by Karen Zelas
But there is no cause for worry, Maman. It is not what I am used to, but we can cope with a little hardship in the interests of a better future.
I was surprised to find we are not the only people living in this land. There are some English scattered about – farmers, I’m told, and others who have, in the past, been whalers. There is even an English magistrate living aboard our naval vessel until suitable accommodation can be erected on shore! I would not have expected such consideration between rivals, but there is something comforting about it.
Further down the harbour there is a settlement of natives. They are called Maoris. They are dark skinned and broad featured and wear a peculiar mix of clothing, some cloaks and skirts of their own coarse weave, and some old jackets and trousers traded from whalers. My husband counsels me to keep a safe distance from the natives, but his warning is unnecessary, as I feel quite wary in any event. However, I have not yet encountered any of them when unaccompanied.
We cannot, of course, converse with any but our own, due to our different tongues, which seems a strange state of affairs if we are to be neighbours.
The tri-colour is yet to be raised over our tiny settlement. I do not understand the delay. Nor do we understand the presence of the English magistrate. Captain Lavaud is the King’s Commissioner and the person in charge at present. There is some jostling for position between Captain Langlois and
M. Belligny (the official representative of the Company) now that we are no longer at sea. Heated words, I am told. My loyalties are divided, as I cannot but be grateful to Captain Langlois for bringing us safely here.
Already plans have been drawn up for allocating “small” lots of flat land for each family near the harbour. Small? A half-acre, I am told, all our own! But it is a half-acre of bush and scrub, Maman. I do not yet know which is to be ours. But it will be good, I think, to start making ourselves a home in this surprising and temperate land. It is so different from all I have known; yet I know it.
At sunrise and sunset this place is blessed by the hand of God. The first and last rays of golden light kiss the tips of the mountains, soft coral clouds sitting above them like a crown. I kneel and say a prayer that God will watch over us all wherever we are, and trust that His will will be done.
I pray that cher Papa will set aside his hurt and once more open his heart to me. I accept now that he was reluctant to permit my marriage to a man who earns his living with his hands. But Claude is a good man and a hard worker, and I feel honoured that he would choose a slip of a girl like me as his wife, and I will prove myself worthy of him.
You understand about wifely duty, chère Maman, so you must see that I had no choice but to bend to my husband’s will and accompany him to this place so far away. And you understand my dear husband’s desire to better himself and to have land of his own, instead of tending the gardens of others like his father before him and his father before that. This is a new land, a land of opportunities, albeit a land of hard labour. My husband will need his wife to stand by him and give him sons.
Please speak to Papa on my behalf, Maman, and try to persuade him to our point of view. It pains me greatly to have this rift between us.
Love to you all,
Bibi
Sue lifted her father’s hands, gently massaging them, the skin slipping easily across the bones, the veins rubbery cords under her thumbs. She planted the toes of her sandals firmly against his slipper-clad feet, as the carers did, and pulled him upright. He rocked back and forth, heels to toes, adapting to the vertical posture like a young foal finding its feet. He smiled and nodded, eyes locked on hers, little taller than she was these days. He seemed to be searching remnants of memory bank for a clue as to who this familiar woman might be. The hurt bit deep. Sue knew it should not, that it was unreasonable, that it said nothing about his love for her, but she felt it just the same. Ever the gentleman, he smiled and nodded.
‘Can I go home now?’ he asked in an ingratiating tone, worrying her sleeve. ‘My wife is waiting.’ The pleading in his voice cut Sue and made her feel like a jailer. ‘She needs me. I … I thought my daughter was coming …’ His eyes searched the dayroom. ‘But you’ll take me, won’t you?’ The dark eyes held Sue. There was a brittle glassiness to their sheen. They seemed even blacker than she remembered, the whites yellowed and veined like the old marbles she coveted as a child, with tears brimming behind slack lower lids. Words stuck in Sue’s throat.
