Ella never returned to the farm. With Beth married, Alice was alone and was glad of the company and the help. Daisy grew up thinking of her as her grandmother and Ella never knew if Alice knew the truth, that Edwin was Daisy’s biological father. Occasionally she caught Alice watching Daisy intently and she would sometimes compare her development with that of her own children, but she was quite impartial in her treatment of the two children despite Violet being prone to nightmares and tantrums in the first few months. Also, Violet had repeatedly asked for Rosie at first, but with time she seemed to forget her.
Edwin was a regular visitor; the children learned to call him ‘Uncle’. William came to visit once and tried, rather half-heartedly, to persuade Ella to return home. The truth was that he was finding life better without her. Rosie was an efficient and hard worker, she ran the house well and once she was convinced that Ella was not coming back, she also shared his bed.
They both missed Violet, particularly Rosie who had done so much more for her than her own mother, but finding she was pregnant compensated somewhat and this was when she suggested to William that he should take the clothes and personal belongings that Ella had left behind to her. This, Rosie knew, would make it clear to Ella that no one expected her to return to the farm.
The two women never met again. Rosie persuaded William to sell up and move to New South Wales where they would not be reminded of the past.
Eventually Violet had stopped asking after Rosie, but she never forgot her and never quite forgave her mother for, as she thought, ‘sending her away’. Gradually ‘Grandma Alice’ earned pride of place in the child’s heart for, however hard she tried to be impartial, or at least to appear so, Violet always knew that Daisy was her mother’s favourite.
Curiously, the relationship between Edwin and Ella did not blossom into a passionate love affair but settled into a solid, deep friendship. Ella knew that she could always rely on him should she need advice or help; he on his side was grateful to her for the help and companionship she gave his mother, thus relieving him of the responsibility. He organized her divorce from William and when her father died suddenly and unexpectedly, he arranged for the small inheritance he had left her to be carefully invested so that she received a quarterly sum. This made her financially independent although far from wealthy. When Edwin’s wife died and he asked her to marry him, Ella prevaricated. He didn’t press the matter.
The months slid into years. Daisy knew no other home and memories of life on the farm, even of Rosie and her father, faded for Violet. It was a happy, untrammelled childhood for both of them. Violet got engaged to her childhood sweetheart, Bill, almost as soon as she left school and was soon totally absorbed in wedding plans. Daisy, on the other hand, announced that she intended to go to England.
‘I want to see where I came from,’ she announced.
‘But you didn’t. You were born out here,’ Violet pointed out.
‘I may not have come personally, but Mum did. It’s where we originated,’ Daisy insisted.
It was Edwin who suggested that if she were so determined to go then it would be a good idea for Ella to go with her. But Violet was getting married and that would mean either postponing the wedding or that Alice, now ageing and rather frail, would be on her own. It was Alice who suggested that Violet and Bill live with her until Ella and Daisy returned.
Edwin held Ella close for a moment and promised her, ‘I shall ask you again when you come back.’
‘Ask me?’ Ella, her mind on the coming adventure, was puzzled.
‘To marry me, of course. I know you have secretly yearned to go home for a long time and accompanying Daisy is a good chance; she wouldn’t be safe on her own, and now Violet and Bill are going to stay with mother, we don’t have any worries. So, enjoy yourself – and come back soon.’
Ella promised she would, but she was excited and terrified at the same time about this trip. Would she find everything and everyone very changed? More importantly, had she changed so much that she would no longer fit in? Daisy had no such qualms; she was fulfilling a childhood dream.
Ella and Daisy spent a good deal of time planning Daisy’s future on the journey home in between the various social events that were so much a part of shipboard life. Oddly enough, neither of them had thought much beyond the fact of actually going to England. Ella was merely planning a visit to catch up with the family she had left behind. But Daisy, it seemed, had greater plans.
‘I want to stay for at least a couple of years, Mum. I want to really live there, not just be a visitor.’
‘You mean you want to work?’
‘Yes, I do. Problem is, I don’t really know what at.’
Ella suggested the two main career paths for women in those days: teaching and nursing. Daisy pulled a face.
‘I don’t want to do either of those. Teachers always seem to end up dried up old maids. Anyway, I have no qualifications. I should have to go to college for about three years. Besides which I don’t think I like children nearly enough to dedicate my life to them.’
Ella smiled; she couldn’t quite see Daisy in the role of dedicated schoolteacher either. ‘Well, that only leaves nursing,’ she pointed out, ‘unless you just want to take some sort of unskilled job in a shop or office, or worse still, housework. Why don’t you just do the rounds of the relatives and then come back to Australia with me?’
Daisy pulled a face again. ‘Mum, you are missing the point. I want to live in England for a couple of years, find out what it is really like. I don’t want to be taken round like a pet dog on a lead.’
‘Well, if you are really serious then you have to train for something,’ Ella insisted.
‘How about doing a really good secretarial course?’ She held up her hand as Daisy began to protest. ‘I don’t mean just a shorthand and typing course, I mean a secretarial course where you would learn other things.’
‘Mmm….’ Daisy could see that this idea had possibilities. So it was that she enrolled in a private secretarial school in Oxford that prided itself on turning out efficient personal secretaries who could get interesting jobs and command good salaries.
