Death Delights (30 page)

‘Dad,’ I said, ‘I need to know about the Bowers. Mrs Bower.’

‘The new viruses,’ my father said. ‘They just keep getting bigger and better.’ He groped around for a science journal. ‘They’re smarter than we are. Much more adaptable. More flexible.’

Charlie looked up from the
New Scientist
he was skimming. He knew I was on to something and he was curious.

‘The Bowers,’ I repeated. ‘Mrs Bower. Tell me about her.’

‘Your sister used to like going over to the Bowers,’ he said. ‘She stayed over occasionally. She was a kind woman, Mrs Bower.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Sometimes she’d bring dinner down for you and’—his voice trembled only a little—‘your sister.’ He paused. ‘She knew about the situation here.’

My father used words like ‘situation’ to describe the awful grief and misery of ordinary family suffering. ‘What about the vicar?’ I said. ‘Reverend Bower?’

‘Never really got to know him,’ said my father. ‘He was a great gardener. Best roses in the district. That’s all I knew about him. I don’t hold with all that God business.’ He looked at me closely. ‘Why are you asking about them after all this time?’

‘And the children?’

‘They were never here,’ said my father. ‘Those youngsters went to boarding school. A girl about your age and a boy a bit older. Lived in Sydney most of the time with relatives. Don’t know what happened to them. There was some problem with the son.’ He snorted. ‘The vicar was such a snob. He didn’t want them mixing with
oi polloi
.’

It takes one snob to recognise another, I forbore remarking, remembering how my father used to enjoy demonstrating his superiority and speaking the phrase in Greek, rather than using the Anglicised ‘hoy polloy’.

‘Do you remember anything more?’ I insisted.

My father shook his head. ‘She was a beautiful girl, your mother. I don’t know what happened.’

‘She was an alcoholic,’ I said, suddenly angry at his vague denial. ‘That’s what happened.’ It was years since I’d thought of her death, the way she’d been lying in the house for days without anyone knowing. It was the way a lot of addicts went.

My father picked up the packet of tobacco beside his chair and started rolling a smoke. I watched the stained fingers deftly tap it into shape and I reached over and picked up the lighter and lit it for him. He looked startled.

‘Charlie thinks that certain things run in families,’ I said. My father grunted.

‘You could say that,’ he said, and I remembered the old contemptuous tone he used to pull out, when he couldn’t run away from a ‘situation’.

‘I’m not talking about genetics,’ I snapped. ‘The way I was brought up didn’t teach me what I needed to know to be a father. I’ve failed my children.’

‘We all fail our children,’ he said and his voice was hard. ‘So what are you going to do? Shoot me?’

I stood up and walked around a bit, letting the sudden anger dissipate. There were things I’d always wanted to say to him, ask him. Like, why didn’t you do anything to help us kids? Why did you just retreat and leave us to face the madwoman alone? But I was starting to see how I’d done much the same thing, leaving the kids with Genevieve, living in Canberra during the week. It wasn’t only about money. Living like that made things easier for me. I didn’t have to deal with family messes. I could avoid all that business. And Charlie was doing it in his way, too. He’d stayed single. He hadn’t married his commando girlfriend. Or any of his girlfriends.

‘And it’s easy for Charlie to say things like that,’ I said, referring to my earlier remarks, ‘because he hasn’t got any children and he’s not married. So he’s safe, in a way. He can stay safely untried. He’s not passing on the curse.’

‘Yet,’ said my brother.

My father’s face had flushed red beneath the translucent skin.

‘What curse?’ he said. ‘What are you going on about?’

Charlie threw down the journal whose pages he was flipping.

‘Why did you just turn your back on us?’ he asked. ‘Why did you leave Jack and Rosie and me alone with her?’

‘Your mother—’ he started to say.

‘Our mother was a sick alcoholic,’ said Charlie, ‘and shouldn’t have been let within coo-ee of any sensitive living thing.’ He was trying to keep it neutral, even light-hearted, but I could see the signs of strain in his face, hear the catch in his voice. I’d never seen my brother in this mood and I think I realised something more about projection in that moment as I heard Charlie voice the questions he’d always said I should ask. All the times Charlie had been pressing me to ‘do something’ about my relationship with our father, he was also speaking from his own need.

I turned back to my father. ‘They’re fair questions,’ I said.

