His Other House

by Sarah Armstrong

  ‘And her mum?’ said Emily.

  ‘She’s going on a cruise next month. To Vanuatu.’ The air conditioner hummed and spewed dusty air. Rachel turned the knob to twenty degrees.

  She went to the bathroom to wash her hands and wet a washer. She gently wiped her mother’s face and wondered if she should call an ambulance. Five o’clock was an hour away. She laid her hand gently on her mum’s forehead, but she didn’t stir.

  ‘You get your kids through their early years and then you think they are okay.’ Her mother’s eyes remained closed. ‘I should have been down there on the river bank keeping an eye on him. I believe that a mother’s loss is worse than any other, but I do know you lost him too. I even knew that back then.’

  Rachel folded the damp washer into a square. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t look after him, Mum.’

  Her mother opened her eyes. ‘It’s okay now, because I’ll see him soon.’

  But what about all those years it wasn’t okay? ‘Rest now, Mum. I’ll be back in a sec to check on you.’

  She stood at the kitchen sink filling her mother’s water jug. She had tried so hard over the years to remember her last words to Scotty. She remembered him stripping down to his green swimmers and tearing over the grass to the river, but what was the last thing they said to each other? She had no idea.

  There was a knock on the front door. It couldn’t be Quinn yet, it was only four o’clock. She walked into the hall and through the window saw his station wagon parked beside her Mum’s car. She didn’t know how to arrange her face, so she didn’t try. She just opened the door.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, her voice quiet, the full water jug in one hand.

  ‘Hi.’ He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and his face shone with sweat.

  She opened the screen door and felt a bodily rush at the broad shape of him as he stepped inside.

  He spoke quietly. ‘I want to see your mum, but before I do . . . How are you? After last night?’

  She nodded. ‘I’m okay . . . And you?’

  ‘It’s umm . . .’ He shook his head. ‘I’m feeling pretty . . . churned up.’ He wiped his hand down the back of his head. ‘You know, I’ve never cheated before and . . .’

  Cheated. The word hit Rachel like a slap. She looked away, out the window to the trees lining the road. She believed him, he seemed so unsteady.

  He took a breath. ‘I’d like nothing better than to see where . . .’ His voice was warm and he reached his hand towards her then pulled it back. ‘Oh, Rachel . . . I’d love to see what might happen between us but I can’t. Do you understand that? We can’t do that again.’

  ‘I know.’ She knew she should concentrate on the fact that he’d just said that it was going no further, but what she heard was his desire. She would be happy to stay standing there with him in her mother’s hot closed-in verandah, surrounded by plastic tubs of fabric and wool.

  Quinn squeezed her forearm. ‘Thank you.’ As he drew his hand away and his fingertips grazed her skin, she knew it wasn’t over.

  He walked down the hall and into her mother’s room. She looked out the front window, every cell in her body alert to the rumble of his voice. Two boys in school uniforms rode their bikes down to the park and Rachel thought how wonderfully, deceptively simple it all seemed. A man and a woman. Summer in a country town. She knew it was desire that blurred away the fact of his wife and made things seem so straightforward. Desire ironed out morality.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Marianna wiped her writing off the whiteboard. Over the years she must have written up those lines about gluten and dough and pastry dozens of times. How many of the kids would remember any of it? How many would find it even faintly useful?

  She crossed to push open another window, the smell of burned taco shells still strong in the empty classroom. Her phone rang in her handbag and she hurried to answer it in case it was Shelly. The day they’d returned from Diggers, Marianna had emailed her about egg donation and Shelly had emailed back: Wow. That’s a biggie! I’ll call you in a couple of days to talk about it.

  But it wasn’t Shelly. ‘Hi, Mum.’

  ‘Hi, darling. We came back early.’

  ‘How was the drive?’ She looked out the window at the empty quadrangle.

  ‘Oh, fine. Thank you for feeding Mango. She was happy to see us.’

  Marianna heard the spurting noise of her parents’ SodaStream machine in the background. Marianna imagined her father pouring a glass of soda water. A whisky and soda more like it.

