Good Girls

by Amanda Brookfield

  Donna’s parents had just arrived and were still in the kitchen. He could see the heads of the three of them bobbing in the window across the pool, talking intently. About him, Nick guessed grimly, his thoughts skittering to the days when he had imagined his in-laws to be friends.

  Catching Jim Cruick’s eye, he raised the barbecue fork in a salute, getting a head-nod in return. He guessed the Scammells would be late. They usually were, in spite of living only a couple of miles away on a similar gated plot with garden and pool. They had a daughter called Meryl who was in the same class as Natalie, which meant the convenience of sharing the thirty-minute drive to the girls’ school. They were not kindred spirits by any means, but decent enough people. He hadn’t seen Mike for weeks, but he would be back-thumping and cheerfully noisy, Nick knew, charged already with a couple of beers. Lindy, meanwhile, would be overdressed, in something a little too short, the heels a little too high. She would come and stand next to Nick at the barbecue and light her first cigarette of the evening, saying in her low smoker’s voice that he was her favourite doctor because he never lectured her about her bad habits.

  For all their families’ interactions, Donna maintained she didn’t like Lindy very much. Because the woman was in love with Nick, she claimed, blatantly chasing after him at every opportunity. That Nick wasn’t interested in the advances of their neighbour, or any other female for that matter, was never of any relevance either to his wife’s train of thought or the viciousness with which such accusations were flung out. Donna’s bullying certainty about Nick’s desire to be unfaithful had formed early on in their marriage, quickly establishing itself as an ugly and unrelenting thread in the tapestry of their arguments. The implausibility of the candidates and Nick’s dogged efforts to convince her otherwise never did any good. Lately, he had stopped trying. Which was ironic, Nick mused, and possibly even connected to the fact that, for the first time in sixteen years of matrimony, Donna might actually have had some dim grounds for complaint. If exchanging a few emails counted as grounds.

  Nick stirred the coals, bringing the outer ones into the middle and then spreading the whole lot flat. But it was over, he reminded himself. Whatever ‘it’ had been. He jabbed at the coals again, ruining the smoothness. He had half hoped his most recent missive – sent from his office the week before – might prompt a reply, in spite of its protestations to the contrary. He was still glad he had written it, Nick decided stubbornly, glad that Kat at least could now be in no doubt that he wasn’t, and had never been, clinging to some rose-tinted version of the past. Deep inside himself, however, he knew her silence was right. It was that knowledge that had helped him delete every word of their stop-start correspondence, up to and including his most recent message. What was less understandable was the hole this appeared to have left in his life. In fact, most hours of most days, Nick was starting to feel as if someone had bulldozed the ground from beneath his feet.

  As regards Lindy, it was clear to Nick that their neighbour’s attentions remained innocuous. He had always found it hard to see the crime in one human being wanting to establish a teasing connection with another, even if it had faint sexual undertones. It was the choices one made about such undertones that mattered; whether they led to action or not. Nick had grown fond of Lindy’s at times off-kilter flirty remarks, but only because they made a welcome change from the usual conversational paths to dominate his and Donna’s otherwise predictable and privileged social circle, tending as they did to range between irritatingly competitive chat about the achievements of offspring, gripes over inept house-staff, and horror at rising crime stats. The pattern of it all could get him down.

  It was also baffling and irksome, Nick decided, stabbing yet more chaos into the hot smooth bed of charcoal, that Donna should claim such dislike of Lindy and yet do so thorough a job of keeping the woman embroiled in their lives. Sharing the school run was an obvious tie, but beyond that there were innumerable invitations to lunch and dinner parties, with Donna rather than Lindy invariably leading the charge.

  ‘Why are you using that?’

  ‘Pardon?’ Nick had been too lost in his cogitations to notice his wife arrive at the barbecue. She was in silver-strapped heels he hadn’t seen before and a long purple silk dress that billowed on the evening breeze round her tanned ankles.

  She pointed with distaste at the barbecue fork in his hand. ‘That is for actual cooking. You know it is for cooking.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘So why the fuck are you shovelling at the fire with it? Christ, Nick, as if it isn’t bad enough that you hide out here—’

  ‘Hide?’

