The Long Weekend, page 7
It was surprising to discover that Geoffrey was still working. I’d presumed he was around the same age as Emily and Margaret – that would put him well into his seventies, but perhaps he’d been younger.
It took me a good two hours to compose the letter and, even then, when I awoke in the morning and re-read it I spent a further hour on rewrites.
After I’d been to the post office, I wandered about the streets of Surry Hills making enquiries. Emily had lived in Alexander Street for over fifty years; the locals must have known her.
It was disappointing. The locals certainly knew of old Mrs. Roper from 21A, but apparently nobody had known the woman herself.
She appeared to be a creature of habit. She went to the butcher’s and the greengrocer’s on Saturday mornings, and every Friday late afternoon she settled her weekly account with the newsagent.
I thought I might be getting somewhere when I chatted to the exuberant little Italian woman who ran the corner store. ‘Thirty years I been live here,’ Mrs. Panozzi boasted in her thick Neapolitan accent. ‘Me and my husband the first Italians live in Surry Hills. All the rest, Greek.’ Thirty years. Perfect, I thought, she would have known the younger Emily. But, again, it was a brick wall.
‘Oh, very nice, very nice lady,’ Mrs. Panozzi assured me, ‘but she keep to herself, you know?’
It saddened me to think that the latter half of Emily’s life might have been empty and miserable. Following Margaret’s death or disappearance in 1940, she had only eight short years until, on the 8th of November, 1948, her ‘beloved Harry’ died – had hers been a sad existence for the ensuing twenty-seven years?
Then I recalled my dream. And the exhilaration in the old woman’s eyes as she spoke about the poet Edward Thomas – ‘To think that Harry knew him – a man who wrote a verse like that.’ No, a spirit and a mind like Emily’s could never lead an empty, sad life. But what had happened? What had she done with the rest of her days?
At nine o’clock the following Friday night, the telephone rang.
‘I do so hope this isn’t too late to call.’ The voice was British. Male. ‘But I just received your letter and I simply couldn’t wait.’
‘What letter?’
‘Oh, I’m most terribly sorry, it might be a good idea to introduce myself, mightn’t it? I’m Geoffrey Brigstock . . .’
Geoffrey Brigstock? Impossible. This wasn’t the voice of a man in his seventies. This was a young man’s voice, and a rather goofy-sounding one at that.
‘My turn to apologise,’ I said. ‘I think I might have picked the wrong Geoffrey Brigstock. You see –’
‘No, you picked the right one, you were just ten years too late. My father died in ’65 . . . Hello? . . . Hello, are you there?’
I finally found my tongue. ‘You’re Margaret and Geoffrey’s son?’
‘Yes.’
Margaret’s son? Impossible. I wondered fleetingly whether he’d been adopted but, even as my mind raised the question, the answer followed.
‘My mother was eight and a half months pregnant when she died, so you can understand how important the discovery of her letters is to me. She was killed in the bombing of London, you know.’
I remained speechless. So Margaret had finally conceived. Why didn’t she write and tell Emily?
I was sure I knew why. Margaret had given up the possibility of ever conceiving, and when the miracle occurred she was too terrified to announce it for fear of tempting fate – for fear that she might experience Emily’s own horror of a stillborn child.
‘I can’t tell you how excited I am at the prospect of reading her letters,’ Geoffrey Brigstock was saying, desperate for a reply.
‘Yes, of course,’ I answered at long last.
‘I’ve only known of her from my father, you see. So to read her own words would be a marvellous experience. I wondered whether –’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘I’ll post them to you immediately.’ I chastised myself for feeling loath to part with the letters.
‘I have an even better suggestion – so long as you don’t think it’s too intrusive,’ he added hurriedly. ‘I go to Singapore regularly on company business – we have an office there – and I wondered whether I might visit you. You described their friendship so beautifully, I would love to see Mrs. Roper’s house. Would you mind?’
Mind? I’d be delighted, I thought. To meet Margaret and Geoffrey’s son! And he didn’t sound that goofy, really, just very eager.
