Moonlight Plains (9 page)

‘It’s all part of the war effort, isn’t it?’ After all, if she’d still been in Townsville, she would have joined the VADs, or the Red Cross, or both for that matter.

Ed’s smile didn’t quite reach his dark eyes as their gazes met across the table.

‘You’ve been brave and kind, Kitty. Don’t underestimate yourself.’

The tenderness in his expression touched Kitty deeply, as if a small gong had been struck inside her, filling her with unexpected happiness.

Good heavens. She couldn’t have a crush on this man. She couldn’t be so foolish. And yet . . .

‘I’m worried about Bobby,’ she said quickly, desperate to get her thoughts back on a safe track. ‘Do you think he’s getting worse?’

Ed sighed. ‘I studied law at Harvard, not medicine, so I can only guess, but I’m pretty darn sure Bobby needs the expertise of a surgeon.’

‘I was afraid of that.’

Ed let out another heavier sigh. ‘Damn rain.’

‘We’ll just have to try to keep him comfortable.’

‘Yeah.’

The weight of their inadequacy seemed to hover over them as they ate.

‘Do you know Bobby very well?’ Kitty asked.

‘Reasonably well, I guess. I only met him a couple of months ago, but we’ve been pretty much in each other’s pockets since then.’

‘Is he from Boston like you?’

Ed looked surprised.

‘Bobby told me you’re from Boston.’

‘Yeah, well, Bobby’s a farm boy from Minnesota. He’s an only child with older parents.’

Imagining how distraught Bobby’s parents would be if they knew he’d been injured, Kitty felt her eyes fill with hot tears. She blinked furiously.

‘Hey,’ Ed said gently, offering her a cheering smile. ‘Bobby’s great talent has been making us laugh. I remember the first day I met him at Lawrence Field in Virginia. We were both lined up for a medical and the doc was a particularly nasty jerk with no sense of humour. It was a freezing cold morning and he enjoyed making us strip down to our shorts. Didn’t even bother to warm up his stethoscope. But Bobby was cracking jokes the whole time, making us all laugh when we were supposed to cough.’ Still smiling at the memory, Ed shook his head. ‘Cheesed the doc off no end.’

Kitty managed to smile. ‘We call cheeky guys like that larrikins.’

‘Larrikins? That’s a great word. That’s what Bobby is. A larrikin.’

Remembering Bobby’s talk of angels and hymns, Kitty was struggling not to cry again.

Boston, 2013

Late on a Sunday afternoon, the inner Boston condo was bathed in shadows and only the softest dusky light filtered through the tall elegant windows that looked down to the Charles River.

When Laura Langley Fox let herself in, she still half-expected to find her father sitting there in his favourite chair, reading or watching a Red Sox game on TV. But, of course, it was almost a month now since his funeral.

Laura shivered. Sunday evenings were always depressing. There was nothing to look forward to but the start of another working week, and on this particular Sunday afternoon she felt especially tired. She’d spent the weekend grading her seniors’ art history papers and then telephoning both her daughters, and she’d travelled in via the subway from West Roxbury to continue clearing and sorting her father’s belongings. The unhappy task had been left solely to her. Neither of her brothers had lifted a finger.

It had been a different story ten years ago, when her older brother Edward Langley Junior had been only too happy to help their father move out of his dignified, bow-fronted home on Mount Vernon Street. Now, Edward and his wife Sarah-Jane were firmly ensconced in the Beacon Hill house that had been in the Langley family since the mid-nineteenth century. Ed Junior, usually to be seen in a square-shouldered tweed jacket and plain Oxford shirt, was so caught up with charities, concerts and parties these days that he simply hadn’t time to help Laura.

Her younger brother Charlie had a different excuse, but the result was the same. He’d raced back to his beloved war zones the very day after the funeral.

If Laura was the family’s failure – and that was how she’d felt ever since her divorce – Charlie was the family’s escapee. She’d watched her brother’s almost nightly reports from Syria or Egypt or Afghanistan and decided he was hiding from his grief behind other people’s catastrophes.

It was probably for the best. Charlie was softer than he liked to let on and if he’d been here, he would have hated the emotional knife twist of going through their father’s things, sifting through his life, a task their father had spared them when their mother died. Now it hurt to come face to face with the reality that a living, warm, vital and intelligent man had been reduced to rooms full of things.

There was one heartening fact: Laura’s task at the condo was almost done. She’d already sent most of the furniture and kitchen items to charity shops and she’d sorted through her father’s clothing, weeping copious tears over his favourite old beige elbow-patch cardigan that he’d worn when he was relaxing at home, still with a roll of cool mints in the right-hand pocket.

