Chapter 42 LOTTIE
LOTTIE
NOW, NSW SOUTHERN HIGHLANDS, AUSTRALIA
‘They put her in a mental hospital?’ I splutter. The idea is so completely unexpected. So foreign to everything I know about my grandmother that it feels impossible. She is the calmest, sanest person I know.
‘She had a little breakdown,’ says Mary. She picks up her beer, looks thoughtful. ‘They admitted her for a couple of months, then she got herself sorted out. But it was slow going. They put her on pills and she had to talk to a head-shrinker.’
‘So, she didn’t cope with David’s death?’ I ask. ‘That was it?’
Mary seems to ponder this.
‘There was more to it than that, love. I think it was that she never really accepted he was going to die. It was so sudden, see? He was young and fit, then a few months later he was dead. I remember nice Doctor Patel saying to me, “Mary, it’s not that simple. There’s something else that has probably triggered this.
It’s a complex grief reaction.” That’s what he reckoned. ’
‘Caleb Patel? The old GP in town here?’
‘Yeah. I had to go and get him from his surgery when she lost her marbles in the cemetery that day. He knew what to do. Janelle from the surgery told me later on she reckoned Phylly was playing her cards close to her chest.’
‘What cards?’
‘From her past. Things that happened to her. Phylly’s a dead-set vault when you tell her a secret, so maybe she had her own secrets locked in there too.’
‘But you have no idea what they are?’
‘No. But Janelle was studying counselling, so we talked about it. She reckoned when you have a traumatic thing, like losing your only kid to cancer, and your early life dramas haven’t been sorted, they pile on. So your brain goes into meltdown.’
‘Do you know anything about her earlier life?’
‘No, love. She turned up here with a baby when she was about thirty, no furniture, no whisper of a bloke. It was like she’d just flown in from the moon.’
‘Or England.’
‘Yeah. She didn’t tell me anything, though, and I respected that. Everyone’s got their past, love.’
‘So, you reckon Phyllida had some awful things happen in her earlier life that triggered the reaction?’
‘I dunno, love. Maybe.’
I stare past Mary’s shoulder. ‘It fits.’
‘Yeah, well. If you say so. But I suppose Miriam didn’t help at the time.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Phyllida promised David that she wouldn’t leave him when he got real crook. She was just popping home for an hour’s sleep here and there, she was that devoted. Wanted to make sure she was right there with him at the end, even though she didn’t believe it was going to be the end.’
‘And?’
‘When Miriam locked her out of the house it sort of tipped her over the edge, I reckon. Phylly couldn’t forgive herself after that. For not being there at the end, when she promised she would be.’
‘That’s terrible. God, I can’t believe Mum could do that to someone when their child was dying.’ I suddenly remember maybe David wasn’t really Phyllida’s child. I push the thought away.
Mary sighs.
If what Mary says about old trauma is true, something else in Phyllida’s past was part of it too.
And it doesn’t take a genius to guess that it probably relates to Francis Fitzhenry and his father’s murder.
‘I want to find this Francis she talks about. I want to know what happened before she came here. She never talks about England.’
Mary is silent for a while. ‘I wonder if I ballsed things up, ringing the ambulance for her the other night. Maybe she’d be better gone. At peace, you know?’
‘I think you get peace from sorting unfinished business. And I think she still has some she needs to deal with.’
I sound snappish and Mary sighs again, moves her teeth about in her mouth. ‘You young people are so different. So hell-bent on dragging the past around like a dead ’roo. What’s done is done, love.’
‘Not if the past won’t leave her alone. What if meeting this Francis person again might put her mind at rest about something?’
Mary blows out her lips in a long huff. She looks down at her lap, turns the beer bottle in her hand. ‘I suppose you might want to see her diaries then, love.’
‘What diaries?’ My heart gives a thump.
‘The ones Phylly’s written in every day of her life—or ever since I’ve known her—going on for fifty years. She was always secretive with them and never let me know what was so important in that head of hers that it needed writing down.’
‘There are no diaries. I’ve turned the house over. I knew she wrote diaries, so I looked for them.’
Mary looks sheepish. ‘Ah, love. It was bin night next day after she took them pills. I started pulling out her recycling bin onto the road after they carted her off to hospital, and it was dead heavy. I fished them out.’