by Helen Garner
‘Bye,’ said Kathleen, and walked on.
Flo’s voice sounded very high-pitched and childish on the phone.
‘How’s everything over there, Flo?’
‘Oh, great! We have roast pork, and Jenny makes these great noodles.’
‘Are you getting to school OK?’
‘Well . . .’ She gave an adventurous giggle. ‘Frank said not to say but most mornings I’m late, because Frank and Jenny don’t wake up as early as you do.’
What mean satisfaction she derived from this. ‘I bet you drag the chain, do you?’
‘A bit.’
A pause fell. Flo was making crunching noises.
‘What are you eating?’
‘A carrot.’
Kathleen felt shy and importunate. She had no small talk.
‘Kath? Know what I wish?’
‘What.’
‘I wish we could all live together.’
‘Who?’
‘You, and me, and Jenny, and Frank.’
‘Hmm. I’m afraid that’s almost certainly never going to happen.’
‘But why?’
‘There’s not a room for me over there, for a start.’
‘You could sleep in my room, with me.’
‘I don’t think so. I don’t think I’d be very . . . welcome.’
‘I wish you could!’ cried Flo urgently, as if mere force of desire might change a hostile destiny.
‘I could come and live in the broom cupboard, and every time Jenny or Frank opened it I’d pop out and sing that song that goes, “Ullo! I’m a reject / Does one arm ’ang down longer?”’
‘Don’t talk like that, Kath.’ Flo’s voice was heavy with disapproval. ‘You’re trying to make me not like Jenny.’
‘Excuse me,’ said Kathleen, mortified at her own grossness. ‘What a nasty thing to say. And not even historically correct.’
‘Never mind. I didn’t think you really meant it. When are you coming to visit? So you and I can cook, and have the meal ready to surprise Frank and Jenny?’
‘I could come on Tuesday. You go and ask Frank now if that’s all right.’
Flo muffled the phone with her hand. Tuesday was all right. There was nothing else to say so they hung up.
*
Before Tuesday could come, the old man died. He stepped out of the bath and his heart simply stopped.
The ground they stood on was untended, unlawned, littered untidily with fallen gum leaves and unruly twigs. The trees gave no sign of autumn in the bush cemetery, but it was in the light, its doubtful angle, its mildness on the skin. Shirley’s eye rolled on that strange warm day but she gave Flo a thick bunch of roses to hold in her two fists beside the grave. Beside the grave in order stood: Shirley, trembling and smiling into space like a vague hostess; Frank, frowning and clearing his throat and standing with his heels together and daylight between his knees; Flo, wishing the coffin lid might open a crack so she could see a dead body; Kathleen, folding herself, putting herself away now, decorous as a spectre; Jenny, almost wife but fighting it, singed from behind by the inquisitiveness of Frank’s cousins and (to Frank, who saw how her brown smooth skin made her lips seem pinker) suddenly resembling Flo, as all people we love at moments resemble each other.
At the house people laughed more than they had thought they would, or ought to. Against a clock stood a very old photograph of Jack as a boy in a striped suit with short pants and lace-up boots; his face bore the good-natured, musing expression he had never lost.
‘It’s a beautiful photo, Mrs Maxwell,’ said Jenny.
‘I’ll bet he hated that suit!’ cried Shirley with the shrill laugh of someone right on the edge.
‘Poor Papa,’ agonised Flo, who wanted there to be more tragedy in the occasion. ‘He was a good man, wasn’t he, Nanna. He led a good life.’
‘He certainly did, sweetheart. Oh, he was the kindest of men.’
Shirley seized Flo in her skinny arms and they hugged eagerly, their eyes full of tears. ‘The first time he asked me out,’ she went on in a conspiratorial tone, glancing around her as she spoke, ‘we drove out into the country. There we sat among the bush irises – flags, we used to call them – white and blue – and Jack asked me if I wanted a drink!’ Her laugh cracked in the middle. ‘He must’ve thought I drank! Well, I did, I suppose – and he said he had a bottle of beer in the car. I thought, Oh good, this is nice. And he got the bottle out of the car but he didn’t have an opener because he didn’t drink! So he knocked the top off the bottle against a tree. And I’ve often thought, later, we could’ve died. One piece of broken glass.’
