The Good Parents (11 page)

In all ways these excursions couldn’t be more different from what she had experienced up till now. The instinct of the boys
she knew was to head for open spaces, the beaches or the river or King’s Park. Everything happened outside, sex, socialising,
music, films. They went to drive-in cinemas, concerts on ovals or in grassy auditoriums, football games. They camped at Rottnest
Island. Even at parties, everyone ended up on the porch or the terrace or the shrubbery down the back of the yard. At the
end of the night their cars, or their fathers’ cars, invariably headed for the beach, or parking lots overlooking the river.
When summer came all the boys wore as little as possible, shorts and singlets, bare feet, a sort of native tribe.

As far as she could see, day or night, winter or summer, Cy Fisher wore the same black suit and white shirt. His only concession
to the heat was to take off his jacket and roll up his sleeves to expose thick, black-haired forearms. He never exposed his
legs or his feet and walked as little as possible in the street. His skin was so white it was as if the sun never reached
him.

His instinct was all for dark interiors, in the north of the city, amongst people he knew, none of whom had an English name.
He had no interest in nature, and actively distrusted all insects, birds, dogs. The only time she’d seen him even slightly
agitated was when a bee flew around his head. He’d cursed and swiped at it and didn’t rest until he’d crushed it beneath his
boot. He said he wouldn’t know one end of a surfboard from another. She realised she’d never known a male under thirty who
didn’t surf.

She began to understand that he was of another species, those who slept late and stayed up all night. She thought of him as
a sort of nocturnal animal, which had, for reasons of its own, decided to bring her into its world.

He saw her for an hour or so after work each day and always delivered her home in time. Never laid a hand on her, apart from
her shoulder or the base of her spine when they walked in or out of a door. She didn’t know what he wanted of her. Suspense
grew. She sensed it was a breaking-in process and couldn’t help admiring his cool.

What did she know of him? Sometimes she told him anecdotes about her day at work when he picked her up. He listened benevolently,
without comment. He drove serenely, uninterested in small talk. The smile he gave her when she got into the car was enough
to warm her through the journey. Why? Because he only ever smiled if he wanted to. It seemed
to signal some deep, mysterious approval that carried her past the strangeness between them.

He wasn’t afraid of silence. It was as if he said, it’s enough I’ve chosen you. I have made a decision.

Christmas went by, but she applied to keep working at Boans. The Leaving results came out, she’d passed respectably. She’d
been going to stay with some classmates on Rottnest, but she had no interest in this now, nor in the backyard parties – punchbowls,
coloured lights, hired music – that broke out all over the suburbs by the river. She stopped returning phone calls. Soon nobody
called her anymore. It was as if she’d moved to another city.

She didn’t know if she liked Cy Fisher or not, she couldn’t think about it. All she knew was that these little sorties with
him had a charm for her. With him, her life was suddenly exotic. In bed at home, this secret life, the places he took her
to, the people she met, seemed like a fairytale.

Cy Fisher was not someone she could talk about to any of the girls she knew. Unlike them, she had no close friendships. This
was not just because she was reserved by nature. Beauty isolated her. By some genetic design, all her inherited features had
harmoniously come together, her father’s olive colouring, her mother’s fine bones, to create its own fresh, perfect form.
At seventeen she was like a new star rising in the firmament, gazed upon with wonder all over her small world. Wherever she
went she attracted attention. There was a hush about her if she came into a room. Old people smiled at her. It was said that
she looked like Natalie Wood, that she could be a cover girl for
Seventeen
.

Girls gazed at her in class, wondering how one creature could be so blessed. They kept their distance. Face to face with some
of them, it seemed to her that their eyes swam with
something secret, some suspicion they were keeping to themselves. She sensed that they were on the lookout for any signs that
she was pleased with herself. She had to work hard to compensate, be extra modest and nice, just to prove that she was the
same as everybody else. This created tension inside her. She felt isolated, unreal, a fake. There was something unexpressed
in her relationships with other girls, even those who included her. When they talked, daily, about appearances, their own
or other people’s, Toni had to stay silent.

