Art Hour at the Duchess Hotel

by Sophie Green

Genres: Friendship; Small Town & Rural; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Sophie Green, Top Ten bestselling author of The Bellbird River Country Choir and Weekends with the Sunshine Gardening Society, returns with a warm-hearted new novel about friendships, fresh starts and finding yourself.

Mornington Peninsula, 1999. Wife and now grandmother Joan has checked into the grand old Duchess Hotel to find herself again after thirty-five years of being who her husband and family have wanted her to be. Peninsula local and soon-to-be octogenarian Frances is distracting herself from getting old, and avoiding her self-interested son by escaping to the warmth of the Duchess where the hotel staff treat her like the person she still is. Meanwhile Frances's daughter, Alison, is trying to manage significant disruptions at home while hoping to finally prove to her mother that she's just as worthy of love as her brother. New to the Duchess, hotel maid Kirrily is feeling the weight of a lifetime of responsibility, struggling to balance bills and work and family, and keeping thoughts of how there must be more to life at bay.

With its old-world glamour, sprawling seaside grounds and air of possibility, the Duchess Hotel might just be the place to help the women rediscover who they are and bring some spark back to their lives.

When Joan decides to pick up a brush and start painting for the first time in decades, she inspires Frances and Kirrily - and, eventually, Alison - to join her. Over canvas, conversation and creativity they will learn that you should always hold onto your dreams and that new friends can give you the courage to live life on your own terms.


Praise for WEEKENDS WITH THE SUNSHINE GARDENING SOCIETY

'Warm and uplifting' WOMAN'S DAY

'Delightful' BETTER HOMES AND GARDENS

'An enjoyable and heartwarming read' ABC GARDENING AUSTRALIA MAGAZINE

'A compassionately written story full of joy and hope' YOUR TIME MAGAZINE

'A ray of sunshine . . . and such a great armchair escape' THE VILLAGE OBSERVER


Praise for the novels of Sophie Green

'Atmospheric and incredibly descriptive, reading a Sophie Green book is the greatest escape' WHO MAGAZINE

'Heartwarming, fulfilling and Australian as a lamb roast and full-bodied shiraz' THE AUSTRALIAN WOMEN'S WEEKLY

'A warm treat of a novel, filled with great music and small-town charm' WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN

'Reading this book was like snuggling beneath a warm beach towel after a bracing dip in the ocean' JOANNA NELL

Release date: July 31, 2024

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 400

Sample

It’s so lovely, this house. Three storeys, newly renovated, off-white paint on the walls and the best furniture she could find. Clean lines, clean surfaces, stainless steel in the kitchen and expensive tiles in the bathrooms. The most expensive architect in Sydney, because that’s what her husband wanted for the house that he has worked so hard to afford and which he wants to show off to his friends and acquaintances and associates. Which makes it a showroom more than a house. And that makes her … his showroom model, perhaps.

Joan walks to the glass doors that open onto a wide balcony. The balcony furniture is also new. Isaac was so determined that everything would be new that she once asked him why he didn’t just pull the whole house down and start again.

‘Because it has history,’ he said. Which made her laugh, because if he liked the history so much he should have kept it the way it was: a little musty, a lot old-fashioned.

The history of this house is that Isaac coveted it for years. They once came to a party here when he was a junior partner at a large law firm and ever since then he’s wanted to own it. Owning it means something to him. Joan was happy to support him, of course, and she knows what he’s like when he covets something because he coveted her once too. And worked just as hard to get her.

So now she’s here in this house he bought for them both, a house they’ve barely lived in because the renovations took years and they rented somewhere while they were done, but which is now complete and resplendent and no doubt they’ll be the envy of everyone they know, and all she’s interested in is what’s outside.

Because as lovely as the house is, it has nothing on the view.

From this balcony, she looks over Sirius Cove and across to Curraghbeena Point between the cove and Mosman Bay. It’s a glorious day with a clear blue sky, the way Sydney can be in winter: the light softens and the air is crisp and everything looks sharper. The movement on the water below her tells her there’s a light breeze, and the few boats moored there bob a little.

To her left, there are the high walls of Taronga Zoo and if she moves her head, she is looking at the city. The Opera House, the Harbour Bridge, the office towers, the Botanic Gardens, Camp Cove, Campbells Cove, The Rocks. She can see it all.

Between the house and Sirius Cove there is a small strip of bushland; a stone staircase nearby leads down to a track that takes her through the bush and, in one direction, to Curlew Camp.

