Family Secrets

by Liz Byrski

  ‘No,’ Connie cuts in, ‘not ridiculous, but I do think it’s a bit unreasonable. I don’t need you to forgive Gerald for anything, Flora, that’s between you and him, or rather you and his memory. I have my own forgiveness issues with him. What he’s left you is inadequate in comparison to what we inherited from your parents. He should have shared it fifty-fifty with you at the time, and as he didn’t he should have found a way of leaving you an equivalent share at current value which would be more. But – this was how he wanted it. And yes, I can see why you felt asking you to imagine a decision free of financial constraints was manipulative. Perhaps it was. It was my own selfishness. I so want you to come to Australia that I was longing to know if you wanted that too. And I was over the moon when you said that you did. I’m so sorry I’ve upset you.’

  Flora’s lips are pressed tightly together. She puts both hands up to her face for a moment and then nods. Connie waits again in the silence. She had thought that Flora might say something cynical about the bequest, perhaps make a joke about it while at the same time being delighted. She had expected breakfast this morning to be a celebration in which they would plan the future. But this has touched a nerve in Flora and Connie sees that it’s more complicated than she had assumed.

  ‘Last night,’ Flora says, ‘while you were out, I was thinking about Gerald a lot, about what he did, what he said to me and the effect it had on me.’

  ‘What do you mean exactly?’

  ‘What he said after he found me with Denise.’

  ‘Look, I know that was awful for you but …’

  ‘Actually, Connie, you don’t know. You only know what he said about not wanting me in the house influencing his children, and about my being jealous of him. You know that because it happened that same day, and I told you about it. What you don’t know is that I saw him again, later.’

  ‘When? I thought that was the last time you saw him, when you left the house that day.’

  Flora shakes her head. ‘I saw him three weeks later. I know you thought I’d left Tasmania, gone to Melbourne before returning to England, but I’d stayed on for a while to sort things out with Denise and of course I had to wait for a berth on a ship, I couldn’t afford to fly in those days. Anyway, one morning I bumped into Gerald near the post office. He was horrified. He grabbed my arm and dragged me around the corner, said he was ashamed to be seen talking to me.’ She stops, staring down into her coffee cup, then picks it up and sips the coffee slowly.

  ‘Go on,’ Connie says. ‘What happened then?’

  ‘He said the most vile things, and told me to get out of Tasmania. He said he was going to run for Parliament at the next election and he wasn’t going to have that skewered by people knowing he had a lesbian for a sister. He said he would never get elected, that you would all be contaminated by my presence, the children would be bullied and shamed at school, and that even if I didn’t care about him, if I cared at all about you and Kerry and Andrew, I should go as far away as possible and never come back.’

  Connie is frozen with shock; she opens her mouth but can’t begin to speak. Her head is spinning with the awfulness of it and the fact that Flora has kept this from her for all these years. ‘I had no idea,’ she says eventually. ‘But he did run a very hard line on homosexuality in his election campaign. And of course Tasmania was a very different place in those days, and it rallied a lot of people to support him. Back in the seventies and eighties it was a red-hot issue.’

  ‘I know,’ Flora says. ‘Connie, Gerald abused me to the extent that I was left feeling that I was essentially sick and shameful. I won’t repeat all of it, and I’ve never told anyone else this, but I know you’ve often wondered why I never really got into a relationship, why I only ever had casual affairs and always ducked out when things started to get serious. Well, that’s the reason. Because whenever I get involved with a woman and start to feel serious, to really care about her, I have this terrible fear that I’ll just bring shame on her and on myself. It completely overwhelms me. And so I back off at a hundred miles an hour, back to my hole and hide, because Gerald is always in my head, his face in my face, his voice saying the hideous things he said that day.’

  ‘But, Flora …’

  ‘I know it’s decades ago and that people, or most people at least, feel differently now, but that’s still there, when I get close to anyone it’s like a switch flicks and I run away.’

