The Last Anniversary (28 page)

W
hat if Connie and Rose killed Alice and Jack
together
? What if they stabbed them, their innocent young-girl faces ravaged with hatred while blood splattered, the marble cake baked and the baby slept? It’s early Saturday morning, the seventy-third Anniversary of Alice and Jack’s disappearance, and Sophie wakes up in Connie’s bed with this thought clear and horrible in her head. Perhaps that is the family secret.

For some reason, instead of feeling happily intrigued by anything to do with the Alice and Jack mystery, today she feels not exactly frightened, but unsettled, a little nervy. For the first time she isn’t thinking of it as a story to enjoy, to puzzle over, but as something that really happened to real flesh-and-blood people, younger than Sophie, who most probably didn’t want to die, thank you very much.

And if Connie and Rose
did
kill them…well, it wasn’t very nice, was it? They’d made fools of everyone for all this time. They’d also made quite a lot of money out of their cover-up. It has been interesting to see the Alice and Jack business up close. Sophie has come to realise how cleverly they’ve developed the island so that everything looks charmingly comfy–never too slick. Visitors are given the carefully calibrated impression that the Alice and Jack house is a sweet family-run museum only opened as a generous favour to the public so they can share and marvel in this unusual history. Sophie herself had that impression, before she moved here. Now she knows that every possible opportunity to relieve people of their money is ever so sweetly exploited. There’s nothing illegal or even especially underhand about it, of course. It’s just the entrepreneurial spirit. It’s good business. It’s just that if it’s all based on a murder, it’s actually quite evil.

Sophie doesn’t like the way her mind is heading. It’s that same heart-sinking sensation you get a few weeks or months into a new relationship when you discover to your horror that your amazing new lover actually has a
fault
! Not just a sweet, quirky flaw but a really horrible fault, like the fact that the slow, methodical way he has of checking the bill actually indicates intense stinginess and it’s not adorable at all–how could it ever have been adorable?–it’s bloody ANNOYING. Sophie hates it when that happens.

She throws back her quilt and walks across the floorboards in her flannelette pyjamas to the window to watch the early morning shimmery haze above the river. It looks like a religious painting at this time of the morning. She doesn’t want to fall out of love with the island, with her life, her new family.

But the other night, when she was out with the girls, for the first time she’d caught herself thinking wistfully about how she used to just hop in a cab and be home at her old flat in less than twenty minutes, instead of the long, rattling train trip followed by the boat trip across the water in the frosty moonlight.

Oh, but look at that view. It’s worth some inconvenience.

This is the point in a relationship when you begin the process of carefully deluding yourself.

Tonight she will be selling pink fairy floss dressed up in a pink fairy dress complete with tiara and glittery wings. Apparently there are quite good margins in fairy floss.

Sophie makes tea in Connie’s ceramic teapot. (Enigma saw her making tea with a teabag once and said sadly, ‘Oh, darling, please don’t do that’, as if she’d caught a child picking their nose.)

As she waits for the kettle to boil she finds herself tentatively massaging her stomach. She’s still got that feeling of apprehension she had when she first woke up. But why? Tonight will be fun. Tonight will be
great
!

Is she nervous about being the Fairy Floss Fairy? For heaven’s sake, no. She’ll love it.

Is she nervous because both the Sweet Solicitor and the Gorgeous Gardener have said they’ll be coming tonight? Not really. She’s only been on one date with each of them. She’s not exactly two-timing them. Besides which, Rick will be working–apparently he does a
fire-eating
performance–and Ian is just stopping by for a while before he has to go off to some family function. So there shouldn’t be time for any awkwardness. Also, in her mind she tends to sort of amalgamate Ian and Rick into the one sweet, gorgeous gardener/solicitor. She’s not nervous about them. They’re both
lovely.

No, it’s something to do with that picture in her head of Connie and Rose wielding knives. And it’s something to do with Callum. And Grace. And how much she wanted to kiss Callum in the bathroom the other night and the expression on Grace’s face when they came back into the living room, as if she knew exactly how much.

