Chapter 21

21

brISBANE – DECEMBER 1998

Rebekah leant against the airplane window, peering eagerly at the beautiful landscape below. They'd crossed landfall somewhere near Darwin several hours ago and the rugged red landscape of outback Queensland had gone on, and on, and on, without a cloud in the sky to break up the view. She glanced back at Paul, who was dozing with his earphones in. If he slept much longer, she was going to have to wake him up so he didn't miss the view of the coastline from this glorious height.

She'd grown used to watching him sleeping, and sharing all the little moments of life with him. And though she had never expected this, Rebekah couldn't imagine a life without Paul beside her. They'd spent virtually every weekend together since July, either in Poole or in London, and occasionally further afield, even taking a weekend trip to Paris in the autumn. She'd bought herself a mobile phone too, so they could stay in contact wherever she was, especially as she was so often outdoors and away from a desk. And now they were on this journey together, home to Brisbane.

The air stewards started raising all the window shields and bringing out the breakfast trolley. Soon, the general hustle and bustle of the plane, or perhaps it was the smell of coffee, roused Paul from his long and much-needed nap. He'd barely slept at all from London to Singapore, and so he'd caught up on the Singapore to Brisbane leg of the journey.

‘We're over Queensland now, babe,' she said and couldn't help but do a little jiggle of delight, she was that excited. Once the coast came into view, she swapped seats with Paul for a while so he could see the gorgeous turquoise colour of the ocean, and the insanely large areas of completely unspoilt beaches.

‘I can't wait to get down there and explore it all with you. You're my perfect tour guide – and have been since the moment I met you,' he said, kissing her hand.

As the plane dropped altitude over Brisbane, Rebekah just about squealed as she saw the Story Bridge over the Brisbane River in the city centre, and the newer, bigger Gateway Bridge much closer to the airport. The flight path took them out over Moreton Bay and she showed him some national parks that were easily identifiable from the air: Moreton Island and North Stradbroke Island, two of the largest sand islands in the world. Then the plane dropped low over the water and as they headed towards the runway, she showed him the mangroves that made up an important layer of the ecosystem all along the coast wherever there were mudflats. She gripped the armrests as they bumped in to land.

‘Rebekah!' she heard the familiar voice of her mum cry, as they pushed their luggage trolley out through the frosted glass sliding doors to the arrivals lounge. Rebekah left Paul with the trolley and ran to throw her arms around her, not realising until this second how much she'd missed the feel of Mum's hugs.

‘Oh, let me get a good look at you, love! Your hair's grown so long!' cried her mum as she held Rebekah out at arm's length again. ‘And this must be Paul,' she said reaching out both hands to pull Paul into a hug too.

‘Hello, Mrs Martin. Lovely to meet you,' he said with his broadest and most handsome grin, Rebekah noticed, although he was looking about as smooth right now after this long-haul flight as he had done the very first time she'd set eyes on him – exhausted, unshaven, and in need of a good shower.

‘None of this formal business please, love; I'm just Helen to my friends,' Rebekah's mum told Paul warmly.

At home in Barrawondi Street, they settled with coffee and cake on the back deck, and both enjoyed wonderfully long showers and dressed into cool linen clothes, much better suited to the humid heat of a Brisbane December. Feeling refreshed, and ready for the adventure ahead, Rebekah had started with a walking tour of the backyard, showing Paul the red bottlebrush, the gigantic gum trees, the yellow grevillea, and explaining to him where the incessant shrill sound was coming from.

‘That's the cicadas. They're a flying bug that comes out of the ground in the hot, humid weather, and some of the Australian cicadas are among the loudest in the world,' she explained.

‘I don't doubt that for one second.' He laughed, just as a flock of rainbow lorikeets chattered overhead and landed in the bottlebrush tree to eat nectar from the red flowers hanging there.

‘This place is absolutely alive with wildlife, Rebekah – and this is only your back garden.'

‘You should wait until you see Pig's garden – I mean the garden next door that used to be Peggy's. She's been gone longer than I have now, but from what I can see, the new owners have kept it just as it was when we planted it together.'

She took him to the front of the house, and they leant on the side fence so Rebekah could explain everything to him. She told him how, back before her graduation morning, she and Peggy had decided to transform the barren and often dusty front yard of her place into a haven for indigenous plants and wildlife. She'd been freshly inspired by the rainforest at South Bank that there would need to be water, and frogs – a kind of mini billabong as a home for insects and skinks. They had planned for as many native flowering trees and shrubs as they could fit into the sunny sections, to draw the honey-eating birds, and she had made contact with a man who could provide them with a small hive of native stingless bees. And in the shady area underneath the front deck of the house, around the damp edges of the billabong, they had planted a young, shade-loving tree fern.

