Eloquent Silence by Margaret Weise Read Free Book Online

Tootsie did not want to know the ins and outs of this as she did not like foreigners much and did not approve of them on the principle that they were not People Like Us.
    ‘They are not People Like Us,’ she told Bernard with absolute certainty as she supervised him in the dairy with her blunt-cut chestnut hair blowing every which way in the westerly wind.
    ‘No, indeed they are not, Sweetness,’ Bernard agreed swiftly which he always did. It saved him from a lot of thinking.
    Not to mention that he knew which side his bread was buttered on.
    The years moved on relentlessly and before you could say, ‘People Like Us,’ all of the children were out of the parental home, married and gone their own ways. This left only the couple, Old Jerry and Emma in their twilight years; in Old Jerry’s case, very twilight indeed. Even Basil had grown up and left the small, drought-stricken outback town to join the Australian Navy and see a bit of water for a change.
    Old Jerry’s second youngest son, Douglas, was a ruddy-cheeked man in his forties with an unusually bumpy nose and an air of ordinariness about him. He had sharp, intense eyes and had learned from Tootsie to ask pertinent questions in a flat, toneless voice when he felt like it. He was working as a spare parts sales man for a large firm who supplied machinery and parts to companies all up and down the east coast of Australia and even into Western Australia.
    He fielded a call from a firm in Perth. The salesman who had made the request for a tractor part gave his name as Brian Gessop.
    ‘That’s an unusual surname,’ said Douglas, seemingly as an afterthought, raising his bushy eyebrows and smelling the scent of something different in the air, something worth pursuing a little instead of merely telling jokes to his work mates in the intervals between phone calls.
    ‘Yes,’ Brian agreed in a jolly voice emanating all the way up the telephone line across from Perth. ‘I’ve really never heard of it in these parts and I’ve lived here since Methuselah was a boy. But then, I originate from Queensland. I was fostered by people over here and brought up by them. The foster parents promised I would never seek out my birth parents, so I haven’t. Actually, my birth parents came from a little town in Queensland just outside Meranga North, a town called Perishing Plains.’
    ‘Now that’s a coincidence if ever I heard one,’ answered Douglas, nibbling on the end of his biro. ‘That’s where I came from. Not many people of that name around these parts, either. None, in fact. I have four uncles called Gessop around Perishing Plains and that was my mother’s maiden name. Josie Gessop. Josephine Pearl Gessop.’
    ‘You’re kidding,’ Brian answered in disbelief. ‘That’s was my mother’s maiden name. Wow! Hey, we’re related in some way, I’d say for sure. Well, I tell you this, mate, that was her name, all right. She came over here with the guy she was going out with, a man called Jerry von Hildebrand. They placed me here in 1938 with distant relatives and all contact was cut.’ Brian was winded. ‘Talk about the fickle finger of Fate! Fancy us catching up like this.’
    ‘That can’t be right,’ Douglas replied, confounded. For a moment he could think of nothing to say so he gave a small, uneasy snicker. ‘They were married in 1940. My sister Mona was born that year and died in 1942. Barnaby came along just after that. Can’t be right. No way in the wide world. Just trying to do the math, here.’
    He tapped his biro in the counter impatiently, trying to work his way through the finer details of his family history.
    ‘Suit yourself, mate,’ Brian answered with a trace of indignation in his voice. ‘I’m just telling you what I know of my past and who I am. I’m not asking you to believe it.’
    Burly, blond-bearded Brian chatted on steadily and cheerfully for a while, making sure he had the right equipment to send across the country to Queensland. He