The Tying of Threads (40 page)

‘Finish
Molly
,’ Amy had said. ‘Finish it in your own inimitable way, Jennifer.’

It was Jim’s book. He’d spent years writing and rewriting it. Four publishers had rejected it and the last time it came back he had tossed it into the wood box.

‘Light the fire with it,’ he’d said.

The manuscript spent one night with the chips and kindling. She’d attempted to crumple a page to use as a firelighter. Couldn’t crumple that anonymous poem, or any one of his pages. She knew the work, the hope that had gone into it, some of it her own, so she’d bundled it into a supermarket bag and taken it and the dogs for a walk down to the McPhersons’.

Her first teacher, Amy, her singing teacher and accompanist, her best friend and a hard editor. They’d gone through those pages together, had burnt many and added many more. Their secret this last twelve months, their private game.

Missed her, and on that gut-wrenching, soul-destroying morning when they carried her from the church, Jenny couldn’t follow the coffin out. She sang ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ while the church cleared, and when it cleared, she escaped out the side door and went home to her dogs, who comforted her while she cried her heart out.

She fetched their leads when the men returned. John removed his suit jacket and tie and walked with her, the dogs wriggling with the pleasure of his company, and craving Amy’s they turned towards the bridge. Too many times Jenny had walked them that way to Amy. Not today. She turned them towards the school.

‘He’s such a shy boy,’ Amy used to say of John, but he spoke that day, to the dogs and to Jenny, he spoke of the retirement units being built down the bottom end of the school road, six single-bedroom brick units, built wall to wall on a block where Mrs Owen had lived and died. Two units were nearing completion. He spoke of buying into one, or into the Willama retirement units.

To Jenny the units looked like prison cells. ‘Give yourself time,’ she said.

A bad week followed before Lorna’s body was released for burial. Jim brought her home to the vacant plot beside Vern’s grave. It was the right thing to do. Had Lorna been born a male, she would have been the son Vern Hooper had wanted at his side.

It was a better attended funeral than Amy’s. Many of the old brigade were there, not for Lorna, who in her lifetime had endeared herself to no one, but for the memory of Vern and the notoriety of her death. Jenny was there only for Jim, and for that wisp of hope that Jimmy would come home to bury his aunt. He didn’t.

Jim’s hand was well shaken that day. Jenny’s remained firmly on her handbag. A few women who couldn’t get to Jim offered her their condolences. She could have used them in ’47. She was there only to make certain that the hole had been dug deep enough, and when Bill O’Brien told Jim that Vern would never be dead while Jim was alive, it was time to go. Jenny had spent the past thirty years denying that there was a skerrick of Hooper in Jim.

There was. Age has a habit of bringing to the fore family resemblances. Jim’s steel-grey wire hair was his father’s, as was his long jaw, and he’d always had his father’s hands, though Vern’s had been broadened by the heavy labour of his youth and Jim’s refined by his years of typing. He walked with a limp, as had Vern, though only after he’d had his stroke.

Two couples had driven up from Melbourne to pay their last respects to Lorna, Jim’s cousin Ian and his wife Lorris, and an elderly couple who introduced themselves as Martin and Mary Leeds; Martin was the former minister of the church Lorna had attended.

‘Your sister’s absence would have been noticed in our time there,’ he said. ‘She and her companion never missed a Sunday in their pew.’ He looked to be ninety and his wife looked as old. Jenny asked them back to the house for lunch. She’d already invited Jim’s cousin and his wife.

They were leaving the cemetery. They were outside the gate when Lorna got in her last hit from the grave. Dust, flicked up by a breeze, landed in Jenny’s eye. A finger or handkerchief raised to remove it might suggest she’d shed a tear for Lorna and, a terrible death or not, let no one believe that Jenny had shed a tear for the woman. She drove home with dust in her eye.

Trudy removed it. She’d come home because of Lorna’s will.
To my niece, Gertrude Juliana Hooper, I leave my all.

‘Why me, Mum?’ Trudy asked again. ‘She didn’t even know me.’

That will had set Jenny back on her heels. Lorna had seen Trudy once in her life. They’d collided in the entrance hall, back in the mid-sixties. Trudy, a three year old at the time, couldn’t remember the collision but had retained an image of a black-clad witch sitting on their floor, showing her knee-length bloomers. It was the first time she’d seen such bloomers. She remembered the haunted house where she’d been taken that night, and that’s all she remembered.

