At half-past 3 on Wednesday afternoon the slam of the front door and the sound of running feet announced disaster.
That must be Sophie, avoiding her and running upstairs as if the devil were after her.
Thinking with anguish, ‘Oh, my darling, what is it?’, Ella put down her scissors and hurried after her.
Sophie was in her room, pulling open a drawer of her bureau. She straightened up and turned her rigid pale face towards Ella.
‘I’ve lost my job. Been sacked. Got the push. Made redundant. Okay?’
Last week she had been everybody’s darling. Rob had been here as usual on Friday, deep in calculation and discussion about the precious film. Ella sat on the bed.
‘But how? How could they do it? Couldn’t Rob stop it?’
‘It’s Rob who’s doing it.’
‘No.’
‘Oh, it’s that woman.’ Rage gave way to contempt. ‘Tried to kill herself. Well, that’s the story. Took an overdose. She knows just how much to take, she’s done it before.’ She stopped for breath and went on more calmly. ‘When Rob got home, she found this Liz in a coma. She’d found that video. You remember when we made the video of Becky? She’s mad jealous, always snooping. Well, she played the video and she got the idea into her head that I … ugh!’ The disgust in her voice was as real as her rage. ‘Sick. That’s what she is, sick. As if I cared for any of them, dirty, rotten perverts. The very thought makes me sick.’
You flirted with Rob, thought Ella. You had me worried.
‘It was the film I cared about, doing something real for once in my life. And they’d started shooting and I was going on location with Rob.’
The dirty, rotten pervert.
‘Damn that creature. I wish she’d died. Too smart for that, of course. Rob got into work late, she’d been at the hospital all night, and she told me I had to go. That very day. She’d promised, sworn it. So I went. Walked out and here I am.’
Surely, when she got over the shock, she would feel some pity.
Sophie had turned back to the drawer and had begun to sort out underwear.
‘Rob can’t be very happy.’
‘Makes her own fun, doesn’t she? Letting that creature rule her life. If she called her bluff just once – could have called it this time.’
‘What are you doing with those clothes, Sophie?’
‘Oh, that. I can’t stay. I’m going to William. That book – it’s not the film, but it’s better than nothing.’
He’s not a book, he’s a human being. And so, thought Ella bitterly, am I. And Rob, and that poor neurotic in the hospital. Didn’t Sophie know the difference?
Suddenly, Sophie was the only stranger in the world.
‘Does William know about this? Does he expect you?’
She remembered David saying, ‘Have you explained to the mice?’
Oh, David, come and help me with this. Say, ‘Come off it, young Soph. Calm down. There are other jobs, even other films.’
The stranger had paused in her packing, studying the extraordinary notion that she might not be welcome.
She shrugged,
‘Well, he can say so, I suppose.’
She had finished her hasty packing and was pulling tight the drawstring of the dufflebag Ella had given her for Christmas.
To throw yourself at a man and be refused – how could you survive such a humiliation? Ella could hope only that William would behave with tact, find some way of letting her down lightly.
She could trust in William’s good intentions, but not in his diplomatic skills.
Sophie had remembered filial duty.
‘Don’t worry, Mum. I’ll keep in touch. I’ll be back to get my things.’
So much for her anxiety about clinging to Sophie, who had kissed her briefly and run downstairs and was gone.
William would send her back, of course, but in what condition? Her father had rejected her, she had lost her beloved job and now she was facing another rejection.
Where had she got this idea about William? Ella looked back over his stay in the house, seeking any sign of interest he might have shown in Sophie. None. None on the other side either. Sophie had typed for him, discussed difficulties in the manuscript in a businesslike manner and if she met him about the house addressed him in a teasing tone which Ella had thought not entirely friendly.
I thought she was forward when she offered to help with the luggage. I thought that was forward.
Never mind that. Think what I’m to do for her when she comes back shamed – and she’s suffering enough now. How can I cope?
Suppose she doesn’t come. Suppose she’s too ashamed to come? Where will she go?
That thought could not be entertained.
