December 17, 2018
Polly had set two places at Nora’s dining table and was preparing a meal. It seemed like a constructive thing to do. She was keen to be constructive. When she’d left Brisbane for Sydney on Friday, she’d envisaged herself supporting Jess in her grief, the two of them working over the weekend to prepare for the funeral on Monday. She’d consulted the internet and drawn up a list of what needed to be done. She had forgotten, though, how capable Jess was, and how independent. The first words from her mouth as a baby had been “I do”; in retrospect, she’d been giving voice to what would become her mantra.
Evidently, Nora had also been confident in Jess because she’d named her as executor, and by the time Polly arrived in Sydney, most of the funeral arrangements had already been made. As Polly listened to Jess and the minister converse knowledgeably on the order of service, she pictured her own handwritten note at the bottom of her bag and wondered how on earth she could have been so foolish.
Jess had done a brilliant job. The funeral had been dignified and elegant, the minister genuine in his eulogy, the reading beautifully rendered. Polly had watched her daughter, a woman of forty now, the picture of grace in a fitted black dress with a square neck and cap sleeves, speak the words of Christina Rossetti’s “Let Me Go.” The poem’s spirit had lingered in the church like a violin’s closing note. The wake, too, had been exactly what Nora would have wanted. A garden party at Darling House, all the people she cared for invited to enjoy the terrace and the view, a final experience of Nora’s famous hospitality. Polly had been filled with pride as she observed Jess moving among the guests, before chastising herself for the misplacedemotion. Admiration, perhaps, but she’d forfeited the right to pride a long time ago.
Polly sliced cheese finely and fanned the pieces around one side of Nora’s porcelain platter. Dinner wasn’t going to be elaborate—neither of them was in the mood for that—but she’d noticed that Jess had hardly eaten all day. She’d been busy performing the role of host, but Polly suspected there was more to it than that. Over the weekend, she’d noticed a sporadic distraction in Jess, at odds with the focus she was applying to Nora’s arrangements. Polly was an astute observer, a skill honed over a lifetime of invisibility. Jess was grief-stricken over Nora, but something else was bothering her. Polly wondered whether it related to Mrs. Robinson’s report that Jess had been asking about the Turner family and Halcyon. “She’s been very insistent,” Mrs. Robinson had said over the phone. “Wanting me to tell her everything I know.”
“Is she upset?” Polly had asked, remembering how distressed she’d been herself to learn of the family connection to a famous murderer.
“Not upset, no, I wouldn’t say that. More curious—the way she used to get: fixated on discovering everything she possibly can about a subject.”
Polly finished putting the cold plate together and debated briefly whether to set it on the table or leave it at the bench so they could serve themselves, buffet-style. The latter, though casual, seemed a bit ridiculous when there was only one platter and two diners. She carried the dish to the middle of the table and then sat at one of the places to wait for Jess. After a few seconds, she got up again and retrieved the copy of Daniel Miller’s book that she’d brought with her from Brisbane. She was going to give it to Jess tonight and had carried it downstairs wrapped in a fabric bookstore bag. Polly had been surprised at first, to think that Nora had confided in Jess about Halcyon after being so adamant that she must never know the truth, but Mrs. Robinson had confirmed that wasn’t the case. “As far as I can tell, your mum said something about it in the hospital, when she was in and out ofconsciousness. Jess was there and put two and two together. Not sure how, exactly—you know what she’s like.”
Polly hooked the bag over her seat and put the book on the table beside her place setting. Shedidknow what Jess was like: curious and committed. As a child, nothing had escaped her notice. It had been a challenge and a delight. When Polly was planning the move to Queensland, she’d had to include Jess in the preparations well before she’d wanted to, because her daughter had gleaned something was afoot and started making scarily accurate guesses.
A foolish decision, as it turned out: she should have tried harder to keep things under wraps until she’d finalized the details. Jess had been a little girl of ten—it was natural that she should get caught up in the excitement of the adventure—but Polly ought to have known better. She’d failed to consider the realities of moving a child away from the only place she’d ever called home. Nora had been the one to make her see that there was more at stake than she’d imagined. On the morning Polly finally worked up the courage to tell her mother she’d taken a new job and they were heading north, Nora had appeared to receive the news dispassionately, saying only, “But you can’t mean to disrupt Jessica in her final year of primary school? Not when she’s just won the lead role in the musical.”
It had been the first crack in the beautiful glass bauble of Polly’s dream.
“Why don’t you leave her with me,” Nora had urged, “just until the end of the school year? Let Jess finish with her friends. You’ll have a lot to organize up there. It’s bound to be a bit stressful. She’s better off here, where I can help.”
