Past Perfect

by Karen Zelas

  Oh, Maman! I have such a pain. My stomach squeezes my baby so tight! Too tight! I feel I shall burst! I must –

  With trepidation, Sue entered her father’s room. Every time she had seen her father lately he seemed smaller. Today his body scarcely made a bump under the tight covers. Albert Charles Dujardin Austin. Disappearing before her eyes. Leaving before she knew him. She fought back the tears. This man who had been her father had become a man of mystery. Sue may not know herself, but she knew her father even less. Bert Austin had been more than he seemed. And she wanted to know everything about him, everything. She was curious, too, about his mother, the grandmother she had heard a little of but never known. And before her … the connection became tenuous; she did not have enough information yet, maybe never would, to bring these people alive. Sue did not yet know from which of Brigitte’s children they were descended – but she would find out; she was determined.

  Brigitte and Claude … their children … their children’s children … her grandmother … her father … herself … and then her children.

  Tracey, the charge nurse, was bending over her father’s gaunt figure in the large hospital cot-bed. Stiff white sheets and puffed white pillows blended with his sparse white hair. Skin like parchment, a translucent shade of grey, was drawn across his cheekbones, his cheeks hollowed. By contrast, his nose protruded, a narrow beak, from his bird-face. A tracery of fine blue lines patterned his cheeks and nose, matching the colour of his lips. This was a man more dead than alive. Heavy lids fluttered over sunken eyes, as Tracey coaxed him to drink.

  ‘Bert won’t swallow,’ Tracey said. ‘If I get anything into his mouth, he just lets it run out again. He’s getting so dry.’ She put down the feeding cup and held a damp sponge to his lips. ‘But he seems comfortable. That’s a blessing.’

  Sue nodded, even though he did not look comfortable to her – the furrowed brow, the trembling eyelids, the parched lips. She supposed you would have to believe your charges were comfortable to cope with doing this kind of work. ‘I’ll do it,’ she heard herself say.

  ‘Sure?’ Tracey passed the sponge and dish to Sue even as she asked. ‘Dab his lips dry afterwards and put some of this cream on. Okay? You’ll be okay? I’ll just be along the passage.’ Sue could hear a querulous voice calling, ‘Nurse! Nurse!’, persistent and wearing. She waved Tracey away.

  The atmosphere in the room was heavy, close, with a faint smell of urine and stale food. The drapes were drawn, adding a dull, sepulchral light. Sue fought a surge of nausea. Mechanically, she carried out the task to which she had committed. Doing so brought memories of her mother’s last days. She was struck by how like her mother her father had become in his dying. With the memories came anguish and immeasurable emptiness. To comfort herself, Sue tried to conjure her mother’s face prior to the final stages of her illness, but did not succeed. She leaned back and squeezed her eyes closed. Still no image. She shivered, suddenly cold in this warm, clammy room. Once more she dabbed her father’s lips with the damp sponge, gently squeezing the liquid between them into his mouth and watching it trickle out one corner.

  Sue wondered that discovery about her father’s family had become so urgent, so central to her being, when she had always believed the loss of her mother had been the most profound thing in her life, leaving a space that could never be filled. Now she had a new space to be filled – would she never feel complete? – and her mother had receded to the extent that, today at least, she could no longer see her, not even her eyes.

  Her mother’s background had always been familiar to Sue; she had heard apocryphal and humorous tales, knew who had married whom and who their children were, who were the bright sparks and who the ragamuffins. But her father’s family was a blank canvas, as if in marrying he had adopted his wife’s family, her history. Sue had never thought about it until now. Recently it felt that part of her father had been missing all her life, and she had now come to feel as if she herself was half missing, like a particular type of stroke victim who does not recognise one side of her own body. Perhaps if she could come to know her father better she would be able to know and feel the whole of herself. But he lay dying and it seemed an impossible undertaking.

  Her father’s breathing was shallow and rapid – except when it stopped. The first time this happened, Sue counted the seconds with escalating anxiety, unsure when to call for help. Her heart pounded and she found herself holding her breath in sympathy. When her head felt about to burst, she turned to run into the corridor, and her father drew a gasping, bubbly breath.

