Silver Wattle (19 page)

My spirits rallied with Uncle Ota’s suggestion. Despite all the terrible things that had happened, I was glad to be living with him. Uncle Ota did not look anything like my father physically, but he resembled him in his generosity. He was right too; I would not be good at administration tasks because my mind was always wandering.

I excused myself to cook lunch. On my way to the kitchen Esther called to me. ‘Adela, could you come here for a moment?’

She was standing in the doorway to the downstairs sitting room, wringing her hands nervously. She was still an anxious and quiet person, but not so much of a mouse. The other evening, we had gone to see
The Golem
, which was set in Prague. On our way home I was praising the film when Esther surprised us all by blurting out that she thought the film was pretentious. Although her opinion conflicted with mine, I was glad she had spoken up. But she still wore drab clothes that made her look much older than her age. I thought of the man with the cockatoo at the Vegetarian Cafe. War left some scars that could not be erased.

I followed Esther into the sitting room, which was much cheerier than when Mrs Bain had occupied it. Esther had replaced the heavy furniture with comfortable armchairs and installed light-shades with beaded trims. A watercolour of the beach decorated the far wall. The burled walnut piano with its lyre detailing and French legs was the only reminder of her mother’s taste.

‘What do you think of the piano?’ Esther asked me.

‘It does stand out now that you’ve changed the room,’ I said. ‘But the most important thing is how it sounds.’

‘Would you play it for me?’ she asked, opening the fallboard and adjusting the stool. ‘I never learned. Mother said I wouldn’t be brilliant so it was no use trying.’

I had not touched the piano since I was fourteen years old. With a virtuoso in the house, there had been little point. Still, I sat down and played a few bars of Sinding’s
Rustle of Spring
, which had been a favourite with Mother. I was surprised that the piano was in tune. The sound it produced was beautiful, despite my amateurish musicianship. Klara’s Petrof grand had a better tone though.

Esther agreed. ‘This old Steinway doesn’t bring me any happy memories. I’ve decided to sell it. To pay for Klara’s tuition.’

I was stunned. That Esther would sell the piano did not surprise me, as she had sold or given away most of her mother’s furniture. But to make such a generous offer!

‘What else should I do with it?’ she said in reply to my babbled refusal. ‘I have no family. It would give me pleasure to see a lovely girl get the chance she deserves.’

Later that day, I approached Esther where she was sitting in the garden and working on a tapestry. The garden was exquisite now that I had pulled out the weeds and planted borders of native flowers and urns of lavender, geraniums and verbena.

‘Esther, I want to thank you for your kindness,’ I said, sitting down next to her. ‘If there is a way to pay you back, I will find it.’

She lowered her eyes. ‘It’s not necessary,’ she said. ‘You and your sister were kind to me.’

A blue butterfly with black-trimmed wings settled on her sleeve.

‘If Klara hadn’t told me that butterflies only live a few weeks, I would swear that one is following you,’ I laughed.

Esther stared at me. ‘Butterfly?’

‘The one on your sleeve,’ I said. ‘The blue and black one. I’ve seen one like that around you several times.’

She held up both her sleeves. ‘Where?’ she asked, squinting. The butterfly was resting on her elbow in plain view. Was Esther short-sighted?

‘There,’ I said. ‘It’s on your shoulder now.’

She shook her head. Tears filled her eyes. ‘I never see it,’ she wept. ‘I never see it.’

The butterfly took off towards the sunshine. I put my hand on her wrist. ‘Esther, I’m sorry. It’s only a butterfly.’

Tears stained her face. ‘He told me that if anything happened, he would come back to me as a butterfly. But I never see it.’

The air shimmered with a sense of the unreal. ‘Your fiance?’

Esther nodded. ‘He knew that I loved butterflies. He said he would communicate to me that way. Mother’s doctor often saw the butterfly, and the funeral director who buried her noticed it resting on my shoulder when I stood by her grave.’

‘I wonder why, if he is trying to communicate with you, you can’t see him?’ I said.

Esther looked at me. ‘The milkman even saw him in human form, standing by the garden gate in his military uniform.’

I remembered the man with innocent eyes I had seen when we first moved into Esther’s house. In Prague, ghosts had often appeared when we made changes to the house. Perhaps Esther’s fiance wanted to see who we were and to make sure we treated Esther well.

