The Families

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  ‘The police know this?’ he had asked them. ‘That you’re talking with me?’

  ‘They think it a good idea.’

  The woman said, ‘The cause before the effects.’ He had told her to fuck off, which was when the male white-coat even if he was in mufti had replaced her.

  He did not trust any of them. The male, who wore a bright floral tie as if he was entertaining at a kids’ party, asked him, ‘You obviously thought family life was ticking along OK?’ What sort of condescension was there in that to begin with, obviously?

  ‘Am I supposed to feel guilty about that?’

  White-coat number two, a boy assistant by the look of him, piped in, ‘Guilt is not what we are after, Tom. We want to understand the situation as much as you do.’

  ‘Lie awake worrying about it, do you?’ Tom said. He knew he had to rein in. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘you can bring me that coffee you offered a moment ago.’ And he tried to tell them. He had no notion in the world what his wife thought. How could he? He wasn’t a criminal to begin with, was he?

  Take your time, he was told, as if that was some kind of privilege, as if time was theirs to bestow. And amazing how little really there was to tell. They had children. He gave her a home most women would kill for. They travelled. He let her spend more on paintings than most people spent on a house. There was nothing she might have wanted she didn’t have.

  ‘Emotionally?’ The man’s hand kept moving over the floral tie. He leaned forward a little. You saw it often enough in the movies when they wanted you to confide. Tom knew this was tricky now, the sort of thing a smartarse could distort. He said directly, ‘If it’s sex you’re on about there was nothing wrong with that. Nothing special but nothing wrong. OK?’ The boy assistant even made a note of that, as though his answer was too complicated for them to remember without writing down. Then oddly he found he was close to tears, talking about something else altogether, telling them about the boys, about Jeremy on the other side of the world, lucky if they heard once in three months, but Gareth, the boy who was here, the boy who was at home, how did they think he’d come out of this? ‘He’s been on the verge of I don’t know what ever since. He keeps asking me, “Do you think April wants to be tied up with someone whose mother’s raving?” He tells me I have to forgive, maybe because I don’t have the choice but he doesn’t, does he, he says, he fucking hates her.’ He dragged a handful of tissues from the box already there on the desk, ready for losers to break down like this, Tom thought, as if we’re the ones supposed to confess, as if we’re the ones who have to explain. He said, ‘He’s wrong about that one though, Gareth. I don’t have to forgive her any more than he does. I don’t know where he got that from.’ Hating hearing himself say it though. Hating it. Everything about it. And then, ‘You don’t expect so much, do you, after all these years? Remoteness and the rest of it. You expect that too.’ He looked across at them again, the younger man and the older one, watching him as if he was something in a zoo. Pleading, he thought, that’s what I’m doing now, what else are you going to call it? Although neither had spoken he cut them off. He said, ‘I don’t have to keep listening, can I remind you of that? That I’m the one who’s actually free?’

  Back home he sat in the big lounge, watched the massive totara a few yards away absorbed into the dark, its leaves losing definition against the late sky. The house had been designed around it. God knows, he thought for a second, why we’re building another one. And at once corrected it. Why we were. Mandy had loved where they now were the moment she walked into the room and saw it there, the tree, within touching distance it almost seemed, through the great plate-glass wall. ‘That at one end and the dark picture at the other,’ meaning the outsize canvas he bought her the year before, what he had always thought of as the grim melancholy picture of forlorn life-size birds standing on a shoreline, on a chunk of coast, apprehensive of whatever it was they picked up on the horizon. He was drawn to it even as he disliked it. Mandy said you didn’t have to make it mean anything, stand for anything else than what it was, when it was first placed up there, covering almost the entire wall. Visitors guessed at how much the picture went for, and felt they had to praise it. Gareth was pacing in front of it now, the palm of his raised hand glowing then again becoming dark, as he drew on his cigarette. April had left an hour before.

  ‘You’re getting on my nerves,’ Tom said.

