Cooee

by Vivienne Kelly

  My sister, by contrast, adopted no girlish strategies, no circumlocutory fluffiness. She was wise enough, I suppose, to know she couldn’t get away with it. Businesslike, sturdy, methodical, she superintended such challenges as table arrangements and flowers with military precision. A wedding was like a lesson: it had to be planned and programmed and rehearsed and, finally, got through with minimal disruption, discipline being maintained and the whole proving an edifying experience for all concerned. Henry came along for the ride: that was as much as he had to do with any of it. Zoë steered her way through it all with, so far as I could see, minimal consultation with him. A likely prevision of their marriage, I thought.

  Henry was such a puzzle to me. He taught science at the school where Zoë taught history. He still does. When Zoë first brought him home, I couldn’t fathom him at all. Even in those days, when (I freely admit) many strange customs obtained, most men of Henry’s age, which I suppose was his late twenties, didn’t customarily wear three-piece suits.

  I’d known Henry for over a year before I saw him in anything else. It made him look like an undertaker. He had a disconcerting habit of tilting his head back, appraising you through the lower half of his spectacles. Balding and bony, slightly stooped even then, a gold filling conspicuous in a front tooth, meticulous in his speech and careful in his movements, he seemed to me desiccated, ponderous and boring.

  I recall teasing Zoë about him.

  Blind as a bat, bald as an eagle

  Henry isn’t sexy; Henry isn’t regal

  Caught like flies in amber in his sober three-piece suit

  Henry isn’t clever and nor is Henry cute.

  I know it wasn’t nice of me. Zoë wasn’t nice to me, either. Anyway, she didn’t see the joke.

  My parents liked Henry. Well, they liked Steve, too, so it shows what their judgement in these matters was like. My mother thought Steve’s blond, square good looks and his doglike adoration of me made him a delightful and endearing young man, and a suitor of eligibility par excellence. The irremediably comic element I detected in Henry was not visible to her.

  ‘She can’t want to live with him,’ I remember saying, one evening after dinner. I think I was drying the dishes at the time.

  ‘Why not?’ My mother would have been wearing the bright pink rubber gloves that she always donned for this task, drawing them with elaborate care over her tiny hands. She was a slow and careful washer of dishes. It drove me mad, having to hang around while she scrubbed at specks minute as atoms and warily held spotless glasses up to the light.

  ‘Oh, Lord, Mum. He’s so frantically boring. He’s such an old man. How could she even think of marrying him?’ What I really meant was: How could she think of going to bed with him?

  ‘He’s a sensible man,’ commented my mother.

  ‘Have you heard the way he tries to tell jokes?’

  ‘Delivering a good punchline isn’t a mandatory skill for a husband.’

  ‘No, but …’

  ‘Actually,’ said my mother, ‘he has a good sense of humour. Very dry.’

  I snorted and my mother frowned.

  ‘He’ll make her very happy.’

  ‘They’re not even engaged yet. Are they?’

  ‘They will be,’ said my mother with quiet certitude. ‘They suit each other. You might find him unglamorous, Isabel, but he’s a reliable, good-tempered man with a great capacity for loyalty. And he loves Zoë.’

  I think I didn’t care enough to argue the point. If Zoë wanted to wreck her future by attaching herself permanently to a tedious freak with bad teeth and bifocals, that was her funeral. I was getting on with my life — or that was how it seemed to me at the time. Amazing though it seems to me now, I was busy planning to marry Steve.

  I’m not sure, now, why. It wasn’t as if I was completely bluffed by the whole marriage scenario. I wanted my degree; I wanted my career. I wanted it all, I suppose. Well, why not?

  It was becoming evident that having it all might be possible: young women of my time, graduating in the early 1970s, were just starting to regard themselves as forerunners to a brave new world where injustice would never again be based on gender and where nothing would dare to intervene between oneself and the star one decided intrepidly to follow. Some of it has come true; a lot hasn’t. In those days, there were no templates to follow, no blueprints to study. Not for careers, not for parenting, not for anything much. Mind you, I don’t think you learn much about being a parent from anything but workplace training.

