HE WALKED ACROSS the morning, trampling a welter of shadows, a tidy, hard man, pushing the sunlight ahead of him. Carefully dressed down in too perfect casuals, Peter still felt uncomfortably aware that he was clothed as if going to a company barbecue. It had taken him a long time to decide what to wear, and though at last the garments were chosen, the Italian shirt even bought especially, he knew, as he walked along, that he could not achieve the casual disregard with which Bethany liked to see clothes worn. And the way she wore clothes so effectively herself.
It was a walk he might have enjoyed under other circumstances, but as it was he would have preferred not to have been seen abroad in this street. Still, the airport bus had put him down just a few hundred yards distant, so there he was. The street was wide and tree-lined, well established now, though that was not the way it had been when he bought the section and had the house built for his wife. But he had known then what it would be, that street — a broad band of green grass and middle-class values where he would be able to sell well when he could afford a still better move. The neighbourhood had turned out just that way, with silver birches grown up and neat block walls, even a tennis court or two stretching down to the fencelines bounded by shasta and Michaelmas daisies. The painted letterboxes stood in line with wrought-iron numerals fixed on them and, by common agreement of all in the street, camellias were planted uniformly along the edge of the grassed verges, apple blossom sasanquas to cast a glimmer of pale pink ice in winter. And the people were right too, not given to squabbling in public, neither very wealthy nor living in poverty. No one talked about the Viet Cong, or abused God, except in swearing which was different, or made love on the lawn as Bethany had suggested they should do and they hadn’t. Oh yes, he had chosen well.
And it had seemed to him that Bethany, too, would grow with, and as, the flowers and the shrubs. True, her style was her own and not inherited, but then neither was his. She had worked in a laboratory where she had to use her brains; there was some standing with the job, and it contained her exuberance enough to make it charming. So why had she not mellowed and moulded with the years into the shape of the street and its inhabitants?
More strangely still, why, despite her incongruity among the coffee parties and club bazaars and the jumble sale pricing, the cashmere and Munro spun tweeds, did they tolerate her, and not him — who had tried so hard?
For though they might appear to ignore conflict, the people did feel here, and care — and, most of all, they wondered. Right now, eyes would be watching him, eyes that knew him, that would consider his movements with memory and knowledge, and the pursuit of drama. Eyes that would wait hungrily for developments. Ears that would listen. Children who must suddenly be still. A surreptitious phone call. Peter is back.
So, at last he came to his house, and knew instinctively that if the woman was there at all, she would be on the porch at the back on a day like this.
As he rounded the corner he felt a sudden knot collecting in his stomach. Up until now this visit had not assumed reality. Carefully considered, yes. The possibilities planned, most certainly. But the emotions carefully contained, because one knew that, deep down, they were waiting there, ready to rise up out of a lost stratum, to engulf him if he was unwary.
He shut his eyes against the sunlight and panic for an instant, paused just long enough for the knot to subside, then walked briskly forward.
The section was much the same as when he and Bethany had lived there together. Only the fence now leaned at a droll angle towards the neighbour’s vegetable garden and lank weeks struggled with the flowing colours of untended summer flowers. Bright waterlily dahlias, perennial phlox and a wild dream rose, the one they called ‘First Love’, grew raggedly, falling across the edges of the proliferating grass. In one corner sunflowers propped themselves indolently against the garage, and in another a plum tree spread enormous branches laden with ripening fruit. He would have thinned the sunflowers long ago, and he knew that the plum would lose half its fruit because the tree was too heavy.
And there was Bethany, as of old, seated on steps, baring long, golden legs to the light. Her dress was of heavy orange and brown linen, too hot for the day, yet the colours somehow right for it. The skirt was tucked into the legs of her panties. Her shoulders were slumped against the verandah post, so that her breasts were thrust forward, and the top of the dress was pulled down to her brassiere so that there also she could soak up the warmth.
She opened her eyes when she heard his footstep and, with a quick involuntary movement, pulled up her top with one hand, and her skirt down with the other, fumbling so that the book that had been in her lap fell to the ground.
He nodded. ‘Hullo,’ he said, and sat down beside her on the step.
‘Hullo,’ she said.
They smiled briefly, preserving the habits of civility, then simultaneously shrugged and turned away.
‘Gerald’s out,’ she said.
‘I guessed he would be.’
‘Of course. You would have known.’ Simple flat statements.
‘Cigarette?’
‘Thanks.’ She took it from him, and he lit it for her, noticing, as he used to, how her unlipsticked mouth was a soft pucker around the cigarette, a ripple in yielding flesh; not tense little corrugations like most women offered. He had a quick vision of her entire body and imagined sex, cursing himself as he did, knowing she would know.
‘I thought I ought to see you,’ he said sharply.
‘Thank you,’ she said, resting her head on her hand, and not looking at him. ‘That was gracious of you.’
This was better, he thought, the old familiar needling; it helped at times.
‘I haven’t seen the children for a long while.’
