“Well, I think it’s a marvelous idea, Lulu, I really do.”
“I’m not sure, Julia, I’ve never done anything like it before.”
“No reason not to.”
“No, I don’t suppose so, it just seems pretty overwhelming.”
“Well, you’ve got to do something.”
“Do I?”
“Of course,” Julia said, kneading the dough on her kitchen bench and then dropping the mixture with a decisive thump. “You can’t spend your whole life in a cave, Lulu. Sooner or later you’ve got to come out and face the wild animals.”
A memory stirred; where had I heard that before, the rhythm of it?
“Julia?”
“Mmm?”
“Do you have any idea how Duncan’s letters got into my mailbox?”
A few days after Duncan’s last letter arrived—it was, of course, part of an elaborate plan set up by Duncan before he died, beginning with enlisting Julia to drop off his letters after I had been on Willow for a suitable amount of time, and ending, I presumed, with a star-crossed wedding between Will and me beneath the casuarinas—I decided to visit Harry and Rose.
I wanted to talk them through Duncan’s idea, and catch up with Simone and Stella, probably by now up to her armpits in papier-mâché angels, on my way back to Willow.
Will took me to the mainland, raising his eyebrows when he saw my luggage.
“I didn’t know you were moving back to the big smoke.”
“Very funny.”
“How long are you going for?”
“A few days.”
“Where’s Barney?”
“He’s at Julia’s, sulking.”
Will nodded. “I’ll go visit him while you’re away, take him some rotten fish.”
He was loading my bags onto the boat and put out his hand to help me. I’d always liked watching Will’s long body move around the boat, pumping the fuel line, giving the motor a little choke, quick and graceful, far more balanced on sea than land. Mostly, I liked the way, once we got going, he sat back, and smiled his lazy-man grin at me.
Only this time, he wasn’t smiling. Instead he was looking straight out to sea, and I felt the whole ocean between us. We hadn’t really spoken since the afternoon he’d left my house so abruptly. We ran into each other once at the post office, where we exchanged some cursory observations about the weather. Now I found myself in the space of Will’s silence, filling it once more with inane meteorological references.
“It’s cold,” I said.
Will nodded. “Really breezy,” I added, and he nodded once more.
“Brrrrr,” I said, shaking my shoulders at the same time, just in case he needed a visual to illustrate what I was saying.
Will ignored me and I didn’t blame him. Who says “Brrrr”? A girl on a boat with a man who was clearly annoyed with her, that’s who.
“Will,” I ventured.
“Yup,” he answered, keeping his eyes on the water.
“Is everything okay?”
“Yup,” he said again, and then added, “Why wouldn’t it be?”
“No reason,” I answered, although if I had been more truthful I would have said, “Because you never say ‘yup,’ and also because if I really was doing a weather report from this particular vessel, I would have said conditions were glacial.”
The rest of the trip passed in silence, and when we got to the mainland Will passed me my bags and nodded once more.
“Have a good time,” he said, starting the motor, not waiting for my reply, and not asking, as he always did, when I would like him to take me back to Willow.
“Will,” I called out, “I should be about three days—I’ll give you a ring and let you know.”
He mouthed something at me from across the water, and although I couldn’t be sure, it looked a lot like “Whatever.”
Back home in Juniper, I put Will’s “Whatever”—and whatever it meant—out of my mind while I told Rose about the possible transformation of my island home. She was folding clothes, her quick hands moving through the pile of laundry as she listened, deftly transforming it into orderly lines.
“Well, Lulu,” she said, “I think it sounds wonderful, and I’m sure you’re just the girl to do it.” She smiled. “Let’s go and tell your father about it, see what he thinks.”
We went out to the garden where Harry was reading, putting the paper down and his arms out when he saw me.
“Lulu, I was just looking at a horse called Island Girl—and here you are,” he said, still squinting.
“Put your glasses on, Harry,” Rose said.
“Can’t find them.”
“They’re on the table beside you.”
He grinned at us. “So they are.”
“Your father is getting vainer as the years go by,” Rose told me.
“Vainer or vaguer?”
“Vainer, and you know it. Who’s going to see you in your glasses apart from me?”
Harry patted the seat.
“Nobody but you, Rosey-girl, but you’re the only one who matters.”
