Family Secrets

by Liz Byrski

  ‘Are you still sure it’s this room you want?’ Andrew says, appearing in the doorway. ‘The other one’s bigger.’

  ‘I know, but this is nicer,’ Brooke says, sitting cross-legged on the carpet in the space where her bed will go. ‘It’s really pretty and I like the view of the garden.’

  Andrew nods, and walks across to sit down beside her. ‘So – happy now?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Brooke says, grinning. ‘I love this place, it’s much nicer than the townhouse, and it’s nicer than home too. It’s like a little cottage.’

  ‘It is a little cottage,’ Andrew says, walking to the window. ‘I like the garden. I’ve always fancied having a proper garden, growing some things.’

  Brooke edges closer and leans against him. ‘Thanks, Dad. It’ll be good living with you. I promise I’ll do heaps to help.’

  He smiles. ‘I know you will. We need to work out a plan for when I have to go away. It’s not a place for you to be on your own for several days at a time, but I guess we can deal with that when it happens.’

  ‘I’d be fine here alone, Dad. It’d be cool.’

  Andrew screws up his face. ‘Your mum won’t be happy about it, and I don’t think I would. But maybe she’d come here to stay with you.’

  ‘Anything as long as I don’t ever have to see The Man in Black again in my whole life, ever,’ Brooke says.

  ‘Well, that might be a tough call. Let’s wait and see how things go,’ Andrew says. ‘But at least this is a good start. Anyway, we should work out furniture and whatever else we’ll need. We’ll have to buy some things – sofa, chairs, kitchen table – and I can’t see your mother parting with any of the kitchen stuff. It’s going to be a bit like camping at first. But I thought we could go and get some of the small things now, and maybe order some furniture this afternoon.’

  ‘Brilliant.’ Brooke scrambles to her feet. ‘We could buy a kettle and mugs and get sandwiches and come back here. It’ll be like we’ve moved in already.’ She reaches down to drag him up.

  ‘We’d better get a heater too,’ he says, looking around. ‘A couple probably. These old stone cottages can get pretty chilly in winter.’ He straightens his jeans and with a final look around the room he follows Brooke out along the passage into the garden.

  *

  This is not at all the sort of place that Andrew had in mind for himself and Brooke. By the time their first choice fell through, the weather had changed; it rained for days on end and darker evenings made it difficult to see places after work. They missed several opportunities because they were snapped up before they’d had a chance to view them. The weekends were packed with disappointing visits to properties that were nothing like the estate agents’ descriptions. Brooke was moody and impatient and while Andrew understood how unhappy she was, the relentless pressure to find somewhere quickly soon began to wear him down. Her constant questions had started to irritate him and he had stopped returning her calls immediately as he had been doing at the start of this drawn-out saga.

  ‘If you really cared about me you’d have got me out of there by now,’ she’d cried, and Andrew had wanted to shake her. Linda was screeching at him over the phone almost every evening about something or other, and now here was Brooke pulling the old emotional blackmail trick.

  ‘Okay,’ he’d said in response to her outburst, swinging the car over to the side of the road and switching off the engine. ‘Now listen to me, Brooke. I’m doing the best I can as fast as I can but these things just don’t happen overnight. I know it’s not nice for you being there, it’s not nice for me either – living in that freezing rat hole above the gallery. But I have managed to get your mum to agree to your coming with me, and I’m constantly checking the internet listings to find places for us to look at. So why don’t you just shut up, stop whingeing and help. Get on the iPad and search. You know what we need and what I can afford, so you see if you can do it faster.’

  It had taken her ten days to find this place, which doesn’t fit any of the criteria they had agreed on. It’s further from her school, although it is on a direct bus route. It’s a cottage with a garden as opposed to a flat or a townhouse with a small, easy-care yard, and it has all the irritations and inconveniences of an old house; the possibility of insects and mice hiding in those gaps between the floorboards and the wainscoting, and a garden to look after. But it also has charm and character in abundance, a newly renovated kitchen and bathroom, and the garden doesn’t look like too much trouble.

