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‘Fantastic!’ said Olivia, snatching it up.

‘It’s a bit ancient and battered. I don’t think it was their top seller.’

‘It’s great! Thanks, Mum. But where’s my pencils for the colouring in, huh?’

Deborah smiled. ‘I’ll get them for you, if you like.’

‘Nah, only kidding. Well… maybe.’

So Olivia actually did spend the afternoon sitting up in bed, pasting in the stickers like an eight-year-old and colouring in the drawings of rats, rabbits, cavies, beavers, and the exotic ones like jerboas and capybaras. She had seen capybaras, at the zoo. Like giant guinea pigs. She drifted off for a while on a pleasant fantasy of running a capybara farm in the country. They liked water, she would
have a dam and streams, and maybe she could have some beavers, too. How would they get on? Though what if they got away, went feral, what could a bunch of out-of-control beavers do to the bush? Scary thought. She’d just have to make sure they
didn’t
get away, that’s all.

As she amused herself like this, and read, and suffered through a couple more stomach cramps but not nearly so bad, just a general ache now, Olivia could hear her mother moving around the house, talking to people on her phone in the study, doing things in the kitchen. She wondered where her father was. Quietly she tried to call him on his mobile but she could only reach his voicemail. The day was drawing to a close and she started to feel a bit stale and restless, took herself off to the bathroom where she had an outrageously long hot shower. When she got out she could smell something cooking, and once dressed in her comfortable old trackies she went out to the kitchen.

‘Hey, Mum,’ she said. Deborah was busy at the stove.

‘You’re up, Ol! How are you feeling now?’

‘Pretty good. Normal, really.’

‘Oh, good. Do you feel up to having Grandpa join us for dinner? I told him you’d been under the weather and he wanted to come round. But only if you’re up to it.’

‘No, that’d be fine. Great.’

‘All right then, I’ll call him back. Meredith’ll drop him off and I’ll drive him home later.’

‘Or maybe Dad could?’ Olivia ventured, fishing.

‘I don’t think so,’ her mother said, keeping her face turned slightly away as she picked up the phone.

I see
, Olivia thought. She put on her ugg boots and thick dressinggown to go out to the shed.
My own little World of Rodents
, she thought fondly as the rats and bunnies scuttled to their food containers, the rats turning their backs for privacy as they ate but the rabbits regarding her with their mild pretty eyes. Congo and Fly-by were miffed at not having had a walk, but as she fed them she told them they were ungrateful hounds who should think themselves lucky.

There was a
beep, beep
from a car horn as Meredith dropped Alex off. Grandpa didn’t make any enquiries other than,
Feeling better now, sweetheart?
Dinner was a beef and vegie stew, rich and hearty and as Grandpa commented several times,
just the ticket for a cold winter’s night.
When Grandpa asked where Angus was, Deborah said something vague about him working late or having a meeting, she wasn’t sure which. Olivia kept her eyes away from her mother’s face. She knew what her mum had said was a fib, and she kind of knew there was something dark and maybe dangerous just beneath the surface. But the truth could wait. It was coming, she felt sure of that.

Grandpa had brought an enormous bunch of daphne, branches of it. The smell was unbelievable, piercing and sweet.

‘Gorgeous, Dad,’ Deborah said as, dinner plates cleared away, she wrestled with the short recalcitrant branches. They were difficult to arrange, kept wanting to slip out of the vase.

‘That smell is the loveliest thing about this nasty bit of winter,’ her father said. ‘And if you’ve got a good bush growing, you never want to shift it, you know that, don’t you, darl?’

‘Yeah, I’ve heard that,’ Olivia said. ‘Daphne doesn’t like to be moved.’

‘Too right,’ Alex said. ‘I made that mistake once, you know. I made that mistake with a young lady. I moved her and I thought she was in the right spot, I thought she was happy, but no. She just couldn’t adjust to the new place. Roots just didn’t take.’

Deborah had shot her father one unreadable look, her hands frozen at the vase, and now was staring at the glass doors, at the dark night outside.

‘What was her name?’ Olivia asked, riveted.

‘Daphne,’ Alex said.

‘No, I meant the name of this lady, Grandpa.’

