The House Within

by Fiona Kidman

  She opened her eyes when she heard his footstep and, with a quick involuntary movement, pulled up her top with one hand, and her skirt down with the other, fumbling so that the book that had been in her lap fell to the ground.

  He nodded. ‘Hullo,’ he said, and sat down beside her on the step.

  ‘Hullo,’ she said.

  They smiled briefly, preserving the habits of civility, then simultaneously shrugged and turned away.

  ‘Gerald’s out,’ she said.

  ‘I guessed he would be.’

  ‘Of course. You would have known.’ Simple flat statements.

  ‘Cigarette?’

  ‘Thanks.’ She took it from him, and he lit it for her, noticing, as he used to, how her unlipsticked mouth was a soft pucker around the cigarette, a ripple in yielding flesh; not tense little corrugations like most women offered. He had a quick vision of her entire body and imagined sex, cursing himself as he did, knowing she would know.

  ‘I thought I ought to see you,’ he said sharply.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, resting her head on her hand, and not looking at him. ‘That was gracious of you.’

  This was better, he thought, the old familiar needling; it helped at times.

  ‘I haven’t seen the children for a long while.’

  ‘There’s nothing to prevent you,’ Bethany replied. She gazed into distance, or at a sunflower, he could not be sure, and her remoteness irritated him as, a moment before, her nearness had disturbed him.

  ‘I’ve been offered a job with the firm in Australia,’ he said. ‘When the divorce goes through Patsy and I thought that we might do — that it would — perhaps — be best for us. So — I thought —’ he spread his hands awkwardly. ‘Oh I don’t know.’

  ‘You thought that you should see that Gerald didn’t beat me, and that your children loved him like a father, and that we would get ourselves safely married so that you’d be free from any responsibility to us, and that your conscience would be quite clear as you sailed — sorry, jetted — off into the blue with Patsy.’

  She paused and glanced sideways. ‘Your conscience always gave you hell. Funny.’

  He wanted to defend himself, but couldn’t. He wanted to say, I didn’t leave you for Patsy, she came after — after, when I was lonely and I wanted to come back and I couldn’t, because you had found someone else. Which I should have known. Which was fair. But it hurt. Picking someone up with ease, like a flower from the roadside, like plucking a man, any man, out of nowhere, out of inspiration.

  Any man? Not Gerald, he wasn’t any man. She wouldn’t make the same mistake so easily again.

  ‘Can’t you make it with Patsy when your conscience is troubling you? You were always susceptible to outside influences.’

  He flushed and she laughed, a short, dry noise deep in her throat, like static.

  ‘Still, you never could leave well alone,’ she added.

  So he said nothing, resting his elbows on his knees, letting his hands hang down between his legs, trailing blue smoke from his cigarette. Words, he thought, always words, and a surfeit of quick answers and cool laughter. Did they laugh, iced water laughs, when they thought of him? Crisp sprinkles of derision, remembering him, after love. Or worse, did they remember him at all?

  Whereas he thought of them often. Imagined their bedroom, a jumble of clothes and bedcovers and her nut-coloured hair, thick and uncombed on rumpled pillows. And Gerald — but, no, he couldn’t really think of Gerald. So then he would talk to Patsy about the untidiness of the lives of people like Bethany and Gerald and she would agree and he’d be comforted with the sense of his own orderliness. For wasn’t it Bethany who had resisted the flat lawns and bevel-edged hedges and the new wallpaper in the hallway each spring where she had let the children put their dirty hands, and the kitchen repainted annually because the fat splashed over and her cigarettes burned holes while she read books?

  Which he and Patsy would never stand for. And he would know that he couldn’t have stood it any more and had been right to go, and there was no need to justify it all over again.

  He turned over the book she had dropped. Lines of poetry sprang out of it —

  Love is blankets full of strange delights

  Love is when you don’t put out the light

  Love is —

  And do they laugh when the bed is warm?

  Love is you and Love is me

  Love is a prison and love is free …

  ‘How are the children?’ he said at last.

