The Tying of Threads (59 page)

They’d fallen in love with each other before learning that their love was forbidden, though not in Leticia’s house. In Thames Ditton no one had heard of Woody Creek.

On two occasions letters posted in Woody Creek had found Morrie, and shaken him to his core. For a time he’d considered replying, but a man is who life makes him, not who he’d been born to be. These days, if he looked back too far, if he remembered Jenny’s frizzy lemon-scented hair beside him in a dark theatre, remembered the photograph of the man with big teeth who’d painted the rainbows in the sky, he shook himself and turned to Tracy, conceived during a business transaction, born in jail to a drug addict, but now Tracy Langdon, a ballet dancer in London. He looked at pretty Elise, born with a crippled leg and dumped at birth at a Romanian orphanage. She’d never dance like her sister, nor sing like her brother, but she’d teach like her mother.

Robin could have, perhaps should have, been taking his bows on stage. His voice was a musical instrument. Place any instrument in his hands and he’d make music on it, but he preferred a surgeon’s instruments. He’d married two years ago and now had a three month old son – and for the nine months their grandson had been growing in the dark, Cara had feared he’d be born imperfect, that Robin would be punished for his parents’ sin against God. Their grandson was perfect – but Cara would continue to suffer that same torment if there were more grandchildren.

‘When are they suggesting we go?’ Morrie asked.

‘November, Hillary said.’

‘For how long?’

Cara shook her head. ‘A book tour. That’s all she said. I told her I’d think about it and get back to her.’

They walked on then, admiring the land, the trees clad in their autumn garb. It was a day when Morrie wished himself an artist so he might capture the trees and the sky and the laughing dogs, rolling in fallen leaves.

‘My father must be around eighty now, if he’s still living,’ Morrie said.

‘Jenny will be seventy-six on New Year’s Eve,’ Cara said. ‘If you ever plan to see him or her, the time to do it is now. It won’t be much good wishing you had when they’ve gone.’

‘No,’ he said.

‘If we go, I’d want free time in Sydney with Pete and Kay, and a few days with Cathy – and I’m going back to the house, Morrie. I’m cold.’

‘You’ve got ice in your blood,’ he said.

‘I’ve got Australia in it. Summer will be coming over there. I’d like to feel its heat, just once more. I’ll give Hillary a call and see if she can find out exactly what they’ve got in mind, then we’ll decide whether we’re going or not.’

Still a good-looking pair, both tall, both slim. Cara’s hair, once cut like Jenny’s short spring-coil gold, was shoulder length, bleached a few shades lighter, tamed by a brush and blow dryer. Wasted effort when the wind blew and fine English rain fell, when that hard worked for smooth style reverted to spring coils, when she still looked a little like Jenny around the brow, around the eyes. No wind, no rain today, a long fringe covered her brow, sunglasses hid her eyes, and her mouth and chin had never been Jenny’s.

His brow was. His nose was Jenny’s in male form, and his ears. He had the Hooper hair, steel grey like his father’s, his grandfather’s. Jenny’s lack of height had saved him from the excessive height of his forebears. He’d made the six foot two inch mark, then no more. He had his forebears’ double-jointed thumbs and hands, which he clapped now. The dogs stopped rolling to lead the way down the track that would take them home.

T
he Winter Boomerang
, released the first week of November, made the bestseller list and Jenny’s publicist was tearing out her hair, according to Georgie, who came to Woody Creek with Katie two weeks after the book’s release. They’d brought a bundle of emails from the publisher. Jenny gave them only a cursory glance before placing them down.

‘Juliana doesn’t do publicity!’ she said.

‘The days have passed when writers sat in their cold garrets and wrote with a quill, Jen, and hiding from this plagiarism thing isn’t making it go away. She suggested that you write something for one of the women’s magazines stating that you hadn’t read
Angel at My Door
, and include a bit about your personal knowledge of Sydney during the war.’

‘Let them talk. It’s selling books,’ Jenny said.

‘They’re talking about it on the ABC now. It’s growing, not dying down,’ George said.

Jenny’s pile of free books was also growing. Georgie had a boot full of things. Every time the publisher did a reprint Jenny had to find space for another carton of their free copies. She used to want to move to a smaller house but had stopped nagging about that. The bedroom they used as a storeroom was full. They loaded the new cartons in a corner of the small sitting room.

