I didn’t take the barge over to Willow.
Instead I went on the new “Day Tripper” service, run by Will, the deckhand I’d met in Walter Prentice’s café, the one, I remembered, who’d said I had a sweaty face.
“It was Duncan’s idea, actually,” he’d told me when I’d rung the number to book. “He said Willow needed a service for people who didn’t want all the palaver of packing up a car, or were only going to stay a day or two.”
Or, I thought inwardly, for people who are carrying so much baggage all by themselves, they really don’t need to take any more.
“Anyway,” Will was saying, “I’ll be happy to take you and Barney across whenever you like,” adding, “Duncan said I was to take good care of you both.”
“Did he?” I said, feeling, as I always did, both annoyed and comforted by Duncan’s proprietary tone, now apparently still booming at me from beyond the grave.
“Yup,” he answered. “I’ve got a boat-building and handyman service on Willow as well, so Duncan said to keep a bit of an eye on you.”
I bristled a little, and when I hung up, said into the air, “Duncan, I am not a five-year-old girl on a kindy excursion, you know!” and began stuffing clothes into a backpack to take over to Willow.
How many other people had Duncan asked to “keep an eye on me” over there, I wondered, but when I told Simone and Stella about it later, Simone had leaned back and said, “Well, Duncan probably had a point, Lulu, I mean look what happens when you’re left to your own devices.”
Stella had insisted on driving me down to the point where Walter’s barge and now Will’s much smaller boat picked up the passengers for Willow. Walter had raised his hand from the deck when he saw me, and I waved back, wishing for a moment I had taken my car, if only to see his leathery face at the window saying, “All right, Lulu, bit of a nor’easter coming, but we’ll be sweet.”
“Man looks like a half-eaten pecan pie,” Duncan always said once Walter had walked away.
Duncan.
I had not, right up until the moment I saw Walter Prentice, realized how difficult this trip to Willow was going to be. Somehow, in the midst of everyone’s voices asking me about the house, it had escaped me that this would be my first trip to Willow without him beside me or waiting for me at the gate of Lingalonga. It felt wrong, as if I had no business being there.
I had no business anywhere, for that matter. No job, no one counting on me to turn up at a certain time, and no real idea of just what I planned to do once I opened the mammoth gift Duncan had given me.
No, given Barney, I reminded myself firmly, it’s Barney’s house, not yours, remember.
I smiled at the absurdity of it, and at what I was doing, or not doing.
I hadn’t really worked in months. I had no partner, no profession, and no, as Simone would say, clue.
What had Duncan said I was to be in his final letter?
A caretaker.
I looked out at the water.
Perhaps, for the time being, that would have to be enough.
I would become the caretaker of my own life, until I figured out what I was really meant to be doing with it.
Besides, it was not as if there was anyone around to take care of me.
I put my backpack down and knelt beside Barney, letting his chocolate eyes steady me until he ran barking toward Will Barton, who was bringing his boat into the bay.
“Hey, Barney boy,” he shouted, “good to see you, mate.” He guided the boat in and shut down the motor, dragging the dinghy onto the wet sand.
“Hey, Tallulah,” he said. “Nice to see you, want me to take the backpack for you?”
“No, thank you, I’m used to it,” I said, wishing I had taken Simone’s advice to sew a few badges on it—“So it looks like you’ve been somewhere, Tallulah.”
Barney had already leaped into the boat and settled himself across its width, and I followed him, but in a decidedly more ungainly fashion, the backpack threatening to take me with it when I swung it off my shoulder.
I don’t know why I’d bought a brand-new backpack for Willow; it just seemed more appropriate than a suitcase—“More ‘islandy,’ ” Stella had offered, while Simone had looked at it and said, “How very Lonely Planet of you.”
Now, I wished I had taken one of them with me, as Will started the motor and we cut across the water in a steady slap of small waves hitting the bow.
I felt strangely nervous, the intimacy of the small space we were in not helping, making me feel like I should make conversation, then finding I had none.
Will Barton filled the space between us, telling me about the house Duncan had bought me.
