Chapter Three

T he weather cools for the funeral. The beginning of March, and the heat of February has slipped into memory, for 1997 anyway. Mara is grateful for the coolness because, with the formal farewell over – the eulogies spoken, the tears shed, the mounds of flowers distributed to cheer the residents and staff of local care homes, and the sandwiches and scones eaten – the most gruelling task of the arrangements needs to be addressed. Clearing Kathryn’s house.

Josie is unable to stay, called to work, but she promises to come every weekend until it’s done. Peter was needed in the office and in Sydney, where the new client apparently can’t cope without his frequent presence. To make matters easier for herself, to help stamp on her suspicions, Mara avoids using the landline to talk to him and, with the help of mobile phone technology on both sides, imagines her husband at home or at his desk in his city office, whether Adelaide or Sydney, during their daily calls. She avoids asking where he is and he avoids telling her.

Mara tackles what she deems will be the easiest task first, her mother’s clothes, which are to go to charity. Except, within thirty minutes of emptying drawers and wardrobes, laying items out on Kathryn’s double bed, she discovers this isn’t the easiest bit by far. Too many items are mementoes of the happy past. Here is the sage green linen suit bought for Josie’s starring role as Mary in the kindergarten nativity play. And the bright red silk blouse which added to the cheer of many a Christmas. There are cashmere jumpers which Mara can’t help lifting to her cheek and breathing in the faint aroma of Beautiful, the scent her mother wore for decades. Scarves too, many from plain old Target, others bearing Hermes and Dior labels. And here – Mara’s breath catches – in its fancy designer cover, hangs the sapphire blue exquisitely cut calf-length satin gown Kathryn wore for Mara’s wedding twenty-five years ago, and likely never wore again.

Holding the glistening dress against herself, Mara gazes into the mirror. She and her mother share the thick, dark hair and clear, pale skin which Josie also inherited, although Kathryn’s and Josie’s hair curls and Mara’s falls straight as a plumbline to her shoulders in a bob. Mara’s eyes too, dark with tiny specks of gold, differ from her mother’s and daughter’s cornflower blue. Witch’s eyes, Peter used to tease in the long ago days when they did such things.

Mara lays the dress on the bed and remembers the secondhand designer clothes boutique recently opened in Regents Arcade in the city. The dress, the suit, the silk scarves can go there, to dress women with an eye for taste and a budget for discounted steals. Decision made, the clothes sorting is a breeze, and in the end the designer pile proves small compared with what will go to charity and what for rags.

Congratulating herself on progress, Mara eats a ham sandwich at the kitchen table and eyes the cupboards, thinking what they hold and what should stay. The same with the furniture. These decisions loom as complex, because they raise the question of whether Mara will keep the house or sell it, and if she keeps it, for what purpose? She could rent it out, furnished or unfurnished. Mara grimaces. Visions of how the garden would likely fare colour this option negatively. The house could earn its keep as a holiday let, with the recently employed weekly gardener staying on to ensure the outside thrived. Yes, a holiday let could work.

Except … Mara sips her tea. The old, comfortable furnishings, shabby around the edges, might have done for an eighty-three-year-old woman living by herself. They won’t do for the trendy young things who insist on smartness in their holiday lets. She dabs at the breadcrumbs on her plate and licks them off her finger. Too many choices.

A wave of tiredness sweeps over her. She’s had no time to grieve, to process her loss. Her time has been filled with funeral directors, solicitors, banks and utility companies, and receiving Kathryn’s friends who popped by with flowers, cards and assurances of what a wonderful woman Mara’s mother was. Josie has been a rock, taking some of the administrative burden. When Peter’s initial instructions on obvious matters (have you called the solicitor?) were coolly received, he hightailed it to Adelaide with an ‘If you need me, yell,’ farewell.

