Life Support: Escape to the Country (7 page)

They held the funeral for Lleyton Charles Winston Chirnside six days later. It was a cold and blustery winter day. Gusty winds whipped gray clouds across the sky from west to east, bringing squally rains and hail followed by brilliant sunshine and blue skies then rain again. Melbourne was known fondly for her four-seasons-in-one-day weather and today she was making every effort to impress and live up to her reputation.

The one-hundred-year-old Trinity College Chapel at Melbourne University was overflowing with Lleyton’s family, friends and work colleagues. Outside, cars whizzed past, people going about their daily lives oblivious to the amount of grief trapped within the old building.

Emma had little to do with the service preparations – Lleyton’s parents had seen to all the arrangements, right down to organizing a company to create a professional DVD presentation in which she barely featured. Not that she minded. His parents were grieving the loss of the man they’d known since birth. She was grieving the loss of a man she’d only known for three years and been married to for two. And as it turned out, she hadn’t really known him at all.

She sat in the front row, dressed in an uncomfortable but obligatory tailored black dress and jacket, flanked by her parents. During the service, she surprised herself when her tears flowed freely as the minister spoke of Lleyton in glowing terms. She roughly wiped them from her cheeks with the back of her hand and sniffed. Win glanced at her before quickly averting his eyes, but not before Emma caught the sheen of tears that glistened.

Maybe the tin-man does have a heart.

Andrew sat behind her, slightly to the left, in the pews reserved for close family friends. At one point Emma heard him weeping openly and her heart broke for him. As difficult as the circumstances were surrounding Lleyton’s life and death, it was clearly as hard for Andrew to say farewell as it was for her. She sighed. The physical pain of Lleyton’s death wasn’t as bad in its intensity as the emotional pain it had caused.

Her head told her to move on, but her heart was trying to find a way to do that. At times her grief felt like an insurmountable brick wall. As much as Lleyton had let her down, she had loved him once, and inexplicably she found herself missing him at the strangest of times. She dragged her attention back to the choristers hoping for anything to distract her from the raw memories.

When the long and formal Anglican service was over and the final hymn was performed by the choir, Andrew managed to pull himself together long enough to perform his duties as a pallbearer. His eyes caught hers briefly as he proceeded past, his back ramrod straight. They shared a tiny smile of comfort and understanding. As extraordinary as the whole situation was, they’d formed a mutual respect for one another and Emma saw no point in hating the man. It was far better to forgive him so she wouldn’t be entrapped in a lifetime of bitterness.

She was, however, still working on forgiving Lleyton.

Her parents stayed for the week after the funeral, but at Emma’s insistence they headed north back up the highway. She needed time to grieve alone. They pleaded with her to come back to Birrangulla with them, but Emma made no plans or promises. She simply had to get through one day at a time.

*

On the fourth of July, a week after the funeral, Emma sat opposite Andrew in his thirty-ninth floor corner office with its commanding views across the city toward Port Philip Bay. She hadn’t seen or spoken to any of the Chirnsides since the afternoon of the funeral and this was the first time she’d had any contact with Andrew. It was the day Americans celebrated their independence, but Emma felt anything but independent. She felt anxious, unsettled about the future, and nervous about the meeting with Andrew to hear the details of Lleyton’s will.

“The police are calling it an accident, which is good,” Andrew said once he sat and straightened the pens and papers on the desk in front of him.

“How is that good?” Emma asked.

“If it was deliberate, there wouldn’t be a life insurance policy which would mean no money for you.”

“Lleyton would never have taken his own life.”

“I know, I know.”

Andrew straightened his already perfectly hung tie and smoothed his hand down the front of his shirt. He rubbed at a spot on his wrist. Why was he so nervous?

“I’ve already told you, Andrew, I don’t want his money,” Emma said.

“Legally it’s yours.”

“Maybe we should split it,” she said, with a halfhearted laugh. She was trying to lighten the heavy mood that hung between them.

Andrew scowled. “Emma, this is serious. You need to understand, if Mary-Margaret or Winston get any sniff of the plans for your divorce or any hint of my … er … relationship with Lleyton, they’ll make sure you don’t get a cent.”

Emma’s heart stilled as a thought landed in the pit of her gut. Fear gripped her. “If they thought
I
was having an affair, would they go after Lleyton’s money?”

