‘It was short-lived,’ Francis says. ‘I gave it up.’
‘What a shame,’ says Mr Thistlethwaite. He has a cup of tea in his hands now and sits on the couch opposite. He folds one elegant leg across the other, and Francis is thrown back to the night of the opening and the front row—all those legs beneath chairs, anonymous shadows watching as he pivots on stage.
He was brimming with nerves that night; had the audience in the palm of his hands, until a heckler had called out.
‘Did your mother write that line?’
The voice was so like his father’s—the intonation, the scorn—that he had jerked his gaze around to the spotlight and frozen.
‘Watching grass grow would be more amusing!’
It was a ghostly voice from his childhood.
‘For god’s sake, stop that ridiculous display, boy! Have you no dignity?’
He had dried up. Gone completely blank. Someone had come on for him in the end. He’d never gone back. Never lived it down either. He wondered why Monty had even brought it up, forty years later. Francis had dropped out of the English Literaturedegree too. Gone off to study fashion and work backstage. He made it to the West End, but not as a front man.
Francis closes the book. He has spent so many hours in this shop, with these people. They are like family to him. There is a smell in here he likes: vanilla and musty paper, wood wax and the lingering hint of old tobacco smoke in the yellowing pages of all these books. It feels safe, so that the hurtful memories of his student days barely touch him. Here, he is himself.
‘I’m thinking of trying another firm of private detectives,’ he says. ‘To look for Dorothea.’
Mr Thistlethwaite blinks slowly. Gives a hint of a disappointed smile. ‘You won’t find her, Francis. She’s long gone. Probably passed away by now.’
Ellery looks at her computer. Looks back at him. She shrugs. ‘Can’t hurt,’ she says, as if her father hasn’t spoken. She picks up a volume from the display unit, its cover a midnight blue that blends with the shop walls. In the corner of the cover are the stars of the Southern Cross. She hands it to him. ‘David Malouf,’ she says. ‘Written in 1985, I think. Not valuable, but excellent. Stories of outsiders living at the bottom of the world.’ She smiles, raises her eyebrow with a mischief he has come to appreciate. ‘You never know,’ she says.
He turns the book over in his hands.
Antipodes.
His heart skips.A sign, he thinks. One must always be alert for signs.
34
LOTTIE
NOW, NSW SOUTHERN HIGHLANDS, AUSTRALIA
I have called an emergency meeting with Roddy. And seeing as I have to be at the bookshop, and Roddy works for himself playing with spreadsheets and numbers—but only when he feels like it, it seems to me—I told him he needed to come in and bring coffees. Preferably large ones because I have not been back to bed since raiding the cellar.
‘There are hundreds of letters here,’ says Roddy, seated on a cracked leather chair in the corner of the shop and sipping on a giant latte.
‘All addressed to Francis Fitzhenry,’ I say. They are in Phyllida’s handwriting. None had been opened (apart from the few I have looked at), or stamped, or sent to the address in the United Kingdom each one was marked with:Bleddesley House, Cambridgeshire. ‘I googled Bleddesley House,’ I say. ‘It’s fully open to the public now. A big tourist attraction.’
‘Through the National Trust?’ asks Roddy.
‘No, I don’t think so. From what I can work out from Wikipedia, it’s still in the Fitzhenry family, but they don’t seem to live there.’
Roddy is biting his lip, looking past me.
‘I rang the general inquiries number on the website to see if I can track down Francis Fitzhenry, but then I remembered they’re eleven hours behind us. So I just got a recorded message.’
I hold out the letter I’ve just finished reading. ‘Phyllida talks about Miriam in this one, and she seems to refer to David as Louis.’
Roddy glances up and reaches for the letter.
‘It’s around when David was dying. Was Louis a name you ever heard her use?’
Roddy shakes his head.
