We All Fall Down (5 page)

‘You'll be able to find classes in Stanwell Park, or nearby, without a doubt.'

‘There won't be anyone as good as Warren.' Then, without waiting for him to contradict her: ‘Five: it's a big financial commitment. As far as I can tell, we'd be stretching ourselves to the limit.' She took another mouthful of wine, dropped her shoulders, and fell back into the sofa, her case stated, the piece of paper lying in her lap.

‘Is that all? Is that the best you can do?'

Although she knew he was joking, pretending to mock her, she was disappointed by his response, by the fact her concerns were being so airily dismissed. ‘I think it's enough.'

‘I can't believe that's your whole argument, Kate. It's the scrapings from the bottom of the barrel. It's verging on the pathetic.'

‘No, it isn't!' She was indignant, her smile strained.

‘I'm not persuaded. And I'll tell you why.'

She folded her arms.

‘You're being defensive.'

She unfolded her arms. She was angry, suddenly feeling, even though he had yet to refute what she'd said, that the argument was lost, that whatever she said wasn't going to make any difference, that he was already treating her like ‘the little woman' and of no real consequence. She leant forward to pick up her glass and finish the last of her wine.

‘One. I'll be able to work on the train, so although I may arrive back at the same time, I will hopefully have done all my work by the time I get home. You will therefore see more of me.'

‘That I find very hard to believe.'

He ignored her. ‘Two. You will make new friends quickly.' To Kate, that sounded very much like a command, as if shouted by an army officer to a subordinate:
You will make friends!
‘In addition to which, your old friends will be desperate to come up and visit you because it will mean a day at the seaside. They'll be keen to spend time on the beach. And there's also the Royal National Park on our doorstep.'

‘But only in summer. They'll only want to go to the beach in summer.'

‘No, all year round.' He carried straight on, ignoring her hesitations, as if he could already sense victory and was not going to be slowed down by any hurdle she might attempt to place in his path. ‘Three. You'll be closer to your parents. Four. Things are going really well at work. I practically run the Bauer account. Murray is no more than a figurehead now. Either he'll soon step aside, or I'll get a salary increase, or both.'

His arguments rolled over her, like waves, pounding her with their inexorable logic.

‘Five. It will be a much healthier environment than Crows Nest in which to bring up Tim –
and
his brother or sister.'

She raised her eyebrows, startled, her interest suddenly aroused. ‘You've been talking to my mother.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘She said that – exactly that.' She held out her empty glass to him. ‘I need some more wine.' She wanted time to think about what he'd said, to come up with some answers. He disappeared into the kitchen.

She was beginning to appreciate how important the house was to him. He'd told her often enough how their Crows Nest terrace house reminded him of Manchester, where he was born. Not as industrial, but cramped and dirty nevertheless. ‘Everyone lived on top of everyone else, and I don't want to live like that for the rest of my life. I want fresh air, open spaces. I want to live in the country.' A house on a hill, overlooking the Pacific, with a sweeping lawn, a verandah and four bedrooms, was something he would never have dreamt of as a child. It was something his parents would never have dreamt of. It was the Australian dream writ large, and she suspected it represented to Hugh, not just visible proof of his success but, more importantly, freedom and security. To him, Crows Nest was a house, Stanwell Park would be a home.

He called through from the kitchen, ‘And number six – or is it seven? – we'll have space! Look at our sitting room. If we had a cat, I wouldn't have enough space to swing it.' She looked around the small room. It was true: there was so much furniture it was hard to see the floor. ‘But we haven't got a cat,' she called back. Keen to get in the last word, he replied, ‘Only because there isn't enough room to swing one.'

What she found most difficult to appreciate, or admit to, was what the house might mean to her. There was something about it that did appeal, most definitely. It would be an unarguable statement of their success, and its very solidity, size and position, would leave no one in any doubt that she and Hugh had
arrived
. And in some kind of perverse way, in a way that she felt was at odds with her image of herself as an artist and a free spirit, this did attract her. She could have a real studio there, a room flooded with light, and invite local artists round, possibly even hold soirées.

When he came back into the room, she said, ‘I still think we should wait, until we have more money.'

He closed his eyes as if exasperated. It so annoyed her when he did that, as if he barely had the patience to deal with her doubts. ‘Katie, the people who become rich are the people who stretch themselves. We've been overly cautious in the past. The reality is, we should consider buying Stanwell Park and keeping this house at the same time – renting it out. That's how we'd make real money.'

She was shocked, almost disbelieving. ‘You can't be serious. You're beginning to sound like my father. We can't possibly afford to do that.'

‘Well, that's what we should be doing – if we had the money.' He took her free hand, leaning forward to look into her eyes. She avoided his gaze. ‘I don't want to spend the rest of my life working for other people, darling. I want to make money while we're still young. Everyone is making a fortune on property at the moment. It's going through the roof. I don't want us to miss out.'

‘We've done all right with this house.'

‘We have. It's gone up by about seventy-five per cent since we bought it. But we'd have done better if we'd had two houses, if we'd speculated a little.'

She was torn when he spoke like this. Although she liked the comforts that money brought, she also liked to feel she wasn't dependent on them. She didn't want to be a rabid accumulator like her parents, but she was fond of eating out when they felt like it, enjoying her glass of good wine at night, holidays overseas every year, even a decent car. It was little different to how she felt about Hugh's work: he earned good money in advertising, but she didn't like it when he began to sound like one of his colleagues, as he did now when he spoke about the merits of becoming a property magnate. She'd fallen in love with him because of his streak of naïveté, his innocence, because he wasn't, in her eyes at least, a typical advertising person. She didn't see him as hard-bitten and cynical like most of the people she'd met in his profession. He had soul. She felt he was the kind of man an artist like herself could marry without betraying her inner self.

