Celia was grilling Anna, ignoring with aplomb Gordie’s request not to pry. She had already extracted from Anna the fact that she was in flight from a failed marriage, causing Celia to talk at length about how gloriously happy she was in hers. ‘I’ve been so lucky,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing like lying in bed at night, holding hands with the same man you made your babies with, long after your babies have grown.’
Anna smiled politely. ‘I wouldn’t know,’ she said. ‘Gaspard’s only fifteen. And Charles isn’t his father.’
Jonathan could practically see Celia’s ears prick up: in fact, she was like a greyhound, he saw that now, all long and lean and pointy, her nose inquisitive and sharp. She had been telling Anna that she was dressed from head to toe in couture. ‘The shoes are Christian Louboutin, my favourite pair. Are you here for a while? Do you know James Street? The Emporium? You must go.’ Anna did not know where James Street was, or the Emporium, so Celia proceeded to tell her. Jonathan guessed that Anna had not flown all the way from London to shop in James Street, but he could be mistaken. He realised he disliked Celia and her condescending air of self-importance; it was a visceral reaction, a bodily recoil. Had she always had this effect on him? Why hadn’t he noticed before? Why was she wearing that ridiculous daisy thing in her hair, her long skinny neck wound around with what looked like ribbons? He was going to save Anna.
He moved nearer to the barbecue, a monster fuelled by a gas bottle set up at the far end of veranda; close enough to the end of the long table where Anna and Celia sat on opposite sides. ‘You should organise a trip on the lake while you’re here,’ he said, addressing Anna. ‘Do you sail?’
‘The last time I went sailing I almost lost my head,’ Anna said. ‘I didn’t duck in time.’
He smiled. ‘I don’t sail either, but I’m told it’s exhilarating when everything goes well.’
‘Glen’s just bought two rather expensive new sailing toys,’ said Celia. ‘One for him, and one for our boys. They did rowing at Terrace, of course, but they’ve only just taken up sailing. Did I tell you Damien got a promotion, Jonathan? He’s off to Singapore to head up Hewlett-Packard’s Asia-Pacific division. We’re hoping he’s going to pop the question before he goes.’
‘What question?’ said Jonathan.
‘The question—the only one that matters,’ said Celia.
‘Oh, that question,’ he said. ‘Who’s he going to pop it to?’ ‘Jonathan! You’ve met Katie! She’s been going out with him since God was a boy,’ she said. ‘Katie went to Stuartholme,’ she added in an aside to Anna, as if this fact might prove significant. ‘Stuartholme’ and ‘Terrace’ and ‘Churchie’ still signalled something to some Brisbane people—aspiration, religious faith, possibly class, a certain self-regarding hope that one’s own child might be distinguished over another—a hangover from the city’s early days, when political and public service appointments and individual jobs were secured according to whether one was Catholic or Protestant. Anna made no comment.
Possibly Celia was waiting for her to say that she, Celia, did not look anywhere near old enough to have a son of marriageable age, but actually she did. Jonathan thought all women were self-deluding when it came to how they looked, either thinking they were fat when they were not, or skinny when they were fat, or else flattering themselves that they looked at least ten years younger than they were. Too many women pranced around in clothes that were two sizes too small for them, or too young. He admired Anna’s discernment in knowing on which side of age she hovered. He looked at her again; possibly she was one of those women who held her age well but would collapse all at once.
‘Everyone eats meat, yes?’ he called down the table.
Through the volley of voices declaring their carnivore love, he heard Rosanna’s small protest. ‘Sorry? Was that a no?’ She nodded.
‘I hope the meat’s halal,’ said Glen. ‘You know we’ll all be eating halal soon. You sheilas will be covered from head to toe in black curtains, with little slits for your eyes.’
Marie gave Penny an I-told-you-so-look, a look that flooded Penny with a high, operatic, out-of-proportion emotion. In the company of Marie her emotions were enlarged, perilously close to the surface, including feelings she did not previously know she possessed. Marie acted upon her as a kind of truth serum, causing her inner self to stand revealed—or at least her more primitive self, which predated manners.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Penny said, ‘this anti-Muslim hysteria is ridiculous.’
‘You won’t be saying that when you get your hands cut off for adultery,’ said Marie.
Pete guffawed: a loud, rude belly laugh of the kind that drove Penny nuts. Her ex-husband was a zealot stripped of a cause: as a young man he had joined a cult—Children of God or some such nonsense; some madness involving pretty girls ‘love bombing’ defenceless young men such as him—and after he had extracted himself from the cult and an early marriage, he was fanatically against religion, manipulative women, political systems; against everything and everyone who attempted any coherent system of belief, especially enthusiastic folk plagued by the notion they must tell others how to live in order to make the world a better place. He got his nickname, Pessimist Pete, at thirty; by forty, he was known as PP, famous among his colleagues at the Department of Education for not voting and regularly getting fined for it, for arguing that changing governments made no difference, in the same way it made no difference joining the union or attempting to change world poverty or the human lust for war, because in the ruined world evil invariably triumphed over goodness. The Holocaust proved this, Stalin’s dead millions, men who raped and murdered children.
Somehow Penny had intuited her way to the bleakest man in Australia; some suffering in her led straight to the suffering in him. Pete thought feminism was a cult, more destructive than the Children of God; he thought dedication to anything—especially to work—was unhealthy, a certifiable psychiatric illness, and that human striving was pointless because in the end life was meaningless and everything turned to dust. Yet throughout their long marriage, Pete charged off on a series of new devotions—surfing, Italian, pottery—blazingly overexcited about each new passion. She remembered his fanatical dedication to photography (which lasted longer than most passions), the building of a darkroom, the long weekends he spent photographing whatever it was he was photographing while she was left alone with Scarlett, a colicky baby, weekend after weekend after weekend. She did not complain; in fact, she made sure her responses to his efforts were effusive, flattering, excessively complimentary, hoping that this particular passion might be the passion of his life. But he gave up photography, too, devising a rambling, gloomy explanation about how concentrating too hard on one thing was bad for the psyche. She remembered arguing that the world would not have the Sistine Chapel or space travel or the beauty of Rome if humans were not compelled to concentrate on one thing. She remembered Pete’s infatuation with sailing, which was how they came to be at The Landing in the first place, after he negotiated a transfer from Brisbane to the Nambour office; how at the shining crest of each new beginning he thought everything before his grateful eyes was beautiful, including her. But to Pete the travel brochures always turned out to be more lustrous than the real, dismal thing, and actual life, and love, eluded and disappointed him; he was temperamentally set at borderline despair, a pessimist and a cynic because his heart was so pure, so willing, furnished with immense, inarticulate hopes, unfulfilled ambitions and unrealised, inexpressible desires. Pete’s tragedy was that he could not value what was his, and could not see the vast dimensions of the kingdom beneath his hand; he didn’t want what he had, he wanted something better. Penny knew all this, and yet the day came when she could not bear to listen to him complain for another second about the smallness of their house or the smallness of their life together. It happened not long after Scarlett ran off to Paris with Paul, in those sorry days when the very air in the house smelled bitter; she thought something was off in a cupboard, truly she did, and one morning she took every single thing from the pantry and laid it out, helter-skelter, on the kitchen floor.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Pete said.
‘I’m leaving you,’ she said.
She hadn’t known she was until she said it. She was bestowing benediction, granting his most cherished wish for release into something finer.