“No fruit or veggies?” Claire asks, scandalised.
“There’s strawberry ice-cream from the shop,” he jokes. He opens the can; its contents emerge with a satisfying whoosh as it plops into the saucepan. He begins heating it but forgets to turn the gas down; it roils along briskly.
“You could grate the cheese, Claire. Grater’s in here,” he indicates the drawer with his foot.
“Parmesan’s in the fridge.” He sets about organising the cutlery drawer while Claire saws at a hard wedge of cheese. Clive pulls out a retro chrome and plastic chair and rests his feet on the chair opposite. He holds his head.
“You okay?” she asks.
“Big day at work. I usually don’t sleep with my women, not sleep, sleep,” he smiles goofily.
“You’re the one that didn’t get away. Don’t worry, I’ll get used to you.” He stares into the distance as if he’s glimpsed an unwelcome vision of his future.
“Listen Clive, we can live together, see how it goes,” says Claire. “Drunken promises don’t…”
"No. You can’t get out of it that easily, Claire. We’re promessi sposi."
“I didn’t know you spoke Italian.”
“We’ve lots to learn about each other. We’ll be okay,” he says flatly.
Does Clive always keep the easier tasks for himself, she wonders. He’s not ‘entertaining’ now, she thinks. Was he ever entertaining? She sniggers at her own silliness. Maybe it will be like this between them for all eternity. She, grating frantically, he, fiddling with cutlery.
Clive makes eternity seem long. He doesn’t talk while cooking. She mentions this.
“What’s to say? We know each other intimately,” he protests.
“We had sex. That’s not ‘knowing’. When Suz and I entertain, we also entertain our friends with stories, set them at ease,” Claire says. Clive studies her face as if he’s trying to read her, a deeply wrinkled ‘v’ above his nose. He doesn’t get it, she thinks. Why would he bother putting anyone at ease?
She feels dispirited. He’s merely a self-centred shit for whom she feels a peculiar attraction. She’ll get over him. Best not tell her parents yet. “That Kristen, who called earlier,” she says, referring to a woman who’d come to visit Clive, “were you dating long?”
“A fortnight. She wanted to be a doctor’s wife. Desperately. But blokes want to win women over. I liked it that you rejected me. But some girls don’t bother. That’s worse than being rejected.”
“I feel like I’m a commodity. As if you bought me with the shopping!”
“No!” He reaches out to pat her on the bottom. “I forgot the shopping. But you! You’re a staple like wheat.”
“I’d rather be a luxury, like chocolate,” says Claire, sighing.
“What do you want from me, Claire? Should I interview you? How much do you enjoy cooking on a one to ten scale?” He adopts a mocking falsetto voice. “Who’s your favourite pop group?”
“Van Morrison! And I’d like some more wine,” she says, sounding angrier than she feels.
“I’d hate to be married to a lush,” he says, but he takes her glass and pours a generous slosh, without spilling a drop and it’s his third tipple at the very least. “To new-fledged lovers!”
They clink glasses while Claire concentrates on spilling neither tears nor shiraz.
Clive swirls the shiraz. “Aerate before tasting,” he says, oblivious of her distress. He gulps greedily. “Ah!” he says, pretending to read the blurb on the bottle. “It’s from the Clare Valley; it has a generous body, and a smoky aroma that stays with you all night long…”
“Ha-ha!” she acknowledges his attempt at humour.
“Listen, I’m not good at talking, Claire. I’m shy,” he admits, pouring more wine. She studies him puzzled. “My only steady girlfriend, Fliss, was in primary school with me.”
“What happened?”
“She came to Melbourne. Couldn’t settle.” He shrugs.
“Thank you. That makes you real, Clive, vulnerable.”
“What’s good about vulnerable? Boys are ‘Strong like King Kong’.” He thumps his chest.
When Claire doesn’t respond, he groans. “My life is about being in control,” he rubs his face.
When he looks up, his eyes are shining with tears.
Clive’s earlier buoyancy has gone. Is he sincere? He can act. She decides to believe him for now. She wants this to work out. Going back to Suz already feels like a retreat. “Thanks for being honest, Clive,” she says.