  ‘They’re fine. You’ve no need to worry,’ she said carelessly. ‘They really do love him like a father.’

  Love’s what’s there when you’re away from me.

  She shrugged again at his look. ‘Well, that’s good, isn’t it? Isn’t that what you want? For them to be happy?’

  ‘And the neighbours?’ Again he felt the watching eyes.

  ‘Look,’ she said impatiently. ‘Look really.’ She flung her hands open protestingly. ‘After all, you did leave me.’

  ‘You don’t seem to care much,’ he remarked, bridling.

  ‘Why should I care?’ she cried out. ‘You — left — me,’ spacing each word so that it became weighted with meaning.

  ‘You’re all right then?’

  But she only arched her throat and let the laughter out again, this time more gently. He looked at her, wondering, almost hoping.

  ‘Would you like some coffee?’ she said.

  ‘Have you tea?’

  ‘Oh, of course.’ Bethany grimaced at her forgetfulness, caught out that she had forgotten the habits of their lives together. Tea for breakfast, tea at mid-morning, for lunch, and every time they sat down to eat, except after dinner when, for her sake, they made coffee.

  ‘I’ve got China tea,’ she said, wrinkling her brow with vexation, ‘but that’s awful with milk and you won’t have it without. Some juice then? It’s very hot.’

  Peter nodded. ‘Yes, that would be nice.’

  She went into the house. His house. After a while he followed her in, wanting to see her in it again.

  His house. It was the same, they hadn’t changed the furniture. But his eyes were screwed up from being in the sun and the interior of the kitchen was frazzled with the red spots in his vision, so that it was a while before he saw that the house, though his, was not his. That there were shaggy flowers in a jam jar above the sink, that books lay open on the refrigerator and that, on closer inspection, they were about communism, which made him suddenly frightened as if he was being watched; and that one of Gerald’s shirts lay on the floor.

  ‘What do they really say?’ He jerked his head towards the houses across the road.

  ‘What about?’ she said, pouring orange liquid into glasses.

  ‘Us.’

  ‘Us?’ She shook her head as if trying to grapple with an alien concept. ‘Us? Nothing much. Not to me. To each other? Depends.’ She smiled at him, genuinely warm all of a sudden. ‘Nell Parker. What do you think?’

  He smiled back tentatively.

  ‘It’s a bit off, you’d think she’d take her fancy man somewhere away from decent folks and their children,’ she said, mimicking. ‘Of course,’ she added, lowering her voice conspiratorially, ‘you’ve got to be charitable, it was him that took off, most likely it’s affected her mind, poor thing.’ She tucked her chin and rolled her eyes. ‘You know how it is?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘The rest — well, they forget, or they seem to, and if they don’t, do you care?’

  ‘No, no,’ he said, turning away from her. ‘I never think I do — until I’m here. Then it seems to matter and I always think it must to you — and yet I know it doesn’t. I care about you not caring. I can’t explain,’ he said despairingly.

  ‘Yes, I understand.’ She spoke slowly, as she always did when her understatements carried more meaning than he was prepared for. ‘I understand that — when you’re here — we’re in it together again, aren’t we?’

  Sh
e picked up the tray on which she had placed the drinks. ‘I’ll take these outside.’

  ‘I’ll go to the bathroom,’ he said, resisting the temptation to ask her permission.

  In there, he was reminded again that this house was no longer his. After he had relieved himself, he washed, more meticulous than the average man, and sat on the edge of the bath, suddenly tired and flat with the morning, and saw that the bath was dirty and that sticking in the dirt were curly brown hairs. There was a sickly smell in the air and lying at his feet was a small, wet bundle. He was filled with premonition and thought to go through the house, but she was calling him, to say it was hot and would he come because the drinks were suffering.

  He went out and sat down with her. ‘You’ve put on weight,’ he said. ‘It suits you.’

  She glanced at herself. ‘I suppose I have, it’s the baby.’

  ‘The baby?’

