Cooee

by Vivienne Kelly

  ‘Yes,’ I say, swallowing. ‘Go on.’

  ‘So I’ll tell him. I’ll say, the reason my mother and Max split up was that Max was having an affair with me. And I’ll say, he kept on having it. I’ll say Max went to Sydney after you and he split up — I thought Sydney would be a good place to have him live, because it’s so big, so crowded, you couldn’t possibly prove someone hadn’t been in Sydney — but I’ll say he came down, every so often, to see me. I’ll say this went on for around two years.

  ‘And then I’ll say he went overseas. I’ll say, I’ve had postcards from Prague and Mexico. I thought Prague and Mexico would be good because they’re a long way away and a long way apart. I’ll say I last heard from Max maybe two, three years ago. And I’ll say I don’t have the postcards any more, because I didn’t want my husband to see them.’

  Kate pauses. She’s twisting her fingers, knitting them unconsciously into the old game of church and steeple that she and I used to play together when she was tiny. Open the doors and let out the people, I nearly say.

  ‘Do you see what I’m doing, Mum? It’ll all work, you see. It’ll explain for him why you never told him why Max left, because of course you didn’t want to admit that he’d slept with your daughter. And it explains why Max left, too. And it makes him think Max kept on being alive long after he left you.’

  She muses for a moment. ‘And, the thing is, I think I can make him believe me. There’ll be enough truth in the lies I’ll be telling for me to pretend to myself it is real, that everything I’m saying has really happened. In point of fact, and you might as well know this, all I’ll be doing is telling him a story I’ve told myself. When Max and you split up, I thought Max would come to see me. I was sure he would. I didn’t think in a million years he’d go away without somehow coming to see me. Because he knew about Sophie, of course he did. Max wasn’t stupid: Max would have taken one look at Sophie and he would have known. And we needed to talk about it, and I know we would have talked about it. But he never came.

  ‘Now, of course, I know why not. But then I didn’t know, I just thought, where’s he gone? I thought, sooner or later, he’s bound to come. And I kept imagining I’d open the door and there he’d be, and then, because, you know, you and he had broken up, we could … well. We could get together again. Just for a little while. And I kept imagining that he’d gone somewhere not very far away, and that he’d turn up. And everything would be the way it had been, could be. Well, that was the story I told myself. So if I tell this to Pritchard, I’ll only be telling him what I wanted to happen, what I’d talked myself into believing was going to happen.’ She breaks off, tiredly.

  I sit in a trance and watch her hands. Here’s the church; here’s the steeple.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ I eventually manage. But the rage flickering within me is going to tell me what to say, very soon. I feel it grow. I let it grow.

  ‘I think it might work, Mum. It might make you safe. I want it to make you safe.’

  ‘You think he’ll believe you?’ I snap.

  ‘I don’t know. Yes, I think so. I think I can be very believable.’

  ‘Kate,’ I say, the tsunami inside me swelling, overflowing, rushing out of control. ‘Kate, this would be the most ... the most half-baked, idiotic, perverse, stupid thing to do. Can you not see that?’

  She looks at me, sideways, clearly surprised. ‘It’ll prove Max was alive, after he was really dead. Why will that be stupid?’

  ‘There is no reason in the world for Frank to believe any of this half-cocked crap. Can’t you see? All he will think is that you and I are conspiring. All he will think is that I’ve been foolish enough to set you onto him, to spin him a story to make him believe Max is still alive. Can’t you see how transparent it is, how ridiculous?’

  She simply stares at me.

  ‘You’re a fool,’ I say. ‘Thank Christ you haven’t done anything.’ A dreadful suspicion smites me. ‘You haven’t, have you? You haven’t done anything? You haven’t spoken to him again?’

  ‘No.’ She has a blank look.

  Can she really not comprehend? What right does she have to break the secret, the secret of her and Max, the secret she told me she’d never tell? Can she really think Frank will be such an idiot as to fall for a story like this, that she can maintain a defence against all his art and skill, his little levers and screws, his delicate chiselling and his slow, relentless assaults? And how dare she lay claim to Max? How dare she imply that his interest in her could have been anything other than a passing aberration?

