Stern Bay, June 1993
A cold wind chased leaves and grit along the main street of Stern Bay. The smell of wood smoke and frying fish swirled through the chink in my van window, bringing with it a whiff of diesel. It was late morning and I guessed the fishing boats were returning with the night’s catch.
Part of me was in a rush to get to Bitterwood, to search Edwin’s gloomy old rooms in the hope of finding the explanation he’d promised. But another more fearful part kept stalling. Being there alone, among the shadows and echoes of the past, would be like sliding back through time into the landscape of my nightmares. A landscape I wasn’t entirely sure I felt ready to face.
I’d skipped breakfast, so decided to have an early lunch. As I manoeuvred into a park outside the town’s only takeaway shop, I saw the red postbox on the corner across the road.
Memory engulfed me. I was ten years old again, standing on that windy corner, the card I’d written to my father clutched tight. Get well soon, Daddy. I miss you.
Edwin had provided envelope and stamp, and printed the address of the hospital where Dad was staying. He called it a sanatorium, a special hospital, he said. He turned away quickly after he said this, but not before I had noticed the tears in his eyes. Later, when he drove me to Stern Bay to send off my card, he was quiet, and his mood infected me. I had lingered beside the postbox, unable to drop the envelope through the slot. That card linked me to Dad, who in turn linked me to my mother. He was the only other person in the world who missed her as terribly as I did, who understood the pain of losing her. I stood there for a long time, the salt breeze flushing my face, before I mustered the courage to let the card drop from my fingers and break the link. When it did, I rested my ear against the postbox. I fancied I could hear all the other letters and cards whispering to the newcomer in their papery voices, asking where it was going and what news it contained.
I walked back along the street to where Edwin waited in the car, my legs leaden, my heart empty as a seashell. It was only later – many years later, long after I had buried my memories of Bitterwood in the darkest corner of my mind – that the broken link between my father and me had finally begun to heal.
A door clanged open up the street, and the smell of fish and chips cut through the softer smells of seaweed and ocean air. Basil meowed in his crate beside me.
‘My sentiments exactly,’ I said. Grabbing my wallet, I climbed from the car and made a beeline for the takeaway shop. Ten minutes later, I was back in the van with my greasy armload: chips, two large fillets of whiting, three dim sims and a milkshake.
It was too windy to sit on the beach, so I parked on the foreshore and sat in the van, gazing through the windscreen at the waves. The hot oily saltiness of the chips made me feel better. Peeling the batter off the second piece of fish, I let it cool and offered a morsel to Basil. He nibbled daintily at first, as if astonished that something could be so delicious. Within minutes, the entire piece of fish was gone. He peered at me through the slender bars, and I smiled to myself.
‘Plenty more where that came from, boyo.’
Settling back with my milkshake, I gazed across the wintry beach. In the distance, a dark speck moved slowly along the shoreline. Someone was collecting shells or pebbles, or flotsam – and the sight of them drew me back in time.
When I was a kid, my family had holidayed near here, in a tiny cottage a mile or so from Bitterwood, right on the beach. Christmas time meant a hamper of sandwiches, cold drinks, fruitcake on the sand. Once or twice we had come midyear, which left indelible memories of huddling out of the wind, scalding our tongues on the sickly sweetness of my mother’s hot chocolate sipped from tin mugs.
The summer I turned ten, all that changed.
In my mind, I could see my mother just as she looked that last day. Her blonde hair tied back from her face, her cheeks pink from the sun. She wore her favourite jeans and her threadbare blue cardigan. She adored that cardigan despite the loose cuffs and odd buttons, and refused all my father’s admonitions to throw it away. I could still see her hurrying along the beach, clutching her sunhat to her head with one hand, its brim flapping like a wounded bird. I tried to keep her frozen there, but the inevitable always followed: her fall from the slippery rocks, her plunge into deep water. Her last breath, not of her garden or of the lavender hand cream she wore to bed, or of chocolate cake fresh from the oven, but of salt air, and rotting seaweed, and deep water – smells I knew she tolerated only for my father’s sake. Mum had been a country girl, preferring the gentler atmosphere of mountain air and river water, but had brought us to the coast every year in the hope of repairing Dad’s relationship with Edwin.
In the years that followed her death, I read anything I could find on the subject of drowning. I learned about people who thrashed so violently they broke ribs or dislocated major joints, or inhaled debris deep into their lungs. Those images of her were the worst. I asked Dad about it years later, when I thought it might have finally been safe to mention her. Dad studied his hands, turning them palm-up, his fingers curled like a limp sea creature.
