by Wendy James
Only one had been more complicated. His last affair had occurred not long after Tom was born. Wanda Robinson. She had been a young solicitor he’d employed, newly graduated, who had expected serious commitment and had made it widely known – with letters to Jodie, his mother, a glass of wine flung in his face at some function. After the Wanda Robinson debacle, he had had to make a very public decision about where his allegiances lay, had to grow up, as it were, suddenly realising that he didn’t want to lose his family. He had sworn to himself and to Jodie: never again. And though opportunities had continued to come his way – after all, Angus was a good-looking, increasingly powerful man in his small-pond city – he had managed to keep his promise.
Until now.
29
Manon has asked to spend the day alone with Jodie, going over her story.
‘It’s important that we do it without anyone else around – just so you don’t offer the expected version,’ she’d explained. ‘I’m certain there must be something you haven’t mentioned, or haven’t remembered. Maybe something that doesn’t seem important. Something we can use.’
Jodie makes them coffee, piles a plate with biscuits, and the two women sit in the sun room, in an attempt to make the whole process as casual, as comfortable as possible – though Jodie can sense that this sharp little woman is anything but casual. Manon claims Angus’s favourite leather recliner, slips off her shoes and pulls up her slender legs, a notebook perched on top of her knees, while Jodie sits on the edge of the lounge opposite, strangely awkward even in her own home. She has met Manon a few times over the years, and despite her daughter’s enthusiasm, her own affection for Assia, has always felt slightly intimidated by her, sensing the other woman’s mild contempt for her stay-at-home status and feeling dowdy, rustic, slow, in her company. Now, forced into this strange professional relationship, she is reassured by the woman’s undoubted competence, her understanding of what’s ahead, her determination to succeed. She feels certain that if anyone can sort out this mess she’s in, it’s Manon.
She makes Jodie start right at the beginning – from her meeting with the boy – and go to the end. She fires questions: fast, blunt, one after another without respite or any consideration for feelings, emotions: Who was he? Where did you meet him? How many times did you fuck him? No subject is off limits, no topic too sensitive, no wound too tender. When did you find out you were pregnant? Why did you take so long to realise? And then, with the first hint of genuine feminine interest: How did you hide it – how would, how could, anyone hide a pregnancy? Manon confesses that she herself had become monstrous during her pregnancies – her stomach and all parts of her body swelling to elephantine proportions by the sixth month – there was no way to disguise it. Jodie describes the loose tracksuits, big T-shirts, the gradual all-over weight gain, the small swell of her stomach even at term, her housemate’s three-month absence during the university break – the only time when her pregnancy was in any way evident. She had had no good friends at uni, and it was easy to stay in the flat, almost completely secluded for those last few months. She had had some savings, and anyway her student allowance was more than enough to live on.
Manon asks about Belfield: this particular hospital – why did you choose it? Jodie explains her reasoning. The distance from home, the improbability of meeting anyone she knew, the cheap hotel where she stayed the weeks before. Mostly – the hope that she wouldn’t be noticed there, that she would be just another teenage pregnancy, that an adoption would be easy to arrange at such a place.
Through all of this, Manon listens intently, her head tilted to one side, like an intelligent bird. She asks question after question, notes everything. But it is Jodie’s account of the events in the hospital that engage her most concentrated attention. She sits up straight after Jodie’s first rendition, her feet sliding back onto the ground. She stops writing, leans forward, closes her eyes as Jodie recites and then recites again each small detail of her stay there – five times, eight times, ten times, until it is only the syntax of her recitation that varies.
‘Tell me again about the midwife, about this Matron O’Malley. What she said to you – about keeping you isolated, keeping the other midwives away.’
‘She said something like, “Don’t worry, I’ve done this before – it’s easy. Just say that Matron is looking after you, and the other nurses will know to steer clear.” I mean, they’re not her exact words, obviously, but it was something like that.’
