Andrew watches as the removal van disappears around the corner. So it’s done at last, after all the arguments about Brooke, about the house, about money and possessions and furniture, it really seems to be over. Suddenly, surprisingly, the hostility has dissipated and all he feels now is relief. It must, he thinks, have been the reality that Brooke was moving out that had led to Linda’s change of heart, the night he’d taken Brooke home. He’d been profoundly moved by her distress that night, but by the following morning he was back to wanting to pull out of the lunch commitment, and tell her to piss off and he’d see her in court. But part of him, he thinks now it was the better part, had made him hold back and he’d turned up at the restaurant to find Linda sitting at a corner table staring out of the window and sipping a glass of sparkling water. She looked terrible, worse even than the previous evening, vulnerable still, and in the harsh white light from the window her face looked haggard. He almost wanted to hug her but didn’t.
‘I can’t bear this anymore,’ she’d said, before he even sat down. ‘I want it to be over. I know I’ve behaved really badly and I don’t expect you to forgive me, but I am sorry, so let’s just decide what happens next.’
She told him to feel free to take everything that was on his list, and anything else he wanted, and had asked him for some time to raise the money to buy him out of the house.
‘I think Zach will buy in,’ she’d said. ‘He’s putting his house up for sale, but you know what the market’s like – it may take a while.’
‘Whatever,’ he said, ‘take your time. I don’t want to put you under any more pressure.’ They’d even managed to talk in a civilised way about Brooke’s maintenance and what Linda would contribute.
‘I want to see her at weekends or at least alternate weekends, and I want her to be able to come over in the week if she wants to.’
‘I won’t interfere with your seeing her,’ Andrew said. ‘I’ll fit in with whatever works for her and for you but you need to understand that Brooke is adamant that she won’t stay with you while Zachary is in the house, so you’ll need to think about how you’re going to manage that.’
Linda had nodded. ‘Well, Brooke may have to be a bit more flexible about that.’
In your dreams, he’d thought, but he hadn’t said it.
‘I keep thinking about what we lost,’ she continued. ‘I mean, things were falling apart long before I got involved with Zach. The heart had gone out of it for both of us.’
Andrew nodded. ‘Even those few times we began to talk about it we ended up in a mess.’
‘You changed . . .’ Linda began.
‘So you’ve said,’ he cut in. ‘I was terminally boring, but frankly I just felt like giving up on everything. We seemed to have come to the end of the road – and Dad getting so sick was part of it.’
‘But what happened was between us,’ Linda said, ‘it wasn’t to do with your father. It was us, we tried talking about it and got stuck so then we just let it all drift.’
‘Yes, but for me that was because I was floundering. Everything changed, I couldn’t get a grip on anything, particularly myself. Mum was cut off and distracted, my relationship with Kerry and Chris went down the plughole. I don’t understand it but it feels as though Dad’s illness somehow infected all of us.’
Linda had shrugged. ‘Sounds a bit fanciful to me,’ she said. ‘I don’t think it was anything to do with that, but it’s your family . . .’
Andrew hadn’t tried to explain because he wasn’t sure he knew how. All he knew was that as Gerald’s decline became more evident, and more incapacitating, he had felt that his own life was also somehow suspended. He couldn’t move forward or back, he was waiting, always waiting, for something to happen, some sort of change that would fix everything and take him – take his whole family – back to where it had once been.
‘Anyway,’ he said, surprising himself with his conciliatory tone, ‘everything will be better if we can keep talking rather than fighting.’
She’d nodded. ‘Yes. You were my friend as well as my husband, I’d like to hang on to the friendship.’
He’d been too choked up to speak then, but eventually managed a rather feeble, ‘Me too.’
As he’d walked back to the office after that lunch he’d felt as though a great weight had lifted off his shoulders. And now, as he stands in this quaint little rented cottage, staring at the cardboard boxes, the pieces of furniture they bought and those they had delivered from the house, the jumble of stuff all in the wrong place, it seems as though a shaft of light has opened up and the ice that had formed around his heart is starting to thaw.
