Chapter 16

Elise

Elise’s kitchen had always been the heart of her house. The table she now sat at alone had hosted competitive card games, countless conquered homework tasks, creative craft projects and philosophical discussions. The kitchen sink had provided the setting for her nightly debrief with Rosie about her day when she was young. The warm soapy water helped to soothe her daughter’s teenage angst and there was something about standing side by side, rather than looking directly at each other, that encouraged her to share. John – who prided himself on being an early adopter of gadgets – was keen to get a dishwasher as soon as they were on the market, to make life easier. But Elise resisted until Rosie had left home, arguing it would make life easier, but not better.

Elise looked to the scars etched into the doorjamb to the left of the sink, which provided evidence of Rosie’s and then the grandkids’ height milestones. Crude markings documented their transitions from toddler, to child, to teen and beyond, when they no longer wanted their height measured and Elise wouldn’t have been able to reach the tops of their heads anyway.

Being a grandmother had brought her so much joy. She and John had been apprehensive when Rosie and Thorn were married after only eight months, and when they had Jarrah shortly after that. Elise had worried that their bohemian lifestyle and what she considered to be alternative theories about parenthood were not suited to caring for a baby. But Jarrah had thrived in a world filled with colour and music and, most of all, love.

When Jarrah was about twenty months old, Rosie fell pregnant with Beth. Everyone was thrilled their family was growing. However, towards the end of her pregnancy, Rosie experienced some bleeding. She called Elise to come and look after Jarrah so she could go to the doctor. By the time Elise got to the house, she’d had a major haemorrhage. Elise arrived to find Rosie shaking with shock in the bathroom and Jarrah covered in the blood her mother had lost on the way down the hallway.

Rosie was put on bedrest for several weeks and then delivered of her baby by emergency caesarean under general anaesthetic a few days after Christmas. Elise and Thorn spent hours pacing the hospital corridors waiting for news. Eventually it came: mother and baby were okay. But just. Rosie was very poorly for several days, and Beth was treated in the neonatal intensive care unit. When the pair was reunited, feeding didn’t come easily, and Beth was very difficult to settle.

By the time Beth was about four weeks old, Rosie was not doing well. Nowadays, she would have likely been diagnosed with postnatal depression but, in those days, it was usually chalked up to a case of the baby blues that would abate once the baby started sleeping better. One afternoon Elise felt an urge to detour past Rosie’s on her way home from work. She could hear Beth’s high-pitched screams reverberating through the quiet suburban street before she’d even got out of her car. By the time she reached the front door, she heard Jarrah’s wailing and Rosie’s sobs too.

She took one look at her daughter and called for John to bring around a suitcase of her things. She spent the next three weeks helping to care for Beth while Rosie got some much-needed rest.

It was during this time that she began the ritual of bundling Beth into her pram in the early evening, when she was at her most fractious, and walking to the local park. They sat under a giant lemon-scented eucalypt where Beth stared up at the leaves while Elise read Snugglepot and Cuddlepie until the local kookaburra issued the final birdcall of the day and indicated it was time for them to go home.

Elise and Beth continued these trips to the park for months; long after Rosie had emerged from her postnatal fog and found joy in motherhood again. No doubt the trips helped lay the foundations for the bond they shared, which grew as Beth matured and she too developed a love of the natural world.

Elise understood the role she played in Beth’s life. She provided dependability and stability when it wasn’t always available at home, and she allowed Beth the space to be herself. Sometimes she felt like she was the conduit between Beth and the rest of the world and she was aware she was closer to Beth than many other grandparents were to their grandchildren. She was happy for Beth that she’d won the money. And she hoped that by giving her a financial leg-up, it would help ease her self-imposed burden of responsibility.

Elise looked at the clock for the second time in as many minutes. It was 7.25am – 11.25pm London time. She knew the chance of hearing from Gerry today decreased with every second that passed.

