from Gray. The only quality the two men had in common was a thriving ambition, but ambition is a light sleeper and it was clear the men were becoming restless.
Evelyn had raised the problems with her sister-in-law, but while Melanie was happy to elaborate on the value of conflict, happy, too, to advise on how to deal with Gray, she refused to hear any criticism that might reflect badly either on Selwyn or the Finemore name.
‘You don’t understand the Finemores,’ she had said in words that could have been borrowed from Gray. ‘We’re tough, but we’re private, and we don’t like to air our grievances in public.’
‘But I’m not asking for a public airing,’ Evelyn had replied. ‘I only want us to talk among ourselves, talk honestly, resolve the differences between the boys and bring Philippa back home.’
‘I know exactly what you want, but as I said before, we’re very private people, and we prefer not to say things that later we might regret. We go about our business and in time the problems will right themselves. The Finemores have always believed that the essence of good family relations is to forgive and forget.’
She also said she had the utmost confidence in her husband and had no intention of interfering in his business affairs. And with that, had risen from the table where they’d been eating lunch, paid the bill, shepherded Evelyn from the restaurant down the street and into Madelaine’s for Evelyn’s opinion on the dress she was having made for the Jamiesons’ masked ball.
With Selwyn busy, Gray frenzied and Melanie resolutely blinkered, it had been left to Evelyn to restore peace in the family, and the best way to do this, she had decided, was with a direct approach to Philippa. Philippa must return home, she must pull the boys into line, she must return the family to normal.
Evelyn made another left turn and found herself on Philippa’s block. She knew exactly the line to take: she would appeal to Philippa’s seniority, her life-long devotion to family, her skill in matters of relationships. At the same time, she would be sure to make Philippa feel needed.
She parked the car, noticed she was low on petrol – Philippa should foot the bill, after all, it was her fault that Evelyn had been wandering through these ridiculous streets for close on twenty minutes – checked her lipstick and hair in the rear vision mirror and got out. She had dressed carefully in beige skirt and rust-coloured jacket; stylish, she thought, in the Finemore way, and entirely suitable for her appointment with Brother Trevor later on – not that he was concerned about such paltry matters, but years of private sessions with him had taught her to be prepared. The middling brown hair was longer than usual and Evelyn had caught up the sides with hand-painted combs. The beautician’s new course of skin care seemed to be working; her freckles were well-camouflaged and the blood vessels across her cheeks were not getting any worse. Of course the eyes were too small and the nostrils too flared and the lips too thin and the jaw receding, but she made the most of herself. And there was always her figure, perfect, irrespective of what she ate. ‘It’s in the genes,’ Melanie had said enviously, as she struggled to discard a few more pounds of George’s genetic legacy. And Evelyn was sure she was right; both of her utterly ordinary parents possessed lithe, athletic figures in which resided the only elegance in their utterly ordinary lives.
Philippa’s Victorian cottage was at the end of a row of six. Small, so small, and indistinguishable from the rest, Evelyn wondered how much she had paid for such idiocy. Not that she couldn’t afford it, but that wasn’t the point, being well off, as she and Gray tried to impress on the children, was no excuse for throwing money away. She opened the gate and walked the couple of metres to the front door. Even before she rang the bell she heard Peach bark, and a moment later Philippa was in the doorway, kissing Evelyn’s cheek and inviting her in.
Philippa looked better than she had for years. The olive skin, once so sallow, was infused with pink, the cropped hair curled prettily about her face, and the lines around the mouth and down the cheeks, so marked at the time of George’s death, had almost disappeared. Despite her Finemore training and the purpose of her visit, Evelyn couldn’t stop herself:
‘You’re looking extremely well, Philippa.’
‘Feeling well too.’ And led the way down the narrow hallway to the lounge. ‘Coffee? Wine? I’ve prepared a light lunch, cheese, salad, nothing substantial, but enough to keep us going for a while.’
Evelyn mentioned her three o’clock appointment, that she would need to leave by half past two.
Philippa nodded and held up a bottle of wine.
‘Not for me, coffee will be fine.’
While Philippa prepared lunch, Evelyn looked around. How Philippa could prefer this matchbox of a place to the grand old home was beyond her. Despite the renovations, the house was cramped and the front rooms dark, and the decor so – so meagre. Worst of all, the house was an irritating reminder of Evelyn’s own past: the same era, the same cell-like rooms, the same peppery smell.
Not that her childhood had been unhappy or her parents anything less than kind. Rather, that period of her life was over, finished, superceded. And while she maintained regular contact with her mother and father, their being on the south coast of New South Wales, still living in the same house where Evelyn had grown up, meant she saw little of them. Which was, as far as she was concerned, entirely satisfactory. Long before meeting Gray, Evelyn had planned her escape. As a girl, she had watched the businessmen, politicians and academics, who, with their families, moved between holiday homes at the coast and permanent homes in the city, and learned that no one who was born on the south coast and lived there permanently could ever be taken seriously.
Evelyn loved her parents but wanted more from life. Her father had been a science teacher; at the end of his career as at the beginning he worked in the classroom, never wanting promotion out of what he did so well. Evelyn’s mother had been happy as a teacher’s wife; her husband’s was a respectable job, and to be respectable was, in her opinion, the most important of qualities. They had raised three children; Evelyn’s brother, a doctor, now worked in central Australia, and her sister was a social worker in Sydney’s west. Evelyn, the youngest, was to have been a teacher, but against her parents’ advice, gave up her studies when she married Gray. Never had she regretted it. She loved Gray and the children, and she loved running the house; she worked energetically for the Blind Society and the Children’s Hospital, and she loved that too. She had everything she had ever dreamed of. More.
Now, as she walked through Philippa’s house, she was annoyed that a Finemore would actually choose to live this way, annoyed and, she realized, insulted; Philippa’s choices were an insult to her own. The passage from lower middle class, south coast respectability to Finemore family stability had not been easy, but always the goals had made the struggle worthwhile. Some lifestyles are clearly preferable to others, and only a fool would choose the servants’ quarters when the mansion was available.
Foolishness or perhaps deliberate provocation? For the first time it occurred to her that Philippa might be playing some sort of malicious game, although why she would do such a thing defied reason; the family had always been good to her, and she’d never wanted for anything. Of course, George had played around a bit, but he’d always put his family first, had always been the model of discretion. No, malice seemed as unlikely an explanation for Philippa’s behaviour as stupidity. Perhaps it was more simple, perhaps Melanie was right and Philippa was mentally unbalanced, for no one in their right mind would choose this pokey little place over the old Finemore home.
She peered into Philippa’s study. Almost identical to the bedroom Evelyn had shared with her sister, small, dark, never enough space for two growing girls. She opened one of the folders on the desk, leafed through sheets of poetry written in an even cursive script,
