Tumbledown Manor Read online

  ‘Sure. Come visit,’ he replied. ‘You can sleep on our sofa.’

  ‘Thanks, but the CIA should hire that thing out as an instrument of torture.’ So if she had any hope of seeing him in December she’d be the one climbing on a plane.

  Loaded questions circled through her head. She wondered if he’d fallen for that nice girl from architecture school. What was her name? Did she eat more than seeds gathered by endangered South American tribes? Was her pelvis the shape that produced children? But the last thing Lisa wanted was to become a sitcom mother, torturing her kids with texts and phone messages. So she kissed Ted and nudged him into the back of the cab next to Gordon.

  Maxine’s window glided down. She fixed Lisa with an emerald gaze. ‘I never liked that prick,’ she said.

  As the cab dissolved into the traffic, Lisa caught a glimpse of Ted’s profile in the shadows of the back seat. The unmistakable Trumperton nose. Gulping a buttery lump at the back of her throat she waved goodbye.

  Back in the apartment, Lisa was sucked into a vacuum of loneliness. She turned James Taylor up loud and plunged into a frenzy of housework. The kids had left her study a mess. She dredged one of Ted’s socks out from under the sofa bed. For once it was hole-free. Someone was looking after him. As usual, Portia had stolen her shampoo and conditioner from the bathroom. Lisa wrote it off as a contribution to the starving artist of the family.

  Once her study was looking half-civilised, she switched on her computer. The bullet points about Three Sisters: Emily glowered back at her. She had no hope of writing an entire book in three months. The first sentence was always the hardest. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard.

  Then, in a cruel twist of what Portia would call irony, a deliveryman arrived with a sheath of freshly ironed shirts. Lisa didn’t have the energy to refuse them. Instead, she carried them numbly to the bedroom. As she hung the shirts in Jake’s side of the closet, she wondered whether they might herald his return. Perhaps he’d realised he’d made a terrible mistake, that he loved Lisa and wanted to come home. He’d promise to never see Cow Belle again.

  She dug her phone out of her handbag. ‘Yr shirts r here,’ she typed, her fingers trembling.

  She made a mug of coffee. James Taylor crooned ‘How Sweet It Is To Be Loved by You’. He’d moved on to ‘Fire and Rain’ by the time her phone buzzed to life. ‘Thx. Will come over.’

  Sure enough, towards evening there was a tap on the door. Lisa opened it a crack. Jake peered through like a naughty schoolboy. Why was he knocking when he had a key? They examined each other in silence. Lisa would take him back after a decent interval of punishment, of course. They had too much shared history.

  ‘Sorry,’ he muttered. ‘My shirts.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, blood draining from her face.

  ‘You okay?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course.’ Her voice was as cold as a surgeon’s blade. ‘Just a minute.’ She left him fidgeting in the doorway while she collected the sheath.

  ‘Let me know if you need anything,’ he said as she handed it to him.

  What could she possibly need?

  His forefinger was turning purple from the coat-hanger hooks cutting off the circulation.

  Lisa knew what he wanted. If she exploded with rage again he could scurry away, confident she was a total witch. But she couldn’t do it.

  Instead, she watched as the boiled egg of his bald patch disappeared down the hall towards the elevator. She noticed a white thread on his shoulder. Jake had a neurotic loathing of imperfection, and she was about to call after him. But that wasn’t her job. Not anymore. All Jake maintenance was over to Cow Belle. She could trim his ear hair, too.

  The elevator doors sighed shut.

  Lisa was officially and permanently alone.

  Chapter 3

  Over the following weeks, Jake negotiated times to visit the apartment as a legal thief. Once he and the removal men had taken the Katz family coffee pot, and his paintings, statues and desk there was hardly any evidence of Jake left.

  Lisa played a game with herself, pretending he’d never lived there and she’d just happened to move into an apartment furnished by an obstetrician. But the king-sized bed still smelt of him. The dent in the mattress on his side stayed in his shape. When she opened the kitchen cupboards, ghosts of Jake and Lisa, the happy couple, hovered over remnants of the dinner service Aunt Caroline gave them as a wedding present.

