The Families

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  I said, ‘It doesn’t bother me as much as you might think.’ Then for the first and only time in our marriage, Claire turned and physically attacked me. Her closed fist came down sharply on my collarbone. I guessed that in her quick rush of anger she had not quite lined me up. I had thought before I said them that she would find my words placating, but it seemed not. It took me some time, with Toni’s help, with the constant raising of her Chinese teapot and the refilling of the little cups, to appreciate why Claire was so enraged.

  ‘It’s because your friend is blind,’ she wanted me to understand. ‘What a woman looks like is hardly to the point, if the man who wants to seduce her has no idea how she appears. Which in turn means that from your point of view, so far as Claire understands it, it didn’t much matter to you because it didn’t count so much if Peter couldn’t see. Both belittle her, don’t you see?’

  I didn’t answer because I was not convinced by Toni’s earnestness, her coming down on certain words with such emphasis as if that was where the truth lurked, and needed to be flushed out. And I thought her explanation a touch too clever, which she must have picked up.

  I saw no point in making more of it. I told her, ‘Thank you for explaining it. Thank you for that.’

  ‘Explaining is one thing,’ she smiled back at me. ‘Accepting what is explained is another.’ I suppose people talk like that because that is how they are trained to talk.

  She dresses rather badly, Toni, and I can only assume she attempts to cut her own hair. She is oddly attractive for all that. Dark skin, grey eyes, a distinct vivacity when she talks, as well as what I guess is priceless in a counsellor, the ability to seem sincere at every moment. But ‘slatternly’ is a word which is also spot-on, and doesn’t do her the harm you might expect it to. The elbow worn thin in the same jersey she wears at each of our meetings, the scuffed caps to her shoes. I’m not good at guessing a woman’s age. When Claire asked me that I said, ‘Could be anything, really. There’s two children at secondary school, if that helps.’

  I think Claire believed I was rather taken with Toni—almost wanted me to be, I sometimes thought. I didn’t tell her that early on the counsellor had told me her own marriage had ‘foundered’, a clunky sort of word to choose, and that now she lived with another woman. ‘Although we’re hardly hammer-and-tongs lesbos,’ she said, which made me like her. I liked her quickness too, her knack for explanations even when they did not convince me. And I was fascinated by the self-centredness of counselling. The whole business took off and returned to you alone, it was hearing yourself told as the central character in a story. Toni, I used to think, became a character too when she talked, at a remove from herself. It was a bit of a performance all round. I’ve never played chess, but I imagined more than once that what we were doing must be a little like that, yourself divided into these ranks of moves and defences, the black-and-white ploys that can never really bring you to a conclusion that will satisfy both sides.

  It had been Claire’s idea that I take these sessions she saw advertised on some women’s website. ‘Marital problems may simply mean you fail to talk.’ There are it seems quite a lot of encouraging messages along those lines, once you go looking for them. I said, ‘It doesn’t seem to me, Claire, that I’m the one with a problem.’

  ‘Charles, love,’ she came back at me, ‘don’t tell me you’re not devastated.’

  ‘Am I?’ I’m not much good at doing sarcastic, doing irony, although she thought I was attempting both. There was nothing more to my asking that than was there on the surface. I was simply puzzled why she would think I needed to sit with Toni, or felt the moorings of our marriage were slipping away. Then she had said, almost peevishly, ‘You’ve hardly said a word in a fortnight, for heaven’s sake. Doesn’t it mean a thing to you?’

  ‘Claire,’ I said, ‘is that being reasonable?’

  ‘You’re the one,’ she said. ‘You’re the one behaving as though there is absolutely nothing to get over.’

  It was simpler to agree then, as I did, to go once a week to ‘engage in useful discussion’ with Toni, whom I first warmed to because she knew there was something rather silly in the language the encouraging brochure used, and even in Claire’s trundling me along as though, as I said, I was some kind of difficult child who had become too much for its parents. Although, professionally speaking, she did insist that my being willing to talk with her in the first place was a positive step. ‘It shows goodwill,’ she said. Then a touch too dramatically for my taste, although I realised this was the kind of thing she was paid for, her splayed fingers raked back through her hair as she held my eye and said, in a tone I hadn’t quite heard since school, ‘I think we can pretty much say, Charles, we’ll all come out of this a darned sight better than when we went in.’

  *

  Claire—I am sure of this, although she would never have said so—felt let down that this was all that had come from it, from that morning of plastercast corpses and a savage southerly when I walked in on them. I had turned and left Peter’s house, back through the tunnel of trees towards the gate, down beside the white railings of the zigzag towards the Parade. The heft of the wind was what I needed. Had the afternoon been still and the harbour placid, I expect it would have enraged me. But the elements, if I can put it in such old-hat romantic terms, matched what I felt, my confusion and blunder and surprise and then that curious floating feeling, which is difficult to admit, the feeling that I should have felt something deeper than I did, the excitement we don’t admit to when things are bad.

