Cooee (6 page)

‘I don't think so. It was twelve years ago, darling.'

She draws a breath and I can see she is working up to something.

‘Do you miss Max a lot, Gandie?'

‘Yes, honey. Of course I miss him.'

‘When will he come back, do you think?'

‘I don't know that he will.'

‘Did you ever report him?'

‘Report him?' I repeat, confused. What would I have reported him for, I am wondering.

‘As a missing person.'

‘Oh. No. No, I never did that.'

‘But he was missing, wasn't he? Is missing.'

‘I suppose so. In a way.'

‘You don't mind me asking?'

Why can't I just say:
Sophie, Sophie darling, don't talk to me about Max. I do mind, I can't bear it, for Christ's sake stop it.

‘No, of course not.'

Sophie looks at the photo again, traces around the edge of it with her slender, honey-brown finger. Sophie's like me: fine-boned, olive-skinned; she's got a tan all year round. She doesn't appreciate it yet, but she will, when she finds what a saving it is on pantyhose.

‘He must come back one day,' she says. ‘He must come back to you, Gandie.'

To my appalled horror I feel tears rising to my eyes. I turn the page and see a spread of Kate and Gavin fooling around with the cake, Gavin brandishing the knife in mock threat.

Sophie giggles. ‘Dad's such a clown.'

Well, that's certainly true.

When the children were small I would go in from time to time, in the evenings, to check on them — as all parents do, I suppose. Kate would always be asleep, curled up, rosy and boringly angelic. Dominic was frequently awake, ramrod-straight in the bed, his wide eyes glinting darkly.

‘Why aren't you asleep, honey?' I'd sit down on the side of the bed. Sometimes, if I dared (as I've said, Dominic never liked being touched), I would run my hands through his thick dark hair.

‘Can't.'

‘Are you trying?'

‘The more you try, the less it happens.'

That's true. Insomniac from way back, I know this.

‘Have you been playing word games?' I know this is one of the things he does, when he can't sleep.

‘Boring.'

‘Are you worried about anything?'

‘No.'

Eventually I would give up and leave, patting him in what was meant to be a consoling, maternal way. I'd peek in later, on my way to bed. Sometimes, even then, he'd be awake.

I never knew what he was thinking, though. Not then; not now. I talked to Zoë about it; I asked her advice. This was a rare step, for me: the trouble with asking advice from Zoë was that she gave it. Then she followed it up, to see if you'd done what she'd told you. It wasn't worth the trouble, asking Zoë what she thought about anything: you knew you would be liable to her swift persecutions, her rampant assaults.

But I suppose I must have approached her when I was feeling yielding or unconfident, forgetting that the aura of sisterhood was more attractive than the actual experience. Anyway, she was a teacher: she was supposed to understand child psychology. I remember she raised her eyebrows at me.

‘
You
worry about things, don't you, Minky?'

‘Some things.'

‘Some things, yes: that's what I mean.'

‘Of course I do. Everybody worries about some things.'

‘Well. Children worry, too.'

‘He's three, Zoë.'

‘The world is a worrying place, when you're three.'

‘How do you know?'

‘Use your brains.'

Well, that was Zoë all over. Use your brains, little sister. Don't get me to work it out for you.

It's always been edgy, my relationship with Zoë. I don't know that I would call it dysfunctional, entirely. I don't know enough about what sisterly relationships are usually like to be able to make that judgement. I am five years younger than Zoë, and she's never let me forget it. I think when I was born she regarded me as a little-sister present, straight from the stork to her, my parents incidental to the transaction.

My character, my clothes, my moral development, my diet: Zoë studied them all earnestly, and never fell short of her duty when she felt good advice was required. Her shadow, murky and persistent and I suppose well meaning, leans over my childhood: wherever I was, whatever I did, Zoë was there to help things along. There were good parts to this, of course: when I started school, for instance, it was comfortable to know Zoë was around to give Chinese burns to anyone who teased me; Zoë was there to look after me if I was ill, if I fell over in the playground, if I forgot my lunch.

It was less comfortable, as we grew up, to find Zoë had read my diary (she gave me marks for it), vetoed potential boyfriends (when they rang, she told them I wasn't home), and insisted on monitoring the sorts of bras I bought. Whenever I complained she always said she did it for my own good, because she loved me.

She said the same thing, many years later, when I complained about her girlhood interventions. She did them because she loved me. I didn't disbelieve her. That was precisely the trouble with Zoë: she did things because she loved you. They were awful things, but she did love you, loved you according to her lights and with a total absence of imagination.

It would have been far easier to cope with her if she had acted out of malice. Contrary to what many people think, it isn't malice or evil that causes most of the world's problems: it's stupidity — it's people thinking they know best and not seeing how disastrously wrong they are.

As I've said, we used to make up rhymes when were young, but Zoë's frequently had an admonitory flavour. I've never used rhyming as a means of instruction or inculcation with Sophie: it's a matter of having fun, of having a giggle and encouraging her to play games with language. It's a skill she already has and it'll never do her any harm. Kate is perpetually astounded by it and shakes her head. ‘She's so
clever
,' she says to me, in wonderment. ‘Just like Dominic. He could always do that, too, couldn't he?'

Once, when Sophie and I were doing some cooking together, she chanted this to me:

Great chefs are contumacious,
Disputatious and pugnacious
In kitchens that are spacious
They make soups that are audacious,
And salads all herbaceous.
Their desserts are ostentatious
And their pancakes farinaceous.

‘Did she truly make it up on her own?' Kate asked later.

