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  When they got back they could hear Aaron in his office, talking on the phone again.

  ‘There’s some business crisis, I’m afraid. On top of Peggy,’ Emma said.

  ‘It’s only natural you’d be worried about her. She doesn’t look well to me.’

  ‘She’s just about stopped eating.’

  ‘I’m quite happy to sit around, you know. I can always entertain myself. I have some part-finished sewing I can get on with now and then, if you don’t mind a bit of a mess. I’ll clear up after myself, I promise.’

  ‘Why should I mind?’

  When she brought her sewing bag down, Emma watched her. ‘That looks like a serious sewing kit and must be important if you’d bring it all the way to Australia with you.’

  Mara took out her project.

  ‘Is that what I think it is?’

  ‘A teddy bear? Yes. It’s a hobby of mine, designing and making soft toys – at the designer end of the market, not the cheapies.’

  ‘That one’s really cute. Did you buy a pattern or do you just make it up as you go along?’

  ‘I make my own patterns. I’m thinking of selling kits with variable outfits and finishes, only it’d cost quite a bit to set myself up, do the advertising and so on. When I lost my job I had to postpone my start-up because it’ll be a while before it’ll support me – if it ever does support me fully. Meet Clarissa.’ She held out the bear, whose fur was a subtle shade of pink. ‘Hold her. See how she feels to cuddle.’

  Emma took the toy and smiled instinctively, then ran her fingers up and down one of its arms. ‘It’s lovely material, so soft. You have her in underclothes, pretty ones too. What’s the top layer going to be?’

  Mara took out the sketch of the clothes she was planning to make for Clarissa, which included a little hat with flowers on it, not the usual bonnet.

  ‘Oh, that’s going to be lovely. Those clothes will add just the right touch.’

  ‘Yes. I’d have to charge a lot for a one-off like this, but some people will pay a lot once the maker gets a reputation.’

  Aaron came in, looking annoyed.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Emma asked at once, dropping the sketch.

  ‘Karen Danson has quit on us and we’ve been drawing up adverts for her job. We can start advertising it from a distance but you can’t gauge what a person is really like till you’ve spent some time with them.’ He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. ‘I may have to nip across to Sydney, or wherever is the best place to conduct the interviews.’

  ‘Can’t you bring applicants over here to the west?’ Emma glanced towards their visitor.

  ‘There are more people than me involved, most of them in Sydney. I’ve still got that studio flat over there. Of all the times for Karen to quit on us, though!’ He wandered back towards his office.

  Emma let out a growl of frustration. ‘The sooner he sells that damned business the happier I’ll be.’

  Mara didn’t say anything but she was beginning to feel that fate was messing her about again. Yes, it was nice to be here, but most of all she wanted to get to know her father and if he wasn’t going to be around what was she going to do with herself? She liked to keep busy.

  For the rest of the afternoon, Aaron was in and out of the office, apologising to her a couple of times and trying to chat, though his mind was obviously elsewhere.

  She didn’t get a lot of sewing done, but having it on her knee as she sat outside made a good smokescreen and stopped them worrying about entertaining her, at least.

  It didn’t stop her worrying about being left here without him, though. It’d be awkward to say the least, especially with Emma anxious about Peggy, who still hadn’t shown up.

  Hal admitted to himself that he was still procrastinating about going through his mother’s possessions and he’d been here in Mandurah for a few days now. He kept walking into the various rooms then coming out again without starting the jobs necessary to clear the place out.

  Apart from anything else, he was, he admitted to himself, recovering from a period of intense stress winding up his business. Lazing around seemed to suit his current emotional needs, so he gave in to it. His deadlines were self-imposed after all.

  He enjoyed several leisurely drives up and down the nearby coast, parking a few times simply to sit and watch the sea and the holidaymakers frolicking on the shore.

  In the evenings he sat out on the patio, careful not to face the neighbours because he wasn’t in the mood for social chit-chat. He had to give them credit for not pushing a conversation on him; indeed, they hadn’t intruded in any way.

  He’d seen no sign of anyone on the house at the other side. It looked shut up with roll-down shutters covering each window. The garden was a sere wilderness of rocks and coloured pebbles. What was the point in owning a house in such a wonderful position on the water if you never came here?

  At least his mother had enjoyed this home, though it was really far too big for one person. He’d get a cleaner in to go through the place once he had finished clearing out her things and in the meantime the parts he wasn’t using could stay dusty.

  When he went indoors later in the evenings he either watched TV or read books from his mother’s wall of what were clearly well-loved romance novels. To his surprise he found himself enjoying the stories, especially the happy endings, which left him feeling good.

  He should be so lucky as to have a romantic ending like that in real life!

  He selected tonight’s tale because he liked the heroine’s face on the cover. It’d be another gentle story. He couldn’t even imagine his mother reading a murder tale or anything gruesome.

  He’d switched the news on the TV automatically, following a long-time daily habit. As he got up to go to bed, he realised that he hadn’t taken much in about what was happening in the wider world, not tonight and not since he’d been here.

  However, he got up the next morning feeling better enough to want more out of life than idling around. He was starting to feel a sense of physical well-being again, thank goodness.

