Lavinia sighs. ‘You may need to sell the house.’
‘No!’ Margot jerks her hand back. How can Lavinia even suggest that? There’s no way she can leave this house. She’s never lived anywhere else.
‘How else are we going to manage?’
‘I …’ Margot bites her bottom lip again. She has no answer for her aunt. Or for herself.
‘Darling.’ Lavinia takes her hand again. ‘If you sell, there will be enough money for you to buy a flat somewhere in Mosman, so you won’t have to go too far away. And if you invest the rest, you’ll likely have enough to live on. It’s why your parents left you the house – so you’d have what you need, not so you’d feel you can never leave it.’
‘But I don’t want to leave it!’
Margot feels almost hysterical now and hates herself a little for it. Isn’t she meant to be looking after Lavinia, not the other way around?
‘Darling– you may not have a choice.’ Lavinia sighs again as she lets go of Margot’s hand and turns to look at the view.
‘We’ve been lucky to have this,’ she says quietly. ‘So very lucky.’ Then she looks at Margot. ‘But I think our luck has run out. And that’s all right. It has to sometime.’
‘I don’t feel lucky,’ Margot says, even though it sounds sulky. ‘My brothers died. My parents died.’ She hiccups from the force of her feelings. ‘I don’t have friends.’
There were friends, when she was a teenager. Back when she had joie de vivre despite the pall of grief that hung over the house. She loved to dance and sing; she would sit in the garden and marvel at the trees and the flowers. ‘My woodland sprite,’ her mother used to call her.
Yes, back when – back then – was a wonderful place. It’s why Margot likes to visit the past more than the present, and definitely more than the future.
‘But you have me.’ Lavinia pushes herself up to standing. ‘And I have you. And that makes us luckier than many.’ She smiles sadly. ‘We’ll cope,’ she adds. ‘We’ll have to.’
As her aunt goes back inside, though, Margot isn’t sure she knows how to cope. Coping is for people who can pay bills.Who can go to the city. Who can drive a car – she can’t even do that.
The bills have to be paid, though. She can’t have Lavinia going without water and electricity.
Some of the furniture is valuable – her father told her that. ‘There are antiques that someone will pay a pretty penny for,’ he said.
They still used pennies then. Now there are cents. The antiques should still bring in lots of those. Perhaps Lavinia will help her work out which are the most valuable items. Starting tomorrow. They’ll do it tomorrow.
For today, Margot wants to keep sitting here, listening to the sounds the moored boats make, watching people come and go from the wharf, thinking about the lives they lead and she never will, up here in her eyrie, waiting for life to pass her by.
THE
1920s LIME-GREEN FLAPPER DRESS
Oh, how the young woman loved this dress. It was one of four made by the same dressmaker – the latest additions to her wardrobe – and perhaps her favourite.
Her husband was fond of seeing her in new dresses so he sent her to a dressmaker in the city every so often, along with instructions that she should have whatever she wanted – up to a point, obviously, as the budget wasn’t limitless. The dressmaker made clothes for his mother so her expertise was beyond question. She had sewn the young woman’s wedding dress three years ago, in 1924, in a modest yet figure-hugging style that made the groom’s eyes light up.
Once the young woman asked her husband why he was so interested in her clothes and he said, ‘You are divine and I love to see divine creatures appropriately attired.’
She clung on to that as one year passed, then another, then another, without her becoming pregnant. They both wanted children desperately. Her husband was fifteen years older than her and blamed his age as the reason there were no babies yet – but she could never blame him.
The clothes were a distraction, of sorts. She spent a fair amount of time being fitted for them, going to the dressmaker for small adjustments while they were being finished – and both she and her husband loved beautiful things, so the clothes gave them a lift.
As time went on, the lifts were harder to come by, but they persisted.
‘There is no point being glum, my love,’ he told her. ‘This world has survived the Great War, we have our health and each other. Come what may, we shall make a wonderful life.’
Her new dresses came in various lovely hues: purple, caramel, soft pink – and this lime green, which caused her to gasp the first time she saw it.
Made of silk, the dress had a simple rounded neckline and fell straight to the hips, as was the style, while the skirt’s hemline sat below her knees at the front before graduating to a lower point at the back. But it was the beading that took her breath away: flowers climbing up the sides of the bodice, unobtrusive until one looked more closely, and meeting at the hips in a profusion of leaves and blooms before trailing down the skirt almost to the hem. The beads were grey and a subtle white that filled in the flowers.
The young woman could have spent hours looking at this dress, but instead she wore it the day it arrived, to a dinner in the city not far from the dressmaker’s studio.