by Lisa Gorton
Treen remembered and looked back at Kit. Her eyes, still blind with feeling, showed their blueness. Hands out, she came across the room. She crouched stiffly by Kit’s chair, so close Kit could see small veins threading the skin under her nostrils. ‘I’m sorry,’ Treen said. ‘Your first morning here. I wasn’t going to mention. Only one of our young men…’ She gestured back: ‘So talented.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘Oh…’ Treen looked dazedly at the door. ‘Crash. A car crash.’ She took hold of Kit’s hands. ‘I haven’t told them at the house yet. Dad gets so upset.’
So much raw feeling: Kit had to work hard not to pull away her hands. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Scott watching. It was a stranger who had died. Kit’s shock was nerveless. What she mostly felt was guilt that she did not feel more. She pictured again on Treen’s head that unnecessary hat.
‘I won’t say anything.’
‘Thank you dear.’ Treen stood upright, found a handkerchief in her sleeve, blew her nose. Standing, she rocked back on her heels. She stood immense—a statue. Some confused sense of ritual made Kit feel that she, too, should get up from her chair. Standing, she wished she had stayed where she was. The two of them looked back at Scott.
‘Your aunt’s upset,’ he said. ‘We all are. When you’re our age you’ll understand, such waste…’ He touched Treen’s arm just above the elbow. ‘We feel the years he hasn’t had.’ He bent down to look at one of the photographs. ‘I’m so angry with him,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Isn’t that terrible. I’m angry with him! His father too, of course.’
Treen raised her arms and let them drop. ‘I don’t know how I’ll tell them.’
Kit stepped around them both to look at the dead boy’s photographs. They were close-ups of grass stalks, black and white with colour tints—ordinary. Only the thought of the boy’s death made them frightening, the way the stalks filled the foreground.
Behind her, the two of them were talking about an art class. She heard Scott say: ‘But do come today. Bring her with you.’
He had dismissed them. Saying goodbye, he bent over her hand, brought his heels together—an oddly formal gesture. The door shut. Cast into the weird glare of midday, Kit and Treen glanced uncertainly down the street. A dry inland wind was making the flags outside the ice cream shop lift and subside. Treen tucked her glasses back into her handbag and clipped it shut.
‘The woman said one for the car.’
Kit had forgotten about the car. Scott had made himself the day’s event. That was what he could do, she saw already. Leaving him, they had stepped into a blank. Treen opened her handbag again and peered into it. She took out an ironed, folded handkerchief and patted at her nose.
‘Don’t tell me I’ve forgotten the shopping list.’ She looked back at the closed door. ‘Listen, it’s so hot.’
The teashop was air-conditioned. They sat at a table by the window, the street hidden by half-curtains of tea-coloured lace. Between them on the table, a white ceramic teardrop vase held a yellowing plastic rose.
‘He was a great friend of your mother’s. They were always together. Not in that way, I don’t think, but they were…’ Treen pushed the centre of her top lip down before taking a sip of tea. Thoughtfully, she chewed on her scone. She had dropped back into her own existence, a vagueness like depths of water.
‘What were the classes?’
‘What’s that?’ Treen roused. A crumb at the edge of her mouth was about to fall. ‘Oh! Life drawing.’
‘Did he mean I should come?’
‘Well, you could.’ She spread cream over her second scone. ‘It’s a lot of old ladies. And the models…’
‘Oh! I know what life drawing is.’
‘You might enjoy it, then.’ Treen frowned at the scone held halfway to her mouth. ‘Only I thought, your first day…’ Kit could see Treen rearranging her thoughts, like chairs. ‘Of course, if you’d like to. Scott did seem a little…’ Treen ducked her head and started searching again through her handbag.
‘A little what?’ Kit said. Treen’s baffled mildness woke in her a new sense of her own power. Seeing Scott’s face in her mind as she had seen it then—so close she could count the pale eyelashes—she wished that she had been ruder, that she had said something.
