The House Within

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘I’m going to my son’s funeral,’ he said. ‘He died,’ he added, unnecessarily, but more to convince himself. It made two children, he thought dully. That’s all. One of Bethany’s and one of Patsy’s. He might as easily have said four without thinking, if anyone had asked him yesterday. Perhaps he had told people that in the past. He couldn’t remember.

  The hostess stood up, and carefully smoothed down her skirt without looking at him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  He knew she was angry at having been trapped like this. If he asked her now, she would have to say yes and she no longer wanted to. At least she would think she had to say yes. That was what she would be like, thinking she had to be kind. So would Patsy, and the woman on the six o’clock from Brisbane. Not Bethany, she’d only say yes if she wanted to, for herself, or because she wanted to be kind.

  Only Bethany, the only one who was different.

  ‘Enjoy your evening,’ he said formally, tilting his head slightly, as she waited to see whether he would allow her to move away. Her sigh of relief was just visible as she slid away to check passengers’ seatbelts. The airport was in sight.

  He shook himself together, wondering if he would be able to buy a bottle of gin to take to his motel. It had been too late to get into a hotel; there was a conference on, and everything was booked. He had shouted at his secretary all morning, until she had wilted and wept. He had tried to apologise, given up, indulged in the luxury of grief.

  If grief was what you could call it. He was uncertain of his rights in that respect.

  The next morning, when he had cleaned the sour taste from his mouth and put on a clean shirt and underwear and picked up his rental car, he tried to work out what he should feel, as he drove south. Of course, he was grieving, he told himself fiercely. Ritchie was mine, my first child. It didn’t matter that he had left him, he would have come back to him. In time. The time hadn’t been right, that was all. It was better for Ritchie that he had gone away. Better for him and Stephen, his little brother, and for Bethany, their mother. He had bullied them, and shouted just as he had at his secretary, ordered them to tidiness and orderliness, to doing things his way. Maybe the boys would have done what he wanted in the end, maybe it was only their mother who was different.

  Ritchie. He’d taken him riding on his shoulders, held him tight round the waist when they rode the miniature railway, showed him how to hold a hammer and bang a nail, wiped up the blood and tears when he’d missed and hit his finger instead, blamed himself.

  His memory came up against a blank. That was the point at which he had left. Ritchie five, and begging him to stay, pulling his shirts out of his suitcase as fast as he packed them, lying on the floor kicking and screaming, banging his head with ferocious intensity against the lino when he knew that his father would go; Bethany comforting both of them, grey and strained, ugly with the realisation of what they had done to each other, telling Peter not to blame himself, that Ritchie would be all right. Peter wondered if he had ever been all right.

  He sent presents to the boys each Christmas, wondered uneasily if he ought to send a present for the girl too, even though he didn’t know her name, in case she felt neglected by some unknown relative; and accepted Patsy’s easy dismissal of his conscience as nonsense. The child was nothing to do with him, she said, and she was right. The boys wrote back dutifully, always in the second week of January. Peter could visualise it, Gerald’s public service Christmas leave and a trip to the beach, then back home for the rest of the school holidays, and Bethany saying, when she had unpacked the holiday gear — if she bothered to — that now they really must thank their father in Australia for the Christmas presents. At first, round, uneven printing, the envelope addressed in Bethany’s flowing hand, later the careful writing. He thought painfully that the last letter, the last he would ever receive from Ritchie, had a vestige of style. The writing had begun to look as it might do when he was a man. Except that his twelve-year-old handwriting was as near as he would ever get to growing up. Peter’s eyes stung. He pulled over to the side of the road. This was ridiculous.

  He opened the car door, letting a breeze blow round him. He reminded himself again that it was he who had left Ritchie.

  He thought of turning back. He would be on the outside, unable to offer comfort, unable to be comforted by friends and relations who still remembered, in that small town, that he had gone away. He was no part of them.

