The car joined the programmed queue of holiday weekenders heading north through the Bays. Edward’s eyes flicked past the miles of ice-cream slab houses as they passed: vanilla, peach parfait, banana, a chocolate mocha surrounded by a sprouting ponga log fence.
‘I’ve never had an automatic. Ever have problems remembering to fling away your left foot?’
She shook her head. ‘Nope.’ A camping ground loomed and disappeared. ‘We stayed there once,’ she said.
‘What was it like?’
‘Not good.’
Not good at all. William had bought a small second-hand tent and insisted they had a dry run before tackling the East Coast. He wished to make sure all was shipshape. He wished to check the guy ropes and procedures for loosening them if necessary, to make sure there were the correct number of tent poles, flys and pegs. The four of them crouched side by side in the damp tent (don’t touch it), gazing across to the camps of the regulars, the long termers, the bronzed hairy men and friendly women in their homes away from home who laughed and drank beer and had fun surrounded by wooden cupboards and useful gear. ‘Will it be like this at Anaura Bay, Mum?’ asked Kit as their neighbour Ena tottered back red-faced from the communal kitchen clutching an enormous frying pan of steaming chow mein. ‘No,’ said Sophie, ‘no, it won’t.’
It was idyllic. The children had a pup tent and William and Sophie made love once or twice. A fat moon beat a path to the island. She could see it when she sat up.
*
They were both quiet on arrival.
‘Well,’ said Edward outside the door labelled ‘Reception’.
He came back swinging the room key. ‘Three. Clarissa’s lucky number.’
Sophie was startled into nonsense. ‘She had one?’
‘Yes. Fortune tellers, astrologers, the lot.’
‘Oh.’
They loved each other. Astonishing things, amazing unforeseen things happened. He begged for more and gave them back. They lay in each other’s arms on the wide bed afterwards listening to the silence of their own world.
He turned to her. ‘You are the most honest woman I have ever known.’
She laughed aloud at the absurdity. A pohutukawa tree waved near the window. A car changed gear.
‘Tell me,’ he said later. ‘Why did you marry young Flynn?’
‘William.’
‘William,’ he said kissing her nose.
‘Because he asked me.’
‘But you were only nineteen.’
‘Yes.’
He lay back, his eyes on the reproduction of a red-robed dancer flamencoing her head off on the concrete wall opposite. ‘Mad,’ he said.
She had loved him. Of course she had. The honeymoon had been a disaster, but she had become used to living with this amiable stranger who desired her. He was a decent man, a man of good character and entirely self-oblivious. He did not question or whinge, had not an ounce of this who-am-I, what-is-life stuff, no crumb of self-doubt had ever reproached him. He was steadfast. The fact that he had no more understanding of her than an armadillo confronted by a yellow-eyed penguin had not worried her after a while. He was fond of her. What passion or interest he had left over from his real purpose in life was hers. She was lucky.
He was a good father. He practised drop kicks with Kit and was proud of Rebecca’s propensity to win things.
She had hoped to absorb some of his strength and give some of hers in return. He had looked puzzled when she mentioned this thought.
‘Your strengths, Soph?’
There were private hot pools, a dining room, oleanders waiting for the summer. Everything was as it should be.
‘Tell me about Clarissa,’ she said later.
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Everything.’
They had met during the war. Clarissa had been a Wren in Malta and much sought after. ‘Wrens were pretty thin on the ground there. A lot of pulling rank went on. She was intrigued by the wild colonial boy. I climbed a tree to her room. Insisted. Was determined.’ He shoved a hand through silver hair. ‘I don’t know. It was …’
‘And then what?’
‘We were married in March. It was cold. Freezing. Stone floors. The whole place is designed to be cool in summer.’
‘Then?’
‘Ah, then.’ His hand flopped against her, tightened on her thigh. ‘Why do you want to know?’
‘Because.’
Because you loved her. Because anything about you, anything in your past, your present, your future is essential to me, is mine. If you have a photograph of yourself as a child I wish to own it. I need this image, however small. And I will keep it, like all secrets, secreted about my person where else.