If she doesn’t come back here, I am no mother and this is no home.
She waited.
She made dinner for two and waited.
She ate dinner alone, left Sophie’s helping in the oven and waited.
At half-past eight the doorbell rang. Sophie must have forgotten her key.
Ella opened the door and found Rob, looking pale, tired and unusually handsome.
Ella said the words which had been so long at the back of her mind.
‘Poor Rob. My poor, poor Rob.’
She held out her arms. Rob had to stoop grotesquely to put her head on Ella’s shoulder, but she managed it for a moment, then freed herself.
‘Don’t sympathise. I’d be bawling for hours. I couldn’t get here before. I have to talk to Sophie.’
‘I thought it was Sophie at the door. She isn’t here.’
‘She didn’t come home then? Oh, Hell.’
‘She came and went again.’
As Rob came after her into the brightly lighted kitchen, Ella saw what had made the change in her face. The skin was drawn tightly over her bones, revealing their severe beauty.
She sat at the table and let her bag slide from her shoulder to the floor. Then she slumped.
‘Hardest thing I ever did, telling her she had to go.’
Those great bags they carry, as if they were carrying their lives about with them, thought Ella. Perhaps she had better get one.
She said, ‘Was it really because of the video? Sophie said your friend found the video and that made her do it. It doesn’t seem reasonable.’
Rob studied the word.
‘Reasonable? No.’
‘A video of Sophie and Becky walking down a street together? Couldn’t you have explained, you were timing Becky’s walk for the film?’
Rob looked from far off into a world where things could be explained, and shook her head.
‘No. May I wait for Sophie?’
‘Sophie mightn’t come back. She has gone to William.’
Rob was startled into life.
‘William? What use would he be?’
‘I mean gone. Packed. Taken her clothes.’ Faster than her father. ‘I’ve been waiting, expecting her back. Hoping William can manage to send her back without hurting her feelings too much.’
‘Send her back?’ Rob was amazed at the suggestion. ‘Do you think he’s crazy? He won’t be able to believe his luck.’
‘Oh,’ cried Ella. ‘I can’t believe it. I know she’s upset, but that’s no excuse. Throwing herself at a man’s head like that! It’s just shameless.’
‘If women didn’t throw themselves at men’s heads, the human race would not proceed. Would you care for a drink? I have a bottle of whisky in my bag. I was going home to get drunk but I could start here.’
Drinking in order to get drunk was a shocking idea, but the thought of Rob’s doing it alone was worse. She could have William’s bed, if it came to that.
Ella fetched two glasses and the water jug. Rob took the bottle out of her bag, uncapped it and poured two drinks.
I’d better go slowly on that, thought Ella, as she saw how much whisky Rob had poured into her glass.
‘Well, here’s to better days. Or something.’
‘Have you had anything to eat?’
Rob contrived a grin. The change in her face made a grimace of it.
‘The Ella response. Yes, I ate at the hospital cafe. Misery never put me off my food yet.’ She put down her glass. ‘Ella, there’s something I want you to know. About Sophie. About coming here. It wasn’t because of Sophie. I have never. Um. To be absolutely truthful, I did put out a feeler.’
‘The shirt and the necklace from Hong Kong.’
Rob nodded.
‘Why did I have to tell you that? Why do I have to tell you everything? Do you hate me for it?’
Ella shook her head. She could not at this moment have named her feeling.
‘Well, the response was negative and in a way I was glad. It would have been a damned shame if she had turned out to be a dyke.’
There had been a time when nobody would have offered Ella such a confidence. She regretted that time very much.
‘Do not use that dreadful word.’
‘The way I’m feeling, I couldn’t pronounce the word gay. I’d be remembering what it used to mean.’
‘Lavatory.’
‘You’ve lost me. Gay means lavatory?’
‘Dyke.’ Ella decided to have no more to drink. ‘Dyke used to be a very vulgar word for lavatory. You should not apply it to yourself in any circumstances.’
Becoming conscious of her stately tone, she looked with alarm at the level of the whisky in her glass. Unfortunately, Rob misunderstood the glance and refilled the glass.
