The Life of Houses (16 page)

The phone had rung out in her mother-in-law's house. Anna had rung again immediately. Sitting on the edge of the bed, three times she had rung until she had felt almost sorry for Verity's phone ringing on and on from its table by the armchair in that room overlooking the tops of trees in the park. Those private London parks, she thought, with their wrought metal fences, their antique keys. Dialling Matt's mobile number, all at once the back of her wrist had come up against her mouth. She had thought: I can't speak to him now. Remembering, she felt frightened. If he had answered, she thought, if I had spoken to him then, I could not have stopped speaking. I would have told him everything.

There was the pine tree, the one she and Treen had always called the Christmas tree, marking the turn-off. It was astonishing to her, suddenly, that the town was still here—unthought of, actual; so that as the car came over the crest past the post office and she turned onto Main Street and saw the bay she felt that she was driving back into her own childhood: here it all was, around her still.

The buildings were bright, freshly painted. The new concrete roundabout struck her, that moment, as not new but wrong. Till that moment, she had not noticed that it was morning. She pulled over and turned off the headlights. She thought: it is not what people say. The town is not smaller. Memory had reduced it to three shops
on a hill, to the sound of a screen door. In truth this town was pretty, charming even, with its striped awnings, bright flags outside the ice-cream shop. The sea opened out behind it an expanse of sky. No, the town itself could not serve any longer as a reason for how unbearable it had been…

She pressed the dry skin under her eyes, surprised by how normal her face looked in the rear-view mirror. Only, she had chewed all the lipstick off her lower lip. Painting more on, it was a relief to grimace. She realised how rigid her face had been. The hospital was another half-hour's drive along the main road. She had an image of the road unrolling out from here as though it went through no country. I need a coffee, she thought, before I face them.

Only the bakery was open. The car door thudded back on her. Car doors always had done that here, she remembered; the gutters were too deep on the street, trapping anyone stepping out onto the road.

The sea was right there, at the end of the street, closer than she remembered, closer than it had looked from inside the car. Now it was all dazzle: the light struck off it was white and looked vertical. She could hear gulls. Involuntarily her hand came up to shield her cheek. Feeling swerved away from so much exposure.

On the footpath, with exaggerated care, she zipped the keys into the side pocket of her bag. She was in just that state, she knew, in which she would lose her keys. She straightened up. In that instant the town built itself around her: the way the path by the sea cut under low branches, sudden greeny dark…Out there, the wind that came in off the sea was cold, blew sand against her shins.

This was more than she had felt that time she came here with
Matt when Kit was how old? When he had looked up at the town from where they stood by the bay, Kit playing in the dirty sand at their feet, and declared that what was wrong with the town was that there was nothing wrong with it. ‘It's like a child's toy,' he had said, and touched her back: ‘Did you really grow up here?' Kit must have been four years old, Anna thought. She had been making sandcastles though the bay sand had always been too coarse for them; they had crumbled.

The bakery was shut off behind tinted glass. Its uncirculated air was thick with the smell of stale biscuits. In the permanent half-light the drinks fridge glowed like a shrine. All three women behind the counter looked up as Anna came in, each adopting at once the same stubborn expression. Anna said to herself: But they're the same women as before: the same closed-up faces that don't move when they speak, the same sour assessing look out from under their caps of brown frizzed hair. She never had been able to feel indifferent to their contempt. Now here she was again parodying herself, ordering a strong three-quarter latte with an overdone, conciliatory charm, which would only antagonise them more. She took herself over to the freezer full of birthday cakes: immense, garish, coated with acrylic-coloured frosting. How long had they been in there; how long would they last? From the coffee machine, there came the smell of burning milk.

The coffee was terrible. Stepping out into the street's glare she seemed to step as suddenly into a longing for Kit: a feeling as physical as hunger. Stopped there, on the footpath, she looked straight into the light vibrating off the sea and felt that Kit would step right out
of it, out of one of those wavering blotches of dark onto the footpath. Because where
was
Kit? Typical of her not to be answering her phone. Anna heard again that thin voice: ‘Patrick's had a heart attack.' That abruptness had made Anna feel that Kit was not anywhere. Shock happened nowhere, and had no place. Now Anna looked at the glassy shops, the town's closed front, and it was suddenly the worst thing of all, unbearable, not to know where her daughter was.