‘The first change she made was to call me Edward.’ He grinned. ‘I’d always been Ed. She thought she could reconstruct me, knock me into shape, ditch the bush and buff up the brawn. I didn’t realise at first what was going on. She was subtle, never corrected me in front of her friends, never made a fool of me until they’d gone. Then she would explain, gently, lovingly, and at some length, which button I’d got wrong.’
‘Button?’
‘Done up. Left undone.’ He lay silent, watching the faded memory of his pale wife. ‘You can’t imagine how insidious, how soul-destroying it is to live with someone who’s waiting for you to make a balls-up so she can explain exactly where you went wrong. And the insane things she fussed about. I didn’t give a stuff about any of it but the sensation of someone waiting for you to crap out …’
‘I know.’
‘It killed it. Love. Sex. Everything. I found myself watching her as she prepared to sacrifice her life, to give me the benefit of her arcane knowledge. “Oh darling, not those shoes. Cap. Tie. Jacket.” It was twenty years ago, remember.’ He was silent once more. The room was still.
‘You do love me, don’t you, Sophie?’ he said at last.
‘Yes.’
His sigh was deep, recognition of atonement. ‘Good.’ His eyes closed. ‘How are we going to do it? Live together. Without destroying people. Us.’ He hesitated. ‘My job.’
‘I’ll think of something.’
He reached for her hand. ‘That’s all right then. Good old Soph.’
‘Sophie.’
‘It doesn’t sound right, Sophie. Not for the sweetest little fucker in the forest. Soph’s better.’
‘No. Not Soph. Come here,’ she said.
She had to know. ‘Did you leave her? Before she died, I mean.’
He frowned slightly, his eyes blank as lapis.
‘Yes.’
Her voice was light, casual. He didn’t have to tell her. ‘Then?’ she murmured.
‘She killed herself.’ He leaped off the bed and strode to the shower. At the door he turned. ‘Gas.’
Captain and Mrs Featherston knew, he told her later. No one else. It was a long time ago.
The mattress, she noticed as she straightened the mangled bed, was named Desire.
The hot pool was good. They slid against each other, nibbled predatory as eels and drifted apart. Her breasts were misplaced water wings. They enjoyed themselves, stayed in too long and crawled out water-logged. Clar-issa. Clar-iss-a.
The next-door pool was also occupied, complete with the requisite laughter and splashes and murmurs. Sophie listened, her pink ears flapping.
They had agreed in one of their final telephone conversations. They were not going to be furtive. They planned to spend their lives together. Later they would work out ways and means to accomplish this without pain or damage to a living soul. It would all work out. This weekend was an exploration, they did not hope for landfall this time. He mentioned, she remembered, the Transit of Venus.
They walked along the beach. Clarissa joined them.
‘I mean she must have loved me.’ He touched Sophie’s cheek with one finger. ‘I’ve never discussed it with anyone, you see. That’s why you’re getting both barrels. And why did I let it get to me?’ He turned to her
in bewilderment. ‘Why did I let her?’
‘You loved her. She loved you.’
‘But why …?’
‘Some people are remodellers. They see the potential. Know best.’
‘Manipulating, soul-destroying … oh, Sophie.’ He whirled her around; a sand crab disappeared in panic. ‘Promise you won’t knock me into shape.’
‘All right.’ She licked her finger, flattened a rogue hair in his right eyebrow.
His face was tense. He really wanted to know. He wanted the truth. ‘Was it my fault?’
She didn’t ask him what he meant. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, it wasn’t.’
Clarissa was dead.
The wind changed, long plumes of spray blew back from breakers, sand whipped their ankles. They were on to the Dardanelles.
‘Balls,’ he said. ‘The ANZACs didn’t forge their national identities in the hell of Gallipoli or anywhere else. Churchill saw a chance of success for himself. Simple as that.’
‘We shall not flag nor fail.’
