Goodbye Sweetheart

by Marion Halligan

  Every time he came he told her something new. One time he asked, did she know about the cardinal’s death?

  Poison, I suppose.

  No. It is dying in the act of making love, he said. A heart attack, a stroke, while fucking.

  Like Billy Snedden?

  So I believe. I’ve always thought, what a good way to go.

  What about the woman?

  Less good for her, certainly.

  They laughed, thinking of the farce that could result, the covering up, the pretending, hiding.

  People still don’t know who the woman was with Snedden, do they?

  Oh, I think they do. They just don’t say.

  I wouldn’t be a party to farce, she said. I’d put on a gown and call the ambulance. You’d be dead and I wouldn’t be ashamed.

  Excellent, said Cecil. You should be proud.

  Why cardinal’s death? Were cardinals particularly prone to dying in the arms of their lovers?

  That’s really interesting, said Cecil. It’s possibly a corruption of carnal, is one suggestion. Dying in the carnal act.

  Oh, I like to think of cardinals. How wicked, dying in mortal sin.

  Dying as they’d lived, most of them.

  Rotting in hell, while the beautiful girls, or boys, repent and go to heaven.

  Of course, he said, carnal is a received Australian pronunciation. As in Carnal Pell.

  That evening she’d been wearing black silk pyjamas, which Greg had given her for their seventh wedding anniversary. Her idea. She’d not ever really worn them, before. Perhaps that was a sign. Greg hadn’t ever remarked upon the fact; perhaps that was a sign too. Maybe she was waiting for him to suggest them. They were Cecil’s favourite; sometimes he asked for them. He liked to unbutton the jacket and slide it aside just a little and contemplate the whiteness of her breasts inside the black silk. They both enjoyed the sensuousness of the fabric sliding over her body.

  Sometimes Barbara wondered how long this could go on. This apartment cocooned by the hushed noise of the street, this sense of time suspended, her costumes, his conversation, the wine, the gifts. All of these things she thought of as belonging to this present moment, not to be depended on, likely not to exist as suddenly as they had begun. So she had told herself. But now she was feeling put out, disappointed, worried. She poured some more wine and ate two grapes from the bunch she had put on a white plate. I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion, he often said, and she could see this meant not really at all, but she took it as a kind of promise. We will tell one another the truth, he said, we will not lie or cheat, there will be no deception, and she had believed him, though once she did think it would be perfectly possible for a liar and cheat to promise to tell the truth always.

  The wine was becoming warm. She put the bottle in the fridge, thinking of the cardinal’s death. Thinking that if he had to die that would be a good way because then he would belong to her. The little death, the big one. If he died in the act he would always be hers. But that wasn’t supposed to be what she wanted, for him to belong to her. What if a woman conceived with the sperm that burst from the man in the moment that he died? A child born out of death. That was irrelevant too. She was not going to get pregnant.

  The kitchen window looked over a car park. She saw a man walking across it hand in hand with a child. Greg. She’d know that big craggy head with its thick pelt of hair anywhere. But it couldn’t be, he’d gone away. Though he could have come back. Greg was a teacher too. After it had happened he’d said, Let’s go somewhere else. Travel. Move to the country. Orange maybe. We could buy a terrace house, you’ve always wanted a terrace house, they have really good ones in Orange. Barb? Let’s do that, he said. You could have fun, furnishing it with local stuff.

  Remarkably garrulous for Greg. No, she said, it’s too late. Too late for talking to her, this man whose idea of foreplay was the old joke: You awake, love? That wasn’t fair. There was no reason to be fair, nothing else was fair, no other thing, why should she worry about being fair? But in fact he had talked to her. Sometimes.

  We love each other, he said. We can get through this.

  But she knew that Greg couldn’t console her. She said, Do we love each other? I don’t think so. She turned away from his bewildered face.

  But you said . . . you always said . . . right at the beginning.

