The Last Anniversary (5 page)

‘Right,’ Grace thinks, loudly in her head, busily, pretending not to notice the silence. ‘Lots to do before the baby wakes. First thing: marble cake.’

Living on the island means performing certain duties for the family business, and this afternoon Grace is giving a tour of the Alice and Jack house. Aunt Connie always insisted that the tours be given by someone who could claim a personal connection to the Munro Baby Mystery. She and Aunt Rose were the sisters who first discovered the Munro Baby, Grandma Enigma was the baby herself, Aunt Margie and Grace’s mother Laura were the Munro Baby’s daughters, while Grace and her cousins Veronika and Thomas were the grandchildren.

It’s been years since Grace has given a tour and she hopes she’ll remember her lines. She’ll have Jake with her, she remembers with a start. A real live baby. Before Aunt Connie had died, she’d suggested to Grace that she pop Jake in Enigma’s crib to give the tour an authentic touch. ‘You can bet your bottom dollar some silly ninny will ask if it’s the same baby,’ Connie had snorted, and slapped her thigh with a withered hand.

One of the responsibilities of giving the tour is making the marble cake to be left cooling on the kitchen table. It’s meant to be made to Alice’s original recipe, but every member of the Scribbly Gum family bakes a slightly different version. Grandma Enigma puts in two tablespoons of honey, while Aunt Rose likes half a teaspoon of grated nutmeg. Thomas uses one egg, Veronika uses two, and Grace uses three. Nobody, not even Laura, would ever dare to use a packet mix.

Marble cake, thinks Grace. You need to start the marble cake,
now.
But she just keeps sitting there, staring at the carton of milk that Callum used for his breakfast cereal and, of course, left sitting on the table.

She thinks through exactly what she needs to do:

Stand up.

Pick up the milk.

Walk to the fridge.

Open the fridge.

Place the milk in the fridge.

Close the fridge door.

But to do all that she needs her brain to send electrical impulses to her legs, her arms and her hands, and it seems that her brain is refusing to cooperate. She knows about electrical impulses from a science teacher from her school days who once set up an elaborate display of dominoes on the classroom floor in the shape of a human body. The idea was to demonstrate how your brain transmitted electrical impulses through your nerve cells. That’s how you moved.

Instead of toppling like dominoes, Grace’s nerves are rigid, waiting for electrical impulses that aren’t forthcoming. Her brain is having a black-out. It is quite possible that she has a brain tumour.

She needs to pick up that milk carton. She has things to do. She is very busy. Mr Callahan. That was the science teacher’s name. In her memory it was always winter when Mr Callahan taught science. He wore brightly coloured jumpers and often had a phlegmy, hacking cough that repelled the girls in his class. ‘Mr
Call
ahan, maybe you could take some sort of medicine because that’s so disgusting!’

It must have taken him so long to set up all those dominoes before the class.

Grace looks at the milk carton and grief sweeps over her. She thinks of Mr Callahan’s excited pink face. That poor, sweet man. Some girl had flicked one of the dominoes before he’d finished his explanation. He had probably thought, Now this will intrigue them. This will stop all that talking and giggling!

Grace puts her head in her hands and weeps inconsolably for Mr Callahan’s disappointment.

Finally, she stops crying and looks again at the milk carton.

Move, she tells herself. Stand up. Put the milk in the fridge. Make the marble cake. Do a load of washing. He’ll be awake soon.

She reads, ‘
If this product is not to your satisfaction, we will cheerfully refund your money.
’ She imagines a cheerful lady, in a floral apron, cheerfully refunding her money. ‘There you go, dear! Can’t have you not happy!’

But I’m so unhappy. I’m so very, very unhappy.

The cheerful lady says, ‘Oh, sweetheart!’ and pats her hand.

Oh for Christ’s sake, now she is crying over some imaginary cheerful lady. She cries and cries and cries. Every tear is fresh, fat and salty. They run down either side of her nose and into her mouth.

Finally she stops, wipes the back of her hand across her face and looks again at the milk carton.

Stand up, Grace!

She glances at her watch. And that’s when she discovers it’s nine thirty. She claps her hand over her mouth. It can’t be right. It has only been five minutes. Ten at the most. But according to her watch she has been sitting in this chair, staring at a milk carton, for an hour and fifteen minutes.