  I was at the bottom of the wooden rails when I saw Rose walking towards me. Her blue Fiat was parked a few yards behind her, in the area marked ‘For residents only’. She carried a string kit fat with shopping. She cheerfully called to me, ‘Aren’t you heading the wrong way?’

  I knew as I answered her how oddly I must sound. ‘Why don’t you park up there, at the other end?’ I looked back to the winding path behind me, to the distant run of railings at its further end, the road so much higher than where we stood. Her and Peter’s house was pretty much midway between the two.

  ‘I’m out again later in the day. Parking up that end can be hell.’

  She smiled with the openness I had found attractive that first evening while I watched her in the dining room at Katoomba. One of her front teeth lapped slightly across the other, reminding me of a movie actress who enchanted me when I was a student. My first thought, I must admit, when I realised back then about Peter, was ‘what a waste’, his never being able to take on board what a handsome wife he had. But that now seemed a very long time ago as I walked back beside the wall above the heaving sea and the lift of its spray, to the museum and its car park.

  How we generalise, as Toni reminded me, from what happens to ourselves, although I don’t see how that is to be avoided. We have nothing else, after all, to consider as absolute, as rock bottom. Who else can we say is typical if not ourselves? Toni asked me once, quite unexpectedly, was I in what one of the brochures called ‘emotional distress’? I told her, ‘Talk like that strikes me, has always struck me, as just a bit stagy.’ Then, without really meaning to, I said, ‘It rattled me, that’s how I’d rather put it.’ Rattled me that I was wrong about a good deal I thought I knew.

  That same evening after a blind man fondled Claire, we had to attend a twenty-first. The girl was a distant relative. There was a lot to drink and a lot of noise, there was an important rugby match on TV and half the party crammed into the ‘games room’. (They were the kind of people who liked words like that, like ‘patio’ and ‘master bedroom’.) The big screen covered half a wall. It came home to me how few of these people I gave a damn for. I had been to the weddings of half the older ones; I expected I would go to the funerals of some of them as well. Always assuming, that is. How mordant my evening had become! Then after the rugby the younger ones took over the real partying in the big lounge and those our age were in a smaller sitting-room or the host’s expansive office. But they were kind
ly enough people, and the girl’s parents insisted as we left towards midnight that we mustn’t leave it till the next big occasion to see each other again. There was a lot of kissing and embracing. Then we drove home.

  By the time we came to our side of the harbour the wind had dropped completely. The city across from us was a bright swathe of lights across the hills. Claire was asleep. Her head tilted onto my shoulder. I had noticed her glass was full most of the evening. Now I said, as we took the tight run of curves before Mahina Bay, ‘You’d hardly believe how calm it’s become.’ I meant, considering the battering across the harbour that afternoon. She said, without looking at it, ‘I know. It always is.’

  Toni asked me at our third or fourth session, now that several weeks had passed, now that vivid image was not returning to me, waking me, as it had in that first week, did I think I really cared?

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said, I cared.

  So could I understand then, she pressed me, why I wasn’t more angry as well? I had told her at an earlier session how I woke some mornings and in that brief sliver of time when it was not night any longer, and not yet quite day, Claire lying beside me so close I felt her hair brush against my mouth, and for that fragment a rush of gratitude—yes, that is the word I’m after—before the detail of Peter’s hand flooded back into my mind, his fingers a bleached flexing sightless spider at my wife’s breasts. Then I was fully awake. Claire pretended to be asleep, her rump pressed against me. The erasing of so much, as desire begins.

  ‘You’re so certain,’ Toni says, ‘that Claire pretends to be asleep?’

  ‘After this many years,’ I told her, ‘you know all right what pretending is.’

  Toni of course asked the obvious question. It was her professional right to do so. There is no such thing as an impertinence if your bread and butter is to pry into another’s life. ‘Sex?’ she said. She filled both our cups with pallid tea. ‘You know I have to ask that?’ She assumed I would feel embarrassed.

  I said, ‘Who knows what is normal or usual with anyone?’

  ‘Give it a try,’ she said.

  So I told her, ‘I expect we’re pretty much both of those.’

  ‘No problems, then? That you know of?’

  I laughed, and then Toni laughed as well, a few seconds later, when I said, ‘If I don’t know, who would?’

  So that was settled. Claire and I apparently were not too much this side nor the other on whatever graph Toni had in mind for the human norm.

  Then—also inevitable, no doubt—her asking, ‘Neither of you have had affairs?’

  I knew my answer could only ever be a half-answer, but I said, ‘Not so far as I know.’

  ‘Or suspect?’

  I said that Claire and I talked with utter frankness in a superficial way. ‘If we can’t laugh about it we don’t talk about it.’

  ‘Go on,’ Toni said.

  ‘She was attracted once to a bank-teller, she thought possibly because there was an iron grille between them. There was a phys ed teacher once in one of the schools where I did the accounts with whom I’d have most certainly been unfaithful but her fiancé was the history teacher at the same school. Bald as an egg. You knew if a woman loved someone as unattractive as that it had to be for real.’

  Toni crackled a packet of wafer-thin Japanese biscuits, She looked at me a moment then asked me directly, ‘Are you taking the piss?’