Daisy enjoyed both the life at the secretarial college and the life outside it. Oxford was an exciting place to be; there always seemed to be a party somewhere. Often she and her friends would go to two or even more on a Saturday night. She made many friends and found the work interesting and far from difficult with exciting possibilities always dangling in front of them in the job market. For both Daisy and her mother, Australia became if not exactly a dim then a rather dreamlike place somewhere in the back of their consciousness.
Ella found that her family – her mother, brother and sister-in-law – automatically assumed she was a widow. She supposed she must thank Edwin for that. They asked after Violet, but whether from tact or lack of interest (she was not sure), did not question her about William. Her mother obviously looked on her marriage as an unfortunate mistake in her past and therefore best forgotten. Ella was not altogether sorry that, elderly and frail, her mother did not seem to have a very clear memory of the circumstances that had led to Ella’s departure for Australia.
One of Ella’s favourite relatives had always been her mother’s younger sister, May. Actually closer to her niece in age than to her elder sister, she had married very young, and very well in all respects. Gordon was not only an extremely successful man of business but a loving and generous husband and father. Their family of three children had now grown to seven, but with the four eldest married and settled in their own homes, it almost seemed to Ella that time had stood still when she visited her. After her time with William struggling on the farm and even the years with Alice Sanders in her modest home, the opulence of her aunt’s house made her feel she was living on a film set.
Daisy seemed so settled and happy in her new life that Ella was thinking rather vaguely of returning to Australia. Distance, she had found, had made Edwin fade into rather a dim figure. She had slipped into her old life and felt totally English again.
‘Ooh!’ May squeezed her arm as she walked with her up the wide, sweeping staircase, ‘this is so lovely, Ella, having you staying here again. Now, promise me you will stay at least six weeks. You won’t go racing back to your mother, or worse still, rushing back to Australia, will you?’
‘Well …’ Ella demurred, ‘I am supposed to be going back in a month, you know. I thought I would spend two or three weeks with you – if you can have me that long.’
‘Oh, Ella, you do talk nonsense. Six weeks at least is what I expect. I have no end of plans to give you a really great time to remember when you go back to that dull life of yours, starting with a little dinner party tonight.’
‘Oh, anyone I remember?’
‘Probably, dear, certainly people who will remember you.’ May’s smile was arch.
Ella told herself that she should have guessed her aunt was plotting something.
‘Now,’ May continued, ‘I sent Carter up to unpack for you so you can have a little rest – a bath too, if you like – before you change for dinner. Drinks about seven in the drawing room.’
As promised, Ella found that her cases had been unpacked. Her clothes hung in the huge wardrobe with her nightdress placed on the pillow, the bed already turned back and her hair brush and make-up on the dressing table. She wandered into the adjoining bathroom and found large, fluffy towels, soap, bath crystals and talcum powder all ready. Unused to such luxury, she frowned slightly, filled with the odd sensation that she was somehow surplus to the scene.
Back in the bedroom, she opened the wardrobe door and surveyed her modest wardrobe. What on earth should she wear for dinner tonight? She finally selected a short shift evening number with a drop waistline she had bought in Oxford when she was settling Daisy in there. She had protested at the time that it was much too youthful for her but had finally succumbed to the urgings of both the saleslady and Daisy after trying it on and seeing, with some surprise, that it really did ‘do’ something for her. Looking at herself in the mirror, she thought that she and the dress had somehow met, agewise, so that it appeared exactly right for her. The colour, a wonderful shade of peacock blue, was what the dress relied on for impact. She pulled it out and hung it on the outside of the wardrobe and stripped off for a leisurely soak in the large tub.
It was just before seven when she walked into the drawing-room. Her brother-in-law was talking to another man at the other end of the room. Engrossed in their conversation and turned away from the door, they did not see her hesitate as she came in. May, however, swiftly detached herself from the group she was chatting with. ‘Ella, darling, come and meet …’ but Ella had stopped dead in the middle of the room, for the man talking to Gordon had turned to face her.
‘Walter!’ she thought she yelled, but in actual fact, her voice came out as a sort of strangled croak. She might have made a bolt for it if her way had not been blocked by the last couple of guests arriving and the fact that Walter was moving towards her, his hand outstretched.
‘Ella, how good to see you again.’
He can’t really mean it, she thought; he always was polite. Then she glanced at May, saw her visibly relax as Walter took her hand and knew this meeting had been carefully orchestrated.
By the time the guests moved into the dining-room some thirty minutes later, Ella was wondering how she could ever have been so crass as to throw over this kind and attentive man for the young William. The years had been kind to him; he had not changed a great deal. In fact, Ella felt that she had, in some way, caught up with him so that now they seemed like equals. In the days of their engagement, he had seemed so much older. She had thought of him then more as one of her father’s contemporaries. Over dinner, she learned that he too had been married and was now widowed.
‘My wife was actually a little older than I was,’ he told her, and though his voice was serious, the slight twinkle in his eye made her say, ‘You had probably had more than enough of young and flighty females.’
‘She was quite different from you. A widow with a young son. I had known her for some time; we were excellent friends and I was always very attached to James. I think of him now as my own son.’
Ella felt pleased that it had not been a great romance and immediately ashamed of the thought. When he asked if he could see her again, she agreed.