The High Places: Stories

Rose Bay

Susan telephoned Rose at work to say she’d decided, finally, to accept her in-laws’ offer to visit California, and would be in Sydney for three days before the ship sailed — it sailed on the Monday, but there was shopping to do, the children had never been to the city, and there was no need for Rose to put them up, oh, but if she could, if it was no trouble, well, that would be lovely, and no, of course, a little flat would be more than big enough for the three of them, they would take up no space, almost none at all. Rose agreed to everything. The thought of her sister being in Sydney filled her with curiosity. Here was an opportunity to be kind to Susan, who was after all a widow. Rose said she would meet them off the train at Central, but Susan wanted to double-check her address and, as usual, laughed when she heard it.

‘Isn’t that just like you,’ she said. ‘To live in a place called Rose Bay.’

Rose laughed too. She made an effort, always, to be pleasant. Her boss referred to her as ‘particularly pleasant’; she had heard him. Her instinct to please people, without being over-eager, came from a dislike of disagreement. She knew Susan considered it immodest of her to live in a place that shared her name; it was the sort of thing Rose did in order to draw attention to herself.

‘It’s lovely there by the water, that’s all,’ Rose said, as she had before. ‘The name is just a coincidence.’

The name was not entirely a coincidence. Robert, the man who paid the rent on her flat, liked the idea of her living there. But walking home from the tram that night, Rose suspected her bay. It was too lovely. It was fragrant streets and bright water, schoolgirls in grey uniforms, nodding nuns, a golf course above the harbour. Flying boats landing on the bay and rising again, heading out for Lord Howe and Singapore. From her flat Rose looked over low rooftops and lower gardens onto the water, and the world was lamplit, lavender, particularly pleasant, and she belonged here, and was neither sad nor lonely. But her sister coming made her wonder, and she saw the lights on the other side of the harbour and understood that she was not entirely content, and not always quiet. Still, not sad. Not lonely.

A few days before Susan’s arrival, Rose went to the theatre with Robert to see an American dance company on tour in Australia. This company was very fashionable, according to the girls in the office, and very modern, full of Americans with illustrious pedigrees and Jewish refugees who’d danced their way out of the war. Tickets had sold out almost immediately; the girls wanted to know how Rose had come by one, but she couldn’t tell them because Robert was a partner in the firm, and married. Rose had her hair set and wore a new grey dress. She was interested in the Americanness of the dancers because Susan’s husband, Jonathan, had been American. Rose used to enjoy listening to his unanticipated voice, never knowing where it would rise or fall, but the rest of her family — even Susan — imitated him in his absence. Rose assumed they’d stopped after he died. She hadn’t been to see them in over a year, not since the funeral. They lived hours inland, in the kind of town this dance company would never visit.

The star of the troupe was a dancer called Adelaide Turner: diminutive, sprightly, with long expressive arms and a broad doll-face. She was famous even in Sydney, so many thousands of miles from the city she was born in, the name of which — Chicago — might as well have been the name of a fruit Rose had never tried, or an animal she’d never seen. Adelaide would dance that week in Sydney, the end of the company’s Australian tour, then sail home on the Coral Sea. The same ship was to carry Susan and the children to California to meet the other half of their family, which seemed to be full of healthy, sunlit cousins, expectant grandparents, and many uncles and aunts. It may have been for this reason — the shared ship — that Rose felt connected to Adelaide Turner; her face, too, reminded Rose a little of Susan’s. Jonathan had laughed at Rose once for seeing in famous people she admired a resemblance to someone she knew. But when Adelaide first came onstage, dressed as a girlish clown in a black smock covered with stars and red circles on her cheeks, Rose felt a funny tug at her own limbs. As Adelaide moved, left and right, above the lights and below them, her arms flying, her feet, Rose moved imperceptibly along with her — left, right, above, below. Her arms, her feet.

Afterward, walking through the night-time city, Rose noticed how many gulls hung in the light above office buildings and street lamps. Bats crossed overhead, quieter. Robert talked about the music and staging, but Adelaide Turner had made an impression on Rose that was too tender for discussion. She was filled with a longing she knew would occupy her for days, then disappear suddenly, as if cured. Rose was conscious of her body in the warm air. She enjoyed the movement of her arms by her side, and the muscles of her legs felt new and within her power. She listened to Robert and thought, I’m much younger than you are. Later that night, lying beside him, she felt her body lift from the bed and hang, for just a moment, in the half-lit room. Not long after, Robert got out of bed to wash and dress and leave for home; Rose lay still and pretended to be sleeping. The next morning, in her empty flat, she cut Adelaide’s picture from the programme and propped it on the mantelpiece.

