‘That’s not Will,’ she said. ‘He’s more of a wander-in-and-say-g’day-in-the-kitchen person.’
Carol took a big breath in and let it out again. She squared her shoulders, lifted her apron over her neck, hung it on the hook on the back of the kitchen door, and said, ‘Don’t worry. I’m ready.’
‘I’m really proud of you, Carol, for doing this.’
Carol allowed herself a little unladylike snort. ‘I’m really proud of myself.’
Joan Sloane had not arrived at Christmas lunch empty-handed: prawns in a dish with ice (welcome); a bottle of red wine with a fancy label (delicious); and a reindeer-shaped dish filled with rumballs (problematic). Carol made a mental note to put her own rumballs back in the pantry before comparisons could be made.
Joan had barely made it through the door and into the narrow corridor before Will was jogging up the stairs and into the house.
‘I’m not late, am I?’ he said, slightly breathless. He smelled like almond croissants and Bangadoon creek water, Carol thought, as he hugged her and smacked a boisterous kiss onto her cheek. ‘Getting away from my niece took some ingenuity.’
‘I don’t know what you are wearing,’ she said.
His hair was wet and he was in board shorts that sported pictures of a surfing Santa and the most ridiculous T-shirt Carol could recall seeing. Huge lettering danced across the front in red:ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS TO BE THE FAVOURITE UNCLE.
‘You look perfect,’ said Jodie.
Carol watched her great niece fling her arms around Will. Jodie looked so terribly happy, and Will looked so terribly happy, she felt those tears again.
Damn it, three times in one day! Today was not a time for crying … even though she was the only one who knew the decision she’d made.
Also, it was ridiculous to cry now, in her eighty-fourth year, when she had finally been blessed with the Christmas gift that meant so much to her: her precious Wallace family historical artefacts would not, now, need to be put in a dusty box, to live on a dusty shelf, to be stored in a dusty museum where the average age of visitors was well over sixty.
Jodie had given her that gift by agreeing to make Clarence her home.
Carol looked at Joan and felt a surge of pity that was almost (but not quite) as big as her envy over Joan’s triumph in the Christmas cake war.
Joan had not had anyone to leave her family memories to.
‘I have something to say,’ Carol said, once the turkey had been decimated and the dusty red bottle breached and the rumballs consumed. She paused, and took a breath to make her big announce—
‘I make an excellent rumball?’ Joan said.
If Carol didn’t already have lungs full to bursting, she would have hauled in even more at this cheek. Said at her own table, no less.
Will gave a short laugh, which he quickly turned into a cough. Possibly Jodie had given him a little kick under the table, because he looked over at her with a half grin, half shrug.
Carol frowned at him. ‘I am attempting to be magnanimous, Will,’ she said, ‘which is not at all funny.’
‘Sorry, Carol.’
‘I took something,’ she said. ‘From the archives, back when I was filled with rage, thinking that you, Joan, had somehow stolen my family recipe. Will and Jodie already know this, because they were with me when I took it. I want to give it back to you today.’
She got up from her chair and moved to the sideboard. Earlier, she had placed the Willow tin from Joan’s museum donation and the scrapbook from her family collection in there. She brought them both out now and set them on the table in front of Joan.
‘You’ll see a post-it note,’ she said. ‘Look at that page.’
Joan opened the scrapbook as directed, and Carol was heartened to see the care with which Joan handled the pages. History mattered. She was glad Joan understood that.
Will and Jodie exchanged a glance.
‘The man in the photo—this one—’ Carol said, pointing but hovering just above the surface, ‘is the man whose wife enclosed her fruit cake recipe in a letter to him in New Guinea.’
‘To Bluey?’ Joan raised her eyebrows, fished up her glasses from the chain dangling around her neck and inspected the photo. ‘But the name. It says …Oh.’
‘Yes,’ said Carol. ‘Sergeant Bruce Wallace. Your father and my father were mates.’