Jacaranda Time
A letter came.
On the very day the jacarandas dropped their first purple, Bea showed it to Babs, and Babs sneezed.
“It’s the jacarandas,” she complained, her eyes streaming. “They do it to me every time.”
They were sitting in the Gardens, a ruckus of duck-feeding nearby, and three purple trumpets drifted down onto six-weeks-old Charade. The blossoms stirred, twirled, slumped like tired ballerinas, drifted off into the grass. Bea touched wood. For good measure she crossed herself, rather haphazardly and clumsily and, in fact, inaccurately; but it was a leftover habit from her dad who had died in jacaranda time (not that he knew, not in Melbourne). Nevertheless almost the first thing she remembered, one of her earliest memories of Brisbane, was jacarandas moulting all over the place and Kay’s eyes widening with shock. With gratifying shock.
There was blood and black stuff on his pillow, Bea said. It was still dribbling out.
Oh Bea! Kay whispered, a white hand over the trembling O of her mouth.
There was something Bea acknowledged to herself, though not in words, and not even in the clear-cut shape of thought.
It was something registered in the flow of quiet and disquiet in her body, it was to do with the kinds of expectation that keep a life on its cogs: the din of cicadas at night, cyclones in January, men hovering, men buggering off, milk in her breasts. And for Kay to be Kay.
Bea’s hands clenched themselves around two tufts of grass and yanked. At the tearing sound, at the sharp smell of earth, she let her forehead butt against the ground. Bugger Kay! But her fingers relaxed and she smiled in spite of herself.
Bugger Kay.
Babs sneezed again, and another small cyclone of flowers came down. Bloody hell, she grumbled, batting at them with a straw hat, taking swipes, swatting the air, lungeing into space.
“Ahh! careful!” Bea had entered that phase where the world was either me-and-the-babies or not me-and-the-babies, and where everything that was not me-and-the-babies was fraught with possible harm. She fussed. She bent over Charade, fanning off the December heat — not that anything helped. Down in the grass, however, if she burrowed down where the sprinklers had been, it was soft and cool; well, cooler; and now she was sorry she’d left Siddie in Tamborine. She touched wood again,
thinking of Julie, the Wentworth’s thirteen-year-old daughter
and the local child-minder. Whatever is going to happen, happens; that’s the sensible thing to believe. But still. Sometimes, when beer glasses and counters were being washed at McGillivray’s, there’d be a splintering sound; things could slip through Julie’s hands. She should have brought Siddie with her. She shouldn’t have brought Charade. She shouldn’t have come.
Ah, stuff it. Take the bull by the horns was her dad’s advice. Dig in your heels. So. She picked up one of the jacaranda trumpets and put it in Charade’s hand. The fingers closed around the flower and around her own finger like tiny grappling hooks. God, she thought, feeling faint, dizzy, as the great wave came swooping up, something inside pleating itself into surf, a swoon warning.
Did you ever get used to it?
Wanting to eat them, wanting to die for them, wanting to wrap them up in silk and tuck them somewhere inside your own body to keep them from harm?
She put her face down close, panic kicking at her, till she felt Charade’s wisp of breath on her cheek.
“Don’t,” Babs advised. “She’ll get a rash. The jacaranda, I mean, get it off her.” She sneezed again. “I can’t read this, my eyes are too puffy.”
“It’s from Kay,” Bea said. “Came two weeks ago.”
“Jeez,” Babs sniffled. “Kay.” She sneezed again. “She makes me nervous, eggheads always do. She as churchly as ever?”
“I dunno.” Bea had never seen the university. No one spoke English there, or not English you could understand, and when Kay had begged: Oh c’mon Bea, please, I want to show it to you, Bea had refused. “I’ll tell you one thing,” she had said to Kay. “You ever start talking to me with a plum in your mouth like those stuck-up uni sheilas, you can kiss my arse.” And Kay, reverting to the ways of the buttercup patch, had stuck out her tongue and wiggled her fingers from her ears. Me? she’d said. You gotta be joking, Bea.