‘If you keep this up, I’ll end up a kept man,’ Jim said.

‘If you’d see a doctor about your hip, you might be worth keeping,’ Jenny said. He’d been having trouble with his hip for months – and refused to see a doctor about it.

‘Your publicist wants you to go on television, Nanny,’ Katie said. Now a leggy eleven year old she’d had her spring-coil curls cut short like her nanny’s and looked older with her mop of hair gone – a beautiful kid with a beautiful nature.

‘That will be the day, my Katie,’ Jenny said.

‘Mum said in the car that you could wear a wig and that no one would even know it was you.’

‘How old are you, Jen?’ Georgie asked.

‘You know how old I am, and don’t bother waking it up.’

‘You’ll turn seventy-six on New Year’s Eve. That’s four years away from eighty, Jen. What have you got to lose?’

‘Twenty-four years. I’m going to live to a hundred, aren’t I, Katie?’

‘A hundred and ten,’ Katie said.

‘You’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain, mate,’ Georgie said.

‘It’s bad enough now. Maisy’s Patricia read
The Stray
and she sent it to Rebecca and I had both of them up here the other day telling me that someone in town wrote my life story.’

‘I’ll make you up so Jim won’t recognise you,’ Georgie said.

‘Do it, Nanny.’

‘Enough,’ Jenny said, her hand raised as Norman’s hand had been raised when he’d commanded ‘enough’.

‘It’s a morning show, not some literary thing. You could handle the host.’

‘I said no, Georgie.’

‘You’ve got no outstanding features.’

‘Thanks.’

‘That’s to the good. Cover up your hair, dress in some way-out writer’s gear, plaster on the makeup and no one would have a hope of recognising you. It would shut your publicist up, and Patricia and Rebecca.’

‘You put the wig on and do it. Or Jim can,’ Jenny said, and Katie giggled. ‘He’d look good with a long ponytail and a fake beard, wouldn’t he, darlin’?’

‘It would be half an hour out of your life, Jen,’ Georgie said.

‘Half an hour would be more than enough to make a fool of myself. I was listening to a writer on the ABC a few weeks back and he sounded like a university professor.’

‘Anyone who has read your books knows that you’re not a university professor, Jen,’ Jim said.

‘Thank you, Jim.’

‘You’ve been standing on stage singing since you were knee high to a grasshopper,’ he said.

‘Truly?’ Katie asked.

‘Once upon a time,’ Jenny said.

‘When I was a kid she played Snow White in a pantomime,’ Georgie said.

‘Were you famous, Nanny?’

‘No I wasn’t, and I don’t want to be.’

‘It would be like going on stage again,’ Georgie said. ‘You’d be playing the role of Juliana. You looked nothing like yourself as Snow White. Jimmy kept pulling on my arm and asking, “Where’s Jenny?” and you had a ball doing it too.’

‘I made money doing it,’ Jenny said.

And she’d had a ball. She’d become Snow White once her wig had been pinned down and her costume laced up. She’d done three two-hour performances at the Hawthorn town hall and when the last show ended, she’d been Jenny King again and four months pregnant, and she’d wanted to howl. Maybe she could play Juliana for half an hour.

Then Georgie said the magic words. ‘We’re proud of you, Jen. Katie drags me into every bookshop to count your books.’

No one had ever said that they were proud of her, or not since little Jenny Morrison had sung about the lonely petunia in the onion patch.
You make me proud
, Norman had said that night.

And goddamn it all, what did a woman four years away from eighty have to lose?

‘Could you make me look like a Juliana?’

‘We can, Nanny. Papa will be pulling at Mum’s elbow asking, “Where’s Jen?”’ Katie said.

*

Papa didn’t go to Greensborough. The night before they were to leave, his hip crippling him, he couldn’t lie still, couldn’t sit in his chair, let alone sit in the car for three hours.

‘I’ll go by myself,’ she said.

He couldn’t walk as far as the letterbox and she couldn’t leave him without his car, which he was able to drive if he took a couple of painkillers half an hour before setting off.

She walked to the bus stop. Georgie picked her up at the Melbourne depot at one.

‘We found the perfect wig at an opportunity shop, and a choice of outfits. Katie has laid them out on your bed for a dress rehearsal after school.’

Their purchases hit Jenny in the eye when she carried her case into the spare room. A pink suit and matching platform-soled sandals and an emerald-green mother of the bride floating chiffon thing.

