The Last Summer of Ada Bloom

by Martine Murray

  But she’d seen something else now. She had seen how things tarnish, how people make it up to themselves when love fails. She would see it sooner or later anyway. Ada’s first piece of love’s shining star had broken, and it was too late to mend it. He frowned, rolled his mind over it. He wanted to sweep this all up. He squatted down next to Ada again and pulled her in close.

  ‘That’s a funny question. I’d cry for weeks and weeks if any of you died—Mummy, Tilly, Ben or you. I promise. I would cry for years.’

  Ada relinquished a smile. Her arm wound around his neck. Her fingers danced over his ear. She stared thoughtfully into the distance and her face looked strangely peaceful.

  ‘Me too, only I’d cry forever,’ she said. She let him go then and went back to the chicken’s grave.

  Forever. He remembered that feeling. Or he remembered the sort of innocence that built futures out of forever. Ada would never know how he had been so fresh and clean. How he had gone to his first formal party like a puppy trotting along at Arnold’s heels. How he could still see Mary Galmotte’s white house, sitting like a cake on a carpet of lawn with arcs of gold light that danced with the tree shadows on the white walls. Mike had felt it as a sort of ambient invitation. He had felt the mysteries too. That house was an apparition, from forever, from once upon a time, from heaven and Hollywood all at once. The evening had laid itself out for him. His heart had quickened just walking down that long driveway leading him to another world, a tantalising, out-of-reach world—a world to conquer. After all, he was brand new and heroic too. Just like Ada, his moral universe was intact.

  There was a stairway in the entrance, the bottom step of which was occupied by a young man with a banjo and a cluster of girls in shining dresses. The room was ample, open, drizzled with the early evening light; alight with a hum of frivolity and opulence he hadn’t ever felt before. Girls, as decorative as tulips, swayed on their high heels, their high voices mingling with those of the young men with combed hair. Arnold had given him a beer and ushered him over to the window seat. It was Arnold’s way to sit back and hold court, but it was Mike’s to go out and explore. Arnold patted his pocket and pulled out two cigars. Mike relented and sat down. They had a game now, which they both knew well. Mike’s good looks lured them in and Arnold held them captive. Mike had barely begun on his beer when Martha appeared at the top of the staircase.

  She advanced into that large room of honeyed light and silk and promise, a tiny dark-haired dart of a girl swathed in dark green, like a blot of ink staining the serenity of it all. She inched forward so tentatively and stubbornly that she broke the spell of it all, as if until then everything had been made of glass, and there she was, so unable to smooth herself down that she tore the evening’s murmuring surface like a star breaking through the dark. He rose instantly, as if she might need him. He stood in front of her and told her that he had thought she might fall. She had replied that she once saw someone fall down at a museum. The woman slipped down marble steps in front of a whole crowd of people and her skirt slid up and Martha couldn’t stop herself from laughing, even though she felt terrible about it. Ever after she thought she deserved to fall down some steps, as punishment for that laughter, so she was terrified of course. Mike assured her that it didn’t show, even though it had.

  He immediately regretted it. He should have told the truth, that her terror had been appealing because it cut through in a room of such glacial composure. She had failed to hold herself in. It showed even then, in the heat on her cheeks as she gazed back at him grateful, he hoped, for filling the space in front of her. She drew a finger across her hair and breathing out she gave a baffled shrug and asked if he ever laughed when he knew he shouldn’t. She said that when she smothered her laugh, everything became much funnier. The more she held it in, the more it wanted to get out.

  Mike had smiled. Here was the girl he had come for. He watched her shoulders rise up to fill the moment, determined and tentative all at once. The instant he knew she was the one, he became acutely aware that he might not succeed in getting her, and the accumulation of those two facts hit him with such a pang that he fell silent.

  She didn’t, though. She told him that it was similar with anger, in that if you tried not to be angry, it was so infuriating to pretend to be nice when you didn’t feel nice, that your anger leaked out in little fits of irritation. He remembered how much he liked her eyes as she spoke to him, how they looked into him, how worried they were, how odd it was that she should be worrying.

