The House Within

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘You didn’t have to come,’ says Bethany, turning the key in the lock.

  ‘You mean you didn’t want me to.’

  Bethany doesn’t answer. She had believed, now Stephen’s teenage truculence was wearing off, that she had done with dark scowls and silences. But here is Abbie, mean-mouthed and bad-tempered. Perhaps it’s not her fault. She has a new family — a stepfather, a new sister, two new brothers and a stepfather, entangled in a web of consanguinity she never asked for. It’s a time of adjustment, all the books remind her. And Abbie has had to move from one house to another, whereas, for Bethany, it was a choice. Time to leave feature walls and conversation pits in the sixties where they belong, Matt said. So Bethany had left the little house (although she still owns it — she is a landlady now), where she has dreamt and wept and dissolved into sudden unfathomable laughter, made love and conceived children.

  And what will she do with this, this old house that now belongs to her? Vera has been dead for some years, but it has taken a long time to settle her estate. For a start she had left some of it to Bethany’s sister, whom she hasn’t seen for years. There had to be notices in the paper in different countries:

  ANNA DEVINE

  aka ANNA CALLAHAN

  aka ANNA GARLAND

  We, the undersigned, have information

  that may be to this person’s advantage.

  Anyone knowing the whereabouts

  of the above …

  And then the wait for answers that, as she had expected, never happened. She walks through the empty rooms, full of rising damp, kicking bottles and rubbish out of her way. It, too, has been let, to people who haven’t cared for it. There is fat on the walls of the once trim blue kitchen, which hasn’t been repainted since she was a girl. Mould pushes through the skirting boards. It renders her speechless with sadness, just standing here in this room, doors hanging off the pantry and the cupboards. Her aunt used to spend hours cooking treats for her at this bench, her recipe books propped above the stove, or preserving, always preserving fruit and making jam, even after Jack was dead, and there was nobody but her to empty the jars. All that sugar.

  ‘I reckon you’ll have to pull the place down,’ says Abbie, her hands on her hips. ‘We aren’t going to sleep here, are we?’

  ‘It doesn’t look like it,’ says Bethany.

  They have brought sleeping bags and air mattresses. This was supposed to have been an adventure. She flicks the light switch. The electricity has been disconnected. Surely, the agent should have left the power on? Abbie walks on ahead, dark hair swinging in a wavy froth round her shoulders. Like me, Bethany thinks, only slimmer, her sharp hips poured into her jeans. Sixteen, come to stay with Aunt Vera, getting ready for dances on Saturday night. Her sister got bored with going to Rotorua because she had friends of her own in the city, but Bethany still came on her own. Perhaps this is why she loved it so much — her place, no competition. She preferred it when Aunt Vera didn’t try to organise her, but that was a small price to pay. Vera would arrange for the girl next door to take her along to the dances at the Ritz. You’ll have a great time with Raewyn, Vera said. She’s a great gal. You just watch out for those boys. And she winked.

  WHEN SHE GOT older, Aunt Vera lost the inhibitions of her youth, as if to say, there’s not much time left, there’s nothing to lose. This was after Uncle Jack died of a massive coronary one afternoon when he was planning to listen to the football on the radio and just never got out of his chair. Goodness knows whether he heard the game or not, Vera said, I just thought he’d nodded off. When she moved to Rotorua she joined a singing group who called themselves the Good Time Gals. The Gals dressed up and sang in the pubs in the evenings, and at old folks’ gatherings. They had different outfits for their themes; Hawaiian, country and western, English country.

  Vera’s favourite was her sailor costume. The dresses were A-line to the hip, then pleated to mid-calf. Half the group wore red, and the other half blue. On their heads they wore frisky little sailor’s caps with an anchor on the front and everyone wore pearl stud earrings and black court shoes. Aunt Vera looked rakish in her outfit, her hair escaping under the cap, brave, permed, seal-brown hair, like the bright colour of her eyes. She practised her sailor’s hornpipe with Bethany counting the beat, her arms folded up high in front of her chest, her feet skipping from one side to another, trying a cheeky bold smile, her staunch false teeth gleaming, sweat running off her brow. The group could sing twenty-two songs in thirty-five minutes. They sang ‘A Capital Ship’ and ‘Life on the Ocean Wave’ and ‘Blow the Man Down’, and pretty well anything you could name. It was a contest, the people versus the Good Time Gals to come up with something they couldn’t sing. The Gals hardly ever lost.