  ‘Thank God for that, anyway,’ I snarl.

  ‘But I want to save you, Mum. You’re in danger, and I want to save you.’

  ‘If I want to be saved, I’ll let you know, thank you very much.’

  ‘Is that all you can say?’ Kate’s voice breaks. ‘Is that all you can say to me? I’ve planned this all for you. You mightn’t like what I’ve thought of, but it might make you safe. I’m telling you, I’ll perjure myself for you. I’ll do anything for you. I only want to try to help you.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Kate,’ I say. ‘Fuck off, will you? Just fuck off. And mind your own business, you and Sophie both. Just stop meddling. Leave me alone.’

  Tears stream down her cheeks. ‘Ever since I can remember,’ she sobs. ‘Ever since — oh, God, what does it matter? I’ve always wanted …’

  She can’t go on, and it looks as if I won’t ever know what it is she always wanted. My anger against her balloons. I cannot bear the thought that she could even consider telling Frank about her and Max, about her and Max in bed together. I can’t bear to imagine Frank sitting at my kitchen table, his eyes meeting mine, the knowledge of Kate and Max, of what Kate and Max did, shared between us. The thought of Frank’s sympathy, his genial commiseration, is intolerable.

  Kate’s sobs increase, multiply. People will hear. Dawn will hear, and anyone else who’s around. I remember that Bea has an important meeting with clients in her office this afternoon. I look at Kate helplessly. I go over to her, pat her shoulder. I find my hand grasped with a ferocious strength. She pulls me down to her and hugs me wildly, hysterically. It’s very uncomfortable, and I try gently to disengage myself. Irritated beyond enduring, I make soothing noises, glancing at the door and hoping Bea can’t hear. Dawn probably can, out in reception.

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ She weeps into my shoulder. ‘I’m so sorry, to get it all wrong.’

  Gradually, she quietens. She looks terrible. I’m still livid with her, but I suppose I can try to get over it. I pat her some more, trying to quash my fury and despair. What more can she expect of me?

  She grabs my box of tissues and blows her nose noisily, several times. She stands, regards me with an unreadable look on her face.

  ‘I love you so much, Mum,’ she says. And is gone.

  Part Five

  The telephone rings just after three o’clock in the morning. My heart leaps from its normal position and rattles against my throat as I reach out of bed for the handset. I expect Frank, Frank ringing me in the middle of the night, ready to catch me adrift, to trap me. Instead, I hear Henry.

  ‘Isabel?’

  ‘Henry,’ I mumble, blurrily cross as I surface from sleep. Here I am, badly frightened, thinking everything is over, that Frank is ringing me to say he knows it all, no use going on, and it’s only Henry. What the hell is he ringing for?

  His voice shakes. ‘I’ve got bad news, dear.’

  Henry’s never called me dear in his life. Suddenly I’m bolt awake.

  ‘It’s Zoë.’ He stops, choking.

  ‘Yes, Henry,’ I say, keeping my voice steady. An accident, I think. She’s hurt, that’s all. A car accident, maybe. She can’t be dead. Not Zoë, not my sturdy, vigorous sister. ‘Tell me, Henry. Tell me.’

  ‘Dead.’

  ‘How?
’ I ask, transfixed.

  ‘Heart attack. Acute myocardial infarction.’ It’s so Henry, to add that.

  ‘But how? I don’t understand. Was she ill? Was there no warning? What happened? What in God’s name happened?’

  ‘It was out of the blue.’ He sounds apologetic, as if he has been uncharacteristically careless. ‘No warning. None at all.’

  ‘When, Henry? Where? Where are you ringing from?’

  ‘I’m at home.’

  I picture him, alone in his study, in his big, faded, brown corduroy chair.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Henry says, suddenly sounding old and exhausted and confused, and with odd pauses. ‘I don’t know, Isabel. We went to … bed as usual. She got up, went to … the bathroom. I heard her cry out. She was … on the floor.’

  And that was it. She had lost consciousness even before he’d reached her. He rang the ambulance. He said they had arrived rapidly — not more than five minutes. But she was dead.