  ‘It looks really cute and it’s cheaper, too,’ Brooke had said. And he’d loved her for that.

  He’d loved her, too, for picking a place on which Linda would not have wasted a second glance, a place that looked homely and comfortable, although of course the reality would certainly be that throughout the year it would be either too hot or too cold, and need more cleaning than he wanted to do. But from the moment they had pulled up outside it for the first time earlier in the week, he knew that this was the right place for the two of them to be.

  ‘Do you think you’d be okay here alone if I go and live with Nan?’ Brooke had asked.

  And Andrew had laughed and said, ‘If that happened I’d be fine, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.’

  She’d nodded. ‘Good, because if I did and then had to come back to Melbourne to go to uni I’d still love to live here.’

  Linda was, of course, horrified when Brooke had shown her the ad for the cottage on the internet. ‘It’ll be freezing, darling,’ she’d said, ‘and old places are so dirty.’

  ‘It’s beautifully clean,’ Andrew had reassured her. ‘The carpets and curtains are all new. It’s just been repainted, the bathroom and kitchen are renovated, there’s nothing to worry about.’ And to his surprise Linda had just shrugged.

  ‘Oh well,’ she’d said, ‘if that’s what you both want, it’ll be your problem.’

  And he’d thought she looked incredibly fed up, and tired. It can’t have been easy living with Brooke and Zachary at loggerheads, and Brooke so hostile towards her. But now, as he and Brooke close the cottage door behind them and walk down the path, he wonders how it will be if he does get involved with someone else in the future. How would it be to have his new partner in the house with Brooke? But that’s too hard to think about right now.

  ‘So – shopping then?’ he asks, slipping into the driving seat.

  ‘Yep,’ Brooke nods. ‘I texted Nan some pictures. I wish she was here.’

  ‘So do I,’ he says. ‘We haven’t seen enough of her for a long time. I want to put that right.’ And as he says that he feels a terrible aching longing for his childhood, for the time when everything seemed so solid and certain and when, however boring, rigid and unreasonable his parents seemed, there was always the comfort of knowing that one of them, usually his mother, would always be there if something went wrong.

  *

  It’s late on Sunday evening when Andrew drops Brooke home. Together they have made a list of the things they want to take to the new house and he is hoping that Linda isn’t going to start an argument over what he can and can’t take. He wants the fighting to end and he’s already sensed that Linda might be getting close to breaking point. She hates uncertainty but she hates mess even more, and each time he has been back to the house to collect Brooke, evidence of Zachary’s mess is all around. All the signs are that while Linda is not starting to regret their separation, she might well be regretting letting Zachary move in with her.

  ‘I know our marriage was falling apart for a long time,’ he’d said to her on one occasion. ‘But Zachary, well, he’s the last person I’d ever imagine …’

  ‘Stop there,’ Linda had said, holding up her hand. ‘I don’t need to know what you think of Zach or anything else. That’s my business.’

  Andrew had shrugged and walked out to wait for Brooke by the car, wondering how Linda was really feeling and whether she was actually allowing herself to imagine what it would be like when Brooke was gone.

&
nbsp; ‘We’re back, Mum,’ Brooke calls now as she opens the front door. ‘Dad needs to see you.’ And she heads on up the stairs with Andrew following her.

  ‘Hi,’ Brooke says, dropping her bag on the floor and looking around. ‘Is he … ?’

  ‘Zach’s out,’ Linda cuts in, getting to her feet. She looks across at Andrew. ‘I was expecting you earlier.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he says, ‘we had stuff to sort out,’ and he hands her the list. ‘These are the things I’d like to collect next Saturday. I’ve booked a removal van with a driver and we’ll stop by and pick up Brooke and this stuff at about ten o’clock. Just email me if you’ve got any problems with it.’

  Linda takes the list from him and glances down at it. He thinks she looks totally exhausted; some light inside her seems to have been extinguished and he feels a sudden stab of concern for her, but it is gone as quickly as it arrived.

