by Minnie Darke
Before Bene could unlock the door, it opened. In his hallway stood Juanita, almost insanely trim in her running kit. Dark and delicate-looking, she was the only woman Bene had ever seen who looked truly beautiful with a septum piercing. Not that this fact stopped him from wanting to tear the fine silver ring out of her nose, just in case it gave Beatrix ideas.
‘Well, welcome home, o holder of all technology,’ Juanita said.
Bene, stepping from the frosty street into the warmth of his house, observed Juanita’s packed bags in the hallway. ‘You look like you’re ready to do a runner. Was she really that monstrous?’
‘No! She’s always a sweetheart . . . for me.’
‘Yeah, thanks for that.’
‘While I’ve been looking after your princess, though, I’ve been losing my form. I’m pretty keen to get a run in this morning, if you’re ready to accept the baton?’
‘Of course, of course. Thanks for being here,’ Bene said. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you. So how was she, really?’
‘Oh, you know. Right after you left there was some intergalactic rage, but by the second day I’d say we were only at white-hot fury. Last night, I think we scaled it back even further to poisonous wrath. So . . . by now, I’m guessing you’re at simmering hostility or similar. She’s through there,’ Juanita said, gesturing to the living room.
‘She’s awake?’
‘Asleep on the couch.’
‘Really?’
‘Don’t think she’d admit it, but I’m pretty sure she wanted to see you as soon as you got home. Get started on venting some of that hostility.’
As Juanita moved about the house, collecting her belongings and tidying up the kitchen, Bene regarded his daughter, curled under a bunched throw-rug on the couch. As he straightened the rug, pulling a fold of it up over Beatrix’s shoulder, the song played on in his head.
When he was a boy, Bene had taken piano lessons on Saturday mornings at a house in Seven Sisters. His teacher was young and unorthodox, with pigtails and denim overalls, and also a large glass jar of jammy dodgers that she’d open up at the end of a lesson – if Bene had been good. Bene had liked the jammy dodgers much more than the drills, but in secondary school when his guitar-playing mates asked him to join their indie-rock cover band, he had cause to be grateful for his young teacher’s insistence.
Beatrix was musical, too. Although she had rejected just about every other vestige of her childhood as her skirts shortened and her eye make-up intensified, she hadn’t given up her music. Like Tess, she played the flute, and Bene would never forget the day mother and daughter had come home with Beatrix’s first instrument.
‘It comes in three pieces, Daddy,’ six-year-old Beatrix had declared. ‘Three pieces, just like our family.’
At that time, Tess had been in the middle of her first fight against breast cancer. She’d already amassed a significant collection of silk headscarves and angora berets to wear in place of her lost, sandy curls. Now those same thick curls were back, but on Beatrix’s head, and at this moment they were spread out over the couch cushions in a profusion of knots and snarls.
Packed down into one corner of the living room was all that remained of Bene’s life in music. An electronic keyboard, a pair of quality headphones, a meagre shelf of recording equipment, some stacks of sheet music and a small collection of dusty CDs.
Bene switched on his keyboard but turned the volume down, so as not to disturb Beatrix with his playing. Absorbed in the song, he didn’t at first notice when Beatrix woke. It wasn’t until she was standing in front of his keyboard, her face puffy with sleep, her hair a beautiful mess, that he looked up.
‘What’s that?’ she asked, and Bene was relieved to see no trace in her expression of the hostility that Juanita had predicted.
‘It’s a . . . love song,’ Bene said.
‘It’s really nice.’
The father studied the daughter. The daughter studied the father just as closely.
‘So, do you still hate me?’ Bene asked.
‘I never hate you,’ she said. ‘Not even when I hate you.’
Bene shuffled over on his stool to make room. Beatrix sat beside him and rested her head on his shoulder, smelling of bubblegum and sleep, and he played the love song through another time.
‘Did you write it?’ she asked.
‘Is there any need to sound quite so surprised?’
‘No, no. I didn’t mean that. I meant . . . well, you don’t . . . you haven’t . . . not for the longest time.’
‘I didn’t write it,’ Bene admitted. ‘It was more like I found it.’
‘It’s beautiful.’
