by Alex Miller
A surge of anger rose in him. He turned and went out into the hall, then opened the door and went down the stairs and out into the street. He just had to get away from her. She could do that without a word to him! He walked fast at first, down to the corner and turning into the street on the left. There was no one about. It was always so quiet. A dog barked at him from behind a hedge and he jumped, his heart batting against his ribs. ‘Fuck you!’ he yelled. The dog became frenzied. A woman popped her head up from behind the hedge and gazed at him with a startled look. He almost shouted at her, but held it back. On he went, striding out. Then he swung around and went back the way he’d come. The woman watched him approaching. As he went by he said hello. She didn’t react but stood staring at him, the dog barking madly. He went into the house and up the stairs. In the kitchen Lena was still sitting at the table.
He said, ‘You don’t know or care what’s at stake for me in this.’ He stood looking at her. It wasn’t only anger but sadness he was feeling now. ‘You’ve had everything in your life. You’ve never had to struggle for anything. And now you sit around doing nothing and going on believing you’re special and must be looked after and taken care of while other people work and struggle for the things they want.’ His feeling of the injustice of the way she was behaving. She went to speak and he jumped in, ‘No! You don’t give a fuck, do you? I know what I want and you’re blocking me from doing it. What the fuck do you want? Just tell me. I’ll believe you. I’ll help you do it. What is it that you want?’
She said calmly, ‘I don’t know what I want. If I knew what I wanted to do with my life, I’d be doing it.’
‘So you’re envious and you want to block me. Is that it? I’d like to understand. I really fucking would.’
‘I didn’t ask you to drop everything and come chasing after me.’
‘But you knew I would. Have you written to Birte? I bet you haven’t. You only think about yourself.’ He felt weary of the game she was forcing him to play. He sat down. ‘Give me the bottle opener.’
She reached across and opened the drawer next to the sink and handed him the bottle opener. He opened the quart of beer. ‘Do you want one?’
‘Yes, please.’ She reached over and took two glasses out of the cupboard without getting up and watched him fill each of them carefully to the brim. He handed a glass to her. She took a sip. ‘Cheers,’ she said. ‘Not knowing what I want from life haunts me day and night. I don’t know what to do about it.’
He drank some beer then took his mother’s letter from the envelope and read it again. ‘You’ve read my mother’s letters. Plenty of times. You must see this is not her style?’
‘It didn’t occur to me.’
‘She’s nervous. She’s worried about meeting the middle-class wife of her difficult son.’ He met Lena’s gaze. ‘The instant I read this note, I knew I had to give in and go with you to see my parents. Anything else would be the behaviour of a madman. You’ve got me. Haven’t you? Are you happy now?’
She said, ‘You didn’t leave me much choice. I thought you’d be more angry.’
‘I am angry. It’s inside anger.’ He lit a cigarette then got up and went to the window and looked out at the lit-up house next door. Huge and grand and apparently deserted. He’d never seen anyone going in or coming out. He turned around. ‘If you haven’t got anything planned for dinner, there’s an Indian place near the station. We could give it a try.’
She said, ‘I thought I’d make an omelette for us.’
‘Is the omelette for us, or is it just for me?’
‘Don’t start, please. Let’s just have one evening without discussing my diet, can we?’
He sat down again and drank some more of the beer. He held the glass up and looked at it. ‘Dad mixed this with brown ale. He called it black and tan. It’s funny the things you remember. I’d never drink this in Australia.’ He looked across at Lena. ‘Mr Haida has an identity problem too. There are people like me all over the world. He said he envies me my need to be a writer. He doesn’t have a need, he said. He lost it, he says, by staying too long in one job. He’s cheerful on the outside and sad on the inside. I like him a lot.’
‘Will you write to him when we get home?’
‘I don’t know. What’s the point?’ He got up from the table and went into the bedroom to change out of his suit. He could hear Lena getting the meal together in the kitchen. She had fucked some bloke on the ship coming out and he hadn’t felt betrayed by it. Writing to his mother without telling him felt like more of a betrayal. The thought of seeing his parents made him anxious. He wondered if his ideas about these things were normal.