He stands here now feeling pleasure in the ache of muscles weary from lifting furniture and boxes, and climbing on and off the tailboard of the van. He really should take more exercise. But there’s more lifting to do before they’re finished. The beds are in the two bedrooms, but more or less everything else is here in the lounge. The familiar torture of flatpack furniture awaits him, but even that seems like fun right now.
‘Coffee, Dad?’ Brooke calls from the kitchen, and he wanders through and sees her standing by the sink, ripping the packaging off the new coffee machine. She stands back looking at it, and then unwinds the cable and plugs it into the socket. ‘This is so cool. Do you know where we put the coffee capsules?’
Andrew pulls the box from a plastic carrier bag and hands it to her.
‘Do you know how to use it?’
She rolls her eyes. ‘Of course. Everyone’s got them these days. Donna’s mum’s got one.’
‘I still feel rather attached to the plunger.’
‘Well, you soon won’t,’ and she fills the machine with water and adjusts various switches. ‘It’s really easy,’ she says. ‘Black or white?’
‘White, please.’
He watches as she gets milk from the bag and begins to unpack the rest of the shopping and put it away.
My daughter, Andrew thinks, my beautiful daughter. And he can barely believe the pleasure he feels as he imagines them with everything unpacked, everything in its place, living here peacefully together.
‘I am so unfit,’ he says, ‘why don’t we start cycling again?’
‘Cool,’ Brooke says. ‘It’s a good thing Mum gave me her bike, because mine was too small last time we rode. I think that path we used to ride on actually comes along quite near here.’ She picks up her phone and fiddles with it.
‘You don’t need to look for it now,’ Andrew says.
‘I’m not. I’m trying to find a photo Nan sent me. Look.’
She hands him her phone and he pulls his glasses from his top pocket and examines the photograph of his mother. She’s in what looks like a hotel bedroom, wearing a dark blue dress and the Broome pearls his father had given her on their thirtieth anniversary. She looks as he remembers her, before all the drama of Gerald’s illness changed her. ‘Crikey,’ he says, ‘I can barely believe it,’ and he peers hard at the photograph, wanting to see it better, moving his fingers across the screen to enlarge it, and he has a sudden intense longing to see Connie in this dress, to be in that room with her.
‘She bought that dress for the opera,’ Brooke says. ‘She went with Granddad’s friend.’
‘Really?’ He can’t take his eyes off it. There is something about his mother in this picture that he had almost forgotten. A look he used to know but which he now realises went missing a long time ago. It’s anticipation, hope, he thinks, a look that says that something good could be about to happen. A huge lump tightens his throat; he sees that in the confusion of his own feelings about his father’s illness and death and the recent turmoil of his failing marriage, he has simply failed to consider what might be happening to his mother. He remembers a conversation with Kerry on the morning of the day they scattered the ashes, a conversation about the future, just the two of them in a café at Battery Point. They had talked about where Connie should live, what should happen to the house, how they would get her to organise her life in a way that they both thought best. And he feels himself flush with shame at the memory of it, the self-interest involved in attempting to tidy up Connie’s life, tidy her away for their own convenience. He opens his mouth to speak, but words seem to choke him and he clears his throat several times.
‘She’s beautiful,’ he says eventually, wishing he could actually express what he feels. ‘Really beautiful.’
Brooke nods, puts their coffee mugs on the table, and sits down, facing him. ‘Scroll through,’ she says, ‘there are some more.’
Andrew swipes his finger across the screen; Connie is laughing, waving her arms, and in another doing a sort of mock curtsey. Carefree, he thinks, that’s the word: free from the burden of care. Then she’s back in her usual clothes, a linen dress, then jeans and a shirt, somewhere on a stony English beach, with another woman.
‘That’s Brighton,’ Brooke says, peering across the table. ‘They were there before they went up to London.’