  ‘Okay,’ Linda says, looking up from the list. ‘This looks fine.’ And then she really takes him by surprise. ‘You both look worn out. Would you like a drink or a cup of tea or something before you go, Andrew?’

  He shakes his head. ‘No thanks.’ He hugs Brooke. ‘Talk to you tomorrow. Ring me when the lit exam is over,’ then turns to Linda. ‘See you Saturday. G’night.’

  ‘Night, Dad,’ Brooke says.

  As he makes his way down the stairs he’s suddenly aware that Linda is following him.

  ‘Andrew – just a minute …’

  He stops and turns back, waiting, expecting her to have changed her mind about something on the list.

  ‘I just …’ She stops and puts her hands to her face for a moment. ‘I … oh, this is all so awful – I’m so sick of arguing, and I’m dreading Brooke moving out.’

  There are tears in her eyes and Andrew is shaken by the sudden wave of compassion that washes over him.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure you are,’ he says, going back up one step and putting his hand on her arm.

  ‘Could we … ?’ Another hesitation. ‘Could we talk. Properly, I mean, without arguing? I mean for Brooke’s sake – well, for all our sakes …’

  It’s him who’s hesitating now. Part of him thinks it may not be possible to avoid arguing over things that matter so much to both of them, but this is a side of Linda that he’s not seen for a very long time. Vulnerability. ‘Of course,’ he says. ‘We can give it go.’

  ‘Tomorrow perhaps? We could have lunch? That place near your office we used to go to.’

  He nods. ‘Twelve-thirty?’

  ‘Fine,’ she says. ‘And thanks.’ She turns and goes back up the stairs.

  As Andrew gets to the front door he hears Linda call out to their daughter: ‘Brooke, darling, don’t go to bed just yet. I thought we might have some hot chocolate and a chat …’

  ‘Sorry, Mum, got revision for tomorrow,’ Brooke says. ‘Lit exam. Night!’

  And he pauses in the silence, and hears the crack in Linda’s voice as she calls out to Brooke to sleep well, and then the silence again, the deadening grief of it, and he has to fight the urge to run back and comfort her as he used to do years ago, so many years ago, when they were different people in a different relationship.

  Seventeen

  Flora is sitting at the table in the hotel room checking the cinema listings and wondering if she would have preferred to be going to the opera after all. Connie’s excitement has made her think that maybe she too should have gone off to buy a new dress, and treated it like a special occasion. In their youth she had made an effort to learn more about opera, so that she might enjoy it for Connie’s sake, but it remained an act of friendship rather than a personal choice. A good play, the ballet, or a classical concert she loved, but when it came to opera she never quite got it. What she had enjoyed, though, had been Connie’s passion; the way she explained the characters and the stories, all the titbits she knew about the idiosyncrasies of the various singers, and the ways in which a different director might have approached it. For Connie it truly was a magnificent obsession, so when Flora abandoned the Maharishi and made her way home, she had been stunned to discover that Connie’s attention was now elsewhere.

  ‘But you can’t just give it up,’ Flora remembers saying. ‘You’ve wanted this since you were twelve, and you were thrilled when you got into the Guildhall.’ She can still see Connie’s face – the deep blush, the conflicting emotions, the way she dropped her gaze before responding.

  ‘I might not be good enough,’ she’d said, mustering enough confidence to meet Flora’s eyes again. ‘You have to have exceptional talent.’

  ‘And have they told you that you don’t have it?’

  ‘Gerald says …’

  ‘Bugger Gerald,’ Flora had said. ‘What does he know about it? The lecturers, what do they say?’

  Connie had shrugged. ‘They said I was …’ she’d hesitated, blushing, looking away again. ‘They said I was outstanding.’

  ‘Well, then … ?’

  ‘But Gerald …’ Another hesitation, another justification that she was struggling to believe. ‘Gerald doesn’t think I’m emotionally suited to the life of the opera. I lack stamina.’