‘As if it wasn’t all that unusual, like it was something she’d done before, no?’ There’s a suppressed excitement in her voice, all at once she sounds foreign. European. Her voice as exotic as her looks.
‘I suppose so. Yes.’
‘That’s it then!’ Manon stands up and yawns, stretches. ‘The matron. She’ll be your defence.’
‘I don’t understand. How can she help? She’s dead.’
Manon smiles down at her. ‘Then she should count her blessings.’
Angus returns home late in the afternoon – he has taken time off, collected both the children and run them to their various activities, arrives home harried, irritable. He gives Jodie – preparing a rudimentary spaghetti bolognese – a perfunctory kiss, then rushes to the study, where Manon has set up a temporary workspace. When the two of them come back into the kitchen together, talking intently, Jodie can tell – and it’s not a guess, but knowledge, deep and inescapable. She can see it in the way that Angus speaks to the other woman, the awkwardness, stiffness, the slightly wary holding back. And he’s especially solicitous of Jodie, asking what she needs, what he can do to help. There’s no apparent sign from Manon, though: she’s brusque, blunt, businesslike – her conversation confined to the case, her thesis, their strategy.
His first affair – or what Jodie has always assumed was his first – had come as a shock, about three years into their marriage. Angus had only been a relatively junior solicitor when the woman, Angela – who was considerably older than them, in her late thirties – had joined the firm as a partner. Hannah was only a few months old, and Jodie had been completely rapt in new motherhood – blissed out and bewildered in equal measure, stumbling through the strange new terrain as if half blind – utterly oblivious to anything much beyond the daily round of feeding, changing, sleeping. She had met Angela, of course, at one or two company dinners, but had barely been aware of her existence, and so had been completely unprepared when Angus had admitted tearfully a few years later that the affair had run almost the entire time the woman had been in Arding – over a year – that Angela’s decision to relocate had been made only after their mutual determination to end it. There had been others since – some he’d confessed to, others she’d surmised.
After Wanda, the affair that had blown up hugely, Angus was desperate to keep Jodie, to keep their family intact, had promised that it would never happen again. He told her he loved her, over and over. And she’d believed him, trusted him.
His remorse has always seemed so genuine that Jodie has managed to forgive him these betrayals. Forgetting has been harder – she still feels the memory of each betrayal physically – like a sharp blow to her ribs, powerful enough to make her gasp, to leave her momentarily breathless. Even now, when everything has been so pared back that the reality of their partnership seems little more than custom, still the prospect of Angus leaving, of Angus not loving her, fills her with terror.
Now, she serves the spaghetti to the four of them – Angus, the two children, Manon – then delays sitting down with them at the table, finding saucepans to scrub, benches to wipe, all the while surreptitiously watching from the kitchen. She sees the laughing smile Manon gives Angus after some comment or other, the way their fingers touch, swiftly, almost unnoticeably, when he passes her the salad, the way Angus cannot stop himself from looking at her – gazing at her – even when she is only eating, or talking to the children. And Hannah, too, is enraptured, so keen to engage Manon, talking to her intently, hands flying, her eyes alight,
enthusiastic in a way that Jodie hasn’t witnessed for months. And Manon’s response, easy, unaffected, without all the weight and strain that characterises Jodie’s mothering. Only Tom is impervious, intent only on his meal, twirling the spaghetti on his fork, eagerly shovelling it in.
And only Tom has noticed Jodie’s absence; he looks up when she joins them, and gives her a curious smile. ‘Where have you been?’ She smiles back, but doesn’t answer, sits down beside him and fills her bowl. But she can’t eat. Instead, she listens to her daughter giving a scathing critique of some obscure French actor’s recent cinema performance, Manon’s ironic rejoinder, her husband’s amused chuckling. She pours herself a generous glass of wine, and sips, watching them enjoy themselves, savour one another’s company, all determinedly disregarding the reason they’re all together. Every now and then a comment is directed her way, or Tom’s, but the conversation belongs to Manon and Hannah – with Angus providing the occasional fact, the odd quip. As she clears away the dishes, her own bowl emptied by an unapologetically starving Tom, Jodie idly wonders what she should have done differently. What she can do. Wonders whether she has the energy to do anything at all. Wonders whether it’s worth it anyway.
