Weeks later, when he came across it crumpled at the back of the drawer, and Minnie read it out to him by the light of her candle, it kept both of them awake half the night. Although as Minnie very sensibly pointed out, what was the use of worrying their soul cases out? It was hardly Tom’s fault, under the circumstances, that the letter had never been delivered. Dear child, she had written, Mrs A. has told me everything – what a ridiculous fuss about nothing! This is to tell you I want you to come and stay with me for as long as you like at my home in East Melbourne – address enclosed – if your guardian doesn’t come for you by Good Friday. Just let me know and I will arrange to meet the train. Don’t worry about the art lessons and keep on drawing whenever you get a spare minute, like Leonardo da Vinci. Fond love. Your friend, Henrietta Valange.
Mrs Valange’s dramatic exit from the College intensified the strains and tensions of the last few days. Despite frustrating rules of silence and the ban on talking in twos and threes without a governess in attendance, it had been conveyed before nightfall, by the passing of scraps of paper and other news-carrying devices, that a Scene had occurred in the study and that the child Sara was somehow to blame. Sara, as usual, had nothing to communicate. ‘Creeping about like an oyster,’ as Edith, never strong on natural history, pointed out. ‘If we don’t get a handsome young drawing master,’ said Blanche, ‘I’m going to give up Art. I’m sick of coloured chalk in my nails.’ Dora Lumley came bustling up: ‘Girls, didn’t you hear the dressing bells? Go upstairs at once and take an order mark each for talking in the passage.’
A few minutes later, still on the prowl, Miss Lumley came upon Sara Waybourne curled up behind the little door of the circular staircase leading to the tower. The governess thought she had been crying, but it was too dark to see her face properly. When they came out on to the landing under the light from the hanging lamp the child looked like a stray half-starved kitten. ‘What’s the matter, Sara? Are you feeling ill?’
‘I’m all right. Please go away.’
‘People don’t sit down on cold stone in the dark just before tea time, unless they’re weak in the head,’ Miss Lumley said.
‘I don’t want any tea. I don’t want anything.’ The governess sniffed. ‘Lucky you! I only wish I could say the same.’ She thought: ‘This wretched snivelling child. This horrible house . . .’ and decided to write to her brother this very night asking him to look out for a position. ‘Not a boarding school. I tell you – I can’t stand much more of it, Reg . . .’ It was as much as she could do not to scream as the tea bell clanged through the empty rooms below. The mice frisking in the long dark drawing-room had heard it too and scampered off under the shrouded sofas and chairs. ‘You heard the bell, Sara? You can’t go down like that with cobwebs all over you. If you aren’t hungry, you had better go to bed.’
It was the same room that Sara had formerly shared with Miranda – the most coveted room in the house, with long windows overlooking the garden, and rose-patterned curtains. Nothing had been changed since the day of the picnic, by Mrs Appleyard’s express instructions. Miranda’s soft pretty dresses still hung in orderly rows in the cedar cupboard from which the child invariably averted her eyes. Miranda’s tennis racquet still leaned against the wall exactly as it did when its owner, flushed and radiant, came running upstairs after a game with Marion on a summer evening. The treasured photograph of Miranda in an oval silver frame on the mantelpiece, the bureau drawer still stuffed with Miranda’s Valentines, the dressing table where she had always put a flower in Miranda’s little crystal vase. Often, pretending sleep, she had lain awake watching Miranda brushing out her shining hair by the light of a candle.
‘Sara, are you still awake, you naughty Puss?’ smiling into the dark pool of the mirror. And sometimes Miranda would sing, in a special tuneless voice that only Sara knew, strange little songs about her family: a favourite horse, her brother’s cockatoo. ‘Some day, Sara, you shall come home with me to the station and see my sweet funny family for yourself. Would you like that Pussy?’ Oh, Miranda, Miranda . . . darling Miranda, where are you?
At last night came down upon the silent wakeful house. In the south wing Tom and Minnie, locked in each other’s arms, murmured endlessly of love. Mrs Appleyard tossed in her curling pins. Dora Lumley sucked peppermints and wrote interminable letters to her brother in her fevered head. The New Zealand sisters had crept into the same bed for company and were lying side by side, taut and fearful of an impending earthquake. A light was still burning in Mademoiselle’s room, where a stiff dose of Racine, by the light of a solitary candle, had so far failed as a soporific. The child Sara was also wide awake, staring into the dreadful dark.
Presently the possums came prancing out on to the dim moonlit slates of the roof. With squeals and grunts they wove obscenely about the squat base of the tower, dark against the paling sky.
10
The reader taking a bird’s eye view of events since the picnic will have noted how various individuals on its outer circumference have somehow become involved in the spreading pattern: Mrs Valange, Reg Lumley, Monsieur Louis Montpelier, Minnie and Tom – all of whose lives have already been disrupted, sometimes violently. So too have the lives of innumerable lesser fry – spiders, mice, beetles – whose scuttlings, burrowings and terrified retreats are comparable, if on a smaller scale. At Appleyard College, out of a clear sky, from the moment the first rays of light had fired the dahlias on the morning of Saint Valentine’s Day, and the boarders, waking early, had begun the innocent interchange of cards and favours, the pattern had begun to form. Until now, on the evening of Friday the thirteenth of March, it was still spreading; still fanning out in depth and intensity, still incomplete. On the lower levels of Mount Macedon it continued to spread, though in gayer colours, to the upper slopes, where the inhabitants of Lake View, unaware of their allotted places in the general scheme of joy and sorrow, light and shade, went about their personal affairs as usual, unconsciously weaving and interweaving the individual threads of their private lives into the complex tapestry of the whole.
Both the invalids were now progressing favourably. Mike was breakfasting on bacon and eggs and Irma had been pronounced by Doctor McKenzie well enough for some gentle questioning by Constable Bumpher, already advised that the girl so far had remembered nothing of her experiences on the Rock; nor, in Doctor McKenzie’s opinion or that of the two eminent specialists from Sydney and Melbourne, would she ever remember. A portion of the delicate mechanism of the brain appeared to be irrevocably damaged. ‘Like a clock, you know,’ the doctor explained. ‘A clock that stops under a certain set of unusual conditions and refuses ever to go again beyond a particular point. I had one at home. Never got beyond three o’clock on an afternoon . . .’ Bumpher, however, was prepared to call on Irma at the Lodge and in his own words ‘give it a go’.
The interview had begun at ten a.m. with the policeman in the bedside chair, nicely shaven, pencil and notebook at the ready. By midday he was sitting back with a cup of tea and expressing his gratitude for an abortive two hours that had yielded precisely nothing. At least nothing in the official sense, although he had appreciated being sadly smiled at now and then by one so young and beautiful. ‘Well, I’ll be off now, Miss Leopold, and if anything does happen to pop into your mind just send me a message and I’ll be up here in two flicks of a duck’s tail.’ He rose to go, replaced the rubber band round the blank pages of his notebook with a reluctance not entirely official, mounted his tall grey horse and trotted slowly down the drive towards his one o’clock dinner in low spirits that even his favourite plum pie did nothing to dispel.