He put on his jeans and hoped Lena had thought to buy mushrooms. He didn’t like bland eggy omelettes. He went back into the kitchen and sat down and watched her at the gas stove. He was hungry. ‘Dad will show you how to make a real omelette.’
She said, ‘We should take them something. What do you think they’d like?’
‘Mum would probably like it if we had the telephone installed so she could call my sister and chat to her grandchildren. Dad would think it was a hint from me that he should have put the telephone on for Mum years ago himself. He’d think I was suggesting he was a failure and was too poor or too stupid to think of it. He’d feel rebuked. It’s probably a good idea. I’ll check with the phone people.’
‘Think of something before Saturday,’ she said. ‘Something that will please them both. Not something that’s going to start a row with your dad.’
‘I’ll see what I can come up with.’ He watched her in silence for a while. ‘And you and I will go together in the morning and book our flights home to Melbourne.’
‘We’ll go to Sydney,’ she said.
‘Sydney?’ Another surprise to wrong-foot him. Another little manoeuvre in her complicated negotiations. But he couldn’t have cared less. So long as they were going home and he could start writing. He had imagined himself writing in Keith’s study, his own books and Keith’s books around him. Now he saw an empty room in Sydney, sunlight pouring in through a long thin window, reflecting off the polished floor, dazzling his vision.
‘Melbourne for me is like Downham for you,’ she said. She turned around from the stove. ‘Try to understand that.’
‘So why are you forcing me to return to Downham?’
‘It’s different. I need to meet your parents.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know what I want from life. I wish to God I did. I don’t expect you to understand. But I hope you can put up with it. I don’t want to pick up where I left off. I’ll never live at the Red Bluff house ever again. It would defeat me.’
32
They got off the Bromley bus opposite Grove Park station. It was a cold blustery Saturday with a spit of rain in the air, women dragging unwilling kids by the hand, men with their coat collars turned up against the chill of the wind, the smell of stale beer wafting across the road from the pub, a pale sun struggling to come through, the clouds grey and streaked with silver rushing along close overhead. He remembered these clouds. There was a nostalgia for him in the memory, a touch of sadness at the sight of these perfectly recollected clouds. The clouds had not changed, but something had been lost. He didn’t think he would ever be able to talk about it, this subtle loss of meaning. In England his emotional life was like a room filled with boxes marked Never to be opened.
Lena had bought herself an expensive new black overcoat. They walked across the road together and he turned to her and said, ‘You look really good in that coat.’ It suited her. She looked cosy and at home in it. Safe from chills. No one could have guessed she was a starveling underneath. She even looked interesting. Possibly sexy. She had a grey woollen scarf tucked into the collar of the coat, and a small dark grey woollen hat. After crossing the road she stood in the shelter of a shop doorway and refreshed her lipstick. They went on up the hill past Dr Hopman’s house with its bright red front door. Dear Dr Hopman, who had once come in the night during the Blitz to see Rob
ert’s sister and had stayed for breakfast and raced him to see which of them could finish his boiled egg first. Robert stopped to read the brass plate. Dr Hopman’s name was no longer there. The door was still red, the surgery still a surgery. The red light above the door. His chest was tight with memory and love. The strange beautiful pain of it. His bold leap carrying him to the other side of the world, to the limitless plains of the Gulf Country with Frankie and his mob, and here he was again, standing outside Dr Hopman’s old surgery, just as if time had collapsed in on him and he had never made the leap but had only dreamed it.
Lena squeezed his arm. ‘It’s going to be all right.’
They turned down Bedevere Road at the corner where his father had given a last wave when he returned to the front after a brief leave, his uniform and his kitbag and his gun, his arm raised, signalling his love to his son. You’re in charge now, son. Take care of your mother and your sister. Robert, a small boy, sitting in the window of the flat, his face pressed to the glass, gazing at his father till the very last second, his heart stilled by his terror that he was never to see his father again, the nightmare of the telegram boy running up the stairs to their door. His dad! His deep puzzling love for him rendering Robert helpless. Now he was afraid of seeing him.
