On Sunday morning I pulled into Lil’s driveway, a tin of Tom’s shortbread on the passenger seat. Lil was in the garden, deadheading spent flowers from a climbing rosebush. She must have been up early, as a tall mound of prunings sat beside her on the grass. Giving me a wave, she abandoned her secateurs and hastened over, beaming from beneath an enormous sun hat. She thanked me for the shortbread, placing it on a shady garden bench. Then she linked her arm through mine and steered me down the hill towards the edge of the garden.
‘Joe and I have a surprise for you, dear. It’s a bit of a hike, though – are you up for it?’
‘Of course. Where’s Joe?’
Lil smiled mysteriously. ‘He’s waiting for us. Come on.’
Her big grin put me at ease. She’d clearly recovered from her episode at the reserve. She seemed different somehow, more at ease with herself, as though she’d released a heavy burden. I wondered if our talk last week had done her good as Joe had claimed, despite the headache it brought on.
As we walked over the grass and onto a gravel trail that veered downhill, she chatted brightly about her involvement with the drama group.
‘They’re such a good bunch of girls,’ she said. ‘For every bad egg that goes through that shelter, there’s a handful who only need a bit of TLC to bring out their best.’ She looked at me and smiled. ‘Like us all, I suppose.’
‘The shelter must’ve been fascinating work, but heart-breaking too, I imagine?’
‘Oh, yes, there were times when I despaired. Some of the women were too beaten down to bounce back. Addicted to drugs, lifelong victims of abuse . . . despite my belief that anyone with enough faith can overcome their baggage, those hardcore cases had lost hope. Lost any belief in themselves and given up trying. It’s something we all struggle with, isn’t it? Time passes and the setbacks wear us down. It seems easier to just give up. I suppose that’s why I love the drama group so much. All my girls have strong spirits.’
‘No hard cases?’
Lil smiled sadly. ‘There are always those. We do have this one girl, Jenny. She turned up a while back with a black eye and split lip. Now, barely a month later, she’s helping me with the costumes and seems to have discovered a love of fashion. She’s asked me to help her fill out a form to study at Gundara TAFE.’
‘Good on her. She’ll be one of your success stories, then?’
‘I hope so. Time will tell. Most of these women have grown up believing they’re not worth anything. We learn so much from others. Parents, school teachers, relatives. That’s how we learn to fit in and develop community spirit. But if the conduct of those we learn from is unhealthy, then how are we supposed to know what’s right? Or even what’s expected of us? So at the shelter, we provide new examples to follow. Kinder, more rational ones.’ She laughed and lifted a brow, her eyes shining. ‘And sometimes it works.’
‘You have a real passion for those women, don’t you? For helping them, I mean.’
‘Yes, I always have.’
‘Have you ever told any of them about . . .?’
She shook her head. ‘Oh no, Abby. Mind you, there were moments when I was tempted to, but of course I never did. I suppose with the women at the shelter, I like to keep the focus on them. Ah, look.’ She patted my arm and darted ahead, pulling aside the prickly boughs of a grevillea bush. ‘There’s Joe.’
I followed her to the edge of a large billabong. Joe stood at the edge of the water and when he saw us he waved. His baggy jeans were rolled above the knee, his feet sunk to the ankle in mud. He squelched over holding a tin bucket filled with what looked like riverweed.
‘Good to see you, Abby love. Magnificent day, isn’t it? What do you think of our visitors?’ He gestured at the scene behind him.
The billabong sheltered under a grove of apple box eucalyptuses and was fed by a deep stream that cut between banks of native grass. Sailing majestically on the water was a family of black swans, the parents trailed by cygnets, and their high-pitched squeaks filled the air.
‘Oh, they’re beautiful! Do they live here?’
‘They arrive around Christmas every year,’ Lil said, ‘and stay till the end of May. Joe thinks it’s because the billabong is protected, but . . .’ She laughed happily. ‘Oh, Joe, you scoundrel. Show her.’
Joe laughed too. Grabbing his bucket, he went over to the water’s edge and began flinging soggy strands of riverweed into the middle of the billabong. The swans squeaked excitedly and rushed for the weed, their tail feathers quivering.
‘They like the water beetles on the weed,’ Joe called over his shoulder. ‘Gets ’em in a frenzy every time.’
Long necks swooped and sleek heads dived, and soon Joe’s bucket was empty. Now the swans began to squeak at Joe, and coasted over to see why the supply had stopped. When one of the larger swans waddled up the shore towards him, Joe headed back up the bank to join us on the grass.
