The Families

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  The clock was from Switzerland, but without a cuckoo in sight. It was sleek and silent, its casing a clear, clinical glass. The mechanism was visible through its transparent walls. One wheel that reflected the showroom’s lighting glinted as it turned. The hands were thin steel needles, with metallic dashes where numerals were to be assumed. Carol observed the clock long enough for a smartly dressed young man to approach her.

  ‘Beautiful,’ he breathed at her, ‘beautiful, right?’ He was jaunty and she disliked him, disliked the too short hair, the ovals of his rimless glasses, the drift of male perfume. She continued to look into the glass framework, the stir and motion within, the needles that stood at three minutes to three.

  ‘Repellent,’ she said, as he waited, and then moved away. She knew she must have come across as rude. She heard the young man say, she supposed to another assistant, in a sotto voce that surely was insincere, ‘Bloody old trout!’ The words rocked her, the full force of their offensiveness as if she had been slapped. The steel hand in front of her slid a minute forward. She walked back through the bright jumble of expensive bric-a-brac, the brilliant Versace plates, the sleek Lladro figurines, the dishes of piled porcelain fruit, coming at her it seemed with an almost animal rush, while her mind insisted I have been labelled too. Her forehead throbbed with confusion and hurt and surprise. She continued on through the loaded aisles, the casually careful spread of Persian rugs, a display wall mounted with thick tiles ornamented with a face taken from Renaissance painting, the letters of a word enlarged on one ceramic square, a line of Latin on another, fragments and remnants that were meant somehow to declare, ‘The person who owns such things as these indeed owns the past.’

  A group of faux-Napoleonic clocks dinged for three o’clock. She now stood at the counter in the tea-rooms. She ordered Ceylon tea. She hoped the muddle in her mind would settle. Her sight still jumped with dots as though insects flew ahead of her. She sat at a plain wooden table, waiting for her pot of tea to draw its strength. She watched the young woman move efficiently behind the glass cases where food was set out, rearranging the plates of scones and Neenish tarts and salmon pinwheels. She looked at the large photograph on the wall a little distance from where she sat, a cricket team from a hundred years back, unsmiling young men in white, two of them holding bats, some wearing soft caps. Still waiting to be looked at.

  The little jug of milk chinked at the lip of her cup as she tilted it. The hot tea helped a little to restore her calm. Carol felt an anger with herself, at the foolishness of letting it matter to her so much! That sharp waft still came to her, what had she recognised the brand she would have known to call Brut. She had been a woman not bothered by age. She prided herself a little that this was so. It had always meant no more to her than where one obviously was, at ease with oneself. Yet now, a few minutes past three o’clock, to be so aware of something else. What the young man so brought home to her, not even by his words so much, as by his indifference to whether or not she heard them said.

  Yes, his phrase had shaken her, which at first she mistook for hurt. By the next day she could think of it without rancour. Even with humour. She phoned her friend and told her what had taken place. If it had hurt as deeply as all that, she would not have mentioned it at all.

  Angela was furious. ‘In Kirks!’ she said. ‘I hope you reported him.’

  ‘For accuracy? You can hardly do that!’

  Angela liked to hang on to outrage. She’d have thought her favourite store would have had more class. Shown more respect. Not employed upstarts and smartarses. She would make that eminently clear! Angela was one for the enforcing word. Carol was laughing by the time their conversation ran out. Yet it came back to her, over the next few days—the young man’s low-spoken, dismissive tone, the plunge of raw panic his words had given her. She accepted it now for what it was—not insult, not malice, but simply her having to accept that something had been said which was true, something that had never quite occurred to her. That when people looked at her, they looked at old age. All it meant, as she now accepted, was that she was in another place from where she had believed herself to be. Like anyone who finds herself in another country, she would have to behave a little differently. That was what it came down to. There was even something nice about that, about having to learn something new.