  She said she supposed he didn’t get angry much. She mustn’t have meant to stare at him like that, as if uncovering him. He almost stepped backwards. He’d never even thought about it. Was he an angry person? Mostly he just got angry with himself, when he missed a goal, when he didn’t win something. If he had made a good impression on her, he was desperate to retain whatever it was she was projecting onto him, but he wasn’t sure how to do it.

  She asked him how he knew Mary. When he asked who Mary was, she seemed delighted that he didn’t know, since it meant that he had stolen into the party. She was instantly more interested in him because of this transgression that wasn’t mitigated by the fact, as he explained, that his friend Arnold had brought him along. She asked if he was at university.

  He had been in the beginning. He had enrolled in an arts degree. Only because of Arnold, who was doing law. Arnold told him to study history and art and literature in order to become interesting. English Literature. Mike didn’t read novels, not unless they were thrilling and the ones in the English literature course were anything but. He had never read anything so convoluted as Henry James. By the time he came to the end of a sentence, he had forgotten the beginning. In the tutorials he floundered, but on the university football team he’d come into his own. And then he got a job at a pub in Richmond. He had cash. He had work. Why persevere with Henry James and the French Revolution? What did any of that mean to him? A country boy.

  She replied that all she wanted to do was travel, to see other countries. Mike didn’t want her to go. She would never come back. He suggested she come with him and meet Arnold. Arnold was European after all.

  Mike should have just stayed there by the stairs and kept talking, but it was his habit to return somehow to Arthur and he escorted her there as if taking her home.

  Arthur glowed. He asked Martha how Mike had captured her. ‘If it wasn’t his handsome face it must have been his good manners, no doubt.’

  Martha smiled and began looking nervously in her bag for a cigarette. She said that Mike had offered to save her should she fall. Arnold asked if Mike did save her since he was a bloody good catch. She said he didn’t have to. Not yet. She tapped the cigarette on her wrist, turning to him with a smile, and because the smile searched him for his approval, his heart had flared, and he had to stop himself moving closer to her. Mike had intended that Arnold’s wit would hold Martha’s attention, and she and he could unwind, warm up as couples do, beneath the sun of Arnold’s banter, and come to know each other.

  Arnold expertly drove the conversation, Mike relaxed, Martha laughed and they all drank more. But things changed before Mike could even take account. Arnold twisted the night towards his own elaborate purpose. He lured them out of the party. They got in his car. He drove. None of them cared where. It had felt mad and free. Martha’s hair had come undone and it blew across her face. Everything seemed empty, the road, the night, the future. They hurled themselves into it as if it courting oblivion, as if pursuing something they never wanted to find. That was forever. Or it was as close he had come to it.

  That night had chased him ever since. It had begun at Mary Galmotte’s and spun out into a dissolute sprawl. Hours passed—they were drunk, exultant, tired, half asleep, wide awake and on fire. But what happened he’d never really understood, except that something had been sacrificed and what remained was dark and turgid and sleeping, like an old ship sunk beneath the sea, beneath the sea of their marriage. He and Martha never talked about it
, yet it was there, even now, even as he stood watching Ada as the day sank away, he felt the tension of that night rising in his throat. The game he played with Susie had the same rules, or lack of rules, as the game they had played that night.

  He wanted to believe he’d convinced Ada of his devotion, and yet he wasn’t sure he had. Ada always looked into things too deeply. She was a child with the soul of an animal, a nose for anything that was off, for the emotional weather of a situation. He hadn’t lied. It was everything to him, this family, even if there was no forever. Most of the time he took it all for granted. Sometimes he felt burdened by it, but surely all men felt like that. It was normal. If losing some part of it wouldn’t make him sad, nothing would. His own father had gone to work in the morning after the night Mike’s mother died, just as he always did. He carried on. That’s what men do.

