The Good Parents

by Joan London

  There was no wake afterwards. Nig couldn’t wait to go home. After Karen and Bevan had driven off, he disappeared into the bedroom to reappear in casual clothes, a polo shirt and crumpled gaberdine trousers and worn soft shoes that Beryl would have tried to throw out. He swung his car keys, ready to leave.

  ‘You’re welcome to stay as long as you like, of course, but I have to tell you that I’m putting the house on the market as soon as possible. I’d like a little flat overlooking the city. I might even move into a hotel.’ He spoke rapidly but firmly, knowing this could be taken as cold-hearted.

  She knew he couldn’t help himself. He couldn’t wait to be alone, to come and go, unaccountable. He’d waited too long for his freedom. Then the poor girl died, by herself, just as she’d always feared. Far from being cold, he was exploding with emotion.

  ‘I’m ready to go,’ she said. ‘There’s a bus I can catch.’ Beryl’s daughter, she ought to have murmured something like if I’m not needed here, but alone at last, there was an instant understanding between them. He didn’t demand hypocrisy. She wasn’t sure there would be a bus, but like him she had to get out of there.

  A retired bishop had listed Beryl’s virtues, service in the WAAF, work for charities, above all commitment to husband and family. Dates and names were confused, but he was too bland and professional to care. Another funeral was waiting to come in one door as they left out the other. Outside, all her mother’s well-dressed, sharp-eyed friends clustered around Nig, murmuring that he mustn’t cut himself off, he would have to come to dinner very soon. He was so distant and handsome in his dark suit that they didn’t quite dare to kiss him. Soon they would be match-making for him. Beryl’s worst fears would be realised.

  The field of battle had come to honour Beryl, or at least look over what remained. They stared openly at Toni as if she were Patty Hearst returned from robbing banks with the Symbionese Liberation Army. If the Richardsons were there, they would have spoken to her, held her hand, and she would have had the chance to look them in the eye. To say without words that she was sorry. Perhaps Doug was too frail to come, or perhaps they were at the beach house now, far away where nobody could reach them.

  Where was Beryl in all this? Toni looked up at the sun shining through the well-groomed trees, and tried to recall her conviction in Brad Skinner’s truck, that Beryl was in the light around the edges everywhere, that she knew something different now and was free.

  She slipped away from the line-up to wait for Nig and Karen in the memorial garden. She realised she missed the silence. The silence that wasn’t silence, wind through leaves, bird calls, nuts falling. The space it gave her. She’d thought she was running away to the country, but in fact she was running towards something she had wanted all her life. She couldn’t wait to go back.

  But not to the commune. She paced up and down the lawn.

  She didn’t offer her father any explanation about where or how she lived and he didn’t ask any questions. Except one, just as they were about to depart. He stopped and looked at her in the hall as she waited for him, in her mother’s dress, her overalls and sandshoes in a plastic bag.

  ‘Anything you need?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. My bus fare. About twenty dollars.’ She hated having to admit this.

  He went straight to the bedroom. She heard a drawer scrape. The sock drawer, where he and Beryl always hid their cash. He put a roll of notes in her hand.

  ‘Here you are.’

  ‘That’s far too much.’

  He pushed her hand away. ‘If you need a bus fare, you need more than a bus fare,’ he said, moving to the front door. ‘Let’s go.’ He was dropping her off in the city. He had never changed towards her. She would never know if he was very wise or just indifferent. ‘Daddy can’t bear to see you.’ Perhaps Beryl hadn’t wanted her to see Daddy.

  ‘Where are you going now?’ she asked as Nig dropped her off at the Perth station.

  ‘To a pub where nobody knows me.’ He caught her eye. ‘To play pool and drink myself silly.’

  They laughed.

  He kissed her affectionately and drove off in a great hurry.

  Within a year he’d be snapped up by Mavis and living on the Gold Coast. It was his curse to have sex appeal. It turned out that Mavis and her ex-husband used to run a pub in the country. Mavis had been on the scene for years.