  She woke in that other country on Sunday morning. She and Paul always had been close, Sunday mornings. As he had liked to joke, ‘We haven’t quite forgotten, have we?’ An hour later they would pretend to argue about the bathroom, who was first, who was second, but always Carol would be the first. When she came back in her towelling robe, with one of her favourite orange towels about her head, he would be asleep, with one of the cats laid across him, or sometimes both. A ‘one cat’ or a ‘two cat’ morning they referred to it as, their love-making. So her first Sunday as an old woman then, five years after Paul died, a week almost since the clock chimed in Kirkcaldies. ‘Chimed is right!’ as she said. Putting paid to all that, the phrase coming into her head that made her think of memoirs about the First World War.

  Paul had never been one for going to church. He had said, said it time and again, ‘Not that I have anything against those who do.’ His sisters after all were regulars. His grandfather had been a vicar. ‘Just not my cup of tea.’ No, the world and the flesh had very much been Paul’s domain. If he thought of God, Carol had said when making arrangements for a service after he died, it was by accident. But on the First Sunday after Kirks, as she put it to herself with a certain drollness, she woke at eight and dressed, and by nine was sitting in a pew at St Ninian’s. It would not have bothered her had it been St Bridget’s, had she lived closer to the red-brick building with its icing-sugar figure in the niche below the bell tower, rather than around the corner from the more substantial edifice of grey volcanic rock.

  She sat in a nicely polished pew, with an embroidered kneeler in front of her with ‘Mercy’ worked between the cross-stitching that sprinkled the rest of the cushion. She liked the lad in his vicar’s garment and liked the way he spoke, in the chattiest way, and mentioned Jesus only once, but was keen, as she was herself, on protecting Hector’s dolphins, for which there was a petition in the porch. She liked singing the hymns, but politely said No to the pleasant people who asked, after the service, if she would care to join the parish for morning tea. No, she thanked them, and thought, ‘Should I tell them I am a fraud, as well as old, and I am here merely from a kind of curiosity, because I am now in a different country which I need to get to know?’

  And so she did, on other Sundays. She went to other churches, other halls. She watched people who were devout, and those who were indifferent, who stood and sat and listened by routine. She was not, as you might think, ‘searching for truth’, ‘looking for an answer’, however one might put it. What I want to know, Carol said to herself, is what other people think. What they do with what they think. She had never considered, for instance, what it might mean to, that word, pray. To pay attention, she supposed. To attend with particular purpose. She had no idea what it might mean beyond that. She thought of the bright ring of attention when she had sometimes looked through her first husband’s microscope when he slipped fragments of leaves and tiny creatures, and once for fun a drop of her blood from a cut finger, for her to see not another world as he insisted but the one she lived in as it also was. Week after week then, in different places, she watched people attend. Once she dreamed of a rather crazy muddle of people handing a telescope from one to the other, and the disappointment she felt as a woman next to her said rather harshly, ‘No, not like that,’ and undid her watchstrap, shook her watch and then fastened it again, ignoring Carol completely. Carol hated attempts to unravel dreams. She had forgotten it by the time she went through to the kitchen next morning, apart from the microscope making her think, as she seldom did, of Kevin, who was a scientist of a modest enough kind, and drank too much, and argued with the twins as they grew up. It was hard for him to be kind. When h
e made love to her his face looked as though it was made from wood.

  Belief, then, was not an issue, because it was not her purpose. But she found a curious enjoyment in going to places where people must have thought so differently from herself, or they would not have been there. She went to hear a famous visiting Buddhist, and to lectures at the Observatory above the Botanic Garden, where she looked at a cluster of pinpricks which was called the Sombrero Galaxy, further than anything else one might ever see. But she knew she was inaccurate and gabbling as she tried to explain it to Angela. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I am trying to use words that simply won’t do.’

