The Alphabet Sisters (36 page)

They’d arranged to meet for a glass of wine when she got home tonight. He was taking Lola out to dinner, he’d told her the night before, but expected to be home by eleven. It was half-past ten. She couldn’t wait to see him.

B
ett and Richard stood in the motel carpark. “Thanks, Richard. That was a lovely night.”

“You’re welcome, Bett. I enjoyed it, too.”

She wondered whether she should invite him in for a glass of wine. Or would he invite her in for a glass of wine? But there was no spark between them, she’d realized. She liked him, enjoyed talking to him, even if she had told him too much. But that was all.

“Well, good night.”

“Good night.”

Inside her room, she sat on the bed and pulled her knees under her chin. Her conversation over dinner kept echoing in her mind.

“It’s been hard. I’ve missed them a lot.”

“Them?”

“Anna and Carrie.”

“I actually meant it must have been terrible when your fiancé left you for your sister.”

She went into the bathroom and stared at herself in the mirror, not liking what she saw. She wiped her hand across her lips, smearing her lip gloss. She leaned in closer and saw her mascara was already smudged. How many years had she stared at that face, felt cross, felt angry, felt powerless? When was maturity going to kick in? When would she get the ability to deal confidently with everything life sent to her?

She decided to have a shower, needing to stand under the stream of water, wash away some of the troubling thoughts. She turned the shower tap on full blast, wanting to fill the room with steam before she got in. As she went back out to the bedroom area to get her dressing gown, she heard a car pull up next door, the headlights momentarily coming through the thin fabric of the motel curtains. Anna arriving home from her trip to Adelaide, she guessed. Five to eleven, a late enough night for her. Bett undressed, stepped under the streaming water, and shut her eyes.

A
fter carrying the costumes into her room, Anna simply turned off the light again, shut the door after her, and walked five doors down. She knocked lightly, two little taps.

He answered immediately. “Anna, welcome back.” His smile was as warm as his voice.

“Hello, Richard.” She took in every detail of him.

“Anna? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” She was more than fine. She was happy, she realized. She was home at the motel. She knew Ellen was safe in Lola’s room. There had been a note on Anna’s bed in Ellen’s best handwriting. “I love you Mummy,” with a picture of Bumper the sheep and the two of them in bright colors. Anna felt light after months of heaviness. She spoke softly, but surely. “Richard, I know I should be coy. And that we should spend more time together first. And have dinner, and go for walks, and get to know each other better. But I don’t want to wait that long. I want to go to bed with you.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“Right now?”

“Yes.” She faltered slightly.

“Will you at least give me time to make the bed?”

She smiled. “No, I won’t.”

“Never mind, then. We’ll have to manage.” He took her by the hand and drew her inside his room.

B
ett sat on the edge of her bed, wrapped in a towel. Her mind was leaping all over the place. From the dinner with Richard tonight to her conversation with Anna the other night.
“Still avoiding the truth after all these years, Bett?”

She hadn’t been avoiding it. She’d known for years, in fact. It’s just she had chosen not to tell anyone, to let the rift go unhealed between them, for three long years. But why? Because she wanted to keep the rift going? Because she was glad to be away from her sisters?

Yes.

That night of their fight she’d felt a hot high flame of anger that she’d never felt before. In the days and months that followed she had easily found other fuel to keep it burning. Some of it had surprised her. Memories of Anna doing things first—learning to ride a bike, wearing a bra, wearing makeup—and feeling jealous, that she always had to wait her turn. Being equally jealous of Carrie, who had been born with all the right accessories for life success—a mop of blonde curls, a small frame, even a slight lisp as a child, like some modern version of Shirley Temple, without the saccharine sweetness.

She had a sudden urge to talk to Anna about it all. About everything. To apologize for the terrible things she had said about Glenn. She’d had no right. Anna loved him, and Glenn loved Anna. Their marriage was their business. The remorse lasted for a moment, then she started remembering things about Glenn. His arrogance. The way he could be so condescending. It was no good. She couldn’t pretend she liked Glenn. But she could still apologize for saying such mean things about him.