Rose is dreaming that a slimy, silver, flapping fish is trying to hug her. She wakes up with her arms wrapped around an icy-cold flaccid hot-water bottle and cries out in disgust and shoves it away from her. You horrible, vile thing!

For a few seconds she lies there trembling with disgust, and then finally she forces herself to smile. Only a dream.

She rolls over–oh, how everything
aches
first thing in the morning. Nobody knows what an effort of will it requires for Rose to just get out of bed each day. She has to give herself a pep talk. ‘Come on. You can do it. One leg. Second leg. That’s it!’ There should be a daily award ceremony.
Congratulations on your achievement, Rose Doughty, you overcame terrible pain and got out of bed. Hooray!

Still, there’s no need to get up just yet; she’s not going swimming this morning. There always comes a point in winter where one day the water just gets so laughably icy that it’s time to stop until spring. Sophie had clasped her hands together in prayer and said ‘Thank you, God’ when Rose had told her there would be no more swimming.

It’s the Anniversary,
again.
It is astounding to believe that there are seventy-three years between this day and that day. Year after year after year. She can remember it clearer than things that happened much later. What did she do in the Seventies, for example? Nothing much that Rose could recall. That whole decade seemed to have taken about a week to live through. She remembered she’d liked the fashions. Colourful. And the children had been such a pleasure. Thomas used to sit on her lap for hours, sucking his thumb. Veronika, trotting around behind her, asking question after question after question. And Grace, painting in companionable silence beside her. Sometimes Rose would reach over and take her little paint-spattered hand and kiss her knuckles. Grace was never one for cuddles.

The way Rose had felt about those three was somehow different from the exasperated affection she had for their mothers, Margie and Laura, those golden-haired Misses with their big blue eyes and sticky, greedy rosebud mouths, who were both in love with their daddy anyway. And it was different again from what she’d felt for their grandmother. Rose’s love for Enigma had always been interlaced with fear:
What if we do something wrong? What if they take her away? What if they find out?
But with Thomas, Veronika and Grace it had just been unadulterated, besotted love. Sometimes she was filled with such love for them it felt almost mystical, almost sexual, almost enough to make it seem the point of…everything.

She reaches up one hand and pulls aside the lace curtain on her window. The sudden flood of sunshine makes her blink. The Anniversary is more often than not a beautiful day, which Rose always feels is a little fraudulent, an inaccurate representation of the actual day itself, which had been a Gothic sort of day, all grey, brooding skies, a howling icy wind whipping the gum trees back and forth, the river murky and choppy. Rose can still see Connie standing at her bedroom door, wearing red mittens and a scarf their mother had knitted, wrapped around her neck to just under her mouth. Rose could tell she had woken up with one of her earaches by the way she was holding her head tilted to one side. She was all snappy. ‘This is your last chance to change your mind, Rose. After today, we can’t go back. Ever.’ But Rose hadn’t been able to speak or move, she was trapped at the bottom of a very deep, very dark mineshaft and she didn’t know how to claw her way out. She thought she was going to be there forever. She hadn’t said a word. She’d had nothing to say. Connie’s face had clenched with irritation and she’d said, ‘Right. Well, we’re doing it then.’ And they’d done it.

And in the blink of an eye seventy-three years had passed.

And now, tonight, some man, some ‘kook’ who saw Veronika’s silly advertisement will be on the island, saying that he’s related to Alice and Jack Munro! It makes Rose want to laugh and it simultaneously makes her want to cry. It gives her a trembly feeling of fear and at the same time it gives her a pleasantly uplifting feeling of rage.

It really is time to get up.

The audience holds its breath in anticipation as that brave battler, Rose Doughty, overcomes horrendous pain yet again to arise from her bed.

Enigma does not dream. Veronika has told her that everybody dreams, they just don’t remember it. This is nonsense. Veronika is always talking
such
nonsense. If Enigma dreamed, she’d remember it. She has an excellent memory. It’s not fair that she doesn’t dream. Her husband Nathaniel used to have long, complicated dreams which he always wanted to tell her about over breakfast. It was very boring pretending to listen to him. She used to sigh a lot to try and give him the hint, but he didn’t take any notice, just kept droning on.