‘Tell me about him,’ I ventured. I was relieved when her tears dried and a smile came to her face. In that instant, I had a sense of what she had been like as a young girl, before the war had torn the man she loved from her.

‘His name was Louis,’ she said. ‘“Like Louis the Fourteenth of France,” he would say when introducing himself. “The monarch who never washed.”’ Esther laughed. ‘He wasn’t like that of course. He was fastidiously clean.’ Her smile faded and a troubled look came to her face. ‘Awful to think of him dying in all that mud.’

‘France?’

She nodded and we fell into silence, listening to the finches twittering in the jacaranda tree. They were not native birds, those little finches. They were from Europe. They were the birds the soldiers in the trenches must have heard in moments of ceasefire—or when they lay dying.

‘When the war came, he told me he had to go,’ Esther said, a faraway look in her eyes. ‘The regiment looked dashing in their uniforms when they marched down the street. “Your mum may not approve of me now but she’ll think differently when I come back a hero,” he said to me. They say he died a hero’s death…but death is still death, isn’t it? Hero or not.’

I understood Esther’s wraithlike existence better now. She had lost hope. Her life had stopped the day she had received the news of Louis’s death, just like Mother had stopped the hands on the tall clock the morning she had learned Father was dead. Esther told me stories about Louis: the way he used to talk to dogs as if they were his friends; the way he never shut a door completely but always left a gap open. ‘Curtains too,’ she said with a fond smile. ‘He couldn’t bring himself to close anything. The cork was never quite in the water bottle, the flour jar never screwed shut, so an unsuspecting person would pick it up and find themselves dusted in powder.’ Esther was telling me things that had been bottled up inside because she’d had no one to listen to her grief.

When Ranjana called out from the house that she was leaving for work and Thomas was asleep, I slipped my arm through Esther’s. To my surprise, she took mine and squeezed it. I sensed that she had unburdened herself. I hoped so, at least.

A few days later, I travelled to the city to visit photographic studios and ask for work. Some studio managers were friendly but had no work; others had work but were unfriendly the moment they heard the traces of my foreign accent. I wanted to take pictures for my living. My clothes were becoming worn and were not fashionable in Sydney. Klara was coming home in a fortnight and I hoped to buy new dresses for us to wear for the family party we had planned for her birthday. I had a vision of having my hair bobbed and donning a new pair of beaded shoes. I enjoyed the bohemian life I lived with Uncle Ota and Ranjana, but I had inherited Mother’s love of beautiful things.

On my way down George Street, I passed the Vegetarian Cafe and stopped for an orange juice. I felt at home with the aroma of vegetable soup and the clatter of opinions echoing around the room. The cafe was crowded with familiar faces. I looked for the man with the cockatoo among them, but he was not there.

The waitress brought my juice and I flipped through the newspaper. My eyes fell on an advertisement:
Madame Diblis: Spiritualist
.

Everyone’s grandmother was a spiritualist in Prague, but the practice had grown in popularity in Australia after the war. So many people had lost loved ones and lost them young. Arthur Conan Doyle had just completed a lecture tour. He was known as the writer of the Sherlock Holmes Mysteries, but after his son, brothers-in-law and nephew were killed in the war he became an exponent of Spiritualism.

I had seen many ghosts in my life but never made contact with them. I thought it irreverent to call souls back into the world after they had departed it. I was an observer of spirits rather than a medium. I thought about Esther and her butterfly. After she had told me about Louis, we had decided that the next time I saw the butterfly I would photograph it. The following day, when I returned home from visiting Klara, Esther was in the garden planting tulips. One look at my face stopped her short.

‘It’s on me, isn’t it?’ she had said.

I nodded. The butterfly was on her forearm.

‘Hold still,’ I told her. I rushed into the house to get my camera. There was no film in it. I searched my cupboard for a pack. I found one and loaded it. I thought the butterfly would have disappeared by the time I returned outside, but it was still there. I pressed the shutter. I wanted to take another picture but before I could, the butterfly flew away.

‘I’ll develop it now,’ I told Esther.

I watched with bated breath as the image came to life: Esther’s shape; her face; her arm. There was no butterfly.

