by Gil Hogg
Tom had thought of many possible openings for this meeting. He didn’t want to be here, had almost feared it, and yet he had a sickly fascination with what this product of his genes was like. Would the boy be like a young version of him? Or would he be like somebody in the street whom you might walk past without a flicker of recognition? Would a subterranean current of recognition flicker between them? Or would the betrayal of parenthood have hardened into a concrete barrier? Would the boy want to partake of the Ashton-Stavely life in some way, visit New Zealand? Would he ask for money? There were a myriad of uncertainties. Tom mumbled an indecipherable but friendly greeting and sat down on one of the flimsy chairs.
“We wanted to see you.” Robyn spoke with a softly sympathetic resonance.
The boy looked at her casually and paused. “Why?”
This bald question, in the boy’s dry voice, silenced the room.
“Because -”Tom began.
“Because we wanted to know you are… alright,” Robyn interjected, her eyes moist.
“Bit late for that, isn’t it?”The boy gave a weak smile at Robyn’s answer.
Tom noticed how much like him Peter was; the same honey-coloured hair - which was sticky - blue eyes, and a prominent jaw line; none of Robyn’s dark looks; unmistakably his son. But Peter’s clothes made him look different; the jeans, with dirty training shoes which Tom had noticed under the table, and the shapeless woollen fleece jacket flecked with white paint. Peter hadn’t dressed up for them. He looked like a tradesman. He was a painter and decorator, they had been told. His hands were bony, the fingernails broken, with dirt in the quicks. He spoke a burred kind of English which Tom supposed was a provincial accent, but Tom couldn’t identify which province.
“I thought you wanted to see us,” Robyn said, with a hint of a whine.
“I went along with it,” he said unemotionally.
“Curious?”Tom asked, trying to make light of it.
“He has every right to be curious,” Robyn said.
“Sure he does. I didn’t mean - ”
“Yeah. And you’re curious too,” Peter said.
Tom was relieved as the boy appeared to want to head away from childish regrets into a more rational exchange. He may have been unschooled, but he had a sharpness about him.
“True,”Tom admitted.
“It’s not true at all,” Robyn said. “It’s so much more than curiosity. I think about you often, Peter. I wonder what you’re doing. I feel that part of me, part of my life, is moving around out there in the darkness. There’s an empty space in my life. We’ve… been haunted by the empty chair at the breakfast table.”
Tom had a pulse of annoyance. Robyn had unbelievably reached for the Hewitt metaphor, one they had both used in their arguments at different times, flopping open a compartment of her being which was damp and dreary inside.
“You wanted it this way.” The boy’s lips curled slightly. He was cold - and factual.
Robyn crumpled. “I know, but we…” She suppressed a sob.
“What’s the ‘we’ business? I thought you weren’t married now?” The boy had the edge.
“No, but we were.” Robyn tried to give the words significance, but they sounded plaintive.
“Are you saying you made a mistake - about marriage?”
Tom had to come in. “Yeah. I think so.” He couldn’t contain a short, painful laugh.
“Shit. You guys make mistakes, don’t you?”
“That’s true, and - ”Tom said.
He had in mind trying to explain the pressures on him and Robyn, inexcusable as they may have been, simply as a matter of candour, but Robyn cut in.
“It’s not true, about our marriage. It was loving and decent until - ”
“Until you decided it was a mistake.” Peter put in boredly.
“I was going to say -” Tom tried to get the initiative.
“How are your… parents?” Robyn sliced through his efforts again.
“They’re OK. Been good to me. ”
“That’s good and…” Tom was going on to try to say something sympathetic about Peter’s family life, ask whether he had brothers or sisters, but he began to see how inquisitive anything like this would sound coming from him.
“Is there something we can do for you, Peter?” Robyn asked.
“Whaddya mean?”
“Like, well, like money. Do you need money? Would you like to meet our family in New Zealand? What about your education? We could help…”
“You want to kinda take over as my parents again?” He had a chilling cynicism.