‘The thing is,’ murmured Treen, ‘I so clearly remember tucking it in here before we left.’ Eyes glazed, Treen looked back through the morning. ‘Unless we stopped somewhere?’
‘He seemed a little what?’
‘What’s that, dear?’
‘Scott. You were saying something.’
‘Oh! I think I was saying I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you came along.’
Chapter Seven
Anna closed the gate and stopped. Night had made the street a single fact. The lights were out in all the houses; the houses had drawn back. The road, which in daytime they would not have noticed, had come into its own: its white line had the force of a vanishing point. Without discussing it, the two of them left the footpath and walked along the centre of the road. She was so tired that she had gone past tiredness into that state, like dreaming, when everything she saw hung before her eyes, separate and without background. His leather-soled shoes struck hollow sounds from the bitumen.
‘What time is it?’
‘After midnight.’ He answered without looking at his watch.
She said, ‘I don’t think I’ve walked like this, just walked at night, since Kit was born.’
There was something festive about the trees at night. Their trunks had disappeared into the darkness. The streetlights shone up through leaves that appeared to float in air, ornate mysterious structures, so that walking along the road between them she felt as though she was taking part in some ritual. She thought: ownership, memory, even expectation make no claim here: we are alone as adults never are. She took hold of his arm. Through the material of his shirt his flesh, warm and separate, seemed to give off an electric force.
She said, ‘I see why they scream and break things.’
‘They?’
‘Teenagers. Disturbing my peace at 3am.’
He nodded. He was following, along the painted line of the road, his own thoughts. His face, whenever they stepped under a streetlight, looked pinched with exhaustion. So long as they were under the streetlight his face looked close. Stepping into the dark again his face seemed to draw back; the street itself drew back and made one darkness. They went from dark to light, dark to light, until it seemed to Anna that they were walking on the spot while the light swung over them from an imaginary lighthouse at the end of the street.
They crossed onto the gravel path that edged the gardens, the wrought iron boundary fence rising like strange foliage beside them in the dark. On the other side a possum, watching them, dropped its tail and sprang into the shrubbery.
They were heading to the beach. Not speaking, not looking at each other, they might have been sleepwalkers. The gardens were full of shadow and shifting leaf sounds: a secret existence alongside them, which composed their togetherness. Anna thought: two people side by side are not apart if they are listening. She only realised how far they had depended on that fenced-in unquiet darkness when they came to Beach Road, which never was calm; where the cars, rushing into their headlights, made her conscious of exhaustion, vacancy.
They went down concrete steps to the sand. To their right, at the end of a long curve, the city rose unreally over the bay. From this distance it looked as though the buildings themselves, concrete and stone, gave off a reddish haze. The beach, its thick sand pitted with the day’s footsteps, seemed more manufactured than those glowing outcrops. He bent to take off his shoes.
‘Needles,’ she said.
Without comment, without looking at her, he straightened up, plunged away down the sand. Beyond him the sea was almost black, its surface oily with light. Small waves ran reflections of light up the beach. Out of nowhere she remembered sitting at the restaurant the previous nigh
t, drinking in solitude. Here was the sound that had been missing then: these waves sounded less like waves than like dry leaves turning over.
Without turning his head he said, ‘I can’t keep doing this.’
‘I know.’ She remembered how he had laid his shaver and shaving cream, his toothpaste and toothbrush, in a neat row by the hotel basin. Loneliness had released in him an implacable humility. These last weeks, exiled to a Sydney hotel, the friends who had supported him most had been the ones he liked least.
He said: ‘I’ve asked about a transfer.’
‘When?’
‘Last week. They said they’d look around.’
‘But, when will they tell you?’ What she should have felt was gratification, a sense of the future widening out. She dug her fingers into the sand. Damp-cold, it felt greasy.
Along the beach a wooden jetty extended out under old-fashioned lights. They seemed to pour down bright swirling dust, the light they gave off only like light where it touched on water. It looked to Anna unbearably lonely. A few dinghies, moored alongside the jetty, made metallic sounds.