‘There’s nothing to prevent you,’ Bethany replied. She gazed into distance, or at a sunflower, he could not be sure, and her remoteness irritated him as, a moment before, her nearness had disturbed him.
‘I’ve been offered a job with the firm in Australia,’ he said. ‘When the divorce goes through Patsy and I thought that we might do — that it would — perhaps — be best for us. So — I thought —’ he spread his hands awkwardly. ‘Oh I don’t know.’
‘You thought that you should see that Gerald didn’t beat me, and that your children loved him like a father, and that we would get ourselves safely married so that you’d be free from any responsibility to us, and that your conscience would be quite clear as you sailed — sorry, jetted — off into the blue with Patsy.’
She paused and glanced sideways. ‘Your conscience always gave you hell. Funny.’
He wanted to defend himself, but couldn’t. He wanted to say, I didn’t leave you for Patsy, she came after — after, when I was lonely and I wanted to come back and I couldn’t, because you had found someone else. Which I should have known. Which was fair. But it hurt. Picking someone up with ease, like a flower from the roadside, like plucking a man, any man, out of nowhere, out of inspiration.
Any man? Not Gerald, he wasn’t any man. She wouldn’t make the same mistake so easily again.
‘Can’t you make it with Patsy when your conscience is troubling you? You were always susceptible to outside influences.’
He flushed and she laughed, a short, dry noise deep in her throat, like static.
‘Still, you never could leave well alone,’ she added.
So he said nothing, resting his elbows on his knees, letting his hands hang down between his legs, trailing blue smoke from his cigarette. Words, he thought, always words, and a surfeit of quick answers and cool laughter. Did they laugh, iced water laughs, when they thought of him? Crisp sprinkles of derision, remembering him, after love. Or worse, did they remember him at all?
Whereas he thought of them often. Imagined their bedroom, a jumble of clothes and bedcovers and her nut-coloured hair, thick and uncombed on rumpled pillows. And Gerald — but, no, he couldn’t really think of Gerald. So then he would talk to Patsy about the untidiness of the lives of people like Bethany and Gerald and she would agree and he’d be comforted with the sense of his own orderliness. For wasn’t it Bethany who had resisted the flat lawns and bevel-edged hedges and the new wallpaper in the hallway each spring where she had let the children put their dirty hands, and the kitchen repainted annually because the fat splashed over and her cigarettes burned holes while she read books?
Which he and Patsy would never stand for. And he would know that he couldn’t have stood it any more and had been right to go, and there was no need to justify it all over again.
He turned over the book she had dropped. Lines of poetry sprang out of it —
Love is blankets full of strange delights
Love is when you don’t put out the light
Love is —
And do they laugh when the bed is warm?
Love is you and Love is me
Love is a prison and love is free …
‘How are the children?’ he said at last.
‘They’re fine. You’ve no need to worry,’ she said carelessly. ‘They really do love him like a father.’
Love’s what’s there when you’re away from me.
She shrugged again at his look. ‘Well, that’s good, isn’t it? Isn’t that what you want? For them to be happy?’
‘And the neighbours?’ Again he felt the watching eyes.
‘Look,’ she said impatiently. ‘Look really.’ She flung her hands open protestingly. ‘After all, you did leave me.’
‘You don’t seem to care much,’ he remarked, bridling.
‘Why should I care?’ she cried out. ‘You — left — me,’ spacing each word so that it became weighted with meaning.
‘You’re all right then?’
But she only arched her throat and let the laughter out again, this time more gently. He looked at her, wondering, almost hoping.
‘Would you like some coffee?’ she said.
‘Have you tea?’
‘Oh, of course.’ Bethany grimaced at her forgetfulness, caught out that she had forgotten the habits of their lives together. Tea for breakfast, tea at mid-morning, for lunch, and every time they sat down to eat, except after dinner when, for her sake, they made coffee.
‘I’ve got China tea,’ she said, wrinkling her brow with vexation, ‘but that’s awful with milk and you won’t have it without. Some juice then? It’s very hot.’
Peter nodded. ‘Yes, that would be nice.’
She went into the house. His house. After a while he followed her in, wanting to see her in it again.
His house. It was the same, they hadn’t changed the furniture. But his eyes were screwed up from being in the sun and the interior of the kitchen was frazzled with the red spots in his vision, so that it was a while before he saw that the house, though his, was not his. That there were shaggy flowers in a jam jar above the sink, that books lay open on the refrigerator and that, on closer inspection, they were about communism, which made him suddenly frightened as if he was being watched; and that one of Gerald’s shirts lay on the floor.
‘What do they really say?’ He jerked his head towards the houses across the road.
‘What about?’ she said, pouring orange liquid into glasses.
‘Us.’
‘Us?’ She shook her head as if trying to grapple with an alien concept. ‘Us? Nothing much. Not to me. To each other? Depends.’ She smiled at him, genuinely warm all of a sudden. ‘Nell Parker. What do you think?’