  There wasn’t a bus until seven the next morning. She sat at the table in Boans’ cafeteria where she and Beryl used to sit. With the roll of notes she could afford to buy a meal but she wasn’t hungry. She bought a cup of tea. There was something consoling about being amongst the clatter of strangers. Ordinary people, eating decadent Western food, meat pies, ham sandwiches, jelly trifle. This was what people wanted and who could blame them? Who wants to eat beans in a forest? The clearing was a little lit scene at the back of her mind, tragic, biblical, the thin smoke, the tiny long-haired figures toiling like peasants. How amateurish and make-do everything seemed. That was the whole point, Jacob said.

  Why all the fuss about the way you lived? It was over in a flash.

  She was in a strange state. Being close to a death was a bit like being high. She hadn’t counted the money but it would be enough for her and Jacob to drive away from the commune for good. There was still the matter of Cy Fisher’s long arm. Just a street away, across the railway line, was his territory. Someone would see her here, she found herself thinking. And then what would happen?

  Nothing at all.

  She realised her fear had started to lift a few weeks ago after a dream about him. She was at some sort of family reunion, a party or wedding in a little suburban house, and Cy Fisher appeared. He brushed against her in the crowded kitchen, and to her amazement she felt a beautiful warmth from the contact with his large body. She tried to find him again to say goodbye, but he never reappeared.

  Was this a sign that Cy had moved on? Cut your losses, he used to say. It was almost his motto. Business as usual. He was above all a business man.

  Everything comes to an end, she knew that now. She stood up from the table and went straight to the public phone in the ladies’ restroom and dialled the familiar number.

  He was there waiting for her at six o’clock in the bar of the old hotel beside the railway line, a five-minute walk across the Horseshoe Bridge. How smooth he looked to her now, a well-groomed city man. The blue shadow was just beginning to creep up his jawline, and his glass of whisky was on the bar in front of him. He hadn’t given any sign of shock to hear her voice on the phone but now, after years of reading him, she knew he was affected by the sight of her. He sat very still and his eyes went dense with calculation. As she climbed onto the stool next to his, he lifted a finger and her standard drink, brandy and dry, was put down in front of her. They didn’t look at one another for a while. Her eyes roamed the room as if it was of almost scientific interest to her. In fact it was a blur of jumpy light and smoke, and end-of-the-day cracked male voices. She noticed that her hand shook a little as she lifted her glass. Yet she hadn’t thought she was nervous.

  She’d never been to this pub with him. It opened straight off an asphalt carpark, where cars pulled up and drivers rushed in out of the day’s last heat to down a glass, and then another one before they went home. There was a line-up of skinny, livid-faced old regulars at the far end of the bar. Not Cy’s usual sort of place. Not the sort of place you’d take a woman to. The barman didn’t look at her. He was generous with the brandy though and because she was unused to alcohol now and hadn’t eaten for two days, its effect swept over her.

  They looked at one another via the mirror behind the bar. She asked after Régine, the essential courtesy. He replied that his mother was well. She couldn’t bring herself to ask about Felice and Sabine.

  She’d forgotten his stillness. He didn’t speak or move, apart from taking an occasional sip of whisky. The barman was suddenly there, filling his empty glass.

  ‘My mother died last week.’

  He bowe
d his head in acknowledgement. She could tell he knew already. He would have read the notice in the paper: he kept a hawk-like watch on The West. His expression was grave. Anyone in his employ could rely on his respect for a death in the family, especially of a mother.

  Then she understood that she was there because she wanted to tell him.

  ‘The funeral was today. It was awful.’ She suddenly wondered if he’d had the proceedings watched.

  The elegant little collar of Beryl’s good silk caught her eye in the mirror and she started to cry. She made no sound, but watched her mouth drop open and her eyes scrunch up, until like a storm outside a window, everything was obscured. Cy Fisher put one of his large, Régine-laundered handkerchiefs into her hand.