“I dunno,” Bea sighed. “She’s different.” Not churchly, not such a ninny anymore. “Not stuck-up different. But different.” And perhaps what Bea meant was that Kay wasn’t keeping to the rules, not playing the proper role of Kay, not gasping with awe, not putting shocked hand to mouth.
“Haven’t seen her since before you left the Duke, when you were big as a bus with Siddie,” Babs said. “Where’s she been?”
“Teaching up north. Near Cairns. She’s home for Christmas.”
“Yeah?” Babs dabbed at her eyes. “You gonna see her?”
“Yeah.”
“She know about Charade?”
“Not yet.” Bea rolled over onto her back and looked up through purple at the sky. “Me and Kay,” she said. “I reckon we both wanted the same thing for our twenty-first. I reckon both of us got it.”
“Listen, Bea, I gotta get away from these bloody jacarandas.” Babs couldn’t stop sneezing. “So whad’ja both get?”
“Dumb question.”
Babs peered at Bea through watery eyes, frowning. “You mean Nicholas?”
“Yeah.”
“Serves you both bloody well right then.”
Twenty-one. Almost a year ago now, and Mick Donovan is hanging over her kitchen table, there’s a bellbird outside the window, shrike thrush get their noisy tuppence-worth in, summer hangs heavy, the mountain is wet and green. The 26th of January 1963, Australia Day, and the twenty-first birthday of Bea Ryan. Over the babbling of Siddie — fenced in on the verandah with cushions and tea chests — she is listening for every truck, every car, every sound of tyres on the dirt road.
“Listen, Bea,” Mick Donovan is saying. “Say the word and I’ll walk out on Maureen tomorrow. Swear to God. Don’t matter a bit to me about little Siddie.” He goes to the verandah to prove a point, hoists the baby onto his shoulders. “Bonzer nipper,” he says, flexing fatherhood muscles, showing them off. “I’ll take him on any day.” Meaning: provided you are part of
the deal.
“Listen,” he says. “Ya can’t work as a barmaid all your life. It’s not right.” He is offering, in shorthand, the security of runaway husband and pig farmer.
Bea hears a crunch of tyres from beyond the mango trees, outside McGillivray’s, and goes still.
“Struth,” Mick Donovan says, on the prongs of exasperation and desire. “You listening to me, Bea Ryan? Who you waiting for?”
“No one. Just some people coming up for my party. Brisbane people.”
“A bloke?” he growls.
“Jesus.” It annoys her, anyone keeping tabs. “You think I’m the kind who only knows blokes? I got a whole busload of women coming, fr’all you know. My best friend Babs from the Duke of Wellington for starters. And my sister Kay for another.” (Liar, liar. Bea bites her lip. She has always had a king-sized scorn for liars, yellowbellies, people with gravel rash chests, the ones who chicken out. She can take her licks.) “Yeah,” she says, hands on her hips, feet apart. “Could be a bloke.
So what?”
Is it her fault that Kay is off in north Queensland teaching, getting rich, meeting fancy schoolteacher blokes? Is it her fault if Babs can’t come? (Of course Babs couldn’t, a new baby, a new man, it would have been a waste of time to invite her.) A certain kind of smile — though she tries to hide it — quirks up the corners of Bea’s mouth.
Mick Donovan scowls and shuffles.
(At McGillivray’s, bets are being made.)
“What I’m telling ya, Bea … say the word, and it’s done. I’ll stick around, starting tonight.”
But her eyes are out there where the bougainvillea is, she might be a dragonfly, transfixed, hearing the footsteps of spider legs on the funnel web. A car door slams. Is it …?
Ignition. Tyres again. Someone driving away.