30
Angus is consumed.
He wonders vaguely how much it has to do with Jodie – whether this particular betrayal is deliberate, some type of punishment or an unconscious outlet for his anger. For there’s no escaping the fact that ever since the announcement of the inquest – and perhaps even before that – Angus has become incandescently angry, and this anger is driving him almost as much as his ardour. He’s not really certain, what it is he is angry about. He knows that it’s not any sort of reasonable response to her unimaginable plight: the desperate pregnancy, the lonely birth, the panic-filled days that followed – how could any of this fail to produce in him sympathy, even pity, for this woman he has lived with and loved, the mother of his children? Though one part of him must judge her youthful actions as stupid, irresponsible – how could she? – he knows that she’s a good woman now, that she was a good woman then, at worst possessed of a strange moral innocence that had everything to do with her childhood, her upbringing. And even when he lets himself go to that place where he shouldn’t, when he questions her story, wonders whether she is lying, whether she is in fact a cold-blooded murderer – even this is not enough to inspire anger. Disgust, yes. And perhaps dislike, though there are reserves of sympathy in him that could accommodate even that, he thinks. He is not a hypocrite, is well aware that he has failed miserably to stick to the moral straight and narrow himself.
No, it’s the mess, the hideous mess that she has made of all their lives – Hannah’s, Tom’s, his own, even his mother’s – that keeps the flame of his anger burning so self-righteously. He can feel the life they have made together, their family – all the hard work, the sacrifices, so many compromises – beginning to disintegrate, dissolve, can feel the cold wind from the chasm, an intimation of the underlying chaos.
But then, perhaps this has nothing to do with his anger. Perhaps he has no excuse, no way of justifying his actions, his desires.
Though he should be concentrating on work, on the coming inquest, right now all he can think of is Manon – her voice, her body, her smell – even a typed sheet of paper that he knows she has touched is a reminder of his unquenchable desire. He notices, just days into the affair, that the panic attacks have stopped – have disappeared as mysteriously as they came. Manon has cured him. He is no longer the sagging, balding, middle-aged has-been that Dave so eloquently described – breathing into a paper bag at the prospect of this being all there is. It’s as if his youthful self has been restored, but larger, stronger, more vital – potential conqueror of women, of worlds.
In his mind (absurd, in middle age, to become the sentimentalist he never was in youth!) he composes odes to her apricot breasts, to the soft, briny petals of her cunt, to her deft, muscular tongue. Manon has become the still centre of his spinning world, just at the moment when he knows he needs the world to be motionless, when he needs to see things clearly, more clearly than ever before.
Even in the depths of his madness, it is clear to Angus that Manon does not feel the same way about him. He is merely the provider of physical release, a vessel for her lust. The irony of this unfamiliar reversal does not escape him, but there’s nothing amusing about it. He knows there’s an end coming, and soon, that the world will cease spinning, that his landing will be painful. But for now he’s fixed in his revolutions, observing the world from a distinct, Manon-coloured perspective. Things may be falling apart – but right now he’s not at all inclined to keep them together.
Sydney Morning Herald, Daily Telegraph, The Australian, Courier-Mail, The Age, West Australian, The Land, Adelaide Advertiser, News of the Day, Who Weekly, Women’s Weekly, New Idea, Woman’s Day, etc.
Would anyone with any knowledge of any adoption arranged by Matron Sheila O’Malley of Belfield Hospital between 1972 and 1992 please contact Peter Silvers at Silvers Wood and Watson, Arding. (02) 6777 2331 or email [email protected]
31
With the announcement of the inquest it all seems to have got worse: the carefully phrased questions from friends, sniggers from enemies, pitying glances from teachers all driving Hannah spare. And the situation at home is tense, to put it mildly. Her mother is barely speaking, and her father is completely off the planet, too. Even the usually bright and breezy Tom has grown quiet and moody. Hannah wants nothing more than to escape from it all.