“I guess,” he shrugs, as if the compliment doesn’t please him. “My brother Alex is my rival; he has no real qualifications. But he gives me one hell of an inferiority complex,” he says.
“Oh, gees!” he says. In losing concentration, he’s burned the tinned spaghetti. Could anything make the prospect of dinner worse? Claire wonders.
“Don’t worry, I’ll steep it in olive oil.” He does so and gives it a whirl in a blender.
Pronounces the brown gloop as good as new.
“Won’t it still taste burnt?” Claire asks.
“Burnt is one of six basic flavours we humans recognise,” he says.
“Yeah, so we can avoid it, surely?” She throws him a derisive look, it’s the best she can manage, her annoyance being so lukewarm. Superlative disdain is for literary lovers whose grand passion has dwindled away. Two nobodies hankering after recreational sex can hardly expect to feel such heightened angst. They’re not Anna Karenina and Vronsky, are they?
Chapter 19
Living with Clive
Last month Claire moved in with a man with a view to marriage. His name is Clive.
Clive St John Smith, although she didn’t know his full name when upon impulse she agreed to their arrangement – a pity he hadn’t been called something unattractive like ‘Puspimple’.
As her first proposal, it was exciting. A month in it feels like Clive has swallowed her whole, an amoeba reproducing in reverse.
Claire’s family in Wang has not been told. She’d promised to finish her course before settling down. She dreads hearing the fake lift in her voice as she convinces her family how gre-at it all is. Claire’s not as besotted as a young woman newly in love should be. The logical part of her brain tells her to scarper, but her sex hormones emit contrary signals.
The trouble is her will’s been sapped. She’s stuck with Clive for now. Love isn’t the heady dizzying state she’d expected. Their union relieves her loneliness somewhat. It’s like she’s a non-driver who’s driven a lorry up a narrow lane and can’t back out ’til doomsday.
She’d fancied she was stepping boldly into her future, when, in reality, she was backing away from independence, burying herself in a family-shaped hole.
At 19 her life had stretched out before her. She’d had chances choices talents to explore.
Does she fear failing at freedom? Is that why she hitched herself to the first half-decent man she encountered? His gallant rescue of her in Collins Street had allowed her to wonder if fate had played a part in their meeting.
Clive has a secret power: he comes bracketed with a ready-made family unit that includes a kind brother and quirky olds. So, Claire, relieved to be retiring from all that demoralising clubbing and pubbing that her friends are resigned to, had stood by paralysed as the rabbit trap of matrimony’s metal teeth closed on her ankle.
It’s gratifying to be needed by someone. But the responsibility of having to save Clive is weighing on her. All that tosh about her curing his ‘loneliness’ was a ploy to mask his real demon: alcohol. Claire had always fantasised about saving lives like the intrepid Nightingale had done. Meanwhile, Clive simply needed her as his unpaid carer. It seems the two are made for each other.
The trouble is: Clive is at his most beguiling and when drinking and playing hail-fellow-well-met with friends. On Saturdays, he’s funny, clever and relaxed. In company, Claire can detect no ugly drunken side to him. Alone, he becomes morose, withdrawn, angry. That he’s able
to deal honestly with Claire she puts down to the fact he reckons she’s no quitter.
Claire understands his disinclination to stop drinking. He’s an amusing drunk. When in party mode, folks are drawn to him. She understands her role in his life: it’s to encourage him to drink a bit less and see he gets home safely when he’s legless. He worries that in giving up or in drinking moderately, people will like him only moderately!
Surely, people have recovered from worse than drinking, Claire thinks. Sometimes she dreams she’s looking in on someone else’s little life, wondering: why does that silly girl imagine her meagre supply of love can save her man? Her dream-self calls out, warning her to run, but frozen in place, she’s overwhelmed by an avalanche.
Claire wants Clive’s parents to like her; as a new couple, they have few to share their joy.
They’re rarely playful at home alone. There’s too much loud TV of a night, too many Taco Bill containers flow from the bin. Claire has given up on trying to persuade Clive to take food seriously. Cook. She’s lowered her standards to fit in with his. There’s too little talking, too little laughter, and bouts of love-making are rationed on work nights. Meanwhile, the drinking of Scotch goes on and on.
