by Liz Byrski
Brooke reckons it’s school that keeps her sane. She has friends; Donna is probably the closest, even though they don’t hang out together much, not like some of the others. Some of the girls call her ‘the cat that walks alone’ but in a nice kind of way and the school’s not bad. Some of the teachers are quite cool, so at least her parents got one thing right. At twelve Brooke had fallen in love with Mademoiselle Marchand, who had arrived fresh from Lyons to teach French and Spanish. French is now her strongest subject and she is obsessed with all things French. Sometimes she makes herself feel better by fantasising that she is not her parents’ daughter, but the love child of a glamorous French couple. The philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy would do fine for her father, she’s seen pictures of him in Vanity Fair. He was wearing a white linen shirt, open almost to the waist, a cream linen jacket and jeans, and looked more like a movie star than a philosopher. At one point she had thought that Mademoiselle Marchand, with her long dark hair, always slicked back in a neat bun like a ballerina, and with her selection of elegant suits and little black linen dresses, would be divine as a mother. But recently her fantasies have become more ambitious, and she fancies the idea of someone more exotic – a beautiful and eccentric writer or singer perhaps. Brooke hasn’t yet decided on a specific candidate for mother, Colette might have been good or Anaïs Nin, but unfortunately they are both dead. She’s considered and dismissed Juliette Greco and Simone Signoret, and is now close to settling for Juliette Binoche. But the way she feels now, as the plane reaches cruising height for the flight back to Melbourne, is that anyone would be better than Linda.
Peering down at the Tasmanian coastline still partially visible through the cloud she thinks about her grandmother, getting all stroppy with them the previous day. She’d never seen Nan like that before, it was always Granddad who told people off and got into arguments with her father and Auntie Kerry. This new version of Nan was different and interesting. This morning, just before they left, they’d been in Granddad’s old study and Brooke had chosen a paperweight that she wanted as a memento. She’d stood there, watching Connie wrapping bubble wrap around the paperweight, thinking how little she knew about her.
‘What did you want to do when you were my age, Nan?’ she’d asked.
Connie stopped wrapping and looked up. ‘A singer,’ she’d said. ‘I was a really good singer at school, and the teacher told me I should study music.’
Brooke was amazed, she’d never heard anything about her Nan singing.
‘So did you do it?’
Connie had closed the top of Brooke’s bag and leaned on it. ‘No. Well, yes and no. Mum got me a voice coach and when I finished school I auditioned for the Guildhall School of Music, which was the place to go in London in those days. I had to wait around and it was really competitive but eventually I was accepted. It was difficult because by that time my father had raced off to Spain with another woman and Mum and I were really hard up. I had to work part time as well. The only thing I was any good at, apart from singing, was French, like you, Brooke, so I got a part time job waiting tables in a French restaurant. It was the only way we could afford for me to stay on at the Guildhall.’
‘Did you want to be in musicals and stuff?’ Brooke asked.
Connie laughed. ‘No, although I suppose I wouldn’t have minded that. I wanted to be an opera singer, I wanted it desperately, and apparently I was quite good.’
‘So why did you stop?’
There was a longish pause, then her Nan had looked up and out of the window before turning back to her.
‘In the middle of my final year, I had an audition coming up and I’d already done two small solo concerts but then Mum died, quite suddenly in an accident. I was on my own. Flora, my best friend – your granddad’s sister – was in India, and so Granddad stepped in to help. He just sort of scooped me up and took over everything, but I dropped out of study that term and I just didn’t go back.’
‘But why?’ Brooke asked.
Connie sighed. ‘I’ve asked myself that so often, Brooke,’ she’d said. ‘I still do. It’s complicated. Things changed from Gerald just helping me. We started going out together and instead of just being a friend he became my boyfriend,’ she’d hesitated then and looked away from Brooke, then back again. ‘Then, a few months later, we got engaged.’
The silence seemed awkward suddenly and Brooke wondered if she’d said something to upset her Nan.
‘But what about the singing? You must have kept on singing?’
Connie shook her head. ‘No, I always meant to but somehow it just didn’t seem to fit in with married life.’
