How Bright Are All Things Here

by Susan Green

  ‘You didn’t fail us. And we’re not damaged. We’re only damaged if we’re supposed to be perfect . . . like china.’

  And that sounds like something you heard from your therapist, I think. China. Crystal. Glass. The years of auctions, jumble sales, junk shops, discarding the chipped, the dented and dingy, the cracked, crazed and crackled. Had I, like Anne, sought perfection in small things to distract myself from the large? Did Anne learn it from me?

  I shake my head. Paula – or her therapist, the mysterious Dr Chen – is right. We are not porcelain.

  ‘But we wish we were, don’t we?’ I hope Paula understands my smile. It is meant to be wry, not mocking. I am not making fun of her. I know, I know, I know how hard they are, the stony paths, the unfathomable chasms of the years. ‘We long so to be perfect. We know we were, once upon a time.’

  But she’s moving on.

  ‘And you can’t take it all on your shoulders, anyway. Tom and Caro and I had years of it. Even Anne. Remember, she was two when Mum went to hospital. You’re important, Bliss . . . but not that important.’

  So I’m not the centre of the universe? Really? I feel myself stiffen imperceptibly. No, she does perceive, and there’s a tiny pressure of her hand in mine. It’s reassurance. Paula’s face, slightly flushed, is intent with love and listening. It’s an expression so pure, so Paula. I’ve always thought she could have posed as ‘Sympathy’ for a sentimental Victorian painter.

  ‘Oh, darling,’ I say. ‘I thought I could rescue you all. I thought that I could make it up to you. And then when I saw you there, the four of you . . . You were personalities, people already – of course children are people, what was I thinking? How stupid this sounds. You and Tom were all right, I could tell even then, but Caroline . . . Your father could have, or should have done something. Got closer to her, helped her.’

  ‘She was the hardest hit.’

  ‘She pushed me away, constantly. I didn’t know that you can’t mind. Or at least, you can’t show you do. You must love even when you’re hated. Do you remember her at the beach house, screaming, “It’s not fair! Everybody’s happy except me!”’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘And Anne was so young, not much more than a baby and had spent so little time with Nina, and I thought she would be unscathed.’

  Paula shook her head. ‘No.’

  Is that the awful truth, hiding in plain sight? I can’t bear to think about it. Now I’m the one who moves on.

  ‘But I loved her so much!’

  ‘I know you did. You still do.’

  I wasn’t going to tell Paula but it tumbles out anyway. ‘Do you know what she said to me the other day? I told her that I was dying – which I am . . .’ I wait, for a heartbeat, and Paula comes up trumps, as of course she would, nodding her head, not denying it, not afraid. ‘And she said to me not to be silly, that I wasn’t that old and had years ahead, and that I was depressed and there was a geriatric psychiatrist attached to the facility and I probably needed medication . . .’ I can hear my voice rising with indignation. ‘And I told her that it wouldn’t be long, and that I loved her, and she said . . . she said . . .’

  ‘What did she say, Bliss?’

  I feel the tears running down my cheeks and scrabble for a tissue. Paula finds one, and wipes my face for me, and holds my hand until I stop.

  ‘She said, “I love you too, you silly old thing.”’

  We are both silent, contemplating those terrible words. My tears dry up at the source.

  ‘Poor Anne,’ says Paula softly. ‘She’s so scared.’

  ‘Yes. That’s why she’s got all this . . . this surface. And, darling, I know one could say something similar about me, but my surface has been used in the service of life and love and enjoyment. I’m not hiding behind something. I have fun. So do other people, when they’re with me. At least they seem to. Don’t they? I’m not being an awful bore, am I?’ Paula’s laughing again, and so am I. ‘Say no, Paula darling.’

  ‘No, and stop it.’

  ‘I never talk to Anne like this. She fusses. It drives me mad.’

  ‘Don’t I fuss?’

  ‘No, you worry, and that’s a completely different thing. Fussing – it’s a form of bullying. Trying to get me to play along with what she thinks is important. And she doesn’t listen. Please pass me another tissue.’ I blow my nose. ‘But she’s not happy, is she? She’s got everything she ever wanted and she’s not happy.’

