When he turns to the next page, something slides out of the album and onto his lap.
‘What’s all this, then?’
She realises too late and grasps for it, but he has already seen it and will not let it go.
‘Heavens.’
There she is, caught in that imaginary instant, glancing out a door that never existed.
But her beauty is real enough.
She feels both mortified and vindicated, and removes herself to the kitchen to make a pot of tea. When she returns, Bill is still fixated upon the photo, and does not even glance up to acknowledge her. It is such a private moment that it seems to exclude her present self, and so she sets the cup and saucer down beside him, and takes herself off to bed.
The following morning, the album is back on the shelf in the spare room. She doesn’t like to ask what has become of the photograph.
Aside from Ralphy Phillips in the kitchen that time, Arthur is the only man she has ever kissed. It is as if that entire vocabulary – of intimacy – was a private language to be spoken only between the two of them, and now that he has moved on, it is a language that has become redundant. She cannot quite imagine how it would translate to another person. Nor does she think these are appropriate considerations at the age of eighty-two.
And yet something is changing between her and Bill. Some sort of idea has emerged in the house.
One morning, she surprises him in the bathroom.
‘Gracious,’ she says, backing out.
She has never previously seen a naked man who was not Arthur or Charlie, and Bill doesn’t look at all as she might have expected. The ends of his limbs could be kiln-baked – burnished and age-spotted – but the rest of him is surprisingly youthful. An old head on young shoulders, she thinks, staring at that whiskery, grizzled face atop that nubile body, like some mythic beast, some variant of a faun. He beams back at her in the mirror, happy in his skin.
‘Front up,’ he says the following evening at bedtime. ‘I don’t mind a bit of a kiss and a cuddle.’
Their embrace lasts longer than might be proper, but who is timing them?
A week later, Bill’s daughter comes down from Darwin to celebrate his birthday, and they all have rather too much champagne. Afterwards, she insists on paying for a taxi to send them home, bundling them into the backseat like children. Bill is unusually quiet, and when Ruby glances at him, strobed by the streetlights, she sees he is grinning at her. As the driver pulls into the crescent, he reaches over and takes her hand. It is a gesture of great certainty. Inside, he leads her to the master bedroom. There is no question in it.
5
In Mother’s final years, Ruby was no longer able to manage her care at home, and she was largely confined to a bed at Compassionate Care. Every morning, Father shuffled over from his own room to visit her. Although Mother never found it in her heart to forgive him, she was civil enough, and he spent most of his days sitting alongside her bed, ensconced in his agedness and his deafness. Occasionally, when Ruby arrived, she caught the two of them at the tail end of an afternoon walk: Mother sitting in her wheelchair, clutching a crocheted rug that spoke of her former accomplishment; Father gripping the handles, the bald dome of his head gleaming like a terrapin’s shell. Sometimes Charlie came too, and she would wheel Mother into the dining hall to hear him play on that battered old upright piano. Sitting in her wheelchair, Mother remained a picture of dignity, but if he started playing the Moments Musicaux, the tears would leak from her eyes and flood her face.
Ruby wonders now where the music took her to. Did it take her to a place where disappointment did not exist? Was there even such a place?
The cruise begins well enough, with the paddle steamer just as she remembers it. She can almost feel Mother’s presence beside her, as she and Bill gaze out at the ducks bobbing along the Murray: great-grand-ducklings, perhaps, of those she had admired last time she was upon this deck.
‘As I recall, the boiler has a steam pressure of about a hundred and fifty pounds.’
‘Aren’t you just the full bottle,’ says Bill.
‘Goodness knows why I’ve carried that useless bit of information around in my head for forty-odd years.’
‘Why, so that you could tell me!’
In the evening, they sip gin and tonics on the lower deck, watching the birds dip in and out of the queenly river. A white ibis swoops towards them; Bill points out the yellow marking on its tail.
‘Breeding season,’ he says.
‘Oh, I think we’re well beyond that now, dear.’