  She drew up a chair beside the bed. Diffidently, she slid one hand across the white, wrinkle-free, cellular-cotton blanket and under her father’s hand. She curled her fingers around his. With her free hand, she traced the bones, like chicken’s feet, translucent wasted tissue webbing them; if she were to rub them, she expected the skin would come away in her fingers. Sue remembered the past strength of these hands; their ability to lift her high above his head giggling with delight; to heft her bicycle into the back of the station wagon; haul her sailing dinghy onto its trailer; open jars that had defeated her mother; hammer in six-inch nails – straight.

  Suddenly she felt overcome with weariness. It all seemed too hard: the emptiness, the obstacles. She leaned forward and rested her forehead on the bed.

  Later she could not say how long she had sat there. But after some time she became aware her father’s breathing had not recommenced. The pause had grown into a silence and the silence into death. Slowly, Sue opened her eyes. The eyelids had stopped trembling. The edentulous mouth hung open. The brow was smooth.

  ‘He’s gone,’ she whispered.

  No tears stung her eyes – she felt an astounding calm. She moved slowly as if in a foreign body. She diverted a passing carer.

  Then everything around her seemed to speed up, while she remained quite still at the centre, the eye of the storm.

  Jayne did not come from London for the funeral. Sue could see the logic of it. They would, after all, be together in a few short months. But when she stood there before her father’s open coffin, staring wide-eyed at the diminutive figure, shirt collar too big for his scrawny chicken neck, suit jacket in folds across his hollow chest, Sue wished Jayne were beside her. She wanted to reach out and feel the solidity and warmth of her sister’s hand, remind herself of the living; anchor herself in the present, yet retain connection with the past. Ground herself, Annie would say. And there was something to that – she felt she was floating, ethereal, and needed a good firm tug to pull her down and plant her feet back flat on the ground. Tie her down like a helium-filled balloon, a silver one with red letters, saying: “HAPPY FUNERAL!”

  Sue thought people would never leave. Family friends, distant relatives of her mother, people she barely knew. She wanted her house and family to herself. Peace and quiet, not well-meaning platitudes. If people meant what they said, they should not have waited until her father was dead before expressing it. If they were so fond of him, they would have continued to visit him in the rest home; Sue had felt hurt for her father, as he sat in the day-room, abandoned. The fact that he could no longer hold a cohesive conversation, or muddled a visitor with someone else was no excuse; the company gave him pleasure. People were ready enough to take, Sue thought, but not to give back.

  Cups and saucers rattled, treble to the low rumble of conversation, people being careful not to laugh too loudly lest the dead think they are forgotten. Sandwiches and cakes disappeared, except for the crumbs and dollops of cream ground into the carpet. No cream next time someone dies; Sue told herself she must remember that, aware even in the moment of the absurdity of the thought.

  Ben rose to the occasion and played host; this would be costing him. Bert and Ben had become close over the years, considering their differing characters and outlooks on life. But they had enough in common to establish a respect and rapport that Ben had not shared with his own father. Bert had been the handyman and would potter at jobs and repairs around
Sue and Ben’s home, trying to get his son-in-law to learn one end of a screwdriver from the other, but never succeeding, whether from his innate lack of practical skills or his sheer determination not to learn, Sue was never sure. But she knew Ben loved Bert like a father, and he visited him in the rest home as often as she did – towards the end, more often. While he was still in his own home, Ben helped supervise and care for him. The phone would go late at night.

  ‘Can you come over? I’ve … I’ve been robbed,’ her father would say, gasping and wheezing.

  ‘What have you lo… what’s missing?’ Sue would ask; she had to choose words carefully now or he would become angry and accuse her of not believing him.

  ‘I just went down the end of the garden to pick some rhubarb for tomorrow –’

  ‘In the dark, Dad? You could fall and break a leg.’

  ‘Don’t fuss, girl. Listen. The door was only open a minute and when I got back, my money was gone.’ And it would be Ben who would drive over and discover the money in his dressing-gown pocket.