‘Why me, and not Dad?’

‘She didn’t approve of his choice of wife,’ Jenny said.

‘I’m not even her blood.’

‘As far as she knew, you were her father’s granddaughter.’

‘Why not Jimmy? You said they’d adopted him.’

‘Lorna’s sister adopted him and gained control of the Hooper estate. That time you collided with Lorna, she’d come up here wanting your dad to go to court to stop the sale of the Monk portion of the land the haunted house was built on.’

‘Dad’s family owned Monk’s?’

‘They did for a lot of years.’

‘What’s Lorna’s house like?’

‘Brick, tiled roof, high fence and a tramline half a dozen houses away.’

‘Kew is a good area. It could be worth a lot of money. Georgie and Paul paid over a hundred thousand for a house way out at Greensborough,’ Trudy said. ‘When did you see her house?’

‘Back in the fifties.’

Jenny sliced lettuce and tomatoes, Trudy worked at her side, efficient in the kitchen. She’d spent much of her early life at Jenny’s elbow.

‘I’d feel like such a fraud if I took her money, Mum.’

‘It’s yours, darlin’, to do with what you will.’

They served their guests in the dining room, served a ham salad followed by trifle, Trudy’s specialty. Ian Hooper spoke of Lorna, whom he hadn’t seen in three years though he’d heard from her more recently. Martin Leeds, Lorna’s executor, who had last seen Lorna three months ago, told them that both he and his wife had suggested Miss Hooper sell her home and move into a church-run retirement home.

‘It was obvious to us that she wasn’t managing alone,’ he said.

‘Your sister was a very determined woman,’ his wife said.

‘However, one had to respect her desire for independence,’ Martin said.

The visitors left in convoy. John closed the gate and released the dogs, who chased the scent of strangers to the gate where they warned them not to return. John raised his voice and they came to his side, heads and tails down. They were more than half human, and if it was possible to fall in love with middle-aged dogs, Jenny had fallen hard. Vern Hooper’s garden belonged to them and for Jenny, they’d altered its character – and its scent.

They spoke of Lorna’s house that night, Trudy wavering between signing it over to the church and selling it as it stood and donating the money to charity. It was not in a saleable condition, according to Sammy, Maisy’s grandson. He’d suggested Jim hire professional cleaners – with shovels and a truck. He’d offered the name and phone number of such a company. Jenny wanted to call them. Jim wanted the old Hooper documents he’d handled in his youth.

‘If any of them have survived, they’ll be in Lorna’s house,’ he said.

‘I’m not going anywhere near that place, Jim.’

Trudy went near it. She phoned on Friday. ‘Tell Dad I’ve got Monday and Tuesday off next week and that I’ll give him a hand to find what he wants before I get in the cleaners. It’s chaos, Mum. Sophie and I had a quick look through it, and you’ve never seen such a mess in your life.’

Then Georgie rang. ‘Trude said that you don’t want to leave John on his own up there.’

He’d moved home before Lorna’s funeral, his means of evading any obligation to attend, though he spent little time in that empty house. He ate at Jenny’s table, walked the dogs with her, and there was no way Jenny would leave him or her dogs to search Lorna’s house for Hooper history.

‘We’re a long way from Kew,’ Georgie said, ‘but we’ve got two spare rooms and a spare bathroom between them. Tell John he’s more than welcome to one.’

‘I can’t leave the dogs, love,’ Jenny said.

‘Harry will feed them.’

‘His leg might. They don’t like him. I’ll try the Willama kennels and get back to you, Georgie.’

She wanted to stay at Greensborough. She’d heard about Georgie’s house but had never seen it. In recent years she’d seen too little of Georgie, and as for Paul Dunn, he’d been up here twice, briefly. She might have spoken ten words to him and heard ten back.

On the phone half an hour later, she was discussing immunisations, unaware dogs had immunisations, and she didn’t have a clue whether old Joe’s dogs had been immunised or not. Knowing him, probably not, and the kennel wouldn’t take her dogs until they’d had their shots, and how was she supposed to get them down to Willama to have their shots—

John tapped her on the shoulder. ‘I’ll look after the dogs,’ he said.