‘It would have been quick,’ he reassured me.
Yet I knew from his hollow voice that quick did not mean pain-free. At ten – and then eleven, twelve, thirteen – I refused to see how dying would be painless. How could it be, when those left behind suffered so terribly?
At first, Dad bore up to the strain, but weeks later, when they found her washed up miles from where she’d gone in, my father’s resolve to be strong for me crumbled. The shadow of my mother’s absence folded around us, took over our lives. My father lost his way and ended up at Banksia House.
As for me, I had gone to stay with my grandfather.
At Bitterwood, where I’d learned to jump at shadows.
The ocean had turned grey. Dirty sea foam capped the waves. Overhead, big bruised clouds pushed across the sky. The distant shell collector had vanished, leaving the shoreline windswept and bare.
Rain was coming. Not just rain, but a storm. The ocean road would be too dangerous to navigate in wild weather, so I buckled up and headed out of town.
I drove west along the coast, leaving behind the village of Stern Bay as my van rattled and clanked around the tight bends of the Great Ocean Road. The road was a grey ribbon, winding along the edge of steep hilly bushland that dropped away to wintry beaches and wind-carved headlands. Beyond that, the vast aquamarine waters of the Bass Strait swept out towards what seemed a deep blue eternity.
I gripped the steering wheel, trying to squeeze the tremor from my fingers. I switched on the radio and jabbed through the channels, hoping to find some music or a talkback show to distract me. My thoughts kept circling back to my grandfather. I had tortured myself for weeks over whether or not to tell him about my wedding. He was too old to travel, I silently argued. He would barely remember me. Yet not inviting him seemed rude.
Then, his reply. He wished Adam and me a happy life together, and quoted a line of Emily Dickinson. Exultation is the going of an inland soul to sea. Odd for a wedding sentiment, which puzzled me . . . until I found the small object he’d included with the letter. Perhaps as an afterthought, he had wrapped the little gold heart in tissue paper and slipped it in. Had he found it washed up on the beach, I wondered, near the rocks where my mother had fallen? Or was there a murkier explanation?
I have something for you . . .
A mile or so from Bitterwood, I passed the beachside cottage where my family had holidayed in the seventies. A car was parked in the drive, and the place looked neat and freshly painted. Only the old pine in the front yard had grown taller and stragglier, and seeing it gave me a pang. Mum had loved to breakfast in its cool shade. As the cottage disappeared behind me I pictured her sitting there, smiling in her thoughtful way, her face turned to the sea, the endless blue-green body of water reflected in her eyes.
The main road veered away from the coastline. I left it and turned onto a narrow lane, which I followed around the back of the headland. The bitumen became dirt, and the roadside trees thinned out, replaced by an avenue of gnarled banksias.
Bitterwood appeared. It was a tall sandstone building with iron lace verandahs and a black tiled roof set back in a rambling garden. The shuttered windows and creeping arms of ivy made it seem otherworldly, a place torn from the pages of a dark fairytale, a porthole to another time.
I pulled up in front of the huge rusty iron gates and got out. Beyond the gates, a gravel driveway led around a turning circle where an old birdbath mouldered in the dappled light. Large trees dominated the garden. Magnolia, fig, bare limbed maples and soaring pines. It was early afternoon, but the atmosphere beneath the trees seemed nocturnal, as though my grandfather’s realm was one of shadows and night.
Once, this had been a magical place. I had loved nothing more than exploring the front garden, or escaping to the sheltered orchard down behind the house, nestled out of the wind where the trees grew lush and strong. Lofty mulberry trees whose fruit I ate in mushy handfuls and then wore the purple evidence on my hands for days afterwards. Quince trees and sour plums, cherries and apples, fuzzy peaches that tasted like sunlight, luscious black figs.
Inside the old guesthouse was even better. The maze of upstairs rooms had seemed to me an Aladdin’s cave of treasures, and my grandfather had happily indulged my eagerness to explore. There were six guest rooms, which, according to my father, had been constantly booked out during the guesthouse’s heyday. Now, they lay empty and dusty. I used to imagine that the only living creature to visit them, aside from the rats and possums and birds nesting in the walls, was me. My grandfather lived in the seventh room, and there was another small private wing once inhabited by servants. Directly above these rooms was an attic the length of a runway, narrow and filled to the rafters with tea chests and boxes, suitcases full of musty papers, debris left behind by the receding tides of the past. Bitterwood was a storehouse of memories . . . not all of them rosy. And somewhere inside was an album of photos that Edwin had not wanted my father to see. With luck, there was also a note or parcel for me, containing Edwin’s promised explanation.