Bea’s body goes slack. Not yet then, but he’ll come, she knows the kind of bait he can’t resist. She has written a letter. She imagines how he will read it, smile at it, preserve it and how it will be, say, like finding a horse that can sing, but not just any old singing horse, a Baching horse. She laughs. It had taken him half of one afternoon at the Duke to explain that joke, but he had thought it worth the trouble; and it is this, perhaps, this lunatic exotic intellectual tenderness that holds her. Anyway, he will have to come to deliver his witty lines, he’s addicted to her pleasure in them; she knows this; he doesn’t know she knows. He will spin long strings of sound that will please her as much as — and make no more sense than — noisy pitta birds fossicking through leaves.
“Bloody hell,” Mick Donovan fumes. “Wake up Australia. What I’m tellin’ ya … and I’m deadly serious, Bea …” A crinkled vein ticks at his temple. “Maureen’s expecting again, you don’t seem to — which means I’m damned to hell, but it don’t make a bloody …” He is painting broad peacock-blue strokes, he is sloshing colour all over the mountain, he is painting the lurid edge of risk. “Bloody hell, Bea, I got young Brian’s eight years old and me wife’s expecting, and here I’m offerin’ ya —”
Mildy startled, Bea turns from the window. “What?” she asks. “Sorry, Mick, I wasn’t listening. Whad’ja say?”
When she looks at him like that he can never say a bloody word. The breath sticks in his throat. He crosses the verandah and spits into the hibiscus and ferns. “You gonna dance with me tonight, or what?” he demands, abashed, confused. He lifts a hand toward her and drops it again. The stakes are too high. No sense scaring her, you never can tell with a woman like Bea, you can’t predict how she’ll … She might slam her door shut in your face for another month.
He backs off.
“Oh Mick,” she laughs, grabbing him by the hands, laughing, giving off sparks. She dances him round her kitchen table. “Mick me darlin’, me darlin’, me darlin’,” she sings. “Whatever ya want, Mickey luv. Course I’ll dance with you tonight, what a stupid question.”
He is practically blinded. She’s a blooming skyrocket when she winds herself up. “Jesus, Bea,” he laughs, wrestling with her, biting at her shoulder. “You bloody witch.” He grapples her to the floor.
“Mick Donovan!” Mock outrage. Rolling deftly out from under. She smooths down her skirt and touches her hands to her hair like a prissy church lady up from Brisbane on a picnic. “When I got guests arriving any minute!” she says.
“Bloody hell,” Mick Donovan fumes. He has to rearrange himself as he staggers down her steps. “Just wait till I get ya dancing, Bea, that’s all I promise. I got something I been keeping for your twenty-first.” He stops at the bottom step and gives her the look. “I’ll be waiting for ya, Bea.” Stressing each word, pelvis butting the air. “See ya, then.” She is leaning over her verandah railing now, arms crossed beneath her breasts, teasing him, daring him to get rash, her eyes on his crotch. “Bloody witch,” he murmurs, helpless. Nodding, nodding. (Aren’t they agreeing to something?) “I’ll be waiting at McGillivray’s,” he says.
Bea is savage with excitement, ruthless. “Mick darlin,” she says, licking her lips. “You’re a bloody animal, you know that?” She blows him a kiss.
She is quite quite mad with happiness. It amazes her, really, that she doesn’t set fire to the railing. She can feel her own heat. She could lift the mountain if she wanted to, she could make birds fly backwards. Anyone who comes close is done for, she knows it. My turf this time, Nicholas. You’ll never be able to leave. Her eyes gleam like a cat’s.
“Bloody hell,” Mick Donovan grins, gearing up for the chase. He whistles all the way to the pub.
When it happens, late in the afternoon, just on twilight, Bea is worn out with straining for the sounds of tyres all day and doesn’t hear his car at all. There’s just a footstep on the verandah and she looks up and he’s there. In the doorway.
God, she thinks, going weak. Who can explain this? It never makes a skerrick of sense. She has to hang on to the kitchen table, though this has become extraordinarily difficult since her hands like the rest of her are water now, no not water, something slick and slow: honey that’s been warming in the sun.
“Bea,” he says, “What a delight. Diana the huntress cornered, the nymph in the woods. I received the most irresistible epistolary enticement in the post last week. Your orthography is a connoisseur’s delight.”
