“Girlie,” Cynthia calls from the doorway; she’s in such a state she’s forgotten Claire’s name.
“Ye-es?”
“Ah. You drive a little, don’t you, dear?”
“I’m not licensed,” Claire says.
“But you do drive on farm tracks?”
“Only in emergencies.” Reflexively, Claire has backed the wheelchair well into the reference nook.
“Good, because we’ve an emergency. I’ll be needing you at the lecture, my dear.”
Cyn cuts off Claire’s protest, signalling like a traffic cop. “Gwen was suppo-osed” – she grants this word an elongated vowel to emphasise Gwen’s treachery in catching a cold on the very day she was to have helped. “Me?” Cyn shrugs. “Colds won’t ground me. No wonder Gwen’s sick. Lunching in rainsqualls on dubious food. I don’t get it, her namby-pamby policy of always being agreeable.”
“Some people are just nice. It’s not a policy,” Claire says.
An expression ripples across Cynthia’s face like a cloudbank briefly reflected in a lake. She thinks Claire vexing, and Gwenda a dill. If only everyone’s storm warnings were as easy to read as Cynthia’s, Claire thinks. Then she’d be an excellent writer; then she’d understand people and their inner thoughts and motivations! “But Cynthia, unlicensed driving’s a crime,” she protests.
“This so-called ‘crime’ will require you merely to steer. And to apply the brake occasionally. It’s well away from prying eyes, despite running alongside the best public gardens in the district.”
“It’s stealing,” Claire bleats, knowing she sounds as pathetic as a new-born lamb.
“It’s borrowing cuttings. No one will see you,” Cyn says, a politician answering questions she’s not been asked. “Only horticulture students go there. Von Mueller founded the Gardens.”
“And he’s too dead to tell on you,” says Claire.
“True, and Hal established the pinetum. I maintain the metal edging around the flowerbeds. Hardy perennials need segregating from pretty annuals. Mustn’t be overrun by the wrong sort.”
Am I the wrong sort? Claire wonders.
“Girlie, I’m merely borrowing flora I planted!”
“So, you’ll return plants after use, then?”
“Don’t be facetious. Your job is to roll downhill in neutral while I scavenge.”
“Steal?”
“Tosh! You’ll brake occasionally. It’s illegal by default to ignore a runaway car gone out of control.”
“But, nicking plants!”
“I’m withdrawing deposits made into the Botanicals over eons. How lucky that your left leg was broken,” says Cynthia, smiling beatifically. “I’m merely requisitioning your good leg.”
“I suppose my accident was fated so you’d win the Ikebana comps?” says Claire.
Cynthia frowns and approaches Claire like a wildcat about to pounce on its prey. She releases the handbrake, draws the wheelchair out, pushes it through the double doors onto the lawn, where the Bentley’s been run up over the bluestone edging for a quick get-away.
Cyn pushes her over the lawn by wrenching the chair this way and that to by-pass the larger stones.
Claire feels she’s been commandeered by an Amazon and not the feeble woman who needed help getting her to church recently. In three shakes of a lamb’s tail, Claire’s belted in, and they’re over the wall! Cyn pulls up in the turning circle and examines Claire. “Fix your hair, dear. It’s lank and greasy.”
Claire twists her hair into a knot…She refuses Cynthia’s cyclamen lipstick though.
They travel in silence. The countryside is beautiful despite the weather threatening to turn or perhaps because of it.
The queer yellow light directs a corona of golden spars beneath banks of cloud. Stands of she-oaks are lashed by wind-gusts that disturb the frill-clad paperbarks. They line creek-banks along their route. The trees’ bark looks like it’s been ripped, torn, then roughly stuck back on by infant hands.
Cynthia drives, her face pressed up against the windscreen as if inclining forward will get them there sooner. “Remember, Claire, this is me pruning my own garden,” she says.
Cynthia could wrestle her way out of an iron box under water while handcuffed and emerge, her do undamaged, Claire decides. “How else could I keep ahead of the pack without purloining the occasional fine old botanical specimen, dear? Who has a stupendous dogwood in their grounds?”
“You do.”
