Chapter Ten
“There’s no need to shout at me, Ksenia. I have a problem with my hips, not my ears.”
Toks wasn’t shouting. She didn’t shout. She never did anything so crass. In fact, she rarely raised her voice. People did as the maestro requested the moment she asked. She absolutely wasn’t shouting now.
Her mother was as annoying as ever.
Toks refused to contemplate how small she looked. In a wheelchair.
She’d been at Jerinja for three days. She worked in the mornings – studying on the deck of her cabin, or bringing a score up to the big house to use the Blüthner in the music room, each time hoping Polly might be there. But Jerinja kept an odd rhythm. If Polly had a routine, Toks hadn’t found it yet. Polly appeared to eat breakfast at lunchtime and sleep in the early afternoons.
She and Daz invited her surfing at first light—
“We’ll want to be on the water to catch the sunrise,” Daz said.
Polly gazed at her hopefully. “It’s a magical time.”
Toks frowned. Polly knew she’d always been shit at surfing. It was one of the things she could legitimately tease her about.
“Korovinja is land-locked,” Toks used to protest when they were home from Sydney on those rare weekends at college when neither of them had performances. “My people are genetically averse to surfing.”
“‘Your people?’ Oh, for heaven’s sake, babe, you’ve lived here since you were seven. You’re Aussie now. That is a rubbish excuse and you know it,” Polly would say. “Just admit it. I’m better at this than you.”
Toks was never prepared to admit that. She chased Polly halfway up the beach and dunked her in the surf.
Kissed the salt from her mouth when she protested.
Daz ploughed on, enthusiastically. “I’ve got a great longboard you can use. We leave at half past five.”
But as enticing as watching Polly in the waves might be, Toks hadn’t set foot on a beach in sixteen years. She wasn’t in the mood to be reminded of her inadequacies by whoever the hell Daz was.
“There’s a five in the morning?” she asked, archly, and Polly dropped it with a flat little smile.
Polly disappeared for hours at a time.
“She’s working somewhere,” Tilda said. “Um. Dunno. Didn’t actually ask her. Let me move that stuff off the piano for you, Maestro. I was just putting down some samples for a track— Oh, if you’ve got a moment, maybe we could talk about the Synthphonic Sessions?” She was still so keen.
So keen, Toks barely had a chance to ask. And when Polly returned, it was with a tired yawn and the news she was off for a nap. At two in the afternoon.
Toks definitely heard noises from Kathleen Paterson’s old pottery shed at three in the morning. Polly tortured pianos in the depths of the night.
So despite the promise of her first day at Jerinja, with the simple joy of dancing with the woman who’d haunted her dreams for sixteen years, Toks knew repairing the rift between them – if that was what they were doing – wasn’t going to be as easy as a giggle in the swimming pool. There was even the possibility Polly was actively avoiding her.
That morning, she’d closed the score on the symphony she was working on at Polly’s piano and drifted into a more melancholy improvisation of the piece when the woman herself appeared at the belly of the instrument and watched her.
Toks almost flubbed a note.
Polly noticed.
Her half-smile was so damn cheeky Toks actually did. She tossed her chin and stopped like she’d intended to finish anyway.
Polly’s smirk widened.
“I have to take some more lilly pilly gin up to your mum at the nursing home,” she said. “You should come.”
Toks plunged straight back into the music – the main theme from the symphony she’d been studying, no improvisations this time. The maestro hard at work. Coming to Jerinja— coming home— had been a spur of the moment decision she’d made with no intention of catching up with her mother. She needed time to prepare for that.
“Or I can invite her back here for dinner this evening,” Polly added. Sly. “Your choice.”
Bitch.
So there she was, paying court to her mother on her throne in the drawing room of the Nerradja Gardens Retirement and Assisted Living Village, and enduring the rough edge of Draga’s tongue.
“You look thin, Ksenia. Are you eating?”
Toks didn’t even dignify that with an answer. “My piano, Mum.”
“I heard you.”
“Well? What did you do with it? I won that thing.”
Draga tossed an eyebrow at Polly. Polly was sitting on the only spare chair in the room – an upright wooden antique at Draga’s side, like a handmaiden to the empress, and every other comfy armchair in the space was filled with residents. Grey, drab creatures Toks didn’t want to look at too closely, who all seemed to be eyeing her keenly. Toks stood in the middle of the room, her hands on her hips and tried not to pace.
