The Last Anniversary (3 page)

(Excerpt from ‘The Munro Baby Mystery
’,
a DL-sized brochure printed in four colours on celloglazed 150 gsm stock and handed to every visitor to Alice and Jack’s house on Scribbly Gum Island, Sydney, Australia.)

Welcome
to the mysterious ‘frozen in time’ home of Alice and Jack Munro! Look, be intrigued, but please
do not touch
! It’s
vital
that we preserve our historical integrity. This home, built in 1901, has not been touched since teenage sisters Connie and Rose Doughty stopped by for a cup of tea with their neighbours on 15 July 1932. They discovered the kettle about to boil, a freshly baked marble cake waiting to be iced, and a tiny baby waking for her feed–but
no sign
of her parents, Alice and Jack Munro.

The only clues that violence may have taken place were a few drops of dried blood on the kitchen floor and one upturned chair. (Please do not attempt to look under the chair.) The bodies of Alice and Jack have
never
been found, and over seventy years later their disappearance remains one of
Australia’s most famous unsolved mysteries.

The sisters, Connie and Rose, took the tiny baby home and reared her as their own child. They named her Enigma–you can guess why! Connie, Rose and little Enigma (now a Grandma Enigma!) are all still residents of Scribbly Gum Island, as are Enigma’s two daughters, Margaret and Laura, and their families.

Note: For obvious health and hygiene reasons the cooling marble cake you will see during your tour is not the original cake but actually a freshly baked one, made to Alice’s delicious original recipe. Enjoy a complimentary piece after your tour!

G
race Tidyman is dreaming. Her eyelids twitch irritably. It’s one of those frustrating, muddled dreams.

Aunt Connie is really cross with her. She’s pouring Grace a cup of tea from her blue china teapot and snapping, ‘Of course I’m not dead! Where did you get that idea?’ Grace is floundering, trying to remember why she thought such a thing. Suddenly, to Grace’s horror, Aunt Connie puts down her teapot, throws back her head and begins to wail with a scrunched-up face like a baby. Grace puts her hands over her ears even though she knows she’s being very rude, but she can’t bear to hear that gruesome baby-cry coming from Aunt Connie’s mouth. The sound keeps going on and on and on. ‘I’m sorry!’ screams Grace. She feels angry, astonishingly angry, with Connie. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings! I thought you were dead!’

‘Grace? He’s crying. Will I get him for you?’

‘Mmmmm. What? Oh. Yes. OK. Good.’

Grace feels her husband leave the bed. She squashes her fingers hard into the sockets of her closed eyes and pushes herself up into a sitting position.

Aunt Connie
is
dead, she remembers. She died yesterday.

She hears her son’s sharp wail and Callum’s voice. ‘You hungry, mate?’

She snaps on the lamp and winces at the yellow spotlight. Her arms in front of her, resting on the duvet, look strange in the light, as though they’re not hers. She thinks of that American rock climber who had to chop off his own arm after he was trapped by a boulder. She imagines sawing diligently away at her own flesh, snapping her own hard, white, bloody bone: escaping.

Callum appears with the baby in the crook of his arm.

Grace thinks, Please just go away, and says, ‘Come here, sweetie.’

‘I
’m positive I remember her saying that she wanted to be buried in that lovely burgundy suit she wore to Grace’s wedding.’

‘Enigma, you are a terrible fibber.’

‘But I remember it quite clearly! It was that day we went to that Legacy luncheon. I complimented her on the suit and she said something about wearing it to her funeral.’

‘She said she was wearing it to Molly Trasker’s funeral, not her
own
! I can remember her saying that she didn’t see the point in wearing anything at all. She said it was a waste of good fabric. “I came into the world naked, I’ll leave it that way too.” That’s what she said.’

‘She was joking, Rose! You can’t bury your own sister in the
nude
!’

‘Why not? It would give her a good laugh.’

Margie Gordon listens to her mother and Aunt Rose bicker while she cuts almond cake to have with their cups of tea. She gives herself a small piece for comfort and motivation. It’s difficult sticking to a diet when you’ve got a big, complicated funeral to arrange. Margie feels quite overwhelmed when she thinks about everything she will have to do over the next few days. She needs a tiny sugar burst.

‘I expect Connie has it written down somewhere what she wants to wear,’ she says to them as she pours tea. ‘You know how organised she is.’

She
was.
Oh my goodness, fancy there being a world without Connie. It seems as though everything on the island will surely fall apart without Connie’s iron-hard certainty, her irrefutable opinions, her snap-fast decisions. Margie feels a sea-sick sensation at the thought. How will they cope without her?

It had been a nasty shock finding Connie’s body yesterday morning, her face sickly grey against the pillow, her eyes glassy slits, her forehead ice-cold under Margie’s palm. For a moment she’d had to fight a childish desire to run away and find a grown-up, but of course
she
was the grown-up, over fifty years old and a grandmother to boot, so she had to ‘bite the bullet’, as they say, and take care of things.

