Wildflower Hill (39 page)

Rehearsal finished, and Patrick and I had to wait outside for twenty minutes with Mina because her father was late. I took her through her steps again on the grass, but she had trouble concentrating without the music, so I let her be. Finally, the Lexus arrived. He beeped, and Mina walked down to the car park with a quick “goodbye.”

“He never comes to watch rehearsal?” I asked Patrick quietly.

“Never.”

“Concerts?”

“Never.”

The door slammed and they drove off.

“Bastard,” I said.

Patrick sighed. “We don’t really know what goes on inside families. Best not to judge.”

“Does she have a mother? Siblings?”

“Her mother died when she was little. No siblings.”

I turned the thought over in my mind for a while. Then Patrick said, “Are you hungry?”

“No,” I said, before I realized the ramifications of his question: hunger in company meant a lunch date. “I mean, yes. A little. We’ve got to eat, after all. Did you want to go and get some lunch?”

“If you like.”

“Sure. Why not?” I said, wondering if I sounded at all nonchalant.

We wound up in a café at Sandy Bay. The coffee was a disappointment, but it was nice to look at Patrick’s front instead of his back. I found it hard to believe that I’d once thought him more interesting than handsome. In fact, his face was
appealing. His eyes, in particular, were an unusual shade of green, and the outer edge of his lids creased upward in an exotic way.

“So how did it go with Mina?” he asked after his first sip of coffee.

“She did great. So focused. I didn’t realize she could be capable of that.”

“All of the kids are different. They have a varied range of abilities,” he said. “Nothing surprises me about them anymore.” He smiled. “So she likes her dance?”

I nodded. “Real ballet,” I said.

“It looked great, what you showed me.”

I squirmed a little. “Very simplified. Dew Drop was my first role. It’s quite demanding, in reality.” I realized I was bragging, but couldn’t stop myself. I wanted him to know what a big deal I had been when I could dance. But my desperation to impress made me sad, and I fell silent.

He let me sit there quietly for a few moments, then he said, “Emma, I’ve seen you dance.”

I lifted my head to meet his eyes. “You have?”

“Monica has a DVD. You were a hero of hers when she was a teenager. Everyone knew about you because of the connection your grandmother had to town, and the newsagent stocked a couple of DVDs with you in them. I must have seen you dancing Giselle about a hundred times.”

I glowed with pride. “I had no idea Monica was a fan.”

“She made me swear not to tell you, in case you thought she was a dork.”

I laughed at this. “She wanted to dance?”

“She tried it for a while when she was small, but she never really got the hang of it. Tall and gangly, like me.” He made a fuss of stirring his coffee, not looking directly at me. “You dance beautifully.”

“Danced,” I said. “Past tense.” I thought about my changing body. Already the edges of my muscles were softening, and a comfortable layer of fat was creeping over everything.

“Sorry,” he said. “I don’t want to make you feel sad.”

Then our lunch came and we got off the topic of me, which was both a blessing and a disappointment. I did want to hear more about how beautifully I’d danced, especially from him. But the thought aroused in me such a keen sadness, of things lost that couldn’t be found again.

Patrick dropped me home around 3:30, and I found myself alone and disconsolate, with a wishing feeling in my chest. Trouble was, I wasn’t at all sure what to wish for anymore.

My grandmother had kept every sketch and every pattern of every item of clothing she had ever made, and they were all filed at Blaxland Wool’s head office in North Sydney. Usually, there was a display in the foyer of the building, behind glass and under white downlighting. So the last thing I expected to find in the boxes was a tracing-paper pattern.

I nearly tore it, vigorously emptying a box I thought contained only cockroach-stained Georgette Heyer novels. It was Sunday, very early. I’d been awake at the first caw of the crow. A dream had woken me. My mother was in it, but she wasn’t really my mother; a big tidal wave was coming, and I had to
find a photograph in a box to prove who she was before the wave hit. I’d woken up just as the sky had grown dark with the coming wall of water.

It unsettled me.

So here I was, pulling out a folded pattern, thinking about how it would go in the collection back in Sydney. Then I unfolded it to look at it, and it was clearly for a child. A little girl. It was a small dress.