She walked into the spare bedroom and retrieved the box from the bottom drawer of the bedside table. She hadn’t returned it to its hiding place on the top shelf of the wardrobe; she figured she was much less likely to break her neck revisiting it there, and it seemed like a small, symbolic gesture to inch it out of the closet, even if it was still hidden in the shadows. The combination dial moved more easily this time, and she felt more confident, excited even, about delving beyond the photo and ticket stub into the box’s contents, and into her past.

Elise’s return from Woodside Ridge during the Easter after she met Gerry had been a turning point; she could no longer ignore that her feelings for Gerry extended beyond platonic. And this had terrified her.

Pastor O’Reilly – the jolly Irish clergyman at the tiny church Elise’s family went to – often told the congregation that it was a sin for two men to ‘lie together’. And, once she moved to the city, it was hard for her to avoid the newspapers that declared that homosexuality was an epidemic. The hysterical articles celebrated a special law enforcement taskforce that had been formed to rid the community of the ‘growing crisis’ and named and shamed the young men who were arrested at ‘queer’ parties or in public toilets.

Those who weren’t arrested, charged or incarcerated were treated for what was considered to be a mental illness. Elise had heard whispers that the brother of a school friend had been subjected to behaviour aversion therapy during which he’d been shown same-sex pornography and given electric shocks to his genitals. Others were subjected to drugs, religious interventions, various psychological therapies and even lobotomies.

While the law did not seem to actively target women in the same way as men, Elise had been in her second-last year of high school when two Kiwi teenagers – Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme – bludgeoned Pauline’s mother to death with a chunk of brick in a stocking. Elise and her friends gathered around the wireless at the end of each day of the trial, to hear details of the case, and debate whether the girls were lovers. The general consensus was that women who were attracted to other women were wicked, and needed to be cured of their affliction before they harmed themselves or others.

Elise decided that avoidance was the best way of dealing with her feelings for Gerry, so she pretended she was ill and locked herself away in her room. But her phoney illness did nothing to keep Gerry away. Gerry brought Elise soup and cold compresses throughout the day, and offered to sit with her through the night.

After a week complaining of everything from muscle aches and dizziness to itchy skin and light sensitivity, Gerry and Miss Too-Priss sent for the doctor. The doctor declared there was nothing physically wrong with Elise and that the best treatment would be for her to head home to Woodside Ridge to convalesce in the country air.

While Elise couldn’t face seeing Gerry at college, she couldn’t bear the thought of being apart from her again either. So the moment the doctor had collected his medical bag and left her room, Elise declared she was feeling much better and turned her acting efforts to convincing everyone she was on the mend.

‘I’m so glad to have you back,’ Gerry said, when Elise agreed to ‘test her strength’ with a walk through the university gardens. ‘All this time we’ve spent apart lately has made me realise how much I enjoy your company and how much I love spending time with you.’

The two women gravitated to a park bench inside a fern grotto. The damp green foliage that lined the perimeter cocooned them.

‘I want you to know how much you mean to me, Elise,’ Gerry started. ‘Seeing you so poorly made me realise …’

She dropped her eyes and stroked the back of Elise’s hand.

‘… how much I love you.’

Elise felt her heart somersault inside her chest. She yearned to tell Gerry that she loved her too. That she loved her more than she had ever loved anyone. And that her love was so intense and confusing that she didn’t have the words to describe it. But the stakes were too high; what if she’d misunderstood, and Gerry didn’t love her the same way? But, as Elise searched for what to say, the space between them disappeared and their lips connected.

For the next two years, they debated who kissed whom first. Gerry maintained it was her. Elise insisted it was her. But they both agreed it was one of the most amazing, surprising, exciting things that had ever happened to them.

From that moment, Gerry and Elise’s lives became one. By day, they were scholarly study buddies, intellectual equals and college companions. By night, when the college hallways were dark and quiet, they were lovers. The fact that their romance was nocturnal, and hidden from the world, only heightened its intensity.

Early in their relationship, they hadn’t been so careful. They assumed that a brush of the arm here or a quick peck there wouldn’t rouse suspicion. But they vowed to be more discreet after a mathematics professor rounded a corridor and caught them kissing. Gerry, quick to provide a plausible excuse for why Elise was holding her face and showing such close attention to her mouth, faked a choking episode.

