Family Secrets

by Liz Byrski

  ‘Typical man,’ Kerry says, nudging him. ‘It had to be all about you! It was never your fault.’ She laughs, leaning closer to him, wanting to feel the solid warmth of his body that she has missed so much. She had called him the previous morning and suggested that he and Erin drive the children down after school and stay until Sunday evening. ‘I want to come home,’ she’d said, ‘but it might be fun for us all to have a weekend in Hobart together.’

  Last night, when everyone else had gone to bed, she’d tried to explain to him how it had changed.

  ‘I haven’t been able to feel anything for weeks – well, months really,’ she’d said. ‘I could see things happening around me and I knew I should feel happy or sad or hurt or touched, I knew what the feelings ought to be but I just couldn’t actually feel them. It was like being behind a wall with everyone else on the other side. But on Monday I was looking at photos of Mum and Flora and I felt something, really felt it. Like something moved through me and I felt it in my chest, something had changed.’ She’d paused, wondering whether he understood, and saw that he was confused but hopeful. ‘You see I’d had a feeling, I actually felt something again.’

  ‘Okay,’ Chris had said cautiously, ‘and then what?’

  ‘Well, a couple of nights later I was thinking about something that happened ages ago when I was about thirteen and this girl, Jennifer, came to stay.’ And she’d told him about Gerald’s reaction.

  ‘Seems a bit over the top,’ Chris had said.

  ‘Exactly. And I kept thinking about it and I felt myself go quite cold with shock at the awfulness of it. And eventually – this sounds weird, I know – but I just started to laugh. Not just pretended to laugh, I actually laughed with my whole body, but most of all with my mind, Chris.’

  ‘Well,’ he’d said, obviously still trying to understand, ‘that sounds good, but why?’

  ‘I laughed because it was so horrible and cruel that it suddenly seemed ridiculous. I laughed about Dad and what he did to Auntie Flora. I laughed about all the years she’s been a sort of pariah – a symbol of darkness. An example of what might happen if one of us overstepped the line in any way. And there was this thing he always said to shut us up. It brings me up in goosebumps remembering it. He did an awful thing to Flora, Chris …’

  ‘Well, by our standards he did, but your dad wasn’t a bad person …’

  ‘I know. But he was a bully and he did a cruel and awful thing, so awful that it suddenly seemed funny and I started laughing at … at the crassness and stupidity of it all, the waste, the terrible hurt. I laughed and I couldn’t stop. In the end I had to lie down on the floor and wait for the laughing to end. And I realised that I was feeling things again, that wall had come down.’

  She could tell that it didn’t make much sense to him but she could also see the enormous relief in his face, and feel the intensity of his feelings in the way he held her and kissed her. And she decided not to tell him about the really dark moments, the dreams, that fragile silhouette, crazed with cracks, shattering into shards of dark glass.

  Later, when she’d leaned over to kiss him, she felt the salt of his tears on her lips.

  ‘It feels just like us again,’ Chris says now. ‘It’s been difficult for a long time and you’ve been different …’

  She nods. ‘I’m sorry, it must’ve been really hard for you. All of it, especially these last three months, but I think I’m getting back to normal now.’

  ‘Normal?’ he grins. ‘You were never normal! You were always outstandingly crazy and infuriating and perfectly wonderful, which is why I married you. It’s really good to have you back. Let’s just take things one day at a time.’ He puts his hand to her face. ‘Good lord, you’re freezing, and your ear is so cold it’ll drop off.’

  Kerry nods. ‘It’s bitter, isn’t it, despite the sun? There’s a stall up here where they sell hand-knitted beanies. I’m going to get one, and the kids probably need them too.’

  Salamanca Place is packed as usual on a Saturday morning, and they squeeze on through the crowd, steering Erin, Farah and all the children to the beanie stall. Kerry watches as Chris insists on buying everyone a beanie and soon they are trying on different colours and patterns while he takes pictures on his phone.

