Amanda O’Callaghan is a Brisbane-based author whose short stories and flash fiction have been published and won awards in Australia, the United Kingdom and Ireland. Her work has been awarded and shortlisted in the Bath Flash Fiction Award, Flash 500, Carmel Bird Award, Aeon Award, Bristol Short Story Prize and Fish Short Story Prize. A former advertising executive, Amanda holds English degrees from King’s College London, and a PhD from the University of Queensland. In 2016 she was a recipient of a Queensland Writers Fellowship. This Taste for Silence is her debut collection. www.amandaocallaghan.com
To Ade and Louis
Contents
A Widow’s Snow
An Uncommon Occurrence
The Turn
The News
Things
Speak the Words
The Mohair Coat
Legacy
Thirty Years
Cutting the Cord
The Golden Hour
Death of a Friend
New Skins
Tying the Boats
The New Bride
These Ordinary Nights
The Memory Bones
All the Perfume
Portal
The Way It Sounds
The Painting
Acknowledgements
A Widow’s Snow
Roger, Maureen decided, is the kind of man who would appreciate an old-fashioned pudding. She flicked through the best of her recipe books, toyed with ideas like spiced apple tart with a rich pastry crust – Gerald’s favourite, so not really an option – and all manner of sponges, even soufflés. She braved the mole-eyed newsagent (twice divorced, blinking at the door for a new, early rising wife) and bought a couple of cookery magazines. The desserts there, lashed down by guy ropes of toffee, subdued under heavy drifts of icing sugar, still seemed to totter on their plates. One wobbly chocolate affair, stacked high and leaning, put her in mind of the ramshackle house on the Scottish coast where she and Gerald had gone on their honeymoon. She remembered lying in his arms for the first time, naked and happy in the cavernous room, wondering whether the whole creaking place might, with one more movement, tip into the howling sea.
By the end of the week, she’d discounted them all. Too insubstantial. She’d seen how Roger conducted his business. ‘No, not the sort of thing I’m interested in, thank you,’ he’d say, dropping the phone back into its cradle with a decisive clunk. There was a certainty about everything he did. Maureen envied that. Now that she was cooking for him for the first time, she didn’t want the merest touch of a dessert fork dismantling the whole effect. She wanted something that kept its shape, something robust. Later on, she’d make one of those fragile confections. Not for this dinner.
She stirred the batter. The scent of the mixed spices curled around her, reaching languidly across the oak table and into the corners of the warm room. It was a long time since she’d made fig pudding. She’d forgotten its festive perfume. Just a week into the new year, the kitchen shelves still edged with ivy, it seemed an appropriate choice.
Looking out the window towards the neighbouring field, where a pony had been startled into cantering for no obvious reason, Maureen felt happier than she’d been in a long time. Contented, she corrected herself, as the large wooden spoon – once her mother’s – turned the mixture.
The sky, which earlier had been choked with cloud, had all but cleared. It would freeze later, she knew. Guiding her small palette knife around the bowl, she garnered the last of the mixture. She scraped the batter from the spoon, running the knife down its bone-strong length until it was clean. Smoothing the hillocks of mixture, she laid discs of paper over the top and bound them in place with a craftswoman’s nimble fingers.
‘That should do nicely,’ she said aloud. Since losing Gerald, she was not afraid to talk to herself, to hear her voice ring out in the empty rooms.
As she pushed the basin into the oven, her eye was drawn to the benchtop, where she saw that the roses in her new vase, the one Roger had given her, were beginning to droop. She must change them before tomorrow night.
The vase was nice, in its way, she thought.
‘Rare, Maureen,’ Roger had said, in the same voice he used with his customers. ‘It’s Spode. Pearlware. 1820. There’s not many like it around. Certainly not in this condition.’
