Hello from the Gillespies

by Monica McInerney

  ‘I read every word, Angela. Three times. I recognised everything you said about Ig. About Genevieve. About Lindy. Victoria too, even if I didn’t know she and that bastard were having an affair. If everything about them is true, then what you say about me has to be true too. About how you feel about me.’

  ‘No, Nick.’

  ‘It’s all there. Everything you think. That I’ve made a big mistake leasing the station. That I’m having an affair —’

  ‘No —’

  ‘Who is Will?’

  ‘I knew him before I met you. I told you about him, when we first met. He was my first boyfriend. Years and years ago.’

  ‘Are you in touch with him now?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘You’re not? So what’s this about your house together, your life with him, your daughter. In all this detail?’

  ‘I haven’t seen him since I first left England. I promise. I made it all up.’

  He picked up the letter. He started to read out a section about her fantasy life with Will, Lexie —

  She couldn’t listen. It was too personal, too humiliating. She had to stop him. ‘What about you and Carol, Nick? I’ve heard you talking to her every day. Laughing with her. All the plans you’re making together, under the cover of a family reunion, family research. You’re going to Ireland to meet up with her, aren’t you? Early next year. She’s organising your itinerary. I overheard you talking about it with her. Were you ever going to tell me about that?’

  ‘Yes, I was. The same day I was going to ask you if you’d come with me. Once I’d had the chance to ask Victoria if she’d look after Ig and your website while you and I were away.’

  Angela went still.

  ‘You really thought that I’d make my first overseas trip without you? I’ve been planning it for weeks. I’d worked it all out. I thought we’d start with a week in Ireland, then you and I would go on to London. Maybe Italy or France after that. Wherever you wanted to go.’

  ‘But I thought you and Carol —’

  ‘That we were what? Going to run away together?’

  ‘I’ve heard you talking to her. Her flirting with you.’

  ‘It’s just her way.’ He picked up the letter again. ‘Who else has read this?’

  ‘Joan. Everyone on the mailing list.’ She wanted to say, ‘Because of you. Because you sent it out.’ She couldn’t. She didn’t.

  ‘How many people?’

  ‘One hundred. At least.’

  He looked down at the pages again. She knew what he was seeing. That she thought he was a failure. An adulterer. That she didn’t want to be married to him.

  It felt impossible to even begin to explain. All she could do was apologise. ‘I’m so sorry, Nick.’

  ‘So am I,’ he said.

  He stood up. For one moment, one hopeful moment, she thought he was going to come close, take her in his arms. Perhaps even smile at her. Say, ‘It’s a mess, but we’ll sort it out together, don’t worry.’ Instead, he walked away; not towards her, not into the house, but away, across the yard.

  ‘Nick . . .’

  He didn’t answer and he didn’t look back.

  By nine o’clock that night, he still hadn’t returned. Ig and Lindy both asked where he was. She said he was out working on the station somewhere. He wasn’t working; he was walking, she knew that. It was what he always did when he needed to think. Walked for miles under that big sky.

  The three of them were in the living room watching TV when they finally heard him come in. He stopped at the doorway. ‘Angela?’

  She turned, trying to read his expression. His face was in shadow.

  ‘Would you come over to the chapel with me?’

  His quiet request nearly broke her heart.

  ‘Ooh,’ Lindy said. ‘A romantic walk under the stars. Dad, you smoothie.’

  Neither of them answered her.

  As they crossed the paddock they didn’t speak. They reached the chapel and took a seat on the one remaining pew. They were both silent at first. Out of sight, a windmill turned, its iron sails clinking rhythmically. In the darkness, Nick’s voice was low, quiet. Sad.

  ‘Why, Angela? Why didn’t you say any of this to my face?’

  ‘We never seem to talk any more. About anything.’

