Homecoming, p.1
Homecoming, page 1
Kate Morton is the award-winning, worldwide bestselling author of The Shifting Fog (known internationally as The House at Riverton), The Forgotten Garden, The Distant Hours, The Secret Keeper, The Lake House and The Clockmaker’s Daughter. Her books are published in 38 languages across 45 territories and have been #1 bestsellers around the world. She holds degrees in dramatic art and English literature and lives with her family in London and Australia.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are used fictitiously or are products of the author’s imagination.
First published in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin in 2023
Copyright © Kate Morton 2023
The Author asserts the Author’s Moral Rights in this work throughout the world without waiver.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
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Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
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ISBN 978 1 76063 048 5
eISBN 978 1 76118 578 6
Cover design: Sandy Cull
Cover artwork: Fairy Tree, original painting by Bec Bartell
For my family
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
Christmas Eve, 1959
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE: London, 7 December 2018
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE: Heathrow Airport, 8 December 2018
CHAPTER FOUR: Adelaide Hills, 24 December 1959
CHAPTER FIVE
PART TWO
CHAPTER SIX: Sydney, 10 December 2018
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Adelaide Hills, 25 December 1959
CHAPTER TWELVE
PART THREE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Sydney, 11 December 2018
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
2 As If They Were Asleep: Daniel Miller
3
4
PART FOUR
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Sydney, 11 December 2018
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
5 As If They Were Asleep: Daniel Miller
6
7
8
9
10
11
PART FIVE
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Sydney, 12 December 2018
12 As If They Were Asleep: Daniel Miller PART TWO
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Sydney, 12 December 2018
PART SIX
CHAPTER NINETEEN: Brisbane, Queensland, 12 December 2018
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Sydney, 12 December 2018
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
13 As If They Were Asleep: Daniel Miller
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: Sydney, 13 December 2018
PART SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: Brisbane, 14 December 2018
14 As If They Were Asleep: Daniel Miller
Epilogue
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: Sydney, 17 December 2018
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
As If They Were Asleep: Daniel Miller - Addendum: Halcyon Revisited
PART EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: Sydney, 18 December 2018
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: Adelaide Hills, 18 December 2018
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: Adelaide Hills, 24 December 1959
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: Sydney, 19 December 2018
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
PART NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: Sydney, 20 December 2018
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN: Adelaide Hills, 15 December 1989
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE: Adelaide Hills, 24 December 2018
Acknowledgements
PROLOGUE
Adelaide Hills, South Australia, New Year’s Day 1959
And, 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 towards 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 towards 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 grey 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 recognised 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
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 in their grand house was not anything like a frontier existence. Why, she had a telephone and electric lights and a lock on every door.
Which wasn’t to say it didn’t get lonely sometimes, and so very dark, when the children had gone to bed. Even reading, which had long been a source of solace for her, had started to feel like a rather isolating endeavour.
Without losing her grip on the ladder, Isabel craned to see whether the curve of the swag was going to fall high enough to accommodate the table beneath. Getting it just so was a trickier task than she’d imagined. Henrik always made it look easy. She could have – should have – asked him to do it before he’d finished work the previous day. There’d been no rain predicted; the bunting would have been fine to hang out overnight. But she couldn’t. Things had changed between them recently, ever since she’d come upon him in the office that afternoon, working late when Thomas was in Sydney. She felt embarrassed now when she asked him to do menial jobs around the place, self-conscious and exposed.
She was simply going to have to do it herself. Really, though, the wind was a menace. She’d made the decision about the western lawn before it started up; she’d forgotten this was the less sheltered side of the garden. But Isabel had a stubborn streak; she’d been like it all her life. A sage friend once told her that people didn’t change as they aged, they merely became older and sadder. The first, she’d figured, she couldn’t do much about, but Isabel had been determined not to permit the latter. Thankfully, she was, by nature, a very positive person.
It was only that the windy days brought with them agitation. They did lately, anyway. She was sure she hadn’t always felt this turbulence within her belly. Once, in a different lifetime, she’d been known for having nerves of steel. Now, she was as likely to be overtaken with a sudden surge of alarm from nowhere. A sense that she was standing alone on the surface of life and it felt as fragile as glass. Breathing helped. She wondered whether she needed a tincture or tea. Something to settle her thoughts so she could at least sleep. She’d even considered a doctor, but not Maud McKendry’s husband in the main street. God forbid.
However she did it, Isabel was going to put things right. That was the other New Year’s resolution she’d made, although she’d kept it to herself. She was giving herself one more year to regain her equilibrium. People were depending on her, and it was time.
