‘Yeah, well. If you say so. But I suppose Miriam didn’t help at the time.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Phyllida promised David that she wouldn’t leave him when he got real crook. She was just popping home for an hour’s sleep here and there, she was that devoted. Wanted to make sure she was right there with him at the end, even though she didn’t believe it was going to be the end.’
‘And?’
‘When Miriam locked her out of the house it sort of tipped her over the edge, I reckon. Phylly couldn’t forgive herself after that. For not being there at the end, when she promised she would be.’
‘That’s terrible. God, I can’t believe Mum could do that to someone when theirchildwas dying.’ I suddenly remember maybe David wasn’t really Phyllida’s child. I push the thought away.
Mary sighs.
If what Mary says about old trauma is true, something else in Phyllida’s past was part of it too. And it doesn’t take a genius to guess that it probably relates to Francis Fitzhenry and his father’s murder. ‘I want to find this Francis she talks about. I want to know what happened before she came here. She never talks about England.’
Mary is silent for a while. ‘I wonder if I ballsed things up, ringing the ambulance for her the other night. Maybe she’d be better gone. At peace, you know?’
‘I think you get peace from sorting unfinished business. And I think she still has some she needs to deal with.’
I sound snappish and Mary sighs again, moves her teeth about in her mouth. ‘You young people are so different. So hell-bent on dragging the past around like a dead ’roo. What’s done is done, love.’
‘Not if the past won’t leave her alone. What if meeting this Francis person again might put her mind at rest about something?’
Mary blows out her lips in a long huff. She looks down at her lap, turns the beer bottle in her hand. ‘I suppose you might want to see her diaries then, love.’
‘What diaries?’ My heart gives a thump.
‘The ones Phylly’s written in every day of her life—or ever since I’ve known her—going on for fifty years. She was always secretive with them and never let me know what was so important in that head of hers that it needed writing down.’
‘There are no diaries. I’ve turned the house over. I knew she wrote diaries, so I looked for them.’
Mary looks sheepish. ‘Ah, love. It was bin night next day after she took them pills. I started pulling out her recycling bin onto the road after they carted her off to hospital, and it was dead heavy. I fished them out.’
43
LOTTIE
NOW, NSW SOUTHERN HIGHLANDS, AUSTRALIA
The diaries begin in 1975, the year Phyllida arrived in Australia. I have started with the one marked 1995 because I want to see what my mother did to Phyllida when David was dying. I must be getting stressed, reading these, as I now have an awful headache.
But it seems Phyllida hasn’t written about the night Mary recounted, when she must have been going mad, knocking on the windows until she broke in and found my mother in her underwear clinging to David. I think about the image of my mother and Phyllida—their grief over the body of this young man—and I have to press my palms into my eyes and remind myself to breathe.
As it turns out, Phyllida doesn’t write about David’s death at all in the weeks around when it happened. She just talks about making his favourite dinner and his favourite show being on telly, as if he is still alive.
I close the 1995 diary and decide to start at the beginning. First, though, I need food. I find my sunnies and phone and let myself out of Phyllida’s house. I am not due to open the shop for another forty minutes. A croissant will sort out this nauseous feeling of stress I keep getting. As I walk towards the coffee shop, I dial the hospital and ask to be put through to the intensive care ward to check on Phyllida.
‘She’s sleeping at the moment,’ says the nurse, Samantha, who had also taken my call yesterday. ‘But slightly more wakeful this morning. Her blood sugar and electrolyte imbalances were severe, though, so it will take a while. She’s still very quiet when she’s awake.’
I promise to visit this afternoon. It’s been almost two weeks now, and I’m worried Phyllida may not recover completely. Where will she find the will to fight if she was so convinced she needed to end things?
At the cafe I pull the first diary from my handbag:1975. It is the year Phyllida arrived in Australia, but it should also cover the time of Edward Fitzhenry’s murder and the mysterious baby’s birth. Strange that Phyllida brought this with her from England, given the dangers if she was caught, but maybe it was a way of holding on to something from her old life.
9 January 1975
Poor Francis, he’s getting taller and lankier by the day, so his ankles are showing beneath his cuffs! He is so pale I sometimes wonder if we need to sit outside more, even though the weather has been so bad lately. When he came into the kitchen, Mrs Wilson looked him up and down and shook her head, thengot him a plate of biscuits and told him to eat up or his legs would get ahead of him, which amused us both.
Edward has noticed his growth spurt, I’m sure. I see Edward watching sometimes with a look of distaste. I want to take Francis and run far away, but I cannot. And leaving him here with Edward, without my interventions and love, is impossible.
