Andrew takes the lift down from his office on the thirteenth floor staring at his own reflection in its mirrored wall, until it comes quietly to rest in the executive car park. He’s about to head straight for his car when he changes his mind and strides up the sloping ramp to the street and stops at the top, breathing in the damp air, watching commuters heading for home and wishing he’d never given up smoking. It’s eight years now and he no longer craves cigarettes, just the excuse to escape from the office for a few minutes and stand here, hunched and shivering in winter, sweating in summer, smoking in companionable silence with the other outcasts.
‘Be at the gallery by quarter past five,’ Linda had instructed him this morning. ‘I might need some last minute help. And it’s good to have a few people in there when the doors open, puts the punters at ease.’ She says this of every exhibition at the small, privately owned gallery in Toorak that she manages. ‘It’s Zachary’s latest – amazing work, it’ll knock everyone’s socks off.’
‘Not mine,’ Brooke had said without looking up from her iPad. ‘I’ve got a rehearsal.’
Linda had sighed and rolled her eyes. ‘But I might need help with the refreshments and, anyway, you’re not in the wretched school play.’
‘I’m assisting the sound engineer, and you always have the food catered. You just want me there to play dutiful daughter.’
Linda had shaken her head. ‘Well, is that too much to ask? Anyway, you’d better be there, Andrew – five-fifteen, no later.’
Andrew had been about to invent a reason why he couldn’t be there but changed his mind once he knew it was Zachary’s gig. It’s not that he has any interest in Zachary’s work, which is, in his opinion, execrable, and the man himself a complete arse. Andrew can’t imagine why Linda is risking her own excellent reputation on him, although of course he can and does imagine it, and that’s why he is going to the opening – to work out whether this is reality or just imagination.
Andrew checks his watch; it’s already quarter to six and Linda has called his mobile twice. She has staff and volunteers, caterers, and various youthful and pretentious hangers-on who see her as their point of entry into the elite of Melbourne’s art world, but he knows she wants him there because of his position in the Department for the Arts. She thinks it raises her profile and the profile and credibility of the artists she exhibits. Andrew sighs and is about to walk back down the ramp but changes his mind for the second time, and weaves his way across the street through the slow moving traffic to the posh little café cum bar where he sometimes has lunch, orders a double scotch, downs it quickly and then makes his way back to the car.
Half an hour later he is hesitating just inside the entrance to the gallery, which is already packed with the sort of crowd who always seem to turn up at Linda’s events: well dressed, well heeled and many of them already on the way to being well oiled. He spots Linda at the far end of the room talking to a couple whose names he really ought to know but can’t recall. She is wearing one of those A-shaped outfits she’s very into at the moment. It looks like a series of different-coloured tents worn one on top of the other; she says it’s called ‘block colour pyramid layering’ and is the latest fashion. Andrew thinks she may have made this up. Around her neck odd shaped lumps of wood painted in vivid colours hang from a black silk cord. And she’s had her hair cut and coloured – today, obviously, because it wasn’t like this at breakfast. It’s a deep sort of claret red, cut short and dead straight on one side and much longer to an angled point on the other. Andrew thinks it looks awful to the point of ridiculous but doubtless her sycophantic friends think it’s incredibly chic. The thought of having to stand beside her and be polite to strangers drains him of energy and he reaches out to grab a glass of wine from the tray of a passing waiter.
As he stands there watching, almost obscured by a pillar, Andrew spots Zachary detaching himself from a small group of admirers. He’s recently grown a stubbly, grey speckled attempt at a beard and is dressed, as always, entirely in black: jeans, skivvy, leather jacket rather too tight for his middle-aged spread. To Andrew’s eyes he looks like a throwback to the sixties and as though he needs a good wash. He watches as Zachary strolls over to where Linda is standing and she turns slightly, and begins the introductions. As he leans forward to shake hands with potential buyers Zachary slides his other hand down to the curve of Linda’s bottom, stroking and squeezing. She looks up at him, smiling, edging closer.
Andrew inhales sharply. He’s been here less than a couple of minutes and knows all he needs to know; if he were still in any doubt, he need only look at the expression on Linda’s normally rather haughty face to see that this is a woman in thrall to the artist, and it’s nothing to do with the paintings. He glances around wondering whether anyone he knows might be watching him watching his wife being groped by this ridiculous poseur. For months, more than a year in fact, he’s been on the point of telling her he wants a divorce; several times he has geared himself up to it but he has always fallen at the first fence. But evidence that she is shagging Zachary firms his resolve, gives him, he thinks, a grievance sharper and more focused than just the fact that he no longer loves her, doesn’t even like her much anymore, finds her boring, shallow and overbearing. It’s not as if she needs or wants him, hasn’t done for years, although career-wise she certainly thinks it’s useful to be married to him.