The owner before Duncan, Will said, had been a bloke called Terry Danvers, a big-talking, smallish man who had tried to turn it into a recreational club, the Willow Island Aqua Sports Association.
“That’s a bit of a mouthful,” I offered.
“Yeah,” grinned Will, “he tried to shorten it to WIASA, but it never really took off.”
Terry had spent a couple of months fixing it up, Will said, then done a runner, taking off in one of his own canoes, never to be seen on the island again.
He’d bobbed up on the mainland a couple of years later, leaving a mountain of debt his mother eventually took care of and an abandoned clubhouse in which the island kids lit bonfires and shared their first kisses.
Since then, it had stood empty, a shell of a house with the horsetail casuarinas creeping closer, and sand billowing into its corners, and people thought Duncan was mad to buy it.
Will smiled. “He didn’t listen to any of them; he said it had excellent bones.”
Duncan had asked Will to be in charge of the renovation, to supervise the contractors and tradies, and after it had been repainted, rewired, had the plumbing “sorted” and the giant yawning holes in its walls replaced by windows, Will had realized Duncan had been right, it did have good bones.
Speaking of bones, Will went on, his last job for Duncan had been to load the new deep freezer with a supply of them for Barney. “You’ve got enough in there to last you for years,” Will said. “I’m coming over to you if there’s a nuclear war, by the way.” It was then that I threw up over the side of the boat and into the bay’s pristine waters.
“I’m sorry,” I said when I’d finished, red-faced. “I’m normally okay on this ride, but I’m just a bit nervous, I think.”
Unnerved and undone by Duncan’s gift, at how hard he had worked to make it work for Barney and me, at how much I wished he was sitting beside me, fingers deep in Barney’s coat.
“I miss Duncan,” I found myself telling Will Barton, who was handing me a bottle of chilled water he’d grabbed from a nearby shelf, “stupid old bastard.”
“You’ll be all right,” he said.
I took a quick sip and looked down at Barney—who was staring reproachfully at me from beneath the seat. “Oh, stop it,” I said to him. “As if you haven’t done worse,” and Will Barton let out a snort of laughter.
“Duncan told me you were funny,” he said.
Oh God, I thought, what else had he told him?
Then the familiar lines of Willow Island came into view—at first a smattering of casuarinas, then, through their fringes, a small, rocky bay and then the long wooden dock visitors hauled their luggage along.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Will said. “I never get tired of this place.”
“Mmm-mmm,” I said through the water bottle, still raised to my lips. I felt I had already committed enough indiscretions on this trip, and I saw no need to add vomit breath to them.
Will idled the boat, cut the engine, and threw a rope around the cleat. Then he hoisted my backpack on one shoulder and stepped onto the dock.
Barney had already jumped ship and was running up and down the shoreline before disappearing entirely up a sandy path.
“Barney!” I called after him. “Come, come back!”
“He’ll be all right,” Will said, and I wondered for a moment if that was his answer to everything.
He put my bag on the old-fashioned wooden luggage trolley and walked beside it until we reached the end of the dock.
“I’ll walk you up to the house, if you like,” Will said. “It’s not very far.”
“No, thank you, I’ll be fine from here, I’ve got a map,” I said, taking out the piece of paper Andrew Lyons had given me, and, seeing Barney come bounding back into view, adding, “and I’m pretty sure he knows the way.”
“Okay,” said Will, “but I might check in on you a bit later, see how you’re settling in.”
“Great, thanks,” I said, my voice high and suddenly not my own. “I’ll see you later, Will.” I began to walk up the path, feeling the eyes of the island on me, some of them, I imagined, peeking through twitching, netted curtains.
Duncan, Will had told me, had remained uncharacteristically tight-lipped to the rest of the Willowers about what he was doing with the former WIASA headquarters, and who was going to live in it.
As a result, who I was had become part of an island guessing game—some Willowers said it was one of Duncan’s former wives, others said a mistress. One of the wilder theories was that it was his little-known, horribly disfigured brother sent to live on the island away from cruel stares and prying eyes.