  Christmas came and went. Portia was too busy with her friendship group and the so-called play to put in an appearance. Ted sent a card featuring Santa wearing sunglasses on a golden beach. Lisa spent the day itself shrieking over Christmas-cracker jokes with Kerry and his friends. She went home and howled until her throat hurt. Her ribs ached. Abandoned, unwanted, unloved. Self-pity was exhausting.

  The thought of Jake’s treachery dried her tears into salt lakes of rage. Anger was invigorating, though only in short bursts.

  After New Year, she tried to settle at the computer, but the memories that clogged the apartment were cluttering her brain. Writer’s block, she assumed. She’d been nuts to sign a three-book deal, especially in a genre that was new to her. All her other books had been safely anchored in non-fiction with a focus on real people and animals. Having witnessed Lisa’s life implode, Vanessa had generously agreed to extend the deadline for Three Sisters: Emily until October. Though Lisa was grateful, she wished she’d given back the advance and abandoned the whole project. Still, it appeared the public had an appetite for feminist romantic twists on the Brontë sisters’ lives. No doubt, the poor sisters were revolving in their graves at the cheerful, sexually empowered adventures Lisa was inventing for them. She was surprised by the enthusiastic reviews Three Sisters: Charlotte was getting on Amazon.

  Lisa cast her eye around the study: in the rising sea of compromise her life had become, this room was the last vestige of who she really was. Apart from her desk and chair, bookshelves and fold-down sofa, it was devoid of furniture. It was the other stuff—the so-called clutter—that mattered. Books spilled off shelves to form miniature skyscrapers on the floor. Tribal masks gazed down from the walls. She’d acquired them, along with the fighting stick from Fiji, long before people developed qualms about removing cultural relics from their homelands. On her desk, among photos of the kids, was a close-up of a black Persian cat. She’d met Bon Jovi at Bideawee animal shelter, where she volunteered once a week. A refugee from Hurricane Sandy, Bon Jovi was the funniest, most affectionate feline. People adored him but they turned away when they heard he’d been diagnosed with kidney failure. She’d longed to adopt him, but Jake was allergic to cats. Fortunately, Bon Jovi had found a home.

  Lisa’s computer sat on a piece of tapa cloth she’d been given by some Pacific Islanders before she was married. Stones and crystals she’d picked up from different parts of the world formed a rough circle around the screen. A sketchbook covered with scribbled story-lines for Three Sisters: Emily, a desk lamp that had stopped working—in this jumble of books and memories she was never alone. She ran her eye across the photo albums on the second-to-top shelf. Only one had disappeared—the book of Jake’s baby photos with the dates he’d first smiled and walked, meticulously recorded by his mother, Naomi.

  On their first meeting Naomi had introduced herself as ‘Jewish but not religious’. Lisa had been relieved, naively assuming it was the same as being a morning-tea Anglican. When Naomi and Sol said they couldn’t make it to the wedding because of Sol’s business commitments, she’d believed them. She took everything at face value back then. Naomi had gone berserk when Lisa refused to have Ted circumcised. Even when Jake and Lisa were middle-aged, Naomi never missed an opportunity to introduce Jake to a Hannah or Miriam. Naomi had gone to her grave hoping Jake would come to his senses and run off with a nice Jewish girl. Well, only half of her wish had come true. Jake had gone, but Cow Belle didn’t have a Jewish chromosome in her big-bosomed (those things had to be fake) frame.

  Lisa dared herself to re
ach for the album she knew would hurt. The first page featured Jake the bearded radical, long hair rippling in the Fijian breeze, a tanned arm draped over her shoulder. With her wispy hair and open smile, Lisa was astonished at how beautiful she’d been, though probably only in the way young people always are. She wished she could fly back through time and tell her younger self that. Even then she knew what would happen. The compliment would get twisted in a ball of barbed wire and tossed back. No matter what people said she’d always felt a misfit.

  She’d fallen into journalism then travel writing the way she did most things—by default. Travel writing wasn’t the glamorous round of cocktails and cruises people assumed. Being dragged around resorts by self-important hotel managers was tedious. Writing gushing prose about sunsets and linen thread count was a semi-colon short of prostitution. So she had no idea how much the commission to write a feature on American student volunteers at a Fijian village would change her life.