  Being a grandparent, however, is different. I can’t believe how dead easy it is, especially after all the times my own children ate me up alive and smacked their lips over me. It’s so effortless, when Sophie wanders into my house in the late afternoon. ‘Hi, Gandie,’ she calls, and comes to give me a big hug and kiss. Never anything forced, never anything other than natural and affectionate and loving. It makes it so easy, to love back.

  I must say, however, that the minuteness of her attention to the detail of my life is starting to wear thin. No more wedding snaps, I pray, silently. I’ve had my fill of staring down old aisles and those who people them.

  But she takes a different tack, the next time. I’d almost prefer the wedding snaps.

  ‘Look what I found, Gandie,’ she says, rummaging in her bag. ‘You’ll never guess.’

  I wouldn’t have, either. It’s a photograph, again; but this time it’s not of a person but a portrait. It’s a photograph of Max’s portrait. The original — the portrait, I mean, not its subject — stands face to the wall, covered in brown paper, in my garage. It’s a long time since I’ve taken it out and checked it for mould or rat nibbles or anything else.

  The photograph is rather dog-eared and, since it is taken from a lower angle, presents an odd perspective on the painting. Max’s head seems, somehow, further away than it ought to be, and his stance appears awkward. Max was never awkward.

  ‘It’s Max, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, honey. It’s Max.’

  ‘Did you paint it, Gandie?’

  ‘Me? Goodness no, darling. I just mess around in watercolours, and all I do are sketches. This is a photo of a proper oil portrait.’

  ‘Where is it now?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I lie.

  ‘Did Max take it with him when he went away?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, relieved to have so neatly packaged a solution ready to hand. ‘Yes, he took it with him.’

  ‘Who painted it?’

  ‘Honey, where did you get this photograph?’ I’ve never seen it before. I certainly didn’t take it.

  Sophie looks equivocal.

  ‘I just found it,’ she says, airily. She sees that I am looking hard at her and shifts slightly.

  ‘Sophie?’

  ‘I found it in one of Mum’s drawers. I wasn’t looking for it, or anything. Mum knew I was looking in her drawer. She was going to lend me some perfume and she told me to go and look for it in her drawer. And this was stuck at the bottom of it.’

  ‘Does she know you’ve got it, Sophie?’

  ‘Well. Not really, I guess. I thought I’d just put it back and, you know, everything would be cool. She wouldn’t mind, I’m sure. I just wanted to show it to you, Gandie. Tell me about it, go on.’

  I know I should be cross with her, but she can always wheedle me. And I love it when we share a secret from which Kate is excluded. I know this is mean and unworthy of me; I know Kate is her mother and she ought to be more open with her mother. But the fact is, I love it when Sophie says: ‘This is just for us, Gandie, okay?’

  But I don’t want to talk to her about the portrait. I fudge it, the way I am fudging so many things with Sophie, these days.

  ‘It was a present,’ I say. ‘It was for his birthday.’

  ‘Which birthday? A special birthday
?’

  ‘Yes, it was his fiftieth birthday.’ I am aware that to Sophie fifty must seem astonishingly old, momentously old. But that’s what it was for: Max’s fiftieth birthday.

  We’d grown fond of a gallery in Richmond: one of the artists who exhibited there regularly had caught our eye. She did portraits in oils — rather fluid, elongated things, almost El Greco-ish or even Dobellian, their exaggerated perspectives delicate and witty, their hues gentle, the likenesses in the best of them magical, wondrous things that caught essential quirks and personalities as well as simply registering identities.

  Her name was Hilary Jacoby and she was a funny, fey wisp of a woman, with pale puffball hair and hard green eyes that to your immense surprise you found looking right through you, into your innermost soul, just when you’d decided she was right off the planet.

  I commissioned a portrait of Max for his fiftieth birthday; he promised to commission one of me for mine. We were going to hang them side by side in the lounge. ‘There’ll be a hundred years of life up there on our wall,’ he said.

  I thought of this when I turned fifty, but wasn’t tempted to do anything about it. Why commission a portrait of yourself for yourself? I haven’t heard of Hilary for years: she may not even be alive any more. She was only a little older then than I am now, but who knows what’s happened to her.

