The House Within

by Fiona Kidman

  Once Peter half-rose, thinking to leave, but Bethany touched his arm, restraining him. It seemed a long way to have come to witness (although he had not had the courage to look properly) his drunk son being carted out of his school prize-giving. Matt and Jill’s son Anthony was awarded the proxime accessit prize. ‘It means runner-up to the dux,’ Bethany whispered through the applause, moving from her rigid position of self-control. Peter couldn’t have cared less. Then she added with a fierce bitter note, ‘Anthony holds his drink better. It isn’t fair. It’s him that starts it, too.’

  A blonde girl accepted the dux’s award as if she had won a beauty contest, and then it was all over and they were released into the night.

  There were no lights on at the house when they arrived. They had driven back in silence. It was only then that she told him they were to have gone round to the Hawkins’ for a celebration. Her tone was flat, denying him access to her feelings. He put out his hand to touch her arm but she pulled away from him.

  ‘I’ll call you in the morning,’ she said.

  ‘Can’t I come in?’

  ‘Not tonight.’

  ‘What will happen when he comes back? Or will be come back?’

  ‘Nothing will happen. I’ll go to bed, that’s all.’

  He thought to kiss her cheek but the surface was uninviting. She felt like a cold, deep lake beside him. He waited until she was inside and the light had come on, and then drove away, back to his hotel.

  In his room he switched on the television to catch the late news and took a drink out of the rack of miniatures above the fridge. When he had finished two he picked up his key and walked out into the night again to his car.

  Her house was in darkness, and he supposed that, as she had said, she had gone to bed and that nothing would happen. He decided not to go down the driveway in case he frightened her. He had not worked out what he could do, or why he was there. His watch showed midnight. The two hours since the prize-giving had slipped by, and he was stiff and dazed. He told himself he was crazy, sitting here outside his ex-wife’s house, the home of his drunken child, in the middle of the night. A light summer rain had begun to fall, trickling down the windscreen. ‘Damn them all to hell,’ he said out loud. He jumped, seeing his own ghost, as someone knocked on the window of the car.

  It was Stephen. In the pale street light he looked wan and ill, though no longer incapacitated. Peter leaned across and opened the door. Stephen slid in beside him.

  They sat in silence. ‘Well,’ said Peter at last.

  ‘I blew it,’ said Stephen. For an instant Peter thought his voice sounded humble. On second thoughts he decided that it contained more than the hint of a sneer.

  ‘Blew it!’ He knew he sounded shrill, but was unable to stop that, or what he said, ‘When have you ever done anything but blow it? I’ve never seen you unless you were in some sort of trouble or whining or demanding or bullying someone. I thought I was supposed to be seeing a transformation but all I get for a son is a drunken little slob.’ He heard himself going on and on, and did not understand what was happening. He had not travelled to such lengths of anger at least since the days when he lived with Bethany, the terrible days before the end, and leaving her and Stephen and Ritchie. Ritchie, who was now dead, and this boy sitting here beside him, this Stephen.

  Pretty well all that was left, when you came to think of it. His thoughts seemed to be operating at two curious levels. He stopped, waiting for Stephen to go away, to make the final move. But the boy sat there. Peter wondered if his son might hit him. If he were Stephen, perhaps that was what he would do.

  ‘You’re right, of course,’ said Stephen.

  Either he or I must be crazy, Peter thought, and yet he was sure he was not mistaken, there was some strange hint of joy in Stephen’s voice.

  And suddenly Peter understood. This was the first time that he had said what he truly thought of Stephen, spoken without reservation, or careful tact, the language of an estranged father.

  After a while Peter said, ‘You won the hockey stick.’

  ‘Did I really? I didn’t expect that.’

  ‘Fancy you being good at hockey. I used to play, you know.’

  ‘No, I didn’t. Where did you play? What position?’

  ‘On the wing.’

  ‘That’s where I play.’

  ‘Go on now.’ The miracle of it overwhelmed Peter. He wanted to weep softly, here in the quiet, splattering dark.

  ‘What are you doing sitting here?’ Stephen asked.

  ‘I was worried about your mother,’ said Peter.

  ‘It’s a bit late for that, isn’t it?’ said Stephen with fresh asperity.

  He was entitled to that, Peter thought. ‘Why don’t we go in together? It might help her,’ he said.