He said: ‘I thought you’d be pleased.’
‘But you know you can’t stay in the house with Kit.’
‘They’re looking for an apartment for me.’ He glanced at her and added: ‘It’s all right. A client asked for me to move here.’
Behind them on the footpath a couple passed. The girl’s laugh— mocking, raucous—broke up the overwarm stillness of the street. She is laughing at us, Anna thought. How desolate we must look: a middle-aged couple, the man in a business suit, sitting out on a beach after midnight.
A passing car sent their shadows sweeping across the sand in front of them like a clock being wound. Peter stretched out his legs and drew them in again. Usually he took any discomfort as an affront: he would not tolerate a cold coffee, a seat in the draught of a door.
She took hold of his arm. ‘But I am pleased,’ she said.
A wave ran high up the sand—a cargo ship perhaps, silently crossing the bay. Did they cross the bay at night? She thought of it out there, sliding through black water.
‘We came here,’ she said. ‘Matt and I, straight off the plane. Our first afternoon.’ Steel-coloured, greasy-looking in the rain, the sea, matching their jetlag, had released in them a sort of delirium. ‘It was pouring.’ The beach deserted, beer cans and faded ice-cream wrappers sinking into the wet sand…Under that grey sky, with freighters sliding across the horizon, the holiday park by the sea that Matt had been dreading had shown itself as an industrial wasteland.
She said, ‘It’s why we bought the house. Nobody lived here then.’
‘What I have never understood is why you came back. Why you didn’t stay in London.’
‘Benno sent us.’
‘Benno?’ he echoed incredulously.
‘Matt’s father. It was his idea, setting up here. He kept wanting Amy to get him a Rover Thomas. In the end Amy said: “Well, Anna’s Australian.”’
‘So you and Matt—’
‘I was working for his father, yes.’
‘You got the picture for him?’
‘By the time I got it back to London it was worth three times what he’d paid for it. They had me round for dinner and he said why not set up a gallery here. Why not?’
‘That was it. A dinner?’
‘He made it sound spontaneous. I found out later he’d done the business plan. He’s one of those bankers—he manages to be very good at collecting art without understanding it at all. He just always knows where the money’s going. He bought up in Notting Hill when it was still bedsits. That’s when he met Matt’s mother. Hanging out with artists half his age and the whole time they were off their heads he was noticing the real estate.’
‘And he sent Matt with you?’
‘He sent Matt with me,’ she echoed. ‘Keeping an eye on me, I suppose, though it was meant to be Matt’s year off after university. It never crossed his mind Matt would stay. He didn’t think it was the kind of place you could stay.’
‘He must have thought the two of you—’
‘Yes, but not…’ She pushed sand away under her hands. ‘The way my mother used to speak about tradesmen—you know, A little man to fix the plumbing.’
‘You showed him,’ Peter said, in a high, ironic voice. More coldly he added, ‘What a lot of arranging you all did.’
‘I can be at a tram stop and before I know it I’ve registered the price of everyone’s shoes. Matt was possible but it wasn’t just that. We…’ She suddenly saw again what she had not remembered for years: Matt’s face that first afternoon when they had stepped out of the taxi into the rain: a striated brightness, against which his face had seemed startlingly close. It had been the surprise of the rain, perhaps: they had looked at each other so directly she had seen her own reflection in the pupils of his eyes.
Peter looked along the beach at the city rising over the dark water. ‘What I don’t understand is, why you didn’t go back with him.’ He picked up her hand. Not looking at it, he explored with his fingers the lines of her palm. ‘He didn’t ask you,’ he went on dreamily. ‘Or he did, but he was going to go anyway, whatever you said. He hurt your feelings.’
