The Last Anniversary (6 page)

And pause, one, two, three
.

Aunt Connie had told them to always pause at that moment for dramatic effect. Grace considered herself quite good at the pause, unlike Veronika, who spoke much too fast and added too many of her own peculiar opinions to Aunt Connie’s carefully drafted script, and Thomas, who was painfully shy at sixteen and delivered his tours in a barely audible monotone.

Jake gives a little whimper and the Shirleys all cluck. ‘Imagine! A tiny baby like you! Your mummy wouldn’t leave you on your own even for a
minute
, would she!’

Grace looks at her son, his face blissfully squished against a Shirley’s large purple-T-shirted breast. He seems very content.

‘I’ll invite you all now to enter the house. Please remember that the house has not been disturbed in over seventy years, so we do ask that you refrain from touching anything.’

She opens the front door of the house and in they troop, all bright-eyed beams and exclamations, while Grace mentally checks off the list of things she needs to cover:

Cake.

Kettle.

Blood stains.

Connie and Rose.

Alice’s diary.

Jack’s love letter.

Theories.

Questions.

Souvenirs.

She’d never been very good at the souvenirs part. That was where Veronika excelled. She could bully anyone into buying anything.

After the tour is finished, Grace stands on the veranda of Alice and Jack’s house and waves the Shirley Club goodbye, a colourful gaggle of women winding their way back down the hill towards the ferry, arms swinging, energy unflagging, going back home to cook their husbands’ dinners.

Jake is sound asleep in his pram, a smudge of a Shirley’s lipstick over one eyebrow.

I should have asked them to adopt you, thinks Grace. Fifteen no-nonsense, happy, laughing, loving mums. What a perfect life. But your daddy would miss you.

She doesn’t allow herself to think about whether she would miss him too.

‘D
on’t tell me! Salmon and salad on multigrain. No butter, no beetroot, no onion!’

‘You got it!’ shouts Sophie across the crowd of people at the sandwich shop. She is actually a little bored with salmon and salad sandwiches, but Al, the man who owns the shop, takes such professional pride in remembering her lunch order that she doesn’t feel she can change it. Once she’d said, ‘I think I might have ham and cheese today,’ and he’d said, ‘Oh, feel like something a bit different, eh?’ and looked hurt, his tongs hovering uncertainly over the sandwich fillings. After all, salmon and salad is a delicious combination. Sometimes she does go to other places for lunch, but then, the next day, Al cries, ‘We missed you yesterday! Where were you?’ and Sophie thinks, This is ridiculous. Why don’t I just admit I had won ton soup at the Chinese takeaway? But Al seems so convinced she is in a monogamous relationship with his sandwich shop that she has to pretend to sneeze to cover up her guilty blush. ‘Ah, you had the flu!’ Al says kindly. As a result, he has decided she is a rather sickly sort.

‘Keeping up that vitamin C, Sally?’ he asks today as he expertly compiles her sandwich. That’s the other problem with Al. He thinks her name is Sally. Sophie is sure she must have tried to correct him at least once but now the moment for setting him straight has long passed. He has been calling her Sally for three years. Once, he confided to her that was how he remembered her sandwich order. ‘I just think to myself, here comes Sally Salmon!’

That had given her such a bad attack of the giggles she’d had to pretend to sneeze six times in a row, causing Al to worriedly suggest garlic tablets.

‘Actually, you’re looking well today, Sally,’ he says now. He nudges his wife who is chopping up boiled eggs. ‘Look. Sally is glowing today. She looks even prettier than usual.’

‘Hmmph,’ says his wife, who doesn’t seem to like working in a sandwich shop or being married to Al.

‘Is love in the air, perhaps, Sally?’ asks Al. He flutters a hygienically gloved hand like a butterfly.

‘Perhaps,’ says Sophie. ‘Oh, well, not really.’ She feels her heart lift as she thinks about Aunt Connie’s letter, sitting safely in the zippered pocket of her handbag. ‘But I got some good news.’

‘Did you now,’ says Al, and then his eyes flicker to another regular in the crowd. ‘Don’t tell me! Avocado and salami!’

‘You got it,’ says a resigned voice.

Sophie picks up her brown paper bag, gives avocado and salami a sympathetic smile and pushes her way through the crowd and out onto the streets of Sydney. She walks down into the Domain to her usual spot to eat her lunch under a Moreton Bay fig, where she can read her book and watch the sporty types from nearby offices playing netball and soccer in their lunch breaks. It is the middle of winter and the air is frosty cold but the sun is hot and summery. The sporty types are red-faced and sweaty.