“You didn’t believe any of it, did you?” I’d asked Will.
“No,” he answered. “I believed what Duncan told me.”
“Which was?”
“He said he bought it for you because you were his friend,” Will replied, “and Barney’s godmother.”
Now Barney and I had come to the visitor’s board, as marked on my map.
Willow Island, the sign said, was officially known as Casuarina Island, after the she-oak, or horsetail casuarina trees that studded its dunes, but locals had adopted the name Willow in the early 1950s for the way the trees bent over, a lifetime of winds forcing them to bow to the inevitable. However, the notice jauntily reminded visitors, Willow Island was not a place to weep but rather to celebrate the strengths of the casuarinas, still standing strong against the winds that buffeted them.
Bloody hell, Duncan, I thought, how many messages can one man send from the grave?
The island, the sign noted, was sixty-three kilometers long and fifty-seven kilometers wide, and currently home to roughly 376 permanent residents—the number written in chalk for easy alteration—although its ranks swelled on weekends and holidays.
I reached for the stub of white chalk to change the number to 377—378, I thought, if I included Barney—but then I put it back in its place again.
Don’t get ahead of yourself, Tallulah, I thought, taking Barney’s lead.
I followed him as he loped down the path, more subdued now, no more scrabbling through the bushes or darting ahead of me. I walked behind him, ducking my head under branches, hearing the whipbirds from somewhere within them and taking in the sharp, wet air, and the long drag line of a snake’s belly on the sandy path in front of me.
Putting my hand up to hold my hat down against the wind, I tramped after Barney, then stopped to put my backpack down outside the high, curved rock wall he had led me to.
Avalon Road—home to the former WIASA, and now to Barney and me.
Barney pushed open the wooden gate with his bullethead, then began to run up the path toward a white house, which was perched like a drunken ship pitching a little to the left. I began to run too, backpack bobbing against my shoulders, toward the house with three roof lines like sails against the sea.
Barney had pushed open the unlocked front door and was sitting on the gray slate tiles in the hallway waiting for me when I arrived panting behind him. I took my shoes off so I could feel their coolness on my skin, and then began to wander through the house, and the whitewashed rooms that filled it.
They were generous, airy spaces, with timbered windows and rough, concrete floors, a kitchen with a pitched roof and a long table, big enough for a dozen people to eat at—“If we knew a dozen people here, Barney,” I said—its cupboards, I saw, already stocked with essentials.
I made a cup of tea, my hands groping about the unfamiliar drawers and cupboards for mugs and sugar, and feeling ridiculously triumphant when I found them.
I felt better with the tea in my hand and padded down the three stone steps into the lounge room, where two fat, overstuffed sofas sat beside a bookshelf that ran along an entire wall, crammed with books.
I ran my finger along their spines, smiling as I realized they had belonged to Duncan, who had loved books and wanted everybody else to as well.
My eyes took in his favorites, and I saw him pressing his nose deep into their folds, looking up at me and saying, “Sometimes, Lulu, I just can’t get close enough.”
Barney was nudging me, also impatient to get on, to lead me up the stairs to the bedrooms—six of them, I counted. I’d never fill them, surely.
Then we climbed some steeper, smaller steps to another bedroom, a storage space that had been converted into a loft, which Barney claimed for both of us by performing his customary three complete circles before collapsing on the rug he had decided was his bed.
“I don’t know, Barney,” I said. “Those stairs could be a problem for you, mate.”
He looked at me with watery eyes, snorted something disgusting out of his mouth, and immediately fell asleep.
Well, I thought, so much for the ludicrously expensive Snoozy Paws custom-made dog bed I’d brought him for his new home.
I lay down on the bed that felt like the house beneath it—big, white, billowing—and listened to the sounds of my new home, Barney’s snores, the she-oaks creaking against the window, the rumble of the ocean, and then, making me sit up in bed, a knock at the door.
Barney stirred, shot skitter-pawed down the stairs, and sniffed at the gap underneath the door.