  ‘You get out and have a good time, young lady,’ Vera said. ‘Not too good a time, or your mother would never forgive me. She knows too much about trouble. Mind you, I was a good girl, and look where it got me. At least, your mother got you girls in the end.’

  Vera’s eyes, when they rested on her, told Bethany what she already knew. Her mother had got her, especially. Aunt Vera would have given anything to have had a daughter like Bethany. She did the next best thing — she loved her to bits and pretended she was hers.

  ‘I’LL HAVE TO get the power put on,’ says Bethany.

  ‘What for? Honestly, Mum.’

  Abbie stalks ahead, opening doors and slamming them behind her. Her hand rests on the knob of a door that is locked. ‘Well, I’ve seen enough anyway.’

  ‘That’s the room I used to sleep in,’ says Bethany. Abbie rolls her eyes. ‘It’s got a second door that opens outside, above the stream. I could break in.’

  ‘You can’t do that,’ says Abbie, scandalised.

  ‘Why not?’ says Bethany, levelly. ‘It’s mine.’ Abbie makes me angry because I love her so much, she tells herself. Although Vera was never angry with her.

  ‘What with?’

  ‘I could go down town and buy a hammer,’ says Bethany, improvising. ‘No, wait. Aunt Vera gave me a key to hide outside so I could come in the back way, when I got home from dances. I used to put it on a little iron stake at the top of the bank. Then, when I was older, she said she’d leave it there, so whenever I came back I could just come straight in, any time of day or night.’

  ‘I’m going to sit in the car,’ said Abbie.

  ‘Well, you do that, Abbie, you just do that.’

  Bethany half-runs through the house and along the bank. This is absurd. The agents will have collected all the keys years ago; water will have flooded down the stream and swept the key away. Or it would have been silted over. But her fingers touch the scaly stake straightaway, and there, miraculously, is the worn key, rusted too, but still intact.

  She places it in the lock of the outside door, not daring to believe it will work. When it does she lets out a little aah of relief, as if she has been denied entrance to a barred kingdom.

  ‘Pretty clever, huh,’ says Abbie.

  ‘I thought you were going to wait in the car.’

  Abbie chews the pad of one thumb, pushing the door as hard as she can. Something holds it back. ‘It’s full of junk,’ says Abbie, in wonder.

  And, the room is chock-a-block with the remains of a lifetime. Vera and Jack’s things. A clutter of objects stored willy nilly up to the ceiling, smelling more of mildew and decay than the rest of the house.

  ‘The agents didn’t tell me Vera left stuff stored.’

  Abbie drags indiscriminately at piles of junk, powdery dust flying in all directions. A filing cabinet half full of Jack’s old invoices and receipts, empty bookcases, bits of Jack’s engines, pieces of odd crockery, a Crown Ducal cup, a broken Royal Doulton plate, odd saucers, a wind-up gramophone with a silver arm, and a huge oak trumpet, His Master’s Voice, and an old vinyl still sitting on the turntable, the needle poised ready to play it. There are blue and white china planters decorated with green rushes, and a stack of matching Huntley & Palmers John o’Groats
shortbread tins, painted in different tartans. The iron bed where Bethany used to sleep is covered with a rotten kapok mattress, and on top of this is stacked a variety of odds and ends — a whist set, cards tucked up neatly in two little trays, a bowl with a matching set of nutcrackers, a Rothman’s Pall Mall cigarette album, which Vera used to fill so that the girls could learn history: Captain Cook in New Zealand, the history of East India, the surrender of Rangoon, Kitchener in the Sudan, the Battle of Quebec … It’s all here, girls, the world at your fingertips. Aunt Vera would give a throaty laugh, holding a cigarette between her fingers to give colour to her pun; a Royal Visit School Scrapbook in which she, Bethany had pasted in the pictures.

  ‘We’ll have to sort this stuff out,’ she says.

  ‘I’m going to catch a bus home — it’s only an hour or two away.’ Abbie looks defiant and determined.