Curious, I kept digging. In the bottom of the box, I found eleven similar tracing-paper patterns. All for a child. Little tops and skirts and pinafores.

My grandmother had never designed children’s wear. She was known as an icon of women’s work wear. I laid them all out and looked at them for a long time. Yes, she could have made these things for a neighbor or a friend or . . . But I kept thinking of the little girl in the photograph. Were these for her? Who was she?

And why wasn’t I just calling my mother to ask? She might be able to clear it up in seconds.

Or not. If Grandma had a secret first family, Mum would be upset if she found out. And then she’d want to come here.

Carefully, I refolded the patterns and put them on top of the piano.

I admitted that I wasn’t just cleaning out boxes to find Grandma’s story. I was on a hunt for evidence. I slowed down to half speed, scrutinizing every notebook, every letter, every business record. I examined old invoices for sheep bought and wool sold, to see if they yielded any clues. They didn’t, but I kept looking.

*  *  *

With her usual almost supernatural prescience, my mother called that evening to see how I was doing.

“Oh, fine,” I said vaguely, sitting on the bottom stair and stretching my knee out. “There’s still a lot more to do.”

“I expected you home today.”

“Ah. You didn’t go to the airport, did you?”

“No. But I changed the sheets on your bed.”

I felt guilty, but it wasn’t new for me to feel guilty where Louise Blaxland-Hunter was concerned. “I’ll be a few more weeks. Maybe six.”

She sounded horrified. “How much is there to do?”

“I’m going slower than I thought, and I really quite like it here. I’ve even made friends. Don’t be shocked.”

Mum laughed.

“I’ll definitely be home for Christmas, though,” I said.

“That will be lovely. Our first Christmas with you in a long time.”

“Hey, Mum, could you send down my stuff, please? The things I brought with me from London?” I could use my laptop, perhaps even my mobile phone. And I did have other clothes apart from jeans and T-shirts.

We chatted for a while, and then—foolishly—I ventured a question. “Mum, how much do you know about what Grandma did when she lived down here?”

“She ran the sheep farm. She kept the books, but she used to go out mustering, too. I never believed her until I saw her ride a horse one time at a friend’s property. She must have been fifty by then but very comfortable in the saddle.”

“I can’t imagine it.”

“She was graceful.” There was a smile in Mum’s voice.

“Anything else? Did she have any friends? Boyfriends?”

“I doubt it, love. She wouldn’t have had time. Besides, Granddad was her first love.”

“Really? She was in her thirties when she met him.”

That little thinking pause that my mother did. A few moments of silence that weren’t mute so much as calculating. “Why do you ask?” she said smoothly.

“No reason,” I said, not nearly so smoothly. And she was on to me.

“Em, if you know something I don’t . . .”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.

“Why are you asking about Grandma’s past?”

“Because I’m here in her big old house and thinking about whether she lived here alone. Thinking about if she was lonely.”

“Are you lonely? Do you need me to come down there?” she said. “Do you need some help sorting things out? Really, you shouldn’t stay too much longer. You belong up here with us in Sydney. I can help you get through it quicker. I can be on a plane tomorrow, bring your things down with me.”

I was well used to her persuasions; I’d heard them a thousand times in London.

“No, Mum, I’m fine. Just send my stuff down. I’m enjoying being by myself. I need the time to think. Don’t come.”
Please don’t come
.

She smelled a rat, though, and I wished I’d said nothing.
At least not to Mum. I wondered whether, if I prodded Uncle Mike the right way, I might get better information.

It took until Thursday for my things to arrive.

“What have you got there?” Monica asked curiously as the courier van backed down my driveway.

“My things. Clothes, bits and pieces I brought from London.” I peeled open the tape and flipped open the first box, kneeling gingerly.

“You’re settling in, then?”

“Not really, I . . . well, for a while.” I pulled out the clothes on top and set them aside on the floor of the hallway.

“Let me turn over the main bedroom for you. Have the nice room.”

I shook my head. “All the rooms are nice. I’m fine where I am. Look, my laptop.” I pulled out the laptop and rested it on the floor. “I thought maybe I could get connected to the Internet.”

