The Idea of Perfection (26 page)

There was another, more private and unsharable guilt. It was a thought that had to be suppressed every time it tried to surface: that the men in the Lancaster had not needed courage so much as someone with a bit of mechanical expertise. Someone who understood jammed pins.

An engineer, for example.

As a boy he’d had to go to Legacy afternoon teas with the old war comrades.
Oh, Douglas Cheeseman,
they’d cry, peering at his name tag.
You must be the son.
They were hearty, glad.

But Douglas Cheeseman the son was not the man his father had been, and had a certain shifty-eyed reluctance to agree about what a legend his father was. After a while their big meaty faces would grow disappointed, and they would turn away.

Alive, his father would have been just another irritable man putting off mowing the lawn, making the bathroom smell of farts, taking wrong turnings on the way to Katoomba.

Dead, he could do no wrong.

Douglas Cheeseman the second knew he was a clumsy jug-eared boy, and had had to accept that he was not only no good at sport, but nothing special at lessons, either. He had always hated the way his face tended to fall into a rather stupid look. He was not stupid, he knew that, but his face sometimes was. He had spent his life avoiding his reflection in shop windows.

He had loved his mother, but she had never been cosy. Nothing gave when you hugged her. Flesh did not yield to flesh. Hers was the engineered perfection of expensive foundation garments. The boys at the school where she taught — not his own school, thank God — had called her,
Her Ladyship
behind her back, for the erectness of her spine, the arch of her pencilled eyebrows, the perfection of her smart little suits and her sharp narrow shoes.

His mother had always been a mystery to him. She had shed a few tears — appropriate, controlled tears, nothing embarrassing — every Anzac Day at the Cenotaph, and Douglas had stood beside her looking up at the bronze soldiers in puttees staring off above his head, and the same kind of alphabetical list as here. In Memory
of Those
Who Fell.

When he was little, it had been necessary to explain to him that this was not
falling
in the sense with which he was all too familiar. As an awkward child, accused in the school report of
Poor Gross Motor Skills
for his inability to kick or catch balls, he had been prepared to extend his full sympathy to
those who fell.

How had his mother really felt, as she went forward to lay the wreath? When she saw the name up there in gilt:
Cheeseman, D.J.,
did she think of how she had laughed with a man made of flesh, at the way their chests had stuck together, in bed on hot afternoons, making rude rubbery noises? How did she feel, running her eye down that alphabetical list,
Adams
to
Yonge,
seeing that sticky chest, that laughing mouth, as
Cheeseman, D.J.?

He wondered, but he found it hard to imagine his mother’s chest without its foundations, making rude noises.

All his life he had wondered why she had given him the dead hero’s name. She should have known it would be asking a lot of any son. Even if he had been handsome and clever, captain of the cricket team and life of the party, he could still not have lived up to his father, smiling confidently out of his silver frame on the mantelpiece. How much less could he do so, being that hangdog boy, carrying his hidden cargo of guilt?

 

 

He turned away and headed up towards where the hills were whale-shapes against the navy-blue sky. Away from the stony light of Parnassus Road and the grim little sinister shops, under the big empty sky, there was a feeling that anything might be possible. Somewhere frogs creaked and croaked and other things made secretive clicking noises, getting on with their invisible lives, driven by urgencies and delights known only to themselves.

His senses felt clarified by the dark. It was not a barrier but a fluid medium, bringing him sounds and smells that lapped him around. Swimming through them, Douglas was no longer hunched under the weight of his shortcomings. He felt his shoulders pull back, his spine straighten, his senses come to the alert. He stood on a corner enjoying the way the moon lay on its back and slid in a dignified way behind the curve of a hill.

Since the divorce he had found himself often walking at night. It was not that he was any kind of Peeping Tom. He had no interest in ladies in their underwear. It was more the chance you might learn something. The thing he would have liked to learn was not something you could ask anyone, although it was so simple.
How do people get on?
He had the feeling that others, somehow, had been born knowing things about how to manage with other people that he himself had been born without. The lives of others, men and women rubbing along together, held a fascination for him. He peered into windows, soaking up other people’s lives as he had once soaked up the logic of the distributed stress-load.

 

 

Walking quietly down a narrow dunny-lane beside houses, he could see straight into a brightly-lit room, a bulb pouring down yellow light on a table, like a still life: wood grain, white doily, fruit bowl, oranges incandescent under the light. It was vivid but uninformative. The trappings of domesticity could not help him, the doilies and the polished wood and the bulb where visible molecules of light seemed to stream outwards. The room waited, and he waited, but no-one came to show him how you did it.

He paused under another window, hearing meat sizzling, smelling cooked lamb. He liked walking at dinner-time. He liked that sense of happy families around the table, tucking in. There was a rattle of cutlery, a low-frequency rumble of voices, swelling music from something on television. A woman called out
No two ways about that, love,
and laughed.

Further along a window threw a square of yellow light on to the road and lit up a hand-painted sign on a gate that had been altered to read BEWARE OF THE FROGS. Behind the window someone was washing up. There was the deadened clatter of dishes in water, the muffled knocking around of the brush in the suds, then a smash and a cry. First the smash, then the cry. Then immediately a man’s voice, querulous from some far room, on a questioning inflection. Right over his head a woman’s sharp voice, exasperated, shrill, called out,
Yes, I dropped a bloody plate!

He wondered. Did that — that querulousness, that sharpness — mean people at the end of their tether with each other? People worn down by years of annoyance, years of the words never connecting, years of the obvious always being spoken, the important things never mentioned: did it mean that? Or was it a man and a woman who knew that cranki ness could be a kind of intimacy?