“We want to help.” Robin supplicated with her two palms raised.
“Shit, I’ve got all I want,” Peter said. “It sounds like you want me to change tracks. Become your son. Enter your life. What makes you think your life is so good that you can make mine better?”
Robyn couldn’t find an answer. Tom was embarrassed for himself and Robyn. “We didn’t mean to put it that way,” he said. If only the kid knew how grotesque the Ashton- Stavely family life was!
Tom could admire the distantly measured way Peter was dealing with them, realising that they were crassly offering material help from a desert dry of real affection, but welling over now, at this moment, with sugary emotion. He thought Peter didn’t want them or need them, and Peter certainly - and quite naturally - didn’t take to them. They were, after all, gratifying their aching curiosity, and trying to apply a soothing poultice to their own dereliction of duty. Tom accepted the way Peter was rejecting - and humiliating - them, and shut up.
The talk spluttered on, with Robyn unable to justify herself under the boy’s cryptic questions. Finally, Robyn asked, “Shall we meet again?”
“I don’t think so.” The answer was quick, dismissive, with even a touch of contempt.
They all stood up and Tom took the calloused hand again, which was grudgingly extended. Robyn got in front of Peter, trying to propel herself into his arms, but he half-turned away, fending her off with his forearm. She gave a moan and ran out of the room.
“Best of luck, Peter,” he said, turning away from Peter and raising his arm in a salute as he went.
He followed Robyn, who had already disappeared. The social worker stood by a desk with a file in her arms.
“How did it go, Mr Stavely? Mrs Stavely was upset.”
“Not well,” Tom said, “but thanks for your trouble.”
The social worker nodded as though that was to be expected. And wasn’t it? Tom thought.
He caught Robyn up in the street. They went into a Starbucks. By the time he had brought two hot cartons of Americano to the table, Robyn had recovered herself.
“We got what we asked for,” he said. “It was a stupid and very embarrassing enterprise.”
“If you hadn’t kept interrupting all the time - ”
“I kept interrupting?”
“We had to see him,” she insisted.
“Our curiosity and guilt. I don’t blame him being touchy.”
“He’s a workman, Tom. A bloody paper-hanger. So different from us.” She said this as though it was a fault of Peter’s.
“Peter isn’t so different.”
He didn’t say why. Sure, he, Tom, had the lawyerly veneer; he spoke and dressed like the middle-class business executive he was, but he was still the son of a flunky. He had had twenty or more years of this polish, but he could still feel that it was wafer thin. Of course Robyn was more remote; neither she or her family thought much about tradesmen.
“Oh, don’t be silly,” she smiled. She had played out the scene and moved on.
Tom realised that the meeting had provided her with the insight she needed. He could almost see her neurotic concerns fading. She could now regard Peter as a lost cause, a person who was irretrievably committed to a course that was different from hers, and somehow less worthwhile. Her thoughts about the part of her that was loose in England would be correspondingly feebler. For himself, he was deeply depressed by his par
t in the massive change that they had wrought in Peter’s life.
“We’ve created a painter and decorator, Robyn.”
“He likes it. That’s what he wants.”
“No, that’s what he got. We dropped him in a slot; it happened to be a tradesman’s slot. It might have been an academic’s slot, or an artist’s, or a civil servant’s, but it wasn’t. There’s nothing wrong with his trade, but just think how different his life would have been as our son.”
“Well, he can get out of it. I offered him money, education…”
“Oh yeah. Now, she says. You’ve given him all the wonderful opportunities, haven’t you? Don’t you see, he’s a fucking house painter? He paints houses. He’ll paint houses all his life. He’ll get up early in the morning before his kids are out of bed, grab a piece of toast and jump into his white van, with a ladder on top, and drive for miles. He’ll paint and paint and drink milky tea sitting on a cold stone wall in the drizzle. He’ll hang wallpaper and some old cow will say to him, ‘There’s a wrinkle over here… Do this bit again.’”