  Her mother said, ‘Dad would really like to talk to you, sweetie.’

  ‘No, Mum.’

  Her mother sighed. ‘Sweetheart . . .’

  ‘I’m sorry you’re caught in the middle but to be honest I don’t know when I’ll want to talk to him.’ Three kids ran across the quadrangle, their giant backpacks slipping around on their backs.

  ‘He’s your father. What about his birthday? Will you come for that?’

  ‘You two celebrate it.’ She brushed some grated cheese off the bench onto the floor.

  ‘He’s been a good dad to you.’

  ‘Well, he’s not the dad I need at this moment.’

  ‘I hope you’re not going to cut me off one day because I say some little thing wrong.’

  She felt a rush of fear at the thought of losing her mother. A vacuum cleaner started up in the hallway outside her room. ‘You’re a different person. Anyway, it’s not about one little thing, you know that. It’s an accumulation of things. I better go, Mum. The cleaner’s here.’

  ‘All right.’ She sighed. ‘Take care.’

  ‘Thanks, Mum.’

  She imagined her mother hanging up and looking at Brian with her eyebrows raised in exasperation. When Marianna was young, she had felt confident of her father’s admiration. At her parents’ cocktail parties she’d wear a good dress and carefully carry around a tray of vol-au-vents or satay sticks and her father would appear at her side and introduce her to Russian or French or Irish guests, his big hand warm on her upper back.

  It was when she was about six, when she started at the International School, that she realised the only time he showed real interest in her was when guests were around. She started noting in a little book the times he initiated a conversation with her, but she stopped after a couple of weeks because there was so little to write.

  She slung her handbag over her shoulder, picked up her folder of notes and locked the classroom door. The cleaner nodded as she passed him, the machine on his back blasting away. She saw this weathered, thin guy several times every week as he vacuumed or emptied bins, but they never exchanged more than a nod. She didn’t know his name or how his voice sounded. Everything about her life seemed hollow, her connections with the people around her, her closest relationships, her future. She rested a hand on her belly, imagining the curve of pregnancy. How would it feel, having another woman’s baby in her womb? Shelly and Quinn’s baby.

  •

  She was at the side of the house emptying the compost bucket when Quinn pulled into the driveway. The sensor light flicked on and she watched him climb out of his car, his face drawn and solemn. She sometimes thought about the vital, intense interactions he had with his patients every day, interactions he was not free to talk to Marianna about. These people depended on him, loved him even, and she knew nothing about them. The dog left Marianna’s side and ran to meet Quinn, claws scrabbling on the cement path.

  When Marianna entered the kitchen through the laundry door, Quinn was at the bench, his back to her, sorting mail.

  ‘Hi,’ she said. She slid the compost bin under the sink.

  ‘Hi.’ He crossed to kiss her, his breath a bit sour. ‘How was your day?’ He was putting on a cheery front.

  ‘Fine. You look like you need a beer,’ she said.

  ‘I do.’ He flopped into a kitchen chair and tossed the unopened letters onto the table.

  She opened the fridge and passed him a cold beer. ‘Big day?’

/>   ‘Thank you. Big week.’

  She sat beside him and fiddled with the letters, stacking them neatly in a pile. When she had come in from the backyard and seen him at the bench, there was something about the way he was standing that sent a shot of fear through her, fear that the whole baby thing would be their undoing, no matter what they did, no matter how hard they tried to hold things together. At nearly thirty-nine, if she lost him then she lost her chance for a family. Wanting a baby had made her calculating and strategic in ways that shocked her.

  He reached over and touched the top of her back where she had circular bruises from her acupuncturist. ‘Cupping?’

  ‘Yeah. I saw Pam yesterday.’ She stood up. ‘Want some chips?’

  ‘Great idea.’ He slumped back into the chair and took a slug of beer.

  She tipped the chips into a bowl and sat down again. Suddenly he leaned forward and hugged her tightly. His shirt smelled of the car, of other spaces and other people. When he finally pulled back, she kissed his cheek and said, ‘Dinner?’ She was suddenly really hungry.