The memory of it now made Elise chuckle. She rummaged her fingers deeper into the box, until she felt what she was looking for – a brooch she had tucked in there after she’d written her last letter to Gerry. She lifted the brooch from the box and oscillated it in her fingers, so the dainty stones glistened in the light.

The Gouldian finch brooch was about the size of a fifty-cent piece. The bird was positioned on a branch, with its head turned in profile to reveal its magnificent colouring. The yellow of its belly, the green of its back and the blue of its lower tail feathers were shiny enamel, while its purple throat and red face were coloured with tiny crystals. It was exquisite.

Elise ran her finger over the letters engraved on the back: EG. Elise and Gerry. Or, if anyone had asked, ‘Elizabeth Gould’. She clutched the brooch to her chest, just as she had when Gerry gave it to her.

On the last night before Gerry went back to the UK, they had ventured to a spot on the river’s edge, not far from their college. They shared a serve of fish and chips and drank bottles of lager from paper bags as the sun set on a perfect February day, and on their time together. They stayed there for hours – well after the other students retreated and the mosquitos emerged – making whispered promises that they would write, and see each other as soon as possible.

Gerry had the brooch made by the only jeweller in the city to carry the Royal Warrant of Appointment. Elise often forgot that Gerry came from such wealth and privilege; she was never flashy or ostentatious. But then Gerry would do something – like commission a stunning hand-made brooch that probably cost as much as a year’s lodging – and remind her they were from two very different worlds.

‘I wanted to give you something to commemorate our time together,’ Gerry had said when Elise insisted it was too much. ‘Something you could wear close to your heart.’

Gerry pinned the brooch to the front of Elise’s cardigan.

‘I chose a Gouldian finch because Elizabeth Gould was such a remarkable woman,’ she continued. ‘And I know you’re going to achieve great things, just like her. But I also chose it because John Gould named the bird after her; he thought it was the most beautiful bird in the world.’

Gerry leaned in and kissed Elise gently.

‘But you, my love, are the most beautiful bird in the world, to me.’

Remembering those words now, Elise allowed the tears she’d been fighting to flow freely down her cheeks. As she placed the brooch back in the box, she recalled that the void Gerry left when she returned to the UK had nearly swallowed her up.

She removed her phone from her dressing gown to confirm that the volume wasn’t set to silent. It wasn’t, just like the four other times she’d checked.

Waiting for her phone to ring reminded Elise of the anxious anticipation she felt in the weeks after Gerry had left. Each day, Elise rushed to the pigeonholes outside Miss Too-Priss’s office, hopeful there was a letter from Gerry. Elise’s pigeonhole was on the second-highest row, which provided her with a glimpse of its contents as she approached it from down the corridor. The moments after she spotted a letter propped inside the small wooden recess were filled with unbridled hope. The hours after discovering it was from her mother or a friend were filled with crushing despair.

When Gerry first left, Elise wrote every second day. She applied the lipstick Gerry had given her and placed a kiss alongside her name at the end of the letter. She sealed it, gave it another kiss for good luck and put it in the outgoing mail tray under the pigeonholes. After three months of no reply, she reduced the frequency of her letters to weekly as the cost of stamps was eating into her modest student budget. Two months after that, when she still hadn’t received a single word from Gerry, Elise wrote her final letter. But instead of adding a watermelon-tinted kiss, she let her tears fall onto the page like big wet punctuation marks. As she sealed the last envelope, Elise closed her heart to ever knowing that kind of love again.

The shrieking ring of her phone, which she still had tucked back into her dressing gown pocket, catapulted Elise from her thoughts.

She gasped in anticipation and fished out the phone.

The phone face illuminated with ‘No caller ID’. Elise swallowed deeply.

‘Hello,’ she said cautiously, holding the cold, flat screen to her face. There was a pause, and Elise wondered if it was one of those scam callers that she’d heard about on A Current Affair.

‘Elise …’ the voice annunciated in perfect Queen’s English. ‘It’s Gerry.’