Maria Quinn - 3.FATHER'S DAY

FATHER'S DAY

Toby was scared. What would Lily do when he refused to have this child she wanted so much, this child they would have to go to such lengths to produce? Would she leave him? He didn’t think he could go on living if she did. But he couldn’t be a father either. What if he made a hash of it the way his old man had done? Imagine if his kid had to bail him out of the drunk tank or be frightened to look the derelict begging on the street in the face, in case that face was all too familiar. At least that fear had been buried a few years ago. Bitterness rose in Toby’s craw and his eyes smarted… Get over it for God’s sake, don’t let him do your head in, even from the grave.

He looked across the pillows to his sleeping wife’s gentle face and came as close to a prayer of thanks as he ever would. Whatever fates had led him to her had changed his life and finally made him understand that there was more to living than the music in his head and hands.

Toby never imagined he would love a woman the way he had loved Lily for the five years of their marriage. But now the time had come to prove it. Lily was determined to reassure her husband, when she put forward the idea.

‘The child will carry the same genes as me. It will be as close to my own as possible for a barren woman. And it will be your baby Toby. We will be a family’

‘Don’t use that ridiculous word “barren”, you sound like some kind of religious fanatic.’

‘Well infertile then, however you put it darling the fact is the same. You know my eggs were damaged by the chemotherapy. I can’t give you my own child.’ His wife was desperate to convince Toby that, by using her sister’s egg and his sperm, the baby would be just like the one they might naturally have together.

‘ It’s your baby I want to raise Toby, not some stranger’s. Anyway, your genes are the ones with the talent imprinted on them. That’s the important thing to pass on.’

Toby was amazed that Lily’s sister, Rose, had agreed to donate her egg. Then he realised this would make Lily beholden to her big sister, and Rose liked to keep the upper hand. But he detested Rose and even she and Lily were not close, especially since Lily’s marriage. Rose didn’t think the young Jewish musician was suitable husband material for any sister of hers. If she had to put up with a Jew in the family, at least he could have money.

‘Jews are supposed to have money’ she’d complained to her father the night before the wedding. ‘What kind of a living will some back- row violinist in the Sydney Symphony make? They’ll always be after you for money. You’ll be the lender this time, not the Jew.’

And this was supposed to be the genetic mother of his child, this waspish anti-Semite? The fact that Toby Rubens didn’t give a stuff about Judaism, was an agnostic and not even a proper Jew, because his mother had been a Dutch Lutheran, didn’t change

his sister-in-law’s view of him, nor his of her. He certainly didn’t want her child, he didn’t want any child, even Lily’s, so he tried a new tack.

‘I don’t trust her Lily. The legals will have to be airtight. She’s just as likely to turn around and demand to keep the baby.’

‘Oh come on darling, she’s not even that motherly with her own two’; and to Toby’s disappointment the law proved to be on their side.

‘The woman who carries and births the child is still legally the mother, no matter whose egg it is,’ the lawyer told them. ‘That’s why couples who use a surrogate have to formally adopt their own genetic child. There’s nothing to worry about in your case. You will be the father in every sense Toby, and Lily, who will be the birth mother, will therefore be the legal mother too.’ Reluctantly Toby played along with the plan to harvest eggs from Rose, fertilise them in vitro and implant the result in Lily’s womb. But he kept procrastinating.

‘I’m only doing this once,’ Rose declared when Lily asked her to wait yet another monthly cycle. ‘So you’d better get that shit of a husband to make up his mind fast, before I just forget it.’

When malignancy had struck her breast, two years into their marriage, Lily’s life was their only priority. It was a torturous battle and Lily knew she’d only won it because Toby simply refused to let her die, injecting her with his own life force and willing her to beat the cancer. They were warned the chemo might effect Lily’s chances of a baby, but there was just no time to harvest and freeze eggs. The treatment that saved her life, and devastated the potential lives within her, had to be immediate. Now her last chance at feeling a child grow in her own body was to use her sister’s egg.

Lily wanted a baby, but even greater than her own longing was her yearning to give Toby the child she knew he needed; the child who might close the open wounds of his upbringing. Lily was sure Toby believed her when she told him how much she loved him, but he still didn’t seem convinced of his own worth and she hoped seeing himself reflected in his child’s eyes would do that. Then Toby might dare to perform his own wonderful music, the compositions that came pouring out of him but ended up stashed away in the old blanket box at the end of their bed.