He looked puzzled suddenly. ‘Wasn’t it Daphne?’ he asked.

‘I think it was Rosemarie,’ Deborah said in a clear, strange voice.
She picked up the vase with its fragrant branches and carried it to the living room.

‘Rosemary?’ said Alex thoughtfully. ‘No… I don’t think so. Daphne. Like the flower.’

Late that night Olivia surfaced out of sleep, aware that someone was standing beside her bed. She opened her eyes: her dad, outlined against the light from the hallway, was walking away quietly towards the door, which he closed softly behind him. She listened intently. Nothing. Then voices, her parents’, quickly becoming raised. Olivia slid out of bed and opened her bedroom door.

She heard her father say forcefully, ‘There is
no way
Marion is going to have an abortion! Not with her history.’

‘
Her
history?’ Deborah cried, low, heartfelt, penetrating. ‘What about
our
history? What about us, our family? The family you already
have
!’

‘Marion is pregnant and she is going to have a baby, and I am the father. Those are the facts, Deborah, that’s what we are going to have to deal with.’

So that’s it
, thought Olivia. Her eyes were open so wide in the darkness they were watering.
There it is.

CHAPTER 23

James promised Rose, he promised Silver, he promised
himself
that when he got back to Melbourne he would tell the rest of the family about Rose. But somehow, somehow…There was his intense engagement with his new artwork; there was Deborah’s rage and grief over the breakdown of her marriage…There was always some reason to think: not today.

And somehow James had been back in Melbourne for two months and he still hadn’t told his siblings about their mother. Almost a year had now gone by since he’d found her, and this in itself made him feel paralysed. How could he tell them that? Confess that he’d visited Rose three times? The thought shrivelled him. With a jolt he realised that the fact of his concealment had become the problem, just as Silver had warned.

And then Rose herself forced the issue. James checked his email one morning and there was one from Rose, with the subject line
Christmas is Coming
.

Hi James –

Christmas is coming and so am I! Well, it’s still a few months away but I have decided I absolutely must visit Australia, and soon. Partly to see Alex again while (if?) he can still remember who I am. But mostly to meet my other three children, not to mention my grandchildren! I know this won’t be a cakewalk but it seems necessary, doesn’t it? And I SO want to.

James closed his email, the backs of his hands tingling the way they did when he’d had a near-miss in the traffic.
No way out of it now, buddy
. He’d always assumed he’d break the news about Rose to Deborah first, but now push had come to shove that didn’t seem right.
It has to be Dad.
This thought popped into his mind with the resonance of certainty.
Okay. Now. Right now!

He got in his car and drove across town to his father’s, and all the way there James thought about what he was about to do. How would Alex respond? Apart from those visits when he’d been looking for the letters, he hadn’t seen much of his father this past year. Thinking about it now, he realised that out of the four children, he was the one who knew their father least, certainly the one who visited him least. Not that there was any ill-feeling, but just… oh, proximity, living on the other side of the city. And they – well, they didn’t have much in common. Dad had a technical sort of mind, his was artistic. Dad’s private passion had always been gardening, and James was no gardener. And he and Silver had no children, and therefore no grandchildren to create a closer bond.

What’s Dad really like now?
Deborah was worried about him, he knew that. So was Robert. They both seemed to think it wouldn’t be long till he had to be moved to a nursing home. Meredith, he gathered, didn’t want that, but what on earth could
she
do? As for James himself, he’d simply avoided thinking about it. In her email Rose had expressed concern that Alex mightn’t remember her. Was that possible? Could
his father’s memory be so damaged that he wouldn’t remember the woman he’d once loved, and married, and had four children with?

What will this mean to him, Rose coming back?
It hit James that he had not given a moment’s consideration to this question throughout the past year’s intoxicating reunion with his mother. Who was also, or had been, Alex’s wife. What he was about to do seemed preposterous. He was on the brink of turning around and driving home.
No, don’t be such a wuss! Grow up, James!

He knocked at the front door. There was no answer. Bloody hell! He was so keyed up to see his father, and now he wasn’t home! A sneaking relief started to seep through him and then he realised that his dad was probably out the back in the garden. But just as James was stepping off the front porch his father’s car pulled up. This was confusing: hadn’t Robert said his father no longer had the car, that his driving had become too erratic?