  Stephen was shocked. ‘You can’t go in there,’ he said.

  ‘Why not?’

  Then he saw, parked on the edge of the road ahead of them, a car that he had not seen before through the rain. He recognised it as Matt’s.

  Of course, he had known from the moment of his arrival, earlier in the evening.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Stephen, as if he wished that none of it were so, as if he would like to improve the lot of his parents but was powerless. Which he was, and always had been. If one dared reflect upon that, the meaning of tonight’s events might all come clear, but that was too difficult and deep to consider. Peter did not think he would ever be up to that.

  ‘Is she happy?’

  ‘You’d have to ask her,’ said Stephen.

  ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Nah. It’s nothing to do with me.’ He reflected. ‘It’s not much of a deal for her. He gets all the bikkies, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Would you like to come back to Sydney with me tomorrow?’ Peter asked on a sudden impulse.

  ‘Do you mean it?’ asked Stephen, his face bright in the glow of the car’s interior light.

  ‘Of course,’ he said stoutly, though, even as he spoke, the logistics appalled him. ‘I live with a woman called Natalie. She’s a dress designer, she’s very nice, you’ll like her. The flat’s a bit small and she works there during the day sometimes, but we’ll work something out. It’ll be fine.’

  Stephen was still. ‘I’d like to sometime,’ he said carefully.

  ‘You don’t want to come?’

  ‘Sure.’ But his tone was evasive.

  ‘I may not always live with Natalie, of course,’ said Peter. This had just occurred to him, but now he realised it was true. He might live with any woman forever. Once he had thought he would always live with Bethany, indeed he had vowed to cherish and protect her as long as they both should live. But that promise had failed and he would never be allowed to redeem it. And if he had been allowed to try, how well could the past be resurrected?

  ‘Can I take a rain check on it?’ said Stephen, meaning the invitation.

  ‘Sure, why not?’

  ‘Will you come in, in the morning?’ Stephen’s face was white and exhausted now from the effects of the alcohol.

  Peter wanted to say he was damned if he would, but even that seemed vain and silly, like all the other things that had brought him and Bethany to this pass. ‘I’ll have to leave at crack of dawn,’ he said, cushioning his refusal. ‘Plane to catch. I’ll be in touch, okay?’

  What did he expect? Suddenly to be called Dad? To be thanked for coming?

  Or an embrace?

  Yes, there might have been that. He would have liked that.

  He slipped the car into gear, thinking that he would work on it.

  ‘Yeah, catch you, mate,’ said Stephen, and slid out the door, disappearing into the blackness.

  DAMN WORDSWORTH

  PETER PICKS UP his mother’s hand and turns it over, fingering the plastic bracelet that harbours her name. Mavis Doreen Dixon. In the hospital bed, she looks smaller than he remembers. Surrounded by bottles and tubes, oxygen, and a monitor with a green erratic line fizzing up and down on a screen, she rem
inds him of a cornered insect. She has become frail and bewildered and her pendulous lower lip trembles when she speaks. Her scalp shines pinkly through white threads of hair. For the moment, she appears to be asleep.

  A nurse comes in to turn her. She is a plump woman in late middle age, quite unlike Peter’s image of a nurse. ‘Come on, Mavis, let’s get you comfortable,’ she says. His mother doesn’t respond. The nurse stifles a sudden yawn. ‘My husband’s taken early retirement,’ she remarks to Peter. ‘He doesn’t know what to do with himself, so he sleeps in in the mornings and stays up at night to watch television. Are you still working?’

  Peter sits up straighter. ‘Certainly,’ he says.

  The nurse goes on, as if she hasn’t noticed. ‘Funny the way things catch up with you. Nobody prepares people for their parents growing old. They tell you about falling in love and getting married, and birth and raising teenagers and all that stuff. This is one of the world’s best-kept secrets.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ he says. What has happened to all the crisp antiseptic young women who supervised the births of his children?

  She looks at him shrewdly. ‘You keep away from hospitals, do you? What about all those colleagues that have heart attacks and get cancer?’

  Peter shrugs. ‘They can do it without me.’

  ‘“Old so-and-so’s got the ‘big C’, eh? Bad luck.” Well, I can’t say I blame you. Death’s better left to others until you’re ready for it.’