“Who is it?” I called.
“Julia Bendon, your neighbor.”
I opened the door to a plump, creamy woman carrying a warm dish covered by a tea towel.
“Hello,” she said, holding it out. “I’ve brought you this dinner to welcome you to the island, and also because I wanted to come and have a good look at you.”
I laughed, taking the dish from her, absurdly happy to meet someone who lived nearby.
“Well,” I said, “at least you’re honest.”
“Not always,” said Julia Bendon.
Later, when our friendship was as robust as the dinner she had brought over that first night, Julia would tell me how she had indeed watched me through her window that afternoon.
“I’m not usually a curtain twitcher,” she would say, “but Duncan had made you so damned mysterious I couldn’t help myself!”
She would also confess she had been a little disappointed at what she saw.
“Because I didn’t have a hunchback, you mean?” I asked.
“Or at least a small limp,” she replied. “Boris”—Julia’s husband—“kept trying to get me away from the window. ‘Leave the poor girl alone,’ he said. ‘Give her a chance to settle in.’ ”
“What did you say?” I asked her.
“I said I was giving you an hour, then I was taking you up some dinner.”
We would both laugh, remembering, but that first afternoon was far more awkward, loaded with polite questions that fell from my lips as if I were conducting a job interview, “And what is your husband’s name, Julia?”
“Boris.”
Boris? “And do the two of you work on the island?”
“Not anymore, both retired, we were in retail over on the mainland.”
Julia, showing admirable restraint, hadn’t asked me too much about myself, but later she would also tell me how she had collared Will on the beach that afternoon to pump him for information.
Will, she reported, had said I seemed “nice,” which was, Julia sighed, just what a man would say. “So unobservant,” she’d sniffed.
But Will Barton was not as unseeing as Julia thought.
He did, I was to discover, know everything about me, including the fact that, for a girl who’d arrived on the island with only a backpack, I was carrying a lot of baggage.
Oh well, at least I’d thrown up some of it on the way over.
My first few weeks on Willow were lazy ones, spent exploring the island with Barney, reading Duncan’s books, and getting to know some of the people who lived there.
I had saved up quite a bit of money and had no real need to start looking for work yet, and although I knew, somewhere between walks through the rock pools at Lonergan’s Bay and throwing a stick again and again to Barney on Spanish Beach, that this indolence could not last forever, but in the meantime I was enjoying the sensation of treading water.
Julia was becoming a friend, and a guide to the island, and most days, when the sting of the sun had waned, she and I would walk the steep path to Racey O’Leary’s seat, Julia sometimes taking a cloth to polish its olive-tinged copper plaque.
In 1902, it said, Douglas O’Leary had run all the way up here to light a fire to guide any survivors of the famous Brereton Venturer shipwreck to Willow’s shore, and by the time he got back down again “Douglas” had been dropped for “Racey,” and an island legend had been born.
Racey O’Leary had been only ten years old at the time, and Julia liked to sit on his seat and imagine him all those years ago racing through the scrub, the pepper trees scratching at his face, dragging the branches through the spindly grass, making his big fire and not stopping until he had it raging, then collapsing beside it, his face blackened and his tiny rib cage heaving from exertion.
“How are you, Racey?” she’d say. “It’s Julia, just stopping by on my way to the lookout to pay my respects.”
I never added anything to these pleasantries, but instead listened to Julia, who said it was important to let people know they were still thought of after they went, wherever it was they had gone. Racey eventually raced off at the age of eighty-five, when he was still, as the plaque proudly noted, making his way up this very track almost every day.
No, Julia had said, just because people no longer walked the paths, it didn’t mean you couldn’t feel their footprints beneath you.
Like Duncan’s.
I thought of him constantly—and of Josh and Annabelle, the two of them somewhere overseas, trying to get their marriage on track after its false start.
That’s what Harry had called it, as if the three of us were swimmers lined up on the blocks, and one of us had accidentally tumbled into the water, or, as Simone had put it, “into Joshua Keaton’s trousers.”