“Yes. And I’d never savage my heritage trees. Just imagine the shame of losing to a cream-brick unit; me with my advantages! We’ll be late but the girls enjoy unstructured time to compare hubbies’ prostates. They want Clive down for a talk.”
“Clive must get his surgery hours up,” Claire insists. “And he failed an exam, Cynthia.”
Cynthia regards Clive as a facile genius who needn’t study because he’s of ‘The Elect’.
Claire knows how hard he struggles to do moderately well.
They stop beside ‘Hal’s’ pinetum. Even a novice garden lover like Claire can admire the clever planting; the various species’ profiles blend aesthetically to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Spindly casuarinas are clumped together; nevertheless, their wispy outlines make them seem pencilled in. Claire wishes she had the vocabulary to describe the beauty before her.
While Cynthia forages, she gets out, tests her bad leg. It’s stronger. She feels her health and strength returning. The world looks rosier. She’s happy suddenly. She doesn’t want to trust this feeling; joy can be fleeting. But in this instant, she realises she loves Alex; she resolves to tell him so as soon as possible.
There’s a yoo-hooing of private school voices echoing from the gardens, and Alex emerges from a thicket of trees with Fliss. They look scruffy. Leaves are clinging to their hair.
Chapter 44
After the Botanical Gardens
After the Botanicals, neither Cynthia nor Claire feels up to a CWA meeting. Cyn phones the town hall from a payphone to apologise, muttering in her mouth full of marbles voice about family troubles. At the café, she vets other patrons in case she knows someone.
Seated at last, her shoulders slump. “Claire, you are a dear girl, but you lose your heart too easily.” She fans her face with a napkin. “You don’t know which twin has the Toni, do you?”
What’s the Toni? Claire wonders. Ah! She remembers. It was in an ad from her Mum’s childhood for a home permanent product! Cyn’s judgement of her as indecisive would be spot on, except for a brief interval – 17 ½ minutes ago – when she’d decided in favour of Alex. But before she’d had a chance to tell him so, he’d turned up with Fliss, looking sheepish at the questions in her eyes. And she’d retreated into indecision.
“Fliss wants to marry one of my sons, too; no, not two.” Cyn raises two fingers. “I mean too, also,” she shakes her head at the treachery of English. “Now, despite the touching scene in the Botanicals, I can assure you Alex isn’t interested in Felicity. Fliss loves Clive. Very much.”
“But Cynthia, you don’t want me to marry either son. You and I…We don’t…get on.”
“I may seem like hard toffee to break one’s teeth on, dear, but deep down I’m a soft centred Polish sweet that seems hard but collapses in the middle.”
“I hadn’t thought of you as lolly,” Claire says. Her hand goes to her mouth to stifle a giggle.
Cynthia bares a run of teeth with a dash of lipstick on them. “If you want a son of mine then marry the one you want and not the one you don’t want out of guilt. Follow your heart and the sums will come out right.”
“The one I want?” says Claire, astonished that her feelings are so transparent. And even more surprised that Mama would accept the jilting of her favourite with such sang-froid. “Don’t you mean the one I’m spoken for, Clive?”
“Not necessarily. Don’t look shocked, dear. Marriage isn’t about romance, it’s pure maths. Take one son, his ideal partner, add them together and multiply by
two and you end up with two happy couples.” She shakes paired fingers on each hand at Claire. “But if one son misses out on his ideal mate, you’re left with a mediocrely happy couple plus two sad loose ends.” Here she joins together both index fingers and lets her middle fingers curl sadly. “Now Claire, there’s group happiness and individual happiness. No one’s happy when his clan is unhappy.”
Cynthia stares at her as if boring holes into Claire’s pupils. “I warmed to you for standing up to Alex over church. You’re strong. Alex’s rustic charm belies his strong will. The decision is for you and the boys to mate, make, but Clive and Fliss have been friends forever…” Cyn shrugs.
“And Clive inherits Arcadia right next door to Fliss’ property,” Claire is moved to say – the words having formed themselves into a sentence without her help. Where did the piecing together of these disparate pieces of information occur? Did the words queue up on the tip of her tongue, forming a theory on their own? Maybe some ideas do creep up on us invisibly like an infection, so there’s no absolute not-knowing to them, no sharp borders around them.
