How Bright Are All Things Here

by Susan Green

  ‘Penny for them?’ he said.

  ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘hardly thinking at all.’

  ‘Happy?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I am.’

  ‘Come here, then.’

  She wriggled closer and dropped a light kiss on his lips. They lay there like that, face to face, and the silence between them was filled with birdsong. Dave touched her cheek.

  ‘Still beautiful, Paula.’

  No I’m not, she wanted to say, but something stopped her. He had a teasing smile playing in the corners of his mouth.

  ‘What?’ she asked. ‘What?’

  ‘You weren’t always so hard to seduce.’

  She stared at him for a few seconds, and then took his meaning. ‘Is that what this is? The drive, the picnic?’

  ‘No. They were to spoil you. To make you happy.’

  ‘They did. They have.’

  She made herself look at him full in the face. The texture of his skin was rough, with the emerging stubble like iron filings on his chin and upper lip. There was grey in his eyebrows and at his temples, pouches and lines under his eyes. He looked every one of his fifty-seven years. Some of them hard years. Very hard. And she had not made them any softer.

  ‘You know, you do make me happy, Dave.’

  ‘And unhappy.’

  She kissed his hand. ‘Not all the time.’

  He rolled over and held her close, kissing her on the lips. A light kiss at first and then another, deeper and questioning.

  She answered with another question. ‘Here?’

  ‘There’s no-one to see us.’

  ‘No-one,’ she agreed.

  ‘If you want to.’ His hand was stroking, exploratory but tentative. ‘Only if you want.’

  ‘I know.’ The screen in her mind was blue, blue, blue.

  On the way home, she leaned against him as he drove. There was a moist fertile smell, like mushrooms, from the dirt that had got in his hair as they rolled off the rug. She fell asleep on his shoulder and did not wake until they reached the freeway.

  ARE YOU THERE?

  I feel ill. Not in pain; no, no. Oh, but I feel . . .

  Oh, sick. This is new.

  Where’s that bloody buzzer? Oh, please . . .

  Are you there?

  Where are you, then?

  UNDER THE WEATHER

  I’ve been under the weather.

  Understatement of the year, darling, but let’s not dwell. It began last week, after Ivana died. Nausea, then an interval of retching and puking with a little writhing and shivering thrown in. At first the staff thought it was gastro – it happens even in the best-managed facilities – and that’s what they told Paula when she called to see me. And then it was probably a virus, but really they had no idea, and it was only Sunny, a personal carer and not a nurse at all, who was clever enough to work it out.

  ‘Such a pity,’ she said shyly to Dr Moran. ‘Mrs Bliss has been so well lately. No breakthrough pain. No needing the – oh!’ And she clapped her hand to her mouth and stared at the doctor. ‘Withdrawal!’ she said.

  And at last I had some sneaking sympathy for Caroline, for those times when the supply dried up or she’d run out of funds. Fancy that. Sympathy for the devil.

  She visited me last night. At first I thought she was dead, because her skin looked mouldy, but when she came close to the bed I saw that she was tattooed with dragons, skulls, axes and all of that tomfoolery.

  ‘What did you do that for, Caroline?’ I asked her. ‘You had such beautiful skin.’

  She didn’t answer, but leaned over me. She had a syringe in one hand, a bottle of red nail varnish in the other, and I wondered if I was supposed to choose. But then she slipped onto her knees beside me, put her hand in mine, and kissed me on the cheek with her ghost lips. I was reminded of one of Daddy’s ballads, ‘Clerk Saunders’. D’you know that one? He loves May Margaret, and she loves him, but when her seven brothers find them together in bed, one of them slays him, just like that. An honour killing, I suppose you would call it. Clerk Saunders’ ghost comes to Margaret’s tower room just before cock-crow.

  Daddy’s voice is a thrilling whisper. Tingles tango down my spine.

  My mouth it is full cold, Margaret,

  It has the smell now of the ground;

  And if I kiss thy comely mouth,

  Thy days of life will not be long . . .

  Caroline was a gentle ghost. Sweet Caroline, says the song, and you know, she could be. It wasn’t all hell, and though Tom might deny it, there were some happy times. It was a pity, though, that Alec left her entirely to me. She’d lost her mother and then her father. With the best of intentions, and utter exhaustion, Alec handed her over to his brand-new wife.