  I said, ‘It may sound like that. It’s not what I intend.’

  A long time later, when Peter and Rose had gone to live in Australia, Claire said, as though it were a thing that had been on her mind some time, and sooner or later had to be declared, ‘A thing you know I’ve never quite worked out. You’ll see why I have to say this, love. That time when it was so awkward there for a while between us, so tough for you I do know that. When Peter took me by surprise. One thing puzzling me I could not work out and never have. And that evening later on, that too of course. You’ve never said what you thought. Not really.’ And then, although there was no logical step towards it, she suddenly said, ‘He took his ring off, his wedding ring. I suppose I should have known from that. I heard it chink when he put it down on that glass-topped table, remember, with a kind of patterned doily between the glass and the wood?’

  I suppose that was my chance to ask what I never did. ‘Good manners will kill you!’ I remember Toni teasing me at one of our sessions. There is that curious point in marriages, I suppose, when the chance to clarify something, to clear up a confusion, to press a little further than at least some of us are prepared to press, is within a hair’s breadth, and we let it pass. As I let my chance go then, not to ask more about that afternoon of the high wind and reading aloud, and the chink of the wedding ring on the glass table, now that I knew of it, but to say to her, ‘What did it mean, that last time, that other time, we were all together?’ It is absurd, to think one can sleep with a person for a thousand, five thousand nights, and yet there are these few minutes of embarrassment one does not refer to.

  The last time we spent with Peter and Rose was the evening before Queen’s Birthday. There was no significance in that, beyond it being a holiday next day, with neither Claire nor I concerned about time or the long drive back round the bays. It was only weeks before they left for Australia. It seemed a long time since we had seen each other, my leaving the house and the fuchsias brushing against me, and then bumping into Rose at the bottom of the zigzag. Peter was the one who seemed the more excited about the move. He said the climate meant rather more to him than it might to us. ‘Seeing things distracts from weather,’ he joked. ‘Take my word for it. When there are no distractions weather is absolute.’

  Was I imagining it, I thought later in the evening, the hint of patience I picked up on Rose’s features while her husband spoke? I supposed she had heard it all so often, which might be said of any spouse. For a moment I had this curious picture of marriage itself being like sitting in a room as a blind person might sit, your picking up—trying to pick up—the merest shifts, the subtlest alterations in tone, the brushings and movements of the slightest kind, which others almost certainly would miss.

  I don’t often think of something that I consider amusing, yet that occurring to me did, a slice of comedy that was entirely mine. In its way it lightened the evening for me.

  Rose broke in through our talk about the weather. She explained that her other sister ran a successful business not far from Brisbane. She was widowed a year ago and lonely. ‘We’re not lonely,’ Rose said, ‘but we’re not rich either. She wants me to go into the business with her as a partner. She caters for weddings, anniversaries, what have you. Bringing style, as she likes to say, to the outback. Sometimes she’ll travel for a day—even fly sometimes—to put on these posh dos. Peter will play the piano. She says the novelty value of that can’t be underestimated either.’ That was another obvious picture that came to mind. Peter in a tuxedo and dark glasses, handsome at the keyboard, women high on Hunter Valley wines demanding the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the songs that had hustled them into romance a lifetime before.

  Rose had gone to trouble with our dinner. Now we sat again in the house I had entered under cover of a southerly and innocence several months before. Tonight the weather was so different. Its stillness made words like ‘exquisite’ come to mind, the harbour’s blackness running with reflected lights, the cars along the Hutt Road like a stream of moving pearls. That is how Claire would describe them on the way home. I knew the women had worked discreetly together for us to have this evening together before Rose and Peter left for their new life. There was not a note of bitterness between us. No more than the closeness we used to share.

  The CD of the Tallis Scholars had come to an end. We sat in silence in the lounge after dinner, our brandy glasses like fragile bubbles in our hands. The only light was from the candles burning on the table. I felt we all knew there was something of a charade about our being together, however much the afternoon of Pompeii now seemed a ghost at the door. The fai
ntest scratching behind a wall. Of course I have no idea—how could I?—what really passed in the minds of the others.

  I was looking into the bronze smear of the brandy tilted in my glass. I heard Peter clear his throat, and the faint clip of his glass on the small table beside him as he placed it down. I heard Claire’s breathing alter slightly. I looked up to see Rose’s arms crossed above her head, as she drew up her dark sweater, shaking her hair free as for a moment it caught the garment’s neckline before it was removed. Her breasts were suddenly unconfined, as though somehow independent of her. The candlelight and its shadows both concealed and enhanced. When Rose turned to drop the sweater on the floor beside her, they were momentarily in profile, the nipples black in the play of light, as large as thimbles. No one spoke for some time. Peter sat with his hands on his crossed knee. And that was all that occurred. Then Claire stood up, and so did I. I have no idea of what it meant to the others, that tableau that puzzles me, as I think of it, yet I knew it was significant to each of us. Absurdly, I thought, the only way Peter—perhaps Rose too—could think of to atone. Thelonious Monk picking out the first few notes of regret.