  Sue watched Ben now, noticing the droop in his shoulders, the smile that touched only his lips, not his eyes. His skin was pale, without its usual healthy but fair toning. For the first time, he appeared to her eyes truly middle-aged. She could not help wondering what a young woman would find attractive, appealing. Perhaps his intellect and authority; perhaps his social diffidence; perhaps his sexual interest in the young woman herself would be flattering. Perhaps she was a young woman caught in an Oedipal complex, Sue thought. Or a trophy hunter, someone whose self-esteem was boosted by conquests; someone who would encourage her husband to make a laughing stock of himself, then throw him away.

  Ben caught her eye across the room and raised his eyebrows, asking silently whether she was all right. She replied with a small nod. They had always looked out for each other.

  ‘Can I get you a cup of tea?’ It was their neighbour, who had sometimes gone fishing with Bert. Sue shook her head as he touched her hand. She had no hunger or thirst. Suddenly she felt conspicuous in the middle of the lounge and retired to an armchair in one corner. Across the room Charlie was on the window-seat, leaning into Patrick, his chin resting lightly on her black spikes; couldn’t be very comfortable – for Patrick, that is, Sue thought. She allowed herself to be kissed and patted by elderly acquaintances, occasionally murmuring ‘Thank you’, her thoughts elsewhere.

  Rain had commenced the moment Bert’s coffin was lowered into the ground beside his wife. Sue had been horrified – quite unreasonably, she knew – that her mother’s remains might have been exposed by the rain as they watched. It had been only gentle rain, the rain of grief. But now it was bucketing down. Wailing. Above Patrick’s head it spattered the window and ran in rivulets, distorting the autumn garden scene: hips forming on roses, seed-heads of delphiniums swaying, the blown beauty of summer at an end; an impressionist painting, colours muted, framed by the window with her daughter and lover sharp in the foreground.

  Annie took hold of Sue. ‘You did everything you could for him. You have nothing to chastise yourself for.’

  ‘Is that how I looked?’ Sue asked. Annie had done it again.

  ‘He was a very special man.’ Annie took her hand. ‘Soon you will remember him as he used to be, not as he became.’

  Remembering she was no longer able to see her mother as she used to be, Sue sniffed and fumbled for a handkerchief. If she started crying, she may never stop. She had been expecting her father’s death, waiting for it, wanting it, but now it did not seem real. Nothing seemed real.

  ‘Here’s a tissue.’ Annie fished a pack out of her handbag, a smaller bag than usual, but still large enough to accommodate everything anyone might need.

  Sue blew her nose loudly and sympathetic heads turned.

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ she said. She did not even have a really good photo of her father, she remembered. She had thought of it too late.

  Akaroa,

  30th June, 1841.

  Ma chère Maman,

  You are a grandmother! Our dear little son was born three weeks early on 5 June.

  We have named him Jules Etienne Dujardin: Jules after Papa and Etienne for the doctor, without whom neither of us might be here today.

  We have both been very poorly these last weeks. Jules was so tiny, Maman, and had such difficulty breathing. It was pitiful to see the cavity form under his ribs as he struggled for breath. We feared for his life but slowly his breathing has eased and he has become stronger.

  At first I could not feed him. He could not suckle and my milk was slow to come in. Rose has been wonderful. She fed him for me by having him suck on muslin dipped in my milk. I could not wish for a better friend. Claude has been very attentive to me, but, of course, he would have been at a loss to know what to do for the baby.

  The doctor said I lost a lot of blood when the afterbirth would not come away. It was so painful and frightening, Maman, but I am slowly becoming stronger and the memory of the terrible event is receding. All the women have been so kind, bringing food and doing our washing. I feel as though I am part of one big family and it helps fill the gap left by not having my mother beside me.

  The weather is very cold and wet. Claude ensures that there are always logs to be burnt, so that our little cottage remains cosy. The doctor said this is necessary to aid Jules’ breathing. He is starting to gain a little weight, but the clothes I made are far too large, so mostly I keep him swaddled in a shawl.

