Homecoming

DedicationFor my family Contents CoverTitle PageDedicationProloguePart I12345Part II6789101112Part III1314Part IV1516Part V1718Part VI1920212223Part VII242526Part VIII27282930313233Part IX343536373839AcknowledgmentsAbout the AuthorAlso by Kate MortonCopyrightAbout the Publisher PrologueAdelaide Hills, South Australia1959New Year’s DayAnd, of course, there was to be a lunch party to mark the new year. A small affair, just family, but Thomas would require all the trimmings. Unthinkable that they would do otherwise: the Turners were big on tradition, and with Nora and Richard visiting from Sydney, neither frippery nor fanfare was to be skipped. Isabel had decided to set up in a different part of the garden this year. Usually, they sat beneath the walnut tree on the eastern lawn, but today she’d been drawn to the stretch of grass in the shade of Mr. Wentworth’s cedar. She’d walked across it when she was cutting flowers for the table earlier and been struck by the pretty westward view toward the mountains. Yes, she’d said to herself. This will do very well. The arrival of the thought, her own decisiveness, had been intoxicating. She told herself it was all part of her New Year’s resolution—to approach 1959 with a fresh pair of eyes and expectations—but there was a small internal voice that wondered whether she wasn’t rather tormenting her husband just a little with the sudden breach of protocol. Ever since they’d discovered the sepia photograph of Mr. Wentworth and his similarly bearded Victorian friends arranged in elegant wooden recliners on the eastern lawn, Thomas had been immovable in his conviction that it represented the superior entertaining spot. It was unclear to Isabel exactly when she’d first started taking guilty pleasure in causing that small vertical frown line to appear between her husband’s brows. A gust of wind threatened to rip the string of bunting from her hands, and she held tight to the highest rung of the wooden ladder. She’d carried the ladder down from the gardening shed herself that morning, quite enjoying the struggle of it. When she first climbed to the top, a childhood memory had come to her—a daytrip to Hampstead Heath with her mother and father, where she’d scrambled up one of the giant sequoia trees and looked south toward the city of London. “I can see St. Paul’s!” she’d called down to her parents when she spotted the familiar dome through the smog. “Don’t let go,” her father had called back.It wasn’t until the moment he said it that Isabel had felt a perverse urge to do just that. The desire had taken her breath away. A clutch of galahs shot from the top of the thickest banksia tree, a panic of pink and gray feathers, and Isabel froze. Someone was there. She’d always had a powerfully developed instinct for danger. “You must have a guilty conscience,” Thomas used to say to her back in London, when they were new to one another and still entranced. “Nonsense,” she’d said, “I’m just unusually perceptive.” Isabel stayed motionless at the top of the ladder and listened. “There now, look!” came the stage whisper. “Hurry up and kill it with the stick.”“I can’t!”“You can—you must—you took an oath.”But it was only the children, Matilda and John! A relief, Isabel supposed. Nonetheless, she remained quiet so as not to give herself away. “Just snap its neck and get it over with.” That was Evie, her youngest, at nine.“I can’t.” “Oh, John,” said Matilda, fourteen going on twenty-four. “Give it here. Stop being such a pill.”Isabel recognized the game. They’d been playing Snake Hunt on and off for years. It had been inspired by a book initially, an anthology of bush poetry that Nora had sent, Isabel had read aloud, and the children had loved with a passion. Like so many of the stories here, it was a tale of warning. It seemed there was an awful lot to fear in this place: snakes and sunsets and thunderstorms and droughts and pregnancy and fever and bushfires and floods and mad bullocks and crows and eagles and strangers—“gallows-faced swagmen” who emerged from the bush with murder in mind. Isabel found the sheer number of deadly threats overwhelming at times, but the children were proper little Australians and delighted in such tales, relishing the game; it was one of the few activities that could be counted on to engage them all despite their different ages and inclinations. “Got it!”“Well done.”A peal of exultant laughter.“Now let’s get moving.”She loved to hear them gleeful and rambunctious; all the same, she held her breath and waited for the game to take them away. Sometimes—though she never would have dared admit it out loud—Isabel caught herself imagining what it might be like if she could make them all disappear. Only for a little while, of course; she’d miss them dreadfully if it were any longer than that. Say an hour, maybe a day—a week at most. Just long enough for her to have some time to think. There was never enough of it, and certainly not sufficient to follow a thought through to its logical conclusion. Thomas looked at her like she was mad if she ever said as much. He had quite fixed ideas about motherhood. And wifedom. In Australia wives were frequently left alone to deal with snakes and fires and wild dogs, apparently. Thomas would get that faraway glint in his eye when he expounded on the subject, the romantic sentimentalist’s fascination with the folklore of his country. He liked to picture her a frontier wife, enduring hardship and keeping the home fires burning as he gallivanted around the world making merry. The idea had amused her once. It had been funnier when she’d thought that he was joking. But he was right when he reminded her that she’d agreed to his grand plan—had leapt, in fact, at the opportunity to embrace something different. The war had been long and grim, and London was despicably mean and milk-washed when it ended. Isabel had been tired. Thomas was right, too, when he pointed out that life