Who did step from a door onto the footpath, that instant, was Scott. She recognised him at once, and with a flaring annoyance. She had not seen him since she left for England. She had not once thought of him. He had been shut up with all this, what she had left behind. He had belonged there; so that now, as he came down the street towards her with his hands extended, his face set in an expression of delighted surprise, it was her own past he broke open.

‘Anna,' he cried.

‘You're still here.'

‘I'm contemplating escape, actually.' He raised his eyebrows, smiled archly. ‘Maybe even Melbourne.'

‘Why not,' she said, and looked at her coffee cup. ‘I can't drink this.'

‘From the bakery? They use instant.'

‘In their
espresso
machine?'

He had always come too close, she remembered: had always stood in what she called breathing distance. Now it was a relief to turn away, to dump the almost full cup in the bin and hear it spill. After more than twenty years she recognised his manner, his instant assumption of confidentiality, his way of smirking as he talked as
though the two of them understood each other quite apart from all they said: the usual things which, in a concession to public manners, they had agreed to say, as though the concession itself was a source of sly amusement to them. She felt a sort of remote pity for the person she had been back then. All the eye makeup, the white face powder, those sagging op-shop fifties dresses…Never friendship, exactly, but the two of them holding court for each other, making something theatrical out of their loneliness and isolation. Once, she remembered, they had stolen a bottle of Stone's ginger wine and drunk it out in the sand dunes: swigging from the bottle, seagulls tilting over the waves. They had only done it once. Still, the nausea of that afternoon tinged all she remembered of her time with him. Those subdued relentless parents, that ugly brick house, his mother on her knees cleaning the linoleum every morning—the mother who had once confided that she didn't like going on holiday because of how the dust would build up on her ornaments. The father—nicknamed Skip—had been self-consciously practical, forever fixing the car himself, his bluff manner mesmerising because of a bewilderment in his eyes—the expression of someone laughing at a joke he hadn't understood.

Scott said: ‘There's a bike track now. And the Coles is new. They knocked down the corner shop…' She frowned. ‘Old Izzie!' he cried out. ‘You remember! Used to kick you out for reading all her magazines.'

She shook her head, smiled ruefully. ‘Sorry.'

Except that of course she did remember: at her back, a stand of books, the pages yellowed and split with damp; sand underfoot; over there, elbows on the counter, Izzie sucking at her gums, never
bothering to put her teeth in when there were only kids in the store. The hair along her upper lip had been white like a milk stain. ‘Not a bloody library,' she had burst out, slapping her hand on the countertop.

‘Listen, I should go,' Anna said. ‘Dad's in hospital.'

Scott's expression changed. He always had done that, she remembered: matched his face to other people's faces. ‘I saw him yesterday.'

‘
You
saw him?'

‘I took Kit in.'

‘You?' she repeated stupidly. ‘Where was Treen?'

He pushed his lips out. ‘Poor Treen,' he said piously. ‘Right beside him when it happened.'

Anna stared past him, not trusting herself to speak. She could feel him watching, eager to be comforting, to take her hand or touch her back. She would not ask him where Kit was. She would not let him tell her anything about her own daughter. Out there a sailing boat was inching across the bay. Deliberately she fixed her eyes on it: the sail, impasto white, the sea forming around it into a landscape. ‘I should thank you,' she said at last. She collected her keys from her bag. ‘I need to go.'

‘Yes of course,' he said, stepping quickly back. ‘Can I drive you?'

In answer, she lifted one hand to show her keys.

‘I mean,' he went on, ‘you're right to drive?'

Closed in her car, she felt recovered enough to call out, ‘See you again, no doubt.' He bent double to peer through the car window, his one hand raised in farewell. As she pulled out she saw him standing
there, hand still raised. Seeing him from this distance, a dark shape in her rear-view mirror, she could almost admit that he was pitiable. At this moment, though, his neediness was more than irritating. She found that she could resent him, and bitterly, for making her acknowledge to herself her own limitations. What was it, what was it for, this thing which overrode feeling, so that she would not ask him what she so much wanted to know: where Kit was?

