baby to crying. ‘What have you been up to, my clever girl?’ From a pile of folded laundry she pulled out a white blouse detailed with fine pintucking. ‘Here.’ She tossed the garment across to Lauren before retrieving a bottle-green skirt. ‘Here, the Peters can’t pay this week. Want to work it off with eggs and butter. Eggs and butter? What do I want with the likes of eggs and butter when I can have condensed milk and a joint of beef.’
Lauren grinned.
‘Men like to be chased just a little, my girl. So you dress yourself up real nice and use some of the money in the jar under my bed to hire yourself a dray and horse. And check the almanac at the store. That way you’ll be safely travelling on the night of a waning full moon.’ Mrs Grant winked. ‘They can’t rush you back now can they, if it’s too dark to travel at night.’
Lauren swirled across the brown grass with the second-hand skirt and blouse clutched between her fingers. She was going to visit Wangallon and show Luke Gordon that she was a lady, one very much in demand.
Sarah opened her eyes to a strip of light. She focused slowly, feeling a crick in her neck. The room was in semi-darkness and the light came from the bottom of the door, beyond which muffled laughter sounded. She straightened slowly in the chair, recalling a late lunch of packaged sandwiches, uncomfortable at her father’s insistence at her staying in the room with her mother while he returned home to shower and change. Streetlights lit the drawn curtains behind her, footsteps sounded in the corridor. Sarah wanted to leave, yet she was aware that once she stepped beyond this room where the woman who should have loved her lay, she would not return. This would be the culmination of her long goodbye; one that had started many years ago.
Hesitantly Sarah walked to her mother’s side. Vividly she recalled the day of her brother’s death. The carrying of his body to the Wangallon dining room table and the outpouring of grief as they stood gazing in shock at his wrecked body. Her mother had blamed her for Cameron’s death because it was Sarah who had wanted to go riding that morning. And before that blame had been years of disinterest. Why? Because Sue Gordon loved and lost a man who was not her husband and then she lost her love child.
‘You should have loved me,’ Sarah said bitterly to her mother. ‘You were so caught up in your own world that you lost something precious –’ she reached over and flicked on the night light – ‘me.’ In the soft light her mother looked almost serene. There was a curve to her lips and the vertical lines that fanned from her mouth in a web of disappointment had smoothed. Her eyes were closed, her breathing steady. ‘I needed love too. I needed your support.’ Her mother’s eyes opened so slowly that Sarah imagined her waking from a deep sleep, one that spanned hurt and betrayal and love. Despite the improbability of her mother returning from the mental abyss which engulfed her, Sarah leant forward and lifted her hand as if to test her mother’s sight, although she doubted if Sue had any synapses left that could join form and reality.
‘She can see you.’
Her father stood beside her, a paper bag of takeaway in one hand, a thermos in the other. ‘It’s time to let go of the past and move forward, Sarah,’ he said wearily. ‘You need to do it for all our sakes.’ He placed the items on the chair near him.
Sarah wanted to argue with him, yet somehow the words were already dissolving.
Ronald took her by the shoulders, turned her towards him. ‘She’s not like you, Sarah. She never could be like you. Can’t you forgive her?’
Sarah shook her head. ‘I can’t Dad. At least not at this moment.’ Too much had occurred in her life to date to make forgiving or forgetting easy. Maybe when she was older with a family of her own she would come to understand her mother’s attitude, but not now. Everything still seemed so raw.
‘You will one day, Sarah.’ Ronald moved a step closer to his wife’s side. ‘In some respects I blame myself for your mother’s troubled life,’ Ronald revealed quietly. ‘She never loved Wangallon. She didn’t fit into the bush.’
With her father’s words Sarah understood the heart of her