Cooee

by Vivienne Kelly

  He’d gone away. We’d quarrelled and he’d gone away. He’d walked out of the house carrying his suitcase, all packed, all ready to go. He’d gone away and I didn’t know where he’d gone. He must have deposited the case in the locker himself: it was nothing to do with me. He’d put the case in the locker and gone off to do something else and never came back. He’d met with an accident. Or perhaps there had been foul play. Perhaps he had been murdered. Why would anyone murder Max? I don’t know, officer.

  I looked around our bathroom and threw out Max’s toothbrush and his comb, and his aftershave and a few nondescript tubes and suchlike. A minimalist in these matters, he had left little for me to do. I’d packed his favourite razor.

  Max’s wallet was lying by the side of the bed, where I had put it after he died. I hadn’t known what to do with it. I’d taken and used some of the cash, but most of it was still there. I put the wallet back, inside his bedside drawer. I saw that there were three or four letters in there — opened envelopes, anyway, with papers in them, in a careful pile at the back corner of the drawer. I picked them up and turned them over. I noticed they had someone else’s name on them, not Max’s. I didn’t care. I didn’t want to know. I felt like an insect, splattered against the windscreen of the great truck Life. Later, I thought, I’d look at them later. Right then I didn’t have the strength.

  ‘When is later?’ Dominic used to ask, when he was a child, waiting for some treat. ‘When is later, Mummy?’ And we made up a nonsense rhyme about it, which he would chant endlessly.

  Later, later, alligator,

  Put him on a merchant freighter,

  Feed him salt and fried potater,

  Shoot him ’cos he is a traitor.

  Dominic would come back, I thought. He would be sorry, and he would come back. I would be calm and peaceful, when he did: I would utter no recriminations, no blame.

  Max wouldn’t come back, but I was the only person who knew that.

  I went to see Kate. By then it had been, I think, six days since I’d seen her. It was the longest I’d been away from them since Sophie’s birth. As I rang her doorbell I remembered that I had meant to telephone first. It had slipped my mind. I noted that, and thought that I’d have to be careful: it didn’t matter so much this time, but now I couldn’t afford for things to slip my mind.

  I’d thought so much about this. Not so much about the visit, as what it betokened. I’d had to try to work through all of it, to work through what I was prepared to do, what I wasn’t prepared to give up.

  The single thing, the factor that mattered, the consideration that towered above all other considerations, was Sophie. I was worried that I wouldn’t feel the same way about Sophie: I’d been wondering how it would be, now that I knew her genesis, now that I knew she was no longer just my granddaughter, no longer the daughter of Gavin and Kate. But I’d felt something new and precious enter my life when I held Sophie for the first time, and I wasn’t willing to relinquish that, not without at least trying.

  So far as Kate was concerned, I’d had to think my way through the morass I was trapped in. To my surprise, I didn’t hate her. At first I had; at first, my hatred had swamped me. Now, however, I’d calmed down. I won’t say I was looking forward to seeing her, but I was concentrating on thinking of her as Sophie’s mother. Not my daughter, not Max’s lover. Just the mother of this child who mattered so much.

  Kate answered the door holding Sophie. Her shirt was crumpled: it had been hastily pulled down and I could tell she had been feeding the baby. She didn’t look surprised to see me. She just held the door open and stepped back.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘You’re feeding? I’m sorry to interrupt,’ I said, formally.

  ‘I’ve just finished. Do you want to hold her?’

  She held Sophie towards me and I took her. She was sleepy and cuddled into me. All the rich warmth flooded back into my veins; I felt the same mesmeric joy, the same startling physical bliss at the contact with her. I was enormously relieved. It was just the same: an entirely involuntary, entirely inevitable response. I held her and the miracle of her impressed itself on me, just as it had the first time I’d held her. I was simply filled with love for her.

  I knew I was doing the right thing; I knew that no matter how this hurt me, it was something I had to do, for my own survival. The connection with Sophie was something I couldn’t jeopardise, couldn’t bear even to think of losing.

