Tad arrived home around midnight; the muffled sounds of Der Rosenkavalier carried to me through my closed bedroom door, and the sounds of food preparation. I ignored a gentle knock on my door; after a time the music ceased and everything was quiet.
I couldn’t sleep. I rose early — long before Tad would be awake — and booked a seat on the first flight to Adelaide. I scribbled a note for Tad, then rang Alison, at home, and asked her to cancel my appointments for a week.
‘What’s wrong, Mara? Are you ill?’
‘No. I’m fine.’
‘you sound … strange. Out of breath. Are you sure everything is all right?’
‘I’m a little tight in the chest. It’s nothing.’
Breakfast noises could be heard in the background, the sounds of a suburban family rising and preparing for the day: the high bird voices of children, the clatter of cutlery, a whistling kettle. Speech was difficult for me, and not just because of asthma; something else suddenly clogged my throat; those ordinary background sounds had a poignancy I couldn’t explain.
‘I’ll be gone for a week,’ I told her. ‘Back home to Adelaide.’
‘This is very sudden.’
I lied: ‘Family illness.’
I rewrote my note to Tad, incorporating this impromptu lie, for reasons of consistency. I was going home to Mother, I suppose. Or, more accurately, going home to myself, seeking refuge in the only safe house I knew. And if that also meant going home to Mother, it was coincidental: she happened to be living where I wanted to hide.
I remember nothing of the flight, or the cab trips that sandwiched it at each end. I was preoccupied, chewing the same obsessive cud of thoughts that had kept me awake the night before. I had never felt so confused and so alone. Was I being employed — being used — merely to manufacture children for Hollis and Mary-Beth Schultz? Why had I been kept in the dark about so many things? And Scanlon — what was his part in this? His emotional grip on me was growing; I wanted to resist it, at least until I had properly thought it through.
I found myself knocking on my mother’s door with only a vague memory of how I came to be there. The door opened to reveal a stranger: an octogenarian male clad only in a bathrobe and mottled, wrinkled skin.
‘You must be Mara,’ he said.
I was yanked back to the world of things in a hurry. An Adelaide suburb assembled itself around me. It was raining; I was standing in the rain, wet and shivering in my light Queensland clothes. A taxi was pulling out into the street behind me.
My mother emerged from a bedroom into the hall behind the stranger, looking confused and embarrassed: ‘I wasn’t expecting you till Christmas, dear.’
Some kind of loose kimono was wrapped about her compact bulk; her skin, exposed in various places, glistened, as if varnished with oil.
‘I should have rung,’ I mumbled. ‘Or written.’
‘Um — this is Albert, dear. A friend. From the golf club. Albert, this is my Mara.’
Albert offered a glistening hand, slippery with oil, and immediately withdrew it, embarrassed. I stalked past to my former bedroom.
My mother appeared in the door a few minutes later, fully dressed, carefully brushed and combed, her oiled skin scrubbed and roughened. I might have been amused, given freedom to concentrate on anything except myself: the minister’s widow from the country, discovering sexuality at the age of seventy. Was it never too late?
‘I meant to write to you about Bert, dear. He’s been such a help. Around the house. Handyman things.’
No joke was intended. I was unpacking clothes, hanging blouses and skirts. I didn’t answer. Men had become a difficult subject for me. She fiddled and twitched at the hems of a few things as I laid them across the bed.
‘This is nice, dear. I haven’t seen it before, have I?’
‘A birthday present to myself.’
‘Did you get the woollens I sent? You never wrote back. Not that you have much need of woollens up there, I suppose. But it was so lonely after you left. I had a lot of knitting in me.’
‘Is your friend living here?’
‘He stays on weekends. In the spare room. As I said, I’ve been so lonely. A house needs a man.’
‘Can you trust him?’ I said. ‘He’s not just using you? Sniffing around for his regular fuck.’
She was speechless for a few moments, her mouth open: ‘Mara, I can’t believe that you would say such things! Such language! You don’t even know him.’
‘I know the type.’
‘He’s the most gentle man you could hope to meet.’
‘They’re the worst type.’
‘Mara, it’s no wonder you never found a husband.’
I sat on the edge of the bed, folding and stacking underclothes into a drawer, trying not to listen.
‘I sometimes wonder what happened to you,’ she said. ‘To my little girl. When you … changed. When you became so hard.’
‘I haven’t changed, Mum.’
‘So … cynical,’ she added, and then, as if remembering that she hadn’t seen me for some time, and that it was a bit early for criticism, began to tweak and fuss at my hair.
‘Why don’t you do something with this hair while you’re here, dear. A perm. Even a simple bun. I have someone down the road you should see.’
I twisted free of her. My throat was clogging up again, my eyes seemed under a great pressure of tears. I had been holding them back for some time, suppressing them; now my chest heaved and they shoved their way free, burst to the surface, filled my eyes, rolled down my cheeks.
I hadn’t cried for thirty years, but it still felt the same, exactly the same. Embarrassed, not knowing what to do, my mother rested a tentative hand on my shoulder, then lifted it off again:
‘Mara, whatever is the matter, dear? Do you want to talk about it?’
Even as she mouthed the words she was backing towards the door, helpless in the face of real misery:
‘Perhaps you should have a lie down, dear. You must be tired after the trip. I’m sure you’ll feel better after a sleep. Then we can talk about it.’