Bett pulled on her dressing gown, slipped outside, and headed to Anna’s door. The lights were out. She knocked gently.

“Anna?” she said softly.

No answer. She must have gone straight to sleep.

Bett looked down the row of rooms and saw a light on in Richard Lawrence’s window. Perhaps she could start with him instead, use him as a trial run. She imagined it. “Hello, Richard. You don’t know me that well, but I need to make another confession, if you don’t mind.”

As she watched, his light went out. She felt a sudden frustration. Why had everyone decided to have an early night? She waited a moment, then turned and went back into her own room, pulled back the sheets of her bed, and climbed in.

I
n his room, Richard traced a finger across Anna’s face in the light from the moon coming through the curtains. “Do you know, I’m not sure if we got that quite right.”

“I’m not too sure either,” Anna answered, just as solemnly. “Perhaps we could try it again?”

“What a great idea.” He leaned down to kiss her again.

Chapter Twenty-two

B
y the time dawn came, Bett still wasn’t asleep. It was a combination of the wine she’d drunk and the conversation with Richard, she decided. It seemed to have unleashed memories she’d kept well locked away for more than three years. Uncomfortable memories.

The motel room felt very claustrophobic. She needed to feel her limbs moving, hoped that would calm her mind. She pulled on tracksuit pants and a light windbreaker, laced on her sneakers, and crept out of her room as the sun was coming up over the gum trees on the hill across the road. She started walking out of the town, headed north past the vineyards, the early autumn colors of red and yellow appearing on the edges of the leaves, still heavy with fruit.

Walking usually soothed her. She’d been walking for an hour a day most days, since the year after she first started working on the newspaper. Lola had gotten her started, in her usual blunt way. She had come into Bett’s room one afternoon, pulled a chair beside the bed Bett was lying on, and looked very serious. “Bett, we need to talk.”

“About what?”

“Do you remember that Piggy in the Middle jibe that upset you so much all those years ago?”

Bett had put down the bag of chips she was eating. “Yes.”

“You might want to be careful or someone will call you that again.” She ignored Bett’s shocked expression. “I’m not the body police, but I don’t like to see someone letting herself go, and that’s what you’re doing.”

“I’ve got every right to be as fat or as thin as I like. And you can hardly talk about clothes.” Stung by Lola’s remarks, she’d wanted to hurt her back.

“I’m happy with what I wear, Bett. And if it makes you happy, you can be as big as you like and wear shapeless clothes for the rest of your life. But you’re not happy, are you?”

For a moment her temper had flared. She had started to deny it. And then she had let the defenses down, confessed all to Lola. No, she wasn’t happy. She was extremely unhappy. Everything had been getting on top of her, and the only comfort had been food. Sitting for hours studying or working at her desk, she’d consoled herself by eating biscuits and cakes and chips. And she was wearing baggy clothes because that was all that fitted her these days.

Lola had listened and then waited for the tears to pass. “You have two choices, Bett. You can do something about your weight. Or you can stay as you are and decide not to let it bother you.”

“It does bother me. Of course it does. But what do I do? I’m useless in a gym or those aerobics classes. And I really love food. I don’t want to live off cabbage soup for the rest of my life.”

“What are those two things hanging off your waist there?”

“They’re my legs.”

“And what can they do?”

“Hold me up. Walk.”

“Walk. Exactly. From today I want you walking an hour a day, in rain or shine, fog or mist. Or, more likely, seeing as it’s summer, in blazing sunshine day after day.”

“Walk?”

“Walk. The world’s best exercise. The world’s best calmer. No one ever regrets a walk, Bett. I’ll be your trainer. I’ll make you do it.”

“You’ll walk with me?”

“On these old legs? I’d collapse in a moment. No, I’ll drop you off somewhere and then I’ll drive to the end of the walking trail and pick you up an hour later. And that way I’ll know how far you’ve gone, and if you get to me any quicker I’ll also know you’ve hitched a lift. And I can sit in the car and listen to classical music, which will calm me down at the same time the walk is calming you down. Is it a deal?”

Bett shook her grandmother’s hand. “It’s a deal.”