  It is strange that Henry and I should have this bond, this powerful link of finding our spouses dead on the floor. It’s different for him, of course: he didn’t put her there. Well, I presume he didn’t. I briefly contemplate the possibility of explaining the irony to him, but decide against it. He’s not going to appreciate this.

  My mind’s in overdrive. I don’t know why this happens to me, why this feverishness grips me in a crisis, why it crowds out my grief, my shock. Already I’m thinking, when will the funeral be? Has he told anyone else yet? Ought I to go over? I’m even wondering what I’ll wear to the funeral. My brain’s manufacturing thoughts to prevent it from thinking the things it doesn’t want to confront. That must be what’s happening. I try to concentrate.

  ‘Would you like me to come over, Henry?’

  ‘No,’ he says, to my huge relief. ‘No, there’s no point.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  He says he is. We exchange a couple of bleak remarks, promise to be in touch the next day, hang up.

  It’s so hard to imagine a world without Zoë. I lie in bed and think about it. I can’t sleep, so I get up and make myself a cup of tea. For once, I don’t feel like a drink: I’m not sure why not. Borrow pads after me and regards me sorrowfully.

  I try to cry. I actually do squeeze out a tear or two. What am I feeling? It’s hard to say. I’m surprised, certainly. I recall Zoë’s stocky figure, her positive stride, her firm, strong voice, her annoying way of articulating words very clearly in case the person to whom she was speaking was mildly retarded. Well, that’s how it sounded. She didn’t look like a candidate for a heart attack. What has Henry been thinking of? How has he allowed this to happen?

  I manage not to ask him these questions when he rings me the following day. I still feel stunned, trapped in the ice in some frozen hinterland where the full realisation of Zoë’s death is withheld from me. Soon I will comprehend it and cope with it.

  ‘We’re all getting together to talk about the funeral, Isabel,’ says Henry, sounding weary. ‘Would you like to come over?’

  Who’s we, I wonder? Henry’s an only child; he and Zoë are childless; all our parents are dead. I suppose Zoë had friends who want a say in it all. I don’t like Zoë’s friends, most of whom are authoritarian women who have spent their lives bellowing in classrooms, and Henry doesn’t sound as if he especially wants me there anyway. I excuse myself and ask him to keep me in touch.

  ‘You don’t want to speak?’ he asks, surprise inflecting his voice.

  ‘At the funeral? God, no.’

  ‘Are you sure, Isabel?’

  I tell him I am sure.

  I hate funerals. In fact I remember once saying this to Zoë, who replied sarcastically that there was nothing special about me; nobody actually enjoyed funerals.

  I think she was wrong. I think some people do enjoy funerals. They remind us, after all, that we’re still alive, a condition not applicable to the person at the centre of the occasion. I’ve been to lots of funerals now, and I’ve often observed a kind of avid relief rampant in the congregation, an ungodly solace perhaps derived from outliving the deceased and perhaps from finally being able to speak frankly of him or her with impunity.

  When we marry we take on other people’s families, their births and deaths and traumas, their scandals and skeletons. This is a fact that certainly hadn’t revealed itself to me when I skipped so smugly down the aisle to Steve, awaiting me with a goofy look on his square face.

  It started to become clear when we’d been married only a year or so. An elderly aunt of his died and I discovered to my alarm that Steve and his entire family confidently expected my attendance at her farewell. I’d never been to a funeral. It sounds silly: I was twenty-one, after all. I suppose I had remained unusually untouched by death. Two grandparents had died during my childhood, but nobody had expected me to go to their funerals. I didn’t think funerals were my business. I panicked at the thought of this one.

  ‘I didn’t even know her,’ I said to Steve. ‘I only ever met her once. Why do I have to go?’

  He had that pained expression I was starting even then to resent so sharply.

  ‘She was my aunt, lovely. Of course we have to go. We both have to go.’

  ‘But I didn’t know her,’ I wailed, despairing of making him see reason. ‘Can’t you say I’ve got morning sickness?’ Already I was pregnant with Kate. ‘It wouldn’t be a lie.’

