The Families

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  She was struck, as she always was after flying in from Melbourne, by that sense of the mildness of what she came back to. It was not only the weather, which was so much less pressing than the summers she still found a trial. It was the mildness of the people too that came back to her, the quieter voices, the hesitancy, the sense with her family perhaps especially, that there was the slightest distance between them. Intimacy was something you worked at, that could never be assumed. ‘You mean good manners?’ Gail had once said to her, when she tried to speak of it. She thought of it now as she waited in the queue to have her passport checked. The woman looked at her and down at her photograph and then up at her once more. Sammy had told her how much you could read into that moment as you passed through Immigration. The woman handed her passport back and hoped she would have a nice stay back home. For a moment Kirsten had in mind her senior class before she left on the Friday afternoon, wishing her the same thing. Clever, good-natured girls, and all of them shocked, amusingly enough, when they first read together the final section of Gulliver’s Travels, appalled at Swift’s being so destructive about mere reason.

  She liked the drive into the green casual country. There was that same expectant lift she had known since she was a child, when they were driving back from Auckland and you first saw the long glint of the river, the far spread of the Waikato, the high distant smokestacks at Huntly. Dad would tell them about places as they passed, point to where the battle had taken place at Rangiriri, the sacred hill at Taupiri where the chiefs’ bodies were carried up the slopes, and the piece of riverbank they waited for, where heads had been raised up on poles, waiting to say in chorus, ‘Yuk!’ There were stretches when the river disappeared behind stands of trees, or the elevation of the land, and it seemed rather dull country you were driving through. Then there it was again, the river, sometimes close enough to imagine throwing a stone at, and at one place she waited to come to, where there was a little island in the middle of the river, and the current divided then met again. The river changed colour with the sky. It was brown and wide further back and under cloud, and now, as she came towards the city where she had grown up, it narrowed, bluish-grey like an old blade. She wished she could look at things without that intrusive ‘like’. Look at them plainly as they were. She advised her classes to watch out for that. The simile trap, she called it. There was nothing wrong with describing something as it was.

  Riley hurled himself at her even before she stepped from the car. He pawed at her door and when her father called him back and gripped his collar his tail whacked against Dad’s leg, almost making him lose balance.

  ‘One fan you’ll always have,’ Dad told her.

  ‘He does the same with anyone,’ Mary said. ‘He knocked your aunt over a week ago.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ Kirsten said, pushing against Riley’s enthusiasm, her lips tingling as his tongue came close and she tilted back her head to avoid his slobber.

  Then, ‘You’ve lost weight,’ Dad said as he embraced her. Kirsten let herself sink against him, his warm hands spread across her back. The feeling of being home.

  Mary too hugged her. Kirsten felt the lightly pressed lips against her cheek. ‘You could do with losing a bit,’ her mother said. Yes, she knew she was home.

  Dad picked up on what passed through her mind. ‘What it is to be appreciated.’ She knew he was glad the dog still bounded around them, excited at her return. It allowed him to say what he may not otherwise have said, laughing, telling her, ‘The house will be jumping at you next, Kirsty. Everybody’s darling.’ He pressed her arm and took her suitcase from the boot. Her mother stood back and smiled. Their daughter raised her hands to the side of Riley’s head, ruffling his ears, feeling the little knuckles of gristle where they folded against his head. ‘And Mum,’ she said, ‘you’ve dyed your hair!’

  She was home without really wanting to be, which she knew they understood. Riley was doing them all a good turn, carrying on like a fool, telling them what fun it was, having her back home.

  Dad said, ‘I think he’s got the hang of things.’

  Kirsten linked her arm through his as they walked the dozen yards to the back patio. Last year it had newly been added on and its timbers raw. Now it gleamed golden-white. She pretended to shade her eyes against the glare of it. ‘My!’

  ‘All things bright and beautiful,’ Dad said.

