The Family Tree (20 page)

‘That's right.'

‘It was a Thomas James Painter.'

‘Painter?' repeated Kate, frowning.

‘That's right. He purchased the land in 1957 and owned it right through until 1974. Now, as I said, we'll be sending this out in the mail. And if you have any further queries, please don't hesitate to give us a ring.'

Kate hung up the phone and stood with her hand on the receiver, glad to have this distraction. Then she walked slowly back into the kitchen. It was all becoming clear, in a most unexpected way. It seemed that rather than her uncle being the cuckolded one, who lost his wife to a usurper,
he
was the one who had been the original usurper. Sophie Wharton had been engaged to Thomas Painter, who had probably been that Aunt Val's son and therefore a cousin of Frank's. Then
something
had happened, around the time Frank was released from jail, and she had thrown over Thomas and married Frank instead.

Kate leant against the island bench, thinking about the dates in question. She knew for a fact that Frank had been working on the Ferntree Gully land around the time her parents married, because her father had often spoken of having the choice of working with his family there, but deciding to buy the farm in Gippsland because he did not get on particularly well with his own father. By the time he returned, in 1963 when Kate was three years old, his father had passed away and he had gone into partnership with his brother.

So, given that she now knew her parents had married in 1960, and that Thomas had bought his land in 1957, both branches of the family must have purchased the neighbouring lots at around the same time. Which would make perfect sense if it weren't for the fact that one cousin had just stolen the fiancée of the other cousin. Unless . . . when they had purchased the land, the fiancée hadn't been stolen, yet.

Kate took a sip of coffee and stared pensively into the courtyard. It all fitted. Her grandparents had probably even told Aunt Val, and therefore Thomas, about the reasonably priced, excellent land in Ferntree Gully. And the young man, about to be married, had decided to establish some roots. Then later that same year, 1957, the prodigal son returned from jail, moved onto the property next door and promptly took up with the teenage fiancée. Perhaps Thomas's missing eye had begun to be a bit of a turn-off. Or maybe she was just the type who found bad boys irresistible.

By March 1958 the errant couple were married and, late the following year, her own parents were testing out the suspension of the Bedford, with rather unexpected results. Kate shook her head as she tried to imagine how it must have been for Thomas, living alone in the house he had built for his bride, right next door to the newly married couple. How bitter the man must have been. How resentful. Bad enough to lose the woman you loved to a stranger, but to family? And family whose home you could see just beyond the nearest fence? He must have felt like poking out his remaining eye for some relief.

Yet clearly he had not given up. Because, five years later, when her only child was two years old, Sophie Painter née Wharton had wandered up to the neighbouring property and made the acquaintance of her ex-fiancé all over again. Eventually deciding that her original instincts had been right on the money and absconding with her new/old paramour to places unknown.

Kate took another sip of coffee and tried to imagine how Angie was going to react to this news. In one fell swoop, her mother had been transformed from a delinquent mother with loose morals, to a teenager who had made a bad choice, and so had become the major player in a quasi-tragic romance. While there was no doubt that Sophie's maternal instincts were still questionable, to say the least, she did at least appear in a more sympathetic light. Unlike Kate's own mother.

Kate sighed, unsure where to go with this information. Did she continue to believe her father, who seemed to have played a little fast with the truth, or did she accept the opinion of Margie and Bev? Maybe they both had an axe to grind. Who knew? But one thing was certain, rather than being a pillar of the community and loved by all, her mother was heartily disliked by at least two of her peers. Who saw her as a sly child who grew into a horrid woman without a kind word to say about anyone. Eventually managing to get herself impregnated by a local man who was clearly not thinking with his head at the time.

And if even
some
of this was true, would her father really have been so devastated when she died? Or was he, perhaps, just a little relieved? Kate finished off her coffee and put the mug in the sink. No wonder her father had kept no mementoes, just his marriage certificate and her death certificate. Perhaps for reassurance that she really was gone.

Kate stared blankly towards the dining room as, almost reluctantly, she visualised a slim young woman swirling around a parquetry dance floor, holding the silver-edged hem of her white dress up with one hand. Above her, suspended from the domed ceiling, a chandelier sparkled, sending lozenges of light to play against the faces of all those who watched. Amongst them was a young man, reclining against the wall with one hand thrust into the pocket of his high-waisted trousers,
trying to appear nonchalant as he watched her dance. Grace in motion. Love at first sight.

Kate played the scene, well remembered from her childhood, for the last time. Then she pirouetted the solitary dancer over to the edge of the dance floor and watched as she metamorphosed into a plain, sharp-nosed woman in an orange-toned twin-set. Who determinedly grasped the young man by the hand and, with a knowing smile, led him out of the dance hall towards the gravelled car-park and an old Bedford truck, and a soon to be hijacked future.

B
irthday parties had not been terribly common when Kate had been a child, certainly not to the extent that they were nowadays. So whenever one was on the horizon, it became quite an anticipated event. Of all the parties she had attended, Kate particularly remembered one when she was about eight years old, for a girl with the unfortunate name of Agnes Poxleitner. From the moment she entered Agnes's house,
in her lemon party dress with the built-in petticoat, Kate became fascinated by the pass-the-parcel, waiting on the sideboard. It was huge, bigger than any she had seen before. Layers upon layers of newspaper making up a bundle so big that it overhung the sideboard and cast a shadow of its own. And while all the other guests ran around playing and throwing balloons, Kate stood to one side and stared at it, wondering what could be within something so magnificent.