  Kate was adjusting her bra strap, watching me. ‘Coffee?’

  ‘I’d like a coffee,’ I said. ‘Is she ready for a sleep?’

  ‘She probably needs a burp. Do you want to hold her for a while?’

  I followed Kate into the kitchen and put Sophie up on my shoulder, rubbing her small solid back, smelling the clean, milky smell of her. Kate put the kettle on and got together mugs and sugar and so forth.

  We sat down at the kitchen table, facing each other.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ asked Kate, stirring her coffee.

  ‘I’m not going to do anything. I’m never going to talk about this again, Kate. It’s all over, it’s all in the past. It didn’t happen.’

  ‘It did happen, though,’ said Kate, with a hardihood I hadn’t expected. ‘It did happen, and we both know it did happen. How are you going to cope with that?’

  ‘That’s my business.’

  ‘As she grows older, as likenesses develop — as likenesses may develop — how are you going to feel?’

  ‘I’ll be all right. It’s not her fault.’

  Sophie gave a contented burp.

  ‘Of course it isn’t her fault,’ observed Kate, with the shadow of a smile. ‘We know that. But it’s not a matter of fault, is it? Not, I mean, so far as she’s concerned. She is who she is, and it may not be her fault, but she still is that person.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it any more. I’ve said that. That’s it.’

  Kate sipped her coffee, rubbed her chin. ‘I’d like to explain. I’d like to explain how it happened.’

  ‘I don’t want to listen.’ I heard my voice rising and tried to take the edge off it. ‘I don’t want to know anything. I never want to talk about it again.’

  She chewed her lip.

  ‘There’s one thing I have to tell you,’ I said. ‘Max has left me.’

  She looked at me narrowly and nodded, almost as if she had expected this. ‘Will he come back?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘You quarrelled?’

  ‘It’s not your business what happened.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right.’

  I turned slightly so that she could see Sophie’s face over my shoulder. ‘Is she asleep?’

  Kate nodded again. ‘Fast asleep. I’ll put her down.’

  When she came back, she sat opposite me.

  ‘There’s one thing I have to say,’ she said. ‘I want you to know it. I heard what you said: I understand you don’t want to talk about it. But this is something I have to tell you. I have to. You always said Max was the love of your life. Well, he was the love of my life, too. I adored him. I’ll never love anyone else, not like that.’

  ‘You’ve got a husband,’ I said, furiously. ‘What about your husband?’

  ‘What about yours?’ snapped Kate. I wasn’t used to Kate biting back. ‘What about yours? You had a husband, too, when you met Max. Gavin is a darling. I love Gavin dearly. I’m going to be a good wife to Gavin. But there’ll never be anyone else but Max, for me. I’ve given him up. I know he’s yours.

  ‘I’m just saying, so you know — all right? — it wasn’t a whim; it wasn’t something I did idly, without thinking about it. It mattered to me more than anything else in the world has ever mattered. It was that important. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I didn’
t mean you ever to know. It was the most important thing in the world, for me. I just want you to know that.’

  Her voice was starting to shake. I couldn’t bear any of this. Why was this necessary? Why did I have to know anything? For Sophie’s sake, I was going to try to forgive her, or at least to pretend that none of it had happened: wasn’t that enough? Wasn’t that more than she had any right to expect?

  She stopped, and we sat there in silence.

  ‘I’m not patching this up for you,’ I said. I knew it would hurt her. I wanted to hurt her. ‘I’m patching it up for her. For Sophie. You don’t matter.’

  Kate winced slightly. ‘Oh,’ she said, with a dry bitterness I’d never heard in her voice before. ‘You didn’t have to say that, Mum. I know I don’t matter. I’ve never mattered, have I?’

  I was enraged by this idiotic grandstanding. I was worked very thin by this stage, like pastry that you roll, and roll again, trying to make it stretch, and it starts to tatter at the edges and to spread into faint withering patches that eventually split and gape. I was stretched so far I couldn’t possibly stretch any further; I couldn’t cover any more space. She had no right to say such things. What right had she to be bitter?

