How Bright Are All Things Here

by Susan Green

  ‘How did she sound?’

  ‘Very surprised to hear from me. Bliss, you didn’t tell us you knew Judith Freeman – or should I say J.P. Freeman. I mean, she’s a famous writer.’

  ‘Did Judith tell you that?’

  ‘No, of course not. Anne worked it out. Anne says her husband was quite a well-known artist, too. I’ve never heard you speak about them before. Where did you meet them?’

  ‘Oh, in London, years ago. I’m sure I’ve mentioned her to you. She and Rob, her husband – I used to go down to see them occasionally, at their house by the beach.’

  Paula shakes her head. ‘Anyway, she said to give you her love.’

  Her love. I can’t stop the sigh, which is almost a groan. ‘So you’re going down to collect the paintings?’

  ‘Yes. She suggested next Wednesday.’ A little pause, and Paula says, in phrasing so unlike her that I can only assume she’s under instructions from Anne, ‘So, Bliss . . . tell me about these paintings. Judith said she and her husband have stored them for you for more than fifty years.’

  ‘That long? Yes.’

  ‘Did you do them? Or was it Judith’s husband?’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘You’re being very mysterious, Bliss. If they’re so valuable, why didn’t you –’

  I interrupt her. ‘I didn’t want to have them, and I didn’t want to sell them. To tell you the truth, I forgot about them. Occasionally Judith or Rob would remind me and I’d feel a little guilty, but I knew they had plenty of storage space so I’d simply put them to the back of my mind. Now that I’m sorting things out, I’ve decided that you three children should have them. To keep or to sell or to give away.’

  ‘So . . .’

  I raised my eyebrows in answer.

  ‘So it’s a surprise?’

  ‘Yes.’ I feel clever and happy. I’m sorting things out.

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ she says.

  I’m still feeling clever and happy in the morning. Ivana is back from her toenail surgery, so when Karen asks us if we want to go to the entertainment in the lounge, I say yes.

  ‘Good girl,’ she says. ‘You’ll enjoy it. It’s Richard. Remember Richard? Last time he did Elvis and it was a hoot. Now, Ivana, what about you? Was that a yes?’

  I thought it was clearly a no, but she’s a good girl, too, and obediently conforms to their suggestions regarding legs over, bottom up and the rest.

  ‘Stella, will you take the other side? Upsy-daisy, that’s right. Now, come on, Bliss.’

  I realise it’s not such a bright idea after all. I start to say, ‘I think I –’

  But it’s like so much in life – he who hesitates is lost – and so off we trundle, Ivana and I, in our wheelchairs. Off to see Richard. Whoever he is.

  Richard is Frank. Last time he was Elvis. Does that make sense to you now? It’s a kind of concert they put on for us oldies. You can sing along or not, but either way it’s meant to help us improve our cognitive functioning. There’s a special morning tea afterwards and Athena, the lovely girl who runs the program, will ask those leading questions which are supposed to nudge our recall of past times.

  ‘Happy times, sad times, that’s life!’ chirps Athena, who, being Greek, is naturally a philosopher.

  Richard sits at the piano.

  ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes is back!’ he cries and with alarming alacrity launches straight into ‘New York, New York’.

  ‘Come Fly with Me’ and ‘Night and Day’ sorely miss the Nelson Riddle Orchestra; Richard tinkles the ivories with hands like hams and fudges all the chords. On the other hand, he has a good voice and his clothes – a lean-cut pale blue suit with a darker shirt, thin tie and, of course, the hat – make for a passable impersonation.

  ‘Doesn’t it take you back?’ says Ivy, coming to sit by my wheelchair. ‘Though I was more of a Dean Martin fan, actually.’ She takes my hand and holds it firmly in hers. ‘What about you, Bliss?’

  Then he starts another song, and I am back in the Odeon, sitting in the darkened cinema next to my lover, a minor film actor called Antony Miles. We are watching Pal Joey, with Sinatra in the title role. He’s magnetic, as always, but my God, I think, how did the censors let Rita Hayworth get away with this? Her beautiful body is one luscious blush of satisfied desire as she half swoons, half dances into the post-coital shower; she’s wild, beguiled and all the rest of it. With Antony there beside me I feel my insides melt. I can’t wait to get back to bed.

