The House Within

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘So you’ll come?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, as if he really has just made up his mind. ‘I think it would be a good thing to do. For Ritchie.’

  ‘Lay some ghosts?’

  ‘They never really go away, d’you think?’ There is an edge of sadness she can’t fathom, beyond mention of their son.

  ‘Will Valerie come?’

  ‘I think she’ll go on down to Timaru to see her mother. Her father died last year.’

  ‘She should feel welcome. If she changes her mind.’

  ‘Ritchie wasn’t her son,’ he says gently, ‘he was ours. She understands that.’

  ‘I’M NOT SURE if I’ll be able to make it,’ Abbie says, after a long pause.

  ‘I know you’re very busy, but we’d really love you to come if you could make it.’ Bethany tries to sound neutral. No emotional blackmail, she reminds herself. So it’s Abbie’s brother they’re talking about. So.

  ‘Who’s coming?’

  ‘Just the family, really. Perhaps a couple of friends.’

  ‘My father?’

  ‘Ritchie’s father. Well, we could ask yours if you want.’

  ‘Of course I don’t,’ says Abbie. Although Bethany thinks she has been in touch with him, of late. ‘I’ll let you know.’

  ‘I’ll look forward to that.’

  Bethany lays the phone down and rests her head on the cool wall. Darling, she had wanted to say, darling, please come.

  She has paid one visit to Abbie since Vikash was born. Abbie and Sekhar and the baby live in a Spanish-style stucco house with a Mediterranean blue bathroom, a black kitchen ceiling and unexpected crimson walls, on a point at Takapuna. In a city where every metre costs, even the driveway reeks of money, it’s so long.

  It was not that Sekhar was unfriendly. Sekhar is always charming when they meet, but that is rare. But they hadn’t been expecting her, it’s just that, well, his mother was there to stay, but they would make do somehow. Bethany had been on a flying trip to Auckland to record a television programme. Sekhar understands this, the way you get so little notice; his industry is an impetuous one (although mostly he makes films nowadays, more creative than television) and, yes, he is delighted that she is getting such wonderful publicity for her books. His eyes stayed on the sea, his long elegant body curled among a pile of silk cushions.

  ‘I’ll make sure I give you lots of notice next time,’ says Bethany, apologising even before she had met Sekhar’s mother who, at this moment, is resting. Abbie couldn’t meet her mother’s eye. The truth was, Bethany had rung her nearly a week earlier. She realised Abbie had only just told Sekhar.

  Bethany braced herself to meet Sekhar’s mother. This was a meeting she must handle with tact and sensitivity; his mother was probably shy. She had imagined her from the beginning, a tiny woman wrapped in a sari, her eyes overlarge and misty behind her spectacles.

  Sekhar’s mother turned out not to be like that at all. She did wear glasses, it was true, fine-rimmed and severe, but otherwise a matronly woman dressed in a red sweater and a tartan skirt, adorned with a great deal of thread-like gold jewellery. Bethany’s outstretched hand was ignored.

  ‘How do you do, Mrs Dixon.’ The English as perfect as Sekhar’s but more careful.

  Bethany stopped herself from saying call me Bethany. She doesn’t like being called Mrs Dixon, but that’s who she is, she supposes, when it comes to people like Sekhar’s mother. Her instincts warn her that to suggest otherwise would not make a good impression.

  ‘I’ll get us all something to eat,’ Abbie had babbled. Bethany sensed the unease but could not work out the reason. She didn’t see herself as threatening; she must find a way to put Sekhar’s mother at her ease. It has occurred to her more than once that she might be unhappy that her son is in an unconventional relationship. But then, Sekhar was nearly forty and hadn’t been married. Surely she must be pleased now she had a grandson.

  While Abbie was in the kitchen Sekhar disappeared too. The silence around the two women thickened.

  ‘I expect they’ll get married,’ Bethany said at last.

  ‘Married? You say marry?’

  ‘Well, it would be nice.’ Nice. She feels the foolishness of the word hanging in the air.

  ‘You want to break a mother’s heart?’

  ‘What about mine?’ Bethany responded, though this seemed worse. A broken heart indeed.

