In the winter months, this attractive, amenable city could be so damned dreary, thought Ali: cold, wet, windy and oddly inhospitable. In the summer and early autumn there were festivals – books, music, drama – and picnics on the beach, barbecues in back yards. But nobody at all – nobody in the McCormacks’ orbit, anyway – seemed to entertain in the long drag of winter weeks; instead they succumbed to a sort of pinch-mouthed reclusiveness, and her spirit rebelled against it, although Michael considered this a new development. This time last year – before Dan, he meant, although he didn’t say so – she was perfectly content to sit out the winter like everyone else, by drawing the curtains, watching some television, writing for long hours at her desk, eating Beatriz’s rabbit stew, and waiting for the sun to shine.
‘I just don’t see why everyone needs to bloody well hibernate,’ Ali said, hating the world and therefore doing what she could to make it worse. She was outside, on her knees, with her arm down an access pipe, clearing a blockage of rotted leaves from a storm drain. She slapped each new handful down on the flagstones with furious energy. The smell, the slime: they combined to represent her mood, because in the struggle to regain their marital equilibrium, Ali and Michael took turns at being angry. Right now, Ali had picked up the gauntlet. ‘God forbid we should have any fun. I suggest getting some friends round, filling the dining table for once, and you react like I just proposed a wife-swapping party. It’s so bloody dull, Michael.’
He stood watching her, silent and stolid.
‘You realise, don’t you, that we’re living the same life your parents lived, and their parents before them?’
‘Well, there’s nothing wrong with that, per se,’ Michael said, to prove himself as loyal to the memory of his folks as he was to his wife. He was hovering behind her, feeling ineffectual, feeling aggravated, feeling under attack. He’d come home to find her in the garden, in the rapidly descending dusk, hauling stinking clumps of blackened vegetation from the inner recesses of the drains, and if this wasn’t passive-aggressive, he didn’t know what was. ‘C’mon, Ali, you know you could’ve left all that for Eddie,’ he said. ‘He’ll be here tomorrow. He does this kinda shit, that’s why I pay him.’
‘We pay him,’ Ali said. ‘We pay him, Michael.’
‘Yeah, OK, we pay him. Jeez.’
She sat back on her heels. ‘That’s cleared now,’ she said, peering into the chasm, then she looked up at the roof. ‘The leaves come in through the downpipe with the rainwater. It’s that ash, and the tallow, they’re a sodding menace.’
He was quiet for a beat then said, ‘I’ll ask Eddie to clear the gutters more often. Now, shall we go inside?’
She said, ‘You go. I’ll be in soon, in a few minutes anyway,’ and he hesitated a moment as if something was on his mind, then turned and went back into the house. Ali replaced the leaf net and the grate, then sniffed her hand, which smelled foul from the decomposing slime, but she didn’t care, and if it hadn’t been pitch dark and windy, she’d be dealing with the guttering herself right now, rather than facing another quiet night in on the sofa with Michael. She closed her eyes, and allowed herself five minutes to consider Dan, five minutes to imagine she could turn to him, even now; reach him, wherever he was, and express the contents of her heart with a song.
She ran her hands under the garden tap to get the worst of the muck off before going inside, because Beatriz hated alien odours in the pristine kitchen sink. That is, Beatriz used to hate alien odours in the pristine kitchen sink, before Stella left home and she seemed to stop caring about anything. Back in March, in the days before Stella left, the old lady had suddenly realised the girl was going alone, and this fact had felled her, because she’d immediately seen all the dangers of the mortal world lined up in waiting. Ali, rinsing the slime off her fingers, thought now about Beatriz, up in her rooms, where she spent most of her time these days. Nothing was the same here any more. Stella had been to Italy and was already in Spain, Thea was still in Melbourne, Michael was in torment, Beatriz was in mourning. And herself? Where was she at? Good question, she thought; please don’t hold your breath while you wait for the answer.