  Eighteen

  Andrew watches as the removal van disappears around the corner. So it’s done at last, after all the arguments about Brooke, about the house, about money and possessions and furniture, it really seems to be over. Suddenly, surprisingly, the hostility has dissipated and all he feels now is relief. It must, he thinks, have been the reality that Brooke was moving out that had led to Linda’s change of heart, the night he’d taken Brooke home. He’d been profoundly moved by her distress that night, but by the following morning he was back to wanting to pull out of the lunch commitment, and tell her to piss off and he’d see her in court. But part of him, he thinks now it was the better part, had made him hold back and he’d turned up at the restaurant to find Linda sitting at a corner table staring out of the window and sipping a glass of sparkling water. She looked terrible, worse even than the previous evening, vulnerable still, and in the harsh white light from the window her face looked haggard. He almost wanted to hug her but didn’t.

  ‘I can’t bear this anymore,’ she’d said, before he even sat down. ‘I want it to be over. I know I’ve behaved really badly and I don’t expect you to forgive me, but I am sorry, so let’s just decide what happens next.’

  She told him to feel free to take everything that was on his list, and anything else he wanted, and had asked him for some time to raise the money to buy him out of the house.

  ‘I think Zach will buy in,’ she’d said. ‘He’s putting his house up for sale, but you know what the market’s like – it may take a while.’

  ‘Whatever,’ he said, ‘take your time. I don’t want to put you under any more pressure.’ They’d even managed to talk in a civilised way about Brooke’s maintenance and what Linda would contribute.

  ‘I want to see her at weekends or at least alternate weekends, and I want her to be able to come over in the week if she wants to.’

  ‘I won’t interfere with your seeing her,’ Andrew said. ‘I’ll fit in with whatever works for her and for you but you need to understand that Brooke is adamant that she won’t stay with you while Zachary is in the house, so you’ll need to think about how you’re going to manage that.’

  Linda had nodded. ‘Well, Brooke may have to be a bit more flexible about that.’

  In your dreams, he’d thought, but he hadn’t said it.

  ‘I keep thinking about what we lost,’ she continued. ‘I mean, things were falling apart long before I got involved with Zach. The heart had gone out of it for both of us.’

  Andrew nodded. ‘Even those few times we began to talk about it we ended up in a mess.’

  ‘You changed …’ Linda began.

  ‘So you’ve said,’ he cut in. ‘I was terminally boring, but frankly I just felt like giving up on everything. We seemed to have come to the end of the road – and Dad getting so sick was part of it.’

  ‘But what happened was between us,’ Linda said, ‘it wasn’t to do with your father. It was us, we tried talking about it and got stuck so then we just let it all drift.’

  ‘Yes, but for me that was because I was floundering. Everything changed, I couldn’t get a grip on anything, particularly myself. Mum was cut off and distracted, my relationship with Kerry and Chris went down the plughole. I don’t understand it but it feels as though Dad’s illness somehow infected all of us.’

  Linda had shrugged. ‘Sounds a bit fanciful to me,’ she said. ‘I don’t think it was anything to do with that, but it’s your family …’

  Andrew hadn’t tried to explain because he wasn’t sure he knew how. All he knew was that as Gerald’s decline beca
me more evident, and more incapacitating, he had felt that his own life was also somehow suspended. He couldn’t move forward or back, he was waiting, always waiting, for something to happen, some sort of change that would fix everything and take him – take his whole family – back to where it had once been.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, surprising himself with his conciliatory tone, ‘everything will be better if we can keep talking rather than fighting.’

  She’d nodded. ‘Yes. You were my friend as well as my husband, I’d like to hang on to the friendship.’

  He’d been too choked up to speak then, but eventually managed a rather feeble, ‘Me too.’

  As he’d walked back to the office after that lunch he’d felt as though a great weight had lifted off his shoulders. And now, as he stands in this quaint little rented cottage, staring at the cardboard boxes, the pieces of furniture they bought and those they had delivered from the house, the jumble of stuff all in the wrong place, it seems as though a shaft of light has opened up and the ice that had formed around his heart is starting to thaw.

