by Susan Green
‘In a minute.’
She sat in the armchair and watched the little figures in stripes surging and eddying over the green background.
‘I thought you didn’t like the footy,’ she said to Maura.
‘Dad and I always watch it.’
‘Have you eaten?’ asked Matty.
‘Sort of.’ Traffic on the outbound lanes had been slow – the football, the rain – and it took her ages to get as far as the roadhouse. She’d needed petrol and a pee, and though she wasn’t hungry, she’d lined up at the McDonald’s counter for fries.
‘There’s curry,’ said Maura, standing up, and Anne noticed she had a stubby in her hand.
‘What’s that?’ she said. ‘Are you drinking beer?’
‘Well, duh,’ said Maura.
‘It’s only light, darl,’ said Matty.
‘She’s not even sixteen. She shouldn’t be drinking at all.’
‘Dad lets me have a stubby with him when we watch the game. It’s just one, it’s no big deal. It’s not like I get drunk or anything.’
‘D’you want me to get you that cuppa now?’ said Matty.
‘No. Don’t bother. I’m going to have a shower.’
In the kitchen a colander half full of rice sat in the sink. On the bench were a saucepan of yellow sludge, empty tomato and coconut milk tins, the remains of a cauliflower and a litter of knives and wooden spoons. She thought of her own meal. Salt, fat and chemicals, a laminex table by a litter bin.
‘I didn’t think you’d be back tonight.’ Matty had followed her. ‘We were going to clean up in the morning. Look, I’ll do it now if you –’
‘Matt, I thought we agreed she can’t drink yet, she’s too young. It undermines me, you letting her drink, that’s just unfair.’
‘Anne –’
‘I’m going to have a shower.’
She stood with hot water streaming over her face and shoulders. The timer beeped after four minutes, and she still hadn’t used shower gel or shampoo. When she finally came out of the en suite, Matty was sitting on the bed.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I was a bit tired and Maura said she’d cook. I’m not usually one for a veggie curry, but she made a terrific job of it. Did you know you could cook pappadums in the microwave?’
Anne towelled her hair.
‘Anne, it was only one stubby. It’s light. It’s not as if I’m getting her smashed or anything. It’s with food.’
‘I wish I hadn’t come home.’
‘To tell you the truth, I wish you hadn’t, too. Not if you’re going to be like this.’
She stared at him.
‘Look, I’m sorry, but we were having a good time. We were talking. She thinks about things, all sorts of things; she really cares, you know? About her friends, about the environment.’ He must have seen the expression on her face. ‘No, really. She’s quite . . . quite deep, Anne. I mean for a kid.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘Anne, I love it that she wants to sit with me and watch the footy and have a beer.’
‘Oh, it’s so easy for you to be the soft touch; Daddy’s home from work, let’s have fun-fun-fun –’
He cut her off. ‘I love it that she wants to be with me.’
She thought about sleeping in the spare bedroom but in the end decided not to. Matty came in about midnight.
‘I’m sorry, Anne,’ he said. How did he know she was still awake? He got into bed and lay beside her, not touching. ‘Goodnight. Sleep well.’
After only a few minutes, Matty began the loud deep breathing that preceded a snore, so she got up and walked out into the passage. Maura’s door was shut and there was no sliver of light coming from under it. The lounge was tidy. So was the kitchen. She opened the fridge. The pot of dhal was uncovered so she took it out, stretched Glad Wrap over the top and put it back. There was a jar of chilli flakes left on the counter, too, and her hand was moving towards the spice rack when she caught sight of the stubbies in the recycling. Two stubbies. One each. Why had she made such a drama of it? Maura was into saving the world, not alco-pops and sex. There was very little likelihood that she’d be a single mum at eighteen, like Anne was. After all this time, she couldn’t even remember what Andy’s father had looked like.
LA RONDE
I’m upset. Distressed. In fact, I am downright angry. It’s not right. I am the one who’s dying. Days, weeks, the smug cardiologist said. And yet it’s Ivana –
Sometime in the night. I heard nothing but woke to find curtains around her bed and a bad smell. Then they moved me to another room and here I am sitting up in bed, seething and crying. My face is wet with tears and so is the front of my nightdress. My nose is running. There are used tissues all over the bedcover.
