up and ravage the peaceful plains at any time. Photographs of relatives in uniform and medals in glass cases were propped above the Murray River pine mantelpiece in the drawing room. The Baileys were a cautious and frugal tribe and remained suspicious of the outside world. Annie was seen off to Europe with money and malaria pills, insurance, clean undies and her mother’s tears ironed into cotton hankies. When she wrote home, she was careful not to mention that she had shared a bunk in a backpackers’ hostel with a German boy.
As soon as she was able, Meredith had escaped the cotton-wool confines of the tidy, affluent suburb of Camberwell where she had grown up. She’d taken a perverse pleasure in sending Bernard and Edith postcards from the most exotic locations she toured—Kathmandu, Istanbul, Casablanca—knowing that Edith would sluice an extra bucket of Pine-O-Cleen over the kitchen floor and that Bernie would drop another note in the contributions plate at St Mark’s to finance the Lord’s protection of her. When Meredith contracted dysentery in Bombay, she was almost proud of herself. Couldn’t wait to write. Her parents had probably incinerated the postcard for the sake of hygiene.
Nina was determined that one day she would visit the graves of her forebears. Her mother and father had both come to Australia as teenagers after World War II. Untold millions of Ukrainian men, including her grandfathers and six great-uncles, perished in that conflict. It was the women left behind who had rebuilt the country. Nina had heard many tales of her great-grandmothers selling roasted sunflower seeds and bunches of home-grown herbs outside the Lvov cemetery, to provide for themselves and their families.
This was the mantra of hard work and self-sacrifice she’d been raised on. Whenever she looked at another pile of football jumpers to be washed and felt like complaining, it was her Great-Baba Magdalyna offering a bunch of sage flowers she thought of, or her Great-Baba Glaphira warming her hands over a mean and spindly flame. Nina imagined them huddling in shawls against a winter wind that blasted the earthly names from the tombstones of a multitude of angels. And with that she would reach, with gratitude, for the fabric softener.
‘We’ll be in the middle of Sydney in an hour, but we still haven’t decided where we’ll stay tonight.’ Meredith was getting antsy now. There was a deeply troubling blank in her travel diary.
‘In Corinne’s backyard in Double Bay,’ Annie mentioned casually. She’d already told Nina, but had been avoiding giving Meredith the bad tidings.
Meredith took the news more calmly than they might have expected. ‘Well, I suppose we’ll be close to the shops in the morning,’ was her only comment. She was prepared to countenance that Annie and Nina might be right, and that it was time to let go of the past with Corinne; but then, when she thought back to that night at the Athenaeum Theatre twenty years ago, the embers of humiliation glowed red hot.
It was to have been Sanctified Soul’s ‘big break’. Roscoe Fortune from Fortune and Associates—the most prestigious talent agency in the country—was coming to check out their act with a view to signing them. The gals were all excited about the possibilities. They hugged themselves and each other as they dreamed of tours to international arts festivals and a recording contract.
It might all have been a mirage, but Meredith sometimes checked the gig guides and saw that at least a couple of the a cappella choirs from those days were still together and had exactly the kind of career Sanctified Soul could have expected. While their little group may never have become world-famous, Meredith had spent years imagining how it might have been. She could have kept on performing—playing the odd gig here and there. She would not have sunk so much of her creative energy into interior design; she might have spent more time with the children. And if she’d done that, she would not be in this passenger seat right now, travelling north to a denouement she was dreading more and more with each passing traffic light.
Meredith’s clients never really understood that she possessed the soul of an artist. Even as they admired the way she expertly coordinated their living spaces—creating a perfect stage on which they might perform—she knew they were thinking that they’d paid too much for something they could have done themselves. If only they’d had the time and energy.