The camp was inhabited by Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts and other artists in the late nineteenth century. They strung up shelters next to the water and painted what they saw in this place that is now her home. Streeton depicted the water she is looking at now, trees, and rocks she can’t see from this spot. They lived rough and painted elegantly.

It’s a romantic story, even as it contains the elements of what art means to her: commitment, the sacrifice of earthy comforts, the pursuit of beauty and excellence and the feeling of something being just right, in you, in the world. It isn’t electric so much as magic, and there is no room for magic in a culture like Australia’s, hewn out of military history and colonial obedience and, in the name of both, conquering wilderness. Conquering wildness. And wildness is an essential component of magic.

Actually, that is what art used to mean to her. She hasn’t painted for a long time now. She used to be good at it, too. Sold works, won prizes, as modest as they were. Her talent was evident from primary school, or so her mother always said; Joan was only aware of it in high school, when she was lucky to have an encouraging art teacher, Miss Sharam, who taught her about acrylics and oils and watercolours, about Impressionism and Classicism and the Renaissance. Miss Sharam rhapsodised about Vincent van Gogh and Artemisia Gentileschi, thought Picasso entirely too brutal and Renoir overrated.

Joan chose oils as her main medium because Miss Sharam offered her space to leave her canvases to dry, in a part of her classroom behind a screen. It wasn’t long before Joan was arriving early to school and staying late. She wasn’t interested in chasing boys or being chased; she just wanted to paint. Miss Sharam encouraged her to enter competitions and, emboldened by successes in them, Joan kept painting.

Then Miss Sharam became Mrs French and stopped teaching. By then, however, Joan was in full flight, and she stayed that way for quite a while.

After she married Isaac, she thought she’d find magic in their marriage too, then in motherhood. Both of those roles, as it turned out, had more to do with militarism, colonialism and conquering wildness – so they felt familiar, but they weren’t what she wanted. She knows that now.

The phone rings, deep in the sitting room behind her, and she walks swiftly towards it before it rings out.

‘Hello?’

‘Darling.’ It’s what Isaac always calls her. Sometimes she thinks he’s forgotten her name, even as she feels mean thinking it. She knows women who wish their husbands would use such endearments.

‘Hi.’

‘Having a good day?’ He sounds distracted, as he always does when he’s at work. Secretaries coming and going, appointments to keep, briefs to study. The law. His great love, she joked once, but really it’s the lifestyle the law affords him that he loves.

‘Sure,’ she says, because he’s not interested. Her job is to make his home run smoothly and keep his social connections humming, keep up with their children – both grown, both in their own homes, and their daughter with her own baby – and inform him of their comings and goings. She is chatelaine and confidante and companion, and what she wants almost more than anything in the world is for someone to be that for her.

The thing she wants most in the world is to pick up a paintbrush again. But there’s no space for that in this life she’s allowed to be built around her.

That’s unfair: she has let it happen in that she hasn’t resisted it. She lives in a house with art on the walls and none of it’s hers. She has a life in which everyone tells her what they want and she makes it happen for them but she does not, ever, open her mouth and say what she wants. Because she’s not meant to want anything, is she, other than the happiness of her nearest and dearest.

Except she does. Oh, she wants things. She wants that hum in her veins that used to happen when a painting flowed out of her. She wants the stillness she would feel in the air around her when she was sitting in nature, looking at nature, trying to capture nature on a canvas in front of her. That feeling was like a drug, and she was gleefully hooked on it. It is almost impossible to understand now why she ever gave it up, no matter how much she rationalises it to herself and how she knows that it came only in the wake of the greatest shock of her life, when she was so shaken she didn’t trust herself to make anything other than tears. So many years ago now, too many to let it stop her from painting again.

And now she feels guilty that she has this glittering existence in this perfect house, and she doesn’t care for it. For any of it. Because it seems empty.

‘Listen, darling,’ Isaac says, and she snaps back to the present.

‘Mm?’ she says, watching as a car drives along the road on the opposite point.

‘Late notice, sorry, really, but I invited some people to dinner.’

That’s got her attention. ‘Tonight?’

‘Yes. Just eight of us. Nothing big.’

‘Eight invited or eight in total?’ The question sounds robotic because she has become an automaton where these requests are concerned, given how often Isaac makes them of her. She has long since given up asking him to give her fair warning of dinner parties and stopped being cross about them too. There’s just no point.

