The House Within

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘He’s impossible,’ Peter says, when Stephen and Molly have finally collected up the last of their nappy bags and juice bottles and teddy bears, and departed. ‘I am not drunk.’

  ‘Nobody said you were,’ Bethany says, and laughs. ‘I wanted to catch up. Now tell me, what’s been happening to Jason?’

  Peter, clearing away plates and carrying them to the dishwasher, stops in his tracks. ‘Didn’t you know?’ he says softly.

  ‘Know what? Pete, nothing’s happened to Jason?’

  ‘He’s in jail. I thought Stephen would have told you.’

  Bethany sits down. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Drugs. He went up to Thailand and we got a call to say he was in trouble. Some chap who’d been travelling with him got scared and bailed out. Val and I went over there to find him. We went up north near the border. They offered us booze out of a bottle with a pickled snake in it — disgusting.’ As if this was the worst thing that had happened, which perhaps it was, the visual manifestation of what was abhorrent to him.

  ‘You didn’t drink it?’

  ‘Of course not. But I pretended to. I wanted someone to show me where he was. And I paid of course. We found him in a shack, out of his mind, out of space. We got him back to Bangkok and left him in a hospital there. He was due to fly back in a week’s time.’

  ‘But he didn’t come?’

  ‘Oh, he came all right. Chock-a-block with drugs, inside and outside his body.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Exactly. As if they wouldn’t have been watching him.’ He puts his head in his hands. ‘It’s not as if he’s stupid. Well, yes, he is, but he’s not thick. More as if he lacks a sixth sense. I don’t understand it.’

  ‘So they picked him up.’

  ‘Yup. Down for five years.’

  ‘How’s he taking it?’ She stands at the sink rinsing cutlery and handing it to him.

  ‘He tried to top himself. I think that’s past. He’s talking about when he gets out. But that’s a long time away.’ He pushes the door of the dishwasher shut. ‘Should I put this on?’

  ‘I’ll leave it until the morning. Peter, I’m sorry. I like Jason. I really do.’

  ‘I know, he told me. I wish …’

  She places her finger on his lips. ‘No, you don’t, he’d be a different person if he’d been ours. What a mix-up we all are.’

  He puts his arms around her again, as if now he has the feel for it. Only this is different from the way they held each other at the cemetery.

  ‘We can’t,’ says Bethany. ‘We can’t do this.’

  His dry, hard mouth is covering hers.

  ‘HE’S A DANGEROUS boy, that son of ours,’ he says, later on. Their ankles are linked.

  ‘Stephen? I’d never have called him that. Your Jason, perhaps.’

  ‘No, Jason’s just sad.’

  ‘I saw a dangerous boy once, a really dangerous, scary boy. He was with my friend, the night I met you. He had bright blazing blue eyes and when he looked at me I knew I could have had him. Well, for that night anyway.’

  ‘What made you decide on me?’

  ‘I was scared of him. Perhaps I got it wrong. Besides, he was with my girlfriend.’

  ‘He sounds like the guy I came down with that weekend — Hamish. He married a girl called Raewyn from Rotorua.’

  ‘Yes, that’s the one. Raewyn. You knew them?’

  ‘He got Raewyn in the family way. She came up north and they got married.’

  ‘You never told me.’

  ‘You never asked me. I lost touch with him, never thought about him again.’

  ‘All these years and I didn’t know something as basic as that. I wonder what happened to them.’

  ‘They’re still married. I came over for a reunion last year and saw them in Auckland. It would never have occurred to me who you meant, otherwise. They’ve got five kids and, oh God, don’t ask how many grandchildren. He wanted to show me the photographs. He’s a doctor up north.’

  ‘Well, perhaps I did make a mistake.’

  ‘He’s got a bigger paunch than me,’ he says, unlinking his foot, ‘Bethany I want to fuck you until I come out the other side.’ He gives a rueful laugh. ‘At least I’d like to try.’