‘Pale blue always suits Connie.’ Rose’s age-spotted hand trembles badly as she lifts her teacup. ‘Not too pale, of course.’

Rose looks awfully frail today, worries Margie. Even her beautiful peach-coloured cardigan is buttoned up wrongly, which is unlike Rose.

‘You’d think Connie would have mentioned what she wanted to wear when she brought around all that minestrone soup,’ says Margie’s mother, Enigma. Her eyes are shiny with tears, but her grey hair is so bouncy, her cheeks so pink with good health, it seems almost disrespectful to Connie. ‘“Put it straight in the freezer, Enigma,” she said, and I said, “Goodness, Connie, what are we stocking up for? Are you going away?” I didn’t know we were stocking up for her blooming death, did I?’

The three women fall quiet, and Margie feels grief wrap its lethargic arms around them, making their shoulders slump.

‘Thomas is going to see Sophie tonight,’ she says.

‘That’s good,’ says Rose. ‘I wonder what she’ll say.’

‘Maybe they’ll get back together!’ says Enigma brightly, conveniently forgetting Thomas’s wife and new baby.

‘Oh
Mum,
don’t be so
ridiculous,
’ snaps Margie, because she wishes that too.

I
n fact, Thomas doesn’t seem in the least smug, and the first few minutes of their meeting at the Regent are surprisingly pleasant–considering that the last time Sophie had seen him he was handing her a laundry basket in which he’d collected every gift, letter and card she’d ever given him throughout their relationship.

Sophie asks him about his baby girl and Thomas speaks with quiet pride and joy. It is obvious that he is very happy. He is so happy he probably doesn’t need to be smug. He is beyond smug.

Listening to him talk, doing an imitation of the ‘grrr’ and ‘meow’ sounds that Lily brilliantly makes whenever she sees a dog or a cat (‘
without
any prompting whatsoever!’), Sophie realises that she will always love Thomas, a little.

But she also realises, as she observes the slight suggestion of a well-fed double chin, that breaking up with him is not, after all, the biggest mistake of her life. She doesn’t want to be Deborah at home with pretty, growling, meowing baby Lily. She really doesn’t. She would rather be single, desperate-for-a-man Sophie. This revelation makes her feel euphoric with relief and she takes a handful of peanuts and settles back in her chair, ready to enjoy all the things she used to like about Thomas.

Finally, he gets down to business.

‘So, as I said on the phone, Aunt Connie died yesterday.’

‘Yes, I’m very sorry,’ says Sophie. ‘She was such a sweet lady.’ She’d actually found Aunt Connie ever so slightly terrifying, but now she is dead ‘sweet’ seems an appropriate description.

Thomas clears his throat. ‘The reason I needed to see you is because I’ve been through her paperwork and it seems that Aunt Connie has left you something in her will.’

‘Oh! Gosh. That’s unexpected.’

Sophie feels awkward. Nobody has ever left her anything in a will before, and it seems to her that if someone is going to do something so thoughtful it is only courteous to be devastated by their death. Ideally she should be crushed, red-eyed and sniffly, clutching a soggy hanky. She should certainly be a few levels higher up the grieving stakes than ‘a little sad’. At the same time, she is flattered and even–she hates to admit it–a bit covetous, wondering if it is something nice, perhaps an antique plate, or a lovely old-fashioned piece of jewellery.

She says, trying not to sound too interested, ‘So, what exactly did she leave me?’

Thomas places his drink down squarely on its coaster and meets her eyes. ‘She left you her house.’

‘Her
house
?’

‘Yep, her house.’

‘Her house on Scribbly Gum Island?’

‘That’s the one.’

Sophie is staggered. Her ex-boyfriend’s aunt, a woman she barely knew, has left her a
house
. A beautiful house. An extraordinary house.

It is very inappropriate and it is probably, somehow, her fault.

So she blushes.

Of course she blushes. Sophie is a blusher. It isn’t cute or funny. It’s a disorder. It even has a name: ‘Idiopathic Craniofacial Erythema’, or ‘severe facial blushing’. Her blush isn’t a petal-pink virginal stain stealing disarmingly up her neck; it’s a burning, blotchy, all-enveloping beetroot, a phenomenon which is impossible for even the most tactful person to ignore, or the least observant person to miss. Her fair skin doesn’t help. Like fine porcelain, her mother says proudly, as if she’d purchased her complexion at David Jones. Like a corpse, her friend Claire says.