Polly and her mother twinkled at each other.
“Ten thousand miles she travels to see me and not so much as a ‘how are you doing?’” Draga said to the room. There was a quavering murmur from the inmates. Toks rolled her eyes.
“What is she saying?”
God, was that old Mrs Ambrose from primary school? She’d been old and deaf when Toks was ten.
“She wants to know where her piano is.” Draga raised her voice and spoke slowly for the benefit of her audience. There was an extended moment of processing time and then a rumble of geriatric laughter. The old dude next to Polly actually put his hand on her knee. Polly smiled at him.
What the hell?
Toks breathed and straightened her shoulders. She leant in and pecked a kiss to her mother’s cheek. Draga’s lips flattened to a thin line.
“Well? Did you sell it? Give it away? It was a Steinway, Mum. You don’t just put them out for curbside cleanup when you’re done with them.”
“This is the world famous conductor I was telling you about, Marjory,” Draga enunciated across the room. “Lives in Europe these days. Apparently manners are optional there.”
“For fuck’s sake, Mum.” Toks huffed at her fringe and rocked on her heels. Polly smothered a giggle.
“She makes my point.” Draga waved an imperious hand. “I promised my friends you’d play for us, Ksenia. It’s not every day we have a world-class maestro to entertain us.”
“Well, yeah, but our Polly’s not bad, though.” The old man still had his hand on Polly’s knee. He gave it a pat. Toks wanted to snap his hand off at the wrist, but Polly patted it back.
“Thanks, Jimmy.” Polly poked the very tip of her tongue out at Toks.
Jimmy looked chuffed. “You’re right, bub.”
Toks blew out another vicious sigh.
“Now, please, Ksenia.”
Toks loomed over her mother and muttered low. “I came home to be the chief conductor and music director of Australia’s premier symphony orchestra, not play show tunes for a bunch of—”
“You came home, daughter of mine, because you lost the fight not to with your brother.” Draga smiled around her at the rest of the room. “Obnoxious, isn’t she?” Her eyes snapped back to hers with a speed Toks hadn’t expected. “Sit down, shut up and do as you’re told for once. You might be grand in Berlin, but here you are still my daughter. Humour your mother.”
The oldies watched Toks with rheumy eyes and pinched expressions. Someone behind her snorted. she turned to see Justin, of all people. What the hell was he doing here? He was wearing scrubs, an upside-down watch pinned to his chest, and he leant against the doorframe, arms folded, watching the scene with a good-natured grin. So he worked here. Could this get any worse?
It could.
Something wicked and gleeful flicked between Draga, Justin and Polly – an in-joke Toks was locked out of, one in which she was definitely the butt. It reinforced the powerful impression of family that wrapped around Polly like a warm blanket. Layers of it Toks didn’t understand. Stronger than ones that had been apparent in Polly’s original family – her parents more interested in their hippy shit than their own daughter. A fact proven, Toks guessed, by the fact that they had retired up the coast and left her alone at Jerinja with a kid.
Once, Toks had known she would be Polly’s family – everything the pair of them would ever need. Two of them against the world, conquering it together.
But Polly had replaced her with this new family. Magpie and Toks’ principal violist Richard Castelli as an outer layer, Justin and Daz a little closer in. Toks’ own mother more on Polly’s side than hers, and Polly and Tilda at its heart.
Tilda.
Toks had known about Tilda, of course..
Her mum told her that day on the tram in Vienna and it was a reality Toks put aside and only took out in her very darkest moments. She’d endured Draga’s yearly updates—
– Little Tilda is walking now –
– I’m giving piano lessons again, Ksenia. Bartók”s Pieces for Children is on the music rack once more –
– Polly’s Tilda has switched to violin. She’d be quite the talent if she practised –
—until she couldn’t stand it anymore and asked her mother to stop.
“I don’t even know this person, Mum. How are Micky’s kids?”
But her brother barely spoke to Draga either, and eventually there was nothing for them to talk about at all.
She’d been surprised to find the girl was sixteen already. That made sense, of course, but in her head the kid was still five. Ten at the most. She had Polly’s smile, Polly’s sass, all the eagerness and passion for life that used to be Polly’s too.
And hair as blonde as Toks’ own.
Not quite the same colour as Justin’s, though.
Toks should just woman-up and ask, for fuck’s sake, but she knew she wasn’t going to.
