All This by Chance

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  2002

  It was a fact of life, she one day will explain to Milan, that Stephen seemed the important one, the presence between her father and herself. ‘As though he were as close to me as a father should be, and David the distant one, too far to understand.’

  So her grandfather was the one who waited for her in the carpark the afternoon of her last interview with the frail, disturbed man. She had said to Stephen on the phone the night before, ‘I don’t know how I can face it, really. Tomorrow’s session.’ She would take the bus for once: she knew she would not want to drive. ‘If you can meet me after? Can you do that for me?’ And so he was there waiting for her, an old man with his new black-framed glasses and his white hair trimly cut, ten years younger perhaps to a stranger’s eyes than to the family who knew his age. And yet still, at times, with the hesitancy almost of a boy, not certain that what he says will be the thing to say.

  Yet so certain for her, Esther thinks. She cannot remember a time when he was not there to say what needed to be said, as silent at those other times when there was little useful to be drawn from talk. When her mother had died and she was at boarding school and they had not lived with her father for nearly as long as she remembered. David, a father of holidays and sudden kindness and carefully punctual presents, yet his saying, back home after the funeral, ‘You’ll understand. This isn’t a good time for us to live together permanently.’ As though the emphasis somehow explained whatever it was he failed to say. ‘Keep on at school and then there’s the summer break. We can be together then or you can be at the beach with Stephen. You love it there. Just it’s more than I can cope with right now. You must see that? My real marriage could not accommodate that.’ How he always called it that—not my second or my next, but the one that qualified as real. ‘We are not people who condone divorce, everyone knows that.’ And the phrase he then chose to tell his grown daughter, a disappointment too in that what should be her faith meant so little to her. ‘Things with Rachel,’ he said, ‘things are folding there, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Like a camp bed,’ Esther later had said, and Stephen smiling, indulging her. If she needed to say childish things then say them. The old man’s rare gift of knowing when to choose silence. Yet David keen enough to tell her, several times, ‘You have no idea how weak that kind of tolerance is. His gentleness, as you take it for. The way so much can be shelved off hiding behind it.’ His meaning how Stephen might, not might but should, have done so much more when Eva was ill, and been aware of how severe it was; and before that again, not left Babcia in isolation all those years, as good as a prisoner with her own. And Esther, by then in her first year at university, defending him. ‘The old lady wanted to be as she was. Lisa thought that too. To be with us. The family. That’s all that mattered to her. And that friend of hers. There was nothing else she wanted.’

  ‘He tried to deny her past. Thinking the present could make up for it.’ Esther knew he meant, ‘She was a Jew. And Stephen wanted her to forget.’

  She said, ‘She didn’t think of things that way,’ and her father demanded of her, quite rightly, ‘What could you know of that?’ The pity she felt for him. David who as a teenager, without saying a word to the family, going to the big white synagogue in Princes Street, knowing the minute he sat through the first and bewildering service that this was home. Telling himself there was something beneath the incomprehensible words that nevertheless was his, his loving from the start the uplifting space, the patterned windows, the intricate designs along the walls. The formality. The rituals he watched so avidly. They are mine as well. After a few weeks a boy his own age had spoken to him, and Rabbi Liebermann, and soon he joined a youth group, aware he was on the edge of so much yet believing himself at its centre.

  ‘This is where I want to be,’ as he told the family in the sitting room one Sunday evening as they listened to the 1YA music programme his parents liked, as Babcia worked at one of her cloths, its German words spelled out in red thread, and his sister sat with a textbook she looked up from as he told them, ‘I’ve come back.’ So much later, decades later, telling his daughter his feeling of disappointment, of so being let down, as his mother said in her calm and kindly way, that if that was what he wanted, then of course they were happy for him. He had wanted to shock them, even anger them. But his father too simply nodding, pressing his shoulder as he walked through to the kitchen to put on the kettle for the supper they always had when the radio programme came to an end. David said after his mother’s death, ‘I had sort of hoped it would mean so much more to all of you. That we could really be ourselves. Well, my mother could and Lisa. But that just didn’t happen. I thought I had done it for all of us.’