‘We have to do it this month.’ Lily tried to sound dispassionate and hide her fear that Rose would back down, or Toby would find some new excuse, while she adjusted the collar of his dress shirt. She stood back and blatantly admired her tall husband, so handsome in his work clothes. It had taken months to talk him into replacing the threadbare tuxedo with another, cut by Italians and sewn to take the wear, tear and sweat it would be subjected to by Vivaldi, Mozart, Beethoven and the rest.

‘No one even notices me. It’s not like I’m the first violin.’

‘But you will be. And you’ll be playing your own music, orchestras all over the world will play your music one day Toby.’ He wanted to believe her, so he had the new suit made.

While Lily quietly waited for Toby’s response to the need for commitment to the IVF, she marvelled again at the beauty of the man who shared her bed.

His hair was dark blonde flecked with gold, like the pictures of the mother who had died in South Africa, when he was two. He wore it long, every bit the musician, and it curled softly onto his neck. In contrast, his expressive eyes were deep brown, with thick, heavy lashes…my father’s eyes, he regretfully admitted to his reflection, when he shaved. His face was thin, so that the prominent cheekbones gave it a sculptural look, as if it were carved out of marble.

But it was the hands that set Toby Rubens apart from simply handsome men. They seemed to have been designed to gently trail across the waters of the Grand Canal from a gondola, or sweep a cape to the ground for a lady to step across. They were outrageously romantic hands. The fine, long fingers ended in smooth, square nails that radiated from perfect half moons at their base. The skin was flawless, unmarked even by a youth spent fencing boundaries. Yet, in spite of their grace, they conveyed strength, the strength to draw great music out of mere wood and catgut. They were hands you longed to have touch you.

Now Lily reached for them and held them to her face.

‘The baby will be the same, it’s just that I won’t be the genetic mother.’

‘How is that the same? How is having that bitch of a woman’s child the same?’ Toby pulled his hands away and picked up the case that held the violin his father once stole from him, and averted his sad eyes. ‘I have to go.’

Lily kissed him, trying to hold back the tears.

‘What is it tonight?’

‘Saen Saens, the Rondo.’

‘Good, you love it.’

‘Not the way this one plays it.’

Lily thought about the frustration of watching a star applauded for a performance you could better on your worst day and wished she hadn’t asked.

‘Don’t wait up.’ Toby said. ‘ I might walk for a while after the concert.’ The message was clear… I have a lot of thinking to do

The concert was a great success. The French soloist had played the Rondo Capriccioso as Toby had intimated, only adequately. But the audience didn’t seem to care. He was a darling of the internationally televised concert circuit, seen with tenors in Verona, choirs in Llangollen, and even appearing as Paganini in a pulp movie version of the musician’s life. He sold tickets and ticket sales paid salaries, so the orchestra bowed to him and feigned respect, as the conductor dared them to do otherwise, with his steely-eyed look.

After, Toby begged off the usual glass or two of wine with other orchestra members and made his way past the crowds spilling out of the different halls and theatres that constitute the Sydney Opera House. He crossed to the south- eastern corner of the peninsula the spectacular building crowns.

The impressive cast- iron gates to the botanical gardens were locked, as he knew they would be at this time of night. Reaching around the sandstone sea wall, Toby’s foot found its target and he stepped onto the broad rock ledge.

Quickly he was over the low wall and in his favourite place, the acres of historic gardens that weave their way around the harbour, deserted at night, except for the chatty comings and goings of the flying foxes, who call its giant Morton Bay Fig Trees home.

Toby knew he was breaking the law, trespassing on state-owned land, but he’d been getting away with it for ten years, ever since he was a twenty-year-old, studying at the Conservatorium of Music, adjoining these gardens. It had been easier in those days. Then there were still loose spokes in the tall iron fence, easily pushed aside to allow budding maestros to lie under the trees, smoke the odd joint, and try and pick out the stars above the afterglow of the big-city lights. “Spot the cross” was a favourite challenge. Though more often than not the iconic star cluster in the southern sky proved to be the lights of a Qantas jet, turning in from the sea to land at Sydney airport.

Now Toby gave it another try. Tucking the violin case under his knees and clasping his hands behind his neck, he lay back on the grass and looked up. No way could he distinguish any particular star. Here, on the city’s front lawn, its night lights still ruled the sky, disguising the kaleidoscope above. ..Not like the bush.