‘Th-this is your home, Dad.’ She put an arm around his bony shoulders but he pulled away. This was terrible; now that he no longer recognised her, she could not even comfort him. She swallowed and changed tack.
‘Your wife is being well cared for while you take a breather here, Bert.’ She patted his hand. ‘She’s resting comfortably and wants you to know that.’ Sue hated doing it, telling him lies, pretending her mother was still alive. But if that was the era to which he had returned, then that was where she must meet him.
Bert Austin had been gradually but steadily declining over several years. Recently, the slope had become increasingly slippery and in the last three months the slide had accelerated. Sue agonised over the changes in him, the indignities of his failing abilities – the food on his shirt, the stain in the groin of his trousers, being undressed by young girls and wearing nappies to bed. He now gave Sue the same vacant smile he offered the Agency carers he had never set eyes on before. For a time before that, he had thought she was Jayne.
Sue’s lies were rewarded by a toothless grin – lately her father refused to wear his false teeth, insisting they belonged to someone else. He had bitten a nurse who was struggling to insert them, snatched them out of his mouth and thrown them across the room. No one had been game to try since. Sue knew that if her father were aware of his condition, he would be mortified. He had been a very particular and modest man who would be embarrassed by his grumpiness, his refusal to cooperate; it was not his nature.
And if the self ceases to exist, thought Sue, why should the body be encouraged to struggle on?
Taking his arm firmly at the elbow, she was again surprised at how little was left of this man of substance, this teddy bear of a man, her father. Skin and stooped bone – that was all. Time had diminished him even more than his losses: first his wife, then his younger daughter.
‘Eighteen is far too young to go off alone to the other side of the world,’ he had said when Jayne had announced she was going on her big OE. He had gripped Sue’s arm and fixed her with sad, brown eyes, as if he expected her to prevail upon Jayne; his authority had evaporated since his wife’s death. His fingers had dug into her arm as they watched the aeroplane swallow Jayne up. The emptiness in the pit of Sue’s stomach then, matched the emptiness she felt now.
Her father had eventually recovered enough to continue living. When Sue married, he chose to remain alone in the house in which his wife had died, much to Sue’s relief. And there he had stayed, with her support, into old age. As long as possible. Longer than was safe, according to Ben. Sue wondered whose interests had been uppermost in her husband’s mind.
‘I owe it to him,’ she had said. ‘And to Mum.’
‘You’ve more than done your duty. No one could criticise you for putting him in a home now.’
No one but Sue. For it was not about duty, but about love.
It was only a few months since the house had been put on the market. Sue had not told her father; although he had ceased speaking of returning home and seemed well settled in the rest home, it had never been openly acknowledged that he would remain there for the rest of his life. She could not place that sentence upon him. Besides, it would register but not remain; so it would be a new shock every time he heard it.
The house fetched a good price, despite its rundown condition. Ben said the value was in the land and that some developer would probably raze it. Sue shuddered at the thought; she had wanted to renovate and rent, to know the house was still there, warmed by a family. But Ben and common sense had prevailed.
Sue led her father into the secure courtyard. It took some persuasion to get him to sit on the bench-seat under the elm tree. Here Sue could talk without being overheard – she needed to talk, to confide in her father. The fact that he would understand little or nothing served her purpose: she would not distress him. Watching the industrious honeybees in the herbaceous border dip in and out of bright blooms, pressed against her father, inhaling his familiar smell, the years slipped away. She wondered how many more times she would sit here with him and who would visit when she was gone. Ben perhaps, occasionally. The children? – unlikely. She imagined him waiting for her indefinitely, then realised that was how it was already, now that he no longer knew her.
Sue told her father of the abnormal mammogram, of the pending biopsy, her fear of dying a drawn out and painful death like her mother.
‘Dad, I’m not ready to die. I’ve barely lived.’ She held her father’s hand and felt it mould to her own. He sat quietly, occupied with something – or nothing – inside himself. But it did not matter; his warmth, his closeness were enough.