  ‘Yes. Starving.’

  She pulled vegies from the fridge and shut the door with her elbow. As she crossed to the bench, he tore open one letter, then put it to one side. He leaned his elbows on the table and put his head in his hands.

  Chapter Twenty

  The morning sun shot through a gap in Bill’s tatty rice paper blinds and into Quinn’s eyes. He checked the time on his phone then rolled away from the sun, pulling the sheet over his shoulder. Outside was a wall of chattering, carolling birdsong.

  Last night they’d fucked in this narrow bed, both of them sweat-slick in the dark. Rachel had moved him around, pressing her fingers into his muscles as if finding their shape. Her fingers left tiny bruises on his arms and chest. She’d put her mouth over his and breathed into him. That was what he remembered of her when they were apart, the white noise of her body moving against his, muscle and sinew, her strength.

  He was dismayed how readily he had taken to lying. He had always thought of it as a decisive abandonment of the truth. Instead, he realised, it was simply a matter of one word slipping into the place of another.

  It was a month since he and Rachel had first fucked. The next day, he’d driven home to Marianna and sat across from her at the dinner table, the feeling of being with Rachel all through his body, certain Marianna must see it written on his face. He had imagined telling her and with a few words, throwing their lives into tumult. But he hadn’t. He had carried on as usual and returned to Corimbi the next week and when Rachel came to the door, he’d let her in and, without speaking, led her by the hand to the bedroom.

  Every Wednesday evening since then, he’d arrive at Bill’s around nine, and she would let herself in the back door and they’d sit on the floor in the dark, leaning against the couch, drinking Tanqueray and tonic, the fact that they’d soon be fucking electrifying every word.

  He understood now that he had imagined himself a good man, if not some kind of quintessentially good man. As if his morals were a fixed point, some place from which to measure others. Perhaps everyone thought of themselves like that. Until they did something that was unquestionably wrong.

  When he was with Rachel, it all made sense. And when he was with Marianna he managed to forget about Rachel, as if she were just a dream. It was when he was on his own, with time to think, that his remorse floated to the surface, like putrid flotsam. That’s when he reminded himself it would be over soon, that her mother would die and Rachel would return to Sydney and this brief, delirious madness would be history.

  He threw the sheet off and found his shorts on the floor. Through the living room window, he saw Rachel in her mother’s backyard, over by the lime tree. She was out there every morning before the heat of the day, weeding and watering and pruning, making order of the garden, even as Bill’s grew wilder. She bent to look at the tree from underneath and her hair fell like a curtain, hiding her face.

  He made a coffee and went to sit on the cool cement steps off the back door. She appeared at the fence and climbed over.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said, as she kissed him and sat down. She’d tied her hair up into a messy ponytail and her cheeks were rosy. He passed her the cup and ran his hand down her warm back.

  She drank from the cup. ‘I have to tell you I’ve been waiting for your coffee since four am. Mum had a bad night.’ She held the cup in two hands and looked out to the hills. Under her short fingernails were lines of black dirt. ‘That Tibouchina’s going to block your view of the escarpment soon. I could prune it for you, if you want.’

  ‘Okay, thanks.’ Two parrots streaked past, flashes of red and green and blue. ‘How long was she awake in the night?’

  ‘Between about one and three. But she was restless the whole night. I ended up sleeping in there, on the floor.’ With one hand she brushed grass seeds from her calves.

  ‘I’ll come in and see her before I go to work.’

  She sighed and examined a small green grass seed stuck to one finger. ‘It feels like she’s already got a foot in the other . . .’ She flicked the seed away, ‘. . . realm. Whatever it is.’ She looked over the fence. ‘I wish she knew how good her garden was looking.’ She passed him the cup. ‘Sorry, I’ve drunk most of your coffee.’

  As he finished the dregs, she stroked his neck, the skin of her fingers rougher than it used to be. In the four weeks since he’d first seen her naked, she’d changed. She was tanned and had put on a bit of weight. He liked it, her breasts full and thighs rounder.