Nights spent rolled into a sleeping bag on the hard ground of the cattle station up north had offered its compensations. Silence so complete the music in his head reverberated off it, and a blanket of diamonds above. ..No trouble finding the Southern Cross there. Before he drank himself into a stupor at night, Toby’s father would comb the sky, pointing out his favourites and educating his son in the ways of constellations and black holes.

‘That’s why it had to be here, Australia. I needed a sky like the one I had in South Africa. But I had to get out.’ He would reach for the bottle then, cheap Bundy Rum, and swig from it.

‘Tell me dad, tell me about her.’ Sometimes Toby would be rewarded with snippets.

‘She was only twenty-two you know, when she played Carnegie Hall. The yanks went crazy for her, not just because she played like an angel but because she was a beauty. Hollywood even made offers. But family was everything to her. Her parents were getting on and wouldn’t leave Cape Town. Then there was me, in Joburg; I’d already proposed.’

Then his father would pull down the shutters and lift the bottle to his mouth again and Toby knew that was it for the night.

On good days, the lessons would happen. While the campfire was being built to cook the kind of meals only men mustering cattle can tackle, his father would bribe the cook with girlie magazines.

‘Let me have your young helper here for an hour Ron, I’ll give him back in time to dish out.’ Ron would eye the cover Sol was flashing at him and, if the tits were big enough, push Toby towards his father with a salacious grin.

Then Sol would take him away from the circle of tired men and unwrap the ordinary-looking swag. He’d open the old case and lift out the instrument, his dead wife’s violin. Even in the fading light, the wood was luminous. Every time Toby reached for it he had the same sensation, a flutter on his right cheek, a subliminal kiss, half imagined, half remembered.

Next came the work books and music, the worse for wear but readable. The finger exercises were monotonous, repetitive and, by now, second nature. The musical theory and written work had been part of everyday life for the boy for as long as he could remember. But it was the playing Toby lusted after.

When he started, the camp went quiet. Even the horses stopped their jostling. The clear, dry air carried Mendelssohn, Bach and Scarlatti across the empty landscape and turned outback characters into concert aficionados.

‘Jeez kid, you play a terrific fiddle. What’s that tune?’

‘Philistine’ his father muttered.

But it was this very philistine, Merv Rooney, and his roustabout mates who were responsible for Toby’s formal music education, for getting him to Sydney and the Conservatorium.

On the morning of his sixteenth birthday, Toby woke in the bunkhouse to find his father’s place empty. Usually he was the last one up, always reluctant to face another day of what he called “failure down under”.

‘Tool man to a bunch of dirt bikes and utes, my great ambition in life.’

The tall, skinny South African only had talent for two things, engines and music. As a boy, the glittering future of a fine concert pianist was predicted for him. But stage fright segued into major panic attacks that caused his heart to pound in his ears and his hands to curl over the keys, rigid and useless. So he turned to teaching. Relieved of the pressure of performance himself, he proved uniquely gifted in recognising and nurturing talent in others.

By the time Toby was born Sol had already established the TIA Music school, a catalyst for melding native African musical tradition with classical composition. Its graduates were soon in demand as performers, composers, conductors, darlings of the musical elite.

At thirty-four Sol was a contented man, fulfilled in his work, delighting in tinkering with his beloved Harleys, blessed in his marriage and thankful for the trouble-free delivery of a healthy son. Five years later, stepping off the plane in Darwin, with a small boy in tow, he was a changed man.

On the eve of Toby’s second birthday, Sol’s wife was found in an alley beside the practice studios where she prepared for her critically- acclaimed concerts. She had been savagely beaten and raped. The young wife and mother lived just two more days, with Sol beside her every moment. In that time she only uttered five words.

‘The Guarneri…’

‘It’s safe, it was in the doorway, it wasn’t touched. It’s safe, my darling.’

‘It’s for Toby.’

‘For you!’ You will play it again. You will be well again. We will get through this!’

For the next three years Sol had tracked him. All of his energy and most of his money went to unearthing the animal who savaged his wife. And he ran him to ground.

Then, before the ex-mercenaries he had hired could present evidence of the man’s guilt to authorities, Solomon Epstein shot him in the head, and ran away to become Sol Rubens and hide himself in the last place on earth he thought they’d look for him, the Australian outback.

Now he was running away again. And he had taken it with him, the magnificent Guarneri violin, the instrument Toby believed held his mother’s soul. Toby knew it belonged to him. In his cups, his father had spilled out those last five words to a nine-year old allowed to play it for the first time. Toby also knew it was worth a great deal of money.