  ‘Jesus!’ Gareth hurled the mobile from his other hand. It slid across the highly polished floor, now black as tar, its panel flying loose as it hit the skirting board beneath the painting. There was his pounding on the stairs down to the garage, the slamming of a door.

  Tom stood at the glass wall. The tree was still enough to have been carved from stone. If he shifted slightly, lights from the hill across the sloping park stirred through the mass of foliage. He thought of how Gareth had been the one close to him, and now he too was gone. He could be one of those birds watching what was leaving, fearing whatever it was about to arrive. Jeremy, the pale boy like a Botticelli angel as his mother used infuriatingly to say, had dropped over the horizon a long time ago, with his London airs and his fruity boyfriends. But not Gareth. Yet life was like that, hadn’t he always tried to face things as they were? Give and take, good things one day, not so good another, but knowing there was something certain, something he and Mandy had, behind it all?

  He hears the door of the garage rise, Gareth gunning the motor far more than it needs, and the screech a few seconds later as he takes the turn at the top of the street. The room now is close to total darkness. The big picture as he turns from the glass to face the long room is a square of black. Then the mobile on the floor beneath it begins to ring. The lighted panel, face down, illumines the few inches of wood to either side. The vibration of the ringing moves it slightly, a kind of science-fiction creature, edging across the polished boards. Tom crosses the room. His heel crunches down on it until the ringing stops, the light goes out. He thinks of himself, as he does so often, almost as another person, following the stage instructions of a play.

  It had been a marriage made, if not in heaven, at least as if more than luck had some say in it from the word go. She had been affectionate, a lot was made of that. (‘A goer if you ask me,’ one jury member remarked to another, before the case was concluded.) She had been attractive, focused, an excellent mother. A lot was made of that. It was such a distant story, Mandy thought, as she heard parts of it being told. The bodies we had, she remembered, from swimming and tennis and hiking, although no one spoke of that. The way we kept sex as the last apple on the tree. She was clever as well, her family on the Herne Bay side of Cox’s Creek. Tom’s people in that border zone between Mt Eden and Epsom adored her. Tom from the start had a knack for doing things right, doing them sensibly. If he did very well, as the saying goes, it was because he deserved to. It was not a matter of luck. Kindly. Level-headed. The Crown came back to that, making much of it. As it did of family, which was flashed in big lights. One son running a gallery in London. In Cork Street, it was noted, which those who knew such things would tell you meant a lot. The other boy completing his business degree, a Masters, in a few months’ time. In a serious relationship.

  Mr Bates, for the Crown, knew he looked the part, as Tom knew he was the man for the job. He understood his brief was a straightforward one. He clasped the edges of his gown at chest level, he spoke without notes as he sketched the family circumstances. They travelled together, husband and wife, at least every second year, mostly to Germany for business reasons. The business showrooms in Parnell, he said, would tell you why. Wasn’t ‘style and quality’ the phrase that rang in its advertising, on the company’s website? The firm imported from the top of the field. There was, of course, a holiday element as well, last year to South Africa, the year before to the Aegean. A contented, considerate life. Mr Bates, Mandy thought, might moonlight as a marriage counsellor, should he ever hanker for an alternative career. As he eloquently pointed out, by now the ci
ty—the entire country—knew behind every occasion of generosity, of family largesse, of apparent marital rapport, that ravening beast, ingratitude, already prowled, more vicious than mad, make no mistake. So this, Mandy thought, was what my life was like? For a moment, there was the image of a woman flipping the pages of an inflight magazine, the glimpses of mountain resorts and beaches, cruises and safaris, the brand names less fortunate women burned for? How she was seen, by those who followed the case.