‘
Pass
, Jen!’ calls out an anguished netballer. ‘I’m here! Would you
pass
!’ Jen, a rather large girl with black hair, flings the ball wildly and the other team intercepts it. There are groans of disgust and Jen looks doleful, hands on her hips, chest heaving. She is probably a high-powered lawyer, thinks Sophie, but every Wednesday at lunchtime she is the kid who nobody wants on their team. Sophie watches the game for a bit and then pulls her book from her bag. She is starting to get to know far too many of these people and has already identified a blossoming romance between the tall Goal Attack and a married-to-somebody-else soccer player. If she isn’t careful these lunchtime games will become her own personal reality TV programme, and she is already unhealthily hooked on too much socially unacceptable television. One should
not
be listening to a very interesting lecture on ancient Greek mythology, like she was last Monday night, and realise that one is actually thinking about who is the most likely candidate to be voted off on tonight’s episode of
The Bachelorette
.

She catches herself hiding the cover of her book in her lap and defiantly holds it upright for the world to see. Reality TV is one thing, but it’s silly to be ashamed of her choice of reading material. After all, these books are often extremely well written and meticulously researched. They are historically interesting, witty and clever. She should just come right out and tell people: ‘It so happens I quite enjoy a good…regency romance.’ She’d caught the habit from her mother, who isn’t in the least concerned about what people think and even belongs to a Regency Romance Readers’ Club. Once a year they have a party where everyone has to dress up as lords and ladies. Sophie’s dad always goes along, stoic and ridiculous in his cravat, breeches, stockings and waistcoat. Now that’s true love: a man who is prepared to wear a cravat for you.

Many of Sophie’s friends blame regency romances for what they describe as her ‘unrealistic’ approach to her love life. Recently, there has been an aggressive campaign to get her to join an Internet dating site.

‘There is nothing sleazy or desperate about Internet dating,’ declares Lisa, who met her boyfriend in a Paris bookstore.

‘I know so many people who are doing it, you don’t need to feel ashamed,’ says Shari, married to a paramedic who fell in love with her when he was winched down by helicopter to rescue her after she broke her ankle in a bushwalking accident.

‘It’s
fun
, it’s
great
fun, it’s so
easy
and
convenient
,’ cries Amanda, who actually did meet her husband on the Internet. Sophie doesn’t really like Amanda’s husband, and she suspects that Amanda doesn’t like him much either, which accounts for her demented enthusiasm on the topic.

She is resisting the Internet idea, not just because of Amanda’s husband but also because she doesn’t want to one day tell her children that she posted an ad on the Internet, interviewed twenty-five hopeful applicants, and finally their father turned up and looked good in comparison with the rest of them. It just doesn’t seem right.

Anyway, when she thinks about a truthful description of herself it makes her wince.

Yep, that about summed it up. What a catch. If Sophie was a man she wouldn’t date herself. She’d run a mile. ‘Jeez,’ she’d say, ‘
regency romances
! Give me a scuba-diving, marathon-running, catamaran-sailing woman!’ The problem is that Sophie wouldn’t want to date the sort of man who would want to date her. She imagines too skinny a man with too nice a complexion, saying, ‘Oh, regency romances, how interesting!’ Blah.

She looks up from her book to watch a family group setting up a picnic nearby. The daddy in his business suit, the mummy in a pretty pink cardigan and skirt, two frolicking angels with white-blond hair. They’ve come in to meet Daddy in his lunch break and he’s so chuffed to see them! Good God, they look like something from a television commercial. Daddy is caressing Mummy’s hand and she’s giggling at something he’s said. Is Mummy looking over and wishing she was a free, single career-woman like Sophie? Nope. No way. She’s so blindingly happy it hurts to look at her.

Oh stop it. You are not going to turn into one of those embittered, jaded single women. They’re a lovely family. If you knew them, you’d be their friend. One of the blond angels comes toddling over to where Sophie is sitting under the tree. He holds out a grubby fist to her and shows her a piece of bark.

‘Wow!’ says Sophie. ‘That’s very pretty.’

‘Sorry!’ The mummy runs over and scoops up her child. ‘Don’t disturb the lady.’

‘It’s OK,’ says Sophie. It’s perfectly OK that you appear to be at least ten years younger than me, and you already have two children, and I’m a ‘lady’ who doesn’t even have a boyfriend. No problem. It’s fine.

