A week later, at eleven in the evening, Rachael was yawning in the study. Tess and Joel had already turned in, and she ought to have been in bed herself three hours ago. She stumbled taking her tea mug back to the kitchen, and was returning carefully with a refill when the study phone rang.
Rachael leapt on it, thinking it must be Sammy, but heard the three short beeps of a long-distance call. She frowned, wondering who it might be.
Hesitantly, came an “’Allo?” The voice was thin with distance, but the accent was unmistakable.
Rachael sat in surprise. “Yvette?”
“Ah, is that you, chérie? This is a terrible line.” Crackles and pops overlaid every word.
“I didn’t expect to hear from you. How did you even get my number?”
“I have your letter,” Yvette said, and Rachael heard a rustle of pages. She imagined Yvette holding up the letter Rachael had mailed care of Martine Bertrand’s showroom. “It is not hard to find a number when you are listed in the directory. You left so quickly after the wedding.”
Rachael’s breath caught. “As I said, I’m so sorry for what happened. I’m . . . ashamed of myself.”
“Well, the idea is usually to be discreet. But you are not French, so perhaps you have not had enough practice.”
Rachael put a hand over her face at the idea she might have been so calculating. “I honestly didn’t mean it to happen. I hadn’t seen Matthew in years. I went to Paris thinking I’d get over him if I saw him get married.”
“Well, Matthew is not French either. But, chérie, I do not think you would make a good mistress. You are too young with too much talent to be ruled by a man like that.”
“Why are you being so nice to me?”
“When you are old, you will understand that so much of life is a farce. I do not sleep much anymore. Instead, I lie awake and think about my life. You are not the first person to do something reckless out of love and regret it. And I remember the kind things you did for me. My own family sometimes is not so accommodating. They think an old woman is to be protected, or ignored.”
Rachael bit her lip. “But Bonnie . . . she would have been standing there at her own wedding thinking the whole time about what Matthew had done.”
“Yes. Then again, if you had not been there, her dress would have been ruined, and she cared very much about those photographs for her charity.”
“Someone else could have fixed it.”
“Maybe.” Yvette paused. “Rachael, I have done many things in my life that I was ashamed of. Everyone has such things. Yet I still made a good life. I had a long career, and I still find surprises even now. The same can be true for you. At the end of your life, you will look at what happened very differently. Time changes everything.”
“I know,” Rachael said. She suddenly remembered the conversation with Antonio. “My mother used to say that people are more than their worst mistakes.”
“This is very true,” Yvette said. “And now she is gone, have you any other family, chérie? Father? Sisters and brothers?”
“My sister.”
“Good. Are you alike?”
“Completely different,” Rachael admitted.
Yvette laughed. “This is good too. It keeps life interesting.” A pause. “I want to tell you something. Before the week you were here in Paris, I had not made anything new for a long time. Now, the collection is complete. I want to send you the pictures. Your work inspired me, and your kindness. I can only imagine how much you meant to your mother.”
A tear rolled down Rachael’s cheek.
“But, chérie, perhaps now you can give some kindness to yourself. Love will make us do wonderful and stupid things in the same day. Write to me again, if you would like. Tell me what you are doing. Tell me what you are making next. I am an old woman and no one writes letters anymore.”
“I guess I could,” Rachael said, though she couldn’t imagine having another sewing project for herself for a long time. She needed only jeans on the farm.
When Yvette had rung off, Rachael crept down the hall toward her bedroom. She paused by the guest rooms filled with Tess and Joel’s things. The house had been so quiet last Christmas. Quiet, empty, and lonely. Rachael missed her mother with a piece of herself that was larger than her dreams had ever been. But with Tess here, the house had life again. Rachael was grateful her sister had stayed as long as she had.
* * *
The next day, Rachael was returning to the house intending to speak to Tess when Felix appeared in the doorway waving the cordless phone. “For you, Aunty Rachael!”
Bernie was on the line. “Rachael, love, I have a question for you,” he said, puffing.
“Sewing machine or overlocker?” Rachael asked, wondering which costume he was working on now. “Have you been running?”
“A little. Listen, your mum had some heart trouble in the last few years, didn’t she?”
“Mmm, sort of.” Marion had had a few episodes of angina.
“So I have this pain,” Bernie huffed. “Sort of in my stomach, and my shoulder a bit. Does that sound worrying to you?”
“Bernie, why didn’t you call the doctor, or the ambulance?”
“Oh, no, no, don’t want to bother them with it. I was on the rowing machine, see? Probably pulled a muscle.”