  TOWARDS DAWN HE snaps on the light, but his watch is on the dressing table. She leans over him, switching on the bedside radio. Marianne Faithfull is singing a song with a line that runs something like some day I’ll get over you. Her voice is throaty, deeper than when she was a girl.

  ‘That should be our song,’ says Peter, his fingers on her spine.

  ‘I always liked her.’

  ‘She was the sixties, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Of course. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘Sometimes I think the sixties didn’t happen.’

  ‘Yes, they did. You were with me, and they happened to us.’

  ‘I was in too much of a hurry. I blinked and they were gone.’

  ‘Is that what was wrong with us? We didn’t get the sixties right?’

  ‘Probably.’ he says

  ‘I got really into them in the seventies,’ Bethany tells him.

  ‘But of course they’d had it by then. Will Valerie be very pissed off about this?’

  ‘She would be.’

  ‘If she knew?’

  He sighs. ‘I think she will. In a way she might be relieved, but that won’t make it any better. Don’t be too hard on me — I didn’t plan any of this. I won’t come back again except to see Stephen’s kids. I swear.’

  ‘I wouldn’t let you.’

  ‘Grandparents, eh? Val likes the idea.’

  ‘Valerie sounds really nice.’

  ‘She’s a fabulous person. D’you think it’s possible to love two people at once?’

  ‘No,’ says Bethany, ‘I don’t. I never have, although I suppose I tried.’

  Peter is silent, the old self-inflicted wound opening in his chest. ‘Such constancy,’ he says at last. ‘It’s more than I deserve.’

  ‘Time to cut loose, Pete. Set each other free.’

  ‘We’ve tried that before.’

  ‘It’s different now. I know who I am. Not just a scandalous woman.’

  ‘You? Scandalous.’

  Yet the word is a wickedly sweet syllabub of sound under his tongue. He knows now that she has always been a magnet, more than a wife, a lover whom he had put beyond his reach, simply by leaving her. He has watched the way other men wanted her, with a strange illicit fascination.

  ‘Will you manage?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says with surprise, as if he hadn’t noticed a thing about her. ‘I manage very well already.’

  ‘So you do.’

  He begins to dress, Bethany watching him for this last time. She will see that nothing much has changed, the way he lays his socks out neatly side by side before pulling them on, the wriggle of his shoulders as he straightens his collar, the slightly preening tilt of his head as he stands in front of the mirror.

  ‘We’ll be all right now, you and me,’ she says.

  And he perceives how they will become, with the patience of the old, their apparent absence of regret, the persistent refrain of memory, meeting over grandchildren at family reunions. Stephen will see to that.

  ‘This Sam,’ he says carefully, smoothing his thinning hair. In his reflection, he sees the early light is shining through it, illuminating his scalp. ‘What about this Sam?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘I just wondered.’

  ‘Well, nothing. He’s a nice man. As far as I know.’

  He doesn’t want Bethany to come out in her dressing gown, but she does anyway, walking barefoot across the lawn to where the car is parked. The grass is frosted and very cold; her footsteps leave a silvery trail. There are stars fading above them, and the pad of the first joggers starting their morning run.

  ‘I nearly forgot. Val asked me to get your autograph.’ He takes her first book from the car - Bethany Dixon’s Traditional Cooking, f
ossicking in the glove-box for a pen. ‘Embarrassing, eh?’

  Bethany hesitates. He can see her asking herself what to say to this woman to whom she is finally bequeathing the past.

  ‘Good wishes?’ she says, reading his thoughts. ‘Of course, I do wish her well, but that’s what you write for strangers. I feel I know her better than that.’

  ‘Kind regards?’

  ‘God, no. Too formal.’

  She turns the pen thoughtfully over in her fingers, and for a moment he thinks she won’t write anything at all. In the end, she writes her name, Bethany Dixon, her usual flowing, slightly rounded script, and flourishes a line beneath her signature.

  Then she kisses him on the cheek. ‘See you round, sweet Pete.’

  FESTIVE TIMES

  ‘I CAN’T STAND the tension,’ says Bethany Dixon, adjusting her collar too carefully. ‘Why did you get me into this, Sam?’