She sat down beside him. “Lulu’s got an idea, Harry. She’s thinking about turning the house into a bed-and-breakfast. Well, it was Duncan’s idea, but she’s thinking about doing it.” She was rushing over her words, as if she couldn’t get them out fast enough. “Julia would help her run it—you know, with the linen and things—and Will might take guests out on fishing trips, and they could hire some of those old canoes and kayaks in the shed.”
“What would you do, Lulu?” Harry asked.
“Well, she’d be Lulu,” Rose answered, so sure, as usual, of my capabilities, before rushing on. “You’d have to do all the plumbing and put in the extra bathrooms, and she wants me to supply some cakes and biscuits.”
“What do you think of that?” Harry asked Rose, knowing the answer.
“Well, I’d like to help out. Lulu says probably the best way would be for me to cook here during the week and then we could go over on a weekend—not every weekend—and I could leave her with some supplies.”
Harry was smiling at her, tripping over her tongue, his Rose, tickled pink.
“Lulu says I have to think of a name for my range, Harry—my range.”
“Very flash,” he said, grinning at me.
“It’s just at the talking stage at the moment,” I told them. “Nothing’s set in stone or anything like that.”
“Do you want to do it, love?” Harry asked.
“I’m not sure; I think so, I think I’d like to give it a go.”
“That’s my girl.”
The first night I was back in Juniper, I lay on my bed reading interior-decoration magazines for ideas about B and Bs, which mostly seemed to involve wicker baskets, and listening to the faint sounds of Michael Parkinson’s theme song playing on the downstairs television.
“Can I come in, love?” Harry said, poking his head around my bedroom door, hands in the pockets of his olive dressing gown, feet tucked into his checked slippers.
“Harry,” I said, “you’ve been wearing that same outfit to bed since I was seven.”
“I know,” he said, sitting on my bed, flexing his feet to inspect the well-worn shoes that encased them.
I smiled at him.
“So,” he began, “I thought I might give you an update.”
I nodded, looked toward the door.
“Engrossed in Parky.”
“So . . .”
“So, it’s all good, Lulu. I know we all have issues with the medication, your mother the most, but Dr. Reynolds has been slowly taking it down, month by month. He reckons she might be able to come off it completely by the end of the year.”
“What do you think?”
“Oh, I think the usual, love, I think I’ll just keep an eye on it, you know, see how she’s going.”
“What does he say about the dress thing?”
“Reckons it’s marvelous, says we should all wear clothes that make us happy.”
“That sounds good,” I said. Dr. Shaw had told us we should throw all the girls out one day when Rose wasn’t looking—“The shock of it might jolt her into reality,” he’d said, and Harry had gone pale beneath his skin.
“He’s got her going to an acupuncturist as well. Don’t see the sense of sticking needles into yourself myself, but Rose reckons it makes a difference.”
I looked at my father, the lines in his face deepening, the tufts of hair at his temples growing grayer each time I saw him.
“She’s really well, and staying well,” he was saying. “We haven’t had a Doris day in months, and she’s getting out more and more.”
“So,” I said, “on a scale of one to ten?”
“About a three,” Harry answered, his eyes locking with mine. “Don’t worry, love.”
Our eyes met, my words our own code for Rose’s state of mental health, one being optimal, ten being the day we never spoke about.
Annabelle had left me at the gate, after walking me home “to keep you company,” she had said, then running back to her house for her bagpipe lesson—Annie’s idea, short-lived, of course. (Annabelle did about three lessons, then gave her bagpipes to a “poor Scottish man” down the street who turned out to be about as Scottish as we were, and who sold them to a pawnshop.)
I had collected the letters out of the box and pushed open our never-locked, stained-glass front door.
“Mum, I’m home, Mu-um, Mum, I’m home,” I said, singsonging the words, like I always did, but I knew straightaway something was not right, feeling the weight of it caught in the stillness of the house.
The letters dropped from my hands to the floor as I ran to the kitchen door, a towel wedged beneath it. I pushed the door open, and the poisoned air made me feel instantly dizzy as I ran for the stove, pawing at its knobs with hands that no longer seemed to belong to me. Then I raised the sash window with a jerk and went to my mother, who was on the floor. I dragged her from the kitchen into the lounge room, my bony fourteen-year-old arms around her, and ran to the telephone to call an ambulance.
I sat next to her and waited, listening for the sounds of her breath, and it felt like the whole time I was holding my own, not exhaling until the paramedics came through the door. Then I had run the length of the street to where I knew Mattie and Sam would be getting off the bus, waylaying them as they did so to take them to Mrs. Delaney, who was hovering uncertainly in her front yard, wanting to help, dying to know, caught between curiosity and compassion.
