Author: Liane Moriarty
Category: Suspense
Go to read content：https://readnovelfree.com/p/9612_12
Veronika is an intelligent girl but sometimes she says things that are so easy to refute that Grace has to wonder if she does it on purpose.
‘Yes, but we’re not Aunt Connie’s flesh and blood, are we?’
‘But we are! Well, perhaps not biologically, but spiritually and morally and perhaps legally! I mean, Aunt Connie and Aunt Rose brought Grandma Enigma up as their own baby! If they hadn’t found her that day, she would have died. A baby can’t survive long without care. Well, you know that better than anyone! A new mother!’
Grace thinks about Jake, asleep in his crib, blue-veined eyelids fluttering. How long would he survive if she followed her great-grandmother’s lead and vanished from his life? Baby Enigma had thrived. According to Aunt Connie and Aunt Rose, she’d been sleeping peacefully, and when they looked into her crib she had opened her eyes and given them the sweetest smile they had ever seen.
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Grace says to Veronika, ‘What does it matter? None of us want Aunt Connie’s house, do we? You always said you’d rather die than live on the island again. You said it makes you feel trapped. Actually, I think I recall you saying that to Aunt Connie, which might have been your downfall.’
‘This isn’t about me wanting the house. It’s the principle of the matter. Sophie broke Thomas’s heart!’
‘So? He seems to have recovered. Last time I saw him he was so disgustingly happy it put me in a bad mood.’
‘That’s not relevant!’
Grace begins to feel exhausted. Her mother doesn’t own a walkabout phone. The phone is kept on an antique table in the hallway, so you have to stand up with your shoulders back while you talk. No cosy, curled-up conversations in armchairs. She slides down to the floor with her back against the wall.
‘Look. If this is what Aunt Connie wanted…’
‘Sophie could only have met Aunt Connie twice at the most!’
‘Well, she obviously had an impact.’
‘Yes, what a conniving, manipulative witch!’
‘I thought she was your friend?’
Veronika ignores that. ‘This morning I heard an ad on the radio for solicitors who actually specialise in this sort of thing. I’m thinking that we all contest the will.’
Suddenly Grace is angry. ‘We haven’t even had Aunt Connie’s funeral yet! I don’t want anything to do with contesting the will. Aunt Connie was perfectly sane and had every right to leave her house to whoever she wanted.’
Veronika’s voice bubbles up and over, relishing the opportunity to argue. ‘You have no sense of family, Grace! No sense of history!’
‘I’m hanging up. The baby’s crying.’
‘I don’t believe you. I can’t hear the baby. You’ve always avoided confrontation!’
‘And you’ve always sought it. I’m hanging up.’
‘Don’t you dare hang up on me! Face this conflict!’
Grace hangs up. She lets her head drop forward onto her knees.
There is a sharp, cross cry from upstairs. Grace looks at her watch, terrified that another hour has vanished without her. What if the baby has been crying and crying without her hearing?
It’s fine. Only a few minutes have passed. The incident in the kitchen was an aberration.
She gets slowly to her feet like an arthritic old woman. With her hand on the banister for support she walks up the stairs, hoping with each step that this time she’ll feel it. But when she walks into the baby’s room and picks up her screaming son, she feels nothing except intense boredom. A drab, dreary sense of nothing much at all.
She changes his nappy and takes him into the bedroom and sits on the end of the bed, unbuttoning her shirt with one hand. The baby’s agitated mouth sucks at the air for her nipple. Finally she manages to get him to latch on and his eyes roll back in ecstasy while he sucks feverishly.
Grace’s aunt, Margie, had mentioned yesterday that she didn’t know about any ‘Mozart effect’ but she had certainly sung to Thomas and Veronika when she was feeding them as babies. ‘It did seem to keep them focused on the job!’
Dutifully, wearily, Grace begins to sing.
In the afternoon, Grace puts Jake in his state-of-the-art stroller. It’s one of those ones you can jog behind, but she can’t imagine having the energy or desire to ever go for a run again. She and Callum had practised running around the shop with it. They’d made other shoppers laugh and there’d been a chummy community feeling about it. That sort of thing was always happening with Callum.
Outside, it is cold and bright and still; the river is flat and hard.
Grace looks worriedly at the cooling marble cake in her mother’s cake tin, sitting on top of the stroller. She had to throw it together in a frantic rush and she’s not even sure it’s cooked all the way through. It’s just her luck that it’s a group of older women doing the tour rather than school kids.
Aunt Connie had told her about the group booking just a few days before she died.
‘Are you sure you can manage it?’ she’d asked. ‘I wouldn’t ask you, but Enigma, Rose and I are going to that recital at the opera house and Margie has her ridiculous Weight Watchers meeting. It’s like a new religion for her. She can’t miss one session.’
‘I’ll be fine!’ Grace had said. ‘At this age they’re still so portable! It’s not like he’s a toddler.’
She’d stolen that ‘portable’ line from a friend. She’d even stolen her happy, casual, motherly tone of voice. Grace doesn’t think babies are portable at all.
‘Well, if you’re sure,’ Connie had said doubtfully. ‘The booking is for the Shirley Club. A club for women called Shirley. Isn’t that the funniest thing you’ve ever heard? There are fifteen of them. Fifteen Shirleys. “You’re not serious,” I said. She said, “Oh, but we are!” I said, “Well, give me your credit card details, Shirley.”’
Grace wonders who will handle the bookings now that Connie has died. Perhaps Sophie will take that responsibility along with the house. That would infuriate Veronika.
The Shirleys are an excitable bunch of women in their fifties and sixties, all wearing similar brightly coloured, comfy parkas, long scarves, beanies, and sunglasses that are too large for their faces. They giggle and chat like girls on a school excursion. Perhaps being called Shirley guarantees you a cheerful personality.