Over by the window, behind the couch on which the three women and the child were sitting, one of the cousins was hissing to Frank,
‘Who’s the new one, Frankie? Got any legal advice?’
Frank tossed his empty glass from palm to palm, smiling furiously and whistling through his teeth. ‘We’re all reasonable people, Brian,’ he replied in a light, tense voice.
‘Ah yeah . . . that’s what they all say.’ The cousin laughed loosely and looked away. He planted his feet wide apart and tightened his thighs like a footballer. ‘You’ll end up paying a packet in alimony, mate,’ he predicted comfortably, draining his glass.
Shirley, Jenny and Kathleen walked down to the beach in their funeral clothes. Their heels sank and they sat down in the sand, Shirley in the middle, and watched the water, the oceanward rushing of the tide, the tiny waves crisping helplessly towards the leftover line of dried seaweed that ran crookedly all along the water’s edge. The younger women, set about the older one like a pair of brackets, did not know each other, did not know what they were protecting the mother-in-law from, but felt their positions to be proper.
‘What am I going to do now?’ asked Shirley.
Nobody answered. The sea ran by. The day seemed very long to them all.
*
Flo dangled maddeningly over into the front seat and whistled and called to the dog. ‘Come! Come! Come in the back with me!’
‘Don’t treat the dog like a toy, Flo,’ said Jenny, irritated. ‘She wants to stay in the front with me.’
‘It’s all right for you two!’ burst out Flo, flinging herself back into her seat. ‘There’s plenty of love in the front seat, but none in the back.’
‘Are you jealous?’ said Frank. He winked at her over his shoulder.
‘I am not jealous,’ cried Flo in a fury. She slouched in her corner and stared out at the trees. ‘I haven’t got anything to do.’
‘We told you if you came away with us there’d be no whingeing,’ said Frank.
‘I am not whingeing.’
‘Look out the window, then.’
‘There’s nothing to see.’
Jenny glanced back over her shoulder and caught an odd cast to Flo’s scowling face: a snubbing of nose, a stretching of eyes, a rising of top lip. She looked sinister. The word passed instantly and was forgotten.
The wind tore steadily past the house, racing off the sea and over the sandhills and up the gravelly drive and through the scraggy hedge. All day the house groaned and shook in the wind, which relented a little at nightfall, leaving pinkish clouds looped neatly above the drab green humps of ti-tree. They were all sunburned in such a way that the sides of their fingers looked silvery-white, as if they were underwater.
On the clifftop the wind still blustered fitfully. On the ocean beach they made a fire, and Frank and Flo ran half a mile beside the cold white and green surf, still clear to Jenny’s eyes no matter how far they ran, so empty was the air. She wrapped herself in a sleeping bag and waited for stars, roasting her face and chilling her back; before it was dark the others came panting back to her through the soft sand. The first planet swung for them, burned pink and green like a prism, spinning idly in the firmament.
The wind blew itself right out in the dark, and next morning sun was flooding quietly into the beach house when they awoke.
Five in the afternoon was the appoi
nted hour, but when Kathleen crossed the creaking verandah and knocked at the front door, the house was silent. No dog barked. She tried the side gate, but it was locked from the inside and had no hand-hole by which she might have climbed it and gone down to the back door. It was quite shocking to her to be locked out of the house of people she knew. She was aggrieved and hurt and cross. It was hot. She sat bad-temperedly on the verandah and swore to herself. Surely they couldn’t have forgotten her.
After ten minutes she got up and tried the front window. It slid up obediently. Jubilant, she crawled in, closed it behind her and ran down to the kitchen where she filled the kettle and set about making herself a drink and a snack, the ingredients for which she found in abundance in the fridge. She opened the back door and sat contentedly on the step, chewing and swallowing.
