When Mike arrived home he was met by Ada, who burst out of the kitchen door pointing at the garden and immediately detailing the day’s horrors including PJ digging up the grave and the grim task now ascribed to him of reburying the bodies. Mike was already weighed down. And now this—another unpleasant task. He blew out a sigh. Ada dutifully led him to where the lifeless chickens lay. He edged them one by one onto the shovel while Ada watched to make sure he was doing it with the right sense of gravitas.
‘Aren’t you sad, Daddy?’ she said finally, squatting down to help heap dirt. She frowned up at him. She could tell he wasn’t.
‘Well, I didn’t know the chickens like you did.’
Ada’s eyes were fixed on him, as if this wasn’t quite acceptable.
‘If PJ died, then would you be sad?’ The question burst out indignantly. He knew what it meant. Her question pleaded as much as it accused. He stopped shovelling and wiped the dirt off his sock. He didn’t want to meet Ada’s questioning face. Those round, startled eyes unpeeled everything.
‘Ada, of course I’d be sad if PJ died,’ he said.
She still looked at him as if this had passed right through her—he had played a shot and she wasn’t playing it back. She folded her arms across her chest as if protecting herself from his ambivalence. Mike shrugged. He felt prickly and defensive and wanted to turn away. A mosquito landed on his forearm. He slapped it dead and wiped the small smear of blood with his thumb. Ada watched him and then, letting her arms loose, she turned back to the grave and began patting the earth down.
Ada was like his grandmother, Ma Betty. In his memory she was a dark old woman, who made him sit on her knee while she pretended to talk to the seagulls. Ma Betty had the same instinct for the arcane as Ada did. She made wafty pronouncements about people that embarrassed the family. Apparently she read the cards too. She died before Mike went to school, so it was hearsay really, but he blamed Ada’s penetrating gaze on Ma Betty and perhaps feared it for the same reason. Would he be sad if PJ died? He’d claimed he would without even thinking about it. But he would. He was fond of PJ. He always gave PJ a passing pat. Ada shouldn’t doubt him.
‘I would cry for weeks and weeks if PJ died.’ Ada’s small voice sailed up from the grave that she assiduously attended. He knew it was true. She was crouched over, rearranging the flowers. She probably would cry for weeks when PJ died. But he could do nothing to match it. He had never understood this sort of emotion. It came out of women and seemed always dangerously imminent within them. He was suffocated by it all. Two daughters and a wife was a forest of women. All mist and moss. And even if Ada was still more child than woman, she had this capacity, the same as Martha and Tilly, to feel things intensely and immediately, and to be easily overwhelmed with sadness.
‘Make sure you put some bricks on it so PJ doesn’t dig them up again,’ he said, readying himself to leave. But the sight of her grubby little hands patting at the dirt, as if she were sending the chickens to sleep, caught at his heart. He swooped down next to her.
‘Ada, PJ will die one day. He’s old now,’ he said. It wasn’t exactly comforting, but it was all he could think to say. Ada ignored him. She busied herself with the arrangement of flowers. She made a circle of flower heads and arranged the sticks so that they spelled out peace.
‘Does this look magnificent?’ she asked.
Mike nodded. It was no good counselling children about the future. The future didn’t exist for them. He was useless at this sort of thing: talking, understanding, guiding children through the thorny moments. He didn’t know how to do it. It was Martha’s job. He stood up again and watched as Ada pressed patterns into the dirt. Then he walked away.
‘Daddy,’ she called out to him. She had stood up. From her hand dangled a limp, creamy rose. The hot falling sky was luminous behind her. She looked like a gypsy child—a pale lemon frock smudged with dirt, swaying over her shins while she stared at him with a dreadful aim.
‘Have you finished?’ he asked, coming back. He was flustered, tired of this burial now.
‘If Mummy died would you be sad?’ She said it with an unnerving directness. She didn’t accuse him, but she watched him intently, as if he were a prisoner about to attempt an escape. He wiped the sweat on his face. A magpie warbled above them. The weight of the world’s truth heaved over him.
‘You know I’d be sad if Mummy died.’ He was defeated as he said it. He stumbled over the words as they rose, hurrying to cover the image of Susie Layton astride him in the living room. Nothing he could say would change the act of his betrayal or the fact of love’s fragility. He couldn’t show her that love was a complicated work, that it wasn’t always as simple, direct, shining and pure as a star. That was how Ada wanted it to be—as simple as her own raw little love.
But she’d seen something else now. She had seen how things tarnish, how people make it up to themselves when love fails. She would see it sooner or later anyway. Ada’s first piece of love’s shining star had broken, and it was too late to mend it. He frowned, rolled his mind over it. He wanted to sweep this all up. He squatted down next to Ada again and pulled her in close.