Rachael pressed her hand to her forehead. Bernie sounded really out of breath. “How long ago were you on the machine?”
“Ten, twenty minutes, something like that.”
“Hang up and call the ambulance. You don’t know with these things.”
Despite her insistence, Bernie protested it wasn’t necessary. Rachael pulled her keys off the kitchen hook and jogged out to her pickup.
“Bernie, I’m getting in the car and coming over. But I expect to see a damn ambulance when I arrive, okay?
“Bloody man,” she muttered as she sped down the road, nudging the speedometer over the limit.
Throwing out all the rules, she dialed Beverley on her mobile, expecting the highway patrol to pull her over at any moment as she left a hurried voice mail.
She made the drive in under twenty minutes. No sign of an ambulance, or any activity at all. With a glance through the windows, she thumped on the door. “Bernie?”
He answered wearing a pair of stubby shorts and an Elvis Festival T-shirt. He had a glass of water in his hand, and his jaw was working.
“What are you eating?” she said, aghast. His face was flushed, sweat drops at his temples.
“Antacid,” he answered, after a big swallow. “Found them in the third drawer and figured I’d give it a go.”
“Is it working?”
He grimaced. “Not really.”
Rachael extracted the water glass. She’d been in enough hospitals with her mother to know a few things. “No more food or drink. If you had to go into surgery, that’s important.”
Bernie collapsed on the couch, saying he just needed a minute and for Rachael not to worry. Rachael turned for his phone—she’d left hers in the car—and found it out of the cradle.
“Bernie, where’s the phone?”
“In the kitchen, I think.” He swallowed. “I actually don’t feel that great.”
She muttered under her breath as she went to find it. “Bernie? It’s not there.”
“Rach, can you bring me that glass of water? Feel a bit sick.” He’d turned gray, his fingers laced over his beer belly. “Ooof,” he moaned. Was he about to pass out? Then color touched his face again. “Easing now. That was a bad one.”
“I’m just racing out to the car for my phone,” Rachael said.
“Before that, maybe get the defib from the hall cupboard, love.”
“You have a defibrillator?”
“’Course. Don’t want to go out like the King, do I?”
Against her better judgment, Rachael jogged into the hall. She threw open the cupboard and was greeted with piles of sheets and towels, a boxed foot spa, and a whole shelf of puzzles.
“Where is it?”
“Next to the first-aid box. Though I suppose I should have put it on the wall in the loo. You don’t see it?”
Rachael scanned the shelves. There it was. She’d just thrown it down on the floor next to the couch when she thought she heard sirens. Ten seconds later, an ambulance pulled into the drive. Five minutes of intense activity followed as the paramedics checked Bernie over, and another five minutes later, a car screamed into the driveway and Beverley tumbled out. Seeing the scene in Bernie’s living room, she hung back with the dignity and poise of Milton’s last postmistress, but her anguish was clear from the hand gripping her handbag.
“I’m sure he’ll be fine,” Rachael said, trying to be reassuring. “I didn’t mean to worry you.”
Instead of a cutting remark, Beverley only said, “You did the right thing. I called the ambulance straightaway.”
When the paramedics decided it was best to transport Bernie to the Parkes hospital, Rachael told Beverley she’d follow in her car. As Bernie was loaded up, dotted with sticky pads and wires leading into a machine, he was still trying to encourage the paramedics to drop into Blue Suede Choux tomorrow for a freebie.
Rachael met up with Beverley again in the hospital’s emergency waiting room.
“He’s stable and they think it might be his gallbladder, but they’re going to keep him awhile to monitor his heart. It’s all those sweet things he eats,” Beverley said, but her voice shook. She extracted a tissue from her handbag. “Listen to me, going on like a schoolgirl.”
Rachael sympathized; she’d spent enough time in a hospital waiting for news of someone she cared about. But she still suppressed a smile. “I didn’t realize you meant so much to each other.”
Beverley chortled. “Oh, I know what people are going to say after the last few years. But it turns out we have more in common than I gave him credit for.”
“Who’d have thought?” Rachael laughed.
“Goodness knows, I didn’t expect this to happen to me at my age,” Bev said, then looked Rachael squarely in the eye. “Your mum did, though. She said I’d find someone again.”
“When did she say that?”
“In her letter. The one you gave me with the quilt. I’m only sorry she didn’t get the same chance.” She put her arm around Rachael. “I know it isn’t the same as her being here, but read her letter again, lovey. I’m sure she left you some good advice.”
Rachael frowned. “What letter?”
“The one she wrote you.”
“There wasn’t one.”
