The Families

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  Thinking of it now, knowing somehow she must explain to Dad, Kirsten blinked back tears. The humiliation of it all. The message there in every moment she had been in their home, You are not what we have in mind. As they left, Sammy had leaned forward and his mother and his sisters kissed his cheeks, ran their hands along his sleeves, gave him round bamboo boxes which were treats they had made for him to take home. Jenny relented enough to say, when the others were still fussing about him, that Sammy looked so like their father, that was why their mother cried, why they all spoiled him. But Rob, she noticed, did not say anything to encourage her, to make her think time would improve anything. And yet she said ‘Thank you’ to him through the lowered window as they left. His mother and the girls were on the driver’s side, still grasping at his hands as he drove off.

  ‘But I told you,’ he said, ‘I told you it would be like that. It isn’t you. They would be jealous of anybody. Now we can forget about it.’ Because he had expected it and it was even rather amusing to him, he thought it might be so for her as well, something surely they could see in perspective? It would prove how close they actually were, how they saw things in the same way because, in that stupid phrase he had picked up somewhere, they were soulmates. Well, weren’t they? ‘We are soulmates, Kirsten.’

  ‘I was shocked at myself, Dad,’ Kirsten now told him. ‘That was about the worst part. That it mattered so much to me.’

  They were walking down to the dark broad tug of the river. It ran close in against the banks. ‘It’s high, isn’t it?’ she said. When she was little she had always been apprehensive when they walked this path that the level of the river would suddenly rise and lap around them and push them downstream with the driftwood and scraps of pumice you saw floating past, so much faster than you’d ever expect. An older cousin knew how much the river frightened her. ‘It’s coming up, it’s coming up,’ she would say, very close against her so that only she and not their parents might hear.

  Now she had started, she went on. ‘I never thought I was like that, you know, and here I was hating them. Really hating them.’

  ‘You’d have felt the same if they’d been Kiwis,’ her father said. ‘It’s not what they look like. It’s what they did.’

  They each knew there was not that much more to say, but it was good even to talk like this, as she never would with Mary. It had always been like this. When she was a teenager, when girls were supposed to be close to their mothers, it was Dad she found herself talking to, telling him about her boyfriend even, about Ron Dowse from Tirau who had said if she didn’t let him do more, let him undo her blouse anyway on the long summer evenings when they and some friends drove up the sanatorium road to Maungakawa and watched the bands of gold and shadow across the river country, well, he had said, that was that. Not that she told Dad exactly, about having to deal with Ron’s hands as if they were huge insects that she constantly slapped at. She supposed now Dad must have guessed anyway. He had told her, ‘Remember you’re always in charge, Kirsty. Your friends can’t make you do anything. You’re always in charge.’

  Sammy just couldn’t understand, she said. It came down to his expecting what happened. ‘And so he thought I would too. He knew they wouldn’t like me. Wouldn’t like anyone who wasn’t one of their own. Ever. He had taken it for granted I somehow wouldn’t mind. That I’d pretend it was OK because he believed himself that it shouldn’t matter.’ Dad touched her arm but thank goodness didn’t come out with what she had heard enough of already from friends in Melbourne—that people change over time, that getting on with in-laws wasn’t everything.

  They walked slowly along the path to the low hulk of the old gun-boat. She knew Dad’s silence told her he agreed. You know in your bones what you think is right. Although he did say, ‘When that first lustre wears off, that’s when you see problems for what they are. It’s a lot harder then to put things right.’

  ‘Once we get used to each other’—she had gone over that so often too. For the week after the visit to his family he came round to her flat and they made love and he told her what she meant to him. But even then, with the comfort of his breathing beside her when he slept, his back warm against her arm, she thought of that, and feared it. When we are used to each other, I am the one he will think differently about, not them. She knew how bad it must have been for them in the war, how, once his father died, his mother had starved and lied and even killed, Sammy had hinted at that even, to get them through, to bring them here. He will not become unkind, Sammy would never be that, but what he grew up with cannot go away. There will be a veil between us, and then at last perhaps a wall.

