iron gutted out of him in the Great War, and truth be told he’d always admired the startling spirit of his youngest. But rules were rules, and Mr McVeigh kept crowing about the rod and the child, and spoiling and sparing, and a crowd was gathering, and hell but it was hot … Still, there was no way any child of his was getting hit, not by his hand, and certainly not for facing up to bullies like that Barker lad. And so he’d done the only thing he could: forbidden her publicly from going on the outing. The punishment had been rashly made and was later a source of deep regret and frequent late-night arguments with his wife, but there was no turning back. Too many people had heard him say it. The words left his mouth and as they arrived at Vivien’s ears she knew, even at the age of eight, that there was nothing left to do but set her chin and cross her arms and show them all that she didn’t give two hoots, she’d never wanted to go anyway.
Which is how she came to be at home, alone, on the hottest day of the summer in 1929, while her family set off for the annual Cedar Getters’ Picnic in Southport. There’d been strict instructions from Dad over breakfast, a list of things to do and a longer list of things not to, a fair bit of agonised handwringing from Mum when she thought she wasn’t being watched, a preventative dose of castor oil for all the kiddies, double for Vivien because she was bound to need it twice as much, and then with an excited flurry of last-minute preparations the rest of them had piled into the Lizzie Ford and headed off down the goat track.
The house was quiet for the lack of them. And darker some-how. And the dust motes hung motionless without the usual moving bodies to orbit around. The kitchen table, where they’d laughed and argued minutes before, was cleared now of plates, spread instead with a motley assortment of jars filled with Mum’s cooling jam, and the notepa- per Dad had laid out so that Vivien could write apology notes to Mr McVeigh and Paulie Barker. So far she’d written ‘Dear Mr McVeigh,’ scratched out the ‘Dear’ and put ‘To’ above it, and then she’d sat staring at the blank page beneath, wondering how many words it would take to fill it. Willing them to appear before Dad got home.
When it became apparent the notes weren’t going to write themselves, Vivien put down the fountain pen, stretched her arms above her head, dangled her bare feet back and forth a bit, and surveyed the rest of the room: the heavily framed pictures on the wall, the dark mahogany furniture, the cane daybed with its crocheted rug. This was Indoors, she thought with distaste; the place of grown-ups and homework, the cleaning of teeth and bodies, of ‘Quiet,’ and ‘Don’t run,’ of combs and lace and Mum having tea with Aunt Ada, and visits from the reverend and the doctor. It was deathly and dull and a place she did her best to avoid, and yet—Vivien chewed the inside of her cheek, struck by a thought—today Indoors was hers and hers alone, most likely for the only time ever.
Vivien read her sister Ivy’s diary first; combed through Robert’s hobby periodicals next; examined Pippin’s marble collection; and then she turned her attention to her mother’s ward-robe. She slipped her feet into the cool inside of shoes that be-longed to the long-ago time of before she was born, rubbed the slippery fabric of Mum’s best blouse against her cheek, layered strings of shiny beads from the walnut box on top of the duchesse around her neck. In the drawer she turned over the Egyptian coins Dad had brought back from the war, the carefully folded copy of his discharge papers, a package of letters tied together with ribbon, and a piece of paper entitled, Certificate of Marriage, with Mum and Dad’s real names printed on it, Mum when she was Isabel Carlyon of Oxford, England, and not one of them at all.
The lace curtains fluttered and the sweet rich smell of Out-doors pushed through the open sash window—eucalypt and lemon myrtle and overripe mangoes starting to boil on her father’s prized tree. Vivien folded the papers back into the drawer and jumped to her feet. The sky was cloudless, blue as the ocean and