Brooke dropped down abruptly to perch on the arm of the sofa. ‘But lots of opera singers are married, Nan.’
‘Of course they are today, Brooke, and yes, I suppose it wasn’t uncommon then, but it was more common for women to give up their careers when they got married. Especially in a family like Granddad’s who were rather old-fashioned and conservative.’ She paused. ‘Anyway, thankfully things are very different now, women have more choices.’
‘Yes, but it’s so sad for you …’
‘No, darling, it’s not.’ Connie looked Brooke in the eye. ‘I married a good man, I’ve been happy and very lucky. I’d always wanted a family, even as little girl I told my mother I wanted two children, a boy and girl. I got them and I got you, Ryan and Mia as well.’
‘I suppose.’ They are silent for a moment. ‘I still think it’s sad though. Didn’t you ever do any singing?’
‘A bit. I joined a choir when we lived in London, and we sang in some little local concerts, but then I got pregnant, and we moved here to Australia, and that was the end of singing.’
Brooke had run her fingers along the worn leather of the sofa arm. ‘Didn’t you mind?’
Connie smiled. ‘It’s not as straightforward as that. There were times when I wished I’d gone on with my career, you know, tried to have it all. But none of us gets everything we want, Brooke, you learn about compromise and also you learn to appreciate what you have got.’
Brooke nodded. ‘I suppose …’ she hesitated. ‘I’m never going to get married.’
Connie nodded. ‘Okay, but you may not always feel like that.’
Brooke had zipped up her bag and turned back to her. ‘Nan, now that Granddad’s …’
‘Now that he’s dead?’
‘Yes,’ she was sure she was blushing, ‘could I come here sometime and stay with you?’
Connie had looked at her then in a way Brooke had never seen her look before.
‘Wouldn’t it be boring for you?’
She shook her head. ‘It’d be so cool to be here and just hang out with you. We could talk French to each other when there’s no one else around.’
‘I’d love it too, darling,’ she said, ‘really love it. I’ve missed out on so much of your life, of everyone’s lives while … well, anyway, do come, when I get back. In the school holidays. Meanwhile I’ll send you some pictures and tell you about the places I go. You don’t have to read it all, just …’
‘I’ll read it,’ Brooke had cut in. ‘All of it, and write about Auntie Flora because she’s so mysterious, no one ever talks about her.’
Connie had paused then, and given her that funny look again. ‘No, no they don’t. But I will – I promise.’
‘Come on, Brooke,’ Andrew had called up from downstairs. ‘The taxi’s here, we’ll be late for the flight.’
‘I’ll write to you, Brooke, and I’ll tell you about Flora, I promise,’ Connie had said as she led the way downstairs.
‘Whatever have you been doing?’ her father had asked, taking her bag.
‘We were talking,’ Connie had said. ‘Brooke would like to come to stay with me when I get back.’
Andrew straightened up. ‘Really? Won’t that be a lot of trouble for you?’
‘Oh Andrew, really!’ her nan said. ‘Sometimes I wonder what planet you live on.’ And she’d hugged Brooke and given her a little pus
h towards the backseat of the cab. And then she’d hugged her father and Brooke heard her say, ‘You need to chill out, darling, or you’ll be dead before you’re fifty.’ And she kissed him and he’d got into the car looking as though someone had punched him.
Brooke fiddles with her headphones and sinks further into her seat wondering what she would be willing to give up to marry a stupid man. She wishes she’d asked Connie whether giving up her music to marry Granddad was really the right decision, because if she’d gone back to music school and ended up being an opera singer she wouldn’t have had to spend years looking after an old man and waiting for him to die. Perhaps she was just being brave.
Brooke thinks of her granddad, and the last time she saw him. She sort of loved him, she supposed, but by the time she’d been old enough to get to know him properly he was pretty sick, hard to talk to, often hard to understand. She’d hated it when his food dribbled out of the side of his mouth, or his nose ran. She knew it was wrong of her to mind those things, but she couldn’t seem to help feeling that way. It was hard to think of him as a normal person, hard to try to love him when he slurred his speech like a drunk, and bits of him jerked around as though they had a life of their own.