‘So who’s this?’ Andrew asks, pointing to the other woman.
‘Auntie Flora, of course,’ Brooke says. ‘Don’t you recognise her? She lived with you, didn’t she?’
Andrew enlarges the photograph. ‘So it is. Yes, she did live with us for a while but it’s so long ago I didn’t recognise her.’
‘She looks like Granddad, and like you.’
‘Yes, yes, I suppose she does.’ He remembers Flora’s hair now, so much of it, wild and curly, just as it is here, only now it’s grey – a silvery grey in the photograph. ‘But Flora lives in France, and this is Brighton.’
‘She went to England with Nan, they’re there now. Did you like her?’
Andrew looks up, wondering. Did he like her? She’s been excluded from his consciousness for so long he can barely recall how he felt, and then he remembers running. Running with his leg tied to Flora’s leg, both of them running as fast as they could, hanging on to each other, bodies hurtling forward towards a white line marked on the school sports field. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘yes, I did. She was fun. We won the three-legged race together.’
‘Really?’
‘Yep, sports day. I’d’ve been about nine or ten. It was one of those races that you have to run with a parent, and Dad was supposed to be there and run it with me, but he forgot, so Flora stepped in instead. Yes, I did like her. She left very suddenly and for a while I really missed her.’
‘I think Granddad was horrible to send her away like that,’ Brooke says. ‘Horrible and stupid.’
Andrew shrugs. ‘Well, he must have thought he was doing the right thing. He was always very fair, so wouldn’t have done it lightly.’
‘But it wasn’t fair. You would never do that to anyone. Like, Auntie Kerry’s your sister and you have your stupid fights where you just bristle up at her and she gets all red in the face, but you’d never banish her from the family.’
Andrew smiles. ‘No, I doubt that would happen. And I can’t see Kerry putting up with that sort of treatment anyway.’
‘Well, you certainly wouldn’t ban her for that.’ Brooke stirs sugar into her cup and licks the spoon.
‘For what?’
‘For being a lesbian. I mean, I know Auntie Kerry’s not a lesbian, but if she was, you would never chuck her out for that.’
Andrew looks at her in amazement. ‘A lesbian? You mean that’s why . . . ?’
Brooke nods. ‘Yep. Didn’t you know?’
Andrew is silent, trying to take it in. ‘I think you must have got it wrong, Brooke,’ he says. ‘I mean, Flora may well be a lesbian but he wouldn’t have thrown her out of the house for that.’
‘He did,’ Brooke says. ‘Nan told me. He made her leave the same day he found out, and he didn’t speak to her again. Not ever. You must’ve known.’
He shakes his head. ‘Well, I knew she was banished and they never spoke, but it was never talked about either. Mum used to talk to her and write but we were never told what it was all about . . .’ he hesitates, wondering suddenly about his own lack of curiosity. ‘She stayed with us for quite a long time, and one Sunday morning I went out to footy practice, and when I came back she was gone. When I asked when she was coming back Dad said she’d left and wouldn’t be coming back, that she’d done something terrible and we were just to forget about her.’
‘But didn’t you mind?’
‘Well, yes, I did actually. In fact I think I started to cry, and he told me not to be a baby. He said he’d sent her away for my sake, well, mine and Kerry’s and Mum’s, and we’d soon forget about her. And . . . and well, I suppose that’s what we did.’
‘That’s horrible. Didn’t you even ask when you were grown up?’
Andrew closes his eyes, trying to remember. ‘I think I did. Yes, I remember now, I asked Mum, years later. I was still living at home, so I suppose I was about seventeen, and she said, “You need to ask your father to explain that”.’
‘And did you?’
