A Perfect Marriage Read online

  I run my fingers over the roses. Jeff’s birth date is almost two years earlier than Anthony’s. Strangely I have thought of Jeff as always young, as so much younger than Anthony. Poor Jeff, my pitiful weak husband. He missed out on so much. Saddest of all, he missed out on seeing his daughter grow up.

  So much has happened since Jeff died, and yet nothing has happened. The world spins on while places stay still in our minds. Still and fixed, while we are swirling around them, whirling through time, revolving through space.

  Below Jeff’s headstone is Charlie’s bunch of lilies arranged in a large jar of water. The lilies give out a strong scent of midsummer that seems incongruous in the wintry setting. Charlie herself is still nowhere to be seen.

  Perhaps she has gone into the church and I try to open its weathered oak door. It is firmly locked. Eventually I find her sitting on a bench in the older section of the graveyard. Dressed in black, she is almost invisible against the dark backdrop of a yew tree. Only her pale hair and paler face indicate her whereabouts.

  ‘Hiya, Mum,’ she says when she sees me. ‘Bit early, aren’t you?’

  I look at my watch. ‘Spot on time.’

  ‘Sit down for a minute,’ she says. ‘It’s nice here. Like, peaceful.’

  I sit down on the bench next to her. The wood feels damp. ‘Are you all right?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes. I’m glad we came. Did you see my flowers?’

  ‘Yes, they look lovely.’

  ‘Funny idea really. To stick flowers on a grave, as if the dead person could see them.’

  ‘Well it’s not for them. It’s for the living.’

  ‘I know.’ She smiles: I see the gleam of her teeth in the fading light. ‘They’re for me. And I feel better for it.’

  We sit in silence for a few more minutes. Then she says: ‘Are you OK, Mum?’

  This is the first time she’s ever asked me this. I feel touched to the centre of my being; I don’t trust myself to reply.

  ‘You’re crying, Mum. I’m so sorry. About everything.’ She reaches out to me; she puts her arm around my shoulders. ‘It’s OK, Mum,’ she says. ‘Everything’s going to be all right.’

  Maybe it is; there is no way of telling. But I sit here beside this young woman, my daughter, and feel a lightening of my burden. It is as if there is a new calmness radiating from Charlie, a calmness that imbues me almost with a sense of peace.

  ‘Time to go,’ I say at last. ‘Time to move on. We’ve got a long drive ahead of us.’

  We proceed in single file across the damp grass and past Jeff’s grave. Charlie waits for me outside the porch of the church. I take her arm, and we walk down the gravel path. The lopsided tombstones seem to leer at us from each side, as if they are adjuring us to get on with living while we can. Framed by dark yew trees, the sky to the west glows briefly golden before the feeble sun vanishes and the evening quickens.

  Charlie opens the lychgate and together we pass through. That hint of peace I began to feel earlier strengthens as, arm in arm, we stroll back to the car.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Ali Arnold for her wise advice, Maggie Hamand for her friendship and instinct for what works and what doesn’t, Kerrie Barnett for her many comments, Clare Christian, Heather Boisseau and Anna Burtt for getting this book into shape and out there. Mark Thompson for his advice on policing procedures, and Varuna the Writers’ House for the opportunity to write with no interruptions when this was most needed.

  Thanks also to my beloved family for listening to my obsessions – and my silences – while I wrote this book.

  About the Author

  © StudioVogue, Canberra, Australia

  Alison Booth was born in Melbourne, brought up in Sydney and worked for many years in the UK. Her first three novels, published by Penguin Random House have become known as The Jingera Trilogy. Her debut novel, Stillwater Creek, was Highly Commended in the 2011 ACT Book of the Year Award, and was also published in French (two editions) and in Reader’s Digest Select Editions in Asia and in Europe. Her subsequent novels were The Indigo Sky and A Distant Land. Her fiction website is at http://www.alisonbooth.net and her Facebook page is at https://www.facebook.com/AlisonBoothAuthor.