She gave her mother a tight smile that didn’t reach her eyes, and sat at the piano. A loud, righteous Rachmaninoff prelude was coiled in her fingers, but Polly caught her gaze just before she crashed into the opening notes.
Polly shook her head minutely. A softness, an absolution Toks didn’t deserve, was in the corner of her smile. It made her fall into something gentler – Vocalise – one of Rachmaninoff’s sweeter songs that everyone cast their own improvisations over.
She was a good five minutes into her own version of the piece when she realised she’d been staring at Polly the entire time. They used to play it together – Polly on her cello. Hot summer nights in their cramped terrace in Paddington with no air-con and the overhead fan working overtime. Polly’s cotton shorts high on her thighs, her legs wide around her instrument – bare and tanned and long – and the line of them catching Toks eyes while she accompanied her on piano. The nape of Polly’s neck as she bent to the fingerboard. The grace of her arms.
That cheeky wink when she caught Toks watching.
Did Polly remember that too?
“Overbaked schmaltz,” Draga muttered when she was done, but the rest of her audience applauded.
Jimmy was particularly enthusiastic. “She’s alright though, eh?” he asked the room. “What does ‘maestro’ mean again?”
Toks opened her mouth.
“Some Chopin, if you please, Ksenia.”
“We’re done here, Mum. Besides, the piano needs a tune.” The F sharp below middle C was slightly flat. She tapped all five fingers over it rapidly, one after the other, short staccato little notes like gunfire. She didn’t miss Polly flinch. “Did you tune this, Pearlie?”
She’d thought it would be funny, but she didn’t expect the symphony of coughing and grumbling that came from the gathered oldies. Jimmy patted Polly’s knee with a surprising urgency.
“Don’t you listen to her, bub.”
“That’s a B?sendorfer Imperial Grand, I’ll thank you to know,” quavered someone. “The Tsar of Russia had one.”
For fuck’s sake.
“Chopin, Ksenia! Do as you’re told!”
Her mother squeezed Polly’s hand and Toks saw her thumb rubbing back and forth on her wrist. It was more comfort than Draga had offered Toks in all the years of being her daughter – even when they’d sheltered from gunfire back in Korovinja when war had broken out, even when Toks had cried herself to sleep in the horrible new country they’d found themselves in. What the hell was going on here?
It pissed her off. She spun on the piano stool and ploughed into Chopin’s Minute Waltz. Only one of the most irritating and overbaked pieces in the repertoire. If her mother wanted her to perform like an organ grinder’s monkey…
“Ksenia!”
She switched to Stravinsky’s Petrouchka.
Nearly crowed when she heard Polly’s giggle.
“Don’t be a smartarse. I said Chopin. Heaven protect me from such a child!”
That stung a little. Her mum was still holding Polly’s hand like Toks was the bully.
She gave them some Chopin. Etude No. 4. Two minutes of presto con fuoco, fiendishly difficult and ridiculously acrobatic with no room to breathe. It barely settled her mood.
The boomers looked like she’d slapped them when she was done, but Polly was watching her with those liquid eyes and a worship Toks had missed.
She had to try.
“Play a duet with me, Pearlie?” She rippled the first arpeggios of a Debussy suite they’d played together since high school. She could feel her shoulder against hers now. Their bare toes nudging each other for the pedal.
Polly’s expression blanked.
“She doesn’t have to,” Draga said, sternly. Jimmy’s hand reached for Polly’s knee again.
Toks slammed the lid closed and stood up. She was done with this.
Old Valerie Clarke stood too and simpered over to her with that smarmy smile the older members of Toks’ fanbase liked to bestow on her. It was a little different to the look the old woman used to give Toks at high school when she’d been the stuffy librarian and Toks just a tatty refugee from Korovinja. Toks did her best not to sneer.
“I’m so looking forward to coming up to Sydney to listen to one of your concerts, dear. Quite a few of us are going, aren’t we?”
“Road trip!” Jimmy sounded keen. Valerie rounded on him primly.
Toks couldn’t wait. A busload of small minds from the small town she’d been so glad to run from. She wrinkled her nose at her mother. “Really?”
Draga sniffed. “Wasn’t my idea.”
Of course it wasn’t.
Toks suddenly felt smothered. Trapped. Coming here had been a terrible idea. Coming back home— fuck it, coming back to Australia had been a mistake. She was magnificent in Europe, feted by audiences, critics and board members alike. This lot knew more about cows than classical music. This whole charade had made her feel like a sulky teenager and she knew she’d behaved awfully.