I hauled open the gates and drove through.
Beside me in his cage, Basil yowled uneasily.
‘It’s just for a few days,’ I reassured him. My voice was reedy, a little breathless, and it didn’t convince either of us.
I parked around the back, and then returned to the front verandah, keys in hand. Taking a breath, I unlocked the door and let myself inside.
The entryway was icy. I rubbed my arms. Ahead stretched a dim hall leading to the back of the house, to the kitchen and laundry, a supply store and Edwin’s office. To my left was the formal sitting room. I went in and gazed around. Wintry sunshine splashed through rips in the curtains, but the room was dark. Going over to the high bay window, I dragged aside the dusty drapes.
Once, this would have been a majestic room. Tall glass fronted cabinets displayed beautiful old tea sets and chinaware. A big grandfather clock stood silently against the far wall, and curvy armchairs made graceful silhouettes in the half-light. Framed watercolour prints hung on the walls, brightly coloured birds and insects, exotic flowers and seedpods. Those prints had kept me spellbound as a child. As I stood before one of them now – a tiny hummingbird hovering on the lip of a bell-shaped flower – it made me itch to take my colours into the garden, spend the afternoon drawing and painting.
But first, there was a house to search.
Crossing the room, I went through the drawers of a long redwood sideboard, but found only tarnished cutlery and yellowing linen napkins. Hands on hips, I surveyed the room. I felt in the grip of a powerful yearning . . . but for what, I didn’t quite know. It had to do with my mother’s charm, Edwin’s letter, and Dad’s urgency for me to find the dusty old album of photos. It was a barely-there voice in the back of my mind, calling me to follow. Echoes from a dream, urging me towards . . . something.
Returning to the hallway, I hurried down to the kitchen. It had always been the most welcoming room in the house. Full of warmth and baking smells, with a large picture window overlooking the back garden.
It hadn’t changed much. The high ceiling with exposed wooden beams, the huge scarred table in the centre, the old Warmray wood heater with its blackened hotplate and copper flue. The faint smell of stewed fruit sent me reeling back through time. I pictured a small, slender woman with huge black-rimmed glasses. Edwin’s housekeeper, I couldn’t recall her name, only that I’d liked her. She knew every bird in the garden: rosellas, currawongs, gang gang cockatoos, little grey fantails, and had a story about each of them. Every morning for breakfast, she’d served thick delicious pancakes with homemade jam.
Something drew me to the window.
The mulberry trees had shed their leaves, their bare branches mottled with lichen, black in the afternoon light.Down the hill at the bottom of the orchard was a shady spot where mushrooms grew beneath a dead oak tree and soft grass carpeted the slope. And there, built into the slope, was a low door. Behind the door lurked my grandfather’s icehouse, a subterranean cave of shadows where, a long time ago, large blocks of ice had lasted through the summer in the cool darkness. Where, long after the last of the ice had melted and been replaced by refrigeration, I had once hidden as a child.
Morgan’s words drifted to me. That’s the thing about you, Lucy. When you really want something, you don’t let fear stand in your way of getting it.
Yet I had let fear stand in my way. Not just once or twice, but repeatedly. My fear was like an iceberg, barely visible on the surface, while the immense frozen bulk of it lurked below. And no matter how much I tried to escape it – no matter how far or fast I ran – it always seemed to catch me in the end.
Dusk crept across the garden. Trees disappeared into the shadows. The air turned damp. I crossed the yard to where I’d parked the Volkswagen on a shady gravel patch at the back of the house. Once, it had been the parking lot for guests, but was now weedy and overgrown.
Sliding open the van hatch, I climbed in. Cool air flowed through the half-open windows. Basil was where I left him, curled snug on an old mohair jumper on the bench seat. He yowled when he saw me, and then began to purr. Sitting beside him, I made sandwiches from the supplies I’d bought, and gazed through the window while I ate.
A feeling of unreality came over me. Maybe it was Bitterwood’s isolation from the rest of the world, or maybe the rush of memories that assailed me at every step. Or perhaps it was simply a delayed reaction to my grandfather’s death and my father’s relapse. Whatever it was, I couldn’t seem to shake the feeling that the quest for Dad’s album, and my hope of finding Edwin’s promised ‘something’ were incidental. As if another, greater, darker force had drawn me here.
