Desmond laughs. ‘Nor can I.’
That laugh causes something in her to uncoil, as though she was the most tightly wound of springs wanting to launch itself.
‘Thank you for taking it well,’ she says.
‘That’s okay. You seem like an all-right sort of person.’ Then he reaches over and pats her hand. As if he is the parent and she is the abandoned child.
It makes her want to weep, but she can’t. That would be an imposition – so much emotion from a woman who is still a stranger to him. So she sniffs back her tears and smiles her broadest smile for him.
‘Would you like something to drink?’ she offers.
He laughs again. ‘Maybe a Scotch? I’ve been nervous as hell.’
At this revelation she sighs, feeling her shoulders relax. ‘Me too.’
They sit staring at each other for a few seconds.
‘It’s an odd situation,’ he says at last.
‘Yes. And I do have Scotch.’
‘Great.’ He stands. ‘How about I help you with it?’
They move around the kitchen as if they know each other, yet they don’t have the familiar rhythms of family. Adelaide feels jarred again and leans against a counter for support. But then he smiles at her once more and she believes everything will be all right.
And then one Scotch turns into two and she finds out about his childhood – yes, on the land – and his three siblings – one adopted, two not – and his strict mother and relaxed father; and he marvels at her career and says he thinks his parents saw her perform once, and how about that?
Their lives have been so different. He is a stranger in all respects except this one: he is her child.
Hours pass as they converse, and when he finally leaves he promises to keep in touch. She doesn’t believe him this time. She thinks he may have found out all he wants to know. If she never hears from him again, she would never blame him.
It’s just that she loves him. Has never stopped – except for decades that love has existed in the vacuum of not knowing what sort of person he turned out to be.
Now she knows, and she’s proud of him, and proud of the parents who raised him. She’s not proud of herself, but she hates herself a little less than she did, because he is a good man, she feels it, and she doesn’t believe it’s all because of his environment. She must have had something to do with it.
That night she replays their meeting. Goes over his face in her mind. Thinks about those bright blue eyes, and his smile.
Her boy. Not her boy.
With her eyes open, she lets herself cry, and keep crying, and eventually she falls asleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Standing by the counter at the frock shop, Christina blows air up to her new fringe and tugs her T-shirt away from her sides. The start of summer probably wasn’t the best time to have a fringe cut, but it seemed to go along with changing her hair colour from its usual blonde to a softer light brown. Why have one change when you can have two?
She had gone to the hairdresser at Cremorne Plaza whom her mother had been visiting for years.
‘Tell Julie you want a change and ask her what she thinks you should do,’ Joni had said.
As Christina is used to other people making decisions about her hair – directors, producers, hair and make-up people on set – she’d thought she might want to take charge this time, but as soon as Julie started running her fingers through her hair, she remembered that it can be a relief to have someone else take charge.
It was Julie who suggested the fringe, and the look she gave Christina suggested she thought Christina might want to hide for a while.
‘Do you need to keep things the way they are for work?’ was the only thing she said that even hinted at Christina’s former life.
‘What work?’ Christina said, smiling ruefully.
Julie patted her shoulders. ‘It’ll come good,’ she said, before setting about making changes that Christina had never envisaged and now enjoyed.