  He stands here now feeling pleasure in the ache of muscles weary from lifting furniture and boxes, and climbing on and off the tailboard of the van. He really should take more exercise. But there’s more lifting to do before they’re finished. The beds are in the two bedrooms, but more or less everything else is here in the lounge. The familiar torture of flatpack furniture awaits him, but even that seems like fun right now.

  ‘Coffee, Dad?’ Brooke calls from the kitchen, and he wanders through and sees her standing by the sink, ripping the packaging off the new coffee machine. She stands back looking at it, and then unwinds the cable and plugs it into the socket. ‘This is so cool. Do you know where we put the coffee capsules?’

  Andrew pulls the box from a plastic carrier bag and hands it to her.

  ‘Do you know how to use it?’

  She rolls her eyes. ‘Of course. Everyone’s got them these days. Donna’s mum’s got one.’

  ‘I still feel rather attached to the plunger.’

  ‘Well, you soon won’t,’ and she fills the machine with water and adjusts various switches. ‘It’s really easy,’ she says. ‘Black or white?’

  ‘White, please.’

  He watches as she gets milk from the bag and begins to unpack the rest of the shopping and put it away.

  My daughter, Andrew thinks, my beautiful daughter. And he can barely believe the pleasure he feels as he imagines them with everything unpacked, everything in its place, living here peacefully together.

  ‘I am so unfit,’ he says, ‘why don’t we start cycling again?’

  ‘Cool,’ Brooke says. ‘It’s a good thing Mum gave me her bike, because mine was too small last time we rode. I think that path we used to ride on actually comes along quite near here.’ She picks up her phone and fiddles with it.

  ‘You don’t need to look for it now,’ Andrew says.

  ‘I’m not. I’m trying to find a photo Nan sent me. Look.’

  She hands him her phone and he pulls his glasses from his top pocket and examines the photograph of his mother. She’s in what looks like a hotel bedroom, wearing a dark blue dress and the Broome pearls his father had given her on their thirtieth anniversary. She looks as he remembers her, before all the drama of Gerald’s illness changed her. ‘Crikey,’ he says, ‘I can barely believe it,’ and he peers hard at the photograph, wanting to see it better, moving his fingers across the screen to enlarge it, and he has a sudden intense longing to see Connie in this dress, to be in that room with her.

  ‘She bought that dress for the opera,’ Brooke says. ‘She went with Granddad’s friend.’

  ‘Really?’ He can’t take his eyes off it. There is something about his mother in this picture that he had almost forgotten. A look he used to know but which he now realises went missing a long time ago. It’s anticipation, hope, he thinks, a look that says that something good could be about to happen. A huge lump tightens his throat; he sees that in the confusion of his own feelings about his father’s illness and death and the recent turmoil of his failing marriage, he has simply failed to consider what might be happening to his mother. He remembers a conversation with Kerry on the morning of the day they scattered the ashes, a conversation about the future, just the two of them in a café at Battery Point. They had talked about where Connie should live, what should happen to the house, how they would get her to organise her life in a way that they both thought best. And he feels himself flush with shame at the memory of it, the self-interest involved in attempting to tidy up Connie’s life, tidy her away for their own convenience. He opens his mouth to speak, but words seem to choke him and he clears his throat several times.

  ‘She’s beautiful,’ he says eventually, wishing he could actually express what he feels. ‘Really beautiful.’

  Brooke nods, puts their coffee mugs on the table, and sits down, facing him. ‘Scroll through,’ she says, ‘there are some more.’

  Andrew swipes his finger across the screen; Connie is laughing, waving her arms, and in another doing a sort of mock curtsey. Carefree, he thinks, that’s the word: free from the burden of care. Then she’s back in her usual clothes, a linen dress, then jeans and a shirt, somewhere on a stony English beach, with another woman.

  ‘That’s Brighton,’ Brooke says, peering across the table. ‘They were there before they went up to London.’

  ‘So who’s this?’ Andrew asks, pointing to the other woman.

  ‘Auntie Flora, of course,’ Brooke says. ‘Don’t you recognise her? She lived with you, didn’t she?’

  Andrew enlarges the photograph. ‘So it is. Yes, she did live with us for a while but it’s so long ago I didn’t recognise her.’

