“Yes, Mum’s bond paper, the pale-blue paper in her writing desk.” She searched her dad’s face for any sign of resistance, but there was none.

Adelaide, November 12th, 1928

As I write all this down, I hesitate. To call Esme my mother feels like a betrayal of Mum, but to deny her that title? Still, I hesitate. All night I have been contemplating the meaning of words, most of which I’ve never used or even heard of. I’ve accepted their importance in the contexts in which they were uttered, and for the first time I’ve questioned the authority of the many volumes that fill one shelf of the bookcase opposite where I now sit.

Mother would be in there. Of course it would, though I have never had any cause to look it up. Until this moment, I would have thought that any English speaker, no matter their education, would know the meaning of that word, know how to use it. Know who to apply it to. But now, I hesitate. Meaning has become relative.

I want to get up and pull the volume from the shelf, but I’m worried that the definition I read will not apply to Mum. So I sit a little longer and my memories of Mum erase all concern. But now, I fear that mother will not apply to Esme.

Meg folded the page and added it to the trunk.

Later, Philip Brooks placed a breakfast tray on the small table beside his daughter. A pot of tea, two slices of lemon in a little dish, four slices of toast and a newly opened jar of orange-and-lime marmalade. There was enough for two.

“Join me, Dad,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Meg picked up her mum’s china cup from where she had left it the night before and held it out for him to fill. He poured her tea, then his. He added a slice of lemon to both cups.

“Does it change anything?” he asked.

“It changes everything,” Meg said.

He bent his head to sip his tea; his hands shook very slightly. When Meg looked at his face she saw that every muscle was working to hold back an emotion he wanted to spare her from.

“Almost everything,” she said.

He looked up.

“It doesn’t change what I feel for you, Dad. And it doesn’t change what I feel for Mum, or how I will remember her. I think perhaps I might even love her a little more. Right now, I miss her terribly.”

They sat in silence among Esme’s things, and from across the park the soothing repetition of bat on ball marked the passing of time.

Epilogue | Adelaide, 1989