And all the time she knew she was no vainer than they were. She took her beauty for granted, it had always been there, it
was part of her, she enjoyed it unthinkingly, carelessly, as someone who has never been ill enjoys a healthy body.

Boys, on the other hand, were always in favour of her. In fact, the cooller she was, the more they seemed to like it. Only
the confident or very daring approached her and asked her out. But this too was unreal. She felt their eyes didn’t really
see her when they looked at her. They didn’t listen to what she said. They liked her whatever she thought or did. She lost
respect for them and was bored.

In her own family, beauty was a word that was never mentioned. Her older sister Karen, with the ordinary good looks of youth,
was twenty-two and soon to be married, distracted, fulfilled, lost in her own world of lists and plans and bridal magazines.
They had never been close. Toni was a quiet, cool, even-tempered child, detached like her father, Beryl said. Karen was closer
to Beryl. Karen’s social persona was warm, poised and chatty. Karen is the
nice
one, people liked to say.

Their father, Nig (for Nigel, but also making reference to the tremendous tan he gained in the navy while on service in the
tropics), never seemed to really look at his daughters, as if that was taboo. He treated them both with a distant, courteous
affection. Perhaps he was only too aware of the trap of appearances – during the war he was as handsome as Cary Grant in his
uniform, Beryl said, he was regarded as a
catch
, all the girls were wild about him. Her marriage was a coup, the triumph of her life.

Caught, he always had the upper hand. It was as if he’d made a pact with himself, to let his marriage interfere with his private
pursuits as little as possible. He resisted all of Beryl’s social ambitions. When he was home he sat silent behind his newspaper,
indifferent to her rants and tears. He lived for going to the pub, to the football or cricket, or card games with old navy
friends. He sold insurance to rural businesses and spent one week in three staying in old pubs, going to country race meets.
‘Look after your mother,’ he told his daughters, smiling as he left, freshly shaved and light-hearted.

A tension grew in her as the weeks passed. Soon she would start university, the first step on the path to the future plotted
out for her (an arts degree, a brief stint in the public service, a year in London. The word ‘marry’ hovered just where this
path met the horizon). Cy Fisher was so very much not a part of that future that she didn’t know how she could keep on seeing
him.

But was this the future that she really wanted? And if not, what did she want? At night she lay in bed and thought about this.
She felt as if there was something she had once known for herself, which now she had forgotten.

She thought about Cy Fisher. She’d never expected to find him desirable – he was hardly the ideal of an attractive man – and
yet she was more and more intrigued. She thought about his self-control, his calmness, the warm dry touch of his hands. He’d
never even tried to kiss her. The way he was suddenly
there, filling a doorway. The way he could, just as suddenly, disappear. The way his beard grew, virile and urgent, so he
had to shave twice a day. But his carefully slick-backed hair, his ring, his clean, filed nails were almost female. He cared
for himself like a
woman
. What would her father think of that?

He’d left school at fourteen. He’d never read a book in his life. But this was her mother’s voice in her ear. He was a king
in his world. In that world, a graceful hospitality flowed around her. She could stay silent and no one said she was stuck-up.
In Cy’s world she felt light and simple and at ease.

By now she ought to have introduced him to her parents. Lately when she came home from work, her mother had leaned forward
to smell her breath. Toni was running out of friends that she’d happened to meet or invitations to drinks from workmates.

‘Tell the truth,’ Cy Fisher said as he drove her to her bus stop. ‘Tell them you’re with me.’ There was a glint in his eye,
a half-smile on his lips.

‘Then you’ll have to meet them,’ she said. He had no comprehension of how much they wouldn’t like him. Or perhaps he did.
He was throwing her a challenge.

She took a breath. ‘Come home with me now.’

She knew at once that it would never be all right. Beryl and Nig were sitting in their armchairs, beneath the standard lamp,
both absorbed in watching the news. Spotlit under the pleated lampshade, their old faces were bleached and sunken, fallen
into worried lines. They looked up at the same time, startled by the vision of Toni in the doorway with a stranger. Nig jumped
up to turn off the sound on the TV. Behind him Beryl whipped off her apron. Toni introduced Cy and the men shook hands. They
all stood looking at one another. No one asked Cy to sit down.