* * *

Rose met Susan and the children off the train on Thursday evening and was relieved to be happy to see them. Lizzie and Alex were mute with the movement, the lights, and the station’s domed ceilings. They were nervous of their aunt and stumbled among the cases and bags. There was a great deal of luggage. It accumulated around their feet as they embraced and enquired and smiled. Then the effort of gathering it and directing Susan and the children and stepping into Rose’s city, into Rose’s life, as if this were natural and easy.

It was dark by the time they reached Rose Bay. Susan was a tourist peering into the small, lit rooms of Rose’s flat.

‘Well, this is very comfortable,’ she said. ‘What do you think, little ones? Isn’t Aunt Rose’s house nice? Isn’t it, Lizzie?’

The children’s tired, formal faces looked up at Rose.

‘It’s smaller than our house,’ said Lizzie. ‘It’s prettier, but we don’t have to climb steps.’

Susan made the children eggs and toast for supper while Rose moved bags into bedrooms under the surveillance of her niece and nephew. They were more distinct here than they had been at the funeral. Lizzie, the elder, seemed clear-headed and observant. Alex was more uncertain. His upper lip was puffy and folded to a sweet point in the middle, which gave him the look of a stiff cupid. Rose thought they were delightful and perhaps a little dull. She searched for their father’s likeness in their faces and failed to find it. Perhaps later, as they grew, they’d acquire Jonathan’s looks, the furrow between thick eyebrows she’d mistaken for good judgement. Upon being shown where he would be sleeping, Alex became raucous and insisted on displaying his navel to Rose.

‘This is my button,’ he announced, over and over, although his sister told him to stop. He lay on the bed, flexing his plump stomach, watching his navel and checking, every so often, that Rose was too.

‘My button!’ he cried.

‘Stop it,’ said Lizzie.

‘I don’t mind,’ said Rose.

Lizzie ignored her. ‘Alex,’ she said, ‘can’t you see Julia would like to make the bed?’

Alex froze on the bedcovers. Rose wasn’t sure how to remind her niece that her name wasn’t Julia.

‘Julia doesn’t need to make the bed,’ said Alex. ‘Aunty Rose made the bed already.’

Lizzie sighed with a laboured patience. She said, in a gentle, teacherly tone, ‘Julia brought a silk robe and a patchwork quilt from home to put on our bed so we’d be comfortable here and sleep quietly and you won’t get up in the middle of the night and cry.’ She tilted her fastidious head to look at Alex in a way Rose recognised as Susan’s.

‘No, she didn’t,’ said Alex, but he rolled off the bed.

‘Julia is Lizzie’s good friend,’ said Susan from the doorway. She emphasised good friend; she was benevolent and motherly, wise when it came to imaginary friendships, indulgent with her children who had lost their father. She expressed this to Rose with a significant smile. ‘Supper’s ready, darlings,’ she said, and Alex charged from the room so that his mother was forced to follow.

Lizzie took Rose’s hand as they walked to the dining table. ‘Julia is my friend,’ she said. ‘My very best friend. She’s coming to America.’

‘Really?’

‘Really. I know you can’t see her, but she’s not a ghost. She’s not dead. She looks a bit like that lady over there.’

Lizzie pointed to the picture of Adelaide Turner on the mantelpiece. Adelaide was in costume for her clown dance: red cheeks and starry outfit, hair plastered in two curls at her temples.

‘Then she’s very pretty,’ said Rose.

Lizzie smiled as if she liked the thought of this but didn’t believe it to be true.

* * *

Susan’s three days in Sydney had been carefully planned. There would be, on Sunday, a trip to the zoo. On Saturday the children would go to the pictures and Susan would have her hair done; they would all shop for gifts and new clothes. On the Friday, when Rose had to work, they would come with her on the tram into the city and walk to Macquarie Street and down the hill where the white sails of the water would rise up to meet them. They would stroll in the botanical gardens and count the steps of the library and sit under palm trees eating ice-cream and reading from comics and magazines. Then they would meet Rose after work. They would all travel back to Rose Bay together, into a quiet Friday night of sleeping children and the hum of the harbour. The thought of them waiting for her at the end of the day made Rose nervous; she recognised in herself an unusual conviction that she owned something that ought to be protected.