  ‘We teach our children not to muck around. I told Sekhar, I should have taken you home to India when you were twenty-five or thereabouts, and found you a wife.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you?’ Bethany asked coldly.

  ‘“You can’t do that to me,” he told me, and I believed him. Like, I really really believe him, this is the new way, it will work itself out, that’s what he told me.’

  ‘My daughter didn’t muck around by herself.’

  ‘That’s what you say. Maybe, it is not all her fault. Poor girl, she doesn’t even know who her father is.’

  ‘She does so,’ Bethany cried, her face on fire. ‘Is that what she told you?’

  ‘Oh she told me who her father is. But who is to know? She believes any old lie you tell her, maybe. How many times you marry, Mrs Dixon?’

  2

  ‘THESE ARE YOUR granddaughters,’ Stephen tells Peter at the airport.

  ‘All of them?’ says Peter, in mock horror, wondering whether to embrace the children or not. It was Valerie, his partner, as he describes her, like a dancing companion, who takes the flowers the little girl Zoe is offering, and gives her a hug.

  At the domestic terminal, Peter farewells Valerie onto another plane south, then saunters to the rental car counter.

  ‘You don’t need a rental,’ Stephen says. ‘We’ve come to get you.’ He has seen the flicker of panic in his father’s eyes, not quickly enough disguised.

  ‘Well, son,’ Peter says, easily enough, ‘I thought you’d have a pretty full car with all these youngsters. I’ve booked the rental now, perhaps I should stick to it.’

  ‘Be realistic, Stephen,’ Molly says, as they drive south, ‘your father’s not used to children.’ She was breast feeding Shannon to keep her quiet, and worrying about the baby not being protected by a seatbelt. Zoe and Tiffany are squabbling in the back. ‘I don’t think he’d have thought much of this.’

  ‘He’s not even going to stay with us.’

  ‘Perhaps he wants to spend some time with your mother.’

  ‘That wouldn’t be right,’ Stephen says.

  ABBIE SITS AT a rest area beside the road and cries. She cries for Sekhar, whom she loves, and for her mother, whom she loves even more. Today Sekhar’s cousin will be married. Two thousand guests have been invited. They have flown in from India and London and New York. The food preparations have been going on for days.

  ‘My son will be greatly shamed if you are not with him,’ Sekhar’s mother had said, the day before.

  ‘I thought he’d be shamed if I was with him,’ Abbie replied.

  Sekhar raised his hand for silence. ‘Of course you’ll come with me, Abbie.’

  Now Abbie hesitates. She barely remembers her half-brother Ritchie. Sekhar is right; what her family hasn’t settled by now isn’t going to be mended on an excursion like this. She would be better attending to the present, to her new family, however hard she finds it. Things will only be made worse by abandoning them now. Vikash stirs in his sleep in his carry-cot behind her, reminding her that he has a father who adores every smile, every movement of his littlest finger. This was more than she ever had.

  She wheels the car round, and starts back the way she came. The road is empty before her. Her head feels as if it is about to burst. The silence she hears is that which descended around her when Ritchie died. The long days when her mother simply stared out into space. If anything happened to Vikash, she catches herself thinking. And, because the road is clear, she is able to pull a fast U-turn, and start back over on her journey.

&nb
sp; ‘IT WOULD BE just like my father to go with her,’ says Stephen, tightening the knot in his tie. He has been trying to decide how to dress, but this is a solemn occasion.

  ‘I think you should forgive your mother,’ says Molly, ‘for this weekend at least. We should give thanks to the Lord that he’s here.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Stephen, trying hard not to snap. Sometimes her tolerance gets to him, even though he knows she is right.

  ‘Look,’ says Molly, as patiently as she can, ‘you’re not your father’s keeper.’

  ‘He did say he’d come with us. My parents aren’t Christians.’

  ‘Well, they’ve never pretended to be,’ says Molly, in her most reasonable voice.

  ‘No, but at least they could act like it sometimes,’ Stephen says, aggrieved. ‘My father was all for this headstone idea. But look who’s done the work.’

  ‘If your father said he’d come with us, I expect he will.’ Molly forgives everyone, even without knowing what they’ve done.