  Flora remembers that she sank down onto the edge of Connie’s bed, put her head in her hands, let forth a chain of abuse about her brother and then challenged Connie over whom she wanted to run her life. She reminded her about the hugely encouraging feedback she’d received on her audition, and of how much her mother had wanted this for her. It all got very uncomfortable after that and it was obvious that her intervention was simply making things harder for Connie, so she’d backed off. But she’d had it out later with Gerald, who had accused her of making trouble because she didn’t want him to marry Connie.

  ‘Well, if you’re going to ruin her life by stopping her from doing the one thing she’s always wanted then no, I don’t,’ she’d said.

  But she’d known by then that the die was cast. Connie, emotionally bereft at thirteen when her father left the country and never contacted her or her mother again, was fair game for a man who professed to love her and wanted to take care of her. Did Gerald love her, or just need her, or were the two things so inextricably mixed that not even he knew? Connie certainly had all the warmth and capacity for love and affection that their own mother had lacked, or perhaps was unable to demonstrate. It was, Flora thinks, what she too most appreciated in Connie – that capacity for love – but it was hard to accept that her friend had relinquished something that meant so much to her for Gerald who, Flora felt, had captured her to fulfil his own needs. It is one more thing for which she hasn’t forgiven him. She wonders now if he had always known that. Did it explain why he sent her that ticket to join them in Tasmania? Did he want to justify his behaviour, show her that he had done the right thing by Connie? Did he want her to see that Connie was happy with the big white house and the two bright, argumentative children, happy to be a wife and mother and not mourning her lost dreams of the opera? Was that it? Did he want her there not for herself but as a witness to his success as a husband?

  ‘I can’t believe you’ve done this,’ she had shouted at Gerald the week she got back from India. ‘Connie had huge talent and ambition but you’ve made her feel it’s not enough. How could you do that?’

  ‘I don’t want her to be disappointed,’ he’d said. ‘She’s fragile now, since her mother died, and her father didn’t even bother to come back for the funeral. Connie needs someone to look after her.’

  ‘Look after her? That’s bullshit!’ Flora had snapped. ‘If you really loved her you’d encourage her, but the truth is that you want her to look after you.’ It had stung him – she’d seen it in his face, in the hardening of his eyes, in the tight set of his mouth.

  ‘Oh grow up, Flo,’ he’d said then. ‘You’re just having a tantrum because you think I’ve stolen your friend. You ought to be pleased that I’m making her a member of the family.’

  In Hobart she had been surprised to see that Connie was fulfilling the conventional rol
e of wife and mother with some conviction, although Flora thought she also detected an underlying unease in her friend.

  ‘You’ve changed her,’ she’d accused him. ‘You knew she could have been a star, but you took her away, starved her talent and her ambition.’

  ‘Don’t be so ridiculous,’ he’d said. ‘You just can’t recognise or appreciate a good marriage when you see one.’

  His cool, dismissive tone infuriated her and she did what she’d promised herself she wouldn’t do – she lost her temper. ‘You’ve crushed something in her,’ she yelled at him. ‘It’s the seventies, Gerry, you don’t seem to have got a grip on the concept of liberation.’

  That was when he said he wouldn’t have any of that hairy-legged women’s lib stuff in his house. Things had been tense and awkward between them after that, although they had both managed – fairly successfully, Flora thinks – to hide it from Connie and the children, until that day: the day he found her with Denise. Flora wonders now, for the first time, about her own motives. Was it a conscious decision to let him discover them together? She had certainly thought several times of bringing it all out into the open. Gerald, she assumed, knew about her sexuality. How could he not? She could even understand that he preferred not to refer to it nor hear about it, but did she unconsciously create a situation that would force him to face it? Was that what she’d really wanted?

  Flora’s flush deepens at what she now thinks might have been her own part in that final schism: forcing a confrontation, shoving reality in Gerald’s face in his own house. She gets to her feet in agitation, paces back and forth across the room. Did she want his rage? Want to taunt him and force him to acknowledge her?

  ‘You disgust me,’ he’d hissed. ‘I want you out of my house right now. I don’t want you here perverting my children. And I see it all now, all that stuff about Connie’s career, of course you didn’t want me to marry her, because you wanted her for yourself.’