  ‘She looks like Granddad, and like you.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I suppose she does.’ He remembers Flora’s hair now, so much of it, wild and curly, just as it is here, only now it’s grey – a silvery grey in the photograph. ‘But Flora lives in France, and this is Brighton.’

  ‘She went to England with Nan, they’re there now. Did you like her?’

  Andrew looks up, wondering. Did he like her? She’s been excluded from his consciousness for so long he can barely recall how he felt, and then he remembers running. Running with his leg tied to Flora’s leg, both of them running as fast as they could, hanging on to each other, bodies hurtling forward towards a white line marked on the school sports field. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘yes, I did. She was fun. We won the three-legged race together.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yep, sports day. I’d’ve been about nine or ten. It was one of those races that you have to run with a parent, and Dad was supposed to be there and run it with me, but he forgot, so Flora stepped in instead. Yes, I did like her. She left very suddenly and for a while I really missed her.’

  ‘I think Granddad was horrible to send her away like that,’ Brooke says. ‘Horrible and stupid.’

  Andrew shrugs. ‘Well, he must have thought he was doing the right thing. He was always very fair, so wouldn’t have done it lightly.’

  ‘But it wasn’t fair. You would never do that to anyone. Like, Auntie Kerry’s your sister and you have your stupid fights where you just bristle up at her and she gets all red in the face, but you’d never banish her from the family.’

  Andrew smiles. ‘No, I doubt that would happen. And I can’t see Kerry putting up with that sort of treatment anyway.’

  ‘Well, you certainly wouldn’t ban her for that.’ Brooke stirs sugar into her cup and licks the spoon.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For being a lesbian. I mean, I know Auntie Kerry’s not a lesbian, but if she was, you would never chuck her out for that.’

  Andrew looks at her in amazement. ‘A lesbian? You mean that’s why … ?’

  Brooke nods. ‘Yep. Didn’t you know?’

  Andrew is silent, trying to take it in. ‘I think you must have got it wrong, Brooke,’ he says. ‘I mean, Flora may well be a lesbian but he wouldn’t h
ave thrown her out of the house for that.’

  ‘He did,’ Brooke says. ‘Nan told me. He made her leave the same day he found out, and he didn’t speak to her again. Not ever. You must’ve known.’

  He shakes his head. ‘Well, I knew she was banished and they never spoke, but it was never talked about either. Mum used to talk to her and write but we were never told what it was all about …’ he hesitates, wondering suddenly about his own lack of curiosity. ‘She stayed with us for quite a long time, and one Sunday morning I went out to footy practice, and when I came back she was gone. When I asked when she was coming back Dad said she’d left and wouldn’t be coming back, that she’d done something terrible and we were just to forget about her.’

  ‘But didn’t you mind?’

  ‘Well, yes, I did actually. In fact I think I started to cry, and he told me not to be a baby. He said he’d sent her away for my sake, well, mine and Kerry’s and Mum’s, and we’d soon forget about her. And … and well, I suppose that’s what we did.’

  ‘That’s horrible. Didn’t you even ask when you were grown up?’

  Andrew closes his eyes, trying to remember. ‘I think I did. Yes, I remember now, I asked Mum, years later. I was still living at home, so I suppose I was about seventeen, and she said, “You need to ask your father to explain that”.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘Yes.’ He remembers it clearly now. ‘I went up to his study and he was sitting at the desk writing something, and I asked him why he’d sent her away and why we couldn’t see her.’ It floods his memory now with images as sharp as if he were standing in Gerald’s study, facing him across the desk, watching the flush of anger creeping up his neck and spreading across his face, his eyes fixed on Andrew’s own. ‘I don’t want to talk about this, Andrew,’ he’d said. ‘And if I were in your position I wouldn’t be asking questions. This will not be mentioned again.’ And he can hear his father’s voice in his ears, and feel the chill of fear at the sense of something dark and dreadful, and his own resolve never to ask again. ‘D’you hear me, Andrew?’ Gerald had repeated. ‘Never.’