Paula came, held my hand for a while, and got a new box of Kleenex. She went and bought a takeaway coffee for me – a treat, usually – but I couldn’t drink it. I am angry and I am sad and I am surprised at the strength of both these emotions. I suppose it means that I am still fully alive, still here, still Bliss, failed heart and all. I suppose it means that I loved Ivana, for all that we were both somnolent most of the time. For eight months, night and day, we were here together. We were friends.
Not that we talked without restraint or reserve. For instance, I’d always suspected that her son Vassily was gay but naturally I never let on. Just as well, actually, for when he came in to see me this morning he hugged and kissed me, thanked me, and introduced his fiancée. Which goes to show how wrong I can be, for she’s a dear little thing, tiny, graceful, fine-featured. Her beautiful skin is the colour of café au lait. Was that why he never brought her to visit his mother? Ivana was a cheerfully unselfconscious xenophobe and racist whose view of the world stopped at the village boundary, but would that have outweighed her love for him? Perhaps, love being what it is – conditional, partial, fragile – but surely her burning desire to get her hands on some grandchildren would have trumped everything. Had he been working up to an announcement? Or had they only just become engaged? It makes me cry again to imagine her joy at those babies of the future. Now all is swept away; the great silence has descended.
‘I thought you’d joined a cult,’ I said.
The fiancée giggled.
‘I’m a yoga teacher,’ he said.
‘Ah. When are you getting married?’
‘Soon, very soon,’ he said.
I’ve had three weddings. Three husbands. Three marriages? No.
James and I were married for a little over two years, and I tried, I swear to you I tried. Just not very hard. He was too good for me and so naturally I had to hurt him. But I can’t tell you about James without first mentioning Felix.
I saw a French film in London all those years ago. It starred Danielle Darrieux, the epitome of Gallic mystery and glamour, and who else? Anton Walbrook. He was in The Red Shoes, the Svengali character. I never liked him after that role. This film was called La Ronde, and it showed a chain of lovers, swapping places, changing hands, like the round dance after which the film was named. My love life was La Ronde, all right. It was through Gerald that I met Felix, and through Felix that I came to James.
*
Kindness is not a virtue you admire when you are young. No, you value passion above all things, even when it hurts. I know I see Gerald through merde-coloured glasses, but I will admit he could be unexpectedly kind.
Take Mrs Eck, for example. It began before I met him, and when Gerald asked if I minded, what could I say? Mrs Eck lived in the flat downstairs. Gerald used to take her bins out, and would change lightbulbs and open jars for her. One day she offered him two free tickets to the ballet. She had a friend in the orchestra, she told him.
‘Don’t you like the ballet?’ he’d asked.
‘Oh yes.’
‘Then why don’t you go?’
She hesitated. ‘I have no-one to go with.’
‘Why don’t I go with you, then? We can go together.’
‘No, no, Mr Grady
; I just thought you might . . .’
But he persisted and, in the end, she went with him to see Giselle. And a month or so later, more tickets, and The Sleeping Beauty. It was hard to reconcile Gerald, my Gerald, so masculine and virile with his springing dark hair and crackling energy, with a Gerald who would take an elderly lady to see ballerina swans.
He took me down to meet her after we were married. I don’t know where I’d got the idea she was elderly, for she must have been only in her late thirties, small, with a slim erect figure and a large tumour, the soft pink of an overgrown earlobe and the size of a dinner roll, growing over her right eye. I glanced frantically around her flat and alighted on a shelf of china figurines. They were ballet dancers, with skirts of real tulle net that had been glazed somehow, and I began to exclaim how much I liked them, liked the ballet, had been to the ballet in Melbourne with Mother and the aunts before Daddy died. In my panic I pulled names out of the air – Tatiana Riabouchinska, Paul Petroff, Tamara Toumanova – and spilled them messily in front of her. Despite the hideous thing on her face she had more poise than me.
‘Ah, Toumanova,’ she said. ‘The Black Pearl of the Russian Ballet. We had a few other names for her. What a temperament! And her mother – the original stage mother – a nightmare.’
‘Oh? You knew her?’