Mara wants to step away for a time. She boils the kettle for more tea, pausing at the sink to gaze through the window where autumn has begun to flaunt its reds and golds on the deciduous trees and bushes. Summer’s glory fades fast. Mara silently mocks her quaintly philosophical statement, nevertheless carrying it over to herself. At forty-nine, summer’s glory has faded for her too, although she doesn’t see herself as autumnal, not yet. She has time left. For what? Besides, what has she done with her forty-nine years to date?

The kettle whistles for attention, and Mara pours boiling water into the small teapot. She tightens her jaw. Don’t go down that road, Mara. Her life has been fruitful. A legal secretary at Peter’s firm, she moved to another firm after marrying him and gave up paid work when Josie came along. Once her daughter was at kindergarten, Mara did what was expected of good aspiring law partner wives and involved herself in a range of respectable charities and, later, invited herself onto the board of governors at Josie’s private school. Good works, good friends. An easy, satisfying life, many would say, and they would be right.

Mara pours the tea, adds milk, and carries the mug to the sofa on the porch where the afternoon sun, not fully committed to abandoning summer, works hard to offset the chill in the air. The wind is off the sea, bringing a tang of salt and seaweed from the beach two streets over, together with shrieks of seagulls and, faintly, traffic on the Esplanade. The sounds, the scents, are different here from her home in Adelaide.

For a moment, Mara experiences a different wave, this time of homesickness. Why? She is as much alone there as she is here, and at least here she doesn’t spend her time wondering if Peter will be home for dinner or has been summoned to a client, or is working late, or on a last minute flight to Sydney, and stopping herself from calling his office to find out before he, or his secretary, rings her.

Putting a halt to these unfruitful meanderings, Mara swallows the remains of her tea and strides inside. Rinsing the mug under the tap, she upends it into the dish rack and tells herself the decision about the house can be put off for a time, together with the kitchen clearance. There is a loft which can fruitfully be attended to, a space too cold in winter and too hot in summer, where a few suitcases and boxes reside. As well as productive, rummaging through the cases could be fun.

A few minutes later, Mara mounts the loft ladder, pokes her head into the space and tosses her roll of rubbish bags onto the bare planks. Windowless and low-roofed, there is barely sufficient light to see the outlines of the neatly piled contents. Mara flicks a switch by the opening. A low wattage light extends her vision further, keeping the corners in shadow. She hauls herself into the opening and peers about, searching out webs and their inhabitants. The space is dry, and a reasonable temperature, and nothing with too many legs scuttles from her presence. Emboldened, Mara steps to the first box, labelled Christmas under a layer of dust. She struggles to remember the last time the box was handed into the hall, with Peter in the loft and herself waiting to receive the goods. Kathryn came to them for Christmas the past several years, and this house had been minimally decorated with cards and red and white flowers ever since.

‘There comes a time when it’s enough to close your eyes and imagine it,’ Kathryn said once, laughing. ‘Having lived this long, I have a pretty good idea what Christmas looks, feels and smells like.’

Mara suspects her mother never became comfortable with hot Christmases. Certainly, the celebrations when Mara was a child involved turkey and pudding, mock snow on the windows, and cards for friends and relatives with cheery robins wearing scarves.

‘Like proper Christmas,’ Kathryn would say, lighting candles to add their miserly heat to the blasts emanating from the oven.

Mara’s father had been ambivalent about Christmas. Likely because he lost his family in late December 1940 with a direct hit on their home during the Blitz. Mother, father, and younger sister, none of whom, for unknown reasons, had hurried to the air raid shelter when the sirens sounded. Robert wasn’t home. As a young GP he had volunteered at the beginning of the war to work with the Army Medical Corps, where he had served in England and overseas for the duration.

No one forced paper hats and pulling crackers on him, and he bore the festivities with grace. His change of heart came about after Josie’s birth, when he unleashed the required merriment to entertain his granddaughter.

Mara strokes the taped box. A good man, her father.

The fate of the decorations can be decided by Josie. She might want to keep a few of those she made and proudly carried to Gran and Gramps in her early school years.

Mara moves the two Christmas boxes to the edge of the trapdoor and turns her attention to the suitcases.