‘There it is,’ he said. And he pointed to where the dark brick three-storey block of flats stood four-square at the far end of the street facing the T-junction with Pendragon Road. Their old top-storey flat set in a mansard roof with three dormer windows overlooking the gardens below. Home. Flanked on either side by cottages. The arch of the central entrance facing them at the bottom of the hill like an open mouth, the street lined by mature elm trees, leafless now. ‘My bedroom was the last window on the left,’ he said. ‘They’ll be watching from the other two windows. Waiting for us. They’ll be as nervous as I am.’ He laughed. ‘I’ve often imagined this.’
Lena said, ‘But it’s beautiful. You said you lived in a housing commission estate. This is lovely.’
The streets were deserted. No gangs of boys. No broken fences with palings missing. No broken windows. No rubble of bombed-out houses, their old adventure playgrounds. The bomb damage repaired long ago, the pallor of the new bricks beside the old, the lives of the dead forgotten. Gardens with the wintry remains of flowers and shrubs, privet hedges neatly clipped. One or two cars parked by the kerb.
They reached the bottom of the hill and went in through the arched entrance and climbed the stairs. Two flights of concrete stairs to each floor, the iron handrail freshly painted black, the stairs scrubbed. His vivid dream of jumping from the top step of the last flight and finding himself held up by a magical force, floating gracefully to the bottom. A dream repeated again and again when he was five or six years of age. And every time he reached that top step, the dizzying temptation to make the leap.
This was that same place. But it was not that place. Home was somewhere else. This was the place of his childhood in fact only. And he understood, with a sudden conviction, that facts were not enough for reality.
His father opened the door to them. Behind him the small entrance hall where they had hung their coats and taken off their shoes. Coats hanging there now in the shadows behind his father, the smell of the cloth. Except for his receding grey hair his father looked unchanged, the pallor of his skin unlined, tight across his broad forehead. That memory had been correct. His resemblance to Martin was safe. It was true. Robert was glad he hadn’t made it up. His memories were not to be entirely contradicted by the facts. He said, ‘Hi, Dad.’ He hesitated, wondering for an uncertain moment whether to embrace him and seeing at once that it was not on. His father had never been one for displays of affection. ‘This is Lena, Dad.’
‘How are you, son?’ They didn’t shake hands. ‘Your mother saw the pair of you coming down Bedevere Road.’ His dark Glasgow working man’s brogue had not softened. He would never be English.
Lena stepped up to him and kissed him on the cheek. They embraced each other warmly and without hesitation. Robert had never seen his father do this, not even with his mother. Lena took his arm and they went ahead of Robert into the front room. Robert followed them. It was the room he remembered.
His mother was standing by the sideboard, one hand to the edge of the polished wood, her glasses glinting in the light from the windows. The flat had always been bright, even on the gloomiest days, sitting up there above the other houses. Robert went up to his mother and put his arms around her, and they held each other. She said softly in his ear, ‘I had a feeling you were here. I just knew I was going to be seeing you soon.’
He was moved to find that her smell was still the pure and lovely smell of his mother. His mother’s smell! They stepped away from each other and she laughed, perhaps so as not to cry, the emotion of the moment going through her. He had never seen her cry. She looked at his father and Lena, his father helping Lena off with her coat. ‘Before you know it,’ his mother said, ‘he’ll be wanting to show her his London and the countryside of Kent.’
Lena came over and she and Robert’s mother embraced briefly. His mother squeezed Lena’s bicep. ‘You’re looking a bit peaky, darling. Is it the travelling? You could do with a bit of building up. Is he not feeding you properly?’ She was as direct with Lena as Birte had been with him at their first meeting, assuming the right to an immediate intimacy. Robert realised he’d been wrong to think she would be nervous at the idea of meeting his wife. His mother’s North Country accent had mellowed, but there was still a touch of Irish in it somewhere, a faint echo of her own mother and her own distant beginnings, something yet cherished by her from her childhood.
