‘You’re quite a good driver,’ said Bette, as the car scrolled along the flat surface of the straight black road towards town.

‘Thanks,’ I said, taking genuine pleasure in both the praise and the skill. Mum had actually been diligent in teaching me from the moment I got my learner plates last year. ‘Being able to drive is important,’ Mum had stressed. ‘A car is an independence machine.’ And I had proved a diligent and attentive student. Those situations were when Mum and I worked the best, when we were both engaged in the same practical task. When our minds were following along similar tracks communication was easy, like when we were moving furniture, or driving a car, or cleaning out the tiny garden shed. In those moments, Mum and I were everything mothers and daughters should be.

Suddenly Bette said, ‘It’s good you’re working in Bromley Cairn. You’ve been waiting a long time to see it. It’s been waiting a long time to see you.’

I nodded. ‘That’s a nice way to put it –’

‘Your great-great-great-great grandfather built it all by himself – with labour, of course. And he cleared the land all around it by hand. He was the very first one in the area to run sheep.’

‘Oh yes, that’s right. Mum said that your family were sheep farmers,’ I said.

‘Did she? What else did she say?’ Bette asked, turning quickly towards me. I couldn’t decide if the tone in her voice was eagerness or wariness.

‘Um, oh nothing else, just that.’

Bette looked at me a little sideways, and I decided that maybe this was a moment for absolute truth. ‘Actually, I’m really sorry, Grandma, but Mum has never actually said anything about you and Hessel and the three of you living here, about her growing up on the farm. I don’t know why. She’s just not really like that, I suppose. I hope that doesn’t upset you.’

Bette leaned back into her seat, put her head against the headrest and closed her eyes. She didn’t stir for a very long time, and when I said again, ‘I’m sorry, Grandma,’ and she still didn’t respond, I assumed she had drifted off to sleep.

So I was surprised when Bette cleared her throat and opened her eyes and kept on with our conversation as if it had never been diverted.

‘My grandfather was the last Bromley to live at Bromley Cairn. And then they just left her there, leased the paddocks out around her and left the house standing where it was. We had a house and shopfront in the main street in town, property brokering, more lucrative than sheep, you see. So she was abandoned, the beautiful old lady, left to go to wrack and ruin.’

‘Oh that’s terrible, Grandma.’

‘Yes. I really wanted us to be able to bring her back to life – for us, you know, for the Bromleys. And once we were married, Hessel wanted to come back out here too, to the country estate. He had an idea about the manor lifestyle. He thought we could revive her.’