Keepers of the House

by JH Fletcher

  One of these days …

  Sure, Dad. Sure.

  An Irish name, he was always telling them, between hiccups. Fitzgerald. The family name of the dukes of Leinster. Whatever that was supposed to prove.

  The name of a drunkard. Of a drunkard’s wife, too feeble to stand up to her useless husband.

  Couple more years, I’m out of here.

  Tamsin Fitzgerald. She imagined someone asking her what it meant. Imagined her answer. Daughter of a piss-cat.

  She pictured herself in a few years, tipping in the booze. Because of a name. Letting a useless husband treat her like dirt because of some duke back in Ireland.

  She thought of her great-grandmother, dead a month earlier, her loss still razor-sharp. Nobody had messed with her, that was sure. Anneliese Riordan. Anneliese Wolmarans, originally. A drum roll in Dutch. It was she who had opened Tamsin’s eyes to what could be done.

  ‘All things are possible,’ Anneliese had said. ‘All. Remember that.’ What would Anneliese have been like if she’d been called Tamsin Fitzgerald?

  She stood on tiptoe before the mirror, straining her body upwards, stretching, stretching, her hands cupped beneath her breasts. I am … Anneliese Wolmarans. She shouted the name silently at her reflection. Pondered. No. The name was not hers to take. It would be like stealing her great-grandmother’s soul from the grave.

  What, then?

  Scary, when you thought about it. Like turning yourself into someone else. What if you didn’t like that person? Would it be too late to change back again?

  She thought some more, facing her reflection. Ceremoniously she leant close. Her lips almost touched their reflection as they exchanged a secret only they could hear. Again her breath bloomed the glass.

  ‘Anna Riordan.’

  She smiled secretly. At the new person she had now become.

  Three years later, in her final year, Tamsin wrote her exams. While she was studying she fenced herself away from everything: her collapsing house, her collapsing family. Most of all, from the emotion that over the years had consumed all others: a sense of horror and loss that this, this, was her life.

  Somehow she must have succeeded. She stared at the results unbelievingly. Straight As.

  ‘The door is open to you,’ the careers teacher said. ‘Medicine, law —’

  ‘Finance,’ Tamsin said.

  Mrs Giles was not sure about finance. There seemed something ignoble about a career devoted only to the making of money. Yet, undeniably, that opportunity also existed.

  ‘Finance,’ she agreed doubtfully.

  ‘I’m sick of being poor,’ Tamsin told her.

  For all her doubts, Mrs Giles, the product of another unhappy family, understood. The father had much to answer for, like many fathers.

  It was easily arranged. The required door opened to her without difficulty. She would start at the School of Commerce when University re-opened.

  She went away for a holiday, with a mate. They explored northwards along the coast, putting up at caravan parks. Nothing happened and everything happened. It was her first glimpse of another life, a reality she intended claiming as her own.

  All things are possible.

  It became an incantation, endlessly repeated. She returned to the house where nothing had changed or ever would. The disgraceful building and tousle-haired garden, the sense of decay that had achieved permanence. Parents as decayed as the rest. Mother, ineffectual, personality in tatters. Archer Fitzgerald, drunk, with ideas.

  Tamsin compared what was here with what she had seen in the world. A coldness in her mind told her that the moment had come to do something about her life.

  Her father said he wanted to talk to her. ‘Seriously,’ he said, the words loose between his teeth. ‘Man to man.’ Laughed. ‘Or man to woman.’

  The study was dark, curtains drawn to shut out reality. Her father spent most of his days here, the darkness illuminated by a kaleidoscope of dreams.

  ‘Sit down.’

  She did so, observing the visible rituals of obedience.

  ‘You’ve done well,’ Archer said. Even now liquor was not far from his hand. He lifted a glass. She heard it glug, going down. He wiped his wet mouth. ‘I hear you’re thinking of going into finance.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good choice. Just what I’ve wanted, someone else with a trained mind around the place. Always had faith in you, Tamsin. We’ll do great things together, you and I.’