  When we got pregnant, and you said we should get married. Yes, I did say I loved you then. Maybe I did. But I think, mainly, I wanted to . . . it was the least thing, to start a marriage. I said it, and it worked . . .

  It can work again.

  No. I’m not that person any more. Everything’s changed. We can’t go back. Make it undone.

  That was when she said she didn’t want the car or any furniture from the house, or objects, or appliances.

  You’ll regret it, Greg said.

  I plan never to regret anything again.

  She’d kept only the cedar table, the small schoolroom table, that had belonged to her grandmother. Its honey colour was startling in the flat. That wasn’t why she kept it, though it was a bonus. She’d thought she should keep just one thing from an earlier life, but not hers. Two generations back.

  Poor Greg. She was thinking too much, drinking too much, wandering about the apartment filling in time she hadn’t expected to have. She organised her life to allow no time for filling. It was tight and efficient like the apartment. She did no entertaining of the cooking kind, there were all the restaurants downstairs to eat in. She grilled vegetables when she got bored with the restaurants. The cupboards contained wine glasses, a few plates, vases. I want none of my old possessions, she’d said, and Greg had looked at her in a kind of terror, as though she’d turned into a monster. She was monstrously different from the person she’d been, in her house furnished with antique furniture she’d restored, its dressers stacked with plates and cups and bowls for every kind of dish, any mood, all the recipes she was always trying out for constant parties of friends. Even Greg had learned to follow her round antique shops, markets, bazaars, junk shops, looking for the odd things that Barbara was famous for unearthing, things that no one else would have noticed but that in her hands became wonderful, unusual, bizarre, useful. She wasn’t that Barbara any more. Barb, he said, Barb? His voice trembling. His big craggy head, his heavy footballer’s body, this head, this body that she’d loved once, hadn’t she?—she’d said she did, believed she did, and now didn’t even want to look at, as he gazed at her, in terror, in bewilderment, wanting her to comfort him, and she looked away and didn’t care. Had it been him, hand in hand with a child, walking across the car park?

  Walking across the car park, undoing the past, making it all right again. How often she wanted to think that. How often had she realised it could never happen. Waiting, looking, thinking, in the waning of the day. When the ghosts come out.

  She put more wine in her glass and went into the spare room that was a kind of study. When she turned on the television there was a crime thriller with impenetrable Scottish accents. She wandered back to the sitting room. It was nearly nine o’clock. Cecil wouldn’t come now. Another channel had a tall handsome Asian man cooking. She used to love cooking programmes, even if they were bad she liked to watch them, now she couldn’t be bothered looking. Cecil had never let her down before. Friday night, and he was there, with glamorous presents and even more glamorous words, with not very many glasses of delicious wine and delicate erotic games. He was twice her age. He did not ask anything of her, in love or constancy, just these small portions of her time, the brief occasional visits during the week, the longer Friday night play. Our cinq à sept, he called the weekday visits, and she didn’t understand what he meant, he had to explain even that it was French. It’s a time, he said, five o’clock to seven o’clock, it’s when you visit your mistress, it’s when work is over but before it is the hour of dinner, and you immerse yourself in this small artificial perfect world, with no worries or cares or responsibilities. It is
fucking, he said, if you want, but it is also conversation. Tea, perhaps, or an aperitif. It is whatever sort of civilised intercourse takes your fancy.

  Is it just men, she’d asked, or can women do it too?

  Oh yes, women can visit their lovers, cinq à sept. Of course it is a high bourgeois activity, it implies someone is at home bathing the children and cooking the dinner.

  Barbara had thought she was safe in this affair, so neatly defined by its time, so practical, so formal; not love or passion but pleasure and affection, not with expectations of forever after but politeness and good manners and knowing where you were. And so there would be no betrayal. Perhaps one day he would say, It has been very nice, or she would murmur, I think it is time to stop, and they would drink the wine and kiss goodbye in a melancholy way and she would do something else on Friday night. Go to the gym. Join another book club. Take in a movie with a friend. Now Cecil had broken the rules. Now there was betrayal. Now she was alone and drinking too much, thinking too much.