Beverley pulled away to look at her. “Yes, there was. You mean you haven’t found it?”
The hospital decided to release Bernie after an hour. Rachael spent the whole time going over in her mind all the papers her mother had left—the piles of envelopes and lists—and where a letter might have been lost. At the back of a drawer? Stuck to another letter? She would have to check.
The doctor recommended that Bernie have a full review with his GP within the week, including a discussion about diet.
“Haven’t seen the doc in years,” Bernie said. “Fit as a fiddle. Can’t be that serious.”
“Thank you, Doctor, I’ll make sure he does,” Beverley said. “After that, we’re going to have a talk.”
Bernie affected a terrified expression as Beverley bustled off to fetch her car and bring it around to collect him. “Better ask the doc to give the old prostate a poke,” he complained to her back. “At least he’ll wear a glove!”
Rachael saw a nurse hide a smile behind her hand, but she was too frantic to find it funny. She couldn’t wait to get back to the farm.
* * *
When Rachael arrived home, Tess and Joel were down in the shed with the children. She went straight to her room and rummaged through the desk drawer where she’d kept her mother’s lists and letters. She found nothing but a frightened daddy longlegs.
She was halfway down the hall to the lounge when she abruptly stopped. Ten seconds later, she stood in the door of her mother’s room. The bed was neatly made in white linen, the knitted blue throw undisturbed across the foot, trailing tasseled ends to the blanket box. The Tiffany glass lamp on the bedside table was unlit. The walk-in closet was quiet with its thick carpet, hanging fabrics and coat bags and no windows to admit outside noise. It smelled of mothballs and wool.
Rachael flicked on the light and took a deep breath. Tess had been right—the racks were full to bursting. Underneath the hanging bags were rows of shoeboxes, and the shelf overhead was two-deep with white plastic storage tubs holding papers, school photos, and knickknacks her mother had grown tired of dusting. Beverley had helped Marion organize it all.
Rachael sat on the ottoman, just as Tess had done, and stared at the clothes and shelves. Where was the letter?
She pulled down a box at random. Papers. Another held old books, the pages tea-brown. Rachael opened every box and found nothing.
She went back to the bedroom and hauled open the blanket box. Maybe there were items to donate in here that she’d missed, and the letter would be with them. The box was stuffed with winter woolens. She frowned. They’d always lived in the red-silk ottoman before.
She rushed back to the walk-in closet and lifted the ottoman cover and found the inside transformed. The usual wool sweaters and mothballs had given way to an incredible haberdashery collection: ribbons in packets or rolled into spirals, buttons in tubes or sewn onto cards, netting, feathers, braiding, pieces of fine lace wrapped in tissue. Each piece bore a tag or a label. It was like the collection Rachael had out in the pattern box, but these came from around the world, some of them decades old; so old it was impossible her mother had been the one to collect them. One tartan ribbon read 1980, London, found in the tube station at Covent Garden. Another, a particularly beautiful piece of beaded lace, said, Calais, found in remnant bin, Rue de Vic.
And there, nestled in the center, was an envelope. For Rachael read the front. Her mother’s writing, the letters uneven and jerky, showing the time and effort it had taken. Rachael swallowed as tears rushed into her eyes. When had her mother written this?
With shaking fingers, she slipped the unevenly folded page from the envelope. Dear Rachael was written by hand at the top, the same hesitant script as the outside. The next part was typed.
Dear Rachael, if you are reading this then I was right about this year being the one. If I made it through Christmas I was intending to destroy this and write something more up-to-date. I thought many times about whether to have this conversation in person, but I guess we have had it all before, just in little pieces over the years. I asked Beverley to help me with writing it down. This way it will be legible, and I can write as fast as I remember it.
I have never shown you this collection. I’ve kept it hidden away because much of the time I didn’t want to look at it. It reminds me of the life I used to want, which is so different from the one I led. I imagined using all these things one day, but I never have. Some of them came from my mother, and when I traveled I added things I found and loved. There are notes about each piece, and I’ve added some photos with what I can remember from my favorite places. When you go yourself (because I know you will), you might have a laugh at what I did, or see how much has changed. Those were odd times (the traveling)—it was wonderful, and lonely, and exhilarating, and scary. Sometimes madly interesting, sometimes a complete bore. A bit like living on the farm (with better coffee). But I knew myself more because of it. You will too. I always thought I was picking my way toward tomorrow, and every day was something new.
At this point, the typing stopped and the handwriting took up again, that careful shaky script. It must have taken hours, Rachael thought, imagining her mother writing alone, without Beverley or anyone else to witness what she was saying.
