The star of the troupe was a dancer called Adelaide Turner: diminutive, sprightly, with long expressive arms and a broad doll-face. She was famous even in Sydney, so many thousands of miles from the city she was born in, the name of which — Chicago — might as well have been the name of a fruit Rose had never tried, or an animal she’d never seen. Adelaide would dance that week in Sydney, the end of the company’s Australian tour, then sail home on the Coral Sea. The same ship was to carry Susan and the children to California to meet the other half of their family, which seemed to be full of healthy, sunlit cousins, expectant grandparents, and many uncles and aunts. It may have been for this reason — the shared ship — that Rose felt connected to Adelaide Turner; her face, too, reminded Rose a little of Susan’s. Jonathan had laughed at Rose once for seeing in famous people she admired a resemblance to someone she knew. But when Adelaide first came onstage, dressed as a girlish clown in a black smock covered with stars and red circles on her cheeks, Rose felt a funny tug at her own limbs. As Adelaide moved, left and right, above the lights and below them, her arms flying, her feet, Rose moved imperceptibly along with her — left, right, above, below. Her arms, her feet.
Afterward, walking through the night-time city, Rose noticed how many gulls hung in the light above office buildings and street lamps. Bats crossed overhead, quieter. Robert talked about the music and staging, but Adelaide Turner had made an impression on Rose that was too tender for discussion. She was filled with a longing she knew would occupy her for days, then disappear suddenly, as if cured. Rose was conscious of her body in the warm air. She enjoyed the movement of her arms by her side, and the muscles of her legs felt new and within her power. She listened to Robert and thought, I’m much younger than you are. Later that night, lying beside him, she felt her body lift from the bed and hang, for just a moment, in the half-lit room. Not long after, Robert got out of bed to wash and dress and leave for home; Rose lay still and pretended to be sleeping. The next morning, in her empty flat, she cut Adelaide’s picture from the programme and propped it on the mantelpiece.
* * *
Rose met Susan and the children off the train on Thursday evening and was relieved to be happy to see them. Lizzie and Alex were mute with the movement, the lights, and the station’s domed ceilings. They were nervous of their aunt and stumbled among the cases and bags. There was a great deal of luggage. It accumulated around their feet as they embraced and enquired and smiled. Then the effort of gathering it and directing Susan and the children and stepping into Rose’s city, into Rose’s life, as if this were natural and easy.
It was dark by the time they reached Rose Bay. Susan was a tourist peering into the small, lit rooms of Rose’s flat.
‘Well, this is very comfortable,’ she said. ‘What do you think, little ones? Isn’t Aunt Rose’s house nice? Isn’t it, Lizzie?’
The children’s tired, formal faces looked up at Rose.
‘It’s smaller than our house,’ said Lizzie. ‘It’s prettier, but we don’t have to climb steps.’
Susan made the children eggs and toast for supper while Rose moved bags into bedrooms under the surveillance of her niece and nephew. They were more distinct here than they had been at the funeral. Lizzie, the elder, seemed clear-headed and observant. Alex was more uncertain. His upper lip was puffy and folded to a sweet point in the middle, which gave him the look of a stiff cupid. Rose thought they were delightful and perhaps a little dull. She searched for their father’s likeness in their faces and failed to find it. Perhaps later, as they grew, they’d acquire Jonathan’s looks, the furrow between thick eyebrows she’d mistaken for good judgement. Upon being shown where he would be sleeping, Alex became raucous and insisted on displaying his navel to Rose.
‘This is my button,’ he announced, over and over, although his sister told him to stop. He lay on the bed, flexing his plump stomach, watching his navel and checking, every so often, that Rose was too.
‘My button!’ he cried.
‘Stop it,’ said Lizzie.
‘I don’t mind,’ said Rose.
Lizzie ignored her. ‘Alex,’ she said, ‘can’t you see Julia would like to make the bed?’
Alex froze on the bedcovers. Rose wasn’t sure how to remind her niece that her name wasn’t Julia.
‘Julia doesn’t need to make the bed,’ said Alex. ‘Aunty Rose made the bed already.’
Lizzie sighed with a laboured patience. She said, in a gentle, teacherly tone, ‘Julia brought a silk robe and a patchwork quilt from home to put on our bed so we’d be comfortable here and sleep quietly and you won’t get up in the middle of the night and cry.’ She tilted her fastidious head to look at Alex in a way Rose recognised as Susan’s.
‘No, she didn’t,’ said Alex, but he rolled off the bed.
‘Julia is Lizzie’s good friend,’ said Susan from the doorway. She emphasised good friend; she was benevolent and motherly, wise when it came to imaginary friendships, indulgent with her children who had lost their father. She expressed this to Rose with a significant smile. ‘Supper’s ready, darlings,’ she said, and Alex charged from the room so that his mother was forced to follow.
Lizzie took Rose’s hand as they walked to the dining table. ‘Julia is my friend,’ she said. ‘My very best friend. She’s coming to America.’
‘Really?’
‘Really. I know you can’t see her, but she’s not a ghost. She’s not dead. She looks a bit like that lady over there.’
Lizzie pointed to the picture of Adelaide Turner on the mantelpiece. Adelaide was in costume for her clown dance: red cheeks and starry outfit, hair plastered in two curls at her temples.
‘Then she’s very pretty,’ said Rose.
Lizzie smiled as if she liked the thought of this but didn’t believe it to be true.
* * *
Susan’s three days in Sydney had been carefully planned. There would be, on Sunday, a trip to the zoo. On Saturday the children would go to the pictures and Susan would have her hair done; they would all shop for gifts and new clothes. On the Friday, when Rose had to work, they would come with her on the tram into the city and walk to Macquarie Street and down the hill where the white sails of the water would rise up to meet them. They would stroll in the botanical gardens and count the steps of the library and sit under palm trees eating ice-cream and reading from comics and magazines. Then they would meet Rose after work. They would all travel back to Rose Bay together, into a quiet Friday night of sleeping children and the hum of the harbour. The thought of them waiting for her at the end of the day made Rose nervous; she recognised in herself an unusual conviction that she owned something that ought to be protected.
Rose left work with the other girls, typists and stenographers and telephonists, all trim and efficient with busy plans and singsong weekend voices. Susan and the children seemed diminished by comparison. They stood on the pavement, waiting, and Susan turned her head from left to right as if Rose might appear from anywhere except the direction she was walking from.
The office girls enveloped the children. ‘Do you live on a farm? Do you ride ponies? How old are you? Nine! Five! Is this your first visit to Sydney?’ The children, bewildered and loving, stared up at these bright faces and forgot how to talk.