  Another memory that sometimes comes back to her. She was older. She was working at the Herald for a holiday job over the summer. It was after her father’s real marriage too had ended, and she had called around to see him. In the house above the bright sheet of the harbour stretching out to Rangitoto that he loved to look at but his wife had said made her uneasy with its precision, its too-insistent symmetry. Esther cannot recall what set her father off, some reminiscence she supposed from the Westmere house and disagreeing with his father before he left home and went south to Wellington for his degree. His raised voice as he spoke of it, the phrase that stayed with her, We were His bloody people after all! She saw he was appalled at what he said. He raised his hands against his face as if in the action of washing it, then lowering them and looking at her with the stone-grey eyes his mother’s family had passed on to him, as he had to her.

  He then sat quietly beside her and the girl said, quite without calculation, ‘Why don’t you go to Israel, Dad? For a trip? There are tours all the time. You’d be bound to know someone? ’ Implying, she later supposed, now that you’re free. Again unmarried. His answer staying with her, making so clear what she had misunderstood about him for so long, ‘And be more out of place than I am here?’ His at once laughing, passing it off lightly, attempting to cover the rawness of what he had said, saying if he was young enough for military service he’d be off like a shot, he’d always fancied himself in fatigues and camouflage. He looked at his watch and walked towards the drinks cabinet with its strips of bevelled mirror. ‘Leave it there, Esther, shall we?’ Our people don’t divorce. He might have said that too, for she knew how that troubled him as well.

  She waited until he brought her a glass of weakly poured gin before she said, ‘It’s not only us. What happens to people.’

  ‘But it’s us especially. You must know that.’

  ‘I would see it as you do if I could, Dad. But I can’t. If we’re crushed by it that’s defeat again.’

  He quoted to her lines she had heard him use before, how God’s will has no obligation to coincide with ours.

  She said, ‘There’s more to it than quotes.’ Then she had gone across the room to hug him. ‘You’re not into big displays but I insist!’

  David said, ‘You could stay over maybe? Tomorrow’s Saturday. It would be nice to have you here. And Judith.’ It was the first time he had spoken directly of his new friend. ‘Judith will be here for Shabbat.’

  ‘If it means so much,’ Esther told him,

  ‘So much? Everything.’

  ‘One of those Polish novelists I wish you’d read but you won’t. It was a sentence I underlined twice. Once for me. Once for you.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ David humoured her.

  ‘“In families of special closeness, blackmail sits quietly in several chairs.”’

  ‘Why I don’t like fiction,’ David said. He took her glass. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘less light-handed than the last one.’

  Stephen waited until she felt like telling him. He had been in the carpark when she left the room she would never need to see again. The man looking up at her as she left. His last audience. Loss. Contempt. His stare might mean anything. Imploring, even.

  ‘Home?’ Stephen said.

  ‘Wherever.’

  He drove towards Moun
t Eden, where she rented the back flat in a wooden villa, on the slopes of a blunt volcanic cone. (Milan would be amused at that, to her saying, in furthest SW6, ‘When I lived on the volcano.’) Then, ‘No,’ Esther said, as they stopped at the lights at Hall Corner in Point Chev. ‘Let’s go to your place, Granddad. For a cup of tea.’

  Not often she called him that. He liked it that since she first talked she had called him directly by his name, almost a prank between them at first, the mop-haired child back then, this quiet handsome young woman who so reminded him of Lisa. Still there were times when he could enter a room and be surprised. That fraction that disturbed, elated. Similar to himself too, he supposed, in some way. How at ease they had always felt together in any case, across a lifetime, if you could say that of one so young. His thinking of David and her mother breaking up when the girl was scarcely old enough for school. When mother and daughter took off to Australia, their visits back once or twice a year. Then Auckland again once her mother died, the years that didn’t work, Stephen supposed that was a neutral way to speak of it, with her father and his second wife, a woman no better suited to him than the first, or he to her, synagogue wedding notwithstanding. Yet David telling his father, enjoying his edge of righteousness, how his marriage was something his mother would have understood, and Babcia of course. But then that wife too leaving him, without acrimony. ‘These things can be done in a decent way,’ David had said, and Stephen thought but did not insist, without a child to make divorce the savagery it is?

