Family Secrets

by Liz Byrski

  The onset of illness, coming as he was about to retire, had crushed him; the loss of autonomy, of control of his body, the limits of his mobility ate away at his self-esteem. He loathed his incapacity, was shamed and disgusted by it, and while always grateful for Connie’s care it was clear that he frequently resented it.

  ‘Promise me,’ he had begged her in the days when he was still fairly self-sufficient, ‘promise me you will never put me in a home.’

  And Connie, who could envisage all too clearly what this might mean, had promised – against her better judgment. When things became very bad she had thought he might recant, suggest a home or hospice for his own sake as well as hers, but he reminded her, several times, of that original promise. And she, while understanding his need, was unable to rid herself of resentment for the way it curtailed her life and her chances to know her children and grandchildren better.

  It was only when Farah came into the house to help with Gerald’s care that she had been able to share this dark side of resentment and frustration, and the desire to lay down the burden and never pick it up again. Farah had understood, and although she rarely spoke of her own loss, the haunting nature of their very different experiences of grief was understood between them and bound them together.

  The lighthouse beam highlights the shadowy contours of the sea wall where she, Flora and Suzanne had so often sat as girls, kicking their sandy feet against the stonework. Connie recalls the feel of damp shorts stained green with seaweed, feels the sting of saltwater on bare legs that were always a mass of tiny scratches from the sharp little shells that formed a crust on the wall. Long and meaningful conversations were held on that wall about school and parents and, later, on the subject of boys, love and sex. Suzanne, perhaps by virtue of being one year older, or French, or on her own territory, or all three, had assumed the role of expert on matters of boys and sex, although she showed little interest in the subject of love. So it was on a day when Connie and Flora sat there alone, giggling with embarrassed fascination at a couple seated further along the wall, locked together in a passionate embrace, that they had got into a conversation about love.

  ‘Do you think that when people fall in love they love each other like that forever,’ Connie had asked, ‘even when they’re old?’ The question had come from a dark place within her in which she constantly questioned the nature of her parents’ relationship; the difficult silences, the hints of resentment, the snide remarks let fall. It seemed so much at odds with their behaviour as a lively, sociable and devoted couple outside their home.

  Flora had paused before saying, ‘I think that if you love someone, really love them, you can also hate them and different things will tip you one way or the other. Perhaps if you love someone a lot you just can’t keep it up all the time,’ she said.

  Connie gets to her feet marvelling now at Flora’s teenage insight into something that she herself has only learned through the course of a long marriage. How did Flora know that? Flora has always been so scared of love, and so often faltered at the borderline of commitment. Did she fear that darker side, or just never meet anyone with whom it was worth taking the risk? Connie sighs, the tiredness capturing her again now, and she turns back into the bedroom casting a last glance across the moonlit bay. Flora is her oldest friend but now they are here together after all this time Connie realises how little she knows of her life, how many gaps there are to be filled, bridges to be crossed before it can really feel like old times once again.

  Five

  Andrew takes the lift down from his office on the thirteenth floor staring at his own reflection in its mirrored wall, until it comes quietly to rest in the executive car park. He’s about to head straight for his car when he changes his mind and strides up the sloping ramp to the street and stops at the top, breathing in the damp air, watching commuters heading for home and wishing he’d never given up smoking. It’s eight years now and he no longer craves cigarettes, just the excuse to escape from the office for a few minutes and stand here, hunched and shivering in winter, sweating in summer, smoking in companionable silence with the other outcasts.

  ‘Be at the gallery by quarter past five,’ Linda had instructed him this morning. ‘I might need some last minute help. And it’s good to have a few people in there when the doors open, puts the punters at ease.’ She says this of every exhibition at the small, privately owned gallery in Toorak that she manages. ‘It’s Zachary’s latest – amazing work, it’ll knock everyone’s socks off.’

  ‘Not mine,’ Brooke had said without looking up from her iPad. ‘I’ve got a rehearsal.’