  ‘Abbie, stop it. Shut up, will you?’ Bethany catches herself in mid-angst, and sighs. ‘Look, if that’s what you want, go. If it’s what you need to do. But I’m not selling Aunt Vera’s house like this. I guess when she went into the home she must have got someone to come in and shift this stuff in here. I expect it was meant for me to find.’

  ‘What did she expect you to do with it?’

  ‘Well, that’s for me to decide now, isn’t it? Look, I can see we can’t sleep here. In a few minutes I’m going up town to find a shiny, deodorised, sanitised, clean as a new pin motel room. I’ll pretend I’m in Singapore.’

  ‘You’ve never been to Singapore.’

  ‘No, but I might,’ she says grimly.

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘I’m going to have a shower and go and find a restaurant and eat and think about what to do next. If you want to stay with me, you can, if you don’t I’ll take you to the bus station. Please yourself.’

  ‘Mum, I’m sorry,’ says Abbie. ‘Don’t cry, for God’s sake don’t cry.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Yes, you ah-are, you are crying, Mummy dear.’ Making a joke of it as if she was a baby, with a touch of malice underlying the teasing. At least she won’t go.

  AT NIGHTS SHE took walks along the potholed road towards the lake. Houses where Maori lived lined the road close together. You’ll be all right, Vera said. People are friendly round here. She walked past the church and the graves alongside, built above the ground because the grave diggers couldn’t dig in the boiling mud beneath the surface. I’m not sure I’d want to live here, the young man said, the first night she met him, testing the flimsy crust of earth with his toe. I’d be scared to live on top of a volcano. She thought she would marry him if he would have her. Past the wild Saturday night dance hall. All the same, you’d better not go to the dances there, Vera said, you’d better stick to the Ritz. Blues, the practising band, a clarinet. She sat and looked at the lake, swans gliding over the water, their wings rising like capes.

  In the university holidays she still came to Vera’s, so she could study. Her mother’s house seemed even smaller and she and Anna didn’t share space in an easy way.

  The last holiday, before she began to work at the hospital laboratory, is the one she remembers with the frightening clarity that makes dreams real, so that she sees a patchwork of light and dark, the beginning of something exceptional in her life. People tell Bethany now that end of innocence stories have had their day. Innocence is not a concept for the young, her children tell her, nobody was ever innocent. At parties, with Matt, her fairly new, handsome, grey-haired husband, people talk about the here and now, about politics and movements and market forces. They are for or against things. The only backwards movement is towards detective stories, engaging readers in clever crime solving, which gets ever more devious and justifies eye gouging and throat slitting. You don’t tell people too much about when you were young. You don’t say, do you remember? Or, it was like that. Bethany, herself, who works in a laboratory in the town she and her first husband adopted soon after their marriage, sees that blood is full of Aids and mysterious deadly viruses and carbon monoxide, that there are distortions and mutations of cells which nobody could have taught her about, because their existence was beyond imagination, that she tests for cocktails of drugs which make alcohol look like carrot juice. All the same, she thinks, there are divisions in time, between when you knew some things, and you didn’t.

  During that last visit to Vera’s, Bethany thought she would soon leave home. Her life seemed poised, as if in waiting. Even at university, where she felt a particular kind of privilege, the depth of her need was unchanged, the stirring she felt unconnected with study. She understood, in herself, that what she wanted was to love and to be loved. You’re a virgin — I don’t believe it, girls said to her. You’re the most tight-arsed bitch I’ve ever met, boys said. Are you cold or something, you got a problem? So she supposed it was about sex.

  There were two things: in the close house where she lived, her mother and her stepfather’s noisy exertions had made her cautious, uneasy about what happened next, once she dropped her panties on the ground, her arms held across her naked breasts (Bethany had got that far, more than once). Then there was this feeling that she had been lucky, in spite of everything, her mother, and unpromising beginnings, that she was making something of herself. I’m so proud of you, lovey, Aunt Vera said. Who’d have thought it, such a clever girl. Two clever girls, she corrected herself, but she always meant Bethany.

