Finn shook her hand but failed to meet her eye. ‘Yes, you too. We’ll be in Melbourne for a couple of days. I’ll ring before we leave.’ He put an unpractised arm around Moss’s shoulder and pecked her cheek. ‘You take care, now,’ he said.
Moss sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee and, surprising herself, eating one of Mrs Pargetter’s muffins. She scrabbled in her bag and drew out a woollen object.
‘Mrs Pargetter sent this for you, Mum. It’s a tea cosy.’ She smiled faintly. ‘One less for the United Nations.’
‘That’s kind of her,’ Amy said, alternately squeezing and smoothing it with nervous hands. She had a difficult message to deliver. ‘Moss, Felicity and Robert will be back tomorrow week. They’re planning a memorial service for Linsey. They believe that she wanted you to sing.’ She peered into her daughter’s suddenly impassive face. ‘You will sing, won’t you?’
Moss’s eyes betrayed her. ‘I can’t. I don’t feel I can, after…’
Amy was uncharacteristically firm. ‘I know that, but this is not about your feelings, Miranda.’
When they met the following week to plan the service, Felicity was even more blunt than usual. She loved her sister dearly and knew how much she longed for reconciliation with Moss. Now there was no hope. Linsey had died carrying the burden of that rejection. ‘You hurt my sister more than you can know,’ she told a weeping Moss. ‘I can’t say that I want you to come, either, but that’s hardly the point. Linsey’s last request was that you sing at her funeral. If you can’t find it in your heart to do this one thing for her, then you’re even more callous than I thought.’
So Moss sang. She chose ‘Pie Jesu’, not for religious consolation but because agnostic Linsey loved the music. She sang her grief and sent it soaring with the white balloons released by the other mourners. Finn stood among them and thought of the strange circumstances that connected him to the dead woman. He even smiled when he remembered her holding out the ‘receptacle’, as she called it, and her disapproving sniff as she handed him the magazines. He looked across the garden at his daughter and allowed himself to drown in her voice. She was so small and vulnerable. And brave. Yesterday she had been distraught, calling him in the middle of the night.
‘Felicity and Amy are right, Finn. I’m so selfish. But how can I sing for Linsey now? I had every opportunity to let her back into my life and I blew it.’ Her voice rose in pitch. ‘She died thinking I hated her. Hated her! What sort of person does that make me?’
Finn felt a surge of panic. Here was the first test of his competence as a parent and he couldn’t think of one reassuring thing to say. ‘Moss, listen: you must sing…’
‘I can’t! My throat is so tight I can’t sing a note. I can’t do it!’
‘You can,’ said Finn helplessly. ‘Moss, you can.’
Listening as the last notes of ‘Pie Jesu’ died away, Finn truly hoped that Linsey would rest in peace. She had been the driving force that produced this child whom, he now realised, he had come to care for very much indeed.
Linsey left a substantial estate. Felicity’s children, Toby and Pippa, and Robert’s son, Cal, all received generous bequests. She left smaller sums to the Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières, but the bulk of her estate, including the house, was left to my goddaughter, Miranda Ophelia Sinclair.
Felicity was outraged. ‘That house belonged to our family,’ she fumed to Robert. ‘And she left it to that girl who’s not even related.’
‘Well, that’s a moot point,’ Robert replied. ‘She always saw Miranda as her daughter, even after she and Amy split up.’
‘And what thanks did she get? That girl broke her heart. There’s nothing we can do about the will, but we’re Linsey’s next of kin, and I intend to make it clear where we stand on this.’
When his sister had one of her ‘notions’, Robert always found it easier to acquiesce.
And so it was that the brass plaque mounted over Linsey’s ashes denied the motherhood that had been her greatest source of joy and pain: Linsey Anne Brookes, died 2 August 2006. Loved and loving daughter of Meredith and John Brookes, loved and loving sister of Felicity and Robert. Returned to the universe.
Moss had read the will in disbelief. The money, the shares, even the house were insignificant beside one stark fact: Linsey had referred to Moss as her ‘goddaughter’.
‘It’s probably just a legal thing,’ Amy said. ‘She always thought of you as her daughter.’
But Moss wasn’t interested in legalities. In her last will and testament her mother Linsey had repudiated their relationship. It was Moss’s fault and now it was too late to make amends.
She felt the title goddaughter scorch her like a brand. Why hadn’t Linsey adopted her? This question became a constant in her effort to deal with her bereavement. ‘Isn’t the fact that she left you the house enough?’ Felicity retorted when asked.
Amy in turn was evasive. ‘I don’t know. We never really discussed it.’ What remained unsaid was their knowledge that Moss had been the one who had wanted to hide the relationship. Averting their eyes, they both remembered the elaborate story Moss had concocted. How Amy and Linsey were sisters-in-law whose husbands had died in a fishing-boat accident. How they decided to live together for company and economy. They both remembered the first parents’ night at Moss’s new school.
‘This is my mother,’ Moss had said, indicating Amy. ‘And this is my… aunt. Aunt Linsey.’ And Linsey had smiled and shaken hands and made polite conversation, never once betraying her pain. Now Moss felt that this was the punishment she was due.
But, perversely, she was still hurt. She wanted answers, and decided to visit Robert. He’d been kind to her at the service, attempting to shield her from the worst of Felicity’s venom and thanking her for the music. He had lived alone since his divorce. While he sounded surprised when Moss rang, he readily agreed to the meeting.
‘Come about one,’ he said. ‘We’ll have a bit of lunch.’
Moss arrived punctually and was greeted with a kiss on the cheek-a real one, where lips actually touch the face. Robert was the oldest of the three siblings; Moss estimated that he must be nearing sixty. His face had deep grooves from nose to chin, and his hair, thinning on top, left him with a greying tonsure. He was small like Linsey, and had the same large grey eyes, which looked mildly at Moss over his reading glasses.
‘So, how are you, Miranda?’
‘Moss, please, Uncle Rob.’
‘Yes. Sorry, Moss. Come in here while I make us a sandwich.’
The kitchen/living room was neat and bare. There were no pictures on the walls or cushions on the sofa. A newspaper lay open on the table. Robert must have been reading when she arrived. It looks temporary, Moss thought. Like a motel room. Her uncle made sandwiches and tea with a minimum of fuss, the conversation easy and impersonal.
‘Now,’ he said, as they sat down. ‘What can I do for you, love?’
Moss nibbled at her sandwich. ‘I suppose you know that I had this silly fight with Linsey, and we weren’t speaking when she died.’ She corrected herself. ‘No, that’s not fair. I wasn’t speaking to her. For all I know, she might have been waiting for me to come to my senses.’
Robert looked at Moss, whose eyes were lowered. Poor little bugger. ‘As far as I understand,’ he said, choosing his words carefully, ‘you were upset about the, ah… conditions that brought about your birth. Would that be fair to say?’
Moss nodded without looking up.
‘Well,’ Robert continued, ‘Linsey confided in me a bit. Probably more in Flissy, her being a woman and all, but I do know she wanted a child badly enough to go to all sorts of trouble to have one. I also know that she loved you from the moment you were born to the day she died.’ He sipped his coffee. ‘She was never an easy woman to get on with. I’m her brother and I know, believe me. She was a fierce little thing when we were kids. Used to insist that Mum cut her sandwiches a certain way-triangles, no crusts. Her schoolbag had to be packed in a certain order… That sort of thing. Even though I was a few years older, I was always a bit scared of her. But I’ll tell you this, Mir-Moss. When she loved someone, it was the real deal. Nothing you could have done would have changed the fact that she loved you.’