She would turn thirty-eight at her next birthday. Practically forty! A greater age than either her father or mother ever reached. Perhaps that was why she had been overcome lately with memories from her childhood. It was as if sufficient time had passed that she could turn around and see it with clarity across the vast ocean of time. She could barely remember crossing that ocean.
It was ridiculous to feel lonely. She had lived in this house for fourteen years. She was surrounded by more family than she’d ever had – God knew, she couldn’t escape the children if she tried. And yet, there were times when she felt terror at her own desolation, the gnawing sensation of having lost something she could not name and therefore could not hope to find.
Down on the curve of the driveway, something moved. She strained to see. Yes, someone was coming, it wasn’t her imagination. A stranger? A bushranger sweeping up the driveway on his horse, straight out of a Banjo Paterson poem?
It was the postman, she realised, as the brown-paper-wrapped parcel he was carrying came into focus. On New Year’s Day! One of the virtues of living in a small country town where everyone knew each other’s business was service outside usual hours, but this was exceptional. A flame of excitement flared inside her and her fingers turned to thumbs as she tried to tie the bunting so she could get down to intercept the delivery. She hoped it was the order she’d written away for some weeks ago. Her liberation! She hadn’t expected it to arrive so soon.
But it was maddening. The string was tangled, and the wind was teasing it around the flags. Isabel struggled and cursed beneath her breath, glancing over her shoulder to observe the postman’s progress.
She didn’t want her package delivered to the house.
As he reached the nearest bend of the driveway, Isabel knew she would have to let go of the string if she were to scramble down the ladder in time. She vacillated for a moment and then called out, ‘Hello!’ and waved. ‘I’m over here.’
He looked up, surprised, and as another gust of wind made her grip the ladder tight, Isabel saw she’d been mistaken. For although he carried a parcel, the stranger on the driveway was not the postman at all.
Christmas Eve, 1959
Later, when he was asked about it, as he would be many times over the course of his long, long life, Percy Summers would say truthfully that he’d thought they were asleep. The weather had been hot enough for it. Throughout December, the heat had pushed in from the west, crossing the desert centre before driving south; there it had gathered, hanging unseen above them and refusing to budge. Each night they listened to the weather report on the wireless, waiting to hear that it was due to break; but relief never came. In the long afternoons they leaned over one another’s fences, squinting in the golden light as the shimmering sun melted into the horizon beyond the edge of town, shaking their heads and lamenting the heat, the blasted heat, asking one another, without expectation of an answer, when it would finally end.
Meanwhile, tall and slender on the upsweep of hills that surrounded their river-run valley, the blue gums stood silent, streaky skins glinting metallic. They were old and had seen it all before. Long before the houses of stone and timber and iron, before the roads and cars and fences, before the rows of grapevines and apple trees and the cattle in the paddocks. The gums had been there first, weathering the blistering heat and, in turn, the cold wet of winter. This was an ancient place, a land of vast extremes.
Even by usual standards, though, the summer of 1959 was hot. Records were falling in the place where scores were kept, and the people of Tambilla were feeling every bit of it. Percy’s wife, Meg, had taken to rising with the dawn to get the day’s milk delivery inside the shop before it had a chance to spoil; Jimmy Riley said that even his aunties and uncles couldn’t remember it so dry; and in everyone’s mind, especially with the memories of 1955 so fresh, was the risk of fire.
‘Black Sunday’ the papers had taken to calling it. The worst fires seen since the colony had been formed. Second of January had dawned four years ago, heavy with a sense of disaster brewing. A dust storm had rolled in overnight, gathered from the dry plains to the north; scorching wind gusts of a hundred kilometres per hour. Trees bowed and leaves hurtled along the ravines; sheets of corrugated iron were wrenched from the tops of farm buildings. Electric power lines broke free, sparking multiple blazes that raged and grew and finally met to form a great hungry wall of fire.
Hour by hour, the locals had fought it hard with wet sacks and shovels and whatever else they could find until at last, miraculously, in the evening, the rain had started to fall and the wind had changed direction – but not before forty or so properties had been lost, along with the lives of two poor souls. They’d been calling for a proper emergency fire service ever since, but the decision-makers down in the city had been too slow to act; this year, in the face of eerily similar conditions, the local branch had taken matters into their own hands.
Jimmy Riley, who worked as a tracker for some of the Hills farmers, had been talking about land clearing for ages. For thousands of years, he said, his ancestors had conducted regular slow burns, reducing the fuel load when the weather was still cool, so there wasn’t enough left to start a fire when the earth was baking and the north-westers howling, and the merest spark was all it took. It seemed to Percy that men like Jimmy Riley, who knew this country from the inside out, weren’t listened to anywhere near as often as they should be.