  Since he and Erin arrived with the children yesterday afternoon Samira and Lala have taken charge of Mia, making a space for her in their bedroom, letting her rummage through their clothes. They are acting like big sisters and Mia is making the most of it, lapping up the attention, and walking between the twins holding both their hands. Chris snaps them discussing whether she should have a pink or purple beanie. Kerry laughs as he photographs her encouraging Ryan to get a dark green one with red stripes, and then Erin and Farah giggling together like little girls – as though they are all one big family.

  Sorting out the beanies takes a while and when Chris has paid for eight of them and they are all kitted out they make their way through the crowds to a café and order several different pizzas. It’s just as the pizzas arrive that Kerry’s phone starts to ring.

  ‘Ignore it,’ Chris says. ‘This is all so good, just ignore it.’

  She ignores it for the first few rings and then pulls it out of her pocket just as it stops.

  ‘Brooke,’ she says, staring at the phone. ‘I don’t think she’s ever called me before. Do you think something’s wrong? Maybe I should …’

  Chris shrugs. ‘Okay, but best go outside, you won’t be able to hear anything in here. Don’t be too long or I’ll eat your share of the one with anchovies.’

  Kerry weaves her way between the tables, finds a spot that is sheltered from the wind, presses ‘call back’ and waits, stamping her feet against the cold and turning up the collar of her jacket.

  Brooke answers, speaking so fast that Kerry can barely understand her. ‘Slow down, Brooke,’ she says, ‘slow down, take some deep breaths and then tell me what’s happened.’

  Brooke slows down and Kerry listens as she tells her about the bike ride, about Andrew being thrown off the bike and onto the bonnet of a passing car. Brooke gasps for breath and goes on: the ambulance, the emergency ward, the cut on Andrew’s head and his arm, and his neck, the brace on his neck …

  ‘Whoa, hang on, Brooke,’ Kerry says. ‘What was that you said about his neck?’

  Brooke repeats it and Kerry’s shiver has nothing to do with the cold. ‘Is he conscious, Brooke? Can I speak to him? Can you hold the phone for him?’

  There is some fumbling and faint voices in the background, and then she hears Andrew’s voice, the apologies, the explanation, the embarrassment and, most of all, the fear.

  ‘I’ll be on the first flight I can get,’ she says. ‘And I’ll call Brooke back to let her know when that’ll be. Try not to worry, Andrew …’ she hesitates, ‘love you.’ Her heart is racing and she can feel fear surging through her and has to pause and feel that, really feel it for its own sake, before she does anything else. Months with nothing and now the intensity of her fear for her brother propels her over the crumbling remains of that paralysing wall. Opening the restaurant door she steps inside and waves to Chris, beckoning him to join her.

  ‘He sounds okay,’ she says when she has explained what’s happened. ‘And he says he’s okay, the cuts on his head and arm hurt, and his bum – his mobile was in his back pocket so when he landed on his bum bits of it got embedded in one buttock, but it’s his neck, Chris. The doctors think he could have broken his neck. They won’t know until they’ve done an MRI, and Brooke’s really rattled. They can’t get hold of Linda, who’s in Singapore, and Andrew’s worried about Brooke having to cope alone. I’ve told him I’ll get the first flight I can.’

  Chris puts his arms around her. ‘Of course,’ he says. ‘I’ll come with you. We’ll see if Erin and the kids can stay here with Farah for a couple of days, until we know what’s happened. There’s no way I’m letting you go alone, not after all you’ve been through. Come on, we’ll tell the others and go straight ho
me, get online and find a flight.’

  Kerry nods, ignoring the tears that are running down her cheeks. She puts her hands up to his face. ‘You’re the best,’ she says, ‘I love you to bits. You do know, don’t you, that none of what’s happened was ever about you?’

  And they hurry back through the restaurant, gather up the others and the remains of the pizzas, and head out through the crowded marketplace to the car and back to Connie’s house.

  Twenty-two

  ‘It’s quite ordinary-looking, isn’t it?’ Connie says, as they clamber out of the taxi, trying to remember how she’d envisaged The Ivy. ‘I was expecting something … well … grander, I suppose – after all, it’s one of the most famous restaurants in the world. Not that I’m complaining. I always feel like a fish out of water in places that are grand or glamorous.’

