She had so little left of Sam that she treasured what she did have: his pillow, which still had the faintest scent of his hair, the shirt he’d worn that last day going into hospital, the engagement ring with its tiny opal bought forty years before. And the David Jones bag with the ripped lining. These were her treasures.
The letter was almost a part of the bag now: the edges curled up, the folds worn. She’d read it many times since it arrived a fortnight ago and could probably recite it in her sleep. It was from Seth, the half-brother she hadn’t known existed, and the one link to a mother she’d never known.
Please come, I’d love to meet you. We’d love to meet you, Frankie and I. You see, I’ve been an only child for fifty and then some years, and it’s wonderful to hear that I have a sister after all. I never knew you existed, Lillie, and I’m sorry.
I’m sorry too to hear about your husband’s death. You must be heartbroken. Tell me if I’m being forward for proffering such advice, but perhaps this is exactly the right time for you to come? Being somewhere new might help?
The one thing I can say for sure after all these years on the planet is that you never know what’s around the corner. I lost my job three months ago, and that was completely unexpected!
We’d love to have you with us, really love it. Do come. As I said before: I may be speaking out of turn because I’ve never suffered the sort of bereavement you have, Lillie, but it might help?
It was such a warm letter. Lillie wondered if Seth’s wife, Frankie, had a hand in the writing of it because there was such a welcome contained in it, and yet the wise woman in Lillie thought that Seth was probably still reeling at discovering her very existence.
The sudden appearance of a sixty-four-year-old Australian sister could mean many things to an Irishman called Seth Green on the other side of the world, but most shocking might be the knowledge that his mother, now dead, had kept this huge secret from him all his life.
Women were often better at secrets than men, Lillie had always felt. Better at keeping them and better at understanding why people kept them.
They knew how to say ‘don’t mind me, my dear, I’m fine, just a bit distracted’ to an anxious child or a confused husband when they weren’t fine at all, when their minds were in a frenzy of worry. What would the doctor say about the breast lump they’d found? Could they afford the mortgage?
Would their shy son ever make a friend in school?
No, a wise woman could easily make the decision that certain information would only bring pain to her loved ones, so why not keep all the pain to herself? She could handle it on her own, which meant they didn’t need to.
Men were different. In Lillie’s experience, men liked things out in the open.
So given a bit of time, Seth might feel entirely differently about the whole notion that his mother had borne another child before him, when she was very young, and had handed that child to a convent that had in turn handed her to a sister convent in Melbourne. It might just help him, if he were to meet that child.
An open-ended ticket, Lillie decided. That would be the right way to travel to see Seth and Frankie.
Martin, one of Lillie’s two grown-up sons, had set the whole thing in motion.
Soon after Sam’s death, Martin, who was tall, kind and clever, just like his father, had taken up genealogy and started spending many hours on his computer looking for details of his past. As a university history lecturer, he said he couldn’t believe he’d never thought to do it before.
‘It’s the history of our family, I should have taken this on years ago. What was wrong with me?’ he asked, running hands through shaggy dark hair that made Lillie’s fingers itch to get the scissors to it, the way she used to when he was a kid.
The thought of him as a child, of her life when he and his brother were children, made her breath catch.
When Martin and Evan were children, she’d had her darling Sam. Now he was gone. He’d died six months ago, gone to who-knew-where, and she was just as heartbroken as if it had happened yesterday.
No matter that Lillie told everyone that she was coping – her sons; her daughters-in-law, Daphne and Bethany; the girls in the book club; her best friends Doris and Viletta; her pals in the Vinnies shop where she put in a few volunteer hours a week – she wasn’t coping. Not at all.
On the outside, she could smile and say she was fine, really. But inside was different: the entire world had a Sam-shaped hole in it and she wasn’t sure she could bear to live with it any more.
In this new world the sky was a different blue: harsher somehow. The sun’s heat, once glorious, had a cruel quality to it. And the garden they’d both loved felt empty without the two hives Sam had kept for forty years: there was no gentle hum of bees lazily roaming through the flowers. In the early stages of his illness, Sam had given his hives to his best friend in the local beekeeping association.
‘I think they’re too much for you to handle, sweetheart,’ he’d told her as he watched, with sad eyes, while Shep carefully got the two traditional-style hives with their little pagoda roofs ready for transportation.
‘Shep could come in and open them every eight or nine days,’ Lillie had protested. ‘He does it when we’re on holiday, he could do it now.’
‘I think I’m worn out looking after them,’ Sam said. Lillie knew he was lying, but she said nothing. Deep down, Sam knew he wasn’t coming out of hospital, but he’d never tell her that. He’d always protected her and he was still doing it.
Now, afterwards, there were plenty of jars of honey in the pantry, but Lillie, who used to love a glossy smear of golden honey on wholegrain toast, couldn’t bring herself to open a new one.
Nothing tasted the same. The flat whites she loved from the little shop near the library tasted so strange that she’d asked the girl behind the counter if they were using a different coffee.
‘No, it’s the same. Fairtrade Java. Do you want me to make another one? No sweat.’
Lillie shook her head. Of course the coffee wasn’t different. She was different.
It must have been his father’s death that prompted Martin’s interest in the family tree.
Martin’s wife, Daphne, groaned good-humouredly to her mother-in-law about Martin’s passionate new interest. ‘Between Martin being permanently attached to the PC on genealogy sites,’ she said, ‘and Dyanne glued to hers on chat rooms, saying she’s only talking to school friends, when she’s supposed to be doing schoolwork, I should add, I could walk out and neither of them would notice.’ A cheerful and kind midwife, Daphne now appeared to have a second full-time job – keeping an eye on Dyanne, their fourteen-year-old daughter, who had recently discovered her power over the opposite sex and was keen to test it out.
‘There’s not much of my side of the family to research,’ Lillie said ruefully. At her age, she’d decided she was long past the pain of the concept that her birth mother had given her away as a baby. She’d always known that she was adopted, and at fifteen it had been achingly painful. At sixty-four it was merely a part of her past. ‘Adoption was different in those days, Daphne. I don’t think they put half of it down on paper. From the little bits I know, he won’t find anything from my side.’
Daphne smiled.
‘That won’t stop Martin. You know what he’s like: when he gets into something, he’s obsessed. The number one topic of conversation at dinner every night is either Martin’s latest haul of illegible records or how every kid in Dyanne’s class is going to a concert apart from her and it’s not fair that we don’t trust her, after all she’s nearly fifteen. We are a pair of fossils, she says. By the way, any chance you’d come to dinner on Friday?’
Lillie