  Then Weston spoke. She was smarter than Mandy had given her credit for. The story she told was a variant of what the court already had heard. It was of the golden wife, with Tom as Midas, gilding what he touched. Again, the gifted sons, the word family shining through. To be admired. To be envied. It was impressively done, but with a different logic, a different pitfall at its end. Another image now flickered in her mind. She was back at school. There was a picture on the library wall. The librarian had not long returned from a trip through Europe. Most of the prints she brought back were Impressionist favourites, easy for the girls to like, a sloping field with splashes of red poppies, a handsome couple dancing at a fête du jour, the famous sky with whirling stars. But there was another print of quite a different kind. Dutch, it must have been. A very formal family, undemonstrative, rich. Mandy had loved to look at it. She had never seen anyone quite so confident as the bearded father, so plain as the mother with pale hands, so provided for as the children who held the painter’s gaze and saw through him. All the family were wearing black, with white collars broad as plates, the finest loops of lace along their edges. There was a cross with dark red stones at the woman’s throat, to let you know as you looked that God had been good to them, that they would never say so, but they owned God too. That is how Weston is painting us, she thought, but she has left out God.

  She was struck not only by how seriously everyone attended to what Weston said but also how their faces were tilted at the same angle as they listened: an artist could have suggested them simply by a row of sloping strokes. The young woman was oddly vital, as she had never seemed in their interviews in the room with its unpleasant green walls, its spying window. And how she drew them in, even more than the handsome man she opposed, who told the same story to such different ends! She sets us in a frame, Mandy thought, so others can only look at us and wonder at good fortune. Of course she already knew, as did no one else at this stage, where Weston would take them, to the moment of the disappearing family.

  She will sweep it away like a magician, as if she raised her arm and flung out the dark wing of the gown she wore, and the cards will fly in all directions. This, she will say, this I am afraid is what the accused has already done, before I explain it to you. What normal woman, what sane woman, would vanish from a world you and I would envy? And one day, later in the week, she will leave it to each and every one of you, to find a more accurate word, if you might, than the one she is obliged to use. Mad, as we colloquially say, when someone does something we find unaccountable, out of character, damaging to themselves and those they love, that no one who knew them would ever assume they might do? Insane, when we speak of it more technically, as those who are expert will assess it, all the evidence to hand?

  Mandy was fascinated to follow how her life emerged. She leaned forward, her hands together on her lap, watching Weston tell the story that was of quite another time, quite another woman. It was amusing even in a restrained way, this drawing together and then drawing apart of competing lawyers, one behind his banner of ‘vicious’, the other with her placard of ‘insane’, neither allowing as a possibility the words she herself so stood by, ‘lucid’ and ‘in control’. Poor young Weston, she thought, going to such trouble to arrive at where I have never been! Poor pleased-with-himself Bates as well, if it came to that, his insisting how somewhere I have a secret motive tucked away, like a diamond in the hem of a dress in those Georgette Heyer stories I sped though in my teens. The diamond that will tell him so much. And the one fact that will never occur to him, that there is no mystery, no hidden spring, no evil wand. It is all so much more straightforward than anyone wants it to be.

  The ‘snap’ as Weston calls it and so carefully argues, or the line, as she also puts it, where her client crossed into that abrupt terrain where a normal wife, a normal mother, becomes capable of what she did, occurred so far as one might time it between the main course and the decision to waive dessert and go for a cheese platter. She is at pains to point out it had been assumed all evening that her client was the one who would drive them home, while the others, as Gareth had put it when questioned, ‘had got into it pretty seriously’. He was the one who liked to consider the lists, order the wines, who knew almost as if he had walked them the various slopes of the Gibbston, assessed the pebbly, flinty whites of the Wairarapa. It was the same when it came to looking at the cheeses, his pointing to the trolley, his assuring April that no, he most certainly would choose nothing heavily peppered, what did she take him for? The mood at the table was more than relaxed—hadn’t Tom already said it was better than that, it was a family having a good time? He liked listening to Gareth take command, his showing off just that bit in front of them all. As if he’d have known where to begin, when he was that age! He had teased him earlier on, while they horsed around at home and before deciding on the Viaduct, and Gareth was into one of his riffs on the Sydney that April was going to, where he would join her once his finals were knocked off, dropping the names of bars and restaurants and clubs as though the town was already his, ‘Rushcutter’s Bay,’ he said, ‘we both like round there, that a deal?’, leaning forward to put his lips against the gleam of her hair while she raised her fingers to his cheek. Christ! Tom thought, lucky, lovely, where do you begin? But telling his son, in that easy way they both knew was something of a put-on, ‘You’ve the makings of a right tosser, that ever occur to you?’, and Gareth telling him back, ‘Genes will out, ever thought of that?’

