The Winds of Heaven Read online

  At nine o’clock the slow main street begins to stir. A car noses out of the driveway of the service station, a man hurries from the newsagents with the morning’s paper tucked beneath his arm, a woman sweeps the pavement outside the tea-shop. As Fan walks down the hill towards the post office she notices that the shop is no longer boarded up; it’s freshly painted, the windows shine. The old sign for Griffiths Tea has gone.

  The woman is inside now; Fan can see her through the window setting out plates of cakes on the shelves: apple tarts and lamingtons, butterfly cakes and pink and white meringues. Fan walks in through the door and sits down at a small wobbly table near the counter.

  ‘Do you sell Griffiths Tea?’ she asks when the woman comes over to her.

  ‘Griffiths Tea?’ The woman laughs, a warm lovely sound that challenges the cold of the day. ‘Gee, you’re goin’ back a bit, aren’t you, love? Haven’t heard that name for donkey’s years.’

  ‘There used to be a sign on your window,’ explains Fan. ‘A few years back, when the shop was boarded up. Right up in the corner there.’ She points to the top of the window.

  ‘Don’t know about that,’ says the woman. ‘We bought it like it is, after old Fred Thoms done the place up, and then sold.’ She pauses to wave through the window at an old woman pushing a shopping trolley up the road. ‘Old Mrs Rellick,’ she explains to Fan. ‘Off to get her milk and bread. You can set your watch by her, most days.’

  Fan orders a pot of ordinary tea. When the woman comes back with it, she says, ‘Not Griffiths, I’m afraid, but you’ve jogged my memory – my gran used to drink Griffiths Tea, but that was way back before the war. Haven’t heard of it since then.’

  ‘Did you ever drink it? Did she give you a little sip?’ Because suddenly Fan has remembered how when she was very, very little she used to beg Mum for a taste of her tea and Mum would put the cup to her lips, very gently, and say, ‘Just one little sip; tea isn’t meant for little girls.’

  ‘Now you mention it, she did. She did use to give me little sips!’ The woman shakes her head, delighted at the memory, and Fan notices how she’s got a little dimple in her cheek, like Clementine’s mother, and tiny freckles across the bridge of her nose, like Clemmie when she was a kid.

  ‘And what did it taste like?’ asks Fan eagerly. ‘Was it different from other teas?’

  ‘Well you know, it’s funny you should say that, because it was. Of course it might just have been because I was a kid, and they didn’t let kids drink tea back then, so it was sort of special, you know? But I thought it tasted wonderful – heavenly.’

  ‘Heavenly?’ smiles Fan. ‘Really?’ She’s smiling because it’s so unexpected, this, it’s like the gift in the very bottom of the Christmas stocking, the one you’ve been hoping for for so long that in some strange way you’ve forgotten all about it. ‘My cousin used to think it would taste like ambrosia,’ she confides.

  ‘Ambrosia? What’s that, love?’

  ‘The nectar of the gods,’ says Fan.

  ‘The nectar of the gods!’ The woman holds out her hand. ‘By the way, my name’s Jenny,’ she says.

  When she’s finished her ordinary, earthly tea Fan walks down to the post office. She buys a stamp and a postcard of the town and writes inside it:

  Dear Clementine, There’s a lady up here in the blue hills whose grandma used to drink Griffiths Tea. And the lady taisted it when she was little, and she says it taisted hevenly, just like you imajined, like ambrosea, the necter of the gods. Love from Fan xxx

  She fixes the stamp on slowly, carefully, like a fourth, last kiss. She wouldn’t ever see Clementine again.

  Thou art lost and gone forever,

  Dreadful sorry, Clementine.

  She addresses the postcard and hands it to the man behind the counter. ‘When will she get it?’ she asks him.

  He glances at the address. ‘Day or two,’ he grins at her. ‘Or three.’ And then, noticing the anxious expression on her face, he adds kindly, ‘Don’t worry, love, it’ll be there sooner than soon. Soonest. Promise.’

