The Idea of Perfection (45 page)

He bit his lip. Not only
a bridge bore,
but a bore about being
a bridge bore.

Sorry, he muttered.

He could feel the water seeping in over the top of one of his boots.

Well, she said.

She looked up again, at where the light stippled the timbers with light and dark.

That’s okay, she said, and laughed abruptly. I interest easily.

She turned her face to him. He had not noticed before how her hazel eyes were flecked with amber when you looked closely. In fact, when you looked closely, there were many colours in her eyes, tiny flecks of a great many different kinds of brown.

The timber’s right there, he said.

He spoke straight into those flecked hazel eyes.

Plenty of timber.

His mouth was moving, but he was not really thinking about the words.

It’s only the corbels, you see.

He could not remember if he was repeating himself.

She had got closer to him. Or he had got closer to her. Either way, he was close enough now to see the pale line of the old scar on her chin, and the fan of wrinkles raying out from the corner of each eye.

The corners of her mouth were amazingly expressive. The muscular precision was remarkable. The human face. The human mouth. That little muscle, just there, that was quirking up the corner of her lips as she turned towards him.

 

 

 

They were looking at each other, but for once Harley did not feel as if it was a performance.
There they are, looking deep into each other’s eyes.
And then the next bit of the script:
They must be in love.

This was simpler than that, and there did not seem to be a running commentary on it. A conversation was going on, but one that did not involve words of any kind. He was looking at her, at Harley Savage her very self, and she was looking at him.
Douglas Cheeseman.

It was a joke of a name, but that was just something his parents had done to him. He himself was not a joke.

Look, she said.

There was something that had to be done, now before the wordless conversation became
looking deep into each other’s eyes
and was just one more thing to hide behind.

I must warn you, she said. I’ve got a dangerous streak.

He laughed. There was relief in it, as if he thought she was going to say something worse.

That’s okay, he said.

He thought for a moment.

Me too.

It was a good joke, but now it was getting close to being a performance again. Harley Savage, known for her
dry wit,
making someone laugh.

No, she said, the thing is.

She stopped. She had never put into words, aloud, just exactly what
the thing
was. She was dizzy with the fear of it, the palms of her hands suddenly sweaty. She steadied herself with a hand against one of the piers, feeling the wood silky under her palm.

I had a husband.

The words seemed large and foreign in her mouth.

He was nodding.

Yes, I had a wife.

As far as he was concerned, it just meant they had something in common.

No, she said, and it came out sharp. He stopped smiling.

The thing is, he.

She had always hidden behind the tidiness of
took his own life.
Behind it, you could pretend to think it had nothing to do with you.

He killed himself with his circular saw. In the shed.

She took a big quavery breath.

And he.

But she could not find the words for the letter.
Dear Harley comma.
She stopped. A big wad of some kind of thick woolliness was filling her throat, stopping any more words getting out. The whole of the space behind her face had swollen with this thing and was bursting through the apertures. The face could not keep it all out of sight any more.

Yes, he said, and after a moment she felt his arm around her shoulders. Yes.

He did not seem to be disgusted or frightened. He did not even seem especially surprised.
Yes,
he said, as if it was normal, a husband cutting his head off out in the shed. His arm around her shoulder was not
being terribly sorry
or
offering my deepest sympathy.
It was just a matter of geometry: an equal and opposite force. It was what a person needed when they could not balance by themselves any more.

Yes. Yes.

And now the dog was pushing against her leg. She could feel its tail beating steadily, backwards and forwards. It stayed pressed up hard, a big warm shape stuck to her, keeping her company while she went about the business of allowing her face to open up, letting out everything that was behind it.

IN SPITE OF his cuts and grazes, William insisted on going to school in the morning, and when he said he would go on his own, Felicity did not argue. As soon as she had the house to herself, she got to work. She did all the washing in the basket and stripped the beds and washed all the bedding. She did the blankets today as well as the sheets and got them all out on the line without needing to tilt her head up. It took a long time, but my word it was satisfying to see them all out purifying in the sun.

Then she got down on her hands and knees to scrub the kitchen floor. It was amazing how much dirt could come off even the cleanest-looking floor when you got down and scrubbed at it. It was the corners especially, of course, and the little cracks where the cupboards joined the floor. She got an old toothbrush — well, it was Hugh‘s, but she would get him a new one — and got into all the cracks with it, using lots of cleaner, smelling the lemon in it, watching the foam go brown.

What a good feeling it was, sponging off the dirt, pouring the water away down the sink! Just to make sure, she filled the bucket again with clean water to sponge it all over again. Even the second time she thought a bit more dirt came off, so she did it again. So much dirt, hiding in her kitchen, all along, when she thought it was clean!

It was awful, really.

 

 

Hugh had not said anything. William had gone to bed early, and so had she. It was not that she was sick, exactly, but it was easier to agree with Hugh that she
needed a rest.
When things got
awkward,
it was always useful to
need a rest.
He brought her a plate of soup and they had quite a conversation about whether it was hot enough, but they had not talked about what had happened. They had never talked about it the other times, either. There was no point. You just
put it behind you.

But this time he had sat on the end of the bed while she toyed with the soup.
Not in front of William,
he said at last. She could see how hard it was for him to bring each word out.
Just not in front of William, darling.