  She had watched them, the two men joshing, wasn’t that the word she had read for what they were doing? Not being father and son together so much as playing at it, acting out the bond she supposed they had seen in movies and on TV, even the physical moves that went with it, Tom’s fist lightly punching on Gareth’s shoulder, Gareth’s exaggerated feinting, as though a boxer facing the real thing. And now, while they waited for the wine to arrive that would accompany the cheese, the boy covering his face with his open-fingered hand, his muttered ‘Oh God, you don’t really!’ when his father began on his sincere, slightly drunken praise of the young woman he, he and Mandy, would be proud to welcome into the family, he knew he spoke for Mandy as well, as if that needed to be spelled out, how proud they were of both of them. As he spoke she watched the girl’s own mannered pose, her elbows on the cloth, her chin on her folded knuckles, a forefinger along one cheek, her eyebrows arched, appreciative. ‘I am not greatly surprised,’ her posture said, ‘but I am touched, believe me, I really and truly am.’ It was what the moment demanded. What the occasion called for. That hollow phrase, Mandy had thought, that perfect phrase. She raised her hand and pinched the bridge of her nose, so that Tom asked her was she feeling all right, not one of her migraines coming on? He and April and Gareth, each remembered that, their asking her that. How intense and remote it was, she remembered that, the moment they sat in, like figures in one of those souvenir glass domes, small and distant figures, where descending flakes so easily were stirred. The image coming back to her as she watched, as though from a similar distance, the little drama of the court proceed around her, the figures both close enough to touch, as distanced as the moon.

  She watches the young woman who speaks for her. She hears the words she was forewarned of in their meeting yesterday, Weston’s assurance that this line of defence truly is the one to take. ‘The unstable,’ she had said, as they sat where they always met, ‘are never guilty. Not in that worst sense.’

  ‘Unstable. Lucid. They hardly go together,’ Mandy had said, going back to the word she so insisted was
hers. And then, ‘So you’ve definitely opted for “snap”?’

  Weston was allowed to bring her client flowers. This morning, a bunch of violets in a twist of purple tissue. ‘They grow wild,’ she said. ‘There’s a sycamore in my backyard and they grow there, beneath it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Mandy said, when they were laid on the table between them. She thought how there is always another life that goes on, that we never guess at. Fancy Weston having a backyard.

  Among other things Mandy also explained to Weston: ‘Sometimes I would take the car and drive to one of the west coast beaches. I would try to find somewhere to stop where I would have a view along the coast. Or pull up in one of the car parks, level with the sand, with the sea as much something I listened to as saw. Some days there was a haze of spray above the beach from the breaking waves, the marvellous smashing down of them. Some days the bush on the hills was almost black. On others, depending of course on the weather, on the time of day I was there, it might seem to glow, as if light was given out from it as much as falling across it. I was content to sit there for hours. I had no desire to walk along the beach. I would sit in the car with the window wound down to hear the banging of the surf, to feel the wind, which was almost always there, some days cold enough for me to draw the zip of my jacket as high as it goes, and sit there with a woollen hat to the tip of my ears. If I angled the car correctly, even in winter, the sun might fall across me, warming the car in even the sharpest wind. Always I took a Thermos with me. I poured the tea into a plastic lid which served as a cup, and held it with both hands. Although very often I might think about death—I don’t see how you can sit for long at a beach without thinking of it—this did not stop my feeling contented in a general sort of way. It was clarity making me think of death, not despondency. Which brought home to me that any idea becomes tolerable if you are left to think of it on your own terms. Although I know I do not believe that utterly, even as I say I do.