  Oh, I know why he did. He had the natural discomfort of a man of his generation with ‘women’s business’, and after the years with Nina, he felt helpless in the world of roiling female emotions. He’d found me, and I was his anchorage. All now would be calm seas and a prosperous voyage. I would play mother. It was always going to be difficult with Caroline, but I actually felt I was getting somewhere until puberty hit. Bam! Kapow! as the comics would have it. Evil stepmother.

  Alec was at a water supply jamboree in Perth, Tom was on school camp and Caroline asked if she could go into the city with some friends. A film, a snack and she’d be home before dark.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I knew these friends; I’d met their parents at school plays and prize nights; it wasn’t a dereliction of duty. I was contemplating a program of pleasure for Anne and me when Caroline trotted out with glossed lips, raccooned eyes and her little bosoms popping out of a skimpy top like astonished puppies. I panicked. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, or what Alec would want me to do, and my own experience of being mothered offered no clue. There were so many choices: I could compliment her, offer a spritz of perfume, suggest a little cardie if the evening became cool. Or I could tell her she looked like a harlot and ground her forthwith.

  I guessed textbook conventionality as the correct response, and I guessed wrong.

  Making the serious face, I said, ‘You’re not going out dressed like that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Caroline,’ I said, spinning her around to face the mirror. ‘Look at you! It’s not safe for a young girl to go out dressed this way.’

  ‘Look at you!’ She shoved me away. ‘Look at your lipstick and your tight pants and your cleavage. What do you think you are? Sexy or something? You disgust me.’

  I must have stared at her, not believing what I was hearing. It kept coming.

  ‘I know why you married Dad.’

  ‘Stop!’ I put a hand up, palm out, like a policeman stopping traffic, but she was never one to obey rules.

  ‘You were after his money. You were out for everything you could get. You’re a bloodsucker, aren’t you?’

  I tried the calm yet stern voice, the voice of reason. As if I was still in charge. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, Caroline. Your father would hate to hear you speaking like this.’

  ‘Why should I care? He’s not my father!’

  I suppose my jaw dropped.

  ‘He’s not my father,’ she repeated. ‘Ah, bet you didn’t know that, did you?’

  ‘That’s nonsense!’

  ‘You’re full of bullshit, Bliss, did you know that? That’s nonsense . . .’ She repeated my words in a horrid fluting imitation of my voice. ‘My real father is Mum’s first boyfriend, the one she really loved, the one she wanted to marry only her mother made her marry Dad.’

  ‘Your grandmother was in America when they got married, Caroline. She’d been there for years. It sounds like you’ve been reading True Romance.’

  ‘Go fuck yourself, Bliss. What would you know? She met him again and they couldn’t help themselves and they were going to run away only he got killed in a motorbike accident. But she had me and I was her secret that made her happy even when she was miserable and I don’t care if you tell D
ad – I’m sure you will anyway.’

  I wanted to laugh but I knew I mustn’t.

  ‘I don’t care what you think. He’s not my father and you’re not my mother and you can’t tell me what to do. I don’t like you; none of us do. You were so lovey-dovey at the start, giving us presents and stuff, pretending you cared. Playing happy families. You know, I used to hope that you and Dad would have a baby, but I should have known.’

  That hit a nerve. ‘All right, that’s enough, stop right there. You’ve had some hard times in your young life, but that doesn’t –’

  ‘You didn’t want to lose your figure, did you? Women like you –’

  Anne came into the room then and, caught in the crossfire of our argument, burst into tears.

  Caroline turned on her. ‘Shut up!’

  ‘Mummy!’ Anne howled.

  ‘Are you stupid or something? She’s not our mother.’

  Anne howled louder. Caroline walked out, slamming the door behind her.

  After I got Anne calmed down, we went for a walk with the neighbour’s dog. Cherry was a fat old labrador, a bit like a seal in her efforts to chase and fetch, and it wasn’t long before Anne was laughing at her and happy again. We had Chinese for dinner, watched rather a lot of television, and when I’d got her tucked into bed I lay on the couch with a glass of Scotch and a pack of Benson & Hedges. Just after eight-thirty, the phone rang. It was the mother of one of Caroline’s friends. Sorry it was so late. Could Caroline stay the night? The three girls had hatched this plan on the way home and she saw no harm in it. Did I mind?