‘I was a dancer too.’ She sounded amused, and may have smiled at my obvious surprise, but of course I couldn’t bear to look. ‘That’s me, there.’
Photographs. Dozens of them: framed studio portraits and candid snapshots, some scrawled with big, looping letters, To Simone; Darling Simone; Ma chère; Ma belle. I recognised a few faces, but not Mrs Eck’s until she pointed her finger. She was very fair, with large eyes and one of those little feathered headdresses that the cygnets wear in Swan Lake. I was so sorry for her, and so repulsed, I felt I might vomit.
‘Why doesn’t she have it taken off?’ I asked Gerald later. ‘She could have it done on the National Health.’
‘They can’t operate. It’s growing behind her eye and into her brain.’
‘How can she bear it?’
‘It’s just flesh,’ he said. ‘You should visit her every now and then. She’s lonely.’
The next time she had tickets, she offered them to the both of us. She was convinced that it was not at all the thing for Gerald to leave his young wife at home, that I’d be within my rights to object. In fact, we had all been out together once, to the cinema, but I declined to make it a party again. I couldn’t bear it, the way she pulled her hat right down and turned her collar up and kept to the shadows. I couldn’t stand looking at her.
‘D’you mind going down and telling her it’s all right, Liza?’ Gerald asked me. ‘Tell her you don’t mind, that you’re not upset or offended.’
‘Do you like ballet that much? Or is it just all the pretty ballerinas?’
‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘You’ve found me out. It’s their little bottoms showing under the tutus.’
I was slightly crumpled when I left our flat, and I wondered if Mrs Eck had heard the laughing and rhythmical banging of the bedhead against the wall.
When I left our flat in Onslow Gardens for the last time, I didn’t think to say goodbye to Mrs Eck, but she must have heard me moving around. She called out to me on the stairs, and I reluctantly backtracked to see her.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, very English and not actually mentioning what she was sorry about. ‘I shall miss our little talks.’
‘Yes,’ I said, and then added stupidly, for something to say, ‘But you will still be able to go to the ballet with Gerald.’
‘He’s very good to me. Will you stay for tea, or do you . . .’ Her phrasing showed she expected disappointment. ‘Do you have to rush away?’
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Eck, I do.’
She nodded and handed me something wrapped in blue tissue paper. ‘I’d like you to have this, as a keepsake. You said once that you liked it, that it reminded you of a happy time with your mother and your aunts.’
I knew what it was. I put it in my handbag and got up to leave.
‘Goodbye, my dear.’
I thought of kissing her, and then realised that I couldn’t, so I took her hand and shook it with, I hoped, great warmth and then, glancing at my watch, ran away.
I stayed with Rob and Judith for a few weeks after Gerald and I separated. Perhaps a few weeks too long. The silver link, the silken tie are all very well but now I wonder whether I was a ball and chain. I was devastated when they told me they were returning to Australia. I could have taken over their flat but, like so much that’s happened to me, sheer luck intervened one day in the Whitechapel Gallery in the person of Eric Partledge. He was an art critic and author – famous then, forgotten now – and had been a protégé of Aunt Emu’s in Melbourne between the wars. He’d sloughed off every last vestige of his colonial origins, and in fact he seemed to me the very picture of the wealthy middle-aged English fruit. You know: fine wines, collection of Regency snuffboxes, cravat and velvet smoking jacket to go with the Noël Coward repartee. Except he wasn’t – a fruit, I mean – though I’m sure the misperception worked very well for him in the main. When he pounced, I thought it was a tremendous joke and I suppose out of embarrassment he went along. He never tried again and, to his credit, didn’t hold a grudge and switched at once to amused, avuncular interest.
‘Roland Gardens?’ he said, when I told him of my plans. ‘You haven’t signed a lease or anything, have you, my dear?’
I told him I hadn’t, and he asked me if I’d like to look after his house and two Siamese cats for twelve months.
‘Rent-free of course, and don’t look like you’re going to faint, my dear. I couldn’t possibly pick you up in these trousers.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Oh, a sort of world tour of private collections; there’s a book in it, of course. Leaving tomorrow, so it’s lucky we bumped into each other, isn’t it, Elizabeth? Here’s the address.’ He handed me his card. ‘And you can get the spare key from Miss Eaves in the basement flat. Miss Eaves is a gem, an official gem. She looks after things for me – you know, lets the charlady in, counts the silver when she’s gone, feeds Wallis and Edward, that kind of thing. She’ll love you.’
