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  PENGUIN BOOKS

  The Olive Sisters

  Amanda Hampson grew up in New Zealand and moved to London in 1976. She spent her early twenties travelling, finally settling in Australia in 1979 where she has been writing professionally for more than a decade. Amanda’s non-fiction titles include Battles with the Baby Gods: Stories of Hope and Take Me Home: Families Living with Alzheimer’s. Amanda lives with her partner on Sydney’s northern beaches and has three children and two grandchildren. The Olive Sisters is her first novel.

  For more information please visit

  www.amandahampson.com

  The Olive Sisters

  AMANDA HAMPSON

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2005

  Copyright © Amanda Hampson 2005

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  ISBN: 978-1-74-228149-0

  penguin.com.au

  For Claudia and Oliver,

  my wild olives

  One

  I STAND ON the threshold of the house. My father’s boots sit beside the door, the shape of his foot preserved in leather. I have only come because he’s gone and I’m only here because I’m desperate. A desperado, you might say.

  It’s thirty years since I saw my father and now, as I stand looking into the darkness of the house, I realise this is the day I have dreaded. Indifferent to the significance of the moment, my daughter Lauren sits in the car parked in the driveway. I can hear her twittering into her mobile. Mercifully, her voice drifts away with the shrilling cicadas as I step into the cool silence of the house.

  The old farmhouse is divided by a wide hallway that connects the front and back doors. On the walls of the hallway are photographs of my father, Jack, wearing a series of hard-hat and dirty-overall ensembles with enormous earthmoving machines in the background. Some photos have a date and location scrawled on them: Broken Hill 1955; Tennant Creek 1962; a bunch of blokes outside a pub, arms flung casually over a mate’s shoulder, daft grins for the camera – Mt Isa 1967. I had similar photos of him in my schoolgirl album. My father was my hero back then. Always absent, always somewhere more interesting.

  To the right of the hall are two bedrooms; both open onto a wide verandah that wraps around the house. To my left is a living room with a kitchen at the back. Every surface is cluttered with books, lumps of rock and chipped mugs sprouting mouldy growths. Spiders have spun delicate palaces of lace in every corner. It smells sad and abandoned. Signs of a solitary life.

  ‘Oh my God, what a dump!’ Lauren calls as she sprints on a tour of the house. ‘It’s so dark and musty – why are all the curtains closed?’ She joins me in the living room, pulls back the curtains and wrestles with the French doors until they burst open. A shaft of sunlight penetrates the room, illuminating a star field of floating dust.

  This house once belonged to my grandparents. Jack moved here sometime after my mother, Isabelle, died. She always knew he would come here; she thought it strange that he had such affection for the house when she, who grew up in it, had none at all. But I can imagine Jack liking this house; it’s simple and solid. It lacks pretensions of any sort.

  ‘I’m tired,’ I say, sitting down on an old brown sofa that appears equally exhausted. It looks as though much of the furniture belonged to my grandparents. Jack’s idea of furniture was more along the lines of a couple of crates with a plank across the top. He was suspicious of style. The two old sofas would be his; the twenty-year-old television definitely. But the polished wooden table in the kitchen with its plump curvaceous legs and the dark dresser carved with flowers and leaves – definitely not. It’s as though there are layers of lives, imposed on top of one another. It’s too depressing for words. I can’t possibly live here. I just can’t.

  ‘You can’t be serious about living here.’ Lauren flops down on the sofa beside me. ‘Things can’t be that bad – this is grotesque.’ She savours the word.

  ‘They want my car next week.’

  ‘Your beautiful car,’ she sighs.

  ‘I don’t care any more. I’ll just buy a cheap get-about.’

  ‘Living in a dump, driving a wreck. It’s so not you, Adrienne.’

  ‘I have everything I need,’ I lie. It’s my new mantra.

  ‘Really?’ Her eyebrows collide with her dark fringe. ‘Where’s the bathroom?’

  She’s right. I didn’t see a bathroom either. We tentatively get up off the sofa and head for the back door. On the verandah there is a sort of lean-to with a striped plastic curtain for a door. Lauren glances at me to see how I’m taking it. She pulls the curtain aside.

  ‘Hmm, no spa I see,’ she says sweetly.

  I smile bravely.

  The garden and lawn are wildly overgrown, neglected as they have been for almost a year. The house is completely enclosed by trees and hedges gone berserk. Attached to the back verandah is an old pergola smothered in grapevine. We wander down the steps and stand knee-deep in grass. I’ve been bracing myself to tell Lauren something she won’t want to hear. Now seems as good a time as any.

  ‘The other thing I have to tell you, Lauren, is that you’re going to have to pay your own rent and uni fees next year,’ I say abruptly.

  ‘What?’ she screeches. ‘How am I going to do that? This is all your fault. You’ve wrecked everything. Why can’t you start another business or just get a job like everyone else?’

  The lawn is a soft green meadow. I have a sudden overwhelming desire to lie down on it but Lauren will tell everyone I’m going mad – and maybe I am.