This idea must have been growing within her like Bonnie’s mung beans in their gauze-covered jar. Add water and a germ of potential life turns into something nourishing. Claire wonders was she influenced by her talk with Fliss that first evening upon learning that the plucky gel had taken on her parents’ debt. A solution was obvious even to an outsider like her: Fliss’ property and the Sins’ being adjacent, their amalgamation would enrich both parties, council permitting. At the ball Hal said their land was too small for development. Had her brain unwittingly figured out a solution to the Sins’ dilemma? The same solution Cyn had worked out too?
Why not? Why should she begrudge Clive, Fliss, Cyn and Hal their lucky win at Monopoly?
Let them end up happy and rich. She’d go back to square one. She’d not been so unhappy there the first time around. And if, in withdrawing from the contest, painlessly disengaging from a man she doesn’t love and his brother, whom she oughtn’t love, she could save their family, then, all the better. With the slate wiped clean, she’ll have endured a pointless feeling fest but at least she’ll have gained a wealth of experience.
Cynthia’s face flushes redder than a Rothko. She fixes Claire with a sharp look. “Have you been going through my papers, dear?”
“Me, Cynthia? Never! Though I wonder if you are planning to do something funny with wills.”
Cynthia shows her disdain for this comment by ignoring it. “Ah, coffee.” The waitress sets the pot down. “And how did you feel upon seeing Alex and Fliss together earlier, dear?” Cyn asks, keen to probe Claire’s feelings while they’re raw.
“I felt awful for Suz,” Claire fibs.
“Hm!” Cyn says, her head shaking, her mouth twisting wryly. “Suz was a red herring. We both know that. But I’ve seen the way he looks at you.”
“You have?” Claire’s gobsmacked at Cyn’s perspicacity. “But Suz talks about Alex constantly,” Claire protests disingenuously.
“She’s trying to make you jealous. You could be made jealous over Alex, I suppose?”
Cynthia pours the coffee and examines Claire shrewdly.
Claire blushes up through Cynthia’s turtle-necked naphthalene smelling cast-off sweater. “Possibly,” she mumbles. “No, you deserve the truth. I could be…I am a bit…”
“Ah, the truth!”
“I love Alex. Today I felt sure until I saw him with…”
Cyn flaps her hand emphatically. “Loose ends. Just loose ends. He’s been friends with Fliss since kinder. If he needed someone to talk to, who better? Alex may be feeling hurt to see you wobbling all over the place, trying to decide.”
She beckons the waiter. “We ordered scones!”
“So, sorry, Ma-am, the scones are ready now and another coffee is complimentary.” Cynthia appears as happy to receive free coffee as the queen to inherit a new castle.
“You look pretty, flushed,” Cyn says. “You’ll make a lovely bride. The question is, whose?”
“I was happy before I met Clive. I had my work…”
“But you’re giving up your work as well as Clive. Nursing’s a perfect calling for a gel! You are a contrarian like me when young. I wanted to be an airwoman,” says Cynthia. “I had to face facts.”
“You’d have been a good pilot, Cynthia,” Claire says. “You’ve got the nerve for it.”
“Are you saying I’ve a hell of a nerve?”
Claire smiles at this unexpected evidence of humour in Cynthia. "Nursing doesn’t engage me fully. I’m not passionate about it.
“It’s not enough to start things so you can give things up, Claire. Writing’s a pastime. I’ve spent my life doing community work. Hal and I support an orphanage in Vietnam. I don’t tell people this…”
But you have just now, Claire thinks, but says nothing. It hits her how hopeless it all is.
She bows her head and weeps. Mid tear-fall, she realises her crying sounds uncannily like hysterical laughter. She starts to laugh in earnest. It’s cathartic.
Cyn’s arm snakes across the table to give her hand a squeeze just as a plate of scones thumps onto the table and the consequent spillage means any chance for a tender moment between her and Cynthia has been squandered.
“Listen dear,” Cyn says, leaning in as close as her shelf of a bosom allows. “You’re alone too much now Alex is focusing on his wood-work.”
She means, ‘now that he’s tired of you’, Claire thinks. Alex’s pretext for staying at Arcadia after the accident was to help-out and to design a chair from which to hang upside down and stretch one’s spine upon.