  Winking, chortling, drinking. She watched, appalled, as he ranted. The things he would do, the ideas he had, the mountains they would climb together. Again he drank; again he laughed, the iciness in Tamsin’s brain growing as she observed this apology for a man offering her a share in his madness.

  The stench of alcohol like a pestilence.

  ‘You’ll see,’ Archer said, holding the future like a gun to her head, ‘you’ll be proud of your name before I’m through. You’ll boast of the fact that you’re a Fitzgerald.’

  Enough. So small a thing on top of the endless torrents of words, a lifetime’s humiliation, yet enough to unleash the contempt that had corroded her for so long.

  ‘I doubt that,’ she said. ‘I’m going to change it.’

  His fuddled wits limped after her. ‘Change?’

  ‘My name. I’m not Tamsin Fitzgerald any more.’

  Like walking off a cliff. She had the sense that she was saying the name for the last time; that if she ever used it again, she would be speaking of the dead.

  ‘How can you change it? It’s your name, for God’s sake!’

  ‘Not any more.’

  ‘You’re getting married,’ he guessed.

  ‘Of course I’m not getting married.’

  ‘Then —’

  ‘Anna Riordan. That’s who I am.’

  Realisation at last. With the realisation, rage.

  ‘What the hell are you talking about? You’re a Fitzgerald! It’s in your blood! In your heart and mind! Fitzgerald! Till you die!’

  Horror in his voice as well as rage. Discarding the name was like saying that neither it nor he existed; he could not, for his life, accept that.

  ‘You can’t just chuck it, like so much rubbish! It’s your name!’

  A bludgeoning hail of fury. Neither words nor anger touched her. She had passed beyond a barrier into a profound stillness where nothing her father said or did would ever touch her again.

  ‘Anna Riordan,’ she said. A seal upon her future. She turned and walked out of the room.

  His final threat howled behind her. ‘You won’t wear my name, you don’t stay in my house.’

  She did not answer, closing the door on her father, on the name that had been hers, the life and person that had been hers. Trepidation mingled with triumph, but she would acknowledge neither. They had no place in the cold and incisive being she had become.

  Coldly, incisively, she walked down the steps to the dilapidated garden. She held her head carefully, determined to spill nothing of the moment, the sense of newness and recommencement. Anna Riordan, walking proudly into her new life.

  Anna sat in the train on her way to University in Adelaide. Life was a flower, opening up to her. Each of her senses was alert to what was going on about her: the zippety-zip of telegraph poles, the rhythmic throb of the iron wheels like a metronome in her head. One and two; one, two.

  Time passed. The landscape blurred and swayed. Anna leant back. One and two; one, two. She dozed; opened her eyes to a sense of danger, a middle-aged man watching her from the opposite corner of the otherwise empty compartment. He must have come in while she slept.

  Seeing her awake, he smiled. Her heart thumped. She sat in her corner, feeling her flesh draw inwards, keeping him out. So far he had said nothing, done nothing, only smiled. Which was enough.

  ‘Good sleep?’

  Perhaps he only wanted to be friendly. She hoped.

  He edged a little closer. A thickset man in nondescript clothes, weather-beaten face, a farmer
’s broken hands. A half-smile, directed through the window. Yet at her, too, she feared.

  ‘Not much to see.’

  Again a little closer. Now he was opposite her; his tweed-clad knees threatened the space between them.

  Beyond the glass the wires rose and fell. Zippety-zip. Tension a network of wires through her body. I should get up and leave, she thought, but did not. She did not want to make a fuss, and changing compartments would do that, if only in her head.

  ‘I got a daughter about your age,’ the man confided.

  The rails had drawn a long bow through the bush so that now the sun shone straight into Anna’s eyes. Being unable to see the man made her feel even more vulnerable, yet still she did not move. Like a rabbit pinned in headlights, she crouched.