  ‘You didn’t know? No, I suppose you wouldn’t. One forgets — how long it is.’

  ‘You — and Gerald — you have a baby?’

  The ripe flesh, the gold and the laughter, took on new meaning. She got to her feet and went inside and in a minute came back to him with a child, wearing a napkin and a singlet, in her arms.

  ‘She’s nine weeks.’

  ‘A girl?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Like Gerald.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘You always wanted us to have a girl.’

  ‘I know,’ said Bethany. ‘So did you.’

  So I did, he thought. Together we wanted. At breakfast we would make pointed jokes about it being the right day for conceiving girls, by afternoon the jokes would be more general, and by night-time conception would be forgotten entirely and it would simply be wanting.

  But later breakfast times were too acrimonious for jokes and whatever it was they wanted was forgotten.

  The baby snuffled at her mother’s hand. ‘She’s hungry,’ Bethany said, and unbuttoned her dress and unhooked the protective shield over her nipple. It sprang out from under the cloth, dark and strong, surrounded by the white, blue-veined breast. The child seized the nipple, sucking avidly. ‘Mmmm, darling, there, there, darling,’ Bethany crooned, cuddling her baby, and forgetting him.

  He leaned his head back against the verandah, consciously shutting his eyes this time, shutting her out, shutting out Gerald.

  ‘Having babies always suited you,’ he said, harshly.

  ‘Yes, I suppose it did.’

  ‘Gerald —’ he began.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You looked lovely feeding the boys like that.’

  ‘So you said.’

  ‘And Gerald —?’

  ‘Of course. Of course he likes it. Don’t all men?’

  ‘Of course — I always said — the bottle was better — in the long run —’

  ‘Oh, you did, I know.’

  ‘Do you take your calcium tablets?’

  ‘I try to remember. You know what I’m like.’

  ‘Yes, I know what you’re like.’ He waited, choosing his words carefully, though their meaning was plain enough. ‘You’re happy then?’

  After a while, she said, ‘A baby makes a difference, doesn’t it?’ Avoiding his question.

  ‘But you wanted it? You and Gerald, you wanted the baby?’

  Her laughter, a little rueful now. ‘Oh, we never not wanted it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We forgot. One night. We forgot. I forgot.’ The old Bethany, laughter peeling out now, the old careless Bethany with her mouth opening, her legs uncovered, her breast shaking in her baby’s mouth, laughing at something beautifully beyond the range of the fat yellow sunflower cushions, somewhere he couldn’t see.

  His stillness penetrating at last, and she looked at him again, watching silently as he got to his feet.

  Two steps away from her, and she said, ‘You’re going?’

  ‘Well,’ he said stiffly, ‘a baby does make a difference, doesn’t it?’

  At the corner of the house, he turned around again to look at her. She had put the baby down and pulled up her dress. As he turned, she got to her feet, and stood shaking and strangely white in the bright day.

  She clenched her hands at her side. ‘Why didn’t you make it better?’ she called after him. ‘Why didn’t you make it better for me?’ The tears streaming down her face.

  Keep on walking, he told himself. Keep on and don’t look back. The eyes will watch and know me for the bastard I am, and soon it will be all right for her again. Whole and clear, as if the page were open in front of him, he remembers the end of the poem Love’s what’s there when you’re away from me … She won’t change, and I won’t forget her the way she is.

  THE SALT PATTERN

  ‘DON’T YOU FLY very often?’

  To Peter, the hostess appeared to hover above him on a cushion of light. Like the inflatable cushions under his seat, he thought. Things hold you up for so long. Sooner or later an aeroplane will put down, if only for refuelling. Or the inflatable cushions will be swamped with water, or burst. Even his own treacherous legs threatened to let him down if he set off along the cabin to the safety of the lavatory. He needed to go very badly. He expected he would get there if he was careful, making little crab-like movements through the plane. But he was not sure. The only thing he knew was that nothing lasted, nothing stood up forever.