  ‘How do you think that makes Daddy feel, or Mummy? Their own son-in-law, not even bothering to come and say hello?’

  ‘But I assumed you would be bringing them straight out here…’ Nick glanced hopelessly in the direction of the kitchen, noting that the heads of his in-laws had been joined by those of the Scammells.

  ‘I have to do everything, do you realise that? Every-fucking-thing.’

  ‘I’ll come in now, of course. I just thought you…’

  But she was already striding away, flicking her hand dismissively over her head in the I-give-up gesture that had the sharp, double power to make him feel both furious and ineffectual. He had often thought that to be treated as purely irrelevant would have been preferable. But Donna wasn’t like that; she liked to poke him with a stick and then storm away, blocking the possibility of explanations or reconciliation. That came later, on her terms, and usually – maddeningly – without any willingness to discuss what had caused the outburst. Indeed, her most common default reaction was to behave as if the outburst hadn’t even happened, precluding the possibility of solving its root cause. Her mood simply changed and she expected Nick to change with it.

  Nick stared after his wife. Her lithe body swayed as she moved, making the shape of its curves tantalisingly visible through the expensive cloth of the dress. It still astounded him that such unpleasantness could erupt out of such beauty. Early on, he had felt not only attracted to, but somehow safe with Donna’s looks; seeing them with mad subconscious logic as insurance against the possibility of ever leading an ugly life. It had taken years for the naivety of this assumption to sink in. Indeed, it was only really with the imminence of his fortieth birthday that he had started to face up to it, driven by unhappiness to the sort of introspection that he had spent a life-time avoiding.

  The introspection had wrought a certain despair. Tilly had been strikingly pretty, a petite brunette who turned heads; Kat’s wild elfin beauty had been in an order all its own; on his elective in Sri Lanka there had been a sultry Spanish nurse, in possession of a healthy sexual appetite and a boyfriend in Manchester. And then there had been Donna, jigging to keep warm at an inter-hospital rugby match soon after his return, chattering about how she had just started working as a PA in London. It had been a steely day at the end of February, seeping drizzle, and she had seemed to throw light at it. Two years later they were married. Six years after that, with his father-in-law oiling the wheels on all fronts, they had made the move to Cape Town.

  Did female beauty make him stupid? Was he just a walking cliché?

  Nick looked round for something to cover the meat. It had occurred to him that he needed to get into the kitchen fast, if there was to be any hope of re-establishing matrimonial peace. But the fly had returned to the plate with a cohort of followers. The steaks were sweating and succulent, so red they were almost blue. He would just have to take them with him. Nick picked up the plate and hurried round the pool. As he reached the garden room doors, Donna stepped through them, followed by their guests. Jim, her father, came first, right on her shoulder, bearing an ice bucket containing – Nick could see at a glance – a different bottle from the one he himself had placed inside it an hour or so before.

  ‘Nick. How you doing?’ It seemed to Nick that the ice bucket was a pretext for not shaking hands. ‘I brought something special – a Chardo
nnay – barrel fermented – from a Durbanville vineyard now being run by a friend of mine. Dean Cobalt. Good man. And the wine isn’t bad either. It will win awards, mark my words.’ Jim rattled the bucket. ‘There’s another keeping cool in the fridge. I brought a couple of his reds too, Cabernet Sauvignons. I’ve opened them to breathe.’

  ‘Thanks, that’s really generous.’ Nick forced out the gratitude and accompanying smile, marvelling that gifts could feel so like coercion. There had been countless others in the past, ranging from horses to holidays. Even work. It was largely due to pressure from his father-in-law that he now did the highly paid day of cosmetic surgery at a private clinic downtown. It would see off the girls’ university fees, Jim had pointed out sharply, when Nick had dared to express doubts about accepting the networking that had produced the possibility of the post. In the end, predictably, Donna had joined the fray and Nick had succumbed, accepting that the extra income made sense, since keeping up with his wife’s idea of living well at the same time as privately educating their daughters was already blowing large, regular holes in his domestic budgeting.

