The House Within Read online

  ‘Where’s my wife, anyone seen my wife?’ said Andy, on one of his swoops past the table, and pretended to look under the tablecloth.

  Peter found her sitting on a seat in the shopping complex, fanning herself gently with a menu.

  ‘Hot flushes. Hell,’ she said, when he sat beside her. She behaved as if she was expecting him.

  ‘I’m a New Zealander,’ she continued, and he knew he wasn’t going to leave her there.

  ‘I might have known,’ he said, though for the life of him he couldn’t think why. It was not her lack of ornamentation that told him this, for his compatriots seemed more decorated and frivolous each time he returned to New Zealand, more certain of their worldliness. But there was that distinguishing quality which he could never define, but imagined he must share. A long Protestant upper lip, a phlegmatic lift to the left side of the mouth signifying a conservative acknowledgement of life’s perils — this was as close as he could get. Maybe it was just a sureness of being, in the face of odds, but only another New Zealander would recognise it.

  ‘Will I book us a room?’ he asked, nodding in the direction of the hotel.

  ‘Yes please,’ said Valerie.

  They made love until morning, on the fifty-second floor. He was astonished by how much her unvarnished hands and naked face pleased him. More, I want you some more, she said often during the night. In the morning the fog outside was so thick they couldn’t see the ground below them. ‘We could walk over that,’ said Valerie, and he believed her.

  MY MOTHER WANTS to see Bethany, Peter’s first wife. No, worse than that, she thinks she’s seeing her now. I don’t know what to do,’ Janet tells her friend, Elaine.

  ‘I’d let it go,’ says Elaine. ‘I mean, what’s to be gained? All you’d do is confuse her more, poor old lady, if the real item turned up.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem fair to Valerie.’

  ‘Is Valerie complaining?’

  ‘Maybe Bethany would like to see Mother.’

  ‘Really?’

  Janet feels a blush rising. ‘I was a bitch to Bethany. You wouldn’t believe what a bitch.’

  ‘Does it matter?’ Elaine asks. ‘She was your sister-in-law. Sisters-in-law become history when they get divorced from the family.’ Janet guesses she is being sarcastic, although Elaine has a way of sounding very reasonable when she is being offensive.

  ‘It’s so arbitrary when you think about, isn’t it?’ Janet says. ‘I don’t suppose she needed us. But I did try to keep in touch.’

  Her friend gives her a quizzical glance and draws on a cigarette. They have both resolved to give up smoking, though Janet has taken her resolution more seriously than Elaine. It irks her that Elaine smokes in front of her; it seems like a betrayal. Elaine is divorced and teaches painting at night classes and weekend schools. Her children’s father lives in America.

  Janet is sitting on a deep leather couch in Elaine’s apartment, upstairs in a redeveloped stone building that once housed turn-of-the-century lecture theatres. The ceiling is vault-like, the floors brightly polished wood with odd stains in the grain where students spilled ink, decades before. Room dividers make space for works of art and craft, spun glass, porcelain pottery, small sculptures. One of Janet’s own sculptures stands in a corner of the room.

  Janet has her name down for an apartment when one comes up, although this is conditional on whether she will be free to take it up. By free, she means whether her mother is alive, though that is not what she says. At present she owns a house with half a hectare of gardens and orchards. New money, the neighbours called people like her, when she went there, even though her husband, the doctor, was one of them. What does your family do? they would ask her over morning coffee. To which she would reply, oh my mother owns land in the Waikato, and my father is a company director in the area. A stimulating environment in which to grow up, she would add. It had been hard to fit in, but now she is used to it and the truth is, she is not sure what she wants. Now that she is alone and free to make choices of her own, she wants to be a new person, or, maybe, she tells herself, the person she has never been. She still has to decide exactly who that is. Sometimes when she chips stone and sees a shape emerging, she thinks she knows.

  ‘Did you ever try asking Bethany what she needed?’ Elaine asks.

