Chapter Seventeen
The view from the verandah is one of Margot’s favourite things.
Since childhood she’s loved sitting out here, angling herself so she can see Mosman Bay and the houses over on Cremorne Point.
Not all the way down the point, but she can almost make out the big Arts and Crafts house that, when she was young, seemed to her like a palace.
When you’re little the world is so much bigger, she thinks.
Big houses are castles. Adults are giants.
When you become a giant yourself, however, the world doesn’t seem any more conquerable than it did when you were small.
That’s the trouble Margot’s always had: how to be an adult in a world that isn’t made for her.
This view calms her, though. The bay is contained. If she focuses on it, her life seems contained too. Manageable. Especially today, with the soft morning light on the water and the clink-clink of the boats moored outside the Rowers Club.
One day she decided to sit and see if anyone took out a boat.
She waited all day, until it started to get dark.
Time is so odd. It can pass like lightning, as it did that day.
Or there can be a day that she wants to end and it goes on forever.
On those days she often takes to her bed to try to sleep the time away.
She never knows what each day is going to be, of course. No one does. It would be nice, though, to have a sense of it in the morning, because if it were to be a day that drags she could just stay asleep.
She’s glad she’s awake this morning, though, with this light and the mild temperature and the trees on the point and the ferry now arriving at the wharf.
Maybe she’ll get on that ferry one day and go to the city. She can’t remember the last time she did that. Town is too hard, too loud. There are too many people who move sharply.
‘Margot, darling.’ She feels a hand on her shoulder.
It can sometimes take her a second or two to work out if the things she sees and hears are real or if they’re her ghosts.
Her mother, her father. The brothers she never met.
The ghosts keep her here. If she strays too far from home they can’t come with her, and she doesn’t know who she is without them.
This hand presses more firmly, though, and she knows it’s Lavinia.
‘Good morning,’ she murmurs, although she doesn’t look around. Lavinia will understand: the view is too entrancing.
Except she doesn’t understand because she moves in front of Margot, blocking the view, and puts some papers on the small table next to her.
Lavinia points to them. ‘We have to talk about these.’
Margot suspects she knows what they are: bills. For water, for electricity. For the telephone that rarely rings. For council rates. For life.
‘Do we?’ she says airily.
She wonders how Lavinia found them – she’s been hiding them in her father’s old study. Or not hiding them, it seems. But she’s never seen Lavinia go into the study so she thought they’d be undetected there.
‘Margot.’ Lavinia’s tone is sharp and therefore unfamiliar enough to make Margot look up.
Her aunt’s nostrils flare. ‘You’ve been lying to me.’
‘I haven’t!’
‘I have asked you about funds several times and you said not to worry.’
Margot thinks about asking how that was a lie, but she knows she deliberately obfuscated with non-answers. That’s only because she didn’t have a solution and didn’t want to upset Lavinia until she did.
Not that a solution has been forthcoming, because solutions are not her forte. Sitting here looking at Mosman Bay is her forte. She was bred to be a lady of leisure – it’s not her fault that she doesn’t know how to earn money. Or so she would like to think.
Of course, that doesn’t help them. They are in a predicament.
‘I …’ Margot presses her lips together.
‘We have to fix this.’
Margot bites her bottom lip to stop it trembling. She’s unused to Lavinia speaking to her like this. And she knows she’s the cause of it. Which is bad.
‘I don’t know how!’ she blurts. ‘I’ve looked in the classifieds, at the jobs. They all want people who have experience! I don’t have any experience! How am I meant to get any?’
Margot has gone round and round in her head trying to work out how she’s meant to gain the experience required to have a job when no one is offering a role that would help her gain it.
Even the entry-level jobs ask for experience – or qualifications, like degrees and diplomas, which she doesn’t have either.
‘That’s the most honest thing you’ve said to me lately,’ Lavinia says, but the sharpness has gone from her tone and instead there’s resignation.
She sits slowly down next to Margot on the cane settee, then takes her hand. ‘We’re in a pickle,’ she says softly, and all Margot can do is nod.
Lavinia sighs. ‘You may need to sell the house.’
‘No!’ Margot jerks her hand back. How can Lavinia even suggest that? There’s no way she can leave this house. She’s never lived anywhere else.
‘How else are we going to manage?’
‘I …’ Margot bites her bottom lip again. She has no answer for her aunt. Or for herself.
‘Darling.’ Lavinia takes her hand again.
‘If you sell, there will be enough money for you to buy a flat somewhere in Mosman, so you won’t have to go too far away.
And if you invest the rest, you’ll likely have enough to live on.
It’s why your parents left you the house – so you’d have what you need, not so you’d feel you can never leave it. ’
‘But I don’t want to leave it!’
Margot feels almost hysterical now and hates herself a little for it. Isn’t she meant to be looking after Lavinia, not the other way around?
‘Darling – you may not have a choice.’ Lavinia sighs again as she lets go of Margot’s hand and turns to look at the view.
‘We’ve been lucky to have this,’ she says quietly. ‘So very lucky.’ Then she looks at Margot. ‘But I think our luck has run out. And that’s all right. It has to sometime.’
‘I don’t feel lucky,’ Margot says, even though it sounds sulky. ‘My brothers died. My parents died.’ She hiccups from the force of her feelings. ‘I don’t have friends.’
There were friends, when she was a teenager. Back when she had joie de vivre despite the pall of grief that hung over the house. She loved to dance and sing; she would sit in the garden and marvel at the trees and the flowers. ‘My woodland sprite,’ her mother used to call her.
Yes, back when – back then – was a wonderful place. It’s why Margot likes to visit the past more than the present, and definitely more than the future.
‘But you have me.’ Lavinia pushes herself up to standing. ‘And I have you. And that makes us luckier than many.’ She smiles sadly. ‘We’ll cope,’ she adds. ‘We’ll have to.’
As her aunt goes back inside, though, Margot isn’t sure she knows how to cope. Coping is for people who can pay bills. Who can go to the city. Who can drive a car – she can’t even do that.
The bills have to be paid, though. She can’t have Lavinia going without water and electricity.
Some of the furniture is valuable – her father told her that. ‘There are antiques that someone will pay a pretty penny for,’ he said.
They still used pennies then. Now there are cents. The antiques should still bring in lots of those. Perhaps Lavinia will help her work out which are the most valuable items. Starting tomorrow. They’ll do it tomorrow.
For today, Margot wants to keep sitting here, listening to the sounds the moored boats make, watching people come and go from the wharf, thinking about the lives they lead and she never will, up here in her eyrie, waiting for life to pass her by.