To the Sea Read online

  Just after Christmas, he made the phone call. He had decided to tell Tom Maguire the truth: John remembered him and his granddaughter and he would like to see them. He would particularly like to see Eva. It sounded disturbing no matter how he tried to phrase it. He was going to tell a retired lawyer and law professor that he wanted to date his teenage granddaughter. The underage daughter of John’s mentally incompetent patient. John didn’t know if such an action could see him struck off. He guessed Tom Maguire would know and might even make it happen if he was offended enough.

  But there was no way around it. He had to meet with Eva and he wasn’t going to do it behind her grandfather’s back. He would confront the age difference and any other obstacles Tom might throw in his path but he’d waited long enough. If Eva didn’t want him, he would accept it. But he had to know.

  There was no answer when he called. He was almost relieved. John called several times a day over the next two weeks but there was no answer. They were obviously away on holiday and he had no idea when they would return. He doubted they’d gone far as Tom had said that he would never take Branna back to Ireland for holidays or even to the mainland as she deteriorated quickly when she was away from home for too long. John remembered they had a house on the coast somewhere and he guessed that was where they were. He would have to wait until they returned.

  It was a long summer for John. He picked up every additional shift that was going in any ward and filled his time with the sick and injured of Hobart. He found himself listening to sad songs on the radio in the staffroom and in his flat between shifts. Roy Orbison’s ‘Only the Lonely’ became his summer anthem.

  And then one evening at the end of February, he made his daily call, expecting the usual ring out but, this time, the phone was answered by Eva. He had always planned on Tom answering and he was frozen, trying to think what to say. There was a long silence while he tried to find the right words. Eva remained silently waiting.

  In the end he said, ‘Hello, Eva. I was wondering if I might come and visit you and your grandfather sometime.’

  He realised that he had not said who he was. But before he could say anything more, Eva replied that he was welcome any time.

  ‘Do you think you should ask your grandfather first? He may have a different view.’ She quietly assured him that he could come any time. And just like that, six months after he had last seen her, he made arrangements to see Eva Harding.

  They were all out in the garden of the sprawling old mansion on Sandy Bay Road when John arrived on Saturday afternoon and Tom walked across the lawn to meet him.

  ‘Nice to see you,’ he said as he shook John’s hand and placed his other hand loosely on John’s shoulder. Despite the warmth of Tom’s welcome, John feared that the day was going to end with an ugly scene as the real reason for his visit was revealed. But he could not back out now.

  Branna was lying on an old cane lounge under a light blanket. The lawn looked out over the River Derwent across to Droughty Point and all the way down to Iron Pot Point. Branna looked in better health than John had previously seen her. Weak and pale but much more animated than she had been in hospital. She had the haunted look of the insane but some of her self was still present.

  Eva was sitting on a tartan blanket next to her mother. She looked up as John walked across the lawn with her grandfather. Just as he had hoped, there was nothing of the schoolgirl in her now.

  It was a late summer Hobart afternoon. The sky was cloudless and the sun still held its heat but the breeze off the river was chilly, reminding them that summer was short. They talked for a while and then Tom continued gardening and Branna slept on the lounge. Eva and John sat on the blanket and talked about what they had been doing over summer. Eva was tanned and the summer freckles across her nose – sommersprossen John faintly remembered from a Goethe poem – were golden and abundant. Her loose hair was bleached white from the sun and she glowed with health and a life force John marvelled at. She had been sailing and swimming most of the summer and she told John about Rosetta. It was the first time he had heard Eva say more than a sentence. She was cheerful and relaxed and, as she talked, John realised how happy he was just sitting there listening to her.

  The day wore on as they sat looking at each other and talking. Branna woke up and appeared refreshed by her sleep. Her cheeks had a faint pinkness to them and the usual dark rings under her eyes had faded. She looked like a kind woman and John felt sorry for what she had become. Eva helped her mother to stand. Branna was tragically thin and her frailty was hard to look at as she sought her daughter’s strength. Branna leaned into Eva and hugged her. Their two white heads lowered together as Branna spoke quietly to Eva in that language John did not know. Eva smiled and said something in reply which made the older woman smile back warmly. She and Eva went up to the house to make tea and Tom and John sat on the lawn in white wooden deckchairs looking across the river in the last thin warmth of the day.

  ‘Thank you for allowing me to come today, Tom,’ he started. ‘I know it must have seemed out of the blue but I was keen to meet with you and Eva again. I would very much like to get to know Eva better.’

  ‘Well, it’s not as out of the blue as all that, lad.’ John tried to decipher Tom’s tone but it was flat and gave him no clue. ‘You seemed quite taken with my granddaughter back in August. I was wondering if it would last.’

  ‘It has.’

  ‘I see,’ said Tom. ‘My love for her grandmother fell upon me in an instant and will last until I take my last breath. Longer if, as the priests like to tell us, there is a world waiting for us after this life. I pray to their damned God that Getha will be there waiting for me. I could not face eternity without her. This life is hard enough.’ After a pause while John tried to grasp where this conversation might be going, Tom continued. ‘How old are you, John?’