How can she complain about Callum not doing enough around the house, if she spends her days staring at milk cartons?

The telephone rings and Grace’s nerve cells finally topple like dominoes. She gets to her feet, puts the milk in the fridge and calmly answers the phone.

‘Grace! Is it a bad time? A good time? How is the baby? Asleep? Awake? This is Veronika, by the way. I hate people who just expect you to know who it is, don’t you? Have you heard? Have you heard what Aunt Connie has done?’

Grace’s cousin Veronika rarely requires answers to her questions. ‘She’s like a breathless, busy little ferret!’ said Callum, fascinated, the first time he met her, as if Veronika was some unusual creature he’d seen on a nature programme. It is true that Veronika has sharp, pointy teeth and darting brown eyes.

That’s why I was crying, thinks Grace. I’m grieving for Aunt Connie. I miss Aunt Connie. Of course I do.

‘I know that she left her house to Thomas’s ex-girlfriend, if that’s what you mean. Your mum told me.’

‘Did your jaw drop? Mine did! Of
all
people: Sophie! A complete stranger! If it wasn’t for me, Aunt Connie would never have even known of Sophie’s existence! And then she just ignores her own flesh and blood!’

Veronika is an intelligent girl but sometimes she says things that are so easy to refute that Grace has to wonder if she does it on purpose.

‘Yes, but we’re not Aunt Connie’s flesh and blood, are we?’

‘But we are! Well, perhaps not
biologically
, but spiritually and morally and perhaps legally! I mean, Aunt Connie and Aunt Rose brought Grandma Enigma up as their own baby! If they hadn’t found her that day, she would have died. A baby can’t survive long without care. Well, you know that better than anyone! A new mother!’

Grace thinks about Jake, asleep in his crib, blue-veined eyelids fluttering. How long would he survive if she followed her great-grandmother’s lead and vanished from his life? Baby Enigma had thrived. According to Aunt Connie and Aunt Rose, she’d been sleeping peacefully, and when they looked into her crib she had opened her eyes and given them the sweetest smile they had ever seen.

Grace says to Veronika, ‘What does it matter? None of us want Aunt Connie’s house, do we? You always said you’d rather die than live on the island again. You said it makes you feel trapped. Actually, I think I recall you saying that to Aunt Connie, which might have been your downfall.’

‘This isn’t about me wanting the house. It’s the principle of the matter. Sophie broke Thomas’s heart!’

‘So? He seems to have recovered. Last time I saw him he was so disgustingly happy it put me in a bad mood.’

‘That’s not relevant!’

Grace begins to feel exhausted. Her mother doesn’t own a walkabout phone. The phone is kept on an antique table in the hallway, so you have to stand up with your shoulders back while you talk. No cosy, curled-up conversations in armchairs. She slides down to the floor with her back against the wall.

‘Look. If this is what Aunt Connie wanted…’

‘Sophie could only have met Aunt Connie twice at the most!’

‘Well, she obviously had an impact.’

‘Yes, what a conniving, manipulative witch!’

‘I thought she was your friend?’

Veronika ignores that. ‘This morning I heard an ad on the radio for solicitors who actually specialise in this sort of thing. I’m thinking that we all contest the will.’

Suddenly Grace is angry. ‘We haven’t even had Aunt Connie’s funeral yet! I don’t want anything to do with contesting the will. Aunt Connie was perfectly sane and had every right to leave her house to whoever she wanted.’

Veronika’s voice bubbles up and over, relishing the opportunity to argue. ‘You have no sense of family, Grace! No sense of history!’

‘I’m hanging up. The baby’s crying.’

‘I don’t believe you. I can’t hear the baby. You’ve always avoided confrontation!’

‘And you’ve always sought it. I’m hanging up.’

‘Don’t you dare hang up on me! Face this conflict!’

Grace hangs up. She lets her head drop forward onto her knees.

There is a sharp, cross cry from upstairs. Grace looks at her watch, terrified that another hour has vanished without her. What if the baby has been crying and crying without her hearing?

It’s fine. Only a few minutes have passed. The incident in the kitchen was an aberration.

