There is an intimacy in cutting someone’s hair, a tenderness even in its simplicity, the sense of control in one, of compliance in the other. Both Carol and Ralph then smiled as he stood, running his palm across the exposed nape above his collar, as Carol went to the door, cradling the blue towel until she stood on the back steps and flicked it out, the greying tufts and wisps into the afternoon’s mild breeze. She came back and folded the towel, and laid it on a basket in the small laundry off the kitchen. She wiped the scissors with a cloth and blew on the clippers before placing them side by side in the box whose leather was buffed with age and wear. She said, ‘These went through the war with my father. North Africa. Italy. Even a prison camp, would you credit that? The war years before yours, of course.’
Ralph asked, ‘He came through all right?’
‘He had hair when he left, my mother said, but almost none when he came back. When I was young I always thought that a funny thing to say. And he taught me a few Italian songs which made me want to learn languages when I grew up. So I suppose there’s something good comes out of it sometimes. Out of war.’
But Ralph missed Carol’s tone completely. He looked at her with that unsettling steadiness. He said, ‘I don’t think it does.’ How solemn, though, the way he continued to look at her. Ah, she thought, there is always a wall, isn’t there, when we think we know what another person thinks?
‘Well,’ he said, ‘those were pretty good,’ nodding to the table, to the empty plate where the scones had been set. ‘And now I’m leaving flashed up as well!’ There was an ease, Carol was glad of that, in the way they could talk like this together. Like friends. He turned as he walked down the path towards his van. He raised his hand as he said, ‘I’ll bring you a fish for that.’
Carol heard from Angela on the Sunday night. The phone rang late. She was surprised at her friend’s voice. It was several weeks at least since she had heard from her, since the cooling off that was never quite explained yet each accepted. There had been gaps like this before over the years, some for months even, yet each woman assumed, quite rightly, they would pick up again, if not exactly where they had left off then somewhere near it. They had been like this since university. But tonight there was a rawness in her friend’s voice, a naturalness, that was it, which made her sound almost like someone else. And then her saying, abruptly, ‘I don’t expect you’ve heard then?’ Heard that Ralph had rowed out, as he often did, from the beach at Makara during the afternoon. That he had not come back.
The accident was in the papers and on the television news, details about the air search, the volunteers who walked the wild coast searching for a body. And as with all such losses, the interest waned after several days, new sadnesses were attended to. A meagre death notice was placed by a cousin, with a regimental number, a reference to Vietnam veterans. Nothing else, for it seemed there was nothing else to say. There was no memorial service, if one discounted the meeting of two elderly women, one with rather comically dyed hair, the other more anxious than she hoped would appear, still troubled as she woke at four in the morning by the dream of a man lolling on the rise and fall of a mild sea, his exposed neck, above his soaked workman’s collar, as white as a bandage beneath his recently clipped hair.
Carol would have liked them to meet somewhere quieter, but as Angela insisted Astoria was life, for goodness’ sake, would her friend have preferred some old ducks’ tea shop in Karori Mall? And so they sat in the big noisy space with its brown tables, its handsome young people carrying trays, the dark-suited lawyers and fashionable young mothers on their morning off, a couple standing in the sunlit forecourt outside, rather glad to be observed, waiting for a friend to arrive.
‘It’s mine, I think,’ Carol insisted as they stood to place their order at the long counter. They were meticulous about whose turn it might be to pay. It went back fifty years, to their days in the student caf, this care to keep things straight.
‘You’re not eating?’ Angela said, as they stood before the glassed-in shelves of food.
‘As if,’ Carol said, her wry reference to her weight turning, as she knew, to a compliment to her friend’s effortless control.
They took a table near the windows, looking out to the office people sitting on the low concrete walls, and the hideous sculpture of serpent-shapes dribbling runnels of water into a pool. Angela tilted the paper tube of sugar above her latte. Carol let her tea stand for several minutes. How she wished she had pleaded some reason not to meet.
Then Angela’s first proprietorial remark. ‘I think he knew he was ill,’ she said. ‘He was sick, you know?’