  The first time she saw Jake, he was cross-legged on a mat drinking kava with a circle of Fijian men. As he sipped from a hollowed-out coconut shell, he glanced up at her and smiled. That secretive, wicked grin had sent shudders through her groin. She was transfixed.

  Jake’s smooth olive skin and exotic American accent were only part of the attraction. Even when he stood up and she saw how short he was she wasn’t put off. She soon found out Jake possessed the ultimate aphrodisiac: he could make her laugh. She’d fallen deeply in lust.

  On the next page was the wedding photo that made the kids snort with derision. What hippies, they said, getting married on the beach at Byron Bay. Okay, so her headband of frangipani flowers could be interpreted as alternative. The kids couldn’t believe the bridal couple was barefoot by accident. But the tide was coming in—they’d had to take their shoes off.

  A few pages on Jake shed his beard and exchanged his bandanna and most of his sense of humour for a cheap suit. They were living in New York, sporting the dark-circled eyes of new parents. She smiled at two year-old Ted, bewildered at being supplanted, staring glumly down at his toy dinosaur while Lisa changed Portia’s diaper.

  Jake and Lisa then faded into the background while Ted and Portia laughed over birthday cakes, lined up for class photos and posed at ballet classes and basketball games. Jake’s suits upgraded to Armani for a while before reverting to post Global Financial Crisis no-name brands.

  Towards the back of the album, Lisa and Jake appeared as middle-aged satellites, teeth yellower, hair thinner, waists thicker. Beaming proudly from the outer edges of graduation photos, they’d become unnervingly similar to their own parents.

  During all those years, it had never occurred to Lisa to be unfaithful. Well, okay, perhaps once at a writers’ festival in Berlin, with the only straight male publisher in a thirty-mile radius, a hand-kisser who was charming to the core of his Austrian bones. Oh, and the jazz pianist she met through a friend of Kerry’s . . . and maybe one or two others. She’d bathed in the glow of mutual attraction, but drawn the line at late-night scuffles in hotel rooms.

  Now a pang of regret shot through her. She should’ve slept with all of them and more while she still had two breasts. Something strange had happened to her hormones over the past year or so. Any mention of the word orgasm gave her a mental image of a church organ. Orgasm, organ—both were freakish remnants of the past.

  Lisa slammed the photo album shut. So much had gone into raising children and trying to be a supportive wife she’d lost something essential—herself? Who the hell was that?

  The computer screen glowed at her expectantly. Sighing, she sank into her office chair and brought up the Three Sisters: Emily file. Writing about Charlotte had been a breeze but Emily was more complicated. A recluse to the marrow of her bony frame, Emily ‘rarely crossed the threshold of home’ to socialise in the village. Tall and frizzy-haired, she made no secret of the fact she preferred animals to people. Though she appeared fragile, she could be incredibly tough. Only the foolhardy tried to cross her. Emily reminded Lisa of Portia in many ways.

  Sighing, she flicked over to her emails. Maxine’s name appeared in bold type. Lisa hesitated before reading her sister’s latest missive. Maxine had been bragging about seeing so much of Ted and his friends, Lisa was frankly jealous. This time Maxine wrote to say that Aunt Caroline had been asking after her. Being their grandfather’s sister, Caroline was technically a great-aunt, but she’d rejected ‘great’ness on the grounds it made her feel ancient. According to Maxine, their aunt was swanning around the retirement village back in Melbourne telling people she’d been engaged to a duke. It was sad to think of the old girl losing her marbles. Lisa had always been fond and intimidated by Aunt Caroline in equal measure. Maxine also said the old woman’s ticker was on the blink. At some point, Lisa would have to make the effort to see her aunt before she went to the great bargain basement in the sky. Apparently, the retirement village had organised a bus trip to Castlemaine, where the Trumperton family home still stood, but Aunt Caroline had refused to go: she seemed to have an irrational snitch against her ancestral dwelling. Maxine again mentioned how much she was enjoying Ted’s visits before signing off with a bossy directive to keep up her visits to the oncologist.