Alongside his anger and fear of humiliation he feels a sense of relief. He imagines the house without Linda in it, furnished in his undoubtedly uncool and more comfortable style. He sees it transformed from the stark awkwardness of a show home to a real home where he can scatter his newspapers and books, put his socked feet up on the coffee table, and where the roof will not fall in if he leaves a dirty cup by his chair overnight and doesn’t make the bed before he goes to work. What joy, what freedom. On the other hand there will doubtless be a long and painful battle before he reaches such a state of bliss.
He longs to stride across the room in outrage and punch Zachary, to make a scene, humiliate them both, draw disapproval and scorn down on them, then stalk away victorious. The trouble is that he doesn’t really feel outrage, just the liberation of knowing that the end is nigh. He remembers his father: ‘You have the upper hand,’ Gerald would have said. ‘Don’t screw it up by descending to their level.’ He’d had a big thing about dignity, his dad. Had he been here now he would have counselled icy calm, steely politeness and eviscerating language all combined with an implacable expression. That’s what Andrew knows he needs now – well, not now, not here, but later, at home, when Brooke has gone to bed he will prove himself to be his father’s son. He hopes he has the chutzpah to carry it off; cool and superior he can manage very well but he knows he lacks his father’s cutting edge. But there has to be a first time. He parks his empty glass on another passing tray and turns back out of the door, leaving as quickly and quietly as he came.
*
The rehearsal is almost at an end when Andrew reaches the school and he slips into a chair in a darkened area at the back of the hall watching as the teenage actors struggle through their remaining lines in tones that indicate they have had enough for tonight. There’s a scene change and a teacher directing the students to move here or there. Eventually they grind on to the end and there is a smattering of applause from half a dozen hangers-on who are sitting down at the front.
The teacher calls the cast and crew together onto the stage for a brief pep talk and Andrew sees Brooke, in jeans and a black t-shirt, her fine reddish hair tied back in a ponytail, wander onto the stage, and his breath stops in his chest at the sight of her. She’ll be sixteen in a few months and could pass for more; here among her friends she seems so unlike the rather surly teenager, cut off from him by her headphones, or irritably slamming her bedroom door. As she sits down cross-legged on the boards she seems totally detached from him – like someone from another world, another life. His distance from her strikes him as quite shocking. When did they last have a real conversation? When did he last ask her what she was doing, whether she was happy, what sort of friends she has? Has he asked her anything at all about the play? How long is it since he talked to her rather than just issued instructions or edicts about the time he expects her back, about homework, or exam results? What does she think of him? Andrew feels his neglected love for Brooke forming into a painful lump in his chest. He leans forward, sinking his face into his hands, and sits like this while the teacher talks about interpretation, energy, concentration and the importance of timing.
What will happen to Brooke when he and Linda split up? Will she understand? Will she forgive him, or side with her mother? There is a lot of talking now, the teacher is winding up and reminding them to be on time for the next rehearsal. Someone switches on the auditorium lights and the students get to their feet. Andrew steadies his breathing, gets up and walks down towards the stage.
‘Oh, hi, Dad.’ Brooke seems awkward, embarrassed by his unexpected presence.
‘Hi,’ he says, smiling up at her and then at the drama teacher who is reaching for his briefcase. ‘I was passing so I thought I’d see if you needed a lift.’
‘I thought you were going to the gallery.’
‘I did, but my heart failed me,’ he says. ‘It was all white wine and canapés, and I wanted a cheeseburger. You?’
She nods, relaxed now. ‘Cool, but you’ll be in dead trouble with Mum.’
He looks up at her, pulling down the corners of his mouth. ‘I know, but a cheeseburger and fries with you would more than make up for that.’
‘I’ll get my stuff,’ Brooke says, grinning. And she heads off backstage and returns immediately, a long green scarf wrapped around her neck and her school backpack slung over one shoulder, looking younger now, more vulnerable. She is totally unlike her mother, he thinks, and she has her grandmother’s eyes. A flash of memory burns him with longing: his mother reaching out to put her arms around him, to comfort him over something – a lost football match, a cut knee, a failed exam – and he wants that comfort now. He aches for it, for her ability to soothe the sore spot, to reassure him that things will all work out okay. For months he has felt that splitting up with Linda will fix everything, but now that this is within reach he sees that it will take more than this to fix his life – work has become little more than routine, his fitness has slipped and Brooke is almost a stranger. Not to mention dealing with his mother and Kerry once Connie returns from her trip. It all seems insurmountable. All he knows is that escaping from his marriage would be a pretty good starting point.