  ‘That’s a stupid and hurtful thing to say,’ I shouted. ‘Haven’t you hurt me enough without attacking me like that?’ I wanted to hit her; I wanted to hit her very hard. ‘It’s not fair,’ I cried into her startled face. ‘I haven’t deserved this from you.’

  I felt the surge of anger within me as a surge of blood; my head was full of it, dizzy with it. If I had had a knife, I think at that moment I would have lurched at her and plunged it into her.

  Well, perhaps I would; perhaps I wouldn’t. There’s something about the imagined meeting between flesh and blade that’s very disconcerting. But if I’d had a gun, I would have shot her. I would have shot her as much for the shocked and wounded look she turned on me, as for what she’d said, what she’d done.

  ‘Never mind, Mum,’ she said, quietly. ‘So long as we do it, patch it up, I mean, so long as that happens, it doesn’t matter why we’re doing it, does it? If it’s for Sophie, okay, it’s for Sophie.’

  I didn’t stay long. I was shaking. I was afraid of what I might say, what I might do, if I stayed. I drank my coffee (it was awful coffee: Kate’s always made bad coffee) and left.

  I paused at the door, I remember, and looked at her. ‘Tell the others, will you? I don’t want to have to talk about it to anyone.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said.

  I took another step and then I paused again and turned. ‘I mean, tell them that Max and I have split up. I don’t mean tell anybody anything else.’

  ‘Am I likely to?’

  ‘I don’t know if you’re likely to or not. But I’m telling you, nobody’s to know.’

  Kate swallowed. ‘Mum, believe me, I’ve told nobody. I’m not going to tell anybody.’

  ‘Promise?’

  She nodded and then said in a dry, croaky voice: ‘I promise.’

  And then I left.

  I don’t recollect a lot of that time very clearly. Perhaps my subconscious has ensured that I don’t. I got up; I went to work; I came home from work. Borrow stopped regarding me reproachfully: at least, I thought he did.

  I made sure I saw Sophie two or three times a week. I babysat whenever I could. I must say, Gavin and Kate had it made with me: I was every young parent’s dream grandmother, even if I had killed the baby’s father. Sometimes, when Kate was tired, I even spent the night with them and walked around with Sophie through the wee small hours. She wasn’t a good sleeper, in her first year. My infatuation with her grew and prospered. I outgrew an obsessive early propensity to trace Max’s lean elegance in her tiny, chiselled features.

  Fortunately, the likeness was intermittent, fleeting: it depended more on expression and angle than anything else, and seemed to me moreover to diminish with time, although that was a hard thing to judge. It did not take long for Sophie to acquire a presence and personality that were all hers and had nothing to do with her progenitors — although people often said (they say it still) that in her dark, quick slenderness, her neat limbs and fine bones, she took after me. These days, I look at Sophie and think about her and speak with her and hug her and love her without even thinking of Max.

  Well, perhaps not entirely. But almost.

  One evening, quite early in the piece, Zoë visited. Kate had told her Max and I had split up. I knew I’d told her to tell everyone, but then I wished she hadn’t. There she was, my sister, when I opened the door, arms extended, replete with coo and drivel.

  ‘Minky!’ she cried. ‘Minky, darling!’ She enfolded me in her capable embrace. I stepped backwards, but it was impossible to evade. Zoë in full flight is simply something that can’t be evaded. In she came, glancing around her, absorbing every detail even as she surrounded me with her crisp perfume and her unctuous readiness to comfort and support. She wanted me to throw myself upon her breast. Come home, Minky, she wanted to say. All is forgiven.

  Well, I wasn’t going to do that, and if she had learnt anything at all about me during the forty-two-odd years we’d known each other by then, she wouldn’t have expected it. She wanted me to weep on her bosom because my love had left me; she wanted me to admit my sins and tell her how right she’d been and how sorry I was. She wanted me to pour it all out to her, open my heart, weep. She wanted to know every last, sordid detail. She was disappointed. He’s gone for good? she wanted to ask me. Never to return? Never mind, darling, you’re better off without him.