My cheeks still burned every time I thought of them, and a hard little ball of anxiety would gather in my throat, but Duncan had known what he was doing when he’d sent me to Willow, neatly whisking them mostly out of sight and out of mind, “Like people in Tasmania,” I could hear him boom.
When I could bear to think of them, it was mostly to wish them well and hope that whatever damage I had done was not permanent. Now that Josh’s breath wasn’t on my skin, or his voice against my ear, without the distraction of him, I could think about Josh with a clearer head and realize he belonged to Annabelle; the two of them, I had come to see, were far better suited than Josh and I ever had been.
I would never have been enough for him—even Annabelle in all her brightness struggled to keep him in her light.
“He’s a crack slipper,” Duncan had told me one day at Lingalonga, just after he’d imparted the rather startling information that Josh had once visited him there.
“What? Josh came here? Why did Josh come here?” I’d asked, my voice rising.
“Because I invited him,” he’d answered maddeningly.
Duncan was still quite well then, padding about the kitchen, making tea, getting out biscuits, and saying, “I could see the way the ship was sailing, and I wanted to have a little talk with him, man-to-man.”
Josh’s visit, which neither of them had mentioned to me at the time, came not long after the Bloom exhibition, and Duncan had taken it upon himself to “have a chat” with the bloke he said he knew was trouble the moment he spotted him.
“Not the teeth thing again,” I’d begged.
Duncan had ignored me, then continued, explaining he’d asked Josh over to Willow “for a bit of fishing.”
“Reeled him right in.” He’d smirked.
They had shared a beer on Josh’s arrival and then headed down to the beach to cast their lines.
“If you want a man to talk,” Duncan said, “you shut up, so I did.”
Josh, he said, had been edgy, finally filling the silence by asking Duncan what he was really there for, and Duncan had answered, “Well, it’s certainly not for your fishing prowess, mate.” Then, Duncan recounted, he had warned Josh off. “I told him I knew all about him—old man shooting through, mother chain-smoking her way through his childhood, barely noticing if he was coming or going. . . .”
I winced. I had not told Duncan any of this for him to recite later in “Duncan McAllister—Monologue on a Windy Beach.”
“The thing is, Lulu, growing up like that, you can’t help but become a crack slipper, someone who just slips through the cracks of other people’s lives, you know, riding your push-bike around the neighborhood, always looking for somewhere to park the bloody thing, someone to let you in.
“Someone like you, Tallulah, with your ready-made family sitting around the table eating one of Rose’s roasts, Harry cracking a beer and pouring the gravy, Mattie and Sam kicking each other’s shins under the table.” Duncan sighed. “If Josh had been smart, he’d have stayed there forever, and he might have been happy, but he didn’t—and do you want to know why?”
“Why?” I asked automatically, rolling my eyes.
“Because, Lulu, I’ll tell you what I told Josh—men like us: we can’t leave it alone, because deep down we can’t believe that girls like you would want someone like us. We know we’re not good enough, never have been good enough. My old man shot through too, remember?
“He left when I was twelve, just walked out the front door with a bag in his hands, and when I said, ‘Don’t go, Dad,’ he said, ‘Nothing here to stay for.’ ”
Duncan shrugged his shoulders.
“And the only time men like us do feel good enough, Lulu, is when we’re finally in bed with a woman we never in a million years thought we could have. We’re skirt chasers, Lulu, not a very honorable profession, and not a very smart one either.
“I told Josh: ‘I’ve got four marriages behind me, four good women let down because I couldn’t keep it in my pants. I’ve got kids running from one end of the beach to the other, and some days I can’t remember which mother they belong to. . . .’ ” Duncan sighed again. “I told him it was a bad show, I told him to give it up, to give you up, or Annabelle, or both of you, before he did something just to see if he could.”
“Bloody hell, Duncan,” I said, “you said all that?”
“I did.” He smiled. “More tea, vicar?”
Now Duncan was gone, having once again been proven right.
Josh and I had never discussed his trip to Willow; somehow I had managed to put it from my mind after Duncan told me about it, and Josh . . . well, who knew what Josh had thought of it.
