The House Within

by Fiona Kidman

  Bethany went back to work at the laboratory. This is a decision she made in the light of Ritchie’s death, not because of Anna or Des, or Gerald, people whose names for a while ran into each other as if they were strangers, but because if she hadn’t done something for herself she might have died as well. She called in someone to clean her house, and lost weight. Gerald tired of pottery and moved on to some other job in another town, having made a fortune out of the sale of Freeways. Her former husband came to visit her and she was able to say, with conviction, I’ll manage.

  But she waited for messages, words from anywhere. She waited for a postcard from Anna. She waited for Gerald to write letters to Abbie in return for the pictures and drawings, and, later, letters, which her daughter prepared and posted in a stamped envelope provided by Bethany. Money was deposited in Bethany’s bank account every month, but there were no messages. She did, at least, know where he was. She knew, because she had taken the trouble to find out, that Anna wasn’t with him. She still doesn’t know if that was the answer. As time passes, it seems increasingly unimportant.

  Bethany went to the police and asked if they could help her track down Anna. She was afraid for her safety. Her sister might be travelling under an alias, or she might have done herself harm. She wanted to know that she was alive. The police were polite, even kind. They knew her sister was alive but she wished to keep her whereabouts to herself. There was nothing they could do about this.

  Bethany advertised through the missing persons link, in New Zealand, and then in Australia. She wrote to women’s magazines and sent old photographs of Anna. A woman wrote to her once and said that she had been on holiday in Queensland and was sure she had encountered Anna, working in a hairdressing salon. When the woman met her, Anna had just come back from Bali, and looked much browner and perhaps a little fatter than in the photograph, but she was convinced it was her. She was, in the words of the writer, ‘a lovely person, very natural and friendly, she made me feel real good about myself. She listened to all my problems because, I can tell you what, I was having more than problems with my permanent, the day that I met her.’ Bethany isn’t convinced that the woman has met Anna, although there is something there that has the ring of truth. Whether or not it is true, she has come to think of Anna as living in Queensland.

  One day, Lyle, Des’s son, rang her at the laboratory. His voice was high and cracked, as if he might be having a breakdown, or was just fighting back tears. Could she meet him after work? He named a coffee shop in town. He sat at one of the round tables covered with a gingham cloth. The restaurant was fake olde English with laminated darkened beams, and a smiling waitress who wore a cute floral apron. You couldn’t see into the coffee shop from the outside, and Lyle seemed pleased with his choice, as if not being seen was what he really wanted out of life. He was paler and thinner than he had been as a child, and his acne had got worse, so that flaming scars stained his cheeks in what were probably permanent blemishes.

  ‘I’m so pleased to see you, Lyle,’ said Bethany. ‘I’ve worried about you.’

  Indeed, she had rung several times and asked Lyle to come over for meals but he had always refused. He was eighteen at the time of his father’s death, old enough, it was decided, in the absence of any other beneficiaries to his father’s will, to take possession of the house and do what he liked.

  She shouldn’t be worried, Lyle explained. He was learning to be a photographer, he had his own darkroom. No, he wasn’t going to lessons, it was something you could teach yourself if you read all the books and had the right equipment. He was lucky, he told her, that he had enough money for that. ‘That woman didn’t get any, you know,’ he said with malicious triumph, as if he had forgotten that that woman was Bethany’s sister.

  ‘What do you want to see me for, Lyle?’ she asked him, unable to bear any longer the angry pathos in his eyes.

  ‘I found my dad’s camera, that’s what got me going. Found it in a cupboard. There was a film in it, you see. I thought it was no good, probably wouldn’t come out. I opened it up too quick, not knowing what I was doing, and I thought the light would have got in. I didn’t want to see it anyway, it would have been pictures of her.’

  ‘So what’s changed?’

  ‘I just decided I would, nothing better to do. It was in the corner of the darkroom.’

  Bethany could feel a dreadful foreboding rising physically inside her. She half-rose to go, then sat down again. Lyle had laid a photograph down on the table, a grainy, black and white image where the light had entered, so that a large whitish patch disfigured the edge. The photograph showed a man sitting at a kitchen table, his hands clasped in front of him, a gun propped beside the table. His head was bowed. Bethany looked up quickly, choking back nausea.