‘If this lot of roughnecks find out about the fortune we have in this old swag we might be murdered in our beds. Never tell anyone how special the violin is Toby, let them just call it a fiddle.’ Toby wasn’t sure how much his father meant by “fortune”. He didn’t care. The violin would be with him every day of his life; or so he had believed.

When Toby realised what had happened, he took an axe to his father’s empty bunk and the other six sleeping men woke to chaos. The wild boy had to be subdued, but it took four of them to do it. When he sobbed out the story, Merv Rooney picked up the axe they’d wrestled from him and finished the job on the bunk.

‘He can’t have got far. He’ll be heading for the aerodrome at Tennant Greek, trying to get to the big jets in Darwin. Bastard needs to get to a major city if he plans to sell it.’ His tree trunk arms reached under a bunk for the canvas carry-all he kept there. ‘Throw a toothbrush and stuff in here Toby, we’re goin’ after him. You blokes will have to cover for us. If we’re not back in forty eight hours, tell the boss.’

‘But what if something breaks down? Without Sol to baby those engines, some of the bikes might get cantankerous.’ Lou wasn’t keen on the idea of getting on the boss’s bad side, even though he liked the kid.

‘Bet your sweet life Sol’s on the big Honda 1000, fast as a King’s Cross hooker, that thing.’ Merv pushed aside the startling image his last words flashed before him… Man, was that a long time ago! None of the dirt bikes should give any trouble. Anyway we’re workin’ close in for a couple of days. Push to just use the horses.’

‘You’ll never catch him if he’s on the Honda.’

‘Not go’nna catch him, go’nna meet him. Ted’s flyin’ down to Lyndhurst Station this morning to pick up those cases of wine for the wedding. He’ll just have to make a little detour to Tennant Creek on the way.’

Merv’s younger brother was the station pilot. Ted would do as he asked, it was Merv who got him the cushy job, complete with a bungalow on the property, for the wife and kid.

The big, powerful bike had indeed been Sol’s chosen mode of escape. ‘Doesn’t just steal musical instruments then.’ But the irony was wasted on Toby who was still trying to unscramble his muddled thoughts. As the Cessna swooped down to the Tennant Creek airfield, Toby spotted it.

‘The Honda, there it is!’ But that’s all there was, the big black bike, emanating power, even propped and silent against the corrugated fence.

‘Eyes off that bike!’ The young black man waved them away, as if the gesture would be enough to scare them off. ‘I’m in charge of that bike.’

‘What do you mean, “in charge”? Merv took an aggressive stance that didn’t come naturally, as he straightened to his full six feet five. The young bloke backed off a bit.

‘I’m keeping an eye on it for the owner. He’s gone into town. Should be back any minute though, for the Fokker to Darwin.’

‘We’ll wait.’

Fifteen minutes later the twenty- seater landed and thirty minutes after that took off again, with no sign of Sol.

‘That’s real funny, because he paid the fare, seemed to be tight on cash too. Know him, do ya?’ The aboriginal youth smiled at Toby and tried to avoid the eyes of the huge bugger standing beside him.

‘Don’t you touch this bike, you hear me!’ Merv turned the tables on him. ‘Look after it, we’ll be back for it later.’

He handed across a twenty-dollar note and immediately made a new friend. Toby and Merv joined the line forming for the bus into the township, while Ted took off and tried to think up an excuse for his late arrival at Lyndhurst.

Toby was clutching at straws.

‘If he missed the flight he might have changed his mind. He might have turned back.’

‘What, and decided to walk the five hundred Ks? More likely on a blinder and doesn’t know what day it is.’

While Merv checked on the pubs the boy tried to hide from the fierce sun, on a bench outside the post office. Then he realized he was right next to the cop shop. Maybe there had been an accident. Maybe they’d know about it.

When the nice-looking boy told the desk sergeant that his father had failed to meet him at the airfield for their flight home for a family wedding, the pudgy face looked concerned.

‘No reports of accidents son. Perhaps he missed the bus and will turn up there soon.’ Then Toby heard it, the sonorous snoring at that unmistakable pitch.

‘What’s back there?’

‘The drunk tank.’

‘Sounds like my dad’s in there, that snoring, it’s him.’ The sergeant shrugged and opened the door behind him.

