On the day June told us she was going to hospital to bring you home, I was in the workshop pressing blue lady orchids. I’ve always loved them best because their centres are my favourite colour: the colour of the gown I was once wrapped in. The colour a king’s wayward daughter favoured. A colour called Alice blue.
Sweet dreams, sweetpea. See you at breakfast.
Alice’s mind filled with images of newborn babies, wild women, and blue gowns that turned into flowers. Suddenly ravenous, she picked up the cupcake, peeled back the patty paper, and sank her teeth into the rich vanilla sweetness.
She fell asleep with crumbs on her face, clutching Candy’s letter to her heart.
Candy filled an old tomato can to water the herbs in the alcove behind the sink. The fragrance of fresh coriander and basil rose in the air. She set four mugs by the kettle for the morning. June’s soup bowl that she liked to call a coffee cup, the chipped enamel camping cup Twig insisted on drinking her tea from, and her own porcelain teacup and saucer, hand-painted in vanilla lilies for her by Robin. The fourth cup was small and plain. At the thought of the child’s grief-stricken face, Candy looked up at the ceiling, wondering if Alice had found her cupcake yet.
She was hanging up the tea towels when June came downstairs and into the kitchen. The pool of light falling from the range hood cast her face in deep shadows.
‘Thanks, Candy. For the cupcake. That’s the first time I’ve seen her smile.’ June rubbed her jawline roughly. ‘It’s uncanny,’ she said, her voice pinched by tears, ‘how she can look so much like both of them.’
Candy nodded. It was for that very reason she hadn’t been ready to meet Alice yet. ‘Tomorrow you can start over. That’s what you always tell us, right?’
‘Not so easy, is it?’ June muttered.
Candy gave June’s arm a squeeze on her way out of the kitchen. As she went into her bedroom, she heard the liquor cabinet squeak open. Candy had never known June to drink as heavily as she had been since the police came with the news about Clem and Agnes. People searched in all kinds of places for an escape; June found it at the bottom of a whisky bottle. Her own mother, Candy imagined, found it in a heath of wild vanilla lilies. Candy had learned the hard way that her escape was Thornfield’s kitchen.
She closed her bedroom door and switched on her bedside lamp, casting her room in diffuse light. Nearly everything she loved was here. The wide window seat with the big windows. Twig’s framed botanical sketches on the wall, all of the vanilla lily. Each one was dated, the first from the night she and June had carried Candy home from the heath. In the corner, her chair and desk, topped with her recipe books. Her single bed covered by the blanket of gum leaves that Ness, a past Flower, had hand-crocheted for Candy’s eighteenth birthday. A postcard had arrived a few years back, from a small banana plantation town up north where Ness said she’d bought a house. Some women, like Ness, came to Thornfield, took what time and strength they needed, and then left. Others, like Twig and Candy, knew they’d found a permanent home.
She sat and opened her bedside-table drawer, reaching inside for the necklace she always took off when she cooked. Slipped it over her head and held the pendant to the light. A fan of vanilla lily petals, preserved in resin, edged by sterling silver on a cob chain. June had made it for her sixteenth birthday, just before Candy had opened her bedroom window to a moonless sky and slipped out into the shadows, trying to outrun a loss that cut her to the core.
June had named her son after clematis, a bright and climbing star-shaped flower, and that’s exactly what Clem was to Candy growing up — a boy as beguiling as a star, a boy she was besotted with. She was always following him around, which he scowled about, but he still checked over his shoulder frequently to make sure she was there.
Candy went to her window and let her eyes rest upon the path at the bottom of the fields, which curled into the bush and led to the river. She was about Alice’s age the first time June allowed her to go to the river by herself. Candy thought she was alone running the winding path through the trees but, of course, she should have known better than to think Clem would let her have an adventure on her own. When she reached the river he swung from a rope tied to the river gum overhead and dropped screeching into the water, making her scream. After she’d recovered, Clem took Candy into the secret cubby house he’d built from branches, sticks and leaves in a clearing near the giant gum. Inside he had a sleeping bag, a lantern, his pocketknife, river stone collection and favourite book. They sat together, their knees touching while he read to her, tracing his finger around the illustration of Wendy sewing Peter Pan’s shadow back on for him.
We’re stitched together, like this, Candy, he said. And we’ll never grow up. He flicked open his pocketknife. Swear it.
She offered the tender centre of her palm to him. I swear, she said, gasping at the quick, piercing pain.
Blood promise, he crowed as he sank the knife tip into his own palm and pressed his hand to Candy’s, lacing his fingers between hers.
Candy rubbed the tiny, faint scar on her palm with her fingertip.
As she grew up, Clem was indeed the bright and ever-climbing star in Candy’s sky. But when she was fourteen years old, and Clem was sixteen, everything changed the day the Salvation Army brought Agnes Ivie to Thornfield. Clem turned pale, moody, and his eyes no longer fully focused on Candy; he was fixed upon Agnes. She was the same age as Candy, and an orphan too. Arrived with sprigs of wattle in her hair, a copy of Alice in Wonderland, and big, deep eyes that followed you wherever you went, like a painting. June set her straight to work and Agnes took to her tasks as if she had a fight to win. Out in the flower fields from dawn to dusk, she worked until her hands blistered, and then until they split and bled. She worked until her spindly arms gave out, carrying buckets of fresh cuts from the flower fields into the workshop. She studied the Thornfield Dictionary with a furrow in her brow. At night she sat in the bell room and sang what she had learned of the language of flowers to the moon. Candy started following Agnes around Thornfield, hovering in long shadows as she worked, studying the girl Clem loved more. She followed her to the river and hid in the bushes watching as Agnes took a pen and wrote stories on her skin, down each forearm, up each leg, before she undressed and swam in the green river water until she was washed clean. When a twig snapped nearby, Candy saw Clem hidden, watching Agnes in the river too, with a look upon his face as if he’d found a star fallen to earth. When Candy saw he’d carved his and Agnes’s names into the trunk of the giant gum, she knew she’d lost him. All she could do was watch on, helpless, as everyone at Thornfield fell under Agnes’s spell, most of all Clem. Agnes seemed to wake something inside him, something entitled, something cruel. He was never the same with Candy again.
When Clem and Agnes left Thornfield, the wake of his violent rage and the totality of his absence tore the belly out of Candy’s world. She had splinters for a month after she scratched Agnes’s name from the giant gum in a grief-stricken frenzy. Nothing eased the pain. Not even leaving Thornfield herself.
Her memories of the night she ran away were still visceraclass="underline" the burn in her legs as she ran in the moonlight through the bush to the road, lured by a lover’s promise to be there waiting for her. Candy had been sneaking into town to meet with him ever since the afternoon he’d pulled up in his car alongside her on her walk home from school. He gave her vodka and smokes. Told her stories about where he’d come from, a place like paradise on the coast. He was passing through town on his way back there. Did she want to go with him? He’d teach her how to ocean-swim, and get them a place with her own garden. The sense of freedom Candy had felt the night she met him on the highway was intoxicating. She got into his car, he put his foot down and they launched into the pale silver night, headed for a place where the haunting pain of Clem’s absence wouldn’t find her. But, only a few months later, Candy walked up Thornfield’s driveway with no more than the cotton dress she was wearing and the vanilla lily pendant hanging from her neck. June and Twig had been sitting on the front verandah. They took her in, set a third place at the table, and didn’t say a word. Her bedroom was exactly as she’d left it; she was crushed to find it unchanged. June and Twig knew Candy had acted a fool and would be back. They’d seen her mistake before she’d made it. Candy had thought she could escape grief.