  I cannot write more now, Maman. The effort has made me quite weary. Please give our news to Papa and the children. And also to Claude’s parents, of course.

  Your Bibi

  11.

  Slowly the rhythm of life was re-established.

  At first, Sue was preoccupied with thoughts of her father, and of her mother, Jayne and herself. Annie was right: gradually memories of her father became those of him as the robust, energetic man of earlier years, rather than the querulous shadow of more recent times. Memories of her mother, which had been veiled by time, were restored, vivid and solid, like refurbished medieval paintings, a comfort Sue was reluctant to relinquish. She felt her parents were with her, her original family re-established. It was sustaining, soothing, yet unsettling, as if she were a child transposed into the present day, trying, pretending, to undertake adult tasks. As a consequence, she had been feeling at a distance from Ben and the children, strangely disengaged from them. She carried out mundane tasks like a robot, managed to put food on the table most evenings, though perhaps not on time, and was surprised to find the tea towels in the pot cupboard or her handbag in the bathroom.

  ‘Mum – derr – what planet are you on?’ Jason wanted to know. Sometimes she wondered if she was getting Alzheimers, like her dad.

  For a time she was unable to contemplate travel; it seemed too far removed, irrelevant. But Ben kept pushing her to make plans.

  ‘We really must decide soon, or we’ll be unable to get the flights we want,’ he said.

  Sue looked up. It was as if he were speaking a foreign language. ‘Mm?’ she said.

  ‘If you don’t want to come, you only have to say so, you know.’ The edge in his voice cut through the haze.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You don’t want to come?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That settles it, then. Stay home. I’ll go by myself.’

  Making a great effort, Sue said, ‘No. Yes, I do want to come.’

  ‘I don’t know why you are being so difficult.’

  Sue wanted to say it was living that was difficult. It felt as though Ben was deliberately misunderstanding her to prove some sort of point.

  But, bit by bit, Sue could feel herself again becoming in and of the world. Once she was able to rally some enthusiasm, she and Ben allowed their travel fantasies free rein. They would stop a few days in Bali, then go on to Singapore, perhaps break the journey again in Rome – until they received the fare quote. In the end, they settled simply on Air New Zealand to
London with stopovers in Singapore.

  ‘Remember the first time we visited Singapore,’ Sue said, ‘stepping off the plane in the dark and being slapped in the face by a gust of warm moist air? We thought they must have been steam-cleaning nearby.’ Ben laughed. He had been beside her, and their first encounter with tropical humidity had become part of a shared memory. Sue wanted more of such memories: warm, comforting.

  They had sipped a gin sling at Raffles; Sue imagined doing so again, luxuriating in colonial elegance. Just Ben and herself, recapturing the past. But as the scene unfolded in her mind, she found herself becoming agitated. What would they talk about, alone together? Conversation, true conversation, as opposed to negotiating the minutiae of daily life, had been infrequent and strained for so long now. Common ground was shrinking; there was little she and Ben shared these days. She pictured Ben’s head bowed attentively over Alisha Garumbadhi. He no longer attended to Sue with fascination, interest even. Thrust together, Sue was afraid the only topics that would come to mind would spring from recent injuries.

  She attempted a jocular tone. ‘I wonder what we’ll talk about on our own for so long.’

  Ben looked startled. Had Sue caught him wishing he was going overseas with Alisha?

  ‘We’ll think of something,’ he said. He gathered Sue to him and hugged her. Sue pulled back far enough to kiss him on the mouth and was relieved to feel him respond, merge with her.

  In the ensuing days, Sue made a pact with herself that she would put her worries aside, stow them at the edge of consciousness. Possession was nine-tenths of the law and she would have Ben twenty-four hours a day, in Singapore at least. She became determined to enjoy the trip, to seize it as an opportunity; she would reclaim her husband, breathe life into their relationship. Not only did she still love Ben, but she liked him – at least, say, eighty per cent of him. And who was perfect? Things could get better; she was sure of it.