  Still she cried. She had the funny feeling that this at last was real and that everything else, Jacob, the commune, the forest, was a dream. ‘I am so tired,’ she said at last, blowing her nose.

  Cy Fisher made a sign to the barman who handed him a key. He put his arm lightly around Toni’s back and ushered her through a door behind the bar, up a flight of dusty stairs, along a green corridor smelling of old bathrooms.

  The room’s window was open and a yellowing lace curtain billowed in the hot evening breeze from the carpark. Cy sat her on the bed and took off her sandals. She lay back on the threadbare cotton bedspread, her plastic bag beside her. You could hear the trains rumbling in and out of the station.

  A no man’s land. ‘It’s nice here,’ she said. He always got it right. She felt as light and scorched and inconsequential as the blowing curtain.

  He lay down on the other side of the bed and put his hands behind his head. ‘You like it? I’ve bought the place. We’ll modernise next year.’ He sniffed the clothes inside her plastic bag and cocked an eye at her. ‘Now why can I smell wood smoke?’

  ‘You smell the same as you always did,’ she said. She yawned. Her eyes closed.

  He was gone when she woke. It was early morning. The curtain hung still in the gray light. He must have folded the bedspread over her and her plastic bag. Just keep out of my sight. Did he whisper that before he left or did she dream it? Could she take it as a promise?

  She made her way down through the dark empty pub, unlocked the door into the carpark and went to buy a cup of tea at the station before she caught the bus.

  She saw Jacob’s sad, soft face from the bus window, waiting for her in the dusk outside the store. She could smell the leaf-mould damp of the air.

  If she hadn’t been on this bus, he said, he would have come for the next one in two days’ time, or the one after that. ‘It’s terrible here without you.’ He couldn’t even smile. ‘I was afraid you wouldn’t come back.’ Because in the silence between bird calls, in the emptiness of the carriage, it had become clear to him that the whole meaning of life was centred, not on the clearing, but on her, being with her, having her with him.

  As they drove through the forest she told him they could leave the commune now. She showed him the roll of notes. But for the time being, she said, they should lie low, stay in the country. Keep out of sight.

  ‘You seem different.’

  ‘Do I?’ she said lightly. ‘I suppose you only go to your mother’s funeral once in your life.’

  During the interminable bus trip down Albany Highway, the long wait in the terminus, the local bus’s crawl along the edge of the forest, she had packed up the hotel room, the blowing curtain, the sound of the trains, and stowed it firmly at the back of her mind.

  Jacob went to the store and rang the Education Department next morning and accepted a post as temporary teacher at Warton Junior High, starting as soon as possible. Accommodation provided. They went back to the commune and packed.

  Prem and Wanda waved them off. No one had much to say. Jacob promised to start sending the money owed as soon as he was paid. Who knows, we might turn up again, he said cheerfully, once we’ve saved up a bit. But they all knew there was no going back. To leave meant they had lost faith. They were deserters, their will was too weak, they were abashed and shamefaced.

  They drove in silence until they hit the open road.

  ‘I don’t want to hear the words self-sufficient again for a very long time,’ Jacob said.

  ‘Or compost toilet,’ she said.

  ‘Wind power.’

  ‘Findhorn.’

  They laughed like naughty children, the wind on their faces.

  But it had marked them.

  They would continue to live by their ideals, they told each other – simply, not wasting the world’s resources – but they would stay quiet about it. For some time they kept themselves apart in Warton. The values of the town were conservative, while they felt they occupied a natural position of dissent. They thought of themselves as more enlightened, more radical, more contemporary than the local inhabitants. They took care however to be seen as respectable, paid their bills, helped out if called upon, wary of the hippie label. In all sorts of small ways they tried to be good.

  They retained a long-term distrust of luxury, viewing dishwashers, microwaves, air-con, the latest toys, with an almost moral distaste. They were suspicious of synthetics, additives, technology, material extravagance of any kind. They debated whether or not to have TV or a telephone. They had a hatred of formality, ‘good china’, clothes ‘for best’, any sign of bourgeois display. Their relationship with nature was more romantic than their neighbours’. Discreetly, alone or together, they would head off into a sunset, a moonlit night, the aftermath of a storm.