  Dad liked to walk. When he still taught at Boys’ High and if the weather was right for it, he would leave half an hour earlier than if he drove, and walk along Grey Street and over the bridge at the other end of town, and walk back in the late afternoon. These days he would sometimes ask at ten in the morning if there was anything needed at the shops. He would saunter up to Hamilton East in any case, walk twice around Steele Park with its trees marvellous at any time of year. It took heavy rain to break his routine. He would walk again in the evenings. Mary said, ‘I’d come too if it wasn’t for all this,’ which they both smiled at. There was always something she was working at, the accounts she did for the café in the Gardens, the Drama Club, the schedules for bridge. ‘The only time I have to think about anything,’ Dad liked to say about his walks. ‘I can’t do that just sitting in a chair.’ Kirsten wondered if that was true. Think about what? She knew it sometimes irritated Mary, with her Zonta and her volunteering and what Dad a bit sharply called her ‘missionary work’, the hours spent with the Somalis in Claudelands, finding them furniture, helping the older ones whose English scarcely existed. ‘Walking and reading,’ Dad said, ‘your mother seems to think they’re not quite what an intelligent adult should do.’ But that was the way things were, from the time Kirsten and Gail were children. Mary got things done, Dad watched from the sidelines. All’s right with the world.

  ‘So?’ Dad said the next morning when Kirsten insisted yes, she really did feel like a walk herself. The sky was overcast but the wind was warm. She supposed he would wait for her to talk. They had been considerate last night, her father and Mary, neither for a moment pressing her to explain. She had telephoned a week ago to say there would not be a wedding after all, that the plans for November had been scrapped. All she had told them over the roast lamb that Mary knew was her favourite was that it had not thank goodness ended in any kind of row with Sammy; they had come to see it at pretty much the same time, seen that it was simply too hard. They left her to say what she wanted, in her own time. How reasonable they had been too, earlier on, though she had guessed they were disappointed that she decided to marry over there and not at home, with the kind of wedding they had given Gail. Far more sensible, Mary agreed, to marry where Sammy’s family was finding its feet. Yet how odd it was too, that feeling Kirsten knew from when she was in her teens, the feeling that her mother understood her, that Dad did too, yet as one, and as the other, rather than both of them together. She was unsure quite what it was she meant. She could not have explained it, had she needed to make it clear to someone else. Even to Gail. But she knew there was something more than mildness behind Dad’s careful calm. She had read a sentence once that had struck her as saying what she herself could not have said. ‘Happiness is a matter of a well-conducted truce.’ When she found it in a notebook ages after she copied it, she was embarrassed at its triteness. In a book with scraps of Leonard Cohen and Borges, when the South American was all the rage.

  At the end of the meal Mary had asked, ‘But you’ll stay on over there?’ And before she answered, her father surprising her. ‘As if she wouldn’t,’ he said. Pouring the last of the Te Kauwhata chardonnay into her glass. As if it was important that he said it before she did.

  ‘I feel such a fool,’ she told them. She left it there. Whatever more she meant by it she would tell them in her own good time. They both knew that. She loved them for it, their giving her time.

  Her father liked Sammy when they came across last Christmas. They talked together easily. ‘We science teachers,’ as Dad liked to say. And Mary carefully practised tact as though it were her way of life. Ki
rsten had not yet met his family. That, as Sammy said, was the treat in store for her when they went back. They used distance as their excuse, which was easy enough to do. A four-hour drive, there and back. ‘But we’ll have to sometime.’ Have to visit his family, which he told her she might ‘find a bit tricky’. She guessed he meant it came down to the language problem. If you heard Sammy across a room you would assume he was Australian. But his mother, even now, was unable to shop unless one of his sisters accompanied her. Both the girls were older than Sammy. One sister was married; the other, the one hurt as a child, lived at home. Sammy sometimes joked about them. ‘These women who believe they own me.’ Yet she knew he spoke with them at least twice a week. There were times when she was at his flat and he would smile and hold his finger to his lips when his mother rang, sometimes at ten or eleven at night. Kirsten would guess he spoke placatingly, assuringly, to her, but knew of course that she was guessing. But there was no mistaking his patience, his respect. He seldom told her what they had spoken of. ‘We’ll have to go up there one day.’ ‘Up there’ was practically South Australia.