‘Whew!’ He wiped his brow, smearing his face with mud. ‘That big fella had a bit of speed on him, didn’t he?’
Lil started giggling, and the sound was infectious. Joe and I joined in, and soon the sound of our laughter drowned out the sound of the swans. As we made our way back to the house, Joe hurried ahead to wash the mud off his legs and face and put the kettle on.
‘He’s such a clown,’ Lil said admiringly. ‘A lovable one though.’ She looked at me. ‘You seem different today, Abby. I’ve been trying to figure it out all morning. Are you doing your hair in a new style?’
‘Um. No.’
‘You have a glow about you. Perhaps that’s a new top you’re wearing – the pale blue is lovely.’
I patted my cheeks. ‘If I’m glowing, it’s only from the sun.’
Lil laughed. ‘What’s his name, love?’
‘There’s no one,’ I said hastily, brushing at my jeans, unable to meet her eyes. ‘I guess I’ve been getting outdoors a little more than usual, that’s all.’
‘I see.’
I tried not to think of my steamy moment with Tom under the gum tree, but heat flooded my face, and then my boot caught on a tree root and I almost tripped. Lil steadied me with her hand and smiled knowingly.
I sighed. ‘I’m no good at relationships, Lil. I mean, not like you and Joe. I really admire what you have. But the minute I start getting serious with someone, I clam up. I feel stifled, as if I’m no longer in charge of my own life.’
‘So you sabotage the relationship before it can trap you?’
‘Yeah, pretty much.’
‘You know, I used to feel the same.’
‘Really?’ I stopped walking and shaded my eyes to look at her. ‘But you and Joe are so devoted. So brilliant together.’
‘We weren’t always. When we first met, I was terrified of getting into something and not being able to get back out. After my father died, my mother used to say that loving him had made her weak. She blamed my father’s death for all her problems. And I’d seen the way love had ruined . . . well, other people’s lives. But when I met Joe, he taught me something very important.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s not love that makes a person weak, but fear. Love is the one thing in life that can truly make you strong. If you allow it to.’
She laughed. ‘Joe has his moments.’
Again I thought of Tom’s stolen kiss under the gum tree, and my skin warmed at the memory. ‘Maybe there’s hope for me after all.’
Lil patted my arm. ‘Anything is possible if you want it badly enough.’
• • •
Fifteen minutes later, I was sitting at the kitchen table. I dug in my bag for Frankie’s diary page and unfolded it, then propped it against a jam jar filled with pink dahlias. Lil bustled about making tea and arranging the shortbread on a plate. Finally, she settled opposite me.
‘Where did we leave off last time?’ she asked.
‘You and Frankie were happy at Ravensong.’
‘Ah, yes.’
‘But I’m guessing things didn’t stay that way?’
Lil adjusted the jar, making the dahlias nod in the listless air, then she tucked her fingers out of sight beneath the table edge. ‘Frankie turned twelve soon after we went to live at Ravensong. By the time she was fifteen, she had formed an attachment with the young serviceman.’
‘An attachment?’
‘She fell in love with him.’
‘Oh.’ I pressed back in my chair. ‘Did he share her feelings?’
‘Yes, he did. In fact, he loved her intensely. Obsessively, you might even say. On Frankie’s fifteenth birthday he asked her to marry him. Frankie had always been a romantic girl. All she’d ever wanted was to fall in love and have adventures. See the faraway places she’d read about in books – India, China, and even the wilds of Africa. So they made a plan. They decided to marry one year later, when Frankie turned sixteen. He spoke of an inheritance, more than enough, he said, to get them both out of the country and settled elsewhere. Meanwhile I would return to our mother in Sydney. So in January 1953, we packed up the truck with our belongings and several days’ worth of supplies, and left Ravensong forever. Frankie decided that driving me all the way to Sydney would be too risky for them, so they dropped me in Gundara with some money for the train, and we said our goodbyes.’
‘You never saw her again?’
‘No.’
‘Oh Lil, why ever not?’
‘She made me promise not to try to find her.’
‘Is that why you never told anyone what happened to her?’
Lil rubbed her cheeks. ‘Can you imagine if I had? The police, the authorities, would have tracked them down. After what he’d done, they might both have faced prison. Or worse. They were still hanging people in those days. Frankie was my sister, and my best friend. I could never have betrayed her that way; so I kept her secret to protect her.’
We sat in the quiet, Lil gazing at her hands, me nursing my empty teacup. Frankie hadn’t perished in the bed upstairs, as I had assumed. She may even still be out there somewhere, alive and well. I looked at Lil.