‘What a lovely idea,’ I said. ‘When will you be here?’
He told me that he’d arrive within the next month, that he’d let me know the date in a week or so, and he refused to allow me to meet him at the airport.
‘Wouldn’t think of it,’ he insisted. ‘I’ll ring you next week. Thank you so very, very much. Goodbye.’ And he rang off.
I cancelled an appointment the day Geoffrey Brigstock was to arrive. Doing so would probably cost me a job, but I couldn’t be bothered. I was too excited.
‘Nancy,’ he said, his handshake firm and friendly. ‘Geoffrey Brigstock. How do you do?’
He was a nice-looking man. About thirty-five. And he looked rather like his voice. A cocker spaniel, I thought. A little bit goofy, keen, eager. Margaret would have liked him, I felt sure.
He loved the house. I showed him the Kookaburra stove and the wardrobe and the christening gown – all the things that Margaret talked of in her letters. Then, over a cup of tea, he told me of his father’s life following Margaret’s death.
‘He never married again. After the war, he opened the company branch in Singapore and that’s where I spent most of my childhood.’
We were in the front room by the fireplace. He put his teacup down on the coffee table and gazed into the empty grate.
‘You mentioned Halstead in your letter. There are two Christmases I recall quite vividly. When I was nine and ten. Two years in a row we returned to spend Christmas with my maternal grandmother. It snowed one time and I was so excited, I remember. She spoke of my mother a great deal, well, rambled really – she was old and her health was not good. She died the following year and we didn’t go back after that.’
I could see quite clearly ‘the log fire in mother’s front sitting room’ and ‘the blanket of snow’ and I wondered whether Geoffrey had climbed the old elm tree.
Now was the time, I thought, and I lifted out the biscuit tin.
‘I’ll make you another cup of tea and leave you to yourself,’ I said.
‘Well, if you don’t mind,’ he answered hesitantly, ‘I’d rather like to take them back to my hotel room.’ He looked at the three bundles of letters I’d placed on the table. ‘I have a feeling I’ll sit up through the night.’
He left a half an hour later and I found myself wondering again and again how he would react to hearing his mother’s words.
I wasn’t disappointed.
‘I can’t tell you how grateful I am,’ he said when he returned the following afternoon. ‘What a wonderful thing, I feel as if I know her.’
‘Yes, that’s the way I felt.’ I nodded.
‘And Emily. You’re quite right. We must find out what happened to Emily. What a pity my mother never kept her letters. Well, of course, she probably did and they were destroyed in the bombing – just about everything was lost, I believe.’
Suddenly I had an ally and it felt good. Geoffrey was just as keen as I was to discover the lost half of Emily’s life.
‘Simple,’ he said. ‘Harry’s solicitor. Emily would have retained the same firm, I’m sure.’ He grinned. ‘And solicitors know all about their clients, believe me.’ So much for the eager cocker spaniel – when Geoffrey was inspired he really got down to business. ‘Ring your own solicitor and find out who handled the exchange of contracts on the house.’
I did. And he was quite right.
Colmer & Mitchell was a small family firm. Old man Colmer had handled the original sale of the house when Harry had purchased it in 1920, and Colmer the son explained to me that he himself had handled the sale of the deceased estate upon the death of Emily Roper.
Before I could think of a probing question, Colmer the younger went on to say, ‘And of course I still handle the estate of Emily Tonkin.’
‘Emily Tonkin?’ I was totally nonplussed. ‘What estate?’
‘Her book has been kept regularly in print for over twenty years now.’
‘Her book?’
‘Yes. Published in 1955. Her collection of poems.’ A pause while he waited for me to say something. I didn’t. ‘She was a poet, didn’t you know?’
Two days later, I tracked down the book in a small shop in Kings Cross.
‘Oh, yes,’ said the spindly woman behind the counter, ‘among true poetry lovers Emily Tonkin is quite popular, particularly with the older set.’ She went on to explain that the publishers printed a limited edition each year, usually in the autumn.
‘Two copies please,’ I said, wishing that she would hurry up.