  Gail, who was closer to Mary in temperament than she ever guessed, sometimes asked during the long calls they made every few weeks, ‘So it’s still OK then, is it?’—as if sooner or later there would come a day when Kirsten would say, ‘No, Gail, it’s not.’ Her younger sister had married at twenty, and now at twenty-six, two children later, had moved into a dream house on the Raglan road. The elder child would start school next term and already could read. Although Gail never skited. She just delivered facts, which almost always were ones to be proud of. And as she said about their parents, ‘I’d shoot myself, honest I would. If Gavin and I ever got to that. They can go a week and hardly say a word.’

  ‘They don’t fight,’ Kirsten said. ‘We’ve never heard them fight.’ She was unsure why she so needed to defend them. And Gail said, the shrewdness of it surprising her, ‘Who said you have to fight not to get on?’

  Gail was a quiet child and attractive, but her big sister was the clever one. Kirsten was the one her parents told friends about first, when asked, ‘How’s the family?’ Yes, finished her degree. Yes, a good school in London, they love her there. No shortage of boyfriends from what we hear. Yet next thing she was thirty. Mary mentioned Gail rather more often. No, Kirsten’s Italian engagement didn’t quite work out. Yes, Melbourne now. Had her fill of Europe, Mary said, it was nice being closer to home again of course. And no great surprise then if another engagement now didn’t go to plan. The cultural divide can be a big one. She’d know more once Kirsten came back for a break. ‘She’ll tell us in her own time,’ as she said to Gail. If being civilised meant anything it meant that. You didn’t lean on people. You gave them space.

  It was nice, in its uneventful way, to walk along the old streets, to speak with the neighbours she had known for years. If there was a world contest for suburbia this would have to be a finalist. The neat sections, the modest, decent houses, the cars in the drives. When she was a teenager Kirsten had thought, if God meant you quietly to smother in the blandest way he would put you in a place like Hillcrest. A week back now and she knew she would find it as stifling again. But walking those streets with Dad at this moment, the sparkle on the early morning verges, the trees vivid and dead still—how nice it was, how nice to remember even what it used to be like! She could have managed to walk here blindfolded.

  ‘You’re lucky, Dad,’ she said, ‘to know what you want.’

  She knew her father would be waiting for her to confide. She must tell him a shortened version at least. Calling off a marriage is serious business. The clock keeps ticking, we all know that. She could hear the whirr of the old clichés. But not now.

  Her father broke the easy silence between them. ‘So you don’t hate it too much? Spending time back here?’

  ‘Dad,’ she said. She leaned towards him, touching the shoulder of his jacket with her forehead. ‘I wasn’t that bad, was I?’

  ‘Standards vary,’ he joked at her. She could never feel this naturalness with Mary as she did with Dad. There was simply nothing that came between them. Each took the other for the private person they were. That was the ground they stood on. It had saddened her last night, sitting in the lounge after dinner, sipping the Dubonnet she knew her parents had bought especially, their remembering her telling them years ago it was her favourite drink while she was away. Saddened her at how he had aged, even in a year. That fraction slower, that thinning of his hair, which those who were close to him each day would not have noticed. She had crossed the road in front of the Catholic cathedral, walking down towards the bridge, towards the long gardens along the river’s banks. She went over what she would tell him, how she would account for calling the wedding off, without ceasing to love the man she had intended marrying.

  Dad would be on her side. He would try to understand. He would agree with her in any case, even if he did not.

  Sammy’s mother stepped back as Kirsten made the mistake of leaning towards her.

  ‘I should have told you,’ he explained to her later. ‘We don’t kiss first off the way you people do.’ Yet not quite saying it as lightly as she might have thought.

  The lunch had been a disaster. His sister who was married to a timid Australian at least had called her by her name. And, ‘This is Rob,’ she had said, without turning to her husband. He was a lot older than his wife. Sammy had said on the drive through that his brother-in-law ran a small electrical appliance store, and Jenny as she now called herself had worked for him. He believed the community should do what they could to welcome new Australians, and a year after she began there, Jenny and he had married.