Another crab appeared, pincers guarding stalked eyes. Edward’s foot stamped. The crab dived. ‘He had his points.’
‘The thing is,’ he said, abandoning the crab and the topic, ‘I can’t live without you.’
Gulls slip-streaming above the spume screamed their dissent. The wind freshened.
William had never tried to change her. ‘It says here,’ she had said to him last year, flapping one of Celia’s magazines in his face, ‘it says here that the secret of a happy marriage is communication, talking things through. I think,’ said Sophie, her hands clasped in emphasis, ‘I think we should “communicate” more.’
William was checking the sports news. He was worried about the navy’s chances on Saturday. It was their backs. He slapped the paper flat, lifted it again. ‘All that happens when we communicate,’ he said, ‘is you tell me what’s wrong with me.’
Smiling, demonstrating her acceptance of his telling point, she tried again. ‘All right. But there must be things you don’t like about me. Tell me!’ She cajoled. She could remember cajoling. She knew how important it was.
‘I’ll think of something,’ said William. He told her later. She snorted. And sometimes braked when she should have changed down.
*
‘I’m going to communion tomorrow,’ she said later. Edward turned to her, his fingers splayed on the greying fluff on his chest. ‘Why?’
‘To give thanks,’ she said inspecting her thumbnail.
‘But you’re spending the weekend fornicating. Backwards. Sideways.’
‘I know.’
His finger touched the side of her mouth. ‘You could go into a sideshow—Sophie, the slowest smiler in space. Doesn’t adultery affect the situation? Sin? All that.’
She tried to work it out. ‘The fact that I’m here with you … That’s wrong. I choose to ignore it because I love you. But that doesn’t mean …’ She sat naked and cross-legged beside her lover on a mattress named Desire, trying to find the words.
‘Dieu me pardonnera, c’est son métier.’
‘Who said that?’
‘Heine.’
‘Tell me about him.’
‘I don’t know much.’
The congregation at the little church was sparse. The Vicar beamed at his scattered flock. ‘Welcome,’ he cried.
He invited them each to greet the person on either side of them. There was no one either side of Sophie. She turned to smile at a man and a woman in the pew behind her. They were identical as bookends; small, ruddy and carved from tweed. They glared back at her. Fellowship was not what they had in mind. They believed, perhaps, that God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. An occasional cup of tea in the parish hall afterwards was as far as they were prepared to go.
There was no one in front of her either. The yellow chrysanthemums on the altar were backed by variegated flax and pittosporum, the brass shone, the wind tossed behind lancet windows. The epistle was from the Colossians, the Gospel from St Luke. New residents to the parish were invited to fill in a card at the back of the church and make themselves known to the Vicar. A slip indicating that more people (preferably younger!) were needed on the grounds roster slid from her hymn book. Also the news that the Queen’s birthday service at eight a.m. would be taken by the Very Reverend Jim Batton from our sister parish in Western Australia.
‘Alleluia!’ cried Mr Batton. He was a large man bursting with goodwill. Alternatives were unknown to him. No sense of misgiving or despair had ever brushed him. His face gleamed, but not with the scrubbed spare glint of age. Well-larded certainty illuminated the Vicar from across the sea.
Behinds wriggled on polished rimu as the congregation settled for the sermon. A man in the pew opposite Sophie closed his eyes the second the Vicar reached the pulpit. Mr Batton, his hands clasped on its carved front, smiled at them yet again. ‘Alleluia!’ he cried. He continued to exhort them, to lead them, to explain to them the wonder of the Risen Lord. He told them about the stone—the one at the mouth of the tomb. He told them about the rolling away of the stone and the linen clothes lying. He told them about the disciple whom Jesus loved outstripping the others in his haste to tell the world. All this they had heard before and were pleased to hear again. The Reverend Batton continued. ‘Those of us who are here, who are gathered here today in love and fellowship, we know.’ His face twinkled above them, his eyes darted. ‘Every man, woman and child gathered together in his name within these four walls knows this story to be true. The truth of the Resurrection. The most important truth in the world.’