“Christ, Nicholas, you bloody Pom.” (She is laughing the way Siddie laughs, in gurgles, in rising bubbles. Is she making any sense at all?) “Why don’cha speak English? When are ya gonna learn to talk like a normal bloke?”
“Alas, alas,” he sighs, sardonic hand over his heart. “Ever the outsider. I’ve missed you, Bea.”
“Bloody liar.”
The kitchen table is between them (and possibly history, language, the past, the future, incurable obsessions, the religion of hopeless hope). It’s no use resisting, it’s pointless. Is it his eyes? (They are very very blue.) Is it hers? (There are green flecks, green as a cat’s, in Bea’s brown eyes.) Some force that no one understands has all their nerve ends jangling. They bend across the table like two magnets.
Bea has a sensation of falling, of going backwards through her life, very slowly, helpless as a mouse in a parachute’s talons. It seems to her that this is the slowest love she has ever made, that everything is happening under water, that she has molasses arms, molasses legs. Odd, the things you remember, the silly details that lodge themselves somewhere. He is lying on her bed (when did she let go of the kitchen table? How did they get into her bedroom?) he is golden as butter, not leathery like other men, not real. He is as smooth to touch as a silkie in a dream. She has her hands on his shoulders, her knees tucked into the dimples on the outsides of his thighs. She is coming slowly down, very slowly, as slowly as mother-of-pearl shell falling through water, it takes years. She is watching his cock disappear. What she notices, the last thing she sees before they lock into a fit, are the two creases, the V at the borders of his fuzz: they are a different kind of whiteness, creamy, two frail milky lines that pierce her as the pulse on Siddie’s head pierces her.
Who can remember anything at all about the commotion itself? But those two creases, that creamy V, can swim up from wherever it is that memory lurks and she will have to catch hold of something, will have to press the back of her hand against her lips.
(Jesus, Bea thinks, nearly twenty-five years later. What sense does this make?)
All this takes a very long time, so long that it is possible the party is over without her, the guests all gone home. (Though next week Mick Donovan, in a drunken fury, will say: Christ, you must have gone at it like dogs, you fucking overheated bitch.) In Bea’s bedroom, the clock runs slow. After years and years and years, when the fit has subsided and there is nothing she can do to stop the lock from unlocking itself, when his cock leaves her with a quiet little slurp of goodbye, with a sucking sigh, when they are lying very wet and very exhausted, Nicholas says: “We could live like this, Bea.”
Over them, like a dome, is their own post-thunderstorm weather of damp peace. Nicholas gestures into it. “We could — I don’t know — farm silky oak and walnut and ash. Breed orchids. I could read Proust and write poetry, you could spin cloth of gold.”
The crazy Pommy, the silly galah.
“In the Bea-loud glade,” he says, and she watches as his voice builds a life, watches a Nicholas-and-Bea world take shape: minarets, caravans, banners of silk. He claps his hands and the Slave of the Ring appears. Deck the Queen Bea with jasmine and honey, he commands. Cover her with cinnamon and cloves. Loony Nicholas, the golden talker with tales on his breath.
And then
“Bea,” he says, leaning on his elbows, kissing her on the lips. “We’d better go. I left Verity at that pub down the road. You don’t mind, do you?”
You don’t mind, do you? Her mind grapples with a translation of those words in the vacuum where the eye of the storm is passing, and then hailstones large and sudden as boulders come pelting down, a cyclone is ripping an illusion to shreds.
“I had the dickens of a time convincing her to come,” he says. “You know what she’s like. You have to help me, Bea. She’s getting worse.” He buries his face in her breasts. “Help her, Bea. I want you to save her.”
The details of shock are no clearer than those of euphoria. Buttons are buttoned, limbs move, smiles get fastened into place. Who expects it to make sense? Who was there when the morning stars sang together? Who watched when the sea was hemmed with sand?
“Sometimes, Bea,” he is saying, “I wonder if you yourself realise. I wouldn’t want to make extravagant metaphysical claims, but you do have … something. A touch. You could hardly not be aware of it, could you? Best not analysed, I suppose you would say?”