  They sat at the kitchen table in the Crescent while they talked. Esther liked the old-fashioned feeling of the house, the same unfussy and dated furniture her grandfather and Eva had bought when they first came back, so young, soon after they married, and Babcia with them in a way even six months before they would not have dreamed of. There was still the framed poster in what had once been David’s bedroom, one of those bright old Railways advertisements with a pretty woman bang in front of the Southern Alps. An assistant in New Zealand House had given it to Eva to let her know what it was like, the lovely place where she would make her life. It had stood rolled in a cupboard until only a few years before she died. Stephen said, ‘Eva had a sense of humour some people didn’t quite catch on to. Mount Cook as never seen from the other end of the country.’

  ‘She might have wanted to go there?’ Esther said. ‘Mightn’t she?’

  He used to ask her, but she had no hankering to go past Wellington. She told him often enough, ‘I knew what you were bringing me to, Stevie. I’m not desperate for other places.’ It was a sort of joke between them. Her putting the poster up all those years later. When Esther was a girl and stayed overnight she liked to lie in bed and look at it, at the mountains drawn in chunky blocks, and the woman who wore clothes like she had never seen, and wonder if it was meant to be her grandmother before she had met Stephen. She had liked too, although she could never understand them, the bits of sewing the so-far-back old aunt she heard her father talk about had made, writing that told you things Babcia must have seen a long time back when she was a girl in Poland. Or Germany as it was when she was there. A place that was both. Esther chattered on about how mysterious all that had seemed to her as a girl, Eva as she imagined her, the auntie who could not speak English, the framed embroidery that told you what you couldn’t guess at, the funny shapes of the letters, the words long and too hard to read. And the secrets about it all as well, back then. Her father telling her some things, while she knew there were others he kept to himself. ‘In any case,’ she said, ‘children actually love not knowing things. Half-knowing them. The mystery of it.’

  It was only then, as she talked on while Stephen placed the pot and the cups on the table, that Esther, beneath the framed sewing spelling out its wisdom of Sauberkeit ist des Hauses Schmuck, began to cry. These were not the ready tears that her father so easily came to. But her crying now quickly becoming a sobbing that she hated. Stephen crossed to a drawer to take a packet of tissues he placed beside her and then sat again facing her, patient, knowing in time she would say whatever needed to be said. He lightly tapped her hand. ‘Whenever.’ He raised his cup in both hands and blew on it as he had done as a boy. ‘Too late to learn manners now.’

  Esther smiled and crushed the tissues against her eyes. She breathed deeply and told him, ‘There!’ She sipped at her own tea. ‘The stupidest,’ she said, ‘the stupidest thing in my life, probably.’ She meant that she had ever thought there was any useful purpose to it, to have sat for those hours of taped attention with the man who told her the story she had waited for. ‘No matter how deranged, he will be fascinating at least.’ She had thought even that, ashamed now at the condescension of it, the vanity of fooling herself that she could draw from him more than was already known. Her trickery of tarting it all up as ‘academic’, as part of a thesis! ‘The Unreliability of Evidence: The Telling of a Family Event.’ This sense now of so much less, the blank space of egotism playing over itself, over and over. As if she hadn’t read enough to have expected it. His banality. The wounding scar of that across other lives, yet still banal.

  ‘The worst thing,’ Esther began, and stopped. She balled another wad of tissues and pressed them hard against her eyes. ‘I’d make a great war correspondent, wouldn’t I just? Great when the heat is on.’

  Stephen left it a minute before bringing her back. ‘The worst?’

  ‘Oh, that.’