  ‘Your father did kill himself. I went to the inquest. There was no doubt about it.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘So who took this photograph?’

  ‘Well, you tell me that.’ His voice was sneering.

  ‘I’m asking you. Do you know?’

  ‘She did.’

  ‘I don’t believe that.’

  ‘She watched him do it.’

  ‘No. Anna wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘Who else would’ve taken it?’

  ‘You could have.’

  He sat watching her, his ugly, mad eyes straining back tears. ‘Oh yeah?’

  Bethany looked at the table. She didn’t know what this meant. Perhaps it didn’t mean anything. Nothing could be changed, nothing turned back. ‘I think she knew how sick he was.’

  ‘Goodness and mercy, eh?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t hand me that crap. She was a bad bitch.’

  Bethany stood up then. ‘That’s enough,’ she said. ‘That’s quite enough of that.’

  BETHANY MISSES ANNA. Anna has left her life, she has vacated the place beside her heart, along with Ritchie, and, yes, Peter too, although it is not the same thing. She feels like an orphan, an only child cut off from family. She works hard to fill the spaces. She watches and listens for signs, for some indication that Anna, at least, will come back. After a long time, she believes it is true — she won’t see Anna again.

  One day, she is swimming in the pool, her body leaner and harder than it was in that very bad time of her life, speeding smoothly through the blue, clear water. Through her goggles she sees the long red lines that trace the lanes on the tiled floor of the pool. She has an image of Anna, like a flame in her red boiler suit, defiant, at the end of her tether perhaps. And she thinks she sees Anna now, one of those sleek, suntanned women who live near Surfers, brittle, with gold bangles on her wrists, playing bridge, or tennis perhaps, dressed in white, drinking poolside at sundown but not before.

  Bethany towels her hair dry in the changing room and looks at herself in the mirror. She studies her reflection. In the corner of the mirror she sees an aura, or so she believes, a reddish aura, like light getting into a very old sepia-toned photograph.

  MRS DIXON AND FRIEND

  FREE PEOPLE

  ‘BUT PETER, I want to meet him,’ cried Patsy.

  Peter glanced anxiously around the bar, seeking a way to escape before the man propped at the counter saw them, and grasped Patsy’s arm firmly. He wondered fleetingly if his superb wife could be bored by the conference. He dismissed the thought as disloyal. She had been splendid, had played golf in the Ladies’ Tournament, stood successfully for the entertainment committee when the conference moved back to Sydney next year, made time to see a few old friends in town. A great week for both of them.

  So that he was astonished when she insisted upon bearing down on the lounging figure draped on a stool. Gerald looked different from the other men in the room. That was what had drawn their attention in the first place. Whereas Peter’s colleagues were like him, still in the sober garb of business suits as they poured out of seminar rooms and sales talk sit-ins, Gerald was dressed in an elegant pale caramel silk shirt with a Pierre Cardin c
ravat tucked into the collar beneath his ginger beard, and exquisite linen slacks. Peter wondered what role Gerald was currently playing. He never looked quite the same from one year to the next. He remembered him back in the old days when Gerald was still with Janice and he with Bethany. The whole hotch-potch Saturday night red wine and barbecue set, dancing to the Beatles and rediscovering Greene and God, getting introduced at the parent teachers’, all of it. And Gerald coming on strong about the Parkers getting a tennis court put in and laughing when Peter got a promotion and drinking a mock toast to capitalism, and singing ‘God Save the Queen’ while he was doing a down trou and popping farts at dinner parties and giving up smoking and telling everybody he was doing it and making bread nobody could eat, and telling them how they had no values at all.

  That and free love. Embarrassing.

  Though at the time Peter thought some of it made sense. He’d actually listened. Janice, Gerald’s wife, used to sit wrapped in a dream world, untouched. One night Peter tried to touch her, break through. ‘What do you think of all this?’ he had said.

  ‘All what? Heigh down, ho down, derry derry down. Fairy down, Peter, fairy down.’