Finally, after a rather rough game of musical chairs, Agnes's mother announced that it was time for the pass-the-parcel. The excited children were organised into a circle, sitting on the floor, while Agnes's father put a record on. The sounds of Burl Ives filled the room, with ‘Chim Chim Cheree', and the huge parcel was lifted down and placed on the birthday girl's lap. Kate felt like her heart was about to burst, and she had to clasp her hands together to prevent them from reaching out and grabbing at it before the game had even begun.

For what seemed like hours, but was probably only about ten minutes, the parcel made the rounds of the circle, each child tearing off a sheet of newspaper if the music stopped while they held it. Every time it reached Kate she would hold it tightly, her fingers leaving indentations in the newspaper, as she stared wide-eyed at Agnes's father and
willed
him to stop the music so that she could tear a sheet off. But Burl Ives continued without pause and suddenly her lap would be empty as she watched the parcel continue its bumpy journey.

By the time it had shrunk to a tenth of its original size, Kate began to feel physically ill. The other children started to accompany each unwrapping with cries of ‘This is it!' and ‘You've got it!' But the parcel kept shrivelling and, it seemed, the music got louder. Until ‘Chim Chim Cheree' was battering at Kate's head like a hammer and she didn't think the parcel would ever reach her again before the end. And then it was with the boy to her right, who held it for what seemed like forever without being told off, and Kate looked pleadingly at the adults.
Say something! Say something!
Then suddenly the parcel was on her lap and, as the girl to her left clutched, Kate slowly, slowly, lifted it. And the music stopped.

She'd won, and it was hers. Kate pulled off the last sheet of newspaper and then stared at the lumpy, silver-wrapped gift. ‘Open it,' said Agnes's mother, smiling at her. So Kate had, breaking her reverie to rip open the silver with eager hands and reveal – a bag of liquorice. So surprised was she by this that it took a moment to register and then, when it did, it took an effort not to burst into tears. She didn't like liquorice, had never liked liquorice. And how could that magnificent parcel, so mysteriously huge, have held nothing more than a bag of liquorice?

Kate spent the rest of the party in a crushingly disappointed daze. Then later on, she mulishly, and rather masochistically, decided that since she had won the liquorice and it now
belonged
to her, she would eat it anyway. So she sat down, in her lemony party dress, underneath a shrub in Agnes's backyard, and determinedly ate the entire bag. Fifteen minutes later Kate staggered into the lounge room, where all the other children were feasting on fairy cakes and chocolate crackles and wobbly little jelly squares. With her hands clenched over her stomach, she made her way across to Agnes's mother, opened her mouth, and threw up a copious amount of black-studded vomit all over the woman's best shoes.

The episode became known, in the Painter household, as the Liquorice Incident. But, as memorable as the embarrassment and humiliation still were, another recollection was even more vivid. It was her father, that evening in between her frequent trips to the toilet with dreadful diarrhoea, holding her tight and telling her that sometimes what you
think
you want, above all else, was the very last thing you actually needed. So it was important to recognise that, and to think twice before you went ahead. Her Uncle Frank had simply laughed and commented that it was also important to recognise what gave you the shits, and then avoid it.

To Kate, all of the new information about her family, and particularly that regarding her mother, was like the Liquorice Incident all over again. The feeling that she had held something good, only to peel the layers off and reveal an entirely different reality. One that couldn't be wrapped back up again, not in the same way. So that now that she'd started, she had no choice but to finish. Even if it made her feel ill.

The whole thing worried at her ceaselessly, throwing up even more questions and giving her an almost constant headache. She searched through her father's papers again, with the new information in hand, but was still unable to discover anything that either proved or disproved its validity. All she had was the memories of his stories, coloured by the veracity with which he had told them. And that was what hurt the most.

At one stage Kate even drove around to her father's house, hoping that perhaps answers would come there. But, for the first time ever, she was unable to get out of the car. Instead she sat with her hands on the steering wheel, as she stared over at the vacant weatherboard, with weeds sprouting amongst the gravel of the driveway and the curtains pulled in every window, especially the last.

In the end, her wake-up call came from a rather unlikely source. A message on the answering machine heralded a couriered package of urgent editing and Kate had no choice but to stop tormenting herself, in order to get the work done. So she wrapped up the issue firmly, within sheets and sheets of cerebral newspaper, and stored it away.

It took four days of solid work, interrupted only by a flying visit from Caleb and a three-hour babysitting stint with Emma, before Kate was able to courier the manuscripts back to the publishing company. By then her masochistic desire to revisit the issue of her parents, dissecting and analysing it over and over again, had largely dissipated and the whole thing simply made her feel weary. So she made a conscious decision to leave them for now. They weren't going anywhere, after all, and could always be dusted off when the time was right.

Instead, she opted to concentrate on her original mystery, that of Sophie Wharton. And neither her parents' marriage nor her mother's personality really had anything to do with Sophie's story. They were simply peripheral landmarks that had become visible as the panorama cleared.

Accordingly, Kate spent a full day on the computer writing up all of her findings thus far. She added summaries of relevant documents and also a transcript, from memory, of her interview with the poker-playing
trio next door. Last of all she drew up a timeline with proven dates in bold, and assumptions, such as the timing of her uncle's incarceration, in italics. When all this information had been safely saved, Kate took all of the items she had removed from under the Lysterfield house and put them in the boot of her car. Then, determined not to put it off, she drove them back.

It was well past five o'clock by the time she pulled up by the kerb, so Kate was rather surprised not to see Sam's car there. Shelley, she knew, would still be at
Fully Booked
, so it seemed, by the cars in the driveway, that only the boys were home. She let herself in the front door expecting to hear some sort of noise, whether it was the television, or the Playstation, or even some loud music floating out from behind somebody's closed door. But there was silence.