‘Eight total. Including you, of course. Although,’ he starts laughing, ‘there will be a lot of work talk so you may be bored.’

I’m sure I will be, she thinks. And she’s not sure he doesn’t count on it: that she’ll be so bored she takes herself off and they can all sit there and talk about work.

‘Right,’ she says. ‘What time?’

‘Seven.’

She looks at her watch. It’s almost midday. She does not have enough food in the house to feed eight people, which means she has to do a lot of work in a short space of time.

‘All right,’ she says. There’s no other acceptable response. She knows the drill: cook and serve and be the hostess he expects her to be. At least the house doesn’t need to be cleaned; Isaac is barely here enough to sully it and she cleans up after herself every day. They could afford help, of course, but part of her feels like she needs to take responsibility for their domestic life, that she’s not worth anything unless she is being useful. Or perhaps she just needs to feel useful and she’s telling herself that she’s really selfless instead.

‘You’re a treasure, darling. See you later.’

The call is over. He doesn’t tell her what time he’ll be home because she knows it will be just before whatever time dinner is. So she’s on her own preparing everything. Again.

There’s so much to do.

Standing by the open balcony doors, she feels the breeze. It’s cool but tolerable. She closes her eyes and listens to boats clinking, a dog barking, children calling out, a cockatoo squawking. When she opens her eyes she can’t see the sources of the noise but she knows they inform the scene she is looking at below. The beauty of nature and the traces of humanity that form a portrait she wishes she could paint.

That’s when she feels it for the first time in decades: the hum.

The hairs on her arms stand up and a shiver runs up her spine. She remembers this, not just in her brain but in her body. The feeling that she just has to do something, make something.

And what she absolutely does not want to make is dinner. Not again. Not ever.

She shuts the balcony doors forcefully and turns away from the view, her breath quickening.

This house is lovely, and it is a trap. Her husband is decent, but she suspects he does not care for her, not really. Her children – well, when she’s feeling less than generous she thinks they only care about the ways in which she can help them, even though she has been so keen to offer that help, over and over. So this is a trap she has probably laid for herself, even as she doesn’t want to take responsibility for it. She’s not sure she wants to take responsibility for anything ever again. Not for this house or her husband’s dinners or her friends’ disappointments. With one exception: she loves her granddaughter, Natalie, and would gladly take care of her forever. That angel face, that baby smell, the wispy hair on her head, the little scratches on her cheeks from her sharp baby fingernails. She loves it all; she wishes she could preserve it all.

Joan smiles as she thinks of her granddaughter’s dimples, but stops when she remembers her daughter, Corinne, presuming that she is always available to help. As if Joan has nothing else going on in her life. And that rankles because, well, it’s largely true. Joan let her interests – indeed, the passions of her younger self – slide out of her life once she married and had children. She can’t really blame her husband or her children, either, because with a bit of effort she could have kept them up. But it was just all too hard. Or it seemed that way at one time. One time that changed her forever.

There was another baby, twenty-five years ago, she couldn’t keep with her. That was the greatest shock of her life. Every day, she hopes she’ll get over it. That hope is sometimes, she thinks, the only proof that she’s still here when she can tend to feel like she exists in some kind of limbo.

Joan shivers and closes her eyes again, willing the hum to abate. When she was young and painting all the time she would let the hum take her over and lose track of time, and sometimes of place. It was a rapture, of sorts. She can’t allow a rapture to take place now. There is too much at stake. For one thing, there is the Joan she has become, the only Joan she knows now: wife, mother, good citizen.

That’s not the Joan she wants to be, though. She wants the other one back – the one who succumbed to the rapture. Who felt that hum in her veins and let it flow like the drug it was. Who had not known great loss and still believed in magic. That Joan does not know how to poach salmon for eight and make a pavlova and set the table just so and arrange flowers like a florist.

No, she’s not going to make dinner tonight.

Hurrying upstairs to her bedroom, she pulls out a decent-sized suitcase and chooses some clothes to go into it. Given almost everything in her wardrobe coordinates, this task is fairly simple.

She goes to the secret stash of money she keeps in her underwear drawer – the one she has ‘just in case’ because her father, who had felt the sting of the Great Depression and World Wars, told her to always have cash on hand in case something happened to the banks. She puts it all in her handbag and picks up the chequebook for the bank account she opened when her grandfather died and left her a tidy inheritance. As Isaac never asked if she had received anything in her grandfather’s will, she didn’t tell him, and now she’s glad of that.

