The Forgotten Garden (2 page)

Legs and shoes and petticoat hems. The tails of coloured paper streamers flicking this way and that. Wily gulls hunting the decks for crumbs.

A lurch and the huge boat groaned, long and low from deep within its belly. Vibrations passed through the deck boards and into the little girl’s fingertips. A moment of suspension and she found herself holding her breath, palms flat beside her, then the boat heaved and pushed itself away from the dock. The horn bellowed and there was a wave of cheering, cries of ‘Bon voyage’. They were on their way.

To America, a place called New York where Papa had been born.

She’d heard them whispering about it for some time, Mamma telling Papa they should go as soon as possible, that they could afford to wait no longer.

The little girl laughed again; the boat was gliding through the water like a giant whale, like Moby Dick in the story her father often read to her. Mamma didn’t like it when he read such stories. She said they were too frightening and would put ideas in her head that couldn’t be got out. Papa always gave Mamma a kiss on the forehead when she said that sort of thing, told her she was right and that he’d be more careful in future. But he still told the little girl stories of the great whale. And others—the ones that were the little girl’s favourite, from the fairytale book, about eyeless crones, and orphaned maidens, and long journeys across the sea. He just made sure that Mamma didn’t know, that it remained their secret.

The little girl understood they had to have secrets from Mamma.

Mamma wasn’t well, had been sickly since before the little girl was born. Grandmamma was always bidding her be good, minding her that 4

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if Mamma were to get upset something terrible might happen and it would be all her fault. The little girl loved her mother and didn’t want to make her sad, didn’t want something terrible to happen, so she kept things secret. Like the fairy stories, and playing near the maze, and the times Papa had taken her to visit the Authoress in the cottage on the far side of the estate.

‘A-ha!’ A voice by her ear. ‘Found you!’ The barrel was heaved aside and the little girl squinted up into the sun. Blinked until the owner of the voice moved to block the light. It was a big boy, eight or nine, she guessed. ‘You’re not Sally,’ he said.

The little girl shook her head.

‘Who are you?’

She wasn’t meant to tell anybody her name. It was a game they were playing, she and the lady.

‘Well?’

‘It’s a secret.’

His nose wrinkled, freckles drew together. ‘What for?’

She shrugged. She wasn’t supposed to speak of the lady, Papa was always minding her so.

‘Where’s Sally then?’ The boy was growing impatient. He looked left and right. ‘She ran this way, I’m sure of it.’

A whoop of laughter from further down the deck and the scramble of fleeing footsteps. The boy’s face lit up. ‘Quick!’ he said as he started to run. ‘She’s getting away.’

The little girl leaned her head around the barrel and watched him weaving in and out of the crowd in keen pursuit of a flurry of white petticoats.

Her toes itched to join them.

But the lady had said to wait.

The boy was getting further away. Ducking around a portly man with a waxed moustache, causing him to scowl so that his features scurried towards the centre of his face like a family of startled crabs.

The little girl laughed.

Maybe it was all part of the same game. The lady reminded her more of a child than of the other grown-ups she knew. Perhaps she was playing too.

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The little girl slid from behind the barrel and stood slowly. Her left foot had gone to sleep and now had pins and needles. She waited a moment for feeling to return, watched as the boy turned the corner and disappeared.

Then, without another thought, she set off after him. Feet pounding, heart singing in her chest.

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2

Brisbane, 1930

Brisbane, Australia, 1930

In the end they held Nell’s birthday party in the Foresters’ building, up on Latrobe Terrace. Hugh had suggested the new dance hall in town, but Nell, echoing her mother, had said it was silly to go to unnecessary expense, especially with times as tough as they were. Hugh conceded, but contented himself by insisting she send away to Sydney for the special lace he knew she wanted for her dress. Lil had put the idea in his head before she passed away. She’d leaned over and taken his hand, then shown him the newspaper advertisement, with its Pitt Street address, and told him how fine the lace was, how much it would mean to Nellie, that it might seem extravagant but it could be reworked into the wedding gown when the time came. Then she’d smiled at him, and she was sixteen years old again and he was smitten.

Lil and Nell had been working on the birthday dress for a couple of weeks by then. In the evenings, when Nell was home from the newspaper shop and tea was finished, and the younger girls were bickering lethargically on the verandahs, and the mosquitoes were so thick in the muggy night air you thought you’d go mad from the drone, Nell would take down her stitching basket and pull up a seat beside her mother’s sickbed. He would hear them sometimes, laughing about something that had happened in the newspaper shop: an argument Max Fitzsimmons had had with this customer or that, Mrs Blackwell’s latest medical complaint, the antics of Nancy Brown’s twins. He would linger by the door, filling his pipe with tobacco and listening as Nell lowered her voice, flushed with pleasure as she recounted something Danny had said. Some promise he’d made about the house he was going to buy her when they were wed, the car he had his eye on that his father 7

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thought he could get for a song, the latest mixmaster from McWhirter’s department store.

Hugh liked Danny; he couldn’t wish more for Nell, which was just as well seeing as the pair had been inseparable since they’d met.

Watching them together reminded Hugh of his early years with Lil.

Happy as larks they’d been, back when the future still stretched, unmarked, before them. And it had been a good marriage. They’d had their testing times, early on before they’d had their girls, but one way or another things had always worked out . . .

His pipe full, his excuse to loiter ended, Hugh would move on. He’d find a place for himself at the quiet end of the front verandah, a dark spot where he could sit in peace, or as near to peace as was possible in a house full of rowdy daughters, each more excitable than the other.

Just him and his flyswat on the window ledge should the mozzies get too close. And then he’d follow his thoughts as they turned invariably towards the secret he’d been keeping all these years.

