by Julia Leigh
The family plot lay beneath an enormous white oak, a tree that in days of old would have held up the sky. The plot consisted of one headstone and, alongside, a small open grave that smelt of fresh-turned earth. An empty open-lidded walnut casket – tiny, trimmed in satin – rested at the foot of the grave. The woman and the children were waiting nearby, amid the assembled guests. A few of the guests snuck glances at the woman, and then to one another, but the woman did not seem to notice. The boy kept his head down so as to ward off any winks or other familiarities from the old folk. Two gardeners stood at a discreet distance, shovels in hand. At last Grandmother appeared at the bottom of the hill, one of the twins pushing her in the wheelchair. Behind Grandmother came the family priest, broad-shouldered though stooped, alert, his vigour tempered by an ebony walking-cane. Marcus and Sophie followed the priest. In her arms, Sophie nursed the bundle.
They huddled around the open grave. The priest stepped forward and raised his cane.
‘Friends,’ he said. ‘Within the healing embrace of God’s love we have gathered here to remember Alice and to entrust her into God’s eternal care…’ He paused. Sophie frowned and sucked in her cheeks.
He continued. ‘Knowing that God’s good purpose for His people cannot be defeated by sin and death. We are all children of God, and in the faith that God has given to us we turn to God now, asking for His comfort and His grace to be upon us – and to dwell in a special way upon Alice and upon those who were —’
He was interrupted by a loud groan. Sophie turned from the grave and with the bundle still in her arms she bolted in the direction of the house; her gait was pained and awkward. When she reached the bottom of the hill Marcus ran after her. A whisper passed from guest to guest and Grandmother pressed her hand to her heart; she looked to be on the verge of fainting. The boy was delighted and grinned at his sister.
‘Please bear with us at this difficult time,’ announced the woman.
A breeze bent blades of grass in and out of shadow. Some leaves of the great oak let loose. In time the guests began to shift their weight from foot to foot, to cough and scratch and splutter. Like a flock of birds, they began their departure as if under the one directive.
‘Goodbye,’ said the woman, holding the fort at the top of the stairs. ‘Goodbye, thank you for coming.’
A guest glared at the woman as if she were personally responsible for the scandal. Most hobbled away shaking their heads in commiseration. ‘Thank you,’ recited the woman. ‘Goodbye, thank you for coming.’
One by one the cars defected. The priest was the last through the door. He stood face to face with the woman and tried to pin her with a look of deep sympathy.
‘Thank you,’ she said flatly. ‘Thank you for coming.’
He bowed his head. By the time he was halfway down the stairs she had gone.
In the drawing room the splendid buffet was untouched. The woman was sitting on a small sofa, drinking white wine. An uncorked bottle of Montrachet rested between her knees. She looked up as Marcus entered the room.
‘I love to be drunk,’ she announced. ‘I’m good at it.’
And as if to prove that this was true she bent down and set her cut-crystal goblet on the floor. With her left hand she raised the bottle and began to fill the goblet; she even drew the bottle up and down, stretching the wine. She filled it to the very lip without spilling a drop. Straightening up, she brought the goblet to her mouth and smiled ruefully as though she were a magician who knew her audience could only be pleased by her lesser tricks.
‘Where’s Sophie?’ she asked.
‘Sleeping,’ said Marcus. ‘With pills. And Alice.’
Oh.
‘Please – please stay,’ said the woman, ultra-lucid. ‘I’m drunk. I see everything. I’m on the cusp of the present and the future – the cusp of a great thing, the cusp is the great thing. The world is unfolding before me. Through me. I feel as if – I can see through things. I’m unreasonably happy. But the terrible thing – the terrible terrible thing – is that I am full of love. I’m full of an all-encompassing love for every single thing. I beg you, stay with me, have a drink, please – because I am so full of love and tenderness and forgiveness that I want… all I want to do in the world is pick up the phone and call… call him, my Murderer. So please, have a drink with your sister.’