  ‘Whatever it was he told you.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t even that. The details, I mean. I don’t mind those. It’s more than that.’ She held out her hand. ‘I hate these tissue things. I’d rather have your hankie.’ Their managing now to laugh together, at least to pretend to laugh, between the tears and snot, her eyelids puffed as though bitten by insects. But her voice level now. She was ready to tell him. ‘No, what I hated about it. My thinking I’d get a “special angle”. As if such a phrase even makes sense. I pretended I was doing this for Lisa and of course I was using her.’

  ‘Don’t think that,’ Stephen said.

  ‘Kidding myself I’d be closer to her. If he talked to me. All that stuff I’d read, the transcripts, the trial, the rest of it. Hearing him tell me. It would make her closer. I really did believe that. The dreadful shit of thinking that!’

  Her grandfather turned his cup in its saucer. ‘I had thought that too. I’d hoped for that.’

  ‘Both of us, then.’

  ‘Details, I suppose,’ he said. ‘A few little things we didn’t know that it would be good to have.’

  Esther shook her head. ‘Bits about the smuggling. The double-cross business he and that other woman were caught up in. The way Lisa and the boy were cover for the gems, diamonds, whatever, that are smuggled north from South Africa like that all the time, across one border and then another, all the stuff Carol Sheridan was wise to and Fergus was not. But her Italian lover had seen through her as well. It was payback time. And the change of drivers and the truck left standing for days in heat in the African port as one game followed another. As if it matters now, the details of that. Their thinking how the smuggled strangers would distract from what was going on. As if he told us one more thing we are better for knowing.’ The littleness of him, she thought. That Lisa could ever have cared for him. The fact of that. The end of life that must be there in the beginning, somehow, surely? Oh Lisa.

  It surprising her, shocking her even, the swerve Stephen’s thinking then took. His voice as matter-of-fact as if he spoke of weather, of something read in the paper. ‘The Sheridan girl. I remember her coming into the pharmacy. Overdressed. Tarty, as we used to say back then. People making fun of her behind her back. As if she had a chance.’ His having no idea of how extraordinary Esther found it. That his kindness might stretch even to her. To the woman Fergus would have killed, had he not been beaten to it.

  Stephen took the cups and rinsed them at the sink. He stood looking through the window, at the strip of sea visible between the neighbours’ houses. The water brightening a
s the sun came from between the trail of clouds, the recent rain. With the breeze in that direction the afternoon would go on like that, clear, shadowed, mottled, the light changing within minutes. Scooting clouds. David used to call them that as a child. Babcia not having a word for it, or not one she was able to share, but fascinated too at the sudden changes.

  ‘A stroll to the beach? Feel like that?’ Stephen asked. ‘Blow the cobwebs.’

  ‘I’d rather the cobwebs than down there. A day like this.’ Esther guessing at what might have been going through his mind. Or was bound to, if they followed the track between the houses to the little beach. No, she wanted to spare him that, at least today. The past like an avalanche. The past always waiting to happen. Whoever it was said that. Then a few minutes later her telling him, ‘There, wasn’t I right?’, the blobs of rain landing against the windows, persisting briefly until another slab of sun fell across the yard.

  ‘Up to the Terminus then,’ he said. ‘Seeing you don’t fancy the beach.’

  ‘It’s still going to rain.’

  ‘We’ll outsmart it.’ He left the kitchen and at once came back, handing her one of the coats that had hung there in the hall cupboard since David and his sister were still at home.

  ‘Talk about high fashion,’ Esther said. ‘This should be in a museum.’

  ‘It fitted Lisa so it will be right for you.’

  The rain’s tinny needling against the plastic hoods as they stepped from the porch. She took Stephen’s arm as they turned into the rise of the street. The slightness of his forearm as her hand closed on it. ‘We must look like twins in these ridiculous things. If anyone walks up here behind us.’

  ‘After fifty yards they’d know who the fit one is.’ He talked about the street as they walked on. They were shadowy things to her, the names, the people he referred to. He told her the Pattersons, who had been there next door from the start, were both in a retirement home across at the Point. ‘Pushing a hundred, they must be.’ Then, ‘Know what it’s called, that place they’re in? Hillary Heights, can you credit that? Forget-me-slowly, they never come at names do they that tell the truth.’