‘What will you do?’ asked Gracie, putting her head against Edie’s.
Edie looked at her. ‘Nothing. It’s my own stupid fault; I shouldn’t have let this happen. I will choose neither. I can’t leave you and Papa. I never could and I never will. I won’t accept either of them.’
‘Bloody hell!’ said Gracie.
Edie was shocked, which was exactly what Gracie wanted.
‘Of course you can leave us. I can look after Papa perfectly well and we have Lilly now too, don’t we, Lilly?’
Lilly looked at Paul and he nodded. ‘She’s not going anywhere.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Lilly. ‘Yes, you do have me.’
Gracie stood as tall as she could, which wasn’t very tall, so she stood on the chair and put her hands on her hips. ‘Edie, you have been the best mother a girl could ever want but I can look after Papa and I have Lilly who will feed us both and make us fat, won’t you?’
‘I imagine Gracie can look after us,’ said Paul, ‘though I don’t need looking after.’
‘But Gracie needs her own life,’ said Edie, and then she realised what she had said. ‘Gracie, I never regretted it, not for a moment.’
‘It’s okay, Edie. I will follow my heart when my Englishman arrives.’
‘Gracie, you don’t know how life is going to turn out,’ said Edie.
‘I do know,’ said Gracie stubbornly. ‘I love you, Edie, and if you don’t follow your heart I will never smile again and you know what that would do to Papa.’
‘I have noticed every gentle wrinkle around his eyes and committed them all to memory,’ said Edie and she smiled and knew her decision.
‘Well, it’s settled then,’ said Paul and he thumped his umbrella on the ground firmly, as if it was a gavel in the courtroom finalising everything, and it made the floorboard quiver and the table bounce.
Lilly topped up the teapot with hot water and Edie took a cup to her room and sat down at her dressing table and replied to Virgil’s letter and then she took out her notebook. She had one empty page left and she wrote:
Sixth September Twenty-Four
Plan — Marry him.
Forty-Eight
The Widower
Monday, 15 September 1924, when Reuben finds a little redemption in Ballarat.
Two weeks he had been in Ballarat and the gossip about him had spread from the Arch of Victory to Bakers Hill and from Mount Buninyong to Black Hill. He hadn’t even given his first sermon yet. But the gossip about the new pastor was all any one talked about. Some of the women said his wife had left him and run back to England, some said that she had gone completely bonkers and was in an asylum, some said he had done her in and then everyone said, ‘Nooooh — he couldn’t. He’s a man of God,’ and the person who had said it would laugh awkwardly and say they had only been joking. But one thing everyone knew was that the new pastor was English, handsome, and his voice made you feel like you could fly away. What’s more he had three little tykes and he needed a woman in his life.
Reuben was well aware of the gossip about him that filled the streets of Ballarat. He had walked up to people too quickly and overheard things; he had seen the way the women looked at him and he knew when the women came to the door of the manse, married or not, they were offering him more than the steaming lamb casserole they held out under his nose. He remained stoic and dignified through it all, ignoring the women’s attempts to lure him. He was so relieved to finally have his own church and he was well aware that, apart from the fact he was no longer that man, any untoward behaviour on his part would raise the ire of the church deacons. And weren’t they a bunch of stuffy old men who constantly told him that he didn’t understand the workings of a small Australian town. Hah — nobody understood the workings of small rural towns like those from small English villages. He had a thousand years of village gossip in his blood.
Monday was Reuben’s day off but he was so glad to have his own church that he didn’t mind when his flock came to see him. They could come any day of the week so long as he got paid his stipend and could feed the children — but now he could see why Alice had been so worried, why she had nagged him endlessly about the money. Food was so expensive and money was so hard to come by and a pastor’s stipend, even full-time as he had now, was small.
When the knock on the door came he stood Martha and Wycliffe in front of him and said sternly, ‘Now, you have to be good, not a sound, and look after your brother.’ They both nodded and agreed they would be good so he went to the door and opened it to two women. The younger one was short, he was sure if he stood right up against her she would barely reach his elbows, and the older one was not much taller. He’d seen them in the congregation on Sunday, when he had sat through Deacon Blackmarsh’s effort at a sermon, but he didn’t know who was who yet. He ushered them into his study, ‘First door on the left,’ he hurried them along and blocked their view so they wouldn’t see the hallway.
The women stood
