Chapter 57 Phyllida
PHYLLIDA
NOW, NSW SOUTHERN HIGHLANDS, AUSTRALIA
Phyllida thinks of the news she received earlier. Roddy has found Francis. He has been told she is alive. And he does not blame her. He wants to see her.
Propped up in the hospital bed, an overwhelming sensation grips Phyllida. A weight being lifted.
She has just finished a session with a lovely psychologist called Gretchen.
Phyllida had told her about David’s death and about her psychiatric hospital stay back then, and the girl had explained she thinks Phyllida has something called PTSD.
A fascinating brain condition that comes when a past trauma is triggered again by something that reminds you about it.
When Phyllida had found the lump above her collarbone a few weeks ago, she knew it was a cancerous tumour.
The knowing hadn’t deserted her. And yet she had theorised that it was likely one of those cancers that is fatal.
It seemed a terribly errant place to find a tumour.
She had feared a swift, awful decline, as David had suffered.
Her new oncologist, Doctor Mendoza, had lightened her worry.
She explained it was thyroid cancer, and apparently ‘one of the good ones’ that could be treated.
She wouldn’t suffer the same painful fate that dear David had.
Not that she feared death for herself. But Lottie did not need to nurse her through such dreadful wasting away.
Apparently, this fear about the lump had triggered the nightmares and hallucinations she’d been having since she found it; they made her think that David was calling her to join him.
As Gretchen had listened and nodded, Phyllida had to hide her urge to smile and laugh as she nursed her new knowledge about Francis through the session.
She wanted to cheer for the world and congratulate Gretchen for being so competent and so kind.
She wanted to say, Well done! You are a credit to your parents, but she thinks this might be patronising given Gretchen looks to be in her late twenties and is a fully fledged professional person and probably moved out of home years ago.
And who knows, her parents might be idiots, and her success occurred in spite of them.
So, she had restrained herself. When Gretchen picked up on her good mood, Phyllida told her it was all down to the excellent therapy.
Phyllida closes her eyes and a memory of her family arrives.
This has been happening more lately, as she ponders her own mortality.
For some reason she had visited her father during the latter months of her pregnancy with Louis.
One of her brothers had been home and she had snapped at him when asked if she’d got married without telling them or if she intended to ‘get the thing adopted’.
It was the mid-seventies for goodness’ sake!
Ten years before, a single pregnant woman may well have been a woman in want of a husband (or a hasty adoption in her case) but things were different in the seventies; change was afoot!
Did her brother live under a rock? There was no way she was going to give away another baby, however appallingly he came to be created.
She smiles as she remembers her father’s lecture that day, and her own indignance at the time.
A fraudster lecturing her about morals! Still, when she had been forced to flee he had helped in every way, not just with the falsified documents and passport.
He sent her money to a Swiss bank account.
She had been reluctant to accept the bequest when first notified a few months earlier.
Her mother may have been a lesser partner in her parents’ shady joint enterprise, and perhaps it was her mother’s family money but, still, Dorothea had considered it tainted.
But with a baby to protect, she didn’t hesitate.
It paid for airfares, set her up in the bookshop and after that she invested, never realising the financial skills learned at her father’s knee would be so useful.
She had loved her father; a warm-hearted, damaged man with a skewed moral compass.
She felt his hands on her shoulders as a child, his thick Scottish accent the anchor she always reached for as a girl when she needed to feel calm. Even now, she missed him.
Phyllida would like to tell this story to Gretchen.
Tell her the whole thing. There is something powerful in the sharing of a story; in the collating and creating of words into the tapestry of a life.
The unfinished threads sit with her. They are reminders that she is not the centre of it all.
Her story is a small part of a greater whole.
She remembers the long-ago words of Mrs Wilson: Lady Fitzhenry’s death was no accident.
Don’t waste your pity on him. That thread is still loose.
It feels frayed. What did Edith Wilson know? Why remain silent?
Phyllida is still. Through the hospital window, she listens to the birds.