  It did not occur to John to lie.

  ‘Twenty-seven.’

  There was a silence between the two men as they sat looking out over the river. The day was ending and the water had darkened with the day. It would be a cool night.

  ‘You may see my granddaughter, John. You may date her, if that is the correct term. But you are a man and she is a girl. A girl who has suffered greatly and has had to take on more burdens than are fair or just. You will treat her with the care she deserves and that I expect. You will not betray my trust in you on this matter. Are we agreed?’

  ‘Yes, sir, we are. You have nothing to fear,’ said John. ‘I guess I’d better talk to Eva. She may not be as interested in me as I’m hoping she is.’

  ‘I can’t help you there, lad,’ said Tom as he continued looking out across the blue of the Derwent.

  Branna called out to them from the wide front verandah to come up for tea.

  John later came to think of 1961 as the year when his real life began. Time spent with Eva was the only time that mattered. Places John had been with other dates were all wrong with Eva. She was too young to go to a hotel or some of the clubs John usually spent time in. They went for long walks, to the pictures or spent time at John’s flat drinking tea and talking. John delighted in looking at Eva; she moved with a grace and deliberateness he had never observed in another person.

  Their first kiss sealed his unshakable desire for her. They had been going out for two months and John had pulled back from kissing her goodbye on each of their dates. He had allowed himself only the briefest of pecks on her cool cheek. He wanted to kiss her – he wanted far more than that – but he was daunted. He knew it would be her first kiss and he feared for what might happen afterwards. He knew he would not be able to stop. He knew he would never be able to think of anything but kissing her again. And he had promised Tom to treat her with care.

  And then one cold autumn afternoon, they were at John’s flat. They had been sitting on the floor in front of the little radiator listening to records and he got up to make a pot of tea and some toast. Eva followed him into the kitchen and sat at his small kitchen table watching
him. In her Eva way, she stood up and slowly walked right up to him until her body was lightly pressed against his and she kissed him. She didn’t know how to do it at first but she explored his lips and mouth with a naive sexual curiosity. Her mouth was soft and delicious. He restrained every nerve end in his body as she ran her light fingers down his neck and followed the contours of his chest, his shoulders and his flat torso. She kissed his throat, his wrists, the palms of his hands and she wandered down the full length of his body with her firm hands. She slowly explored all of him and John’s only movement was to breathe. When she was finished, she stepped back and looked at him with her wide-eyed candour. John knew if he touched her, he would betray Tom’s trust completely.

  He walked her home in the early darkness and on the sandstone flags on the wide verandah of her grandfather’s house on Sandy Bay Road, he held her and kissed her. This time he was in control. He could not walk away from this kiss without the promise of more. He knew she would give him more. They would give each other everything. And so he asked her to marry him and she, in her barely audible Eva voice and with her warm lips lightly touching his, said yes.

  Eva

  EVA STOOD AT THE OPEN FRENCH DOORS IN THE BIG LIVING ROOM. THERE were police boats in Driving Sound. Policemen were standing with members of her family on the lawn. They were not mingling.

  Eva was not familiar with panic but she felt it now writhing somewhere deep inside her. She concentrated on her breathing. She could slow it down and go without breathing for a very long time. She stilled and waited for the panic to find a place to settle.

  The dark-haired detective was the one calm spot in the frenzy of people spread out in front of her. He was looking at the water. Standing alone and calm in the centre of the fray. Eva followed his lead. She, too, needed to calm. The police had come to Rosetta once before to tell her family that the sea had taken one of them. Eva did not remember the officers from that time but she remembered the despair they brought with them in their blue car. It stayed swirling in the air long after they had left. Then Branna’s unborn baby had died and Branna stopped talking.

  But the police could not be here today to tell her that Zoe was gone. Like the detective, she tried to relax into her body and just look to the sea. That was where the answer would come from. He was the right man for the job.

  She turned her back on the activity on the lawn and went back into the coolness of the house and over to the pale yellow and blue chart hanging on the long white wall. All the bays and every little cove and beach had been mapped and named on the chart, but the big blue mass in the middle with its ripply lines marking the massive depths of the pale blue vastness was nameless. Eva ran her fingers across the glass that covered the chart and round the mapped coastline she had walked and sailed and swum since childhood. She knew the names and the feel of every rocky outcrop and beach for the fifty kilometres her finger slowly traced. She moved her finger slowly past Grave Rock on the east coast up past Munster Beach and her favourite little beach at Gypsy Dance Bay. Her finger stopped on the pink smudge near the bottom of the yellow peninsula which was Rosetta. Like Eva, her children loved this house and this place. Two of her children had been married here. They had learned to swim, to sail, to live here. Zoe had been conceived here. Meara and Getha had both died here. Eva had been born here and she hoped that it would be at Rosetta that she would one day die. It was here, in front of the big open fire, that Eva had told John Ornice’s story.