Now, just three years later, the little pond was alive with frogs and insects, and the trees had grown to at least triple the height they'd been when she last saw them. The tiny black bees were busy among the flowers, and there was even a water dragon resting under the cooling fronds of the tree fern.

‘Peggy and I planned it all together. Well – she actually let me do all the planning, and she did as much of the work with me as she could manage. But it was a real joint effort,' she said with a pleased sigh.

‘It really is something, and quite different from most of the plain lawns I can see up and down the street. I wonder who moved in who is just as keen on the garden as you were?' Paul asked her just as Helen came along to join them.

‘That would be Tim,' she said, and gave a little nervous cough. ‘Tim's been living here for two years now, and he and I have become quite close friends. Actually, he's coming over for dinner tonight,' she said, looking as shy as a young girl.

‘Mum? What kind of friends?' teased Rebekah, but her mum just walked away chuckling.

‘Well, I never thought I'd see that happen,' whispered Rebekah to Paul. ‘Mum's always been so independent, and happy with it just being the two of us.'

‘Was she really happy with that arrangement do you think? Or was it just the way it had to be while you were growing up?' asked Paul, wrapping his arms around Rebekah's waist as they watched Helen disappear into the house.

That evening, Paul and Rebekah shared a wonderful meal with Helen and Tim from next door who, it was obvious, spent a lot of time here with her mum. He was kind, and helpful, and looked at Rebekah's mum as though she was the most wonderful thing in his life.

Rebekah took the chance to talk with her mum as they were fetching the dessert from the kitchen.

‘Tim is lovely, Mum, and I'm very happy for you both,' she said.

‘Steady, love, we aren't getting married or anything.' Helen laughed. ‘But he is wonderful, I know. It all started when I needed a hand to chop some wood for the fire – as clichéd as that sounds – but I never have been able to handle an axe, though I can do pretty much everything else for myself. And then we got chatting about caring for that wonderful native garden you and Peggy created and the rest is history,' she said as they went back to the dining table.

‘Actually, we probably should talk about Peggy, Mum,' Rebekah began, and she and Paul updated her on all they had discovered so far about Peggy's interesting life in Poole, and the whereabouts of this mysterious Darrell Taylor.

Paul had used some of his knowledge and contacts to trace what had happened to him, and found that he'd returned to Australia after the war but left the air force, working instead on commercial airlines, and particularly the flying boats that operated right here in Brisbane, out at nearby Redland Bay.

‘He is still receiving a Defence Force pension, and lives in a retirement village down by the water. We have a phone number, but haven't called yet,' said Paul. ‘We don't want to alarm him, and he might be upset to have old memories brought up again.'

‘Why don't you write a note and deliver it to his mailbox? Leave your phone number, and ask him to call you if he would like you to visit?' offered Tim.

After dinner, before they went to bed, Paul and Rebekah wrote the letter to Darrell together, telling him about the letter that had been found addressed to him and kept in Poole for over fifty years.

‘I have the perfect place to take you for a day trip tomorrow, and we need to catch a ferry not far at all from Darrell's address, so we'll drop this off on our way,' Rebekah said.

That night, they were asleep by nine o'clock and awake the next morning before dawn, thanks to the jet lag kicking in, but that was a perfect start to the day trip Rebekah had planned for them. They made up a sandwich picnic bag, and added a couple of bottles of chilled beer with some frozen cooler blocks and, borrowing her mum's car, Rebekah drove them south, over the river, and out to Cleveland. They found the retirement village, and posted the letter to Darrell, hoping they would get a reply soon. From there, they drove to the car barge to North Stradbroke Island.

‘This is one of the islands you pointed out from the plane, isn't it? Quite a bit bigger than Brownsea, I think,' Paul commented, and she laughed.

‘Brownsea is a speck on the map compared to Straddie. It's an island with a lot of Aboriginal history – Minjerribah, in the traditional language – and you're going to love the scenery. If we were here in winter, we'd be able to spot humpback whales breaching on the ocean side of the island, but I'm hoping today for wallabies, turtles and dolphins at the very least,' she said as she drove the car off the barge at the end of the trip across Moreton Bay to the island.

‘And I'm keen for you to get your feet wet in the Pacific Ocean, too,' she said as she parked the car at the gloriously unspoilt Cylinder Beach, named for the perfectly formed surfing waves that crashed onto the shore.