  ‘But your mother didn’t mind that?’

  ‘She was a girl marrying a man with a nice house and a shop in the main street. There was nothing too much to mind.’

  Kirsten tried not to make too much of it. She laughed, touching Sammy’s knee. ‘If I put in a pool and bought you your own car do you think that would help?’

  ‘And make me lose face?’ He put his hand on hers, leaving it there for several minutes as they covered the long flat road towards ‘the Family’, as she thought of it, the word drained of any warmth it might be expected to hold.

  ‘Rob isn’t a drinker and he doesn’t expect Jenny to cook steak and chips. How can we compete with that?’ She smiled to show she was up to whatever the Family might throw at her, but was apprehensive. Sammy was part of the Family too, as deeply a part of it as his sisters and far more important than them, of course. He was what his mother was proud of, he was what they had achieved. The girls were minor players.

  On the way back home on the Highway, ten minutes after they had left the house, Kirsten said quietly, ‘You didn’t warn me I’d be treated like shit.’ Her cheeks burned. After that first gaffe with the attempted kiss, Sammy’s mother ignored her for the longest two hours of her life. Kirsten was seated at the end of the table, Jenny to one side of her, Rob on the other. Both spoke to her, but sparingly, as though Rob’s now being one of the Family obliged him to behave in the same way. All attention was turned to Sammy, who was next to his mother and elder sister at the further end of the carved heavy table, with its red embroidered runner and elaborate arrangement of dishes. A big jug of lemon tea was poured by Li, who was pretty, but walked with one foot shuffling from her injury. Jenny occasionally looked towards their guest and asked if she liked the food. Her mother placed dishes in front of the others, but left it to her son-in-law to attend to the woman her son had brought with him.

  Kirsten looked at the large vases of artificial flowers on their low black tables, at the figurines on the mantelpiece that may have been religious. A jar with blackened joss-sticks stood between them. A large hand-coloured photograph of a middle-aged man hung on the wall above them, with two miniature crossed flags beneath it. Sammy seemed not to take in how wretched she was. Towards the end of the meal Rob broke ranks and began to ask her about Melbourne, and when she said she liv
ed a stone’s throw from Central he said he supposed there would be no point having a vehicle that close to the centre, even supposing you had a place to park it. No, she said, there wouldn’t be much point. He seemed not to mind when she said she hadn’t given it much thought.

  Jenny too began to speak. ‘An Audi, that’s what we have,’ she said. ‘An Audi, Rob?’—as though he may not have heard.

  ‘I like a European car,’ he said.

  Sammy’s mother looked down the table and said to her son, who translated and passed on to Rob, that his mother-in-law thought that in a flat city like Melbourne, it was ridiculous how few bicycles there were, or even mopeds, how every Australian seemed to want a car first and then only after that a wife.

  Kirsten forced herself to smile, guessing the mother may have made a joke. But Sammy had translated what his mother said seemingly dead straight, and Rob too appeared to take her opinion as worth attending to. And he said quietly across to his wife, that the fish was OK but you could tell it had been frozen longer than was good for it. They’d have to give that new place a try, did she think?

  Jenny agreed. She said, to no one specifically, that was the trouble living inland. You could never be certain, whatever the shop people said.

  It was inevitable there would be a row on the long drive back.

  ‘Not a word,’ Kirsten said, ‘you must have noticed that? Not one word the whole time we were there.’

  Sammy tried to tell her, ‘Nothing else much matters when she’s cooking. She’s the generation where cooking is everything. Getting a meal ready for people. She went to a lot of trouble.’

  ‘Ready for people? Well I wasn’t one of them, I can tell you that. If she and your sisters had their way they’d have starved me to death!’ She felt the stinging shame of not being able to keep her anger to herself. She knew Sammy must have hated it as much as she did. He said, ‘We had to get it over. Now we have.’ And as if grasping for some small thing that did not offend her, ‘Jenny was nice to you, wasn’t she? Jenny was nice?’