‘Titties like that!’ Juliet’s sister complimented her a year after that, telling her she was a lucky thing, ‘You can’t miss out,’ she said, ‘they’ll always make a fuss of you,’ after their first school dance in the St Benedict’s hall. But she never felt the least awkwardness when boys first and then men later proved Juliet’s sister right. It’s not just for them I like you, Eric Scotter had said after he tried to touch them, then he began crying, the biggest surprise of her life that had been, to see him cry and tell her he was sorry. I know that, Eric, she had said, and liked him enough to let him press against her but when he wanted to kiss her on the neck she was scared that it would leave a mark. And then when she was working in the chemist shop on Friday nights that other surprise when Terry McCormick one time pulled her into a bedroom where you could hear his parents talking in the sitting room next door, and Terry telling her he wouldn’t let her out until she said they were engaged. So she had told him Yes and as soon as he unlocked the door she told him No. You’ve got to understand, she said, that when you bully people round like that no one means what they say. It surprised her how clearly she could put things when she had to. Terry later on joined the Army and went to Korea and was one of those who had died. And that strange phrase people used when they spoke about it, ‘friendly fire’, which meant it wasn’t the enemy who killed him but someone you knew who had made a mistake. But the medal for dying for his country was presented to his mother just the same. At the funeral when the Army brought him home the other soldiers pointed their rifles above his grave and fired them. Even the men were crying.
Josie liked remembering back when she spotted a name she knew in the bereavements column. Memories you didn’t know you had swam up at you. It seemed to amuse Robbie but irritated him as well. ‘Your own name’ll be there one day, you don’t need to look so hard in case you miss it.’ His jokes had been like that—not really as funny, were they, as he thought. Now he was the one who was gone. She had told him once, years back, when he used to hate her going to church and said to her finally it was a matter, wasn’t it, if you were married to someone you didn’t go spending half your time thinking about something else. He had got worked up about it all right. It was soon after he had lost the warehouse job, that’s how far back it was. There was a ding-dong with the boss and the others he had thought were his mates didn’t take his side and the manager had said it was better he moved on. No question of not giving him a good reference but harmony was the issue, he didn’t have the choice. At first she had no idea what she was going to say and then there she was saying it, feeling her throat and neck were bursting with wanting to get it out. ‘No wonder you can’t get on with God,’ she told him, ‘you can’t even get on with the people you work with.’ He had looked at her like he couldn’t believe his own ears. Like he didn’t know what.
‘Flabbergasted?’ Molly offered, when Josie told her about it, ages later of course. Not that she believed in talking about private matters as a rule. But she and her friend were standing in the parish hall sorting clothes for UNESCO and one thing led to another. She was sorry afterwards that she had mentioned it. If loyalty doesn’t begin at home then where the heck does it? But it was her father she was remembering then, her father reaching out and giving her brother a flick across the ear for something he had told the neighbours that should have been kept to themselves.
‘It can bring them down to earth with a thud all right,’ Molly had said. ‘Standing up for yourself.’
Even so. Robbie waited until she was finished, until she could feel her heart pelting sixteen to the dozen, that’s what an earful she must have given him. Then he stood up and took his blazer from the coathanger in the porch and it seemed an age until he came back. After an hour Josie had thought if he thinks I’m out of my mind worrying about where he is he’s got another think coming. She got the dinner ready and her hand was still shaking when she peeled the potatoes. Then she phoned her sister without of course mentioning a word and straightened the linen cupboard and was sitting at the kitchen table with People, reading about a Russian ballet dancer who had toured Australia twenty years ago and then stayed on. She was married to a cattleman in the Northern Territory and told the interviewer she didn’t have a moment’s regret. She still looked lovely enough you could imagine her starting to dance again there and then. And the gate clicked as Josie had known it would sooner or later. Robbie sat down at the table as if nothing had happened. He said, ‘I could smell the corned beef from the corner.’
‘I could hardly credit it,’ Josie had said when she told her friend.
Mollie said, ‘After two marriages I could credit anything.’
They eat their dinner without saying much apart from Robbie remarking the supermarket didn’t half get the oldest steak they could lay their hands on, did they? Then after the news they watched a documentary about frogs and forests in the Amazon, and tribes they kept finding and tried to make live like everybody else. Josie had thought just the other day how they had grown older together with the Englishman with the nice voice whose films they watched since he was in his thirties she supposed and here they were still watching. Things you remember. They had been watching him in Africa another time about elephants and how to protect them from hunters who were after them for their tusks, when Robbie had sort of come at her and made her put cushions beneath her on the floor and there they were, the TV still flickering because he had turned the sound off but not the picture. She laughed about it now, it was like a herd of silent elephants was running over her. Robbie didn’t care for her saying things, though, once times like that were over, so when she mentioned the elephants he hadn’t thought it much of a joke. Out of the blue, she had always thought of it, the way it was when he suddenly made up his mind and usually nothing could be further from what she was thinking of.