I walked to the fountain at the top of The Cross, sat on a bench and looked at the book. A slim paperback volume. Riches, it was called. ‘The story of an ordinary life’ by Emily Tonkin. I wanted to laugh and cry all at the same time. I flicked through the pages. There was a poem called ‘Margaret’, there was a poem called ‘Harry’, there was a poem called ‘My House’. I didn’t read them then and there. I wanted to be alone. Just Emily and me.
Geoffrey wasn’t at his hotel. He was probably out on a book search himself. We’d decided to split up on our hunt for Emily’s poems. I left the copy I’d bought for him at the reception desk.
Back home once more, the phone off the hook, I settled down by the wardrobe. And, curled up in the spot where I’d read of her life, I opened Emily’s book.
On the very first page was the dedication:
For Harry, who taught me that love
Is the very last breath that we take.
The breath that we share and then, beyond.
To the richness we leave in our wake.
I heard her voice. And I continued to hear her voice all through that night as, page after page, Emily spoke to me . . .
It’s nearly twenty years since all of that happened and the little old house is no longer mine. I’m married now – I live in England and my name is Margaret Brigstock. (Although my friends still call me Nancy.) But Geoffrey and I kept the wardrobe and everything’s stored inside. There’s the cardboard box and the biscuit tin. And the hot water bottle covers and Harry’s gown. And, wrapped in tissue, the christening robe, which has been worn three times since then.
I’m no longer a struggling journalist – these days my work’s in demand. And, though I never did write that epic novel, I think Grandma Rose would be proud. Because I did become an author of sorts. I did see my words in print. I wrote a story and I called it ‘The Wardrobe’, and Emily guided the pen.
A WORD FROM JUDY
The setting of this story is not fictional at all. Many years ago, I bought a small terrace house in Surry Hills, Sydney. It was a deceased estate, old and dilapidated. The elderly woman who’d lived there had recently died, and her middle-aged sons had put the house on the market. A few items of furniture had been left, including an overly large and rather ugly wardrobe.
That wardrobe – or rather what was in it – had a profound effect upon me. There was a man’s woollen dressing gown, very old but in pristine condition, folded and wrapped in tissue paper. There were hand-crocheted his-and-hers hot water bottle covers in pink and blue. There was a silver-framed photograph of two small boys, obviously brothers, about four and six, taken – it would appear – sometime in the 1930s. And there was a rusted biscuit tin, inside which was a history: personal items, memorabilia, letters from a bygone age, all very touching.
This was poignant stuff and I was deeply moved, but I was also puzzled. What about the sons who’d put the house on the market? Why hadn’t they come to clear out their mother’s memories? I called the real estate agent, and he said that one of the brothers’ wives had collected all she felt was necessary and left the rest of the ‘junk’.
Pretty shocking, wouldn’t you agree? Sheer gold for a writer though. I adored creating ‘The Wardrobe’, which is purely fiction, but inspired by what I found in that little old house.
THE OTTO BIN EMPIRE
Clive’s Story
It was Madge who came up with the term. The site had always been referred to among the locals as simply ‘The Corner’, although it wasn’t really a corner at all, just a dozen or so big plastic rubbish bins, the collective property of the old suburb’s tiny and impoverished terrace houses that sat under the flyover down near the docks. But one day when Clive, who’d only recently joined the eclectic group that gathered there, had inquired why they’d chosen this particular spot, Madge had waved a hand about airily, referring to the manufacturer of the wheelie bins.
‘No reason at all,’ she’d said. ‘This is just one place among hundreds in the Otto Bin Empire.’ Then she’d dragged heavily on her roll-your-own and given one of her chesty chortles, and Clive had laughed along with her. The fact that he’d ‘got the joke’ had forged an instant bond between the two, for Madge was proud of her wit, and justifiably so – she was a clever woman.