  He turned and looked at her. ‘Is it that bad being married to me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I always thought you’d leave me, did you know that? That you’d decide you hated it here and would go back to England. When you first came, and it was so hard and you were so lonely, I used to pray, and I don’t even know if I believe in God, but I would come here and pray that you wouldn’t find it too hard. And then when we found out you were having twins, I thought it was a sign, a double sign, that you would stay. And then Lindy too. And then Ig. I almost thought there was something mystical at work. Because whatever problems you and I might ever have had, I always thought you loved the kids.’

  ‘I do love the kids.’

  ‘I thought you loved me too.’

  ‘I do love you.’ But did he love her any more? Ask him, a voice in her mind said. She couldn’t find the words.

  ‘Do you want to leave now?’ he said. ‘Leave us all? Go back to London? Is that what this is about?’

  His question shocked her. Did she? She must have thought about it, to have been able to write that letter. But no. She didn’t want to leave. Her mentions of London had been just one more detail of her fanciful thoughts about Will and Lexie. It all seemed shameful now. She couldn’t bear to see him so hurt, so serious beside her. She shook her head.

  There was a long silence. He broke it again.

  ‘Have you ever been happy here?’

  ‘Of course, Nick. Of course.’

  ‘But not for a long time. And not now. I annoy you. I disappoint you. Not just me, the kids too. You want a break from us, is that it?’

  ‘It’s not that. I just need a break from myself. I’m sick of myself. Sick and tired of everything about myself.’

  ‘So I gathered from your letter. As everybody who got it now knows as well.’

  Her hackles suddenly rose. ‘We’re both to blame for the letter. You were trying to help me, I know, sending it out, but —’

  ‘I’m not talking about how the letter got out. I’m talking about our family. Our marriage. What everyone now knows about us. It went to all our neighbours? Everyone coming to the party?’

  She nodded. ‘We can cancel it.’

  ‘We can’t cancel it,’ he said.

  ‘So do you want to leave me?’ she said.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘Do you want a separation?’

  ‘We’ve got more to worry about than that at the moment. This party: how many are coming?’

  She told him about the increase in numbers in the past few days. ‘Ghouls, Joan called them.’

  ‘Joan knows about all of this?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Do the kids know?’

  ‘Not yet. They don’t read my letters any more. And I don’t think they’ve heard about it from anyone else.’

  ‘Has Celia read it?’

  ‘She’s on the mailing list. I don’t know if she’s read it yet.’

  ‘We say nothing to any of them for now. Only if someone asks do we mention it. Otherwise, we ignore it.’

  It felt like he wasn’t asking her, but telling her. Something brid­led inside.

  ‘Please don’t talk to me like that. You’re the one who sent it out.’

  ‘You’re the one who wrote it.’

  They sounded like children.

  He continued. ‘We have to at least appear united, in front of the kids and at the party. And while Celia’s here.’

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘After that, we’ll talk about it again.’

  He stood up, waiting for her.

  She needed time on her own. Time to think.

  ‘I’ll follow you in,’ she said.

/>   Again, she saw that expression in his eyes. Not anger. It was hurt.

  Twenty minutes passed before she stood up too, and started walking back across the empty paddocks towards the light of the homestead.

  She finished the dishes. She swept and washed the kitchen floor. She cleaned the bathroom. She put Ig to bed. When that was all done, she joined Lindy in the lounge room, as if it were a normal night together. Angela knew Nick was in the office. As they finished watching their TV program, she heard his steps in the hall. She didn’t turn off the TV until Lindy had gone to her room too, until the house was quiet.

  For once, he was the one asleep by the time she came to bed.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  It was two days later. Angela was on her way to Adelaide to collect Genevieve and Victoria from the airport.

  It was the quietest few hours she’d had in months. In the first half of her four-hour journey, she’d passed less than a dozen cars, one semitrailer and an elderly couple towing a caravan. She’d waved and all of them – all strangers – had waved back. The country salute. She remembered noticing it for the first time while driving with Nick along this road three decades ago. She’d thought he knew everyone.

