She smiled, and squeezed him again. He could see her eyes quivering with tears. It is good to see you, she said.
She’d always worn the same style of clothes, dark slinky fabrics, fluid, loose, but moulding her willowy figure. It occurred to him that they were not just the same style, they were the same clothes. There was a flight of little moth holes in the front of her top that she had embroidered with silk thread in a lazy-daisy pattern. He remembered her doing it, years ago. She still had the same car, and it was a wreck. After the majesty of Pegasus. The house in Banksia Street hadn’t changed, either. Helen liked old things, liked to keep them. He supposed it was his time of absence that made all this so noticeable.
The house was small, red brick, in a seaside suburb with cliffs and ridges that made the houses huddle. The blocks were small and there were only a few left of the old houses, which had fitted them well enough. The rest had been vastly extended, or pulled down and rebuilt, into McMansions crowding out one another’s light. Or else there were blocks of apartments. All this had been happening for a long time, but it seemed to have got worse while he was away. The vegetation stuffed itself in where it could, its dark green strappy leaves greedily swallowing the sunshine. His mother’s had a great fig tree in the garden, which was otherwise morning glory holding up the fences, scabby geraniums and patches of thick cushiony buffalo grass, coarse padding that scratched at bare feet. She’d inherited the place from her parents. Ferdie remembered visiting them, the house in Banksia Street, thinking Big Bad Banksia Men, those hairy-faced many-eyed thugs in his Snugglepot and Cuddlepie books, and he’d been frightened, but looking forward to them too, because life as it is in books isn’t always available, and they didn’t ever win, in the end. But there were no banksias, not flowers or men. Big railway-sleepered beds of vegetables in the backyard, broad beans, silver-beet, lettuces, strawberries, and in the front, flowers, stocks scenting the night air, marigolds, shastas, gerberas, vivid daisy-faced flowers that glowed in the bright air of the seaside. Only straggling ghosts of them left, now. Helen would have been surprised had anyone suggested that she might cultivate a garden herself. She taught in a school, she read a lot of books, she ate frugal meals in a regular fashion. She was cracked, and broken, she had to step carefully or she would shatter into pieces.
His room was as he’d last slept in it. The narrow bed, the Wagga quilt his great-grandmother had made, during the Depression, out of patchwork fragments of men’s suits. The posters from art galleries, their edges torn and yellowing. He’d never spent a lot of time in it. When his mother came to Sydney to live, his father had been furious with her: interrupting the boy’s schooling, the most dangerous thing that could happen to a boy in his teenage years. Taking him away from his father when he so badly needed a male role model in his life. William had organised for him to board at his school in Canberra. His mother had protested, but it had happened. She’d lived in a tiny flat, her mother died and she’d moved in with her father, then inherited the house. Ferdie had lived here sometimes as an undergraduate, mainly in the vacations. The room was certainly his, but not in any affectionate way.
What would you like? she asked. A cup of tea? I could cook you a breakfast. Or do you want to go straight to bed?
Oh no, I’m not going to bed. The only way to cope with jet lag is to go to bed at the normal time for the new country. Early normal, he said, but not silly.
Helen looked alarmed. Oh.
I’ve had breakfast. But a cup of tea would be nice.
He’d seen the alarm. He knew she was wondering what she was going to do with him all day. She so much wanted to see him, but then didn’t know what to do with him. Except unwillingly to get cross. What he’d like was to go to a decent restaurant by the water and eat fish, with a bottle of decent white. But he knew this would be regarded as wickedly extravagant, so he didn’t mention it. He didn’t think his mother was poor, exactly, but he knew she wouldn’t choose to spend money like that.
He hung up his clothes in the wardrobe while Helen made the tea. He looked out at the brilliant sunshine. He imagined a table and chairs under the fig tree, enjoying the winter sun. He knew that were he to suggest a table and chairs in the garden she would say, But I never go out there.
They sat in the kitchen and drank the tea. It was some strong cheap kind, not anything like Pepita’s. He told his mother about Pepita and her tea ceremonies but the topic didn’t turn into a conversation. He ate an Iced VoVo, which would have been bought as a special treat, even though he was feeling overfed on plane food. It had a very pink taste.