What the bloody hell is he talking about? She is watching for the spaces between words (those treacherous rocks), feeling her way. That is where she must swim. Take it slowly, move this foot, then this one, grope with hands turned clumsy as flippers. Ah, and the chill, the black water. She cannot remember a January that has been so cold.
Do they cross the verandah, collect Siddie, go down the steps? Apparently. And at McGillivray’s there is something going on, there is one hell of a hubbub, a general commotion, a bunch of yobbos making catcalls and jokes. Bea can smell the same sort of ghastly thing you smell when a lamb is snagged on barbed wire and dingoes are gathering.
God Almighty.
She runs blindly but for some reason the sense of barbed wire is so strong that she runs with her hands in front of her face. She could as easily abandon her dad in his stink and his sodden sheets as watch this. She doesn’t remember much: the stumbling up the steps, shouting, a certain amount of cuffing ears, lashing around with her tongue, letting them have it. Then (she thinks) there was a long embarrassed silence, the men sheepish, Verity shaking like a sick dog, Bea herself drained and shaking (the bloody infectious shivers going the rounds like the wind through shivery-grass), and Nicholas … ah well, let that go.
Over his shoulder Bea and Verity are eye to eye. Endlessly, endlessly Bea has replayed that look; or rather, Bea has never disengaged herself from that moment whose meaning will forever tantalise her: there is the image of barbed wire and a creature snagged; that translation is always present. There is another thing, a black black black thing, but where does it come from? From Verity’s eyes? Or from Bea’s thoughts? It is the black gleam of an ace trumped.
Someone lurches and drops a glass.
“Struth,” Bea says, her eyes flashing. “Ya bloody pack of dingoes. Can’t ya bloody behave yerselves with me guests at me own bloody party?”
Aw shucks, Bea, nobody meant …
“Well,” she says, climbing onto the bar and holding high a glass of beer, flinging up her arm so that foam flecks fall like confetti. “It’s me twenty-first birthday, dammit. Who’s gonna dance?”
Twenty-one. Kay’s twenty-first, November 1963. Of course Bea remembered it. She had Mick Donovan drive her down to Been- leigh in his truck, she bought a card that had pink satin balloons on it, real satin, very fancy, with cushiony stuff glued under the satin so that you could press a finger into each balloon. She mailed it off to north Queensland where Kay was teaching.
And Kay wrote back.
You will never believe who showed up at my door on my birthday. I have trouble believing it myself. It was an absolute fluke, but he’s been a visiting tutor this year, they have to visit all the external students. We never know when they’re going to drop in, he’s been a couple of times, actually. The first time was nearly a year ago (just after your twenty-first). He told me he’d been to your party. But this time was an incredible fluke, it was just sheer good luck, he hadn’t even known it was my birthday. We went to Green Island again.
Anyway, see you in December. Lots to tell.
Hah, Bea thought. I’ll bet.
And what took place in the kiosk of the Botanical Gardens, at the foot of George Street in Brisbane, on a steamy December day in 1963, just one hour after Bea had shown Kay’s letter to Babs, just six weeks after the birth of Charade, and just two weeks from the assassination of John F. Kennedy — an event which seemed to hold some relevance for Kay and none whatsoever for Bea?
According to Babs McGinnis, who knows as much as anyone (which is not much) about that meeting, it was briefer than either of the parties intended.
(“But Babs is something of a problem,” Charade tells Koenig. “In the long run, nothing she says is reliable. If there was something Mum didn’t want me to know, Babs would back her up.
I have to take her with a grain of salt. And getting anything from Aunt Kay — other than JFK talk — was like trying to get blood from a stone.”)
So: Babs McGinnis, not under sworn oath, maintained that Bea had planned to go straight from the rendezvous at the Gardens to the 6 p.m. Beenleigh bus; and that instead she had appeared, just a little after 3 p.m. and with Charade in her arms, at Babs’s West End flat.