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t mind.’

  Yes, yes, I know. Rewarding the bad behaviour, thin edge of the wedge, all of that. But I didn’t want to see her. I lay there, drinking and blowing beautifully formed smoke rings into the air. On the coffee table, the heavy crystal ashtray slowly filled and the bottle of Johnnie Walker emptied. I lay there, as I’m lying here now, floating in and out of past, present and future, of realities and possibilities and lost or faded hopes. Caroline, as I first saw her, in a rage at life for taking her mother. And angry with Alec for not being able to save her.

  Will Tom always blame me for what Caroline made of her life? I’ll take on the generic guilt that all parents must bear, but not the particular. Not the shooting up in the on-site van with the petty crims. That was her own particular florid flourish.

  And yet . . . Oh, Caroline. Caroline, I’m sorry. I could fudge it a bit, as I did with Tom, and say that I loved you, but it was as Alec’s child, out of love for him. That’s not love, it’s duty. I didn’t, I couldn’t, like you, love you. You for yourself, sweet Caroline, little cracked and broken child that you were, seething with hurt and fear and self-protective anger.

  Daddy used to read to us from the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Not that he was a churchgoer, but he always said – and it’s one of his vast simplifications that contain a kernel of truth – that the only two books you need are the King James Bible and a complete Shakespeare, and if you could only have one, you should choose the Bible. He held that it was part of our common cultural heritage, our tribal magic, and certain phrases in it toll eternally like bells for grief and for joy. Well, Daddy, I wasn’t patient, I wasn’t kind. I was envious, easily angered. I kept a record of wrongs. Corinthians 13: 4–7, Daddy.

  I had a sudden glimpse of myself as Caroline saw me, a grotesque in a tightly belted leopard-skin trench coat, battening onto Alec and feeding off him like a vampire. The picture was so funny that if I’d had the energy, I’d have laughed out loud.

  There’s nae room at my head, Marg’ret,

  There’s nae room at my feet;

  My bed it is full lowly now,

  Among hungry worms I sleep.

  C’EST FAIT

  The girls are going to Chelsea to see Judith. Tomorrow? Or is it the next day? They are giving me lots of lovely drugs and time’s gone all elastic.

  Paula sat with me and talked, but I was thinking about Judith. The silver link broke, you know. She needed to be looked up to and admired, and I did when I was young. I needed her. And then I didn’t, and I don’t think she liked me nearly as much. People are funny like that, aren’t they?

  I never stopped loving her. I just stopped seeing her. It seemed the best thing to do. C’est la vie, as Rob would say. He didn’t speak French but had learned, from films perhaps, all sorts of useful garlicky phrases. C’est la vie, c’est la guerre. Courage, mon brave.

  I used to call them Robisms, those little phrases and proverbs and quotations of his. They annoyed the hell out of Gerald.

  For instance, Tolstoy. Tolstoy, according to Rob, wrote, ‘All there is for us is to love another, and to work.’

  To me, it seemed quite profound. On the one hand, depressing – that’s all? No fun and games, no parties and frocks? – but on the other, liberating, uplifting. Work, real work, I thought, is marvellous. And as for love, it goes without saying.

  One day, Gerald asked Rob exactly where Tolstoy said it.

  ‘In Russia, of course. In his dacha.’

  I giggled, but Gerald was not to be deflected. ‘In what book?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I’ve forgotten.’

  ‘Well, what have you read?’

  ‘What is this, Gerry? The third degree? I’ve read War and Peace and Anna Karenina. I read them on the boat coming over. So did you. Perhaps I didn’t read it. Perhaps I heard it on the radio. Some talks program. I’ve forgotten.’

  Gerald kept on and on at him. I couldn’t understand why.

  ‘What does it matter?’ I asked him later.

  ‘He doesn’t know where it comes from; he has no idea. He’s trying to impress.’

