‘I tried to explain that she wrote to us; she tried to stay in touch,’ he told Silver. ‘But you know, it didn’t even sound convincing to
me
.’
‘It’s early days,’ said Silver kindly. ‘They’ll come round.’
James shook his head. ‘Go ahead, Sil,’ he said gloomily, ‘say,
I told you so
.’
‘Oh, hon!’ she murmured, stroking his arm.
He emailed Rose, reporting the bare bones of the meeting and that it hadn’t gone well, but sparing the details. He turned his mind away from it with all the slithery skill that a lifetime of avoiding conflict had given him, but it was there, all the time.
It was two or three weeks before Rose reported that she’d had a phone call from Meredith,
very emotional
, but unfortunately
Merry had muddled the time difference and called in the middle of the English night. ‘I was only half awake,’ Rose said. James got the impression that the conversation had been upsetting, but he didn’t want to ask further. A little later she received a letter from Robert, handwritten and delivered by post. ‘Formal’, she told James, ‘but not entirely frosty.’
James got phone calls from both Robert and Meredith, on the same day, and saying much the same thing: ‘I know this has been hard for you, too.’ Robert described telling their father about Rose, and Alex’s lack of response. He was solemn, James thought, but cordial, and at the end of her call Meredith said, ‘I’ve made some pretty big mistakes in my time, too, Jamesey.’ It wasn’t quite forgiveness but it was close, and James nearly wept with gratitude. Still nothing, though, from Deborah, except chilly silence. He felt cowed by it. Then she rang one night, and tore strips off him. She had remembered phoning him on Christmas Day, and figured out who he was with. She called him an ‘ungrateful rat’ and a ‘sneaking bastard’. James wondered if he could possibly feel worse.
He wished he could go back in time. He found himself thinking about the photos in Rose’s album, the one with the green silk binding. That other, unsuspected family album. The pictures took on greater and more poigniant significance than they’d had when Rose first showed them to him. He kept imagining them being sent across the ocean, bundle by bundle, to his mother, and her trying to piece together her children’s lives from these random occasional clues. Documentary evidence, but a documentary without narration.
James found himself drawn by the wish to look again at the photographs in what he thought of as their original form. There was nothing wrong with that, was there? Nothing to be ashamed of – so why did he feel so sneaky when he went to visit Alex early one afternoon, and asked him with studied casualness about getting out the old photo albums?
‘Of course, of course,’ said his father, but he looked a little
nonplussed. ‘The photo albums. You go for your life, lad. I’m just not too sure where they are right now… ’
‘I’m pretty sure they’re in the usual place still, Dad,’ James said, getting up from the kitchen table and heading into the living room, to the big white bookcase. Alex followed him.
‘Oh, there they are. Of course,’ said Alex as James lifted them down from the top of the case, the old black leather album and the second, more recent one with its tan cloth cover. A couple of cardboard shoeboxes beside them contained, James knew, a muddle of unsorted photos, some loose, some in packets with their negatives. He carried the whole lot over to the big dining table.
It was years, decades maybe, since James had opened these albums. How strange it was to see the pictures of his mother as a young woman. As he went through them he put a few aside, intending to get copies made to send to Rose, but he still felt as detached from them as he always had. His
real
mother was not this barely remembered girl; no, she was the vibrant silver-haired older woman he had met just on a year ago. It must be the enormous gap, the long years of absence that made the difference, James decided, since he felt no such disconnection between the photos of his father as a younger man and the interested but slightly baffled eighty-something Dad who was sitting beside him.
Alex reached across and picked up the half dozen photos of Rose that James had put aside. One by one, he gazed at them. ‘She was a nice girl,’ he said. His voice sounded regretful. James breathed in hard, almost a gasp. He hadn’t said anything yet to his father about Rose, and Robert thought that the news hadn’t seemed to really register. But perhaps Alex did understand, after all, that she’d been found? James felt a sudden boldness.
‘Would you like to see her again, Dad?’ he asked.
‘Yes, that’d be nice,’ Alex said mildly. He put the photos down on the table.
Nice?
That didn’t seem right.
As if I asked him if he’d like a cup of tea.
‘That’s Rose you know, Dad. Rosemarie. Our mum. Who you were married to.’