Andrew’s eyes bored into hers. “
Were
you having an affair?”

She shook her head vigorously. “No.”

Andrew sighed heavily. “I’m sorry, I know this can’t be easy for you.”

She appreciated his empathy. It couldn’t have been easy for him either. Her eyes dropped to her lap. She cleared her throat. “There may be a small problem. Mary-Margaret did, um, catch me kissing someone in Sydney. Two weeks before Lleyton died.”

Andrew’s eyes snapped open wide. “Who?”

Josh’s face – the face which reminded her of Tom – came to mind, and Emma flushed at the memory. “No one important. A doctor. A man I met at a conference.”

“Is it someone who knows Lleyton, or the family?”

“No.”

“Do you think he’ll tell anyone about the affair?”

“It wasn’t an affair.” Emma realized she was shouting when Andrew glanced at the closed office door. She lowered her voice. “I kissed him
once
. That was it. I’ve never seen or spoken to him since and I don’t intend to. We never swapped numbers or anything. It was a stupid, stupid thing to do. I was upset. I’d gotten your email about Lleyton agreeing to the divorce and I wasn’t thinking straight. He reminded me of a guy I used to know and when he came onto me in the bar I—”

Andrew was shaking his head at her. “Let’s hope he keeps his mouth shut if the Chirnsides go looking for him.”

Emma frowned. “Why would they do that?”

“Trust me, you have no idea what this family is like. Lleyton has left you a considerable amount of money – the money he received when he turned twenty-one as part of his inheritance. Although Winston and Mary-Margaret have no legal entitlement to it whatsoever, they’ll try anything to get their hands on that money because they believe it’s rightfully theirs. The Chirnsides are the type of people to go looking for dirt. If they can prove you were having an affair with this doctor in Sydney you can expect they’ll challenge the will.”

“I told you, I wasn’t having an affair and I also told you I don’t want Lleyton’s money!” She was shouting again, but didn’t care. She folded her arms and glared at Andrew. It was partly his fault she’d found herself in this predicament.

He stared at her in return but kept his mouth closed, drawing his lips together in a tight grimace. He looked withdrawn and pale and on closer examination, Emma saw the lines of grief etched around his tired eyes. He looked terrible, and suddenly she felt sorry for him. Unlike Emma who had been surrounded by love and casseroles after Lleyton’s death, Andrew would’ve received nothing.

She sighed. “Okay, because you keep going on about it, because I’m here, and because you have to do the right thing as Lleyton’s lawyer, how much are we talking? Define considerable. A million dollars for his life insurance policy? Maybe a few grand in savings? I think he might have shares too, but I’m not sure.” Or he may have blown the whole of his family inheritance. Lleyton might have been a control freak, but he was also the type of person who acted on a whim and thought about the consequences of his actions later.

Andrew moved a pile of papers aside and opened a manila folder. Another ream of papers was neatly stacked inside, held together by a large paperclip. He ran his finger around the perfectly aligned edges. Judging by his mannerisms, Emma could understand what Lleyton had seen in Andrew. They were a lot alike.

By contrast, Emma was messy and disorganized which had driven Lleyton mad. When she’d first moved in, Lleyton said he didn’t care how untidy she was, as long as he didn’t have to look at her mess. “A place for everything and everything in its place” was his motto – a motto that for the most part she tried to adhere to. But it didn’t matter that she had a walk-in robe bigger than most people’s bedroom, her clothes always ended up strewn across the floor. Lleyton lined up his business shirts in order of color, and shelved his shoes beneath the shirts in opaque plastic boxes.
Labeled
opaque plastic boxes. She vaguely wondered what Andrew’s wardrobe looked like. No doubt, he brought much-desired order and structure into their relationship.

“The insurance policy was worth five million dollars,” Andrew said softly, interrupting her wandering thoughts.

Emma let her breath out in a rush. “Whoa. That’s a lot of money. Far more than I expected.”

“You get the car too.”

She nodded. She’d expected that.

“He gave me that car for my birthday.”

The car was the massive white Mercedes SUV she hated driving because it was too big to fit between the white lines of the supermarket car park. Lleyton had called it the “king of the jungle” when he’d proudly presented her with the keys and told her it was the safest vehicle on the road. He’d driven a brand new black Audi sports car himself, which in hindsight had not been the best or safest option given the police had to unwrap what was left of it from around the gum tree in the mountains. She shuddered, glad she’d never seen any evidence of the accident scene.