She is in town late one afternoon, has been wandering around with Assia – shopping for supplies for their coming weekend at Cosmic, an annual folk festival down in the Valley. It’s not an event that she would ordinarily attend, but Wes and a few of the other drama students are heading down, so she’s convinced Assia that they should go, too. She put it to her parents, who, distracted by everything else that is going on, agreed without too much questioning. So the girls buy the essentials for camping out – two-minute noodles, Coke, chocolate bars, some tinned fruit, sunscreen, insect repellent, matches, a torch – then visit a café where they share a big bowl of dense potato wedges. It is late when they leave the café and Assia heads back towards school, looking forward to the prospect of dinner later with Manon – but Hannah is too full, too loaded with shopping, to make the trip up the hill home. Instead, she decides to go to her father’s office – he will undoubtedly still be there – and bludge a lift.
She doesn’t understand what she is hearing, walking up the stairs to the office, has her mind on other things, and the muffled thumps don’t resolve into anything meaningful until she actually walks through his door. Her father’s secretary (or his Office Manager, as she prefers to be called) has already left, the lights in the waiting room are switched off, but Hannah can see a dim light shining beneath her father’s door, and there is obviously some sort of activity going on within. She knocks, opening the door just as an order to wait is shouted, meeting the wild eyes of her father, tie askew, caught in a position that would have been laughably clichéd were it not her father, and therefore beyond disgusting: her dad, pants around his ankles, a woman lying prone on the desk beneath him, half naked. The woman’s face is turned away, but Hannah recognises her immediately – knows that it is Assia’s mother, and most definitely not her own.
Hannah turns and runs through the office and down the stairs, ignoring the desperate entreaties of her father. She rushes through the alley beside the mall and then as far as she can in the opposite direction to home, pausing only when she’s forced to, breathless, a stitch in her side, in a deserted car park beside the car wash, bent over double and feeling sick. She tries hard to wipe the memory – equal parts humiliation and revulsion – from her mind, along with the tears that are suddenly streaming down her face. She texts Wes, almost without thinking, and he arrives, barely five minutes later, holds her while she tells him what she’s seen – hesitantly at first and then in a rush. When she’s
calm, he leads her to his car and they drive up to the lookout in his rusting Datsun. Wes doesn’t ask her any more about it – and she’s glad of his reticence, glad to be given space, to not be forced to think about it, sort it out. Right now she’s in no mood to be offered advice or consolation. Right now she wants to forget that particular scene – wants to forget her parents, forget Manon. Wesley rolls a joint and they sit together, holding hands, passing the joint back and forth, saying nothing, the Cat Empire calling Hello from the radio.
From the lookout there’s a clear view of Arding – and even from this perspective there’s no denying that Arding is a lovely place, aesthetically pleasing in every way, teeming with important historical buildings, charming cottages, beautiful European trees and sensational gardens. It’s neat and well maintained, the streets running tidily in a grid surrounding a central business and church district. It has two grand cathedrals, but nowadays they’re basically deserted, as is the traditional town centre. These days everyone flocks to the two new shopping malls, ugly concrete behemoths that bookend the town.
It’s not a bad place to grow up, or it shouldn’t be. But right now, with everything that’s going on, Hannah hates Arding. She hates its facile prettiness, its eager citizenry, despises its right-on reputation as a tolerant town, its pretensions to being an edgy, artsy, intellectual outpost – a kind of Balmain of the tablelands – almost as much as she detests the desperate gentility and subtle snobbery of her own social group. She hates the way nobody ever seems to leave, even her parents – who have had every opportunity – the way the concerns of one generation spill into the next and then the next. She knows that if they lived elsewhere, somewhere bigger, none of what was happening now would matter so much. The Garrows would be nobodies. Gloriously anonymous. No one would know them, know what was going on. And no one would really care.