‘CROFT? Peter?’
The older doctor at the other end of the phone line was brisk. Pete didn’t correct the other man’s mistake. His name wasn’t Peter, but of course most people assumed that it was. Generally, since he wasn’t remotely fond of Pentreath—it had been his mother’s maiden name—he let them do so.
‘I thought you’d want a report on Alethea Childer’s surgery,’ Geoffrey Caldwell said.
‘Yes, very much.’ He had hoped to hear yesterday afternoon but hadn’t, and would have called the hospital in Melbourne today if Dr Caldwell hadn’t phoned.
‘It went according to plan, and she survived. There’s still a long way to go before she’ll be out of the woods.’
Dr Caldwell continued with some technical detail that had Pete wincing as he considered what the atmosphere must have been like in Theatre, with the crowd of gowned figures bending over such a pitifully tiny form, using special extensions on some of their instruments to reach and manipulate the miniature chambers and vessels of the malformed heart.
He knew what the baby would look like now, too—attached to a tangle of lines and monitors, spread out on her back like a frog awaiting dissection, twitching with pain or with the effect of the medication that controlled pain, fighting to survive. How must it feel to see your baby looking that way?
‘How’s the mother?’ he asked, when Geoffrey Caldwell had finished. ‘Rebecca. How’s she handling it?’
‘Well, she’s handling it. That’s really all I can say. She’s here. She’s terrified and upset.’
‘Lord, of course!’
‘She needs a lot from the nurses. Sorry, that’s my pager going off…’
Pete knew this was all he’d get for the moment. Geoffrey Caldwell was a busy man. He put down the phone and rang Rebecca’s mother, who was at home. Rebecca had already spoken to her several times since the surgery.
‘You were planning to go down, weren’t you?’ Pete asked, a little surprised that Susan Childer hadn’t done so yet. ‘I thought you were.’
‘You have no idea!’ she said, laughing wearily. ‘I’m going to drive down tomorrow. Would have flown in the aircraft with them, only there was no room and I knew it would have been wrong.’
‘Wrong?’
‘Maybe it’s still wrong. You see, if I go, Dr Croft, is Rebecca just going to hand it all over to me? The bonding, and the worry, and the love?’
‘She might, yes.’ He saw her point now.
‘You know, when you told her about the suspected heart problem, and I wasn’t there,’ Mrs Childer went on, ‘she made the decision to go to Melbourne all on her own. When she has to, she can handle this, and she loves that baby. But when I’m around, she turns into a child again, and wants to dump it all on Mum.’
‘That’s tough,’ he said. ‘I can see what you’re saying.’
‘But I’m that baby’s granny, and I want to see her, so I’m going tomorrow. We’ll just see…’ Mrs Childer would probably need to go on saying those last three words for months to come.
Pete sighed and put down the pen he’d been fiddling with. Time to call in his next patient. His schedule had been delayed by Geoffrey Caldwell’s phone call, and by Pete’s own conversation with Susan Childer. He’d had a late start today to begin with, after visiting the psychiatric ward at the hospital on his way in.
The girls were at preschool again this morning—one of their scheduled sessions this time. Jackie would run them over to the childcare centre after the session ended at twelve-thirty, and he’d pick them up by six when the centre closed. If he was running late, he’d arranged for Vicki Lewis, one of the centre’s part-timers, to bring them home. They’d have eggs for dinner tonight, that was easy, but he couldn’t fall back on eggs or pizza every night of the week.
Meanwhile, the medication Claire had been put on to bring her down from her manic high had pushed her too far the other way, and she’d been sleeping since six o’clock yesterday evening, exhausted by the sleepless energy that had gripped her for days before. At least it meant Pete could see her, and talk to the staff, without unleashing an outburst from her.
By her bed, he’d brushed a strand of hair from her face and found a thin thread of tenderness still remaining, even after the roller-coaster they’d been on for so many years.
More than five years, in fact—since the day she’d told him she was pregnant.