“I can call the phone company,” she offered. “You’ll need a modem.”

“That would be great,” I replied. I found my mobile phone. Dead as a doornail. I rummaged farther for the charger but couldn’t see it. I couldn’t even remember bringing it from England. It was probably still plugged into the wall there.

Monica took the phone from me. “I’ll take care of it,” she said.

I smiled at her, thinking of what Patrick had told me: her
teenage case of hero worship. “You are so fabulous, Monica. But I really should learn how to do some of this stuff myself. I always had a PA, so that meant I never had to be organized or figure out how things work. I just danced.”

“That’s good, though.”

“In some ways. In others, it meant I was allowed to fall out of the world. That made it much harder to cope when I had my accident.” From the kitchen, I could hear the kettle whistling. Monica had put it on before the courier arrived.

“I’ll get it,” Monica said. “Tea or coffee?”

“Coffee,” I replied. “Make it strong.” The front door was still open, and a wide strip of sunlight crept into my lap as I unpacked the box. A flock of cockatoos screeched past, but then there was silence in their wake. I was growing to love the silence, the absence of traffic noise particularly.

In the box, I found a plastic bag with the Blaxland Wool logo on it. Curious, I opened it up. Inside was my tiara from
Swan Lake,
the one I’d told Dad to throw away. He never was good at taking instructions, I suppose. Years of being bossed by Mum made him immune. Monica returned, and we sat together on the floor drinking coffee.

“What does it say about me,” I asked, “that my whole life fits in four boxes, while my grandmother’s takes up a whole house?”

“It doesn’t say anything,” Monica replied. “You had a different kind of life.”

In the next box, I found a photo of Josh and me in a cracked frame. I wasn’t prepared for it. I pulled it slowly out into the light.

“Who’s that?” Monica asked.

It took a moment for me to speak. “That’s Josh,” I said. “That’s my ex.”

“Your ex?”

“Yes, only I didn’t want him to be ex. He left me right before my accident.”

“You still love him?” There was a frown in her voice, and I glanced up to see that she was scrutinizing me very closely.

“Well, yes,” I said. “Perhaps. He’s always on my mind.” Though I was beginning to forget. Forget the way his face moved when he smiled, forget the way his skin smelled when he came out of the shower, forget the exact timbre of his laugh . . .

Monica grew quiet, and I wondered why my talk of Josh upset her so. We drank our coffee in silence as I pulled out some of my dancing awards. Mum hadn’t been selective at all: she had literally sent all of my things.

“Can you think of a place I can put these?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “Not really.”

“You’re usually so good at that kind of thing.”

She climbed to her feet. “I’ll go clean up the kitchen,” she said shortly.

I looked at the photo of Josh on the floor, then back at Monica. She was acting as though she were jealous. Then it all clicked into place. She
was
jealous: on behalf of Patrick. I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. I was torn between wanting to reassure her and not wanting to lie. I
did
still love Josh. At least I thought I did. I couldn’t broach the topic, so I pretended I hadn’t noticed her anger.

But I did curse myself for going against my instincts and making friends with people down here. People were so complex and unpredictable.

Myself included.

I knew if I waited until around eight o’clock on Saturday night, I’d have a good chance of getting Uncle Mike while he was sauced. He loved his beer but was prudent enough to partake only on weekends.

Uncle Mike lived alone. My auntie Donna had left him when I was still small, and since then he’d had a string of “lady friends” but hadn’t settled down with anyone.

“Uncle Mike?” I said when he picked up the phone. “It’s Emma.”

“My favorite niece!” he boomed. “Just having a few beers. Why don’t you pop over?”

“I’m in Tasmania,” I replied.

“Still? Louise didn’t tell me that.”

“There’s a lot more work involved in clearing up this place than I’d thought.”

“You should pay someone to do it for you, sell the place, and use the money to get yourself a nice little flat in Sydney. I’m seeing a lady who’s in real estate. She can help you find something.”

I let him talk and offer me advice for a while, warming him up, I suppose. I did love my uncle Mike, but he was a terrible know-it-all. Finally, he drew breath long enough for me
to speak again. “Hey, Uncle Mike, what do you know about Grandma’s life down here in Tassie?”