She’d taken it to her place, folding it carefully and wrapping it in tissue paper, then placing it with due reverence in the bottom of her chest of drawers, along with the family christening gown, her mother’s Bible and a folder of her own artwork from her college days.

Of course, she’d taken the photo albums home as well, weeping again as she carefully turned the pages of black and white prints of her parents’ beautiful wedding in the Church of the Advent and their glamorous honeymoon in Paris.

Predictably, these photos had been followed by pages devoted to Laura and her brothers. Ed Junior, with dark bangs flopping forward and the Langley sculpted cheekbones, looked serious and self-important at a surprisingly early age. Laura, the only daughter, had almost always been dressed in stiff frills and ruffles that she’d never found comfortable, invariably with a ribbon pinned into her wiry, mousey hair that was neither blonde like her mother’s nor dark like her father’s. Charlie had been cute and handsome from birth.

And there were photos of various family birthday parties and Christmases and of vacations in the snow or at the beach. For Laura, they woke countless memories . . .

Skating on the smooth, perfect ice, making snowmen with her brothers, and her frustration when she couldn’t make them look perfect like the ones on Christmas cards. Standing with her toes digging into the damp sand at the edge of the sea, waiting impatiently for her turn to be taken out on her father’s strong shoulders into the huge, exciting waves. Being tucked into bed and listening to her father’s deep, expressive voice as he read her favourite stories aloud.

But it was the photos of her parents that held her attention the longest and brought back the strongest memories. Through a mist of nostalgic tears, Laura had stared wistfully at their smiling faces and at the unmistakable evidence of their very deep and abiding love.

She’d recalled how their father had cared for their mom with such amazing devotion during her final illness. And she remembered the many occasions in her childhood when she’d sat at the top of the stairs in the Beacon Hill house, watching her parents leave for a night at the theatre. Her mom in midnight-blue silk with diamonds at her throat and ears. Her father in tails, looking like Prince Charming as he helped his wife into her fur coat.

Laura remembered the way he smiled at Mom as if she were his princess, how he drew her into his arms and kissed the graceful white curve of her neck instead of her mouth, because he wasn’t allowed to smudge her lipstick. Laughing, they would leave through the front door in a flurry of snowflakes . . . like beautiful creatures from a fairytale.

She remembered the everyday moments too, when her parents’ eyes would meet across the dinner table, smiling with happy secrets, momentarily cut off from the children and in a world of their own. Their love had sustained them through fifty years of marriage and it had filtered through to their children, providing the adhesive that held the family together.

Now, however, with her father’s death five years after their mother’s, Laura felt as if she and her brothers were drifting apart – three separate vessels sailing in three vast and very different oceans.

Perhaps she was oversensitive after the breakdown of her own marriage, but this new sense of solitude made her anxious, especially since both her daughters were now living on the west coast.

She was feeling especially low and vulnerable this evening as she started on the biggest task of all – clearing her father’s study.

It had been her father’s favourite room, with his beloved mahogany desk and pale-green fitted carpets and white-painted floor-to-ceiling bookshelves built around tall elegant windows that looked down to the Charles River. Books, books and more books.

Much to his family’s dismay, Ed Langley had given up law after the war and had turned to history. He once told Laura he’d hoped that studying the past would help him to make some kind of sense of the crazy maelstrom he’d just lived through.

Quite a few of his history books had already been removed, in line with directions in his will that they be donated to the History Department at Boston University where he’d taught for forty years.

There were other history books Laura was sure Charlie would like, if he ever settled down in one place. Then there were all the other books, the novels, the travel books, the ones on philosophy and music. Laura would take the volumes of art history, but just looking at the rest of the crammed shelves and imagining the task ahead exhausted her.

Come to think of it, sorting the books was too big a task to begin on a Sunday evening . . . She would take a look at some of the paperwork instead . . .

Laura eyed a row of large cardboard boxes on the bottom shelf of the bookcase behind the desk, some of which were clearly labelled, others left plain. Her father had mentioned several times that he planned to dump most of this. It was one of those jobs he probably would have attended to if he hadn’t died so suddenly.

She picked up the nearest box. It was rather shabby and grey and fortunately not too heavy, and she lifted the lid, surprised to discover sheets of handwriting. Her father’s handwriting.

In recent years, he’d rarely written by hand. All his correspondence had come via his PC.

These papers looked like letters, and the top one was to a woman.

