The Last Anniversary Read online

  It must have taken him so long to set up all those dominoes before the class.

  Grace looks at the milk carton and grief sweeps over her. She thinks of Mr Callahan's excited pink face. That poor, sweet man. Some girl had flicked one of the dominoes before he'd finished his explanation. He had probably thought, Now this will intrigue them. This will stop all that talking and giggling!

  Grace puts her head in her hands and weeps inconsolably for Mr Callahan's disappointment.

  Finally, she stops crying and looks again at the milk carton.

  Move, she tells herself. Stand up. Put the milk in the fridge. Make the marble cake. Do a load of washing. He'll be awake soon.

  She reads, 'If this product is not to your satisfaction, we will cheerfully refund your money.' She imagines a cheerful lady, in a floral apron, cheerfully refunding her money. 'There you go, dear! Can't have you not happy!'

  But I'm so unhappy. I'm so very, very unhappy.

  The cheerful lady says, 'Oh, sweetheart!' and pats her hand.

  Oh for Christ's sake, now she is crying over some imaginary cheerful lady. She cries and cries and cries. Every tear is fresh, fat and salty. They run down either side of her nose and into her mouth.

  Finally she stops, wipes the back of her hand across her face and looks again at the milk carton.

  Stand up, Grace!

  She glances at her watch. And that's when she discovers it's nine thirty. She claps her hand over her mouth. It can't be right. It has only been five minutes. Ten at the most. But according to her watch she has been sitting in this chair, staring at a milk carton, for an hour and fifteen minutes.

  How can she complain about Callum not doing enough around the house, if she spends her days staring at milk cartons?

  The telephone rings and Grace's nerve cells finally topple like dominoes. She gets to her feet, puts the milk in the fridge and calmly answers the phone.

  'Grace! Is it a bad time? A good time? How is the baby? Asleep? Awake? This is Veronika, by the way. I hate people who just expect you to know who it is, don't you? Have you heard? Have you heard what Aunt Connie has done?'

  Grace's cousin Veronika rarely requires answers to her questions. 'She's like a breathless, busy little ferret!' said Callum, fascinated, the first time he met her, as if Veronika was some unusual creature he'd seen on a nature programme. It is true that Veronika has sharp, pointy teeth and darting brown eyes.

  That's why I was crying, thinks Grace. I'm grieving for Aunt Connie. I miss Aunt Connie. Of course I do.

  'I know that she left her house to Thomas's ex-girlfriend, if that's what you mean. Your mum told me.'

  'Did your jaw drop? Mine did! Of all people: Sophie! A complete stranger! If it wasn't for me, Aunt Connie would never have even known of Sophie's existence! And then she just ignores her own flesh and blood!'

  Veronika is an intelligent girl but sometimes she says things that are so easy to refute that Grace has to wonder if she does it on purpose.

  'Yes, but we're not Aunt Connie's flesh and blood, are we?'

  'But we are! Well, perhaps not biologically, but spiritually and morally and perhaps legally! I mean, Aunt Connie and Aunt Rose brought Grandma Enigma up as their own baby! If they hadn't found her that day, she would have died. A baby can't survive long without care. Well, you know that better than anyone! A new mother!'

  Grace thinks about Jake, asleep in his crib, blue-veined eyelids fluttering. How long would he survive if she followed her great-grandmother's lead and vanished from his life? Baby Enigma had thrived. According to Aunt Connie and Aunt Rose, she'd been sleeping peacefully, and when they looked into her crib she had opened her eyes and given them the sweetest smile they had ever seen.

  Grace says to Veronika, 'What does it matter? None of us want Aunt Connie's house, do we? You always said you'd rather die than live on the island again. You said it makes you feel trapped. Actually, I think I recall you saying that to Aunt Connie, which might have been your downfall.'

  'This isn't about me wanting the house. It's the principle of the matter. Sophie broke Thomas's heart!'

  'So? He seems to have recovered. Last time I saw him he was so disgustingly happy it put me in a bad mood.'

  'That's not relevant!'

  Grace begins to feel exhausted. Her mother doesn't own a walkabout phone. The phone is kept on an antique table in the hallway, so you have to stand up with your shoulders back while you talk. No cosy, curled-up conversations in armchairs. She slides down to the floor with her back against the wall.