  The cedar table glowed in the pale room, yellow as amber, old and rich and polished. Only one thing from that old life, which once had seemed so nourishing. She ate several more grapes, green on a white plate. She squeezed herself into a corner of the sofa, crunching up as small as possible. It didn’t matter about the Rita Hayworth nightdress any more.

  Greg in the car park. She had not been kind to Greg. She had to stop thinking about Greg because in a minute she’d be thinking about Chloe and that mustn’t happen. Her life was organised so she never had to think about Chloe. Fleeting moments, of course, you couldn’t do anything to stop them, but if you were busy you could move on, shake them off. But she was crunched in a ball in a corner of a sofa, she was a woman bereft and thinking about Chloe.

  Chloe would be eleven now, still a pretty and clever little girl, though reaching towards puberty. She must be still, mustn’t she. Nothing could have happened to stop that. Chloe still alive, smiling, funny, happy. But she wasn’t. A freak accident, that’s what they said. Freak. She didn’t know precisely how it had happened, hadn’t wanted to know, hadn’t wanted to picture it as vividly as if she had seen it. But still she did, she invented it, there it was happening. Playing in her mind and no off button to get rid of it. The ferry. The children stepping on to the gangplank, crossing from the jetty to the boat. Not Chloe. Chloe somehow slipping, a lurch, a trip, her little body sliding down into the water, caught between the boat and one of the piles of the jetty, crushed and drowned in the oily cold algae-infested water, too poisonous for swimming. How could it happen? Such care. Such responsibility. Chloe such a sensible child. The class of nine-year-olds, the school excursion to the museum, the ferry ride across the lake an extra treat.

  The daughter she had loved. The daughter who had married her to Greg, had made the three of them into a family full of love. Living in a big old comfortable house full of objects, full of friends, full of life. She hadn’t really minded when the doctor told her there would be no more children, her cervix was damaged, she could not carry another child. She had her family, and it was perfect.

  Such a rich life they’d had, and orderly, a beautiful complicated order that nourished them. She had a habit of saying, we must not leave anything to chance. About picnics or holidays or simply the next day’s plans. We cannot leave anything to chance. And so it was as though chance, so rigorously excluded, grabbed its own moment, one so unlikely that Barbara could never quite believe it. But then she thought, it wasn’t chance. It was some ancient and godly malice. Or devilish. It wasn’t chance: there was fault, and blame.

  You can’t say that, said Greg. It was simple accident, terrible, but accident.

  Yes I can. It was malice. It was jealousy. It was fate, jealous of us. And it worked. We’re destroyed.

  Greg thought he could eventually comfort her. That she would accept and grieve for the child. That the terrible anger would calm. But when he put his arms around her she was like a post and he could not warm or soften her. Barbara knew what she had to do, empty herself, get rid of all possibility of future hurt. She was furious with Cecil for showing her she hadn’t anywhere near achieved that.

  She had to get out of the sofa. She uncurled, and dragged herself upright. She stumbled over the long folds of the nightgown and dropped the wine glass. Her feet were bare, she walked round it in a wide detour, the glass had exploded like a bomb on the white stone floor. She poured the rest of the wine into a tumbler and got into bed, lucky she already had her nightie on, took two temazapam from her emergency supply and still did not sleep very quickly or easily. She was thinking of Chloe’s terror as she slipped off the gangplank into the water, the terror that her mother could never comfort now, and of how the child would not have known that this was the end for her, not at first. Would that knowledge have come to her before she died? Would she have understood that her life was over? Barbara could not escape the sickening wash of pain and fear, as if she herself were her child, this nightmare that she could never wake up from.

  I want to sue, she said to Cecil, recommended by a colleague as a useful lawyer; she’d got his name back to front but stuck with it anyway, it was another game. Do you want money? he said. No, revenge. And he’d suggested she read Bacon. Had lent her the book. A kind of wild justice.