Rose left work with the other girls, typists and stenographers and telephonists, all trim and efficient with busy plans and singsong weekend voices. Susan and the children seemed diminished by comparison. They stood on the pavement, waiting, and Susan turned her head from left to right as if Rose might appear from anywhere except the direction she was walking from.

The office girls enveloped the children. ‘Do you live on a farm? Do you ride ponies? How old are you? Nine! Five! Is this your first visit to Sydney?’ The children, bewildered and loving, stared up at these bright faces and forgot how to talk.

On the tram, when asked about her day, Lizzie said, ‘Alex needed to use the toilet but we couldn’t find one and then Julia knew where they were. I saw flowers in a glasshouse that grew in the Bible.’

‘They were ferns,’ said Susan.

‘Is that old?’ asked Alex.

Lizzie looked at him with concern. ‘Of course it is,’ she said.

The children were restless at bedtime. Julia wanted a light left on. Rose waited with them for tiredness to come, and was delighted by the sure and sudden way it did. Once asleep, they breathed like birds. Their bodies lifted, briefly, then fell back. As Rose returned to the living room, Susan said, ‘There’s so much dust in the air. How do you keep your skin cool? And so much noise in the street. I hope they’ll sleep.’

But the children slept long and evenly, their soft arms rigid over the sheets.

Rose and Susan sat by a window with one lamp on and the curtains open. They looked almost identical in this pliable light. Ships sounded out on the harbour and a buoy in the bay fell and fell in the tide. Susan composed lists in the lamplight: errands, letters to write, shopping to be done. One finger was bright with her wedding ring. Rose disliked the publicity of wedding rings. Or perhaps she was only irritated that Robert was out with his wife tonight, at a fancy-dress party to which Rose had also been invited. She would have gone as a dancer, with red circles on her cheeks and her hair curled around her face. At some point during the party Robert would have placed his hand on the small of her back, but he would have left with his wife. Usually, Rose was happy to go home alone to her bay, but there were times when her envy of Robert’s wife felt like a stone resting at the base of her spine, a reminder that she was wanted, but not singly, and not enough. She remembered feeling that way about Susan, once. Maybe even now. Rose seemed to have made a career of this doubleness, as if she always came in pairs. Jonathan had listed for her all the animals that do not mate for life. Chinchillas, he said. Bison. Deer, bears, sea lions. Elephants with their old memories. Waterfowl of various kinds. He said these names lying in bed beside her in that flat and pollinated town, in those new days after Lizzie was born, and Rose, who had already decided to leave for Sydney, loved this menagerie and was made impatient by it.

‘Many whales,’ he said, ‘don’t even mate for a season. Swans, beloved by the sentimental — that’s you, Rosie — don’t even necessarily mate for a season.’

Susan looked up from her list. ‘I hope you don’t disapprove of the way I indulge Lizzie. I mean with Julia,’ she said. ‘It’s all been so hard on her. But I thought the passage over, our time on the ship, would be a good chance to wean her off.’

Rose said, ‘Yes, I suppose it would.’ I know nothing, she thought, about the hearts of children.

Susan sat quietly for a moment. She was very pretty, still, and at thirty-five a widow. Then she said, looking out across the harbour, ‘Oh — America.’

* * *

The zoo rose out of the water on the north side of the harbour, a hillside of animals with Sydney’s best views. It pleased Rose to think that as she looked across the bay from her window there were giraffes looking back. A city with a harbour-side zoo was a happy city, in Rose’s estimation. It was a city playing a sweet joke upon itself.

To reach the zoo on Sunday they caught a ferry from Circular Quay, that busy square of water. The wharves hovered out upon the harbour, covered over, like Japanese pavilions. The day was warm and windless. The Coral Sea was already docked in the quay. The ship was a vast wall in the water, with small windows, and it seemed ridiculous that something of this size could remain afloat over the profound Pacific.

‘One of those windows will be yours,’ said Rose, kneeling beside Lizzie. ‘Isn’t that exciting?’

‘Which one?’ said Lizzie, turning her face up to her mother. ‘Which is our window?’

‘We’ll find out tomorrow,’ said Susan.

‘And that will be Julia’s window too,’ said Lizzie.

Susan kissed the top of Lizzie’s head. Then she said, ‘No, Julia will have her own window.’

‘Next to ours?’

‘Near ours,’ said Susan, ‘but not next to it.’

Alex pressed against his sister’s side. He said, ‘Will the boat go fast or slow?’

‘Very fast,’ said Lizzie.