‘You have to marry me, Pete,’ she’d said that day, quite panicky about it. ‘I’m going to be a terrible mother, I know it! I’m not ready for this at all. I hadn’t decided if I ever wanted children, let alone now. We hadn’t even decided if we were serious about each other, had we?’
He hadn’t.
He’d just been humming along, thinking this was all rather nice and fun, but not looking to the future at all. Claire had been new in town, lively and attractive. And suddenly they were to be bonded together by a baby. Twins, as it had turned out. He’d found out the hard way that the future could sometimes arrive unwanted, all on its own.
Their marriage had been a mess from the beginning, although they’d both done their best for the sake of their daughters. Ending it was proving even worse. How long had Claire’s illness been developing, while he’d already felt so hostile towards her after years of incompatibility that he hadn’t picked up on it?
‘Oh, Claire, I’m so sorry,’ he’d whispered to her this morning, staring down at her sleeping form.
And he’d known he’d been right not to consummate the powerful awareness that had flared between himself and Emma last night.
The time might never be right for that, he realised. The weeks would pass, while the rest of his life was still an unsorted mess. The opportunity would slip away. The intensity of need would subside in one or both of them, leaving only awkwardness. He recognised this danger, but there was nothing he could do about it. He had to sort his life out first.
He stood up, left his desk and went out to the waiting room to pick up the topmost file in the pile that was balanced on the edge of the reception desk.
‘Gwen?’ he said to his next patient. ‘Come on in.’
‘I talked to Pete at lunchtime,’ Nell said to Emma over the phone. She was at home, about to leave for an afternoon shift. ‘And I heard from Geoffrey Caldwell directly, too. Thought you might want to know.’
About Alethea Childer, Emma realised.
At first she’d thought Nell might have been talking about Claire. She wanted to ask, but knew she couldn’t. Professionally, it just wasn’t her business, and Nell was the last person to break patient confidentiality. Pete himself might easily be regretting what he’d told her, as he had done before.
‘The surgery took place, and the baby survived,’ Nell said.
One piece of good news.
‘That’s great, Nell!’
There was a pause, then Nell said bluntly, ‘Listen, is there something going on between you and Pete?’ The Hippocratic oath didn’t encompass any scruples regarding interference in her friend’s personal life
‘No. There isn’t,’ Emma said. ‘I mean, I guess you could say we’re friends, but—’
‘I’m glad to hear it.’
‘Why, Nell?’
Silence.
‘Look, I know Claire’s in the psych unit,’ Emma said, then she sighed. ‘OK, I—I guess I don’t need to ask why, do I?’
‘I suddenly realised I’d dug myself into a big, fat ethical hole,’ Nell said. ‘I’m glad you know about it. Steer clear. You don’t need the grief.’
The advice sounded callous and cold.
‘Don’t you think he might need some support?’ Emma said.
‘People have to handle these things on their own. No. I don’t mean that, of course. Lord, I sound like my mother!’ With whom, Emma knew, Nell had a difficult relationship. ‘But Pete does have other people he can call on, and I just don’t think you or Pete need an emotional complication of this nature when Claire’s illness has pulled their divorce right off the table.’
‘I told you there was nothing going on, Nell.’ But Emma had to fight to keep her voice steady now.
Of course Claire’s illness changed things. Hadn’t she already understood this herself? She hadn’t considered it quite in Nell’s blunt terms, however, and Nell was right. Maybe there wouldn’t be a divorce at all now. If Claire’s undiagnosed illness was at the root of their problems, or even if it wasn’t.
‘Yes. Right. Good. Keep it that way,’ Nell said. ‘You looked fabulous in that dress the other day. We all told you so. Find someone who’s in a position to appreciate the fact freely.’
‘Nell—’
‘I know. I’m a sledgehammer. It gets results. You’ve put up with it for fifteen years or more.’
‘Because you’re made of fluffy pink marshmallow deep below the thick outer crust, Dr Cassidy.’
‘Not true,’ Nell answered crisply. ‘The marshmallow is, in fact, dangerously close to the surface and the crust is pitifully thin. Which is why I’m saying all this about Pete. You’re a friend, and you need something nice in your life after the years you gave to your mother when she was ill, and to your father and Beryl. You don’t need to get hurt. OK?’