Charlie had his back to us and seemed to be concentrating on the tassel of a threadbare cushion, as if the answers might have been there. ‘And what Jacko wants to say to you,’ said Charlie, ‘is that he’s failed as a husband and father because he didn’t know how it was done. On account of he only had’—Charlie swung around and pointed at my father’—
you
to teach him.’

The old man was staring at him, wide-eyed, cigarette forgotten on the ashtray.

‘Our sister ran away, Jack’s daughter ran away at the same age. He married a nightmare woman like you did. I’ve got a similar tale to tell. And now Jack’s living alone behind a house like you.’

I interrupted. ‘Not like him, Charlie.’ I shook my head again. ‘Not like him.’

There was a long silence. My father was staring into space, and his blue eyes seemed to be seeing something in the middle distance. The silence went on and on, punctuated only by the gurgling of the kero heater as it plopped from its tank into the mantle and the shrieking of black cockatoos. That was supposed to mean rain.

While my father relit the cigarette, I pulled out the photograph of the youth near the stone wall and passed it to him.

‘Do you know who that is?’ I asked.

My father studied it for a long time. Then he handed it back to me, shaking his head. ‘Maybe I knew once,’ he said, ‘but not any more. It’s not little Snotty Kirkwood, is it?’

I took the photograph and studied it again. I could see nothing familiar in the features. I remembered Snotty with a wide, snub-nosed face, not like the youth depicted here.

‘Why do you want to know?’ our father asked.

‘I’ve found a photograph of Rosie,’ I said, ‘taken just a few days before she disappeared. This one’s from the same series.’

My father squashed the narrow handmade cigarette out. ‘Maybe your mother took them, the photographs.’

I stared at him, incredulous. ‘The only things she was taking in those days, were scotch and valium.’ It was an absurd suggestion.

It was time to leave but I had one last question. ‘Bevan Treweeke,’ I said. ‘Does that name mean anything to you?’

My father shook his head. ‘Never heard of it. Why?’ It wasn’t a good question. My father wouldn’t have known anything much about what went on in our house by the time Rosie was taken. Our mother could have been renting the front parlour to Jack the Ripper and my father would’ve been none the wiser.

‘Come on, Jacko,’ said Charlie. ‘We’ve done what we had to do.’

Our father sat in silence, waiting for us to go. We left him in his chair, with his cigarettes and the stink of the kero heater and I was about to pull the door closed behind us when I heard his shuffling steps. I turned and saw that he was coming towards us, his mouth moving as if he were trying to speak. I stood there, transfixed, Charlie close behind me. Finally, my father made a noise like a cough and pulled his handkerchief out again.

‘My father was a miner,’ he said finally. ‘He left home when I was twelve. And the only thing I got from him was this scar on the side of my head. I thought that when I grew up, I’d know what to do. Well, I didn’t.’ Abruptly, he stopped, glared at me, then turned away.

My brother and I didn’t speak as we crunched down the driveway on our way back to the car. I was still thinking about what had happened back there in our father’s shed.

‘I suppose,’ Charlie said finally as he started up the ignition, ‘that he gave both of us a great desire to
know.
That’s something
.
’

I thought of our respective careers, both of them investigating human behaviour in their different ways, Charlie in the mind, me in the physical world. I turned to my brother as he drove. He was staring straight ahead and we drove in silence to the end of the street. ‘I want to go back to the rectory,’ I told Charlie. He turned with a slight smile. ‘I know you do,’ he said.

At the corner, Charlie stopped the car and we got out again, climbing back up to the top of the grassy bank in front of the rectory.

‘Maybe she was cleaning the windows at the back of the house,’ I said. Charlie shrugged and we both walked through the gates, with me leading, and up the path. I knocked on the front door and waited. An attractive woman with a warm smile opened the door, introduced herself as Mrs Veronica Bailey, and glanced down at my ID.

‘I hope there’s no problem,’ she said, looking past me to Charlie as he came up behind me.

‘Not for you, ma’am,’ I said. ‘Just a routine inquiry. I want to know if there are louvred windows anywhere at the back of this house.’

The woman looked even more surprised. ‘No,’ she said. ‘There’s a balcony at the back. No louvres. May I ask you why you want to know?’