Toiletries, a winter coat, a couple of pairs of shoes, the book she’s reading and her reading glasses go into the suitcase.

Joan hauls the case downstairs then picks up her keys. She pulls off the car key and leaves the house keys behind. They’re not needed any more.

Out to the driveway of that lovely home with its harbour views and guest bedrooms and swimming pool and a tennis court they never use. Her new-model Mercedes is in its usual spot. Suitcase in the back, handbag in the front.

Within seconds, she has reversed onto the street and soon she is driving towards the Harbour Bridge, heading south, for the Hume Highway, letting instinct guide her away from the dinners that will remain uncooked and the perfect house she won’t be able to appreciate and the phone calls that will be made from that house in search of her.

She drives past Goulburn and Yass and places she knew as a child when her parents would put her and her sisters in the back seat and take them away for school holidays. Into Victoria, which as an adult she hasn’t known well apart from the occasional trip to Melbourne and its boutiques.

Melbourne isn’t where she wants to go, though. Too much of a city, not enough of an escape.

The Mornington Peninsula is her destination. This part of Victoria has lived in her memories for decades, because it was where her parents would bring her and her sisters. They’d take two days to drive here, stopping in Gundagai on the way, and when they arrived at the Duchess Hotel they would all sigh with relief. It was their haven away from home.

So it is to the Duchess Hotel that Joan has escaped from her adult life. Because she has decided that the Joan who lived that life is not the Joan she wants to be for the rest of her years, and there is no better time to start than now, so she will let this road take her as far as it needs to so that she can start again.

This noise and bustle is the reason Frances likes to sit in the lobby of the Duchess Hotel. Not that she sits here for long. A few minutes. Long enough to appreciate, as she does every day, that there are so many different types of people in the world and a lot of them come and go from this hotel. At least, that’s her theory: that the Duchess Hotel is a microcosm of the world. It’s more of the world than she saw through most of her youth and now, at seventy-five, this place makes her feel more engaged in life than anything else.

Perched not far from the tip of the Mornington Peninsula, the Duchess is not a pub but a grand hotel of the old style, perched on a large amount of land not far from Sorrento Back Beach. With its views out to the Southern Ocean and winds sweeping up from Antarctica, it’s an impressive place. Built like a castle. She’s heard that the original owner – it was a private house – fancied himself a lord of the manor and a castle was, therefore, in order. She can’t imagine why anyone would want to live in a place this large. How lonely. Hotel accommodation is a better use for it; that way people can fill it with life.

‘Frances,’ says a tall man with thick, dark hair and a slight stoop, as he passes, giving her a nod. That’s William, the hotel’s manager. Polite fellow. Always greets her even though she is in no way a regular paying customer. She’s a denizen, yes, but not a guest. Not a resident. She is a local, however, and as the Duchess is only fifteen or so minutes’ walk from her home it’s a convenient place to visit when she feels like an outing. Plus the outing doubles as exercise, which makes her feel virtuous.

Frances sighs with contentment as she looks up to the very high ceiling of the lobby. It is decorated with a mural in a classical style, probably by someone who thought mimicking Michelangelo was a good idea, and it sort of was. Frances is more keen on Impressionists than Michelangelo. Her and everyone else, she guesses. There was some exhibition at the National Gallery in Canberra and half of Australia went. She didn’t. Too hard. Melbourne seems too far for her these days and it’s only a car ride away. Canberra is … an idea only. Maybe that means she is unadventurous. Oh well. In her youth, she would ride bareback through the High Country and help her father and her brothers put in fence posts and chase stray cattle and do all sorts of things. Plenty of adventure. She’s earnt a more sedate life.

Not that she’s having as quiet a time as she might. Frances is sure that when her mother was the same age she was enjoying cups of tea and crosswords and crocheting, and Frances was busy running her own family by then, as were her brothers. She might have caused her mother worry while she was still living at home, but once she was established in her own home she barely troubled her with more than a request for a recipe or a tip on removing a stain.

If only her own children could be the same.

Her son, Keith, was a talented boy and everything came easily to him at school, right up until his classmates decided to study in their final years and Keith – who had always topped the class by barely studying – found himself slipping down the rungs. It didn’t motivate him to work harder; instead, he sowed the seeds of later discontent, lamenting that it wasn’t fair that everyone was suddenly doing well. As if it was a mystery as to why it was happening.