  ‘I can’t think of anyone less likely to want to impress,’ I said. ‘He’s just being himself.’ Cyril Connolly and his pram in the hall came to mind. ‘And besides, you like to quote things you’ve read.’

  ‘That’s the whole point, Liza. He quotes bits and pieces of works he hasn’t read. He just picks things up, like a magpie. Or he invents.’

  Gerald was just beginning to pull away from Rob, and his continual sniping annoyed me. More than that, it pained me. I leaped to my friend’s defence as best I could.

  ‘That’s not true, Gerald,’ I said. ‘Rob reads a lot. He reads serious things. Just the other day, we were at lunch, and he’d been reading Nietzsche –’

  ‘Nietzsche!’ That I could even pronounce the name seemed to astonish him.

  ‘Yes, and he had the book right there with him.’ I could feel the muscles of my face all screwed up with the effort of remembering. ‘He told me – oh, it was something about being a real human being. Or a great human being. There’s a formula, or is it a secret . . .’

  ‘For God’s sake, Liza, can’t you hear yourself? You don’t know what you’re talking about. And neither does Rob.’

  But we did, darling. Can I explain?

  Nietzsche’s secret formula is a thing called amor fati.

  Months later, after my marriage ended, I was crying in Rob and Judith’s kitchen, and he said to me, ‘Nothing is lost, Bliss. None of it is in vain.’

  ‘Amor fati,’ I said, deadly serious, with the tears running down my face.

  It is Latin for ‘love your fate’. I don’t know what Nietzsche meant by it and Rob probably didn’t either. Not really. When it came to heavy reading, Rob was a skipper and a skimmer, like me; easily distracted, one of the butterflies of life.

  Amor fati. Though the phrase is Rob’s via the works of a mad, syphilitic German philosopher, it was a concept we shared. Instinctively, I think, I knew that my mistakes and missteps must be owned and even embraced. If not at the time, then later, for everything that happens becomes part of you, nourishing you, helping you to grow. Whether you judge it good or bad does not, in the end, matter at all. And – I did not know this at twenty-three, but I do now – ‘everything’ includes the lies you tell yourself, and the pathetic manoeuvres of denial. Even the gaps, th
e things you cannot remember because they cannot be faced.

  ‘C’est fait,’ said Rob. Which is French for: ‘It is done.’

  ‘Fairy fay.’ I was close to hysterics.

  ‘Fare thee well,’ sang Rob.

  And we began to sing together.

  ‘Fare thee well, fare thee well,

  Fare thee well, my fairy fay,

  For I’m going to Louisiana, for to see my Susyanna,

  Singing Polly Wolly Doodle all the day.’

  Only with you, Rob. Only ever with you.

  Play was perhaps at the heart of our friendship. Not erotic play or intellectual play, but the ability to take our fun where we found it. During one of our lunches, when we were both a little drunk, he explained to me that he was the originator of Dr Freeman’s Ludic Principle. There was only one precept: you must approach life as a game.

  Judith did not play. She was an essentially serious person, and you might wonder how it was that the marriage endured more than fifty years, but it’s simple. As in all successful marriages, they needed each other for counterbalance and completion. A free spirit needs an anchor, otherwise he’ll disappear up his own ethereal arse. And a serious woman needs a man who’ll make her laugh.

  Was she jealous of our friendship? I imagine she’d have refused, on principle, to experience that particular emotion. It would have been beneath her. And anyway, she had no cause for jealousy. Oh, I’m not going to tell you that we never thought about it. Well, I certainly did. I loved my Alec, but it was always there between Rob and I, taut like a filament of spider’s web, gossamer but strong. All unspoken, we knew to limit ourselves to a letter a month and three or four lunches a year. A meal, a nice bottle of claret, a walk together and goodbye. Perhaps these assignations were good for our respective marriages. I know that afterwards, with Alec, I was particularly loving.

  It would have been in the mid-1970s, at the gallery in St Kilda Road. We’d had our expensive lunch in the Garden Restaurant, with rather too much wine, and then strolling through the Decorative Arts we came to a halt in front of an impressive silver dressing-table set. A mirror with barley-twist pillars, candlesticks, caskets, all kinds of hallmarked bibs and bobs with the moony sheen of old silver and glass.