So she had started it, walking for an hour every day, along the dusty roads at the back of the Valley. Lola would drop her off and then head off in her small white car, driving past her, sitting upright in the car like a meerkat as she went past. The girls had always laughed at Lola’s style of driving. Bett walked until she met Lola waiting some miles away, reading the paper, doing a crossword, or sometimes dozing, classical music or a tape of musical highlights playing loudly from the car. Three months later Bett had summoned up the courage to go clothes shopping. She’d dropped only a size, but her body shape was different, firmer. She wasn’t skinny—she’d never be skinny—but she was fitter and had definitely found a figure that she was comfortable with.

She’d met Matthew not long afterward. He had moved to the Valley as a junior vet, while he was studying at the nearby agricultural college. She had interviewed him on his second day for a feature on new arrivals in the town. As an interview subject, he hadn’t seemed eligible, so she hadn’t been as nervous of him as she would have been if she met him in a bar or somewhere social. When he mentioned he didn’t know anyone locally yet, she’d invited him for a drink up at the motel bar. Her father had poured him beers and asked him lots of questions, while Bett sat beside him, joining in, enjoying the fact that it was her, not Anna or Carrie for once, sitting beside a good-looking man on these bar stools. Carrie had been on her overseas trip at the time. Anna was in Sydney.

The next weekend she and Matthew met again, this time in one of the three pubs in town. Again, she’d had no nerves. She felt relaxed with him. They met the weekend after that. It had become a regular thing, so stress-free, so easy that people in the town had started calling them a couple before they had thought too much about it themselves.

He’d kissed her on their fifth date. By the seventh date it had progressed to his hands touching her body. She’d decided six weeks into the relationship that she was going to sleep with him. She had gathered early on that he was more experienced than her. He’d had a number of girlfriends in Perth, he’d told her. On a weekend away, two months after they’d met, they’d had sex for the first time. It had been nice. Not earth-shattering, not painful, not even especially passionate, but comfortable. Easy. Gentle. It had continued that way, too. She was still self-conscious, not liking to make love in full light, feeling a bit awkward in the sexy underwear he started buying her. But the relief she felt outweighed any of that.

Because the truth was she had been a virgin when she started going out with Matthew. At twenty-eight years old. There had been several near misses, one or two very close encounters, but something had stopped her each time. She hadn’t told Matthew. He hadn’t guessed either. And she’d certainly never told Anna or Carrie. To the two of them, losing their virginity had been straightforward, pleasant. Just a matter of their getting it out of the way, was how it had seemed to Bett.

After five months she and Matthew had fallen into an easygoing relationship—meeting for drinks once or twice a week, dinner one night a week, after which she would usually go back to the house he was sharing in town. Sometimes they would make love, sometimes they wouldn’t. Then one night, out of the blue, he asked her to marry him. They were on their way back from a friend’s wedding. All night long the two of them had been teased, been asked when their big day would be. “A wedding begets a wedding, you two, remember.” The speeches had been very moving, the couple talking of their love for each other, the importance of their families, how they couldn’t wait to set up a home together, start their own family.

On the way back to Clare, Matthew told her more about his own childhood, how his parents had separated when he was young, and how he’d shifted around a lot. “I don’t want the rest of my life to be like that, Bett. I want to stay in one place. Have children. Make them feel safe.”

It had moved her almost to tears at the time, thinking of him being so lonely as a child, wanting to make sure that his own kids didn’t go through what he’d been through.

“You understand, Bett, don’t you? You know exactly what I mean.”

At the back of her mind, Bett wanted to disagree. She’d quite liked all the shifting they had done as children. But that night the champagne had taken over her emotions. “Of course I understand. And I think you’d be a great dad, make a great husband and father.”

He stopped the car, took her hands. “Bett, do you want to get married? You and me?”

She felt a warm, comforting feeling. Even a sort of relief again. She wasn’t a failure, someone loved her enough to want to marry her. They drove straight to the motel to tell her parents and Lola. That night, Carrie happened to ring from her travels and they told her the news, too. Word whipped around the town. Rebecca came into work with a bottle of champagne. It was a very happy time.