‘Yes.’ He remembers it clearly now. ‘I went up to his study and he was sitting at the desk writing something, and I asked him why he’d sent her away and why we couldn’t see her.’ It floods his memory now with images as sharp as if he were standing in Gerald’s study, facing him across the desk, watching the flush of anger creeping up his neck and spreading across his face, his eyes fixed on Andrew’s own. ‘I don’t want to talk about this, Andrew,’ he’d said. ‘And if I were in your position I wouldn’t be asking questions. This will not be mentioned again.’ And he can hear his father’s voice in his ears, and feel the chill of fear at the sense of something dark and dreadful, and his own resolve never to ask again. ‘D’you hear me, Andrew?’ Gerald had repeated. ‘Never.’
*
Kerry wanders around the little supermarket ostensibly looking for dog food and washing powder but, paying insufficient attention, she keeps missing them. She sighs, stopping for a moment, staring into the freezer filled with vegetables, trying to focus on the task at hand, trying not to think about her mother, trying to find a place in her head that will get the shopping done and get her back home again. She has left Farah and the girls clearing leaves and weeds in Connie’s garden, while she has come to get the things she and Farah forgot when they did the shopping earlier in the week. Right now Kerry thinks it would suit her nicely to climb into the freezer and be cryogenically frozen if she could wake up sometime in the future to find she was normal again.
She can remember times when she has cursed her feelings, wished she didn’t feel so much, so intensely and so often. But since she slipped into this black hole of depression, this feeling-free zone, she knows that feeling intensely is far better than the alternative. She wonders if she will feel anything ever again, and it seems pretty unlikely – in fact some days it seems impossible. Feelings are all around her, but she is never a part of them, just an observer. She had thought that getting away would make a difference. Chris, Erin, the children all seemed to be thrusting feelings in her face all the time. They were happy, ecstatic even, or sad, or angry, worried, anxious, or spilling over with laughter, and she was a thing apart.
But even though she’s been at Connie’s for three weeks now, her numbness hasn’t really gone away. The one thing that is easier, though, is that Farah doesn’t keep asking her if she’s okay, or if she’s feeling better. Chris and Erin, on the other hand, had constantly looked at her with concern or sympathy. ‘How’re you doing?’ Chris would ask as they woke up each morning, and she could hear his need for her to be better, and his fear that nothing was changing. ‘Any better today?’ Erin would ask over breakfast, trying to sound casual but her tone was loaded with concern. Kerry had struggled to find something within herself to reassure them, but it just wasn’t there, nothing was there, not better, not worse, just nothing.
So it is a bit easier with Farah, who seems to understand that this is not something that is going to be better in the morning, so she doesn’t ask. What she does, instead, is to make sure that Kerry works towards getting better.
‘I think we could all do with a walk,’ she’d said this morning when she had seen Kerry lying on the sofa staring glumly at the blank TV screen. And Kerry, who would have much preferred to stay put, got up, put on her walking shoes and they all walked right down into Sandy Bay, had a coffee and struggled back up the hill again, after which she did feel more able to get through the rest of the dull and wintry Sunday.
‘The exercise does help,’ Kerry had admitted when they got back.
‘Good, because I think we must tidy up the garden this afternoon, and we’ve run out of dog food so one of us has to drive down to the supermarket.’
What Farah is doing, Kerry realises, is keeping her on track. She is kind and concerned but she expects Kerry to pull her weight, and doesn’t count on overnight results.
When Chris called yesterday evening he’d asked if being in the house was helping, and she had wanted to tell him something to make him feel better, to give him some sort of hope.
‘I think it may be,’ she’d said. ‘There are lots of memories, I suppose that’s a good thing.’ It was all she could think of to say but he’d sounded relieved.
‘We miss you,’ he’d said. ‘I miss you especially, Kerry. I love you, and I’m thinking of you all the time.’
‘I love you too,’ she’d said, because she knows that she does, she must do, even though she can’t feel it. She thinks of him and the children constantly, wanting their hugs, their kisses, their physical presence, without having to try to enter their emotional space. And she thinks of Connie and wonders whether her mother will ever be able to forgive her for being the daughter from hell.