  A silence prolonged enough to suggest that all might yet be well.

  ‘Not as beautiful as you, though. You’re gorgeous. You know that?’ The voice emerging from brightness, delved softly, stroking her breasts, parting her thighs.

  She said nothing.

  Quietly, with an air of terrifying inevitability, he leant forward and placed his big broken hands lightly on her legs. A feather touch, at once withdrawn; it might have been the unaware touching of friends in conversation. But was not.

  I want you to leave me alone. That’s all. No fuss. No screaming. Just go away.

  Horrifyingly, Anna could not bring herself to say even that. Instead sat petrified, the memory of his touch flowing through her.

  The compartment door slid back. The noise of the speeding train came in, and a man. Perhaps young. The farmer sat back.

  ‘No harm,’ he said, voice as casual as the feather-light hands.

  The newcomer’s arrival released her. She stood and blundered blindly out. In the corridor she clung to the rail, stomach churning, eyes staring blindly through the smeared glass.

  Behind her the compartment door opened again. She flinched.

  ‘You okay?’

  A concerned voice. She risked a glance. The man who had come in a minute ago. Young, indeed; about her own age. She jerked her eyes away at once, saying nothing.

  Leave me alone, she screamed silently. Go away.

  When she looked again, he had gone.

  How could I just sit there, doing nothing, letting him do what he did? I should have screamed, slapped his face, anything. As it is, he’s got away with it. It means there will be another time, another woman. It will be my fault because I didn’t have the guts to make a fuss. Maybe he’s out of my life, but what about her? Or the woman after her? How could I? How could I?

  I cannot leave it here. If I do, I shall feel guilty, always.

  A month later, Anna followed one of the students when he left the campus. She did not know him; never knew why she had homed in on him in particular. A certain vulnerability of mouth and eye, perhaps, a hint of the tentative about the way he walked. She did not even know what she was going to do until she did it. Which was nothing very remarkable.

  He caught a bus into the city. She did the same, watching the back of his unsuspecting head as the bus lurched and roared along. He got off, went into a bookshop. She, sauntering, guarded the entrance until he came out. He walked on. She followed. All that day. He met no one, talked to no one, went to roost at last in a huddle of backstreet units. A lonely boy. The next day the same. When first he noticed her, when doubt congealed into certainty, she did not know. Only that at one point, walking aimlessly, it seemed, beside the river, she could tell by the set of his shoulders, the furtive sidle of his walk, that he was on to her. What of it? Still he walked, self-consciously now, while Anna, connected to him by that invisible strand of shared knowledge, followed. A waiting game that by its nature she was bound to win. He left the footpath. Turned to face her. She walked at him, daring him. At the last moment he put out his hand. Imploringly.

  ‘Why are you following me?’

  ‘You’re mad.’ She ladled contempt into her voice.

  ‘You are following me.’

  She looked. As at a louse.

  ‘Quit it, d’you hear?’

  What she heard was uncertainty, the break of panic in his voice.

  ‘I’d see a doctor, I was you.’

  She walked on, Ms Nose-In-The-Air.

  Glorious. It was not only men who could terrorise.

  Several men — students, even one of the lecturers — made advances, or would have made them, had she permitted. She did not; after the episode of the train, her subsequent revenge stalking of the timid boy, she wanted nothing more to do with men. Crazy — it was a man’s arrival that had saved her, after all.

  Crazy or not, it was how she felt. Then she met Ben, who she supposed qualified as a man of sorts. She saw him, briefly, at a Student Union meeting. They exchanged a dozen words, no more. Afterwards she always seemed to be running into him, so regularly that she began to wonder if he was arranging it on purpose.

  You’re psycho, she thought. You’re the one who haunts people; don’t start imagining the rest of the world’s as nutty as you are.

  Ben was tied up with some green outfit. She agreed with them, in theory, but the way they were going about things was hopeless.