‘Does that prescription require a doctor’s signature, or is it available over the counter?’
‘Now, isn’t that an appealing thought?’ Nell drawled, and they both laughed.
The maternity unit was quiet, both in Labour and Delivery and on the post-partum side, when Emma went in to work. Liz Stokes had her two-bed room to herself, and the three new mums who’d been at yesterday’s baby bathing demonstration had all been discharged, with their healthy babies feeding well.
One fourth-time mother had delivered last night, at around one in the morning, and the baby, the afterbirth pains and a stubborn uterus which wouldn’t tone up as it was supposed to hadn’t given her much rest since. Emma put a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on her door and left Mrs Eltham to catch up on sleep that she wouldn’t get once she went home.
Emma wheeled the baby boy into the little nursery next to the nurses’ station and kept an eye on him for the next two hours, cuddling him in the crook of her arm for half of that time when he began to cry. One-handed, she was still able to get through plenty of backlogged paperwork.
In the back of her mind, she wondered if she should cancel Sunday’s arranged excursion to the garden centre with Pete and the girls.
Pete hadn’t kissed her. She’d told the truth to Nell when she’d said that there was nothing going on. A kiss was surely the first step—sweetly melting mouths, warm bodies pressed together. Nothing concrete existed between a man and a woman without a kiss.
Yes, but he’d wanted it. They both had.
In fact, they’d wanted it so badly that it didn’t need to be mentioned and it didn’t need to actually happen. She’d felt him and tasted him in the thickness of the air, in the look in his eyes. So perhaps she was kidding herself. Perhaps intimacy did exist without a kiss.
She could easily phone and cancel the arrangement. There were plenty of potential excuses to do so.
But he very deliberately hadn’t kissed her, as if he knew exactly how wrong it would be, and why. And he’d asked her to go with him to the garden centre as if their awareness of each other and his need for a haven of friendship away from the tumult of his tempestuous, failing marriage were two entirely different things.
If he’d kissed her, she might have been prepared to let him down. Since he hadn’t, however, she let the hours pass, let her shift slip away, let the days go by, and didn’t pick up the phone.
Sunday came, and once again the spring weather was gorgeous. Birds battled with the sound of lawnmowers to make their songs heard. The daphne had been out for weeks, filling the air with sweetness. It was getting past its best, and the soft, semi-translucent red and green shoots on the rose-bushes had unfurled into glossy leaves.
The citrus groves beyond the town were all in flower, and every breath of air was heavy with the sweet, bridal scent they gave off. Garden catalogues landed in people’s letter-boxes, filled with impossibly bright colours and enticing offers of twenty per cent off.
Pete picked her up at ten.
He wore clumpy boots and thick socks and bare brown legs and khaki shorts. ‘I didn’t change,’ he said. He wore a navy T-shirt and an Akubra hat as well, shading his brown eyes.
‘No?’ Emma arched her brows. ‘I’d never have guessed. Thought you’d come straight from surgery.’
His laugh came unexpectedly, like storm rain on a tin roof. It was welcome to both of them. ‘The landscapers finished on Friday,’ he said. ‘I had a load of topsoil delivered yesterday for the lawn out the front. I’ve been raking it out and putting in seed. Got up at six and left the girls asleep.’
‘Earning your Devonshire tea?’
‘Yep.’ He grinned, and some of the strain had gone from his face since Tuesday.
Emma wanted to ask about Claire, even while convinced it must be the last subject he’d want to talk about. She couldn’t let it go, though. It was too important. She touched his arm and asked, ‘How’s everything?’ If he did want to talk about it, he could, and if he didn’t, he could make his answer as vague as her question had been.
The touch was a mistake. She knew it at once, and dropped her hand, but it was too late. The imprint of his bare forearm lingered against her fingertips, bringing an awareness of warmth and hardness and a fine mist of hair.
