The House Within

by Fiona Kidman

  All the same, looking at Stephen now, Peter isn’t sure that his son is happy with his choice. His hair hangs in a lank wedge over his shoulders; his breath smells of tobacco and something else, like bad hay. Faint blue pouches swell beneath his eyes. He seems to have regressed back towards his adolescence.

  ‘What does she want with the Buddha?’

  ‘She doesn’t want it, Nana, she was just interested in what happened to it.’

  ‘Is she going off on one of those funny religions?’ says Mavis. ‘I always knew she would. Funny, I could have sworn she was right here the other day.’

  ‘Time to go,’ says Peter.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ says Mavis. Her voice, which has been drowsing along, suddenly sharpens. Her fingers pluck the hem of her cotton sheet into little bunches. ‘I’d give my life’s blood,’ she says.

  ‘What?’ says Peter. ‘Mum, what did you say?’

  ‘I’d give my life’s blood,’ she says slowly and carefully, as if it to a child, looking straight at him with a searching, meaningful look that he can’t interpret.

  ‘For what?’ says Peter. ‘Stephen, you ask her.’

  Mavis isn’t listening. ‘Tom Morton showed me his bottom,’ she says in an important, solemn voice, and then, when this information has had time to register, she begins a high-pitched giggle.

  ‘Did he, now?’ says Peter. ‘Fancy. Who was Tom Morton?’

  ‘Not was, is, silly boy,’ says Mavis. Before Peter can frame a suitable response, she turns her head on the pillow and begins to snore.

  ‘WHY DID YOU leave my mother?’ asks Stephen, as they drive to Janet’s place. Peter is driving Janet’s red Ferrari. It corners faster than he is used to. He puts his foot on the brake and almost mounts the pavement.

  ‘Jeez, Dad, I only asked.’

  ‘Bloody car. How old does your aunt think she is, driving a thing like this?’ says Peter. Yet he enjoys it, this red bullet spinning under his hand. He likes the concentration it demands; it keeps the accumulating chaos in his head at bay. Three days have passed and not a word from Valerie. If he wants her back, it is beginning to look seriously as if he might have to go after her. He is not sure that he can handle this.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Peter tells Stephen. ‘I thought I knew at the beginning. I thought Bethany was untidy and dangerous and bad for me and that I wouldn’t achieve the things I set out to do if I stayed with her.’

  ‘Was it true?’

  ‘I doubt it. I can’t remember now who told me it was.’

  ‘You mean you didn’t decide that on your own?’

  ‘I thought I did. What’s this about? Are you getting serious about a girl?’

  Stephen draws his teeth back over his lips and grimaces. ‘You were always a shit,’ he says.

  As he speaks a stone hits the windscreen and glass beads and bubbles of Canterbury’s spring sun explode in front of them.

  VALERIE AND ANDY kept a whiteboard in their kitchen on which they wrote up shopping lists and telephone messages and records of where they are and their children would be at given times of the day. When they separated, finally and irrevocably, as opposed to the times when they had merely talked of it, Andy had written up a message. It was the morning after Valerie’s night in the hotel with Peter. This was what she found:

  WHAT A JOKE

  WHAT A FARCE

  WHAT A TRAGEDY

  I’ve changed the Light Bulbs and Taken the Rubbish to the Dump.

  You Are A Wonderful Woman i.e. You’re Not Fat Or Ugly. You Weren’t Here When I Needed You. You Can Have the House.

  She committed the words to memory, then wiped the whiteboard clean. All you Say Is True, she wrote in place of his message. Let’s Not Get Into Who Did What First. I DON’T WANT THE HOUSE.

  After she had made a cup of coffee, she rang her children, and told them she had made it easier for their father to do what he wanted to do anyway, now that they had left home. Her daughter had said, with real panic, Mum, you wouldn’t do anything silly, would you?

  ‘I’ve done it,’ Valerie said, ‘and I don’t need a doctor. I’m handling menopause well.’ When she had finished her coffee, she packed her bag.

