sure Polly undertook no risky activities (like walking down the stairs too quickly), and she entreated her constantly to stay calm, relaxed, happy. Polly began to chafe. And then one day an idea came to her, a small act of defiance. She convinced Nora to drive her to the university library to return a couple of borrowings, and while she was there asked one of the librarians how she could go about finding a particular book—title unknown—about a real-life crime investigation. The librarian, who said she liked a challenge, had taken a list of the scant information Polly had—the name “Thomas Turner,” the approximate publication date, the fact that the journalist was American and the publication a commercial success—and promised to do what she could. A fortnight later, Polly received a message that the book had been found and requested from an interstate library and was now awaiting collection at the front desk.
A sudden thought sent Polly to her feet. She went quickly to the shelves that ran the length of her sitting room wall. She was sure she’dseen her copy of Daniel Miller’s book recently. It was easy enough to spot among the rest; the spine still bore its library classification sticker. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to return it; in the end, she’d pretended it was lost and paid the fine.
Tucked away at Darling House, Polly had devouredAs If They Were Asleep. She’d had to be careful; Nora was everywhere. But the illicit nature of her reading made the experience more intense. The weave of Halcyon was shot through with threads of pregnancy and babies and summer and heat, of long days and twisted dreams, of her life and theirs, of now and then. She thought of that period in her life as “the Halcyon summer,” even though the months had leached into autumn.
One of the strangest aspects of reading the book had been experiencing her mother as a character—herself, too, as the baby born to “Mrs. Turner-Bridges” on Christmas Eve. In various scenes Daniel Miller described Nora with her baby—at the community meeting held by police or in the main street of Tambilla, taking her first tentative steps back into “normal life” after the tragedy that had befallen her family. This Nora was younger and less experienced than the woman Polly knew, but still quite recognizable. Daniel Miller had captured her as the perfect, attentive, “good” mother, in contrast, presumably, to Isabel. Polly could remember lingering on those passages when she first read the book, her own baby starting to move in her belly, hoping against hope that she, too, would be a good mother. But she’d had her doubts even then.
When she started to dream about Halcyon, Polly was dismayed to find that it wasn’t her mother whose part her unconscious mind took, but Isabel’s. She would wake in the mornings, having visited the house in her dreams, briefly certain that were she to look from the window she would see paddocks and roses and cockatoos in a walnut tree, instead of Sydney Harbor. She told Dr. Bruce that she was having vivid dreams, but he didn’t ask what they were about, saying only that it was normal to experience “excitement” during pregnancy and murmuring something about hormones.
She wondered what was wrong with her, to feel any sort of empathy for someone like Isabel. To feel lonely and isolated, almost homesick, even though she was in her own home. Was that the fault of hormones, too? Nora had been right to warn her against telling Jon. Perhaps she was like this mysterious aunt in some way; maybe Nora had perceived it? Polly had so many questions, but Nora was resolute. She didn’t want to talk about it.
Polly recognized the familiar yellow spine with its library classification and slid the book from the shelf. It was a stylistic cover: of its era, with a sixties font declaring just the title and the author’s name. But in its simplicity, Polly felt that she could glimpse Daniel Miller’s decency, the authenticity of his approach. He hadn’t sensationalized events; his affection for his characters had been evident as he sought to show the ways in which a shocking event leaves its mark on everyone, individually and as a community. She still thought sometimes about Percy Summers, the man who’d found the bodies and whose comment to police—that the family had looked “as if they were asleep”—had given Daniel Miller’s book its title.
Polly had met the author once. He’d come to visit her mother at Darling House around the time of Jess’s first birthday. Nora had been quiet all morning, and when the doorbell rang, Mrs. Robinson went quickly to answer it. “Daniel Miller is here,” she’d said, hurrying into the room off the kitchen, where Nora was playing with baby Jess. Polly had been sitting on the carpet with them; the shock of the name, the illicit nature of its familiarity had made her skin heat.
“An old friend” was all Nora said by way of explanation. “Passing through Sydney.” And then she disappeared into the hall and up the stairs to the library, taking Daniel Miller with her and closing the door behind them.
They were in the library for over an hour, and by the time they emerged Polly had taken Jess out into the garden. She was sitting on the stone edge of the pond when the front door opened and Daniel Miller appeared: a well-preserved fifty-year-old with dark hair anda leather jacket, carrying a large satchel over his shoulder. He was wearing jeans and boots and was taller than Nora, who followed him out; there was an unmistakably American manner in the way he held himself. They spoke for a short time, and then Nora seemed to remember something, hurrying back inside the house, leaving the door ajar.
Daniel Miller, alone on the gravel turning circle, surveyed the garden and then walked across the lawn toward the harbor view. He was almost at the pond before he noticed Polly. “Oh, hello there. I didn’t mean to sneak up on you. I’m Daniel.” He extended his hand.
“Polly,” she said, dusting her own on her jeans. “Nora’s daughter.”
His expression seemed to change then, and she felt as if he were studying her face. Recognition lit his eyes.
“You’re American,” she said, not knowing what else to say. She couldn’t admit she’d read the book; that would be a betrayal of Nora’s trust.
“I am. But I spend a lot of time in Australia. I have family here.”
“In Sydney?”
“In South Australia.”
Polly waited, hoping he would say more. When he didn’t, she ventured, “My mother used to have family down there, too.”
Daniel Miller smiled but didn’t take the bait. “This is a beautiful home,” he said, shifting his gaze to take in the water view. “It must have been a nice place to grow up.”
Disappointed, but not surprised, Polly said neutrally, “It was. It is.”
Jess had crawled back around from the other side of the pond. It was getting close to her lunchtime, and she knew it.