  ‘Subtlety and tradition, Connie.’ Bea smiles and grips her elbow as they hurry across the street, out of the rain, while Flora follows with Phillip. ‘The glamour of The Ivy is the clientele, and today that’s us! You’ll love it, it’s understated and down to earth, but very special. And you may catch a glimpse of the ghost of Noël Coward or Virginia Woolf, or even Laurence Olivier.’ She shakes out her umbrella and closes it. ‘Phillip has brought me here on my birthday for as long as I can remember. Perhaps that’s a lack of imagination on both our parts but I wouldn’t swap it for anywhere else. It always feels like a special occasion.’

  ‘And it always has to be the same table,’ Phillip cuts in, as he and Flora join them. ‘I think the sky would fall in if we had to sit somewhere else. We saw Tony Blair in here once, and last year Helen Mirren was almost within groping distance but I managed to restrain myself.’ And he steers them inside and Connie checks out the customers as he speaks to the maître d’ about their reservation. She feels an ache of envy over his friendship with Bea, it’s so rich with familiarity and knowing, more comfortable than many marriages. In fact it appears more comfortable than her own marriage had been, but then this is not a marriage and so it’s free of the complications and expectations of that kind of relationship.

  She remembers a summer evening a couple of years ago when, in the room that had become Gerald’s bedroom, she had heard his breathing settle to the rhythm of sleep and had switched off the light and crept out, closing the door behind her. It was still early and she hadn’t been ready to go to bed, nor had she wanted the distraction of a book or the television. She wanted company, intimacy; not sexual intimacy – she’d given up on that long ago – but a male friend to talk to and relax with, to give her a hug or hold her hand from time to time. And she needed someone who could understand the spiritual and emotional loneliness and the burden of guilt she felt in her own ingratitude for what she had. Farah, she thought, was the only person who could possibly understand this.

  Through the open door she caught the scent of the honeysuckle and moon flowers that she had planted years earlier alongside the pergola, and she followed that scent to the garden where the last vestiges of light were fading. In the blissful stillness and silence she had walked across the lawn to gaze out over the darkness of the river glittering with sprinkled reflections of the city lights. There she had sat on the low rock wall beyond which the land dropped sharply away, and wept. She wept silently with loneliness, and with despair that Gerald’s illness was devouring the people she loved most. Her family was like an old piece of porcelain crazed with tiny cracks and ready to shatter. Kerry’s feisty energy had turned to bitter impotence and hurt, Andrew’s calm thoughtfulness to chilly distance and Chris was struggling with the change in Kerry. And Linda, well, they had never been close, but now she seemed more critical and superior than ever, while Brooke was turning inwards to protect herself as her mother seemed to pick on her as a way of getting at Andrew. Only Ryan and Mia seemed unscathed. She had wondered how long it would last, and whether it was too late even for Gerald’s death to rescue them.

  Connie stares down at the menu without seeing it, thinking of going home, of being alone. Her stomach lurches as she recalls the prickly emotions of the last day she spent with her family, the day they had scattered Gerald’s ashes. How can I mend this, she wonders, will we ever recover from the last ten years?

  ‘Have you decided on an entrée, Connie?’ Phillip asks. ‘The oysters are always magnificent …’

  And she draws a deep breath and actually looks around the restaurant. Bea was right, she does love the atmosphere, the modest art deco style, the soft lighting, and the sense of tasteful restraint; it touches a part of her that remains essentially English. But her pleasure in it is overhung by the knowledge that all this will be over in a few days. She had wanted to recapture the past but she had never anticipated that it would evoke such curiosity about and longing for the road not taken. She is not ready to go home, not ready for this to finish.

  The waiter hovers alongside her and she drags herself back into the present – it’s Bea’s birthday, not a time for self-indulgent raking over the past or brooding about the future. She looks up and smiles.

  ‘I’ll have the scallops and then the risotto, please,’ she says, putting down the menu. ‘What are you having, Bea?’