  ‘It could have been worse,’ Peter said later, when she told him. ‘When I left Patsy she threw my pyjamas out of the window into the street and slammed the Venetians. The neighbours got a hell of a laugh.’

  Valerie sits in her parents’ house, overlooking Caroline Bay, and reflects over and again on that twenty-four hours of her life. Her parents potter in and out of the room, exclaiming and regretting. None of their other children have ‘committed divorce’. This is her father’s term for it. He was an army colonel once. His moustache is white and neatly trimmed. Although he still stands tall, his chin folds softly down his neck, and his hair has thinned out like a dusting of straw in a chicken coop. He reminds Valerie of Mavis. In the morning, he coughs bright yellow wattles of phlegm discreetly into his handkerchief. Her mother is sparrow-like, one of those tiny women who has avoided a dowager’s hump. Valerie can’t help looking at them and wondering which one she will end up looking like.

  ‘This man,’ says her mother tentatively, ‘is he a good character? I mean, are you going to marry him? Dear, what shall I tell your aunts about him?’ She had known, of course, for years, that Valerie shared an address with a man who was not her husband. The reality only matters now that Valerie is threatening to bring him home to meet them.

  Only Valerie is wondering if that is what she ever really wanted to do. Peter is a philandering man, she has decided, who likes things and appearances and will run to fat if she doesn’t go on endlessly helping him with his diet. He needs to take responsibility for himself.

  ‘Remember that lovely boy from Lands and Survey who you used to go out with?’ says her mother. Valerie does. She had forgotten his existence until her return but she has thought of him a lot since she came home. He had curly hair and a turned-up nose. When he was a boy he sang in the Anglican choir. They were engaged to be married when he was transferred to Masterton. As soon as he got a house organised up north, they would set a date for the wedding. Six weeks later he had written. He was sorry but he had met a girl who worked in the chain-store next door to the office. And yes, he was very sorry. Caroline Bay, she thinks, the beginning and the end. What a tragedy, what a farce, what a joke. Andy had written her life story in fewer than ten words. That was his job, she supposes. How well he did it.

  Her mother says, ‘If only Andy hadn’t left you.’

  ‘He didn’t leave me, Mother, I left him. You know that.’

  The corners of her mother’s determined smile droop. ‘Has this Peter been unfaithful to you?’ Valerie had told her at the beginning, when it seemed to her that nothing she told anyone about Peter could damage him in the other person’s eyes, that he had been married twice before.

  Valerie doesn’t answer. ‘Have you still got my debutante photograph?’ she asks, instead.

  PETER GIVES JANET this photograph to look at, after it arrives in the mail next day.

  Janet studies the picture. It shows a young woman with straight hair caught up in a graceful loop, wearing elbow-length gloves and a white dress with a ruffled skirt, walking under an archway of cut-out stars.

  ‘Does she look like anyone you can think of?’

  ‘She’s not like Bethany,’ says Janet, putting the photograph down.

  ‘I didn’t think so either.’

  ‘That’s what she meant, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I think so.’ Peter puts his head down on his arms between the marmalade and the empty toast rack.

  ‘Peter,’ says Janet. ‘It was me. I told Mum that Bethany was awful. She always believed what I told her.’

  ‘I know,’ says Peter. ‘I know it was you.’

  ‘I wanted you to come back to the shop. I took her letters before you got them.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wanted you to come back and be my friend.’

 
‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘How did you know it was me?’

  ‘Who else could it have been?’ says Peter.

  He remembers his return from Australia, that first time, when he had run away from Bethany. He can still see her intensity, the little suburban box where she lived in Grey Lynn, her mother with the plucked eyebrows and the loud voice. A year had passed and he thought that he had forgotten her. He had taken a week’s holiday from his job in Sydney and come home to visit his family. Mavis was fussing over a cooked breakfast for him, one morning, while he read the Herald. She was cooking his eggs sunny side up when an item caught his eye. It was about a child called Bethany who had won a prize — he can’t remember what it was now, horse riding, or an essay competition, something like that. He remembers better the smell of strong tea and hot dripping in the pan.