Back in the house, I went along the hallway to Edwin’s office. The cold air wrapped around me, giving me the shivers. The house was utterly silent, not even the distant murmur of waves or birdsong from the garden seemed able to penetrate the tomblike stillness. There was just the whisper of my breath, and my shoes echoing on the wooden boards.
Pushing open the office door, I stepped inside . . . and let out a cry when I saw the man standing behind the desk. Then I breathed out. It wasn’t a man. Hand on my chest, I laughed weakly. A large portrait hung on the far wall. One of many that turned Edwin’s office into a grim gallery of patriarchs. It came back to me then, how I’d hated this room as a child. All those stern faces with disapproving eyes. They gave me the creeps as much now as they had then.
Only one face seemed friendly.
I went over to the portrait of my grandfather.
It showed a tall man standing disembodied against a black background. He was lanky as a scarecrow, his long sallow face creased with worry, his overly large, wet looking eyes gazing, almost fearfully, at something only he could see.
When I stayed at Bitterwood, he had spent all his time indoors. Upstairs in the little library or down here in his office, bent over a ledger, his pen scratching furiously. He never remarried after Grandma Dulcie died. He must have been lonely. For fifty years his only real company was his housekeeper, and for a time, once a year on holidays, my parents and me. What sort of secrets would a man like that be hiding? Surely nothing too dreadful.
In a bookshelf, I noticed a row of familiar books. Going over, I took one out. It was a twisted version of Riding Hood, the cover showed a girl in a red cape with smug, knowing eyes. It was one of Dad’s early editions, before I’d started illustrating. The pages were well thumbed, and as I went along the row, I found Dad’s other books. All of them, each worse for wear, as though Edwin had read and reread them countless times.
An ache of warmth went through me. I glanced back at the portrait, and my grandfather’s sorrowful eyes held mine for an instant. You see, they seemed to say, I never forgot you. I wondered if he’d also sensed the echo of my father’s life written into his stories. I suspected he had, and it made me wish with all my heart that I’d managed to get here before he died.
I went through the desk. In the top drawer, I found a ring of keys, mostly duplicates of the ones Dad had given me. I pocketed the keys, but there was little else of interest, just pens, letter opener, a dried up inkbottle. The battered old filing cabinet in the corner yielded only dusty documents, years out of date. A chair, a desk lamp, a pile of boxes in one corner. No hint or clue that Edwin might have left something here for me.
The enormity of my task washed over me. The old guesthouse was a labyrinth of rooms, all of them crammed with clutter, honeycombed with possible hiding places. Searching through it was going to take forever.
I leaned in the doorway, frowning.
I didn’t have forever. But I did have my remaining three weeks. And so I made a silent promise that by the time I was ready to return to London – to Adam and the new life I’d forged there – any unfinished business here would be done, dusted, and resolutely left behind in the past where it belonged.
The following day, I started searching the upper floors. My plan was to begin at the top of the house and methodically work my way down, filling rubbish bags, and setting aside anything of value that we could sell.
The attic was smaller and more cramped than I remembered. It was full of wooden tea chests, piles of dusty books, the buckled remains of a bicycle, a mountain of cardboard boxes, abandoned furniture.
I went over to an old wardrobe. Its doors hung askew, its mirror so tarnished that my reflection was barely more than a ghost. On the floor of the hanging compartment, I found a cardboard box littered with mouse dirt. Inside was a stack of rectangular glass pieces. They were old photo negatives, haphazardly packed one on top of the other and crusty with grime. I began sliding out the box, but was stopped by the crack of breaking glass.
I sat back. Dad hadn’t said anything about negatives, so perhaps there was nothing of interest among them. I lifted out the top plate, blew away some of the dust and held it to the light.
It showed two young men and a stout woman. The woman was leaning against one of the men, her arms around his waist. The other man stood a little apart, and something about his stance – lanky, somehow ill at ease – made me think of the portrait downstairs in Edwin’s office. It may have been my grandfather, but I couldn’t be sure, his features obscured by the eerie inversion of bright and dark. The woman’s mutton sleeves were tight around her chubby arms, her collar buttoned under her chin, her face set in a frown. Both men wore military uniforms, and the longer I looked the more I began to see a similarity in their angular features. They stood beneath an archway formed by the heavily laden boughs of a mulberry tree. In the background, I recognised the edge of a familiar building: my grandfather’s rearing house.
Taking the plate over to the window, I held it up to a bright patch of light and studied the picture for a long time. It was him, I felt sure. He was younger, straight-backed with thick hair, but the narrow face with its huge eyes and feeble chin was undeniably familiar.