‘I didn’t,’ Carol said. ‘No, I didn’t know that.’
‘He hadn’t mentioned that to you? His X-ray? His lung trouble?’
‘Remember I scarcely knew him. He’d only been doing my lawns a few months.’
Angela’s wetted finger dabbed at her saucer where grains of sugar had spilled. ‘He told me he liked talking with you, though.’
Carol made light of it. ‘He liked scones. But you can’t just sit there and eat them. You have to talk about something.’ And after another pause, ‘We weren’t close. There’s no reason he’d confide.’ She knew how good Angela was at watching one, picking up on discomfort. Had always been good at it. They were each other’s bridesmaids, their closeness went back as far as that. Not as if there wasn’t time to perfect it then, that ‘spider eye’ as they used to joke about it, a phrase from some poem they read together when the Metaphysicals were the rage. As Carol herself was good too, she supposed, at winkling out her friend’s little dashes of resentment, however deft Angela became at trying to conceal them. At Paul’s postings, say. At Canberra over Ottawa, the year he and Simon were appointed together. At her scholarship after her degree. Far back as that.
‘He had every reason,’ Angela said. She waved to someone she knew who came into the café, smiled quickly, charmingly, looked again towards Carol, shook the thin gold chain on her wrist. ‘He knew that bit of coast backwards.’
It took a moment to come in on Carol quite what Angela was saying. Then it came to her as if her friend had leaned across the table and physically hit her. Her own words rising then before she had time to know what it was she might say, before there was time even to censor herself, which had been a lifelong gift. But something in her look must have given warning of what she felt, before she spoke. A muscle twitched at the side of Angela’s mouth. She quickly took up the paper napkin from where it lay ruffled on the table, holding it across the lower part of her face. Pretended to be dabbing with it. At the same instant leaning back a little, as though Carol’s words carried a force she must evade. For her friend was telling her, without raising her voice, with the precision of a knife finding its line against her skin, ‘That, Angela, is what you want me to believe and you know it is a lie. A lie about Ralph wanting it to happen. A lie to make yourself more important than you are. The disgust as well as the absurdity of that.’ And Carol standing then, without haste, drawing back her chair, uninterested, at last, in what her friend might say. A marvellous sense of what—what was it?—of freedom, she supposed. Of no longer giving a damn.
‘Thank you,’ she said to the young man, one of the waiters, who held the door back for her, who told her as she left to have a nice day. A nice day in that other country she still was getting used to.
GETTING IT RIGHT
I knew Alice, my mother, was dying, which could well begin a much longer story than this. But the shorter version is about as much as I can bear. So I begin with her telephoning only a week after her last call, which was quite unlike her. She was not one really for ‘keeping in touch’. Emails of course would have been as unnatural to her as smoke signals, although my brother Tommy had bought her a computer more than a year before. In the usual run of things, she wrote to me once in three weeks or a month, in her rather lovely flowing script on squares of plain linen paper. Croxley Bond, which she once had bought in bulk and never ran short of. When our fathe
r was still with us he wrote less often, on hotel paper he saved from when they travelled. He put a line through the embossed name, the Grand Plaza in Hong Kong, the Rembrandt in London, the way authors score a stroke through their names on the title page of a book they have been asked to sign. This meant his letters carried a whiff of the exotic, even when they were not. But then Dad, as the family liked to say, was the romantic. He was the one who sang carols at Christmas, and when he went to the opera, which he said he did not really like, he was the one who left with tears in his eyes, although Alice understood the music and read up on the story before going to see it.
When I answered the phone the dog was barking like crazy at the new people next door. I said, ‘I’ll have to get him, sorry.’ By the time I’d dragged him inside and shut him in the conservatory I thought she would have hung up. But she was still there when I came back. She said, ‘Is he all right then?’ A strange thing to ask about a dog that was behaving badly.