  Celia had arrived the previous day. Nick had collected her from the bus in Hawker. She had been all charm and girlish giggles with him, all icy politeness with Angela. She was as perfectly groomed as always, her petite frame in an elegant, well-tailored dress. As Angela carried in her bag, helped her settle into the guestroom, she waited for a sign that Celia had read her Christmas email. There had been nothing, until she heard Lindy ask her about the bus journey. ‘It was fine, thank you,’ Celia had said. ‘Especially because there was no one sitting beside me.’ It had to be a reference to the email. But Celia had said nothing directly to Angela, nor Angela to her.

  She wondered whether Celia had noticed the tension between her and Nick. Whether anyone could not notice it. They had barely spoken since their conversation at the chapel. Polite exchanges in the kitchen, no conversation at all in the bedroom. She wouldn’t have thought it possible to be so physically close to someone, yet so far apart.

  ‘Give him time,’ Joan had advised. Angela was talking to Joan as often as she could, as difficult as it was when the only phone was in the kitchen. She’d told her some of what had happened with Nick. Not all of it. Some of it hurt too much to share. Some of it was still sinking in.

  I was going to ask you if you’d come with me.

  A trip with Nick was something she had wanted for years, the two of them travelling overseas together. Both times she had been back to the UK, for her parents’ funerals, she’d gone on her own. He had offered to come with her, tried to insist, but she’d known it made the most sense to go on her own. Nick needed to be home, looking after the children, the stock, the station. She’d first made the long journey home to London after her father died suddenly. The twins had been seven, Lindy four. She’d spent three weeks with her mother in her old family house in Forest Hill, trying and failing to convince her to come to Australia to live. Her mother had all her friends in London, she’d said. She was happy here. It was too hot in Australia. The second trip three years after that had been even sadder. Her mother had died in the nursing home. A quick and painless death, the matron assured her. Angela had hoped it was true. She’d sat in the small chapel, with only the staff around her, wishing that she had a big family to share this with. She’d rung Nick that night and wept. ‘I’m an orphan now, aren’t I?’

  ‘You’ve got us. We’re here waiting for you. We can’t wait for you to come home.’

  When she’d landed at Adelaide airport, Nick and the three girls had been there. She’d never felt anything like the hugs the four of them gave her. The drive home in her jet-lagged state felt like a dream, Nick holding her hand with his left hand as he steered with his right. The three girls in the back, singing the songs they always sang on long trips, ‘Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree’ and ‘Ten Green Bottles’, over and over again. Nick had been right. She had all of them.

  She arrived at Adelaide airport now to discover the twins’ flight from Sydney was delayed by forty minutes. She wandered through the airport, past the shops and cafes. She saw a bank of public computers. One was free. She was logged on within a minute. Another twenty-two emails about her Christmas letter.

  There was also another one from Keith, the station manager at the Port Pirie radio station. Angela, just a follow-up – there might be something here at the station for Victoria sooner than I expected. Can you ask her to call me?

  One from their neighbours to the east, the Ryans, a family of seven. If Genevieve is back, don’t suppose she’d like to drop over for an at-home hairdressing session?? We won’t be able to pay Hollywood prices but we can pay her in eggs???

  As she was about to log off, she saw an email with a different subject line. Re: Enquiry re sculptures. It was from an art gallery. A big gallery in Adelaide. Six weeks earlier, she’d sent them four photos of her most successful clay sculptures. Her only successful clay sculptures. Her heart began to beat faster.

  Dear Mrs Gillespie,

  I have always made it my policy not to mince my words and give unfair hope to artists if I genuinely felt their talents were best served elsewhere. I therefore write this to you in the spirit of artistic honesty and personal integrity. You say in your email that you have been working in the medium of clay for some time now. Your sculptures appear amateurish and ill thought-out. This may sound harsh, but believe me, a critic of any show I might be foolish enough to stage with your work would be harsher. You mention you plan to send your portfolio to other galleries too. My advice is not to bother. I have personally fostered the careers of some of the country’s most successful ceramic artists and I know what I am talking about. I say this in the best possible spirit: please stop.