‘I don’t mean to sound selfish,’ she said. ‘I don’t begrudge Ben and the kids. I just feel there’s more out there and I have to find it.’
Sue’s ambition had died with her mother; studying became no longer a means to an end, but a diversion, an end in itself. An avoidance, though she had not realised it. And, when she and Ben married, she had willingly taken the first job that came along, an assistant archivist in the Canterbury Museum, to support Ben through the rest of his studies. She had taken pride in caring for her husband and raising their children – making a family. She knew she was out of step with most of her generation. Even Annie had a full time job then. But she had felt driven, as though this was the reason she had been put on this earth.
Now, it was not enough.
‘It scares me,’ Sue said. ‘I don’t know where it will lead, Dad.’ She faced her father and saw tears in his eyes. She wanted to believe he had understood, that he sympathised, and most of all, that he still held the key to who she was; that he knew, even though she did not. How sad it was that she could not ask him; she could ask, but there would be no answers. So many questions were forming in her mind, swirling, coalescing, then falling apart again, and it was too late. A blackbird warbled above their heads and a supply van ground past on the other side of the high paling fence. Sue felt as trapped and bewildered as her father.
Annie was late – as usual. As she waited, seated in the courtyard, Sue watched two seagulls circle, squawking, fighting for supremacy and a position atop a tall wind sculpture on the forecourt of the Art Gallery across the road. She thought again of Jayne – resentment tinged with envy. Sunlight glanced off steel.
‘Sorry I’m late.’ Annie squeezed Sue’s shoulders and planted a kiss on her cheek. She slid into the chair opposite. Immediately her bag started playing “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain”. Annie rummaged through it, then resorted to distributing much of the contents over the wrought iron surface of the table. Sue smiled, contemplating her friend’s disorganisation: it was only benign disorganisation, not a terminal condition. In many things, Annie had remained reassuringly unchanged since school days. Sue waved a menu as Annie switched off her cellphone.
‘You’re a tonic,’ Sue said, lifting her face to the sun.
‘Are you needing one?’
Part of Sue wanted to let her cancer fears come pouring out, while the rest of her wanted to relegate morbid thoughts to the back of beyond.
A waiter arrived clad in black, a strip of flesh and hipbones bared above her apron. They placed their orders and Sue watched the slim butt sashay away.
‘Oh, to be young and lean,’ she said.
‘We were once. Eons ago.’
Sue sighed, thinking of how Ben liked her to keep in shape. She recalled his smug smile recently when the new professor looked her up and down approvingly. At the time she had been pleased; she was making a good impression. For Ben. Now she wished she had slapped both their faces. What was happening to her? Suddenly it felt too much, and yet, at the same time, trivial. She leant back in her chair as the waiter placed their drinks on the table. The wine gleamed pale and gold. She rotated the glass, holding it to the light. ‘Here’s to …’ Everything felt pointless. She looked at Annie and her shoulders relaxed. ‘To us,’ she said.
‘Salute.’ Annie raised her glass to her nose, swirling the liquid in the bowl. ‘A crisp, fruity little number with a lingering palate of new-mown grass, kiwifruit and a hint of oak.’
‘Just drink it.’ Sue laughed; she was feeling better already.
When their meals arrived, they ate for a time in silence, but for the clatter of cutlery, the clamour of voices, and the clang of a passing tramcar. Sue found it hard to see the skinny teenager she first knew inside Annie’s voluptuous and unselfconscious body. The two girls had been alike but different; whereas life was a serious matter to Sue, Annie romped through effortlessly; when Sue was in a state of pre-exam nerves, Annie’s humour and nonchalance would calm her – it still did. After Sue’s mother died, Annie was the one person who did not behave differently towards her. She was lucky to have found Annie, she told herself; she was lucky to have her still.
‘You’re quiet today,’ Annie said. She sounded like Ben.