The term had been steadily passed along the grapevine of the inner-city homeless after that. Even those who didn’t understand the reference to the Ottoman Empire, and to be truthful most didn’t, approved of the title. They were now part of an empire, and they liked that fact. The pools of wheelie bins that littered the city’s pokier suburbs and cluttered the lanes behind high-rise apartment blocks had always been popular gathering places, forming practical leaning posts and tabletops as they did, but there was a subtle difference now. The humble Otto Bin had taken on a new form of dignity.
For Clive, Madge’s term came to register something more significant than the amusing remark he’d initially taken it to be. As more and more he found himself drawn to ‘The Corner’, firstly for Madge’s company, then for the companionship offered by some of the others, he realised for the first time that he was actually one of them. He was one of the homeless and therefore a member of the Otto Bin Empire.
He’d known for two months that he was a person without a home. A pathetic figure perhaps, a forty-five-year-old whose worldly possessions were housed in a mothy backpack and who roamed the city’s streets and parks seeking out nooks and crannies, sleeping in the bedroll he carried slung over one shoulder. But he’d never thought of himself as officially ‘homeless’. He was not one of those displaying a cardboard sign declaiming a state of homelessness and begging on street corners; he was not one of those openly scrounging through the contents of public litter bins and gathering cigarette butts that had been ground into the pavement. Nor, thank God, was he one of those lost souls talking gibberish and guzzling who-knows-what, possibly methylated spirits, from a bottle in a brown paper bag. They were the homeless – the lost, the mentally ill, the alcoholics and junkies, the all-round seriously discombobulated. I’m not one of them, he’d think. I’m just a bloke going through a period of adjustment, I’ll be back on my feet soon.
He didn’t know exactly when that would be because he didn’t give the matter a great deal of thought. For the moment he earned enough to scrape by doing odd gardening jobs and a bit of handyman work now and then. Some days he’d walk for miles into the leafier outer suburbs where houses boasted gardens – he enjoyed walking – and other days he’d stick to the ritzier city suburbs, choosing the wealthy homes whose once-meticulous landscaping appeared in need of a little attention. He rarely asked for work outright, he found he didn’t need to – most opportunities presented themselves through casual conversation. That’s the way things had started out anyway.
‘You want to be careful doing that,’ he’d said as he’d watched her through the ornate iron railings of the house’s front fence. She was ten metres or so away, a matronly woman focussed upon her task, kneeling on the grass methodically trimming the dead flowers from a plant that took up quite an area of the sizeable garden bed.
She’d turned and looked over to him where he stood in the street, surprised but not annoyed by the comment, for he’d been polite. In fact, she seemed to be waiting for him to go on.
‘You really should be wearing gloves,’ he’d said.
‘Why?’ she’d asked.
‘Because the latex from the Euphorbia is toxic,’ he’d explained. ‘That white sap on your hands,’ she’d obediently looked down at the milky fluid on her fingers, ‘if you inadvertently get that in your eyes, you’ll be poisoned. Very painful.’
That’s all it had taken to initiate conversation about gardening, and conversation had led to casual employment. Mrs Cookson, for that was the woman’s name, had even become a semi-regular client. He called around about once a fortnight these days, and she always had a morning or afternoon’s work for him.
The conversational tactic as a form of introduction had proved so effective that Clive adopted it as his modus operandi. He always chose women, aware that he made a favourable impression upon them, even in his currently reduced state.
‘Have you tried Epsom salts for your gardenias?’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Seated in her wicker armchair on her front verandah enjoying the mild spring weather, seventy-three-year-old Florence McPherson had looked up from the book she was reading.
‘Epsom salts,’ he’d called once again, ‘have you tried them on your gardenias?’
‘No,’ she’d called back, ‘why on earth should I?’ Florence had been mystified not only by the comment but the appearance of the man who stood on the other side of the low stone wall. He was pleasant enough and quite well spoken, but he was dressed like a vagrant. And Epsom salts? What could he possibly mean?
‘The leaves on your gardenias are turning yellow,’ he’d said, no longer raising his voice. Now that contact had been established there seemed no need. The street – a cul-de-sac in a pleasant, middle-class neighbourhood – was silent, deserted, and they could hear each other perfectly.
