Jubilee (26 page)

Something was knotting up in her head, pulling it tight. She mumbled a farewell to the librarian.

‘Don’t you want your books?’ she called out after her.

Jessamy shook her head and ran for the door. The pain in her head pressed against her. She felt chilled and her legs shook.

Rachel

2003

‘I came down with something,’ Jessamy said. ‘It was bad. Still not sure what it was. Medical care wasn’t exactly extensive out in that little township.
I had some kind of weird fever, pains in my muscles, a rash. For days and days my temperature stayed up at 104. Robert didn’t move from my side. He just let the men get on with the cane
harvest. He sponged me down, changed my sheets and helped me to the bathroom.’ She nodded to herself, as though reliving the illness. ‘I had bad dreams, terrible nightmares.’

‘About being taken from here?’

She shook her head. ‘About monsters coming out from underneath the veranda and pulling me down there with them. They were snakes, swollen to six times their normal size. And the
kookaburras flying in the sky were like pterodactyls.’ She grimaced. ‘I begged him not to leave me. He sat there every night holding my hand until I fell asleep. By the time I was
better Robert Winter had become my protector. While he was with me nothing terrible could happen to me. If he even went out of the room to fetch me a drink I shouted at him to come back. I was so
weak I couldn’t go back to school for days after the holidays ended. I have to tell you, Rachel, I felt I owed him after that.’

‘You owed him nothing!’ I spat. ‘OK, he’d mopped your brow when you were ill and made sure you had a decent education, but so what?’

‘I loved Robert,’ she said in a low tone. ‘I couldn’t let myself think badly of him. I was – ’ she seemed to hunt for the right words – ‘in
torment, really. Whatever I did, someone would get hurt. And then Robert got sick again himself while I was back home for Easter, another bout of malaria – that seemed to be happening more
and more frequently. And he was disturbed in his mind, going on about the jungle and the Thais he’d bartered with while they were out there. Something about the Thai trader’s
daughter—’

‘The girl in the jungle.’

She nodded. ‘The one he called Noi. Something had happened to her. I didn’t understand what he was on about. All I wanted was to go back to school. Life was boring there but it felt
safe and ordered and I had time to think.’

I could imagine how reassuringly normal school must have seemed.

‘Seeing me off to school on the plane to Brisbane was tough for him. He had his friends, men he drank with in the hotel. Many of them had been POWs in the East.’

‘Do you think he told them about what had happened to him? Perhaps it would have helped to talk to people who really understood what he’d been through.’

She snorted. ‘They’d have understood all right. But they wouldn’t necessarily have thanked him for bringing the subject up. Men of that generation, Australian ones, anyway,
just kept it all buried.’ She settled back in her chair. ‘Today we think that’s unhealthy, it all needs to come out. But Robert and his friends probably worried that once it
started leaking out, the punishments, the executions, the hunger, it would take them over.’

‘Keeping quiet about what happened to him stopped Robert getting help for his nervous disorder, though,’ I pointed out. ‘Proper treatment might have stopped him believing you
needed “saving” from something terrible that was supposedly happening here.’ I sounded acid.

‘Back in the seventies nobody’d heard of post-traumatic stress disorder.’ Jessamy flopped into a chair, pushing back her dark hair, looking suddenly as though whatever had been
charging her batteries had abandoned her. For the first time she looked her age: thirty-five, like me.

‘You felt responsible for Robert, didn’t you?’ I saw it all, the teenage girl alone in the tropics with the sick man.

‘Yes.’

‘But what about the farm? And me?’

‘He’d told me you’d moved abroad with your father. He didn’t know the address. And the farm’d been sold.’

And, of course, she’d had no way of finding out this was untrue. No internet back then, no easy way of checking things out.

‘To be honest, I wasn’t even sure you’d want to hear from me after some years had passed. I thought you’d just forgotten about me, moved on.’

I opened my mouth to protest but didn’t say anything. She couldn’t have known any different, isolated as she was from reality.

‘Perhaps you did readjust to my absence,’ Jessamy continued. ‘Perhaps you were perfectly happy.’