‘That’s right,’ agreed his father.
‘And I’ve found her, and she’s going to come out here, at Christmas. And visit us.’ It all came out in such a rush.
‘Jolly good, lad,’ Alex said, nodding. There was a short silence. ‘You just let me know about it then, will you?’ He pushed his chair back from the table. ‘You happy to keep on going here, are you? I’ve just got a few things to do out the back.’
James blinked several times. ‘Okay, Dad.’ His father left the room and James stared after him.
What the hell was that about? Is this dementia? Or did I just fuck that up, too?
He might as well continue with the photos, even though it all seemed a bit of an anticlimax now. He started sifting through the shoeboxes. Most of these photos were also well known to him, but then he came across an unfamiliar envelope with a single word written on it in faded copperplate pencil:
Inverness
.
Inside were some very old photographs he’d never seen before. Three children on the seat of a cart: a stern-faced girl of about eight, and a plump toddler hauled onto the lap of a smiling little girl not much bigger than he was. Several pictures of four children lined up on the verandah of a weatherboard house, their bodies in bright sunshine, their heads in deep shadow. The older boy was dressed in a sailor suit, the two girls in long pale dresses with aprons.
Pinafores
, the word popped into James’s mind. Here, all standing on the steps in front of the house, squinting into the sun, and a woman had joined them, her hand held slantwise against her forehead to shield her eyes.
A photograph of the same place from further back, a cottage like a child’s drawing with a window either side of the central front door. A boy was standing on the grass out the front between a pair of spiky trees, date palms, holding a big sloppy-looking horse by its bridle. And here, the family group in a garden: a middle-aged couple, she
with steel-rimmed glasses, a deep frown and her hair pulled back, he with his hands in his trouser pockets, his head tilted down shyly, while a young boy on the edge of adolescence leaned against his side, and two teenage girls sat demurely on the grass at their feet. Perhaps the older son had taken the photograph, since he wasn’t in the picture. Ah, but here he was, surely it was him again but in a different sort of sailor suit: naval uniform. A studio portrait, with the name of the photographer printed across one corner. James turned the photograph over. On the back was written
Robert, 1939. Age 19.
Uncle Bob. Of course.
There were more. As James looked through them he understood that the older girl was Auntie Isobel, who had died quite young, long before James was born. And Uncle Bob, who’d served in the navy, he’d died not long ago; Robert had gone over to Perth for the funeral. The younger girl was Auntie Margaret, gone too now, and the plump toddler who grew into the sweet-faced boy was Alex himself. The adults were James’s own grandparents, before they got old. His grandfather had died when James was just a baby. This shy-looking man was the one Rose had told him was a drinker:
an exceptionally pleasant drunk, but still an alcoholic
. Had it been hard on his wife? His grandmother he remembered from childhood as a rather stern old lady parked in a chair at rare McDonald family gatherings. In the photographs she looked a bit fed up, the way spouses of alcoholics often did. Even the nicest ones. In the art world, James had seen plenty of both.
Alex came back in from the garden. ‘Cuppa?’ he asked brightly, standing in the doorway with his head poked forward enquiringly.
‘Thanks, Dad. But, Dad, can you just tell me…’ James said, beckoning his father over, ‘what was Inverness? Or where, rather?’
‘Inverness? That’s in Scotland. The town my mum came from.’ Alex came over and looked down at the photos spread on the table. ‘Oh, look at that!’ he exclaimed. ‘That’s the house I grew up in!’
‘Is it? Maybe Gran called it Inverness after the town, then.’
‘I suppose she did,’ Alex agreed, picking up the picture of the boy holding the horse in front of the house. He grinned. ‘Ah, see… that’s me and old… Benny, that was his name. By golly he was a nice horse. Steady as a rock.’
He picked up another. ‘Oh!’ he exclaimed. ‘Would you look at that!’ James craned to see: his father and grandfather sitting side by side on the verandah steps, leaning towards each other with a box of something unidentifiable between them, and a long-legged fox terrier peering anxiously on. ‘That’s when Dora had her first lot of pups. She was a wonderful dog. Champion rabbitter.’
‘So where was this place, Dad?’