  But inwardly Nick had resented the strong-arm tactics. It had made him see more clearly than ever that his father-in-law was a man forged out of granite, with his own agenda. Physically, Jim Cruick exuded a powerful force too, his Dutch ancestry having dealt him the same piercing blue eyes he had passed onto his daughter and thick sandy-gold hair, which still showed no trace of grey and which he kept cropped in vertical spikes, like bristles on a boot-scraper. He had been a rugby player in his youth, tried out for the Springboks, and still had the wide neck and a tank of a chest to prove it. Well into his sixties, he now boasted about maintaining his fitness in the gym or through horseback riding round the formidable Stellenbosch property he had acquired and extended through his success in real estate. It was where Donna and the girls kept the horses he had given them, ensuring that riding with Grandad was always a favourite weekend treat.

  ‘We are sorry the girls aren’t here,’ cried Lauren, his mother-in-law, her bangles jangling as she grasped one of Nick’s arms with both hands. ‘Aren’t we sorry, Jim?’ She threw the words carelessly in the direction of her husband, making the big gold loops lancing her ears swing like wind chimes. Her hair was white and expensively styled in high waves. She was wearing one of her tent-dresses, a medley of electric greens and blues designed to accentuate the lingering prettiness of her strong grey eyes and mask the swell of her sizeable midriff. Compared to Jim, she looked an old woman. The difference was almost comical.

  Nick kissed her on both cheeks, feeling a burst of sympathetic affection. Living with his father-in-law could not be easy. Moving on to greet the Scammells, he was aware of the stiffening of his smile and the grit of tiredness under his eyelids. He had hit a particularly bad patch of sleeping, making trips to the bathroom just to relieve the tedium of lying in bed. Lingering in front of the basin mirror in the small hours that morning, he had found himself wondering how the years had treated the Keating sisters. Lately, he had been struggling to picture either of them clearly, even as young girls. Whenever he tried, all that came to mind, vividly, was the voice in the emails, intelligent, playful, fresh. Honest.

  Rapidly and unexpectedly, the dinner party grew enjoyable. It helped that the wind, like a fan turned off at the mains, suddenly dropped, leaving a balmy warmth that caressed their bare skin. The pool, with its underwater lights, became a huge emerald mirror. On the table, the candles glinted in their vases like jewels in glass cases. The steaks were buttery-soft and Nick highly praised for his outdoor cooking skills. Jim’s wines slid smoothly over the tongue and throat, making any resentment about being forced to consume them seem churlish. When Mike got out his iPad to start making notes of the grapes and labels, Jim insisted that he would organise a visit to Dean Cobalt’s vineyard. A multi-course lunch of tastings for all six of them – it would be his treat and a great day out, he boomed, in the tone he favoured, the one that defied contradiction.

  Donna floated off to the kitchen with the dirty plates and floated back again, bearing a tray of mountainous fruit salad, home-made chocolate brownies and a tub of organic vanilla ice cream. As it was the weekend they had sent their kitchen help home. After setting the food on the table, she took a detour to her own chair via Nick’s, pausing to trail her fingers up the back of his neck and under the cuff of his hair. He was being forgiven. An involuntary shiver of pleasure rippled over his skull. Maybe the forgiveness would stretch to sex. That didn’t happen often. Nick rubbed his arms, aware of the shiver of pleasure disappearing as quickly as it had come. He caught his father-in-law watching him, steel flashing in the dark blue eyes, as sharp as any sword.

  After their guests had gone, and they were clearing up, the atmosphere of truce prevailed; an atmosphere that Nick, as ever, felt little inclination to jeopardise with defensive questions or recriminations about what had gone before. With Donna, saying the wrong thing was akin to pressing a detonator. Shouting, hitting. Sometimes things got thrown.

  She had her back to him and was busy transferring the leftover salads to smaller containers for stowing in the fridge. The pulses had barely been touched. ‘Daddy says he is going to put one of the flats in the new Waterfront condo in trust for Sash and Nat. Like a nest egg for them. Isn’t that insanely generous?’