There was a tiny nugget of truth in what she’d said. Hadn’t I started to enjoy those holidays I’d spent here following Jessamy’s disappearance? Sometimes I’d hardly
wanted to return to my parents at the end of the visits. ‘Aren’t you pleased to be home, darling?’ my mother would ask, thrusting beautifully wrapped clothes from Riviera
boutiques at me. ‘See what we bought you.’ And as I tried on another perfectly tailored dress in yet another gleaming executive home in Weybridge or an apartment in some Mediterranean
resort, and said thank you, my heart would be back in Evie’s kitchen. The two of us dressed in our oldest clothes making hot chocolate after a night out in the lambing shed.

A whole year had passed before I’d lost the habit of mentally recording events to replay to Jess in the holidays.
Did I tell you that we all had detention because someone blocked the
loos . .
.
? You’ll never guess what happened in French . . . Mummy wrote and told me she found a lizard in her slipper and she won’t wear them ever again now.
Sometimes when
I was riding one of the ponies in the field behind the barn I’d expect to see her running towards us. ‘Try the jumps, Rachel! You can do it.’ When I’d stayed at
Winter’s Copse I’d continued to sleep in the second twin bed in her room. Sometimes I’d sit on Jessamy’s bed, holding one of her soft toys or flicking through the pages of
one of her books and longing for her so strongly it made my insides ache. After two or three years had passed Evie had covered her bed with a blue candlewick cover and moved the toys into the
cupboard.

And yet . . . My eyes lit on the laptop on the kitchen table, top of the range and new. Out in the drive, mercifully now clear of the floods, stood my equally shiny convertible. I’d made
something of my life. With Jessamy gone perhaps parts of my personality had flourished. If she’d stayed at Winter’s Copse I’d have retained my position as the natural second, the
quieter one. I’d never have done all I’d achieved. But, a little voice whispered, perhaps I’d have chosen a less demanding and rewarding career. Married younger and had children
by now, instead of leaving it until I was in my thirties to start trying. ‘If I’d seen you four years ago we’d have had a better chance,’ the consultant had told me.

Perhaps my long silence had worried Jessamy. She uncrossed an arm and reached across the expanse of oak table to pat my hand. I sensed that the gesture had cost her quite a bit so I forced
myself to clear the thoughts from my mind. ‘I know you weren’t really glad I was out of the way, Rachel.’

‘Tell me what happened after you went off to boarding school.’

‘My life went on, I did well at school, even though it was an old-fashioned kind of place. When I left I managed to get a scholarship to a college in the US. It was fun but I fell apart a
bit out there, couldn’t deal with all the freedom. Robert had kept me so sheltered. I got into drugs.’

I looked at her.

‘Fairly badly. They made it easier to deal with this.’ She pointed to her chest. ‘All the emptiness inside me. Then I got out of drugs. Married the first guy who looked decent
and kind.’

‘Are you still together?’ I couldn’t see a ring on her hand.

‘Nope. But we’re still friends. Have to be to manage custody of our kids.’

‘Tell me about the children.’ Even now, even at this moment, I felt a pang.

She nodded. ‘Twins of eight, one of each. They’re in the States at the moment, with their father and his parents. I miss them.’ Her face fell. ‘We’re civilized
about it but it’s complicated because I’m in Sydney and he’s in Spain most of the time.’ She gave a dismissive wave. ‘But don’t let me work myself up about
it.’ Then her face crumpled. ‘My mother will never see Marcus and Sophie. They ask me about my family and I’ve never been able to tell them very much.’ I reached out for her
hand.’ I can’t believe I saw her for just that little time, Rachel. And now she’s gone. It’s so cruel.’ We sat listening to the kitchen clock ticking while her tears
fell onto the wooden table. There was nothing I could say to console her; I could only hope that just sitting with her gave her some comfort.

‘Tell me how you found out the truth, Jess,’ I said at last.

‘It was only weeks ago. He’d been sick. Skin cancer to start with. All those years in the tropical heat in Thailand. Then sugar cane farming. It would have been surprising if he
hadn’t developed melanomas. I kept telling him to go to the doctor. But he didn’t and the cancer spread and it was obvious he was dying. I went up to be with him.’

Her voice dropped to a whisper and I guessed that she was no longer in the kitchen at Winter’s Copse with me: she was back in tropical Queensland, sitting with the man who’d brought
her up and looked after her, who’d stolen her and lied to her.