  Fear, and the promise of better things to come. This is what kept Bethany to herself. So she watched the lake, the way water never lapped in exactly the same way, even though the motion went on repeating itself over again, the wind ruffling up cold, short waves, the kind people said killed you so quickly on Lake Rotorua, their hard slap-slapping against an upturned face, and breathed the sulphurous air.

  ‘Raewyn’s been over,’ Vera said, one evening when Bethany came back from one of these walks. ‘She’s arranged for you to go to the dance. Chop chop, let’s get you dressed.’

  ‘It’s okay, I’d rather stay in,’ said Bethany. Raewyn was a dumpy, kind girl who liked to find them double dates to ride home with, so they could do heavy petting down at the lake front. Pitching a woo, was the way she described it. Couldn’t he pitch a woo? she enquired when Bethany asked to go home earlier than the others. You don’t have much luck, do you? Bethany didn’t have the heart to tell Vera she was fed up with humouring Raewyn. She was so good-hearted, and Vera’s neighbour. Besides, girls didn’t tell on each other like that.

  Vera’s face dropped. ‘I told her you’d be ready in an hour.’

  ‘I’d rather spend the time with you, I mightn’t be down for a while.’ Vera’s expression softened. ‘Can’t we ring her and tell her another time?’

  ‘Sweetheart, she’s gone out already, said she’d come back when she’d borrowed her dad’s car from his work.’ Raewyn’s father was a pool attendant who worked late. ‘Why don’t I iron your hair for you, the way I promised?’

  Which left nothing for it but to change. Bethany thinks sometimes that her life would have been different if she had stood up for herself, thanked Raewyn politely when she came for her, and made a cup of tea for herself and her aunt. But she didn’t. She changed into a dress she had made herself, crisp white cotton with huge black polka dots, a full circular skirt, a small back to front cowl collar sloping down her back in a V-shape, a wide cinch belt at her waist. The hem always was crooked but who would notice?

  ‘Lovely,’ said Vera, who had put the ironing board up and heated the iron, while Bethany was out of the room. ‘Head back now. It’s just as well you washed your hair in vinegar this morning. This chair’ll be the most comfy, it’s Jack’s chair, I know you never sit on it, but I did have it re-covered. Afterwards, you know.’

  Vera had told Bethany this before. Sometimes she forgot it was Jack’s chair and sat on it anyway. It was only when Vera reminded her that she felt uncomfortable, felt Jack’s life slipping down between the cushions behind her. The new covering on the chair
was emerald brocade.

  Her aunt collected up a handful of Bethany’s hair, running her fingers through it, exclaiming at the weight of it in her hand, holding its texture lovingly to her face, before she spread it out on the ironing table. A warm, wet towel had been prepared to damp it down. ‘I can’t imagine why you don’t want all those curls,’ she said, but she spread brown paper over them all the same, firmly holding them in place with the side of her hand against the nape of Bethany’s neck so that the iron wouldn’t burn. ‘I’d never forgive myself.’

  Vera spat on the iron to test its heat, half-humming, half-singing ‘You’ve got me between the devil and the deep blue sea’. The long, even strokes made Bethany sleepy, so that she could have sat all night in the front of the fire, with her aunt going on and on, straightening her out. Her hair, when she stood up, fell in a brown waterfall round her shoulders.

  ‘I’m so glad you came,’ Raewyn said, squeezing her arm. ‘I’ve met this gorgeous hunk, he’s going to the dance down the road. I thought we’d go there tonight.’

  Bethany pulled back from her. ‘I couldn’t go in there.’

  ‘Course you can, I’ve been there before with another of my girlfriends. It’s just that people look at you. Aw, come on, Bethany, we don’t have to stay long.’

  Raewyn had already parked the car near the church. The dance had begun, a stream of smoke billowing round the doorway, the lights inside flickering and low.

  This was how Bethany came to find herself sitting alone on a bench, surrounded by dark dancing people with supple bodies, so deep inside the music that she didn’t believe they saw anybody, certainly not her. Intense swollen music, full of rhythm and sex. The girls wore toreador pants and tight sweaters rather than dresses. Bethany could see that, as long as you didn’t come alone, you could do almost anything you liked, pick up a guy with a friendly squeeze of the arm, and start to jive on the spot. Raewyn was wandering along the edge of the dance, pretending she wasn’t looking for someone.