Chapter Eleven
‘Thanks for coming over,’ Adelaide says. ‘You didn’t have to.’
She gestures for her brother to sit down and he does, with the sort of sigh that comes from being in your seventies and having joints that don’t bend as easily as they used to.
‘I know I didn’t have to,’ he says, smiling tiredly. ‘But I wanted to see your home.’
Louis lives in the house Adelaide grew up in, on Musgrave Street, which runs down to Mosman Bay and is so narrow that cars can’t pass.
In their youth they would run around the neighbourhood, down to Sirius Cove and around to the new Taronga Zoo, then home again.
They’d get dirty and hot and their mother would exclaim over their clothes that needed washing, but she never looked too unhappy about it.
Their father would tell them about the artists’ camp at Sirius Cove, which didn’t last long into the new century but he used to go there when he was younger, just to poke around and see what was happening.
The names of the artists didn’t mean much to Adelaide when she was a child, but they do now: Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton.
And there was another camp round at Balmoral Beach.
If only her father had managed to acquire some of the art! He rued this until the day he died.
These days the house he bought in Musgrave Street is far more valuable than any piece of art he could have bought, and it belongs to Louis.
Then it will go to his son. That’s the way of things in their family, and in others.
Adelaide has resented it but not fought it.
To do that would risk alienating her one sibling and she long ago decided that their relationship was worth more to her than half a house.
Even as she has wished that Louis would stop to consider what it must be like for her to inherit nothing, to have to make her own way in the world without the ease of a whole house coming to her.
‘Letter for you,’ Louis says, placing an official-looking envelope on the table.
‘How odd.’ She reaches for the letter and sees that it’s from the Department of Family and Community Services. For a second – maybe two, or three – she has no idea why she would have a letter from this department.
Then she remembers, and she fancies that her heart starts to thud so audibly that Louis could hear it if he stayed quiet. She tries not to show anything on her face, but he’s always been able to read her. They’re only a year apart. Almost twins, her mother used to say.
If she doesn’t look at him, though, he will know she’s hiding something. So she takes a breath and presses her lips together and fakes a smile as her eyes meet his.
‘I’ll open it later,’ she says.
He doesn’t say anything, just glances at her, and she wonders what he is thinking.
Swallowing, she resists the urge to whip the letter off the table and into the pocket of her cardigan, as that would make Louis suspicious – but oh, how she wants it out of sight.
She doesn’t want to talk to him – to anyone – about what happened so many years ago.
But she’ll have to. This letter will want something from her.
Louis only stays another few minutes, long enough to invite her to dinner during the week, and she accepts.
‘I’ll come and pick you up,’ he says as he leaves, kissing her cheek, which he doesn’t normally do. So maybe he suspects something. She probably gave him reason to by not opening the letter in front of him.
Once he’s gone she puts on the kettle and takes her time making a pot of tea, letting it steep, pouring out a cuppa.
Stalling, yes. She is not denying it. But there are only so many moments in a life when you have warning that things are going to change in a way you can’t control, and such moments need to be marked.
What she’s doing is marking this moment.
Does Louis have any idea of what really happened to her when she was young?
That she didn’t spend a season in a regional orchestra?
That she was, in fact, in a home for unwed mothers, waiting out the last months of her pregnancy and knowing that she wouldn’t be able to keep the baby because that simply wasn’t done?
Their own mother told her it was for the best and it wasn’t for Adelaide to question that. She wasn’t too young to know better – she was in her twenties – but she was in a vulnerable position. No husband, so no shield against gossip. Against shame.
Of course, her mother thought the whole business of her having the baby was unseemly, but there wasn’t another option.
Adelaide knew of girls who had tried to ‘take care of things’ and it had never ended well.
One died. Others were in a bad way for a long time.
And she felt she needed to bring this child to life, even if she couldn’t keep her or him.
Him. The child turned out to be a him. She knew that much before he was taken away. For her own good and his, she was told.
She told the baby’s father that she was pregnant but they both knew he would never be able to claim the child as his.
He was married, and had other children. Her mother was the only other person who knew.
The clothing of the time meant Adelaide could conceal the pregnancy for a little while, and by the time she was about halfway through she was in the country.
Waiting. Waiting for her life to end or her life to start.
All these decades later, she still isn’t sure which it really was.
She drinks one cup of tea before she opens the letter. The glue sticks in parts but she doesn’t want to rip it open. That would be unseemly.
The letter tells her that her son, now called Desmond – she had named him George – had written to the department requesting information about her and also asking if it would be possible to meet her.
He would be forty-eight now. She was twenty-three when he was born. Old enough to know what was what. Young enough to think that everything might work out. Except it didn’t.
There’s nowhere to put the love you have for a child who is gone but not dead.
There’s no grave to visit; no memorial to lay flowers upon.
When you haven’t seen that child since the day he was born, there are no memories to hold on to.
There is only the fantasy you carry of one day seeing him again, and the fear that accompanies that fantasy, of what will happen if you do.
Because he is not your child any more; he is someone else’s.
In his mind, that is. In yours, he belongs to you always.
He was made of your flesh and blood. You are still joined.
Maybe it was better, though, that she never held him.
Maybe it helped her not think about him too often all these years.
Just in the quieter times when she didn’t rush to fill her brain with crotchets and minims and scores and details of rehearsals.
Which means she’s been thinking about him a lot lately.
And here he is. Now her fantasy is her reality, and her fear is thundering into the present. It makes her gasp. Makes her put a hand on the arm of her chair to steady herself.
Almost half a century has passed and she feels it all: the gulf inside her just after they took him away; the chasm that kept widening in the days after he was gone.
She wanted to fall down it, and didn’t care what happened if she did.
Except she crawled out, on bloodied hands and knees, and took herself to Europe.
To a different life that she could stuff full of music and the rapture that comes with it.
She was safe inside that life. For all these years, the chasm was closed.
But not sealed.
This letter … it threatens to open it up again.
For all that she has wanted this very thing the letter is promising, she is terrified of it. And she has absolutely no one to talk to about it. Unless Louis suspected something at the time, or does now. He won’t say anything, though; he would think that rude.
There is only one thing to do.
For the first time in weeks, she goes to her cello case, takes out her instrument, tunes it, and begins to play. To keep the chasm closed. For just a little while longer.