‘Up near Castlemaine,’ said Alex promptly. ‘Out the back there, past the cemetery. Not the Castlemaine cemetery, another place. Little place.’
‘How long were you there for?’
‘Oh, a long time. Till I went to high school in Ballarat. I boarded there. Then it was Melbourne and the university. Mum wanted me to study. She thought I wouldn’t have to fight if I was at Melbourne University. She was right, too.’
‘To fight in the war, do you mean? The Second World War?’
Alex looked at his son challengingly. ‘Well, with one son already a POW, she didn’t want me going over there, did she?’
‘No, absolutely!’ said James quickly. ‘Of course not.’
‘I’d love to have a foxie again,’ said his father, gazing at another photo of himself with an arm round the neck of the dog, Dora. ‘My dad used to say foxies have such long noses because they’re always sticking them in where they don’t belong.’
‘So when did your parents leave there? Inverness.’
Alex looked up thoughtfully. ‘Oh, they left there…They left there…’ He grimaced. ‘Oh, a long time ago. You don’t remember?’
‘No, Dad, it must’ve been way before my time. I never went there at all.’
‘That’s a pity. Nice house, that house. I’d love to show it to you, laddie.’
‘Well,’ said James, suddenly fired with inspiration, ‘maybe you could! If it’s still there. We could go for a run and see.’
‘Oh, it’s too far to run.’
‘Drive, I mean, Dad. Not far to drive. It’s early – look, not even three o’clock. We could go right now! Have a look around, see what we can see, and still be back in time for dinner.’
‘I’d want to have a cuppa first.’
‘Naturally. Cup of tea first. And maybe… tell you what, we could take our time and have a counter tea at a pub in Castlemaine. How does that sound?’ James could tell by the look on his father’s face that it sounded like a grand idea to him.
‘Hello, Uncle James,’ said Olivia, opening the front door to him. ‘Come in. Mum’s in the study.’
Hovering in the doorway to her bedroom, Olivia heard him knock at the study door and greet her mother, and Deborah’s voice coolly responding. It was the first time Uncle James had been to visit since the big meeting, but Olivia had heard her mother talking to him angrily on the phone, still furious, even crying.
Mind you, she cries about anything these days.
Now they were both going into the kitchen. Good. Olivia joined them there. Her uncle was perched on one of the stools at the bench, Deborah had the fridge door open and her back to them.
‘It was amazing, Deb,’ James was saying. ‘I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t been there.’
‘What was amazing?’ asked Olivia, parking herself on the stool beside him.
‘I took your grandpa to see if we could find the house he grew up in, up near Castlemaine. Inverness, it was called.’
‘I’d love a house with its own name,’ said Olivia.
‘Pretentious,’ Deborah declared, closing the fridge door with her elbow. She had a bottle of white wine, already opened, in one hand, a bottle of soda water in the other. She looked at James questioningly. He pointed at the soda water.
‘Inverness was the town in Scotland Dad’s mother grew up in,’ he said.
‘Oh?’ Deborah said with studied indifference.
Oh, lighten up, Mum
, thought Olivia.
He’s your favourite brother!
James rattled on excitedly, apparently oblivious to the frost. ‘You could hardly see the road that led to the place, it was so overgrown. But Dad directed me like he’d been there yesterday. All the way out from Castlemaine:
Take this road. Turn left here!
And there it was, sitting under these two huge old date palms, just like in the photos. Well, except the date palms weren’t huge then.’
‘What photos?’ asked Deborah, interested despite herself.
‘These photos I came across at Dad’s earlier today. I can’t remember ever seeing them before. They were in an old envelope marked Inverness.’
‘I bet Auntie Joan gave them to Dad when she came over from Perth a month or so ago. She told me she’d been sorting through things. She probably thought they should come back to Dad, now that he’s the last of his lot still kicking.’
‘Didn’t she give you that really pretty bowl?’ asked Olivia.
‘Yes, she said it used to belong to Dad’s mother. You know those Royal Doulton ones with the scenes from Shakespeare?’ James made an interested face. ‘Mine’s got Portia making her speech. She gave Meredith one, too, with poor old Ophelia drifting down the stream. All too appropriate, really.’
‘Me and Robert got some silverware. A carving set, she gave me.’
‘Mmm, she mentioned that.’