  He ate a hearty breakfast for the first time and sat thinking about what to do. It seemed clear that before he could build a new life for himself, he needed to do as his mother had asked and clear out her possessions, so that was where he’d start. And he would start today.

  He might get someone from a charity to come and go through her clothes but he was the only one who could or should sort out her office. Before he could change his mind, he marched into that room and switched on her computer.

  Of course it wanted a password before it would let him in and for a moment he couldn’t think what to do. Then he remembered the lawyer giving him a piece of paper with various bits of essential information on it. Old-fashioned, that lawyer. He could have sent him this information in a digital file, or even emailed it.

  It took him a while to find the paper, which was crumpled up in a drawer next to his bed. Why on earth had he put it there?

  He scanned it rapidly, relieved to find the password. It made him smile. It was the name of a toy dragon he’d been very fond of as a child. He’d have no difficulty remembering it from now on.

  ‘Good idea, Ma,’ he said aloud, took a deep breath and started investigating what was on her computer.

  She couldn’t have spent a lot of time exploring online, he decided quite quickly. Well, he knew she’d usually done the first drafts of new poems in pencil on the little pad she carried everywhere. She didn’t seem to be in any social media group, but had sent emails regularly to him and a few old friends whose names he recognised, and to her editor. There didn’t seem to be any new friends among them, though.

  He’d taken a fresh notepad from her stationery stash and now started his own list of ‘To do’ tasks. First, contact those friends and make sure they knew she’d died. Surely they would by now? It had been mentioned in some newspapers, just a paragraph or so.

  It was no surprise that she had quite a lot of document files. He opened t
he folder labelled ‘Published poems’ first of all, finding the master files for all her books there. He sent them to his own cloud storage straight away, just for safety.

  Then he opened a folder labelled ‘Works in progress’ and found files containing sets of poems or partially completed poems, grouped in similar topics. Then there were some ‘ideas’ for future poems for her next collection. It was to be named, appropriately, Final Thoughts: A Personal View of the World. Only she hadn’t lived long enough to finish it, sadly.

  He took a deep, painful breath and opened a folder at random. ‘Older subjects’. There were quite a lot of poems there, ones he hadn’t seen before.

  He started reading and soon realised these were simpler poems than most of the ones in her other books. They seemed to be offering her views on life or describing people and everyday scenes.

  One entitled ‘Old Friends’ was particularly moving because it reminded him of a dog they’d had when he was a child. He’d taken that dog for some of her final slow walks himself. Such a lovely dog, Ellie.

  We pace the streets of suburbia

  My four-legged friend and I

  In a leisurely way

  For we’ve both had our day

  And we study the world we pass by.

  We envy the young folk their running,

  My stiff-legged old pal and I

  So I pat him and say

  ‘Well, we once used to play

  Now we’ll just watch the others trot by.’

  He read it to the end, liking the way the rhythm of the words seemed to echo the slow paces of the two elderly characters moving along the street. He had seen old people walking their dogs in just this way, both owners and pets stiff with age.

  ‘Claudia, you can still touch my heart,’ he said aloud. He’d started calling her by her first name when he turned eighteen. It had seemed more appropriate, somehow. The first time he did it, she’d looked at him, head on one side, and nodded. It wasn’t that she’d not been loving, just not in the usual motherly way.

  Ah, well …

  He blew his nose vigorously, checked the printer and made a copy of that old dog poem. He could see the scene so clearly and was going to make a sketch to go with it. He didn’t discuss his sketches with anyone. Only his mother had known how much his hobby meant to him. She’d tried to persuade him to follow his creativity instead of going into business. But they’d been short of money when he was young and once it came to choosing a career path, he’d wanted security more than anything else – for both himself and her – so had chosen to study economics and, later, personnel management.

  The habit of sketching had refused go away, though. It had been easily portable whenever he travelled, a way of relaxing in his rare moments of leisure, an activity for the precious quiet times on his own when he’d not been caught up in anything.

  Since he’d come here to Mandurah he hadn’t even got out his sketching materials, had only unpacked a few clothes. He would unpack the rest of his things later today. It felt as if that would be putting down a few tentative roots. Only time would tell whether he could thrive here.

  Whatever happened, there was nothing to stop him setting up one of the spare rooms as a studio. He’d buy some oil and acrylic paints as well as paper and other essentials. He’d tried painting a few times, but it was too messy to take the paints with him when he travelled, so only the sketching materials had gone with him.

  Enough thinking about the past! he told himself and went back to reading his mother’s poems.

  They were rather different from her early collections, but it was still her voice, her perceptive views of the world around her.

  This last year she seemed to have been painting the everyday world in simple words and beautiful images, captured like soap bubbles drifting along on the breeze.

  He smiled as he sat and ate his lunch. It felt good to have made a start on her office.

  Then he unpacked his sketching materials. He’d need to buy a lot more ‘stuff’. And set up her office with the right sort of desk and maybe an easel.

  Not a long-term life plan, but a beginning at least of new patterns of behaviour.

  Chapter Eleven

  When Peggy did eventually come home that evening, she looked heavy-eyed and had a bleak expression. That changed to anger when she saw her parents get up hurriedly and come into the house towards her.

