The Families

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  Alice encouraged him and said how she admired his social conscience, but preferred as she aged to do little apart from voting Labour once every three years, and reading in between. She said, ‘I’m too healthy to play sport and frankly everything apart from reading bores me.’ She said it in her rather bemused offhand way, so those she said it to thought she was not as serious as she was. She managed to read through libraries while she did all a woman of her generation also did to keep her house shiny as a pin and her family contented. And she was quietly sardonic. Above the fridge in the kitchen hung a framed, beautifully embroidered cloth she picked up at a garage sale, with a sentence in German declaring that ‘Cleanliness Is the House’s Jewel’. She liked to explain—although very few quite got her point—that she believed it had been brought back by a soldier after the war, a souvenir from a bombed house. Yet what did it mean, Tommy used to wonder, having a thing like that on the wall? Did she want people to think she was a moron?

  I think my father was disappointed, once Tommy and I were at secondary school and so in any real sense off our mother’s hands, that she showed no interest whatsoever in taking up the teaching she had been trained for and then put aside to rear us. Knowing she had to say something, she said, ‘I’m too out of touch.’ I remember it being broached several times. Dad slowly stroked the side of his face over and over, a curious, disciplined gesture that told those who knew him well that he was on the verge of anger. He told Alice, ‘It needn’t be at my school. That goes without saying.’ She was puzzled that he might think that could be the reason. ‘I’d happily work with your Dad,’ she said, ‘Supposing I wanted to work.’

  ‘They simply sail past each other,’ my brother used to say, ‘and they think they’ve had a conversation.’

  In fact, Alice was left a little money by an aunt in Port Adelaide, which allowed her the luxury to make a choice. As she said, ‘Comfortable, that darling middle-class word!’ She and my father—another point when Ross wants to score—never lost their zeal for socialism, so I suppose that remark too falls under ‘sardonic’. One year I remember she read almost everything written by Graham Greene. She said, ‘It’s all so deplorable you just have to believe in it!’ She explained, as she came to the last of the novels, ‘I could pass an exam on slippery theology, let alone squalid love.’ My father, who usually was the kindest person you could imagine, once hinted to me that she gave herself up to enthusiasms like that because nothing in ‘real life’, as he called it, actually interested her, which is why books mattered so much. Tommy took the argument even further. He said Alice couldn’t really be happy. If you had her temperament and were as intelligent as our mother, you knew life was a void and that’s that.

  Ross, though, thought Tommy and I talked up a problem that wasn’t a problem at all. ‘Most people wouldn’t work if they didn’t have to. I know I wouldn’t. She’s the sanest of us all and that’s what we can’t cope with.’ As for Alice’s bland reluctance to talk intimately of anything, about that Ross simply said, ‘Why do we resent it so much when someone insists on being private?’

  Well, whatever the spring one wanted to source her back to, my mother, in that unsatisfactory phrase, was ‘her own person’. She could be kind, and was amusing, but we did not easily forgive her that elusive core she so guarded as her own. Ross may even be right. There was no great mystery to it: we just don’t care much for those who live on their own terms. By the time Tommy was gay beyond concealing, and my husband was my first and almost my only lover, Dad had taken up with the vulgar woman who did the accounts at his school. ‘Vulgar’ was my way, my brother’s way, to dismiss her good humour, her high, spontaneous laugh, her frilled blouses, the little diamantes at the side of her winged sunglasses. She just too blatantly declared that life, for all its ups and downs, was a bit of a hoot, that ‘gather ye rosebuds’ or whatever was as close as we’re likely to get to wisdom, even in a school whose headmaster put on the hard word. They made no great effort, my father and Mrs Beatrice Nesbitt, to conceal their closeness. The lovers believed their partners, both quiet, self-sufficient people, were not the kind in any case to be irreversibly hurt. Tommy told me much later, after Dad had died, that Beatrice’s husband was an old hand, you could say, at a male sauna in Victoria Street that had to be closed down. But none of this explains my mother as I want her to be explained.