She repositioned the slumping flowers. Roger’s vase was large and almost shockingly bright. It had a lapis blue background with broad green leaves entwined all over it. Here and there, an oriental eye of neon pink flower blinked through the foliage. Every leaf on the vase was yellowed at the tip, as if the pattern itself was at some kind of turning point, the moment when ripeness begins to spoil, when beauty becomes a far-off thing. Those yellow edges bothered her.
It was a Christmas present. The first real gift from him, surprisingly generous. ‘Now, Maureen, I want you to unwrap this very carefully,’ he’d told her, setting it on the hall table. Before she could pull back the wrapping – she could see the colours flaring through the tissue – he blurted out, ‘It’s a vase,’ like a child.
‘It’s a lovely shape,’ she said to him, noticing the yellow-edged leaves, even then.
Roger told her about its provenance, but most of the detail washed over her. She knew nothing about porcelain. She did remember that he’d told her the vase was clobbered. She’d nodded at this as if she knew exactly what he was talking about. After he left, she checked the vase all over, believing it must be slightly damaged in some way. Later, when she admitted this to him, he laughed so hard he knocked over his wineglass.
‘Oh, Maureen,’ he said, patting her hand, oblivious to the pooling wine, ‘you do cheer me up.’
While a waiter mopped at the spill, they ate small pyramids of cheese and shrivelled muscatels, and Roger explained the process of clobbering. As far as Maureen could work out, it meant one layer of decoration put over another. Overdecorated.
And that’s what it is, she thought, as she leaned against her kitchen bench. Those snarling bright colours, those throttling leaves. She preferred muted tones. Gerald had never been one for anything too showy. ‘It’s just not our thing, is it, love?’ he used to say.
The pale roses were refusing to rally under her hand. They drooped against the wide lip of Roger’s vase, looking insipid. She regarded her clotted cream walls, the watery green plates stacked on an open shelf beside her. She wondered how someone, seeing this kitchen, this house, might describe its owner. She pulled the roses out in one swift movement and drove them all, headfirst, into the bin.
Perhaps, she thought, Roger never intended me to actually use the vase. This made the blood rush to her face. It still felt new, this life after Gerald, this confusing business of being alone. The glare of it, after so long in the pleasant shadow of married life. And now, this new world of dinners out, and makers’ marks, and Roger Kempton with his knife-creased trousers, and his good cologne that smelled, not unpleasantly, of the old leather hymn books from school.
He’s quite handsome, in a broad-faced way, she thought, wiping a tiny mound of spilled sugar into her cupped hand. She hadn’t really noticed Roger’s looks until the time he’d been delayed by a big sale. He’d come striding through the restaurant towards her, wearing a burgundy-coloured cashmere as thin as muslin. He always wore those cashmere pullovers. When the weather was particularly cold, he’d wear two, the polo neck beneath reaching almost to his jawline. Maureen wondered whether it felt a little strangling, all that close-knit wool.
Roger had good hair. Dark silver. He kept it cut very short as if he’d served as a soldier and couldn’t quite shake off military st
rictures. Perhaps he had, she thought, amazed to realise that, months on, she knew very little about his background. Why hadn’t she asked?
There’d been a woman, a while back. He’d mentioned her in passing. ‘A good few years,’ he told her, when she asked how long they were together. ‘But that was a thousand years ago,’ he said, then changed the subject.
The scent of the pudding was rising around her. Maureen caught sight of her profile reflected in the kitchen window. She drew back her wide shoulders into a better posture, put her hands on her hips, watched her breasts rise in the glass. She felt an unexpected longing for the shapely waist that had once been hers.
She could see the outline of her hair, brushed into a soft helmet. The dark hanks that had once swooped heavily across her back were long gone. Stop being ridiculous, Maureen thought. A thousand years ago, indeed.
Outside, the sky had turned a pale, flawless blue. Unaccountably, she shivered in the yeasty warmth.
He brought flowers. Deep purple peonies, their petals drawing back from the centre, leaving a creamy cavity open like a surprised mouth.
‘They say this is the last of it,’ he said, brushing epaulettes of snow from the shoulders of his coat.