  There, at any rate, in this old and rather creased photograph of his portrait, is Max, elegant as always in a crisp, white, open-neck shirt, tailored grey pants, black shiny shoes. He’s sitting back in a dark leather armchair; his long and beautiful hands lie, relaxed, on its armrests. Beside him is a small table and on the table is a photograph of me, sitting at my desk at Rain. On my desk is a photograph of Max’s portrait, with its photograph of me inside it, and so on. It was something Hilary wasn’t keen on, but Max persuaded her: he loved tricksy little things, puzzles that made you look twice and three times, and charmed you. Sophie doesn’t fail to notice it, of course.

  ‘Look, Gandie!’ she exclaims. ‘It’s a trick, isn’t it? It goes back, and back, and back. It’s so clever!’

  ‘Yes. It is clever.’

  ‘Who thought of doing that? Was that you?’

  ‘No, honey, that was Max. Max liked puzzles. Conundrums, riddles — anything like that.’

  ‘He’s got such a nice face,’ says Sophie, studying the nice face closely.

  ‘Yes.’

  Sophie twines her arms about my neck.

  ‘He just went away, didn’t he, Gandie?’

  ‘Yes, he did, honey.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to have him back?’ she says, coaxingly, as if she were offering me an especially delicious chocolate.

  ‘Oh, honey, it’s all water under the bridge. When you’re older you’ll understand that. There’s no point looking back, saying I wish, I wish.’

  ‘Where’s Max now, Gandie?’

  ‘It sounds like one of those books, doesn’t it?’ I say with an effort, giving her a quick hug. ‘Where’s Wally? Where’s Max now?’

  ‘Yes, but don’t put me off, Gandie.’

  ‘I don’t know, honey.’

  ‘But he might come back?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘But he might, Gandie?’

  ‘Sophie, darling, leave it. Max is dead, that’s the truth of it. He’s dead: he’s not coming back. Let’s not talk about it any more. And you make sure you pop that picture back in your mum’s drawer, okay?’

  ‘Yes, I will. Of course I will, Gandie. But listen, Gandie darling, you don’t know he’s dead, do you? Mum says he’s still alive. Mum says he’ll come back, one day.’

  Bloody Kate, interfering again, I think in fury. And, suddenly, something snaps. She’s twisted the terrible knife enough. I can’t take this any more.

  ‘I do know he’s dead,’ I say, tightly. ‘I do know it.’

  She cocks her head, sceptical, a little dismayed. ‘Do you know it for absolute certain sure? I mean, have you visited his grave?’

  ‘Yes.’ I reach out and hold her hand. ‘I have visited his grave. I do know he’s dead. Sophie, you mustn’t tell this to anyone. It’s our secret, okay? You mustn’t tell your mum, or your dad, or anyone. Can you keep an important secret, like this?’

  Sophie’s eyes grow wide as she absorbs this. ‘But, Gandie, Mum would want to know, wouldn’t she? Mum really liked Max; she says he was the best friend she ever had. Why don’t you tell Mum?’

  ‘I can’t explain,’ I say, aware that I am gripping her hand too hard and loosening my grasp. ‘When you’re older, I’ll explain. I can’t talk about it, Sophie. Not at present. When you’re older, I’ll tell Mum. I’ll explain everything. But I can’t do it now. Believe me, darling, you mustn’t say anything to your mother.’

  At last, puzzled and chastened by my disclosure, she settles down to her milk and apple and homework. She looks serene, but what is she thinking? What does she make of what I’ve told her? What will she do about it?

  She sprawls at the kitchen table to work; I sit on the other side of the bench, in the living room, which opens out between the kitchen and the small, pretty back garden, with its ferns and roses and two young birch trees. This is what we usually do when Sophie does her homework. She’s at the kitchen table; I’m in the living room drinking coffee and reading the newspaper, available to answer questions.

  I often sneak a look at her around the side of the paper when she doesn’t know I’m doing it. I like to watch her sweet face creased with concentration; I like to watch her chewing her hair and mumbling figures to herself and doodling on the side of the page.