It was early days when she hit on this way to make it seem not so rushed, not something she didn’t much want to begin with although soon enough it could be nice. She knew she was loving Robbie as she promised to do when they married but there was this idea in her mind at the same time that it was really someone else. Not imagining another man, not that, but if you were someone else, funny how that made such a difference. She never had who exactly it was in mind. But she knew it wasn’t her, and was thinking I am doing this and liking it because the other person likes it already. She could not easily put it into words and thank goodness she didn’t need to. You didn’t have to work it out.
As she now moved about the kitchen making tea for just herself, Josie wondered how things might have been different if there were children. The remoteness, she meant. For both of them. The growing apart which of course you never notice happening day by day and then there, wallop, and it’s so obvious what the years have done. That was Molly’s word, wallop, because something like that had happened to her. More so, if anything. Her husband who was such a great football player in his time seemed to sit on the sofa for the next thirty years. Someone switched the motor off, Molly said. ‘The buggers don’t tell you, mind. As if it’s none of your business.’ Josie didn’t care for people saying things like ‘We all have our trials, though, don’t we?’ so had said only, ‘Of course I do, Molly,’ when her friend asked, ‘You do know what I’m on about, don’t you?’ These days of course you could visit Molly in the Little Sisters and you’d be surprised if she remembered what her husbands’ names had been.
Josie liked to sit after tea with the radio on mostly, rather than TV. She thought sometimes how private our lives were, really, how different the surface was from what was actually going on. You can chatter on for hours if you have to and yet you keep yourself to yourself, that’s the truth of the matter, you can’t help it. ‘Between God and yourself,’ that’s what that same nun at school liked reminding the girls. ‘Don’t gabble, girls,’ she would say. ‘No one respects you if you do. There are some things better kept between you and God.’ Even with Molly when they had so easily chatted on together, she had never spoken for i
nstance about the mean things Robbie could get up to. The way he’d set her up for a mistake and then rebuke her for it. Like that time the old Hoover was on its last legs and she remembered him saying as plainly as if he was standing there in front of her this minute, ‘Well, we have to get one, don’t we, we can’t make do with that clapped-out thing.’ So she had looked at one in Farmers and had it delivered free because that was part of the special offer. It was a beauty, really. It as good as followed you round; there was no tugging on it like there was with the old one. Then he had gone on as if she had been behind his back and bought a Rolls Royce or something. Right, he had said, and he locked it in the shed and it was weeks before she was allowed to use it. Their friends never had an inkling of that side of him. Robbie, they used to think, he’d give you the shirt off his back. So he would, too, to just about anyone else.
You can’t be with anyone that long and not miss them, though. For months Josie would find herself suddenly crying, in Pak’nSave for instance when she saw the chocomints he was partial to there on the shelf in front of her. Or when a woman stopped her as she was passing the bowling club where Robbie had played for years until those last six months when he said there’s a new element down there I can’t bloody abide, and threw it in. The club president had written a nice note when Robbie died but this was months after that. This woman had spotted her and smiled and said, ‘Now you are Robbie’s widow, aren’t you?’ And when Josie said yes I am, the woman said, ‘Just wait a minute, do you mind?’ She then nipped into the clubhouse and came back with a plastic raincoat, the kind you can roll up so tight it fits in a blazer pocket. The woman said, ‘I’ve been meaning to for ages,’ and there they were, Robbie’s initials in thick biro on the tag inside the collar. She remembered the day he had sat at the kitchen table carefully tracing them out, his tongue in that odd way in the corner of his mouth as it always was when he wrote. She had hardly been able to see her way home, the street was so blurred and to make it worse there was only one tissue she had with her, would you believe it? There she was walking along the road Robbie must have walked a thousand times, with his folded-up raincoat in her hands as if carrying a packet of ashes.
It was all far enough back now for Josie to face what she would never have admitted to, even a month back. She had not really loved him, had she? Not in that deep way you read about, when you breathe as one story had said so it’s the other person you are breathing for as well. Yet she couldn’t stand it, that was the mystery of it, just seeing his favourite biscuits in the supermarket, carrying back the coat he had forgotten and left at bowls. Not that she felt a fool. No one has the right to say that about themselves, it was like saying No to life, no one should let themselves do that. But it was the half-closed door, that was how she had thought of it, how she thought of being dead, a door drawn to, and for those who were left it would soon close completely. Yet how wrong she had been!