  It was the bleak and ragged end of autumn, and the wind was cold. It had rained the night before and the last leaves hung sodden in the heavy air. He drove on slowly, promising himself that he wouldn’t think. He started to plan how he might return to Sydney that evening. It might just be possible.

  The white wooden church was near the centre of the town. Peter took his place in a pew near the back. Crowds of people were flowing in, and many of them were children. It bewildered him for a moment. There were not usually children at funerals. Then he remembered that he was at a child’s funeral. He tried to study them while keeping his eyes lowered. Most of them were with adults and he thought that he recognised them as people from around the suburb where he and Bethany had lived. As well, there were a number of boys on the verge of adolescence, Ritchie’s friends perhaps. A group of Scout uniforms moved up to a pew near the front. He felt his eyes prickling. These would be the pallbearers. And he looked at the coffin. Its length surprised him. Perhaps Ritchie had been tall for his age. Peter had been. Perhaps Ritchie was like him.

  A woman slipped in beside him and touched his arm. He had been afraid of this. He was not here to talk to any of them. As he half-turned the woman dropped to her knees and covered her face for a moment, an obligatory gesture towards prayer. It was his sister Janet.

  She slid her bottom back onto the seat, a well-rounded, plumper bottom than when he had seen her last.

  ‘You should be up front,’ she muttered. ‘Up front. You should be there.’

  He shook his head uncomprehendingly. ‘I couldn’t.’

  ‘You’re the father,’ she said, out of the corner of her mouth.

  Janet had never liked Bethany. Of all the people who knew them both, Janet had been the only one who didn’t mind when they got divorced. Peter had supposed he should be grateful for that, only he wasn’t.

  ‘That’s not the point,’ said Peter.

  ‘Only three single flowers,’ she said. ‘That’s all she’d have. One from each of the family, she said.’

  He tried to consider the permutations of family to which Janet referred. Bethany and Gerald’s little girl? Himself? Probably not. Certainly not, he chided himself.

  The organ started to play quietly. ‘How did he die?’ he said suddenly, too loudly, too violently. Heads turned. It was the question he had refused to ask himself on the plane, and the reason he hadn’t rung Bethany when he got her telegram, simply returned one to say he was coming.

  Janet looked as if she would hush him if she could, then her face softened, giving way to a mixture of curiosity and tenderness. Her suit was good, her hands still fine, though thickened round the knuckles. Peter wished that he could touch her, have him hold her. He had loved her when they were little. Perhaps still did. It was difficult to comprehend now, didn’t bear thinking about.

  She whispered. ‘He was on the back of Gerald’s motorbike. They both came off.’

  ‘Is Gerald hurt?’

  ‘Scratches.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘He was travelling too fast. Do you think he’ll have the nerve to show his face?’

  Peter plucked the order of service from the back of the pew in front of him and let it fall open. ‘I don’t expect he’ll have the guts to stay away. I would.’ He glanced at Janet, to gauge her reaction, but her face looked merely woebegone. Ritchie was her nephew too. He wondered if her presents had sat beside his at Christmas.

  ‘Did you send him Christmas presents?’ he asked.

  She snapped, ‘Of course,’ and her face composed itself again.
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  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean —’

  She turned her head away. He thought, Gerald killed my son. At last he had a right to be angry with him. And he was angry. He felt bile rising, his mouth awash with a bitter taste, his gut knotted in the middle. Afterwards he would hit Gerald, smash his face in, do the things to him that Ritchie couldn’t do for himself. And, thinking of Bethany, he would hit him for her too, and because of her.

  He was appalled at himself, at his train of thought. He slumped beside Janet. ‘Will there be charges?’ he whispered.

  ‘Be quiet. People are looking at us.’

  Heads were turning too. He caught Nell Parker’s eye. She was wearing a tight black wool dress over her mountainous breasts. Nell had teased him in the old days, kissed him in the kitchen when they had parties in the neighbourhood, flashed her cleavage at him, and never let him touch, just pecking, damp, little kisses and getting a thrill out of seeing him with a hard on, even though both of them knew it was the sight of her breasts and not the kisses that did it. When he had got maudlin with her one evening, she had told him he should leave Bethany and then, later, she had given evidence against him at the divorce. That was Nell. She had short cropped brown hair now, and the same cold blue eyes. They widened across the church at him. He put two fingers up in a vee and pretended he was scratching his ear with one of them.