  If she doesn’t shut up soon, he thinks he might slap her. The galling part is that all her truisms are striking home. For here he is, confronted at last by the face of a death he can’t avoid. His mother lies fighting for her breath, the cancer in her lungs slowing pressing air out of her chest cavity, against her windpipe, deflating every organ.

  She has woken up. ‘Oh, there, there, dear,’ says the nurse, wiping her face. Mavis is crying, as she does every time she opens her eyes and sees Peter sitting there.

  ‘It’s the stroke,’ says the nurse. ‘Doctor told you she’s had a little stroke as well, didn’t he? Don’t worry she’s not that sad. It might even be happiness, eh, Mavis? She’s so happy to see you.’

  ‘You won’t go away, will you, Peter?’ whispers his mother.

  ‘Of course I won’t, Mum,’ Peter replies. But he can see why she might doubt him.

  VALERIE, THE MOST recent woman in his life, is coming into the room with his sister, Janet.

  Her mother’s eyes light up with recognition. ‘Why, hullo, Bethany,’ she pants.

  ‘Mum’, he begins awkwardly, ‘it’s not…’

  He is silenced by a look from Valerie that leaves him floundering in mid-air. No, this isn’t Bethany, he had been about to say, it’s someone else. This is not my first wife, the one you remember with our children, pushing them on the swings, singing to them at night, making dinner for you and Pop when you visited. This is Valerie. Please, he wants to say, don’t hurt Valerie, she’s the nearest I’ve come to happiness in a very long time.

  ‘I want to take her home,’ Janet tells the nurse. Janet, older than him, wears a patchwork velvet top over her slacks, her hair caught up in a Madonna knot. Peter wonders whether she is too old to look like that, but decides that if she feels good, it is probably all right.

  The nurse looks doubtful. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ says Janet. ‘I promised our mother I wouldn’t leave her in hospital if I could help it.’ Mavis had moved south to Christchurch to live with her daughter five years earlier.

  ‘It won’t be easy,’ the nurse says. She picks up Mavis’s wrist with one hand and, with the other, turns up the watch pinned to her breast, beginning to count.

  ‘We can afford it,’ Janet says. ‘I talked to the doctor this morning — he says we can hire a nurse, and the equipment.’

  Peter doesn’t know what to say. Although Janet had urged him to hurry to his mother’s beside, and he knows this was the right thing for her to do, the doctor had said, also, that Mavis might live for weeks or months yet. She’s worn out, the doctor said, the cancer’s slow but steady. It’s really a case of what catches up with her first, age or the cancer.

  ‘You want to come home, don’t you, Mother?’ says Janet. Janet has lived in Fendalton for a quarter of a century, and she has referred to Mavis as Mother for a very long time. She is working through this, she had told Peter last night.

  Mavis’s eyes look past Janet, seeking out Valerie. ‘What do you think, Bethany, should I go home?’

  ‘I think Janet would like you to,’ Valerie says, choosing her words with care. ‘Whatever’s best for you both.’

  ‘Will you be able to help if I get too much for her? You’ve always been such a kind girl.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ says Valerie. ‘I might have to go home later.’

  Mavis begins to cry again, the unquenchable flow of her tears spreading over the pillow. ‘Bethany, Pop was sick when Ritchie had the accident. I’m so sorry I didn’t come to the funeral, dear, so sorry.’

  ‘It’s all right, Mum, she understands,’ says Peter, taking her hand. It is too late for him and his mother to speak of the death of his son.

  ‘Tell me it’s all right, Bethany,’ says Mavis. Her fingers reach out, suddenly strong, wrapping themselves around Valerie’s wrist. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘It’s all right. I can see how hard it would have been for you to get away,’ Valerie says.

  ‘When is Stephen coming to see me?’ Her hands are relentless. Yet Peter could swear there is cunning in the sideways look she gives Valerie. With a sudden flash, he remembers the way she double talked to him when he was a child. The teacher says you have something to tell me, she would say, if she suspected he was holding back from her. The trick worked for years. He never knew whether his mother had spoken to the teacher or not, but he would always fear the worst, and tell her what he was afraid she might already know.

  ‘Peter’s going to ring him tonight,’ Valerie says, and the grip relaxes, leaving white marks on her arm.

