Wildflower Hill (45 page)

“It’s a long way,” he said, unthreading his tie.

“I’ll take the train.”

“No, no. Get a car to run you up there.”

“Then I’ll feel like I have to make conversation. No, I just want to read my book and drink a cup of tea.”

He patted her hand. “Have it your way. As long as you’re happy.”

She turned away so he wouldn’t see her face.

A miserable London morning dawned. Gray streets, black taxis, black umbrellas, sodden leaves in the gutters. Ray left while she was still packing a few necessities. She couldn’t concentrate, kept forgetting what she was doing.

Finally, she made her way to King’s Cross station, her shoes filling with water, and bought a ticket for the ten o’clock train.

“There’s a delay on the line,” the man behind the counter told her. “We’re running twenty minutes late.”

She took her ticket and sat on a bench while the activity of the station whirled around her. People in overcoats and dripping umbrellas brushed past. She closed her eyes, thinking of home and sunshine. An image of Wildflower Hill on a clear day came to mind, Lucy in the garden with Mikhail, sunshine
in her hair. Beattie hadn’t missed Tasmania in long time; Sydney had firmly become her home. But all these thoughts of Lucy had made her long for the lingering quiet, the smell of the eucalyptus, the cool sunlit days.

When the first set of tenants had moved out of Wildflower Hill in 1951, Ray had urged her to put the place on the market.

“You’re too busy to manage it,” he said, “and we can’t move there permanently. I’m an elected official. My job is here, among my constituents.”

“I know, I know,” she said. By this stage she had two children in nappies, both of them hanging off her ankles at inconvenient times. They had money for a nanny four days a week, but she was still far too busy to think about taking anything else on. And yet she couldn’t face the idea of selling Wildflower Hill. Not the least reason being that Charlie was buried there.

But she could hardly admit that to Ray. No man liked to think that he wasn’t his wife’s greatest love.

Still, what was she to do with the thousands of sheep? She contacted Leo Sampson, who suggested she divide the property. Wool prices were skyrocketing: she would have no trouble finding a buyer. Keep the house itself and the paddock it stood in, along with the shearers’ cottage and the new stables. Sell the rest. The new owners could build their own house at the southern end of the property.

Within a week Leo had called back. “Now, you might
not like this idea,” he said, “so I need to know you’re sitting down.”

Sitting down? She had two children under two. She couldn’t find a chair under the piles of unfolded laundry, let alone a moment to sit. She glanced around the large, sunny room and realized that she couldn’t even see Mikey. He’d pulled one of his disappearing acts.

“Go on,” she said.

“The Harrows have asked about buying the farm.”

“The Harrows? Tilly and Frank?”

“Yes. I know you don’t like them, nor do I, but—”

“Name a price they can barely afford. Wool is booming. They’ll pay,” she said. “If they accept it, why shouldn’t I take their money?”

Leo hesitated.

“I really must go,” she said before she changed her mind. “I’ve lost one of my children.”

“I’ll see what they say,” he replied. “Take care, Beattie.”

“And you.”

“Boo!” said Mikey, jumping out from behind a curtain. Baby Louise began to cry.

The children had changed them. There were not long hours for leisurely discussion anymore. In truth, they were probably both too old and too set in their ways for children, but the chorus of urgent voices had eventually persuaded them. They were a happy couple with public lives; they needed offspring to cement the image. A boy for him and a girl for her.

Having Mikey had been so different from Lucy’s birth twenty years before. This time around, doctors interfered, nurses tried to separate her from her baby and return him to her every four hours, when he was too distraught to feed properly and had to have a bottle forced into his mouth. Beattie had told Ray she wanted to leave the hospital immediately.

“But shouldn’t you listen to them?” he said. “They have so much experience with babies. We have none.”

She’d convinced him, returned home with Mikey. He thrived on her breast milk and slept in a crib right next to their bed until he was six months, just as Lucy had done.

Both her babies were fat and happy, and she hadn’t wanted more, but Ray had taken himself off for a vasectomy without consulting her. She didn’t know why she minded so much; she didn’t tell him everything. But it was the first in a long string of infelicities that weakened their relationship. The fact that he was away so much, leaving her to single-handedly care for the children and run her business, didn’t help. He never quite valued her work as highly as his own.