  ‘You wouldn’t think there could be more than one of them,’ he said to his mother.

  ‘What’s that, dear?’

  ‘Some kid called Bethany. Did I ever tell you I had a girlfriend called that?’

  ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish, if you ask me,’ his mother had snapped.

  Only, he hadn’t asked her, not once. Bethany belonged to the era of discoveries, of youth, of the first things you did when you were a young man free in the city. He had never told his mother of Bethany, and he didn’t know why she should have held a view about her.

  His curiosity got the better of him. The night before he flew back to Australia, back in Auckland, he appeared on her doorstep, and discovered why. Not that she had a baby — it had vanished down a toilet bowl soon after the visit to Mavis — but she told him what had happened. It wasn’t intentional, she said. She didn’t have an abortion. One morning it was there, in the evening it was like, oh, like some gravitational force, pulling away at her, something that couldn’t stay.

  ‘I’ll look after you,’ he said, not sure whether he meant it or not, almost shielding himself from the fierce, unyielding need in her eyes. When it was said, he knew that was what he wanted, more than anything in the world, and he became afraid that she wouldn’t have him.

  Hasty, her mother said through a mouthful of pins, full of seeming disapproval, as she pinned up the hem of the wedding dress, but her fingers flew faster and faster.

  THE HOSPITAL BED that had contained Mavis is being wheeled away when Stephen walks into the ward.

  ‘Nana,’ he says to the empty space. ‘Nana. Nana, Nana. Don’t die, please don’t die.’

  Where the bed had stood, he can now see a Buddha, rising and expanding, and filling the room with a brassy glow.

  ‘HER LIFE’S BLOOD for what?’ Peter says. ‘What would Mum have given her life’s blood for, do you think?’

  They sit in Janet’s garden, the evening after the funeral, passing a bottle of Cabernet Merlot from hand to hand. They fill their glasses and toast each other more often than necessary. Moths bang against the flickering lights in the oak trees. Valerie and Janet wear jerseys to protect themselves from the cool spring wind that curls off the mountains. Janet’s sculptures lurk in the shadows.

  ‘Another sight of Tom Morton’s bum,’ called Stephen. He and his cousin Belinda, Janet’s daughter, perch on a mossy step, sharing a joint. None of the older people have the will to remonstrate. Belinda, too thin by far, is dressed in a floppy green and red rag beret, a tie-dyed jacket and forest green leggings. She and Stephen hugged each other and cried at the funeral. It is the first time they have seen each other since they were children. Stephen looks healthier than when he arrived, Peter thinks. He also believes that his son has cried over something. It surprises him that it might be over his grandmother, for, like Belinda, she was someone Stephen hadn’t seen for years. All the same, he looks as if something has been washed out of him for the moment, as if he feels better and more whole. He had been nice to Valerie when he met her.

  ‘To die peacefully,’ suggests Janet. ‘Before I could get my hands on her again and tell her how to die.’

  ‘You’re too hard on yourself,’ Valerie says. ‘You looked after your mother as long as you could.’

  ‘We looked after each other,’ muses Janet. ‘Now there’s a revelation. What wouldn’t she have given to hear me say that?’

  Peter leans against Valerie. Although it is he who has put the question to the others, he is shy about expressing what he really thinks. He believes that their mother would have said, had she still the wit to answer, that she would have given her life’s blood for his happiness.

  Yesterday he had driven to Timaru and met Valerie’s silent and worried parents. Valerie stroked his face as if discovering him for the first time. They walked on the beach at Caroline Bay, and he said, ‘So it’s not over?’

  ‘Nothing’s ever over, Peter.’

  ‘I know. Do you mind?’ They were deliberately talking at cross purposes.

  ‘I can bear it,’ she said. ‘I just got afraid for a while.’ Her parents shook hands and smiled uncertainly when they left.

  ‘Do you want to get married?’ Peter asked, on the way back to Christchurch.

  ‘Not at all,’ Valerie said, and laughed.

