In the morning, Elsie slept through the time for breakfast and for morning tea. She slept through the time she could have joined the garden club and the time she could have joined a game of lawn bowls. When she woke, the sun was near its midday peak, blasting the flowers on the jacaranda tree by her window to an impossible luminosity. It looked hot out there: she waited for the day to dim.
In the old days, she and Clem had walked the streets at dusk this time of year—October and into November—inhaling the colour of these flowers. Had they been walking again? She rubbed at her calves and her shins: what had she been doing to make that ache?
Then her mind slipped into another time and place. It made perfect sense. It reminded her of reading Alice in Wonderland to Donny and Elaine, and then to the grandkids. It was like following Alice down a rabbit hole. She heard a bell ring nearby and knew that lunch would now be served. Might as well eat in the dining room as fuss about with cooking.
‘I think it’s chicken, Mrs Gormley,’ said the Cheshire Cat, sliding a plate onto her placemat as she sat down. ‘Lovely to see you today.’
It was quite a pleasant way to pass the time. In some moments, she thought her mind might just be wandering—that was the phrase people liked to use—but wasn’t it nicer to wander off into your memories, instead of holding them at arm’s length? Surely it was nicer to feel yourself back in the moment when your husband was ten minutes away from home than to remember that he’d been dead for thirty-seven years now, and would not be home again?
All this nonsense about which day of the week it was and who was the prime minister—Elsie had never cared much for politics. Everyone shouting at everyone else and not a skerrick of manners in sight. Here was Clem, coming through the park; here were Elaine and Don, kitted out for their first day at school—way back in the summer of 1947.
Little things; her little things. Swinging their big bags up onto their shoulders and setting off through the school gate. Donny so quick with his numbers—she didn’t know where he got that from—and Lainey always top with her reading. Elsie could have burst with pride at the pair of them: and here they were, running back across the high-school yard, twelve years later, straight past her and into their lives. Ah well, Donny had made a happy go of it. But Elaine: no matter how muddled the stuff of all her memories, Elsie tripped up on Elaine’s disappointments. One of the last talks she’d had with Clem (here it came, unspooling like a length of film) was about his worry that they hadn’t done enough to encourage their girl.
‘But her baby—she had Gloria,’ Elsie had said. ‘What more could she have wanted than that?’
‘I reckon she’d a head for learning,’ Clem said, reaching over to turn off the bedside lamp and finishing the conversation in the dark. ‘I reckon we did her a disservice, not pushing her more towards that. I reckon we could have done more.’ Those last words eaten by his horrible cough.
Elsie braced against the side of the table, almost pushing herself to standing to get away from this memory. No, I don’t want that today. She looked at her chicken and found herself hungry, wolfing it down, while she let herself imagine gliding along the river in the handy boat that Clem had always talked of building, scavenged from bits and pieces he’d found in the swampy dump by the back of their place. That was better than hearing sharp words from long ago.
On the shelves in her new bedroom Donny had set up the bracket clock that Clem’s great-grandfather had brought around the world from Kent to Brisbane. Clem had loved the sound of the clock’s tick, and after lunch, Elsie lay on her bed again, her ears attuned to the beat of its pendulum. It was a drum. It was a footfall. It was the rain. It was her life.
‘You’ll have that clock when I go, Donny,’ she said to him when he came in to see her later. ‘You’ll take good care of it. It’s all that’s left now of your father’s family.’
‘All that’s left, apart from us,’ he said.
She smiled, reaching up to pat his faded ginger hair. ‘You look just like your father, young man.’ She could say anything to her son—a stray memory; a sudden segue; a question from the depths of distant time—and he took it in his stride.
‘Young man!’ He gave her a smile in return. ‘We’re seventy next year, Elaine and I.’ He held her hand tight for a while. ‘Carol will love the clock,’ he said then. ‘I remember her talking to Dad about it—years ago, when we were first married. They were fond of each other, you know.’
Bless him for reminding her; she couldn’t tell him that his wife entwined sometimes in her mind with his sullen sister, and she could spend a whole morning wondering why her Donny had married such a woman before she unknotted the mess, located his real life, and settled herself back into some happiness with his world.
‘I was thinking about your first day at school, love,’ she said in a while. ‘How little and brave you looked—how it all went by so quickly.’
‘Your next great-grandchild will be at school before you know it, Mum—we’ll have to bring you along for that day.’
And bless him for imagining her future.
‘Wind it for me, Donny?’ She nodded to the clock on its shelf. ‘I don’t like the idea it might stop.’ And she watched as he fitted the key into its clean white face and turned it; she loved the sound of its gears. She loved its buffer against the silence.
‘You know I’m going to marry Clement Gormley,’ she said above the mechanical crick of the clockwork. ‘I met him the other week—just when war was declared. I was coming through the city on a tram and decided to hop off in Adelaide Street. He’s a lovely man, very gentle. I think you’ll like him, when you meet him. Should we have a little drink in celebration?’
‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ said Don, emptying her bedside jug of water into the pot plant that stood on the sill. It was an orchid and so perfectly white that she wondered if he was rubbing its petals to see if they were real. ‘Who brought you this, Mum?’
Did they ask these things to be polite, she wondered, or to check how much she knew?
