They were moving like mercury through the shadows, silvery silhouettes forming and reforming in clusters under the branches.
In the half-light, I began to make out their faces, the gang, as Duncan would say, all here six months after Rose’s death, gathered beneath Frank’s tree house.
Annie and Frank, Fergus, Christa, Josh and Annabelle, Simone, Stella and Billy, Mattie, Sam, even Ben, with Monica Golliana tucked under his arm.
“I hope it’s all right that I am joining in,” she said when she met me, and I liked her instantly, even if she did look unnecessarily pretty for this time of the morning.
The Willowers were there too, Julia and Boris, Will trying to keep control of Barney, who was giddy with the heady collision of old and new smells.
Annie had said we had to get there before the bulldozers did—“to take the bastards by surprise”—and so there we all were, wearing the shocked, wan expressions of the half-asleep.
“I may be a drunk old hippie,” Annie had said at one of the meetings she had called at the River House, “but if it’s one thing we drunk old hippies know how to do, it’s how to stage a protest, so listen and learn, people, particularly you, Lulu, no wetting your pants when the policemen come.”
I watched as Maxine Mathers picked her way with a camera crew down the path, and felt Simone bristle beside me.
“Remember”—I grinned at her in the semidarkness—“we’re making love, not war.”
Annie, of all people, had invited Maxine, given her this exclusive on the various warring branches of Frank Andrews’s family banding together to save his tree house.
“We want maximum publicity,” Annie had continued, “and that means, whether we like it or not, Maxine Mathers.”
Annabelle had looked across at me and rolled her eyes, and she was twelve years old again, making faces at her mother for putting an unboiled egg in her lunch.
Annabelle and Josh were staying this time for a little while, to curate Frank’s work, bits and pieces of art strewn throughout the River House, paintings and etchings and pastels stuffed in drawers and at the back of cupboards, and in the boot of his car.
Annie was helping too, she and Frank once more entwined together at the River House, Frank, I knew from personal experience, well acquainted with the art of forgiveness. It was during one of Annie’s forays through the house for more pieces of Frank’s work that she’d come across the council’s final notice for the demolition of the tree house. Apparently she’d simply shaken her head and said, “No, I don’t think so.”
Then all of us had been caught up in Annie’s kaleidoscope, a jumble of phone calls and meetings, with Annie at the center, not drinking at all now but barking out orders with a joint dangling from her dark-plum lips.
Somewhere in the middle of it, Ben rang to ask, “Can we come? I’d like to, Lulu,” and Fergus strolled in saying, “So, what are we doing?” as if nothing had ever happened.
The Willowers arrived the day before the protest, Julia in a T-shirt and beach shorts, tanned legs and a bucket hat on her head, Boris in a button-up shirt and ironed trousers—“I don’t know what to wear to a protest,” he said.
The night before, I’d stayed at the River House, where Annie had called a last meeting, outlining what time to gather beneath the tree, what to wear, how to behave when the bulldozers, then the cops, came: “Don’t be rude,” she’d said, “just stand your ground.” She’d taught us to how to link our arms so they were hard to dislodge from one another. In the breaking dawn light, I heard a hum from the far end of the street and I knew it had begun.
“All right,” said Annie, “link arms.” I felt a little thrill rush through me.
Maxine Mathers straightened her shoulders and used a small compact to apply lipstick, and everyone was getting into position, except not everyone was there.
I looked around the tree and thought of Duncan, of how much he would have loved this, how he would have dug out a shirt that read Bread Not Bombs and pretended for the entire morning he had been a student radical in the seventies, when really he was hosting fondue parties in a full-length silk kaftan.
“Marvelous,” I heard him boom at me from somewhere in the branches, “bloody marvelous, Lulu.”
And Rose.
Rose should have been there, Rose who would have been so happy to see Annabelle and me together again with no prickles against our skin, who would have said to Josh, “You need some meat on those bones, come for roast this Sunday”; Rose who would have been handing out biscuits still warm in our palms.
But Rose was not there—and neither, I realized in a flash of panic, was Harry.
I unhooked my arm from Annabelle’s.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Harry,” I told her.
Annabelle stepped out of the circle, her eyes darting around it. She turned to me and held both of my hands in hers.
“It will be all right, Tallulah,” she said. “He’ll be here, and we won’t start without him.”
We both looked down the road to where the bulldozer’s lights were bobbing up and down, and I started to worry, my breath little white puffs of anxiety in the air.
Where was Harry? Yesterday he’d said he would not miss this “for all the rice in China,” and now he was not there, and I felt flutters of panic rising inside my chest.
I trained my eyes on the road, willing Harry to appear; then, as a bulldozer lumbered up the street, I saw a car with a smaller set of headlights overtaking it, and as it got closer I made out DE LONGLAND PLUMBERS emblazoned down its side, and underneath it, PLUMBING THE DEPTHS OF EXCELLENCE.
Harry swung the ute into the River House’s long driveway and got out. “Sorry I’m late,” he called walking toward the tree, slowing his pace as his eyes traveled to the exquisite flowers it bore.
From the mango tree’s branches fluttered Grace, Audrey, Phoebe, Betty, Madeleine, Lauren, Constance, and Kitty, swaying like geishas in the breeze.
There was Greta’s buttercup yellow, Betty’s blue and white spots, Madeleine’s reds and Kitty’s lime greens, all of Rose’s dresses there because she couldn’t be.
“Oh, love,” Harry said.
“Annabelle and I hung them last night,” I told him. “Do you like it?”’
I had been worried it might be too much for him, so much of Rose to take in all at once.
“It’s perfect, Lulu,” he said. “Thank you.”
Harry stood gazing at the dresses, his eyes taking in every one, until they came to rest on a new addition to the chorus line.
It had a sweetheart neckline, bell sleeves, a skirt that fell in folds like secrets from its waist, and Julia and I had spent weeks designing it for Boris to make with his gentle hands.
“I don’t know that one, Lulu,” Harry said, pointing to it, “I don’t recognize it at all—who is it?”
I took my father’s hand in mine and we considered the rose-pink dress together.