Alice came to stay with us for a few days the next week. I worried about Chelsea with her moods and her swearing and her walking around the house in her underwear, her navel stud glinting as the light caught it, so the school trip to Melbourne did us all a favour. ‘You might as well live with a nun,’ she had said once before about her grandmother. Not her narrow-mindedness—Alice was never like that—but her frugality, her not needing to chatter for its own sake, was more than a teenager could take. But Chelsea wrote a card that she said she would leave in her room. ‘Love you, Gran,’ it said, with little stars stuck over it and shiny gold specks sprinkled across the glue stick where she had written her name. ‘If that doesn’t grab her,’ she said, ‘just tell me sometime what does, OK?’
I’d hoped that Ross would be at home when she visited. But as he said, quite reasonably, ‘Every third week, you know how it goes, hon.’ With the new Taupo shop not quite in its stride he needed to keep a close eye. The young chap down there was sharp and put in the hours, but an older head, Ross explained, it would come with time, but you couldn’t assume. Just a pity it was that week. I know he meant it too, as he and Alice rather hit it off. Cryptic crosswords, for one thing. He could never get over how she knocked them off so quickly. As he teased her with language he knew she detested, he complimented her that she was in the top bracket crossword-wise. And at least for the brief holidays she spent with us, she seemed quite happy to sit with him watching sport.
‘I draw the line at darts, mind,’ she told him. She even had—I have Ross’s word for it—intelligent opinions about rugby, although her grasp of rules was shaky. She liked this winger, disliked that, wouldn’t trust the little Australian halfback as far as she could throw him. The one time in her life, I suppose, she bought the Woman’s Weekly was for its cover story of an All Black whose child was dying of leukaemia. She said, ‘The man’s such a decent soul he’ll never get over it. He thinks all this public attention helps and then he’ll find out that it doesn’t.’ Ross told me she had written a letter to the man and his wife, which surprised me as much as anything I ever knew about her.
She travelled so lightly, my mother. I met her as she came through the gateway, where we half-embraced and touched cheeks. Her skin was so soft, and she must have been to the hairdresser’s the day before. Her hair was fluffed to disguise the thinness since her treatment. My cheek brushed against it as we drew apart. We’ve always been a family to indicate feelings, without too much carrying on. Her right hand had not let go of the handle she grasped, one of those suitcases you drew along, yet still compact enough to get by as cabin baggage. When I said the claim area was a little further along, and lightly touched her arm to direct her, she said, ‘It’s only a few days. As if I’d need more than this.’ She turned and smiled up at me as the escalator lowered her head level with my chest. Her frank smile, lovelier because it was a rarity. I would give anything for a photograph of her like that. How envious I am when I see the photo albums piled at a friend’s house, or hear of the way some families stash away images on their computers. We had never collected that many snaps anyway, and those we had were lost years before Dad died. He and Alice were on a trip overseas. And almost unbelievable, the next bit. When the house burned down completely in a couple of hours, when the investigator brutally told Tommy you might as well have an empty house gift-wrapped when an arsonist had been working the suburb for a year, they decided what was the point in rushing back home, why miss the Colosseum and the rest of it to see a few charred sticks and a scorched section, now the damage was done? By the time they arrived back the bulldozer had been in and the new grass planted and the land ready to be built on again, although the lingering stench of ash was still there months later, when the framework of the new house stood against the sky.
I had said to her on her last visit, ‘It’s such a pity there are no photos of the family.’
She reminded me, ‘Your father never took that many anyway.’
I said it was not many that was important, it’s the fact that there are none.
‘Well, that fire,’ she said offhandedly, not taking what I meant.
‘Not even one photo of you and Dad together. Seeing you didn’t bother even when you were away.’
Her eyes held mine with their striking Scandinavian blueness that had men running all over the place, so the story goes, when she was young. She said, ‘People look at photos properly what? Once every few years? Your own memories do more than that.’
I smiled but was exasperated as I told her, ‘For heaven’s sake, Alice.’
I had called her by her first name like that since I was a teenager. Some people thought it a sign of intimacy between us, which it was not at all. A kind of fencing-off rather, if you think about it.