‘Well if it is I’m sorry for you. Gave us a lot of trouble before he passed out.’

Sol was curled up on the floor, lying in his own vomit. Combined with the smell of dark rum and the ripe odour of a body that hadn’t found a bathtub in town, this made the stench unbearable.

‘Jeesus!’. The sergeant pushed Toby back through the door and slammed it shut. ‘That him?’

The boy nodded, then put his hands to his face and broke down.

An hour later Toby handed over the $200 bail money Merv had given him. The sergeant tried to put the best face on things.

‘It’s not the drunkenness you understand. We just make ‘em sober up in there before we let ‘em go. It was the foul language and that. He was abusing some poor busker outside the emporium, bloke playing a fiddle, Irish bloke, not doing anyone any harm. Tried to smash the thing, frightened the little leprechaun to death. The charge will just be creating a public nuisance. Lucky we got there in time or it might have been serious assault. Come back for him in four hours son, should be able to stand by then.’

Toby couldn’t face the cell again, anyway he needed a go-between, so Merv would have to collect Sol and bring him to the hotel room. As the boy turned to leave the sergeant said,

‘Maybe he was jealous eh, guy played a better tune than him?’ He lifted the case onto the counter. ‘Want to take this? State he’s still in he might lose it.’

Toby clutched the violin case to his chest, then his eyes widened in panic. He put the case back on the counter, flipped the clasp and lifted the top. The Guarneri glowed, as comforting as a night light to a frightened child.

By the time Merv went to the police station the duty sergeant’s shift had changed. The rather attractive female officer behind the counter told him casually.

‘Oh he left half an hour ago. Had a bit of a wash and tidy up, walked in a straight line, bail was already paid.’ And she turned back to her paperwork. Then Merv decided it was probably the best thing all round. After all, they’d saved the violin, that seemed to be what mattered most to the boy… But how do I tell him his old man’s pissed off again?

When Sol’s abandonment of his son was explained to the station owner he proved Merv’s theory that he was from salt-of-the-earth stock. He put Toby on the payroll, not as the part-time kitchen hand he’d been limited to as a junior, but now as a full-time employee, setting and mending fences, a never-ending job on a property with hundreds of kilometres of boundary. Wherever he went the Guaneri went too and many a curious kangaroo or wallaby stopped just short of his solitary camp fire and became his audience. Once, when he set up by the only waterhole for miles, a family of wild camels decided he was an intruder. That’s when he discovered it’s true, music does “soothe the savage breast.”

The work strengthened his hands, though they looked rough and the skin started cracking. Then Merv imparted the secret know to shearers, those strong tough men with hands like silk gloves. From then on Toby carried a piece of sheepskin in his swag, uncombed and rich with lanolin. The new-found strength in his fingers improved the playing, though he had no bench mark to judge by.

The other men now took for granted that when he was around he would play for them at night after the meal. And he took for granted that even the most complex works would be received with pleasure by an appreciative audience. One night Merv brought the boss along, and Toby’s life took a new turn.

The enormous old squatter’s homestead regularly played host to politicians, socialites, artists and bureaucrats, Now when they came Toby played for them. Magically an audition was arranged. He would go to Sydney and play for the selection panel of The Conservatorium of Music.

Standing alone and trying not to shake with fright, on the stage of the Conservatorium’s concert hall, Toby answered all their trick musical questions.

When they instructed him to play his selected piece he opened the worn old case and lifted the Guarnari to his shoulder. An audible gasp reached him, as a woman examiner leaned across to whisper to her colleagues. He finished the Mozart and lowered the beautiful instrument. Even the air remained quiet and still for several seconds. Then heads nodded vigorously, smiles widened, shoulders were patted and seemingly endless bits of paper passed hands. That’s when the frowns appeared.

There was no doubt that they wanted him, talent keeps the grants coming. But Toby had never been to school. To apply for a degree in music he would first have to complete the standard formal school exams, and achieve a mark that would allow him to continue to study at university level.

All the boy knew was what his father taught him, as they drifted from one property to another, avoiding the bigger country towns. So the seventeen-year-old went back to the station to mend fences, and spend time in the schoolroom with the boss’s three kids and their clever tutor.

Two years later, saying goodbye to the hot, ochre- drenched landscape wasn’t too hard, but saying goodbye to Merv Rooney was. When he put him on the plane in Darwin, Merv handed Toby a package.

