‘That was a good sale,’ Daphne agrees.
Adelaide shakes her head. ‘I don’t know how you do what you do with the clothes. I can’t see what you’re seeing.’
‘Well, that’s all right,’ Daphne replies. ‘I can’t play the cello at all, let alone to concert standard.’
They smile at each other, although it’s not an exuberant, carefree smile like they used to share. It’s the smile of people who are too old to believe that anything in life is carefree, even if exuberance may sound appealing.
‘How did we go so long without seeing each other?’ Adelaide says after several moments have passed.
‘You made a life overseas. A fabulous one.’ Daphne has always been proud of her friend’s achievements.
‘But I never made a friend as good as you.’
It’s said sadly, as if they were never in touch all these years, but they’d maintained a friendship as well as any two people could over such distances – via letters and trunk calls and telegrams – because they both worked at it.
‘I’m still your friend,’ Daphne says with a light tone. ‘I’m still here.’
An odd look crosses Adelaide’s face. ‘I’m lucky you took me back.’
‘As if I wouldn’t!’
The door opens and a lady closer to their age steps in.
Daphne glances at Adelaide, who nods and says, ‘Off you go.’
It isn’t until after the woman has left with a bracelet wrapped in tissue paper that Daphne realises she hasn’t seen Adelaide for some time. She hears something that sounds like sniffling from the back room, but then Adelaide appears carrying the cake and Daphne forgets all about it.
CHAPTER TEN
‘Kevin, would youstop?’ Christina yanks on the lead as her mother’s beagle tries to run after a spaniel that walks past with its owner.
Kevin is the most sociable dog alive, she’s decided, because he wants to make friends with every dog and human who pass them, and if she’d known that about him she wouldn’t have offered to take him for a walk.
Well … she hadn’t offered so much as her mother had suggested it. Several times. ‘You need to get out,’ she said. ‘Leave the house. A young lass like you shouldn’t be inside all this time.’
Christina had laughed at her use of the word ‘lass’ – she didn’t hear it once in the United States – and that’s how she knew she was starting to feel better.
So she pretended to be doing her mother a favour by taking Kevin for one of the half-dozen walks he has each day. Joni says he needs them. Christina thought she was exaggerating but now she can see how vigorously his tail is wagging, she believes her mother had a point. The dog is happy. And if walks outside can make him happy, maybe they’ll have the same effect on her.
‘I’ll get the milk and the paper,’ she’d called to her mother as she left, not knowing then how much Kevin pulls on the leadand how she needs two hands to control him. She’s not going to have much luck carrying the milk and paper home.
When they reach Anderson Park at the bottom of the Kurraba Road hill, Christina lets him off the lead for a bit. She’d decided to head down to the shops on the intersection rather than go up the hill to the little shop on Ben Boyd Road, thinking the climb up would be harder – except, of course, she’ll have to climb up to get home, and this time she’ll have groceries as well as an excitable beagle.
These are the sorts of quotidian issues she hasn’t needed to face in a while. In Los Angeles, no one walks to do anything if they can avoid it. Christina was told this before she moved there and she hadn’t believed it. Growing up in Sydney, where everyone walks probably because there are just so many lovely places to walk and also because there’s no reason not to, then living in London, where people also walk, it hadn’t occurred to her that there might be a city so wedded to cars that people look at you strangely if you say you’re going for a stroll somewhere. So she had adapted to the LA way and driven not very far for her milk and papers.
That was before she became mildly famous and started hiring people to run her life for her. It’s weird, having staff. Nice to not have to worry about shopping and cooking and cleaning. But weird. And even weirder now that she’s back in what some might call the real world.
Whistling to Kevin – named after Joni’s favourite uncle, long deceased – Christina clips his lead back on and heads for the mixed business that’s been there since she was a kid. Back then she’d buy lollies, which she’d make last all week.
The shop doesn’t look much different as she steps inside, and it still smells like eucalyptus oil, which is what the old owners – maybe still the current? – cleaned it with. A little bell tinkles over the door too, just as it always did. For a second – less – Christina feels like she’s twelve again, saving up her coins to buy the sweets.Back when so little could mean so much. Maybe it still does. Maybe that’s what she needs to remember if she’s to recover something from the wreckage of the life she thought she had.
She pulls a carton of milk from the fridge and picks up a copy ofThe Sun, then takes coins out of her purse and waits to be told how many are needed by the tall, sandy-haired man behind the counter who is grinning at her like he knows her.
Great. Clearly tucking her white-blonde hair into a baseball cap and not wearing make-up hasn’t helped her. Nor have her rumpled white linen pants and un-ironed terracotta-coloured long-sleeved T-shirt paired with her oldest sandshoes – an ensemble designed to make her look like she doesn’t care about her appearance. Because she doesn’t.
Now she feels like she shouldn’t have left the house after all. Is he going to say something to her about the director? Is she going to have to leave the milk and paper behind? Is she –
‘Chrissie?’ He’s still smiling. And being quite familiar, calling her that. Which no one except her mother has called her since …