He glances sideways at his daughter as they walk out across the car park. Choose me, Brooke, he begs her silently. Please choose me. I’ll do the best I can, better – much better – than I have ever done before or am doing right now, if you only choose me. He clicks the remote control and the car lights flash.
‘Are we going to McDonald’s or Hungry Jack’s?’ Brooke asks, sliding into the front seat.
‘Up to you, I’m at your ladyship’s disposal,’ he says, wondering whether he sounds normal, or pathetic, like the desperate, needy loser he feels.
*
Bloomsbury, London
In his flat above the bookshop Phillip Tonkin lights a cigarette and draws lovingly on it, thinking yet again how increasingly hard it is to be a smoker these days; so many places ban it, so many people disapprove. You can’t even smoke in a pub now. To Phillip, pubs no longer seem like real pubs without the faint haze of tobacco smoke as you walk in the door, and some old codger in a corner of the public bar constantly trying to relight his pipe. And what about flirting? How do you flirt without smoking? Nothing beats the moment of eye contact as you light a woman’s cigarette and then your hands touch. Phillip brushes a fleck of ash off the lapel of his blue linen jacket.
It’s hard to come to terms with the fact that a lifelong comforting habit is now socially unacceptable. One of the advantages of living alone is that he has the freedom to smoke whenever he chooses. He’s not allowed to smoke in the shop, even though he owns it, because it’s a workplace. And even if he tried to have a quick fag in the little back office or the stockroom, Bea would find out and give him hell. She’s a tough old coot, but he couldn’t do without her – she knows the stock back to front and inside out. She’s become a bit of a Bloomsbury institution. Her reputation has travelled far and wide; people come into the shop to have her hand-pick titles for them, even to be interrogated by her about their seriousness as book buyers. Phillip frequently cringes at the way she challenges customers’ requests, criticises their choices and bears them off instead to another shelf to sell them something completely different. But they return time and again, like prisoners volunteering for torture, and as they rarely leave without having bought at least a couple of books, Bea is worth her weight in rare first editions.
They were at university together, and their shared passion for books has been the basis of a long, although frequently combative, friendship. Bea’s career in publishing that ended with retirement a few years ago has now become a new career selling books. The sign above the shop says Tonkin’s New, Second-hand, Remainders and Rare Books, but it seems to Phillip that it is less Tonkin’s and more Bea these days. To her, all books are rare and precious, with the exception of memoirs written by anyone who has ever been in a reality TV show.
‘I’ve spent my life cultivating writers,’ she’d once told him. ‘I’ve seen them at their best and their worst, on drugs and off them, blind drunk, starving in garrets and lounging around in penthouse suites. Turning vegetarian because they can’t afford meat, and even selling their bodies to buy a new typewriter or computer. I’ve had them lie to me, try to bribe me with gifts, abuse me and beg me. Writing books is not for sissies, and I don’t make judgments.’
It’s not true of course; she is hugely judgmental. Last year he’d discovered she was binning the recently published memoir of a Big Brother contestant. More recently the arrival of several complete second-hand sets of a best-selling erotica series had her foaming at the mouth. ‘There’s plenty of women’s erotica if that’s what they want,’ she had stormed. ‘Erotica with proper sentences, diverse vocabulary and actual ideas, elegantly and eloquently crafted, but this . . .’ and he’d had to instruct one of the other staff to shelve the books and then keep checking that Bea hadn’t smuggled them out to the bins. She’s always been stroppy, and now she’s become some sort of legend in her own lifetime.
Resting his cigarette on the edge of an ashtray Phillip leans across the desk and pushes open the window. Cool spring air and the sounds of the street float in – the beloved background music of his life. He settles into his swivel chair from where he can see right up the street to the sign outside Russell Square underground station. ‘Small pleasures,’ he murmurs, sifting through the personal mail he has brought up from the shop; the rest he left down there for Bea. She wouldn’t have let him get his hands on it anyway in case he lost track of something. Small pleasures: The Guardian, a fag, and Bloomsbury at his feet.
‘You’re an anachronism, sitting there, smoking, still surrounded by books, peering at the small print,’ his ex-wife, Lorna, had told him recently. ‘It’s the twenty-first century, Phillip. Get yourself a Kindle so that you can adjust the font.’