Rebekah taught Paul how to apply sunblock the Aussie way, and they stepped quickly across the baking-hot, silky white sand, and slipped into the refreshing, crystal-clear water that glittered in the sunlight. They jumped over and swam through the surf until they were deep enough to float on the waves as they came in.

‘This is a delectable and rather tiny bikini,' Paul said, hugging her near-naked shape to him as they floated in paradise. ‘I'm quite fond of the way the weather here dictates clothing that shows me your gorgeous skin, so much of the time,' he said, and she turned round to encircle his waist with her legs and kiss his salty lips. But, in closing her eyes for a moment, she'd taken her attention off the waves and didn't see what hit them. They tumbled in the surf, and came up gasping for air, with sand in their hair, feeling like they'd had a round in a salty washing machine.

‘I can't believe the power in these waves!' gasped Paul, coughing as he wiped sand and saltwater from his eyes.

‘Sorry, I should have warned you how strong it is – and this is not exactly what we would call big surf. But I'm sure it's more than you're used to in England.' She showed him where the freshwater showers were at the edge of the beach, and then they relaxed in the shade of the grassy picnic area to eat their lunch, the cool beer soothing their salt-washed throats, then they lay in the shade from a whispering she-oak tree, enjoying a few minutes' siesta time as the whispers soothed them to sleep.

‘This is a wonderful start to our holiday, Rebekah. What a glorious place. Tour guide extraordinaire, as always,' he said sleepily, raising her hand to his mouth so he could plant a kiss on each of her fingers.

‘There's much more to come after lunch,' she said, turning to her side and draping an arm over his chest, revelling in the prospect of a whole month spent together. ‘Wait until you see the gorge we're going to walk. It's too beautiful to describe.'

The gorge walk proved to be an even bigger hit with Paul than had the beach, and Rebekah was not surprised. She never failed to be amazing by the clarity of the waters, the colour of the most pristine Ceylon sapphire. They crashed and foamed relentlessly into the gorge, worn away by the same action over millennia, oblivious to the changes that humanity wrought on the world around the island. She had spotted turtles floating at the mouth of the gorge and they'd leant over the railings to watch them dive and disappear into the deep. Then, as they stood to admire the beauty of the unspoilt beach that swept away into the far distance, they spotted a pod of dolphins surfing in the waves.

That night, she dreamed of surfing with dolphins, and swimming in the peaceful silence of the sparkling waters beneath the waves, where the sunlight shone through the water like raining diamonds. When she woke in the cool of the dawn, a flock of kookaburras laughed at the morning, and she turned to Paul's sleeping face, wishing he'd been awake to hear it. There would be others. But they were only here for a month, and then they'd be back in England, on Brownsea, which she loved, and he in London, which she knew he was beginning to love less. Rebekah wished she could bottle the glorious nature of Australia and take a little home, to pour into the bath on a cold winter's night and bring herself back here.

She chuckled at the idea but couldn't lose the feeling that by gaining the joy of living on Brownsea – and ultimately meeting Paul – she'd lost so much by leaving behind the Australian landscape and weather that she loved so much. She wouldn't change anything, she realised, but there was an acceptance of loss to be considered even in what she had gained.

The next morning at breakfast, Paul and Rebekah showed her mum all the documents in the folder that they'd found on Peggy.

‘Are you allowed to have these with you?' Helen asked. ‘Shouldn't they be in some official records somewhere?'

‘By rights they should be, yes, but where we found them, they had no business being. So nobody is missing them. In time, I expect I'll get them sent to the British Airways archivist, if they think it worthwhile. But we're not hurting anyone by having them here. And besides, the whole problem is that these papers really don't tell us anything,' Paul explained.

‘We want to give the letter to Darrell Taylor, Mum. It was written for him – and was meant to be given to him on Peggy's death, which it seemed she imagined was going to occur during the war. So, now she's gone, we're doing the right thing by delivering it. And I'm hopeful he might have some clues about exactly what she got up to during the war, and whether they had any relationship afterwards.'

‘Whatever it was she did, you can bet she did it with gumption,' said Helen, as she got up to answer the phone.

She came back a few moments later looking stunned.

‘It's for you Rebekah – a Mr Darrell Taylor,' she said with meaning, and Rebekah had to stop herself running to the phone.

When she came back to the others, she was glowing.

‘He wants to meet us. He was shocked, but he remembers Peggy very well, and is interested to read the letter. We're invited to go there today for morning tea.'