Perhaps Madame Diblis could help Esther see Louis. I imagined Esther would not have the courage to go to a spiritualist on her own so decided to go with her. It would be a way of thanking her for her generosity to Klara.

Madame Diblis instructed us to come in the afternoon. I did not tell Ranjana or Uncle Ota where we were headed. They were superstitious in many ways but they were also convinced that spiritualists were charlatans who took advantage of people. I told them that Esther and I were going to an exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. I did not like being deceitful with Uncle Ota and Ranjana, but I convinced myself that it was for the greater good.

Even if my aunt and uncle had consented to my going to Madame Diblis’s house with Esther, they would not have approved of the location. The medium lived in an unsavoury part of Sydney. Esther and I walked close together through the dingy streets of Darlinghurst, clutching our purses to our chests, steeling ourselves against the stink of urine that wafted up from the drains. I eyed the weather-stained walls of what had once been mansions now subdivided into apartments. The remnants of a more genteel time lingered in the wrought-iron railings and the palm trees that shaded some of the gardens. Every so often we passed a lion’s-head fountain or a statue of the Venus de Milo, incongruous with the newspaper-lined windows.

Madame Diblis’s apartment was on the second floor of a terrace in Forbes Street. We climbed the stairs, blocking our noses to the stench of damp. We jumped when we saw a man lying on the landing, his head thrown back and his mouth open. At first we thought he was dead, but then we heard his snoring and saw the beer bottle clasped in his hand. We slipped around him and continued down a corridor that reeked of onions. A woman’s voice burst out from behind one of the closed doors. ‘Lay orf him, I tell yer. Lay orf him!’

We hurried down the hall towards Madame Diblis’s apartment, which was the last door on the left. I rapped on the splintered wood. Footsteps approached and we heard the clicks of several locks being turned. The door swung open and a trace of sandalwood temporarily masked the unsavoury smell of the hallway. We found ourselves facing a woman with her grey hair tucked into a scarf. The pendant she wore around her neck disappeared down her cleavage when she leaned forward to see who we were. We introduced ourselves and Madame Diblis held a finger to her lips. ‘We must talk quietly,’ she said. ‘The spirits are restless today.’

We followed her into the parlour. The furniture was draped in velvet fabrics and lace doilies. In the centre of the room stood a marble dining table surrounded by high-backed chairs. By the window hung a mirror bracketed by curves and florets. It was the type of mirror I imagined the dark queen in
Snow White
gazing into when she asked her famous question: ‘Mirror, Mirror on the wall…’

‘Please sit down,’ said Madame Diblis, indicating a sofa covered in cushions. She listened to our story about the butterfly and Louis’s promise. When I told her that I could see the butterfly while Esther could not, the medium turned to me and studied my face before sitting back and staring at her hands thoughtfully.

‘It is five years since your fiance died,’ Madame Diblis said to Esther. ‘It is easier to call back those who have recently passed to the other side, but with all the activity today we may have some luck. My feeling is, however, that because he is trying to reach you in the way he promised, he may not be able to speak. But we will try.’

I tried to ascertain if Madame Diblis was a fraud. I thought of the tricks false mediums used that Uncle Ota had told me about—using strings to move objects and ring bells—but could not see anything odd in the room or around the marble table, which was where I assumed she would work. Madame Diblis’s apartment was more pleasant than the others around it, but there was nothing to suggest she was making a lot of money. The gold ring with the red garnet she wore was beautiful but not expensive. She had an exotic accent that I could not place, although that could have been affected.

Madame Diblis turned to me as if she had read my thoughts. ‘It’s important that you are a believer,’ she said. ‘If you bring doubts to the seance you will keep the spirits away. We must have unity of purpose.’

I decided that she was genuine.

Esther and I took our places at the table while Madame Diblis closed the curtains. She then lit the candelabra. From a cabinet she brought out a hand bell, a maraca, a notepad and pencil and placed them on the table, explaining that spirits used different tools to communicate. I glanced at Esther whose face was as white as a sheet. I was sure, with her religious upbringing, Esther had never imagined she would be taking part in a seance. I felt uneasy myself. If Louis appeared, I would not be afraid. But an upsetting thought had been bothering me. What if I disturbed Mother or Father? I closed my eyes and prayed for them to remain at rest. They had both died in terrible circumstances: I wanted them to be at peace.