‘Come on, Edie,’ she called. ‘It’s quite lovely and not at all scary.’
Edie walked in and looked about her. The room wasn’t at all musty, it smelt of her mother, she could hear her mother’s voice singing. Or was it Gracie? She realised they sounded exactly the same. She touched the perfume bottle and held it to her nose and memories of her mother’s smell flooded into her, then she opened the drawer and touched the silk underwear, now so incredibly old-fashioned, and remembered how soft her mother’s skin was.
‘She loved you, Gracie,’ she said.
Gracie said, ‘I know,’ and believed it because Edie said it.
Edie sat on the bed with a plop and a dust cloud filled the room. They both ran out laughing.
‘Oh, we have some work to do,’ said Gracie, but Edie grabbed her and held her tight and whispered that she loved her over and over. When Edie finally let her go, Gracie said, ‘What do we start with? The dusting or the floors?’
‘The bed.’ They both agreed and within hours the room was clean and fresh. It still had Lucy’s things in it, and when Edie touched them she thought how right her mother had been to make her promise to care for Gracie.
Forty-Seven
The Notebook
Sunday, 31 August 1924, which isn’t as pleasant as expected.
Edie couldn’t think straight about anything at all. Theo had said he would see her at his usual time, which she took to mean three on Sunday afternoon, when he used to come each week with his rose. Which was the exact same time she usually went for a drive with Virgil and she just couldn’t bring herself to tell Virgil not to come around because that would make him curious and she would have to answer a lot of questions about Theo. She and Paul and Gracie were sitting in the kitchen. Lilly was resting in Lucy’s room.
‘Look at this, Edie,’ Paul said, holding a rolled-up newspaper in the air so she couldn’t see anything at all. ‘Not only did Reverend Whitlock spout all that rubbish from the pulpit this morning but he has a piece in yesterday’s Courier claiming that those — and we know here he means me — fighting for a forty-four hour week for workers are extremists attempting to undermine the economic stability of the state. He only got the piece printed because he’s retiring, and for that reason alone I am going to be the bigger person and let him have the last word.’
‘Well, there is a first time for everything,’ said Edie.
Edie heard the knock on the door at three and went to open it, not sure which man she would find. It was Virgil. He stood hat in hand and looked at her hopefully.
‘Virgil, hello,’ she said, as though he was a friend she hadn’t seen in months. ‘Why don’t you come in for afternoon tea?’ Why was she talking to him like that, sounding so formal?
‘Afternoon tea? Why not.’
So she took him into the dining room and left him there while she went back to the kitchen and asked Paul and Gracie if they could entertain him for a moment. Edie went to her bedroom and paced and took out her notebook and flicked through the pages and put it back in her pocket.
Gracie came in and said, ‘Are you going to come and see him? He’s come for you, after all. Why aren’t you going for your usual drive?’
‘Ohhh,’ said Edie. ‘You’re right.’ And she followed Gracie back into the dining room and was relieved to find that Paul had engaged Virgil in a one-way conversation about the working week.
Ten minutes later the next knock on the door came and she rushed to make sure she got to it before Gracie.
‘You’re late,’ she said to Theo.
He smiled. ‘Am I? Late for what?’
She didn’t know and motioned for him to come inside.
‘I’ll just see my mother first,’ he said.
Edie watched from the door of Lucy’s room as Lilly, who had been having a rest, got up and threw her arms around Theo, saying over and over that she never once believed him to be dead.
She left them and went back to the dining room where Virgil was waiting for her with Gracie and Paul. She had no idea how they filled the next fifteen minutes until Theo walked in.
Edie saw Virgil’s face darken when he saw Theo.
‘Virgil Ainsworth, this is Theo Hooley,’ said Edie and Virgil stood up and the two men shook hands too vigorously.
‘Virgil is staying for tea and cake too,’ Edie told Theo.
Theo didn’t react. To Edie he seemed calm and unreadable — or was he so sure of his future with her that Virgil was just a hiccup to him? She couldn’t tell and it bothered her because as far as she was concerned she hadn’t made any decisions.
She looked to Paul and Gracie for help but they were trying to wipe the grins from their faces. Paul pulled himself together first. ‘We should go to the kitchen,’ he said. ‘It’s more friendly.’
So they all sat around the kitchen table — Gracie, Paul, Lilly, Theo, Virgil and Edie. Gracie kept looking at Edie and then at Theo, then at Edie and then at Virgil, trying to see which coupling worked best and Edie scowled at her to stop. But Edie found herself gazing at Theo and then Virgil and then Theo, trying to compare the two men and realising she couldn’t because they were cut from different cloth and it would be unfair to try.
Gracie made tea and put out scones and got the good china. Paul kept grinning at Edie and she knew it was because he was enjoying every minute of her discomfort