  'Look. If this is what Aunt Connie wanted...'

  'Sophie could only have met Aunt Connie twice at the most!'

  'Well, she obviously had an impact.'

  'Yes, what a conniving, manipulative witch!'

  'I thought she was your friend?'

  Veronika ignores that. 'This morning I heard an ad on the radio for solicitors who actually specialise in this sort of thing. I'm thinking that we all contest the will.'

  Suddenly Grace is angry. 'We haven't even had Aunt Connie's funeral yet! I don't want anything to do with contesting the will. Aunt Connie was perfectly sane and had every right to leave her house to whoever she wanted.'

  Veronika's voice bubbles up and over, relishing the opportunity to argue. 'You have no sense of family, Grace! No sense of history!'

  'I'm hanging up. The baby's crying.'

  'I don't believe you. I can't hear the baby. You've always avoided confrontation!'

  'And you've always sought it. I'm hanging up.'

  'Don't you dare hang up on me! Face this conflict!'

  Grace hangs up. She lets her head drop forward onto her knees.

  There is a sharp, cross cry from upstairs. Grace looks at her watch, terrified that another hour has vanished without her. What if the baby has been crying and crying without her hearing?

  It's fine. Only a few minutes have passed. The incident in the kitchen was an aberration.

  She gets slowly to her feet like an arthritic old woman. With her hand on the banister for support she walks up the stairs, hoping with each step that this time she'll feel it. But when she walks into the baby's room and picks up her screaming son, she feels nothing except intense boredom. A drab, dreary sense of nothing much at all.

  She changes his nappy and takes him into the bedroom and sits on the end of the bed, unbuttoning her shirt with one hand. The baby's agitated mouth sucks at the air for her nipple. Finally she manages to get him to latch on and his eyes roll back in ecstasy while he sucks feverishly.

  Grace's aunt, Margie, had mentioned yesterday that she didn't know about any 'Mozart effect' but she had certainly sung to Thomas and Veronika when she was feeding them as babies. 'It did seem to keep them focused on the job!'

  Dutifully, wearily, Grace begins to sing.

  In the afternoon, Grace puts Jake in his state-of-the-art stroller. It's one of those ones you can jog behind, but she can't imagine having the energy or desire to ever go for a run again. She and Callum had practised running around the shop with it. They'd made other shoppers laugh and there'd been a chummy community feeling about it. That sort of thing was always happening with Callum.

  Outside, it is cold and bright and still; the river is flat and hard.

  Grace looks worriedly at the cooling marble cake in her mother's cake tin, sitting on top of the stroller. She had to throw it together in a frantic rush and she's not even sure it's cooked all the way through. It's just her luck that it's a group of older women doing the tour rather than school kids.

  Aunt Connie had told her about the group booking just a few days before she died.

  'Are you sure you can manage it?' she'd asked. 'I wouldn't ask you, but Enigma, Rose and I are going to that recital at the opera house and Margie has her ridiculous Weight Watchers meeting. It's like a new religion for her. She can't miss one session.'

  'I'll be fine!' Grace had said. 'At this age they're still so portable! It's not like he's a toddler.'

  She'd
stolen that 'portable' line from a friend. She'd even stolen her happy, casual, motherly tone of voice. Grace doesn't think babies are portable at all.

  'Well, if you're sure,' Connie had said doubtfully. 'The booking is for the Shirley Club. A club for women called Shirley. Isn't that the funniest thing you've ever heard? There are fifteen of them. Fifteen Shirleys. "You're not serious," I said. She said, "Oh, but we are!" I said, "Well, give me your credit card details, Shirley."'

  Grace wonders who will handle the bookings now that Connie has died. Perhaps Sophie will take that responsibility along with the house. That would infuriate Veronika.

  The Shirleys are an excitable bunch of women in their fifties and sixties, all wearing similar brightly coloured, comfy parkas, long scarves, beanies, and sunglasses that are too large for their faces. They giggle and chat like girls on a school excursion. Perhaps being called Shirley guarantees you a cheerful personality.

  They'd caught the train and then the ferry from Glass Bay, and are full of praise for the weather, the scenery, the island and the hot chocolates down at the wharf.

