The Families

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  Robin was uncomfortable even before that. He sat on in the car for a moment after Pamela opened her door and stood waiting, his mind on nothing more than leaning forward a little to check the date on the warrant of fitness on the far side of the windscreen.

  He had not heard when she first spoke, until her stooping to see him more clearly, asking him was he all right? Did he feel all right? Then ‘Sure?’ she insisted. Since the fall, how frequently she came at that! How much more watchful she had become, more powerful, as a spouse inevitably does when there is the least suggestion there is something that must be watched. Only there was nothing to be alert for, why couldn’t that sink in? There had been a run of tests and X-rays, there were tinkerings with diet, there was the advice to walk when it was not essential to ride. No more in fact than you’d suggest to a person half his age. Common sense, as he told his wife. It had nothing to do with the simple fact of slipping in a public loo, Christ, couldn’t she take that in? Even his doctor, who ran marathons until his knee gave out, said, with his stethoscope dangling round his neck like some kind of bloody snakecharmer, ‘Chances are you’ll see me out, Robin, I can tell you that.’ Yet he knew the ground had shifted, at least a little. Pamela made sure that it did. As he had quietly told Jack Kelty as the women looked one evening at carpet samples in another room, ‘We have entered the age of surveillance, know that, Jack?’ There was no way of getting round it, the sense that Pamela felt it her duty to observe. To pick up the signs. He would have said, only Jack was a left-footer and he would not want to offend, how the only important woman in his life had turned into Mother Teresa.

  ‘You know I hate shopping,’ he said. ‘You know I hate the small talk,’ and so his wife went up alone to the welcoming assistant, who smiled again as she mentioned Ted, their neighbour, who worked in accounts.

  Robin told her, ‘I’ll look at this stuff here.’ The enormous shelves of home appliances.

  The range of Black & Decker drills. The toolkits in their bright yellow boxes. He picked up a miniature saw, unsure what on earth one would use it for, but Pamela thank God had left him where he could step back and not be seen. He felt the sweat working inside his shirt, his blood surge in his ears. The fat man Pamela smiled back at brushed at his lapels, the fingers together as though the hands were flippers.

  He was unsure if he was angry, or was it upset? He placed his own hands against the deep wooden shelf in front of him. A nerve in his kneecap began a wiry twitch. Small objects on the shelves about him appeared to jitter. He bent a little to peer through the wooden slats. He saw his wife speaking and the man nodding at her while one hand moved with a slow circling between his jacket and his shirt, as though he were in some way favouring his breast. The thought of it disgusted. Robin walked down to the gleaming line of barbecues along the wall at the end of the shelves. He touched the flank of a metal lid, large enough to conceal a body. It must be meant for a restaurant, surely, something that size? He glanced back along the aisle. Pamela was grasping the shaft of a new Flymo, testing it for height, for comfort, angling it so it touched the ground, as though she were about to mow the concrete floor. The fat man stood very close to her. He took the machine from her to tilt in against himself, to make some point about its use, cradling its long handle like a broom. For one moment, as he moved in his demonstration, his bulk obscured Pamela entirely. She disappeared as though into it. And then she was there again, smiling, as was the man himself, at some remark he had made.

  Robin’s palms were wet, as if he had passed them under a tap. He went to an open door in the side of the huge barn-like building, standing back as two young men efficiently unloaded a van and added cartons to a stack inside the door. The breeze was welcome against his forehead, his throat. He waited until he saw his wife carry the long cardboard box towards the checkout. She talked gaily to the young woman who took her card and entered it in the Eftpos machine, but said nothing to her husband as he came to stand beside her and carried her purchase back to the car. It was necessary to lower the back seat before he could angle the mower through from the boot. With Pamela already sitting in the driver’s seat, waiting to turn the key, her features set as stone, he thought, ‘I am too tired for this. To care whether she is angry or not.’