But do we? How can we possibly? All we can know is that a large man sweating in a nylon surplice is telling us so. Sophie gave a minuscule shake of her head. What about Faith. Grace. All that.
He got worse. He lifted his hands; avuncular, smug, entire as a hot cross bun, Mr Batton shone at the faithful far below him. ‘And you know,’ he confided, ‘I feel sorry for those who know not faith. All those who scoff at the Christian religion and there are many of them. Those who are lost to the love of God and walk not in his ways. Who lie and cheat and fornicate and know not his love.’ His arms were outstretched. ‘I am sorry for those people. That is what I feel for all those people out there. Sorry.’ The minister paused, overcome by the impact of his own words. His hands rose beside him, the surplice sleeves slipped back. ‘I am sorry for them,’ he said yet again, nodding his head in stately confirmation.
Sophie’s mind was busy. His smugness, his unctuous conviction that he was right and would continue to be so for all eternity and that those people out there could never be, bruised her heart. His faith was repellent. She did not wish to share it. She wished to doubt.
Staring up at him she was filled with an extraordinary lightening of spirit, a soaring upwards from the clamp of certainty, from the conviction onto which he now moved, that those who were gathered together inside St Whatever’s would ascend into heaven and eternal bliss and the rest of the north and the world beyond would not.
He was sorry for them but there it was. They had had their chance.
Light filtered into her mind, illuminated the dark patches, the bits used for thinking.
The Reverend Batton’s philosophy was not Christ-like. His convictions could be paraphrased, and had been by William. ‘Shove off, Jack. I’m inboard.’
What did the resurrection of her soul matter. It was a deceiving lying soul. Why should the fact that its attendant body had climbed out of an adulterous bed and ambled down to Eight O’Clock mean it should be saved. She was sick of her soul. It was not worth fussing about. Thoughts of rejection, liberation, release were thundering in her head. Drenching showers of disbelief filled her mind. She had shed the life hereafter. To hell with it. The Vicar lifted his hands to her thumping heart to welcome it to communion. ‘We do not presume to come to this thy table, Oh merciful Lord, trusting in our own …’
She did not take communion. Nor did she leave. She sat in her
pew and waited for the end.
She tried to avoid the Vicar at the door. He seized her hand. ‘Alleluia,’ he cried yet again.
A small boy in a Superman cloak pedalled past her at speed. He swung round at the corner and charged at a little girl on an even smaller trike. She backed, turned, attacked. Antlers clashed. One of them yelled.
Edward waved from the hot pool. His body sank.
‘Don’t put your head under!’ yelled Sophie.
He laughed, spluttered, stayed up.
She had once seen a slide of infected spinal fluid, had watched the amoeba flow after its own ever-changing shape. So beautiful. So lethal. Never put your head under. Not in a hot pool.
Her legs wrapped around his. Buoyed up by water she was light as a feather from Bertha’s fan.
‘Nice,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he said, reaching for her as she drifted towards the outlet. ‘Very nice.’ She drifted beyond reach.
‘What’s Mrs Featherston like, really?’
‘Lettie? Why on earth?’
‘I just wondered.’
‘Oh, a fine woman. Very strong character. Lionel’d be lost without her.’
The comment was unsatisfactory. Even though she no longer cared, was strong, had put on the whole armour of love, Sophie did not wish to hear it. She wished Edward to find poor old Mrs Featherston who disliked her wanting in some minor detail. Floating on her back beside him, Sophie had her second revelation of the day. Love is not enough. Nor sex. Nor understanding, nor sheer bloody joy. Insidious, invasive as pathogens, she wished to flow into her lover’s mind, to absorb, to be part of it.
To make her home there. She had another thought. This need for wholeness is why people believe. It was not a new thought, but it was the first time she had thought it and it pleased her. It was a clean hard thought. Clear-sighted. It stood upright. There was probably a poem about it. But not a hymn.
All the Nice Girls Page 10