  Bethany walked in slowly. Their younger son Stephen walked beside her, appearing to hold her arm, though it seemed that halfway down the church Bethany had begun to support him. Together they lurched towards the front.

  Peter tried to remember the last time they had been there. The children’s christenings, he supposed. But then he had walked with her. The last time she had walked in a church alone, in his sight, was towards him the day they were married. The thought shook him.

  He had looked over his shoulder. He had been told not to, but he couldn’t help it, he so needed to be sure that it really was her coming towards him. Her face had been under a veil, and her stepfather had trudged towards him like a soldier on duty, with her long satin-clad arm resting on his. When they reached the altar and she stood beside him, he had been able to see her soft, generously curved mouth through the veil and her eyes shining and moist. He had felt so faint, and she had touched him then and whispered, ‘I came, didn’t I?’ He had wanted to have a long conversation with her on the spot, about a whole number of things that he hadn’t thought to discuss with her before, about why she had wanted to come, and what he would have to do for her to stay with him, and whether the dinner service they had chosen was really in the best possible taste considering how much his aunt has given them towards it for a wedding present and, indeed, whether her definition of good taste coincided with his at all, though he hadn’t really ever stopped to think about it before.

  It didn’t matter, though. In the end it was Patsy who defined that subject for him.

  At the time, the vicar persisted in marrying them. Peter hadn’t heard a word of the service and couldn’t recall anything of it now. Except that the vicar had let the hair in his ears grow too long and there was a globule of wax hanging in the thicket in one ear. He’d never thought of it again, not until now. That was all he could remember of his marriage service. That and Bethany walking towards him.

  Now she was walking away, her too-pudgy figure dressed in a brown sweater with a short coat over the top and a long, straight, grey serge skirt to her ankles. So like Bethany, he thought, out-of-date and vaguely outrageous and at the same time trying to look dignified enough for the occasion. She had a sense of occasion. Even in her grief, and there was no doubt, from the hunch of her shoulders and swollen, lowered face, that she was grief-stricken, she would have had a sense of occasion. He knew she would have sorted out the dull, ugly colours because it was Ritchie’s funeral. She was still trying. He wished he had been able to give her more, then thought better of it. If she hadn’t been so careless with her clothes she wouldn’t have had to make do like this. He rebuked himself for feeling sorry for her. Bethany had to be the most slatternly woman he had ever known.

  Behind her, much further behind, and limping slightly, Gerald followed, leading a little girl by the hand. The child strained away from him, and called, ‘Mummy, Mummy, I want to go to Mummy.’ She broke free and ran after Bethany. Gerald sank his face into his beard.

  At last the four of them were settled in some kind of awkward order at the front and the service began.

  Peter didn’t listen. It was like his marriage service. Nothing related to the reality of the moment. He wondered, instead, why he had been sorry for Bethany one moment and angry with her the next. It must be old habit. It occurred to him then that the hem of her long skirt had been down at the back, though he hadn’t quite realised that when he had been watching her. Of course it explained everything.

  The boys in their uniforms carried out the coffin, some of them crying. Peter wondered if it was right to make children observe such painful ritual. He was not sure what he and Patsy would do if it were their son. Perhaps it would be more proper to have a private service.

  He said as much to Janet on the way to the cemetery. She had flown up from Christchurch for the funeral and didn’t have a car.

  ‘Proper. What’s proper?’ she said in a dull voice when he asked her. ‘Is that all you ever think of?’

  ‘Whose side are you on?’ he replied sharply.

  ‘Side! Peter, that was Ritchie.’

  He swerved to avoid a cat and wondered why he bothered. He had never liked cats much.