Lena said, ‘What a beautiful room.’
Robert experienced a little thrill of delight to hear her approving of his parents’ style, the warm homeliness of their living room. The gas fire was burning. ‘You did away with the coal fire then?’ he said.
‘We had to,’ his mother said. ‘The Council changed them over when the new regulations came in. Do you remember the pea-soupers? You got bronchitis every winter. Do you still suffer with your chest these days?’
‘I’ve never had the flu since I left.’
‘Keeping your father’s chef’s hats white was a terrible struggle. Everything was black with the soot in those days. I’ll make us a cup of tea.’ She gave him a private smile and squeezed his hand and went out to the kitchen. She did not close the door. He didn’t feel it would be quite the right thing to join her, but he wanted to. There were things he wanted to talk about with her. He was sure his father wouldn’t mind being left on his own with Lena.
The sun had broken through and was shining into the room, the leafless branches of the old elm tree outside the window black and still. A little wave of sadness went through him. It was all there: the polished sideboard with the ticking clock, the big square table in the middle of the room, covered with a Persian rug, the china cabinet with its shelves of treasures his father had collected over the years—the Cadogan teapot and the precious old porcelain coffee set with the paintings on it, and the Chinese jade pieces, the collection of little Japanese ivories, old men carrying burdens of one kind and another. It was all still there, their lives going on with it. And the secret drawer in the bottom of the china cabinet where his dad had kept his collection of the erotic drawings by the Frenchman Félicien Rops. His mother’s silent toleration of them. Were they still there? And the bookshelves over to the left of the fire, filled with his father’s collection of poetry and literature, Burns and the Glasgow poets, the set of Scott’s Waverley novels, all read and reread and loved nearly to death over the years. And the pictures around the walls. His father’s own watercolours and the two precious sketches by John Sell Cotman, his father’s hero and idol, picked out with his quick eye one grey morning at the Bermondsey market.
Robert watched his father taking a folio from the shelves to show to Lena. His dad said over his shoulder, ‘Brian Rush went to America. He married a beautiful girl from Los Angeles
.’
Brian had lived next door. He and Robert were friends off and on. Never anything serious. He was an only child and was never one of the gang out in the street or on conker raids. A studious loner, so he had seemed then, always welcomed into the front room by Robert’s father, the two of them sharing books. Brian’s dad was a gloomy man with massive hands, like the hands of a giant. A stoker on the night shift at the gasworks.
‘Good for him,’ Robert said. He had not really liked Brian all that much.
‘When his father died, Brian came home and took his mother back to the States with him.’ A pause for effect. Then, ‘You weren’t the only one who left the estate.’
Robert said, ‘Are you still painting?’
Lena said, ‘I’d love to see your drawings, Mr Crofts. Robert has told me how much he used to love going into the country with you for the day and sketching and painting.’
Robert caught his father’s eye and they exchanged a look in which there was for an instant a clear grain of that love of those old innocent days, the fleeting edge of its wing brushing them both, something not of the present but composed of memory, like a fleck of gold in a fast-running stream. His dad had hoped then that Robert would become an artist, inspired by his influence. Robert might have told him that the skill had saved him from despair when he drew his picture of the fighting man. But how to tell his father that? The desperation that had gripped him then, it was not something for telling.
Robert pulled out a chair and sat at the table and watched the two of them. His father wasn’t going to ask him about his writing. And probably not about anything else. His father was in his own world, showing Lena his books. A greater mystery in the books for him than was in his own drawings and paintings. Many of his books were early editions and he was proud of them. She was admiring the 1820 first edition of Keats’s The Eve of St Agnes. Robert knew the book well. His father was looking at Lena with admiration. Robert heard him say, ‘It’s yours, Lena.’