For a moment she felt a flicker of hope that something might transpire from this, but then dismissed it as a long shot. The address was incomplete, twenty-two years had passed since her mother disappeared—and the image of that pistol weighed heavy on her mind.

Chapter 11

Sydney, December 1973

THE WEEKS AFTER HER FATHER’S DEATH WERE HARD for Val, as she grieved without being sure who or what she was grieving for. She felt stranded and rootless, uncertain who she was and what kind of genetic legacy she had passed to her daughter.

She knew the bare facts of her parents’ backgrounds: her father had fled the civil war in Russia around 1920 or 1921 and had arrived in Harbin, just across the border, where he met her mother some years later. She knew they had emigrated to Australia in 1930 and that she had been born in 1938, but everything else was a blank. What kind of families had they come from? Were there any other living relatives, no matter how distant the connection? Why had the mother she remembered as both warm and beautiful married such a cantankerous, unprepossessing man? Now that there was no one left to provide answers, it made Val question her own identity: who was she apart from Tony’s wife and Nicole’s mother?

She enjoyed being a mom and thought she did a reasonable job, simply by following her instincts. She remembered the games her own mother used to play with her, the fun they had, and tried to emulate them, while rejecting the authoritarian parenting style of her father, who had tried to ban all joy from the household. There were never any jokes; she couldn’t remember the sound of her father laughing and suspected she had never heard it. After her mother disappeared, he bought the teenage Val strictly utilitarian clothes, designed to “last a good few years.” It was astonishing she had managed to get a boyfriend wearing those long, shapeless skirts and baggy blouses that earned her the nickname “Hillbilly” at secondary school. She’d been pathetically grateful when Tony asked her to be his girl, and there had been no hesitation when he proposed while she was just seventeen.

Now her daughter supplied the only joy in her life, but she faced the prospect that Nicole would leave home one day and have a family of her own. Then Val would be relegated once more to joyless domestic servitude with Tony as her lord and master. Was that what life was about? Did other people settle for that?