  Antony squeezes my thigh. ‘Looks pretty good for her age, doesn’t she?’

  She would have been forty, if that. Somehow the realisation had only recently come to me that I myself, approaching thirty, was no longer young.

  I turn to his perfect profile and even in the dim cinema I can see the smirk on his face.

  I brush his hand off my leg. ‘Stop it,’ I say.

  He thinks I’m teasing.

  The finale.

  Regrets? Mr Sinatra has a few . . .

  Ah, Frank! You are, as Caroline would have said, full of bullshit. And what about that other little songbird? Je Ne Regrette Rien? Come now. Je ne souviens rien is more like it. If you’re still in your right mind and have no regrets you’re either a liar or a psychopath. We all make mistakes, and we should regret them when we hurt others.

  I have hurt myself too, of course. Falling headlong will usually end in tears and I regret the wanton wilful waste of it all. But the worst waste is perhaps more mundane. It is the wasted time, the time spent flapping and fluttering, perching here and there but never settling, in constant flight but never high enough to soar . . .

  That last is perhaps a little disingenuous. Compared to many women, most women, I’ve soared all right. There were the early prizes and the scholarship, the illustrations for magazines like My Journal (full page! full colour!). Then there were the textile designs. Some of those were good; the over-scale heraldic beasts, for instance, and the florals that looked like William Morris on LSD and the original ‘Victoria’ with the head of the young queen, taken from Rob’s lucky sixpence, enlarged and repeated in silver, grey and black. My crowning achievement was, of course, our shop – though ‘shop’ hardly begins to describe Victoria’s. In its day, Victoria’s was buzzing with the rich and famous of Swinging London and more than a little rubbed off on Bridget and me. After all, Vogue and House & Garden are not to be sneezed at. We were the first in the King’s Road, before Guinevere’s, to do that kind of thing, to mix modern with antique and junk shop; apparently (I read this in World of Interiors) we were the first to throw out the rulebook and democratise design. That’s gravitas for you, and I swear I never gave politics a thought.

  Is that it? A decor shop, some curtain material, a few pictures in a women’s magazine? Inconsequential, ephemeral things, and you could say, moreover, feminine things. Men ran the show and it was always a struggle to be taken seriously. Young women today cannot, I think, imagine what it was like. A contract, a credit, a bank loan? I think not, Miss Adair . . .

  I am sounding like Judith, aren’t I? Judith in her role as Feminist Icon. But you know, this is all hindsight. Which is the best sight. Back in the day, I thought nothing of it, if I thought at all. It was as it was, and as I’ve said before, if a man judged me on how I pleased his eye, well, I enjoyed the attention.

  Judith used to scold me. ‘You need to take yourself more seriously,’ she’d say. ‘You’ll always be an amateur, Bliss, until you find something that interests you more than yourself.’

  Ah, Judith. You had something I did not. You had drive. Or perhaps you were driven, which is not at all the same thing. In any case, look at you now, a national treasure, with your novels and your ecological tracts, your memoirs, your medals and prizes, always on the side of goodness and virtue. But, then, you had a philosophy, didn’t you? A code, a program, a plan. You knew right from wrong whereas my ethics were situational at best, a finely calibrated range of greys like the monochrome sets of Conté à Paris I used to buy from Co
rnelissen’s.

  I started a kind of Victoria’s here, in Toorak Village, in the late 1960s. I imported fabrics and wallpapers, sourced antiques, curios and decor items, offered a design service. From the first it was wildly successful – people are so insecure, and such snobs – but I got sick of it rather quickly. I had done it all before in London and, to tell you the truth, my Australian clientele were dreadful, dreadful people. Alec, poor pet, thought I should have something to do. He thought I would miss what he quaintly called, as if it were some kind of vocation instead of a shop, ‘my work’.

  ‘You’ve always been a career woman,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you to be bored.’

  I was not to be the bird in the golden cage, was that it? Dear Alec.

  Dear Alec. It was he who told me that I did not have to be beautiful or clever or charming; that I did not have to glitter – no, not even one little winking twinkle – that I could simply rest in his arms, or stand by his side and be silent, unsmiling, even – ugly word that it is – glum, and he would still take my hand in his. No, I’m lying; he didn’t say all that. He said, exasperated by my anxious amusing chatter early in our marriage, ‘You don’t have to be anything for me, Bliss.’