  Slowly they came back into the world. They forgot that they had ever thought they were different. After all, their children were natives here. Over time they were accepted. They were helped in this by Toni’s appearance. Babies, dogs, shop owners were always drawn to her gleam and fragrance, the symmetry of her features. Men kept an eye on her. Women were suspicious of her, but everybody enjoyed looking at her. There was the story of the truck that veered into the kerb, smashing a verandah post, one hot afternoon when Toni pushed her pram down Cannon Street in a pair of small denim shorts. But she was modest and helpful, a devoted mother, and never flirtatious. In the end the town was proud of her. A world-class beauty, they said.

  Jacob was well-liked by many of the students, and being with Toni, he suspected, gave him extra clout.

  Soon after they came to Warton Toni discovered she was pregnant and after that there was no question that they would stay together. She must have been pregnant when her mother died, when she went to the city. Sometimes she wondered if unconsciously she’d known, and that was why she phoned Cy Fisher from Boans. To make a home for a child.

  And so they had another shared project, one that called on their innermost resources, which they could not desert, or afford to fail. Everything served that purpose, and in its relentlessness they were grateful to discover each other’s constancy and diligence and were satisfied with the simple joys of their life. For many years they were busy, their arms full, their hands occupied. Jacob at last learnt how to work. Apart from his sporadic little trips to Perth, he stuck around. His kids were going to know what it was to have a father.

  Toni never asked him to do anything he didn’t want to, as if deep down she felt she owed him. She gave him space, the greatest gift, which she herself required. They never married because to divorce Cy Fisher would not be keeping out of sight. Anyway, as they told their kids, they didn’t believe relationships needed official sanction. After a while they forgot about lying low. Toni never spoke of her former life. The years with Cy Fisher were like a silent movie. She couldn’t remember the words.

  They ended up with a house, a dog, a TV and video, a four-wheel drive. They grumbled about bills and teachers’ pay. Like the farmers around them, they had good and bad seasons. They went to funerals and weddings and quiz nights, just like everybody else. The values they’d aspired to, sharing, hospitality, community, turned out to be country values, not radical at all.

  Jacob sent three instalments of money to Prem,
and then he let it slide. With a baby there were new expenses. A dilapidated cottage opposite the drive-in had come up for sale. He was sure that by now he’d reimbursed Prem for their share in the meagre meals and the occasional jerry can of petrol. He wasn’t going to run his family short to pay back rent for a mouldy mattress on a carriage floor.

  Some years later they met a visiting teacher who’d taught for a term in the one-room school in the forest. He told them that Prem and Wanda had stuck it out, built up a seed business, gained respect with the locals. That is, Prem did. Wanda was always regarded as not being the full quid. Did they have kids? Toni asked. The teacher thought not. But there were always people and kids hanging out there. Then a few summers ago they got burnt out. Houses, trees, plant, everything went. Uninsured of course. Prem and Wanda went to join the Orange movement in Poona and never came back.

  15

  Tod and Clarice

  Most nights now, when Cecile came home late, they went to the little wine bar around the corner. She was always hungry after work, and though exhausted, not yet ready to sleep. It was the time she liked to talk. In the house they had a whole conversation pit to themselves, and yet they seemed to need this neutral territory – with a couple of glasses of red wine for Jacob, a steaming bowl of noodles for Cecile – in order to sit face to face across a table and speak about whatever came into their minds. He liked to think of it as their place, but he kept that to himself.

  He made sure that he was always downstairs and dressed ready to go out when she came in the door. All day he saved up things to tell her in the bar. He even went to places so he could report on them to her, caught trams all over Melbourne. Once he went to see a Russian film she recommended in an old art-house cinema in the city and waited for her afterwards in Chinatown amongst ferociously fashionable young Asians. It was a warm night, every shop and bar was open, the trams swung along under their canopies, and he began to feel alive to this city.