He said suddenly, with a harshness he hoped would be helpful, Well, you’re a widow now, you can grieve, and move on.
His mother balanced her Iced VoVo on the rim of her saucer. No I’m not. I’m not a widow. I’m a divorcee. William’s death doesn’t change that. Everything is the same.
Ferdie was silent. I should have known, he thought. Nothing’s going to change. He said, I think, as far as the church is concerned for instance, death, well, it frees you in a way that divorce doesn’t.
What’s the church got to do with it? I don’t believe.
I meant it as a way to look at things. Oh Ma, I want you to be happy. Let it go. Live your life.
These things are not for deciding. They are, or they are not. Do you think I can change that?
She stood up, her head bent. She was a pillar of darkness.
Yes, he wanted to say, in a loud vehement voice. He wanted to shake her clothes and let the light in. But he stayed silent, and still. He poured out more of the dull tea. He said, Do you know what I’d like us to do? I’d like to go and walk along the beach. Blow the cobwebs away.
As he said it he heard Lynette’s voice. Let’s take our bikes and ride along the lake. Blow the cobwebs away. Erin would come, at first in the child seat on the back of her mother’s bike, later on her own. Sometimes she had a friend with her, there were often friends of Erin’s in the house. Rarely did William come. They’d pedal the lake path, sometimes doing the circuit from bridge to bridge. There were always mobs of people doing the same thing, it was a cheerful public outing.
Would you like to come?
Oh, I don’t think so, said Helen. I’ve got things to do here. You go.
So he did. Though he knew she’d be thinking, thankless child, hardly home before he’s off again. She loved him, and was jealous of him. She wanted him beside her but would not go with him, so she sent him away. He walked the short distance through jumbled suburban streets to the seafront. She had said, Oh, won’t you be cold? He’d kissed her cheek: Not after London, Ma. There was a fine bracing wind off the water and the sun shone hot through it. The Norfolk Island pines looked very spiky, the fringed palm trees rattled. He walked from one end of the beach to the other and then around the cliff path to look at the cemetery on the headland. Stone angels turned their grieving backs to the sea, or faced it with their arms outflung. They held flowers, or leaned against urns, or pointed to heaven. He’d never explored it, though it was always something he was going to do. After lunch, maybe; a melancholy walk and thinking about the death of the father. Perhaps there would be ghosts. He should come in the twilight.
He walked enviously past the restaurant in the converted changing pavilion, the terrace already crowded with fisheaters chewing, talking, laughing, pouring yellow gleaming wine out of bottles misty with condensation. He couldn’t really afford it and his mother wouldn’t. If William had been there they’d have stepped in, boldly sure that a good table would be found for them.
At the back of the restaurant was a takeaway. And on the corner a pub with a bottle shop. He walked briskly back to the house in Banksia Street. Come on, he said, we’re going to eat fish and chips on the beach.
His mother demurred, but not very actively. Ferdie thought there might not be much lunch in the house, since she’d expected him to go straight to bed. But she wouldn’t walk. They had to take the car. There was nowhere to park. Ferdie dropped her at
the restaurant. He had to drive nearly to Banksia Street to find a place. He’d put two glass tumblers and a corkscrew in a plastic bag and stopped at the bottle shop to buy wine. It had a screw top, that was a new thing since he’d been here last, he didn’t need the corkscrew.
They sat at a picnic table in a gazebo overlooking the beach. A bunch of wetsuited surfers waited out beyond the breakers for a good wave. He unscrewed the bottle and poured wine. Surely this is illegal, she said.
All those people are doing it, he said, pointing to the restaurant terrace. But I’ll leave it in the brown paper bag. No one will ever know.
He’d bought grilled snapper; it was good. The chips were thick but crisp. The wine was heavenly. He tipped his head back to the sun and closed his eyes. He felt very clever as he said to himself, I have circumvented both poverty and parsimony. I am eating fish and drinking wine by the sea. He wondered if he wished Berenice was here. She would have expected the terrace of the restaurant, one of the best tables, right by the grassy edge of the sand. In his head he wrote a postcard to her that suggested this was where the fish and chips were happening without actually lying.