‘I suppose you’re right. But all this liberation, this coming out. You don’t liberate yourself. There’s one closet you don’t come out of. Never mind that. I just want you to know, I never had designs on Sophie. Wouldn’t have been here, wouldn’t have come to your house, ever. By the way, some people would think lavatory was a vulgar word for toilet.’
‘You would not wish to call yourself a toilet.’
Rob couldn’t stop laughing.
‘Really, you mustn’t drink any more. You’ll be sick tomorrow.’
‘That’s the idea. Convert emotional pain into physical pain. Which passes.’
‘Well, you won’t be able to drive. You’ll have to sleep it off in William’s bed.’
‘That’s a strange conjugation. Conjunction. Me in William’s bed. Oh damn. Listen, Ella. It’s no big deal. She isn’t tied to him and he’s not such a bad stick.’
‘I could never get him to say he enjoyed the food.’
‘You saw him at his worst. He gets so wrapped up in what he’s doing that he’s hardly human. That’s what I envy and why I give him such a bad press. He’s quite amiable, really. Clean, honest, sober … more than I am. Paid me back my sixty dollars straight away. Thousands wouldn’t. If he is a genius, he doesn’t trade on it. It’s just … you don’t understand about Sophie. Perhaps a parent wouldn’t see it. She’s the kind they yearn after in the street. Beauty and the little extra, whatever it is. Animal magnetism to a high degree. Do you think she’d get the push from William? Not a hope.’
‘Parents don’t want to know these things about their children, any more than … the other way around.’
‘That’s right. The old incest tabu.’
Since she could not focus on this new view of Sophie, Ella concentrated on the words ‘incest tabu’. ‘The things I had about this house that I didn’t know about.’
She paused and drank.
‘Hate. People hating each other and I never knew.’
‘Did you think you could hand out love with the clean shirts?’
‘He was tying his tie.’ She spoke with dreamy astonishment. ‘He was tying his tie when he asked me for a divorce and his hands didn’t shake.’
‘Comes of having been a surgeon, I suppose. “Scalpel, please. Swab, please. Clips, please. Divorce, please.” By the way …’
She halted and shut her mouth firmly on what she had been about to say.
‘You know what, Ella. This world. This human race. It isn’t divided into sexes. Everybody thinks it’s divided into sexes but it isn’t. It’s the givers and the takers, the diners and the dinners.’
Ella said, carefully, ‘If the dinner goes looking for the diner, who’s the giver and who’s the taker?’ She added, as Rob refilled the glasses, ‘We should have a cup of coffee,’ but the sink seemed too far away.
Rob pondered.
‘I’ll think that over later.’ She added profoundly, ‘Resinous pines and insects.’
They should really have that cup of coffee.
‘I think we’ve had too much to drink.’
‘No, but listen. The pine exudes the resin which attracts the insect. The insect settles, the resin sets hard and there you are, trapped in the amber of someone else’s passion. Trapped in amber, there you are for life.
‘Your poor bloody husband, ex-husband, you know what he was? A failure. Hamfisted Harry, he was. Tying his tie, that would be the limit of his animal his manual dexterity. Got out of that hospital just ahead of a scandal, settled the mess out of court, got out under pressure. I suppose he’s better as a lecturer but not that much. And there he is, the poor shit, stuck fast in the amber of your devotion. Oh God, I’m drunk. I never meant to say that.’
‘Not now he isn’t. Stuck fast.’
Rob muttered, ‘I’m sorry.’
She looked truly wretched.
Ella now felt quite sober. Indeed, she needed a drink. There was in her mind the image of a tired old horse dragging a heavy cart, but she dismissed it briskly.
‘May I have another drink, please?’
Rob poured eagerly.
‘I’ve had my ration, that’s clear.’
Nevertheless, she poured the rest of the whisky into her own glass.
‘If Sophie is what you say …’
‘Heavenly bodies. They shine on you for a while but you have to remember, night must fall.’