  Janet starts; she has almost forgotten what they were talking about. ‘She didn’t give us much of a chance,’ she says, by way of reply. ‘After Peter left, Bethany ran off with a neighbour and had a ba-by.’ Her voice rises. ‘Then the neighbour took Ritchie, my little nephew, for a ride on the back of his motorbike, without a helmet on, and he got killed.’

  ‘Well then,’ says Elaine, ‘you can all feel good about that, can’t you? Who needs to like Bethany?’

  ‘You’re warped,’ says Janet.

  ‘Sure, I’m divorced too. Do you know what it’s like for children to expect a father who might pop in once every five years or so? While he leaves the engine running in the drive? I’ll tell you, it’s like being in love with a dream, a mirage. Ritchie was lucky to have someone to take him on the motorbike, even if it killed him.’

  ‘I think you’d quite like my brother,’ says Janet. She picks a cigarette out of Elaine’s pack, and lights it.

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid I might. I’ll bet your mother did too.’

  ‘Well, of course she did.’

  ‘Mothers are all the same,’ says Elaine. ‘They spend their lives complaining about daughters and indulging sons, then when it’s too late they discover the women’s movement and say, oh golly. Fancy that. If only I’d known.’

  ‘I don’t think my mother discovered the women’s movement.’

  ‘I’m hoping it’ll discover me,’ says Elaine, screwing out her cigarette. ‘Look at me, I’m a size ten but my mother goes shopping and thinks she’ll pick me up a nice little number. So what does she buy? She buys a size sixteen. Then she turns round and complains when I don’t wear it. Why are you doing this, she says to me. Other people like me, why are you always trying to show how much you hate me? Other people aren’t your daughter, I said last time she did this to me, which I might say was just last week. So she gets this weird look on her face and says, well, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll just go out to the garden and get a lettuce. I said to her, see if you can find a worm while you’re out there. You can have it with the salad.’

  ‘My mother’s not like that,’ says Janet, stiff again. ‘My mother’s dying.’

  ‘That’s now. She hasn’t always been dying,’ says Elaine.

  Janet picks up her bag. ‘Forget it, all I wanted was someone to talk to.’

  ‘Why didn’t you like Bethany?’ Elaine asks. ‘Really, go on, why didn’t you like her?’

  ‘YOU’RE A SAINT,’ Peter tells Valerie. They sit at an outdoor café at the Arts Centre, waiting for Janet. The waitress brings them cappuccinos and brioches.

  Valerie looks away so that the waitress won’t see her face.

  ‘You’ve been wonderful about all of this,’ says Peter.

  They have walked through the park where the Avon River runs so slowly it appears to have stopped between its banks. The grass around them was choked with daffodils.

  Peter took her arm, and felt her flinch away from him. ‘What is it?’ he said. That was when he first saw that she was crying.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Damn Wordsworth, damn daffs.’

  ‘Why blame Wordsworth?’

  ‘He makes everything you say about daffodils sound as corny as him. They make me cry.’

  Three years have passed since they met. Valerie’s children, a son and two daughters, visit them on Sundays at their apartment, and cook sausages and steaks on the barbecue. Some weekends, Jason, the son of his second marriage, comes to visit, and, to Peter’s shame, he asks him for money before he leaves, in front of Valerie’s children. Valerie is a freelance book editor and, although she draws commas in the cereal, in general he believes that she has brought a broad perspective of
interesting ideas and information to his life that was missing before. It has been nearly twenty years since he has lain in bed with a woman while she read a book. Where once he would have spent Sunday afternoon at work, nowadays he goes to art galleries. Valerie doesn’t want to be an artist herself; what she wanted was just to look at pictures, in a still, careful way. That serenity is what he likes.

  She also amuses him, collecting ridiculous bits of news. People on average burp or fart at least fifteen times a day, she read to him at breakfast, only the morning they came away, before the phone call from Janet. The population of Australia releases seven hundred million millilitres of gas into the air a year. Sweetheart, you’re a record breaker at everything, she said, and he was still chuckling when he got to work. If anything, their roles have been reversed, for lately he often wonders what it is that she sees in him.