Beryl was unable to smile. Her eyes kept returning to Cy’s hair and ring. She would be thinking ‘common’, Toni knew, she would
be thinking ‘flashy’. Her father cleared his throat a couple of times.

‘Do you work at Boans with Toni, er …?’

‘I’m in business. For myself.’ A small smile hovered on Cy’s lips. Somewhere, deep down, he was amused. Something was happening
to the room, it felt smaller, stuffier, it could hardly contain his huge unsuitability.

‘What line of business would that be?’ Nig ventured.

‘Real estate.’

Down the hall the telephone rang and was instantly answered. Karen. Her fiancé Bevan always rang her at this time. I have
never, Beryl was often heard to say, had a moment’s doubt about Bevan.

‘Dinner’s ready,’ Beryl said, looking hard at Toni, her eyes signalling.
Get rid of him
.

The two men nodded at one another, Cy bowed to Beryl and Toni saw him to the door. By the time she sat down in the dining
room she knew she didn’t want to be there anymore.

When the university term started Cy picked her up in the Arts carpark. She hadn’t realised how much freedom university life
would give her. Now she could meet up with him between lectures, at any time of the day. His real estate business didn’t seem
to have set hours. It felt strange at first that she could come and go without having to lie or ask anyone’s permission. She
still looked over her shoulder before she stepped into the Citroën.

One twilight he took her back to his apartment. It was in his part of the city, on top of an old shop on the corner of
Fitzgerald Street and a road that ran along a park ringed by huge Moreton Bay fig trees. The shop had been turned into a travel
agency called Park Lane Travel which his sisters ran but they had left for the day. ‘I bought this building for a song a few
years ago,’ he said, as he led her past the counter to a staircase at the back of the room. At the top of the stairs was a
door which he unlocked.

‘Nobody comes up here except my mother when I let her clean.’

‘No guests? Not even your sisters?’

He shook his head.

A large living room with long windows overlooked the trees in the park. He’d knocked down walls to modernise the place, he
explained, he liked big spaces. The walls were painted white, there was a leather and chrome couch, a glass coffee table,
polished wooden floors. She’d never been in a room like this before, and she understood at once that it was something new,
contemporary.

‘I really like this,’ she said.

She sensed that he was keeping an eye on her reaction, standing with his arms folded. Here he was different, private, a little
shy. This was a big step for him. He was letting her in.

The bedroom was bare, apart from a high, white-covered bed under a skylight. He showed her how the skylight could be opened
or closed by pressing a button in the bedside table. There was a tiny spotless kitchen in a glassed-in back porch, a toy kitchen
because he never ate a meal at home.

She liked best the wooden platform built out from the kitchen, right into the arms of a giant old pepper tree. You could sit
out there amongst the trailing leaves and spy on Fitzgerald Street and no one would know you were there.

‘Kids would love it out here,’ she said.

‘No kids,’ he said promptly.

‘What d’you mean?’

‘I’ve taken steps. I don’t want to have ’em.’

‘Why not?’

He shrugged. ‘I never want to do what my father did to me.’

‘Why would you?’

‘Violence runs in families.’

She was silent.

‘Just one less thing to worry about,’ he said, placing his hand affectionately behind her neck as he ushered her towards the
bed. Lying back she could see the first star through the open skylight. He sat on the side of the bed and took his boots off
at last. Then his watch and heavy ring. His cufflinks. He smiled thoughtfully at her and started to unbutton his shirt. He
took his time. Like his flat, like everything he did, he was clean, elegant, decisive.

Later in The Riviera Cy made a great show of shaking hands with everyone in the room, like a bridegroom, Toni caught herself
thinking. He was in a playful mood. He sent Pino to the jukebox, and sat listening to the strains of Wilson Pickett’s ‘I’ll
Be There’, tapping with his hand on her thigh under the bar. She sat close to him, peaceful, aching all over. Pino gave him
a message in front of her. Something had been decided and everybody seemed to know it. She was part of the team.