When they got back to the house he mentioned coffee but there was only instant. I don’t really drink coffee, said Helen. Tea?
She made a pot of the strong cheap tea but he said he would just have water, sitting at the kitchen table keeping her company. Helen washed her hands under the kitchen tap and took a little silver metal tube out of a drawer. It had a label with purple writing. She squeezed a little on to her palm, it smelt dry, pungent, a bit like eucalyptus but not exactly. She rubbed it between her palms then over the backs of her hands, smoothing it to her wrists, pushing it down her fingers as though she was pulling on gloves; she squeezed a bit more out of the tube and worked it around the edges of her fingernails, and then polished them against the palms of her hands. She realised she was frowning slightly, and massaged between her brows with three fingers, her face settling into a serene expression.
Ferdie picked up the tube. L’Occitane, it said. Hand cream. Lavender of Provence. He’d always thought of lavender and old ladies going together, it being a genteel perfume far away from any sexy overtones, but this was different; elemental, somehow. Maybe it was coming from Provence.
Are you going to have a nap? asked Helen.
No. It’s important to stay awake till bedtime. When you come to London to visit me I will make sure you fit instantly into English hours.
She smiled the small smile of someone who is safe from what is being proposed. Yes, she said.
So, said Ferdie. What’s news? He was pretty sure she wouldn’t know any.
Aurora is trying to get pregnant, she said.
Aurora, he said, pleased to be able to talk about her. Still.
Aurora was his half-sister, daughter of Nerys who became an Orange person. He didn’t know her very well but he held a small shining memory like a drop of water . . . there was the honey scent of blossom, a girl who was grown up and a child, who played with him. The scent of the blossom released that little drop of memory, full of light but opaque. He didn’t know when it was, or where, no flowers to go with the smell, no pictures at all, the whole thing a mysterious sense, not graspable, not readable, just the musical name Aurora and a small time of bliss.
Of course, said his mother, she’s left it too late, the way girls do these days.
Was her voice smug? He knew she’d been twenty-two when he was born.
Do you see her?
Not very often. Sometimes on the bus. She lives a bit further out. Sometimes I get on the bus and there she is, so I sit next to her and she tells me what she’s up to. It doesn’t happen often, mostly she drives, and so do I.
Is she married?
Oh no. She’s got a partner. He’s older than her. He’s a perfusionist.
What’s that?
It’s a kind of doctor. He does the heart-lung machine for open-heart surgery. She tells me he’s writing a book about the dreams people have when their hearts are outside their bodies. Very strange dreams, apparently. Well, why wouldn’t they be? It isn’t very natural, having your heart out of your body.
And she’s trying to get pregnant.
Yes. IVF, the whole lot. So far it’s not working.
Maybe I should ring her up.
If you want to. Please yourself.
What’s she doing these days?
A merchant banker. Still. They know where the money is.
And Nerys? Is she still an Orange person? I thought they came to an end. He knew it was safe to talk about Nerys, who had realised William wasn’t for her and had gone on to another life.
I don’t think so. That dreadful holy man died, but there are still followers. Communities, or communes rather, up Byron Bay way.
Helen emptied the tea leaves out the back door and washed her mug. Well, she said, you mightn’t want to, but I think I’ll have a nap. She picked up a book. There were a lot of books in this house. He went into the lounge room and looked along the shelves. Helen read mainly novels. There were books of poetry, rows of classics, and Booker Prize winners, and a lot of the kind called commercial fiction. He picked up a Jodi Picoult; he’d seen her reviewed a lot and knew that she sold millions of copies, while critics had the habit of sneering. He sat on the sofa and began to read, but it soon became clear that this was a mistake, he’d send himself to sleep. He went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. In the mirror it looked pinched and bluish. He turned on the light above it and suddenly his skin was rosy. There was a shelf with more bottles of L’Occitane creams, lotions, unguents. Olive oil night cream. Angelica shampoo, a potion of vine clippings that seemed to be for the feet, almond oil for bathing in, mud for a face mask. All the containers were part empty, Helen evidently used them all. He unscrewed lids and smelt them; they were herby, potent, evanescent. Serious, somehow. The promise of desire was in them. The labels talked about the plants and odours of Provence as though there were magic in the name of the place, as though the air of that fabled province would wreath out from the bottles and encloud you with beauty. None of them recalled the scent of his playtime with Aurora.