It had snowed for most of the previous night, and billows had pushed against the kitchen window all day as Maureen cooked. As she closed the hall door, she noticed high mounds forming on either side of the path.
‘They’re beautiful,’ she said, taking the flowers, feeling a sudden gush of shyness. ‘I’ll put them in water straight away, before we sit down.’
‘Not in the Spode, I hope,’ he called after her, and his too-loud voice seemed to bounce down the hall behind her.
Maureen felt a singe of heat in her cheeks. She did not turn. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Of course not.’
She heard Roger stamp the snow from his boots onto the flagstones. He followed her in.
Maureen had always thought the sitting room was beautiful, but now she wasn’t so sure. The expensive furniture she’d bought from Hempsey’s had begun, tonight, to look a little plain. The small drinks table that Gerald had made after he retired seemed rather gauche and unfinished. She was thankful for the few nice pieces of inherited crystal on the bureau. Roger’s eyes had settled on them with an approving, if brief, glance.
His vase looked garish beside the crystal, but it was jolly and bright, and he was gratified to see it there, she felt sure. He would have found the rest of the room colourless, she imagined, as she watched him raise the brandy glass to his lips and stretch his legs towards the fire.
She hadn’t been to his house yet. She looked forward to seeing what it was like, which pieces he prized enough to bring into his own home. She’d wondered about it. But so far she’d always met him at his shop. She didn’t even know where he lived, beyond the fact that it was a few miles out on the other side of town.
She liked calling in to the shop. She’d sit on the floral slipper chair in the corner while Roger served his customers. She’d try to make herself inconspicuous by leafing through books on Edwardian glassware, or that great thick folder with pictures of spoons, nothing else. She’d imagine the families who once sipped and ate from these things. She’d think of the homecomings, the grand dinners. All the clink and clatter across the decades. She’d think, too, of the empty places: the sons lost at war, the daughters lost in childbirth. It made her feel, as antiques always did, a little sad.
She liked hearing Roger discuss a piece of china or silver that had taken someone’s eye. Antiques did not make him sad; their beauty energised him. His big voice always seemed out of keeping with whatever delicate piece he might be handling: the miniature cruet set; that arching spoon in heavy silver; the tiny pink teapot in the window. ‘It’s French, Maureen. Limoges. Lovely piece.’ She liked his commanding presence. Others did, too. The business did well.
But tonight, Roger spoke rather quietly as they sat in her matching, string-coloured armchairs. The dinner had been a triumph. Stilton soup, roast beef in a light jus – he’d had two servings – and the fig pudding, perfect and scented, imported raspberries skirting the edges, a buttery clot of cream sliding in the warmth. A rich, wintry meal. Delicious, if she did say so herself.
Perhaps this is the beginning of something, Maureen thought, as she watched him relax. Not a friendship. Since meeting him at the shop, she felt they’d been friends, although the thought of what happened that first day still made her cringe. She’d been cleaning out cupboards all morning. In the hallway, she’d stacked a little cairn of Gerald’s old things, which she planned to throw away. She felt a jolt of guilt every time she looked at them, but relief, too. Stopping for lunch, she’d taken down the stack of painted dessert plates that were kept in a glass-fronted cabinet. On a whim, she’d wrapped them in a cloth, put them in a flat-bottomed basket, carried them into the village and up the narrow footpath to Kempton Antiques.
She didn’t know why she did this. To get them valued? To sell them? The plates had been in Gerald’s family for years. They’d only been used for special occasions, then carefully handwashed and stacked away. Before Gerald had inherited them, they’d taken pride of place in what had been known to generations of his family as ‘the good cupboard’.
The basket was cumbersome. She’d spotted Roger through the shop window, sitting at a broad, carved desk. He glanced up at her approach. ‘Come in, please,’ he called to her. He had not risen from his chair, but his face was friendly.