‘Gloria sent it—from London. It came the other day. Lovely girl, that Gloria. A shame she and her mother never found a way to be friends. A shame she never had kids of her own. I thought Glory’s kids would be my first great-grandchildren. And she’d have been such a good mum.’
‘I’m sure Elaine and Gloria are friends in their own way,’ said Don carefully, heading over to the kitchen. ‘It’s not everyone who takes to mothering like you did, and like Carol. Gloria was lucky she had you to make a fuss of her. All our kids were.’
‘I remember walking you and Elaine to school one morning,’ said Elsie. ‘She was so little—but she wouldn’t hold my hand. And she saw this girl, the little sister of someone in her class, I think, all pigtails and a pretty frock. “Do I have to do that, Mama?” she asked me. I always thought she meant wear her hair like that, or the frilliness of the dress—but maybe she meant having a child. Maybe I never heard them right, the things Lainey tried to tell me.’
Elsie’s hand was stretched out, as if to hold the hand of her tiny daughter. In this memory, the jacarandas were so thick and rich overhead that they seemed to make a canopy as wide as the sky. From beyond the footpath came the sound of hinged windows as a veranda was opened up. Elsie began to hum the music she could hear now from inside the house.
‘In the old days,’ she said as Donny came back with the tea, ‘they held dances in one of the houses by the school; all the women in pretty dresses, twirling and spinning in the night. I used to walk up in the evenings trying to catch the breeze at the crest of the hill. It was like peeking into a jewellery box, watching them all at their fun.’
‘Did you ever go, you and Dad? Did you ever go to those dances?’ Don was holding out a teacup, its china pure white against the sun-spotted skin of his hands.
‘Did we ever go?’ Elsie frowned at her son’s hands; how old they looked. ‘I wanted to—I can’t remember. I had a silver dress I wanted to wear: did anyone pack that? I can’t remember seeing it since I came here. Although I suppose there’s not much call for dancing. I still see your father sometimes, over there by the dressing table.’ She pointed to the corner where a single armchair sat. No mirror. No dressing table. No stool. ‘He comes home from time to time.’
‘Give him my love, and I’ll head off now,’ said Don then, downing his tea in a gulp. ‘I’ve got to take one of the boys to his swimming—a full-time job, these little ones.’ He rattled his cup against its saucer. ‘Pop in again tomorrow. I drove past the old place yesterday; someone’s done the front garden—I thought you’d like to know how neat it looks. They’re already planting trees; Dad’d be complaining about the mowing. But it’s looking lovely.’
‘Yes,’ said Elsie, wistful. ‘Yes.’ She blew him a series of kisses as he went, her lovely bright boy. He looked older now than she was, although she didn’t suppose that could be true. Such a surprise, when Lainey had slipped out in his wake; she hadn’t known she was having twins. Like all my Christmases had come at once, thought Elsie. She’d been poleaxed by how utterly and completely she loved them.
She’d look up sometimes when she was bent over helping them with their homework, entranced with the idea that she was guiding them towards some solution, some new piece of knowledge—entranced that she might have that power—and she’d catch sight of a softness in her husband’s face and she’d smile.
‘You make such a lovely mum, Else,’ Clem had said, and she said it was all she could do.
It was all she’d ever wanted.
She blew another kiss as she watched her son cross the garden to his car, and he paused, looked up and waved—for all the world as if he’d felt it.
We’ve got something special, you and me. It used to scare her to even think such a thing about her son, but she’d always known it was true. And there he went, two toots on the horn as always, and a cheery wave through the window.
Whereas her daughter—Elsie frowned. Never so much as a backwards glance. She shook her head: how had she gone wrong with her girl? In the forties, when Elaine was just tiny? In the fifties, when she was at school? In the sixties, when she did what Elsie had always hoped for—found a husband, had a child.
‘Be the making of her,’ Elsie had whispered to Clem. But he shook his head.
How right he had been. When all Elsie ever wanted was her daughter’s happiness.
The way Elaine spoke to her: so cold, Elsie sometimes waited for her to call her ‘Mrs Gormley’.
It was the puzzle of her life. What else could I have done? How else should I have been?
The hands of the clock inched around to three—they’d be in from school soon, and ravenous. Elsie looked around her new rooms—the clock, the orchid, the spackled ceiling, the shiny sink and bench—thinking of her old kitchen, with its heavy, rounded fridge and its cream and green enamelled biscuit barrel. But her world, her real world, had gone, submerged by a strange wash of time. She drank the last of the tea her son had made for her, stone cold now and in the wrong cup. Even Donny hadn’t found her favourite one to bring.
In the bathroom she stood splashing water onto her face—she must have splashed through a riverload of water in her years in this city, keeping herself cool through Brisbane’s summers. Now, she knew, another summer was on its way. Elsie loved the way the heat pressed against every plane of her skin.
She sized up the image in the mirror. Age seemed to have come on so quickly. ‘I have no idea who you are or why you’re here,’ she said clearly, and she took a mouthful of water and sloshed it around, then spat it onto the troubling reflection.
When she tried the door to the hallway—the one by which Donny had left—it seemed jammed, somehow, or locked.
She closed her eyes, determined to think herself through.