  Down in the garden, Belinda begins to sing ‘Lord of the Dance.’ Her voice is smoky and deep, soaring out of her thin frame … danced in the morning when the world was begun, and I danced in the moon and the stars and the sun …

  Peter supposes that his mother would have liked them all to be happy, that, like most people, she had not intended to cause grief and partings, sorrow and loss. But he thinks he can see, however dimly and briefly, that it is not worth the sacrifice of a life, to realise such ambition. He has found out for himself, as much as he can, what it is or might be about, even if he has failed most of the tests. He begins to sing with Belinda … dance, then, wherever you may be, I am the Lord of the Dance, said he … One by one, around the garden, each of them picks up the song, and the words carry into the cold, clear, starry sky.

  THE BETHANY CHRONICLES

  STILETTOS

  THE WORST MOMENT, she is sure, will be when she fronts up to Norma Brewis at reception. Tubal ligation, eh Bethany? She won’t say that, but that’s not the point.

  The gynaecologist’s rooms are in a quiet cul-de-sac in an older part of town, if you can say there is any such thing as old round here. What passes for old is art deco, late thirties, curved walls with double stacked roofs, small strips of concrete trim painted in contrast colours. Rodney Shapcott’s rooms are concealed in one of these houses, down a driveway. Big glossy-leaved magnolias hide it from the road. I must be going mad, Bethany thinks, I could be coming about a prolapse, or flooding (for which she has been several times already). Anyone would think I was coming for an abortion. Which it’s been said Rodney did perform, in the bad old days. He’s a cross between a hero and a demon, depending on your point of view. He’s also the only show in town.

  Norma and Bethany are old acquaintances. In a town like this you know pretty well everyone, and in their business they speak to each other several times a week, when Norma phones the laboratory for the results of blood tests. At this level, they both know local secrets, who has what diseases and distresses — what ails thee, friend? Discretion is their middle name.

  ‘So how’re things going?’ Norma is a razor-thin English blonde with a flat chest and huge nipples.

  Bethany sits in one of the deep easy chairs, picking up a magazine and stroking her bare legs with her other hand. She had them waxed the day before; she’s not going to poke them in the air with stubble on them for Rodney’s smooth stare. Because he is something of a dandy, she has dressed with extra care — slim skirt, smart jacket, high heels.

  ‘Pretty good, Norma. Yourself?’

  ‘Okay. This job’s getting me down.’ She speaks sotto voce, widening her eyes and shrugging at the closed door of Rodney’s room.

  ‘What’s he up to?’

  ‘Up himself as ever.’

  ‘Getting worse?’

  Norma pulls a face, disap
proving, resigned. ‘He thinks he can pick and choose these days.’

  Bethany can see the way the rooms are freshly decorated with textured silk wall coverings, filtered coffee on a side table. The old formica-topped occasional tables have been replaced with a circular smoked glass one. It is a while since Bethany was here. When she was younger she used to come about her periods. Awful days when tampons and pads weren’t enough. But that wasn’t the worst part. The state of her temper, the surge of hormones that reduced her to shouting and tears for three days a month were the worst. Was that what drove Peter away? She supposes, looking back, that it didn’t help. Her husband was a man too quiet in his rages. He saw virtue in retreat, long walks, unending silences. They drove her to greater fury than if he had shouted back at her. She prayed sometimes that he would break his silence, his passive resistance to her voice. She used to wish he would chastise and rebuke her; most of all, that he would tell her he loved her no matter what she did. ‘Hysterectomy for you, young lady,’ Rodney Shapcott told her. ‘You don’t need a womb.’

  But she wasn’t sure about that. After Peter left, there was Abbie, and she cannot imagine her life without this daughter. And after her son died? Yes, she did use to think about another child. Not another man, just someone she could capture, anyone would do. Only she didn’t. She got better, or better than she was. She came to understand her need to take care of the children she had. She believes she has done as well as she can. Besides, a friend recommended Vitamin B6 to her, and, although the flooding still happens from time to time, the rages have gone. Switched off, just like that, a simple vitamin deficiency. It doesn’t work for everyone, but it works for her.