Claire mourns the happy coupledom she should have had; there’s no teasing, tickling, being playful. Their progress is seemly, like the passage of a royal carriage when they should be hip-hopping with abandon in the City Square. If not now, when will they be joyous?
Mama summons them to Arcadia. She’s vexed that her favourite son is marrying outside their set. Claire had regarded Clive’s mama as the unshakeable stone in her sandal. Now she wonders if Mama’s disapproval is all that holds them together.
Claire does love Clive. She’s not cleaving to him merely to spite his mama. She likes sleeping with him now that she’s used to him; he smells manly and he’s unfaithful only with Jim Beam; he’s a conscientious medico, a practised flirt, the situation’s novel. She enjoys saving up for bits and pieces that say something about the people she and Clive aspire to be.
She catches nursing colleagues’ envious glances. “If she can snaffle a surgeon, why can’t we?”
“It’s a fluke,” they whisper.
“She’s not even the prettiest,” Nola says.
Mary sticks by Claire loyally. “A clever guy like Clive chose Claire as much for her kindness and sunny nature as for her looks. Men don’t have to be shallow.”
Suz hasn’t recovered from their break-up. She can’t utter Clive’s name, which limits conversation. Her epithet, ‘that man who’s paying me to keep your room empty’, implies he’s crassly buying Claire from Suz and keeping her old room as a bolthole because neither believes they’ll last. Claire thinks this assessment rather mean.
Alex is rarely out of Suzy’s conversation.
“Last night Alex and I went to dinner,” she’ll say. “Chinese. Three chef’s hats!”
But you’re not materialistic, Suz, Claire thinks. “The Flower Drum?” she asks. “What do you two talk about?” Claire asks.
“Shakespeare. Everything. He’s a genius!”
“Shakespeare?”
“Alex.” She sighs deeply at Claire’s inanity. “And next weekend we’re off to Port Fairy.”
“Meeting the parents?” Claire asks, knowing Alex hasn’t mentioned Suz to his parents yet.
These two are always going out. Claire can’t ask Suz whether they’re also staying in.
Tacitly, Suzy marks off the boundaries of their intimacy.
Chapter 20
Meeting the Olds
They turn off the highway at Colac. Clive is taking the long way around to give Claire a feel for the countryside. It’s pretty. Gentle rises fold into one another like egg whites coaxed into a soufflé mix. Drama may be lacking but even tiny slopes yield enticing views of the district.
Despite this, she suspects that over there will look the same as right here does. She remains expectant, moving through the landscape, daring it to surprise.
Actually, it’s not so very different from Wangaratta if you remove the splendour of the Victorian Alps (Although why would anyone do that? Claire wonders). The Victorian Alps are mainly discerned as a eucalyptus haze from Wangaratta. Down here the undulating paddocks’ gentle rises rest against a backdrop of white wintry sky. It’s as if two two-dimensional planes met at the horizon, where they’d been sewn together at a right angle, like scenery in black and white movies, with clumps of mid-range verticals: stands of gums and scrub. The vegetation flanking the creek banks looks to have been daubed in at a later stage.
Australia must have been a shock for the squatters with their Anglophile sensibilities, she thinks. But they couldn’t have helped loving this corner of Victoria. Passing through this pretty landscape Claire finds it rather complacent. Clive stays silent, hoping to entice gasps of admiration from her. He gets tired of waiting, turns to her and asks: “Well? Do you like it?”
“Yes, it’s very…scenic. Nice.” She doesn’t want him to get too conceited.
“Nice.” Clive’s disappointed. “It may not be the Victorian Alps, but I love it,” he says.
“Of course, you do,” she replies, rubbing his arm comfortingly.
“Here it is.”
“What?”
“The hamlet of Smithfield. There’s not a lot of it, so don’t blink. It’s got a church, the pub, the Mechanics Institute, a general store, a garage, a small hardware, and an artist has set up shop in the old bakery. Mama hates anything that brings tourists in. Oh, and there’s a primary school and a Greek fish and chip shop, with real booths.”