He smiled back tentatively.
‘It’s a bit off, you’d think she’d take her fancy man somewhere away from decent folks and their children,’ she said, mimicking. ‘Of course,’ she added, lowering her voice conspiratorially, ‘you’ve got to be charitable, it was him that took off, most likely it’s affected her mind, poor thing.’ She tucked her chin and rolled her eyes. ‘You know how it is?’
‘I know.’
‘The rest — well, they forget, or they seem to, and if they don’t, do you care?’
‘No, no,’ he said, turning away from her. ‘I never think I do — until I’m here. Then it seems to matter and I always think it must to you — and yet I know it doesn’t. I care about you not caring. I can’t explain,’ he said despairingly.
‘Yes, I understand.’ She spoke slowly, as she always did when her understatements carried more meaning than he was prepared for. ‘I understand that — when you’re here — we’re in it together again, aren’t we?’
She picked up the tray on which she had placed the drinks. ‘I’ll take these outside.’
‘I’ll go to the bathroom,’ he said, resisting the temptation to ask her permission.
In there, he was reminded again that this house was no longer his. After he had relieved himself, he washed, more meticulous than the average man, and sat on the edge of the bath, suddenly tired and flat with the morning, and saw that the bath was dirty and that sticking in the dirt were curly brown hairs. There was a sickly smell in the air and lying at his feet was a small, wet bundle. He was filled with premonition and thought to go through the house, but she was calling him, to say it was hot and would he come because the drinks were suffering.
He went out and sat down with her. ‘You’ve put on weight,’ he said. ‘It suits you.’
She glanced at herself. ‘I suppose I have, it’s the baby.’
‘The baby?’
‘You didn’t know? No, I suppose you wouldn’t. One forgets — how long it is.’
‘You — and Gerald — you have a baby?’
The ripe flesh, the gold and the laughter, took on new meaning. She got to her feet and went inside and in a minute came back to him with a child, wearing a napkin and a singlet, in her arms.
‘She’s nine weeks.’
‘A girl?’
‘Yes.’
‘Like Gerald.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘You always wanted us to have a girl.’
‘I know,’ said Bethany. ‘So did you.’
So I did, he thought. Together we wanted. At breakfast we would make pointed jokes about it being the right day for conceiving girls, by afternoon the jokes would be more general, and by night-time conception would be forgotten entirely and it would simply be wanting.
But later breakfast times were too acrimonious for jokes and whatever it was they wanted was forgotten.
The baby snuffled at her mother’s hand. ‘She’s hungry,’ Bethany said, and unbuttoned her dress and unhooked the protective shield over her nipple. It sprang out from under the cloth, dark and strong, surrounded by the white, blue-veined breast. The child seized the nipple, sucking avidly. ‘Mmmm, darling, there, there, darling,’ Bethany crooned, cuddling her baby, and forgetting him.
He leaned his head back against the verandah, consciously shutting his eyes this time, shutting her out, shutting out Gerald.
‘Having babies always suited you,’ he said, harshly.
‘Yes, I suppose it did.’
‘Gerald —’ he began.
‘Yes?’
‘You looked lovely feeding the boys like that.’
‘So you said.’
‘And Gerald —?’
‘Of course. Of course he likes it. Don’t all men?’
‘Of course — I always said — the bottle was better — in the long run —’
‘Oh, you did, I know.’
‘Do you take your calcium tablets?’
‘I try to remember. You know what I’m like.’
‘Yes, I know what you’re like.’ He waited, choosing his words carefully, though their meaning was plain enough. ‘You’re happy then?’
After a while, she said, ‘A baby makes a difference, doesn’t it?’ Avoiding his question.
‘But you wanted it? You and Gerald, you wanted the baby?’
Her laughter, a little rueful now. ‘Oh, we never not wanted it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘We forgot. One night. We forgot. I forgot.’ The old Bethany, laughter peeling out now, the old careless Bethany with her mouth opening, her legs uncovered, her breast shaking in her baby’s mouth, laughing at something beautifully beyond the range of the fat yellow sunflower cushions, somewhere he couldn’t see.
His stillness penetrating at last, and she looked at him again, watching silently as he got to his feet.
Two steps away from her, and she said, ‘You’re going?’
‘Well,’ he said stiffly, ‘a baby does make a difference, doesn’t it?’
At the corner of the house, he turned around again to look at her. She had put the baby down and pulled up her dress. As he turned, she got to her feet, and stood shaking and strangely white in the bright day.
She clenched her hands at her side. ‘Why didn’t you make it better?’ she called after him. ‘Why didn’t you make it better for me?’ The tears streaming down her face.
Keep on walking, he told himself. Keep on and don’t look back. The eyes will watch and know me for the bastard I am, and soon it will be all right for her again. Whole and clear, as if the page were open in front of him, he remembers the end of the poem Love’s what’s there when you’re away from me … She won’t change, and I won’t forget her the way she is.