‘Sentimentality,’ she said, not leaving the matter of photographs alone.
I said, ‘I hope I don’t get as blasé about things as you are.’ But it was impossible to provoke her. So we sat as we had so many times, so many years, seemingly at ease and close, yet each of us knowing how much closer and easier we might have been. She went on, conceding, ‘People feel things in different ways.’ Too intelligent not to know she sheltered behind a cliché, as I did myself, although mine was compliant silence. Until I said, to change tack, ‘Chelsea’s eyes must have come from you, have you noticed that? I never really thought it before but now that she’s grown up—.’
‘There,’ my mother laughed, ‘why worry about photos, then?’
I knew for several years that my father pursued an affair with a woman who worked at the school office. ‘Pursued’—how odd, now that I consider it, to use such a genteel phrase for his cheating on my mother. ‘Had a relationship with’ is how Tommy still puts it. That amuses me, a bohemian and a homosexual refusing out of deference to his dad to say ‘bonking’ or ‘having it off’ or ‘feeding her a length’, phrases he will fling about of anyone else! Ross, of course, can be quite cruel about that. He says he understands perfectly his brother-in-law’s delicacy. Once an arse-bandit starts calling a spade a spade, even his own father’s, he’d have such a gob-load of filth he’d never be able to swill the wines he pays an arm and a leg for. Ross in fact has few moral scruples about anything. It simply irks him that Tommy splashes his pink dollars about as a married man cannot. I try to say a successful artist naturally has more to come and go on than someone running small-town bookshops even if one does it well as Ross so obviously does. My noting the obvious seems to spur him on. Have I ever looked at who swans about at his openings, he asks, les garçons du vernissage, have I? Aston Martins. Beamers. Ever seen a rich pansy arrive in a Toyota? I tell him, ‘I don’t think that’s a real French expression.’ But then we laugh together. We don’t allow Tommy to come between us. We are good mates, make no mistake, Ross and I.
The woman’s name was Beatrice. Dad’s bit on the side. On her previous visit I had raised it with Alice for the first time. It was almost perverse, I suppose, to do so, knowing it was so long ago it could hardly matter to her, and I should have let
it lie. It was the second morning she was with us. The sun flooded the kitchen table, the marmalade glowed as if it was lit inside like a lamp, and she picked at a piece of toast without really eating much at all. I asked, ‘Did you know about Beatrice? From the start, I mean?’
‘But of course,’ she said. ‘And Dad knew I knew.’ She answered me so directly I knew I should not have asked. But she left it exactly there. I admired her for that, even as I knew that it was putting me in my place. For she must have known I wanted more from her than that. I was entitled to know more. She would have known as well my less-declared reason for asking, my hope that now, this late in the day, we might talk frankly together. About anything. She must have known but felt no compulsion to oblige me. We speak of the past as another country. Yet what about one’s parents? She said nothing more of that even more distant place I longed to hear about.
What I know—how meagre it now seems—is that my parents met at a church social soon after the war, although both were too young to have been overseas. Neither Alice nor Dad was religious, any more than they were against people believing. Churchgoing just didn’t, to use one of Dad’s favourite expressions, ‘add up’. Each of them had gone to the social with someone else, but they danced with each other, and met later that same week. They were married a few months later. ‘The war had rather distorted one’s sense of pace.’ Tommy and I were born in less than three years. My father quickly became a senior teacher and my mother was trained to teach as well, although she preferred to stay at home, as most women then did, to be with her children. Tommy sometimes teased her, ‘Tough-minded as you like but definitely not a feminist are you, Ma?’ It was Dad, as she said, who carried the flag. She meant in later years, when even in winter on Lambton Quay he would don a knitted beanie and shake a tin for any women’s group that asked him to lend a hand. ‘I was belted and so was my mother,’ he used to say. ‘I know what I’m collecting for.’ Once his fingers swelled with chilblains from standing out with his tin. Most of us hadn’t heard of chilblains for years.
The Families Page 18