‘Yes, of course.'

‘You didn't help with any of it? Even the farinaceous bit?'

‘It started with the farinaceous bit. She discovered that it was a word that had to do with flour, and she just took it from there.'

‘Amazing,' murmured Kate. ‘Amazing.'

One of the things Sophie has achieved by the very fact of her existence is to inject a little normality into her extended family. Split as we are by old histories, replete with enmities matured like ripened cheese, we gather at family occasions with an inbuilt propensity to eyeball each other across the room as if battlelines were about to be declared.

Sophie overcomes these divisions; she traverses the sharp and jagged crevices in our family landscape; she presents to us an image of ourselves as harmonious and ordinary. A regular family, a commonplace and unremarkable group of related people who don't bicker and simmer, who don't harbour fetid suspicions or implacable hostilities about each other. It isn't a bit true, of course: we're so lost in our dysfunction, so crabbed and twisted by it, that we'll never emerge from it. It's like an indelible dye: it's imbued the fibre and substance of our relationships with its telltale stain.

So we're a dysfunctional family: but then again, what's dysfunction? Show me a functional family and I'll show you a pack of poseurs and fibbers. Our dysfunction is at any rate remedied, if not completely repaired, by Sophie: it's partly why she's so important, so necessary.

When she was eight or so, Dominic's passion for old cars was just starting: Sophie was scornful. He came around to Kate's one time to show off his latest purchase when I was there (clearly, he didn't know I was or he would have chosen another time), and Sophie poked fun at him. How did it go again, the nonsense rhyme she made up on the spot?

Dominic, bominic, tinsel and stars,
Spends all his money on silly old cars,
Drives down the street in his burgundy Jag,
Bominic, Dominic, Oh! what a dag!

And Dominic — proud, prickly, difficult Dominic — laughed and hugged her. Somehow Sophie could get away with all kinds of things I never could, where Dominic was concerned. I don't know how seriously close he's ever allowed her to get; but he certainly lowers the barricades for her.

I presume he lowers them for Paula, too. I wonder what he's told her — what he tells her — about me, I mean. I see her eyes resting on me sometimes with that kind of prissy speculative look she gets, and I wonder what he's shared with her, what she knows, what she guesses.

I wonder what he knows, too.

‘What about your wedding, Gandie?' said Sophie to me one day, as I knew she would. ‘I mean, your other wedding. Your wedding to Max.'

Ah. What about it? Well, it's a good question. I won't tell her how good. I'd anticipated the approach and I'm ready for her this time: I bring out the measly handful of photographs (they're not in an album: I never got around to doing that) and she studies them earnestly.

‘Why did you get married on a beach?'

‘Max decided to,' I say.

‘Didn't you want to?'

‘I didn't mind.'

‘Was it sunset?'

‘Yes.'

‘Was it very romantic?'

‘Yes.' I realise this must sound bald, but it's hard to enthuse.

‘Where are all your guests, Gandie? Didn't they come to the beach?'

‘We didn't have guests. Only witnesses. Two witnesses.'

‘A wedding with no guests?' She is incredulous.

‘We sort of eloped, honey.'

She isn't impressed, I can tell.

‘But didn't your mum come? Or Mum, or Dominic? Or Aunt Zoë?'

Hard to explain, especially from this distance: it's like something that happened to me in another life. Well, it is, really.

I could always tell her the truth, that Aunt Zoë (Zoë's her great-aunt, of course, but she always calls her Aunt) and my mother (if she'd still been alive, which she wasn't) would have stoned Max to death and eaten his liver sooner than come to our wedding. It doesn't seem worth it, though.

‘Who took the photos, then?'

‘One of the witnesses.'

‘But why?'

‘It's just the way it was, honey.'

Sophie studies one of the photographs closely, wrinkling the smooth skin around her eyes as she strains to see more clearly.

‘Max is awfully handsome, isn't he, Gandie?'

Oh, yes. Max was handsome. Max was only
the
most attractive man I'd ever laid eyes on. How many women get to make their marriage vows to the most attractive man they've ever seen, I wonder, bleakly. Cross Cary Grant with Sean Connery; add a dash of Robert Redford. (I'm aware that these names betray my age.) Shake together.

People turned to look at Max. They took one look at him and they were ready to be seduced by him. Except for my family, of course. Other people fell about for Max: they lay on their back and waggled their paws in the air. It wasn't just that he was so good-looking. He had slathers of charm. Pots of it. Vats of it.

‘Yes, honey,' I say. ‘Max was very handsome.'

‘But he's probably still alive, isn't he? He wasn't very old, was he, when he went away? Won't he come back?'

‘He won't come back, honey.'

Sophie looks as if she's going to cry.

‘But, Gandie, he can't be dead. He's not dead. You don't think he's dead, do you?'

I find I can't answer, and turn to the photographs instead. But it doesn't work. Sophie can't understand why I haven't mounted these shots in a satin-bound album, why I keep them in an old envelope. She wants them carefully arranged and lovingly displayed, and even offers to do it all for me. But I can't bear it, suddenly; I can't bear the way she's pawing the photos, the questions she's asking, the way she assumes I'm going to want to talk about all of this.

I cut her off sharply, and I go into the kitchen to make myself a cup of coffee with my trembling hands and my loneliness and my desolation. Sophie doesn't follow me. She's a tactful child: she can tell she's overstepped some line she didn't know existed. When she says goodbye to me she gives me a fiercer hug than usual.

‘Poor Gandie,' she mumbles into my neck. ‘Poor Gandie.'