  'It's the most beautiful island! Have you lived here long, love?'

  'I grew up here,' says Grace. 'But I only just moved back about six weeks ago, before my baby was born.'

  'Are you a model, sweetheart?'

  'No, no, I'm a graphic designer.'

  'Well, you could be a model. Couldn't she, Shirl?'

  Jake is passed around from Shirley to Shirley and looks perfectly content in each expert pair of arms. Grace wonders if she should be worried about letting so many strangers hold him, but decides it's worth it. He is being topped up with all the proper motherly love he is missing out on. Besides which, these energetic women are far too cleanly scrubbed to harbour germs.

  She stands on the front porch and begins the speech she, Thomas and Veronika were all taught to give when they turned sixteen and were considered old enough to take their turns at the Alice and Jack tours.

  'Welcome to the home of my great-grandparents, Alice and Jack Munro. Some of you may have heard of a famous, mysterious ship called the Mary Celeste. It was found adrift in 1872, sailing itself across the Atlantic Ocean. The crew and passengers had vanished. There were no signs of struggle and the ship was in perfect condition, with plenty of food and water. Well, this house is similar to the Mary Celeste. When Connie and Rose Doughty visited this house in 1932, there were no immediate signs that anything was amiss, yet Alice and Jack had vanished into thin air. The difference is that in this case there was one survivor. A tiny baby was just waking for her feed. That baby was my grandmother.'

  And pause, one, two, three.

  Aunt Connie had told them to always pause at that moment for dramatic effect. Grace considered herself quite good at the pause, unlike Veronika, who spoke much too fast and added too many of her own peculiar opinions to Aunt Connie's carefully drafted script, and Thomas, who was painfully shy at sixteen and delivered his tours in a barely audible monotone.

  Jake gives a little whimper and the Shirleys all cluck. 'Imagine! A tiny baby like you! Your mummy wouldn't leave you on your own even for a minute, would she!'

  Grace looks at her son, his face blissfully squished against a Shirley's large purple-T-shirted breast. He seems very content.

  'I'll invite you all now to enter the house. Please remember that the house has not been disturbed in over seventy years, so we do ask that you refrain from touching anything.'

  She opens the front door of the house and in they troop, all bright-eyed beams and exclamations, while Grace mentally checks off the list of things she needs to cover:

  Cake.

  Kettle.

  Blood stains.

  Connie and Rose.

  Alice's diary.

  Jack's love letter.

  Theories.

  Questions.

  Souvenirs.

  She'd never been very good at the souvenirs part. That was where Veronika excelled. She could bully anyone into buying anything.

  After the tour is finished, Grace stands on the veranda of Alice and Jack's house and waves the Shirley Club goodbye, a colourful gaggle of women winding their way back down the hill towards the ferry, arms swinging, energy unflagging, going back home to cook their husbands' dinners.

  Jake is sound asleep in his pram, a smudge of a Shirley's lipstick over one eyebrow.

  I should have asked them to adopt you, thinks Grace. Fifteen no-nonsense, happy, laughing, loving mums. What a perfect life. But your daddy would miss you.

  She doesn't allow herself to think about whether she would miss him too.

  13

  'Don't tell me! Salmon and salad on multigrain. No butter, no beetroot, no onion!'

  'You got it!' shouts Sophie across the crowd of people at the sandwich shop. She is actually a little bored with salmon and salad sandwiches, but Al, the man who owns the shop, takes such professional pride in remembering her lunch order that she doesn't feel she can change it. Once she'd said, 'I think I might have ham and cheese today,' and he'd said, 'Oh, feel like something a bit different, eh?' and looked hurt, his tongs hovering uncertainly over the sandwich fillings. After all, salmon and salad is a delicious combination. Sometimes she does go to other places for lunch, but then, the next day, Al cries, 'We missed you yesterday! Where were you?' and Sophie thinks, This is ridiculous. Why don't I just admit I had won ton soup at the Chinese takeaway? But Al seems so convinced she is in a monogamous relationship with his sandwich shop that she has to pretend to sneeze to cover up her guilty blush. 'Ah, you had the flu!' Al says kindly. As a result, he has decided she is a rather sickly sort.