‘That’s a funny question. I’d cry for weeks and weeks if any of you died—Mummy, Tilly, Ben or you. I promise. I would cry for years.’
Ada relinquished a smile. Her arm wound around his neck. Her fingers danced over his ear. She stared thoughtfully into the distance and her face looked strangely peaceful.
‘Me too, only I’d cry forever,’ she said. She let him go then and went back to the chicken’s grave.
Forever. He remembered that feeling. Or he remembered the sort of innocence that built futures out of forever. Ada would never know how he had been so fresh and clean. How he had gone to his first formal party like a puppy trotting along at Arnold’s heels. How he could still see Mary Galmotte’s white house, sitting like a cake on a carpet of lawn with arcs of gold light that danced with the tree shadows on the white walls. Mike had felt it as a sort of ambient invitation. He had felt the mysteries too. That house was an apparition, from forever, from once upon a time, from heaven and Hollywood all at once. The evening had laid itself out for him. His heart had quickened just walking down that long driveway leading him to another world, a tantalising, out-of-reach world—a world to conquer. After all, he was brand new and heroic too. Just like Ada, his moral universe was intact.
There was a stairway in the entrance, the bottom step of which was occupied by a young man with a banjo and a cluster of girls in shining dresses. The room was ample, open, drizzled with the early evening light; alight with a hum of frivolity and opulence he hadn’t ever felt before. Girls, as decorative as tulips, swayed on their high heels, their high voices mingling with those of the young men with combed hair. Arnold had given him a beer and ushered him over to the window seat. It was Arnold’s way to sit back and hold court, but it was Mike’s to go out and explore. Arnold patted his pocket and pulled out two cigars. Mike relented and sat down. They had a game now, which they both knew well. Mike’s good looks lured them in and Arnold held them captive. Mike had barely begun on his beer when Martha appeared at the top of the staircase.
She advanced into that large room of honeyed light and silk and promise, a tiny dark-haired dart of a girl swathed in dark green, like a blot of ink staining the serenity of it all. She inched forward so tentatively and stubbornly that she broke the spell of it all, as if until then everything had been made of glass, and there she was, so unable to smooth herself down that she tore the evening’s murmuring surface like a star breaking through the dark. He rose instantly, as if she might need him. He stood in front of her and told her that he had thought she might fall. She had replied that she once saw someone fall down at a museum. The woman slipped down marble steps in front of a whole crowd of people and her skirt slid up and Martha couldn’t stop herself from laughing, even though she felt terrible about it. Ever after she thought she deserved to fall down some steps, as punishment for that laughter, so she was terrified of course. Mike assured her that it didn’t show, even though it had.
He immediately regretted it. He should have told the truth, that her terror had been appealing because it cut through in a room of such glacial composure. She had failed to hold herself in. It showed even then, in the heat on her cheeks as she gazed back at him grateful, he hoped, for filling the space in front of her. She drew a finger across her hair and breathing out she gave a baffled shrug and asked if he ever laughed when he knew he shouldn’t. She said that when she smothered her laugh, everything became much funnier. The more she held it in, the more it wanted to get out.
Mike had smiled. Here was the girl he had come for. He watched her shoulders rise up to fill the moment, determined and tentative all at once. The instant he knew she was the one, he became acutely aware that he might not succeed in getting her, and the accumulation of those two facts hit him with such a pang that he fell silent.
She didn’t, though. She told him that it was similar with anger, in that if you tried not to be angry, it was so infuriating to pretend to be nice when you didn’t feel nice, that your anger leaked out in little fits of irritation. He remembered how much he liked her eyes as she spoke to him, how they looked into him, how worried they were, how odd it was that she should be worrying.
She said she supposed he didn’t get angry much. She mustn’t have meant to stare at him like that, as if uncovering him. He almost stepped backwards. He’d never even thought about it. Was he an angry person? Mostly he just got angry with himself, when he missed a goal, when he didn’t win something. If he had made a good impression on her, he was desperate to retain whatever it was she was projecting onto him, but he wasn’t sure how to do it.
She asked him how he knew Mary. When he asked who Mary was, she seemed delighted that he didn’t know, since it meant that he had stolen into the party. She was instantly more interested in him because of this transgression that wasn’t mitigated by the fact, as he explained, that his friend Arnold had brought him along. She asked if he was at university.
He had been in the beginning. He had enrolled in an arts degree. Only because of Arnold, who was doing law. Arnold told him to study history and art and literature in order to become interesting. English Literature. Mike didn’t read novels, not unless they were thrilling and the ones in the English literature course were anything but. He had never read anything so convoluted as Henry James. By the time he came to the end of a sentence, he had forgotten the beginning. In the tutorials he floundered, but on the university football team he’d come into his own. And then he got a job at a pub in Richmond. He had cash. He had work. Why persevere with Henry James and the French Revolution? What did any of that mean to him? A country boy.