‘You know, we could have a go at arranging it as a duet? The flute could play the melody?’
Beatrix shrugged, but Bene was too pleased to see her to be annoyed.
‘Want to go get your flute?’
‘Tired,’ she said, then yawned and stretched.
‘Go on,’ he urged.
Beatrix grumbled, but she got up anyway, and before she went upstairs she landed a cursory kiss on her father’s cheek. In a moment she would come back down again, open the flute case and fit the three pieces of her instrument together. She would warm up her lips, and the instrument itself, and together they would play.
As Bene waited for her to return, he understood that there was every chance that tonight, or perhaps even before then, there would be a fresh kerfuffle, whether it was about the dishwasher or the state of Beatrix’s floordrobe, the age-appropriateness of her latest Netflix obsession or an invitation to a party that Bene thought likely to be dodgy. He knew that – perhaps even today – he would screw up. But he also knew he would then try to do better. Screw up and try to do better; screw up and try to do better. Probably, there wasn’t any other way to hold on.
APPROXIMATELY TWENTY MILES south-west of Bene and Beatrix’s home in Winchmore Hill, an unexceptional dawn gradually lightened the historic facade of a pub on the banks of the River Thames. It was called the Noble Swan, in honour of the big white birds that fed in the waterway and stretched their wings on the banks of the nearby Isleworth Eyot.
When Evie Greenlees, the barmaid, arrived with the keys, she was met by Gordon Philpott and his aged spaniel, Betty, even though it was not yet twenty to eleven.
‘Morning, Evie,’ Gordon said, and as man and dog turned their rheumy eyes on her in entreaty, she couldn’t see how she could possibly insist that they remain outside in the cold until opening time.
‘Morning, Gordon. Hey, Betty,’ Evie said. She opened the door and allowed the pair to shuffle in. Catching a combined whiff of wet dog and stale, unwashed human, she wondered just how many years it had been since Gordon had dry-cleaned his tweed coat.
Gordon and Betty took up their regular spot at a table that was equidistant from the fire that Evie would soon light and the television set that she switched on immediately. She handed Gordon the remote control, figuring that he could enjoy his darts or his snooker, at least until somebody else came in wanting to watch the football.
This morning, though, as Evie kneeled at the hearth waiting for the firelighters to wear down the defiance of the kindling, and as Betty stretched out on the floorboards and began to snore, Gordon made the surprise move of selecting the news channel.
‘Air Pleiades is your lot, isn’t it?’ he asked.
Evie, intent on the fire, didn’t hear him properly. ‘Sorry, Gordon?’
‘Air Pleiades. The airline,’ he said.
‘What about it?’
‘It’s like you, from Down Under, isn’t it?’
It was a rare day at the Noble Swan when the fact that Evie was Australian went unremarked. The regulars made good-natured sport of her accent, told jokes in which Australians featured in place of Irishmen, and just a few weeks ago had thought themselves hilarious when they presented her with a pair of Dame Edna Everage spectacles as a Christmas gift.
‘Air Pleiades? Yes, last I checked.’
‘Well, you won’t want to fly with them when you go home,’ Gordon observed. ‘Horrible business.’
‘What is?’ Evie asked.
‘That,’ Gordon said, waving the remote at the television. ‘Bloody terrible.’
A few dismal twists of smoke were rising from the kindling as Evie stood to look. On the screen was a map of Europe, with a curving dotted line overshooting the French coast to end in a big, red X. The text under the image read, AIR PLEIADES FLIGHT PQ108 CRASH SITE: 312 DEAD.
‘Oh,’ Evie said, a hand going to her chest. ‘That’s awful.’
Evie had flown Air Pleiades the first time she’d gone overseas. She’d been seventeen years old and on a student trip to Japan. Although she stayed away only a month, when she stepped onto the plane for the journey home, the deeply Australian accents of the Air Pleiades flight attendants had been enough to move her to tears. She’d also flown Air Pleiades when – at the age of twenty-two – she’d flown out of Melbourne with a one-way ticket, a backpack, a wristwatch perpetually stuck at a few minutes to five o’clock, and the half-baked notion of becoming a poet. That was four years ago, and so far all Evie had to show for her travels was a bundle of notebooks filled with unpublished poems.