  Everyone is being kind: Jenny in the tea-shop, the old man who gave her the lift to the town, this man behind the counter of the post office – and somehow their kindness reminds her of Evie Castairs and Maggie Carmody at the bus stop that day she’d gone to Lachlan with Cash and Madeleine: how Evie had taken Madeleine so Fan could put her cardigan on right side round, and how Maggie had said, ‘Plenty of kids with no shoes round here!’ As if they were on her side. As if they really liked her. And how Cash said they’d waved as the bus pulled away…

  For a moment, a crack of light shines on a different world, or is it simply the same world, with a different light upon it? The world you hadn’t believed was there but might have been, even though you hadn’t noticed it. The thought makes Fan deeply uneasy and she walks quickly from the post office and out to the telephone box in the street. She looks up a number in the book and dials. ‘Is that Lake Conapaira railway station?’

  ‘Sure is!’

  ‘ls that Fred Niland?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘It’s Mrs Jameson here, Mrs Fan Jameson. You know, I live up the end of Palm Street. I used to be Fan Lancie.’ The line crackles and she adds suddenly, ‘Francesca.’

  ‘Francesca?’

  ‘That’s my real name.’

  ‘Oh. Well, sure I know you, Fan. I mean, Francesca. Showed you how to tie your shoelaces, didn’t I?’

  He did, too. She remembers now. When she started school Fred was one of the big boys in sixth class who helped the little ones. Tying her shoelaces was the one thing Caro had never been able to teach her, but Fred had known this special, easy way, with two loops instead of one.

  ‘And what can I do for you this cold, cold morning?’ A small raspy sound comes over the wire and she pictures Fred in his cluttered little station master’s office, rubbing his big red hands to get them warm, like he used to do on winter mornings at school. ‘Said on the wireless they might get snow up in the hills today,’ he tells her, ‘and if they do, it’ll be only the second time this century!’

  ‘Will it?’

  ‘Yep. So what can I do for you?’

  ‘Um, did you see my sister get off the train this morning? You know, Caroline? She’s Mrs Waters now. Mrs Caroline Waters.’

  Fan thinks how when you say Mrs Waters it sounds solid; when you say Mrs Jameson, it sounds like a girl with her hem coming down. ‘She was coming from Temora.’

  ‘Sure did,’ answers Fred. ‘Only passenger we had. How come you want – ’

  ‘Thank you,’ she says quickly. ‘Thank you, Fred,’ cutting him off before he can say anything else because the kindness in his voice is like the man in the post office and Jenny in the tea-shop and the old farmer in the truck and Evie Castairs and Maggie Carmody and she doesn’t want to think how people might be kind. Not now. Not when she’s made up her mind. She replaces the receiver and walks out into the street, past the tea-shop and the little park with the empty bandstand, on up the road to the lookout on the very top of the ridge.

  It’s a cold day in the very heart of winter. The thick grey clouds are so low that little misty wisps of them drift in front of her, dabbing at her face like small cold fingertips – like Cash’s fingers last night when she’d plucked them from her dress.

  ‘You’ll be okay,’ she whispers to Cash and Madeleine, who would be safe with Caro now. ‘In a little while, you’ll be all right.’

  Below her are the soft billowy crowns of the trees, like pillows, like a big fat quilt you could jump into and pull up over your face.

  ‘I grew up so fast I didn’t have time to look,’ she says to no one in particular, and not at all complainingly. Though it was true.

  Then she says the first lines of old Miss Greely’s kindergarten prayer. They’re still the only lines she remembers, but as she stands there a strange thing happens: into the stillness she hears her old teacher’s voice speaking the last two lines: But in the kingdom of Thy
grace, Give this little child a place.

  Fan stepped out into the air.

  There was a majestic silence.

  It began to snow.

  Epilogue: 2009

  On the bench beside the flat suburban lake, Clementine’s friend Sarah says sadly, ‘Ah, the poor little love.’

  It’s good to hear the dead called ‘love’, thinks Clementine. You feel the word might reach them and lay a calm, gentle touch on their souls. She remembers Fan’s small hand lying light as a moth on the hand of the old black man, and she looks away to the horizon, almost expecting to see the blue hills there instead of the rooftops and smudged greenery of city trees.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asks Sarah.

  ‘Yes.’ Even after all this time loss can still sweep over her. ‘You know, I dreamed of her that morning, the morning after she – left home,’ she confides to Sarah. ‘Of Fan. Before they found her.’