  Linda had sighed and rolled her eyes. ‘But I might need help with the refreshments and, anyway, you’re not in the wretched school play.’

  ‘I’m assisting the sound engineer, and you always have the food catered. You just want me there to play dutiful daughter.’

  Linda had shaken her head. ‘Well, is that too much to ask? Anyway, you’d better be there, Andrew – five-fifteen, no later.’

  Andrew had been about to invent a reason why he couldn’t be there but changed his mind once he knew it was Zachary’s gig. It’s not that he has any interest in Zachary’s work, which is, in his opinion, execrable, and the man himself a complete arse. Andrew can’t imagine why Linda is risking her own excellent reputation on him, although of course he can and does imagine it, and that’s why he is going to the opening – to work out whether this is reality or just imagination.

  Andrew checks his watch; it’s already quarter to six and Linda has called his mobile twice. She has staff and volunteers, caterers, and various youthful and pretentious hangers-on who see her as their point of entry into the elite of Melbourne’s art world, but he knows she wants him there because of his position in the Department for the Arts. She thinks it raises her profile and the profile and credibility of the artists she exhibits. Andrew sighs and is about to walk back down the ramp but changes his mind for the second time, and weaves his way across the street through the slow moving traffic to the posh little café cum bar where he sometimes has lunch, orders a double scotch, downs it quickly and then makes his way back to the car.

  Half an hour later he is hesitating just inside the entrance to the gallery, which is already packed with the sort of crowd who always seem to turn up at Linda’s events: well dressed, well heeled and many of them already on the way to being well oiled. He spots Linda at the far end of the room talking to a couple whose names he really ought to know but can’t recall. She is wearing one of those A-shaped outfits she’s very into at the moment. It looks like a series of different-coloured tents worn one on top of the other; she says it’s called ‘block colour pyramid layering’ and is the latest fashion. Andrew thinks she may have made this up. Around her neck odd shaped lumps of wood painted in vivid colours hang from a black silk cord. And she’s had her hair cut and coloured – today, obviously, because it wasn’t like this at breakfast. It’s a deep sort of claret red, cut short and dead straight on one side and much longer to an angled point on the other. Andrew thinks it looks awful to the point of ridiculous but doubtless her sycophantic friends think it’s incredibly chic. The thought of having to stand beside her and be polite to strangers drains him of energy and he reaches out to grab a glass of wine from the tray of a passing waiter.

  As he stands there watching, almost obscured by a pillar, Andrew spots Zachary detaching himself from a small group of admirers. He’s recently grown a stubbly, grey speckled attempt at a beard and is dressed, as always, entirely in black: jeans, skivvy, leather jacket rather too tight for his middle-aged spread. To Andrew’s eyes he looks like a throwback to the sixties and as though he needs a good wash. He watches as Zachary strolls over to where Linda is standing and she turns slightly, and begins the introductions. As he leans forward to shake hands with potential buyers Zachary slides his other hand down to the curve of Linda’s bottom, stroking and squeezing. She looks up at him, smiling, edging closer.

  Andrew inhales sharply. He’s be
en here less than a couple of minutes and knows all he needs to know; if he were still in any doubt, he need only look at the expression on Linda’s normally rather haughty face to see that this is a woman in thrall to the artist, and it’s nothing to do with the paintings. He glances around wondering whether anyone he knows might be watching him watching his wife being groped by this ridiculous poseur. For months, more than a year in fact, he’s been on the point of telling her he wants a divorce; several times he has geared himself up to it but he has always fallen at the first fence. But evidence that she is shagging Zachary firms his resolve, gives him, he thinks, a grievance sharper and more focused than just the fact that he no longer loves her, doesn’t even like her much anymore, finds her boring, shallow and overbearing. It’s not as if she needs or wants him, hasn’t done for years, although career-wise she certainly thinks it’s useful to be married to him.