  BETHANY’S SECRET PASSION has always been clothes, though for so long she couldn’t afford them that it took her years to admit this was the case. It was Anna who looked like a clothes horse, but it was Bethany who really craved them, like sugar and cigarettes. She remembers the day Peter bought her a dress he didn’t expect her to wear. She knew he thought that, but he was wrong. She wore and wore that dress, like a talisman, a trophy. In the end he had said that he cared. Well, almost the end, because the last time she saw him she had moved on, met Matt. At the time it felt as if he had given her permission. That dress he bought her, black with rusty gold leaves and rough scarlet flowers bordering its silken surface, had signalled a change in the way she dressed. It still hangs at the back of the wardrobe, two sizes too small for her now, having survived several spring cleans and two shifts, from her house to Matt’s and back again. She has never been able to throw it out.

  Today, Bethany chooses her clothes with care, the same colours as that dress, only softer — a cream silk blouse scattered with pale cocoa roses, a tawny-coloured jacket, a skirt that flares and falls gently below her knee, and a reckless, brilliant scarf thrown casually across her shoulder.

  ‘What d’you think, Peter?’ she says, walking ahead of him.

  ‘A few changes around here.’ She is showing off the new kitchen, startling with its scarlet and gold trim, and the new room upstairs, its windows looking out into the branches of the tall trees that surround the house. ‘I wasn’t going to have this room upstairs, but I lost the boys’ bedroom when the kitchen was built. It’s not as if I have heaps of people to stay, although when the grandchildren are here it does get a bit crowded. And Sam said, it would make such a nice room for you, and it would give you somewhere to get away from your work. It’s not as if I couldn’t afford it.’

  ‘You’re rich, Bethany?’ said Peter, smiling and leaning on the window sill.

  ‘Not exactly. I could have had some of Matt’s money seeing I was still married to him when he died, but I didn’t take any.’

  ‘I wasn’t prying.’

  ‘No, I know you weren’t, that was just an observation. There was some money from my aunt — you met her once.’ She hesitates, and a branch scratches on the glass of the window. And I do have an income. It helps that my books are sold in Australia — the market’s so small here. Really, I’m no Alison Holst.’

  ‘Not yet anyway.’

  ‘Oh truly, we’re not the same style at all. I’m trying to tell a kind of oral history of food, which means I have to spend heaps and heaps of time talking to people.’

  ‘It all sounds quite complicated.’

  ‘Not really, Pete. I do have a system. And I’m having the time of my life.’

  ‘What time are we expected?’ he says.

  The room doesn’t feel like a room in any house he has lived in. It is hard for him to believe it is part of a dwelling he has been responsible for building. It really is new, a space she has created for herself.

  ‘Soon,’ she says, ‘I promised Stephen I wouldn’t be late. Aren’t you supposed to be going with them?’

  ‘Can’t I come with you?’

  ‘No,’ says Bethany. ‘You can’t.’

  IT IS AS near to a family gathering as they are likely to get. Bethany and Peter, Stephen and Molly and the girls, Abbie and Vikash, Bethany’s chocolate brown grandson, although Raneesh’s father is away filming on location, so Abbie has explained, and Bethany’s stepson Anthony and his new wife. As well, Bethany has asked along her old friend Marjorie Ross, simply because she knew Ritchie, and also for some moral support, although she can see that Stephen not so secretly thinks this is out of line, and Marjorie’s husband, leaning on a stick. She had thought about inviting her friend Sam, given that he is connected with the family, but she can see how Stephen might find this excessive. The important thing about this gathering is that every adult here knew Ritchie when he was alive.

  There are, of course, gaps beside the grave. Where, for instance, is Anna, but she wonders this only fleetingly, because that is territory too difficult to explore at the moment. At least she knows what happened to Ritchie.

  Stephen did ask her, what shall I put on Ritchie’s stone? I don’t know, she had replied. I think you should decide. Because she cannot commit her heart to a stone. Because to find words would open up the old desolation afresh. Not that she thinks she will get off lightly. It is all waiting there for her. She has been procrastinating, waiting for the knife to slice. Now it is happening.