  ‘Goodness, yes. Insane.’

  She spun round, her cat-eyes wide with the readiness to take affront. ‘Are you taking the piss?’

  ‘No. I am agreeing.’ Nick found a laugh escaping. Her quickness to take offence was absurd and yet somehow always caught him off guard.

  She spun back to the fridge, restacking shelves to make room for the Tupperware. ‘With your recent midlife career crisis it makes me feel more secure, anyway. For the girls’ future, if not my own.’

  ‘I haven’t had a career crisis.’ Nick braced himself. He had hoped the truce might be more resilient, one of those that lasted for several days.

  ‘No, right. A top consultant wanting to become a teacher.’ Her tone was sneering, but she still had the pretence of a grin fixed in place when she turned round. ‘Not to mention all these sudden urges about visiting the UK.’ She wagged a finger at him. ‘Pretending you want to rush off and see your mother, whom you hate anyway, when it’s perfectly clear you’re really after a sneaky closer look at this school teacher idea, talk to some old chums.’ She gave the word a faux posh English accent, the one that once upon a time had made him smile. ‘And as for how you could even consider trading in what we have here for a life like that…’ She shook her head in disgusted wonderment.

  ‘I don’t hate my mother,’ Nick said levelly. ‘She’s hard work, I admit. Since losing Dad, she’s not been the same, but that doesn’t stop my sense of duty—’

  ‘Which is why we are going in January. I have agreed we are going to bloody England in bloody January, have I not?’ Donna’s once professed fondness for his homeland had sunk over the years beyond her own recollection, let alone retrieval. She hated the weather, the food, the traffic, quite apart from her mother-in-law.

  ‘Yes, you have. And thank you for that.’ Nick spoke firmly and as warmly as he could manage, resisting the urge to remind her that the January plan was the poor compromise, reached thanks to her pulling out of the original agreement to visit England in September. A suggestion that he go on his own had proved one of those unforeseeable detonator moments. She didn’t trust him, she had shrieked, throwing a mug that time; she didn’t trust him with life choices, with women, with anything. The mug had somersaulted through the air, giving him plenty of time to duck. And since Kat had been half on his mind at the time, he had climbed down with guilt for once, rather than suppressed outrage, sweeping up the broken fragments, soothing her with the idea of postponing to a visit in the New Year instead.

  ‘Though why your mother can’t come and see us…’ Donna started fiercely, but then let the sentence hang. This was slightly less safe ground. The last thing she wante
d was a visit from Carol Wharton, as they both knew. What they also both knew was that since her mother-in-law barely ventured out of the small Cheltenham flat to which she had retreated in widowhood, there was little chance of her bluff being called.

  Nick hesitated. It was always a question of picking which battles to fight. ‘Yes, well, you know how she is.’

  ‘Yes, I bloody do.’

  ‘So January it is.’

  ‘Yes. But only if you promise to drop all this fucking crazy teacher talk once and for all,’ Donna countered bitterly. ‘You don’t mean it, do you? You can’t mean it.’ She slammed the fridge door and turned to face him, hands on hips.

  ‘It was just an idea,’ Nick said quietly, regretting for the umpteenth time that he had ever been foolhardy enough to broach the subject out loud. ‘Surely,’ Nick went on carefully, ‘one should be able to have a few off-the-wall ideas and share them with one’s partner. As you know, teaching literature was something I used to want to do. And now that I’m getting past the age where…’ He paused.

  Donna was fiddling with the fridge magnets which had slipped out of their usual places thanks to her slam of the door. A Barbie logo, a figure of the Little Mermaid, a plastic hamburger, a smiley face; relics of a lost time, it seemed to Nick suddenly, of lost hope, lost innocence.

  ‘I was just airing an idea,’ he tried again, speaking very calmly and gently to her back. ‘I love our lifestyle here, as you well know, and there is so much about being a doctor that I like too. I know I am good at it. And, as things stand, I couldn’t afford to switch careers anyway.’