Cyn’s often in the kitchen. It’s beside the lounge – my sick bay. Bonnie’s being overwhelmed with help.
In Alex’s demeanour, I see nothing beyond what’s brotherly but there’s a humming in the air between us as if we’re connected by an invisible string that vibrates subtly.
Returning from the beach that day, we decided to bide our time.
Alex has an opinion on everything. I raise topics to challenge him. “Alex, I say, I can’t heal until you’ve taught me all you know.”
“Okay, I’ll up my erudition a notch each day, so you’ll never quite catch up. Then you’ll need me forever.” I can’t help blushing at this romantic notion. “Scheherazade with a pony tail,” he says, “concocting tales to fascinate or I’ll lose my head. Too late, I’ve lost it already.”
Reluctantly, he plays with his prototype upending spine-extending chair; he’ll apply for a Design Council grant once the idea coalesces. Now he’s distracted by thoughts of me! Is he really? I hope so, and I dread it equally. I receive one hour a day from Cynthia so the ratio of Alex’s company to her bossiness is 4:1. Happy ratio? No. Cyn delivers her hour of lavender scented malice most efficaciously.
Example:
“Claara,” Cynthia calls, “I’m frying bacon. There’s room in the pan for you.” She materialises in the lounge, in a pink candlewick dressing gown, matching rollers, her face is flushed from the Aga.
“Oops,” she says putting her hand over her mouth to simulate regret at her ill-chosen words. “Silly me!”
She taps her temple, miming a level of idiocy that we both know she doesn’t possess. The corners of her mouth droop in mimicry of a clown face. “You can’t eat bacon. The Belgian lace is for a hand-span waist.”
Bonnie barges into this exchange. “Now, Cyn, there are too many thin girls. It’s a downhill race to become a broomstick or dead, and all for some shallow man.”
Cynthia looks fed-up.
“Surely, Clive enjoys Claire’s curves,’” says Bonnie.
“No smutty talk, dear.”
Alex drops in with kindling for the firebox. “Two streaky bacon DNA twists for you my girl plus a big fat fried egg.” He heads towards the kitchen.
“Remember how I had to lace you up on your wedding day,” says Bonnie. “And you passed out.”
How does Bonnie get away with her cheek?
“Bonnie,” I ask, “were you here when Hal and Cynthia married?”
“Yes, I started at 17. I knew Hal well” – she pauses a second here – “before Cyn came on the scene.”
I tense up, awaiting Cyn’s retort to B’s claim of prior knowledge of Hal. Cynthia’s mouth sets in a hard line but she says nothing.
“Poor Cynthia,” I say. “You must have felt like a cow being crushed by her own ribs.”
Cynthia inhales, examines her image in the mirrored sideboard. “Ideally, you’re too tall for Clive,” she says, parry for thrust.
“Better go in and get my legs shortened,” I say. Bonnie laughs raucously.
“Alex is making you a bacon sandwich,” Ma says. “Enjoy now. Grieve later. At least exercise your arms.” She wheels hers as if semaphoring her witches’ coven.
Aromas invade the drawing room. Cynthia trundles off to supervise as fast as her Hush Puppies allow.
1 Ma: 0 Claire!
Clive and I mouth platitudes during phone calls. Lots of platitudes like, ‘missing you, hon’, ‘take care’, ‘keep your chin up’.
“Bought any new silk duvets recently?”
“Turned your face into a pav yet?” Clive retorts.
“Don’t drink horizontal on the sofa. It’ll cure your hiccups by killing you, Hon!”
“I’m learning to write with my foot,” he says, and I laugh so loud, Cyn comes in to see what’s up.
“Good to hear you two getting on,” she says.
I don’t know enough about Clive to ease our conversations along. Clive and I have spent a total of nine hours talking since we met. No wonder we’re awkward. Our love is too recent to have evolved its own catch phrases. Born hurriedly, it already needs mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Any free time we had was spent drinking, eating, snogging, but rarely talking.
So, if I don’t know my fiancé’s concerns, blame hospital timetabling. Does Clive vote Liberal? Read classics? Barrack for Collingwood? Read philosophy? Asked what existed before the ‘Big Bang’, he’d said, “Whoever thinks he knows the meaning of life is a wanker.” It was our longest spurt conversation yet!