  ‘That’s life.’

  ‘Don’t be trivial, darling. And don’t be offended. I know you worry about her too. I’m not so old and addled that I can’t see beneath the surface. That surface Anne works so relentlessly to maintain. God, it must be exhausting.’

  ‘I don’t think she even knows she’s doing it, or how much it costs her in . . .’

  ‘In what, darling?’

  ‘In real connection with people. With Maura and the boys. And with Matty.’

  Suddenly, I don’t want this. No more sadness. I’m tired, and take refuge in naughtiness and provocation. In surfaces.

  ‘Does Anne get lots of sex, do you think?’

  ‘I really wouldn’t know.’

  ‘She probably dragoons that poor man into it, night after night after night. Stand and deliver! Oh, don’t be so disapproving, darling. From what you see on the television, you’d think marriages stand and fall on the sexual act, but really, it’s just the icing on the cake, isn’t it? If sex was the key, I’d still be married to my first husband. He was a man of very dark moods and I was too young to understand that they were, really, very little to do with me. I took them personally, I allowed myself to become infected by them. Your David, sometimes, reminds me . . .’ Ah. No need to go into it. ‘You can still love him, Paula, but don’t let yourself think you’re responsible.’

  ‘No, Bliss.’

  ‘You were made to be a wife, darling, and I mean to pay you a compliment. And some men are made to be husbands – your father was one. Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and the Lord do so to me and more also, if aught but death part thee and me . . . Sounds romantic, doesn’t it? Book of Ruth, chapter one, verse sixteen – but you know, darling, the funny thing is she was talking to her mother-in-law. I had a mother-in-law once . . .’

  I wince. I didn’t mean to go there.

  Two people talking truth to each other is a beautiful thing, but enough is enough is enough.

  ‘I’m tired now, darling. Can you help me with my pillows? And give my love to David,’ I say. I mean it, and I want her to know. ‘Really, specially – my dear love.’

  ‘I will.’ Paula leans down to kiss me and I close my eyes. I hear her shut the door quietly. I wait a few seconds in case she comes back for something, and then I turn the television back on. They’re still there, the dancing stars, the stars dancing, spinning and whirling in sequins and bared flesh.

  I knew a ballerina once. It was said, she told me, that Pavlova was born under a dancing star. How beautiful, I thought, and I repeated it to my husband.

  ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘She’s mixing it up with a line from Much Ado About Nothing. Shakespeare. “There was a star danced, and under that I was born.”’

  ‘Well, you were born under a lecturing star. A correcting star. A know-it-all star.’

  ‘And you, sweetheart, were born under an exasperating star.’

  ‘An exasperating, loveable star?’ We were not long married.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said, and spun me around as we waltzed backwards towards the bed.

  THE SILVER LINK, THE SILKEN TIE

  What shall I talk about? Love and art? Life and death? Sex? Or flowers? Flowers are nice.

  That’s a joke. An in-joke, actually. The only other person in the world who’d laugh at it now is Judith. I admit that I’ve been avoiding the thought of Judith. The fact of Judith, too, for years and years. When did we last meet? I mean really? It was twelve years ago, at Rob’s f
uneral, and on that day, to our credit, grief annihilated time and space and we embraced. She reminded me about the paintings, and a week or so later, along with the card thanking me for my condolences, was a note written in her back-slanting hand that hadn’t changed in forty years.

  You know we still have the paintings, and they may be quite valuable by now. Perhaps you should come and see about them. In any case, I have made it clear in my will that they belong to you, or your heirs.

  She signed it: As ever, with love.

  Ah yes, the paintings. Six artist’s wives; half a dozen half-naked beautiful me. I didn’t want them. I never wanted them, but I should have gone to see her. Judith was reaching out a hand, an olive branch. She said love and she must have meant it, because she never lied. But I let the matter slip. Then, of course, like spider webs in an unused room there grew between us those filaments of doubt and guilt. On my side, at least. Last year she sent me a letter with Malcolm’s death notice enclosed. The funeral had already been held. It was private, in any case, in Adelaide. Family only. A month later his obituary was in The Age. I clipped it out.