‘There was a stain on the bed sheets, even on the pillow . . . it looked like blood.’
Lil looked at me sharply. ‘Blood?’
‘In the room upstairs. I thought perhaps that someone had died up there.’
A long silence. ‘Not while we were living there.’ Then Lil’s face creased into a smile, her puzzlement falling away. ‘I do seem to remember a bowl of soup being spilled the night before we left. Perhaps that’s what you saw?’
I recalled the leathery feel of the mark and its dark unpleasant colour. What sort of soup stain persisted like that for sixty years? I wanted to point this out, but sensed that Lil was growing restless. So I washed down the last of my shortbread with a swallow of tea, choosing my next words with care. ‘Have you ever tried to trace her?’
Lil reached for one of the dahlias, plucking off a petal and crushing it between her fingers. ‘No, never.’
‘But she might still be alive.’
Lil rubbed her hands together, then examined her palms. ‘I made a promise, Abby. And no matter how lonely I sometimes get without her, I’ve sacrificed so much to keep that promise. It’s what Frankie wanted.’
Tilting my empty cup from side to side, I inspected the dregs, waiting for Lil to continue. But the silence stretched. I had my answer, but it hadn’t stopped the buzz of questions as I’d hoped it would. Where was Frankie now? Still with her serviceman? Had they really found their happy ever after? Or had Frankie matured enough to grow resentful over the childhood he’d stolen from her and her sister? And if so, why hadn’t she come forward, or at least tried to contact Lil?
Lil caught my eye, then looked at the diary page. I nodded. She picked it up, folded it in half, and then in half again. She kept folding until it was too tiny to fold any more. Then she tucked it into her skirt pocket, and got to her feet.
‘Well, then. I’d best clear those rose prunings before it gets dark. If I leave it till tomorrow, the possums will scatter them all over the yard and Joe and I will be picking thorns out of our shoes for days.’
I collected our tea things and took them to the sink. Ran the tap and rinsed them. Then, not looking at Lil, I said, ‘Do you ever wish you could see her again?’
Lil put away the shortbread and then took out a tea towel, joining me at the sink to dry the cups. ‘My sister doesn’t care to be found, Abby. I daresay she’s changed her name many times. Perhaps even left the country. Even if I wanted to, I’d never be able to trace her.’
‘But you’d like to see her again?’
She dropped her gaze. ‘With all my heart.’
‘What if I told you there might be a way?’
• • •
Lil hung the tea towel to dry and returned to the table, sinking into her chair. She watched the younger woman from beneath her lashes. She liked Abby, but she wished the girl would leave. All this nonsense about finding Frankie was making her head hurt. The only thing she wanted to do right now was retreat to her room and read Frankie’s diary page.
But Abby seemed in no hurry to go. Settling opposite Lil, she reached into the bag slung over her chair and pulled out a sheet of paper. She passed it across the table.
Lil stared at the sheet. It looked like a photocopy from a book. She examined the heading, Gundara Remembered by Mary Quail, but it meant nothing to her.
‘It’s an excerpt from a memoir,’ Abby said.
‘Oh?’
‘Tom found it on the internet last night.’
Lil frowned at the paper. ‘What’s it got to do with Frankie?’
‘Mary Quail was a midwife born at the turn of the century. She lived in Gundara all her life. Apparently she was quite a character, had her finger in everyone’s pies. And, as you’ll see, she was blessed with an extraordinary memory.’
Lil swallowed. Smoothing the excerpt of Mary Quail’s memoir on the table, she blinked to clear her vision and then began to read.
In 1942 my brother came home on furlough and we spent two glorious weeks exploring some of his old haunts. Childhood polio had made him unfit for combat so, to his eternal chagrin, he’d been posted at a war office in Darwin. ‘A hellhole of heat and mosquitoes,’ he called it, and was mighty glad to be home.
In early November he took me out to see old Lars Gilbertsen’s house, Ravensong, the stately wilderness mansion the Gilbertsens had built in the 1920s. Lars and his wife Inge had emigrated from Norway in the early 1900s. Lars was a recluse and his wife a raging socialite. Luckily they were also stupendously rich. According to my brother, Lars and Inge were once famous for their lavish garden parties. People would travel miles for the honour of attending. I didn’t believe a word of it, until I saw the house with my own eyes.
It was a splendid big place, surrounded by perfectly manicured gardens – the Gilbertsens were one of the few families in the district who could still afford hired help. I got my hopes up about being invited to one of their famous parties, but Lars was very ill when I met him, all hollow eyes and sunken cheeks, he seemed stooped and prematurely old, barely more than a shadow. And his famed parties had stopped several years before.