  My chief regret is that it took so long for me to believe him.

  ‘Lovely, wasn’t it?’ says Ivy in my ear as, with a round of palsied applause, Frank turns into Richard again. ‘Are you having morning tea? Do you want me to wheel you in?’

  Shake is no, nod is yes.

  ‘Do you want to go back to bed? Shall I get Stella?’

  I find, after Frank, I am too exhausted to talk. Nod is yes, shake is no.

  ANNE AND TOM

  Anne arrived at the airport to find that Tom’s flight had been delayed. She’d stopped off at the Digger’s Rest roadhouse for a quick takeaway coffee but now it felt good to sit, unhurried, in one of the little cafes, watching uniformed air crews and motley travellers pass by in a constant stream while she drank her latte. She’d ordered a croissant, too, and when the waitress brought it, oozing molten cheese, Anne felt contentment like a slow warm flush through her body. Stopping. Waiting, being waited upon. She sometimes felt she lived for these moments of pause and passivity.

  Tom had said he’d catch the Skybus into the city but she’d said no, of course she’d pick him up from the airport, it was on her way. She enjoyed feeling generous and besides, Tom, up there in Sydney and out of the loop, had to be drawn back in to the family. Not so that he could help with Bliss’s care but because it was right; it was what real families did.

  Bliss and Alec hadn’t done family. Christmas cards, the occasional wedding or funeral, that was it. Marrying Matty, she’d become part of a clan, a tribe. They were Irish Catholic – Micks, Bliss called them, laughing, but the old-fashioned disdain was there – so of course there were truckloads of them. Not that Matty had anything to do with the church. He hated the whole institution, refused to send the children to the local Catholic school or attend the Christmas or Easter services. Anne would have done so happily, without believing in any of it, and Matty’s attitude was embarrassing sometimes, given that Maureen, his mother, had been a mainstay of St Mary’s. Her funeral two years ago had packed the church and spilled outside, and in the hall afterwards the noise was incredible, you could see the air almost shimmer with it, with talk, laughter, tears, hugging, clasping of hands, tea-drinking, cake-eating, togetherness, friendship, family. Family. She was well in. She loved it. Yes, there were the inevitable prickles, the ruffled feathers – her sister-in-law Dionne came to mind – but none of that mattered when you had the nephews and nieces, cousins to her own children through intertwined generations, great mobs of them at family parties and barbecues, rushing about with little ones and teenagers all together. It was a joy. There was no other word for it.

  When she thought of her childhood, it seemed to stretch backwards into long empty spaces of time. The silent weekends, the older ones always together without her and then going, one by one, until she was alone in a house turned in on itself. She could hear her parents talking in another room, low voices, the tinkle of ice, the hours and hours . . .

  Since she’d decided to be the conduit for information, and now phoned Tom regularly, sometimes they had a real conversation and she felt, finally, as if she’d graduated. She was no longer the baby sister; she was one adult person talking to another. But there was big brother in the relationship as well. When she was small, Tom had been kind to her casually and only occasionally, but it had been enough – especially when combined with his particular brand of dazzling sweetness – to instil hero worship. The imprint was still there.

  ‘Tom!’ she called.

  You couldn’t miss him. He was tall, and the best-dressed man in the crowd of arrivals. It was the cut of his jeans, the shiny lace-up brogues, the mocha-brown corduroy jacket and V-neck camel-coloured sweater – probably cashmere; Roly was mad for cashmere – all worn with the ease of a model in a fashion spread. She thought of Matty at his nephew’s wedding, stiff and stitched up in his suit, and the suit buttoned wrong, and the wrong style anyway, and the lavender shirt making his skin look red.

  ‘Little Annie,’ Tom said, dropping his bag and slumping onto the banquette beside her. ‘It’s fucking freezing. They made us walk across the tarmac. God, I hate Melbourne.’ He waved to the waitress. ‘Long black? Thanks a million. And smell this.’ He held out his sleeve. ‘Smell it. I was sitting next to some fucking old hippie from Byron. Patchouli! I reek.’