  The car jerked rather than backed from the parking bay. Her resolve to say nothing quickly passed, as he expected it to do. Before she turned from the car park into the traffic streaming back along the Quay towards the city, where had he got to then, she was demanding, might she ask? Leaving her to lug that lump of a thing the length of PlaceMakers before he deigned to come near her?

  ‘I don’t think you know quite how I felt in there. I needed fresh air.’

  ‘You mean you’re ill?’

  ‘I felt I had no freedom. That the script was written for me.’

  ‘You’re talking nonsense now,’ Pamela said. But his admission seemed to calm her. He supposed his words had slipped into one of her pigeonholes, ‘Inexplicably upset’ for instance. Once it was named it could be coped with. ‘Best thing you can do,’ she said, ‘is lie down the minute we get home.’

  ‘That isn’t what I need.’

  ‘It was an episode,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that enough?’ She placed her left hand for a moment on his right sleeve. She thought of the sales which started next week. Decent material this time, though, she’d make sure of that. The last jacket he had bought without her being with him, the cloth brushing into small tight tufts that needed to be picked off. Something a bit livelier too than the greys and fawns he chose if left to himself. Brighter colours suited him. She glanced across at him as they waited at the Tinakori Road lights.

  ‘Better now?’

  ‘Nothing to be better about.’

  ‘Oh no,’ Pamela laughed, ‘I’d be the last to notice, wouldn’t I.’ Amazing, she thought, even now, how quickly their occasional spats blew over. Love, she supposed, although amused a little at how trite it sounded, said as starkly as that. A tricky word at the best of times.

  Then with no more warning than if he had been clipped on a pedestrian crossing, Ted Pike next door, who had only that Monday confirmed the order for the wheelbarrow, came in from playing squash on the Tuesday night and was dead by the time his wife had taken down the teacups. The crackers and cheese were already on the table.

  The funeral was three days later. Most of those in the church were from the same age group as the dead man and his wife. Friends spoke sincerely, and some found it difficult to end what they wanted to say. There were also stories one was meant to laugh at, which these days seemed de rigueur for funerals. It brought home to Robin how out of touch he was with how fashions changed. He disliked it too when the woman minister thought it obligatory to smile as if to jolly things along, and mentioned God as little as possible, out of deference, was it, for the dead?

  Robin had looked down at his hands while waiting for the service to begin. He thought, am I a hard-hearted person? He would be sad if he was. He could not, however, line it up quite satisfactorily, this sense of indifference, of embarrassment even, sitting here among mourners, and the warmth he had always felt for his neighbour, now lying there a few yards away. How many dozens of times had they chatted, shared their delight when the Blues were beaten, collected each other’s mail during holidays? Done the odd good neighbourly turn?

  It had occurred to him, pretty much from the moment when the phone call came to tell them of Ted’s death, that the fat man would be at the funeral. Bound to be. He and Ted worked together, after all. How familiar Ted would have been with that chesty breathing, the clump of fingers, the brushed lapels. The man to put you right, Ted had called him that.

  Robin knew he was afraid, that was the only word. Afraid to see him again. But never imagining it quite like this, not with Pamela instructing him quietly to move along the pew, the man lowering himself next to her at the end of the row. The nonsense of it, even as he felt the vein beating in his forehead! A thin voice coming back to him, a teacher’s v
oice, Mr Minn’s dry informing on the beginnings of religion, mere objects becoming presences, the irrational fear that accrued to a figurine. Robin sang loudly to distract himself. He approved of the mourning family in their decent suits and frocks. He had been to a funeral earlier in the year when the deceased was carried by tieless men in jeans, followed by females wearing cardigans. You could not have dressed more casually for a barbecue, which he supposed to purely secular minds it was halfway to being. Two of the hymns he sang he knew, a third he had never heard of. There was a kind of pop song in there as well, for the grandchildren he supposed. Nietzsche would have made a fist of it, proclaimed Taste was dead as well. Made a total sweep. ‘As the casket leaves,’ he read. Christ, he quietly seethed, why couldn’t they call it a coffin! Why not put advertising on the outside as well, to show how American we’ve become? The Lord’s Prayer, the familiar lines. Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them. Pamela’s attractive voice, her careful emphasis on the important words. The total quietness while good things were said by the minister, things that are always said of the departed, sometimes justly, sometimes not. Robin was glad ‘beyond all telling’, as one of the hymns declared, that it was his wife there, next to the fat man, rather than himself.