  He pumped himself with these reassurances so that his step regained its characteristic bounce. He could expertly dodge that niggling doubt after all. He had been exhausted and he didn’t know why. He’d blamed it on the heat and work and the way blame had collided with his excitement about Susie. Tilly’s accusation had shaken his moral perspective. Bouts of guilt had been dragging at the thoughts that used to swerve so smoothly back and forth to the orange-brick motel. But now, hadn’t Ada given it all back to him? His rightful place. He could still love his family, be a good father, bury the chickens. None of this had changed; none of it was compromised by what he had done. Ada saw that, she must have.

  He braced himself to face Martha. She would be raw after the chickens’ deaths. Anything would set her off. He would have to be careful not to get into any discussions. It always irritated her if they did discuss anything. Nothing he said was ever right. She found his opinions narrow-minded and chauvinistic and she told him so too. He tried not to let things veer that way, but they always did, because Martha provoked him, airing her contentious views as wantonly as Susie Layton revealed her flesh. She upset herself worrying about injustices that had nothing to do with her; she found the whole damn country small-minded and backward; she resented the government, criticised the school curriculum. If he didn’t raise his objections, own his opinions, what sort of a man was he? A pushover?

  Not he.

  Still, tonight was not a night to stir things up. He had to try to be sensitive about the chickens. Perhaps he should offer to do something. Get takeaway? After all it was Saturday. It seemed fitting and Ada would love it. She could go with him. Just he and Ada. He would even try to enjoy it. They could have a conversation in the car. He would listen to her properly. Usually he could just let her chatter away, while still managing to steer his own thoughts over the top. But in the car they could plan what dishes they would order. Ada always had the special fried rice. He could promise ice cream afterwards and she might forgive him. And as for Tilly, he could sling her twenty bucks secretly; tell her to buy something special, a new dress or something. Then all his debts would be paid, and Martha wouldn’t have to cook dinner. Even she might be grateful.

  21

  Mike took Ada to the theatre to see E.T. Martha wasn’t sure Ada should be seeing it, but Ada would have sulked if Martha had said no. And since Tilly was doing her supermarket shift and Ben had gone swimming with friends, Martha would have the house to herself.

  After they had all left, she cleaned the kitchen and surveyed it with some satisfaction. For at least a few hours no one would mess it up and Martha could do whatever she pleased. But there were Ada’s dirty little sneakers still sitting on the kitchen stool. Martha flinched as she caught sight of them. She’d told Ada so many times to take them to her room. She should throw them out the door and then Ada would be sorry she’d left them there. She’d never learn otherwise. She could see Ada in her mind’s eye, standing as if in a daze, singing to herself and forgetting or deliberately not hearing what Martha had just asked her to do. Martha marched over and grabbed the sneakers, opened the kitchen door and, emitting a little grunt, threw them overarm, one after the other as far away from the house as she could. They landed with a satisfying thud on the sun-grizzled lawn. Then she closed the door against the wall of heat and sank down on the kitchen stool, slumping her arms onto the bench.

  Ben was the only one who could keep his room tidy. He was the only one who ever helped her too. She sat up straight again. Now she would have to verify this by checking the girls’ room just to see how messy it was.

  The house was so empty that it gave Martha the feeling that she had been left behind, forgotten like those dirty sneakers lying on the stool. It was because the garden was deserted now that the chickens weren’t there. Life had been sucked out of everything and in its wake was an unnatural stillness. Even PJ seemed ambivalent: too old to hobble down the hall after her as he used to, he merely opened one eye to watch her leave the kitchen. All their lives continued out there in the world—Mike’s, the kids’. They were all steadily advancing, while she was left behind, guarding the crumbling fort with the old dog and the flagging garden. They would all return, knowing that when they returned the house would be ready for them, the kitchen cleaned, the garden watered. This was her life’s work. It was hardly luminous but sometimes, it had to be admitted, she didn’t mind those dull, uneventful days with their slow, small non-accomplishments. When the chickens had run to her and gathered around her ankles as if they loved her, and PJ flopped at her feet, as she resuscitated the tomatoes with the hose, yanked idly at the weeds, emptied the compost, allowing herself to be distracted by wrens chasing each other through the grapevine.