‘Edwin,’ I whispered.
As his name left my lips, an image opened in my mind. Deep in the forgotten dungeon of a fairytale castle, a young woman daydreamed about her soldier love. And then my father’s voice. Writing is how I work through things I don’t understand.
I searched the grimy negative, tilting it this way and that in the light, wondering. If the thin young man was my grandfather, who were his companions? His mother, a brother? Dad had never mentioned an uncle, but that meant nothing. My father’s distant past was a closed book. He often sang Grandma Dulcie’s praises, but rarely mentioned his life growing up with Edwin.
I stood there for a long time, gazing at the image, my thoughts on fire. If the castle in Dad’s fairytale was Bitterwood, and the old King was my grandfather, then who were the other players? Was one of these young men the soldier Fineflower had loved? And if so, who was Fineflower? Who were the other wives strung from the rafters and drained of blood? Was that detail purely fiction, or did it also contain reverberations of the truth? I couldn’t help wondering if my father knew more than he was telling. At least, more than he was telling me.
Placing the glass negative back in the box, I dusted my hands on my jeans and ran downstairs to retrieve his manuscript from my van.
Night settled across the land. The moon rose, and one by one bright stars pricked the sky. Deep in the heart of the King’s gloomy castle, Fineflower huddled in her cell, thinking about her little boy. Was he crying for her, missing her warm cuddles, hungry? She folded her empty arms about her chest, but the ache of loneliness only deepened.
Behind her, the mountain of cocoons seemed to have grown. Some of the silkworms had hatched into butterflies. A few had flown away, escaping between the window bars and vanishing into the night; most had perished in the shadows. Fineflower felt the weight of despair settle on her. Each day she picked at the cocoons, trying to peel away the weblike threads of silk. She thought of her son and worked until her fingers bled, but each day she failed.
Unravelling silk was one thing, but turning it into gold?
She was doomed.
The cell grew darker. The other wives swayed, their shadows bumping beneath their slippered feet. Fineflower felt them watching her, the blind hollows of their eyes beseeching, but for what she did not know. She offered them water from her cup, but they did not drink. She sang to them while she worked, but they did not seem to hear. It was only when she told them about her little boy – six weeks old with bright button eyes and hair like thistledown – that their interest pricked. She thought she heard them whispering among themselves, and the sound made her shiver.
She rested her head in her hands. She did not love the King. She had seen his real face, the face he kept hidden from the outside world. He cared nothing for her, and perhaps he cared nothing for her child. His only passion was gold – and if Fineflower failed to spin it, she would join the other wives in their silent dance beneath the window.
‘I’d give anything to see my son again,’ she whispered fiercely. ‘Anything to hold him again in my arms.’
A shuffle came from the darkness. Looking up, she blinked in surprise. A man stood before her. He wore a blue jacket with brass buttons. A soldier, she realised – her soldier, the same young man who had caught her eye in the marketplace.
What a glorious smile he had. His eyes glowed like black fire, his teeth shone straight and white. Dimples bracketed his lovely lips. He stood tall, his fine military coat snug around muscular arms, his hair glossy as an eagle’s wing, his limbs sturdy and strong.
‘Who are you?’ she asked, with a catch of wonder in her throat.
The man did not answer. He swooped to her side, and for one wild reckless moment, she thought he meant to pull her into his arms for a kiss. Instead, his quick fingers plucked a silk thread from her sleeve.
Fineflower flinched at his touch. ‘Won’t you tell me your name?’
The man held the strand up before his eyes. ‘My name is not important,’ he said in a voice that sent tingles of fright and desire across her skin. ‘All that matters is getting you out of here. Alive,’ he added, gazing pointedly at the ghostly wives.
‘All favours come with a price,’ she said warily. ‘What is yours?’
Dusting the silk from his fingers, the soldier looked into her eyes. His gaze was fathomless as a subterranean cave. When he spoke, his voice was full of hunger.
‘Your willing heart.’
Fineflower shuddered and drew away. ‘I can’t give you that. I don’t believe in love. But my gown is sewn with jewels. You can have those, if you like. Sapphires. Rubies. Diamonds?’
The man of shadows shook his head. ‘I have no need of baubles.’ He glanced at the mountain of cocoons, and sighed heavily. ‘A task such as this demands a high price. The heart is a treasure, nothing of greater value exists in this world or the next. My offer stands. Your heart . . . given willingly.’