  The stone is more tasteful than she has dared to hope. She was afraid of angels and pillars, and lengthy sentiment, a lot about God. Instead, it is a simple sand-coloured slab. Apart from the photograph inset under glass, Ritchie’s childish face under a cap, which she doesn’t care for, the smooth, uncluttered shape of it pleases her. She moves closer to read the words:

  RITCHIE DIXON 1964–76

  Loved son and brother of

  Peter, Bethany, Stephen and Abbie

  Endless Day, Love Without End

  Nothing about God at all. She stares wordlessly at the inscription, her upper lip clenched between her teeth. Peter moves towards her, drops his arm lightly round her shoulder. She looks up at Stephen, her mouth shaping the words. Her silent thank you.

  Then the four of them, she and Peter, Stephen and Abbie, holding on to each other, a strange little group of not quite connected people.

  That familiar brisk wind unfurling off the mountains, races towards them. Stephen says a brief prayer, their arms still around him and each other. It is all over in a few minutes.

  3

  PETER CANNOT HELP admiring the way Bethany handles all these people with such delicate tact. He used to think she was too blunt, a trifle coarse at times, but all that has changed. He supposes it is more than that, it is also his own long perspective on what happened, the way he sees himself. Too arrogant by far, too determined to make his mark on the world and yet never quite knowing what it was he had to say. Money talks, he believed back then. He still thinks it’s useful, but who doesn’t? He sees himself as changed, and believes that, although you can’t go back, there are some things you can clarify. His mother meant him to be a gentleman, a task at which he thinks he may have failed, but perhaps he has learned to listen. He counts himself lately to be lucky in love.

  The food is Bethany’s contribution to the gathering. She has butterflied a leg of lamb, cooked with herbs, made a salad scattered with petals. For Abbie, who is a real vegetarian now, she has made ratatouille and rice. There are fruit flans and croustades for dessert.

  ‘Show-off,’ says Abbie, her mouth full. ‘What’s this, cross-over food?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Tastes yummy,’ says Abbie. ‘It’ll keep me going till I get home.’

  ‘You’re not going home tonight?’

  ‘Yes, I am actually.’

  ‘Oh no, I thought you’d come for the weekend.’

  ‘’Fraid not, Ma. I said I’d go n
orth for the shoot tomorrow morning. Sekhar’s got a couple of the crew down with the flu.’

  Later, Bethany will explain Sekhar to Peter, showing him a photograph of a tall man with a nest of frosted white sculptured hair, a blue-black chin and fiercely curved features. Peter sees how her eyes dwell with longing on her daughter.

  ‘It’s only a couple of hours’ run.’ Abbie drives an iridescent green Saab shaped like a chrysalis, her latest in a succession of glamorous cars.

  ‘Three hours at least. Stephen, you tell her.’ Behaving like any fussy aging relative.

  But Stephen is back in religious mode, extolling God, his born-again faith. His voice, when he said grace, had acquired a faintly nasal singalong quality. ‘Hey God up there, hey God everywhere,’ he intoned. Like a pastor, Peter thought, that’s what he wants, to have a flock.

  The Ross’s have already gone, but it is still only nine o’clock, and Stephen is looking at his watch. It flashes through Peter’s mind that he is waiting for him to leave. As if it is inappropriate for him and his mother to be alone. Peter has drunk three glasses of wine.

  ‘I can run you back to the motel,’ says Stephen, ‘if you want to pick up your car tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m sober,’ says Peter, with indignation.

  ‘All the same.’ Stephen looks serious.

  ‘I’m going to make us a cup of coffee,’ says Bethany. ‘You’re all welcome to stay.’

  But Molly is looking twitchy and drawn. Zoe and Tiffany are excited and restless and Shannon won’t go down for a nap anywhere except on her mother’s lap.

  ‘Stephen, I’ll run your father back to the motel if he doesn’t want to drive,’ says Bethany. Dismissing him. Which is not fair, given that he has done his best, Peter thinks. His very best. Beneath the bravado, the various guises that Stephen has so far adopted in his life, there is real kindness. But he asks for it, that’s the trouble.

  Stephen looks relieved, if still doubtful, about the propriety of leaving them on their own.