He still loved her. She still loved him. But the prospect of their growing old together no longer seemed romantic. Some days it seemed a trial.

Leo Sampson contacted her just before shearing season. She’d had to hire staff and cross her fingers, and so far everything seemed to be going smoothly. So she dreaded bad news.

“The Harrows have agreed to your offer,” he said.

“Really?” she asked. “I get to keep the house paddock?”

“They’re going to build a lean-to down on the southern boundary near the dam. Are you happy for me to send you the contracts?”

“I’m delighted!”

Their bungalow in Edgecliff was getting too small for them, so they put the windfall toward a purchase they’d been wary about making so far: a ramshackle but sunlight-filled house at Point Piper.

They had been there nearly a year when Tilly Harrow phoned her. The nanny, a Yugoslavian immigrant named Ivona, was playing a rowdy game of horsies with the children in the living room. Beattie was in her office, under the window with the view over the harbor, trying to catch up on some long-neglected correspondence. The phone rang, and she was tempted not to pick it up, but Ray was away, and she didn’t want to miss him.

“Hello?”

“Beattie Blaxland?”

Wary now. “Yes.”

“My name is Tilly Harrow. I don’t know if . . . you remember me?”

Oh yes, Beattie remembered her. She remembered all of them, the way they had treated her, the stories they’d told about her. They had played their part in her losing Lucy, of that she had no doubt. But she said none of this. “Of course I do, Tilly.”

A long silence. Beattie wondered if the line had gone dead. Then a long, shuddering breath. Tilly was crying.

“What’s wrong?”

“Can you help me? We’ve been running this farm a year, and it’s not going well for us. We just did a muster, and we’ve somehow lost a thousand sheep. Is that even possible?”

“Are they dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“Tilly, I’m very busy.” Beattie tapped her pencil on the desk, wondering how to extricate herself from the conversation. “When I ran the farm, I always had good help. Good advice. Who’s managing the place?”

“Frank.”

“But does he have some expert advice? A man who knows the land?”

Tilly’s voice dropped to a whisper. “He won’t take advice. It hasn’t rained, and the dam’s drying up. The sheep won’t lamb. I don’t know what to do. We can’t make the repayments.”

Beattie felt a twinge of guilt. She had asked a terribly high price and was living in a house bought partly with those proceeds. “Tilly, I’m sorry you’re in trouble. But you simply must convince him to hire somebody to help. That’s the only suggestion I can give you.”

Tilly drew a shuddering breath. “I’ll try.”

Three years of bad rainfall plagued the Harrows. As Leo Sampson told it, every rain cloud skidded past the farm to rain on their neighbors, on the town, everywhere but in their dams and on their fields. In early 1955, Beattie heard that
Frank Harrow had hanged himself and Tilly had moved back to South Africa, a broken woman. Beattie found that she couldn’t feel sorry for him or for Tilly.

Perhaps the land had a way of finding its own justice.

Still the train hadn’t come. A slow bloom of adrenaline uncurled in her heart. What if it was a sign? What if she shouldn’t go?

Beattie stood and returned to the ticket counter. The rain had eased, and weak sunshine broke through clouds to gleam in oily puddles. “Any news on the Glasgow train?”

“Another twenty minutes, at least. Go and have a cup of tea.”

She walked back out to the street and hesitated outside the entrance to a café. Her reflection looked back at her. She was well dressed, of course, and still slim. But any trace of the old Beattie—break-of-dawn Beattie—was gone. She was a respectable middle-class woman, the head of a fashion empire, the wife of an MP. What on earth was she thinking she would find in Glasgow? Heartache: yes. Public scandal: perhaps. Her daughter’s love returned: probably not. It had been too long. If Ray found out now that she’d kept a secret from him for over twenty years, it would tear them apart.

Beattie turned away from the station and her silly plan.

“You’re here?”

Beattie looked up from the armchair under the hotel window. “Yes.”