He grins. ‘Knock, knock.’
‘Who’s there?’
‘Ibis.’
‘Ibis who?’
‘I biss we weren’t!’
She laughs, even though breeding is the last thing on her mind, and she has never much approved of knock-knock jokes in the first place.
Soon, the sky becomes iridescent with sunset; around them, the trees darken into silhouettes.
‘Ich habe genug,’ she sighs.
‘What’s that, dear?’
‘It was a Bach cantata Arthur used to listen to sometimes, when he got home from work.’
‘A clever fellow, your Arthur.’
‘He knew how to count his blessings.’
The river is a sheet of gold, divided only by the dark shape of a pelican, dragging a trail through the water.
Bill takes her hand and squeezes it. ‘Wouldn’t be dead for quids,’ he says.
Ruby remembers a Saturday, perhaps fifteen years ago, when Eva had arrived at the house in tears.
‘Whatever is the matter?’
Her daughter’s body had shuddered with sobs. ‘I just feel so alone. If Ned’s not out playing footy, he’s away at some fucking conference.’
Ruby was not sure what to say to her daughter. Over the years, she had become fonder of Ned. By all accounts, he was now quite distinguished in his field.
‘Ned’s not the worst in the world,’ she tried. ‘For all his shortcomings, he’s always been a good father and provider.’
‘Is that the best I can hope for? Provision?’
‘And it seems that when he is at home, he helps you with the housework to an extent I could never dream of.’
But Eva remained unconsoled. ‘It’s Betty Friedan all over again, just like I used to taunt Granny. You know, the silent question. Is this all?’
This had vexed Ruby. It had seemed to imply some sort of failure on her part.
‘You have more than enough,’ she had said sternly, as when Eva was a child and had contested her slice of cake. ‘You have your beautiful house, your lovely daughter, and even a career, for heaven’s sake. Count your blessings.’
Eva had seemed a bit huffy at this advice, as if she had been short-changed. But what more could Ruby have offered her daughter?
It is after she has a fall that things become trying. She slips on the staircase on the way back to the cabin, and for the remainder of the trip she is confined to bed. Bill is never less than attentive, smuggling bread rolls from the dining room, and providing regular updates on the bird life and the other guests. But the cruise does not turn out to be the relaxing escape that they had hoped for. Alarmingly, whenever she limps to the toilet, her hip makes a crunching sound, as if a pestle were grinding its very own mortar. Back in Adelaide, the orthopaedic surgeon announces that the ceramic cap from her hip replacement has fractured – a fascinating complication – and that there is no alternative but to repeat the operation.
Even to think of it! Just when she is out and about and enjoying life!
‘I’ll help you through it, dear,’ says Bill.
‘You most certainly will not.’ The following month, they had planned to take the Ghan up to Darwin for the reunion of his squadron. ‘You’ll get on that train and go to your reunion or I’ll be very cross indeed.’
‘Won’t hear of it. Leaving you alone at your darkest hour.’
At first he is as good as his word: taking care of
the shopping, and even folding up the laundry, after a fashion. The only problem is that as far as Mrs Windsor is concerned, he cannot leave well enough alone. On the one hand, he never misses an opportunity to taunt her: swooping in from the crescent as if in a drag race, boisterously tooting his horn. On the other hand, he seems to imagine that interfering with her geraniums will win him a friend.
‘For God’s sake,’ Ruby repeats. ‘Stay away from the geraniums.’
But he cannot seem to help himself, and soon enough, a letter appears on the retirement village’s official letterhead, enumerating a number of complaints about Bill’s behaviour, and requesting their presence at a ‘mediation’ session.
‘“Unruly behaviour” my arse,’ says Eva, when she reads it.
To Ruby’s astonishment, Bill seems to be weeping. Arthur would never have been weeping.
‘Nobody’s ever hated me before,’ he sniffs.
Ruby pivots towards her daughter. ‘If only your father were here to witness Charlie’s success with his book. A man of great integrity, your father. And intellect. He would have been so proud.’