  Told him so once, after she’d let him talk her into having a cup of coffee with him. ‘Yelling only annoys people. You’ve got to get them on your side. Why don’t you pass your exams first, get somewhere in industry or politics, somewhere people will listen to you?’

  In some ways she thought he was an idiot, yet still respected him. At least he cared enough to try.

  ‘The world needs more people like Ben Champion,’ she told a friend, surprising herself.

  He laughed. ‘The guy’s a nut.’

  It was easier to laugh along. ‘Isn’t he, just?’ She owed Ben nothing, had no reason to feel disloyal. Yet did.

  Anna had never had what you would call a real boyfriend; had never felt the need for one. Like everyone, she supposed, she had thought about love, what it would be like to be burnt by that fire. There was a problem: love would involve a man.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ suggested a woman in whom Anna had confided. She caressed Anna’s arm, smiling brilliantly into her eyes. ‘There are other options.’

  Anna had no wish to hurt; withdrew her arm, none the less. Several of her acquaintances were shacked up in girlie relationships, but she knew that path was not for her.

  A man it would have to be. Or men. Those who claimed experience talked of safety in numbers. But Anna was talking of love, in which numbers would have no place.

  The trouble was that she wanted freedom, too, had pledged herself to it. It was difficult to see how she could be free and at the same time in bondage to a man. Which she suspected was what love would mean.

  She found herself looking at Ben with a fresh eye. She only had to snap her fingers, she knew that. Still she hesitated. On the surface he was nice enough, but how could you be sure? Her mother must have fancied her father, once.

  The idea of Ben as a lover …

  She couldn’t imagine it. All that dog-like devotion. And he was ignorant, too, like all men; had never known what it was like to be alone in a railway carriage, to be terrorised simply for being a woman and helpless. Had never felt such an absence of power. Eventually, surprising herself, she told Ben about it.

  ‘I thought there was something …’ He was pleased because he’d guessed right. It didn’t occur to him that she might have feelings, too. His obtuseness angered her.

  ‘I was terrified. Don’t you understand?’

  ‘Why? Nothing happened.’

  ‘A total stranger sticks his hands all over you? You call that nothing?’

  ‘You should have told him to piss off.’

  True, and futile. She could not expect him to understand what she did not understand herself but was disappointed, none the less. She believed that love was sharing, a partnership. His reaction ruled out any possibility of that.

  There was another option: lust. About whic
h she had also thought. Experimentation might be safer if she didn’t care so much. Ben owed her something, she decided. And was a man, after all. She could use him without danger of entanglement.

  She thought, We all have to start somewhere. So did.

  Afterwards wondered what all the fuss was about. She discovered that what Ben needed was not a lover but a mother. Which she had no inclination to provide.

  They remained casual friends. She had feared he might be difficult but he was not. She realised with astonishment that he was scared of her. Was afraid she might have hurt him, too, but that couldn’t be helped. She had found she needed more strength than Ben could offer. Odd, when you thought about it, for she despised the concept of male domination.

  What Ben could not supply, she would. She would build her own strength, brick by brick, like a wall. She would use the wall to shut out weakness and desire.

  In her last year at University, Anna was recruited by Ogilvie Schuster, one of the world’s top accounting firms. Ben, dogmatic as ever about the things that mattered to him, was horrified.

  ‘I never thought you’d betray your principles like this.’

  ‘Why do you always assume yours is the only way of doing things?’ said Anna angrily.

  ‘I don’t. But to spend your whole life making money …’

  What a waste, his voice implied. His impracticality exasperated her. ‘You can’t do much without it.’

  He would not listen. ‘Once you’ve got your feet in the trough, you’ll end up like the rest of them.’

  They parted, furious with each other. She marched along the path by the river, shouting her anger at the black and indifferent swans. ‘Sanctimonious bastard!’

  Passers-by gave her a look, but she ignored them.

  She refused to waste her life in gestures. Sort out the economics and the rest would follow. She had to believe it; there was nothing else.