  Janice, he thought, had it made. Or something. They were new to the district. He wasn’t surprised when he heard, after he’d left and when Gerald had gone to live with Bethany, that actually Gerald and Janice weren’t married at all. Shook the foundations back there, though.

  Worst of all, it was Peter who was the convert, even though when they got home from parties, he’d laugh about Gerald and Janice to Bethany in the privacy of their room. But Gerald triggered something inside of him, something that said let loose boy-o.

  He did too. And prospered when he’d done it.

  Bethany suffered.

  Gerald picked up the pieces.

  Then put them down again. He left Bethany.

  In short, as Peter could see quite clearly now, Gerald was a fraud.

  He preferred not to define his own role.

  ‘Please, Patsy, I don’t want to see him.’ But it was too late. Gerald had spotted them. They wended their way through the crowd, Peter inwardly cursing that he had disclosed the man’s identity to Patsy. She looked so beautiful, though, that he decided it must be his fault. Every head turned towards them and he knew it was Patsy they were looking at, tall and statuesque, perfectly groomed, fresh with paint and oral spray, deodorant and French perfume, thin-bottomed in her designer jeans. Soon it would be time for her to change. He knew she had a new dress for the last night of the conference. They would look at Patsy all night, and she was his. He could forgive her anything.

  ‘Hullo, Gerald,’ he said awkwardly and extended his hand.

  Gerald sat contemplating it for a moment or two and Peter thought he would push his face in if he played his old games of holier than thou and what’s your motive. It was what he had always hated most about Gerald.

  Gerald took his hand tentatively with limp fingers and muttered, ‘I’d forgotten you were in textiles now, Peter.’

  Peter had no way of telling whether that was true or not, but it did appear Gerald was genuinely surprised and embarrassed by this unexpected meeting. It occurred to him that his ex-wife’s ex-lover had been afraid to shake hands with him because of what had happened to Ritchie. As well he might be.

  To be fair, after the accident he had written Peter a laboured, desperate letter, full of remorse and sorrow. He had enclosed a copy of the court’s and the coroner’s findings, that it was death by misadventure, even though Gerald had been slightly exceeding the speed limit. A favour on a wet night to a boy who trusted him, stranded without transport. A mild infringement. Punishment far beyond the crime. And so on. It was in itself a plea. In rational moments in the months immediately following Ritchie’s death, Peter agreed that justice had been done.

  At other times, on hot, dark, sleepless nights, he planned what he would say to Gerald if he ever met him again.

  ‘You with someone then, old chap?’ he said heartily, after he had introduced Patsy.

  ‘I was,’ said Gerald morosely, yet more comfortable too, as if he had sensed the passing of danger. ‘Old school friend, over from Australia, like you. Asked me in for a drink.’

  He gestured round vaguely. ‘Bowman. Andrew Bowman. Know him? Good on the wing. Hockey, you know. You know Andrew?’

  ‘Oh yes. Andrew. Allied Carpets.’

  ‘I think so. Yes.’

  ‘Good chap.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Peter thought savagely, bloody good, great, yes. Asked his old mate in for a drink, taken one look and run for cover. Andrew Bowman was nowhere in sight. Not that you could put a finger on what was wrong with Gerald. Flashy perhaps. Not impossible, just unsuitable. Though he’d suited Bethany for a while. Actually, seeing Gerald pleased Peter. He was confirmation that he had been right to leave them all behind him, that Bethany was bound to fail or, more importantly, that had he stayed, he would have failed with her. Peter settled himself on a stool.

  ‘Said he had a phone call. I expect he’ll be back,’ Gerald said, peering around.

  Patsy was beginning to look ashamed. She liked to do things well and instead she had landed them in this.

  ‘We’d better —’ she started.

  ‘We’d better have a drink,’ said Peter at the same time. ‘Come on, drink up, Gerald.’

  ‘Well, I — thank you.’ Gerald did a fancy tap of his fingernails on the top of the bar, starting with the forefinger and following through finger by finger, only so rapidly that it was hard to define the motion precisely. The noise was staccato and jarring. He drained his drink hurriedly.