‘I took the girls in to see their mother yesterday,’ he said quietly. The twins still sat in his car in her driveway, while he’d come by himself to knock on Emma’s door. ‘She was still pretty sleepy. She’d come right down after the full-blown manic state she was in on Tuesday. They hugged her, and she responded, but it wasn’t a great visit. I’m not sure if they’re still thinking about it. Just wanted to warn you, in case we get some odd behaviour from them today.’
‘That’s fine, Pete. I understand.’
‘They’re excited about this shopping spree, though. I’ll probably indulge them. They want a garden like yours.’
‘I’m not sure if the garden centre sells sixty-year-old hydrangea bushes.’
‘Apparently hydrangeas are back in fashion, according to my catalogues. We’ll get baby ones and watch them grow.’
The girls were a little shy as they greeted Emma, and she didn’t know whether to try and push past it or not. Every instinct suggested caution, but in the end she didn’t have to worry about it. Pete put on a tape of their favourite performers, The Wiggles, and the car was filled with Greg, Murray, Anthony and Jeff singing about Dorothy the Dinosaur and Henry the Octopus, which meant that no one needed to talk.
The garden centre was already busy, and the girls ran around excitedly, examining plants and fountains and statues.
‘Help!’ Pete said. ‘I don’t know where to begin.’
‘Trees?’ Emma suggested.
‘I’d like some shade,’ he agreed. ‘But I’ll have to wait about thirty years!’
‘Eucalypts and acacias grow much more quickly than that, but they limit what you can plant near them. A lot of European plants don’t like what they do to the soil.’
‘No?’
‘You really don’t know a lot about gardening, do you, Pete?’
‘Told you I didn’t,’ he said cheerfully. ‘But I’m ready to learn.’
‘OK, then, lesson number one. If you’re going to have Australian natives, it’s best to keep them in one section, away from the rest of the garden.’
They wandered along the paths, examining a huge variety of plants, shrubs and trees and talking at length about Pete’s garden. Then they pushed the twins on the playground swings for a while and talked about it some more.
It was such a lovely safe, easy subject, and they both understood that. No undercurrents. No dark patches to trespass into accidentally and then burn with regret about for the next hour or the next week. It still had meaning, though.
Emma like the way Pete spoke about how he imagined the new garden when time had passed and things had grown. He wasn’t afraid to use extravagant, poetic words. Some men had no descriptive vocabulary beyond the word ‘nice’, and seemed to feel that it wasn’t rugged to talk about light and colour and scent. Pete could barely tell parsley from marigolds, but he had a feel for what he wanted, and if he didn’t know the right word, he invented one.
‘I like those frithy things,’ he said when they’d finished in the playground and were walking around again.
‘Yes? OK. Let’s not buy the frithy ones, though,’ Emma advised.
‘Why not?’
‘If you buy the ones that haven’t quite frithed yet—the ones in bud—they’ll do it at your place and look nice for longer. If you buy the ones that are in full frith right now, the flowers will have gone droopy and brown by the time you get them in the garden.’
‘Can’t I get them in today?’
‘They should sit for a few days in their pots, to get used to their new home. And you have to prepare the beds and dig the holes.’
‘I’m going to need more soil.’
‘Definitely, and something to enrich it with. It all takes time, you know.’ She frowned at him sternly, then added, ‘They’re azaleas, by the way. Which colours do you like?’
‘Hmm, let’s think…’
They’d loaded up two big wheeled trolleys with trees and shrubs and seedlings and a stone birdbath and numerous bags of composted manure by half past eleven.
‘It’s going to be a lot of work, putting all this in,’ she told him finally. ‘Are you doing it yourself?’
‘Not if you’ll help me.’
‘I’d—’ she began.
‘No,’ he cut in. ‘Don’t answer.’ He stopped and looked at her. ‘I didn’t mean that. Sorry. It just slipped out. You’re already doing way too much. I’ll get a bloke in, by the hour.’