  Dr Malcolm Freeman, 55, marine biologist . . . University of Adelaide . . . great loss to the scientific community and the community at large . . . author, adviser to the National Ocean Strategy Committee and the Bremner Fisheries Review . . . love of nature and habits of observation taught by his late father, the noted artist and teacher Robert Freeman . . .

  The last paragraph.

  He died after a short illness.

  It was cancer, she wrote. A highly aggressive brain tumour. It was all over very quickly; there’d been no time to get in touch with me.

  Survived by his wife Hilary Scotchmer, herself a biologist, and three children, seven grandchildren, and his mother, the historian, novelist and environmental activist Judith Freeman.

  There was a big article on Judith in the Age’s Saturday magazine in March. I clipped that out, too. She had adopted two Sudanese teenagers, a boy and a girl, and the photograph they used was rather charming, with their long arms draped casually around her and her rather austere face caught in the middle of a laugh. In the background, out of focus but to me quite recognisable, was one of Rob’s canvases from London in the early 1950s. He did a whole series of roofscapes: chimneypots, the tops of trees and flying birds against clouds, all made ravishingly romantic by a sunset palette of pinks, oranges and palest greys.

  ‘Honestly, Rob,’ Gerald said at the time. ‘You may as well be knitting.’

  ‘Knit a sock and put it in your mouth, Gerry,’ said Rob, quite pleasantly but with an edge in his voice. It was towards the end of our marriage, and Gerald was gravitating towards junkyards for his inspiration. ‘Should I kill a sparrow and paint its corpse?’

  ‘At least I’m trying to say something.’

  ‘So am I. It’s winter, it’s bloody cold, the birds are flying over the rainbow and why the bloody hell can’t I?’

  ‘Why do you always have to be such an ass, Rob?’

  Embarrassed by Gerald’s aggression, I broke in with the first words that popped into my head.

  ‘The flowers are nice!’

  Three heads turned to me and then to the bunch of bronze chrysanthemums Rob had brought home for Judith.

  She was first to laugh, then Rob, then, finally and reluctantly, Gerald.

  Judith came up and kissed me on the top of the head. ‘Darling Bliss,’ she said, still laughing. ‘Flowers are nice.’

  Actually, Judith didn’t laugh often, and beside giddy-goat Rob she sometimes seemed rather severe. Though she did have an eye for the ridiculous. Often she’d come home from the library and sit quite unsmiling, sipping her drink, making us laugh with her anecdotes of the day. English eccentrics, you see, were out in force in South Kensington. Like the man who came up to the circulation desk and said, voice quivering with triumph, ‘I have to tell someone. My wife’s gone away, and now the monkey sleeps with me!’

  I was angry after Malcolm died. She could have let me know, I’m sure. If she’d wanted to. People don’t just suddenly get a brain tumour and drop dead. Do they? I could have simply hopped on a plane and gone to Adelaide and said goodbye.

  It could have happened like that if I’d kept in touch. If I’d visited after Rob’s death. We could have become close again. Someone would have driven me down to see her; Paula, or Anna-Mae, or even that lovely Patrick from over the road. I didn’t have to go on the train.

  It was an hour and a half in a red rattler, a little more, a little less, depending on whether you were able to catch an express from Richmond to Caulfield, and then from Caulfield to Parkdale. I used to know all the stations. I’d recite them to myself as a kind of ditty in time to the movement of the train. Still can, probably. Let’s see . . . Caulfield Glenhuntly Ormond McKinnon Bentleigh Moorabbin Highett Cheltenham Mentone Parkdale Mordialloc Edithvale Aspendale Chelsea. How’s that?

  I used to smoke and watch the world pass by. First, the cramped backyards and grey streets, and then suburb by suburb more space appeared. Space enough for lawns and bright flags of washing on rotary hoists, for swings and garden sheds and vegetables in rows. When the sand belt began, the landscape changed again. Flatter, paler, more sky; at the first glimpse of the bay it was time to stop dreaming, sit up, gather my coat and handbag and suitcase . . .

