Elianne by Judy Nunn Page B

house was finally deserted and plans were set in motion for its demolition.
    ‘How fortunate you are not to be here for that saddest of days,’ Hilda said as Kate pulled the Holden up in the driveway of old Elianne House. Kate was leaving for Sydney in two days. She’d decided to go back several weeks early in order to find a place of her own. She’d given ample notice before the holidays that she would not be returning to the flat she’d shared with three fellow students, although she’d not told them why. She’d had her reasons at the time and she still did. Now more than ever Jeremy was beckoning.
    ‘You won’t have to stand by and watch it you know,’ Kate said as the two of them climbed out of the car. ‘You could plan a trip into Bundy on that saddest of days.’
    ‘It would not ease the pain, Kate,’ Hilda said a little tartly; sometimes her daughter’s practicality was annoying. ‘I would know it was happening.’
    They walked up the front steps together. The old home, so similar in design to The Big House, was a Queenslander built on stilts and surrounded by wide verandahs, but the living area was restricted to one floor only with storage space beneath. Indeed, Stanley Durham in having The Big House designed along the lines of the original had been true to his promise: ‘the same only bigger’.
    ‘To think she brought up three children here,’ Hilda said, running her fingers reverently over panelled surfaces and carved wooden fixtures. ‘Married so young, half-French as she was and new to the country, how foreign it must all have seemed . . .’
    Kate had prepared herself for a running diatribe about Grandmother Ellie and the past.
    ‘And oh, the tragedies she suffered,’ Hilda continued. ‘Well, they both did of course: they shared the heartache. Losing two sons in the Great War, just imagine the pain.’ She floated through to the next room like a wraith, her hand trailing over surfaces as if making contact with another life.
    Kate couldn’t romanticise the house herself. Pretty as the detail and the fixtures were, the house now empty and unlived-in was just a house. How interesting, she thought as she followed her mother, that the rooms are so much smaller than I remember from my childhood visits.
    ‘It was their great love that gave them the strength to carry on.’ Hilda suddenly stopped floating and they came to a halt in the main drawing room. ‘Throughout all of their trials, Big Jim and Ellie always had each other.’
    Kate couldn’t help but register the note of regret in her mother’s voice. Why? she wondered. What did her mother regret?
    ‘Ellie lived the whole of her married life in this house,’ Hilda said. ‘The early days in particular must have been so very happy.’ She remembered how happy she’d been in the early days of her own marriage. But things had changed when they’d moved into The Big House. That was when the babies had arrived and Stan had become unfaithful. Nothing serious, just dalliances, only two, and neither had lasted long. She’d supposed that many men with children needed dalliances in order to keep them distracted from the mundane aspects of parenthood. But she’d been so shockingly disillusioned. How she’d longed for a great love like Ellie’s and Big Jim’s, a love without dalliances, a love where fidelity was sacred.
    ‘Are you all right, Marmee?’ Kate asked, concerned. Her mother’s silence was puzzling, and she looked worryingly sad.
    ‘Of course I’m all right, my darling.’ Hilda painted on a bright smile, ‘just saying goodbye to the past.’ My own or Ellie’s? she wondered momentarily. ‘That’s always a little affecting.’ She looked about the drawing room. ‘Despite her share of tragedy, Grandmother Ellie was very happy here. She told me so. I remember the occasion well. She was sitting over there, on the little pink sofa that used to live by the window,’ Hilda’s voice took on a distant quality, ‘and she told me