The House Within

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘It would only take a minute,’ said Bethany.

  ‘But hamburgers. I mean, today? Well, if there’s something at Anna’s.’ Although he had already stopped the car.

  ‘It’s not a wedding breakfast,’ she said. She was halfway out of the car.

  ‘Actually, I’m hungry too,’ he said. It was true, and as well, he wanted to make amends. For the moment he was committed to them.

  ‘What do you want, Abbie?’

  ‘Chippies,’ said the child, with a little skip.

  ‘And a hamburger,’ said Stephen. ‘You’ve got to have a hamburger, too.’

  ‘Daddy gets me chips without a hamburger. Will you?’ she asked Peter.

  ‘Yes, of course. Why don’t you all sit down?’ He put the burgers and french fries in front of them on the shaky little formica tables. Their knees were all too close together, and he had to lean sideways to avoid the bend in Bethany’s. He knew what silky little pits they were, especially if she was lying in bed with her legs drawn up. He used to tuck his kneecaps in behind them and hold her to him all the way down. That way you got closer to someone in bed than if you were lying face to face. Everything touched.

  ‘I’d rather have had fish and chips,’ said Stephen peevishly.

  ‘Oh, you would not,’ said Bethany.

  ‘I would.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say then?’

  ‘You didn’t ask me.’

  ‘But you said to stop here,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t want a hamburger,’ he said, as if it were irrefutable proof of his point of view. He pushed his food away from him. Abbie inched sideways towards Peter. He wanted to cuddle her. Her hair was the same colour as Bethany’s.

  ‘Then go without,’ said Bethany.

  ‘I will too.’

  She looked as if she might strike him, and checked herself.

  ‘Stephen,’ she said, and her voice was so blunted and exhausted that Peter wanted somehow to be united with her, though not necessarily in the physical sense. ‘Stephen, would you like to go and sit in the car with your hamburger?’ She looked at Peter. ‘I’m sure it’s all right,’ she said.

  She was going to say she was sure Peter wouldn’t mind, he guessed, only that didn’t fit, and neither did ‘dad,’ nor ‘your father’. Nothing fitted.

  ‘Are you going to fight?’ Stephen said, looking from one to the other.

  ‘Why should we do that?’ said Bethany.

  ‘Because Alan Mahoney’s mother and father are divorced and they fight.’

  ‘No,’ said Peter firmly. ‘We’re not going to fight. It’s all right. If you want to sit in the car that’s fine … You go and have your hamburger there, okay?’

  He dangled the keys in front of him. Stephen looked carefully from one to the other. ‘Abbie should come too. You should send her away too.’

  ‘Stephen, I’m not sending you away.’ Bethany’s voice was barely under control. Stephen snatched the keys from Peter’s hand and ran out of the restaurant.

  ‘Will he be all right?’ said Peter.

  ‘Yes. I suppose so. I don’t know.’ She rested her head in her hands. ‘I don’t know whether my children will be safe. I thought I did, but I don’t know any more.’

  Abbie stroked her mother’s face. ‘Poor Mummy,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. Poor Mummy,’ said Peter. He recalled, with an effort, that Abbie was not their child.

  ‘It’s all right. I’m sorry I got so impatient,’ said Bethany. She raised haggard eyes. ‘Stephen gets to me like that. I don’t mean him to. He’s more like you, I guess.’

  ‘Than Ritchie?’

  She didn’t answer that straightaway. She poured some salt out on to the table top, spread it evenly, then began to draw little patterns in it.

  ‘I’m sorry, Bethany,’ he said.

  ‘Who for?’

  ‘You.’

  ‘What about Ritchie?’

  ‘I’m trying to be. But I don’t know Ritchie. I’m sorry, I mean — I can’t relate.’

  ‘Whose fault’s that?’

  ‘Fault!’ In a moment, he thought, I’ll be shouting at her and doing unforgivable things. He was beside himself with rage. But she wouldn’t know it, he told himself, she won’t, she will not, I won’t let her know, not today.

  She powdered a dash of pepper over her patterns of salt. She had drawn the letter ‘R’. She erased it and drew a ‘B’, her own initial, then Abbie’s.