“Mum’s had a bit of a fall. I have to stay at the house in case the doctor calls, but you two go next door to the Delaneys’, there’s some cake for you,” and they had been far too young, and too hungry, to question the logic of it.
I went back into the house to call Harry and methodically clean up, straighten the chairs I had knocked over, wash the dishes, sweep the flour from the floor, and spray the room with Forest Glen’s Mountain Mist, guaranteed, the can said, “to remove even the most stubborn household odors.”
Except, of course, for the scent of that day, which lingered on my skin long after it was over.
That was the ten.
I stayed in Juniper for a week, talking through ideas for the B and B with Harry and Rose, and vacillating between deciding I would definitely do it and dismissing it altogether in favor of leaving Willow and returning to the life I’d once had.
But before I could make any of those decisions, I knew there was one thing I should do, at least one part of my past I needed to redress on the way to my future.
After saying good-bye to Harry and Rose, I swung my car out of the driveway and down the road to a familiar intersection—left to my house down Laurel Terrace, or right to Annabelle’s down Beddington.
Frank still lived at the River House, and I owed him an apology.
I’d decimated his daughter’s wedding, been instrumental in sending her away just as she’d come back into the family fold, cost him thousands of dollars for a wedding reception no one wanted to remember and photos of the happy couple no one wanted to see.
I had wanted to say sorry, of course, to Frank, to Annie, to Annabelle, to all of them, but I had balked every time. Easier to retreat behind the she-oaks that guarded my house on an island hardly anyone went to.
I’d done it my whole life, I thought, hidden myself away when the going got too tough. I’d done it when Harry and Rose had let me stay at home all those years ago, and I was doing it again now, on Willow.
Well, if I really was going start my own business there, then perhaps it was time I started minding my own. What had I always told Mattie and Sam, twisting like corkscrews to get out of my way when they were little and I was trying to take a Band-Aid off their grazed knees?
“Hold still,” I’d say, “it’ll hurt more if I do it slowly. If you let me rip it off, you won’t feel it so much, I promise.”
I swung the car onto Annabelle’s street.
“Rip the Band-Aid off, Lulu,” I said to myself.
I parked well away from the house, feeling pit-of-the-stomach nervous.
I walked toward the house, waiting for the moment when the white glare of the footpath would give way to shadow as the poinciana tree behind Annabelle’s fence reached over to brush the path with its branches. Red flowers tossed casually across its canopy, I took a few calming breaths, then let its cool fingers claim me and lead me inside.
“I live in a jungle,” Annabelle whispered as I walked through the gates, the gargoyles grinning at me with their green mossy teeth.
“Evening, Annabelle; evening, Lulu,” echoed Rose as I passed beneath them to walk toward the stairs where two little girls sat with their heads together writing words in a book, and closing it wordlessly when they saw me, standing on pale legs to disapanish into the house.
Green tendrils curled around doors, in and out of windows, and traveled all the way across the roof, the wisteria, it seemed, trying to take the house down with it. I stood outside the front door, shut, but needing, I knew, just a slight push to open, and for one of those tendrils to reach down and pull me in.
Putting one hand against it, I called out, “Frank, are you home?”
“In the kitchen, Lulu,” he called back, as if it was the most natural thing in the world that I should be here in this house where everything and nothing had changed.
“Tallulah,” he said, “how wonderful to see you.”
Frank, sitting at his table, covered in papers and pots of paint and bits of ribbon and staples and notepads and coffee cups and a jug filled with water and frangipanis dripping their milk into it. “They say you should burn the stems or something, to stop their leaking,” he told me, “but I can’t see the point.”
“No,” I said, thinking that one of the things I had always liked about this man was that he rarely could.
“I’m so glad you’ve come.”
“Really?” I said, “Because I wasn’t sure if I should, I actually wouldn’t blame you if you weren’t overjoyed to see me because”—rip the damn thing off, Lulu—“of what I did at the wedding. It was inexcusable, Frank, and I’ve come to apologize to you.”
“No need.”
“No need? Frank, I did a terrible thing, and I am so sorry, it was petty and spiteful and wrong”—now the Band-Aid was off, there was no stopping the bloodletting—“and I don’t think I can actually stay in this house and look at you, Frank, with your beautiful milky frangipanis in that jug.” I burst into tears—big, shuddering sobs that sprang from my eyes and set my nose coursing.