He decided to walk down to the pub and buy a bottle of red wine for dinner, blowing some more cobwebs away. Helen would doubtless say, What, wine for lunch and dinner? Are we turning into lushes? He’d buy two, always good to have a spare.
The shadows were long. It was getting cold. The angels in the cemetery stood serene against the wind. He passed the bottle shop and went into the bar. It was warm and beery and the sport zapped soundlessly from a huge television screen. He sat at a sticky formica table and saw himself staring into a glass of beer thinking about his father and death and what his life was doing. He felt sad but wasn’t doing a good job of thinking about William. It was his mother who filled his mind. Living in London he thought at times about her, inhabiting the house of her parents, going every day to her teaching job, reading her books, eating frugal vegetable meals, but coming back to it suddenly was a shock, the dullness of it, the emptiness. He was to blame, he’d gone and left her. But guilt was a lame horse, he’d done what children do, moved out into his own life, and that long before he went to England.
He bought two bottles of red, inexpensive ones, and once again walked briskly back to Banksia Street. When he opened the door he smelt his mother’s roast chicken. It was her dish that she made whenever a grand meal was called for, and very good it was, always a free-range chicken, golden-skinned and succulent, with a whole lot of root vegetables crisply roasted. She was welcoming him home in her best style. He was touched, but his heart did not lift as it ought to have done. Roast chicken dinners hadn’t always brought happiness with them. Still he stepped blithely into the house, cried, Lovely roast chicken for dinner again, and found his mother in the kitchen, smiling and pink. He grabbed her round the waist and hugged her, feeling her soft warm cheek against his cold one, but did not miss her small pout of disgust when she smelt the
beer on his breath. Ah, but Ma, he didn’t say, without the beer I would not be so cheerful.
Shall I set the table? he said, but it was done. So he opened a bottle of wine instead. Such bad habits, said Helen, but she took her glass.
Wine’s a good habit, he said.
You’ll end up an alcoholic like your father. Dying young.
He knew William wasn’t an alcoholic. So did Helen.
Don’t you have a glass of wine with your dinner? he asked. It’s so cheap in this country, and so good.
I don’t think it looks well for a woman living on her own to be putting out empty bottles, she said.
Ma, said Ferdie, who cares? What do you care?
It’s a matter of one’s role, said Helen.
Browbeaten by anonymous neighbours, he said. Imaginary neighbours. It’s mad.
He praised the chicken extravagantly, but no more than it deserved. He talked about his life in London. His mother didn’t say much but she seemed to absorb what he said. After a while he tired of his prattling narratives. He poured out the last of the wine. Helen looked into her glass before she took a mouthful.
I’m glad I don’t live closer to the cemetery, she said. You know what I think? I think those statues walk about at night. Walk the streets, and if they meet you, you have to join them. That’s why there are so many, and getting more all the time. People don’t put up marble statues any more, yet look, every time you turn around there are more of them.
There do seem to be a lot, he said, uneasy; he thought her words a bit mad.
They finished dinner and did the dishes, she washing, he drying, but he no longer remembered where anything went.
There’s an Agatha Christie movie, she said. On the television. It should be good.
But when he sat down beside her on the sofa he realised how tired he was. He had a shower—it was over the bath, antique and given to squirting, but hot at least—got into the old narrow bed and went immediately to sleep. He came wide awake at two o’clock and tried reading some more Jodi Picoult but it didn’t work. He lay with his brain buzzing until the dawn sky lightened, then fell heavily asleep again. When he woke up, his mother had gone to school.
Goodbye Sweetheart Page 11