Brooke shakes her head and skips a couple of tracks on the iPod. I am never going to get married, she reminds herself, and I’ll never have children, and I will never ever give up anything for some stupid boy who wants to marry me.
*
They agree to share the drive home to Launceston and Kerry, irritated and ill at ease after her encounter with an unusually assertive Connie, takes the first shift. Mia is asleep in minutes, Ryan plugged into some game on his iPod, and once out of the city Chris drops his seat to a reclining position. Kerry takes a quick sideways glance at him and sees that his eyes are closed. It’s a relief; the last thing she wants is some sort of post mortem on the way home. She’s always an anxious driver and so is at her best behind the wheel in an otherwise empty car, or not involved in a conversation. The tension in her body relaxes slightly and she shifts her position and at that moment Chris brings his seat upright again.
‘You were a shocker yesterday,’ he says. ‘An absolute shocker. I can’t think what got into you.’
‘I was just saying what I thought. I don’t see what’s wrong with that. It’s my father that’s died, I’m entitled …’
‘Grief does not entitle you to be rude and hurtful, love. Your ma is grieving too and she has a perfect right to go anywhere she likes, with whomever she likes, and what she said about us not helping was absolutely spot on.’
‘I couldn’t face it, you know I couldn’t,’ Kerry says, ‘having to do all that stuff for him, washing him, feeding him, cleaning him up when … well … sorting out his clothes. He was my father – I shouldn’t have to do that.’
‘Unbelievable,’ Chris says, shaking his head, and he turns away from her, looking out of the passenger window. ‘Y’know, Kerry, one of the things I love most about you, always have done, is your relentlessness in telling it how it is. But yesterday you were set on telling it how it isn’t, grabbing at straws and turning them to cudgels to beat your mother with. There’s a difference between assertiveness and aggression, and you really crossed the line.’
Kerry’s heart is pounding in her chest and she feels the heat of the embarrassing crimson blush that always gives her away. She hates it when Chris disapproves of something she’s said or done, but she’s always been able to handle it and make her case. Now it rocks her because she knows she was in the wrong, but can’t admit it. To do so would rip apart the suffocating blanket that has been threatening to smother her for months now, and that simply won’t shift.
‘I had to say what I thought about the house,’ she says, hearing the defensiveness of her tone. ‘It’s my responsibility to let Mum know my concerns about her staying there alone.’
Chris lets out a short laugh. ‘That’s bullshit. If that were really a concern for you, you’d have been talking about it with me months ago when we knew your dad was close to the end. Yesterday was not about the house and where Connie should live. And what was all that stuff about Farah? “She’s not one of us!” What’s that supposed to mean? Not what it sounds like, I hope. You teach Muslim kids at school. You get on all right with their parents, you’ve signed petitions for onshore processing and against the treatment of asylum seekers.’
‘They don’t stay in my house,’ Kerry says, searching for a justifiable position. ‘It’s different.’
‘No it’s not. Don’t play games with me about this, Kerry. Anyway it’s not your house and before your da disappeared into wherever he disappeared to he was okay with Farah doing all the things you couldn’t face doing. And now you’re spitting chips because she’s going to stay in the house and look after the dog? I don’t know what’s going on with you, but I do know that none of this is really about where Connie lives, nor about Farah.’
Kerry feels nausea rising in her chest. She swings the car sharply onto the hard shoulder, slams on the brakes and snaps off her seatbelt. In seconds she is out of the car and striding towards a wooden bench that overlooks a sweep of fields scattered with a few sheep. Breathing deeply to calm the nausea, she drops down on the bench and sinks her head in her hands. She and Chris have always been frank with each other; she’d demanded that of him from the early days of their relationship. Since she was old enough to understand what was happening between her parents she had watched time and again as her mother bottled her own feelings and opinions and went along with what her father wanted. Kerry had come to understand that this was Connie’s well-intentioned effort to keep the peace, to provide a home life free of parental dissent and argument. But it had always irritated her, she had thought her mother worthy and capable of so much more, but she had never broached the subject. Kerry loved her father, but had come to resent the routine acquiescence to his wishes and demands – demands that were still respected when he was no longer capable of expressing them.