  They walked up the grassy slope and sat on a bench beneath a tree whose name Kirsten did not know. Mary would have, though. Mary could have walked to the coast and told you about everything they passed. But how good it was to sit here. The peacefulness of it. The last few weeks had been so wretched. Sammy had said, over and over, ‘Perhaps we just need time. If we love each other we’ll get through.’ She watched a sculler skim across the taut dark water. On the other bank a group of rowers were carrying their boat down to the river. Kirsten said again, ‘I’m sure the river’s higher than I remembered it last year,’ and Dad said there’d been so much rain, weeks of it in fact. Then he said, ‘You mustn’t regret what was good about it, though. That always stays as it was.’

  She could have hugged him for saying that! She put her hand on his and he took her fingers and pressed them, before they stood and walked back up to River Road. He said, ‘I think your mother wants to drive you out to Cambridge after lunch. To have you to herself.’

  Which meant, Kirsten supposed, her wanting to say something without her father there to hear.

  On the way they drove past the house near Hautapu where they had lived when Dad was at the country school.

  ‘We must have been so packed in!’

  ‘We were,’ Mary said, ‘but we seemed not to know at the time.’

  It was the first home Kirsten remembered, before the later years after the shift into town, years when Mary did the accounts at the dairy factory, and the arguments when Dad said he was content where he was. It angered her mother, his having no desire in the world to apply for something more. He was an excellent teacher, wasn’t he, a school of his own would have been his for the asking. ‘But I like what I do.’ It must have been said so much the sentence stayed in her mind, as did Mary’s silences. The house was a roughcast, white-painted box, with blue sills and a door that made it look oddly like a Greek postcard.

  ‘It doesn’t look lived in,’ Kirsten said. The lawns were uncut, a trailer stood in high grass.

  ‘The school closed years back so there’s no need for a teacher’s house. The dairy factory too. That’s closed.’

  ‘And the big tree. It’s not there.’ The copper beech that flickered across the windows at the side of the house, its leaves looking as though it was an ordinary tree that had been scorched. She thought of the fat, round cheeses, so heavy you could hardly hold one, which Mr Prendergast the manager let their mother bring home. Kirsten did not remember ever seeing him, Mr Prendergast, but knew they were a present from him. The deep sides were curved and lovely to run the palms of your hand across, but if you pushed at the cheese before it was cut it made her think of trying to push against hard rubber. There were some nights too—not many, but how they stayed alive!—when she and Gail lay in bed and her parents argued in the kitchen. Dad had closed the door so what they said was not loud enough to hear. But you could tell just how angry they were. Gail had said it was like when a kettle begins to boil. But once when they thought she was outside and Dad was marking at the table he joked about and called his office, she heard Mary ask him, not sure of what her mother meant, what sort of man doesn’t want to get on? Surely he owed her that?

  ‘You wouldn’t remember much from when we lived out here? Before we went into town?’

  ‘Not much,’ Kirsten said. ‘I do remember how empty it all seemed, though. The paddock
s. How big they were. How few houses. And now they’re everywhere. New and ugly.’

  ‘Not all of them,’ Mary said.

  ‘I suppose not. Just big and ostentatious.’

  ‘So Marx isn’t dead,’ her mother teased her.

  ‘Not as dead as that,’ she smiled. How they argued about all that during her last year at school! Not even argued, that was the problem. Her parents, who voted Labour anyway, had been amused at her vehemence, at her defending Trotsky as the lost leader.

  Just before coming into Cambridge, a stone’s throw from the watertower that once seemed so exotic to her, like something you saw in books about foreign places, they passed a mock Tudor mansion where a cousin, the town’s plumber, lived in style. His wife grew orchids in a long glasshouse at the side of the house. There was talk of his standing for the local council on a Ratepayers’ ticket. ‘He’s that overweight,’ Mary said, ‘I doubt he’ll last till Christmas.’

  Both women laughed at what occurred to them together, the thought of his bulk clambering beneath houses to attend to drains. ‘You never let up, do you?’ said Kirsten.