It was the door flung right open, wide as it would go, and it was the emptiness that shook her. Closed, you can cope with anything, the feeling that something is hidden from you, isn’t there so much we don’t understand as it is? But the empty room, the sudden awfulness of that! As she had turned into the avenue with its stumpy, recently cut-back trees, then into their Crescent and their house just before the turn, before the big willow hanging like a curtain from the neighbours’ front lawn, she simply couldn’t help it, the crying, even the crying out, at the room he wasn’t in.
Not that she was really down to it, don’t think that. There was always enough to keep her occupied; she’d never been one for moping. She worked two mornings a week in the big kitchen behind the church hall, making meals for those who needed them, for sick pensioners and the lonely and those who couldn’t look after themselves. Another day she took Tigger to the hospice where the thin fleshless hands liked to stroke him, the little blighter purring there like a dynamo, making up to whoever it was, the tired fingers ruffling his throat. One morning she even took these three middle-aged women shopping, in their long dresses and their veils across their faces like you’d think what they really wanted to do was rob a bank. She wished Molly was round to share that one with. But they needed help getting used to a new country and trying out new words.
Then the strangest thing, in her own head really, she knew it was only that, but it surprised her when it happened all the same. She was dog-tired most nights. Ten minutes after she switched off the bedside light she was nodding off. But those ten minutes she looked forward to, and the oddest thing was bringing God into it. God wanting to be brought in. It was like when Robbie had made love to her and how she had made it nice when it might easily enough not have been. She thought of God straight out as she hadn’t for years. He’d always been there, of course he had, but there was really somewhere else, but now she thought of Him being here. In the room, even, when she closed her eyes. If there was a colour to him it was warm, something you could lean into the way a child leans into a grown-up. ‘I imagine I belong there and I am someone else,’ wasn’t that what she had thought with Robbie? She could think of herself like that, someone deserving to lean against God, and God not really choosy whether it was her or anyone else. He didn’t mind—it was up to her. ‘I am here,’ she would say, just before she went to sleep, and He was glad she was. As often as not Tigger was there too, lying beneath the soft part of her wrist.
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Cecilia was a good name because there had been an English lady, married to a doctor, so everyone said, who worked himself to death for people who often paid him nothing. Her name was on the door opposite her husband’s surgery. She tested people’s eyes and had open on a table beside her a box full of glasses frames that looked like insects lying over each other, and another box with soft notches where she kept the circles of glass that she fitted into the frames for the people she had tested. So later on when the girl was more than twenty, and had to take a name that the Australian woman who interviewed her for the list needed to write on the back of her photograph, she said that, she said Cecilia. The woman across the desk at the agent’s office said, ‘Let me hear you say it. No good having a name if you can’t say it properly.’ Which made this new Cecilia think that those other girls and women who sat in the small hot waiting room, their shoes slipped off and their hands waving the magazines taken from the rack, were probably choosing more ordinary names. A friend of Cecilia’s who had not been chosen when she visited the agency told her the people there looked through a peephole to see what magazines the girls were looking at, those that weren’t using them for fans against the heat. They wanted to know who were reading the difficult ones and who chose the ones that were mostly pictures of film stars and baseball players. Then they favoured the ones who were good at reading.
That of course might not have been true. Cecilia was not worried in any case because at school, before working in the kitchen at the army base, she had been the best at writing. She was the one the manager picked out to do the menus on the board each morning. But because her friend had told her that about the peephole she had brought with her a book of stories a New Zealander had left in a room at the hotel. That was how Cecilia knew the wind was so strong in the country she was advertising for. It was a place too, one story said, where people were mean to cats, and the native people were much the same colour as herself, and sang at parties.
The woman at the agency that was called Numero Uno said when she saw the book held underneath the nice black handbag she had borrowed from her friend, ‘You mustn’t think a book of stories is a guidebook, Cecilia. I had to read that book when I was a student and I wondered if I lived in the same country.’ She laughed when she said that, and Cecilia smiled that she was reading a book that people who went to university read. The woman who would be described as hard and unhelpful by some of the girls in the waiting room was not like that with Cecilia. She asked her which of the stories she liked, and laughed again when Cecilia said she liked the way the lady was so strong and made the street kids stay out when
they came to look at the toy house. Didn’t she just know from her first job, before the army base, what it was like keeping ones like that in their place.
‘Dancing?’ the woman asked her then, suddenly so serious again. No, Cecilia said. But cooking, she was good at that. And talking with people. And yes, she went to church. There were other questions before the woman said she hoped Cecilia would understand how careful an agency like this had to be, there had been one or two unfortunate episodes. The doctor would write a certificate and then they could advertise right away. It seemed not so bad to let the doctor examine her. He was old and stern-looking, although she could not really see his eyes behind their smoked glasses. She was able to say no to every question he asked her, and when he listened to her chest he said, ‘Very good,’ and ticked each box in the column in front of him. She folded her vaccination certificates and put them back in her borrowed purse.
The Families Page 7