  ‘Back on the grog then?’ said Peter maliciously.

  ‘Not me. Too bloody dear.’

  ‘Never mind, industry can stand it — once in a while.’ Just like Gerald, he thought, mean. You could bet Gerald didn’t drink except at someone else’s expense.

  ‘Perhaps we should be getting along to dinner,’ said Patsy, betraying her nervousness. She looked round the room, trying to locate one of their new friends.

  ‘What do you do then?’ she said, when there was no sign of rescue.

  ‘Commercial artist. Advertising.’ The busy tapping finger flashed a gold signet ring.

  ‘Oh rea-lly,’ said Patsy, her interest rekindled. ‘How fascinating.’

  Gerald named a firm that was into timber accounts.

  ‘Still into conservation?’ asked Peter. Gerald blushed. Really, he was too easy. Peter had wanted to attack him. Now he could see that it was he who held all the advantages, that although Gerald might be held responsible for any number of offences it was he, Peter, who must be kind if only because Gerald was vulnerable.

  ‘Have you heard from Bethany?’ said Gerald, as the silence grew between them.

  ‘No. Have you?’ said Peter. Again, it sounded abrasive. He tried to soften it. ‘I mean you’d be more likely to.’

  ‘You know she threw me out?’ said Gerald.

  Patsy glanced at Peter.

  ‘That’s not what she told me,’ he said evenly.

  ‘I’ll bet she didn’t.’

  ‘She said, the last time I saw her, which was — a long time ago —” he halted, unable to say that it had been at Ritchie’s funeral, yet feeling that he ought to for Patsy’s peace of mind, and searched for a way to indicate that he was not in the habit of seeing his ex-wife. ‘Two or three years ago,’ he resumed, ‘she said that she was sad to see you go.’

  ‘Oh, then. Oh yes. I’ll bet she was sorry to see me go then. I went back to her. Did you know that?’ Gerald wore an air of triumph.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, I did. I mean, it was the least I could do, wasn’t it, in the circumstances?’

  Peter thought, you turd, you devastating, rotten, smelly, fart-holding turd, you’ve got the nerve to be self-righteous with me. And, on second thoughts, wondered why Gerald shouldn’t be so. After all, it was he, Peter, who had set the precedent for leaving Bethany, if
that’s what they were talking about. He supposed it was and was humbled.

  ‘You mean you went back to look after her!’ exclaimed Patsy. ‘Oh, that was nice of you. She must have needed someone.’

  ‘That’s what I thought, too,’ said Gerald, shaking his head. ‘I mean, look, she was on the booze, going to pieces. Well, you should have seen her.’ He gave Peter a serious, meaningful look.

  ‘I wrote to her and asked if she was all right,’ said Peter. He studied his drink. He had not told Patsy that, but it was reasonable. She must surely see that. Afterwards he would talk to her about it.

  ‘Well,’ said Patsy, flicking an imaginary speck off her trousers, ‘Peter couldn’t do more than that, could he? And if she didn’t answer …’ She didn’t say if what, but there was an implied question in the air.

  ‘She didn’t answer,’ said Peter.

  ‘Oh, she wouldn’t,’ said Gerald. ‘She was off on a liberation jag.’

  ‘Bethany?’ said Peter, though it didn’t really surprise him. Something in his chest, lifted and stirred.

  ‘Oh no,’ Patsy was saying. ‘Not all that nonsense.’

  ‘Oh yes. Got a bad dose.’

  ‘I thought you would have approved,’ said Peter. ‘Sounds like your thing.’

  ‘Oh, well, some of them are extremists, you know.’

  ‘She was always very independent,’ said Peter defensively.

  ‘Oh, come on now, Peter,’ said his wife, turning on him, ‘you always told me how Bethany made a laughing stock of herself trying to be different. That’s why you left her. Well.’ She gave a small inner smile. Peter was silent. He would not let her see how angry he was. He couldn’t have explained why anyway; it was just a choking, breathless feeling, locked in here among all the civil, well-balanced people who were the substance of his life. He breathed deeply, nodded affably to an acquaintance across the room.