Oh, yes. Oh, yes, thought Ella.
She must commit those words to memory.
‘Suppose she shtops …’
Because it isn’t a man, it’s a book. That’s the terrible thing. If the book’s a failure, will she look for another … writer, artist, whatever?
‘You mean, when night falls for William?’
Not if, but when.
‘He’d get a book out of it. You can do what you like to a writer if you don’t mind being put in a book.’
Not to poets, though, thought Ella cleverly, and just as cleverly remained silent.
She said instead, ‘I thought she was heartless. Heartless to you.’
‘Heartless is part of it, dear. That’s why night must fall. That lot have one problem and that’s growing old. That’s a long way off for Sophie.’
This was the future of her youngest child, alien and unimaginable to Ella.
Hamfisted Harry. Was nothing what it seemed?
Rob stood up with majestic poise.
‘I am for William’s bed.’
She took a deep breath and walked steadily from the room.
Hamfisted Harry. But he got the University Medal – that must mean something. Passed the FRCS exams first try.
Night must fall.
She could catch ideas as they sped past but she could not hold them. She must lie down. She thought of the stairs and decided that her bedroom was out of reach. She stood up, reeled and sat down. Even the door was out of reach.
She lowered herself carefully to hands and knees. As she advanced towards the bathroom, she thought triumphantly, ‘This is how it is. Words are nothing. This is it. The truth of it.’
Clinging to the basin with one hand, she splashed cold water on her face, groped for the sponge, saturated it and held it to the nape of her neck until it seemed possible to advance to William’s room.
Rob was already stretched out on the doona, snoring gently. Ella nudged her firmly across the bed, took off her shoes and wriggled under as much of the doona as was not pinned down by Rob’s body.
Sleep. Refuge.
She woke in daylight, looked at her watch and wondered why it was there. She never wore her watch to bed. Then she became aware that she had worn all her clothes to bed.
The situation required thought.
Memory of the evening returned with the astonishing discovery that she had got very drunk, too drunk to get upstairs, too drunk to get undressed.
Amazing.
And the body next to her was Rob. Unhappy Rob, for whom there was no escape.
She sat up to look down at her. Her face, loose and heavy in sleep, had lost its abnormal beauty. Ella put out a hand to stroke her cheek and let it rest on her throat below the angle of her jaw. Under the damp hair, the flesh was heavy, hot and alien, moving gently with her sleeping breath.
Ella took her hand away, not knowing why she had made the gesture, knowing that there were loves for which there were no gestures.
She looked at her watch again, this time with intelligence. Twenty past 6. Time enough.
There was something else Rob had said last night, something quite astounding.
Hamfisted Harry.
She repeated the words with vindictive delight. It wasn’t a feeling she was proud of. She didn’t own it as hers. It belonged with the house. This house was dead now, rotten and breeding evil. All that fuss about William’s work, keeping the house quiet, keeping the volume of the radio down, not switching on the television for the midday program – devices to keep the house alive. A life-support system. William had gone, Sophie had gone.
But Sophie might come back.
That thought brought her to the present and her absurd and shameful situation, with the urge to restore normality in haste.
Moving discreetly out of respect for Rob’s sleep, she got out of bed, found her shoes and made for the upstairs bathroom.
Looking in the glass, she agreed that this unkempt, unwashed object with the dry mouth and the whisky breath was her true self but it was going to remain her secret, even from Rob.
Showered, dressed and combed, she looked at herself again with relief.
Surfaces, however false, must be preserved.
She was pressing oranges for juice when Rob came into the kitchen.
‘Good morning. You slept well.’
‘That wasn’t sleep. It was alcoholic stupor. How about you?’
‘Yes, I died too.’
Gratefully Rob accepted a glass of orange juice and sat down to drink it.
‘Sophie didn’t come back.’
‘No. Just as well, perhaps.’
They stared at each other in silent complicity.
Rob asked, ‘What would you have done if she had come in at the wrong moment?’
‘Lost consciousness at once.’