He moved on. It was bad enough to have bored his wife into leaving, but it would be worse to be discovered lurking in the dunny-lane.
I was seeing how other people do it,
he might say, but a copper would take a dim view.

On a street of big old houses, like boats moored in their gardens, he paused on the nature strip, beside a bush, glanced in to a lit-up living-room and there she was, the woman of the cows. She was standing leaning over a table looking down at something. As he watched, the dog gave him a fright, coming out like a welcoming host and suddenly licking his hand loudly, not barking, seeming to remember him from the last time they had met.

Her tee-shirt was coming undone along the shoulder. He could see the lips of the seam spreading open along her shoulder so that skin showed.

Marjorie would never have dreamed of wearing a tee-shirt coming undone along the shoulder. But then, Marjorie would never have dreamed of wearing a tee-shirt of any kind. She would have said that it
didn’t do anything for her.
It had been important to Marjorie that things
did something for her.

It was obvious that this woman did not care if things
did something for her
or not.

He stood there for a long time, watching. When you stood still, you could hear the way the frog noises mounted to a crescendo
cr crrr crrrrrrr
and then stopped so that you could hear a
tick, tick, tick, ticktickticktick, ticktick, tickticktick,
and some kind of very high
eep eep eeep.
Then the frogs started up again. If you were inside a house, you did not hear any of that. But standing outside, holding your breath behind a bush, you heard it all very clearly.

Now she was arranging something on the table in front of her and, as she flicked and lifted, he saw it was pieces of fabric that she was laying out across the table. Then she picked something up and ran it across the surface with a grand gesture like a dancer’s. He watched as she picked up fabric, laid it down, ran the tool across it again. Each time she picked them up, the pieces of fabric were smaller.

Her big plain face was serious, brooding, as she cut and flipped the fabric. She stepped back, cocked her head on one side, rearranged the fabric again.

He wished he could see what it was she was so interested in, laid out on the table.

He quelled the phrases as they rose into his mind again.
Very pleased if you would be my guest.
She would be embarrassed. You show some bloke how to get through a fence, and suddenly you’re stuck with him: some bloke with big ears and a hungry kind of look in his eyes, being an embarrassment.

She would refuse, but in a tactful way, and that would be embarrassing too.

He had given it a lot of thought, and he had definitely decided not to suggest anything.

THE THING ABOUT the school was, it was almost opposite the shops: there was the Cobwebbe Crafte Shoppe and the Caledonian, and next to that was Alfred Chang Superior Meats. Very handy, for picking up a few chops for dinner on the way home. But it meant that as Felicity waited for the children to be let out in the afternoon, she knew she was in full view of the butcher. He could be standing there, behind the triangle of dripping-containers, watching you from across the road. You would never know whether he was or not.

Not that it mattered, of course. She did not even know why she thought of it.

But she did, every afternoon, and looked forward to going down to the school.

 

 

When they had first come to Karakarook, the other mothers at the school had all looked alike to her. She had recognised them only by signs: the tall one, the one who was always smoking, the fat one.

They were nice enough women, and good-hearted, of course. They had invited her to join the Red Cross and the Country Women’s Association, and play tennis with them on Tuesdays, and now there was this business with the Museum Committee. She did not want to be stand-offish, and Hugh had encouraged her to join in, so she went along to the Red Cross now and then, when they had an interesting speaker, and she had made some lovely lamingtons for the school Lamington Drive, and the Museum Committee had seemed promising.

So she knew them all now, to say hello to, but there was no one she wanted to see very much of. They just did not share any interests, really, and most of them were
letting themselves go
shockingly.

The other thing was that when you were the bank manager’s wife, it could be a little bit tricky. You did not want to look stand-offish, but you did not want to get too close, either. It could be awkward if there turned out to be a problem later about an overdraft.

The one who was always smoking, Angela, was leaning against the fence today, talking to Lois, the one whose bra and petticoat straps were always drooping down over her upper arms. She was forever plunging a hand in for one or other of them. She did not seem to realise how awful it looked. Angela had a cigarette in her mouth that was flipping up and down as she talked. The lighter was at the ready in her hand, thumb poised to spin the wheel, but she could not bring herself to stop talking for long enough to light it.

Felicity did not approve of mothers who smoked. There was a great deal of literature on the subject. Apart from the effect on children, there was the effect on your own complexion. It was well-documented that smoking could add a decade to your age by the time you were fifty.

She smiled at the woman with the earrings in the shape of parrots. Fiona. She knew Fiona quite well. William sometimes played with her son and although Fiona allowed the boys to play with toy guns, of which Felicity did not approve, on the whole it was a friendship to encourage, since the boy seemed quite bright.

Felicity would not herself have worn earrings like that, and if Fiona did a little reading in the magazines she would know better than to use that kind of eyeshadow. She looked red in the face today and her hair needed a comb. A bra strap was showing.

Felicity smiled, but cautiously. Fiona sometimes let things get on top of her.

She herself was wearing her nice navy pants, very good quality from Honeycutt‘s, and the blue top with the
little touch of white at the throat.
She could have told Fiona, if she was interested, about the way the
little touch of white at the throat
bounced light up under your chin, so that any little pouchings and darkenings of skin would disappear.

She smiled, and made sure she was standing up nice and straight. Posture was so important. She glanced over towards the shops, but their windows looked back blankly.

If he were ever to suggest some photos of her, of course she would laugh and refuse. She was a wife and mother, after all.

Refuse, but nicely.

Fiona was pushing the stroller over to Felicity. The baby was in it, looking cranky, and there was a lot of shopping hanging off the back, and little Darren was holding on to the side.

These children are eating me alive, she cried as she came up to Felicity.

She laughed as if taken by surprise by the words that had come out of her mouth. But she could not seem to stop.