Actually, Miss Eaves seemed surprised and rather flustered when I turned up with my suitcases and a few boxes. Eric hadn’t told her to expect me at all. Looking back, I wonder if Eric had in fact told her that she could stay there. However, she kindly helped carry my boxes and bags, brought up half a pint of milk and some bread and then left me alone in the drawing room. It wasn’t quite my style but I could coexist quite happily with green velvet curtains and plush carpet, a chandelier, antique furniture – real or faux, I didn’t know – and more objets d’art than you could shake a stick at. I had peeped inside Miss Eaves’s dark little flat on the way up and though I’d like to say I felt a twinge of guilt, I just thought, lucky me.
Three months later, the morning after my farewell with Gerald, when I was lying hungover with my empty wineglass in its own cheery sunbeam, the phone rang. It was a woman called Lucie Deare, asking if I was Mrs Grady.
‘Yes.’
‘And you were a friend of Simone Eck?’
‘Yes,’ I said, wondering where this was leading. I hadn’t seen Mrs Eck since I left our flat. I’d stuffed the little china dancer into a drawer and simply forgotten about her.
‘She passed away on the weekend.’
What was this woman talking about?
‘The funeral is tomorrow. I’m so sorry that it’s such short notice.’
‘Funeral? You mean she’s dead?’ I sat bolt upright, trying to unfuddle myself.
‘Yes, but I had trouble finding you. Could you make sure Mr Grady knows?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid I can’t. He’s on his way to New York.’ And for some reason – no, for a lot of reasons, and you can work them out – I began to cry, and she assumed it was for Mrs Ec
k, and told me which church, what time and the tube station.
It was a small, sad funeral. There were about a dozen of us there: Mrs Eck’s ex-husband, her sister, brother-in-law and niece, a few friends from the ballet and me. You might say, since I scarcely knew her, that my tears were inappropriate, but believe me, I truly grieved for Mrs Eck. For her blinded, blighted face, her beautiful dark eyes, her feathery swan’s headdress. For Gerald’s kindness to her. For our baby who’d died and our dead romance. Outside the church afterwards, a tiny dark-haired young woman came up to me and introduced herself as Lucie Deare. It was she who was in the orchestra, who sent tickets to Mrs Eck.
‘You knew her well, Mrs Grady?’
‘No, not really. It was my husband, my ex-husband I mean; he used to take her to the ballet, and –’
I noticed, over her shoulder, some kind of fuss – a young man turning on his heel and the little knot of people moving aside to let him pass.
Mrs Eck’s sister said loudly to her husband, ‘Well, I don’t know why they have to be so thin-skinned! All I said was –’
Lucie put out her arm as the young man brushed past, saying in a low voice, ‘Felix!’ and he stopped. He was dark and slender, like her, and rather ugly, I thought, with a beaky nose and high, bony forehead. ‘Mrs Grady, this is my brother Felix. Felix, this is Mrs Grady. She was Simone’s neighbour.’
He shook my hand, and Lucie turned away to the other mourners. She was trying to organise the whole group into going together to have tea at the Lyons in the high street. A kind of wake. Tea and cake. No.
‘Please say goodbye to your sister,’ I said. ‘I have to go.’
‘So do I,’ he said, and took my arm. ‘What are we waiting for?’
Felix, I am waiting. I am still waiting.
Oh, Felix, you are such a poor pitiful ghost of a memory and yet once I would have said you were the pivot upon which my whole life turned. Why is Gerald such a fine, hearty revenant, letting himself in and out just as he wishes, as if he still had his own key? Why can I only see you as the camera did, a slight, dark young man in between Lucie and a Bliss who dominates the trio with her clear-eyed, carefree, overabundant joie de vivre? Lucie got a passer-by to take the photograph of us at the zoo, and I kept it, because it was the only picture of Felix and me that I had. I have it still, though Lucie is missing. I cut her off and threw her in the bin.