  They stand a little apart from the throng of people pressed together in the James Cook Hotel, looking down the long view Wellington Harbour provides, a lost and lovely island floating in the sea above a cloak of fog. Sam has persuaded her to enter Bethany Dixon’s Traditional Cooking in the Guild of Food Writers’ competition.

  ‘D’you think I should have another glass of bubbly?’

  ‘Probably not, wait until after you’ve won.’

  ‘But I don’t know if I’m going to win. Look at all these people, they all know each other — I’ll bet they know who’s going to win. They’re probably saying, look at that old country hick, thinking she can win a flash prize like this.’

  ‘You don’t have much faith in human nature,’ says Sam, rescuing a fresh glass of champagne from a passing waiter, and putting it in her hand anyway.

  ‘Only in quantities I can measure,’ says Bethany, looking around with close to a shudder. The voices are very loud, and people call each other darling and dear heart; none of them appear to be talking about food and cooking. Somebody is pointing at her in a not very discreet way.

  ‘See,’ mutters Sam, ‘if they do know, they want to let each other know they recognise you. Touching the hem of glory in advance.’

  ‘Then they’ll hate me already.’

  The award for which she is short-listed is the guild’s recently established prize for the best newcomer to food writing, a first book published in the previous two years. Her daughter Abbie had groaned when she told her. You won’t like it, she said, I know what Sekhar is like when the film and television prizes are handed out. You can’t speak to him for weeks beforehand because he can’t stand the idea of losing, and you can’t speak to him afterwards because he’s strapped in the middle of conspiracy theories.

  It’s just a bit of a laugh, Bethany had explained.

  Just you wait and see. Abbie’s voice was gloomy. In fact, Sekhar had won awards in the past, but that didn’t mean he felt any happier. When he lost, it only went to show that people took turns at winning, nothing to do with the quality of the work. Mutter, mutter, mutter, Abbie said, that’s what awards are all about.

  Which is how Bethany feels at the moment. It’s not a laugh at all. She is appalled to discover how badly she wants to win.

  ‘I guess I just want to be sure someone will publish my next book,’ she tells Sam, trying to rationalise her agreement to enter her name for the awards. Troy, the beautiful young man who published her first book, has decided to go to design school instead of pursuing his idea of being a publisher. ‘You’d have thought after all the money he’s made out of my book he’d have taken the business more seriously,’ Bethany complains.

  Troy, for his part, says that the book’s success has just shown him where his skills really lie, from which Bethany is left to contemplate whether it’s his style or her food which has won her a following. She raises her glass to him anyway, standing on the other side of the room. He pushes his way through the gathering.

  ‘Have you got your speech ready?’

  ‘I probably won’t need it,’ says Bethany. ‘And if I do, you could probably make it for me.’ There she goes, bitchy as the rest of them. Troy appears not to hear.

  ‘It’s sweet you could come,’ he says to Sam. ‘Are you two an item?’

  ‘WHICH ONE WAS your favourite?’ Sam asked one day, during the renovation of her house.

  She was holding a piece of timber for him at the time. We can do it on a labour only contract and I’ll do the finishing off, he told her when he first suggested the alterations. He had seen the way the photographers stood on stepladders and the kitchen stool to get angles of her. They were in the garden when he suggested it, straight after he had pointed out the skeleton of a praying mantis that had choked to death in the dried curl of a leaf. ‘Sad, don’t you think?’ His minute observations intrigued her.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked, thinking he meant a restaurant, or a movie, something like that.

  ‘Which chap?’

  She didn’t know whether he was being smutty or just curious. ‘Mind your own damn business,’ she said, finally. Comments like this have made her cautious of Sam. That, and the fact she and his brother, to whom she was married, had fallen to bitterness and separation before his death.

  ‘What do you want of me, Sam?’ she asked him, another day, when they were painting architraves, and he stood too close to her for comfort.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, laying down his paintbrush. ‘I thought at the beginning I just wanted to know more about my brother in the last years of his life. I suppose, now, I want to know what he saw in you. If that’s not too offensive.’