  Alongside his anger and fear of humiliation he feels a sense of relief. He imagines the house without Linda in it, furnished in his undoubtedly uncool and more comfortable style. He sees it transformed from the stark awkwardness of a show home to a real home where he can scatter his newspapers and books, put his socked feet up on the coffee table, and where the roof will not fall in if he leaves a dirty cup by his chair overnight and doesn’t make the bed before he goes to work. What joy, what freedom. On the other hand there will doubtless be a long and painful battle before he reaches such a state of bliss.

  He longs to stride across the room in outrage and punch Zachary, to make a scene, humiliate them both, draw disapproval and scorn down on them, then stalk away victorious. The trouble is that he doesn’t really feel outrage, just the liberation of knowing that the end is nigh. He remembers his father: ‘You have the upper hand,’ Gerald would have said. ‘Don’t screw it up by descending to their level.’ He’d had a big thing about dignity, his dad. Had he been here now he would have counselled icy calm, steely politeness and eviscerating language all combined with an implacable expression. That’s what Andrew knows he needs now – well, not now, not here, but later, at home, when Brooke has gone to bed he will prove himself to be his father’s son. He hopes he has the chutzpah to carry it off; cool and superior he can manage very well but he knows he lacks his father’s cutting edge. But there has to be a first time. He parks his empty glass on another passing tray and turns back out of the door, leaving as quickly and quietly as he came.

  *

  The rehearsal is almost at an end when Andrew reaches the school and he slips into a chair in a darkened area at the back of the hall watching as the teenage actors struggle through their remaining lines in tones that indicate they have had enough for tonight. There’s a scene change and a teacher directing the students to move here or there. Eventually they grind on to the end and there is a smattering of applause from half a dozen hangers-on who are sitting down at the front.

  The teacher calls the cast and crew together onto the stage for a brief pep talk and Andrew sees Brooke, in jeans and a black t-shirt, her fine reddish hair tied back in a ponytail, wander onto the stage, and his breath stops in his chest at the sight of her. She’ll be sixteen in a few months and could pass for more; here among her friends she seems so unlike the rather surly teenager, cut off from him by her headphones, or irritably slamming her bedroom door. As she sits down cross-legged on the boards she seems totally detached from him – like someone from another world, another life. His distance from her strikes him as quite shocking. When did they last have a real conversation? When did he last ask her what she was doing, whether she was happy, what sort of friends she has? Has he asked her anything at all about the play? How long is it since he talked to her rather than just issued instructions or edicts about the time he expects her back, about homework, or exam results? What does she think of him? Andrew feels his neglected love for Brooke forming into a painful lump in his chest. He leans forward, sinking his face into his hands, and sits like this while the teacher talks about interpretation, energy, concentration and the importance of timing.

  What will happen to Brooke when he and Linda split up? Will she understand? Will she forgive him, or side with her mother? There is a lot of talking now, the teacher is winding up and reminding them to be on time for the next rehearsal. Someone switches on the auditorium lights and the students get to their feet. Andrew steadies his breathing, gets up and walks down towards the stage.

  ‘Oh, hi, Dad.’ Brooke seems awkward, embarrassed by his unexpected presence.

  ‘Hi,’ he says, smiling up at her and then at the drama teacher who is reaching for his briefcase. ‘I was passing so I thought I’d see if you needed a lift.’

  ‘I thought you were going to the gallery.’

  ‘I did, but my heart failed me,’ he says. ‘It was all white wine and canapés, and I wanted a cheeseburger. You?’

  She nods, relaxed now. ‘Cool, but you’ll be in dead trouble with Mum.’

  He looks up at her, pulling down the corners of his mouth. ‘I know, but a cheeseburger and fries with you would more than make up for that.’