‘And you should probably test the acid balance of your soil,’ Emma said quickly, as if she was thinking purely of Pete’s garden, not Pete himself. As if this was so bone-meltingly nice purely because it was such fun to plan a brand-new garden, not because it was such an aching, important pleasure to plan a garden with him.
She would have helped him, if he’d really wanted her to. She’d been about to say so. She would have come round to his place the whole of next weekend and slaved for hours if he’d meant what he’d said, just to be in his company.
But he hadn’t meant it. Perhaps he was a little more sensible than she was. And perhaps he had stronger emotions pulling him in another direction. Plenty of people felt attractions they never acted upon. This was just some time out for him. It was a necessary holiday from his problems with Claire.
‘Let’s eat,’ he said. ‘Let’s pay for this lot and arrange to have it delivered. It’s not going to fit in the car. The girls must be getting hungry, and I certainly am. Should we make it lunch?’
‘Um, might as well, I suppose,’ she said.
They had soup and a salad each, and the girls had toasted sandwiches, but were eager for scones with strawberry jam and whipped cream as well.
‘You need some, too,’ Pete told Emma. ‘With tea.’
‘This is taking longer than you wanted, I’m sure.’
‘And it’s you that’s holding us up, is it?’
‘No, but—’
‘Let me make the most of this, Emma.’ His voice fell to a low, serious pitch suddenly, and the safe feeling—the pretence to each other, and to themselves, that they were just friends, and were just talking about gardens—shattered. Nothing about this was safe at all.
The sun shone on one side of his face, and he’d let his legs jut out sideways. His knees were brown, and a little soil-stained. Beneath the tilted brim of the hat, his eyes sat in shadow, but Emma could read more than just his eyes. She could read every movement he made.
‘You’ve got something in your hair,’ he said, and reached across the table. ‘Lean forward a bit, and sit still.’
He barely touched her, just pulled a shrivelled leaf from her hair. She felt the light brush of his wrist against her temple, and watched the flick of his fingers as he tossed the leaf away. There was a stillness to the moment that made it seem to last much longer than it really did.
And he didn’t kiss me, so it’s all right, she thought later, after he’d dropped her home so that she could get ready for work.
He’d thanked her warmly, but he hadn’t touched her, and he hadn’t got out of the car. Perhaps because he’d known that if he did…
He would have kissed me. He wanted to.
Emma touched her fingers to her lips, and felt the soft pressure of his mouth as vividly as if it had been real. She closed her eyes, tasting him, feeling him, and aching all over.
He would be home by now, awaiting the delivery of his plants. Minutes had passed since he’d driven away, but her mouth was still sensitised and expectant after the flash of opportunity in the car when it could have happened—the moment when he’d thanked her, and she’d had her hand on the doorhandle, and they’d been looking at each other, and it would have been easy for him to lean across and brush her lips with his. The moment when, because the girls had been watching, it could have been brief and light and would barely have meant anything at all.
But Pete hadn’t even done that.
So it was all right.
No betrayals, no complexities, no promises, no illusions.
Five days passed.
Liz Stokes had reached what she’d begun to call ‘the magic thirty-seven-week mark’ and was due to go down to Radiology for her ultrasound scan today. She was impatient about it.
‘If it looks good,’ she asked Emma, ‘would Dr Croft do the Caesarean today, do you think?’
‘Probably not,’ Emma answered. It was already two o’clock. Caesareans were usually done in the morning, and Friday wasn’t the best day, in any case.
‘Because the weekend is coming, right?’ Liz guessed. Her tone was bitter and frustrated. ‘If he was in real estate, he’d really know what working all hours means, and every weekend. I don’t know why doctors complain! I’m going to tell him I realise he’s only protecting his golf game.’
Emma resisted the urge to sketch out Pete’s far more serious problems at home, and his need to spend time with his daughters.
‘It’s more than that,’ she told Liz instead. ‘Certain hospital departments aren’t staffed so fully on weekends. Pathology and Radiology, for example. If you or the baby needed extra tests or treatment, we might have to wait while extra people were called in.’
‘That’s ridiculous!’ Liz snorted. ‘Babies are born naturally on weekends all the time!’