She sleeps a lot and finds herself dreaming of her childhood, strange muddled dreams in which she is running to catch up with her father who is always just that little bit too far ahead of her. And sometimes she dreams of Andrew, something she hasn’t done for years, and in those dreams she’s trying to catch him too. He stops and turns around and holds out his hand waiting for her to catch up with him and take it, but however fast she runs she never reaches him. Weird, she thinks, but then maybe not really weird at all.
But it does seem odd when, as she climbs back into the car with her supermarket shopping, her phone rings and it’s Andrew.
‘I tried you at home,’ Andrew says, ‘but Chris said you’re at Mum’s. Is . . . well, is everything okay?’
‘Of course, why wouldn’t it be?’ Kerry says, trying to sound normal.
‘You and Chris, I mean, you haven’t . . . ?’
‘We’re fine,’ she says. ‘I just needed a bit of a break and Erin’s there so I came down here for a while.’
‘Oh good, I just . . . well, actually, Linda and I have split up, and then when you weren’t home I thought . . .’
‘Oh god,’ she says, ‘I’m so sorry about you and Linda, I’d no idea. But, no, Chris and I are okay, thanks, nothing like that. Are you okay?’
‘Yes, well, yes and no. It’s all been a bit of a mess. Linda’s with someone else, and they’re in the house and Brooke and I are renting a cottage until she can buy me out.’
‘Shit! That’s all happened pretty quickly. Are you okay?’
‘I am now. Relieved really. It’s been a long time coming, and the last couple of months have been bloody awful but the worst is over. We moved in here yesterday and it’s really nice.’
‘And Brooke?’
‘It’s been hard on her,’ Andrews says. ‘She loathes Linda’s new . . . er . . . boyfriend, but she had to stay on in the house with them both longer than was good for her.’
‘You should’ve let me know,’ she says. ‘Is there anything I can do?’ She can’t imagine what she possibly could do even in her normal state and as she is now it seems a ridiculous question.
‘No, but thanks,’ he says. ‘It’d be good to get together sometime soon though. School holidays perhaps? It seems so long since we actually had a conversation without arguing.’
Goosebumps take Kerry by surprise and she shivers. ‘Yes, too long,’ she says.
‘Are you sure you’re okay, Ker? You sound a bit odd.’
‘Just tired, I think, still getting over Dad. We all are, I suppose. Have you heard from Mum?’
‘I spoke to her on the phone about the break-up and she’s been in regular touch with Brooke. Helped her through it, I think. Kerry, there’s something I want to ask you. Do you know why Dad kicked Auntie Flora out of the house all those years ago?’
‘No idea. I asked once, and Dad just said it was none of my business, and we should all be very glad that he’d sent her away for our sake.’ As she speaks she can see a vague image of her aunt, a tall woman with a nice smile and curly reddish-brown hair, building a sandcastle with her and saying, ‘This bit is the tower where the princess gets locked away.’ ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Well, it’s just that Mum told Brooke that Dad found out Flora was a lesbian.’
‘What?’
‘I know – it’s weird, isn’t it? I mean, not that she was, or is, but that he reacted like that. Does it make sense to you? I mean, he was always rabidly anti-gay but that . . .’
‘I think I remember something . . .’ she says, trying to recall how it happened. It was later, years later, and her chest is suddenly tense, her heart beating faster as she remembers another summer. She was fourteen, the summer that Jennifer Mortimer came to stay. Another day, another beach, she and Jen stretched out on towels on the sand. She could feel the heat of Jen’s body alongside her, the sides of their hands were almost touching, and although they were apparently dozing and sunbaking, Kerry knew Jennifer was as alert as she was; the narrow space between them fizzled and crackled with electricity. She felt Jennifer’s little finger twitch and shift and link into hers and her heart seemed to swell with the thrill of it as her father’s dark shadow loomed above them blocking out the sun.
‘Kerry?’ Andrew asks. ‘Kerry are you still there?’