  *

  Bea orders the Mediterranean fish soup followed by gnocchi and sits back watching as Phillip and Flora order their food. This birthday feels special. So many old friends have gone already, died in their fifties and sixties, but she is seventy-three, still working and feeling as though she will go on doing so forever. What she wishes now though is that she could go on doing so with Flora. It’s rare at this age, she thinks, to encounter someone who seems like a kindred spirit, someone with whom you feel totally at ease, as though you’ve known them your whole life. How different things might have been had she known Flora all those years ago. How delightful it would be to make up for that now.

  The waiter arrives back at the table with a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket and Phillip nods to him to open it.

  ‘So,’ he says, when their glasses are filled, ‘a toast to you, Bea, happy birthday, my dear and oldest friend, and many happy returns.’

  And they raise their glasses to echo his toast and for one extraordinary moment Bea feels she might shed a tear. ‘It’s lovely to be celebrating with you, but you’ll be gone in a few days and I’m really going to miss you,’ she tells Connie.

  ‘You and Phillip must come to Hobart,’ Connie says. ‘Separately or together. I have heaps of space.’

  ‘Well, unless Flora decides to stay on and run the shop we’ll have to come separately,’ Phillip says.

  ‘I need to go there first anyway,’ Flora says. ‘There’s a lot of catching up to do. I have a family to meet, and I have to convince them that I’m a completely harmless old black sheep.’

  ‘I think meeting an aunt who is a black sheep might be fun – intriguing, really,’ Phillip says. ‘Don’t let them think you are completely harmless, it might disappoint them.’

  ‘I’ve always wanted to go to Australia,’ Bea says, ‘especially Tasmania, and now there’s that amazing new art museum full of weird and wonderful things.’

  Connie nods. ‘It’s carved into the rock. The construction alone is worth a visit and …’ She stops abruptly and Bea, sitting opposite her with her back to the entrance, sees her expression change, sees laughter fade into puzzlement. Connie sits up straighter, peering past Bea, tilting her head to one side to get a better view.

  ‘Are you celebrity spotting, Connie,’ Bea asks, sipping her champagne, ‘or did you see a famous ghost?’

  Connie is silent for a few seconds. ‘Not a celebrity … for a moment I thought … but it must be a trick of the light …’

  ‘You obviously need more champagne,’ Phillip says and he reaches across the table to fill her glass, but Connie ignores him, leaning back in her chair as though backing off from something.

  ‘What is it, Connie? What’s wrong?’ Bea asks, seeing that Flora’s expression has also changed. ‘What’s … ?’ and she jum
ps as a pair of hands cover her eyes.

  ‘Happy birthday,’ says a voice behind her. ‘Guess who?’

  *

  Flora had seen the woman come into the restaurant, seen her speak to the maître d’, but then she’d been distracted by the conversation at the table. It was only as the woman seemed to be heading in their direction that she’d had a flash of recognition … familiar, she’d thought, but who … ?

  The woman is tall, with familiar grey-green eyes, reddish hair curling around her face, late forties, perhaps. She stops behind Bea’s chair and smiles at Flora and Connie over her head as she slips her hands over Bea’s eyes, and in a moment of horrible clarity Flora knows exactly who the woman is and that something truly awful is about to happen. She hears Connie gasp, then feels her stiffen beside her, sees Phillip turn and almost leap from his chair. And as Bea takes the woman’s hands in hers and moves them from her eyes, Flora sees the shock and distress in her face.

  ‘Surprise indeed …’ Bea says, clearly shaken, getting to her feet.

  And before she can say any more the woman hugs her, smiling at Connie and Flora over Bea’s shoulder, while Phillip looks from one to the other as if working out what to do. Connie’s gaze is riveted on the two women and she seems not to notice as Flora moves closer to her and puts a reassuring hand on her arm.

  ‘So sorry to gatecrash,’ the woman says, smiling apologetically, hugging Bea. ‘I thought it would just be lunch with Uncle Phil as usual.’

  Bea’s face is flushed. Connie’s seems to have turned to stone.

  Bea looks at Flora and panic crosses her face. She clings to the younger woman’s arm. ‘Flora, Connie …’ she hesitates, smiling. ‘This is my daughter – Geraldine.’

  A waiter appears alongside Phillip, takes the champagne from the ice bucket and reaches out to top up their glasses.