‘What’s that, dear?’ Bill blinks.
‘Never you mind.’
He is a very sorry sight indeed, with the tears running down his cheeks. It is a weakness, surely, not being able to take it on the chin. Always needing to be liked.
Of course, the mediation session is a disaster. It begins with Bill describing Mrs Windsor as a real blot on the landscape. When asked to apologise, he throws his arms into the air – Hello, I’m out of here – and charges from the room. Afterwards, Eva drives Ruby home alone.
‘We were so happy,’ Ruby says. ‘And she had to ruin it.’
‘Jealous of your fun. Couldn’t stand to see anyone enjoying their life.’
‘I wish to heavens she’d just move out.’
‘Or worse,’ Eva suggests darkly. ‘That holier-than-thou high-and-mighty cantankerous old bat.’
Later that afternoon, after Eva has left, Bill makes a sheepish return, and slumps into his favourite chair in the sunroom.
‘Perhaps I oughtn’t have stormed out like that.’
‘Quite right you oughtn’t have. Allowing that woman to take the moral high ground.’
‘But to know that she’s right there, and just’ – he starts sniffling again – ‘hating me. I’m sorry, dear. I just can’t cope with it.’
‘For Pete’s sake! What does it even matter what she or anyone else thinks? We’ve got our own lives to live. Can’t be looking over our shoulders all the time, worrying about the neighbours!’
The words surprise her, but she will stand by them. Bill, however, does not seem convinced.
‘Won’t you come with me to Marino?’
How could she? Abandon the comfort of home, leaving all of her things behind. She has no interest in camping out in his bachelor flat, hostage to his weakness.
‘We can still have our fun,’ he pleads.
Her disappointment is so complete that she has nothing further to say to him. When he kisses her goodbye, she offers him her cheek; she chooses not go out into the carport to see him off.
Why couldn’t he have been more of a man?
Ruby has always got on with the requirements of being a woman, even when Eva has scoffed at her. She has cooked and baked and cleaned and laundered and darned and sewn and knitted and gardened and kept an entire family well turned out and fed on a tight budget. She has always discharged her responsibilities with great competence and efficiency. She has never, as far as she recalls, been self-indulgent, except on the odd occasion when she may have boasted too fulsomely of Charlie’s triumphs at bridge. And every day of her life she has sought to make things pleasing and presentable for those around her. She has dusted the ornaments and brought fresh flowers into the house. She has pencilled on her eyebrows, regardless of whether or not an outing was planned; she has had her hair coiffed once a week. She has maintained her side of the bargain, as her mother had maintained her own. There was never any weakness in it; she would not have allowed it in the door.
‘Your father would have risen above it,’ she tells Eva. ‘I’m disappointed in Bill.’
But now, as if it were contagious, she senses the creeping onset of self-pity.
‘How am I going to manage after the operation?’
‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. You can come and stay with me again.’
She thinks of the weeks of recovery from her last hip replacement; the incremental gains of rehabilitation. And for what?
‘Keep your pecker up,’ Eva tells her. ‘You’ve still got a lot to be thankful for. Count your blessings.’
It is true that she still has Eva, who really does go above and beyond; and Charlie when he is not travelling; and of course dear Amy, doing them all proud. And she still has her gracious home, with her elegant antiques – regardless of what the young might call them – and her three remaining hydrangeas, thriving in their pots, and her fragile maidenhair fern, lone survivor of the fernery.
But the flat feels emptier for having been emptied a second time. The grinding sound in her hip has become unbearable – a jeering assertion of decrepitude – so she spends much of her day in bed. Her tremor is now so insistent that she drops her eyebrow pencil, fracturing it on the bathroom tiles; the stiffness spreads from her hip up through her back, so she can no longer lift her arms to wash her hair. When she trips in the sunroom, she experiences it as a type of assault. There is a rush of heat to her smitten nose; tears spring from her eyes. As she patches herself up in the bathroom, she feels a morbid curiosity at the spectre in the mirror: that lank hair; that angry nose; that featureless, unmade-up face. Never before has she let herself go to seed. But what does it matter? There is no longer anyone to look.