There is something so undignified about being single when you’re nearly forty. It’s not glamorous any more, or funny. It’s sad and sometimes it’s lonely, even when you do have a Christmas card list numbering over one hundred and you can remember the birthdays of at least forty different people, not even counting their children. For God’s sake, even the girls on
Sex and the City
all got matched up in the final episode.

On Saturday afternoon, Sophie had talked to a friend who described what she’d done that morning: two loads of washing, grocery shopping, driving children to soccer and ballet, and so on and so forth. She might even have baked a cake. It was quite extraordinary.

‘What have you been doing?’ asked the friend.

‘Oh, cleaned the bathroom, paid a few bills, you know, just pottering,’ said Sophie, stifling a yawn.

Actually, she was still in her pyjamas and all she’d achieved that morning was getting out of bed. She hadn’t even managed to feed herself breakfast yet. It made her feel like a frivolous flibbertigibbet from one of her regency romances, except that frivolous flibbertigibbets don’t have wrinkles that appear on either side of their mouths when the bathroom lights are too bright, and they don’t feel sick when they see magazine articles about the decreasing fertility of women in their late thirties.

She remembers a woman at her first job who used to sit at the desk next to her doing data entry and saying at regular intervals, ‘Oops! Stuffed it up, buttercup!’ It seems an appropriate description for Sophie’s life:
Oops! Stuffed it up, buttercup
.
You forgot to get a family!

She reads a page of her book. The heroine in her regency romance engages in sparkling banter with her dashing suitor.

Maybe Sophie should try out Internet dating. Maybe she is unrealistically romantic. Maybe she does think her life is a friggin’ fairytale, like her friend Claire had said once when they were both very drunk. ‘Sophie, your problem is that you think life is a friggin’ fairytale. You’re so friggin’ optimistic you don’t just see the glass as half-f, you see it as
full
, of, of…pink champagne! And the thing is,
the glass isn’t full
, Sophie! It’s half
empty
!’ Claire said ‘friggin’ a lot when she was drunk. It was funny. She always denied it the next day.

Sophie munches her way through her sandwich without really tasting it. She should just come clean with Al and tell him she’s sick to death of salmon and salad and she wants something really loopy like curried egg and asparagus. She is in a rut. That’s the problem. These sandwiches are a symbol of a life that’s going nowhere.

Ah, but then again, how could she have forgotten? Her life isn’t in a rut! It’s at a crossroads, a turning point. Her life actually
is
like a fairytale and Aunt Connie is her fairy godmother. She puts down the book and takes out the letter from her handbag to re-read it for about the hundredth time. It’s weirdly compelling reading something written ‘from the grave’, so to speak.

You would expect a letter from an old lady to be written in spidery handwriting on lavender-scented notepaper–it’s typical of Aunt Connie that hers is perfectly typed in Microsoft Word and looks like a business letter. Apparently she did a computer course when she was eighty.

Sophie tries to visualise Connie sitting at her computer to type it. She remembers an upright, white-haired woman with powdery, papery skin, a longish, fine-boned face and intelligent brown eyes that dared you to even think about treating her like an old person. Some elderly people look like they’ve always been old, but Connie looked like a young person who had aged a great deal. She was frail, and moved slowly but impatiently, as if she was driving too slow a car. You could tell that once upon a time she’d been the sort of person who never sat still.

It had been a summer’s day when Thomas had taken Sophie to visit, and there was the smell of an approaching storm in the air. Sophie was feeling flippant and skittish, while Thomas was in one of his stodgy grown-up moods that made Sophie want to act like a rebellious teenager. He didn’t like going to visit his family on Scribbly Gum; he preferred it when they came into Sydney. ‘It’s such a hassle getting out there,’ he’d say, in an exhausted tone, as if it involved a mountain trek. He’d only taken Sophie out to the island two or three times while they’d been dating, in spite of the fact that Sophie was always hopefully suggesting it.

They’d had lunch first with his parents, Margie and Ron. It was Margie who had said it might be a good idea to stop in and say hello to Connie before they caught the ferry back. Connie’s husband Jimmy had died just a couple of months earlier. Thomas hadn’t complained–he was a good, dutiful son–but he was anxious to get off the island.

‘I just start to feel a bit trapped when I’m here for too long,’ he’d told Sophie as they walked down the hill towards Aunt Connie’s place. ‘It’s so
small
, you know what I mean?’