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘yes I’m here, I’m thinking. And I don’t know . . . but I think it does make sense. Something happened . . . years ago one summer . . . it’s just . . . just so long ago . . .’
*
‘So d’you think she’d fit in?’ Phillip asks, attempting to cross his legs and knocking his knee hard against the corner of the filing cabinet in the process.
Bea smiles. He never fails to forget the filing cabinet, she thinks; he must have a permanent bruise on that knee.
Phillip swears and rubs the knee. ‘This office is ridiculous.’
‘You’re telling me,’ she says. ‘When are you going to get that other room fixed up so I can have a proper office?’
‘Okay, okay, I’ll get that chap down the road to come in and give me a quote this week.’
‘Yes, I do think she’s ideal. We’ve been lucky with staff but the young ones do tend to come and go. We need someone more mature and if Flora says yes it’ll be because she’s really made up her mind to settle here. I think we’d get on well.’
Phillip nods. ‘Me too. So hopefully she’ll make up her mind in the next few days and we can get things moving.’
‘How was the opera?’ Bea asks.
‘Magnificent, as always, or almost always, I’m very . . .’
‘Actually, I meant how was going to the opera with Connie?’
‘Ah, yes. Well, it was very nice to go with someone who really knows their stuff and enjoys it. And it was . . .’ He stops, as if struggling to find the words he wants to say.
‘And it was what?’ Bea prompts.
‘It was interesting to hear about Gerry from Connie’s point of view.’
‘Really?’ Bea is bursting to know what this means but he will only tell her in his own time.
‘Mmmm, I don’t know whether I should . . .’ Another pause. ‘But I don’t think she said it in confidence . . .’
‘Oh for god’s sake, Phillip, stop farting around and tell me whatever it is.’
He fidgets in his chair and sits upright, this time banging his elbow. ‘Shit!’ He rubs it fiercely. ‘Well, you know all that stuff Gerry told you about how needy Connie was, and how helpless after her mother died, and how he felt compelled to look after her?’
‘Yes, yes, and how much she relied on him – get on with it.’
‘Well, I don’t think that was true at all.’
Bea smiles. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘Oh, just something she said about letting Gerald persuade her that she might not make it in the opera.’
‘Flora said something similar – what she was implying, I think, was that it was Gerald who was afraid he couldn’t make it without a woman who would stand adoringly alongside him.’
Phillip puffs out his cheeks. ‘That sort of makes sense, I think.’ He pauses. ‘You don’t seem surprised.’
‘No, but I was surprised when I met Connie because she didn’t seem to me to be a woman who could ever have been as Gerry described her. It absolutely rocked everything I’d ever believed about the two of them. And then the other day, when I had lunch with Flora, it all started to make sense.’
They sit there in the office, staring at each other.
‘So how does that make you feel now, Bea?’
Bea gives a short, sharp laugh. ‘Well, Dr Freud, I suppose the answer to that is that I feel strangely relieved. As though something has been put to rest. I realised long ago that Gerry and I would never have lasted in the long term. And I suppose it clarifies something that always concerned me about him – his capacity for self-deception in getting what he wanted or needed. I think I always saw that but tried not to, although it made me uneasy.’
He nods. ‘Odd bloke, wasn’t he? And I get the feeling he was stuck in a groove, didn’t change much over the years. Anyway, your birthday next week. Lunch at The Ivy as usual? Or do you want to go wild and do something different?’
‘Different? Good heavens,’ she grins, ‘why would I do something different? It’s the annual highlight in my pleasantly boring social life. Might be nice to see if Connie and Flora would like to come along.’
‘Excellent idea.’ Phillip gets to his feet without bumping anything. ‘I’ll check with them and hopefully book for four. I wonder what would have happened to your publishing career if you’d married Gerry. You probably had a lucky escape.’
‘I’m beginning to think that myself,’ she says. ‘And it comes as something of a relief after all this time.’