Maureen set the basket on the desk without a word, unwrapped the plates with nervous hands. ‘We’ve had these a long time,’ she said, offering no further detail, finding herself overcome with emotion.
Roger gave her a small, encouraging nod. He looked at her for a few seconds before taking up one of the plates, turning it over, turning it back, putting it down. His eyes narrowed into a hard, appraising stare. Then he told her in a kind but firm voice that they were very pretty plates but of no commercial value whatsoever.
She’d stood for a moment, staring down at the stack of floral china, feeling a slight sway, wondering, stupidly, if the floor was giving way. Then she burst into great hiccuping sobs.
Roger could not have been more considerate. He guided her to the slipper chair, where she cried into a series of tissues from a box that he’d placed at her elbow. She tried to compose herself, but when she thought of the long years of reverence for those worthless plates, her life with Gerald also seemed to become something trivial, even bogus.
Roger made her tea in the small kitchen at the back of the shop and brought it to her on a dainty oval tray. ‘Take your time,’ he said. ‘It’s quiet today. Too sunny for antique lovers.’
Maureen had seen people stretched in the sun beside the river as she’d walked into town. Lying prone on the bare grass, they looked like they’d been washed up in a flood.
After her tears subsided, they talked a little. As if to soothe her, he showed her things in the shop he thought particularly beautiful.
‘This is Belleek,’ he said, holding up a large basket-weave bowl, each creamy strand spaghetti thin and perfect. ‘Parian china. From Northern Ireland. Black stamp,’ he’d added, almost in a whisper. ‘There’s nothing,’ he said, shaking his head like a doting father, ‘that could possibly upset the perfection of this piece.’
Maureen had become used to this sort of fervour in the time since.
And now, as she watched Roger lounge before the fire, things seemed different. She was comfortable, that was it. She hadn’t felt like this for a long time. Since Gerald. Tonight, she didn’t feel that aching sense of being uncoupled, the scratch and prickle of eyes judging and pitying. Here in this room, with Roger, she didn’t mind being a widow.
She worried the room was too hot.
‘I grew up in South Africa,’ he said. ‘The hotter the better.’
She’d thought he was English. She found herself liste
ning for the small rasp of accent. It was there. So obvious, now that she knew.
She asked about his family. His father had been an engineer, he told her. A looming, sunburned presence who disappeared into the bush for long periods, building roads and bridges. He had not approved of antiques.
‘Dead people’s stuff,’ Roger said. ‘That’s what he used to call it. He’s dead now, himself, of course. Ten years, I think.’
Something of a relief, Maureen thought. ‘And your mother?’ she asked.
‘She’s been gone a long time,’ he said. ‘Killed in a car accident when I was still at boarding school.’ Maureen was about to speak when he added, ‘She had an eye for beautiful things. Knew quite a lot about antiques, actually. And before you ask,’ he said, irritation rising in his voice, ‘I also have a sister in Germany, but she’s rather strange. We don’t have much contact.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be,’ he said, kindly enough. ‘Anyway, that really was a magnificent meal.’
Although there was no question of it as far as Maureen was concerned, she was shocked to find she kept thinking about sex. Well, not sex, precisely. Nothing that involved her baring herself to him, perish the thought. Just odd flashes of something wonderful: bodies, warmth, happiness. She realised that it was a long time since anyone had touched her. Even a hug. The thought of this, and the tumbling images in her brain, flustered her. Her hands rose and fell in nervous movements. Four years, she thought. Gerald’s been dead for over four years.
They’d had no children. A quiet kind of loss, like a sadness gone missing. One they never discussed in any deep sense. ‘It’s an awful shame, Maureen,’ Gerald had said, when they knew for sure. ‘Such a pity.’ He had hugged her that day, and she’d felt his body galvanise in a great, dry sob before he strode out to the car without another word, leaving her staring into the swirling grain of the kitchen table. They rarely mentioned it again, but the absence of a child sometimes sat between them, solid and immovable.
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