Despite my delinquent obsession with A, I’m torn. I’ve a duty to try loving Clive, knowing ‘duty’ and ‘love’ shouldn’t exist in the same sentence. I doubt I ever I loved him, but I can’t let him go yet.
Here in the country it’s hard to keep Clive in the forefront of my mind, A being so, so…I need an omni word here. I’ll leave a gap…A wouldn’t need to. He’d know the word already; Clive wouldn’t care.
Clive is sure life has no meaning. A is sure he doesn’t know. But he speculates, wonders, mulls.
Mama’s more likely to gull than mull. She drops rocks into the tranquil well of my peace of mind via anecdotes about Fliss et al Clive’s other gels. She trumpets their riding exultant to hounds. Asks: “Claire, do you ride? Oh, silly me, it’s why you’re in that horrid cast, fallen before the first hedge.”
As far as soundings of my heart go, presence trumps abscess, oops, absence, every time. A bird in the hand in the bush is worth an aviary of peacocks in Melbourne town.
Now I can wheel myself from the lounge room through the kitchen to the conservatory, where I lie on a daybed, trying to summon up the image my fiancé’s face. All I can retrieve is a caricature of Clive’s moon-face, the corners of his mouth quirking up in a crazed grin while he picks pasta ears off his bosom apron, whistling through them before swallowing them. Was I ever that girl? The middle of his face is empty; thinking of him brings on macular degeneration in me. The skylarking, so funny that night, seems totally naff now.
Dada is an angel. I can’t fault him. He guesses the complexity of my feelings towards his sons, and though I chatter fatuously about how great it is that Clive’s coming down soon, and how we’ll have more fun than anyone’s had with three legs between them, Dada shakes his head, smiles sadly, eases himself out of his armchair and heads to the sideboard for another Scotch. And it’s not even teatime.
Mama guesses something’s not right. She studies me with puzzlement. “You don’t mind Alex helping you to the lav?” she’ll ask, squinting at me. "Nursing toughens you gels up."
I smile sweetly. "We all have bums, and they all need wiping and I’m capable of doing that alone.
“How lucky that A’s here to lift the chair over the uneven floors. You with your frozen shoulder…”
Mama frowns. “Marriage to a professional is like having an absentee spouse, you know,” she’ll say. “Early in my marriage Hal was always off at dawn to assess bridge stress in peak hours. He’d buy a cold pie. I’ve no doubt Da was off early home late – he’d assess stress levels brought on by the prospect of Ma’s cold collation.”
“I’m throwing myself headlong into my career,” I say.
“So, you are going on with nursing?”
My bowels clench. My diary! When A. took me to the old volcano, she…! I can’t think about it!
I smile sweetly and grind my teeth. Failure to react to her malice is near-criminal. What if she knew her prize ram had been superseded by the black sheep? She’d be glad Clive’s been saved for Fliss, perhaps.
Chapter 40
Cyn at Church
If guests can diarise, then so can I. I took Claire to church today. I’d planned to ‘church’ her last Sunday but she fell from ’Beau Fils’ instead. I was just leaving when I heard piteous cries and phoned for an ambulance while the boys made a makeshift gurney and carried her in.
Did God, moving mysteriously, have anything to do with Claire’s fall? I mean, who falls from a near-stationary horse without divine int
ervention?
Home now, Claire has been resisting my attempts to raise her religious profile; she’s an atheist one day, an agnostic next, Buddhist in the evening. Just as I’m throwing up my metaphorical hands, I resort to the insider info discovered within the pages of her diary to give me an insight into Claire’s state of mind.
“You know, dear,” I say, “a dose of church might be the thing to help you decide.”
She flushes at the word ‘decide’. “Decide what, Cynthia?”
“Decide upon your future,” I say, leaving it vague.
“Oh, Cynthia, I’m giving up on…”
“Marrying?” I ask.
“Nursing,” she says, unready to confess her feelings for Alex yet. “I want to write.”
“Goodness,” I say, appearing surprised. “Does Clive know?”
Claire looks so miserable, I’d give her a hug but it wouldn’t be the thing, so I keep my arms folded across my chest.
“Clive will be displeased, but you must follow your heart.”
“Yes,” she says, looking frantic.