She replied that all she wanted to do was travel, to see other countries. Mike didn’t want her to go. She would never come back. He suggested she come with him and meet Arnold. Arnold was European after all.
Mike should have just stayed there by the stairs and kept talking, but it was his habit to return somehow to Arthur and he escorted her there as if taking her home.
Arthur glowed. He asked Martha how Mike had captured her. ‘If it wasn’t his handsome face it must have been his good manners, no doubt.’
Martha smiled and began looking nervously in her bag for a cigarette. She said that Mike had offered to save her should she fall. Arnold asked if Mike did save her since he was a bloody good catch. She said he didn’t have to. Not yet. She tapped the cigarette on her wrist, turning to him with a smile, and because the smile searched him for his approval, his heart had flared, and he had to stop himself moving closer to her. Mike had intended that Arnold’s wit would hold Martha’s attention, and she and he could unwind, warm up as couples do, beneath the sun of Arnold’s banter, and come to know each other.
Arnold expertly drove the conversation, Mike relaxed, Martha laughed and they all drank more. But things changed before Mike could even take account. Arnold twisted the night towards his own elaborate purpose. He lured them out of the party. They got in his car. He drove. None of them cared where. It had felt mad and free. Martha’s hair had come undone and it blew across her face. Everything seemed empty, the road, the night, the future. They hurled themselves into it as if it courting oblivion, as if pursuing something they never wanted to find. That was forever. Or it was as close he had come to it.
That night had chased him ever since. It had begun at Mary Galmotte’s and spun out into a dissolute sprawl. Hours passed—they were drunk, exultant, tired, half asleep, wide awake and on fire. But what happened he’d never really understood, except that something had been sacrificed and what remained was dark and turgid and sleeping, like an old ship sunk beneath the sea, beneath the sea of their marriage. He and Martha never talked about it, yet it was there, even now, even as he stood watching Ada as the day sank away, he felt the tension of that night rising in his throat. The game he played with Susie had the same rules, or lack of rules, as the game they had played that night.
He wanted to believe he’d convinced Ada of his devotion, and yet he wasn’t sure he had. Ada always looked into things too deeply. She was a child with the soul of an animal, a nose for anything that was off, for the emotional weather of a situation. He hadn’t lied. It was everything to him, this family, even if there was no forever. Most of the time he took it all for granted. Sometimes he felt burdened by it, but surely all men felt like that. It was normal. If losing some part of it wouldn’t make him sad, nothing would. His own father had gone to work in the morning after the night Mike’s mother died, just as he always did. He carried on. That’s what men do.
He pumped himself with these reassurances so that his step regained its characteristic bounce. He could expertly dodge that niggling doubt after all. He had been exhausted and he didn’t know why. He’d blamed it on the heat and work and the way blame had collided with his excitement about Susie. Tilly’s accusation had shaken his moral perspective. Bouts of guilt had been dragging at the thoughts that used to swerve so smoothly back and forth to the orange-brick motel. But now, hadn’t Ada given it all back to him? His rightful place. He could still love his family, be a good father, bury the chickens. None of this had changed; none of it was compromised by what he had done. Ada saw that, she must have.
He braced himself to face Martha. She would be raw after the chickens’ deaths. Anything would set her off. He would have to be careful not to get into any discussions. It always irritated her if they did discuss anything. Nothing he said was ever right. She found his opinions narrow-minded and chauvinistic and she told him so too. He tried not to let things veer that way, but they always did, because Martha provoked him, airing her contentious views as wantonly as Susie Layton revealed her flesh. She upset herself worrying about injustices that had nothing to do with her; she found the whole damn country small-minded and backward; she resented the government, criticised the school curriculum. If he didn’t raise his objections, own his opinions, what sort of a man was he? A pushover?
Not he.
Still, tonight was not a night to stir things up. He had to try to be sensitive about the chickens. Perhaps he should offer to do something. Get takeaway? After all it was Saturday. It seemed fitting and Ada would love it. She could go with him. Just he and Ada. He would even try to enjoy it. They could have a conversation in the car. He would listen to her properly. Usually he could just let her chatter away, while still managing to steer his own thoughts over the top. But in the car they could plan what dishes they would order. Ada always had the special fried rice. He could promise ice cream afterwards and she might forgive him. And as for Tilly, he could sling her twenty bucks secretly; tell her to buy something special, a new dress or something. Then all his debts would be paid, and Martha wouldn’t have to cook dinner. Even she might be grateful.