Marcus found himself a goblet. He plucked one of the ancient wooden instruments off the wall, something like a small bulbous banjo, and tucked it under his arm. Equipped, he grabbed hold of a dining chair and set it down opposite the woman. They made a silent toast. Then he slid off the chair onto his knees and, still on his knees, shuffled over toward his sister. She bent down and he reached up: he gave her a kiss on the forehead. In his ear she whispered, ‘The child’s death – it was not your doing.’ They were motionless for some time, felt the warmth of the other’s breathing. Eventually he swivelled on his knees and returned to his place. He set the instrument on his lap and with his head low, a natural fit, he examined the strings, quickly lifting his eyes to signal a performance for her benefit. It was a tune she immediately recognised from their childhood. He played faster and faster – grinning, nimble, scurrying to keep up with the runaway jig. Listening, she grew radiant.
The girl had wandered into the garden; she was pushing her pram down a pathway lined with stone obelisks that were covered in a fine furry moss and she had the contented air of someone walking without need of destination. Because there was no-one else around to dwarf her – and because the grandeur of the garden had a miniaturising effect on all who passed through it – the girl appeared to be full-grown. She sallied forth. The poplar trees threw thin afternoon shadows. Out of the corner of her eye she spied something on the lawn. She parked her pram at a safe distance and went to duly investigate. It was a rabbit. Dead for some days. There was a wound on the animal’s back and this wound was infested with maggots. She bent over the animal as though to shield it from prying eyes and then examined the waxy maggots at close range. She marvelled at how they curled whenever she would touch them. After a while she tired of the maggot game and abandoned the rabbit. She continued her long walk along the path until it occurred to her to stop, to unbuckle her doll. She held Pinky at arm’s length and studied her closely. All of a sudden she opened her hands and let Pinky drop. Keeping her arms outstretched she stared down to the doll on the ground.
On her return to the house the girl ran into her brother as though attracted by a sibling valency. He enticed her into the drawing room where the woman lay unstrung on the sofa. Her dress had ridden up toward her hips, revealing a pattern of yellowed bruises on her thighs. Marcus was slumped nearby in his chair, lightly snoring. By his feet were two empty bottles of wine. The children tried to rouse their mother. The girl pulled at her hair and then began to batter her shoulders like a Swedish masseuse. The boy squatted down so that he was level with the woman; he observed her as she scrunched up her eyes and resisted the onslaught. Finally the girl gave up. As they were leaving the room the boy caught sight of the mobile phone in the breast pocket of Marcus’s jacket. To the girl’s amazement he inched it out, he pinched it. The rise and fall of snoring was constant. She was about to speak but the boy glared and made the gesture of zipping his lips, back and forth, back and forth; he jabbed his thumb over his shoulder.
Upstairs they hid beneath a piano covered in a white drop-cloth; the music room had been closed many years ago. Suddenly the phone began to vibrate. Startled, the boy put it on the parquet floor and they watched it wriggle like a squib. The vibrations stopped for a few moments and then it began to rattle again. This time the boy picked up the phone and held it to his ear. He listened for a while and looked to his sister, making a sick-face by pretending to stick his finger down his throat. He pressed a button and ended the call.
‘Who was it? Who was it?’ demanded the girl.
He shrugged. ‘A ka-ray-zee lay-dee.’
The phone began to vibrate again. The girl reached over t
o answer it but the boy slapped her hand away. When at last the call was exhausted the boy snatched up the phone and tried dialling a long number. He listened for a dial tone and frowned. He tried again, pressing each button with slow deliberation. And again. His face became dangerously plastic as though he were on the point of tears. The very moment he stopped dialling the phone vibrated once more. He crawled out from under the piano and went over to a cloth-covered chair; he buried the phone – still alive – below a cushion. Before they left the children couldn’t resist thumping the piano keys, thwang bang, a sonata for four elbows.
They hurried through the garden until they chanced upon two gardeners clipping a yew into a topiary whose form had yet to be revealed.
‘Bonjour!’ called the girl.
The gardeners downed their tools, curious and delighted. ‘Bonjour!’