  ‘For all the difference it makes,’ Angela tartly told her. What was into Carol these days? Thinking things worth doing she had never shown interest in? Once she had even talked her friend into going with her to a raceway, to watch horses in harnesses drawing flimsy carts, and men who looked too large for them flicking long thin whips across the horses’ backs. Neither woman was interested in gambling, none of their friends showed the least taste for horses, the time between the actual racing seemed interminable. It bored Angela rigid. Literally, she said. The evening was cool and quickly turned cold. After four races she said she was not prepared to stay on, to watch the same thing over and over. For God’s sake, Carol! Good-humouredly, her friend agreed to leave. But there had been a quick, vivid beauty to it, an animal surge in the rising and shouting of the crowd, the sleek passage of light along the straining creatures as they ran in front of one, their manes leaping at each step. Angela found she began, more and more, to find excuses when Carol phoned. When she asked would she come to a reading at the library, a woman whose novel Angela had given up on after sixty pages, a political story with the depth of a newspaper cartoon. Or to a Japanese speaker who, this late in the day, talked of being a child when the bomb fell. And the gall to say, when Angela told her of a remake of Miss Marple, that she watched less and less television over recent months, as though getting over some kind of ailment! Whatever that was supposed to imply about her! Angela accepted that even old friendships had their rocky patches: that, you might say, was part of the deal. But this was pushing it.

  And now the business of Ralph, the grasscutter, the handyman, whatever you wanted to call him, a treasure, she called him, before Carol had so much as clapped eyes on him. She must have given him a hundred cups of tea over the years, a dear, good, rather tiresome man, she wouldn’t hear a word against him. Now Carol saying did they perhaps underpay him! A neighbour had told her the young man who worked for her next door charged almost double. Angela actually found herself casting about for excuses not to go with her old friend even to things she looked forward to, an orchestra performance, for example, or a movie set in Florence. There was a limit, that’s what it came down to. She rang Frankie Retter and saw the movie with her. Being at ease with a friend was the first essential, the sine qua non, surely?

  Ralph was not Ralph to begin with. There had been another name at first, the aunt who brought him up told him, but his mother had not had the chance to tell her before she died. His aunt said, allowing the facts to speak for themselves to make her moral point, ‘Your mother was one for anything foreign. Anything that wasn’t here. She’d have called you something outlandish to show she should have been something else.’ The baby had been left with her pretty much out of the blue, dropped off by a man driving what even in the yard of the Paeroa pub was a clapped-out jalopy. When Carol asked did she love him though, was his aunt kind to him, he said he supposed she must have been to take him in the first place. There was a birthmark on the side of his aunt’s face the size of a matchbox, that was what it had made him think of, it was grainy like sandpaper when he had kissed her on that cheek once by mistake and she’d pushed him away. ‘Don’t do that!’ she had come at him. She tried not to look in mirrors, he knew that because there were none in the rooms behind the pub where she cooked the meals. She was always up early and went to bed late.

  Carol put together the life Ralph told her about in small pieces. She liked it when he talked. Once he was used to her, once he knew she meant it when he came inside to be paid and she said, ‘But it’s ready, see?’, and the table was set with the big blue mugs and the cheese scones she had made for him. The stories he told her were specific and concrete and bare. Life was what happened to you. Going on about it, once the facts were there, wasn’t that beside the point? If you said too much then you were talking about something else. Such a sense of one life’s solidity, that was what it came to, and yet so little ego. She listened to him as she had to no one else she had known, because no one she knew was remotely like him. Angela had said to her, several months ago now, when it was arranged that he work on her section every second or third week, ‘He’s a great worker but you’ll never know much more about him than that. A war veteran of some kind. Vietnam, would it be? Our age, more or less. I don’t think you’ll get him talking about Proust.’

  It was what Carol expected from her friend, these little ironies, her run of caustic remarks. When their husbands had been together in the Ministry, Angela, as everyone used to say, was the essential guest at any party. At even the dullest, some consular event where only sheer duty ticked the hours by and no one expected witticisms, Angela somehow managed to run a sparkle through the evening. The odd harsher soul might hint with a wry eyebrow that Simon’s landing Paris may have owed as much to that sparkle as to his innate gifts, but bitchiness was not encouraged among the spouses, not as a rule. ‘That’s Angela for you’ was what you would hear more often, the tone admiring, at times a touch bemused. Paul had been as susceptible as the average male. Goodness, as Carol thought now, I should have received an award for good humour. It was not a nice thing to note, but the years had not been quite so kind to Angela as Angela believed. ‘That must be a disappointment for you,’ Carol answered her. ‘No Proust.’