Sue’s fork gave a flat ring like a cracked bell as she laid it on the rim of her large white plate. She drained the last mouthful of wine and raised her empty glass. ‘I need another.’ She gestured to the waiter.
‘That serious?’ Concern twisted Annie’s pretty features.
Sue nodded and gripped the edge of the table. ‘I might have cancer.’ The words she had been holding back just popped out.
‘Oh, my God!’ Annie’s hands stopped her mouth. ‘Suzie!’ She reached over and grasped Sue, as though she could hold her there against any odds, stop her from disappearing, and it felt good.
‘Well,’ Sue said, somewhat soothed, ‘they’ve called me back for a biopsy. So I suppose that’s what it means.’
‘Not necessarily.’
‘With my history?’ Annie looked away. ‘But it sets you thinking. It has set me thinking. What have I got to show for my life, Annie?’
‘You’ve got two great kids –’
‘Today, that doesn’t feel enough. I mean, why am I here?’ Sue could feel herself disappearing. ‘Take it a step further, who am I?’ She spread her hands in an empty gesture, willing Annie to save her.
‘Now that’s a curly one.’ Annie leant across the table, gazing intently into Sue’s eyes. ‘Chances are you haven’t got cancer and you’ll have plenty of time to find out.’ She paused. ‘Know the trouble with you? You don’t have a passion. Every woman needs a passion.’
‘A passion?’ What was the woman talking about?
‘Every woman needs something consuming. To absorb her, get her creative juices flowing.’
‘A passion.’ Sue turned the word around on her tongue, then in her mind. It was a word which conjured up exotica, intensity of feeling – pleasure and pain – a reason for being. But what was the point of a passion when she was going to die? And anyway, there was nothing that she could imagine being consumed by, other than cancer. ‘You’re joking. Aren’t you?’ Even without the cancer, Sue could imagine how Ben and the kids would react – they would say she was losing it. They did their own thing without consulting her, but somehow she could not imagine the reverse.
But Annie’s face did not suggest she was joking.
‘What about you? Yes, of course. Your work – needy kids.’ Sue flopped back in her chair as if exhausted by the enormity of the conundrum, unable to see how “a passion” might help. ‘No employer would want me – on the wrong side of forty, with no recent experience. A hopeless case, Annie.’
‘Don’t write yourself off. You have a good degree.’
‘What practical use is that?’
‘Use it as a springboard. Become a student again.’ Annie’s persis
tence was becoming irritating.
‘Three of us at university? Can you imagine it? Even if I’m not going to die, Ben continually giving me the benefit of his expertise from the perspective of Assistant Head of Department. And Charlie … I’d just be an embarrassment.’ She took a large swallow of the wine that had finally materialised. ‘Jason would think it the joke of the century. All a mother is good for is stocking the fridge and picking up dirty clothes. You know teenage boys.’ It was an impossible idea. ‘Anyway, I couldn’t get my head around anything with this looming over me.’
‘It will be behind you soon enough. Ring me when you get the results, whatever they are.’ Annie opened her holdall. ‘We’ll lunch again soon.’
Sue took her shoulder bag, small and neat by comparison with Annie’s. It felt good, safe, to have Annie take charge and her annoyance melted away. She removed a black leather Filofax sporting tooled initials, S.M.D.S.
‘I didn’t know there was a “D” in there.’
‘Ben gave me this. He’s a stickler for accuracy. And labels. Puts them on everything.’ She was remembering how he had wanted to label the electric switches when the new kitchen was installed, and her own outrage. She knew at the time she was overreacting; it had surprised and bewildered her. But she had triumphed.
‘All those hours we used to spend practising signatures, and “D” never featured. What does it stand for?’
‘Mm? Dujardin.’
‘Dujardin?’
‘Comes from my Dad’s side of the family. I always thought it was stupid to give a girl a surname for a middle name, especially when I had another perfectly good one.’
‘Dujardin. But that’s French. Suzanne Marie Dujardin Spencer. What’s the French connection?’