  'Keeping up that vitamin C, Sally?' he asks today as he expertly compiles her sandwich. That's the other problem with Al. He thinks her name is Sally. Sophie is sure she must have tried to correct him at least once but now the moment for setting him straight has long passed. He has been calling her Sally for three years. Once, he confided to her that was how he remembered her sandwich order. 'I just think to myself, here comes Sally Salmon!'

  That had given her such a bad attack of the giggles she'd had to pretend to sneeze six times in a row, causing Al to worriedly suggest garlic tablets.

  'Actually, you're looking well today, Sally,' he says now. He nudges his wife who is chopping up boiled eggs. 'Look. Sally is glowing today. She looks even prettier than usual.'

  'Hmmph,' says his wife, who doesn't seem to like working in a sandwich shop or being married to Al.

  'Is love in the air, perhaps, Sally?' asks Al. He flutters a hygienically gloved hand like a butterfly.

  'Perhaps,' says Sophie. 'Oh, well, not really.' She feels her heart lift as she thinks about Aunt Connie's letter, sitting safely in the zippered pocket of her handbag. 'But I got some good news.'

  'Did you now,' says Al, and then his eyes flicker to another regular in the crowd. 'Don't tell me! Avocado and salami!'

  'You got it,' says a resigned voice.

  Sophie picks up her brown paper bag, gives avocado and salami a sympathetic smile and pushes her way through the crowd and out onto the streets of Sydney. She walks down into the Domain to her usual spot to eat her lunch under a Moreton Bay fig, where she can read her book and watch the sporty types from nearby offices playing netball and soccer in their lunch breaks. It is the middle of winter and the air is frosty cold but the sun is hot and summery. The sporty types are red-faced and sweaty.

  'Pass, Jen!' calls out an anguished netballer. 'I'm here! Would you pass!' Jen, a rather large girl with black hair, flings the ball wildly and the other team intercepts it. There are groans of disgust and Jen looks doleful, hands on her hips, chest heaving. She is probably a high-powered lawyer, thinks Sophie, but every Wednesday at lunchtime she is the kid who nobody wants on their team. Sophie watches the game for a bit and then pulls her book from her bag. She is starting to get to know far too many of these people and has already identified a blossoming romance between the tall Goal Attack and a married-to-somebody-else soccer p
layer. If she isn't careful these lunchtime games will become her own personal reality TV programme, and she is already unhealthily hooked on too much socially unacceptable television. One should not be listening to a very interesting lecture on ancient Greek mythology, like she was last Monday night, and realise that one is actually thinking about who is the most likely candidate to be voted off on tonight's episode of The Bachelorette.

  She catches herself hiding the cover of her book in her lap and defiantly holds it upright for the world to see. Reality TV is one thing, but it's silly to be ashamed of her choice of reading material. After all, these books are often extremely well written and meticulously researched. They are historically interesting, witty and clever. She should just come right out and tell people: 'It so happens I quite enjoy a good...regency romance.' She'd caught the habit from her mother, who isn't in the least concerned about what people think and even belongs to a Regency Romance Readers' Club. Once a year they have a party where everyone has to dress up as lords and ladies. Sophie's dad always goes along, stoic and ridiculous in his cravat, breeches, stockings and waistcoat. Now that's true love: a man who is prepared to wear a cravat for you.

  Many of Sophie's friends blame regency romances for what they describe as her 'unrealistic' approach to her love life. Recently, there has been an aggressive campaign to get her to join an Internet dating site.

  'There is nothing sleazy or desperate about Internet dating,' declares Lisa, who met her boyfriend in a Paris bookstore.

  'I know so many people who are doing it, you don't need to feel ashamed,' says Shari, married to a paramedic who fell in love with her when he was winched down by helicopter to rescue her after she broke her ankle in a bushwalking accident.

  'It's fun, it's great fun, it's so easy and convenient,' cries Amanda, who actually did meet her husband on the Internet. Sophie doesn't really like Amanda's husband, and she suspects that Amanda doesn't like him much either, which accounts for her demented enthusiasm on the topic.

  She is resisting the Internet idea, not just because of Amanda's husband but also because she doesn't want to one day tell her children that she posted an ad on the Internet, interviewed twenty-five hopeful applicants, and finally their father turned up and looked good in comparison with the rest of them. It just doesn't seem right.