Frances told him that it wasn’t enough to be talented and smart, that you had to apply yourself in order to make the most of that talent. Even as she said it she feared it was too late: his path was fixed and would only change if he truly decided to change it. Which he has not.

Still, he’s had opportunities. When Frances’s husband, Gerald, died he left his business and the family house to Keith, reckoning that Keith would take care of Frances. But Keith ran the pharmacy into the ground and sold the house to pay the debts. Now she’s in the cheapest house she could find with the money that was left, and while it’s not like she hasn’t lived on air before – her family were not rich – she has her pride and this has dented it. She drew the line at living in a flat – a woman who grew up in the High Country the way she did could not be confined to a box, which makes her wonder how she’ll like being dead and tossed into a coffin. So she has a house, and it’s small and needs repairs, but at least she’s not on the street.

She knows that people aren’t talking about her – because most are wrapped up in their own lives – but she feels embarrassed that her son has done this to her, and even more embarrassed that she can’t bring herself to cut off contact with him. Because he’s Albert’s.

In 1941, when she was nineteen, she became engaged to Albert, a young man from a neighbouring property. He was from a good family, and she had no plans to leave the High Country so it seemed like a sensible idea. Plus she loved him, such as love can be at that age. He was handsome and wild – compared with the other young men she knew – and they would ride together across the mountains. She’d never felt so free as when she was with him.

Then he was called up to fight in the Pacific and that was the last time she saw him. Two years later there was a letter saying he’d died; sometime after that she found out he was on the Burma Railway, and she never liked to think about what he had gone through. And she never forgot him, not even when she married the older, respectable Gerald, to whom she was introduced on a rare trip to Melbourne. He was a friend of her aunt’s, a man previously thought to be a confirmed bachelor who came alive in her presence and wasted no time proposing.

Gerald was also prepared to accept the son who had been born to Frances eight months after Albert left. It was a shock to find herself pregnant because she and Albert had only decided to be together in that way after he was called up. They didn’t know if they’d see each other again, and every encounter took on an urgency that they allowed to carry them away. She didn’t regret it, even once she found out how much the pregnancy would complicate her life. Keith was the only evidence she had that she was loved sincerely and truly by a good man. Perhaps that’s another reason why she can’t ever tell her son when he’s let her down.

Gerald had his roots and his pharmacy on the Mornington Peninsula so Frances left the High Country and her family. And the headstone they installed for Albert in the local cemetery. There was no body to bury; no one knew where he was. She thinks about Albert every day; she misses the land where she grew up. She especially misses her brother Cec, who was her strength throughout the turbulent years of pregnancy and early motherhood, and his wife, Margie, who was her confidante. But wives had to go with their husbands and that’s how Frances became embedded here on the lowlands.

Gerald died a decade ago, and Frances is getting towards the age he was when he died. She hates growing older. Her body doesn’t behave the way she wants it to. She has trouble climbing stairs, and she fears her sight is going.

The other thing that’s not behaving so well is her bank account, thanks to Keith’s fondness for ‘investments’ that never seem to work out and the money that she doesn’t have as a result of him not taking care of her the way Gerald wanted him to.

Thank goodness his sister doesn’t have the same fondness for failure. No, Alison’s problem is that she gets on Frances’s goat. Constantly ringing to check on her. Telling her she’s ‘just worried, Mum’ but not being specific about the worries, which leads Frances to believe that she thinks Frances’s whole existence is a worry. It’s not pleasant when your own child thinks that way about you.

Frances told her friend Shane about Alison’s behaviour and he told her to see it as evidence of how much Alison loves her. Shane is the bartender at the Duchess Hotel. She knows him because she goes to the Duchess almost every day, just to be there. That’s her social life. Mainly because she talks to Shane. He’s around Keith’s age – a little older, perhaps – and he doesn’t mind old ducks. That’s what he said once.

Now here he is, standing in front of her with his big grin showing a little evidence of his fondness for cigarettes on his teeth. Two of her brothers had teeth stains from smoking, so she doesn’t mind them.

‘There you are,’ Shane says, holding out his hand like the gentleman Frances knows him to be. ‘I thought you’d either be here or in the garden. Fancy a drink?’

‘That would be lovely.’ She takes his hand, and he gently pulls her to her feet then offers her his elbow, and she takes it. She likes it when men do that – they make it easy for a lady to accept support.