  ‘Look, I’ve just done three hours of driving, Lu. I need to rest,’ I say firmly, trying to claw my way back into you-child-me-adult territory. ‘Why don’t you explore the farm – or something …’ I falter at her pinched face and narrowed eyes. She’s nineteen years old and I vacillate between treating her as an equal and, if that fails, a pre-schooler. No wonder she behaves like one sometimes.

  ‘You know I hate the country.’ She stalks back to the car, mute with fury.

  I sleep on the sofa for an hour, dreaming of my beautiful apartment; of my white bedroom, where every morning I would wake to see the edge of the world where sea meets s
ky. Gone … all gone. The sadness is a dead weight pressing on my chest. I’m too sad to cry. That apartment was my dream. My fortress. It took me twenty years to get there. I probably waited too long to sell it, convinced there was some other way out of the financial tangle I was in, convinced there would be a reprieve. I didn’t deserve this punishment. It wasn’t my fault. There came a terrible, terrible moment when I looked around and realised that my home was truly gone; that some other dreamer would soon inhabit its light-filled rooms.

  It hurt like a lover’s betrayal. I thought we were forever.

  It’s late afternoon when I wake with a sense of urgency. We need to make a space for ourselves, tidy up the kitchen and find some clean sheets for the beds so we can sleep tonight. Tomorrow the removal truck will arrive from Sydney with the few things I still own. I need to be ready.

  I stand at the front door. Lauren is in the car still, on the mobile. I’ll need to choose my moment carefully to tell her that her phone belongs to the company. I walk over and open the car boot, pull some of the bags out and carry them back to the verandah. ‘Come on, I need your help.’ She ignores me. ‘Lauren!’ Scowling, she slowly gets out of the car.

  ‘I’ll call you back,’ she mutters into the phone.

  ‘Look,’ I say with a big smile, pulling out two pairs of crisp white disposable overalls and pink rubber gloves. ‘Aren’t they just divine? We’ll look like the avenging angels of cleanliness. There they go – Saint Brillo and her sidekick Ajax, ascending to heaven in a white tornado.’

  ‘They’re grotesque, Adrienne; you’re not a saint and —’

  ‘I gather grotesque is the word of the week,’ I snap. ‘I’m bloody tired of it. Just last week you were going on about becoming more spiritual – grotesque doesn’t sound very bloody Zen to me.’

  ‘I will never tell you anything again!’ She snatches a pair of overalls from me and marches into the house. I don’t need to have the last word. Really I don’t.

  ‘Good!’ I shout after her.

  We do the basics in silence, the bathroom and the kitchen benches, and clear off some of the rubbish into bags. It’s years since I did my own cleaning. A stranger to domestics (apart from complaining endlessly about the cleaner), Lauren hasn’t got a clue. She flops the cloth around ineffectually with a sulky look on her face. But I’m actually surprised at how satisfying it is to do work that requires little thought but is so involving at the same time. I’ve had too much to think about these last few months.

  ‘Yoo-hoo! Hello. Oh, you look like those people who clean up after nuclear accidents.’ The solid shape of a woman is silhouetted in the doorway, the bright afternoon sun glowing at her back. She comes towards me with her hand outstretched. I just have time to slip off my rubber glove before she grasps my hand, shaking it vigorously for a woman easily in her seventies.

  ‘Mrs Oldfield – Joy. I’m just down the road. I heard you were coming up, thought I’d drop in to see if you needed a hand with anything.’ Despite the warm afternoon she is wearing a light raincoat, trackpants and jogging shoes.

  ‘Heard from who?’

  ‘Oh, you know, round and about. You must be Adrienne,’ she says, her curiosity a little too obvious.

  ‘I am, and this is my daughter, Lauren.’

  ‘I’ve brought you some tomatoes from my garden, and a lettuce. Jack’s lettuces will have all gone to the wallabies,’ she says, lifting a carrier bag out of her basket and handing it to me. She looks around the room. ‘Grief, you’ve got your work cut out here. I’ve got a couple of hours – let me give you a hand.’

  ‘That’s very generous, Mrs Oldfield, but I couldn’t expect —’

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ says Lauren, shooting me a warning look.

  ‘Perhaps we need a proper plan …’ I venture, slipping on my managing and directing mantle.

  Mrs Oldfield smiles. ‘We’ll be right, dear. We’ll muddle through.’ She fossicks around in her basket and pulls out a carefully ironed cotton floral wraparound. She’s come prepared. Removing her raincoat, she hangs it on the back of the door and slips into her wrap. She switches on the mutinous vacuum cleaner we have struggled to get working for the last half hour, gives it a swift kick and together they roar off down the hall.

  In one bedroom there’s a double bed and a pile of boxes, in the other are two single beds, some bags of old clothes and stacks of newspapers. We decide to tackle the smaller room with the single beds first. We strip the worn and yellowing sheets from the beds and discard them in the bin, carry the mattresses out into the sun and prop them up against two large fruit trees. Lauren’s expression throughout this operation is like that of someone who has found an entire dog turd stuck to the bottom of her shoe and is trying to clean it off with a wholly inadequate twig. It’s all a little too sordid for her, poor love.