  Glaring at them, she made a movement with one arm as if to fend them off. ‘What is this? A welcome home committee?’

  Mara had started to get up too, but sat down again and stayed out on the patio. They’d be better off without her around if they were going to quarrel with Peggy.

  ‘We were worried when you didn’t come home last night,’ Emma said.

  ‘You should have phoned,’ Aaron added.

  ‘I’m an adult. I can do my own worrying, thank you very much. Now, I had a late night yesterday, so I’m going straight up to bed. And no, I don’t want anything to eat.’

  She hurried out of the room and ran up the stairs. After her bedroom door had slammed shut, Mara saw Emma go straight into Aaron’s arms and burst into tears.

  It was a while before Emma went upstairs and then Mara’s father came out again to join her, giving a helpless shrug as he sat down.

  ‘I’m so sorry you walked into this situation, Mara. It’s blown up quite suddenly. She was living with that horrible fellow and seemed happy, most of the time anyway, then suddenly she was knocking on our door, needing somewhere to live, saying he’d thrown her out. We couldn’t say no, could we? Bad timing, though. I’d wanted things to go more smoothly for you and me.’

  ‘It’s usual for families to have problems.’ She was an expert witness to that. Her mother hadn’t once responded to her emails about what Mandurah was like. Her father sent her a message every day, not saying anything about her mother. ‘I’m sorry Peggy is being so difficult, Aaron, but it won’t make any difference to how I feel about you.’

  ‘Would you give me a hug then? I’m mostly the one dishing out the hugs at the moment.’

  Feeling shy, she walked into his arms – and felt suddenly at home there, as she did with Phil, so it turned into a proper hug.

  When he moved away, Aaron blew his nose and said in a husky voice, ‘Thanks. That really helped.’

  Shortly afterwards Emma came downstairs again. ‘Peggy won’t even speak to me. It’s time for the late-night news. Let’s watch it together.’

  But Mara could see that Emma was finding it difficult to settle and wasn’t surprised when she got up as the weather map came on the screen and said, ‘I’ll just leave a small plate of salad for Peggy. She might – you know, want a snack later.’

  She put some leftover salad from the evening meal on a plate, arranged it artistically and covered it with cling film. Then she put it on the kitchen surface with ‘Peggy’s snack’ on a piece of paper in big, dark writing.

  She and Aaron went up to bed shortly afterwards.

  Mara went back out to sit by the canal. She was getting rather bored with sitting here by herself. She hadn’t liked to go out for a long walk after the dire warnings about sunburn, so had confined herself to strolls round the nearby streets, which seemed mostly deserted during the daytime.

  Just as she was thinking of following the rest of the family’s example and going to bed, she saw Peggy come down into the kitchen. With a sigh, she again stayed where she was to avoid a confrontation.

  Peggy made herself a cup of tea, took the covering off the salad and fiddled with it. She ate a couple of pieces of tomato, then muttered something and scooped the rest up and put it into the rubbish bin. She frowned down at it then covered it up with a crumpled sheet torn off the daily newspaper. After that she went back up to bed, her movements slow and weary.

  Mara wondered whether she should have spoken to her about how upset her mother was and how dangerous it was to go without food for long periods.

  No. It’d have done no good. She was a newcome
r here, should stay right out of their quarrels. The trouble was, Mara had once worked with someone whose sister had died of anorexia and it had been a horrible, long-drawn-out experience for her friend and the family. Looking on from the sidelines had been painful. And now it was happening in her own family.

  She stayed there worrying for long enough to see the guy next door come out and throw himself down on one of the cheap plastic chairs. He looked sad. Well, his mother had died recently, hadn’t she? There would be something wrong if he wasn’t sad.

  He didn’t glance towards Mara and she tried to go into the house silently.

  She was tiptoeing round everyone here, not what she’d expected at all.

  The following morning, Emma got up earlier than usual and went downstairs to see whether the plate of salad had been touched. Surely her daughter would have got hungry enough to eat some of it? Her hopes began to rise when it wasn’t there or in the fridge.

  She looked across at Mara, who was on her way outside with a mug of coffee, and saw her flush and look hastily away as if feeling guilty.

  Something had clearly upset her and Emma wondered whether it might be connected with Peggy and the food. Emma had heard Peggy creep downstairs before Mara came up to bed.

  It’d be unfair to expect their guest to tell tales about her daughter so on the off-chance that she’d guessed correctly, she looked into the rubbish bin. Thank goodness! There was no sign of the salad, just some crumpled newspaper. Then she realised it had yesterday’s date on it. She definitely hadn’t thrown that newspaper away because Aaron liked to keep them for a few days.

  She looked in the bin again. Where were the food scraps she’d dumped in there after making their meal last night? They’d formed such a brightly coloured collection of bits and pieces that she’d felt smug after reading recently that it was healthy to eat as many vivid coloured fruits and vegetables as you could.

  Taking a spoon, she poked around, her heart sinking as she found the salad she’d left for Peggy wrapped in the thin plastic film. It didn’t look as if any of it had been eaten.