For the time was almost upon him, he could feel that. The pressure, long kept at bay, had recently begun to build. She was nearly twenty-one, a grown woman ready to embark on her own life, engaged to be married no less. She had a right to know the truth.

He knew what Lil would say to that, which is why he didn’t tell her.

The last thing he wanted was for Lil to worry, to spend her final days trying to talk him out of it, as she’d done so often in the past.

Sometimes, as he wondered at the words he’d find to make his confession, Hugh caught himself wishing it on one of the other girls instead. He cursed himself then for acknowledging he had a favourite, even to himself.

But Nellie had always been special, so unlike the others. Spirited, more imaginative. More like Lil, he often thought, though of course that made no sense.

c

They’d strung ribbons along the rafters—white to match her dress and red to match her hair. The old wooden hall might not have had the spit and polish of the newer brick buildings about town, but it scrubbed up all right. In the back near the stage, Nell’s four younger sisters had 8

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arranged a table for birthday gifts, and a decent pile had begun to take shape. Some of the ladies from church had got together to make the supper, and Ethel Mortimer was giving the piano a workout, romantic dance tunes from the war.

Young men and women clustered at first in nervous knots around the walls, but as the music and the more outgoing lads warmed up, they began to split into pairs and take to the floor. The little sisters looked on longingly until sequestered to help carry trays of sandwiches from the kitchen to the supper table.

When time came for the speeches, cheeks were glowing and shoes were scuffed from dancing. Marcie McDonald, the minister’s wife, tapped on her glass and everybody turned to Hugh, who was unfolding a small piece of paper from his breast pocket. He cleared his throat and ran a hand over his comb-striped hair. Public speaking had never been his caper. He was the sort of man who kept himself to himself, minded his own opinions and happily let the more vocal fellows do the talking.

Still, a daughter came of age but once and it was his duty to announce her. He’d always been a stickler for duty, a rule follower. For the most part anyway.

He smiled as one of his mates from the wharf shouted a heckle, then he cupped the paper in his palm and took a deep breath. One by one, he read off the points on his list, scribbled in tiny black handwriting: how proud of Nell he and her mother had always been; how blessed they’d felt when she arrived; how fond they were of Danny. Lil had been especially happy, he said, to learn of the engagement before she passed away.

At this mention of his wife’s recent death, Hugh’s eyes began to smart and he fell silent. He paused for a while and allowed his gaze to roam the faces of his friends and his daughters, to fix a moment on Nell who was smiling as Danny whispered something in her ear. As a cloud seemed to cross his brow, folk wondered if some important announcement was coming, but the moment passed. His expression lightened and he returned the piece of paper to his pocket. It was about time he had another man in the family, he said with a smile, it’d even things up a bit.

The ladies in the kitchen swept into action then, administering cups of tea to the guests, but Hugh loitered a while, letting people brush 9

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past him, accepting the pats on the shoulder, the calls of ‘Well done, mate’, a cup and saucer thrust into his hand. The speech had gone well, yet he couldn’t relax. His heart had stepped up its beat and he was sweating though it wasn’t hot.

He knew why, of course. The night’s duties were not yet over. When he noticed Nell slip alone through the side door, onto the little landing, he saw his opportunity. He cleared his throat and set his teacup in a space on the gift table, then he disappeared from the warm hum of the room into the cool night air.

Nell was standing by the silver-green trunk of a lone eucalypt.

Once, Hugh thought, the whole ridge would’ve been covered by them, and the gullies either side. Must’ve been a sight, that crowd of ghostly trunks on nights when the moon was full.

There. He was putting things off. Even now he was trying to shirk his responsibility, was being weak.

A pair of black bats coasted silently across the night sky and he made his way down the rickety wooden steps, across the dew-damp grass.

She must have heard him coming—sensed him perhaps—for she turned and smiled as he drew close.

She was thinking about Ma, she said, as he reached her side, wondering which of the stars she was watching from.

Hugh could’ve wept when she said it. Damned if she didn’t have to bring Lil into it right now. Make him aware that she was observing, angry with him for what he was about to do. He could hear Lil’s voice, all the old arguments . . .

But it was his decision to make and he’d made it. It was he, after all, who’d started the whole thing. Unwitting though he might have been, he’d taken the step that set them on this path and he was responsible for putting things right. Secrets had a way of making themselves known, and it was better, surely, that she learned the truth from him.

He took Nell’s hands in his and placed a kiss on the top of each.

Squeezed them tight, her soft smooth fingers against his work-hardened palms.

His daughter. His first.

She smiled at him, radiant in her delicate lace-trimmed dress.

He smiled back.

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Then he led her to sit by him on a fallen gum trunk, smooth and white, and he leaned to whisper in her ear. Transferred the secret he and her mother had kept for seventeen years. Waited for the flicker of recognition, the minute shift in expression as she registered what he was telling her. Watched as the bottom fell out of her world and the person she had been vanished in an instant.

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3

Brisbane, 2005

Brisbane, Australia, 2005

Cassandra hadn’t left the hospital in days, though the doctor held out little hope her grandmother would regain lucidity. It wasn’t likely, he said, not at her age, not with that amount of morphine in her system.

The night nurse was there again, so Cassandra knew it was no longer day. The precise time she couldn’t guess. It was hard to tell in here: the foyer lights were constantly on, a television could always be heard though never seen, trolleys tracked up and down the halls no matter what the hour. An irony that a place relying so heavily on routine should operate so resolutely outside time’s usual rhythms.

Nonetheless, Cassandra waited. Watching, comforting, as Nell drowned in a sea of memories, came up for air again and again in earlier times of life. She couldn’t bear to think her grandmother might defy the odds and find her way back to the present, only to discover herself floating on the outer edge of life, alone.