Eventually her hand began to turn vaguely blue under the running water so she dried it off on her jeans and went into the house through the back door. Michael had found a chicken casserole in the freezer and now it was in the oven, and the smell in the kitchen was comfortable and cosy, a little like it used to be. Then Ali scanned the worktop for her mobile phone and saw at once that it had moved from the place she’d left it; there it was, by the kettle, and there it was not, by her rucksack, and immediately all sense of comfort was dismissed by the low thudding in her chest which was either anxiety or anger, she didn’t know, but she picked up her phone and walked out of the kitchen and into the den, where Michael was watching Port Adelaide v. Essendon on the television. He looked up and smiled; then the smile faded.
‘You’ve been looking at my phone,’ she said.
It was anger, she decided, not anxiety. She had right on her side this time.
He paused, then held up his hands, unashamedly caught bang to rights. ‘It helps keep me sane,’ he said.
‘You may not check my phone,’ Ali said. Her voice shook a little. ‘I’m entitled to privacy. You can’t continue to treat me like a delinquent child.’
The commentary from the TV swelled to a feverish excitement and he coolly silenced it with the mute button. ‘Your entitlement to privacy is a moot point,’ he said. ‘I still don’t trust you. I used to trust you, but I don’t trust you any more, for obvious reasons.’
How she hated his patrician morality, his bloated sense of disappointment. He was a consultant paediatrician with decades of experience at dealing smoothly with difficulties, and he had this particular way of speaking under duress – calm, considered, rational – that made her want to hit him.
‘I think you’ve been in touch with him,’ he said.
She felt sick, slightly faint, and unutterably tired.
‘I have not contacted Dan Lawrence,’ she said, which was the truth, although not the whole truth. Three songs, she’d sent him, in the first days of their separation. But nothing since then, nothing for five months.
He sat forward on the sofa, his elbows resting on his knees, and he looked at her searchingly for a while; then he spoke. ‘You’re short-tempered with me. You never show me any affection, never, ever, initiate sex, and did you flinch yesterday when I kissed you? I’d swear you did. You’re dissatisfied with our home life. Home life? Why, the whole of Adelaide society’s not quite the go for you any more because we’re blinkered, limited, narrow-minded, parochial and penny-pinching. You’re doing your level best to be as uncomfortable in this house as possible, which is why I came home this evening to find you on your knees in the dark, scooping filth out of the fucking drains with your bare hand!’
Michael rarely swore, and never shouted, so when he did both, she knew he was provoked. But so was she. So was she.
‘What I’m “doing my level best to be” here, Michael, is the person you want me to be,’ she said quietly. ‘But this relationship isn’t tenable if you keep treating me as your subordinate.’
‘See, how can you say, “this relationship isn’t tenable” with such … such equanimity?’ he said. ‘It’s like it’s neither here nor there to you, whether we hold it together or not.’
‘I won’t live under suspicion,’ she said. ‘I will not forever be this … this lesser person, the bad one, the weak one.’
‘Ali, I admit I checked your phone just now, it was a reflex action, a gut feeling. But it’s the first time I’ve done it in weeks, and I didn’t like doing it, I just needed to put my mind at rest.’
‘And did you find what you were looking for?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know what I was looking for, and anyway my heart wasn’t in it.’
He looked a little defeated suddenly, and she felt a beat of true compassion for what she’d put him through – was still putting him through. Neither of them needed this scene. She’d left her phone out; he’d seen it, glanced at it and moved on. No drama.
‘How’s the game?’ she said, nodding at the silent footballers in the corner of the room.
He seemed to soften, letting go of the tension. Maybe Michael wasn’t really seeking confrontation, she thought. Maybe all he wanted was his old life back. And after all, the old life had been fine, hadn’t it, for both of them? On the whole? She sat down next to him.
‘Not pretty,’ he said. ‘In fact, downright ugly, but they’ve got Port on the run.’
‘Yeah, well, Port’s still going better than the sodding Crows.’
He turned his head sharply and looked at her.
‘What?’ she asked, glancing at him, away from the screen.
