Chapter 43 LOTTIE
LOTTIE
NOW, NSW SOUTHERN HIGHLANDS, AUSTRALIA
But it seems Phyllida hasn’t written about the night Mary recounted, when she must have been going mad, knocking on the windows until she broke in and found my mother in her underwear clinging to David.
I think about the image of my mother and Phyllida—their grief over the body of this young man—and I have to press my palms into my eyes and remind myself to breathe.
As it turns out, Phyllida doesn’t write about David’s death at all in the weeks around when it happened. She just talks about making his favourite dinner and his favourite show being on telly, as if he is still alive.
I close the 1995 diary and decide to start at the beginning.
First, though, I need food. I find my sunnies and phone and let myself out of Phyllida’s house.
I am not due to open the shop for another forty minutes.
A croissant will sort out this nauseous feeling of stress I keep getting.
As I walk towards the coffee shop, I dial the hospital and ask to be put through to the intensive care ward to check on Phyllida.
‘She’s sleeping at the moment,’ says the nurse, Samantha, who had also taken my call yesterday. ‘But slightly more wakeful this morning. Her blood sugar and electrolyte imbalances were severe, though, so it will take a while. She’s still very quiet when she’s awake.’
I promise to visit this afternoon. It’s been almost two weeks now, and I’m worried Phyllida may not recover completely. Where will she find the will to fight if she was so convinced she needed to end things?
At the cafe I pull the first diary from my handbag: 1975.
It is the year Phyllida arrived in Australia, but it should also cover the time of Edward Fitzhenry’s murder and the mysterious baby’s birth.
Strange that Phyllida brought this with her from England, given the dangers if she was caught, but maybe it was a way of holding on to something from her old life.
9 January 1975
Poor Francis, he’s getting taller and lankier by the day, so his ankles are showing beneath his cuffs!
He is so pale I sometimes wonder if we need to sit outside more, even though the weather has been so bad lately.
When he came into the kitchen, Mrs Wilson looked him up and down and shook her head, then got him a plate of biscuits and told him to eat up or his legs would get ahead of him, which amused us both.
Edward has noticed his growth spurt, I’m sure. I see Edward watching sometimes with a look of distaste. I want to take Francis and run far away, but I cannot. And leaving him here with Edward, without my interventions and love, is impossible.
Edward has promised (or threatened?) to take Francis shooting soon, and so Francis needs to be ready to ‘show some backbone’.
I’ve told Francis that shooting is one of those things he needs to learn, but that when he is grown up, he need never touch another gun.
He says it hurts to think of the animals in pain and if he were the one to hurt them, he would hate himself forever.
He is so sensitive. I used my best spit-spot voice and talked about the need to appease his father, and he looked at me as if I were a traitor.
Sometimes I worry I cannot bear so many more years here, waiting until Francis grows up.
I feel terrible contemplating leaving him, because I have never felt such love.
And now, with the baby coming, how will things change?
Will I love this baby too? Cricket is beside herself.
I am worried about her. She is an innocent, confused and vulnerable, and Edward treats her like a child.
He bullies her into agreeing with him and doing exactly as he wishes.
I am far too entrenched in this household; and now Cricket relies on me.
I knew I couldn’t trust Edward, knew something was coming. I let good manners override my intuition when it happened. Cricket is becoming increasingly erratic too. Poor girl, she is always on edge. I spend a great deal of time trying to calm all her worries.
I hear my grandmother’s words clearly: ‘Fate will knock, little one. Listen for it.’ So, I must trust that fate has brought us together—Cricket, me, Edward—and the reason will become clear in time. Perhaps a solution will present itself.
And when I think about my earlier life—in the village, in the bookshop, meeting Adeline—I can see it was all for a purpose and this thought calms me.
And yet, I cannot shake the feeling that something else dreadful is still coming. The man is unhinged. Some days I just wish to be back in the bookshop, a decade ago. I wish I had gotten through my teenage years without the pregnancy that changed everything.
My coffee arrives and I close the diary, stunned and a little sick. Phyllida was pregnant when she was a teenager? This new information is head spinning.
I sip coffee and read more entries, shorter and less informative, about the weather, the food, the way Francis takes to his lessons and about her fears for the coming months, though what those fears are, I’m not sure.
But my mind is on that one, startling revelation. Did she have a baby when she was a teenager? And if so, what on earth happened to it?