Half an hour later a key rattled in the front door and they were upon her: the dog yapping dutifully, Flo leaping on her back with cries of welcome, Frank looking preoccupied, Jenny frozen-faced and very sharp-footed. At the sight of Jenny, whose eyes avoided hers after the first obligatory greeting, Kathleen realised that something was badly wrong. She scrambled to her feet, noticing that her shirt was covered with crumbs. Jenny opened the fridge and began to forage in the lower shelves.
‘There’s a fresh pot of tea made,’ said Kathleen, performing a dance of appeasement behind Jenny’s back. Flo was dragging at her, and she followed into the girl’s bedroom.
‘What will we make for dinner?’ Flo was saying, sitting up importantly at her table. ‘We could have a tomato salad, and ice-cream.’
Kathleen knew that everything she said would be overheard in the kitchen, where the silence was being broken only by the movement of feet and chair legs on the wooden floor. She felt miserable, superfluous, and would have disappeared as impolitely as she had come had it not been for oblivious Flo with her pencil and paper, waiting eagerly for her reply.
‘Hold your horses, Flo,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t think we’re going to be able to make the dinner after all.’
‘But why?’
‘Because . . .’ She heard Jenny’s heels go out of the kitchen in the other direction. ‘Because maybe Jenny or Frank would rather do the cooking here. I’m a guest – guests aren’t supposed to act as if they owned the place.’
Flo could see her plans slipping out of her grasp again, sliding away for reasons that would be carefully explained to her in words of one syllable, adding to the load of childish trouble not of her making that she must lug about with her. She let out the eternal cry of childhood, prelude to resignation: ‘It’s not fair!’
At that moment Frank stepped into the room. He was smiling awkwardly. ‘Kath – look, don’t get excited – I want to talk to you for a minute. There’s a crisis on here.’
Kathleen’s face was burning with resentment. She knew what was coming, and stuck out her chin to cop it.
‘Now listen –’ He was unconsciously making calming movements with his flat hands. ‘Jenny’s feeling extremely . . . uncomfortable that you’re here.’
‘But I was invited!’ she cried, knowing that by climbing in the window she had effectively dispensed Jenny from the hostly obligations that would have otherwise been due. She sat there on the edge of the bed, spine erect, hands under thighs, feet dangling.
‘Yes, yes, I know. But – you didn’t – wait. You –’
‘I know. I came in the window. Well, what am I going to do now? I came to see Flo. That’s why I came.’ Although this was true, she had a nasty feeling that it was not the whole story. She saw that Frank was floundering out of his depth, did not know what was the right thing to do, hated carrying the bad news between the two women who were too cowardly to face each other. She was full of disgust, and pity, for all of them.
‘We’re going to have to talk about a few things,’ said Frank urgently. ‘Can you meet me and Flo at the school in the morning? Eight thirty?’
‘OK.’ She got off the bed.
‘You’re not going home, are you, Kath?’ Flo too was in over her head.
‘Let’s go out in the back yard, Flo, just you and me,’ said Kathleen desperately. ‘And we’ll think what to do.’
They shuffled outside past Frank who nodded anxiously at them, and squatted against the fence at the very bottom of the yard. The little dog nosed about them, and Flo scratched its woolly coat and squinted up at her mother, waiting for enlightenment.
‘I made a mistake, Floss. I shouldn’t have climbed in the window when there was nobody home.’
‘But there’s nothing wrong with climbing in someone’s window. We used to always get in the window at Sutherland Street, if we forgot the key, and so did everyone else.’ There was a moral in here somewhere, Flo knew, and she wrestled to get at it.