‘Kindle schmindle,’ Phillip says aloud now as he rips the plastic wrapper off the latest newsletter from his old school, ‘ebooks indeed. Smoking banned and real books being edged out. Heresy.’ It’s happened with music of course, cassettes first, then CDs, now it’s all downloading onto phones and iPods. Thank goodness he’s hung on to his vinyl, and stocked up on a lifetime’s supply of styluses when he saw it coming.
The fate of real books, printed ones, is a constant source of worry to him, not just the potential loss of business in his own shop, but the whole global shift that could mean that real books just disappear. What is a home, a room, any place at all without books, without the smell of print and paper, the heft of a book in the hand, the joy of stroking covers and flicking through pages, of making those sinful notes in the margins, or falling asleep on the beach with an open paperback on one’s face. It won’t happen in his time probably, but the threat, he knows, is there, already he can sense it, and he frequently dwells gloomily on what this will mean for his grandchildren and their children. There may, he realises, be future generations of Tonkins who will never own a real book, will see them only as museum pieces, and who will never fully understand how their great-great-great-grandfather earned a living.
Phillip opens the newsletter and starts to work his way through it. It always comes as a treat, although he’s finding that it doesn’t give him quite the same pleasure now that even the alumni list is crammed with unfamiliar names. The articles are about people much younger than his own children, and he has to search for snippets about his contemporaries who seem to be dropping off their perches with uncomfortable frequency. There is an appeal for funds to build a new gymnasium, news of exam results and university scholarships, and profiles of retiring staff and their replacements. He always reads it from cover to cover. Why is there an advert for The Samaritans? This is a school newsletter; is it the students, the staff or the alumni who are prone to despair or suicide? He reads on, grumbling quietly about declining standards, until he reaches the obituaries and finds himself staring at a photograph of a very familiar face.
‘Good lord,’ he says aloud, peering more closely, ‘Gerald Hawkins, good lord. Well, there’s a sad thing.’
They’d been at school together and then at Cambridge, but some years later Gerry took it into his head to go back to Australia. Tasmania, for god’s sake, end of the bloody world more like, although he’d seen a program about it on television recently and it did look rather lovely. But Australia! Gerry had always seemed more English than the English. Father posted here to the embassy of course, that was when Gerry first came to the school, how they first met: same class, same dorm, rugby team, rowing, sixth form and then Cambridge together, pissing off the porters, smoking dope, and the drinking. Christ, all that drinking, a wonder they survived it really.
Phillip stops reading for a moment, and stares out of the window. They’d exchanged letters for a few years and met once when Gerry had been in London on business, but that was back in the early eighties. Then it all tailed off except for Christmas cards but Gerry just stopped sending them and so Phillip eventually stopped a couple of Christmases later. He remembers the last time they’d met, they’d had lunch in the restaurant down the road, spent hours reminiscing. And now he’s gone. Bloody shame. He wonders if Bea knows, but of course she doesn’t or she’d have mentioned it.
Phillip returns to the obituary: the academic and sporting honours, the starred first, the Cambridge scholarship, and then his life in Australia. He’d married the lovely Connie of course, children, public service career and, good heavens – member of the State Parliament of Tasmania. So he’d gone into politics after all! Phillip tries to visualise Gerald as a politician – not difficult, he thinks, but Tasmania? Tiny place, does it really have its own parliament? ‘Shows how little I know about Australia,’ he says aloud. He was a Catholic of course, Phillip remembers now, and there was a religious phase – lots of agonising over contraception and the Church – although with Gerry it was always hard to tell whether those contentious bones that he’d throw into a discussion actually constituted something he was wrestling with, or was just something he did to start an argument. He returns to the obituary. Long illness, what rotten luck. Survived by wife, children, grandchildren, and sister. Ah yes, Flora.
Phillip leans his head back and closes his eyes. A punt on the river, Flora and Connie in summer dresses, bare shoulders turning pink in the sun, legs stretched out enticingly between the seats, a bottle of champagne. He can almost smell the dark weedy water, Flora’s French cigarettes and the scent of those girls’ bodies sweating slightly in the heat. He remembers longing to slide his hand under Flora’s skirt and up her smooth inner thigh to the warm acquiescent wetness that he was sure awaited him. Those were the days. Not that he’d had much luck with Flora though. He’d waited until Gerry was locked in a clinch with Connie, and then moved closer, pushing Flora’s skirt above her knee, and the moment he put his hand on her bare thigh she’d thrust out her foot and kicked him hard in the balls. Fortunately she wasn’t wearing shoes at the time, but just the same it doubled him up and he’d had a horrible feeling he might be going to throw up.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ she’d hissed, leaning close to his ear as he moaned softly over the side of the boat. ‘It’s not going to happen, not in a million years.’ He’d been worried that Gerald might have heard but he was far too involved with the intricacies of Connie’s bra to be even remotely interested in his best friend’s pain and humiliation.