‘You never, ever used to say sodding,’ he said. ‘Now you say it a hell of a lot.’
She shrugged, but a blush spread across her cheeks and throat, and he noted this too.
‘A Sheffield thing, is it?’ he said with acid in his voice. ‘Something from the good old days?’
It was the work of mere seconds, but on the turn of his words the atmosphere in the small room curdled, and she knew she could neither explain herself nor stand another scene, so she stood up and left him to stew over the facts; stew over what he knew and what he didn’t know, and watch the rest of the game alone.
She’d deleted their shared song list on Twitter months ago, but she knew it by heart because they were all assembled on her iPod, under a playlist she’d named Mix Tape. To put on her headphones and play them through without a break was one of her greatest pleasures, from the first throb of ‘Pump It Up’ to the final fade of ‘Go Down Easy’. She’d deleted the final three, the three he hadn’t replied to, because she knew she’d lost him by then, but still, she loved this list, loved what it said about her and Dan and the road they’d travelled on to get here. This evening though, it only made her desperately sad, which was something that happened too: sometimes she felt none of the remembered joy, only the distance and the ache of loss. She got as far as ‘Let’s Dance’, then M. Ward got to her with his intimate melancholy and she pulled off the headphones and lay down on the floor of her office with tears streaming sideways from her eyes, down her temples, on to the wooden floor. She was a pulpy mess of self-pity and she hated herself for being her own worst enemy, for wanting what she couldn’t have, for not having had the strength or the imagination, when the chance presented itself, to give up one life for another. Cass had been angry with her at first: sympathetic, and angry, at one and the same time. She’d told her that she’d made her bed, so she should lie in it; then she’d said, ‘Oh, darling girl,’ and held her close when Ali burst into tears of despair. That was months ago, way back in February, when she’d not long been back from Quorn, and oh, there’d been so many tears since then, and now, once more, she covered her face with her hands and gave herself up to misery. Time was not healing this pain. She couldn’t think straight any more. She couldn’t write. She couldn’t make Michael happy – although he refuted this, he trusted in the past, thought happiness lay in how things once were, and could be again, and at first this had been a comfort, but at times such as this, Ali saw that his belief in the perfect order of their previous lives could just be a kind of blindness holding them back. Couldn’t they both be freed from constraint? Couldn’t they each benefit from the shaking off of all the accumulated layers of habit and expectation? But how to go about freeing a person who didn’t consider himself in chains? And anyway, all Michael would say was that what Ali called freedom, he called adultery. He was brutally moral, constitutionally upright. And there was this too: he said he loved her, and he didn’t desire any other woman.
But meanwhile they’d both forgotten what harmony felt like, here in their beautiful home. Every day, the emotional temperature seemed to shift, and this kept Ali on her guard, trying to read the nuances in his face, his tone, his body language. She was sick of it, and sick of being a sinner, and she’d told him again and again, but he couldn’t comprehend how it might feel to face a life sentence of guilt for being – once, just once in your otherwise unblemished record – so spectacularly disappointing.
She’d tried to love Michael more than she did, better than she had. She had tried, too, to forget how Dan had made her feel, but there were too many memories and you can’t unring a bell. There was the music, the recognition of a perfect fit, the certainty that here was her link to a kind of redemption she’d thought impossible, perhaps even a path to her lost brother. And there was also, always and for ever, the bliss, the bliss, the bliss. She never would, never could, talk to Michael about how lovemaking could be elevated, between the right two people, and he steered clear of the subject himself, perhaps from an instinct to protect himself from further harm. He had his theories, and they all came down to this: she’d fallen – briefly – for the lure of her youth, but it was a trick of the light, an illusion; Michael said a true relationship had longevity on its side, proper foundations, heaps of memories. Ali, keeping her counsel, nodding with a kind of ambiguous assent, nevertheless knew that he was wrong. What she’d fallen for was the real thing.
Later, recovered from her descent into the vale of tears, she wandered into Beatriz’s room, and there was the old lady in her rocking chair, looking at nothing.