‘Yes, but Jenny’s never lived like us, in big open houses where groups of people live and anyone can come in and out in the day-time and the night. She doesn’t agree with that sort of way of living. Most people would be mad if they invited someone to dinner and came home and found them already making themselves a snack in the kitchen.’ She felt quite giddy and disorientated, trying to remember ordinary social formalities. ‘Also,’ she went on, forcing herself, ‘there are sometimes funny feelings between an old wife and a new one.’
‘Jenny isn’t Frank’s wife. You are.’
‘That’s true in one way. But Jenny lives with Frank now, and I don’t any more, so it’s sort of the same, really.’
The little girl squeezed the struggling dog in her arms. ‘I don’t like this,’ she said stubbornly. ‘I asked you to come and visit, and nothing’s working out like I want it. It’s not fair. I don’t think grown-ups should fight when children want to have a visitor.’
The back door banged and Jenny, who had taken off her shoes, was coming down the yard towards them with a glass of wine in her hand. She crouched down three feet in front of Kathleen and offered her the glass. The two women looked each other steadily in the eyes, and their mouths curved in identical grimaces of embarrassment which they could neither conceal nor metamorphose into smiles. It was the best they could manage.
Kathleen leaned against the school gate from eight thirty till nine o’clock when the siren cleared the yard of children and only a few papers blew about in the dust. She was wondering whether it was time to panic when she spotted Frank and Flo, walking hand in hand and uncharacteristically slowly, coming round the building from the other side. She rushed up to them.
‘Where were you! I’ve been waiting for half an hour.’
‘We said at the gate,’ said Flo, her face straining against tears. ‘We’ve been at the gate, we got there at half past and you weren’t there.’
‘Oh Floss! We were at different gates.’ She dropped to her haunches, but the child stood stiffly holding her father’s hand, unapproachable.
Frank was darting agitated looks about him. ‘Let’s get out of here. We could go to the espresso bar.’
Kathleen took Flo’s other hand and they crossed the road and sat at the window table of the café, Flo in the middle, one parent at each end. Kathleen began.
‘I know I shouldn’t have climbed in the window. I’m not in the habit of climbing in windows.’ Her voice sounded huffy, and Frank let out an impatient laugh.
‘Windows, windows! What we should really be talking about is getting this bloody divorce.’
‘Divorce? Flo burst out sobbing. ‘Oh no! I don’t want you to get a divorce!’
‘Come and sit on my knee, Floss,’ said Kathleen wretchedly.
‘No!’ She fought them both off and sobbed desperately in the exact middle of her side of the table, refusing to touch either of them, battling for honour.
‘But Flo!’ said Frank. ‘Divorce is no different from how me and Kath have already been living for years!’
‘I don’t care! Oh, I want us all to live together, in the same house. Can’t we all go back to Sutherland Street? I know it would work! Oh, can’t we?’
&nbs
p; She wept bitterly, in floods of grief: she did not touch her face, for she was sitting on her hands so that neither of her parents might seize one and sway her into partiality. The tears, unwiped, splashed off her cheeks and on to the table. The Italian waiter behind the espresso machine turned his face away in distress, his hands still clinging to the upright handles.
‘It’s just – it’s just life, Flo,’ stammered Frank, the tears standing in his eyes. ‘We have to make the best we can of it.’
They sat helplessly at the table, survivors of an attempt at a family, while the little girl wept aloud for the three of them, for things that had gone wrong before she was born and when she was only a baby, for the hard truth which they had thought to escape by running parallel with it instead of tackling it head on.
*
By nightfall there was nowhere else to go.
Jenny opened the door in a night-dress, red pencil in hand, curly hair pinned back off her forehead. With her shoes off she was the same height as Kathleen.
‘Oh. I was working. Frank’s out.’
‘It was to see you. Excuse me for coming without being invited.’
‘Oh Kathleen. I’m not a monster, you know.’
‘Neither am I.’
‘Come in.’ She stood aside. Flo was curled up on the floor. The book had slipped sideways from her hand, and her mouth was open. A little trail of dribble had wet the cushion. The women sat down on two hard chairs.