Frank handed me a tissue.
“Blow,” he said, guiding my hands up to my nose. “Blow the living daylights out of it, Lulu.”
He lit the gas, put the kettle on, put some leaves in the blue enamel pot, and two mugs on the table.
“Sit down and have some tea.” He smiled. “There is very little in the world that can’t be solved with a cuppa.”
I sat, and began apologizing all over again.
“Enough, Tallulah,” Frank said. “I am happy to see you. I am happy you are here in this house with me, drinking my tea and destroying my tissues.”
“Stop being so nice to me, Frank,” I said. “I can’t stand it.”
He poured out the tea, handed me my cup.
“Lulu,” he said, “you don’t have to explain your actions to me, just as I don’t have to explain my daughter’s to you. I told your dad the same thing when he tried to talk to me about it all.”
“He did? I didn’t know that.”
“Well, he did—and I asked him if he could remember what King Edward said, when he abdicated.”
“What did Harry say?”
“He said, ‘Jeez, Frank, I’m not that old.’ ”
I laughed and Frank laughed with me.
“Anyway, King Edward said, when nobody could understand why he was throwing it all away, all of it, an empire no less, for a woman who even the kindest person could only say had an interesting face, he said, ‘The heart wants what it wants.’
“Anyway,” he said, “enough of this. I am glad to see you, Lulu, and in fact, you may have come, as they say, in the nick of time.”
“What do you mean?”
“They want to pull our tree house down.”
The letter had arrived weeks ago, Frank said, telling me how dismayed he had been when he found it among the clutter on the kitchen table.
It had lain between some pen-and-ink doodles—one rather good one, he thought, of Harry and his truck—and now he had just three weeks or thereabouts to lodge an application for building approval from the local council, an application he could see had bugger-all chance of being successful.
“You read it, Lulu,” he said, “see if I’m right.”
I scanned the pages, seeing Frank’s chances ricochet from bugger-all to not-at-all as I did so. Because of its size and character, the letter said, the tree house was “an extension,” which had not been approved by council. Furthermore, when the “extension” had been inspected by Mr. K. Munroe on September 7, it had been found to contravene local building codes 34, 36 A, 36 B, 42, and 78, copies of which were attached.
Not that there would be much point in doing that, when the letter also said that the “tree in which the extension was housed”—“Tree house,” I muttered, “just say tree house”—had been found to be outside of Frank’s land’s designated boundaries. Therefore, it was actually on council land; therefore, we were, as Harry would say, completely stuffed.
I had no legal training whatsoever, no concept of council by-laws, and the letter was making my head spin, but nevertheless I immediately launched into some spirited straw-clutching.
“Frank,” I said, “did you give your permission for this Munroe man to come onto your property?”
Frank said at first he thought that no, he hadn’t—but then a few days ago he’d remembered a bloke a month or so back, asking if he could have a bit of a wander around his garden. Frank had been working on a portrait of Annie in his studio—he didn’t usually go in for portraits, he said, but had been working on this one for ages. It was from a Polaroid photo taken years ago, when Polaroids had just come out and everyone stood around at parties waiting for the photos to emerge from the camera’s belly. Annie had hated those cameras, Frank said—happily veering completely off course—believing it was unnatural to capture people so instantly. “Annie liked a more languid getting-to-know-you process.” He laughed. But he had kept quite a few shots, and he had been working from one of Annie, taken at, of all things, a fondue party, when that bloke had stuck his head in the door and asked him if he could have a look around. Frank had said yes and waved him away—people were always wandering into his home, or turning up in his garden, “down there with the fairies.”
“So have you done anything about it?” I asked, trying to lead him back to the real problem sitting atop a mango tree in his backyard.
“No, I just put the letter away until someone came and helped me work out what to do—and here you are, Tallulah,” he said as the tendrils came down through the window and yanked me all the way back in.
“I’d like to see it,” I said, “the tree house.”
“After you, Tallulah de Lovely,” Frank said, standing up.
We went down through the garden and stood at the bottom of the tree, climbing the rungs, then pulling ourselves up with the rope to the veranda. Ducking our heads through the doorway with the moon and the stars dancing over it, Frank asked me, “You remember it, Lulu?”
I breathed it all in.
“Yes,” I said, thinking that although I might have done it once, I would never let Frank Andrews down again.
“Give me the letter, Frank,” I said. “I might know someone who can help.”