  Had I sensibly thought about it, I would not have asked an even closer question this last time she came to stay. The evening before we had watched a Fred Astaire movie on Sky. While Alice was with us I was always on the lookout for something to kill time. I flicked through the TV Guide and remembered how she liked old musicals, which the rest of us used to think rather a joke. As the dancers swirled and cavorted she sat in the too-big armchair, leaning forward a little, her hands joined on her lap. ‘I had no idea you got films like this on television.’ But by the end of the movie, as elegant coattails flared out and the tall handsome woman stepped so beautifully beneath her billowing dress, Alice had slumped into the cushions behind her, her mouth opened, an old exhausted woman. What I still so regret asking was at breakfast the next morning.

  Already I had done with her several of the things Ross and I knew she enjoyed. I drove her through the park where at this time of year the long grass on the side of the hill was the colour of straw, and against the blue sky the grey glinting olive trees, two colours in one when the wind turned them, made you think of another country. We parked for ten minutes on the rim of a volcanic crater and watched the business of the harbour, although as Alice said, in her day it had been the North Shore ferries, distant and small as toys, she had so liked to watch. She said the outline of the big buildings in the central city were like a clutch of up-ended knives. She at once apologised for being so fanciful. ‘What a nonsensical thing to say!’ Then another morning we drove to the café in the Rose Gardens, with their bed after bed of brilliant blooms, although half of them, she said, were more than a touch blowsy, didn’t I think? But each day by early afternoon she would need to lie down. ‘Too old for playing at tourists,’ as she went off to the settee in the conservatory, then read in the lounge after she had slept, read until the news came on at six o’clock.

  I’d have given anything, especially as I think of it now, for us to have sat together at the kitchen table, confided as mothers and daughters are meant to do. If one of my friends called in she would chat for ten minutes and then say, ‘I’ll let you two get on with it. You don’t want an old crone hanging about.’ My friends of course fell for her, smiling as she quietly moved off. As she read one hand moved absently in the dog’s grey, shaggy fur. It too trailed after her, content to lie there for as long as she wanted.

  It was like this each time—the three times—that she came in the two years since Dad died. Ross said after the last visit, when I was in tears, ‘Some people are simply like that. It doesn’t mean you don’t matter to her.’

  ‘Your mother can’t be private!’ And I insisted rather stupidly, ‘She’s no different with me than she is with anyone else.’

  He was patient, missing the point completely. He repeated, ‘If you just accept the way she is, perhaps there isn’t a problem?’

  Ross once asked me a strange question. He said, ‘Did Alice ever tell you about sex?’ He then said, as if to cover the oddness of it, ‘I mean, my father never did.’

  ‘When I was twelve. She gave me a book and talked to me about what was in it. She couldn’t have done it more efficiently, more kindly, if I was a pupil and she was paid to instruct me.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s the way it should be,’ my husband said. ‘No big deal, I mean.’

  ‘No shattering of innocence?’

  ‘Ignorance,’ Ross laughed. ‘Better to use the correct words.’

  I said, smiling back at him, ‘She made love sound a bit like a Meccano set.’

  ‘But she did say “love”?’

  ‘She said it, I think, but not the way it should have been said.’ Yet I knew as I reco
unted this to Ross that it was not quite that way, and why I told it like this was something I could not explain. She made clear to me what I had half-guessed anyway. She spoke carefully, considerately. She had not given me a book. I didn’t say to Ross that soon before our talk, Alice’s and mine, I saw my father in his headmaster’s office with his hand on Mrs Nesbitt’s breast. She was sitting at the typewriter and he was standing behind her. Her hands were moving over the keys, I could hear the machine’s clacking as I opened the door, and he stood behind her with one hand across her shoulder, feeling her. It was a strange memory. My father’s hand seemed so large. I thought at first he must be wearing a padded glove, and Mrs Nesbitt’s breast, so it struck me then, was pitiably small, so why did he bother? Yet I knew exactly what they wanted to do, that this could not possibly be all that their behaviour, their secrecy, arrived at. When Alice later talked to me and ever after I invented the detail of her giving me the book which did not exist, I resented her for telling me at all, for confirming what she must have known they did.