Robyn was actually grinning - which emphasised the wrinkles forming around her mouth and on her cheeks. “It’s not so bad. He can take his family to the Costa del Sol in summer and eat fish and chips on the beach.”
He couldn’t summon anger in his clashes with Robyn any more; she was as distant as a short-tempered taxi driver, or a woman ramming her baby carriage through a supermarket queue. Seeing the reality of Peter’s lost possibilities, and understanding his part in them, was a jolt as hard as a blow on the head. He had participated in the theft of Peter’s options in life - as he had suspected long before this meeting - but now he would continue to see Peter when sleep departed at 3am; a fleshed out person with a ladder and splashed overalls.
He kept his promise to himself to call Patricia Hedley and she invited him to visit. He did so in part because he was curious to see how she was faring, and partly in memory of George. He had been George’s best man at his wedding. George had died in New Zealand when Tom was in London, and he hadn’t seen Patricia since a year before that time.
The Hedley home was a bungalow in a quiet and prosperous street in Geraldine. Patricia, who was working in the front garden, pulled off her gloves and welcomed him at the gate. She was exceptionally well-groomed for a gardener. They hugged sedately and, as with so many of his meetings with old friends, they studied each other across a chasm without saying more than a few words of greeting.
“Nice car,” she said, looking at the vehicle he had parked opposite. “The Ashton Bentley?”
Odd that she should know that, but it was a showy car. “Sure. I’ve never driven or even ridden in a Bentley or a Rolls before. You have to try everything, if you get the chance,” Tom said.
“And?”
“A bit gross and quite unnecessary.”
She hesitated. “Oh, I don’t know.”
“I like the new house,” he said. It looked modern and confident, expensive; architect designed, he guessed.
“I sold the farm after George died and bought this place,” Patricia said, leading him to a seat in an orangery overlooking the garden. “It was nearly new and one of the couple who built it died, so…their retirement dreams ended.”
“The girls don’t plan to take up the plough?”
“Hardly. They’re at uni and after that I suppose they’ll be travelling abroad or living in the city. They’re doing cityish things, you know, computers, finance, and they have cityish boyfriends - not like George.”
“What about you?”
“I’m stuck here,” she smiled, serene but not enthusiastic.
“And not uncomfortable, by any means.”
“But stuck. I see my sister. We don’t holiday together. You know, she’s a nun. I see the girls, but they don’t want me hanging around their lives except at Christmas. Maybe a weekend at Queenstown with one or other of them. But that’s it.”
“You don’t get away on a holiday on your own?”
“I keep thinking about it.”
“What do you actually do when you’re here, Patricia?”
“Oh, all the usual things. I play tennis and bowls. Walk. Voluntary work for a charity. I’m on the church committee. There’s plenty to do.”
Patricia would be about forty-five, perhaps a few years older, and she seemed to regard herself as old, or at least retired. And yet she was a comely woman of good, even voluptuous shape and obvious good health. With her cashmere sweater and tweed skirt, she wasn’t sending any sexual signals, but she must have had the scope if she wished. Her hair was carefully cut and combed, and probably dyed that straw colour; her complexion was pale and smooth. She had a natural smile.
“It sounds as though you think of yourself as seventy,” Tom said wryly.
He had a long draught of the lime juice Patricia had given him and surveyed a scene of domestic comfort, the couches and chintzy curtains, the bookcase, the wide window sill with its vases of begonias, the spaniel asleep on a mat. Everything was in its expected place, a version of what everybody strives for. And yet he had a sense of waste. This woman with half her life before her seemed to have stopped living. She was in a mausoleum surrounded by her comforts. The spaniel might as well be stuffed; the flowers, wax.
“I don’t think of my age very much, Tom.”
“I hope not. You’re a young woman with many miles to go.”