“Writing’s an urge,” I say. “And a woman must follow her urges – I mean the decent ones.”
“Cynthia,” she says eventually. “Perhaps I will come to church.”
Poor girl. Brought up in a loving family of the sort that leaves one as vulnerable as shelled snails in a Parisian restaurant.
Alex shakes his head. He thinks she’s capitulating, but he pushes the wheelchair onto the turning circle Hal supplies with quartz so it won’t revert to a bog.
I’m wearing my favourite hat, all brim but little crown. One needs a crown in today’s gale. I clamp it to my head, leaving me one hand for the wheelchair. Alex calls: “Ma, lose the silly hat!”
But I battle on, praying it’ll stay in place. It’s a ‘picture’ hat. Supposed to set my face off, though with this horrid horizontal wind, its brim decrees that I walk hunched over like a crone or end up in a pothole. In church I’ll have to throw back my head with sunflower-like abandon to be seen.
“Claire,” I say, “do your bit or we’ll get bogged.” The gel has strong arms so we make decent progress.
The church is a tent pitched in a windstorm. In consecrating this makeshift edifice, God was evidently trialling environmentally suitable building styles. Wise of Him not to waste bluestone on a site that mightn’t ‘take’ since it adjoins the ugly BP.
We brave the scrum of Marconis – the father Italian, the wife Maureen, Irish. They assemble in the forecourt in long woollen coats. Why not talk later while masticating their Aberdeen Angus lumps of beef as big as plates? Maureen hails me – we’re neighbours now.
The warmth of my response is congruent with Christianity – just.
I settle Claire into the aisle beside my pew. The organist plays, Shall We Gather at the River?
Claire’s a rock-like obstruction in the river of life. We’d have been better at the end of the row but fewer congregants would then have seen Clive’s pretty fiancée. The pew’s heated rail is my footrest, and I allow its warmth to percolate up through my skirt.
It’s a loose silk undies day today, but God doesn’t need to know this. What would the minister think? It’d give him a blush to go with his stammer.
Once I’m sure nothing of interest will be said, I slump into alert semi-consciousness.
Who needs Alex’s yogi vouchers with church so close? It’d be a waste of petrol travelling to observe cheesecloth and ashes hippies contort themselves into pretzels. I remove the hatpin, confident it won’t be needed, despite Mr Preeps being a windbag and needing a little prick. The boys would be shocked to see the bawdy side of their Mama. Hal wouldn’t. Each generation thinks it invented naughtiness.
Now I assume an attitude of gratitude in hopes of His beatitude. I’ve a pencil handy to jot that down. I never waste felicitous phrases.
The McCance/Marconis in their shiny suits haven’t a clue; it’s the holes and patches in Hal’s worsted jackets that make a gent of him.
And now it’s all things wise and wonderful. All fur trims, great and small. All coats come from Georges. Draped bodices for all. He loves things teal and shapeless. He made our twin-sets wool. Hooray for pearls and opals. Hooray for horse-brass scarves…
Wearing a full fur coat (a little arriviste), Gwen sweeps in late on the arm of big bluff square-jawed Len Law. Handsome pair! They’re like the awful Whitlams as to bearing. I’m honoured they’ve befriended me! Oops! No, it’s the other way around. I raise my suede-gloved arm in greeting. Such an aura of health comes from wealth or good sex, although if that were true, Maureen Marconi would look like Lady Muck. She catches sight of my fluttering fingers, and waves frenziedly. I cover my mouth as if to say: ‘not waving, yawning’. I must discourage Maureen, or we’ll be invited over for margaritas soon.
At last the minister spreads words of comfort over us like margarine on Granny Davis bread in a voice that suggests he’s juggling marbles near his epiglottis. Restrained piety is the note I aim for. Doctrinally, I feel a knot of grievance tighten in my chest when the minister reads inflammatory Pauline passages. St Paul has turned me into a blamey feminist! One morning, I twisted around, expecting to see faces contorted in scowls of an intensity similar to my own but the flock was busy wool-gathering, except for Gwenda, whose glower of pain and rage was remarkable.
Much later, after we’d befriended the Laws, I learned that Gwenda used prunes to alleviate bowel complaints and although striving to coordinate her ‘voidance’ with her churchgoing, sometimes the parson’s oration cued the prunes in to make a break for freedom – just when she could not. Her anguish was hard to conceal, given clenching of facial muscles among others.