  The complaints kept flowing and Anne suddenly recognised the peevish, irritable tone. He was hungry. Like her own boys, he’d be better once he’d eaten – and carbs, of course, were best. She and the other mums used to joke that there was nothing like pasta to soothe the savage beast.

  ‘What do you want, Tom? I had a cheese and ham croissant.’

  He shuddered. ‘Toast. Raisin toast.’

  When the waitress came with the espresso, Anne ordered for him and then, while he drank with half-shut eyes, she studied his clothes, his face, his hair, his hands. Those hands! So different to Matty’s, slim and smooth, with such long tapering fingers and the glinting blond hair on his wrists almost invisible in this light. Matty’s hands were big, blunt and meaty. Builder’s hands, gardener’s hands. When they were first together, he used to scrub the ingrained dirt from his palms with butter and sugar – it was a trick of his father’s – and even now cake mixture made Anne think of sex.

  ‘How’s Roly?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, he’s obsessed with the renovation. The place will be the fucking Versailles of the North Shore by the time he’s through. And then he’ll only want to sell it.’

  ‘I meant . . .’

  ‘Oh, there’s been some delay with the biopsy results. It’s not as if we haven’t been through this before, you know. I mean, it’s routine.’

  ‘Well, that’s good.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Tom’s order arrived. ‘No, I’m sorry. I’m grumpy and I’m hungover.’ He took a bite from his toast, showing his own naturally white and even teeth. ‘Roly invited people over last night and I drank a bit much. And the flight was obscenely early. Thank you for putting up with me, little Annie. D’you mind me calling you that? I always used to, remember?’ The charm offensive was shameless and even slightly mocking but somehow he was laughing at himself as well as her and it was impossible to hold out against it. ‘Do you have some Panadol? Why am I asking? Of course you do.’

  She opened her purse.

  The door to the flat was open, and garbage bags were ranged on either side of the hall down towards the kitchen.

  Paula was crouched on the floor in front of the built-in cupboards, boxing up Bliss’s cookware.

  ‘Tom!’ she said, standing up. ‘Oh, Tommy!’

  He was shocked at how thin she was, all angles and lines. But as she looked at him, everything about her softened and tears prickled his eyes as he held her. He stroked her hai
r. It was greying now and he wondered when she’d stopped dyeing. He hadn’t seen her for three years.

  ‘You’ve done heaps,’ said Anne. ‘You’ve worked so hard.’

  ‘The kitchen’s nearly finished. And I’ve got everything out of the en suite.’

  Tom had felt calmer in the car. Anne was an excellent driver, and the cafe had been a good idea. But now something – irritation? anger? fear? – bubbled up again like reflux.

  ‘Well, the division of the spoils, eh?’ he said, stepping back and leaning against the doorframe. ‘Who gets what? Did she put you in charge of the whole thing, Paula, or is it first in, best dressed?’ He paused to take in the distress on Paula’s face and then said abruptly, ‘What’s that smell?’

  Paula gestured towards a basket of toiletries on the table but Tom knew anyway. It was a cake of the special Savon de something-or-other Bliss had always used. It was French, triple-milled – whatever that meant – expensive, imported. She’d had a friend in London send it to her for years before it was available in Australia.

  Tom felt himself breathing heavily. He was wasting time. If he stuffed around going through Bliss’s things he’d chicken out and not see her. He’d been excited about the furniture, the cedar and mahogany and bird’s-eye maple, the inlaid table and the little Georgian secretaire. How had he not known it was all unimportant?

  ‘I think I’d better go and see her now. Car keys, girls – Anne? Or Paula, it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘But you’ve only just got here,’ said Anne. ‘I thought we were going to choose what we wanted before –’

  ‘No, I want to see her first.’

  ‘Then I’ll drive you,’ said Anne.

  ‘No.’ Tom held out his hand.

  ‘Take mine,’ said Paula. ‘It’s Dave’s, actually. The Subaru out the front.’

  ‘Sorry, Paula,’ he said. ‘About what I said before.’

  ‘Oh, Tom,’ she said. The tiny lines around his mouth and eyes made her want to cry. He was out of the door before Anne could offer the Landcruiser.