  Then there he was—there they were—joining those who followed Ted down the aisle of the church. The fat man bulked in front of them, some discreet male deodorant wafting back from him. The woman minister stood to one side of the door, still smiling as though it were a wedding she was leading. The undertaker, with professional deftness, moved between the figures in the forecourt where the hearse was parked, offering a basket of carnation heads to be laid on the coffin as it slid snugly to its shining space. Time passed. The little bit of time before Ted would be driven off. Robin stood at the back of the crowd. Pamela was talking with a neighbour from the house on their other side. He was aware again of the faint deodorant behind him, the voice saying too loudly, although thank heavens not to him, saying to another man who shared perhaps the professional eye of PlaceMakers, ‘Lovely wood,’ he was saying as the hearse moved off, the light glinting along the varnished box. ‘There’s lovely wood for you.’

  DADDY DROPS A LINE

  My father used to say … I intended to begin that sentence, ‘Our father used to say,’ but the phrase is now too suppositional, too much what the boys at least are so trying to get away from. So back to what is really a second shot to let nothing stand in the way of what needs to be said.

  My father used to say if there was truth anywhere, we had to make it for ourselves. A dubious enough thing to tell children, who want certainty from their parents, not that proviso for self-discovery. As children we want absolutes we can later move from with a sense of victory won, and feel maturity is the reward for breaking away. We most certainly do not want relativism, not as five-year-olds. (My brother the journalist has said to me time and again in his peremptory emails, ‘For Christ’s sake do not put stuff in italics!! You sound so tentative about everything!!’)

  My father used to say there would come a time when we thanked him that he never told us what to think. That he never imposed his certainties on any of us. Daddy—the boys hate my calling him that—Daddy was constantly in a state of self-revising. Their view of him now is clear-cut, a picture of sad confusion from day one. I want to say to them but in fact do not that he is more like half a dozen profiles drawn on separate sheets of transparent paper that do not align exactly. Placed one on another there is a blur of lines, and the truth is in the blur:

  Joel is the journalist. Frank, my other brother, is a teacher, who once fancied he would write history books. Each has a family of teenagers and is, I’d say, maritally a mess. I am the one who married at an early age, to a considerably older man who is richer than either of them. My brothers, at the time Roger and I got together, referred to him as a sexual property developer. The jokes kept up over the years, not altogether malicious, but certainly with an edge. Joel’s first wife opted out for a farmer she met at a Rotary luncheon her husband was speaking at. Frank’s wife simply moved in with a mother of two, a mild Maltese woman, a few streets from where they lived. I keep in touch with second-string sisters-in-law who are better adjusted to contemporary mores than either of my brothers, both of whom seem angry a good deal of the time. My own marriage is childless but contented, sidestepping whatever ravages the boys once assumed it was in for. ‘Whatever successful’s supposed to mean,’ I can hear Frank saying.

  Joel lives in Dunedin and Frank in Sydney. Maori Hill and Paddington. Roger and I ‘reside’—another of Joel’s loaded words—in Epsom, ‘leafy Epsom’, he’d say. Both brothers of course believe we are far-right stormtroopers, responsible for letting the little monkey-man swing into Parliament, feeding him our votes as though they were nuts. I say very little, as nothing I say could let us off the hook. Roger’s first wife way back—I wasn’t yet in Standard Six—was Italian, a well-off communist from Milan, whose father published incendiary books. Her outspoken politics went with what Roger’s sister recalls as ‘Junoesque jugs’, which, as again my brothers believe, makes my husband not a difficult man to explain.