  SOMETIMES HE WOKE from dreams in which he saw the Waikato fog lying thick and strong across the landscape, or the cows’ breaths in the dawn light, or heavy thunder clouds lying sullenly at the edge of an afternoon, the sunlight filtering through the gaps in angry red streaks. Always, these images were of mist and condensation, never of bright light, and it seemed to him that, in his imagination, his mother was enveloped in the same cloud. He could never see her clearly.

  ‘You’ve got to get out of here,’ she said, when he was a boy. ‘There’s nothing here for you.’ His father ran the local hardware shop and a scrap metal yard out the back. They lived on the edge of town down a long road, in an old farmhouse that had belonged to his grandparents. The river ran behind the property, a wide bracken-coloured swathe of water. Scows and barges passed backwards and forwards carrying coal and timber. Farms lay all about them. His father wanted to move into town but his mother said it would be throwing good money away, seeing that they owned the house. Now that he looked back on it, he could see that his mother spent most of her life expecting her husband to leave her. A laughing, strong-jawed man with fair hair and a smooth complexion, he belonged to the service clubs in town and knew everybody. It troubled Peter that sometimes he could remember the women who stood around the shop talking to his father better than he could remember his mother’s face.

  ‘He has to go to school in Auckland,’ his mother insisted. ‘What are you earning all this money for? We should turn him into a gentleman before this town turns him into a lout.’

  ‘What if he never comes back?’ For once his father was uneasy. ‘I’ve built this business up for that boy.’

  He was right, of course. Peter didn’t go back. Nearly forty years later, Janet still sees it as a defection, a sin against herself. She went to work in the hardware shop and counted nails until a medical student hitchhiking through town rescued her. Marriage suited her, she said. Where would she have been without it? Mixing paint and wrap
ping up frying pans in High Street?

  Mavis had grown old growling because Peter went to see her so rarely. She wrote him letters of complaint, even offering him money if he visited her. But although at times the money stretched thinly between wives and partners and their children, he didn’t need money. He had learned to make money of his own. When she went to live with Janet, her letters stopped.

  JANET SEEMS TO like Valerie. At dinner, the night before, after they had flown in from Melbourne, they had had more to talk about than since they were children.

  Janet, a widow now, has become a sculptor. ‘It’s all those hammers and chisels I used to hang out for Pop,’ she says. ‘The Heavy Metal Kid. Perhaps it suited me after all.’ She sends Peter catalogues of exhibitions she holds in people’s gardens. Her fingernails are blunt and her figure not unlike their mother’s at the same age. The work she does is just as heavy, but there is also a satiny, flamboyant quality Peter had never expected. ‘Should I send for Belinda, do you think?’ Her only child is an eccentric will o’ the wisp young woman who has been in analysis for ten years and doesn’t look as if she will come out of it soon. She lives in Wellington.

  ‘You sent for me,’ said Peter.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Janet, ‘so I did.’ She turned to Valerie. ‘You know, when I was a child, I had a book called The Probable Son. It was about a little girl who thought that prodigal and probable were the same word. Do you know what I think now?’

  ‘What?’ asked Valerie.

  ‘That the book wasn’t far wrong. That’s our Peter. Probably he would and probably he wouldn’t.’

  Valerie smiled and took a sip of wine. ‘Come now, Janet,’ she said. ‘You knew he would.’

  To his surprise, Janet actually laughed. Later, before they went to bed at her house, she had kissed him on the cheek.

  VALERIE ASTONISHES PETER, not so much for what she is, but because they ever began to live together at all. Where other women in his life have been beautiful or chic, Valerie borders on plainness. Her style is dressed down, as if she is determined to go unnoticed in a crowd. They had met in Melbourne at a banquet to mark the launch of a new multinational corporation in Australia. Peter, who had done figures on the deal, was on his own, between partners at the time. Valerie was married to an advertising executive called Andy, who pranced around, sporting an image of tan, tennis and vigour. They were all seated together at a table in the Regent Hotel. It was difficult to make oneself heard above the noise. While Andy kept seeing people across the room and darting across to them between courses, his wife sat still and silent. Peter, experienced in such matters, thought, there’s a marriage in trouble. Probably, Valerie should do something more about herself, he supposed, bored from being alone. Her hair was iron-grey, cut in a severe style, her face barely made-up. Somewhere after the main course and during the sorbet, Valerie disappeared. Well, not exactly, for Peter saw her go, and as she left, he decided that he liked the way she moved under the soft and surprisingly stylish cut of her dress.