‘Don’t open this until you get to Sydney.’ Toby kept his word and waited until he closed the door of the little room in the students’ residence. He sat on the bed and smiled at Merv’s familiar looping scrawl. “Tobias David Rubens, from Mervyn Alphonsus Rooney”…Alphonsus!

Toby removed the wrapping and opened the kangaroo leather box it covered. He found two thick bundles of bank notes, consisting of one- hundred- dollar bills. There was ten thousand dollars in each roll. With shaking hands he opened the accompanying letter. It was set out rather formally and Merv had obviously made a special effort with his handwriting… He wants me to keep it, to remember him by ;as if I could ever forget.

'Dear Tobias,

This money has been collected over the last year and a half and is a gift from your fellow station hands.(All the blokes who gave something signed their names on the end of this letter.) We want you to take this, and no arguments.

We have seen how much hard yakka you’ve had to do to get that place at the Conservatorium, and we know you will do us proud. But we have been told it is very tough there, they work you longer hours than you are used to, though you don’t start so early!

Taking some sort of bum job, just to keep yourself in books, warm clothes (gets a lot colder down there)and that kind of thing might string you out. You’ve started a bit late already, so we want you to really set to it. This should see you through the four years, till you get your degree, or whatever you music blokes call it, and start giving concerts. (As long as you’re careful and don’t go up to King’s Cross too often. Remember what I told you about those so-called ‘girls’. Most of ‘em haven’t been ‘girls’ for years.)

Anyway, that’s what the money is for. Don’t do other jobs, just your music. You’ll have it hard enough paying back that loan the government pays your fees with. Until you’re world famous and rich that is, which won’t take long. When you are, we expect you to come up here and give us another concert under the stars. You can charge everyone else whatever you like, but we want front row seats on the house.

Toby, I never will understand how your old man ditched you like that. He must have some real bad trouble to do it. If you were my kid I’d be just about the proudest bugger in the Territory.

Your friend,

Mervyn Alphonsus Rooney.

PS. Don’t trust banks, but might be better not to keep this lot under the mattress, the city’s full of low life.

There followed a list of twenty names and signatures, many of whom Toby didn’t even recognise.'

Now, lying on the grass in the Botanical Gardens thinking about how he got there, Toby again regretted that he’d never give that concert for Merv. It was too late. Mervyn Rooney died of a heart attack that first year of Toby’s music studies.

The musician sat up and took his violin out of its battered case. Then he stood, as in a formal solo performance. There was still something he could do for Merv, right here, right now. He had learned a piece especially for him and, when he played it to him, the big man always turned his face away to hide his emotions.

Toby raised the bow and the simple, haunting melody drifted through the trees and across the water, while the violinist offered the only thanks he knew how to. Because his eyes were closed, Toby didn’t see the two approaching figures. When he stopped playing and opened them, he was startled to see two burly security guards standing no more than a metre from him.

‘What do you think you’re doing? You might have noticed The Gardens are closed. Can’t you read mate? You can be charged with trespassing.'

‘I know, I know I shouldn’t be trespassing. I needed a place to think. I needed to get away somewhere quiet and just think.’

‘Well it was quiet.’

Toby quickly packed the instrument and bow back in the case. ‘I suppose that’s another law I’ve broken. It was for a friend, an old promise.’

‘Not bad either mate. Not bloody bad.’ The shorter of the guards nodded knowingly. ‘What do you think Steve, look like a terrorist to you?’

‘Looks more like a member of the Orchestra to me.’

Toby was grateful for the new tuxedo. In his old one he might have been taken for a musical deadbeat. If they put him in a cell, even if it didn’t smell of vomit and rum, he wasn’t sure he’d get through the night.

‘Follow us.’ In spite of the order, the security guards actually walked one in front and one behind him, until they came to the big gates fronting Macquarie St. The taller one took a chain of large keys and unlocked the gates.

‘ First and last chance mate, ever catch you like this again and we’ll do you for it.’

‘Thank you. I won’t be back. It’s good of you to let me off.’

‘Yeah, well, I always did like that “Danny Boy” That’s the best I’ve ever heard it too.’ Then the gates banged shut.

Toby walked slowly down the hill to the quayside. He’d missed the last ferry and would have to indulge in a taxi ride home. He hadn’t meant to be so late. But immersing himself in memories of the unlikely man who had become a gentle surrogate father to him when his own left him stranded, had made time an irrelevance.