You’re sleeping now, just down the hall, like you did when you were a little girl. I can scarcely believe you’re all grown up. I often feel guilty that I’ve taken these years from you. You should have been out in the world—living, finding your way, making mistakes—instead of looking after your mother. But you stayed, and I have loved you so fiercely for that.
People say all the time that their children are their greatest achievements. I’ve always viewed that as foolishness. We each make our own achievements. But I’ve had so much more time with you than a mother can expect of her daughter. I am sorry to leave before I meant to, to not be there to see what you’ll do in your long life. You still sit at my feet to tell me about your day, just as you did when you were small. You can’t imagine how it breaks my heart to miss that now. But you will have your freedom, as you should. I want you to have the chance at things I was too scared to do.
My own mother was wonderful, but she told me not to be a seamstress, and I think I said that to you once too, in haste and without thought. I don’t regret the life I had, but it isn’t the one I imagined when I was standing in castles or drinking wine in a trattoria in Rome. I wanted to be a dressmaker. That is why I have never touched this collection—it’s for another life. I don’t know what you will do, but don’t make that mistake. Ignore anything I ever said to you, because I am not your heart. You wanted to go to Sydney once. Maybe you still do. Maybe you want something else. Find it. Bind yourself with love to all you do. Life can be long or so short, and we don’t know which it will be. There is no time for looking back.
And so I have only one thing left to say. You are generous and courageous, my lovely daughter. Go. Live.
With love unending, Mum
The last four words were written with no hesitation at all.
Rachael swiped at her eyes, sniffing back tears before her nose ran. She read the letter again. Then she picked through the collection and found a thick packet of photos.
“Oh, Mum,” she said, clapping a hand over her mouth.
Right on top was a picture of her mother in a scarf and beanie with the Eiffel Tower rising behind her into a gray Parisian sky. Rachael had stood right there during the photography class. It was where Antonio had sat down beside her.
On the back of her mother’s photo was a printed sticker that read: Paris (duh!). Horribly ill after catching the flu on the train. Was terrified of the metro but made it here eventually after two wrong stops. Asked a young man called Pierre to take the photo—we had lunch! Fantastic day, even after finding bed bugs at the hostel (be warned, photo later).
On it went: more photos from Paris; then Barcelona and the Sagrada Família, and a shot near the coast labeled Barcelona—eating cheese and drinking wine at the beach with Frankie, Susan, and Scott. Spent the night sketching dresses inspired by the cathedral. Then a photo in a London pub, where Rachael recognized a very young version of her father. Her mother had written: With Andrew and pint at the Spaniards Inn. He didn’t know who Dickens or Keats were (perhaps I should have known better?) but had a great time anyway.
Rachael had never before appreciated that time in her mother’s life. Marion had never mentioned that she’d been afraid of the metro, or fleeced by train conductors for buying the wrong ticket on an overnight train. To Rachael, her mother had always seemed sure of herself, no matter what happened. She’d never seemed regretful. Now, with the letter and these photos, she saw Marion as . . . young, before everything that Rachael had seen happen to her.
One photo, taken in a pristine Swiss village, was labeled: Lucerne—bored. So bored. And out of money. Thought I would have to eat my hat that night. Rachael giggled.
She read the letter again. When she’d finished, the sun was sinking over the fields, kissing good night the tiny shoots that would soon push through last year’s stubble. She stood on the back verandah, the breeze lifting her hair. Her mother’s tree crowned the rise, its leaves all golden in the light. Rachael was filled with the same light, and absolution settled on her softly as a feather.
She could see Tess outside the big shed, supervising Felix and Emily as they helped their baby sister walk, while Joel worked at the bench, mending a panel. He’d insisted on doing it. Rachael watched them with entirely different eyes. The whole farm was different. The shadows were the color of the cobbles on the Île de la Cité, and the horizon was so clear that she imagined she could almost see the whole world in the gray smudge between land and sky.
She had a decision to make. It demanded a ritual.
Without bothering to take a towel, she rode an ATV toward the river, calling to Tess she’d be back in an hour.
The swimming hole was already in long shadows, but the rocks were warm from the sun. Rachael peeled off her clothes and slid into the frigid water. Her skin contracted with cold, and when she ducked her head under, chill fingers probed her scalp. She reemerged with a gasp, the droplets on her eyelashes making jeweled sparkles of the last of the sun.
After ten minutes—longer than was sane this time of year—she sat on a warm boulder to drip-dry, etching the place in her memory. She realized then that the decision had been made long ago. She’d just never had the courage to act on it.