She’s been blushing since she was seven. She knows this because she can remember her first blush. Her mother had dropped her off at school and Sophie was trotting into the playground when she heard the toot of a horn and turned to see her mum leaning out of the car window waving her teddy bear and calling, ‘Sophie, darling, did you remember to kiss Teddy goodbye?!’ A dozen kids witnessed this profoundly humiliating incident, including Bruno Tripodopolous, the most glamorously wicked boy in her class. (Twelve years later she dated Bruno for two weeks, during which time they had a lot of vigorous sex and only spoke when absolutely necessary. Even when she was seven, before she knew what sex was, some part of her must have known that Bruno would be good at it.) When Sophie heard Bruno making smacking sounds with his lips she was shattered. Her face went boiling-hot purple. Bruno stopped snickering and looked at her with scientific interest, calling over his friends to ‘Come check out what’s happened to Sophie’s head!’ Her mother instantly grasped the enormity of her error and quickly withdrew Teddy from the car window, but it was too late. Sophie was thenceforth a blusher.

‘What colour is red?’ the boys used to yell, squashing their cheeks together like gargoyles. ‘Sophie’s face, Sophie’s face!’ ‘Oh, poor Sophie is
embarrassed
,’ the girls would snigger with fake sympathy. ‘Poor Sophie is
shy
.’ For the rest of that year she spent every recess and lunchtime hidden under the tuckshop stairs with another outcast, a boy called Eddie Ripple, who had a horrendous facial twitch. They were the school ‘retards’, until Eddie left and Sophie, in the same way that fat kids learn to be funny, learned to be extremely social and eventually became popular, so much so that she was voted school captain in high school. She can now walk straight into a cocktail party of strangers and within five minutes be part of the group that’s laughing the loudest and making everyone else feel jealous and left out. But she has never managed to fully vanquish the blush and it continues to make regular appearances at the most inconvenient times.

‘This must be a mistake,’ she says to Thomas as her face heats up as reliably as a hotplate. ‘She can’t have left me her house. That’s ridiculous.’

Thomas looks everywhere except at her. He is one of those people who writhe in empathetic embarrassment whenever she blushes. They really had been quite incompatible.

‘I’ve seen the paperwork,’ he says. ‘It’s all very clear.’

Sophie picks up a piece of ice from her glass and holds it against her forehead. ‘But I would have thought she’d leave the house to you or Veronika. Or your cousin. The beautiful one who does the children’s books. Veronika said she just had a new baby. What is her name again? Grace?’

‘Yes, Grace. Well, Grace has just moved into her mother’s place on the island. Aunt Laura has gone travelling for a year and Grace and her husband are building a home. Maybe Aunt Connie thought they didn’t need another one. Anyway, apparently she has left all three of us some money.’

‘But she hardly knew me! And my history with your family isn’t that good, is it?’

Thomas smiles slightly and doesn’t say anything.

‘What does your mother say? Oh, God, what does Veronika say? I hope they don’t think I somehow manipulated your aunt! I complimented her on her house, that’s all. I didn’t mean I
wanted
it!’

‘I know,’ says Thomas. ‘I was there.’

But Sophie is in agonies of guilt because this sort of thing has been happening to her all her life–although on a much smaller scale. She admires some person’s belonging, and the next thing she knows they are absolutely insisting she take it as a gift, which naturally causes Sophie to blush. ‘Darling, don’t be so
heartfelt
when you like something,’ her mother advises her. ‘It’s when you get that shiny-eyed look.’

She probably did have that shiny-eyed look when she visited Aunt Connie’s house, because she loved it. She absolutely loved it.

‘The thing is,’ says Thomas, ‘Veronika doesn’t know yet–and you’re right, she probably will be upset. Have you heard about her latest idea? She reckons she’s writing a book about the Munro Baby Mystery. She’s got a bet with Dad that she’s going to solve it. She was interviewing Aunt Connie the night before she died. Mum thinks she probably talked her to death. Anyway, if I know Veronika she’ll still want to go on writing it, and of course it would suit her right down to the ground to live in Aunt Connie’s house. She hasn’t really got herself settled since the divorce. She’s living in a share house and driving her flatmates insane; they only put up with her because they like her cooking. Anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised if she gets it into her head to contest the will.’

‘Well, that’s the solution, then!’ says Sophie. She can feel her face settling back to normal. ‘It’s obvious. I won’t take the house. Veronika can have it!’

‘I think Aunt Connie was worried you might say something like that,’ says Thomas. ‘She left you this letter.’

From his jacket pocket he pulls out a plain white envelope with the word ‘Sophie’ written on the front in firm black letters. ‘Just read it first before you decide anything. If you decide you want the house then I won’t let Veronika contest the will.’

Sophie says, ‘That’s very kind of you.’ Thomas shrugs and gives a small grimace. She opens the letter, reads it slowly, carefully refolds it, puts it back in the envelope and smiles, a touch flirtatiously, certainly fondly, at Thomas.

‘I guess I’d like to keep the house.’

He grins back at her. ‘Knew you would.’

Then he opens his briefcase and pulls out a Tupperware container with a piece of marzipan tart. ‘Here. Your favourite.’

It seems that Thomas stills love her, just a little, too.