  But to my/our father. He invested in New Zealand Breweries, and Fletcher’s when they built state houses, decades before the rot set in. That was aside from his own business. He was loaded, an expression used by all of us at different times, and, on occasion, by us together. His solicitor was a life-long friend and so surely must have been complicit, although it is in the nature of his profession to deny it. Nalden even has the gall to say he was surprised. ‘He was never one to confide. Did he confide in any of you?’ A guarded truculence in his voice. He had opened a drawer in his old-fashioned legal desk and placed an envelope in front of him. His chair swivelled in a semicircle, as he looked to each of us. Yes?

  Frank nodded on behalf of the family. Nalden slit the envelope with a paperknife shaped like a dolphin. We could see the paper bore a single typed line, our father’s signature beneath it, and another signature to the side, witnessing it. Nalden then read in a voice trained in neutrality, a voice to offend neither the living nor the dead, ‘At last everything is clear.’

  There was a long pause. Then Joel said, so quietly it was a dead giveaway that he was prepared to kill, ‘That cannot be all.’

  ‘I’m afraid it is, Joel.’ Nalden pinched his lower lip to a little rosebud between his forefinger and thumb.

  ‘Then what does it mean?’

  My other brother shouted in the quiet, almost sepulchral office, ‘It means, “At last everything is clear.”’ Frank had studied philosophy as well as history. He hated imprecision even as a child. For years he had corrected Joel and me if we lost the thread of a story or strayed from the point. He was now the first of us to stand up.

  The solicitor again looked from one to the other, and allowed his eyes to slide back across each of us. He said, ‘There are various lines of approach that might be considered.’ His voice, I thought, purred with caution, reservations, the hint of protracted submissions and challenged judgments.

  Joel, a touch dramatically, placed an elbow on each knee, to support the weight of his head lowered on to his spread hands.

  Frank was the one whose coolness won out. ‘The problem we have here may be so intractable one cannot easily confront it.’

  It was the kind of remark that appealed to Nalden. ‘Point taken,’ he said, ‘point taken,’ misunderstanding my brother completely.

  Frank enlightened him. ‘The point I am making,’ he said, ‘is that your client was a prick.’

  ‘Your father?’ Nalden uneasily tapping the bridge of his glasses.

  ‘Total,’ Frank told him.

  There were various factors that rubbed salt. Our father had left an earmarked fund to pay for a more ornate headstone than, in all honesty, any of his offspring considered decent. Daddy had no more religious conviction than a bar of soap. Yet there was to be not only one of those old-fashioned marble mortuary angels that always intrig
ue children obliged to visit cemeteries, but the angel was to be playing a mouth organ. ‘In the desert,’ Nalden offered. ‘In the desert in ’43 your father was what the boys called a dag with his mouth organ. Hymns. Off-colour songs.’

  ‘What a friend Eskimo Nell has in Jesus?’ Joel said, never one to rein in his bile.

  Nalden said, ‘You’re rather missing the point.’

  I said, ‘It’s nice to think he was sentimental about the good times, surely?’

  ‘Christ, Sophie!’ Joel shouted, across the lounge in our home, when I repeated it later that evening. Roger was irritated but for my sake said nothing. He took their emptied glasses from my brothers and carried them to the bar where he refilled them and swizzled the ice until it chinked in the awkward silence. I stroked Monty’s lovely coat. Monty is our miniature schnauzer who so often is my distraction in awkward moments.

  More temperately, Frank repeated the phrases Daddy had drawn up and given to his solicitor in a separate document, to be run in the papers for three days, in Sydney and Dunedin as well as up here. ‘Deeply grieving children.’ ‘Truly beloved father.’ ‘Bereft for ever.’

  ‘If that’s not taking the piss,’ he said.

  ‘Not many people you know will see them,’ Roger tried to console. My brothers had too much contempt for him to answer. Then my husband said he had phoned a QC friend of his who said there was no compulsion—.

  Frank cut across his brother-in-law. ‘You cannot prevent a man saying what he likes in his own bloody death notice.’

  Then Joel: ‘His children can’t deny all that grieving stuff without sounding like ungrateful nasty shits.’