Alex got out from the front passenger seat, Meredith from the driver’s, and each opened a rear door and retrieved a bulging shopping basket. They were so busy talking to each other they didn’t notice James till they were almost upon him.

‘Hello, boy!’ yelled his father jovially.

‘James! How lovely!’ cried Meredith. He reached to take the shopping basket from her. ‘Ta,’ she said. ‘We’ve just been up to High Street and done the weekly shop. What brings you here?’

‘Oh, you know,’ James said. ‘Just thought I’d drop in.’

‘We needed some more cheese,’ said Alex, unlocking the front door and leading the way through the house.

‘I dunno what’s with the cheese,’ said Meredith to her brother in a cheerful aside. ‘He really has a thing about not running out of cheese. And sardines. Do you think it’s because of growing up in the Depression?’

‘Could be,’ said James. He felt completely disoriented: this hadn’t been what he was expecting at all.
But what was I expecting?

‘Oh, jolly good!’ exclaimed Alex, unpacking the groceries. ‘We’ve
got some sardines! Needed them. I’m going to have some sardines on toast, how about you kids?’

‘Lovely, Daddy!’ said Meredith, winking at James.

Over the next hour James learned two things. One, Alex’s memory loss was a very real thing, and two, Meredith was far more on the ball than he had ever given her credit for. She was cagey about just how much she was doing for their father, but it seemed clear to James that it was a lot. There was a cheerful, equitable familiarity between his father and his sister that was… well, that was just so unexpected. It was all a bit of a shock, really.

After they’d had their sardines on toast and tea, Alex announced that he was going to put his feet up for a while and went into his bedroom, closing the door behind him.

‘Daddy gets up so early these days, he likes to have a nap around now,’ Meredith said.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘So how does he seem to you?’ Meredith asked. ‘If you haven’t seen him for a while… Does he seem… different?’ She had got some papers and an extra-large envelope out of her bag and was addressing it as she talked.

‘Different? Not really, no.’ James said. He took his time. He wanted to sound positive, but in fact he was starting to doubt his impulse to tell his father about Rose before his other siblings. ‘Not in like, essence-of-Dad, you know? And I reckon he looks well. Healthy.’

‘Yeah, he does, doesn’t he,’ Meredith agreed. She was turning over the papers now, three or four large sheets, checking they were all there. Each sheet was covered in drawings in strips and blocks, rather like a comic.

‘But his memory’s definitely a bit… Hey, Merry, what’re they?’ James asked, curiosity overcoming him. ‘Can I see?’

‘Sure,’ his sister said, handing the sheets to him. They were on medium weight card, not paper. ‘It’s just something I’ve done to send Mr Domasi. He’s not well, he’s in hospital. In fact, he’s really sick.’

‘Mr Domasi? The guy you rent your house from?’

‘Yeah, for all this time, nearly twenty years, and he’s never put the rent up once and it was ridiculously low to begin with. We used to meet up every month for lunch till a few years ago. Then he moved in with his daughter out in Coburg.’

James saw that the four dense sheets told the whole story of his sister’s relationship with Mr Domasi, from the day she helped this old Italian gent off the tram at Kew Junction. Their friendship, the stories he’d told her about village life in Italy, the war, migrating to Australia. The little house he’d rented to her for almost nothing, the handmade cradle that had been his gift when Laurence was born. It was all there in the form of, yes, a kind of comic, or a very detailed sort of storyboard, with collage elements too: an old tram ticket, the rug covering baby Laurence in his cradle made out of a tiny scrap of real cloth, which James guessed was probably a piece from Laurence’s actual bunnyrug. It was funny and moving and extraordinarily vivid, and the more he looked, the more he saw.

James heard his mother’s voice, telling him about Meredith’s story-drawings.
The Penguin and the Horsey.

‘Wow, Merry,’ he said. ‘This is amazing! Do you do much of this stuff?’

‘Oh yeah,’ she shrugged. ‘Always fiddling around with ’em. It’s just mucking round, you know.’

‘This isn’t just mucking around,’ he said. ‘This is art.’