Eventually, Polly had agreed. It wasn’t going to be for long, she told herself. It would give her a chance to find her feet and work out a plan for school. So she moved north, started her job, set up the house, and then waited at night for the clock to reach eight thirty—Nora’s nominated time—so she could ring and find out how the school day had been. Jess was always full of stories, and Polly would listen withequal parts joy and sadness; sometimes, though, Jess was still at rehearsal, or else she’d gone to bed early because she was exhausted from her many extracurricular activities. “I can wake her, if you like,” Nora would say. “I’m sure she’ll want to say hello. She was expecting to hear from you, but she was just so tired I didn’t have the heart to make her wait up.”
“Of course, of course,” Polly would always reply. “It’s far more important that she gets enough sleep.”
It was her own fault, Polly knew: her job was new so she didn’t like to say no to later shifts, and she couldn’t call long distance from work, but she still should have found a way to speak with Jess, as she’d promised.
One night she worked up the nerve to ask Nora how Jess wasreallydoing—was she missing her mother too much, did she feel abandoned, was she fretting? But Nora brushed away her concern. “You mustn’t worry, darling,” she said. “Jess is fine—better than fine; she’s thriving.”
Polly couldn’t think what to say to that. It was a good thing, she decided. She didn’t want Jess to be unhappy and pining for her. She was glad.
“You did the right thing letting her stay through to the end of the term.”
Polly had made a small noise of acknowledgment.
“I know how difficult it must be, my dear. You’re a wonderful mother to put your little girl’s needs before your own.”
Polly swatted a fly away from the platter. All of that was old news now. She shouldn’t be dwelling on it. There was no going back, and it had all worked out. Nora had been right: Sydney was the best place for Jess, Darling House the better home. Polly couldn’t have offered her daughter half the opportunities Nora had, and the proof of the pudding was in the eating: Jess was a magnificent person.
Polly straightened the book in line with her fork and listened closely for movement on the stairs. The house creaked in reply, butotherwise sat silent. Ever since the night of Daniel Miller’s visit, when Nora had stood over Jess’s crib, impossibly pale and wretched, and implored Polly to keep the secret of what had happened in South Australia to herself, Polly had done as she’d been asked. It hadn’t been difficult at first: she would never have wished upon her young daughter the anguish she’d suffered when she learned the truth, and by the time Jess was old enough to be told, their relationship was no longer of the sort to encourage confidences.
But now Jess was asking about their family history and Nora was gone. The decision was no longer Polly’s to make, the secret not hers to keep. As in all the best fairy tales, she felt herself released from her promise by Nora’s death.
Polly eyed the book again. After a moment’s deliberation she slipped it back inside the bag. Better to give a small preamble before presenting it to Jess, she decided. She glanced at the clock and wondered whether she ought to call out that dinner was ready. She’d said earlier that she was going to prepare something; Jess had said that sounded good. But perhaps she’d forgotten? Polly shook her head and chided herself for overcomplicating a very simple arrangement. She had put together a meal, her daughter would be downstairs in a minute or two, and then they would eat. She just needed to relax.
Jess was still wearing the dress she’d chosen for the funeral. It was one of Nora’s. She hadn’t brought anything remotely suitable with her from London, and the idea of shopping for clothing over the weekend had been abhorrent. Besides, the vintage Carla Zampatti at the back of Nora’s wardrobe was perfect. There was a photograph of Nora wearing it at the opening of a theater production in the eighties; the image had been printed in the newspaper, and the photographer had sent Nora a print as a gift. People, as a rule, liked to please Nora. Jess could remember admiring the framed picture when she was a little girl, standing at her grandmother’s chest of drawers, inspectingthe exotic items that graced its surface, and thinking that the woman in the black dress was the height of adult chic.
“Aim to be decorative, dearest, but always on your own terms.”
Jess closed her eyes tightly. The memory of her grandmother’s voice was so close it seared. How was she ever going to accept that Nora was gone? There had been moments since the horror of last Wednesday when she’d felt the solid earth disappear from beneath her feet. She had found herself casting about for something familiar to hold on to, and yet at the same time doing so numbly, without panic; she had struggled to find the right word to describe the emotion she was feeling, before realizing it was grief. Not only for the loss of Nora, but for herself, her life, for all of the things that she had once counted on that now seemed lost.
Her career, a source of pride and solidity, was in tatters: for the first time that she could remember, she’d missed a deadline. And while to an outside view her grandmother’s death might seem to offer a valid reason, Jess knew it was more than that. She’d been struggling with the article beforehand. Never had she felt her work to be so pointless.
She had no family to speak of; her home was a house she couldn’t afford, standing empty in a faraway street on the other side of the planet. She felt as if the strings that tethered her to the world and everyone and everything in it had been severed.
To top it all off, she was suffering a chest-hollowing guilt at the thought that she’d let her grandmother down. She had not honored Nora’s wish to die at Darling House. She’d told herself that it had all happened so fast; now, though, she wondered whether she had simply been too slow to understand what the doctor and nurses had been trying to tell her at the hospital. She should have brought Nora home sooner; she should have been more observant, more insistent. The one time that Nora had relied on Jess to advocate for her, she had failed.