‘We’re just checking some information received, ma’am. Misinformation, really. Sorry to disturb you.’ I thanked her and was about to rejoin Charlie. ‘I used to live in this street,’ I said, ‘when the Reverend Bower was the vicar.’

‘That was a long time ago,’ she said. ‘We’ve been here seven years, and the Driscolls were here for ages before that.’

‘Do you know where the Bowers went?’ I asked, ‘after Reverend Bower retired?’

She shook her head. ‘I’m afraid I can’t help you,’ she said. ‘I’m sure the office in Sydney would know, though. If you wanted to catch up.’ I heard a butcherbird calling and then I saw him fly over the garden to sit on the branch of a tree.

Mrs Bailey noticed. ‘That’s Bob,’ she said. ‘The butcherbird.’ As if on cue, the smart black and white bird started his melodious carolling. The three of us walked slowly across the wide front garden to get a better view. The phone started ringing from inside the house and Mrs Bailey excused herself and ran inside.

‘What are you up to?’ Charlie asked, strolling over to a sundial that stood near the vine-covered wall of the rectory garden.

‘I want to know why Mrs Bower lied in her statement,’ I said. ‘Let’s go and start looking for that stone wall in the photographs.’

Charlie straightened up from the sundial. ‘Those things never work,’ I said to him.

‘Look here,’ he suddenly said to me and his voice was charged with excitement. ‘Come over here.’ But it wasn’t the sundial he was talking about. I came up beside him to see that he was staring past it. With a deft movement, he pushed up a dense curtain of the flowering clematis. And there it was, underneath the thick vine, running along the eastern side of the rectory building, a stone wall, with a wrought-iron grille. I stood there, amazed. Then I pulled out the photograph and tried matching it up. I looked from the photograph to the wall.

Gradually, things became clear. When certain patches of mosses and ferns were disregarded, and allowances made for the inevitable shifting of the years, the area of wall I was looking at seemed to be the section I could see in the photograph.

Then I felt the sting of disappointment. The sundial should be there, or part of it, because of the angle of the shot. ‘Damn,’ I said to Charlie. ‘There’s no sundial.’

Charlie came back and looked at the photograph. Then he looked at the wall again. He went over to the sundial and examined it. He straightened up again and beckoned me over.

‘Look,’ he said. Stamped in the metal was the date 1975. ‘You’re supposed to be the detective, dill-brain,’ he said. ‘It was a while ago. The sundial wasn’t here when this photo was taken. Just leave it out and look straight across from where you are now.’

I did. It was a perfect match.

‘She was here,’ I said. ‘Rosie stood here, wearing her necklace, while someone took that shot.’

I positioned myself in the place and looked back at Charlie. No cloud darkened the sun, no chill wind lifted vines. Nothing happened to suggest I was treading on sacred, dangerous ground. Just the warm summer day and the butcherbird singing. I looked up and there he was, perched in the upper reaches of a tall yellow gum, in his neat black and white suit, turning his six-note remarks.

Half an hour later, Charlie and I walked through the country cemetery with its peaceful gums and saplings. It took us a while to find our mother’s grave. There was only a limestone header with her name and dates on the double grave site. Charlie looked around. ‘Not a bad place to end up,’ he said. I looked past the weathered tombstones and rusting iron railings to where an ancient Clydesdale and a fat pony grazed on a hillside.

‘I want to find Rosie,’ I said, ‘and bury her properly. I want to have a place like this to come and sit beside sometimes, and just do nothing.’

We hung around the graveyard, reading the Victorian epitaphs.

‘I need to find her,’ I said, ‘and bring her here. Put her to rest. That way it somehow makes up for something.’ I looked around the peaceful resting place of the dead. ‘I know I’m not making much sense.’

Charlie looked concerned. ‘I didn’t know,’ he said, ‘that that sort of thing was important to you.’

‘It’s not, really,’ I said. ‘But I failed her. I was her big brother and I failed her. I should have run after her and brought her back to the house that evening.’

‘Chrissakes, Jack,’ said Charlie. ‘You were
fifteen.’

We drove back to Sydney, stopping for lunch at a chintzy little café just before Emu Plains. I ordered a toasted bacon and egg sandwich. Again, I had that odd sensation that something was staring me in the face and I wasn’t seeing it. Something to do with bacon and eggs.

‘Tell me why you think people lie,’ Charlie asked, interrupting my strange preoccupation.