  He wished he could sit there with her all day, in the quiet and cool and green. He was the one with a foot in two realms.

  His phone rang inside the house. Quinn heaved himself up and found the phone. It was Marianna. ‘Hi,’ he said.

  ‘Good morning.’ She sounded perky. ‘I didn’t wake you, did I?’

  ‘No. I’m up. Drinking my first coffee.’

  The screen door squeaked and Rachel came in with the cup.

  Marianna said, ‘How’d you sleep?’

  ‘Fine. And you?’ He wanted to turn his back to Rachel, to focus on sounding normal to Marianna.

  Rachel raised her eyebrows at him and he mouthed, ‘Marianna.’

  ‘Yes. Good,’ said Marianna. He heard crackling paper at her end.

  Rachel put the cup on the draining board. She left, closing the screen door very carefully.

  ‘So, Bill just rang here,’ Marianna went on. ‘He couldn’t call you ’cause he can’t call mobiles for some reason.’

  Quinn watched Rachel walk down the steps, climb back over the fence and disappear behind the greenery.

  ‘He wants you to find a document for him and take it to his lawyer.’ Down the phone he heard the dog’s toenails on the verandah boards and something that sounded like a garbage truck. Brisbane seemed a world away.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘It’s in his filing cabinet, under House. It’s an evaluation.’

  In Bill’s small study, Quinn slid open the filing cabinet. He found the document and laid it on the desk. ‘Got it.’

  ‘The lawyer’s just a few doors down from the medical centre, apparently.’

  ‘Yeah, I know it. I can do that.’ Quinn smoothed his hand over the document. ‘So how’s Bill sound?’

  ‘Good.’ He heard the smile in her voice. ‘A bit harried.’

  ‘I think he likes it that way.’

  ‘True. He says he’ll try and call on the weekend. Sounds like he’s keen to talk to you.’

  ‘Okay.’ Quinn wished this affair with Rachel wasn’t happening in Bill’s house, in Bill’s spare room, using his sheets and towels and crockery. And he wished he could talk to Bill about it. But Bill loved Marianna. At uni they had been a trio and would hang out, slumped in beanbags on the narrow balcony of the Riley Street terrace house, drinking beer and listening to Bill’s CDs.

  After he hung up, Quinn made another coffee and went to stand by the fence. Rachel had left the sprink
ler running on the vegie patch. He stood there and finished his coffee, watching the water spiral out from the sprinkler and run down the lettuce leaves.

  Neither of them ever mentioned Marianna when they were together. But she was always there, as if hovering at the edge of his peripheral vision. He sighed and thought ahead to when Rachel was gone and someone else was living next door and he could pretend to be a decent man again.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  He sat at his desk between patients. His mobile showed two missed calls: one from his father and one from Rachel. His door swung open. ‘Quinn?’ Jim stuck his head in. ‘Alice Mobray has ended up at the hospital,’ he said. ‘I’ve just been to see her.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘She’s hysterical.’

  ‘Nice modern term that one, Jim.’ He smiled to soften the edge in his voice.

  ‘Okay.’ The older doctor was poker-faced. ‘She’s agitated. Anxious.’ He regarded Quinn. ‘She sounds a bit obsessed with you, I have to say.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Quinn had a sinking feeling. He should have tried harder to convince Jim to refer her to a shrink.

  ‘She’s having some funny ideas you’ve been looking in her windows.’

  ‘What?’

  Jim waved a hand about. ‘Don’t worry. I assured her you weren’t even in town the night she says she saw you.’

  Quinn sighed. ‘I’d better go and see her this afternoon. Make sure it’s not thyroid related.’

  ‘Right.’ Jim nodded.

  ‘Has she had an episode like this before?’

  ‘Not that I know of. She’ll be glad to see you. Possibly a little too glad.’ He turned to leave and then said, ‘I suspect that she may have been looking in your windows. You might want to buy young Bill some curtains.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He’d already tacked up some sheets so Rachel could walk through the living room without the neighbours seeing her.

  ‘I hear Rachel has taken you swimming in the town pool at night.’