  ‘I’ll get my stuff,’ Brooke says, grinning. And she heads off backstage and returns immediately, a long green scarf wrapped around her neck and her school backpack slung over one shoulder, looking younger now, more vulnerable. She is totally unlike her mother, he thinks, and she has her grandmother’s eyes. A flash of memory burns him with longing: his mother reaching out to put her arms around him, to comfort him over something – a lost football match, a cut knee, a failed exam – and he wants that comfort now. He aches for it, for her ability to soothe the sore spot, to reassure him that things will all work out okay. For months he has felt that splitting up with Linda will fix everything, but now that this is within reach he sees that it will take more than this to fix his life – work has become little more than routine, his fitness has slipped and Brooke is almost a stranger. Not to mention dealing with his mother and Kerry once Connie returns from her trip. It all seems insurmountable. All he knows is that escaping from his marriage would be a pretty good starting point.

  He glances sideways at his daughter as they walk out across the car park. Choose me, Brooke, he begs her silently. Please choose me. I’ll do the best I can, better – much better – than I have ever done before or am doing right now, if you only choose me. He clicks the remote control and the car lights flash.

  ‘Are we going to McDonald’s or Hungry Jack’s?’ Brooke asks, sliding into the front seat.

  ‘Up to you, I’m at your ladyship’s disposal,’ he says, wondering whether he sounds normal, or pathetic, like the desperate, needy loser he feels.

  *

  Bloomsbury, London

  In his flat above the bookshop Phillip Tonkin lights a cigarette and draws lovingly on it, thinking yet again how increasingly hard it is to be a smoker these days; so many places ban it, so many people disapprove. You can’t even smoke in a pub now. To Phillip, pubs no longer seem like real pubs without the faint haze of tobacco smoke as you walk in the door, and some old codger in a corner of the public bar constantly trying to relight his pipe. And what about flirting? How do you flirt without smoking? Nothing beats the moment of eye contact as you light a woman’s cigarette and then your hands touch. Phillip brushes a fleck of ash off the lapel of his blue linen jacket.

  It’s hard to come to terms with the fact that a lifelong comforting habit is now socially unacceptable. One of the advantages of living alone is that he has the freedom to smoke whenever he chooses. He’s not allowed to smoke in the shop, even though he owns it, because it’s a workplace. And even if he tried to have a quick fag in the little back office or the stockroom, Bea would find out and give him hell. She’s a tough old coot, but he couldn’t do without her – she knows the stock back to front and inside out. She’s become a bit of a Bloomsbury institution. Her reputation has travelled far and wide; people come into the shop to have her hand-pick titles for them, even to be interrogated by her about their seriousness as book buyers. Phillip frequent
ly cringes at the way she challenges customers’ requests, criticises their choices and bears them off instead to another shelf to sell them something completely different. But they return time and again, like prisoners volunteering for torture, and as they rarely leave without having bought at least a couple of books, Bea is worth her weight in rare first editions.

  They were at university together, and their shared passion for books has been the basis of a long, although frequently combative, friendship. Bea’s career in publishing that ended with retirement a few years ago has now become a new career selling books. The sign above the shop says Tonkin’s New, Second-hand, Remainders and Rare Books, but it seems to Phillip that it is less Tonkin’s and more Bea these days. To her, all books are rare and precious, with the exception of memoirs written by anyone who has ever been in a reality TV show.

  ‘I’ve spent my life cultivating writers,’ she’d once told him. ‘I’ve seen them at their best and their worst, on drugs and off them, blind drunk, starving in garrets and lounging around in penthouse suites. Turning vegetarian because they can’t afford meat, and even selling their bodies to buy a new typewriter or computer. I’ve had them lie to me, try to bribe me with gifts, abuse me and beg me. Writing books is not for sissies, and I don’t make judgments.’

  It’s not true of course; she is hugely judgmental. Last year he’d discovered she was binning the recently published memoir of a Big Brother contestant. More recently the arrival of several complete second-hand sets of a best-selling erotica series had her foaming at the mouth. ‘There’s plenty of women’s erotica if that’s what they want,’ she had stormed. ‘Erotica with proper sentences, diverse vocabulary and actual ideas, elegantly and eloquently crafted, but this …’ and he’d had to instruct one of the other staff to shelve the books and then keep checking that Bea hadn’t smuggled them out to the bins. She’s always been stroppy, and now she’s become some sort of legend in her own lifetime.