there?’
‘Yes we do, Mr Hardy.’
‘Would it be possible for me to speak to her? I…’
‘Oh, would you?’ The woman at the other end of the phone sounded as if I’d offered her a holiday in Bali. ‘Mrs North is a most interesting woman, but very lonely. She seldom gets any visitors and that’s such a pity because her mind is very active and… What would you want to talk to her about, Mr Hardy?’
‘Her late son. I’m writing about the Angolan civil war. He fought there you see.’
‘Fascinating. I’m sure Rose would love to talk to you. When would you like to come?’
‘Where are you exactly? And who am I talking to, please?’
‘I’m sorry. My name is Mrs Saunders, I’m the supervisor here. We’re in Carlingford Road, Epping.’
It was three-thirty and I had nothing pressing on hand. It would take me forty-five minutes to get there, half an hour with the old dear, back in the city by five-thirty, just in time for the first drink of the day. ‘How about today, Mrs Saunders, within the hour?’
‘Wonderful. I’ll send someone to tell her you’re coming and get her tidied up. She’ll be thrilled. Just drive in the gates. There’s plenty of parking space.’
The nursing home was a Victorian mansion set in big grounds dominated by large trees. The early April afternoon was breezy and leaves were blowing over the gravel drive and the lawn and the flower beds. An old man was raking the leaves into piles and watching while the wind blew them away again. He didn’t seem to mind. I parked to one side of the building and walked up a set of deeply worn brick steps onto a wide verandah that swept around the whole structure. A gap had been made in the waist-high wall around the verandah and a ramp built down to ground level. There was another ramp beside the steps that led into a small lobby. I pushed open the door, stepped inside and was greeted by a woman who’d evidently been waiting for me.
‘You must be Mr Hardy? I’m Mavis Saunders.’ She was a stout, motherly type in a blue dress vaguely reminiscent of a nurse’s uniform with a white cardigan draped around her shoulders. We shook hands and she led me up the stairs and down a corridor to a corner room. She pushed the door open and beckoned me in.
An old woman was sitting in a cane chair near the open window. The room smelled of flowers and medicines and tobacco. The woman was smoking a cigarette held in a long holder. She looked up at me with beautiful dark eyes sunk deep in a sallow, lined face and took a deep drag.
‘Rose is a terror,’ Mavis Saunders said. ‘We cannot stop her smoking no matter what we do, so we allow her to have two or three each day as long as she sits by the window and blows the smoke outside.’
Rose North blew the smoke at Mrs Saunders.
‘Rose!’
The old woman grinned and I couldn’t help grinning back. Mrs Saunders plumped a cushion behind the old woman’s back and pointed to a chair I could bring closer to the window. ‘She’s a little deaf but there’s nothing wrong with her brainbox, is there, Rose?’
‘No.’
There was the hint of an accent even in that one syllable, along with a considerable amount of authority. Mavis Saunders stopped fussing as if she’d been reprimanded. ‘Well, I’ll just leave you with her. About half an hour, Mr Hardy.’
‘Fine.’ I pulled the chair across and sat down. The dark eyes bored into me as she drew on her cigarette again.
‘Would you like some tea?’ Mrs Saunders said.
‘Coffee,’ Rose North snapped.
‘You know you’re not allowed coffee.’
‘Perhaps just this once, Mrs Saunders,’ I said.
Rose North grinned again and Mrs Saunders sighed and bustled out of the room.
‘I’ve got a million and one things wrong with me. Don’t get old, that’s my advice to you. I don’t suppose you’ve got any cigarettes on you?’
‘I’m sorry, Mrs North. I gave it up.’
‘Everyone has. Damn foolishness. Well, you wanted to talk about Lee, Mavis said. Poor boy. I never could understand why he wanted to go off and shoot black people, him and his brother.’
I looked at my notes. ‘Did Peter go to Angola as well? I’d have thought he was too young.’
The old woman smoked and said nothing for a couple of long minutes. Mavis Saunders came in with two cups of coffee on a tray. Rose North snatched at hers with a brown, wrinkled hand. A little spilled into the saucer and she deftly tipped it into the cup. Her hands didn’t shake. I took my cup and sipped it-instant and pretty weak at that. The old woman gulped hers down fast. She took a last drag on her cigarette, flicked the butt out of the holder and dropped it into the cup. She lit another and drew in the smoke. ‘Always best after a coffee, better still with a glass of wine. You know how much wine they allow me here?’
I shook my head.
‘A litre a week. Can you imagine that? Not worth having. What were you saying? My memory jumps around a bit. It’s all right for most things, it just sort of skips a beat now and then.’
‘I said I thought your son Peter would have been too young to have fought in Angola.’
She stared through the window at the waving treetops, the cigarette burning unheeded in its holder. She sat very still and seemed to be looking down a tunnel into the past. Her voice was quieter and the accent stronger. ‘Eric and May Trumble are dead, is that right?’
‘Yes.’
‘And my Percy is long gone. He was a good man, Percy, but… I am Maltese, did you know that?’
‘No.’
‘Yes. African, Arab, Greek, Roman-real mixture. Passionate people. What harm can the truth do now? Eric Trumble was Lee’s father, not Percy. I had an affair with Eric soon after Percy and I were married. What do you think of that?’
I had many questions but no idea of how to ask them. How does a married woman with a lover know which man is the father of her child? Did Eric Trumble know about his paternity? Did Lee North know? Most importantly, was the old woman romancing? She twisted in her chair away from the window and stared at me. ‘I don’t know why I told you that. There’s something about you that made me want to say it. That’s your talent is it, Mr Hardy? Making people talk?’
I mulled over what I’d learned as I drove back to the city. She had shown me a family photograph of herself with Percy, Lee, Peter and Maria. Lee and the girl resembled the mother, lean and dark. Peter followed his father who was a stocky, sandy-haired type. No doubts about paternity there. The information was just a further twist to an already screwy story and didn’t help me.
I’d felt bad about lying to Rose North about my interest in her family, but there was some comfort in my feeling that she didn’t believe me anyway. She’d been about to press me for more details on my project when a kind of cloud had passed across her face and her mind drifted away. Mrs Saunders had chosen that moment to come in and pronounce her tired and Rose hadn’t objected. Her last words to me were, ‘They were brave, brave boys, but very, very, foolish.’
Well, one of them was foolish still. The address I had for Maria North was in Stanmore, not far from the comforts of home. I’d intended to leave her until the next day but the intriguing elements in the case had got to me. I called her number on the car phone.
‘Maria North-Barr.’ The voice was a rich, slurred contralto.
I gave her the journalistic spiel, including that I’d just come from seeing her mother, and asked if it would be possible to see her.
‘I would be positively delighted, Mr Hardy, positively delighted. It’s, been ages since I’ve talked to a journalist. It’ll be just like old times. I’m just having a little drink. You do drink, I trust.’
I told her I drank and that I was only a few minutes away. I turned off Parramatta Road and drove through the leafy, gentrified streets of Stanmore. Her house was an imposing Federation job set in a big overgrown garden at the bottom of a street that ended at the railway line. The location-the tracks were within seventy metres of the house-would have sliced thirty grand off the value. A train rumbled past as I pulled up and a plane roared low