  ‘Weird. This is too weird, isn’t it? Sitting here like this, when all the time … I hope you thought the funeral was all right.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Have you a cigarette?’ She spoke spitefully, so he knew how full of anger she was. Silently he presented her with a cigarette from his squashed packet.

  ‘The funeral was fine,’ he said evenly. ‘It’s the way I would have done it.’

  ‘It would have been cheaper to have cremated him.’

  ‘I’m not counting the cost.’

  She shrugged. ‘Well, it doesn’t matter. I mean, it doesn’t, does it? Not to Ritchie.’

  ‘No. Should we be going?’

  She blew smoke out of the corner of her mouth, a new gesture. It irritated him. Her busy finger smudged over the pile of salt again, and drew an ‘S’ in it. She had exquisite fingernails. Even now. They always came as a surprise, fragile, pale and shapely.

  ‘Who were the flowers from?’

  She glanced at him quickly then. ‘Janet?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought she could have told you all the details.’

  ‘Who?’ It was desperately important he know.

  ‘The family. Me, Stephen, Abbie.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I’m letting you help with the funeral. That should be enough for you.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You said, Peter, you did say, you didn’t know him. I’m so stuffed in the head, Peter. Please.’

  ‘It’s all right. I do see …’

  ‘We should get to Anna’s.’

  They sat and looked at one another. Abbie rested her head on Bethany’s arm. At four, she had a promise of beauty. Her resemblance to Bethany had made Peter forget Gerald. She could have been theirs. He could love Abbie if he were allowed to.

  ‘What about Gerald?’ he said.

  ‘Gerald? Oh … I don’t know. I couldn’t really count him, could I? Perhaps I should have.’

  ‘He’s your family now, Bethany,’ said Peter. This sounded sanctimonious, he knew, but he hadn’t meant it that way. He wanted the conversation over. He supposed that now was the time to talk about other things that she might want to say to him about Ritchie, about the manner of his death, about what he had been like before he died, what sort of kid he had been.

  But they were due at Anna’s and there was no time. There had never been any time. Or not enough of the right sort.

  ‘Gerald’s not family,’ said Bethany. ‘Though I think Ritchie sort of believed he was.’

  Peter spread his hands carefully across the table and saw with shame that they were shaking, but he didn’t seem to be able to stop them. It was as if they didn’t belong to him.

  ‘You and Gerald, no go?’

  Her surprise was real. ‘We don’t live together. You must know.’

  But he didn’t. That was how effectively he had blotted her out of his life. Nobody even bothered to tell him a thing like that. Why should they think he would be interested? His eyes flicked to his watch. If he dropped them at Anna’s and didn’t go in he could still get back to Auckland for the evening plane. He was in quicksand and he didn’t want to go under. He could be drinking fresh orange juice for breakfast and reading the Sydney Morning Herald while Patsy got Jason ready for play group. If he hurried now. He made jerky little getting up movements from the seat.

  ‘Gerald and I … we get on well together. He still comes round.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’ He was trying to stop his agitation, but at the same time gather them
up and shepherd them out.

  But Bethany wasn’t having that. She didn’t get up.

  ‘You’re all right on your own?’ He tried, at least, to carry the conversation forward.

  ‘I didn’t like him going. I never liked people going.’ Her gaze rested frankly on him. The comment was intended as much for him as for Gerald.

  ‘It wouldn’t have been any good, us staying married,’ he said.

  ‘I wanted you.’

  The moist eyes under the veil. Her coming to him. There was that.

  ‘You didn’t want to stay married to me,’ he said quietly, ‘No more than I did to you. You knew that then.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well then.’

  ‘I guess I’m not the marrying kind. Or the kind to be married to.’

  ‘You and Gerald never thought of it?’

  ‘At first. But it never seemed important. Then he went away. It was upsetting for the kids. Well, that’s what I think, though you can’t tell with Stephen — you never know what’s on his mind.’

  ‘Ritchie still saw him?’

  ‘Of course. He was good to the kids.’

  ‘But he killed Ritchie.’