Then she reflected that the remark had no connection with reality – she did not know what she would have done, at all – but was intended only to amuse Rob, in which it had been effective.
That sort of thing – not like me at all, she said to herself in astonishment.
‘Pretty restricting, being a parent,’ said Rob. ‘That ass G.K. Chesterton saying “My country, right or wrong” is like “My mother, drunk or sober”. It sounds so smart but I’ve often thought the second proposition preferable to the first. Do mothers cease to be human?’
‘Their children would like to think so.’
In spite of her resolution, Ella felt inclined to confession. It would be good to laugh with Rob over that crawl to the bathroom. She couldn’t quite manage to laugh at it alone.
No. Not even with Rob.
Rob accepted toast, coffee and aspirin but declined the offer of a shower.
‘I’ll make it home and change before I go to the hospital. Probably be bringing her home today. Tell Sophie will you that of course she has money coming. In lieu of notice, at least, and I’ll do what I can about sick pay and holiday pay. Do you think she wants me to look for an opening for her?’
‘I don’t know. She was so keen on that film.’
‘I’ll never find another like her,’ Rob sighed. ‘It isn’t much of a film. An unambitious little enterprise. Sometimes they take off.’
‘I hope it will.’
There was a valedictory sadness in their voices.
‘I owe you a few good meals, Ella. What about coming to lunch in town?’
‘I’d like that. I won’t be here for much longer. I have to give up the house.’
She could not keep the weariness of defeat out of her voice.
‘Oh, what a rotten shame. Look, I’ll give you my private number at work so you can ring and let me know where you are.’
She found a pen and a notebook in the bag and wrote her name and a number.
‘Now see you use it,’ she said as she handed over the sheet of paper. ‘I don’t want all the worry and expense of tracking you down with a private eye. Okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘And don’t worry too much about Sophie. Truly, she won’t come to any harm with William. He’s a good old stick, really.’
Could not even Rob suppose that she might be feeling for herself? Feeling betrayed by Sophie?
About Rob’s troubles there was nothing to be said. She went out to the car with her and waved a ceremonious farewell, hoping the gesture would be understood. Rob returned the wave as if it had been speech.
When she had cleared the breakfast away, she fetched clean linen and made up William’s bed. Then, admitting her intentions, she went upstairs to get clothes and toilet equipment, hung her clothes in William’s wardrobe and her toothbrush in the downstairs bathroom.
In the mid-afternoon the phone rang and Sophie spoke.
‘Mum, it’s all right. Everything is going really well. I thought you might be worrying but I couldn’t get to a phone before. I’ll be up tomorrow to collect a few things. Is that all right?’
‘Rob came looking for you last night.’
‘Rob did? What did she want?’
The slight emphasis on the personal pronoun consigned Rob to history.
‘She talked about money due to you and she wanted to know if she should look for another opening for you.’
‘Are you all right, Mum? You sound a bit down. You’re not worrying about me, are you?’
No, Sophie. I am worrying about myself.
‘Well, you mustn’t. About the job – I don’t want to look for anything until we’ve got this manuscript to the publisher. That’s one reason I want to come up tomorrow. Can I borrow the typewriter from upstairs? I can’t do a thing with William’s old rattletrap.’
‘I suppose so. You’d better start taking everything you want. The house will have to be sold, of course,’ said Ella, hoping to spark remorse.
Sophie instead became thoughtful.
‘I could do with some furniture. What about the furniture in my room? Can I have that?’
‘I don’t know about the contents of the house. I don’t think anything’s been decided.’
‘Oh. Well, I suppose I can borrow the typewriter.’
‘Of course you can. We don’t have the bailiffs in.’
‘Well, the money will be useful. She didn’t give you any idea how much, did she?’
‘None at all.’
Sophie, say a kind word about her, will you? Just one kind word.
‘Right. See you tomorrow then. Goodbye.’
It’s her age, that’s all, thought Ella as she put down the phone.
At least she’s no hypocrite. Any feeling she expressed would be genuine.
And come to think of it, she had lived a long time with falsehood.