  ‘I could only see Bethany,’ he said, though he didn’t expect her to understand.

  ‘Do you think she’ll speak to me?’ he said, as they shuffled through the crowd at the cemetery.

  ‘Why don’t you ask her?’ snapped Janet. But then he saw the grave’s cruel grin, the open wound in the ground, and there was nothing to say, although around him ragged cries rose in the air. After what seemed a long time, he found himself standing at the gate to the cemetery, his hand smudged with the clay soil he had thrown on Ritchie’s coffin.

  Bethany spoke to him first. She sought him out among the sea of smudged and blotchy faces. Or perhaps his was the only one she recognised.

  ‘Have you got a car? Can you take me to Anna’s?’ she said, as if they had already had conversation.

  ‘Aren’t they going back to — your place?’ He hesitated over the phrase.

  ‘It’s a mess. I couldn’t face cleaning up, not for this. Anyway, there’s been too much else to do.’ She was on the defence even before he had begun to attack.

  ‘Of course, I can see that,’ he said, and for once he did.

  ‘Anna said she’d have us. I’m not asking too many around. Actually,’ she corrected herself, ‘I’m not asking anyone around. But they come. They want to. You know how it is.’ She gestured vaguely.

  ‘Has Anna got a house now?’

  ‘Oh yes. A very nice house. She came back, you know.’ She could see he didn’t know. ‘She got married,’ she said, as if that explained everything.

  Anna was Bethany’s sister. She had been a student when Peter and Bethany were married. He fancied her a lot. She had hair she could sit on, and very good legs, if you went for legs, though they weren’t a priority for him. Funny how he had always wanted women other than the ones he was married to. He had never been able to understand that in himself. It was the one untidy part.

  ‘What about Gerald?’ he asked then.

  ‘He’s getting a lift with Bruce.’ Peter had no idea who Bruce was, but it didn’t seem important, though he would have liked to ask why Bruce didn’t take them both, or all of them, for that matter, for it looked as if he, Peter, was going to take Stephen and the little girl too. He had lost sight of Janet, and wished she were with him, but already he could see her climbing into Nell Parker’s car. She probably thought she was being tactful, he thought savagely, and then, that that was exactly what he would have done if he had been her. Well might she ask a
bout his sense of the proper. They were not brother and sister for nothing.

  Bethany settled herself in the car, with the children sitting silently in the back. She fumbled with the seatbelt, and her hands touched Peter’s as he helped her.

  ‘What’s the little girl’s name?’ he asked, for want of something to say.

  ‘Abbie. It’s short for Abigail.’

  ‘Pretty.’

  ‘It means a source of joy.’

  ‘And is she?’ he said, too heartily. What he really meant was that he would like Bethany to be joyous now, however clearly that was impossible. He could forgive her anything when she was happy. Or so he had once believed. She was so very beautiful when she was happy. He believed if she laughed even now that her face would not be so strained and putty coloured, that he wouldn’t notice that the rich brown hair pulled back behind her head was greasy and probably hadn’t been washed for days, and that her clothes really were dreadful.

  ‘You go down Griffin Street,’ said Bethany. ‘After that it’s the third street on the right.’

  He had to think where Griffin Street was. Everything had changed. Seven years, and the town’s very face had altered just like Bethany’s. He reminded himself that the shape of the hills and the valleys would still be the same.

  ‘Keep going, further down yet,’ said Bethany.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ said Stephen suddenly, from the back seat. It was the first time he had spoken since he got into the car. Peter divined that it was a calculated comment, for they had come alongside a hamburger bar.

  ‘We’ll get something at Aunty Anna’s,’ said Bethany.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ he repeated and there was a dangerously high whine in his voice.

  Bethany sighed and said, ‘Do you think we could stop?’

  Peter slowed the car down. ‘Yes, but surely —?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You can get something at your aunt’s, old chap,’ he said to his son. The boy stared at him mutinously. He was a slightly built ten-year-old with mousy hair and a row of freckles across the pale, narrow bridge of his nose.