just before the turn of the millennium, when Elsie was almost sixty, Grace Southam passed away. She was ninety-one years old. Aida’s hiking group, still calling themselves the BOGs, scattered Grace’s ashes at the Mannum Waterfalls.
And in the mysterious way that life groups similar events together, three days after Mrs Southam’s funeral, Elsie’s sister Rose died.
Rose Burnett (nee Rushall) left behind a husband (who had recently celebrated his seventieth birthday; photographs of the event made it into the community pages of the local paper), four children, thirteen grandchildren and one great-grandchild – an infant girl who was only eleven weeks old.
At the funeral, Rose’s single great-grandchild was disinterested in the congregation of people and the solemn, sad nature of proceedings. Instead, she protested first the confines of her pram, then the confines of her swaddle, then the desperate attempts of her mother to rock, jiggle or swing her into repose and was finally smuggled apologetically out of the chapel to be silenced by a teat outside.
Elsie gave her grandniece a sympathetic smile as she squeezed by with the bawling infant, then looked across Millie at Jordan, now four years old, sitting on her father’s lap and quietly munching her way through a packet of Barbecue Shapes. Millie had decided that Jasmine, her toddler, was best left at home with the babysitter.
‘Isn’t Jordan a good girl?’ Elsie whispered to Thomas.
‘Give it five minutes,’ Thomas said, ‘and she might make as much racket as poor Laura’s kid.’
Elsie sniffed and faced the front, preferring to believe her granddaughters were perfect.
Rose’s husband, Larry, despite watering eyes, finished his eulogy with stoicism. As sniffs, sobs and coughs came from the pews, Elsie’s other sister Lila made her way to the lectern.
Lila had asked Elsie if she would join her in a eulogy but Elsie declined. Public speaking was on a list alongside airplane travel and wringing the necks of chickens: if at all possible, best avoided. Besides, Elsie had told Lila, what could she possibly say better than her? It was Lila who had lived two doors away from Rose for over forty years. It was Lila’s children with whom Rose’s children had grown up. It was Lila’s husband, Roger, with whom Larry had gone golfing and to the football and on two occasions to the Birdsville Races, a four-day drive from Gawler. Elsie, on the other hand, was the far younger sister with whom Rose had had little to do – certainly in adulthood.
As Elsie gazed at Rose’s mahogany coffin, topped with sprays of lilies and orchids and with Rose lying dead inside, she was able to admit to herself that lack of contact, that lost kinship, was not through any fault of her sister. By choosing her own family and by keeping her life obscure, Elsie had lost her blood family.
She felt Aida’s gaze on the back of her head. Aida was sitting behind her, because the front row was reserved for family only.
As they had come into the chapel and made their way reluctantly to the front, Aida had quietly insisted she would rather sit a row back. She could still help Millie with Jordan if needed. But Elsie fretted. Her sister was dead, and she wanted the comfort of Aida’s hand to hold. Especially so now, as Roger pushed her mother’s wheelchair to the front of the chapel. Her mother didn’t always need the chair, but today Alice Rushall looked as tiny and frail as a just-hatched baby bird, as she stretched a quavering hand out and rested it on the gleaming wood of her eldest daughter’s coffin.
Heat rose in Elsie’s throat and she blinked rapidly against tears. She had to fumble for Thomas’s hand; he found her, but not quickly enough.
A stroke had taken Rose. On Monday she was as fine as usual, on Tuesday she dropped herself and a fruit cake onto the kitchen floor, knocked out cold, and by Thursday she had passed away. When her mother called with the miserable news, Elsie herself had dropped the phone and screeched, pleading at Aida, You quit smoking right now, right this instant, not one more filthy cigarette for you, do you hear me? And Aida heard her. It was now eight days since her last filthy cigarette.
The service finished and the mourners creaked and rumbled to their feet, surreptitiously rubbing life back into stiffened limbs as they shuffled outside. Elsie and Lila went to their mother, who was still sitting by the coffin. Thomas stood to one side with Larry and Roger, doing his best not to look frightfully uncomfortable. Thomas’s brother, David, approached Elsie and kissed her cheek. Elsie smiled at him, wished she could invite him home for tea but knew she wouldn’t; she hadn’t seen him for several years. He murmured his condolences to Lila and Alice.
‘Who was that?’ Lila said, when he was gone.
Elsie said, ‘You’ve met Thomas’s brother, surely.’
Lila gave a dismissive shrug, and Elsie made a derisive noise under her breath.
Her sister turned to her, cocked an eyebrow. ‘I’m sorry – do you have something to say?’
‘Not now, girls,’ their mother spoke up, her voice papery.
Grief had shortened their fuses, stirred up all the decades of unsaid pique and resentment. Phone calls dissolving into the obligatory once or twice a year, the declined invitations, the unattended birthdays, christenings and anniversaries. All the I’m busy that day and the I’ve been unwell and the I’m just overcommitted at the moment – Elsie saw it all in her sister’s eyes, unforgiven.
Elsie held her gaze for a long time, excuses and defences swelling and ebbing. In the end she looked away. There was nothing she could say.
On the other side of the chapel, Aida lingered in the doorway with Millie, Joseph and Jordan, who had, as Thomas predicted, begun to fuss and tug at her mother’s dress. When Aida saw Elsie looking over, she caught her eye and smiled.
‘Is that your neighbour there, with Millie?’ Lila said.
‘Yes. Aida Shepherd.’
‘God, she’s still living next door?’
‘Yes,’ Elsie said.
‘Did she ever remarry?’ Lila plucked a couple of wilting leaves from the arrangement on top of Rose’s casket, crumpling them in her hand.
‘No,’ said Elsie. ‘She didn’t.’
‘Nice of her to come.’
Elsie told herself she didn’t have time to reply that Aida was a terrifically nice person, and that she wished her sisters could have learned that for themselves, because Lila’s eldest daughter came and grasped the handles of Alice’s wheelchair, and chattered about how beautiful the weather had turned out for them, and said was time to go into the sunshine.