“Didn’t she turn up?” Babs asked, surprised.
“Yeah,” Bea said. “She turned up.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing,” Bea said. “Can you drive me back in for the six o’clock bus?”
“Sure. You want a drink? Beer? Whad’ja talk about?”
“About the bloody American president getting his bloody head shot off,” Bea snapped.
Bea is at the kiosk first. She sits on one of the benches and leans back against the lattice, with Charade in her arms, in such a way that she can watch the path winding in from the George Street gates. She wants a few moments to accustom herself to the sight of Kay again before she hears whatever Kay has to tell.
It is as she feared. There is a radiance to Kay, and so Bea knows. She can feel a pain beginning behind her forehead and opening downward and through her like a rift valley. Verity is one thing. This is another.
“Bea!” Kay calls. “Oh Bea.” Running, laughing, hugging, dangerous happiness slopping in all directions so that people turn and feel a pang of envy, you can see it in their eyes. “Oh my God, a baby, another one? You never even told me! Oh how gorgeous … He or she? Oh, she’s adorable, what’s her name?”
“Charade,” Bea says, waiting (that’s what this is all right, a bloody charade), waiting, swaying, poised, watchful, ready to snake away or strike.
“Charade?” Kay’s eyebrows go up, she laughs. “Charade as in …?” There’s a second’s awkward pause, a feeling for context. “I like it, Bea. It’s got class.” Kay is not full of awe, or shock, or anything but her own excitement. “Bea,” she says, “I can’t wait to tell you. I’ve won a scholarship, I’m going to America, can you believe it? America.”
These meaningless words eddy past Bea like yesterday’s tram tickets. City flotsam.
“America!” Kay says again. “And at such a time, an assassination. It’s like being catapulted from the outer suburbs of history to the core of … of … I don’t know … My God, Bea, it’s like …” — Kay is shredding bougainvillea leaves with a fingernail; Bea is waiting for the real reason for all this frazzle — “it’s like having your whole life suddenly translated … Who will I become, over there? There’ll be, there would have to be, it stands to reason, a sort of quantum difference. Unpredictable changes. I mean, it’s inconceivable here, isn’t it? Can you imagine a Prime Minister shot?” She sits down momentarily beside Bea, bounces up again. “Well, can you, Bea?”
“What?”
“Shot. Can you?”
“Yes,” Bea says.
“What? You can? Are you serious? How can you think something like that?”
“Like what? What the bloody hell are you going on about?”
“About President Kennedy, about the assassination. Oh Bea.” Kay gestures with good-natured exasperation. “I’m leaving the first week in January,” she says. “I’ll go straight into … listen to this: the winter semester, that’s what they call it.”
Bea shifts position and adjusts Charade in her lap.
“Actually,” Kay says — she cannot keep still — “it was Nicholas’s idea.” Bea leans forward slightly, listening for the undercurrent. “He encouraged me to apply. As a matter of fact —”
Bea strikes.
“Yes,” she says. “He told me.”
Kay lurches. (The thought does not come to Bea in the shape of that particular word, but that is her judgment.) Kay puts the back of her hand against her mouth. Bea, waiting, counts seven full seconds before more words make a rush on the silence. “Bea …?” Kay stumbles. “Is Charade …? Is Charade …?”
“Yes,” Bea says.
“That’s one of my versions,” Charade says. Koenig is stroking her hair. All night they have lain naked together, she is still in his arms. “But it doesn’t quite work, there are too many gaps.”
“It’s all right,” he murmurs. “We learn to live with whatever we have to live with.” He brushes her cheek with his lips. “After a fashion.”
“I used to lie awake at nights,” Charade says, “inventing the event. I was there, that’s what’s weird. Somewhere” — she knocks on her forehead with her fist — “there must be neurons and synapses that store it.”
“Yes,” he says. “And others whose job it is to screen it.”
She leans on one elbow to look down at him. “You think I do, in some sense, know what happened?”
“I think it’s possible.”
