Flora stands on the hard sand letting the icy water lap around her feet and wondering if she has the fortitude to immerse herself in it. April is proving to be unseasonably warm on a coast that’s not renowned for warmth. The water is freezing but inviting, such a clear transparent green, and she can see the tiny shells shifting back and forth in the sand around her feet. She walks out a little further until it covers her ankles, and then a bit further to mid-calf. Her legs are almost numb but the sun is comforting on her back and shoulders. For Flora it is always the knees that are crucial; if she can make it to a depth that covers them she knows she’s going in.
Turning around she looks back to the beach to where Connie is sitting on a towel, in a sunny spot between two rocks, head tilted back, facing the sun with her eyes closed. She has done a lot of sleeping since she arrived: jetlag probably but also, Flora thinks, a greater exhaustion, grief and an as yet undeclared relief at the lifting of a burden. How would that feel, Flora wonders, to be totally occupied with caring for someone for years and then to be finally freed? She wonders if Connie has any real sense of that freedom yet and, if she has, whether it thrills or terrifies her. Yes, a lot of sleeping, and not much talking. The latter has been something of a disappointment to Flora, who had anticipated conversations of the sort that it was never quite possible to have on a computer screen or by email. She’d imagined silences too, of course, but long companionable silences in which they would each be in their own worlds but also within the world of the past, its understandings, its memories and its own silences. But it hasn’t been like that. There has been awkwardness between them, something cautious and guarded, something more noticeable still when Suzanne is around. The hotel is a place of constant interruptions and mini-dramas. It will get better, Flora thinks, it has to, we just need more time alone, and Connie needs to chill out.
She turns back to face the horizon and takes a small step and then two large strides forward until her knees are covered, holds her breath and plunges in, gasping with the shock and thrashing wildly around to warm herself up, swearing under her breath, until her body temperature drops and she can relax. It’s ages since she came to this beach although it’s her favourite and the closest to home of the little inlets off the cape. While she loves to walk alone, the beach, she feels, should be a shared pleasure.
They had come here first as children, with her parents and in later years alone, her mother and father preferring the town beach. It seemed like a secret cove; of course other people did go there, but there weren’t many tourists back in the fifties and those that were around preferred the larger beaches with longer stretches of sand further up the cape. After her first visit to Port d’Esprit, Flora had mounted a relentless campaign to get both sets of parents to agree that Connie could go with them the following year. It was hard at first; her own parents had taken to Connie, who was quiet and polite. They thought her a very suitable friend for their daughter, and even Gerald had conceded that as girls went she wasn’t too bad. Connie’s parents were hard up though, and her father was touchy, quick to feel insulted. But eventually he had given in, and had insisted on paying her way and making a big fuss about it at the same time. So Connie had come with them to Port d’Esprit, and continued to do so every subsequent year until the summer after the year they finished school. After that Connie won her scholarship to the Guildhall, and Flora made her first – and, as it turned out, her last – step towards entering a convent.
Halcyon days, Flora thinks now. They were free to do much as they wanted, sometimes with Suzanne, but more often on their own, exploring beaches and rocks, fishing with a cork and hook on a line off the quayside, wandering through the streets of the little town. Gerald had grown out of family holidays by then, although he did come one year and spent most of his time grunting irritably or skulking off into town to chat up local girls. Gerald! Flora feels the uncomfortable tightening of resentment in her chest thinking of the way he encouraged their parents’ anger and disapproval when she went to India. It was then, while Flora was away for almost two years, that Connie’s mother had died in a traffic accident and Gerald stepped into her life. And by the time Flora came home Connie was abandoning her dreams of the opera, and planning a wedding. Flora had long felt that she and Connie were like sisters and now that was about to be reality, but she was torn between joy at the prospect of her best friend being part of her family, and an uneasy feeling that Gerald had kidnapped her. And that was only the beginning. She wonders if Gerald ever had any inkling of the grief he had caused her or the insidious, long-lasting effects of his behaviour towards her some years later.
Looking up to the beach Flora sees Connie sit up and rub her eyes before she looks around, spots Flora, waves, gets up and strolls to the water’s edge, yelping as the ripples reach her feet. She looks good, Flora thinks; she’s always been sturdy but shapely, and her fine English skin has withstood the ravages of age pretty well.
‘Good heavens, Flora, it’s bloody freezing,’ Connie calls. ‘Have you gone raving mad, you could die of hypothermia.’
‘It’s gorgeous once you’re in,’ Flora says, wading back towards her.