She’d been tricked into it.
What she couldn’t understand was why.
Polly met her eyes.
“Sorry,” Polly mouthed, and there was an endless depth of sympathy in her gaze that both infuriated Toks and made her want to run and bury her face in her hair.
And that was confusing too.
She had to get out of there.
Draga was far too cunning to let her simply escape. She instructed Toks to push her wheelchair out to the car and they bickered the whole way.
There was another piano in the gardens.
It was an upright, old and weathered, and surprisingly intact compared to the ruined pianos Toks had encountered in the last few days. It sat under the shade of a vast lilly pilly just off the path they were following. Piles of fallen berries scattered its keyboard and littered the ground at its feet, hot pink against the grass. The piano made a curiously poignant image – a cultural relic, alien in the Australian landscape, but slowly being absorbed into it.
Toks’ tentative appreciation for the scene shattered violently the moment she heard the sound it made.
Two men were ‘playing’ it – if you could call it that. One was a gardener. The young, fit man took the bass end and pounded out a standard boogie-woogie rhythm. Next to him, a resident in pyjamas and a dressing gown, fingers old and twisted, thumped at the keys with a smile from ear to ear.
There was barely a note in tune.
In fact, there was hardly a note. The piano had been so altered it was nothing more than a percussion instrument. She heard the twang of metal on metal. The thud of rubber, the clatter of wood. If a note rang out, it was purposefully discordant.
Her mind rebelled. Toks’ very soul seethed at the raw, ugly sounds even as her brain tried to make sense of it. Calculations and comparisons that came so naturally they were part of her ran like fury through her veins – tonalities and harmonies just out of reach, rubbing against her entire being like sandpaper, dissonance choking in the back of her throat. She turned to Polly – this had to be her—
“Why—?”
—but was astonished to find Polly waving cheerfully to the pair at the piano.
“Hi Mr Everington. Hey Koen.”
The gardener laughed over the cacophony. “He loves it, Poll! I’m never going to get any work done.”
The old man looked ecstatic.
“What the hell?” Toks muttered. “It’s just noise.”
Draga bit almost immediately. “This is one of Polly’s pianos.” She sounded proud. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand the subtleties of her art, Ksenia, but there’s no need to be rude about it.”
Toks was glad she was behind her mother’s wheelchair and Draga couldn’t see her face, but Polly could. Toks winced as she saw her mood crush Polly’s smile.
Draga reached for Polly’s hand again and Polly let her hold it while her eyes sought out Toks’ again. They watched each other over Draga’s head.
“The world’s foremost orchestral conductor was always bound to find your music preposterous, darling Polly. We shouldn’t have expected anything better.”
Darling Polly?This was getting ridiculous. What the hell had she missed?
“For heaven’s sake, Mum. I’m right here. I can hear you. I came home, just as you asked me to and I am actually here. You’re being a bitch.” Draga tsked, and Toks ploughed on, her eyes never leaving Polly’s. “And I didn’t say ‘preposterous.’ I don’t think that— Polly, I—” God, she’d never been so inarticulate. Then again, she rarely had to explain herself. “Intriguing,” she managed, aiming all her puzzlement at Polly and hoping she’d save her. “I think there’s something magical about your pianos, Pearlie, but I don’t understand them. I don’t understand why—”
“Still need to be the centre of every conversation, don’t you, Ksenia?” Her mother could have scorched the earth with her tone. “Wonder why you came home at all.”
Toks strode away to the car before Polly or her mother saw her shoulders shaking.
She was annoyed at herself.
Toks had thought she was the one betrayed, but Polly’s pain was a glaring neon sign and Toks had simply never seen it. Now it was flashing in her face, her first instinct hadn’t even been sympathy. The aloof and accomplished maestro had been irritated. As if the woman of her heart and her suffering was merely an itch she couldn’t scratch. She was angry at Polly – for not revealing her hurt earlier, for making Toks feel like she was walking through a minefield. She was seething at her own blindness and her inability to see past her own ego.
The embarrassment stung too. The shame. A hot, prickly sensation she was no longer accustomed to, creeping up her neck, reddening her cheeks. She’d been a jerk, with her stubborn, self-absorbed sulking silence, her own self-preservation and ambition more important than whatever forgiveness she might have offered Polly. It was a part of herself she’d always known was there – Polly’s graciousness had always tempered it. It flooded free, now, ugly and selfish.