‘Bonjour,’ said the boy as he reached them. ‘Je voudrais téléphoner,’ he dialled an invisible phone, ‘Australie.’
The gardeners tilted their heads and smiled benignly as though they couldn’t quite understand his accent.
‘Appeler Australie,’ insisted the boy. He made another call on the imaginary phone.
‘Téléphoner?’ asked a gardener.
‘Oui oui. Australie.’ He tried again. ‘Aus-stray-lie.’
The gardener shrugged and shook his head. ‘Désolé.’
‘Téléphoner.’ The boy would not budge.
The other gardener spoke up. ‘Assistance?’
‘Oui oui.’ The boy grew excited. ‘Oui, assistance.’
‘Assistance. Il faut appeler 4567.’
‘4567.’
‘C’est ça.’
‘Merci-beaucoup-vous-êtes-trés-gentil.’ By rote. Mission accomplished. Away.
Back in their hidey-hole the boy tried once more to make a call. He allowed his accomplice to press the buttons 4, 5, 6, 7.
‘Bonjour assistance?’ said the boy. To the girl he reported, ‘Recorded message. On hold.’
They waited. She rolled her eyes around and around.
‘Oui.’ He nudged the eye-roller and gave her the thumbs up. ‘Bonjour assistance.’ He spoke slowly and clearly. ‘Je voudrais téléphoner Australie.’ There was a pause. ‘Australie. Oui.’ A little smile. He painstakingly wrote down a number on the notepad he had at the ready. ‘Répétez lentement,’ he said and checked over the figures.
‘Merci-madame-vous-êtes-trés-gentille.’
He dialled the number with that look of intense concentration often seen on children who are opening their birthday presents. Phone to ear, chin up. A frown – the unwanted gift. He tried again, pressing the buttons with more force as if this would aid the connection. Service denied.
‘You broke it,’ said the girl.
‘It was already busted.’
There was nothing else for him to do but carefully rebury the phone underneath the cushion.
When Marcus awoke the light was pinkening, so that it could have been dusk or dawn: penumbral. He had to check his watch to work out that night was falling. The woman was fast asleep on the sofa; near her mouth a little pool of drool had soaked into the cream silk upholstery. He stayed slumped in his chair as if his limbs had separated from his torso, only by a millimetre or two, so that he had to wait for fusion. At last – and all at once – he stood to his feet. Not wanting to disturb his sister he quietly took his leave but halfway across the room he froze and clasped a hand over his breast pocket, the way he would if he were having a heart attack. No phone. He patted down every pocket twice over. And a third time just to make sure. He lifted the cushions on his chair; he crawled around on the floor. For a long time he gripped the sides of his head, pressing his thumbs against his eyeballs.
Sophie did not wake when he stole into their room. She was curled on her side with a blood-stained pillow wedged between her thighs; the bundle lay beside her. Marcus began to rifle through his clothes, through the drawers. He worked methodically, in the practised manner of a spy who knows better than to make haste. Item by item he emptied out the baby-bag. No luck. The only sound was the soft purl of Sophie’s breathing. He sighed, and at the end of the prolonged audible sigh was fortified. With great care he gathered up the bundle. Just then Sophie struggled to right herself.
‘Marcus?’
‘Hey.’
‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I just want – I wanted –’ She stopped short, a sworn enemy of solace and reason.
‘Me too.’
‘I know.’ Lowering her head.
He bowed down to kiss her cheek and then decamped to the kitchen.
Later that evening the woman and the children were sitting with Grandmother upstairs in her suite. Grandmother and the girl were squeezed together on a small sofa, the boy was on the floor, the woman had her own chair: they were eating dinner in front of the TV. A bluish light jittered over their faces. The boy was concentrating on the program; his mother was not looking at the screen but was steadily watching her son’s reactions. After a while he seemed to feel her eyes on his back and shuddered violently. He turned and glared at her – ‘Stop it!’ Unrepentant, she switched her attention to the TV. Every few minutes there came a burst of canned laughter but no-one watching laughed or even smiled. Grandmother forgot the program and observed the woman. It didn’t take long for the woman to sense this and, turning to Grandmother, she conceded a small smile. They held one another’s gaze and held and held. In her mother’s face the woman saw all her mothers, countless faces of her mother, each fractionally different, one face streaming forward out of the next in the ghostly way of early stop-motion photography. Ghostly, milky with light.