  ‘Not with a prick like that, I don’t.’ It brought them together, her saying that. An easing of tension, Kirsten supposed that was it, their shared mockery of a relative they both disliked, her mother using a word that took her by surprise.

  Then, ‘Let’s live it up,’ Mary said, as they passed the war memorial and she turned to park facing the green expanse where over the years they had come to heaven knows how many occasions, candlelight carol services, athletic events, even cricket matches, when Gail had briefly played for a first-class team, and then gave up a month after she met Gavin, when she might have been chosen for the national squad. They walked back past the Town Hall, to the gable-roofed church that was now a coffee shop and painted lolly-pink.

  ‘On me,’ Mary said.

  Kirsten felt she was at school again and being taken for a treat. They sat at a table made from recycled wood, with koru patterns roughly incised in the surface. There were equally rough paintings with pioneer motifs on large hardboard panels attached to the walls. When their lattes were brought to them, with fern-leaves patterned in the cream, Mary said, ‘If I ran a place like this I’d put something offensive on them. Swastikas, say. I can’t stand this way we have to play at being Kiwis all the time.’

  I suppose this is it, then, Kirsten thought, she will want me to talk. Mary began head on. ‘You miss him, do you? Sammy?’

  ‘I hoped I’d be over the worst of it. But yes. All the time.’

  Her mother tore at one of the narrow paper tubes of sugar stacked in a bowl in front of them and tilted it over her cup. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘It shows how deeply you’ve considered what you’ve decided to do.’

  My God, Kirsten thought, what she wouldn’t give to live as neatly as Mary managed to. Life clipped into place. Jennys trimmed at the same time every year. Essential things logically done. There was no condescension in her thinking this, nor envy either. She could not imagine herself being further from her mother, that was all. In temperament. In what she wanted from life. And then what in a week’s time would so come back to her, in the high tidy apartment in the renovated Drewery Place factory, with the noise from the nightclub across the narrow lane starting up at midnight, and lasting sometimes until four o’clock. Her mother now asking her, ‘You’ve talked with your father then?’

  ‘When we walked down to the river. There’s not much really to say, is there? And you know Dad. He’s not one to lecture. But he was kind and listened. It was good to get it over.’

  ‘No, I mean about us,’ Mary said. ‘He didn’t talk about us? He didn’t tell you that I’m leaving him?’ She folded in half the empty sugar packet she took up from beside her cup. Then she said, ‘No, I suppose it’s fair enough that I’m the one who should tell you.’

  Kirsten began to cry. Her mother passed her a tissue that she took from her purse, then sat holding her daughter’s hand, running her index finger along the cuff of Kirsten’s shirt. ‘My dear,’ she said, ‘I know, I know.’

  ‘The worst thing,’ Kirsten said later in the day, when she walked to the end of the back garden and stood against the small glasshouse with its neat shelves of potted herbs, its staked tomato plants, the things she did not know the names for, and talked to her sister on her mobile. ‘The worst thing was the moment I heard her say it, I knew it was right. It would never have occurred to me that they might break up. But as soon as she said so I was thinking, yes, they’re right to. I cried but it wasn’t for that, it was because they had left it until now. And for her too. That she was the one who had to see it.’

  She felt her sister’s anger surging at her. ‘I think you’re talking shit,’ Gail shouted. ‘You’ve become so bloody selfish over there you can’t think of anyone else. Have you thought of Dad? Have you?’ There was the interruption of one of the children hectoring its mother, a whining that made Kirsten impatient. But Gail was the one to say, ‘I’ll talk to you later.’ Although before she put the phone down she found her final shot. ‘I’d get myself sorted out marriage-wise if I were you, Kirsten. Before working it out for others.’

  On the way back along the Cambridge Road Mary had said, very calmly, ‘I expect it was like that with you. You just know a point’s been reached. There’s nothing very dramatic about it. It’s not there in big lights. You just know.’