  Ralph told her about his first marriage, and his second. The girl from the dairy at the top of Summer Street in Ponsonby, ‘a different suburb then, though’. She made the milkshakes and sometimes on a hot afternoon he would drink three, because that was the only way he could think of to talk with her. ‘I wanted to reach out and touch her but I said, “Can I have another one please?”’ They were twenty, which everyone else except themselves thought too young. Then about his second marriage, a long time after that, and Marie had died not having their baby but months before the baby would have been born. ‘I don’t suppose I loved her any more than you loved Paul you’ve told me about but you just go on, don’t you?’ That was after the army, he said. After he came back when he wasn’t much good for anything, there, for a while. And then that. ‘But you go on,’ he said again. ‘The blind comes down but you get on with it.’

  It had made her uncomfortable for a moment, that about the blind. A touch too glib, too rehearsed. But Carol was unfair to him. It was like someone using a line from an advertisement to say what mattered most to them. She was being a snob. So she said, ‘Yes, I felt that too.’ She was touched by the way he brought in Paul, because he knew it mattered to her as well, to be suddenly reminded. She had mentioned once or twice their postings in different places, their time in New Delhi and, when his career stalled for a little, in the Pacific. The years when the twins were there with them for the holidays and then flown back to their schools in Auckland. Happy enough, she supposed. A charmed run, lots would have thought it, those years. But he had picked it up, the man who did the lawns, picked up on something, a flaw in the glass, or however one put it. Who was she to talk about trite images! But his saying that, his hinting—at what exactly? Whatever, it had moved her. Bringing back what she would rather have left alone. She looked across the table as Ralph’s raw, purplish hand took up another scone. Surely there must be guile in the man, in his saying that? A play for sympathy? But no, she thought, there is not an ounce of that. She supposed he already may have forgotten that he said it.

  She watched him as he spread too much butter on his scone, this ra
ther ugly man, in his checked working shirt, his hair curling up across its collar. He stirred his tea so much longer than was needed. He looked across at her and smiled and touched the lobe of one of his enormous ears. And his war, she thought, which he had told her about, a little one day, a little more another. That his friend went on patrol and was killed by the Australians, whose co-ordinates were confused. And about the compounds outside the American camps, those were the saddest thing, he said, about the whole outfit.

  ‘What?’ she said. And he told her they were more like cardboard towns, the rickety shacks with fancy names written up in big letters, like ‘Miami Paradise’ or ‘Venice Beach Resort’. The frail smiling polite girls, and the money they made, so the story went, going back to the Viet Cong, to help kill the men who swaggered into them. His stories seldom followed a straight line. ‘That’s when I got married, Marie and me. After I got back,’ he told her. And then cut across that memory to return up there, to where you wouldn’t believe what shit it was, excuse him saying that. And out of the blue, ‘See that?’ He turned in his chair so he sat side on to her, and tilted his head as he drew his collar back. There was a line like a pink raised thread running into the grey hair. ‘A war wound,’ he said, laughing as he seldom did, showing his big tobacco-tainted teeth. ‘An American hit me one night there with a bottle.’ She surprised herself, yet it was said: ‘Here, I’ll cut that for you. It must be months since your hair was cut.’

  She draped a towel around his shoulders, tucking its edge into his collar, and went to a drawer in the big French dresser that ran almost the length of the kitchen wall. She took from beneath a stack of folded cloths a thin leather box, the one thing that survived, she said, from her father’s shop, fifty years ago, in Grey Lynn. She said, ‘My father’s name was Les. It was written on the window in those old letters, you know? A shadow sort of shaded off behind them? There was even a painted pole outside.’ She too was smiling now as she smoothed the towel in the way she so often had done for Paul, who was snob enough to think it something of a lark to have his wife, even in those years during their postings, tilt his head and clip his hair, then at the end to hold a mirror for him to appraise. She knew he had thought it erotic too, when they were younger. ‘Like that,’ he would say afterwards, ‘like that’, as she sat across him.