It certainly hadn’t stopped him.
Thinking about Josh and Annabelle and Duncan constantly sometimes made me feel like I was sharing the former WIASA headquarters with three ghosts—perhaps not, I realized after a few weeks, the healthiest of living arrangements.
So I picked up the phone to ask Harry and Rose over, and invite a little bit of my present into my past.
“Your mum will be thrilled, Lulu,” Harry said. “She’s been champing at the bit to get there, you know, and Sam and Mattie would love to come too. They were just saying the other day they haven’t seen you since they got back from Canberra.”
I’d hung up the phone and glanced at the enormous kitchen table, happy that at least some of the places at it would be filled. Then I began to get the house ready, plumping pillows and opening windows, setting up the spare bedrooms and stocking the shelves in readiness for my brothers’ gargantuan appetites.
They came on a Sunday morning and stayed for three weeks that melded effortlessly into one another, days into nights and back again. I had not spent so much time with my brothers since they were small boys; now they were young men. Mattie and Sam hadn’t chosen to continue the family tradition of plumbing the depths of excellence, but if Harry was disappointed not to add “and Sons” to the de Longland company name, he never let it show. He loved having two boys at university, both of them studying physiotherapy, both of them, he’d brag to anyone who’d listen, capable of fixing his back, crooked from years of bending over pipes.
Will seemed to be around much more during my family’s stay too, taking my brothers out to collect the crab pots, or showing Harry all the work that had been done to WIASA, Harry happy as always for a bit of tradie talk.
“I hope my father’s not stalking you,” I said to Will one morning in the kitchen after Harry had been chatting to him about fixing up the boat shed.
“Nah.” Will laughed. “I like having him around, he’s a good bloke.”
Then he reached out for my cheek.
“And it gives me an excuse to hang around you a bit more.”
My stomach did a little flip as our eyes locked together for an instant, but I stepped back out of his reach.
The truth was, from the moment I first saw him, it registered that Will Barton was a very attractive man, in the same way that you register that the sun comes up every morning, but I was in no shape to contemplate any sort of dalliance.
I didn’t deserve it, so I stepped out of the way, brushing Will, and what he’d said, aside.
His eyes dropped from mine, and I saw a slight flush rise to his cheeks as he awkwardly turned away from me, murmuring something about tide times.
He was still murmuring when he walked out the door.
Over the next few days, it was easy to forget his words, lost in the cacophony Mattie and Sam created. I loved having my brothers around, so grown-up now, so loud, so busy. Sometimes, as much as I loved Willow, there were days that hung empty in the afternoon and nights where the casuarinas nudged at my window, and I would lie and listen and wrap my fingers deep in Barney’s coat.
Now my brothers’ long bodies and strangely deep voices seemed to fill every room, where they ate and strummed at guitars and still played tricks on their big sister—for example, I discovered the day after they’d gone, putting rotting crab shells in her laundry basket.
On the morning they left—Harry warning me not to get too fat on all the food Rose had packed into the deep freezer, Rose pretending to be offended—I watched Will take them all the way across the bay, then turned to walk home, Barney close beside me, the weight of his body against my legs. He leaned into me along the path, his head knocking against my knees, up to the front door and onto the couch, where he lay panting beside me.
I lay back and took in the silence: no Harry banging away at the gurgling pipes of the WIASA, no Mattie and Sam playing soccer in the front yard with Boris and Will, and no Rose.
No Rose singing in the kitchen in Lauren as she rolled and sliced and cut and mixed and told me, for the first time, about us.
Harry and the boys had gone out with Will in the boat and we’d had the whole afternoon to ourselves. Rose, making two lasagnas—one for us, one for Julia and Boris—had put it out to cool and said, “Let’s go for a walk, Lulu, it’s too nice a day to be stuck inside.”
I had thought so too, but a childhood spent watching her in the kitchen and not daring to ask if she would like to come anywhere at all still lingered. So I had not suggested a walk myself, despite the fact that every day of my family’s visit, most of her dresses had an airing—and I knew, without having to peek in her suitcase, that there would be no Doris days on this holiday.
