Ripples on a Pond Read Free

brother,’ he said.
    He’d met his niece three or four times. She’d fitted the criteria. They sat Bernard down, mentioned Lorna’s prospects, didn’t remind him of her height; mentioned a sea voyage, first class. And thus little Bernard Grenville, artist, newly tagged Grenville-Langdon, had sailed away to meet his intended.
    Lorna was not at all pleased with her mail-order acquisition. However, if she must prostitute herself to that pint-sized pom in order to gain control of her nephew and her father’s estate, she’d do it – or agree to do it.
    Poor little Bernard was not so sure. He took one look at his intended’s size eleven lace-up shoes, her sparrow ankles encased in wrinkled lisle stockings, and had no desire to look higher. Higher was a chin you could hang a coat on, a nose fit only for trumpeting snorts of disdain, ears like a London cab’s open doors, black beetle eyes, a tongue that dripped acid.
    There was also a sister, Margaret, a plump and chatty little dormouse of a woman with a head of platinum-blonde curls. Margaret stole Lorna’s intended. Margaret and Bernard married, and before Vern Hooper died, they became the legal parents of Vern’s beloved grandson.
    They also gained control of the Hooper estate, until little Jimmy Morrison Hooper Grenville-Langdon reached his thirtieth year, or wed.

H EARTBREAK
    A t midnight on the twenty-eighth of June, 1969, Margaret Hooper Grenville-Langdon, dying by the inch for months, smiled. She’d seen her handsome son married to his boyhood sweetheart. Morrie’s inheritance now safe from Lorna, Margaret was at peace for the first time in months.
    Across the city of Melbourne on that bitter winter night, taxis prowled, looking for late fares. In dark lanes, babies were conceived in the back seats of cars, while others were born beneath the bright lights of labour wards. The homeless sought sheltered corners, and sorely injured animals dragged themselves home to die.
    Sometime after midnight, Cara took a taxi home to her tiny dogbox of a flat. She didn’t wait for her change, walked down the drive, cold, shuddering cold, on legs unwilling to obey her mind’s commands while an icy wind funnelling between the buildings attempted to blow her back to the street, back to the hotel, to the bed, to before Morrie had left the bed, to before she’d mentioned Jenny. Wind not strong enough for that.
    The concrete staircase leading up to her first-floor flat was too steep tonight. She rested twice, thrice, before reaching her door, where she drew on reserves already depleted to find her key, then find the keyhole with a shaking hand.
    â€˜Do you know your birth mother’s name?’
    â€˜Jenny. Jennifer Morrison, now Hooper. She married her soldier.’
    She got it inside, closed the door behind her, fixed the safety chain into its slot, and, in the dark, felt her way to her bed, wanting no light tonight. Couldn’t stand to see herself. Didn’t undress. Kicked off her shoes and slid in beneath the quilt.
    Bed too cold, too empty, without him. Beyond crying now, beyond cold, she shuddered with the shame of what she’d done. And the longer she lay in that bed, the clearer the memory became of what she’d done. Morrie was Jimmy, her brother, Georgie’s brother. He was her brother and she’d made love with him!
    â€˜I used to dream about them, the lost boy dreams, I called them. Little Jimmy always trying to find his way home. Back when they started, I knew he was me. They’ve never stopped, but home changed too often for my dreams to keep up, and after a while he wasn’t me, but Peter Pan. He could run like the wind, ride his bike at a hundred miles an hour. He could fly. I loved my lost boy dreams.’
    There was a scream inside her that wanted out, a howl of the damned. If she let it out, it would never end. Had to hold it in. Had to get through this night to daylight.
    Green