‘Hello, Beatriz,’ Ali said. She knelt beside her and wrapped one of her frail hands in both of her own. The skin was as thin as a corn husk, and as dry. ‘Can I get you something? Coffee, maybe? Some raisin toast?’ But Beatriz shook her head sadly, as if those simple pleasures – drinking, eating – were lost to her now. Beatriz, the busy, beatific, beating heart of the McCormack household, had decided enough was enough; there was so much to worry about that, instead, she wouldn’t worry about anything at all. She’d just gently rock herself into another dimension and spend time in her head with the people of her distant past, and Ali grieved for her, and knew she was in part responsible for dear Beatriz’s decline. She’d been self-absorbed, mired in her own difficulties, and she’d made Beatriz suspicious these past months: she’d made Michael miserable and she’d sent Stella off to Europe with a steady calm that, to Beatriz, was inexplicable. Since Stella left, there’d been no structure to Beatriz’s day, no child to nurture, no lovely, growing girl to spoil with sweet pastries and cuddles, and meanwhile, rumbling on like the distant drums of war, there was the ongoing low-level trauma of Ali and Michael’s wounded marriage. They’d tried, when they remembered to try, or had sufficient command over their feelings, to protect Beatriz from the zigzag trajectory of their shattered emotions, but look at her now, thought Ali: the old lady had eyes and ears and decades of wisdom; she knew everything, of course she did.
‘Listen, Beatriz, I spoke to Stella today.’
‘You told me,’ Beatriz said flatly.
‘I know, but you were sleepy and I didn’t say what she’d said. Guess where she’s headed next?’
Beatriz sighed and shifted in her chair. She looked down at her hand in Ali’s, and then up at the crucifix on the opposite wall. ‘Tell me,’ she said with no interest.
‘Portugal!’ Ali said. ‘She’s going to make her way down through Spain by train. She’s going to send you a postcard when she gets to Porto. She’ll send you a picture of the Douro twinkling at night.’
‘And is she still alone?’
Yes, thought Ali, alone, and perfectly fine. ‘No, no, there’s a little gang of them,’ she told Beatriz. ‘Friends she’s met along the way.’
Beatriz turned her head to look at Ali. ‘Is she still alone?’ she said again.
‘OK, yes,’ Ali said, because she’d told enough lies in this house for a lifetime. ‘But, Beatriz, look, she’s so happy and well, and she sends her love to you.’
From downstairs, Michael’s voice – brightly gung-ho, to show he was no longer in a funk – reached them through the closed door. ‘Who’s hungry?’ he shouted. ‘Dinner’s ready down here.’
‘Beatriz?’ Ali asked gently. ‘Please will you come and eat with us?’
The old lady shook her head. ‘I’m not hungry.’
‘But you must be,’ Ali said. ‘I don’t know when you last had a proper meal. Maybe you’re hungry without realising it. Maybe if you came downstairs with me and—’
‘Ali, I can’t eat, I have no wish to eat, and you have matters to talk about with Michael that don’t include me.’
‘Oh, Beatriz.’ She longed for her to say Ali, my girl.
‘Go,’ Beatriz said. ‘Make your husband happy, and leave me be. I’m best left here, on my own.’ And she turned her face away so emphatically that Ali released her hand, kissed her cheek, told her she loved her, and left the room. She’d always imagined herself dearly loved by Beatriz, and indeed she had been – until she’d made Michael unhappy. Then Ali had understood with the full force of a revelation that Beatriz’s love for her had been conditional, dependent upon the rules of the household, and that this was the cult of the McCormacks in action: this was the closing of the ranks.
A little over a week later, Beatriz was dead, and it was as if she’d willed it, walking towards God and the promise of eternal life. Even Michael, who knew there was a solid, biological cause behind every human death, didn’t deny that she seemed to have initiated and stage-managed her own exit from a world for which she’d lost all energy. He’d been the one to find her, in the early evening, and the sound of his weeping brought Ali running to find him, her gut churning because she’d assumed she was the cause, but then there he was, on his knees by Beatriz’s bed, crying more than he had when either of his parents passed away, because nobody had loved Michael more than Beatriz. He stopped when Ali came into the room, pulled himself together as if he felt unmanned by his grief, but she’d gathered him in her arms, and they’d cried together for the loss of her. If Beatriz could have seen their embrace, it might have brought her some joy.