Gwen made this confession to me while taking cognac one night, after a dinner party; hearty laughter cemented our friendship.
On the day in question, Gwenda hadn’t a clue she’d been taken for a rebel. Over a cup of tea in the Sunday school, I grumbled about ‘that awful man’ and Gwenda, thinking I meant the parson, laughed aloud as she too found him a bore. Thus, deep friendships may flourish even in the meagre soil of misunderstanding!
Gwenda was pleased to be singled out by me. A pharmacist, Gwen had remained friendless for want of suitable candidates. I, too, despite community work, was one friend short of the full complement, so the friendship suits us both.
Despite the misunderstanding at its bottom (tch! how wickedly the sub-conscious mind works), Gwenda was elated, indeed elevated, to be singled out by Hal and me. She had little time for gentry before we took her up. As for me, I’m glad to be chums with such a sensible, unpretentious woman from the middle classes.
Just as Mr Preeps is beseeching the Lord to “Be with us and remain with us in the week to come”, the heavens open and there’s an almost tropical downpour. An excess of drumming and thrumming on the corrugated iron roof – comforting when comfortably curled up with one’s hottie – bodes ill; is God reviling this, His measly church hall?
I call for help in manoeuvring the wheelchair towards the hall. Some young ones oblige. I exit with “Lead kindly light amid the encircling gloom” ringing in my ears. Maudlin, these non-conformist hymns. It reminds me to change the batteries of the bedroom torches.
Blast! The walk downhill has done for my ankle. Now a word in Gwen’s ear.
“Gwennie, thank God!”
“I’d hug you but my limb has been commandeered,” whispers Gwenda, trying to disconnect from Maureen McCance/Marconi Her Octopussyness.
“You seem liverish, Gwen. Is it your usual theological issue?”
We laugh. “I’m fine, Cyn. None of us is getting any younger,” Gwen says.
I wish she wouldn’t use platitudes. It’s Toastmasters for Gwen. “I’ve a brainwave,” I say. “I won’t disturb you and your new pal.” I poke my tongue out at Maureen’s back.
“What’s up, Cyn?” she asks.
“You’re invited to lunch. I’ve solved Clive’s romantic problems, ours as well.”
“Didn’t know you were having romantic problems, Cynthia. The thing is we’re invited to the Marconis’ for lunch and as you didn’t invite us this week, we’d no excuse.” She bunches her mouth up as if trying to shrink it to a pinhole.
Chapter 41
Post-Church Lunch
Thanks to the heavens opening, GwenLen, guilty about lunching with the McCance’s, drive Claire and Cynthia home. Rain has made the road’s narrow shoulders deadly, and Claire’s accident has left her with a sense of dread. Her former love of novelty has gone; change no longer means happy excursions into the unknown; exciting adventures are likely to become exiting adventures. She’s too young to die; she’d hate to see anyone she loved getting hurt or bogged.
Does this include Cynthia? Has their joint church going bonded them? Has their zizzing off side by side made her feel cosy as if she’d crept into bed of a Sunday morning with her mum?
Pew!
Claire admires the masculine efficiency of Len as he lifts her into the front seat, snaps the wheelchair shut and packs it in the boot. Gwenda holds her brolly over Cyn while she climbs into the back. They join a queue of cars going nowhere fast. Len must be driving by radar as visibility’s zero.
“You’d think some of them would drop into the Parthenon for lunch to ease the traffic jam,” says Cyn, employing the self-serving logic she’s known for. She herself would never be seen dead in a Greek Chippy, though she sends Bertie down for supper on pension day. It amazes Claire that folks who own broad acres can draw a pension.
They laugh about God orchestrating inclement weather in order to cause maximum inconvenience for His flock. Does He disapprove of them so much He must begin to punish them immediately? On the slow drive home, they speculate about what has displeased Him. “I reckon someone’s committed one of the Seven Deadly Sins,” says Len. “Which one, Cynthia?”
“Adultery,” she says. “Those Marconis didn’t come by stork.”
“Now, Cynthia, be nice! We’re going there for lunch. My money is on avarice,” says Len.
Falling into Place Page 17