  Four days is a long time to fill in with someone you feel ill at ease with, no matter how much you love her. My mother was always polite and grateful but, I felt, not especially interested in anything we did. When we stopped in Princes Street to look at the floral clock that I thought might amuse her—that kind of civic silliness usually did—she said, ‘Begonias are detestable really, aren’t they?’ I knew what she meant. Those cramped speckled leaves, the nothing pinkness of their flowers that made me think of children’s toothpaste. Yet it irritated me, her saying that. The begonias were not my fault. And when we had driven up the ridged hill to its sudden scooped-out cone and scatter of loose rocks, the day turned suddenly dull, rain pocked at the windscreen, and Alice asked me, ‘Is this where that unfortunate man drove over with his children?’ That too irritated me. I said, ‘That was the hill over there.’ I pointed through the veil of rain thickening towards us. ‘I can’t see it,’ she said, ‘with this Auckland weather.’

  On the way home she asked me to stop at the dairy at the end of the road. I said I’d pop in to get whatever it was she wanted. No, she insisted, humour me. She moved slowly from the car to the shop, and as slowly walked back. She carried a plastic bag with two tubs of ice cream. I said we had stacks of it at home, she need not have bothered. A fact she ignored as she said, with a kind of embarrassed frankness, ‘I just had this craving.’ I thought of when I was seven or eight, when Dad had brought home pineapple ice cream as a treat. Tommy ploughed through his as though it were the last he would ever taste. When I was halfway through mine I edged the plate aside because I did not like pineapple, and said, ‘That was marvellous, Daddy.’ My mother said, ‘But you haven’t finished.’ She said, ‘Daddy will think you don’t like it.’ Then five minutes later I was sick as I ran from the table to the bathroom. I knew something had been proved, yet whatever it was, I scarcely understood. I watched Alice slowly moving back towards the car, then easing the plastic bag down beside her feet after she closed the door, before she told me about her ‘craving’. How I disliked her using that word too. I thought how is it that something that sears into you as a child, someone else who should remember so casually forgets?

  I said to her next morning, ‘I know you are here this time, Mummy, because you’re dying. So why can’t we talk?’ I don’t know what she thought when at last someone compelled her to speak out. And so I watched her, a frail, declining woman, as she turned her cup several times on its saucer. She then looked up, not at me but through the window beyond me, at the gently sloping lawn that Ross kept as smooth as his own cheek. (‘If a blade of grass is out of place it’s like a fish bone in my throat.’)

  She watched beyond me for so long that I thought, this time I have gone too far. This time I have hurt her. Then she looked at me directly. She said, ‘I’m taking so long, I’m sorry, because there isn’t any answer I can give you that will satisfy you.’ Her thin hands—more twigs than hands, I thought, with a kind of shame at how glibly comparisons like that jump at one—were around her cup, as though she hoped to draw in its warmth. She began again. She said, ‘I’m not here because I want to be. Next to not dying at all, I’d prefer to do it the way a cat does. Just slope off quietly.’ Smiling, knowing I suppose that what she said was ridiculous. Yet insisting, ‘You know I don’t like fuss at any time and I like it even less now. Which is why I’ve not told you outright, although I know that I owe it to you. So I’m glad we’ve had our talk. I’ll go back home and everything’s very clear. There’ll be fuss, I suppose, but I hope not too much of it.’ Her hand left the side of the cup and was warm as it ran along my forearm. When she said ‘fuss’ for the second time, it was apparent that it meant her death, and everything that surrounds it: family, regret, fear, goodbye, all trimmed back to four letters that attempted to contain them. I took her hand and thought how much larger, clumsier my fingers seemed as they closed over hers. I thought, not of Alice only, but in a broader, general way, that human beings ought not to be like this, that dying was too vast a tract to cross alone, and yet we have no choice.

  I said, ‘Of course I’ll come back with you.’

  ‘There’s months yet,’ she said. ‘Leave it a few weeks and then come down. That’s what I’d really like.’ She said there were things to sort out, not many but a few, so to come down then. ‘It will be Easter, the weather’s always nice.’ She made me promise that for the moment I would not mention it to Ross. ‘It’s a dreadful thing to say, but even the kindest people can’t always help.’ I thought of the tugs we had seen yesterday on the harbour. They were too far off to be anything but tiny shapes, so I must have been remembering something from when the family sometimes walked down the waterfront when Tommy and I were children. We watched the thick buffers on the tugs that were like rubbery lips, that made it safe to nudge against other boats, cushioning both against each other. Her hand stayed resting on my arm.