Andrew shuffled more papers without looking at her. “There’s also a house.”

“What do you mean? The house belongs to Win and Mary-Margaret.”

Andrew opened the front page of another document in front of him and smoothed his hand across imaginary wrinkles in the paper. “I’m not talking about the house in Kew.”

“What house
are
you talking about?”

Andrew coughed nervously once behind a closed fist. She wanted to tell him to spit it out, but could tell he wasn’t a man who liked to be rushed.

“A property called Lexton Downs.”

Emma frowned. “Where is it?”

He rubbed at his wrist again. “New South Wales.”

She tucked her hair behind her right ear and stared at him. “Where in New South Wales? On the coast? Is it a holiday house?”

“Er, no, not a holiday house. It’s marginally larger than a holiday house.” Andrew rubbed his chin.

Emma sat back in her seat and crossed one leg over the other. “So where is it? And why do I know nothing about it?”

“It’s near a town called Birrangulla.”

“What?” She uncrossed her legs and scooted forward on the edge of the chair.

“It’s a regional town in central New South Wales west of Sydney. Near Orange.”

“I know where it is. I grew up there.”

Now it was Andrew’s turn to look surprised. “I didn’t know that.” His brows knit together. “I always wondered what made Lleyton choose a house in the middle of nowhere.” He leaned over and opened the top drawer of his desk. Pulling out a set of keys, he laid them on the papers in front of him. “Emma, Lleyton has left you a three-hundred-hectare heritage listed property.”

Emma burst out laughing. “You’ve got to be joking. A farm? He’s left me a farm?”

“It’s more than a farm. According to the report from the real estate agent, it’s a substantial property. It comes complete with an 1860s bluestone homestead, a gatekeeper’s cottage and another one-bedroom cottage behind the stables. The homestead was in a terrible state of disrepair when Lleyton bought it a couple of years ago. He paid a builder to restore it to its original state. From what I understand, the renovations are almost finished. There’s a full-time farm manager and a caretaker employed to keep the property operational.”

Emma’s mind swam with all this information. Lleyton had bought a property and she knew nothing about it? How many more secrets had he taken with him to the grave?

“Substantial?” she repeated, quoting Andrew. “What does that even mean? And why did he leave it to me? I know nothing about farms. Besides, I can’t move back to Birrangulla. Melbourne is my home now. My job is here. My friends are here. I don’t want, and nor do I
need,
some farmhouse in the country.”

Andrew nudged the keys closer to her and gave her a small smile. “I’ve seen the photos. You’ll want
this
house.”

Emma had heard enough. She pushed her chair back from the desk. “So from the grave he still speaks and I have to keep his secrets,” she muttered. “It’s so unfair.” She banged her hand on the desk. Andrew looked up, startled.

The sharp sting of tears surprised her. She hadn’t cried properly since the funeral and the last place she wanted to cry was in her husband’s lover’s office.

“I’m sorry,” Andrew said softly.

“It’s not your fault,” she replied, “but you have to admit, this is crazy. I was the one who asked for a divorce. Surely Lleyton would have wanted the will to be changed, but he died before he had a chance. It hardly seems fair that I should take the house. The insurance money will be more than enough for me to buy a nice place here in Melbourne and invest the rest. Then I can start my life again.”

Andrew spun in his chair and stared out across the overcast skies that formed the backdrop of the city skyline. She followed his gaze.

Finally she spoke to his back. “I don’t get it, Andrew. Why did Lleyton buy a farm in Birrangulla? He hated it up there. The only times he ever went there after he finished university was to visit my parents. And that was only when I dragged him.”

Andrew swiveled in his chair to face her again. He loosened his tie and undid his top button, sliding his finger around the collar of his shirt. “It’s not easy for me to have to tell you this, but you know what Lleyton was like. He always acted on impulse. Last year he used part of his inheritance and bought Lexton Downs. He purchased it over the internet without ever seeing it, as a gift for you. I didn’t know anything about it until afterward.” Andrew’s eyes bored into hers. “Lleyton loved you, Emma, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to keep his secret from you much longer. He wanted to be sure that he had properly looked after you when you went your separate ways, so he bought you a house. It was always yours regardless of what happened.”