“Let’s go,” I smiled, whistling for Barney.
We walked, my mother and I, along the edge of the water all the way to Pipers Point and back again.
Then Rose looked out at the water, slipped her arm around me, and began to speak.
“When I was about sixteen, Lulu, I started to panic,” she said, keeping her eyes fixed on the ocean. “I don’t know why. It felt like all these little knocks just behind my heart, hammering away inside me.
“I managed to hide it for a long time, but it wouldn’t go away, and the knocks got louder and louder, and when I was nineteen I was sent to the hospital for treatment, and then I was in and out, and in and out of there for months, and one time when I was out I met your father.”
We began to walk again, her arm still around my shoulders, her eyes still on the bobbing sea.
“I told him how I was, Lulu, I told him I was too much to take on, but he said, ‘I’ll take you on, Rose,’ and he did.
“The next few years were up and down, but Harry and I were in it together, so I was lucky, and then I fell pregnant with you.”
She turned to face me and took both my hands in hers.
“I’m sorry, Lulu,” she said, “but I was no good at it, no good at you from the moment you were born.
“All the other mothers were holding on to their babies like their life depended on it, but on the day I took you home I was holding you and I needed to get something from my bag, and a nurse was passing by, and I held you out to her and I said, ‘Here, can you hold that for a minute?’
“I hated myself for calling you ‘that,’ even though the nurse laughed and said, ‘Don’t worry, Mrs. de Longland, it’s just sleep deprivation.’ But I knew it wasn’t.
“We took you home and Harry carried you inside, and I went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea.”
Rose shook her head. “I spent years in that damned kitchen,” she said. “I’d look out the window and see you and your father playing in the backyard; I’d watch the way he’d throw you into the air and I wanted to run outside and push him out of the way so I could be the one to catch you, but I couldn’t do it. All I could do was stay in that kitchen and try to bake my way to goodness.”
I smiled at her, remembering the packets of Taylor’s self-raising flour sitting on our kitchen bench, the company’s high-topped slogan known by generations of Australian women: “Bake Your Way to Goodness.”
“Oh, Rose,” I said, both of us now smiling at the absurdity of trying so damned hard to follow a slogan—its writer could never have known how literally at least one woman took it.
“Then,” Rose continued, “then the twins came.”
I remembered that too, my two squawking, squealing brothers who, it seemed to me, took what little my mother had left to give, then sent her scurrying back into the kitchen, where she stayed and stayed and stayed, until Harry and I knew it was up to us to help them grow up.
“You were marvelous with them, Lulu, you did everything I should have done. Everyone kept saying what a wonderful little mother you were—do you remember that?”
I nodded. “I hated being called that.”
“I hated it too,” Rose said, “because you were not a little mother, Lulu, you were my daughter, and I failed you.”
“No, you didn’t,” I began, but she shook her head.
“I did, I didn’t mean to for a second, but I did.”
We had begun walking again, this time in silence, picking our way across the smooth, gray rocks strewn between a small arc of coastline.
We walked toward the end of the headland, and she linked her arm with mine.
“What I wanted to tell you, Tallulah, what I probably should have told you years ago was that all that time, when it was Harry you’d run to when you’d hurt yourself, all those times when it was his arms that caught you, not mine, I loved you.
“It might have been from afar, Tallulah,” she continued, taking my face once more in her hands, “but I loved you with every single breath I had in me.”
There was a loud knock, bringing me abruptly back from the beach with my mother to the screen door where Julia stood, asking me over for dinner.
“Thought you might be a bit lonely with your family gone,” she said.
No, I told her, I was all right, and there was no need for her to cook, Rose had left both of us a lasagna, enough for several dinners, to keep us warm.
Besides, for the next few weeks I had very little chance to feel lonely, much less alone. Duncan had always told me you never knew how many friends you had until you moved to the beach. “No man is an island, Lulu,” he’d say, “especially when he lives on one.”