‘Don’t splash me,’ Connie cries, ‘promise you won’t splash me,’ and she wraps her arms around her body defensively but keeps walking slowly into the shallow waves.
Flora stops, sees her bend to dip her hands in the water and then rub them over her upper arms and neck. In that moment, Connie is eleven again, or thirteen, or even sixteen; this is how she does it, griping, gasping, slowly but surely heading towards full body immersion, and Flora begins to laugh.
‘What?’ Connie calls out. ‘Why are you laughing?’
‘You haven’t changed,’ Flora says. ‘Same old Connie, grumble, grumble, gasp, moan and then suddenly you’ll be in there, thrashing around and screaming.’
And Connie stops, looks at her for a moment, takes a huge breath, plunges in and comes up gasping, water spouting from her mouth. ‘Right,’ she shouts, ‘you’ve asked for it, madam. I’m coming for you,’ and then she is half-swimming, half-running towards her, and Flora, breathless with laughter and exertion, turns to escape, stumbles, disappears underwater and struggles up again just as Connie grabs her, and instead of the dunking Flora is expecting, Connie hangs on tightly, throwing her head up, struggling for breath, and looks straight into her eyes.
‘Oh, Flora, I am so thankful to be here with you. I have missed you so terribly for so long.’
And they cling together just as they had done when they met on the station platform, but this time it’s different – something has changed. Time and distance, age and experience, seem to dissolve in the icy water and they are jumping up and down, splashing and squealing like teenagers, freed at last both by what they remember and what they choose to forget.
*
As she drives past the front door and parks at the side of the house Kerry can see that there is no one home. The doors are locked, Scooter is not barking, no signs of life. She gets out of the car and looks around, wondering why she is here. She only decided to come last night, when Chris had suggested they take the kids to the zoo for a picnic.
‘You’ll have to do it without me,’ she’d said on the spur of the moment. ‘I’m going down to Mum’s.’
Chris, who had been unpacking the dishwasher, had looked up in surprise. ‘To Hobart – why?’
‘I just – Mum wants me to check it out, make sure everything’s okay,’ she’d said, and he’d straightened up and looked at her and it was clear he didn’t believe her.
‘You mean you want to check on Farah.’
She’d flushed then and turned away. ‘Somebody has to.’
‘No they don’t. Connie made the arrangement and she trusts Farah. Don’t meddle, Kerry.’
‘Can’t I just have a day to myself sometimes?’ she’d said. ‘You’re perfectly capable of taking the kids on a picnic.’
‘Indeed I am,’ he’d said, ‘but that’s not the point, is it?’
She hates it when he calls her to account like this. In the early days she had admired it, had even felt that it might make her a better, less selfish, more honest person. Now it just pisses her off. He should’ve been a lawyer instead of a teacher; he’d be fearsome in the courtroom, picking up every inconsistency, every lie, every evasion, torturing witnesses like a cat toying with mice.
‘I’m planning to leave really early,’ she’d continued. ‘I’ll be back by tea time.’
She looks at her watch – just after nine, hopefully Farah has taken her children out for the day. Kerry takes the house keys from her bag, snaps open the boot of the car and retrieves two bags of books that she has, over the last couple of years, borrowed from Gerald’s shelves. And leaving the boot and the driver’s door open she lugs them to the back of the house and lets herself in through the kitchen.
The house is immaculate, spotless; she can’t remember ever having seen it looking so perfect. She dumps the bags on the kitchen floor and wanders from room to room sampling the stillness, the fresh lemony scent of some kind of furniture polish or floor cleaner. How does Farah keep it so tidy with two kids? Kerry wonders, gazing at the red plastic crate filled with children’s books and a few toys, standing neatly in the corner by the fireplace. Even the cushions and loose covers on the sofa, which is too soft and squishy ever to look neat, appear to have been freshly laundered or dry cleaned. Kerry considers lying down on it; these days she’s always tired. But it is not the couch that she wants to lie on, and before she does anything else she wants to see upstairs.
She goes first to Connie’s room. The bed linen is stacked neatly alongside the folded doona on the bed, presumably in readiness for her mother’s return. The big spare room is still essentially tidy but the toys and books are not packed away like those downstairs. The twin beds are made up, each with a furry nightdress case on it – one a grey and white penguin, the other a pink lion. Some children’s clothes are draped over the chair, others are in a neatly folded stack on the chest of drawers. Twins, of course, Farah has twin girls, Kerry remembers – she’s met them once. They must be Ryan’s age, more perhaps. Well, that’s the children, so where is Farah sleeping?