‘Why can't we be satisfied with what we have? Why this sudden need for more? We used to be happy with what we had – remember that? When we used to criticise our friends for always talking about property prices and the stock market and the assets they'd accumulated?'

‘Kate, I'm still like that. I haven't changed. I simply want enough money not to have to worry about money, that's all. I hate money and I hate talking about it, but I also hate never having enough. This isn't being greedy, it's being realistic.'

‘But we have enough. Compared to most people we're really well off.'

‘So long as I work until I drop.'

She knew that he should be the one saying what she was saying, that they were comfortable as they were. After his upbringing in the industrial heartland of Britain, he should surely be the one looking around him now and saying, we don't want for anything, we're doing very nicely thank you, far better than I could ever have imagined coming from my background. Whereas she had never wanted for anything in her life. Her parents, by most people's standards, were rich. Her father had retired at fifty-five and was still living more comfortably than at least ninety per cent of the population.

‘I'm concerned this property boom isn't going to last. It can't last forever.'

‘You realise how long people have been saying that? Forever! This one has a long way to go yet. Paul Skirrow – you know, one of the Board directors at work – is a bit of a property wiz and he reckons this boom won't end.'

‘That's nonsense. Every property boom ends.'

‘He told me that with the number of migrants flooding into the country – something like three jumbo jets a week – the demand for property will remain high for years, even decades. Builders can't keep up with demand. So long as you buy quality, you can't go wrong. And the Stanwell Park property is quality. It'll never fall in value. Not when you look at its location and its proximity to the city. We can't lose with a house like that.'

She felt it was futile to argue with him at times like this and, anyway, did she care that much? Money had never held any interest for her because she'd always had it. Only people without money worried about it. If this property was so important to him, maybe she should just give way gracefully. It would be so much easier. ‘I'm tired,' she said. ‘I'll get us something to eat.'

‘I think we should sleep on it.' Those had been his last words on the subject that evening. He'd buried a seed in her mind with the sole intention of keeping her awake most of the night and finally having her won over to his point of view by morning. By and large, he was successful.

* * *

Her glass of wine was empty. The sun had sunk behind the hills above the town, and her spirits had sunk with it. Apart from the light from a small lamp on a side table in a far corner of the room, she was sitting in almost darkness. Outside, there was absolute silence. There was no wind, there were no waves, and there was certainly no traffic. The roar from the Pacific Highway was no longer a part of her life. That, she had worked out some time ago now, was what they were paying for: silence. And she wasn't sure, in her own mind, that it was worth that much. She felt unusually heavy and tired, very much as she had felt those eighteen months ago in Crows Nest. She was brought back to the present by the sound of her husband walking down the corridor and into the kitchen. She decided to escape up to bed, to avoid him. She didn't want to argue with him yet again about his being late back from work. And she wasn't sure there was anything else she wanted to talk to him about.

3

He woke up to find Tim clambering across Kate and settling, without a sound, his back to Hugh, like a foetus between them. Hugh rolled onto his side and edged forward so that he could snuggle up against his son. Such occasions were possibly the best part of his day; to be cocooned within that warmth and softness, to become part of such abandoned intimacy, that was how he felt a family should be. Yet it occurred so rarely. Within minutes all three were again asleep.

When he woke, it was still barely light. He willed himself to disengage from the sleeping bodies at his side and slip out from beneath the duvet. He crept from the room.

Five minutes later he was out of the house and running down the road towards the beach. With the exception of someone walking a dog in the distance, there was no one around. He ran on the soft sand, half way between the breaking waves and the coarse grass that straggled across the dunes at the top of the beach. Someone had once told him it was twice as difficult and therefore, at least in his mind, twice as good for you as running on a hard surface. Against the vast backdrop of sea and sky, the sparkling, almost blinding white spray lying low against the rapidly lightening blue above, he became a disconnected being, blank, unthinking, and wonderfully insignificant. Running towards the headland, attempting to put as great a distance as possible between himself and the demands that everyone – Russell, Murray, Dieter, Kate, Tim, his in-laws, even his own son – were always making of him, he couldn't help feeling that they were still there, just over his shoulder, in relentless pursuit.

At the end of the beach, where the cliff, as if on some capricious fancy, had decided to suddenly curl around and dive headlong into the ocean, he threw off his running gear and ran into the water. He didn't go far out. He was naturally cautious, never having overcome his English awareness (bordering on fear) of the rips and sharks that his imagination told him were waiting to attack him just a few metres out from the Australian shore. He swam a steady crawl parallel to the beach, keeping well within his depth. The waves continually swept him up and tried to push him back towards the beach, and he had to struggle not to be dumped on the sand. Back on the beach, he dabbed himself half dry with his T-shirt, struggled into his shorts and running shoes and set off back along the beach. At the house, after showering, he crept into their bedroom. There were giggles from under the bedclothes. He leapt on top of the smaller of the giggles, and a shrieking three-year old wriggled out to throw his arms around his father's neck. ‘If you come downstairs with me, young man, I'll get you some cereal.'

‘Can I watch TV while I eat my breakfast?'

‘What does your mother think?'

‘His mother thinks that's a brilliant idea, then she can enjoy a cup of tea in peace and quiet.'

He carried Tim downstairs, and left him in front of the television with a bowl of cereal. He took a tray back to the bedroom with two cups of tea, some toast and marmalade, and the
Sydney Morning Herald
. They sat side by side against the head of the bed, Kate staring out of the window, Hugh flicking through the newspaper. It was as if they'd agreed, without a word, not to mention his getting home late the evening before, but had yet to decide what would be a safe topic of conversation. Finally, she spoke, ‘You know that café that let me display some of my paintings?'