  A fortnight later Ross was down at Taupo again, checking out the new mall. He rang to say he would take another day, he couldn’t be this close to the lake and turn down the chance to go fishing—well, could he, hon? He is so matter-of-fact about fishing, that is when I know that he lies. Yet we enjoy being together. He still amuses me with his stories about his partners, his employees, his incisive phrases that set them up like ninepins and then good-humouredly knock down. To laugh together after twenty-odd years of marriage isn’t a bad platform for getting on. He is generous and people like him, he’s as outgoing I sometimes say as I’m indoors, you’ll know what I mean when I say like the figures on those Swiss clocks? But I knew he meant it when he said he’d definitely come with me to see Alice at Easter, he said he’d make sure that Chelsea came too. But before Ross was home from his fishing she died, as they say, ‘like that’. I could almost hear the neighbour’s fingers snap as she told me on the phone. Yes, the neighbour said, while she was watching telly.

  ‘She loathed television,’ I said, ‘except the news.’

  ‘That’s why I mention it,’ said Jo Kavanagh from next door. ‘We saw the light through the curtains just after it got dark, that’s why we went across. We both said it wasn’t like her.’ I could see Jo’s sandpapery skin, her throat flushed above the girly collars she had worn for as long as I had known her, since Dad and Alice moved down there for the sun.

  She said, ‘I’m sorry I’m the one who had to ring.’

  I put down the phone and went into Chelsea’s room. She was lying on her bed, turning the pages of a brochure that advertised cheap rates for Fijian resorts. Her father had told her it was beyond him, how anyone could take advantage of a hijacked democracy so underpaid Fijians could cut up your pineapple for you. Although he smiled as he teased her and she told him back, ‘Fuck off, will you, Dad?’ As I now opened the door she said without looking up, ‘This is unbelievable you know, this deal?’ her hand patting the page in front of her. ‘I’ve got to let Trish know about this one.’

  I said, ‘That was Tauranga. Alic
e has passed on.’

  Chelsea swung her legs from the bed and looked down for a moment as she flexed her toes. Then she held my eye and said, ‘She didn’t even open that card I left her, know that?’

  And then I was beating her. Not slapping her but actually beating, my closed fists flailing down on her, pummelling, wanting her to cry out. She drew up her knees and crawled close against the wall, her body folded small to get away from me. A rage I had never known in my life came over me, a wave, I kept thinking, a wave so high of anger and regret that it had nowhere to go but here, Chelsea was the beach where it broke and threw us both aside. ‘She did, she did, she did!’ my words too hammering down on her in a gasping rush that appalled me and that I was unable to stop, as she writhed and began pushing against me, her raised foot catching my hip and thrusting me back against the windowsill. My anger gone as quickly as it had struck, a sense of exhaustion flooding me to fill where it had drained.

  My daughter pushed past me to wrench at the drawer of her dressing table. She threw the pink envelope onto the bed. ‘You can see it,’ she screamed at me, ‘even you can see it isn’t opened!’ I picked up the envelope and turned it and ran after her from the room. I called to her as she pelted down the stairs, but my words were lost in the same garbled sobbing that disgusted me, as if they foamed from a person I despised. ‘It was me, darling,’ I was trying to tell her, ‘I forgot. I forgot. I just forgot to give it to her.’ I stood now at the top of the stairs. A string of saliva had leaped across my cheek. But the front door slammed and in the silence I slipped to my knees and held in each hand one of the round wooden supports of the balustrade above the hall. I was like a prisoner against the bars of her cell. I kept saying in the same catching sobs, ‘My darling!’ I knelt there for five minutes, perhaps longer. I heard steps and a key scratching for the lock in the front door, Chelsea coming back. But the door opened and Ross stepped inside. He glanced up at me. God knows what I must have looked like. His hand jangled his keys that were on a key ring I had given him years ago, the coat of arms of a city where once we spent a week in Italy. From the bedroom window the sea had been blue beyond belief. He placed the keys on the hook inside the front door and put down his briefcase against the hall table. He then walked through into the living room and closed the door. I leaned my forehead on the cool white wood of the railing. I began again to repeat the words as though I was unable to stop, but quietly, you would not have heard them from the bottom of the stairs. Not sure even which of the three, which of the four of us, I meant.