The highway was running through a field of canola: sudden chemical yellow. There had not been canola before. A metal sound, which Anna took at first to be the sound of insects, turned out to be an immense machine, an irrigator advancing along the field's far side, its side-struts of rust-coloured metal extending perhaps a hundred metres. Under these, the sprinklers caught a blurred radiance. How implacably it advanced, as if on rails—it was perhaps that implacability which made it dream-like, which drove loneliness in. She thought, what I dread is not grief but something blander, more permanent: some final knowledge of my own incapacity. Because it had been the same thing: with Kit, with Peter, even with Scott back there on the street. Other people seemed to have accesses of feeling, of impulsive warmth, which she could not find in herself. All these months with Peter she had been reproaching herself for her recklessness but what had their night on the beach shown if not how careful with herself she had always been? Had it been that with Matt too? She had always believed that he was the one who kept back, who said so little. Had she from the beginning been too limited, unkind?

With a quick motion of self-revulsion, she wiped her cheeks
with the back of her hand. She never could cry on her own without remembering how as a child she had lain awake in the dark imagining her own funeral and sobbing with her knuckles pressed against her teeth. On her face, now, a mocking smile—even the memory of that voluptuous self-importance drove her back upon a social mode. She could not be alone with it; she could not help but imagine how it would look to other people. And here I am, she thought, driving to see my dying father, and all the pity I feel is for myself.

Chapter Sixteen

K
it lay rigid under the covers listening to their morning. Someone was having a shower—Miranda's father, maybe, or her brother. Carol and Miranda had already showered; they were talking in the kitchen. Carol was making coffee; her voice sounded out sharply over the whirr of the machine. Somewhere a door slammed. How long could she stay pretending to be asleep? People sleep till ten, she told herself, and looked at her watch. Just seven: hours to get through: hours and hours. She turned on her side, pulled Carol's eucalyptus-scented sheets over her head. At once the memory of last night's drive from the hospital poured into her. Even while it was happening it had been weightless, which brought it closer now—a dream happening again, the headlights of Scott's car making a narrow world as though inventing it out of the dark. Over the cattle grid, along the overgrown drive, her grandparents' house—Scott telling her not to forget her toothbrush, saying ‘Do you want me to come in with you?' while he kept the engine running. When she opened the car door the sea, sounding so close, brought back her first night here. Out of the headlights, around the corner of the house, she stepped into utter dark. The kitchen was unlocked. Feeling for the light switch, she felt the house as a single presence: patient, opposed. The lights along the hall,
the light in her bedroom, the light in the bathroom: she advanced along a track of light, but the rooms belonged to the house.

She opened her eyes: Carol's house. Morning, coming through the plantation shutters, marked stripes of greenish light on the carpet and up to the handle of the built-in wardrobe. Everything in Carol's house was pale grey, duck-egg blue or beige. Everything matched, it had been chosen at the same time: it was a house without history. On the wall over her bed they had hung one of Miranda's pictures in a gilt frame—a pencil drawing of three birds in a row on a very theoretical branch. Each bird was looking down its beak with a dignified and slightly pained look. In their almost-rightness these birds exactly illustrated how Kit felt: wrong in a way that was hard to pin down. Looking at the picture long enough gave a feeling like the beginning of a headache.

Kit knelt on the bed to study Miranda's signature: its oversized M with soft points like bunny ears, its d with an open loop. In its careful flamboyance, Miranda's signature testified to an exercise book somewhere filled with trial signatures, probably one at least with a heart-shaped dot over the i. Kit thought, I have not been fair to Miranda. She had never imagined for Miranda those hours of trying out personalities line by line—hours of queasy self-absorption, filling out those quizzes where the animal you said you liked best was how you wanted to be and the animal you said you liked second-best was how you really were. Except that you weren't: you were neither horse nor elephant but inescapably, helplessly yourself. Kit had settled on her name in capitals with a circle around it. She had been surreptitiously proud of that until she found the primary school lunch
box on which her mother had written her name in just that way.