  Today, however, I use the paper to hide my face from her perceptive eyes. My hands, I notice, are trembling. Does she believe me? I wonder. I think she does. Will she tell her mother? I don’t think she will: Sophie and I have shared secrets before, and she’s been reliable. But this is different. It matters.

  When she goes, I say, quite lightly: ‘You won’t forget, Sophie? It’s our secret, darling. Just ours.’ She nods solemnly, and leaves me on my own, with nothing to do but fret, and gnaw my fingernails.

  I don’t want to think about Max. I don’t want to think about anything, really: I just want to calm myself down and return to a state of dreary neutrality, so that Sophie’s interest in these matters loses its edge, so that I escape this awful sense of staring down the crevasse.

  I know that the more emotional I get, the more her ready sympathies are stirred, and the more she wants to know and understand. I should be grateful, I suppose: how many children are obsessed with their grandmother’s past?

  In my determination not to think about Max or his fiftieth birthday, I find myself thinking about mine instead. It wasn’t as we’d envisaged it when Max spoke of hanging our portraits together. I would have let it pass, frankly. The celebration of having spent half a century battling away at life is bound to be an ambiguous kind of occasion, after all; although I suppose survival pure and simple is probably something to celebrate.

  Anyway, Kate and Zoë between them were determined not to let the day pass without some kind of family get-together, God save me. They even had a mild disagreement about where it should be held. Kate wanted it at her place so that, she said, the children could feel part of the festivities; Zoë thought it more appropriate (she actually put it like that) that she and Henry host the event. Ever since Max’s departure from my life Zoë has treated me with a kind of scrupulously considerate and self-conscious benevolence that drives me stark raving mad.

  ‘I don’t see why we have to do anything at all,’ I say. ‘I’ve never been a party person: you both know that. It’s just another birthday. Let’s let it go.’

  ‘Rubbish, Minky,’ says Zoë. ‘It’s not just another birthday. I had a big fiftieth and I want you to have the same.’

  ‘We’re not
kids, Zoë. I don’t have to have a party because you had a party.’

  ‘Of course you must have a party, Mum,’ says Kate, beaming, misinterpreting my genuine pleading for a variety of specious attention-getting. She thinks I’m merely making a fuss so that I can then gracefully give in. Zoë knows better: I can tell that from the look in her eye, but all her native persistence is to the fore and, terrier-like, she’s not going to let go till she gets her way and forces it on me as well.

  ‘I don’t like fuss,’ I say.

  ‘You used to like it,’ says Zoë. ‘Remember your sixteenth birthday? You had a huge party. I helped with that one, too.’

  ‘Zoë, you mightn’t have noticed this, but I’m not sixteen any more.’

  Zoë laughs immoderately, as if I’d cracked rather a funny joke, and continues to discuss menus and methodologies with Kate.

  The event was held at Zoë and Henry’s. I could have told Kate this would happen: someone with her pliancy is at a disadvantage when dealing with resolve of Zoë’s calibre. They actually went to a lot of trouble, or Zoë did, anyway: I don’t suppose Henry had much to do with it.

  It’s a big house, in which they rattle around like a pair of dried peas. Sometimes they have students staying in one of the three spare bedrooms: they both involve themselves in their school’s international program and a succession of Chinese and Malaysian and Vietnamese and Thai adolescents have come and gone through Zoë’s militant domesticity and Henry’s fussy over-organisation. They are always suckers for good causes, Zoë and Henry.

  Sometimes, as I’ve said, I think our family is as dysfunctional as families get; other times I marvel, startled into unwilling admiration, at how well we manage, all of us, how we scrub up for the big occasion. We’ve improved, no doubt about it. This is partly because of Sophie, as I’ve said, but it’s also because we ourselves try so damned hard. Assiduously we paper over the cracks, snip off the dangling telltale threads; and we front up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, to the big occasion.

  We carry out all this feverish remedial activity only partly for the outsiders who will attend and for whom some sort of fiction needs to be maintained; principally it is all for our own benefit, to fool ourselves into a temporary acceptance of family unity and bonhomie.