  Found tangled in the treetops, Caro had told her after the funeral. Her neck was broken. ‘They said it was instantaneous,’ said Caro. ‘They said she wouldn’t have felt a thing, but they always say that, don’t they?’ Caro’s eyes had been red with angry tears; she’d added in a whisper, ‘She was all covered with snow.’

  Snow. ‘Like a fat white quilt,’ Fan had said that last time they’d walked beside the lake, imagining how the treetops of the blue hills would look when it snowed. ‘A fat white quilt you could jump into and pull right over your head and snuggle down to sleep.’

  ‘What did you dream?’ asks Sarah, and Clementine tells her friend how she’d dreamed her cousin was climbing up into the black night sky of Lake Conapaira. She’d been a child again, fat wild-honey-coloured braids tumbling down her back, small slender feet freckled with red dust, gamely scaling the rungs of an invisible ladder set down amongst the cold-faced stars. ‘She’s looking for her friend,’ Clementine had murmured in her dream. ‘She’s looking for the old black man.’

  And then she’d woken with a start because her mother had come into the room and was tugging at the blankets. ‘Oh darling,’ she’d whispered when her daughter opened her eyes, ‘Oh darling, there’s such bad news.’

  ‘What?’ Clementine had jerked upright in her bed. There’d been dark at the window of her bedroom; it wasn’t even morning yet. ‘What?’ But she’d known it was Fan, even before her mother started telling.

  ‘That was Caroline on the phone. Fan’s sister.’

  ‘I know. I know.’ Clementine had wrenched at her mother’s arm. ‘What is it? Tell me! What’s happened to Fan?’

  ‘No one knows yet. She’s gone and disappeared…’

  Clementine and Sarah get up from the wooden bench beside the lake and take the path towards the car park. ‘Do you need a lift?’ asks Sarah. ‘Only I noticed you got dropped off this morning; you haven’t got your car.’

  ‘Thank you,’ says Clementine. ‘But someone’s coming to pick me up at twelve.’

  It’s almost noon now, and the sky has turned hazy; frail white streamers of cloud float there, like prayer flags or bridal veils or the gauziest of shawls.

  On Fan’s funeral day the clouds were small and white and fluffy, children’s clouds: kittens and ducklings and little lambs on a bright blue kindergarten freize. The townspeople stood in small clusters, whispering to each other; neighbours and shopkeepers, younger people who might once have been at school with Fan; Fred Niland from the station, a teacher called Miss Langland who’d come all the way from Parkes. Old Mr Chiltern from the hardware store was crying into a big checked hanky; beside him Evie Castairs and Maggie Carmody were crying too.

  ‘And she a mother!’ a woman’s voice exclaimed harshly, suddenly, and then another, softer voice said, ‘Hush!’

  There wasn’t a sign of the young man who might have been Gary, no sign of the vanished Uncle Len. Even Aunty Rene had been absent, far away with Trevor in Tucson, Arizona, dancing on a competition stage. ‘“Too far to come,” that’s what she said,’ an angry Caroline told Clementine. ‘Couldn’t be bothered, more like!’ She’d stamped her foot, but gently, so as not to alarm the small fair-haired baby she was holding in her arms, and a puff of bright red dust rose up round her shoe. ‘Oh, I hate her! Mum! Bloody old dancing fool!’

  ‘Ah, come on, love.’ Her husband put an arm around her shoulders.

  Caro’s anger was the kind Clementine had instantly recognised, an anger with oneself. ‘I’d give anything,’ Caro had begun, and then fallen silent, her unfinished sentence drifting away on the air of the bright winter day.

  The baby she was holding was Fan’s daughter. ‘We left Cash with the neighbours,’ Frank explained. ‘We reckoned this might be too much for him, seeing he’s old enough to understand what’s going on – ’ he gestured round the little cemetery, the scrubby grass, the dry, lopsided stones, the small heaps of deep red earth beside the hole where Fan’s casket had been lowered into the ground.