Not in Andrew’s old room she sees as she opens the door, and not the other small one which Connie is now obviously using for storage. So it’s Kerry’s old room that has been occupied by the invading force. Farah has brought her own doona cover, a glorious swirling pattern in shades of turquoise and cobalt, with matching pillowcases. Beside the bed is a pair of black satin slippers embroidered in silver thread and on the night table a pair of glasses, a small dish containing a couple of silver bracelets and a ring, and alongside it three books stacked one on top of the other.
She tiptoes to the bedside table embarrassed by her own intrusion into what is now Farah’s room, reaches out a cautious hand and pushes the books around so she can see the titles. One has a red and gold cover with a title in an unfamiliar alphabet, there is a well-worn copy of Mrs Dalloway, and a new edition of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, both of which she knows to be her mother’s favourites. Glancing nervously over her shoulder she picks up Rebecca and sees that it is inscribed – ‘To Farah, I hope you’ll enjoy this. Many thanks for taking care of everything for me. Love, Connie.’ Mrs Dalloway is Connie’s own copy, her name scrawled in the top right-hand corner of the title page along with the year, 1974.
Kerry straightens the books, looks around the room, barely recognisable as hers, and tiptoes out closing the door behind her. At the foot of the narrow staircase to her father’s study she pauses, then turns away. What’s the point? It’s several years since he was able to inhabit that room, although as far as she knows Connie has left it just as it was the last time he used it. Is there something of him still left up there or has every vestige of his spirit departed from the house?
Sighing, she goes down to the kitchen, fills the kettle and stands staring out at the garden, waiting for the water to boil, wondering what she is really doing here. What she wants to do is to lie on the old chaise longue in the study. To find something of him there, just as she had wanted to lie alongside him in the last few months and days of his life, on that wretched hospital bed that had been set up for him in the small sitting room downstairs. She had ached for closeness then, but been so repelled by his physical condition that she had struggled even to make herself bend to kiss his cool, sunken cheek or hold his trembling hand. The memory of her inability to accept his illness or help with his care fills her with shame. What a failure she is as a daughter, as a woman. No wonder her mother dislikes her; she, more than anyone, sees through the confident, stroppy exterior to the weak, hopeless person she really is. Some sort of wall has grown up between her and other people, cutting her off from everyone she loves, even her children. She is trapped behind it, disconnected from everyone else, watching what happens but unable to feel a part of it. She’s gone through periods like this in the last few years but they have passed; this time, however, it seems to have become a permanent state.
Kerry pours the water onto a tea bag, finds milk in the fridge, and makes her way to the lounge, but the pull of the study is too strong and she is soon heading slowly back up the stairs, along the landing to the narrow little staircase up to the converted loft that her father had described as his eyrie. The room is as it has always been, piled with books and papers, the 1930s telephone converted into a table lamp, the box files, the stacks of government reports, the framed photographs of family, from sepia studio portraits of great-grandparents to snaps of Andrew and herself as children, a photo of her and Chris’s wedding, and pictures of them with Ryan and Mia. She picks up a yellowing photograph of her parents’ wedding; Gerald in a morning suit, Connie in a full length satin dress with lace sleeves, carrying a bouquet of apricot roses, and then she spots another, a studio portrait of her father taken some time before he got sick. The photographer had captured the best of him, a full head of greying hair, the searching eyes and that cleft chin that Andrew has inherited and she, thankfully, has not. The knowing, half-amused expression, the slightly crooked hint of a smile, his natural air of authority – it’s all there. It is a picture of the father she wants to remember, the man whose approval she had so desperately sought but which always evaded her. It is a picture that restores him, and allows her to ignore the metamorphosis that transformed and diminished him, and finally repelled her.
The old couch where Gerald sat to read, or to snooze on Sunday afternoons, looks very inviting. Setting her cup down on the wonky old wooden stool nearby, Kerry sorts out the faded cushions and lies down. A dodgy spring digs into her hip and she shifts her position, wondering just how long it is since Gerald lay here. Four years, more perhaps? Is it possible that no one has lain here since then? She holds the framed photograph against her chest, folding her arms over it and around herself, trying to recapture him, her mind rambling through the past. All the questions that she never asked, and to which she now so desperately wants the answers, crawl out from the woodwork of her memory. She recalls all the missed opportunities to know him better, to bridge the various stages in both their lives, to reach out as an adult woman, instead of always as a stumbling child. She has spent all her life trying to get to know him, and to make him see her, to notice her, but always being disappointed. What did he really think of her? What would he think of her now? She closes her eyes, willing herself to see him, to feel his presence, but hard as she tries there is nothing. She is cut off from the dead just as she is from the living.