  It was out. The anger spurting from him. He ought to hit her, seeing Gerald wasn’t there.

  ‘Is that what they’re saying? Your sister? Is that what Janet said?’

  ‘She said it was Gerald’s fault.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Bethany. ‘You went away.’ She swept the salt off the table and stood up, taking Abbie’s hand as she did so. ‘It was your fault.’

  She walked towards the light, a thick, bunchy woman in dowdy clothes. Peter hated her. He wanted to take her from behind and choke her.

  They drove to Anna’s place in silence, except for her curt instructions. Stephen hadn’t eaten his hamburger and it smelled greasy and messy in the car. Peter thought, the plane will go without me, I will never get away from this place without their reproaches. I have to suffer through to the last bitter drop. He had learned, he believed then. He would tidy up the part of his life that wanted other women; even affairs could be made tidy, and not muddled heaps of desire and problems that went on and on forever. Patsy would never catch him out the way Bethany had. He would walk the whole gamut of their small-town, never-ending disapproval this day, and never again. He would never come back, to be criticised and reviled and unforgiven for the things that they did every day of their lives, either in their heads or in their deeds. He would never come back to remind Bethany that, for all his sins, he had given her freedom, and the dignity to be as she chose; to read what she liked, to live in a garden of sprawling trees that were never pruned in the winter, with larkspurs and sunflowers in the summer, and now, in the ragged autumn, the red cotoneasters and the rough, untethered chrysanthemums. She had life the way he had given it to her because it was all he had had to give, and still they were going to make him pay for it, in Anna’s neat brick house where they had drawn up, among the lines of cars down each side of the roadway. The cars were empty now, and he knew that the people inside would have been waiting for a long time, as they did when a bridal couple took too long to get to the reception. He wondered if they would be drinking, and the idea of them drinking at his son’s funeral, toasting his death, made him recoil. He would have to watch it.

  They would make him watch.

  They would blame him.

  ‘Thank you for the ride,’ Bethany said. He reached for the door handle. ‘Come on, kids,’ she said to the children in the back.

  ‘I’ll find a park,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t come in. It would be better not.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I thought you wanted me to come.’

  She looked at him thoughtfully. ‘So did I.’ She brushed against him in a way that might or might not have been intentional. ‘Catch your plane, Peter. Go on, I know that’s what you want.’

  Later, in the purring night, he thought that she might have sent him away for Gerald’s sake. It didn’t matter, though. Either way, her dismissal was a benediction.

  A woman smiled at him across the aisle and he smiled back.

  ANNA’S ALBUM

  1: PICTURED IN INNOCENCE

  WHEN BETHANY THINKS of Anna her heart clenches up like a small fist, full of knuckle. In the heat of summer she smells her clean little girl armpits, open, as she lies asleep spreadeagled on the bed beside her; on winter nights she draws the duvet cover up under her chin and reaches not for her one-time husband, or her children, although one child haunts all her dreams, but for the possumy body of her baby sister who has climbed into bed to suck her thumb next to Bethany’s heart.

  I’ll be the mother, she used to tell Anna, when they put their teacups, no bigger than mushrooms, in a circle under a tree. No, it’s my turn, Anna would say, and reluctantly, so as to be fair and sharing, as Miss McTavish, their junior school teacher, had told her she must be, Bethany allowed Anna her moment of pouring bark-stained water out of the miniature teapot.

  ‘Remember to crook your finger,’ Bethany had to remind her. Really, she wanted to be in charge, to make sure that, by asserting her older sister authority, she would be in a better position to ward off evil that might befall Anna.

  Sometimes Anna played on this. You could see it coming in the mornings. Their mother, dressing them hurriedly, in between putting on her own clothes and bright make-up, would yank Anna’s hair trying to put the brush through the dark curls. ‘I’ll be late, don’t you care?’ Their mother was a sales assistant at Gold’s Menswear.

  ‘Bethy forgot to wake me up.’ Sly green eyes, curved outwards at the corners, looking sideways. Baby names.