  ‘And it was so-o dark, Clemmie, like you were right down buried in the ground…’

  Frank chucked a big finger under the baby’s chin and she grinned up at him. ‘But we thought we’d bring the little one along for her mum.’ He took her small hand and held it out to Clementine. ‘This is Madeleine,’ he said.

  Madeleine.

  Clementine felt the ground falling away beneath her feet. She could hear Fan’s voice, her actual laughing fourteen-year-old voice: ‘Okay, tell you what: when I have my first little girl I’ll call her Madeleine for you.’

  Clementine looked up at the small frisking clouds, the kittens and ducklings and baby lambs and fought back angry tears. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she cried out silently. ‘Why didn’t you write and say, “I’ve had a little girl and I’ve given her your favourite name like I promised. Madeleine!”’

  Why hadn’t she? Because if Fan had done that, then Clementine would have written back because she’d have known what to write about, and she’d have come up to see Fan and the baby in the holidays, and –

  And then perhaps none of this would have happened. There’d have been no vanishing, no death, and she and Fan might this very morning be walking round the lake with Madeleine and little Cash, the fluffy clouds frolicking above them, the small winds of heaven riffling through their hair. Distantly, she heard Caroline saying, ‘It was good of you to come.’

  She spun round in anguish. ‘But I didn’t!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I didn’t come! Not when I should have, anyway! I didn’t even write to her when you sent me that letter. I didn’t – ’ Clementine burst into noisy tears and Frank took the baby so that Caro could put her arms around her cousin. ‘Shhh,’ Caro whispered. ‘Shhh.’

  ‘It’s not your fault, love,’ said Frank. ‘Even if you’d written a letter she mightn’t have got round to opening it. Fan sort of – left things lying.’

  ‘She would have opened it,’ said Clementine. She was sure of it. And she couldn’t help remembering the girl she thought she’d seen on that rainy afternoon a few weeks ago, the girl at the end of the corridor in the Old Arts building, in the faded blue-grey dress with the hem coming down. Fan had still been alive then, so it couldn’t have been her ghost. But what if she’d learned to send her spirit wandering when she was asleep, like she’d told Clementine the old black man used to do – sent it roaming down the red land to Sydney, searching for her gindaymaidhaany?

  ‘Was that you?’ Clementine whispered, gazing up at the great blue arch of sky. ‘Was that you, Fan? Francesca?’ The beautiful name, suddenly remembered, so long forgotten, settled in Clementine’s heart like a sweet white dove. Francesca.

  ‘Grief is the worst thing, I think.’ Sarah might have been tracing the silent passage of her companion’s thoughts as she and Clementine make their way slowly along the path towards the car park.

  ‘Yes,’ agrees Clementine. ‘Oh, yes.’

  In a fourth year English exam, a whole two years after her cousin’s death, Clementine had opened the poetry paper and unexpectedly b
egun to cry. It had been the question on Henry Vaughan that had undone her, the poem for analysis printed out on the page. It was the eighth stanza:

  If a star were confin’d into a Tomb

  Her captive flames must needs burn there;

  But when the hand that lockt her up, gives room,

  She’l shine through all the sphere.

  She had read those lines many times, but never before had the connection to her cousin revealed itself, as it did that December afternoon in the middle of the English Honours exam. Oh, that was like Fan! It was! Perhaps it was the heat of the summer day pouring through the high windows of the exam room, or the sound of the wind roaring outside, or the smell of red inland dust in the air, but Clementine couldn’t stop crying; she’d had to be helped from the examination room to sit outside in a chair in the corridor, an invigilator beside her, until she’d got herself together and could go inside again.

  ‘Fan would have shone, she would have, if only – ’ she’d sobbed out in the corridor. ‘If only she’d stayed!’

  ‘Do you want to go to the sick room?’ the invigilator had asked.

  ‘No, no, I’m all right.’ Clementine had rubbed at her eyes. ‘I’m better now.’ And she’d marched back into the exam room, sat down at her desk and answered the question on Henry Vaughan. She was living life for both of them now, and it had to be good, it had to be ‘brushed with light’, as old Henry Vaughan would have said.

  Then there was the time, at a party in a terrace house on Glebe Road, where she’d gone with David Lowell, when Clementine had turned pale and quiet as Johnny Cash’s rich deep voice flooded out into the room –