  ‘It’s bordering on it.’

  ‘It’s not a proposition.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ she said.

  ‘My brother was smarter than me, his instincts were good.’

  ‘Smarter than you? I wouldn’t have thought so.’ Sam had been a physics lecturer at Dalhousie in Halifax. ‘The bright and glorious career of the younger brother — that’s how he talked about you. He saw himself as a small-town shopkeeper.’

  ‘You know he was more than that.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Bethany, ‘I do, but in the end I couldn’t convince him. It’s why he moved on to a poet, but she didn’t do any better than I did. I don’t have a track record in holding on to men, by the way.’

  ‘It’s because you’re powerful,’ he told her. ‘You shouldn’t take it amiss. Anyway, as far as I’m concerned, my career crashed in flames years ago.’

  ‘Matt told me something had changed. He was disappointed. He never told your parents.’

  ‘I know. What family wants a guy who builds log cabins in place of a professor?’

  ‘That’s self-pity.’

  ‘I crashed, had a breakdown, as they say. Yeah, you could say that’s fairly self-indulgent.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it that way.’

  ‘And then my wife died and I thought I couldn’t survive another day of my life.’

  ‘I know the feeling.’

  ‘Do you? Do you really know what it feels like? A son, yes, you lost a son — it doesn’t come much worse. But you can’t compare grief with grief.’

  ‘No, you can’t and it’s not what I was thinking about, because that’s private, nothing to do with you. But when my husband Peter left, I thought, well, I won’t come out of this one. But I did.’

  ‘At least he’s alive.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bethany, her voice softer, ‘he is.’ It was not long after the unveiling of Ritchie’s headstone. Sam looked at her curiously, and left it at that.

  ‘AND THE WINNER is,’ says the compere of the awards ceremony. He pauses, an urbane, nattily suited man who has spent long minutes thanking the sponsors, and now takes an inordinate amount of time opening an envelope. Bethany crosses her fingers behind her back. ‘The winner is … Bethany Dixon.’

  ‘Yee-ess’, cries Troy, punching the air.

  ‘Now isn’t that somethin’?’ Sam murmurs in his hybrid drawl.

  She is propelled forward, f
lash bulbs going off in her face, television cameras rolling — not that it’s the first time she has faced them, but this time she is actually news. So this is fame. And she wonders, did I ask for it, or is it something that simply happens to you, and then she has to make her speech. She finds herself thanking Troy in extravagant terms, and her family, of course, without whose support none of this would have happened, and her Aunty Vera, and her mother and her grandmothers who made it possible with their memories and recipes. So poised, no notes to speak from, but the words are all there as if she had rehearsed them in her head, which she had without knowing it.

  She feels a prickle of tears behind her eyelids when she thanks all these people, and reminds herself that everyone who gets prizes does the same. But it’s no less real, this feeling of honey and bitterness, the losses and gains, that such a moment brings. She knows her life will never be quite the same again.

  It seems like hours and glasses and glasses of champagne later that she remembers to slip the cheque for five thousand dollars into her handbag.

  ‘I KNEW YOU were going to win when they asked you to bring someone along with you. They always do that at award ceremonies so the sponsors can take you out to dinner and not have to spend the whole evening talking to you if you turn out to be a bore.’

  ‘Charming. How did you know that?’

  ‘I’d heard.’

  ‘It’s what Abbie said too.’

  ‘In the event, they couldn’t stop talking to you all evening. I saw the chairman eyeing you over.’

  She laughs. ‘He didn’t offer me any more money.’

  Sam and Bethany are driving north the day after the awards. They have been late getting away from Wellington because of more interviews and a meeting with a prospective publisher. Now it is mid-afternoon and they have just reached Taupo.

  ‘Only another hour or so,’ says Bethany, adjusting her seat back so she can sit up straighter.

  ‘I think we should get a meal. Why don’t I shout you?’

  ‘It’s too late for lunch and too early for dinner,’ she says, glancing at her watch. ‘We’d just have to cool our heels.’