  ‘Quite often.’ Peter made his reply non-committal and cool. If he said more he was afraid his voice might slur. He was full of gin. The woman knew that. She had brought him enough since they left Sydney. Probably she wouldn’t have bothered to ask at all if the flight had been full, but there were only six people on the huge plane. The empty seats yawned around them.

  The hostess looked mildly sorry for having spoken to him. As well as knowing he was drunk, she must also have understood from his appearance that he was no stranger to flying. He carried a briefcase and wore a neat and recent three-piece suit with a matching tie and socks. People like him always flew when they were getting from one place to another, and people like him, particularly men like him (he thought of Patsy then, and of Bethany) were always needing to get from place to place.

  The young woman shrugged. He thought for a moment, with relief, that she would go away. She turned back, her mouth parted round a smile and further conversation.

  ‘Excuse me.’ He got to his feet and started down the long aisle towards the toilets. He was surprisingly steady. He walked with confidence and when he returned, relieved and washed, believed he was in control again.

  The debris of food and drink remains had been removed from his tray, except for a tidy little pile of swizzle sticks. He remembered that he had been making patterns with them on the plastic tray, like a child’s match game. The seat beside him had been taken. The hostess was sitting, relaxed and elegant, flipping the pages of a magazine. She smiled again as he sat down.

  ‘You have children?’ she said, glancing at the swizzle sticks.

  It was an opening gambit. Maybe she had supposed he was saving them for his children, but he didn’t think so. He thought, rather, that it was an excuse for lifting a corner of his life, and sliding briefly into it.

  ‘Some,’ he said shortly.

  He leaned his head back and breathed deeply. He could have her if he wanted. It was over to him to decide. His abruptness had delayed the decision. If he didn’t make it soon she would get up and move away as smoothly as she had arrived. He wondered why she bothered, and supposed she must be lonely. Sometimes he was too, when he was away from home, but mostly he was relieved to be alone, which was different again from loneliness. The hostess was perhaps thirty-five. There were little lines around her immaculate face, a fraction of grey at the edges of the carefully pulled back hair. He thought that, if they went to bed, she might be momentarily embarrassed when she took her hair down, because it was due to be washed. Maybe she had come away in a hurry, standing in for someone else. If they spent the evening togethe
r he would have to listen to the details.

  Not tonight. He couldn’t listen to the small details of other people’s lives tonight.

  She did have beautiful bones, though, very fine and angular and almost no flesh at all at the high point of the cheekbone. Like the woman on the six o’clock flight from Brisbane last month. A lovely woman, very cool and elegant, carrying a briefcase, like him. He had been delighted that she chose him from a planeful of businessmen, annoyed with himself that he had not had the flair to organise the whole night with her, floundering between wanting to stay with her and having to get home to Patsy and their child.

  It still surprised him that they wanted him. Meaning women. He had come a long way, he supposed. It was frightening when he was caught out like that, with a sudden lack of assurance. He nearly always had things together. He had fought for that, back there in the days with Bethany. He had fought his way out of guilt and the shame of a failed marriage, gone not one, but many steps, beyond auditing government departments, the sleazy secrets of light-fingered clerks. A businessman now, a man of the world, with a wife as polished as the woman beside him, who still looked good in her bathing suit beside the pool. One child was enough, Patsy said. At her age she wasn’t risking her figure for more. Not like Bethany, careless about breeding and her figure. But he was past Bethany and all of that. Oh yes.

  Only tonight he was going back. He glanced at the window. He could see a glimmer on the horizon, and guessed that the tinge in the sky was the lights of Auckland. Beneath them the black. Nothing stands up forever.

  The hostess had put the in-flight magazine in the seat pocket.

  He felt full of confusion and horror.

  ‘I have several children,’ he said, and his mouth was so dry that he could hardly speak. For a moment he could not work out exactly how many children he had. Did Bethany’s child with Gerald count? He supposed not. Except that because she was Bethany’s he had somehow, he realised, thought of her in the back of his mind as something to do with him too, a kind of responsibility. Maybe if you went far enough back, she was. But now there was one to subtract too.