  I was not certain why my response was so negative. Normally I did what Steve asked me to do: I regarded docility as one of the wifely panoply of virtues to which I aspired. But this time my alarm was disproportionate: I passionately did not want to be a strand of the tapestry of this dead woman’s life; I did not want to be caught up in a grief that was none of my business, a loss that I had never felt.

  ‘It wouldn’t be true either,’ said Steve. ‘You’re over the morning sickness, lovely: you know you are.’

  I could not withstand his obduracy. So he hauled me off to his Aunt Bessie’s funeral, where, ironically, I did indeed feel nauseous, although this was (as he pointed out) probably because of the heat of the day and the closeness inside the church, rather than because of my pregnancy. I hated it all but I was morbidly fascinated by it, too.

  And I understand now what I didn’t then, that in marrying him I assumed for him (as he did for me) afflictions and encumbrances such as illnesses and deaths and funerals, that marriages entail families and joining in what families do. When we marry, we share lives; we learn customs; we adopt relations; we inherit deaths.

  Except marriage to Max, of course — or at least what passed for marriage to Max. Max had no family: no mother to terrorise me (as Steve’s had), no father to glance appreciatively up my legs and down my cleavage (as Steve’s had), no sister to patronise me (as Steve’s had). No family at all.

  And so I go to my sister’s funeral. It is a typical Melbourne day — cool, bleak, grey, with the occasional perverse flash of sunshine disrupting the dismal threat of drizzle.

  I sit in the funeral chapel, front pew (membership of the deceased’s family offers me these privileges), and gaze at the coffin, which undertakers always insist in calling a casket. (I note that these undertakers wear brass badges on their lapels that identify them as bereavement consultants, whatever that might mean.)

  The coffin is bright and smart and snazzy and rather too ornate, its decorated brass handles gleaming and its dark mahogany veneer polished to the clean, brilliant gloss of a new mirror. She would have thought it tacky: Zoë had taste, after all, and she wouldn’t have liked the tawdry dazzle of the brass, the fussy curlicues on the handles, the insufficiently solid look the whole thing somehow has. It is so narrow, it is hard to believe Zoë’s robust figure is contained within.

  The taped music is Vivaldi, and seems too sprightly for the occas
ion. I don’t think Zoë had any particular affection for (or indeed knowledge of) Vivaldi, and presume this choice is Henry’s flight of fancy. Zoë was a Mahler person, a Wagner person. The Valkyries might have farewelled her, or the Meistersingers, not Vivaldi.

  Henry is out in the foyer, looking solemn and burdened, thanking people for coming. Who knows? Probably he does indeed feel burdened; perhaps he is genuinely grateful.

  I remember the last time I sat in a church for a ceremony at which Zoë was a central participant. It was her wedding, some thirty years ago. A little more than thirty years. Well, I hadn’t much enjoyed that, either.

  I find myself glancing around, every so often, to the back of the church. I pretend to myself that I’m doing this out of interest in who will attend. But it’s Frank who’s on my mind, Frank’s shadow I expect to see lurking at the back, sliding behind the door, treading up the aisle in that measured, weighty way he has.

  The Vivaldi finishes and the service begins. It is quiet and unexceptional. Henry (always technically proficient, as becomes a science teacher) speaks with the accompaniment of a powerpoint screening that shows photographs of Zoë at various stages of her life. Zoë as a baby, toddler, schoolgirl, teenager, debutante, graduate, bride, daughter, sister, wife, aunt, teacher. All the roles of her life, neatly clipped out and presented. I am in some of them, especially the early ones. I feel oddly uncomfortable about this, and find myself thinking that Henry should have asked me if I minded. I don’t like it, being on show in this way: it’s one thing in a family living room or a photograph album, quite another in a funeral chapel with a coffin next to one.

  Here we are, Zoë and me, neatly attired in our school uniform, our hair freshly combed, standing awkwardly together, holding hands (a thing we never normally did, as I recall). Here we are sitting on our father’s knee, too old to be doing so comfortably, displaying forced grins. Here is Zoë in a long dress, going to her first ball. Here she is marrying Henry in his silly tie, looking for once as if she mildly likes him. Here she is being auntly, holding Kate as a newborn. There she is, in her coffin; here I am, in my pew. It is bothersome.