Of course it would be Flora who’d have advised the school of Gerald’s death. He should write her a note of condolence. ‘Wonder where the hell she is now?’ he murmurs, and then realises that of course the school will know. They’ll have at least an email address, and if they won’t give it to him perhaps they’ll forward a message on to her. On the other hand a letter of condolence should really be written with old-fashioned pen and paper and sent snail mail – more respectful. What he wants is a postal address. And he picks up the phone, dials the number and, swearing at the automatic answering service, he presses the third option for the administration office.
*
Andrew feels as though his head is exploding. All he wants is for this conversation, argument, fight – whatever it is – to be over. Any thought of emulating his father’s icy restraint and cutting language evaporated as soon as it began. It’s the night following the exhibition opening and Brooke has gone to a movie with friends.
‘Okay,’ Linda says now, her voice at a slightly lower octave than it has been for the last hour. ‘Yes, I’m having an affair. I didn’t plan it, it happened, and it happened because of you and our marriage. You’ve changed, Andrew – you used to be fun, we used to do stuff together. Now . . . well, I don’t know what happened to you but it’s like being married to a zombie, you’re so remote and cut off. I was bored and miserable and then Zach came along. He’s exciting, totally out there, he’s creative and clever and funny, and I fell in love because I was bored to death with you and our marriage.’
‘Do not blame this on me,’ Andrew cuts in. ‘You’re the one having the affair, and not just having it but flaunting it at your poncy launch party, and plenty of other places for all I know. This is not my fault. Anyway, as far as I’m concerned this is the end. I want a divorce. Feel free to go and live with that ridiculous wanker if that’s what you want, move out, but don’t think for a moment that you can take Brooke. She’ll stay here with me.’
‘No way,’ Linda says. ‘You can have your divorce as soon as you want, what a blessed relief that will be, but this is my home and Brooke’s home and you’re the one that has to go. You get a place of your own and Zach can move in here with me and Brooke.’
Andrew’s heart is pounding so hard that he feels it may burst out of his chest. ‘In your dreams,’ he shouts, ‘in your fucking dreams! This is my home too, and my daughter is not going to live with that man either here or anywhere else, so you might as well get that into your head right now, Linda. You’re the one that’s in the wrong. You’re the one who’s screwing someone else. I am staying right where I am.’ He turns away from her and sits on an arm of the lime green sofa that he hates. Arguing has always exhausted him, made him feel less of a man – so unlike his father. ‘I’m not having this conversation anymore, but tomorrow I’m getting myself a lawyer and you’d better get one too. And we should agree not to say anything to Brooke until we’ve sorted the details out between us. Even someone as selfish as you must be able to see that she should not have to be dragged through arguments like this.’
Linda is silent for a moment. ‘So I’m the selfish one, am I? Well, that’s a laugh. But yes, I agree, we need to keep her out of it, behave as normal. Things are pretty chilly and have been for a while, so she probably won’t notice. But don’t kid yourself, Andrew, Brooke stays with me. She needs her mother and that’s what any judge in any court will tell you.’
Andrew closes his eyes, trying to shut her out. The awful thing, he realises, is that Linda is probably right. If they end up going to court a judge might well favour the mother. But Brooke is almost sixteen, surely she’d be allowed some say in it . . . in which case, what would she say? Who would she choose? He hears the sound of a key being inserted in the front door. He gets up quickly.
‘She’s home,’ he says in a low voice. ‘Not a word about this. Agreed?’
Linda nods. ‘Yep.’ She takes a deep breath and straightens her shoulders. ‘Hi, Brooke darling.’
Brooke mumbles a greeting from below and as Andrew hears her begin to climb the stairs to the living room he is gripped by a terrible sense of failure, a feeling that Linda will win, that Brooke will slowly be drawn into a new and alien life in which he has no part.
‘Hi,’ Brooke says, stopping as she reaches the top of the stairs. She looks from one to the other and raises her eyebrows. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Nothing,’ Andrew and Linda say in unison, their timing far too perfect to be natural.
Brooke’s expression becomes anxious. ‘It feels weird, you two seem weird.’ She drops her bag on the floor.
‘Oh we’re always weird, darling,’ Linda says with forced gaiety. ‘Parents are always weird, you should know that by now.’
And Andrew stands there, feeling as boring and hopeless as Linda obviously thinks he is, staring desperately at his daughter and willing her to read his mind and see how much he loves her and how it will kill him if he loses her.