‘Don’t give that little boy of yours any dangerous ideas,’ Emma teased. She could understand Liz’s short temper after so many weeks of bed rest.
In the event, Pete’s unforgivable decision to schedule a weekend for himself didn’t enter into the matter. Liz went down for her ultrasound, endured an uncomfortable wait with a full bladder as Radiology was running behind, and then returned to await Pete’s verdict after he’d looked at the scan and read the report.
He phoned the news to Emma in the late afternoon.
‘Tell Liz I’m sorry, but I think we should wait a couple more weeks,’ he said. ‘The baby’s still pretty small, possibly as a result of the bleeds she had earlier in the pregnancy. I’d hate to deliver him and have him end up in Special Care.’
‘She’s not going to like this.’
‘I know. Now she isn’t. But I’m not looking at now. I’m looking at the rest of the little guy’s life.’
‘I’ll break the bad news.’
‘Before you go…’
‘Yes, Pete?’ Oh, hell, it was ridiculous! Just the tiny change in his tone had set her heart thudding!
‘I’ve got my garden bloke for the weekend, but he’s made it clear he’s just the brawn. He’ll cart dirt—in fact, he’s doing that today—and he’ll dig holes, but he won’t decide on where to put things.’
‘You want me after all,’ she blurted, careless in her choice of words.
‘I…uh…always wanted you, I just didn’t think I had the right to ask if you could,’ he answered.
There was a thick silence. Emma could almost hear him wondering how to escape gracefully from a trap of language use that they’d both helped to create. The double meaning was as clear as subtitles on a screen. He wanted her, and she wanted him.
She took a breath and said, ‘I’ll bring my gardening books and some of my tools. What time to do you want me? What time should I get there?’
‘Well, my bloke’s an early bird.’ She could hear the roughness and the struggle in his voice, even on the phone. ‘He likes to start at seven-thirty.’
‘Ugh! On my day off!’
‘Yes, I know. Don’t come that early.’
‘How about eight-thirty? Is that early enough?’
‘Perfect! I’ll give you breakfast. Croissants, or something.’
‘Yum.’
As expected, Liz wasn’t happy about Pete’s verdict on the ultrasound. ‘How much difference can a couple of weeks make?’
‘A lifetime, Liz,’ Emma said seriously. ‘Most babies born at thirty-seven weeks will do fine, but occasionally there can be a problem. Even at very low odds, do you want to take any kind of a chance on your baby’s long-term health?’
‘No, none,’ Liz agreed. ‘You’re right. It’s not worth any risk at all. I’ll wait. But don’t leave any sharp objects within reach, because I might start throwing them!’
Emma got to Pete’s at twenty to nine the next morning.
His ‘bloke’, an older man named Darryl with crooked teeth and a smoker’s cough, was emptying barrowloads of sand into the shadecloth-canopied sand-pit Pete’s landscapers had made for the girls. Jessie and Zoe jumped up and down, wanting to play in it straight away before it was even full.
They had sticky, jam-stained mouths, having apparently just finished their croissants, and to Emma’s surprise and pleasure, they both ran up when they saw her, wanting to give her kisses. Did they like her that much, then? She could so easily get deeply attached to them. She bent down and hugged them, and got jam and sand on her cheeks. It set like cement at once.
‘Somehow,’ Pete drawled, meeting her on his way out the back door, ‘I don’t think your sticky face is because you’ve already eaten. Want to go and wash?’
He led the way inside.
‘I’d better. They won’t think I’m washing off their kisses, will they?’
‘They won’t notice.’ He stopped in the middle of the bright, modern kitchen. ‘They’re a bit funny this morning. Claire was discharged yesterday, and she’s gone to Canberra to stay with her mother. She’ll be seeing a psychiatrist there. It sometimes takes a while to get the medication right, and to work out just what’s going on—whether there are emotional triggers that are important, all sorts of things.’
‘Do the girls know?’
‘Yes, I’ve told them. It seems to have made her absence more real to them. Mummy’s gone to stay with Granny in Canberra while she gets better. They wanted to know why they couldn’t go, too, to help look after her.’