Well, here she is all alone on the Anniversary morning with nobody to bring her so much as a cup of tea in bed. She is a lonely old widow, sitting here in her bed, which is so sad, like something in a Grace Kelly movie. She sniffs experimentally.

Actually, the truth is she doesn’t miss Nathaniel all that much. It’s nice having all the extra space in bed and keeping the electric blanket turned up so high that she can wear her summer nightie. She’d never actually meant to marry him. There were plenty of other livelier fellows who would have suited her better than Nathaniel, with his hangdog face, always loping around behind her. Always just
there.
She’d accidentally said yes to his proposal. It was because all her friends were always going on about what a nice boy he was–so sweet, so clever–so she thought she’d look silly if she said no. It was just like when she went shopping with Connie and Rose and they told her that red polo-neck top looked so good on her, she’d be mad not to buy it. So she bought it, against her better judgement, and sure enough, did she ever wear it? Not once! It just sat there hanging in the cupboard. Nathaniel was just like that red polo-neck top. A mistake. But you couldn’t keep your receipt and exchange your husband, could you? No, you were stuck with him. Well, you were back then. Today they just divorced each other at the drop of a hat. Look at Veronika. Married for all of five minutes. Enigma had given her a very expensive iron as a wedding present. Did she get it back? No siree.

She pushes back the covers and slips her feet into fluffy pink slippers, which Laura once said looked like something Barbara Cartland would wear. This should have been a compliment but Laura made it sound like an insult, which was confusing. Enigma doesn’t really understand Laura a lot of the time. She supposes she is clever. Mothers aren’t meant to have favourites but how can they not, when one child is so much nicer to you than the other one? Enigma has taken care not to treat Margie like her favourite daughter, but she is of course, and she should be grateful for that and she should certainly not be abandoning her mother on such an important day as the Anniversary. It’s hurtful.

The house is warm and toasty as she walks to the kitchen because she kept the heating on all night. Nathaniel would have had a fit. But as she was always trying to tell him, he was married to a
celebrity.
Enigma was a celebrity, just like Barbara Cartland, and she was also quite rich, just like Barbara Cartland, so why should she have to shiver on cold winter mornings?

She’s going to have a smoked-salmon omelette for breakfast, made with King Island cream, her treat to celebrate the Anniversary. Seeing as nobody else cares about her, she’ll just have to look after herself. When she was a child she always got a special gift and breakfast on the Anniversary. It was like her birthday but even better because she was the Star of the Day. Rose made her a special new dress to wear, and the night before she wore rags in her hair to curl it. She looked just like a little princess and the ladies who visited the island all wanted to hug and kiss her even more than usual. ‘You poor, poor darling!’ they’d cry, sweeping her into scented arms. And Enigma would cry with them, thinking, ‘I
am
a poor darling!’ and that would make them cry even harder, thinking she was crying for her vanished mummy and daddy. This was sort of true, but not in the way they thought. Enigma’s greatest fear had been that her real parents would come back to claim her and take her away from Rose and Connie and Jimmy. Every Anniversary morning she woke up terrified that this might be the day Alice and Jack would turn up, saying, ‘Right. We’ll have her back now, thanks very much!’ And they wouldn’t know her favourite foods, or how she needed to have her hair brushed as light as a feather, or her back washed upways, not crossways, or how to tuck the blanket under her neck, or anything important about her!

When Connie and Rose had told her the truth about Alice and Jack on her fortieth birthday, that had been the part that made her really very cross. All those years thinking that Alice and Jack might turn up and steal her away when there was as much chance of that happening as Santa Claus turning up on the island! It was virtually child abuse!

‘But you never told us you were worried about that!’ Rose had looked quite upset, as well she should have.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Rose, we spoiled the child rotten!’ Connie hadn’t been at all sympathetic.