Ancient cardboard items, scuffed at the edges, heavy with travel stickers, two brown and one deep blue. Mara believes they may have accompanied her parents on their long boat trip from London to Adelaide after the war. She kneels by the blue one, flicks the latches, lifts the lid and sits on her heels. Bulging paper bags, more clothes to deal with, and a pile of ring-bound folders. Mara takes hold of the vaguely familiar top folder and confirms her suspicion – her notes from college when she did her legal secretary course. Why on earth did her parents bring these with them when they moved here? Mara doesn’t explore the folders further. They are of no use to man or beast. She reaches for her rubbish bags, unrolls one and tips the notes inside.

Mara frowns. The two bottom items aren’t binders. They are large journals. She pulls them out, checks if there are others, and sets them on the floor. They are old, very old, with cracked, faded leather covers. Mara opens one and bites her top lip, tilting the page to catch more of the dim loft light.

Inscribed on the flyleaf in immaculate copperplate, written in ink which has faded to sepia, is the name of the journal’s owner:

Aaron Appleby, Barnley, AD 1892 to 1895 .

And underneath:

Continuing his notes on the flora of the Forest of Dean and the fields thereabouts .

Aaron Appleby? Who is Aaron Appleby and why did Kathryn have his journals? The Forest. Mara traces the hundred-year-old word with her finger. This must be the Forest which Kathryn talked about in her last moments, her regrets at not returning there. Aaron Appleby must be someone she knew, maybe a family member.

With care, and worrying if she should be wearing gloves like they do in museums, Mara turns the pages which are filled with intricately detailed coloured and pen and ink drawings of plants. The same copperplate handwriting gives their names and notes on their uses in medicine and – she squints, checking what she’s read – in more spiritual lore too. Here, for example, a belladonna plant and the notation, ‘forget past loves’. Mara’s heart patters. How wonderful to have found these, and why are they hidden in an old case? To preserve them? She gently flips forward, and smiles.

A sketch of a pretty toddler in a calf-length blue gown and a white pinny, pink chubby cheeks, thick black straight hair falling loose to her shoulders. Her dark eyes crinkle with laughter and she’s holding tight to her chest a pale yellow ball with a tiny orange triangle sticking out. Behind her is a garden in full flower, each bloom drawn with care. Underneath, Aaron has written, Ellen Williams (Appleby) and her first chick.

Ellen? Mara’s smile widens. She knows this one. Ellen was Kathryn’s mother, and Mara knows her as Ellen Goode, with Williams as her maiden name. What does the Appleby signify? Was this Aaron her father and if he was, why wasn’t she Ellen Appleby?

Mara jumps at the sound of the house phone ringing in the kitchen. No way she can reach it in time. She lets the phone ring out while she carries the journals to sit by the Christmas boxes. The caller will leave a message on the answering machine Mara has installed, and Josie or Peter will call her mobile if she doesn’t answer. There’s no one else whose call she worries about missing.

A good plan, except she’s left her mobile on the porch. With a sigh, Mara steps onto the top rung of the ladder, tucks the journals under her arm and carefully makes her way down. The distance from the last rung to the floor is further than she expects. She mis-steps, landing heavily and twisting her ankle. The journals judder in her grip, and a folded sheet of paper flutters to the hall carpet. Screwing up her face with pain, and putting her weight on the uninjured leg, Mara bends to pick the paper up, gingerly, given its aged fragility. She slips it into the first journal.

The ankle is an omen, Mara decides, telling her to leave loft-clearing for another day, take these fascinating journals and read them, and the piece of paper, and see what she can learn about Mr Appleby and plants. Before she can make good on her promise, the phone rings again, and this time Mara is within reach. She hastily places the journals and the letter on the hall table and limps to the kitchen.

The caller is Josie, complaining about her mother not having her mobile with her, because how is she expected to pass on the brilliant news she’s been accepted for the studentship at Kew Gardens? The decision makers were impressed with her recent degree and her practical work, and she will start her studies in London in September.