  ‘Then Bethany can do the washing up, really fast, so the rest of us can get going.’ Other times, Anna’s foot might explode, landing a well-aimed kick on their mother’s shin, her mouth set in a mean line that their mother’s slap couldn’t dislodge. Anna didn’t cry.

  ‘What’s the matter dear?’ Miss McTavish asked Anna, noting her mutinous expression. ‘Bethany, have you been unkind to Anna again?’

  And Bethany, because she must also protect her mother, hung her head and said nothing, for she had her own brand of silence. This is how it was. People had a way of protecting Anna and assuming the worst of Bethany. It wasn’t just the difference in their ages that did it. Bethany, rounder, plainer and older by thirteen months, bore the brunt of what befell the family. Their father didn’t come back from the war, as her mother and her sisters put it, a euphemism for saying he was as dead as a bad rat in Egypt.

  There are pictures in the album of her father, heartbreakingly young, with a jaunty cigarette tilted upwards between his lips, a soldier’s cap on his head. Her mother, Lynne Myrtle Devine, with her head tipped up, laughing in his face. The girls were conceived during leaves after the war started, before he was despatched. The album, dark green with scratched gold lettering and a spiral binding, dense black pages with the texture of felt, their surfaces scattered with randomly chosen snapshots. Her mother holding her, an anxious, squalling baby.

  Bethany, sniffed her aunts, anyone would think she’d been born illegit. Bethany has no idea why her mother gave her this name; there is nothing in the family chronicles to offer an answer. There was a home for unmarried mothers called Bethany down the road from them in Auckland. You never got a look at the mothers, they were kept mercifully out of sight from decent folks, but everyone knew what a bunch of bad girls they were. You’re sure your baby didn’t die and you exchanged her for one of those, Lynne’s sister asked her, one Christmas Day, when they had all had a beer too many. We haven’t got a skeleton in the cupboard, have we? It is, Bethany discovered, the name of the village where Jesus stayed during Holy Week, before going on to Jerusalem and the crucifixion. Mary of Bethany was the sister of Martha and Lazarus.

  The dead sleep, Bethany believes. There is no raising them. Bethany has lain down on the side of a road imploring her own son to stand up
and walk while she waited for an ambulance to come. Her lover had stood and wrung his hands. Death, fucking death. Her son didn’t rise. The death of love. If you could call what Bethany felt for Gerald the real thing, the bite and test it with your teeth kind of real. She had already handed him on to Anna at the time. This is the more perverse reality which she prefers to forget. She doesn’t think of Gerald now, unless she is confronted with his name, has blocked him out, as they say. Even Abbie, their daughter, doesn’t speak of him as her father any more. Hatched on the blankets, Ma, she says with irreverence. Bethany handles Abbie’s birth certificate with distaste when she must, as if holding it with tongs, the name it bears an admission of a certain kind of failure that has no redemption.

  Further on in the album, here is her mother looking as close to grave as she will ever be, two serious daughters beside her, fragile little creatures with spindly arms and legs. ‘I’ll get a job,’ her mother said, when the first tears were over and the telegram from the King was framed on the wall. She had a war pension, of course. ‘But where will that go, with two smart little girls like mine?’ The kids need you at home, the sisters pleaded in vain. Aunt Vera said well there was only one thing for it, she would just have to see to these children. Which she did; Aunt Vera, stout, corseted, childless, although she was decently married, took over.

  Bethany could see they were doing Aunt Vera a favour, being available like this after school and in the holidays. And Bethany guessed it wasn’t just the money her mother needed — she was glad of an escape from child minding and the narrow walls of her scrim-lined cottage. Bethany visited her once or twice in Gold’s Menswear, when it was the holidays and Aunt Vera had taken her and Anna shopping. Her mother’s finely painted eyebrows would arch above wide eyes and her plush red mouth purse into a little ‘oh’ of feigned surprise.

  ‘Yes, they’re really mine,’ she told gentlemen emerging from the fitting rooms in their new civilian suits, as if they needed convincing that she could possibly have two children as old as this. ‘Aren’t they just darlings? Don’t you think I just love them?’ But it was Anna’s hand she picked up. Their mother no longer wore a wedding ring.