Dearest Kitty . . .

Laura frowned. She couldn’t remember anyone by that name in her father’s circle. There were a couple of Kates, but no one called Kitty. Who was this person? An old relative? There was no date on the letter.

Quickly she flicked through other pages.
Dearest Kitty . . .

Dearest Kitty . . .

Dearest Kitty . . .

Nervous now, Laura sank into a chair and fearfully turned back to the top sheet. She would have to read this letter properly.

Dearest Kitty,

I heard a woman singing ‘Danny Boy’ on the radio tonight and my thoughts rushed straight back to you.

Oh my God.
After reading two lines, Laura was scared. This did
not
look good. As far as she could tell, the box held loads of letters written to a strange woman . . . For some very weird reason the letters hadn’t been posted, but even from this first sentence, the tone was clearly
intimate
 . . .

Confused and shaking, Laura forced herself to read on.

I remembered the night I came back to the homestead after I’d been almost washed away and drowned trying to cross that damned creek.

I was cold and wringing wet as I came into the house by the back door. I remember a pretty lamp with a ruby glass bowl sitting on the scrubbed pine table and the big blackened stove giving out gentle heat.

Then I heard you singing.

Even now, goosebumps prickle my skin when I recall your lovely voice. Honestly, Kitty, I don’t think you ever knew how good you were.

I’d heard enough top-class singers to recognise your talent. My mother was an amateur violinist and a great music lover and supporter. When I was a youngster, I went with her to classical music concerts at the Boston Symphony and to the Lyric Opera. I heard a wide range of highly trained voices, all of them beautiful, but not once was I moved to tears the way I was that night by a girl singing sweetly to the accompaniment of rain on an iron roof.

I knew you were singing for Bobby and I was so touched I nearly broke down completely.

What happened to your singing, Kitty? What happened to you?

Do you ever think about that night? It’s so clear in my mind. I came down the hallway to the room where we’d put Bobby to bed, and I stopped in the doorway.

There was a lamp on the dresser, casting a warm circle of light over the bed and over Bobby and you. Bobby was so very still I couldn’t tell if he was asleep or unconscious and he looked very pale, much as he had before I left.

You’d changed out of your mannish shirt and trousers into a pretty blue floral dress, and you were sitting on a chair beside the bed, leaning forward, with your elbows resting on the mattress, watching Bobby, while you held his hand. Such a sight – Bobby’s big, work-toughened, farm-boy hand clasped innocently in yours.

I could only see your profile, but I knew you were smiling as you sang, and your hair gleamed bright and coppery in the lamplight.

So beautiful . . .

Where are you now, Kitty?

I long to find you, and yet I know that seeing you again would only break my heart.

Take care. Sweet dreams.

Ed

Laura was shaking by the time she’d finished reading this.

I know that seeing you again would only break my heart.

So many questions screamed in her head. What was this letter about? Who the hell were Kitty and Bobby? When had this happened? Her father had recalled this night in such vivid, intimate detail.

But he couldn’t have had an affair. There hadn’t been another woman in his life. There simply wasn’t. It was inconceivable.

Shaken to her very core, Laura forced herself to read another letter. And then another . . .

Half an hour passed . . . and then an hour. Often, she read with a trembling hand pressed to her mouth. At other times she could barely read the words through her tears. Page by page, she pieced together a story – an old story from long ago, a story that had taken place in Australia in 1942, during the war . . .

By the time she finished reading she was shivering and aching. The room was completely dark and she was sitting in a small island of light from the desk lamp.

Some of the more hurtful words her father had written were by now burned onto her brain.

Kitty, I hope you are at least as happy as I am with my good, intelligent and eminently suitable wife, who is the most wonderful mother to our three very different but quite amazing children.

How could he describe their mother as
good, intelligent and eminently suitable
? Laura was appalled. Her father hadn’t said his wife was beautiful or beloved, but
eminently suitable
?

How could he say that?

How
dare
he?

Shocked and hurt, Laura could draw absolutely no comfort from the fact that her father had met this Kitty person in a foreign country years before he’d met her mother and that he’d apparently had no further contact with the woman.

How could this possibly console her when he’d never forgotten the Australian girl? Never let her go? Clearly, he’d never got over his
Dearest Kitty
, and Laura couldn’t bear it.

The bitter knowledge brought her world collapsing all around her. Everything she’d ever believed about her family and herself was imploding. There were cracks in the perfect image that had been her parents’ love, and she no longer knew the father she’d adored for almost fifty years.

She wasn’t sure she could ever forgive him.