  In the end she hadn’t done it. You can’t sue fate, he said.

  Greg in the car park with a child. Greg in her dreams with a head like a bear. Who was the child? The child’s hair had been cloudy with curls, but pale, not dark like Greg’s.

  Then Chloe was in her dream too. They were in the kitchen. She was making toast. The little girl stood up from the table and got a favourite plate off the dresser, patterned with a lady in a crinoline dress under a trellis of pink roses, and in the distance a pond and a summerhouse. Chloe liked to look at this plate and think of the story of the lady in her frilled dress. It was a small plate, meant for dainty tea sandwiches, and the large piece of sourdough bread overflowed it. Chloe spread butter carefully right to the edges and then Vegemite over that. Black toast, she said with satisfaction, and took a bite. In the dream Barbara suddenly knew it was a dream, which might have been the nightmare, the usual nightmare of drowning and terror and swamping dirty water. Instead she thought, perhaps I should have kept that plate; it had belonged to her mother and as a small child Barbara too had thought it was marvellously beautiful; of course she had got rid of all such things because of the memories in them. But she also as she realised this was a dream felt grateful. In life Chloe had never said Black toast in that gleeful voice, so it was as if new things were still happening, as if she was still growing and changing. Her hair was longer. It was very curly and usually cut short but in the dream it had grown into ringlets, and as she bent over the toast, concentrating on spreading the butter and Vegemite, they danced in a springy lively way. Chloe was always dancing, she was a slender sprite of a child who was never still, and even as she sat and concentrated on her task the curls of her hair danced. The hair was quite fair and when you looked at it was striped with a whole lot of different pale brown and yellow colours that caught the light and sparkled in the sunny kitchen.

  In the morning Barbara woke up fusty and grubby and heavy with wine and drugged sleep, but remembering Chloe curly-haired and gleeful. She had a long shower and took vitamin pills, and then as she always did on Saturdays went to a cafe for coffee and the papers. In the Canberra Times she read how a well-known Canberra lawyer had died in the pool of the hotel where he swam regularly. William Cecil, aged sixty-four, had had a heart attack and drowned on Wednesday evening.

  Barbara thought, so he did not betray me, after all. It was death, again. Not the cardinal’s death; death by water. She stared out the window and was sad. And frightened, as well. If she had not seen that little notice in the paper she might not have found out the truth of things, might have gone on blaming him for deserting her. Might still have been the bereft and victimised woman. Of course she still was that, if you put in f
ate instead of Cecil, but somehow fate didn’t fit well, or perhaps it was not she who was the object of its malice.

  FERDIE ARRIVES

  Ferdie came out of the doors of the customs hall, knowing his mother would be waiting for him. He couldn’t see her. Maybe something had gone wrong, she’d slept in, her car had broken down; it would have to be something drastic. But she was there, he had seen her, just not registered her. He had forgotten, and he felt sad. So few years away, and he had forgotten his mother, and yet she had not changed. Tall, and slender still, like a maiden in a tower, he used to think. There were a great many Greek people ahead of him in the railed-off exit, being met by even more relations, who crowded in and made it difficult for the people behind to get through. His mother stood back, patiently waiting. A maiden in a tower? No, he thought; she is the tower, she is the imprisonment, invisible, impenetrable. You shut the princess in a tower for long enough and she becomes the tower. And there’s only one key, which she gave to William. She could have taken it back, or called a locksmith and had another made. She chose not to do either of these things.

  She wasn’t looking at him though he knew she could see him, and when he reached her and spoke she was silent, she put her arms out and held him with such passion that he felt her crushing him. Then she moved back a little and scrutinised him, tenderly, frowning. Oh Ferdie, you’re so thin! You’re disappearing.

  No I’m not. I’m exactly the same. And who are you to talk? He put his arm around her and felt long, frail bones under meagre flesh. I’m your son, remember? I don’t think we run to fat.