  She ate a slice of apple and turned on the radio; the sound of it was like an old friend. She squatted down next to PJ and took his head in her hands and professed her love for him. She did this daily. He was so accommodating. Maybe this would all be enough—if it weren’t for the certainty that there was something else, something that existed deeper within it. She almost wished she was religious, or had some other sort of faith, a belief that she could lose herself in.

  She stiffened as she entered the girls’ room. As she suspected, it was in a mess. Clothes were strewn everywhere, beds unmade. Martha examined the clothes: they were mostly Ada’s. And it was probably Ada who had emptied the jar of buttons. The desk was piled with things. How could Tilly complain about not having her own room when she couldn’t even keep her desk clean? But it was Ada’s things that covered the desk: feathers, balls of wool, rocks, a sun hat and jars of coloured pencils. Martha jerked open the drawer of the desk. Sticky tape, a cigarette lighter (so Tilly was smoking) Ada’s diary with the lock—Martha had already looked in it—Ada only wrote lists of friend’s birthdays and phone numbers. Ada’s purse, too, which was filled with coins she rabbited away. Both beds were unmade. She lifted Tilly’s pillow and caught sight of an unaddressed envelope that Tilly must have hidden there. Martha snatched it up as if it might evaporate before she’d had a chance to investigate. She hadn’t really expected to find anything; she was just doing her perfunctory checking. But this was possibly something. She sat on the bed and opened it. Inside was a small piece of paper folded over a twenty-dollar note. On the paper: Buy yourself something special, love Dad.

  Martha almost screwed it up, but she controlled herself. That would be childish. There were better ways to deal with this. She carefully folded it up and slipped it back under the pillow. He had done this behind her back. And Tilly had accepted it, of course. Martha paced the room. But why would Mike give Tilly money? Was he helping her pay for piano lessons. Martha pushed at the spilt buttons with her foot. The piano lessons had already disturbed her. Tilly always getting opportunities that she’d never had. No one had ever thought of giving Martha piano lessons and Martha had an ear. Martha was musical. And now Tilly was learning with Daisy Cavallo. This was too much. The woman who stood for everything Martha didn’t have. Martha could hardly bear to think of it. And if Mike was giving her the money…

  She looked out the window at the garden wilting in the bright midday sun. She gr
abbed her bag, keys and sunglasses and got in the car.

  Ten minutes later she arrived at Daisy Cavallo’s house. From the street, which cut across the back of the hill, all Martha could see was the old gate and a driveway overhung with a large tree. She stepped out of the car and peered through the huddle of trees that shaded the back of the house. It was a narrow weatherboard wedged on the steep incline, as old and worn as her own house and almost disappointingly familiar. Despite the rumours of a sordid past there was nothing sinister about it. (It had once belonged to a reclusive relative of Daisy’s, an artist who had come to an unseemly death, a hanging possibly?) She had expected to have to fortify herself to knock on the door. But this house only whispered a collapsing, domestic sigh of exhaustion.

  Loquats fermented on the concrete driveway. Martha could see down to the front porch, a slated patio with a round table and potted plants. A bike leaned against the wall; there were green thongs outside, and some towels drying over a rail. A pleasant sense of life emanated from the house. It unnerved her. She forgot why she had even come. She had no idea what she would say. She should have at least planned something. The note from Mike had infuriated her and when she had fallen on the thought of the piano lessons, she felt so excluded that she had barged ahead. Mike probably wanted to meet Daisy himself, maybe even flirt with her. It had all come to Martha in a torrent of indignation and it had occupied her so completely that she hadn’t stopped to consider.

  She took a breath and, stepping over the squashed loquats, she made her way down the steep driveway. There would probably be no one home anyway. And if there was, she would just say she was making sure about the piano lessons.