“God,” she says, digesting this. She burrows back down into his arms, the wiry pelt on his chest against her cheek. “The thing is, my mum and Kay, you can feel the connection still, God you can feel it. So why, for nearly twenty-five years, haven’t they …? Why?”
“There’s no theory elegant enough to answer that,” Koenig says. “Maybe after particle physics, after the Theory of Everything is cut and dried …”
“And Nicholas, my father, my father. Not so much as a sign. Why doesn’t he … Why?” She pummels the pillow with her fists.
“Ah,” Koenig sighs. “That’s easier to understand.”
“When will he come?”
“Perhaps he has. Perhaps he’s watching all the time.”
“Well,” she says, “I make him watch. My Nicholas, I mean, the one I’ve made. I make him watch me all the time.”
The one you’ve made, Koenig thinks, can be calculated to strike terror in the other’s heart. Who can compete with his own mythology? He strokes Charade’s belly, the tuft of hair, the soft flesh between her thighs, not to arouse either of them, they are too sated for that; but to indicate protection, sustenance, solace. On her skin, he draws a frail blueprint of hope.
“I have another version,” Charade says. “You see, there’s Green Island to think about. And this version came to me entire, in a split second, the day I rang Aunt Kay’s doorbell in the house beside the lake outside Toronto. It was the way she looked at me, the shock in her eyes. I look like Nicholas, I know that, Mum says it, Babs says it, Michael Donovan’s dad has said it. And that would be enough, I suppose, to explain … But I don’t know, I just had the feeling there was something else, something more, in that look.
“So here’s my second version.”
Kay was first at the kiosk in the Brisbane Gardens, and when Bea arrived it was Bea who had to lean against the lattice in shock.
“Well, whad’ya you know?” she said. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, who’d have thought? You been home?”
“How could I?” Kay asked. “They think I’m not arriving back until next week.” Kay sank onto the bench and faced her. “Bea?” It was a desperate and convoluted plea.
“What?”
“It’s Mum and Dad, you know what this would … So I can’t …”
“Christ,” Bea said.
“Bea, it would break their hearts, they’d die of shock.”
“Yeah,” Bea said dryly. “That’s for sure. You’ll be the subject of a few prayer meetings, that’s also for sure. Howd’ja get away with it?”
“I taught till a few weeks before the end, then I had to resign, they’re the rules. So I don’t have a job any more. Not here. I applied for one overseas, I saw an ad for teachers, I leave next month. Bea …?”
“What?”
“I can’t just give her away.”
Bea said nothing.
“So … so would you, Bea?”
“Would I what?” They stared at each other and Bea turned white. “Bloody hell,” she said, and had to sit down. “Bloody hell, Kay, you’ve got a nerve.” She lit a cigarette and asked harshly: “Boy or girl?”
“A girl. I’ve called her Charade.”
“You seen him since?” Bea wanted to know.
“Once. On my twenty-first. I told you.”
“So he’s seen her. What the hell did he say?”
“He said it wasn’t the first time, and he was sorry.”
“Jesus,” Bea said. “Bloody Nicholas.”
Kay’s eyes were still asking: Bea, will you?
“Bloody hell,” Bea swore. “As well hung for a sheep as a lamb, right? Our wayward sister Bea, and who’ll think twice? All right then, I will, but Jesus, Kay.”
And after that, how could they ever speak to each other again?
“I don’t know,” Charade says, “I don’t know. It came and went, that version, in a second. Like a bird flying in one window and out another. It doesn’t quite add up either. I mean, they’d never have let Kay keep teaching that long, not back in those days.”
But why did so much happen in late 1963, when Nicholas and Verity vanished from sight? And what was the translation of that look in Katherine’s eyes? “And why …?” Charade begins.
“Hush,” Koenig murmurs, his lips in her hair. “It doesn’t matter any more.”
The last street lamp blinks off.
“Look,” he says. “Now you can see the constellation of Taurus. And if we had a telescope, the Crab Nebula would wink its neutron eye.”
But Charade is asleep in his arms.