Forty-eight
BRISBANE, 1997
It was the next day now. Victoria had hardly slept after she’d hung up from Claire. She’d been to talk to Maddie again early in the morning. They sat where they’d sat the day before, in the chairs out on the front veranda.
“I’m in trouble,” Victoria had said.
Maddie looked at her. “What sort of trouble?”
“I’m engaged, and he . . . he isn’t right.” She let out a sharp sob, held her breath to stop from crying. “He hit me,” she whispered.
“Oh, my dear girl,” Maddie said, taking her hand. Maddie’s was cold. Victoria grabbed it with her other hand and held on.
“Oh,” Maddie said again with such love.
Victoria started crying in earnest now. Maddie pulled her into an embrace and said, “There, there.”
Victoria sat down on the floor at her grandmother’s feet and cried then as she hadn’t when she was a little girl, when her mother was gone. She cried and it felt like she would never stop. She said this, her nose and eyes running, the tissue Maddie handed her of no use to stem the tide.
“Well, that’s possible but unlikely,” Maddie said. “In my experience, we cry for as long as we need to, and not a moment longer.” She kept her hand on Victoria’s back.
Maddie didn’t ask questions and that was a relief. When Victoria had cried herself out, finally, she blew her nose on Maddie’s handkerchief and wiped her eyes.
“Better?” Maddie said.
Victoria nodded.
“You’ll be leaving him,” Maddie said, as a statement not a question.
“I know. There’s a baby.”
“I see,” she said. “How lovely.”
It was later that same day and Andrew Shaw had collected her from Maddie’s and taken her out to a wildlife park. She’d said she’d like to see a platypus, but now she had a koala in her arms. It really was dear, with a sweet, stupid face and chubby little legs, the softest fur, although it smelled musty, like moss after rain. It didn’t look at her. It stared front and center, like a teddy bear preparing for a photo shoot.
As they were taking the photograph, it pooped in her hand. She didn’t know what to do.
“Oh dear,” Andy said afterward, brushing the poop to the ground. “That’s not very respectful of an international visitor.”
Earlier they’d seen the platypus in a tank. It was much smaller than she thought it would be.
“If you were here another week, I’d drive you up to O’Reilly’s,” Andy said. “There’s a creek on the way where you usually see them.”
“They’re the strangest animals,” she said.
“The platypus?”
“All of them.”
“That’s why I like Lone Pine,” he said. “They’re making the animals available for people to see.”
“Maddie told me they gave the prince animals on his tour,” she said. “A kangaroo they took on the ship with them and a koala, but it belonged to a little girl who was devastated to lose it so he gave it back. A lizard. They returned them all before they went home to England. Probably a good thing.”
“I came here with Maddie a lot when the kids were small,” he said. “She never told me that.”
They sat on the riverbank and ate the picnic he’d brought: egg sandwiches and tea in a flask.
“Maddie’s better,” he said. “What I mean is, she’s more settled than she was.” There were tears in his eyes. “She might not live much longer but she’ll know she has nothing to be forgiven for.” He wiped his eyes on his sleeve. “She’s very religious. I think she thought she might be going to hell. You were kind about all this.”
“Kind?” Victoria said. “It wasn’t her fault.”
“No, but she thought it was.”
“I don’t know if my father will come and see her.”
“I don’t think it matters. You did.” He looked at her. “Is it hard, knowing? Would you rather not know?”
“Do you care?”
“I do,” he said. “I thought about it before we did this. I wondered, Would I want to know? I decided I would.”
It had been Andy’s idea to contact Victoria and not Michael. It was easier to ask for a journalist and he figured Victoria, being one generation removed, might find it easier. Poor Finian Inglis would be disappointed there wasn’t another book, Victoria had thought, although she wasn’t entirely sure there wasn’t a book. There was a manuscript on Maddie’s desk and Victoria wondered if it told the story after all. She had been itching to have a closer look.
“It’s the deception that most rankles,” Victoria said. “I was close to my grandmother growing up, and yet she never told me.”
“I guess once she’d told Maddie, she felt she’d done what she should. And they were different times. They were scared of the royal family.”
“Yes.”
“Not now though. They’d never do that now.”
She looked at him. “No, although you never know. I have a friend who thinks they’re worse than the mafia.”
He laughed. “Is that your fiancé?”
“No,” she said.
“I notice you’re not wearing a ring,” he said.
She hadn’t worn her engagement ring since arriving.
She looked at her hand. “I’m working it out,” she said finally.
He nodded. “Let me know when you have.”
“Why?”
“I might want to know.”
She laughed. “You never remarried?”
“No,” he said. “I tried a couple of dates when the kids were a bit older, but none of them . . . Women don’t generally want two kids from the get-go.”
“Some might,” Victoria said.
“Well, it’s not The Brady Bunch out there.”
“My father might not want to meet you,” Victoria had said to Maddie before she’d left in the morning.
“I know.”
“Will that be all right?”
“It will have to be.”
“How do you stay happy, given everything that happened?”
“Ah, well, I don’t know much about happiness. The children saved me, first the children I taught at Ithaca and then Frank and Sally. It’s impossible to be anything but in the moment when you have forty youngsters to contend with.
“What I know is I have these gifts. First, Ed, then Andy and Frank and Sally, and now you. You’ve arrived and now I know I can meet my maker and I won’t have to account for killing a child. You’re a beautiful girl and Diana is at peace. And there’s a baby!”