‘Don’t…’ What she wanted—what she had ever wanted—seemed the least of it. That moment, she saw how unreal all this time since Matt left had been. It had been afterwards, simply. The dread she felt was something she remembered from dreams, when whatever she did was from the beginning too late, too slow. She found herself thinking of Peter’s dog, of Peter’s formal, considerate settlement with Clare. Impossible to go back to the beginning…
The day they had discovered she was pregnant Matt had said that he ‘wasn’t an optimiser’. He had meant it as reassurance. She was enough. He never had allowed the sort of talk that indulged self-regard. From the first, that refusal of his had built itself into their relationship. It had been their arrogance, she thought now: a feeling that if they spoke of feeling they would be like all the rest, wanting reassurance all their lives.
She said, ‘Matt refuses to smile when he meets people. He thinks it’s like dogs rolling over, watching strangers smile at each other.’
‘You never smile.’
‘I learnt that from him. It was Matt who said I shouldn’t sell to just anyone.’
‘His father was rich.’
‘His mother wasn’t. Matt’s father was brutal to her. Twentyone when she married him and even then he was sleeping with his secretary. Somehow he’d convinced himself she wouldn’t mind. He left her with a dreary apartment in Notting Hill and the Warhol he’d given her when Matt was born. And he still carries on as though she treated him badly.’
How far away Matt sounded when she talked of him like this. It was true, what she said, but it felt like a lie. It was a lie. Matt was the shape in their bed in the dark, he was the one who made coffee in the morning. His voice called out from the study when she walked in the door. The smell of seaweed and petrol, the grey sand marked with shadowy black footprints—all she saw seemed built out of feeling without substance. I am asleep, she thought, hearing a wave with a sucking sound retreat down the sand.
The couple passing along the street had gone up into one of the apartments overlooking the road. Anna could still hear that laugh. Sudden, abandoned, frightening. Young, she thought suddenly. Young. It seemed almost impossible that this was the same hour where Kit was.
The years when Kit was at primary school Anna had known at each moment where she was, the way she would know without conscious thought where a window was in a room. These days, whenever Kit was asleep in her own bed Anna felt something right itself in her. She had come to realise it would be part of her always: this atonal feeling whenever Kit was somewhere she did not know. Trying again to picture Kit at Sea House, Anna felt the house build itself around her as it had been when she was growing up in it: the queasy familiarity of mealtimes, the unfree defiance of her bedroom with a slammed door. But that plac
e was years ago. Kit could not be there.
‘I drove Matt to the airport,’ she said. ‘We were early. We checked in his luggage and still had an hour in the lounge. There we were, looking across at each other. The little armchairs in clusters, the stunned light they have in those places. I felt as though I’d forgotten how to live. He went away through the doors and I drove home and the house felt as though it was somebody else’s house. The light was strange and I felt sick—you know that fake brightness things have after fever? For one thing, I’m never home in the middle of the day, or only when I’m not well. I sat there, at his desk. He’d packed up everything and it didn’t feel as though he’d gone. It felt as though he’d never been.’
‘How much?’ Not believing her blank look Peter went on, deliberately brutal: ‘To buy him out. Matt’s father.’
‘I’ve no idea.’ She heard him take in breath. It was like Peter to keep insisting on practicalities with the sea sliding up to their feet in the dark. ‘I should have thought of that before. But thinking wasn’t what we were doing.’
He said nothing. Glancing up, she saw him pressing the heel of his hand against his forehead. The nakedness was dreadful—his face all lines.
‘You haven’t even told Matt about us.’
‘I will…’
Closing her eyes, hearing the small waves exhaust themselves, it seemed to Anna that she was in a position so false it made its own logic. She could have foreseen how her betrayal would cause her to lose faith in herself. What she could not have foreseen was how she would forfeit, even before this, her faith in other people—even Matt. Peter had shown from the start a sort of compassionate chivalry. For him, she was the one betrayed. His assumption had been so much a part of their beginning she had almost forgotten that it was not, so far as she knew, true. Perhaps Matt really had gone back to have time with his mother. Perhaps only her own ornate dishonesties had made her incapable of believing that simple truth.