  ‘It’s not the daffodils, is it?’ Peter says. Her strong, pale face with its traces of pink lipstick looks puffy, as if she has been crying for much longer than the few minutes it has taken them to walk through the park.

  ‘I knew it was a mistake to come here,’ says Valerie.

  ‘I didn’t know this was going to happen,’ Peter says. ‘Anyway you want to see your parents.’ Valerie’s parents live in Timaru. They had decided, at once, that they would travel together, so that she could go on to see them, and that Peter would join her there. He has yet to meet her family. He reaches for her hand, but she pulls it away. ‘Look, you’ve being doing this so well. You seemed so calm, so kind about it. What’s changed?’

  ‘Your mother’s not as confused as you want me to believe, is she?’

  ‘She’s lost her marbles,’ says Peter. ‘Anyone can see that.’

  ‘Yes and no. But she hasn’t seen Bethany for, oh, how many years? Nearly twenty, perhaps. The point is, I could be her, couldn’t I? I could be Bethany grown older? Eh, Peter? It’s true, isn’t it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Truth, Peter. That was why you followed me that night. How like her am I?’

  ‘You don’t look like her,’ Peter says at last. ‘You don’t bullshit, that’s all, that’s the only likeness.’

  ‘Don’t lie, you get off on me looking like her,’ says Valerie, and stands up. ‘Anyway, what does she want me to forgive her for?’

  MAVIS AND BOB Dixon’s farmhouse had charm, as they said around there. In an age when farmers were building solid pale-brick bungalows like pink bastions against the landscape, their house was elderly and built of kauri. Mavis had always kept the same dark, floral paper on the walls of the sitting room. The kitchen was lined with shelves, heavy with crockery and preserves. She scrubbed the wooden bench, grew plants on the wide windowsills, and polished odds and ends of brass that people had given Bob with loads of scrap metal. Flag irises grew waist-high in the garden among mauve poppies and navy-blue honey-wort. The neighbours often appeared along the dusty dead-end road on Saturdays to beg flowers for the church.

  It was down this road that Mavis saw Bethany walk one hard, bright afternoon. She began to inspect the girl before she arrived. The heat shimmered around her wilting figure, but there was something purposeful about her that made Mavis wary. Mavis knew straightaway who she was, for she had been expecting her, even though she had not admitted this to herself until that moment. But she didn’t go out to meet the girl, she just watched from the distance as the dust spurted up behind her sandalled feet, drawing closer. Mavis hadn’t expected her on foot.

  The girl was wearing a long, limp dress gathered at the waist. The hem was stained where it had brushed against sticky paspalum heads. At the gate she paused, and Mavis could see the light shining behind her and guessed that she was not wearing a bra. Her figure looked shapeless already. She glanced at the letterbox for confirmation that she had found the right place, and walked up the path. Mavis still didn’t move.

  ‘Mrs Dixon?’ said Bethany, standing at the open door.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My name’s Bethany. Can I come in, please?’

  ‘What do you want?’ Mavis said, standing where the girl would have to pass.

  ‘I just want to talk to you.’

  ‘Talk’s cheap, I suppose.’

  ‘May I have a glass of water?’

  ‘If you want. There’s a glass there.’

  Bethany ran some water into her cupped hands and splashed it on to her face before getting herself a drink. She drank in big, thirsty gulps that irritated Mavis.

  ‘You can sit down,’ Mavis said.

  ‘It’s all right, I’d rather stand,’ said Bethany, prowling around the room. ‘The brass is pretty,’ she said, touching a tall vase. ‘Do you collect it?’

  ‘It’s just junk. It’s collected itself,’ said Mavis, not giving anything away.

  ‘A Buddha. You have a Buddha,’ Bethany exclaimed.

  ‘A heathen thing.’

  ‘You believe in God, then?’

  ‘What are you?’ Mavis asked angrily. ‘Some religious crank? You didn’t say what you wanted. There should be a law against people like you.’ She moved towards the door, as if to shoo the girl out. Bethany sat down at the table.