The doorbell startles her with a flare of hope. But it is only Mrs Windsor, proffering a tray of jam tartlets like a Girl Guide.
‘I remembered how much you admired my strawberry jam, so Wilf drove me up to the hills to get some more.’
If only Eva were here to slam the door in her face; Ruby cannot quite bring herself to do it. Instead, she accepts the tartlets with a curt thank you, and conveys them to the kitchen. Much as it goes against the grain to waste good food, she tips them into a kitchen tidy bag, where they concuss gently against each other and then crumble: clearly, Mrs Windsor makes a tender crust. Then she seals the bag, puts it in the garbage bin and takes herself off to bed.
The following morning, she has only just put the kettle on when Eva arrives.
‘What are you doing here so early?’
Eva looks concerned. ‘Mum, it’s six o’clock at night. I was on my way home from work and thought I’d check up on you.’
Ruby feels a mild vertigo; the morning darkness changes complexion and becomes evening.
‘Are you taking proper care of yourself?’
‘Don’t you worry about me.’
‘How’s that Bill?’
‘I wouldn’t know.’
She has not heard from him, and is determined not to call him herself. At the same time, she is forever conscious of the silent telephone. Each time it rings, her heart starts pounding – but it is always just Eva checking up on her, or Daisy relating the latest goings-on within the homeopathy society.
‘I can only assume he’s on the Ghan by now, headed up to Darwin to see all his old boys.’
‘Perhaps you might find it in your heart to forgive him.’
She snorts. ‘I’m certainly not asking him back.’
The problem is that she misses him. That’s the rub. She misses his jaunty walk, his constant stream of conversation. She misses the twinkle in his eye, the way it illuminates all the possibility in a room. She misses the delinquent feeling of being out and about with him, the truancy it offered from old age. He was deteriorating, and hard of hearing, and weaker than she had allowed herself to believe. And yet he led her towards life rather than away from it.
The morning o
f the operation, Eva helps Ruby into the bathroom, where she drapes a towel over her shoulders and guides her neck back over the lip of the basin.
‘Is that comfortable enough?’
It is in fact terribly uncomfortable, but nonetheless there is some great physical truth in having her hair lathered up by her daughter’s strong, competent fingers.
‘It’s lover-ly,’ she murmurs. ‘Always loved a good shampoo.’
When she was a child, Sunday night had been hair-washing night at the farm. Mother approached the task with the same grim efficiency she brought to any household chore, as if determined there would be no pleasure found in it. There was always a good deal of scrubbing and yanking, and large quantities of soap in the eye, alongside stern admonitions not to cry, and yet for Ruby, the net effect of those Sunday evenings, which began with warm water heaved in from the stove and concluded with Mother sitting at the piano, was of an almost wanton ravishment and access to beauty.
After their bath, the girls were allowed to remain up by the stove to dry their hair. Father would sit at the table, filling out a coupon, while Mother would finish the drying and scrubbing and sweeping and folding before finally, should the mood take her, sitting down at the piano to play. An astonishing lightness issued from the piano – an entwined joy and melancholy. There was no moment in the week to match it: the warmth of the stove against the back of Ruby’s neck; the sound filling the house. Once, she had heard Mrs McInernay tell little Lottie that she loved her, which struck her as an astonishing thing to say to a daughter. On such Sunday nights it was clear that these things never needed to be said. It was enough to know them.
‘Don’t cry, Mum,’ says Eva, as she rinses. ‘We’ll get you through this.’
‘It’s just the shampoo, dear. It irritates my eyes.’
She must stop thinking about her parents. It undoes her: all this scalp interference, this immersion in the past.
When Eva has dried her hair, it is too big and blowsy, but at least the face in the mirror is a recognisable version of her own, rather than that crone who had been peering out at her over recent days.
Melting Moments Page 16