  It was summer, more than forty years ago, and I was taking a holiday from the London winter. When I arrived some relatives of Rob’s – Allan and Hester, a middle-aged teacher and his much younger wife – were there for the day. They had two children and eleven-year-old Malcolm was remarkably kind and patient with them. He distracted the toddler while the mother breastfed the baby, and then held the baby while she petted the fractious big brother. It was sweet – we all thought so – the skinny little boy, brown from the sun as children were in those pre-cancer days, his black hair stiff from the salt water, with the pink plump baby held tight in his arms. He pressed his cheek against hers, unselfconsciously cooing little words of love.

  The mother was touched. ‘What a lovely boy,’ she said quietly to Judith as they were leaving. ‘You must be so proud of him.’

  ‘We are,’ she said, hugging him to her, and Rob put his arm around her, and there they were, the happy family, mother, father and child, the trinity, all glowing with sunshine and happiness.

  It was on my return from that trip that I met Alec. When I came back to Australia to live, I did make a couple more visits – day visits – and I continued to send cards and presents for Christmas and birthdays until Malcolm moved out of home. We went to his graduation and to his wedding. He introduced me to Hilary as an old family friend.

  ‘A sort of aunt.’

  ‘I met Rob and Judith in London,’ I explained. ‘I’ve known Malcolm since he was a baby.’

  ‘Your visits were always pretty exciting. You brought such exotic presents. D’you remember the Babar books all in French, and the paint set and the nutcracker shaped like a squirrel?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘He still has the nutcracker,’ said Hilary, smiling fondly at her new husband, appropriating his past for their future, the way couples do.

  After a while it was Hilary who wrote the cards and the Christmas news, sending school photographs and family snaps. Every now and then I had an urge to visit, but I never followed through. There was always plenty of time. In her last Christmas card, Hilary didn’t mention his illness and I suppose that means it was brief, as Judith said. I sent her a sympathy card – the best I could find, the best of a bad lot, a photograph of sunset over the ocean – and I hope it was comforting.

  Gerald would have called it trite. Sentimental. So what? It was Gerald who despised sentimentality, not me. It was what made him so significant an artist. That’s what they say. The academics, at any rate.

  An example:

  Grady’s art was an antidote to post-war conformity. His initially abstract canvases referencing American suburban housing developments gradual
ly segued into a powerful critique of the joyless emptiness under the saccharine surface of middle-class suburban existence. His later Australian paintings developed the theme with increasing realism, offering a shake-up to an increasingly complacent society.

  But when I looked at the colour plates I thought the writer had it wrong. It was the joyless emptiness of his existence that they revealed. He could not connect, so he judged, and of course almost everyone was found wanting.

  *

  Judith, I always thought it was Rob I loved most. He was easy to love, with his silly jokes and songs, his irreverence, his easy warmth and charm.

  But you were always behind him, steadying, consoling. You were his rock. At one time, Judith, you were mine. A long, silken thread looped around the two of us as we sat tête-à-tête upstairs in Onslow Gardens, on the tube together, in the registry office and in France, lounging together in the pleasant shade while Rob drew, and then across half the world to twine around our ankles as we stood on the sand at low tide; around all of us, the little family and the family friend, lazing on beach towels, watching the baby, the toddler, the child as he grew . . .

  Daddy would have quoted his fellow Scot:

  It is the secret sympathy,

  The silver link, the silken tie,

  Which heart to heart, and mind to mind,

  In body and in soul can bind.

  THE WAY TO HELL

  I am surprisingly well this morning. I didn’t need any morphine in the night and, come to think of it, I didn’t need any yesterday evening either. Maybe that’s why my head is clearer. I have been thinking about Anne and Paula and Tom instead of deep-sea diving, and I realise . . .

  Realise what? I start these profundities and then can’t continue without going further and further into the red side of the ledger, the side where truth and wishful thinking are mixed in a kind of creative moral accounting. I want to be honest. I don’t believe in heaven or hell except here on earth, but it’s shaming when I realise how little I’ve learned. One would have thought that a person of my age would have some wisdom, but I think that, in essentials, I’m more stupid than ever. (Non-essentials. Now, that is another story. In non-essentials, I was always a quick learner.)