‘I like your hair like that,’ Grandmother said quietly. ‘It suits you.’ She spoke for the sake of speaking.
After a pause the woman replied, ‘Thank you.’ There was no trace of formality in her voice. At that moment she became both very young and very old. Comforted, and with gratitude, mother and daughter pretended to take interest in the hullabaloo onscreen.
During the night the girl started screaming. No crocodile tears, a real shrieking. The woman immediately awoke and sat up in her bed, listening. When the screaming did not abate she pulled on a dressing gown but found it too difficult to slip into with her cast and so wore it as a cape. She waited in the hallway outside the door to the children’s room, the parquet cold beneath her feet. The girl’s cries were growing increasingly ragged and breathless. The brass door handle was smooth and cool to the touch. At last a light came on under the door. The boy could be heard soothing his sister and soon the cries became sobs and swallowed gulps and then there was silence. Sophie came creeping down the hallway. The woman let her pass without comment.
In the kitchen the flowers from the funeral had been shoved head first into a garbage bin beside the walk-in fireplace. Those that didn’t fit were piled against the bin as though votive offerings. Sophie sat alone at one end of the long wooden table. No lights had been turned on, there was only the faint glow of the moon. At her swollen breast she nursed a suction pump attached to a plastic bottle. She listened to the quiet hum of the battery-operated pump, the tick of the freezer, the occasional skitterings of night roaches. Outside the million-million green and growing things were absorbing oxygen. From time to time she winced and rearranged herself. Her eyes filled with tears. The level of her milk rose slowly.
Ida wheeled Grandmother out to a commanding position in the middle of a lawn corridor which ran deep between two rows of steel-spun cypress. It was a day when the clouds were membrane-thin and very high, so high that it seemed the sky itself had recently expanded.
‘To begin, Sophie,’ said Grandmother, ‘I have known you – for how long? Eight years. The day you were married to my son I was so proud, so happy, so proud. Your parents, bless them, if they could have been there I know they would have been proud too. And now – now I am very fond of you. It is a wonderful thing, to be married, to be welcomed into a new family. I was not born to this place. Ha –
no, this,’ she made a sweeping gesture, ‘all this came to me by marriage. I married Maurice when I was just out of school – that young, yes. He was on vacation in New York and somehow my cousin made the introduction. I adored him. My husband… We had the children. First, Marcus. And then I was pregnant for a second time. For five months and… I lost it. What do they say – miscarried? As if it were as simple as misplacing. No, it was terrible. I know this – terrible.’ She lowered her head. Looked up. ‘A year later, we had Olivia. Our daughter. Our family. We were happy, Maurice and I. Ups and downs – yes, of course. He “chased skirt”. I never said anything but I knew, there were signs: oh, long lunches, the usual. Once a friend even told me they’d seen him tête-è-tête in our favourite restaurant with… And there was an abortion.’ The sign of the cross. ‘Poor girl. But we weren’t making love so how could I blame him? I let him run. There were the children to think of. And I loved him. For forty-two years I loved him and then one day, one afternoon, on a spring day not unlike today, he died. Dropped dead. Out of the blue. The heart. We buried him – over there.’ She craned her neck and waved in the direction of the great oak. ‘A week later my daughter left me. With no warning. First one, then the other – just like that. Well, it’s true she fell in love with a pig. A pig. I’d tried everything to stop her but, of course – stone ears. Then one day: gone. It was as if she… vanished. I didn’t hear from her for twelve years. Nothing. Not… nothing. And today she is home. Your child is with God. You have samples: there will be another. You must talk to your husband. You must bury this baby. In a short time no-one will speak of it. That is good. Things are not diminished by being left alone.’