  Kirsten did not say, as she might have, ‘No, Mum, it wasn’t like that with me at all. We were at the beginning. Sammy and I had hardly begun. You are at the end.’ She was glad she held back from saying it. They were passing the old farmhouse with an enormous Norfolk pine at the end of the drive. How many dozens of times they must have driven along here, from the time she first remembered, she and her sister strapped into the back seat, Dad sometimes singing and turning to call back to them, ‘Come on you two, you know this song don’t you? Right? Row, row, row your boat,’ and Mary telling him, ‘Watch the road, can’t you, John?’ But she would join in too, her voice thin and sweet, Kirsten liking it so much when they sang like that together, ‘gently down the stream.’ Their grandmother had lived in a house dark as a cupboard. She got their names mixed up or sometimes called them by names they had never heard, names of people in other places and some of them even dead. The house was a box of shadows, and smelled of medicine and dust. The curtains were drawn in the room they sat in while Dad was outside running a mower across the lawn. When he came inside he left his shoes on the steps, sprayed with grass that looked like clipped green paper.

  Kirsten said as they passed another villa set behind a wide swathe of acacias, ‘They were horse trainers, weren’t they, the two men who lived in there?’

  ‘Something odd about that set-up too,’ Mary said. And their laughing at that, as Kirsten noticed the glazed streak on her mother’s cheek. ‘Oh, Mum,’ she said, touching her arm.

  ‘Those tissues are in the glovebox,’ Mary said. ‘I don’t know which of us needs them most.’

  Kirsten switched on voicemail messages as soon as she set her bag down inside the bedroom door, and threw her jacket across a chair. It was late afternoon. The apartment in the converted printing works was cool enough for her to slip on a sweater, although when she stood at the large window of the lounge and looked up the sky was bright above the walls of the lane. A friend from school had phoned to say ring back if she felt like meeting at the usual bar in Carlton. ‘Tuesdays are good,’ the message said. ‘We can hear ourselves talk.’ She knew it was a sympathy call, her friend thinking she would need cheering up now that she was back to an empty flat. There was another message from the telephone company, with details of a new deal that ran out at the end of the week, and a curt reminder from the caretaker that garbage collecting had moved to another day of the week. She then counted seven calls that left nothing but the click of a phone disconnecting. For those last few days before her trip home she had sat while the phone trilled, unwilling to have another conversation, not wanting
to cover the same ground again. It was the hardest thing not to ring back. She sat now with her hands in her lap, looked through the squares of the big divided window at the brick wall of the nightclub across the lane. She had felt exhausted the minute she boarded the plane, and slept until they were crossing the coast. She looked at the stretch of land beneath her, the vastness of it, until it was lost in a bluish distant haze. Her mother had said to her the other afternoon, as they came up from the dip and into Hillcrest, ‘You’re the tough one, Kirsten, you’ll be all right. Your sister’s the one I worry about. I don’t know if Gavin’s all he should be.’ I’m not, Kirsten had wanted to cry out, no, I’m not! But with Mary there was a point where you drew the line. And later Dad had said only, ‘It can’t have come as such a surprise?’ And again she had not said what she had thought, ‘There was nothing in my life, Dad, that surprised me as much.’

  Luckily, he said, money was not an issue, they certainly wouldn’t be arguing over that. Luckily there’s the bach at Raglan, in fact he quite liked the idea of living out there, years of reading, he said, to catch up on. There’d be no problem with Riley. There wouldn’t be the least problem with the dog.

  ‘Don’t keep saying “luckily”,’ she had said to him. And then they talked about teaching, how he knew he had been good at it but had not missed it for a day. That had surprised him. She told him about her own classes, how fortunate that most of them were French, she didn’t have the problems that drove some of her colleagues up the wall. It had been the same with Sammy and senior maths, she said. They didn’t get the yobbos. They didn’t get the thugs. Luckily.

  When the window darkened she turned on the lamp that stood on the small carved table Sammy had given her, the Tiffany panes brightening the room. She looked at her watch and saw it was eight o’clock. The phone began to ring. I won’t answer it, she said, I won’t answer it, as she stood and walked towards it.