At least now he knew why Sol had turned into the desperate alcoholic who dragged him from one outback property to another, only keeping jobs as long as he could feign sobriety and not give in to the abusive outbursts that made landowners hand him his walking papers. When these psychotic fits involved beating his young son, the police were often not far behind.

But Sol had chosen his exile well, this was country to lose yourself in.

In the atmosphere of the Conservatorium, where music was the centre of all life, it seemed natural to talk of a mother who had been a concert violinist. What he hadn’t known was just how special she was.

‘Sonia Van Loom. God boy, that’s a name to live up to! To lose her so young, a tragedy, a real tragedy.’

The Master of Strings had loaned Toby recordings of some of his mother’s performances and he would listen to them, trying to bring the shadow on his memory into focus, and spilling tears onto the Guarnari against his cheek. He knew his mother had been murdered, that much Sol had let out. But he hadn’t known about the rape.

When he turned to the old newspaper reports Toby made himself ill. “Nervous exhaustion” was the official diagnosis, due to overwork and the stress of study. The reports of his mother’s funeral and the hundreds of mourners who had come to pay tribute and listen to her music, as it filled the square outside the concert hall, amazed Toby. But it was the pictures of his father, a young man devastated by loss, that affected Toby most; a young man named Solomon Epstein… Why, why had he changed the name? Then he found the answer.

The murder of Jonas Seepmann made headlines. There were a number of witnesses who said that his father shot the man at point blank range then calmly walked away… Why did he run? The courts might understand. Me, he was afraid for me. It was my fault.

After Toby and Lily had been married for just over a year, the police called late one night and asked Toby to come to the morgue and look at a body they hoped he might be able to tell them something about.

The dirty, ragged man they slid from death’s cold filing cabinet had no identification on him, but in his pocket was a slim programme for “Meet The Symphony”a children’s event held two weeks earlier in the Sydney Town Hall. All kinds of instrument had been highlighted and demonstrated to the young audience. Each musician who presented an instrument was listed. “Toby Rubens, Violin” was circled in red.

Toby looked down on the remains of a man who had committed murder, who had cruelly beaten his son and robbed him of childhood. This man had stolen his only precious possession and then abandoned him, but the body on the slab had once been his father. So Toby put a death notice in the newspaper and paid for a simple burial. Nobody came.

These were the genes he carried, the genes Lily was determined to pass on to another generation. These were the genes that frightened Toby Rubens.

Lily was asleep when he got home, and Toby went into the kitchen to make himself a cup of tea. There was a note on the table in Lily’s neat, feminine hand.

'Darling,

The doctor told Rose that the eggs have to be harvested in the next two days, if it’s to be done in this cycle. Rose says if we don’t do it now, that’s it, she’s tired of being mucked about. I told her I will call her in the morning with a decision. You know how I feel about it, but it is up to you Toby. I’ll just say again, you will make a wonderful father, I know that, no matter what you think. I love you, whatever you decide, and always will.

Your Lily.'

Tobyslipped silently into their bed, but even in the moonlight spilling through the window he could see she had been crying. She’d been through so much. First the surgery on her breast, then months of chemotherapy that robbed her of her long, dark hair and left her haggard and listless. Now he gently brushed wayward strands of the renewed hair back from her face.

Tony remembered his despair throughout the longs months of Lily’s illness. He had put a brave face on it, but he’d decided that if she didn’t make it through he would go too. Without Lily he would have no one to live for, no one to love or have love him. Without Lily, even the music wouldn’t matter.

‘It will be your baby Toby. We will be a family…’ Perhaps it was possible, perhaps the sins of the parent did not have to be borne forever by the child. Lily wanted his child, she wanted to be a mother, even if her sister made her pay for it in a thousand mean little ways. He would have to learn to want to be a father.

Toby Rubens reached across and kissed his stirring wife.

‘What’s the time?’ she asked sleepily. ‘Is it time to get up?’

‘No Lil, go back to sleep, I’m just letting you know I’m here.’

She pulled him to her and he lay with his head against her scarred breast, while she gently stroked his forehead.

‘Did you see my note?’ He didn’t answer straight away. His mind was full of Solomon Epstein/Rubens and Mervyn Alphonsus Rooney, the fathers he had known.

‘Toby?’

‘Yes Lil. I read the note.’ Toby could feel his wife’s body tense up under him. He gently kissed her scars.

‘I have decided that if we have a boy we will call him Daniel…Danny Boy, and I will teach him to play it.’