‘Soon we’ll all be flying in planes to places like California,’ said Rose, and this seemed to disgust Lizzie; she turned away from the Coral Sea.

The zoo ferry, in comparison, was toy-small and overly bright. Alex ran toward it and had to be held back; he was thrilled and loud, as he had been about his navel. But Lizzie seemed sceptical. As they were walking across the narrow plank onto the boat, she gave a sudden cry, full of grief and fear, and people around them turned to look.

‘Are you frightened, Lizzie?’ said Rose. ‘Hold my hand. Don’t look down.’

Lizzie held her hand and took small steps across the plank, all the while looking down at the water, but once she had settled into a seat on the deck she no longer seemed afraid. As the ferry moved away from the quay, Alex complained of a ‘tummy feeling’, over which Susan fussed. Rose sat quietly beside quiet Lizzie, irritated as she always was by sick people, even children. Rose herself was never sick. But she helped Susan hold Alex against the railing as he threw up into the harbour, and she loved and pitied him, this small pale boy over all that water. They returned to their seats, where Lizzie waited tense and white. Rose and Susan bent their heads over the children as the ferry rocked.

The Sunday zoo was full of people, but Rose identified the dancers right away. There was a man she recognised with conspicuously red hair. She heard their accents and noted the surety and discipline with which they walked. Last night had been their final show and tomorrow they sailed on the Coral Sea; for now they were seeing the sights. They eddied about in same-sex groups, interacting with loud jokes and theatrical gestures. Passing aviaries on the zoo’s sloping streets, Rose saw half a dozen of them sitting among the tropical birds, coaxing them onto arms and shoulders with a trick of the posture that was, Rose knew, beyond her own shoulders, her own arms.

Rose couldn’t see Adelaide Turner with the dancers, but she hoped she might, later on. Perhaps they would meet beside the polar bear and talk together on the subject of his greenish fur and his obvious disgruntlement in the unlooked-for heat. Then, tomorrow after work, while the Coral Sea unloosed from the city and took Susan and Adelaide to America, Rose could tell Robert about it. Or she could not tell him, just as she pleased.

Rose followed Susan and the children to the aquarium, with its rocky grottoes and litter of Pacific shells. Afterward, they saw the Malayan bears and spider monkeys. A band played in the rotunda and children sat by a pond while a Sunday-school teacher read instructions from a piece of paper. There was a black rhinoceros calf, but Lizzie and Alex seemed annoyed by baby animals of any kind. Alex’s eyes remained on the ponderous mother and Lizzie drooped against the fence.

‘Is this the first time Julia’s seen a rhino?’ asked Rose.

Now Lizzie looked hard at the baby. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

Both children had begun the excursion with enthusiasm but were now almost shy. They stood on either side of the floral clock, following its fragrant moving hands; they remained silent on the little zoo train as it slid alongside emus and mountain goats. The very fact of mechanical movement seemed to have stunned them into noiselessness. It was as if their excitement for their trip to Sydney, and beyond to California, had all been worn out in the preparation for it; the actual journey was so large they couldn’t account for it. Susan appeared not to mind. Rose assumed her sister knew, from experience, that careful days of planned good cheer often turn out this way.

The children were too afraid to enter the reptile house, which was dark and green and cool. Alex lingered by the doorway, terrified but unwilling to leave. Lizzie couldn’t even bring herself to look at the picture of the snake on the sign. Their mother, for the first time, was visibly frustrated with them both. As Susan called Alex away, a flock of dancers ran screaming from the reptile house, women at first, then men leaping and laughing. They’d obviously given the women a scare — a snake-hiss, a careful brush against someone’s ankle, a low-voiced story that ended in shouts. Now the women clapped and scolded. Rose knew Adelaide Turner even without her costumes and wigs and drawn-on eyebrows; her round face and the agile manner of her walk were unmistakable. She looked very young. Adelaide called to one man — ‘Roger, what did I tell you? No cake for weeks!’ — and when Roger hung his head and arms in mock dejection, she mimicked his pose perfectly, teasing. Her blunt accent wasn’t as beautiful as her dancing. Rose could have taken one step and been in her path; she could have said, ‘Excuse me, Miss Turner?’ But what if Adelaide was to smile as if Rose had just called her name in order to say, Your table’s ready, your car is here? There was no way to tell Adelaide about the nocturnal gulls after the theatre, the sensation of her body rising from the bed. Rose watched the dancers walk down the hill toward the seal pools, the women quiet now, holding hands and resting their heads on their friends’ shoulders. It seemed ridiculous, then — juvenile — to have cut out Adelaide’s picture and put it on the mantelpiece.