  I wasn’t better off, and I wasn’t going to pretend I was. Not then, not ever.

  In fact, one of the major irritations of this time and the following few months was the way in which people treated me: full of sober consolation, a reverential and pitying circumspection as if Max had died. Which he had, of course, but they didn’t know that. What had happened to me was much worse, much more traumatic, than a mere death: it seemed to me I deserved far more sympathy than anybody was prepared to give me; and it exasperated me that I could explain this to nobody, could weep truthfully on nobody’s shoulder.

  When I told Bea, she was just as pleased as Zoë was, but she handled it with more tact. (Zoë and tact have always been strangers to each other.) I told Bea that Max and I had split. She nodded non-committally, her eyes on my face.

  ‘Are you all right, Izzie?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Thanks for telling me. Any time you want a cup of tea, or something stronger for that matter, let me know.’

  And that was that. I dare say she jumped up and did cartwheels when I’d left her office, but at least she didn’t make her delight evident. Nor did she display Zoë’s itch to find out exactly what had transpired. Zoë never did like it when I had secrets from her.

  When you have secrets in a family, after a while you start to wonder who knows them. Who knows, who guesses, who hasn’t a clue? Sometimes, when our family gets together on one of those appalling occasions — birthdays, Christmas, whatever — I glance around the room; I briefly study their faces. Who knows the identity of Sophie’s father? Does Zoë? Does Gavin speculate? Dominic? Steve? No, surely not Steve. Has anyone else detected Max’s finely drawn mouth in Sophie’s exquisite lips, his long, slender hands in her small, neat fingers? Who knows?

  I found I became edgy on my own in Rain. I developed the habit of keeping the radio on at all times, so I never walked into silence. I still do that, even now. I can’t bear a silent house. I hated sleeping in the capacious bed, in the vast acreage of the main bedroom, under the skylight, the heavy square sky always falling into my eyes, into my head. I depended on Borrow a lot. Once, I remember, he had to spend a night at the vet’s for some minor operation. With the comfort
of his presence withdrawn, I hardly slept.

  I’d never been a nervous person, and I didn’t believe in ghosts. Well, I didn’t think I did. But solitude didn’t suit me any more; and Rain, which had been a comfortable house for two or three of us, became ridiculously large. I thought of selling: this was one step I could take without legal complications, since Max had given the place to me. But it was all too hard and required too much energy, too much thought and action. In any case, I loved Rain; it had housed my happiest days. I tried not to think of what lay in the garden, under the smart, new flowerbeds. I procrastinated.

  One night, about four months after Max’s death, a light knock came at the front door. It was slightly later than I would normally have expected Foxtel or Jehovah’s Witnesses, and I opened up cautiously, wishing I’d locked the security door. A small and unremarkable man was standing there. He was balding and his hands were in his pockets. He wore a striped shirt and a dingy bomber jacket; his face was lined, ratlike and attentive.

  ‘Can I have a word with Matty?’ he said. His voice had the hint of a soft lilt to it. Irish?

  ‘Matty?’ I said. ‘I’m afraid you have the wrong house.’

  He shook his head cheerfully. ‘The fool I am. It’s Max I’m after.’

  ‘Max?’ My mouth was dry. Silly of me, not to be more prepared, when it happened. I had known moments like this would come; I’d rehearsed them. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Max isn’t here.’

  ‘When will he be back?’

  ‘No. What I mean is, Max doesn’t live here any more.’ It sounded absurd, when I said it, like a pop song.

  His eyes widened slightly. ‘Then it’s a forwarding address I’m after.’

  ‘He didn’t give me one.’

  ‘I find that hard to believe.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, starting to shut the door.

  In a quick and supple movement the little man prevented me from doing so, and suddenly, instead of being outside the door looking in at me, he was inside the door, next to me, his hand closed hard on my wrist.