‘Was it a possibility?’ The stickiness on her cheeks pulled and tightened every time she moved her face. It was irritating—trivial yet distracting, when Pete was talking about something this important and she was so desperate to give him the right attention. ‘That they might go, I mean.’
‘Claire thought it best not to have them with her,’ he said. The low pitch of his voice seemed to enclose them in greater intimacy. ‘She felt it wouldn’t be fair to them. She doesn’t have much energy or focus for them at the moment, and felt they wouldn’t be safe in her care. I couldn’t disagree, after the way she’s dealt with them recently. Effectively, they’d be her mother’s responsibility, and since the goal is for Hester to help Claire learn to manage her illness…The girls are better off here, but they’re missing her today.’
‘Pete, I haven’t been asking you much about all this,’ Emma said. ‘I’ve felt perhaps you didn’t want to dwell on it. But, please, remember that I’m here.’
‘I do,’ he said quietly. ‘I remember it every day.’
He turned to the sink and picked up a dish mop, waved it in his hand then looked at it with a frown on his face, as if he couldn’t remember what it was for.
‘I’m glad, Pete,’ she said, her voice too husky.
He dropped the mop again. ‘Hey, want those croissants and some coffee, once you’ve washed?’
‘And get my face sticky again straight away? Yes, please!’
When Emma had her coffee and a croissant in hand a few minutes later, Darryl finished filling the sand-pit and needed his next instructions.
‘Turn the composted manure into the soil, water the beds and cover them with mulch,’ Emma decreed. ‘It’s easier to mulch first and plant second. We can scrape the mulch aside to dig the holes.’
‘I’ll open the bags of compost,’ Pete said. ‘Do you want to think about where we’re putting everything, Emma? You’re our expert today.’
The plants, trees and shrubs he’d bought last weekend made a colourful miniature forest in the angle of newly paved space between the deck and the house. As instructed by Emma, he’d watered them every couple of days, and they were all doing well. She contemplated them thoughtfully, trying to imagine how they’d all look months or years from now, when they were grown.
Hard! Almost as hard as trying to imagine her own life several years down the track.
The girls ran back and forth between the garage and the new sand-pit, bringing their sand toys. Pete began chopping open the thirty-litre bags of composted manure with the edge of a shovel, and Darryl raked out the contents and turned the soil over, spreading the rich, dark stuff evenly.
Emma worked out which way was north, and which parts of the garden would get direct sun at which times of day. They’d roughly planned where to put the five young trees Pete had chosen, so she put down her coffee and the remaining end of her croissant and carried the trees into position, one by one.
When she got to the last one, Pete took a break, leaning on his shovel, and watched her. Self-conscious as always, she asked him, ‘Here, Pete?’
‘Maybe a little closer to the fence?’
‘It’ll grow, remember, and this one’ll spread out sideways, too.’
‘You’re right. We’re keeping all the Australian natives in this area, aren’t we?’
She stopped. Zoe had suddenly fallen on the cement in her eagerness to bring another load of toys to the sand-pit. She was crying loudly. Pete ran to her at once, took her up in his arms and sat down on the new garden wall.
‘Ah, sweetheart,’ he crooned. ‘Did you trip?’
‘Ye-es.’
Emma came over and he said to her, ‘She’s got some grazes on her knees and arms. Not deep ones, but they’re bleeding. Could you bring a bowl of warm water from the kitchen, and a towel to pat them dry?’
‘Dressings?’
‘There’s a packet in the medicine cabinet in the main bathroom. We’ll use a couple to cover the worst spots.’
Zoe was still crying when Emma got back with the things Pete had asked for. Jessie looked on, round-eyed, while Pete washed the grazes clean and patted them dry. Putting the sticky bandages on, he managed to comment to Emma, over Zoe’s head, ‘It’s psychological more than anything.’
‘Is it?’
‘My kids have an unshakable faith in the power of little bits of flesh-coloured sticky plastic, with squares of gauze attached, to alleviate pain immediately.’