Later though, downstairs, waiting for the funeral director to come and take Beatriz’s body away from the house, Ali said, ‘Michael, I have this terrible feeling that this is my doing.’ She was unburdening herself of her darkest fear, trusting him to dismiss it as nonsense. ‘Her death, I mean. I’m afraid I somehow caused it.’
She longed for him to speak, to contradict her, but he was silent for a while after she spoke and then he said, ‘She knew she was deeply loved, that’s all that really matters,’ and this wasn’t a contradiction at all, didn’t even address the point, but was merely an assertion of something they already knew. Ali took a deep breath and stepped away from him. A dense quiet descended, circling around and between them, a menacing third presence in the room.
‘I’ll call Thea,’ she said suddenly, moving to the phone on the kitchen wall. ‘And we need to tell Stella, and you need to ring Rory and Rob.’
‘Thank you, I know what I need to do.’
‘Sorry, Michael, I suppose I’m just trying to fill this dreadful silence.’
‘I’d be more than grateful if you didn’t,’ Michael said.
She stared at him. He sounded like his mother, killingly and meaninglessly courteous. ‘Michael, do you blame me for this, too?’ she asked.
He looked at her. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Not entirely. But you’re implicated, aren’t you?’
‘And are you implicated too?’
‘Me? I’m innocent, Ali. My conscience is clear, and Beatriz knew that, and probably knows it still, wherever she is now.’
‘She’s dead,’ Ali said, wondering if her husband, the esteemed doctor, was quietly having a nervous breakdown. ‘Her days of having an opinion are over.’
‘Just call Thea,’ he said, and he stood up. ‘I’ll ring my brothers from my office,’ and he left her there, where she held the back of a chair for support, feeling momentarily shipwrecked. But she did ring Thea, who took the news gravely but clinically, like the med student she was; then she rang Stella, who cried and cried in her hostel dorm in Seville, and they stayed together on the line until she’d stopped, until she’d promised Ali that she’d be fine and until she’d further reassured her mother by putting another person on the line – Karin, from Dusseldorf – who said yes, she knew Stella, in fact Stella was her friend, although a very recent one, but certainly she’d spend the rest of the day with her, and she’d call Ali at once if it seemed necessary. Then Ali scooped up her car keys, grabbed her bag and drove to Cass’s flat, where she cried over Beatriz who had died thinking ill of her, and Cass listened to her woes for a long while then said, ‘Enough, enough, I have the antidote to what ails you,’ and together they ate salty crackers with Brie, and watched Terms of Endearment and Steel Magnolias; something they could laugh at as well as cry, Cass said, and anyway she believed there was no sadness in this world that couldn’t be at least fractionally eased by Shirley MacLaine.
When Cass fell asleep, Ali lay awake for a long time, feeling maudlin, far too unhappy to switch off, but it wasn’t Beatriz on her mind, it was that other loss, far greater and more devastating, entirely self-inflicted. When she’d chosen Michael over Dan in that terrible confrontation, she’d told herself afterwards that she’d made a courageous decision, and a selfless, generous one, essentially to preserve the equilibrium of their daughters’ lives, and to spare all of them from crisis. But she’d been wrong, she understood that now: badly, epically wrong. She’d been shown a bold, brilliant alternative future for herself, and then rejected it. She lay on the king-sized bed beside a softly snoring Cass, and she wept self-pitying tears for the loss of the life she might have had with Daniel, who, in the melodrama of her grief, she felt was her heart’s home, her magnetic north, the darling of her soul. It was only later, when she woke from a fitful few hours’ sleep, that she thought, OK, Ali, so quit whingeing and do something.