The Midnight Dress(73)

She rests her head on the old woman’s lap. Closes her eyes, but the tears keep coming.

‘You know,’ says Edie. ‘You know what has happened.’

And she does.

Rose doesn’t leave. Not then. Not for a while. She is weighted down by the truth, which is a dead weight, an anchor, holding her there. She sleeps in a long-forgotten bedroom on a dusty-smelling mattress under a dusty-smelling sheet. There is a mirror in a huge mahogany dresser in that room, and each morning and night she looks at her face there. The blood is still moving in her veins. Her cheeks are turned dusky-red each afternoon when she returns from climbing.

She goes up at dawn. First to the hut. She sees the policemen there once, crouches like a wild thing, watches them through the trees. The place is split open now, touched by too many hands. It needs to be left alone. Given over to the forest. Already things have changed there. A bird examining a sliver of amber glass has left behind the seed of a satin ash. A tiny sapling has sprouted. The forest is already taking a step forward into that clearing. The crumpled timber frame will rot. The orange fungi will bloom along its length. A carpet snake will curl itself amid the old blackened floorboards. If only it can be left alone. These are things she wishes for.

She leaves there and climbs higher.

Climbs further.

Her mother is with her still, in her limbs, in her thighs grown strong; she speaks in the pulse jumping at her throat. Keep going. Keep going. Keep going. Rose climbs until she can no longer stand. Until she crumples on the forest floor. Until she is free of the forest on the upper rocky reaches, where she stands in the clouds. She calls out to Pearl. She calls out again and again. Pearl. Pearlie. Pearl Kelly. Persephone. Pearl.

‘I love her,’ says Rose, limbs exhausted, lying curled on the day bed, Edie opening the windows to the evening.

Edie doesn’t say a thing.

‘I loved her, that’s all,’ says Rose.

When she tells Detective Glass she doesn’t feel relieved. No huge weight lifts from her shoulders. She aches inside; it’s a terrible ache. When her mother died she felt the same way, she thinks, although it was too long ago to be sure.

She tells Glass about Paul Rendell, about the love letters, about his kissing Pearl up near the hut, about the fire she caused. She tells him all these things and he listens patiently.

She tells him that it’s her father. It’s her father they should be looking for.

‘Why do you think that?’ Glass asks.

‘It was his eyes,’ she says. ‘He couldn’t look at me and then, when he did, I knew. He’s always making mistakes. Terrible mistakes.’ She sobs with these last words. Aloud, it sounds stupid. She’s aware of how stupid it must sound. ‘I just know,’ she says.

Glass nods. He doesn’t look convinced. He’s losing interest. He’s going to start asking more questions about Paul Rendell. She senses them there, ready on his tongue.

‘Mrs Lamond has my dad’s sketchbooks,’ she says. ‘They’re full of his Pearl drawings. He couldn’t stop drawing her. You should go there. She’ll have kept them. She thinks Dad is coming back to her.’

Rose writes letters to Pearl, hundreds of them. She posts some up in among the trees. Leaves them between rocks in the lovely carved spaces made by the buttress roots. Throws them over the falls, one by one, her words like petals.

Others, she keeps. She’ll carry them for years. She’ll carry them with her between the places she lives. In cities, towns, across seas. The letters are written on writing paper from motel rooms and on the back of beer coasters, on cardboard torn from tissue boxes, the last pages of books and on shopping dockets. She’ll keep these words she meant for Pearl. When she is lost, and later when she finds herself again.

They find her father before she leaves town. It’s everywhere in the papers and on television. He’s on some back road to nowhere. Face grown lean and assuming his biblical air. He offers no resistance, answers every question, slowly and carefully.

She stops the traffic when she goes to town. People freeze where they stand, whisper when she passes. She sees Murray Falconer beside the park gates. She doesn’t want to stop, to harm him, to draw a dark mark across him with her presence, but he calls out. ‘Rose.’

‘Rose Blackbird,’ he says, when she is close.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says.

He shrugs. His laconic Murray Falconer smile is gone. He looks behind her to see if anyone is watching. He can’t think of anything else to say. He’s trying. He’s exasperated by it, his lack of words, almost angry; she thinks she sees the beginnings of tears. She can’t think of anything to ease his uneasiness. Finally, his father blows the car horn and he’s gone.

So she never goes again to town until she leaves.

‘Have you got money?’

Edie stands, goes down the hallway and comes back with a small yellow purse with a gold clasp.

‘Here,’ she says. The purse is full of money, stuffed full.

‘That’s insane,’ says Rose.

‘It will come in handy.’

‘Do you think I will ever see you again?’ asks Rose.

‘You know where I live.’

Rose Lovell doesn’t cry.

Edie puts her hand out and holds Rose Lovell’s wrist. An old, old hand, feather-light.

‘Maybe I’ll come back here to visit,’ Rose says.