The tiny fragment of equanimity she’d found in the curiously beautiful pianos Polly had littered her home with dissolved away. The sliver of hope she’d let into her heart froze over into a blade that cut straight through the old holes.
She’d been right before. Before coming to Jerinja, before coming back to Australia. Ever since she tossed that purple sofa down the stairwell in Berlin.
This was too messed up to save.
“I’ll head up to Sydney as soon as we’re back at Jerinja,” she said, once Polly had returned to the car and they were on their way back… home. It annoyed her that she still wanted to use that word.
“Don’t. Please don’t.” Polly kept her eyes on the road. It was narrow, lined with hundred year old eucalypts that arched over and made a tunnel of trees, but no one else was on it. She could have looked at Toks. “You said you’d stay all week.”
“I don’t really see the point.”
Polly stiffened.
Toks felt like shit. “You asked me to stay but I’ve hardly seen you. You’ve barely spoken to me. I thought you might want to talk—” She made herself stop. She hated sounding weak.
“You had work to do! Mahler’s First. Prokoviev and Shostakovich, Richard said. I didn’t want to disturb—”
“I know those symphonies backwards. You really think I need to study—”
“You said you had work to do. You used to like peace and quiet when you studied. We used to go to the library, remember? On Macquarie Street, just up from the Con. Because the ceiling fan in the study room at the Con hummed in A flat and it used to drive you crazy.”
Toks huffed at the memory. “We found that member’s card that got us into the private reading lounge.”
“And discounts on our coffees. We used to share a—”
“—neenish tart,” Toks finished. She almost smiled, then remembered they were fighting again. “That was a long time ago, Polly. I don’t really need—”
“What? Too good for neenish tarts now, are you?” Polly snarled at the road.
“Christ, Pearl.”
There was a sniff. They drove in silence.
“Is that why you’ve been avoiding me?” Toks asked after a while. She’d been oafish again.
Polly finally turned her head. Her eyes glittered. “Well… yes. You’re the Chief Conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and I don’t even know how many others. I thought you needed to work.”
Polly Paterson didn’t know her anymore. And she seemed intimidated. By her. Toks had never wanted that. She was such a fool.
“Sorry,” she murmured. “Can we start again?”
The car turned out of the long road to the Aged Care Village and back into Nerradja township. Toks could see a ferris wheel on the skyline above the old Federation era buildings and the pubs.
Polly nodded at it. “They’re setting up for the Nerradja Country Fair tomorrow,” she said. “How far do you want to go back?”
Toks felt something tick over at double speed in her chest. She was seventeen again, and walking around the fair with her arm slung over Polly’s shoulder and not caring a jot for the way anyone looked at them. She kissed her in the maze of mirrors and they were a thousand lovers, giggling one second, captivated by the sight of themselves the next. “The Nerradja Country Fair?” she said, stupidly. “Do they still have that?”
“Every year for a hundred and thirty eight years,” Polly said. “Even when you’re not here.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Oh, god.” Polly sighed. “My turn. Sorry. Seems like we can barely speak to each other anyway.”
Their car cruised past the showground and the CWA hall where the good women of Nerradja were probably setting out the prize-winning lamingtons and pots of the region”s best raspberry jam at that very moment. Toks was stuck in a time loop.
“Tomorrow?” she asked.
“Tilda is conducting the primary school band there at ten o’clock,” Polly said. “She’ll never forgive you if you’re not there.”
That hung in the air between them for a long moment. A bunch of red roses and snowflakes drifting under a bleak Berlin sky. Forgiveness still felt a long way off.
“Maybe I’ll stay.”
When they got back, Polly found that someone had leant her cello up against the Blüthner in the music room.
She had her suspicions. Magpie and Tilda were nowhere to be found.
They both looked at it, Toks with her hands in her pockets and something nonchalant and assured in the tilt of her chin.
“You think that’s a sign?” she asked, mildly. The shift of her weight to the balls of her feet gave her eagerness away.
Polly surrendered. She’d asked the woman to stay – twice. The least she could do was play with her.
Toks sat at the piano and shook the notes out of her sleeves. The opening chords of the Rachmaninoff – the Vocalise – the same piece she’d played for Draga earlier. Polly brushed her bow against the strings and found her cello perfectly in tune.
Tilda, then.
Traitorous child.