‘So what’s happening?’ Chris says, sitting down beside her on the bench.
Kerry shrugs; she feels remote from him, almost numb.
‘Look, darlin’, you can’t go on like this – you really upset your ma. Sure, you lost your pa, but she’s lost her husband.’
Tears crawl down Kerry’s cheeks and Chris offers her his handkerchief.
‘It’s the selfishness,’ she says eventually, and her voice sounds cold and distant, as though the numbness has taken over. ‘The selfishness of it all.’
‘Selfishness?’
‘Yes, all the time – ever since the kids were born – she’s never been there for me. Everyone else’s mother is ready to take their kids, ready to help out, but not my mother. No babysitting, no taking the kids overnight, helping out with all the work, nothing.’ She knows it’s all wrong but she’s digging herself in deeper now.
Chris inhales sharply. ‘Darlin’, we live more than two hours’ drive away, Connie could hardly pop over to babysit for the afternoon. Besides, she’s been looking after Gerald full-time virtually since Ryan was born, and all of Mia’s life. And she did drive up for an occasional day and stay overnight when she could get someone to look after him.’
‘Oh you always make excuses for her, don’t you? According to you she’s the bloody perfect motherin-law, I suppose.’
‘I’m very fond of her. I admire her and, yes, as a motherin-law she’s as good as they get. What is this all about?’
‘Well, she may be the best motherin-law but she’s been a lousy mother and grandmother, so wouldn’t you think that now that she’s free she’d jump at the chance to put that right? She could sell that place straight away and come up to Launceston, but no, she won’t even talk about it. Instead she’s going off on this ridiculous holiday for lord knows how long …’
‘Okay,’ Chris says, standing up. ‘This is totally unreasonable. Come on, get back in the car, we’re going home and I’ll drive.’ And she watches as he walks back to the car, s
lides into the driving seat, starts the engine and sits there waiting.
Kerry sighs and rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands. So now she’s made things even worse. She gets to her feet and takes a last look out across the countryside. It’s all so beautiful, so green, so pure, the sheep grazing peacefully in the distance. Chris always says that Tasmania captured his heart because in so many ways it is so like his home in southern Ireland.
‘And you’re just like the women in my family,’ he’d told her when they first met. ‘Formidable they are, smart, feisty women with their feet on the ground, who’ll argue the hind leg off a donkey when they believe in something. I love that in you.’
She shakes her head, takes a deep breath and turns back towards the car.
‘So I’ve stuffed that,’ she tells herself. ‘My feet are nowhere near the ground and I don’t seem to believe in anything right now.’ And she walks back to the car, gets into the passenger seat, fastens her seatbelt, and turns away from Chris towards the window, wishing she could just reach out and touch him, touch anyone in a way that would help her understand what’s happening to her.
Four
Port d’Esprit, March 2012
Flora weaves her way between the café tables out to the edge of the pavement, screws up her eyes and peers down the quayside hoping for a glimpse of the yellow Renault heading back to the hotel. Nothing. Sighing with frustration she checks her watch again – ten to four. Suzanne had promised to be back by three-thirty at the latest; if she doesn’t show up in the next five minutes Flora will have to take the old Citroën van to St Malo to meet Connie’s train.
All around her the pre-Easter holidaymakers are sipping tea and coffee or dawdling over wine, and Flora feels a stab of envy trying to remember the last time she had a real holiday. The year-round nature of the hotel business isn’t conducive to holidays, although twice a year Suzanne always finds time to spend with her parents, who have retired to the south of France. Flora’s occasional trips back to England don’t qualify as holidays, being only a few days at a time, and usually packed with commitments. Last time she had stayed overnight in Nottingham with an old colleague from her teaching days, and they had gone together to visit a mutual friend who was seeing out his final weeks in a hospice. From there she’d gone to London to squeeze in a film and an exhibition, and the next day a meeting with a solicitor about her will – not that she really has much to leave – and an appointment with the dentist. When she got back she was more exhausted than when she’d left. The days of three-week holidays in a hotel, fed, watered, laundered, and with the freedom to wander aimlessly, paddle, lie on a beach, or sit in a café and read a book, are long past.