  When Eva had been small, her father had put his finger on this unmarked spot and said, ‘Here we are, Evie. This is us. This spot right here is Rosetta.’ She was very small, older than baby Evie but not yet big girl Eva who she had to become after he died. She remembered not really understanding what he was saying that day. How could the spot under his finger on the pale yellow paper chart be them and this big house? There wasn’t even a picture of Rosetta.

  On that long ago day, she was looking out the big glass doors across the verandah and wet dark lawn, past the low dunes to the waves slowly breaking on the white sand while she listened to her father talking to her. She couldn’t hear the waves. The doors were closed and the waves were small, the sea mirror grey and still. Her father held her up to the chart and his finger was still on the pale yellow spot as she leaned into his shoulder and wondered at the impossible thing he was telling her. She remembered laying her head over his shoulder and the warm smell of his sea-damp flannel shirt as she watched the silent waves breaking slowly on the wet sand. She could feel his heart beating slow and strong against her own chest. She listened through his thick body to his rumbling words moving up from somewhere deep in his chest and along his long throat and coming out quiet and low against the side of her head.

  One day when she was six and he was dead and Branna was in the hospital, Eva was looking up at the chart and saw the faint smudge of his dirty finger on the pale yellow land above Driving Sound. She still couldn’t read the chart, and the lines and arrows didn’t look anything like Garnet Point, but her father had known how to read it and he was always pointing at that spot and saying ‘Here we are’. She went over to her grandfather’s big wooden desk with the locked drawers at the far end of the living room and got a pen. She dragged across the round leather ottoman from in front of the fireplace and stood on it to reach the chart. With the red pen, she made a little cross like the one on her father’s gravestone. The red cross was right on the smudge of his finger. She wanted it marked with something more than a smudge, which could be wiped away. If that happened, where would they be then? She knew a cross was the mark for a dead person.

  Eva knew as soon as she stepped down from the ottoman that she shouldn’t have done it. The big chart covered half the wall. Fine grey lines separated the yellow mainland and the islands from the pale blue sea and other pale lines measured the depth of the sea all around them. All the writing on it was small and in the same fine grey ink of the lines. Eva’s thick red cross shone like the beacon on the Isle of Caves.

  Eva wasn’t there when her grandparents found the red cross. They said nothing to her about it. The next time Eva was at Rosetta, she saw that the big chart was now in a dark wood and gold frame and covered in glass. Where the red cross had been, there was now the palest pink smudge. It looked just like the mark her father had made with his grimy finger and Eva was glad that, even though someone had tried to get the red cross off, Rosetta was still marked forever.

  At the bottom of the frame in the middle was a small brass plaque with some words etched in soft curly writing. Eva asked her grandfather what the words said but he told her that they were hard words and she would have to grow up to understand them.

  Eva accepted his answer. There was a lot she already didn’t understand and she didn’t need any more just now. Later, when she could read, she would run her fingers over the brass plaque and read the words engraved beneath her fingers.

  unsignificantly off the coast

  there was a splash quite unnoticed

  this was Icarus drowning.

  Even when Eva didn’t know who Icarus was, she didn’t need her grandfather to tell her what those words meant.

  Eva walked back out from the cool of the house onto the verandah. The young detective had moved down to the jetty. He was surrounded by people: policemen and divers all talking to him or waiting for him. Cecile and Carl were among them. Everything buzzed around him. Nobody made a move without his say-so or his blessing. Ben followed him everywhere, sitting alert at his feet when the detective paused to talk to others.

  Eva watched him. He turned away from the diver who was showing him something on a chart. He looked far out past the water of the sound. He shook his head. The others fell away. He was a conductor. His head shake had created a silence. A lull in the symphony before all the horns and strings and loud percussion found their voices again.

  They looked to him when they felt the lull to be over and this time Eva could see that he was speaking. She couldn’t hear his words but she co
uld see everyone hanging on them.

  Tony

  IT HAD BEEN A LONG DAY BUT THE THREE DETECTIVES WERE STILL IN THE Liverpool Street office. It was quiet in CIB but the station was busy. The usual drunks, the usual fights, the loud outbursts of shouting and clatter of a city police station late at night in the summer holidays. Most of the boats were in from the Sydney to Hobart race and the streets were full. The wharf area was crowded to capacity with thousands eating and drinking and partying, cramming a whole year of entertainment into the two frantic weeks after Christmas.

  Through the glass doors out into the station area, Tony watched as two constables dealt with a guy off his face on some fun drug screaming abuse and trying to punch whichever head he could reach. One of the officers had yellow vomit all down the front of his uniform. They’d clearly been trying to arrest or subdue this guy for a while. One constable slammed him up against the high counter while the other officer cuffed him before he was able to do any more damage.

  There was probably excessive force in the slam but Tony wasn’t going out there to control the situation. Technically he was off duty eight hours ago, and he had other things on his mind.

  The wrap-up at the end of the day down at Garnet Point had confirmed they still had nothing. Zoe Kennett was with her family all day and sometime after dinner she disappeared. Her family remained convinced that she had disappeared into the depths of the ocean but none of them could say any more about this conviction other than that they held it. All that was known for certain was that Zoe was gone and no one, least of all Tony, had any idea where.