  ‘I can see your soul,’ Bethany said. ‘It’s quite beautiful, but right now it’s corrupted by darkness. The spark will conquer.’

  ‘Get out,’ Mavis said.

  Bethany dropped her chin. ‘I’m sorry, that was a stupid thing to say. My mother gets furious when I talk like that. I’m a vegetarian too, and it makes her really mad. She says I’ll grow out of it.’

  ‘Haven’t you got a job, girl? What’s your mother think of you wandering around the countryside like this?’ Mavis picked up the coal shovel and began to hurl coal into the stove, so that her back was turned to Bethany.

  ‘Yes, well, I had one until yesterday. My mother doesn’t know I’ve left it. I’m a lab technician. I worked at the hospital.’

  ‘Did you now?’ Mavis put the shovel down and gave her a sideways look of respect. ‘With doctors and things?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You must get to see some sights there.’ The girl didn’t look like a laboratory technician, she was too sloppy and careless of her appearance.

  ‘I see cells mostly,’ said Bethany. ‘Little bits of tissue.’

  ‘Bits of humans?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I guess that would put you off meat a bit,’ said Mavis. She wished the girl would get to the point. Soon it would be time to start dinner; half her head was planning the lamb chops in the oven, the steaming mounds of potatoes, a frothy sweet dessert whipped out of egg whites. If she didn’t hold on to these images, things would come unstuck.

  As if sensing that she had used up her ration of time, Bethany said in a humble tone, ‘I was wondering if you could tell me where Peter is?’

  ‘I wondered when you’d get to that,’ said Mavis.

  Bethany looked up sharply. ‘You know who I am? You knew all along.’ She stood up. ‘You might have said.’

  ‘It won’t be his,’ said Mavis. ‘Peter was properly brought up. He’s a private school boy you know, an educated lad.’

  Bethany’s lip curled. ‘You old bitch,’ she said. ‘You silly old cow. A private school boy. They’re the worst. They think if they wipe their dicks when they take them out and say thank you, they’re different from all the rest.’ She ducked as the older woman moved to smack her face. Mavis’s hand flapped the hot air with an ineffectual swipe.

  ‘You’re a bike. That’s what you are, just a city bike.’

  ‘Who told you that? Peter. Eh? Did Peter tell you that?’ Bethany held the older woman’s eyes.

  Finally, Mavis said no, it wasn’t Peter who said that. Telling lies had never come easily to her, and she felt that the girl would know she was lying, and although there was nothing Bethany could do, she didn’t want her to think of her as a liar. It would have weakened her position.

  ‘He wouldn’t,’ Bethany said. ‘Because he was my first, my very first, and
he knows it, and even someone who runs away, like Peter has, wouldn’t say that. Now tell me where he is, Mrs Dixon, because you’re going to be a grandmother.’

  ‘He’s not ready for anything like that,’ Mavis said, her eyes brimming. ‘I don’t believe you. You’re a bad girl.’

  ‘I’m not leaving until you tell me,’ Bethany said.

  ‘He’s in Australia,’ said Mavis, and a note of triumph flourished in her voice, as if she had forgotten that she held the winning hand all the time.

  ‘MUM SAID TO ask you, what did you do with the brass Buddha?’ Stephen Dixon says to his grandmother.

  ‘Why didn’t she ask me when she was here?’

  ‘Mum, she wasn’t here,’ says Peter. Mavis stares right through him, out of eyes that have become bulbous and pale.

  ‘Where’s this Valerie, then?’ asks Stephen. When Peter doesn’t reply, Stephen rolls his eyes. ‘Another relationship on the big dipper?’

  Stephen has been making smart comments ever since Peter picked him up at the airport. Peter has had great hopes that Stephen would succeed. This probably means that he wishes he was like him. When Stephen began an apprenticeship as an auto electrician Peter had rung him every night for a week, until Stephen had yelled at him. Don’t you know how bloody lucky I am? he shouted. Don’t you understand, there’s a recession on and even graduates can’t get jobs, and anyway who the fuck is the job for, you or me?