She was evidently embarrassed that he had touched a nerve. “And you, Tom, are a young man. You look very fit. I know you must be happy with Alison.”
“Yes, but I have to work for my living, bringing up children while you are… at leisure.”
“You’re having a second run with Alison, which is marvellous. You deserve it. You know I never was very keen on Robyn myself. You’ve got a new life with all the striving and stress of any family life. I don’t want a second run. I feel that what I had with George was enough for me. I can’t imagine starting again, because that’s what it would be, getting used to somebody else, accommodating them…”
“Comparing them with the past.” He thought of the difficulty of getting used to somebody who held his spoon differently, who changed his socks only when reminded, who farted in bed, and forgot to put the garbage bins out. A new irritant in your life.
“I suppose so. George wasn’t perfect, but at least he never upset me.”
“George was a good man, and I can understand he’s a kind of roadblock in your life.”
“No, Tom. He was my life. What I have left is just… the rest, the fag end.”
“No, Patricia.”
“It’s very quiet and also very pleasant. I count myself lucky.” She was still smiling.
“Surely some local beau pursues you?”
“Yes, but I draw the line at men who are married, and those who haven’t a bean.”
He wasn’t surprised at the bar on married men. She was a moral kind of woman, as well as being a practising Catholic. She and George had been two swans, never part of the party set in the past. The indigent male was an understandable problem too. She had money, so how could she ever get a guarantee that it wasn’t her main attraction?
“Understood,” he said. “That means you’re still alive. There is a niche. An umarried man with a bean or two.”
“It’s not a very big niche and I don’t think it can be filled in Geraldine.”
“I hope you don’t mind me saying so,” he said, laughing, “go to Christchurch. Go and stay in Sydney for a while. Take a cruise with a singles company. Do some computer dating!”
“Is it as easy as that?”
“Have you ever tried?”
“I’ve read the ‘man seeks woman’ ads in the magazines and I get a bit cynical when I read about so many attractive, unattached and solvent males who strangely have to seek a companion through a dating ad.”
“Sure, there’s a lot of creeps, male and female, out there, but you can’t just moulder away here for the next forty plus years. Give yourself
a chance.”
She was silent for a moment. “You’re right, Tom. You come through the door after however many years and put your finger on the tender part of my existence. I don’t talk to anybody about such things, not even my sister. But you’re right.”
“I’m not a stranger. Remember your wedding day? Your sister Kate, forgive me again, is unlikely to argue against celibacy. The point is, you shouldn’t just sit still whether you hook up with anybody else or not. Try it. Experiment. Have some fun.”
“I’ll think about it. Come and see the garden. The fruit trees are lovely. You should see the colours in the spring.”
She showed him round the garden in a withdrawn manner, and when he declined to stay for dinner, she brought him back to the orangery. He felt she wanted to say something to him, but couldn’t quite bring herself to speak. He sat down after mixing Southern Comforts with ice for them both.
“I’ll have to get away soon, Patricia.”
“Oh, I love this drink,” she said, “and I wickedly have one when…”
He wouldn’t have thought of her as a solitary tippler. She was so neat, tidy, well-controlled and thought out. “When you have a problem?”
“It’s to do with what we were talking about before, Tom. Me, sitting here.”
“Afraid to go out and meet the lions.”
“Yes. I’d like to tell you. You ought to know. I trust you, Tom. Did you hear about the circumstances… the events around George’s death?”
“Not much more than you told me on the telephone. All I heard was that he died suddenly from a heart attack or seizure, and in some ways I understood because he always seemed to like to do hard, physical work. But he was relatively young.”
“It wasn’t a heart attack, but I suppose that was broadly the story that got around.”
“What happened?”
“Suicide.”
All his fixed ideas about George lurched. “I’m surprised to hear that. I always regarded George as one of the few people who was unreservedly happy with his lot. I couldn’t have done what he did on the farm. It would have been like a sentence in a prison for me, but he loved it.”