It only took the merest flicker of Toks’ eyelids and they were in. No words. They hadn’t ever needed any. Music was a language they spoke with their bodies and their minds, and Polly had forgotten how profound it could be.
Toks led her back into a world of music she had abandoned sixteen years ago, back when she’d lost her cello to violence and then lost her mind completely. She’d only tiptoed around the edges of music in the years since, teaching Tilda, indulging Draga with the shallowest classics. But now, Toks pulled her into the deep end. Rachmaninoff and a piece they’d played together long before they’d hurt each other.
Polly was painfully aware of her below-standard playing, and she winced at the hesitant stutter of her bow on the strings.
She expected Toks’ disdain.
She felt something crack and weep inside her when Toks led her gently onwards with a kind of musical grace that demonstrated the maestro’s brilliance more utterly than any dazzling symphony.
Toks nurtured her.
Polly felt the piano caress and soothe her melodic line, felt it lift her and set her flying. She saw the challenge and the encouragement in Toks’ eyes. She remembered how it had been, when their minds had met in music and they’d played as one. She could let go again, she realised, and Toks would catch her.
The piece gathered in passion and Polly closed her eyes and bent her head, submitting utterly to Toks’ musical will. Gladly. She’d forgotten how powerful it felt to be held in someone’s focus like that – in Toks’ focus – led and drawn and coaxed until they were playing something sublime together. Her fingers, her mind, her body and her music at Toks’ command. Time unspooled on a song that reached forward and backward through her heart.
Toks let her chin drop to her chest when the piece came to an end, her fingers resting soundlessly on the keys. Polly was just as breathless. She blinked.
She had something in her eye.
“Thank you,” Toks whispered.
Polly loosened her bow. She wanted to play more. She wanted so much more of this connection with Toks. She wanted to work their way through the Brahms sonatas and argue interpretation, dash through more Rachmaninoff with all its agony and hope, then drown in the tranquil tonality of Fauré.
But she was no longer the musician she’d once been.
Toks quailed when Polly lifted the instrument from her knees and retreated to the sofa. “Don’t you want to play more?” She sounded lost.
“Please just play for me?” Polly begged. “Something lush. I used to love your Ravel. Do you still have Gaspard in your fingers?”
Toks huffed out a laugh. “You don’t ask much!”
It was one of the trickier pieces in the repertoire. She knew she was appealing to Toks’ ego – goading – but she wanted to hear her play with all her soul.
“Well, do you?”
“Of course, I do.”
“Big head,” Polly murmured.
Toks answered by fluttering into the piece. It was fiendishly difficult, but delicate in the extreme, full of restless uncertainty and quiet heartache, blurred with a sense of disappointment. Toks had always brought a wistful optimism to the piece and now she played it like she was searching. For Polly. She knew from the opening notes that Toks still carried it masterfully.
Polly curled up on the sofa and rested her head on a cushion, her eyes watching the grace in Toks’ wrists, the stretch of her fingers and the power in her arms. She let herself remember all the things those fingers could do and allowed her memories to swell with hope. She listened to the lyricism and mystery Toks brought to the piece, and admired the way it flowed through her spine, from the tilt of her head to the line of her thighs as her feet worked the pedals.
Polly missed this. Oh, she’d spent so many years telling herself she didn’t, and the lie of that crashed over her in a crescendo of rippling arpeggios.
She was glad the music was so complex. Toks would have to keep her eyes on the keys.
She wouldn’t see her crying.
Toks had forgotten how it felt to play with Polly’s gaze on her. It made her hot under her clothes, nervous like she hadn’t been in decades. She knew she fumbled a few runs in the middle movement, but she was a little put out to come to the end and realise Polly had fallen asleep.
The others were gathered in the kitchen watching them both.
Richard put a glass of red in her hand and Tilda came to Polly’s defence immediately.
“She does this,” Tilda said, her chin up, daring Toks to say anything. “Mum can fall asleep anywhere.”
“When she feels safe,” Richard added. His look carried a significance Toks didn’t understand.
There was the smell of dinner cooking and Daz called Tilda to set the table. He gave Justin a nod.
Richard drew Toks out of the music room. She saw Justin drop to one knee beside Polly’s sofa, pick her up like she weighed nothing and carry her away.
Polly didn’t stir.
Richard shrugged at Toks’ question.
“You don’t want to see how she wakes up,” he muttered.
Toks had no idea what that meant.