Ray crossed the room and kissed her. “That’s a nice surprise. Shall we go out for dinner?”

“I think I need to go back home for a while.”

He looked at her curiously. “We’ll be going home at the end of next week.”

“I’m sorry. I mean Tasmania. I . . . I want to go back to Wildflower Hill.”

“You know we can’t move. I represent the people of Mortondale; I can hardly do my job from the back of beyond in Tasmania.”

She looked at him, and for a moment, he seemed a complete stranger. Had she really been married to him for over twenty years? Shared a bed with him? Had children with him? How could she have shared so much with him and yet never have told him about the twin losses she had endured—first her daughter, then her soul mate? Then he seemed familiar again: her Ray, the man who had been so good to her for so long.

“I think I need to get away by myself,” she said quietly.

“Without us?”

“You go away all the time.”

“For work.”

“I’ll do some work. The children are big enough, not so hard to take care of.” She hated herself for the pain in his face. “I’m sorry, Ray, but it will be good for us, I know it.”

“Are you thinking of leaving me?”

“No,” she said quickly, and it was true. “But I need some time and space to think, to be by myself.” To put some memories to rest at last.

“If that’s what you need, of course. Of course.” He touched her hair tenderly. “I do love you, Beattie. So very much. I’m glad you’re here and not in Glasgow.”

Beattie didn’t trust herself to speak without crying, so she said nothing.

W
ildflower Hill was both terribly familiar and not quite as she remembered. It seemed bigger. The trees were much taller, the cottage was farther away from the house. But the way the light changed across the fields, the way the leaves on the gums rattled, the way the starlings and sparrows chattered and sang at the twilit ends of the day was exactly the same.

The poor house was dim and neglected. The old fridge had given up long ago, and the laundry was still home to a boiler and wringer; she was used to the ease of her Rolls Razor twin-tub machine. For the first two days Beattie managed with the inconveniences but then told herself she was being foolish: she was a wealthy woman. She made two phone calls to Hobart for some appliances to be delivered. Then she got busy cleaning up the place, sewing new curtains, taking care of small repairs.

The misgivings were enormous. On the one hand, she was fixing up Wildflower Hill because it had once meant a lot to her and it deserved to be taken care of well. On the
other hand, she was making herself comfortable here . . . just in case. After years of hard work—running a business, raising children, being the perfect politician’s wife—Beattie was grateful to have a break from it all and be herself. She felt she grew younger in the first few weeks she was there. Was she thinking about leaving Ray?

Well, perhaps she was.

She spoke to him every night on the phone, her voice smooth and calm over her tumultuous feelings. Her children clamored to speak to her. Mikey was jovial and full of sunshine, as he always was. Louise was more circumspect, with dark irony underlying her words. They knew. They knew she was away to consider her future. And they weren’t happy.

The guilt burned most intensely at night, when she had time in the dark to think about all her children. Not just Michael and Louise but also Lucy. Sometimes she entertained fantasies of a reunion, but then she told herself not to be a fool. She wasn’t the first woman in the world with a secret illegitimate child, and she would hardly be the last. Nevertheless, her thoughts turned more and more to her own mortality, to the fortune she would leave behind. How could it be fair to leave it to Michael and Louise and not to Lucy? What would they all make of such unfairness? How dimly must Beattie be remembered in Lucy’s mind? Most nights she fell asleep pondering these questions, questions that were too hard for her to answer.

Right outside her bedroom window was Charlie. He was the first thing she saw every morning when she opened the
curtains, the last thing she saw in the evening when she drew them again. Really, there was only a tree. But he was there nonetheless. She could
feel
him, see him as though he were right in front of her. He hadn’t changed at all. His hair was still thick and black, his body still lean and strong. If she closed her eyes at those moments, she could smell him, too, and she experienced a longing so intense—a longing to be young again, to be in the time before it had all gone bad, to be in love and to have her little girl with her—that it caused shooting pains throughout her body. How unfair that she should have to grow old! She cared nothing for her business, for her wealth, for the mansion they had built on the harbor. She would trade it all to be back in 1939: frozen in one moment there, forever.