She gets slowly to her feet like an arthritic old woman. With her hand on the banister for support she walks up the stairs, hoping with each step that this time she’ll feel it. But when she walks into the baby’s room and picks up her screaming son, she feels nothing except intense boredom. A drab, dreary sense of nothing much at all.

She changes his nappy and takes him into the bedroom and sits on the end of the bed, unbuttoning her shirt with one hand. The baby’s agitated mouth sucks at the air for her nipple. Finally she manages to get him to latch on and his eyes roll back in ecstasy while he sucks feverishly.

Grace’s aunt, Margie, had mentioned yesterday that she didn’t know about any ‘Mozart effect’ but she had certainly sung to Thomas and Veronika when she was feeding them as babies. ‘It did seem to keep them focused on the job!’

Dutifully, wearily, Grace begins to sing.

In the afternoon, Grace puts Jake in his state-of-the-art stroller. It’s one of those ones you can jog behind, but she can’t imagine having the energy or desire to ever go for a run again. She and Callum had practised running around the shop with it. They’d made other shoppers laugh and there’d been a chummy community feeling about it. That sort of thing was always happening with Callum.

Outside, it is cold and bright and still; the river is flat and hard.

Grace looks worriedly at the cooling marble cake in her mother’s cake tin, sitting on top of the stroller. She had to throw it together in a frantic rush and she’s not even sure it’s cooked all the way through. It’s just her luck that it’s a group of older women doing the tour rather than school kids.

Aunt Connie had told her about the group booking just a few days before she died.

‘Are you sure you can manage it?’ she’d asked. ‘I wouldn’t ask you, but Enigma, Rose and I are going to that recital at the opera house and Margie has her ridiculous Weight Watchers meeting. It’s like a new religion for her. She can’t miss one session.’

‘I’ll be fine!’ Grace had said. ‘At this age they’re still so portable! It’s not like he’s a toddler.’

She’d stolen that ‘portable’ line from a friend. She’d even stolen her happy, casual, motherly tone of voice. Grace doesn’t think babies are portable at all.

‘Well, if you’re sure,’ Connie had said doubtfully. ‘The booking is for the
Shirley Club
. A club for women called Shirley. Isn’t that the funniest thing you’ve ever heard? There are fifteen of them. Fifteen Shirleys. “You’re not serious,” I said. She said, “Oh, but we are!” I said, “Well, give me your credit card details,
Shirley
.”’

Grace wonders who will handle the bookings now that Connie has died. Perhaps Sophie will take that responsibility along with the house. That would infuriate Veronika.

The Shirleys are an excitable bunch of women in their fifties and sixties, all wearing similar brightly coloured, comfy parkas, long scarves, beanies, and sunglasses that are too large for their faces. They giggle and chat like girls on a school excursion. Perhaps being called Shirley guarantees you a cheerful personality.

They’d caught the train and then the ferry from Glass Bay, and are full of praise for the weather, the scenery, the island and the hot chocolates down at the wharf.

‘It’s the most beautiful island! Have you lived here long, love?’

‘I grew up here,’ says Grace. ‘But I only just moved back about six weeks ago, before my baby was born.’

‘Are you a model, sweetheart?’

‘No, no, I’m a graphic designer.’

‘Well, you
could
be a model. Couldn’t she, Shirl?’

Jake is passed around from Shirley to Shirley and looks perfectly content in each expert pair of arms. Grace wonders if she should be worried about letting so many strangers hold him, but decides it’s worth it. He is being topped up with all the proper motherly love he is missing out on. Besides which, these energetic women are far too cleanly scrubbed to harbour germs.

She stands on the front porch and begins the speech she, Thomas and Veronika were all taught to give when they turned sixteen and were considered old enough to take their turns at the Alice and Jack tours.

‘Welcome to the home of my great-grandparents, Alice and Jack Munro. Some of you may have heard of a famous, mysterious ship called the
Mary Celeste
. It was found adrift in 1872, sailing itself across the Atlantic Ocean. The crew and passengers had vanished. There were no signs of struggle and the ship was in perfect condition, with plenty of food and water. Well, this house is similar to the
Mary Celeste
. When Connie and Rose Doughty visited this house in 1932, there were no
immediate
signs that anything was amiss, yet Alice and Jack had vanished into thin air. The difference is that in this case there
was
one survivor. A tiny baby was just waking for her feed. That baby was my grandmother.’