‘There was one afternoon when he was resting. It was too hot to go out. I managed to get a reasonable dial-up connection on the laptop I’d brought with me. Something, some crazy
whim, made me think of searching on Craven, on the farm’s name, just to see who still lived there. I had no idea . . .’ She choked on the last words.

Jessamy

February 2003

She closed her eyes and opened them again. But it was still there on the screen.
Pictured here, children from Craven Primary School enjoy newborn lambs at Winter’s
Copse farm.
And there was the woman, standing almost out of the frame, smiling at the children, a scarf wrapped round her neck. Jessamy focused so hard on the face that it fragmented into a
collection of coloured pixels, nothingness. Was she wrong? Her imagination was willing her mother to be there. She forced her eyes to look at the blinds on the windows and then switched them back
to stare at the screen. Her mother was still there.

The dial-up internet service up here was so slow that she hardly dared to carry out an internet search on her mother’s name in an attempt to find more information about her, in case she
lost this picture for good and couldn’t reopen the file. ‘Jess . . .’ came the voice from the lounge.

She stood so abruptly that the chair fell over. Trying to compose herself she walked to him. Years of experience had taught her how to hide emotion from him. Even now she was able to push this
into the recesses of her mind.

It had been a better day; he could sit up, which helped his lungs. ‘Do you need more water?’ She filled his glass again, amazed at how she could still communicate normally, as though
the certainties governing her world hadn’t collapsed. ‘Nearly time for the drugs.’

He watched her, eyes buried deep in the yellowing, papery skin. ‘What’ve you been doing?’ There must have been something about her that he’d picked out. Her hands must be
shaking. God, her mouth felt dry, too. Robert was sensitive to mood, even when cancer was sweeping his body.

‘Just looking at some old newspapers on the internet.’ She was surprised she could actually speak.

‘They have newspapers on the net?’ He laughed. ‘I haven’t ever looked. Haven’t really got to grips with the thing yet. It seems to take for ever.’

‘I’ve heard they’re laying cables up here. It’ll be quicker then.’ She felt hot blood pulsing in her head. Calm down. Think. There had to be a mistake; she’d
been hallucinating. The kookaburras outside seemed to shriek mockery at her.

‘Too quick for me.’ He gave his rasping cough. ‘You can find out anything on the internet, I’ve heard.’

‘So they say.’ Suddenly her heart was thumping and she thought she might retch. She longed to dash from the room, which seemed to spin in front of her.

‘Jess.’ He was struggling to straighten himself in the chair. ‘There’s something you need to know.’ The words were spoken quickly, like beads dropping from a
necklace. ‘I should have told you last time you came up here but you had the kids with you and everything.’

She’d left the children with a friend in Sydney this time, not wanting them to see their Uncle Robert like this.

‘I need to tell you now while I can see things straight. Sometimes I just can’t, you know. Sometimes it all blurs together.’

He’d explain. There’d be a reason for all this. She sat down on the sofa opposite him. She could see him still struggling to sit more upright and got up again to rearrange the
cushions behind his back. ‘Thanks.’ His eyes were suddenly less glazed; he looked more alert. Probably because he was due more morphine. Over the years she’d noticed how the
alcohol had kept him in his strange world. Now the painkilling drugs seemed to fulfil the same purpose. He’d be in pain now. ‘I’m not stupid, I know that I’m not going to be
around much longer . . .’ He coughed. ‘I also know that I should be seeing a priest or minister. Or a police officer. Because of what I’ve done. But I’ll take my chances
with my maker. The person I need to be honest with is you, Jess.’

‘She’s not dead, is she?’ She almost looked around to see who’d spoken the words; it didn’t seem possible that she could have uttered them. She forced herself to
concentrate on a loose thread on the sofa arm, to make its frayed cream colour her focus. If she let go of the thread she’d be falling.

‘No.’

Again she concentrated on the cream thread, holding on to it for dear life, afraid of what would happen if she moved her eyes from it. Her mouth wanted to form itself into a scream.

‘Why?’

‘Why did I take you? Why did I lie to you?’ He gave the rasping laugh again. ‘God, Jess, you must want to kill me. I wish you would, in fact. Then we’d be even. Perhaps
this – ’ he pointed to the oxygen cylinder and mask in the corner of the room – ‘is punishment enough.’ He seemed to slump. ‘But you want answers. Of
course.’