FRANGIPANI CORONATION
Late November 1960
Four faces at the Heartwood dinner table were trained on the long hallway down which a fully arrayed, adorned and accessorised high school graduate would sashay at any moment.
‘We’re ready for you!’ sang Olive.
‘We don’t want to be late,’ Sonnet added. ‘It’s going to be hell finding a parking space at the school.’
‘Sonny,’ whined Plum. ‘Why is she taking so looong?’
Gav said nothing, as though even his droll humour was held back by the formal suit constraining his hulking shape.
Sonnet had been oddly touched by Gav’s insistence on wearing a suit – something he didn’t even do for Sunday services, and a feat which hadn’t been achieved, Olive declared, in the thirty years since they’d been married.
Olive hadn’t scrubbed up too badly herself, Sonnet thought, glancing at her aunt in her specially tailored dress.
This was a historic moment for them all: the first Hamilton to finish Grade Twelve at Noah Vale School! Sonnet felt a secret flash of affection for Olive. It had been an unlikely partnership, fraught with conflict, but together she and Olive had propelled that exasperating, talented girl through her high school years. They’d made it to her graduation and, as far as Sonnet was concerned, Fable’s springboard right out of Noah Vale’s suffocating limits.
The hesitant creak of the bathroom door cast an expectant hush over the table. A few seconds of anticipation followed before Fable stepped, eyes downcast, into the hallway.
Oh she’s a bride, was Sonnet’s first thought. And truly, she could have been. She was sylph-like in a white dress that flowed from delicate spaghetti straps, through sweetheart neckline and along perfect hourglass curves to puddle daintily at her feet. It was not a tiara or veil she wore, rather a simple, shining coronet braid, pinned thrice with white frangipani flowers. Strawberry-gold waves tumbled below her breasts.
As she came towards them, the sconced lights set every crystal on her bodice twinkling and turned her hair to spun gold. Sonnet corrected herself: no, not a bride – a faerie queen en route to her coronation.
It was Gav who first found words to speak. ‘You little beauty.’
Olive was speechless, and Sonnet wondered why the old girl wasn’t patting herself on the back right now for a job well done. This gown had been Olive’s idea, after all.
When the graduation ball invites had arrived, weeks back, Fable had desperately wanted to wear one of Mama’s mothballed gowns from the cottage wardrobe. Sonnet had acquiesced readily, glad both to save money and play her own small part with the alteration of Fable’s dress. When she’d mentioned the idea to Olive, however, she had been vehemently opposed.
The green dress Fable selected with such dreamy reverence was unsuitable, Olive said. Too grown-up, not a fashionable colour, impractical for climbing the steps to the graduation stage or celebrating wildly at the after-grad party, not to mention the fine crystal beading would make alteration a difficult if not impossible task for a seamstress of Sonnet’s ability.
None of which Sonnet had actually believed. It didn’t take a genius to figure out Olive’s waffling refusal had less to do with fashion and practicality than it did some mawkishness relating to that particular dress. Fable’s dismay and Sonnet’s suspicions had been allayed by the speed at which Olive swooped to order and pay for a brand-new gown for Fable from her favourite supplier. Sonnet’s initial scepticism of the colour choice, or lack thereof, was quashed by Olive’s insistence that no other girl in town had come into Emerson’s to order anything white, everyone else would be wearing long lace sleeves, and this simple dress was a nostalgic nod, instead, to the Noah balls of yesteryear, held in a grand riverside mansion called Vinelands.
Noting Olive’s pensive pinch now, Sonnet intuited the white dress had not quite produced the picture of virginal innocence she’d engineered. On the contrary, the girl who stood before them now was utterly desirable. The white dress hid nothing of her figure, only highlighted her magnificent colouring, and the pinned frangipanis, with their fragrant yellow hearts, conjured up sultry, far-flung isles.
Fable looked exactly like she was too good for this damned town, and wouldn’t be stuck here much longer! Sonnet heartily approved.
Aloud, though, she said, ‘You look fine. Now let’s go!’
‘Wait!’ cried Olive. ‘I want to get a photo with our dear girl.’
*
It was only later, as they settled into their school-hall pew, the reality of where they were finally struck Sonnet.
She turned to Olive in mute distress and was just in time to glimpse Olive swallowing a telltale aspirin from her purse.
It was true then! This was the infamous school hall in which the Hamiltons had been stripped of their pride, their reputation, and all their hopes for their gifted younger daughter. This was where Pandora’s box had been opened.
Sonnet’s panicked gape settled on the heavy curtains still drawn on the stage. Had those curtains hung there these past twenty-six years? On which pew had Lois and Malcolm Hamilton sat when their daughter’s transgressions had been exposed for all to know; worse, to see?
‘On the school stage, in flagrante delicto,’ Sonnet imagined she could hear, not in distant memory on Alfred’s lips, but like a viper’s hiss at her shoulder. Sonnet spun accusingly, and found plenty of closely tipped, murmuring faces fixed on the Hamilton-Emerson clan. Sonnet’s eyes dropped quickly to the programme quaking in her hands. Her stomach fell faster.
Bloody hell, I might have been conceived on that very stage!
And how many people here were thinking the exact same thing, with the spitting image of Esther Hamilton about to cross that stage this very evening.
From the studious way Olive was avoiding her niece’s eyes, she was most certainly thinking of nothing else. Poor Olive, her unflappable belief in the fundamental kindness and mercy of Noah residents had taken a severe hit since ‘The Sign Episode’. Sonnet was sorry to have witnessed the taint of Esther Hamilton’s misfortune seep back into Olive’s cheerfully respectable life, but there it was.
Still without looking in Sonnet’s direction, Olive took another aspirin from her purse and slipped it across into her hand. Touched, Sonnet forced herself back against the wooden seat, gripping the medicine in her lap as though it were the last cyanide pill out of captivity.
OK, breathe.
She just had to grit her way through a few inevitably verbose speeches, definitely roll her eyes through Adriana’s valedictorian address, cheer Fable across that stage to accept her certificate – digging nails into her palms as every jaw in the audience dropped – then wave Fable off to the after-graduation celebrations at Moria Falls.
She could handle this.
The Hamilton girls were making history here tonight, not repeating it.
*
The clock was about to strike midnight on the after-grad party and Fable, sober and sombre, was ready to go home. She was sick of the leering lot of them! Skirting yet another crowd of revellers in various states of frottage, she slipped through the teahouse doors, and sucked in a breath of balmy air.
She’d survived. All of it: not only six years of school, and the shame and fame that had preceded her each step of the way, but also the terror of ascending that stage tonight in front of the whole town, and somewhere out there in that huge audience, a pair of cerulean eyes.
But it was done. She would never again spend time around her school peers, with two exceptions: Sal, when she might come back to visit Noah from her job at the newly opened Aboriginal cultural centre up north; and good old Marco, whose dad was giving their retinue a lift back to Heartwood tonight. No sign of Mr Lagorio yet, though – the car park was dark and empty.
And that gave Fable precious time alone to explore.
Ebullient now, Fable veered off between floundering flame-lit torches into the hedged tea gardens.