Susan sat on the low wall beside the reptile house.

‘I want the snakes,’ said Alex. He had run into the building, quickly in and out, made brave by the presence of the dancers.

‘Well, Lizzie?’ said Susan.

Like Rose, Lizzie was watching the procession walk toward the seals. She waited until the dancers were out of sight before turning to her mother.

Susan said, ‘What do you think of taking your brother in to see the snakes? While your old mum has a rest out here.’

‘I’ll take him,’ said Rose.

‘I want to,’ said Lizzie. She gave a small, triumphant laugh. ‘I was never frightened of the snakes.’

Alex seemed uneasy. He ran back into the semi-dark and his sister followed him.

‘They’re tired, aren’t they?’ said Rose.

Susan didn’t answer at once. Then she said, ‘We’re all tired, I think.’

‘You must be. So much to organise.’

‘I’ll tell you something. It’s absurd,’ said Susan. ‘It’s that I’m sure I’m going to see Jonathan again. I have that feeling. As if he’s waiting for me in California. You know, they say the climate there is basically Australian, and there’s the coast and gum trees.’ She laughed the way Lizzie had before saying, ‘I was never frightened of the snakes.’

Rose held her sister’s hand, which may never have happened before; Susan was years older and rarely tender. Rose didn’t love her, but then she thought of love as a hasty secret that drew out, eventually, into something slow and denied and sought and carefully planned. Loving Jonathan had been small for her at first, and then grew smaller, but it was in this smallness that she had found pleasure and safety, as if the secrecy had necessarily pushed it into a tiny space of compacted intensity. Anything larger would have frightened her; would have led to change, or confession. Rose was made impatient by confession. The possibility of it had sent her to Sydney. And it was better, wasn’t it, that she could sit like this with Susan, holding hands.

The afternoon was beginning to lengthen. Currawongs cried out of bubbling throats. There were also stranger sounds that travelled through the air from an indeterminate source, as if sprung from the mouths of some outlandish animal and his equally extraordinary mate. These noises hummed at the back of the ear along with other incidental roars and calls and trumpets that filled this unfamiliar world, briefly jungle, briefly savannah and mountain range. Rose understood before Susan did that the noises were coming from the children. She ran toward the reptile house.

It took a moment for her eyes to adjust. The light was low and green and the glass cases seemed to swim out of it, full of leafy foliage, full of fake creeks and desert rocks and their jewelled inhabitants, mostly sleeping.

‘Lizzie!’ called Rose.

‘You killed her,’ Lizzie was yelling, over and over. ‘You killed her! You pushed! You killed her.’

There was another sound, thinner: Alex crying out, high-pitched. Somewhere in the dark he was struggling and crying. The snakes didn’t move, except one python that continued to bury itself in the sand of its tank.

‘You killed her!’ Lizzie yelled again, and Alex cried and Rose ran through the corridors into the green darkness, afraid of what might be at her feet. Then Susan was there too; she also ran, breathing loudly, calling, and Rose saw her every now and then flashing against a lit case.

Rose found them first. They were deep in the reptile house, on the floor below the tank of a large, pouchy lizard. Alex lay on his back and Lizzie sat astride his chest, pinning his shoulders with her knees. She hit at his head again and again with her palms, her face teary and furious. Alex was half hidden beneath her; his legs rose slightly with each blow, his hands opened and closed, and his shoulders strained as Lizzie pressed tighter with her knees. She hit at him until Rose dragged her away, and even then she kicked at him with her bony shoes, and scratched and bit at Rose.

Lizzie quieted when Susan reached Alex. They were all quiet until they came out into the light, then Lizzie pulled herself from Rose’s arms and began to scream. She opened her throat and a large noise came from it, much larger than she was. The effort of it shook her whole body, and closed her eyes, and turned her red. Children walking past the reptile house stopped to look; their parents hurried them on. ‘Someone’s tired!’ called one jovial man. Rose smiled at him. She realised he thought she was Lizzie’s mother.

‘Elizabeth Rose,’ said Susan. Alex had slithered to the ground and pressed his face against his mother’s legs. Now Susan shouted, ‘Elizabeth!’

Lizzie stopped screaming. She sat on the ground, limp, worn out by the exertion of being so angry.