  Next, we start to clear the boxes, mostly full of newspapers and old mining books. There is something so utilitarian about the way Jack lived here. No adornments, no comforts; just the dusty accumulation of life.

  ‘When I was a child everything my mother had was beautiful,’ I say wistfully.

  ‘Didn’t you say she made wedding dresses?’ Lauren asks.

  ‘She was just a dressmaker, I suppose, but she made christening gowns and wedding dresses – debutante gowns were the thing in those days. She embroidered and made lace. She used to make our sheets and pillowcases. My father was more of a pragmatist; I don’t think he ever really cared for that sort of thing. I see nothing of hers here. None of the lovely things we had. He probably sent the lot to St Vinnie’s, knowing him.’

  Lauren narrows her eyes, thinking. ‘Did you see that big chest in the hall with a cloth over it?’

  Moments later we stand in the hall, scanning the bits and pieces sitting on top of the chest. Without a word between us, I open the mouth of a garbage bag and Lauren sweeps the lot into it.

  ‘Extreme feng shui!’ she giggles. Things are looking up.

  The box is full of at least some of the things I have just described to Lauren. There are soft cotton sheets and damask bed covers, all folded carefully with withered sprigs of lavender tucked inside. There are many things I haven’t seen before – perhaps from my mother’s early life. Pillowcases embroidered with plump cherubs and enshrined with tiny knotted rosebuds. Double sheets adorned with hearts and flowers. Folded pieces of satin, silk and organza, neatly coiled lace and satin ribbon – my mother’s unfinished symphonies. When she died, Jack took everything from her flat, so he must have packed this chest. Perhaps even he couldn’t find it in himself to throw it all away. As I touch the richness of the fabric, I can almost hear my mother’s voice. A brittle fragment of grief from somewhere in my chest journeys through my body until even my fingers ache with it.

  Lauren shakes out a single cotton sheet with ‘Isabella’ embroidered across the top, elegant in pale pink. There’s another just like it, but the stitching – blue and rather wobbly – reads ‘Rosanna’

  ‘Who’s Rosanna?’ asks Lauren.

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Rosanna?’ repeats Mrs O, who has suddenly materialised, bent over and pulling dusters from her magic basket. She straightens up and looks at me. ‘You don’t know who Rosanna is?’

  A heartbeat. It is as though the three of us are suspended in the open space between question and answer, drifting like birds as we wait for a current to move us to the next moment.

  ‘Should I?’

  I see Mrs O watching me carefully. ‘Rosanna and Isabelle were sisters.’

  I’m stunned. ‘No. Can’t have been. My mother never, ever mentioned having a sister.’

  ‘That’s weird …’ says Lauren. ‘Is she in prison or an asylum or something? Locked in the attic, perhaps!’

  Mrs Oldfield raises an eyebrow and gives her a look I imagine she refined on her own children over the years. It proves to be effective with Lauren. ‘Rosanna hasn’t lived here for a long time. I didn’t keep in touch with her.’

  �
�Well, I … I have to say that I am shocked,’ I stammer, sitting down with a jolt.

  ‘It would take more than that to shock me,’ says Lauren, ever the opportunist. ‘I thought Jack, who was, after all, my grandfather, was dead – until I happened to see a letter saying he had actually died.’

  They both look at me oddly. The odd one out – that’s me. I’ve lived all my life as the only child of an only child, and the same fate has befallen Lauren. But now I find that’s not quite true. Suddenly I feel I’ve been short-changed. I have an aunty! Perhaps there are cousins as well. Aunt Rosanna. Aunty Rosa – sounds quite cosy.

  ‘Well – I’d better be on my way,’ Mrs Oldfield says, breaking my reverie. ‘Got my grandkids coming for dinner. Which reminds me, you’ll most likely get a visit from Darryl Leeton. He’s been wanting to get in touch with you. You’ll know the Leeton boys when you meet ’em – second-generation earthmovers – they all shout. Don’t ask him inside, whatever you do.’ She gives us a wink, slips her coat on and is out the door.

  I watch her drive away as I sit down on the front steps. Lauren comes and settles beside me, quiet for once. Both tired, we watch the evening descend, infusing the garden with shadows that fade from plum to grape. It’s a relief to be still, but I have a niggling discomfort at the Rosanna revelation. That crevice of distrust that opens when you realise you have been deliberately deceived … Why? What else don’t I know?

  We eventually rouse ourselves and move into the kitchen to find the food we brought from the city this morning. I open our bottle of wine and arrange the camembert, olives, tomatoes and baguette on a plate and take it outside to the pergola. There’s an old, quite ornate, metal table and four matching chairs decorated in a vine-leaf design and a rectangle of light from the kitchen falls conveniently on the table.

  The trees become stark silhouettes as the moon rises quickly behind them, glowing like an alien spacecraft. It rises so swiftly that the trees seem to tear its light to tatters, then suddenly it’s full and plump again, sitting smugly above the distant hills. Within minutes a distant dog howls a lonely song.