We were greeted at the door by a sullen, black-haired boy of about fifteen, Lars’s grandson, Ennis. Once inside, we were handed cups of watery tea and Christmas cake that I suspected had been from the year before, because it tasted mouldy. The large-boned teenage girl who served us was Ennis’s sister, Violet. She was a shifty lass, about seventeen, clearly uneasy with company. Judging by her lank hair and dowdy attire, her spotty face, she wasn’t getting the right care out here in the bush with her brother and grandfather. I felt sorry for her, and wished we could be friends, but she ignored my overtures.
Perhaps it was grief. Ennis and Violet had lost their parents many years before, when they were still little. Then in 1940, two years before I met them, their grandmother Inge had died. Soon after that, one of Lars’s business ventures crumbled when an employee died on the job and it was discovered that Lars had insufficient insurance.
By the time I met Lars he was sixty-five and bankrupt. For a while he lived off his assets, then eked a diminished income providing firewood around the region. A year after our visit to Ravensong, I heard that Lars had died. I don’t know what happened to Ennis and his sister. I heard a rumour that Ennis enlisted, though he can’t have been more than sixteen at the time. I assumed they were still living at the house, but by war’s end they both seemed to have vanished.
Lil sat very still. There had been a time, many decades ago, when she’d been adept at hiding her feelings. Despite the turmoil and guilt raging inside her, she’d always managed to keep her face pleasant and her hands steady. But somehow the passing years had eroded that ability.
The sheet of paper trembled as she passed it back to Abby. The girl was watching her expectantly. Lil pulled her hands into her lap again and took a deep breath.
‘I don’t see how any of that relates to Frankie.’
‘The serviceman’s name was Ennis Gilbertsen, wasn’t it? Which means you could locate him through army records. He might have received a service pension, or be traceable through the RSL. If you found him, you might also find Frankie.’
Lil’s fingers knotted in her lap. ‘I don’t want to find them, Abby.’
‘Are you worried about discovering that Frankie has died?’
Lil sighed. ‘I’m afraid I wasn’t truthful with you before.’
‘Oh?’
‘There’s a reason Frankie doesn’t care to be found. You see, the day we left Ravensong, we had a terrible row. We said things. Unforgivable things.’
‘What was the row about?’
‘It was about him. Ennis. I was jealous, I suppose.’
‘You had feelings for him too?’
Lil scoffed. ‘Not the sort of romantic feelings Frankie had, but yes. In a way, I loved him too. You remember that our mother never had time for us? And because of all the days we skipped school – to look after our mother or just play truant for the hell of it – the teachers considered us a lost cause. But Ennis gave us what we craved most. What every child craves. Attention. Approval. Love.’
‘He locked you in a room for five years, Lil. How is that love?’
Lil got to her feet without answering. How could she expect anyone to understand? Going over to the window, she stared out at the garden.
A sullen black-haired boy of fifteen, Mary Quail had written. Lars’s grandson, Ennis. It had shocked her to see his name printed there in black and white. All these years his name had remained in the back of her mind like a moth fluttering against the window – her secret. Seeing it written there had jolted her. To think that he’d had a life before those days she had known him at Ravensong. To think he’d been a boy with a family of his own. She’d heard his stories, of course. Known about his heartbreak and sorrows. The loss of his parents, and then his beloved sister dying so young. But seeing it written there, now, all these years later, brought such an ache to her chest she couldn’t breathe. After the war, he used to say, I never expected to be happy again. But you girls are my salvation. I thought I was saving you by taking you away from your horrible life in Sydney. But in the end you’re the ones who’ve saved me—
She jerked around.
Abby’s brows were drawn in worry. ‘Are you all right?’
Lil picked up the tea towel, but the drying rack was empty. She twisted the cloth between her hands. Spots of shadow swirled before her eyes. She needed a tablet. ‘Actually, dear. I’m feeling a little peaky.’
Abby nodded. ‘It’s been another big day. I’m sorry I pushed you about finding Frankie. I do understand about the row you had, and why you don’t want to find her.’ She collected her bag then hugged Lil, placing a gentle kiss on her cheek. At the door, she looked back. ‘I’m glad you found your happy ending, Lil. Even if it didn’t include Frankie.’
Lil stood at the window watching Abby’s little car zoom off down the driveway. Then, when the dust of the girl’s departure had settled, Lil dropped her tea towel by the sink and marched out to the sewing room.
It was time to do what she’d been putting off for too long.