Frances squeezes his arm, then they walk through scattered people and busy staff, past gilt-framed paintings and semi-worn couches, to the bar, to the place where Shane makes everyone feel welcome.

He sees her to her favourite spot then promises to return with her usual drink. And he will, she knows that. He’s one of the reliable things she likes about this hotel. That, and the fact that it is unchanging even though it’s constantly changing: the structure of each day is the same, the rhythms, the feeling of it, they don’t change. It’s the place that feels most like home to her, and the people who work here are a huge part of that.

‘Here you go,’ Shane says, putting a shandy in front of her and waving off her money, as he always does. But she has to offer; that’s only right. The only time she ever gets to pay is when someone else is behind the bar, which isn’t often. She likes to do it, though, to feel like she’s not entirely taking advantage.

‘On me,’ he says.

Then he’s on his way, and she sits back and surveys the room, as she likes to do. Time to watch, time to think, time to be. That’s what the Duchess gives her. In here she has no age and no concerns and no children trying to put her in an old-age home. In here she is just Frances, part of the furniture. It’s heaven.

‘Bridge, sweetie, where are you?’ Kirrily calls to her daughter as she hauls towels out of the dryer and puts them in her ‘clean’ basket.

‘Bridge!’ Her daughter is somewhere in the house, probably with her head in a book, and Kirrily wants to find her so she can feed her and her brother before their father comes home, so then all Connor needs to do is put them to bed. The benefit of the kids being six and eight is that she can feed them early. And Connor is never late, so that helps her organise things.

Kirrily puts more towels into the clean basket. She likes to keep the laundry separate – one basket for dirty and one for clean even when there’s nothing in either of them. It’s a distinction she thinks logical and her husband, Connor, believes to be extravagant.

‘We end up wearing it all anyway,’ he said once. ‘Can’t it all go in together?’

Not for her it can’t, because she likes things just so. Some might say she likes them a little too just so to the point where she’s obsessive. Or fanatical.

Right around the time Connor puts the kids to bed, Kirrily will be in the laundry at the Duchess Hotel, making things clean for the guests. At the Duchess, they appreciate her love of cleanliness – all right, her preoccupation with it. William tells her all the time that she’s the neatest, tidiest, cleanest employee he’s ever had. That’s why he likes her being in the laundry on weekends when they’re busier. At other times she’s a maid. Or a factotum. William just calls her ‘a staff member’ but a maid is what you are when you run things up to people’s rooms and clean up spills and check to see where their husbands or children are.

The clientele of the Duchess Hotel can be quite demanding, you see. The hotel is expensive so the guests like to think of themselves as being a bit ooh-lah-lah. Or la-di-da, maybe. They remind Kirrily of the song ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’. She loves that song. And she thinks of it each time a guest demonstrates a few airs and graces that they definitely weren’t born with and probably didn’t grow up with but which they’ve put on especially to annoy her and the other workers.

Kirrily’s developed theories about people and classes thereof since she started working at the Duchess. These are not theories she had while she was growing up because her experience of the world was what one of her teachers called ‘limited’.

She spent her younger years in Tasmania, the eldest of five children. Her mother died when Kirrily was thirteen, which meant she had to look after her siblings so her father could go to work and support them. He worked in a timber mill in Burnie, in the island’s north, where it was freezing in winter and less freezing in summer but, still, warmer than other parts of Tasmania.

Kirrily would stand on the beach looking north into Bass Strait and dream about what might lie across the water: a life where she could do whatever she wanted, when she wanted, no siblings to look after. She had dreams of being a dancer in the Australian Ballet or maybe a singer in a rock band. Something glamorous. Grand. Different to how her life was. It felt small and she felt constrained.

So one day she took the ferry across Bass Strait to Melbourne and tried to make it as a singer because she knew she didn’t have what it took to make it as a dancer. She didn’t have it as a singer either and ended up working in a pub. That’s where she met Connor when he was out one night drinking with his mates. He stayed until closing then after closing; he walked her home, because she lived close enough to walk but far enough for it to be a little scary at night. With him she felt safe. He was tall, and fit from his work as a plumber, and after she’d known him for a little while she realised that he was prepared to take on all the responsibility she’d been carrying ever since her mother died. For her siblings she had been mother, father, caregiver and caretaker. Connor took that off her hands and said he’d look after her.

He told her stories about growing up on the Mornington Peninsula, how he loved the wild