Seeing how hard it was for him, she was shocked by a sudden piercing X-ray picture of exactly what she was doing. Just for one moment, holding the plate of soup and the spoon, she saw it, naked, without the veil of not-really-knowing, and was stricken. For a sharp instant she recognised the world that Hugh inhabited as he watched her, seeing and trying not to see. Just for that moment — the space of a breath — she knew how unbearable it was for him, how smiling and ticking things off on his fingers was the only way he could manage. She saw that she was inflicting this pain on him by the choices she was making. Just for one puncturing moment she saw herself: a cruel smiling child.

Then she had picked up the spoon, sipped at the soup, and the moment passed.

 

 

She decided to make something a bit special for dinner tonight. It would be a pleasure to cook in a kitchen she knew for sure did not harbour so much as a particle of dirt in any hidden little crack or crevice. When Hugh opened the door, coming home this afternoon, he would be greeted with lovely smells. Her special pasta sauce, perhaps, that he liked so much. It filled the house nicely with the smell of oregano. After lunch she would pop into Livingstone to get some mince for it, and something for the rest of the week, that she could put in the freezer.

Before he turned into the gate she would have all the lamps switched on to fill the house with light. It would still be sunny outside, but there were a few spots in the house that tended to be shadowy, even on the brightest day. Everything would be fresh and clean. There would be no dirt, and no shadows, and the only smell would be the oregano. She would be at the centre of it, crisp and clean in the little blue top he had always liked, that showed off her bust, although not in a tarty way, naturally.

She would give him a lovely smile as he came in the door, and another one when he told her how
flavoursome
the dinner was.
Veryflavoursome
, he would say, the way he always did.

If she did not smile between now and when he came home, she could afford to give him two smiles tonight. And after each smile she could just pop into the bathroom for a moment to undo the damage by smoothing a little dab of moisturiser around the corners of the mouth.

She would listen very attentively as he told her about his day, and after the second smile there would probably be no need to smile again for the rest of the evening.

HARLEY SAT ON the back step, watching the dog. The early morning sky was luminous, the sun not yet risen, only a big simple radiance behind the horizon. A line of pink clouds above the distant hills formed and re-formed, melting from shape to shape like thoughts.

Whispering together, the leaves of the big gum at the bottom of the yard moved softly in a slight breeze. The pigeons lined up on the top of the garage next door cooed on and on, soothing each other.

She had left Douglas sleeping in the daybed, the tuft of hair sticking straight up on the pillow, and tiptoed out. He had turned over and muttered something in his sleep, but had not woken up.

With him behind her in the house, the view from the back step was somehow different. She knew it all now: the way the shade of the gumtree was as soft as hair when you sat under it, the way the sky out here in the country was always paler at the bottom than the top, the way the birds came right up to the back step if you fed them. Just as she was leaving, she felt as if Lorraine Smart’s house was a code she had finally cracked.

But having Douglas Cheeseman asleep in the daybed was a new part of the code. She did not know what it might turn out to mean. Since the previous day, out at the bridge, things had taken on a different look. Things that had seemed complicated had become simple, but certainties that had seemed set hard had turned more fluid. The solid little block that had been
Harley Savage, the one with the dangerous streak,
had broken open, and it seemed possible that the parts might rearrange themselves, although into what new shapes she could not imagine.

 

 

The dog came over to the dish of water at the bottom of the steps, lapped up a lot of water and sneezed twice. It was enough to set the parrot off.
Johnny! Come here, Johnny! Come here!
She could see it sticking its head out between the bars of its cage, peering sideways at the dog as if waiting for an encore. The dog scratched behind its ear, then went and lay down on the grass with a stick, holding one end down with a paw while it gnawed at the other.

The dog was another of the certainties that seemed to have turned fluid. Until today she had never entertained the idea of taking it back with her to Sydney. Now it appeared as a possibility. There was room in her backyard, and she was at home often enough to keep it company.

It was amazing, the way a part of her mind seemed to have worked out all the details.

But even as she pictured it, she drew back. Taking the dog back with her to Sydney would be a
declaration.
It was too soon for that. She did not feel ready to put aside, at a stroke, all those years of avoiding
declarations.

It had seemed simple enough: you just left the dog here where you had found it, in Karakarook. You just turned your back and drove away. But she could see now that that simplicity contained layers of complication within itself. The dog would not understand. Whatever her own views on the matter, it had no doubts about their relationship. If she tried to drive away, it would race after the car, barking through the quiet streets. It would think it was all a misunderstanding, or a joke. At worst, it would think it had been overlooked.

It would never occur to this dog that it was being abandoned.

She saw now that she would have to tie it up to stop it chasing the car. But not here, of course, in the backyard, where it would starve to death before Lorraine Smart came home. She would have to take it down to the town and tie it up somewhere, the railing of the War Memorial perhaps. She could imagine the scene as she drove away. It would bark and strain at the rope till its eyes bulged. It would whimper and grieve. Finally it would droop. But it would keep watching the corner of Parnassus Road where it had had its last glimpse of the brown car. It would keep watching that corner until someone untied the rope and forcibly dragged it off.