T
hey left John, installed again in the rear room, the refrigerator full of easy meals for him and the dogs. He’d done most of the food preparation this past year and, unlike Jim, wasn’t useless in a kitchen. Left him on the Sunday morning, a dog at each heel. Hoped he’d be okay.

‘We’ll phone you tonight,’ Jenny called.

With the aid of a Melway’s directory, they found Georgie’s street, and eventually her house, a brown brick with a terracotta tiled roof, triple fronted, relatively modern but with a narrow drive, where by seven that evening, five vehicles were parked nose to tail. Trudy was spending the night in Georgie’s second spare bedroom, and before the morning traffic was too heavy, she’d guide Jim via an easy route across town to Kew.

The house woke at six and by seven thirty four of the five vehicles had cleared the drive, leaving Georgie’s old ute to stand alone, and Jenny to wait alone in a strange house in a strange land. That Monday morning may have been the longest of her life. She weeded the garden, made a pot of soup out of what she could find – and she couldn’t find much. She baked a lemon cake to use up a few of the stockpiled eggs. Could find no icing sugar, and had used most of Georgie’s butter in the cake.

The keys to the ute hung on a hook beside the fridge. Georgie now drove a cream Datsun and went to work in a business suit. She didn’t look like Jenny’s Georgie. She looked like half of a business couple, and Jenny felt out of place in that couple’s house. Wanting out of it, she took the ute keys from their hook, locked the back doors, deadlocked the front door behind her and walked down to the ute. She’d seen shops on a corner when they’d driven in yesterday. She’d find them.

The ute coughed. It coughed, caught, shuddered then died. She persevered until the battery died. Locked it and looked at her watch. She still had almost five hours to fill before the workers came home. Reversing her actions, she unlocked the front door and phoned a taxi. Waited twenty minutes for it to arrive, then told the driver that she needed to go to a big supermarket somewhere. Should have been more specific. He took her touring for miles, then pulled into a rank out front of a huge enclosed centre where she spent the next half-hour searching for a supermarket.

Dangerous things, supermarkets. They offer you a massive trolley and somehow you manage to fill it. And she got lost on the way back to the taxi rank.

Taxi drivers used to open their door for passengers. There were three lined up waiting for a fare. She opened the rear door of the first in line, tossed in three bags, propped the trolley against a no parking sign and crawled into the taxi with the last two bags.

‘Greensborough,’ she said, and she gave him Georgie’s address.

Smell of stranger in the taxi – of stale stranger sweat. She opened a window, just a little, considered lighting a cigarette, glanced at him, hoping the driver would light one and give her leave to. He didn’t. Dark greying hair, something familiar about the back of his head, or the way it was attached to his shoulders. She shrugged her own shoulders down and told herself that she was in Melbourne where one in ten people looked familiar. She’d seen a younger Maisy at the supermarket.

He knew the roads, or she hoped he did. She sat back, found the end of the seat belt beneath her shopping, buckled herself in then settled back to watch the traffic, pleased she was being driven and not driving in it.

It wasn’t only his hairline and neck that was familiar. She could see his left ear and she knew it.

Idiot, she thought. Ears all look the same.

But they don’t. Ears could be as different as eyes. Jim’s ears were big. John’s ears were small and the driver’s ear looked like . . .

She was being ridiculous. She’d last seen those ears in a courtroom, their wearer strapped into a wheelchair, oxygen bottles strapped to that chair. The driver wasn’t sucking on bottled oxygen.

She checked the money in her purse. Taxis were expensive these days. Back in the forties she’d caught one once from Spencer Street Station to Armadale and paid the driver a few coins – her last few coins, which back in those days would have fed her and her kids for a week. She’d empty her purse today. Supermarkets swallowed money.

Again her eyes were drawn to the driver’s ear. There was not much else she could see of him – his ear, his neck and his hairline. Wished he’d say something. Most taxi drivers wouldn’t shut up. This one hadn’t said a word. His concentration was on the road, as it should be, she told herself – and no longer believed herself. He’d recognised her when she’d walked out with her trolley. That’s why he hadn’t spoken.

His ear had no lobe. The first day Raelene brought him to the house, Jenny had spent a lot of time looking at that ear. Hadn’t liked it, or his eyes. If she could see his eyes, she’d know him. Determined to get a look at his eyes, his face, she moved her shopping bags, eased more of the seat belt free and slid a little towards the centre of the seat.