‘I wouldn’t be seen dead in either of them,’ Jenny said.

‘That’s the idea, Jen. If you’re going to pull it off, you need to think outside the square of you.’

They picked Katie up at three thirty. At ten days old, she’d asked for Jenny’s heart and it had been given. She gave her her dress rehearsal.

The pink sandals were too big. Had they not been, Jenny would have claimed that they were too small. She tried both outfits – and had no intention of wearing either. She’d packed her black slacksuit and a blue top, and who could tell one black suit from the next?

She’d never been overly busty and didn’t have a lot left of what she’d had in her youth. Georgie tossed a padded bra onto the bed. ‘Try it, Jen.’

She tried it, and it gave her a bustline equal to Lila’s marble breasts – before they’d gone lopsided. She played busty Lila for Katie; she did her voice, then did Juliana’s accent, and Katie laughed and Jenny laughed, then Georgie offered the wig, a dark brown neck-length bob with a long and heavy fringe.

It covered most of her face and felt like one of those head-hugging hats from the thirties. ‘It itches, Georgie.’

‘I checked it for lice.’

‘We sprayed its inside with Mortein fly spray, then shampooed it,’ Katie said, and Jenny looked at her image in the mirror. She didn’t look like herself. She felt the textured fabric of the pink suit which might have been expensive in its day.

‘No one wears pink suits now,’ she said.

‘Except Juliana. It looks good,’ Georgie said.

‘I haven’t worn pink since Sissy’s hand-me-down sixty years ago. It ripped while I was on stage and put me off pink for life.’

‘That suit was tailored for you.’

The jacket might have been. The skirt barely covered her knees and it had no hem to let down.

‘It’s too short.’

‘You’ve still got good legs. Flaunt them,’ Georgie said.

She slid the pink sandals off and put her black high heels on. She’d need to wear stockings if she was flashing her legs, but Georgie had thought of everything. She’d bought pantihose. It was just a game she was playing to amuse Katie, so Jenny played it. Played mother of the bride later in green chiffon, and at dinner she drank two glasses of wine so she might continue the charade. Made silly jokes for her beautiful girl, made up silly poems.

‘There was an old lady in pink, who had far too much to drink. When she rose from the table, she was quite unable, and down to the floor she did sink.’

‘There was an old lady in green, the funniest that ever was seen. When she went on the telly, she got a pain in the belly, and how that old lady did scream,’ Katie countered.

‘There once was a lady of law, who stood barricading the door . . .’

But eleven year olds have to go to school. At nine Katie went to bed and Jenny took her cigarettes from her case and walked out to the street to light up and blow smoke into the dark. She never smoked when Katie was around. Kids learned in school that smoking kills. As did living, but they didn’t learn that at school. She walked to the corner, hoping to trip over in the dark and break a minor bone, and when she returned to the darker dark of Georgie’s backyard she damn near got her wish. Stubbed her toe on a rock and almost went for a sixer.

It was eleven when she went to bed the first time. Rose at midnight and made a cup of tea she took outside. Lit a smoke. Lit two. She was out of bed again at three o’clock, and eventually fell asleep propped on the family room couch, the television silent but flashing its mind-numbing commercials. Paul woke her at seven when he turned her sleeping pill off. He didn’t ask why she’d slept on the couch.

‘It will be a breeze, Jen,’ he said.

‘I feel stretched to breaking point,’ she said.

‘You don’t break, mate,’ Georgie called from the bathroom. ‘You’ve got the recoil of a rubber band.’

Last night had been warm, but while they’d slept a cool change had blown through turning midsummer to winter. Jenny took her coffee to the glass door where she stood looking out at the yard, seeing nothing, her mind going over and over the hours ahead. She watched the morning show from time to time. The host had been on television for years. She knew his interview style. Jim had made a list of questions she might be asked. They’d rehearsed Jenny’s replies. She couldn’t remember the questions this morning.

Georgie’s foot now well in the door of Marino and Associates, she’d arranged her appointments so she might play literary agent cum taxi driver, and when Katie was at school, she slid into her literary agent role.

There was a poem about a wolf and a vain little pig, a kids’ poem Jenny had long ago memorised. She recalled it now as she dressed for her date with the big bad wolves . . . and when Georgie saw her blue top and black slack suit, she told her to get them off. Then she dropped her bombshell.