“Your mother would hate a chippy, wouldn’t she?”
“Not at all. Con is happy to deliver to Arcadia on Bonnie’s days off. Saves the two of them setting fire to the place while heating up their baked beans.”
“Oh, I was expecting roast beef down here.”
“Not if Bonnie’s away. Look: here’s the sign, population 151. But the Evans are expecting.”
“Why so precise?”
“If you have a baby in the middle of the night, you’d better be out there with a can of paint by morning. It’s a two-teacher primary school,” he says. “They need every kid they can get on their register to keep the second teacher. There’s a rumour that kids who leave school never really ‘leave’, if you know what I mean.”
Claire thinks she knows, but she can’t shake the sinister image of a necklace of tiny skulls threaded on strings and decorating a blackboard.
A hundred metres further on, they take a right turn through a rusted wrought iron gateway and clank over a cattle grid leading to an avenue of tall poplars and stately banks of cedars sheltering Clive’s family home, which is known around here as the ‘mock gothic pile’. From here it reminds her of the Great Hall of Montsalvat in Eltham, where Clive had taken her for a drive one Sunday.
Clive stops the car and lowers the car roof, so they can make their entrance in high style.
“But my hair!” she protests.
“No point in having a convertible if you don’t convert.”
The drive terminates in a porte cochere. She asks Clive how it’s spelt. The drive’s turning circle has an arrow indicating one should keep right.
They pull up short of the porte-whatever – it isn’t raining – not yet and here, out in the open, the Sin Sens (his olds) will get an eyeful of Clive’s gorgeous new…fi…car.
Claire hopes it’s her they’re looking at as they start raving: “How utterly gorgeous! What curves! You get what you pay for in this life,” says Clive’s mama. “So sleek! Top notch. A conveyance worthy of my son. And such a sleek chassis! What’s its cc?”
“Is she paid for yet?” This is Clive’s papa and he is grinning pointedly at Claire, saying this.
He’s kidding, but she doesn’t know whether to glare or smile.
“Daarling, you’ve come a long way from your Volkswagen days,” says his mama. “Let’s hope this one serves you as well. What’s her name?”
“Moneypenny!”
“What did you pay for the 007 plates?” Clive’s papa asks.
“Enough,” he says. “She’s pretty, and she’s built to last,” says Clive, putting his arm around Claire. “Mama, Dada, this is Claire, my new fiancée, who runs beautifully.”
Claire doesn’t like word ‘new’, but at least he is claiming ownership of her. She clambers out of the car eager to greet the Sins and to be first to offer them her hand like the queen does.
But Clive remains transfixed; he seems to have become involved with his conveyance at a profound level.
“Some chassis the lass has, even better than the car’s!” exclaims Hal. “Good long legs so I assume she’s a fast woman.”
Claire doesn’t begrudge Clive’s papa his innuendo, seeing he’s approving of her.
“Da, show some respect for Claire,” Clive says in a facetious tone. He runs his fingers across the wood-grain dashboard but his shoulders are shaking with laughter.
Dada moves awkwardly down the terrace steps to the car. Claire diagnoses a skeletal problem of some sort. “I’m Hal,” he says. “Delighted to meet you, Claire dear. Welcome to the family. Pardon my sense of humour; it’s a little outré.” His eyes smile, saying this.
“Of course. May I call you Hal?” Already Claire likes him. She shakes the tiny paw he offers her; he raises her hand to his lips in a courtly way. He’s a tortoise emerging from his shell. Sweet and benign.
Mama is built like a front-end loader; she’s dolled up like Queen Elizabeth in a ram’s horn hairdo that’s lacquered heavily.
Claire’s judging her unkindly but the Sins are having too much fun with her.
Cynthia wears a paisley-printed one-size-fits-all jersey frock. She favours Claire with a smile that seems about to turn into a burp, but once it resolves itself, she receives a brisk handshake, and a howdy-do. Then she turns and spreads herself over her firstborn – he’s still immobilised in his car – like margarine on toast. She pries his hand from the gear stick before giving him a kiss that lands wetly on the lips!
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