When she started out, she flew to Los Angeles then made her way north to San Francisco, where she got a job as a croupier on a cruise ship that plied the Mexican Riviera. After eighteen months, she stepped off and headed to Canada, where she leapfrogged the country, ski resort to ski resort, working as a chambermaid, to land in Quebec, where she boarded a flight to London. Other than life itself, eligibility for a five-year UK ancestry visa – now one-fifth used up – was the only useful gift her father had ever given her.
‘Never been one for travelling, myself,’ Gordon said. ‘You Aussies, though, you’re all travellers, aren’t you? Suppose you’d want to be if you had the rotten luck to be born in a country full of murderers and thieves.’
Evie didn’t react; she had long since learned to let such jibes slide. She kept her eyes on the television, where footage from Charles de Gaulle Airport showed flashes of an arrivals board and images of people in coats and scarves holding each other as they sobbed with shock and grief.
Evie – like everyone else in the world, she supposed – had a horror of plane crashes. Every time she took her seat on a plane, she half-imagined what it would be like. How would she behave? If she knew the plane that held her aloft was going to fall out of the sky, would she turn to the person next to her and say something profound? Or would she just scream, even though it could do no good at all? Or would she shut her eyes and try to disappear? At what point, exactly, would she die? And would it hurt?
By now, Evie thought, all that suffering was over for the passengers and the crew of Flight PQ108. At the same time, the distress of the people who loved them had only just begun. The idea of this was enough to make Evie choke up.
‘I reckon we ought to raise a glass to the poor bastards, don’t you?’ Gordon said, the eyes in his wrinkled face suddenly as wide as a child’s.
Evie, wiping at one eye with the heel of her hand, gave a short burst of almost-laughter. ‘You dreadful old rascal.’
‘Go on, love. It’s close enough to eleven. What’s ten minutes between friends?’
The TV news rolled on while Evie shook her head and let herself through the hinged section of the bar. She reached down the Glenfiddich, and as she poured Gordon’s first nip of whisky for the day, she imagined a wedge of the Atlantic Ocean rising up in a curve like a huge, blue mouth – crying out in sadness before it swallowed a plane whole. She would have to remember, she thought, to write that down.
THE SUMMER AFTER the one in which Diana died, nobody picked the fruit from the apricot trees at the far end of her mother’s yard. Instead the apricots hung from the branches, getting heavier and sweeter, softer and more deeply orange, until at last they fell to the ground.
This did not seem to matter to the trees, which only shed their leaves in the autumn and proceeded to wait out the winter, so that in spring they could put forth the blossoms that would eventually transform into the hard, green nuts of the young fruits. By the time these were ripe, their pinkish-orange skins stippled with red in the places where they’d been touched by the sun, high summer had come once again and Diana had been gone for almost two years.
Mid-morning on New Year’s Eve, Arie arrived at Diana’s mother’s old weatherboard farmhouse, and although his knock went unanswered he opened the front door, knowing that Belinda would be outside, having already begun their day’s task. He walked the length of the cool, shadowed hall and, just before he reached the back door, failed to resist the temptation to glance into the section of the wraparound veranda that had long ago been closed in for a bedroom.
This space was so full of memories that it seemed to Arie that he could almost see them, flitting about in the air with the dust motes. The room was narrow, a rickety double bed taking up almost all the space between its walls. Arie remembered the dehydrated feeling of being woken too early by the sun through those thin cotton curtains. He remembered, too, the smell of old rubber pillows, and the quiet way he and Diana had to move together in that bed if they didn’t want it to creak.
He looked away, took a weather-beaten Akubra from a hook at the back door, and stepped out onto the porch. He could see Belinda down at the bottom of the yard, halfway up a stepladder with a bucket under one arm. In a T-shirt and denim shorts, she looked thinner than ever.
‘Morning,’ he called, and she waved.
He knew the first thing he and Belinda had to do was to get through the awkwardness of a greeting. Even now, after everything they’d been through together, these stilted moments still had to be borne.