  Yours,

  James Billington

  She deleted it. She didn’t need to keep it. She already knew that what he said was the truth.

  Back on Errigal, Lindy, Ig and Celia were in the office, Celia in the chair in front of the computer. Before their mother left, she had asked Lindy and Ig to be nice to Celia. They were trying.

  ‘No, I’m sorry,’ Celia said to Lindy, ‘I still don’t understand. Can you explain again?’

  Lindy tried not to sigh. ‘So, I set this cushion website up. People find it, read about all the things I can do and then order a cushion from me. They pay in advance. I make the cushion and then send it to them. Simple.’

  ‘And this is how you make your living?’

  ‘Not yet, no. But that’s the plan.’

  ‘How many cushions have you made?’

  ‘I’m doing the finishing touches to the first one.’

  ‘Still,’ Ig said.

  ‘And your profit margin will be?’ Celia asked.

  ‘Five dollars.’

  ‘So your annual wage so far is five dollars?’

  ‘That’s it so far, yes.’

  ‘I see. And what if you get so much work you can’t fulfill the orders?’

  ‘I don’t think there’s much chance of that.’

  ‘That’s a very defeatist attitude.’

  ‘It’s a realistic attitude. If I didn’t have a semitrailer’s worth of material out there, I’d forget the whole thing. But I owe it to Dad and Mum to somehow sell it, pay them back.’

  ‘Well, that’s all very interesting. Thank you, Rosalind.’

  ‘Aunt Celia?’

  ‘Yes, Ignatius?’

  ‘Would you like to see my cubby now?’

  ‘Thank you, yes, I would.’

  Lindy waited until they’d left before she pressed refresh. It didn’t make any difference. She still hadn’t had any new orders.

  Outside, Ig was conducting his tour with the solemnity of a museum guide. He’d thought of a few ways to be nice to Celia. This cubby-house tour for a start. He’d ask Celia to play Scrabble later on too.

  ‘This corner is the
living room,’ he said, gesturing to it with his good arm. He still had the sling on the other one. He’d got used to being one-armed. He quite liked it, actually. Robbie had started wearing a sling too. They both removed them now and again, though. When there was no one around to tell them off. ‘And that corner is the bedroom.’

  ‘And will you sleep out here one night?’ Celia asked.

  Ig nodded. ‘Especially when Genevieve and Victoria are home. They can be very noisy.’

  He stood back beside Celia. Yes, he was happy with his cubby­house now. He’d made many of them over the years, out of sheets and chairs, old tents, and corrugated iron. He’d even had one in the broken-down station truck once, until a snake slithered up through the disused engine and gave him a fright. He hated snakes as much as his mum hated spiders. But none of those cubbies had compared to this one.

  ‘Have you given it a name yet?’ Celia asked.

  He shrugged. ‘It’s just my cubby.’

  ‘It’s not just a cubby, Ignatius. It’s like a castle. So you should give it a noble name.’

  He shot her a suspicious look. She wasn’t usually this nice.

  ‘The Gillespie Fortress?’

  ‘Very good. You’ll need a flag too. To fly over the castle, to warn off would-be invaders.’

  ‘Can you help me and Robbie make it?’

  ‘Robbie? You still believe in that nonsense about an imaginary friend?’

  He went still. ‘It’s not nonsense.’

  ‘Ignatius, it is. Robbie isn’t real. You need to make real friends, with real boys. You’re too old for all this business and it isn’t healthy. I’m sure your parents agree with me. Now, come on, come inside and I’ll show you how to make the flag.’

  ‘No, thank you,’ Ig said.

  ‘What do you mean, “no, thank you”?’

  ‘I won’t have a flag. It doesn’t need one.’

  ‘But it would look much better with a flag.’

  ‘No, thank you,’ he said again.

  ‘Very well. Suit yourself.’

  He waited until she was back inside and out of earshot before he spoke.

  ‘You’re right, Robbie. That’s exactly what she is.’