  Lisa hadn’t seen Trumperton Manor, as it was called, for decades. Her father, William, had seldom spoken of it, even though his father, Alexander—Aunt Caroline’s brother—had lived there as a young man in the 1890s. Now she took her father’s album down from the shelf and found the sepia image of the old country house. It was every bit as grand as she remembered, and its Georgian lines and portico supported by Doric columns would’ve been perfectly at home in the English countryside. Only the garden betrayed the fact that the house had been built in a much harsher, wilder place—rural Australia. Attempts to grow English oaks had been only partially successful, and the lawn was far from lush. The only plants thriving on the rim of the circular driveway were clumps of pampas grass with outlandish feather plumes.

  Another photo showed a portly gentleman on horseback in front of imposing gates with posts topped by giant spheres. He wore a top hat and appeared to be in eveningwear. Behind him stood a woman in a dark Victorian costume with a light-coloured hat. Lisa supposed the old pair were Alexander’s parents. They wore authority with ease.

  A portrait of a handsome young man dressed in white-tie slid out of the album into Lisa’s hand. The young man’s face was long and sensitive, with a carefully groomed moustache over full lips. He looked the perfect Victorian gentleman—apart from the fact his eyes were immeasurably sad.

  Lisa saw echoes of that face in the mirror and whenever she looked at Ted. Portia had inherited a more rounded, compact face from Jake. Strange things, genes.

  A new email announced its arrival with a pleasant ping. It was from Jake.

  ‘Dear Lisa, I hope this finds you well.’ The tone was unusually formal. ‘Belle and I are great . . .’ Lisa’s chest contracted at the sight of her rival’s name. ‘As you can imagine, we’re finding her apartment a little small for our requirements . . .’ How much space did they need for their sexual gymnastics—an Olympic stadium? ‘We’re looking for a larger, more suitable place. So I think it makes sense to get on with divorce proceedings right away. Hope you don’t mind. Best, J.’

  Lisa’s knees turned to blancmange. Kicking her shoes off, she stumbled over the herringbone parquet floor to the kitchen cupboard. Chocolate. That’s what she needed. Preferably Green and Black’s 70 per cent Cocoa.

  Inside the shadowy depths of the larder her fingers trembled over a comforting shape. Rectangular, solid. But it turned out to be a protein bar. It was dipped in fake chocolate and was probably 100 per cent carcinogenic.

  She flicked the kettle on. Rinsing the Happy Holidays mug, she reached for the nearest tea towel. The crinkled face of a cockatoo unravelled in the linen. Only Maxine could leave such a garish gift.

  The great white parrot’s wings spread joyfully across the cloth, his yellow crest splayed like a
hand. The bird seemed to be laughing, not at Lisa but at the ridiculousness of life in general.

  Suddenly overcome, she buried her face in the bird’s image, sank to the floor and sobbed. She was sick of being alone. With Jake gone, she didn’t even know who she was anymore. Plus she missed her kids and was worried about Portia. It was all too much. When she could cry no more she stood up, rinsed the tea towel in cold water and dabbed her face.

  She tore the wrapping of the protein bar. Sinking her teeth into its plasticy flesh, she opened the door onto the balcony. A blast of cold air hit her face. Chomping mechanically, she stepped outside and gazed over the city. Nine floors up provided the ideal view—or diving board. Rows of buildings punctured the pale spring sky. Somewhere down in Central Park, daffodil spears would be pushing out of the soil in ridiculous acts of optimism.

  Lisa loved New York and her friends. Unlike many people who’d been born there, she’d never taken it for granted. Having grown up in a culture-free zone, she adored the brooding architecture, the galleries and the shows. For all its crowds and inconveniences, the city had every right to call itself the Centre of the Universe. It pulsed with life. Lisa loved the crusty workmen and the cops. But even though she’d tried to feel at home among the carefully scrubbed faces of the Upper East Side, deep down she’d always been a big-boned Aussie girl.

  Lisa twisted the ring on her left hand. It was tighter these days. She tugged it off. She was an Abandoned Woman tragic, though not quite so malnourished as a Brontë heroine. To climb over the rails and jump nine floors would be a considerate act.

  She peered down at the street and reeled with nausea. She’d always wanted to fly. There’d be a few seconds of terrifying, exhilarated weightlessness. The thrill of it might make up for the inevitable splat.

  But the mess would be unspeakable. Pedro would have to deal with it until the ambulance arrived. Or would it be a fire engine with high pressure hoses? Either way, Pedro hardly deserved it. His wife was pregnant.