There had been hugging on the day of Diana’s service, and on one – but only one – of the days when he and Belinda visited Diana’s memorial in a churchyard that lay a ten-minute drive, on a winding country road, from the farmhouse. There, on the windward side of a rose garden, was a brick wall that had been specially designed to accommodate metal drawers full of ashes. The face of each drawer was engraved with a name and the dates that had bracketed a life, but Arie found it impossible, as he set down his roses or tulips or sunflowers at the base of that sunny wall, to forget that Diana’s drawer was empty, and that her last resting place was a long, cold way away.
Arie crossed the daisy-studded lawn to the small orchard at its far end, and there he stood ready, just in case Belinda climbed down from the stepladder and opened her arms to him. But she didn’t. She only wobbled slightly on the tread of the ladder; she too, Arie thought, was experiencing an internal battle between the instinct to reach out and fear of a cheek-kiss going astray or an embrace turning awkward.
‘They’re perfect,’ she said instead, looking up into the laden boughs of the tree.
Arie nodded. He tried not to look down at the ground, where a scattered carpet of apricot pits was all that remained of last year’s wasted harvest.
The picking was slow and pensive, Arie placing each apricot in the bucket as carefully as if it were an egg – no bruising allowed. As he gentled the fruits away from their branches, he could almost imagine that Diana was there with them, climbing up and down a nearby stepladder, singing, her pale skin turning pink in the summer sun, no matter how wide the brim of her sun hat.
‘Another year gone,’ Belinda said into the leaves that surrounded her face. It seemed to Arie that there was an edge of reproach in her voice, and he felt unaccountably guilty, even though he knew it was hardly his fault that the earth had once again lapped the sun.
‘Making any New Year’s resolutions?’ Arie asked. He had a habit, when he was with Belinda, of trying to minimise conversational risk by making such small talk, even though he knew that it was just as likely to be met with a snappish response as talk of any other kind.
‘Ha,’ she said, drily. ‘Are you?’
‘I am. My resolution for this year is to return all the casserole dishe
s to their rightful owners.’
After Diana’s death, the sheer number of casseroles – left on the doorstep wrapped in tea-towels or pressed still warm into Arie’s hands – had been overwhelming. The influx had dwindled after a couple of months, but the chilli con carnes and the ham-chicken-and-asparaguses had lived on in the freezer for what felt like eternity. Arie had recently part-defrosted the last of these condolence meals, consigning the solid lumps of them to the garbage, but now he was left with the stress of trying to work out who belonged to the yellow dish, and who to the CorningWare with the little blue flowers on the side.
Belinda gave a faintly bitter laugh. ‘At least you got casseroles. I suppose people thought you needed them more, being a mere male.’
‘Ironic, isn’t it?’ Arie replied. ‘If the tables had been turned, Diana really would’ve needed casseroles.’
‘What do you mean?’ Belinda’s tone was brittle.
Arie knew he had blundered and should probably shut up, but he somehow found himself saying, ‘Well, cooking was hardly Diana’s favourite thing to do.’
‘Diana could cook. I made sure Diana could cook.’
‘Diana could have done anything she put her mind to,’ Arie said, in an effort to appease her, even though the truth was that Diana’s understanding of cooking had been mashing avocado onto toast.
‘Diana certainly could.’
Diana.
That word. Three syllables that made up their own tiny melody.
It was true that in the winter Arie chopped Belinda’s firewood, and in springtime unblocked her gutters. For her part, she usually sent him back to the city with jars of green tomato chutney and foil-wrapped slabs of fruit cake. But the real reason he kept coming to visit, which was also the reason Belinda kept inviting him, was that when they were together they could say those three syllables as often as they wanted. Diana, Diana, Diana.
In Belinda’s pleasantly ramshackle kitchen there was mismatched crockery on the open shelves, threadbare tea-towels hanging over the rail of an old-fashioned wood stove, and patchy linoleum that peeled up at the corners of the floor. It was a room full of things that Diana had touched, used and loved. By the kettle was a Humpty Dumpty eggcup from her childhood. Rather appropriately, she’d dropped it and it had smashed. Rather less appropriately, Belinda had put it back together again. It had not been a professional job, and a gluggy seam of Araldite was now a permanent feature on poor Humpty’s moony forehead.