‘Explain yourself,’ said Susan. ‘We are going home immediately, you have ruined our day, but first you will tell me why you behaved so badly, so terribly, I’ve never been so ashamed of you. And no nonsense, Lizzie, no silliness about anybody killing anybody else.’

‘But he did,’ said Lizzie, collected now, and sullen.

Susan smacked her lightly on the arm. Lizzie opened her mouth as if to scream again, but she looked across at Rose and didn’t.

‘I’m not lying,’ she said. ‘Alex killed Julia.’ And now she began to cry in messy, unfeigned gulps, staring at her mother.

‘What are you talking about?’ said Susan.

‘Alex pushed her off the ferry. While we were getting on the ferry he pushed her off the bridge we walked on and she fell in the sea and drowned and she’s dead forever.’ This through sobs full of air and water.

‘She did not drown,’ Alex called out. He turned to Rose and she noticed blood in his hair. ‘She didn’t.’

‘You hurt your brother,’ said Susan. ‘You attacked your brother. Where does this come from, Lizzie? Why do you make these things up?’

‘All right!’ Lizzie cried. Then her voice became very quiet. ‘I pushed her. Not Alex. I pushed her because there’s no room for her on the big boat. No, I didn’t push her. She fell in the water while we walked across the bridge because there were too many people. I didn’t help her. I didn’t help her because she can’t come in our window on the boat. And now she’s dead forever.’

Lizzie lay back on the dirt of the path that led to the reptile house.

* * *

Rose waited for a long time on a bench outside the zoo’s first- aid clinic. Below her the lions slept in the afternoon light. She wondered if the flying boats passed over the lions as they lifted out of Rose Bay. She wondered what Robert was doing now, with his wife and children; they might walk past her here at the zoo, gathered together, weary, cross, loving, bound for home; it seemed as likely as having seen Adelaide Turner on the hillside with the giraffes and Harbour Bridge behind her. The clinic door opened and Susan stepped out. She was red with worry; her eyes were swollen and red.

‘The children won’t co-operate with me in there,’ she said. ‘They won’t let go of my arms. It’s best I leave them. I think it’s best.’

‘I’m sure it is,’ said Rose. She stood beside her sister; she was the taller by at least an inch.

‘They’ll only be a minute,’ said Susan. ‘Just being checked over. Getting cleaned up.’

‘Shall we go right home?’

Susan nodded. Rose wished, at that moment, to be quick with comfort and easy with words. But it was Susan who spoke. She said, ‘Is there anyone for you, right now?’

Rose watched the lions and their sunned flanks. They breathed deeply, rib-movingly, as if the light were a weight upon them.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Will we meet him? Or is that … difficult?’

Rose shook her head, very slightly, perhaps to say no, perhaps to shake off her sister’s question. ‘You don’t know him,’ she said.

‘I don’t expect to know him. I don’t know anyone in this city of yours. Just looking at it, I think might be too much for me. All this water, those boats, the houses. And I don’t know a soul in them.’

Rose looked out over her city.

‘There are some schoolfriends,’ said Susan. ‘I should have looked them up, shouldn’t I? A few girls. Married.’

‘Married’ sounded to Rose like a white, tall, marble word. It sounded like a word she might stand on — not to crush it, but in order to see farther. The city rose up out of the harbour, not far away, but it seemed to float on the opposite shore of an unplumbed sea. If Rose hadn’t left for Sydney, Jonathan might have told Susan; they might have left together. There would be no Alex. But Jonathan would still have got sick. What I most want, thought Rose, is to be quiet, and private, and not to upset anybody. She knew, at the same time, that this could not be what she most wanted.

The children emerged from the clinic. Lizzie held Alex’s hand, and he didn’t mind. They looked happy and tired. Their father was dead.

* * *

Rose left work at lunchtime on Monday even though Robert had made plans with her for the early evening. She told people she was sick, and because she was never sick — because she was ‘particularly pleasant’ — they believed her. Robert could be, this once, unmet. She sat by her window all afternoon, waiting for the Coral Sea to sail between Rose Bay and the zoo with both Susan and Adelaide Turner on it. When it did Rose tried to count its windows, none of which belonged to Julia. She watched the small shapes on deck in the hope of finding somebody she recognised. Jonathan would have had binoculars. The harbour and the afternoon sun took turns with the light. Rose Bay rocked on the edge of the Coral Sea’s wake, a small sea with tides in it. Rose wasn’t sad. She wasn’t lonely. She sat at her window and watched the ship disappear, little by little, toward America.