“What about your little friend Mary, who’s so bubbly on the telephone? Could she spare you a few days?”
“Maybe.”
“Then call her, Claire. You need someone to talk to.”
“Thank you, Cynthia. I shall.”
“I’d be most interested to see your writing.” She gives her tea a thorough stir, clunking the spoon against the china. “Cheap tea set,” she says, “doesn’t clink.”
Chapter 45
Mary Comes
Mary’s fed up with exam prep. “Sure, I’ll come,” she says.
Next day they argue about who’ll pick her up from the station. “Not you, Alex, dear, you’re susceptible to the fairer sex just now,” says Cyn.
“But what about the less fair sex?” he says.
Mama won’t answer. Claire disguises her laughter, hiccoughing. Alex gives her a gentle whack on the back and although its intent is practical, she enjoys the contact. She now realises Fliss was merely counselling Alex in the gardens. Regarding her, Claire!
“What’s wrong with having female friends? Ma? You were suspicious of me and Fliss. But, nothing doing. We got talking on the grass.” Alex jiggles his ute keys at Claire. “Let’s go. It’s the 2.00 pm.”
“Alex,” she asks, when they’re in the ute. “I need money for…things.”
“What?”
“Stuff my brothers won’t buy me.”
“‘Hygiene items’?”
“Mm,” she says. Eight weeks is late for Claire. She experiences a pulse of fear.
“Hm,” he looks at her speculatively. “Well, I’m glad I’m not your brother.” He rubs his eyes with the heel of his hand. “That would be intolerable.” He engages first gear.
“It’ll be a squash in here with Mary,” she says.
“Slide across,” he stops at the road and eases her along until their bodies are aligned. Claire smiles. Alex too. He turns to her and grins hugely. “Glad you’re back, Clarabelle. I was…” He raises his hand then lets it drop. “Jealous. I’m an idiot.”
“I said nice things about you on the phone,” Claire says.
“I know. Mama was listening on the extension.”
“Thank God she’s a snoop.”
“She still hopes Clive and Fliss will get back together.”
“You should have trusted me.” She pounds her fist upon h
is thigh.
“Can’t you say you love me without resorting to violence?”
“I do,” Claire protests.
“What?”
“Love you.”
“More than Clive?”
“More than Clive loves you? Probably,” Claire says, teasing. “Of course, I do! Hang on, Alex, Something fishy is going on. Ma’s spent a month keeping us apart. What’s changed?”
He shrugs. “It’ll be about money.”
“Mm. Cyn no longer cares whom I love. She’ll have her reasons.” As they’re about to pull onto the highway a sleek car slows. It’s Gwenda with Maureen.
“Alex,” she says, restraining his hand, “we’ve been seen!”
“Let’s give Gwenda something to talk about.” He turns towards her and kisses her whole-heartedly on the lips. Mid-kiss, he pulls away to wave. Gwen and Maureen return the wave gleefully as they glide by in the Lamborghini. “See, kissing spreads goodwill,” he says.
“And gossip. How do we dump Suz and Clive painlessly, Alex?”
“Impossible. Come on. Let’s get girlfriend number two.”
“Do let Suz down gently, Alex.”
“There was no chemistry between us.”
“She talks about you constantly. ‘Alex called. Next time he’s in town, blah blah.’ You two, did you?” Claire asks.
“Fuck? Of course.”
At the station, Claire weeps to see Mary. Alex leaves them in a café to talk.
They order coffees with French vanilla slices. “Snot blocks!” says Mary.
“How’s nursing?” Claire asks. Mary gives her a summary.
“Gosh, I’m well away,” she says.
“But you were conscientissimo!”
“I fell out of love with nursing. Down here Ma makes me exercise my back fat; I dry dishes from my wheelchair. Alex wheels me to the loo.”
“Ooh la loo!” says Mary.
"The floor’s uneven. There’s dry rot, rats at night. I sleep with the radio on so I can’t hear their skittering. Alex goes to pubs when there’s a band playing. I plead with him to take me. He won’t.
“I play chess with Bonnie or the olds; TV’s on the blink. Alex sleeps in the hall in case I need help.”
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