‘Faith is good,’ Emma said.
Zoe’s sobs tapered away. ‘I want Mummy,’ she said in a very small voice. ‘Why isn’t she here?’
‘We’ve talked about that, love,’ Pete said gently. He kissed the top of her head. ‘She’s gone to Canberra to stay with Granny. She’s not feeling very well, and Granny’s going to look after her until she gets better.’
‘We could look after her.’
‘We could put bandages on her,’ Jessie agreed.
‘She doesn’t have a bandage kind of sickness. She has a different kind of sickness that needs some time and lots of quiet. Do you want to draw pictures to send her later today?’
‘Now!’ Jessie said. ‘I want to draw one now.’
‘Now, this minute?’ Pete said.
‘Yes! Yes!’
‘Drawing it is, then.’ As an aside, mostly to Emma but partly to himself, he added, ‘Am I spoiling them? Is that going to be the result of everything that’s happening? I find I’m jumping to give them everything they want, the moment they want it.’
‘I—I don’t think that’s something you should think about now, Pete,’ she answered him helplessly.
Both girls had apparently forgotten all about the new sand-pit and the grazed knees and arms, and Pete had to set them up with drawing things at the dining table inside. His face wore a little of its familiar bleak look when he came out again, but he shook it off quickly. Emma could only guess what an effort it must have taken to do so.
They didn’t finish in the garden until five-thirty, after a break for a sandwich lunch on the deck. Darryl had knocked off an hour earlier, at half past four.
‘We’ve done well,’ Pete commented, surveying several mulched beds, where hopeful, green-leafed young shrubs were flowering their little hearts out in a late afternoon breeze. Some of them were already in the ground, while other sat in their pots, marking their future positions so that Pete could plant them the next day.
‘We have,’ Emma agreed. ‘Not to downplay Darryl’s role as the brawn.’
‘Or the girls, because they’ve put up with not getting much attention today.’
‘They’re going to love watching all this growing up, and helping you to keep it watered over summer.’
‘You’ll stay to eat, won’t you?’ Pete said, his voice dropping to the more intimate pitch that she recognised easily now.
She moved away before she answered, bending to cradle a pale apricot azalea blossom in her hand. ‘That’d be nice,’ she said, with her back to him. ‘I don’t have much in the fridge at home.’
‘It’ll be simple. We’ll barbecue some sausages and chops. There are salad fixings in the kitchen, and I’ve got a bag of oven fries I can throw in.’
‘As long as it’s food!’
‘Sounds like you’re hungry already. Would you like a drink? Wine? We can have some biscuits and cheese to keep us going while I fire up the grill.’
‘Would the girls like a bath? They got much dirtier than we did, even though I’m quite sure we did more work!’
‘Happens with kids, for some reason. They’re dirt magnets. And they’d probably love a bath. Are you up to it? I read an article recently, quoting a study which claimed that bathing children uses up more calories than…Can’t remember…playing tennis, or something.’
‘More calories than planting a garden?’
‘Try it and see. Yell, if you need help. Their towels are on the rail, and you can put them straight in their jammies, because they’re going to bed early tonight. I’ll get the barbecue started.’
The girls got themselves undressed while Emma ran the bath, pulled out some bath toys and got the water temperature right. She held their hands as they climbed in, afraid that the porcelain tub might be slippery. It was an awkward climb from the floor for little legs.
They seemed quite happy to accept her help, and to be left for a moment, with the taps still running and clear instructions not to touch them, while Emma dashed across the corridor to the laundry to dump their dirt-stained clothing in the washing-machine.
The laundry window was open, and she could hear the click-click-click of the barbecue’s automatic ignition outside as Pete got it going, while the sound of the bath water threatened to swamp the clicking noise from the other direction. They were two such domestic, family-oriented sounds, and they fed the dangerous needs that were growing inside her.
Hearing a loud splash, Emma hurried back to the bathroom, knowing that she, rather than Jessie and Zoe, was the one who risked getting in way out of her depth.