twenty-two she was gone. Moved to Byron.’
Annie pushed the tissue box closer to Meredith’s side of the table. This was threatening to be a soggy tennis match.
‘I’ve only had the odd phone call and email since. Now she’s getting married, and I’ve never even met the man . . .’
‘Let’s get back to Brad,’ Annie intervened. She couldn’t cope if the two women started weeping in unison. ‘The only fact we have in front of us is that Nina has a husband who loves her and his family very much. He’s hardly likely to be having an affair and bringing his mother-in-law in to cover for him! It must be some work thing, or something happening with his family maybe?’
‘I’ve rung his mother. She hasn’t heard from him,’ Nina said, her head drooping into her hands.
Annie sighed; she was exhausted with it all too. ‘We’ll have to give him the benefit of the doubt, that’s all.’
Meredith tore a tissue from the box, wiped her eyes and nodded. She was glad no-one wanted to linger on her own disappointments with Sigrid. She couldn’t quite believe she’d brought up the topic.
They said their goodnights. Reading lights behind drawn curtains cast a blue glow through the cabin. As Nina assembled her bed she reflected that, if she had been in East Malvern right now, she would be standing by the foot of the stairs thinking about school lunches, sports gear, permission notes and pocket money. She would have been preoccupied, with no time to think about where her life was heading. And maybe that was a good thing.
When she climbed into bed with Brad, her mind would still be whirring with tomorrow’s impossible timetable. He would sneak his hand onto her thigh, wanting sex, and she would brush him away, knowing the revulsion he must feel at touching her fat white Bratwurst legs.
‘I’m tired, Brad. I’ve got so much on tomorrow.’
And he—dutiful father, loving husband—would kiss her cheek and roll over to sleep without protest. She loved him so much for his quiet acceptance of how things were with her. As he snored, she would look at his tightly muscled back and the long curve to his still-slim waist, and know that there would, inevitably, come a time when she couldn’t refuse her husband anymore. And that time would only come because he would stop asking.
Now, as she climbed into bed and ran her hands across her flabby stretchmarked stomach, she knew she was in a land of regret way beyond the sweet and comforting balm of chocolate.
Eleven
Ulladulla, Nowra, Wollongong . . . almost three hundred k’s up the Princes Highway and the RoadMaster Royale did not falter as it sped its precious cargo towards Sydney Town. Nina had the measure of the machine now—she merged like a maestro, changed gear, indicated, sped up and slowed down with a smooth and confident grace. She was grateful for the cylinders, valves and pistons that were acting in concert to produce such a seamless performance. She glanced down to admire her strong forearms conducting the vehicle with such skill.
By the time they reached Sydney’s southern suburbs, Nina was weaving through the stream of traffic, imagining every car was a note on a musical score and she was conducting a big band—anything to stop herself thinking about home. She’d tried to ring Brad during the day and couldn’t raise him. The last person on earth she would call was her mother. She knew that Wanda would put her through the mother of all interrogations with one aim in mind—to bully her into returning home. As confusing as things might be right now, Nina had no intention of taking that particular guilt trip back to Melbourne.
The three women were now, they reminded themselves, a long way from hearth and history, traversing places they had never visited before. And all of them, they reminded each other, were lucky to be women a long way from home.
When Annie had travelled to Paris in her twenties, it was the first time a Tongala Bailey had been to France since her great-grandfather had fought at Pozières in World War I. He had returned from that slaughterhouse to take up a Soldier’s Settlement farm in Tongala in the ‘Golden Square Mile’—the richest patch of farming land in Australia. And there he, and all the Bailey sons after him, had stayed. But they had not rested. They remained ever-vigilant, tight-lipped and upstanding against the spectre of the Dogs of War that might rise