The House Within Read online

  Glancing up, Bethany saw a young man with savage blue eyes and a shock of fair hair staring at her. For a moment she felt a flare of recognition, a sense of fear. His shirt was open at the throat. He didn’t belong here, yet he possessed the same aura of danger as the dancers. Her face flamed, unbidden, and she turned away. When she looked back, she saw him shrug and turn in the other direction. In a moment, Raewyn had found him, the person she was looking for.

  Bethany stood up to leave. A young man wearing a jacket and tie stood near the doorway. Dark hair, short back and sides, just about ready for a haircut. ‘Taking in local colour, or are you it?’ he said.

  She recognised him at once, a student from the accountancy department at university.

  ‘I wouldn’t have expected to find you here. Still waters. They said you were quiet.’

  ‘Who said?’ she asked, feeling foolish and caught out. She drew a deep breath, wondering why she should explain herself to this student, whose name, she thought, was Peter. She looked him in the eye. ‘I could say the same.’

  ‘Why don’t we dance?’ He took her hand in his and put the other on her waist; the music shimmied up and the crowd pressed them closer together, her breasts pushed against the silvered buttons of his jacket.

  ‘I’ve never been here before,’ he said, ‘we came down for the hockey trials. Are you from here?’

  Later, he said, ‘You’re fantastic.’

  And she was, she knew she was, already alight and unsettled when she met him. She took her hand off his shoulder and jived in front of him, pushing out her pelvis, opening her mouth so he could see the tip of her tongue arched against her lip, her feet weaving across the floor, so that she was dancing with him, and at the same time on her own. He danced at first with reserve, then matching the passionate intricate pattern she made, loosening his tie, throwing his head back, soon pitching his jacket in the corner. Her hair slap-slapping across both their faces, like lake waves. She closed her eyes and she still knew where he was; this was how they danced, for a long time, on and on. Spot you, said Raewyn, sweeping past with her catch. Spot you.

  Heat. The acrid gasp, the excitement of tobacco when they stood outside and smoked. The same lake wind rising. Sweat.

  ‘Look at you,’ said Bethany, touching his wet armpits. ‘Sweat.’

  ‘Sweat,’ he said, with surprise. ‘Animals sweat.’

  ‘Who said so?’

  ‘My mother. That’s what she says. Animals sweat, gentlemen perspire.’

  ‘What do women do?’

  ‘Ladies glow.’

  ‘Glow. Oh my God.’ Her big, rich, surprising laughter she didn’t know she had inside her. ‘Oh Peter, you’re putting me on.’

  His smile folded away, so that she thought she might have lost him, but she hadn’t. Not yet. It began to rain as they walked to Aunt Vera’s, gentle rain, that sweet melt-down of air into water.

  A light still burned in the house. She wondered about taking Peter in and offering him supper. But then, Vera might still be up, and she would be all over Peter, Bethany knew, asking him what he did, how his study was coming along, preparing her verdict to deliver to Bethany the next morning. Or perhaps she was already asleep. Bethany thought about the key down the bank, how she could take Peter Dixon inside with her, how she might quickly learn the things she needed to know. She could feel the hair on her head springing back into its old wavy shape in the night air, curling round her face.

  They stood against a tree while he kissed her goodnight, his hand inching up her back, around to cup her breasts. ‘You’re not wearing a bra,’ he said, with real surprise. She touched herself. It was true; in her haste to get changed she had gone out without all her underwear. She can’t see how Aunt Vera could have missed this when she was stretched out in front of her having her hair ironed.

  ‘I’ve never done that before,’ she said, embarrassed again.

  ‘Don’t hand me that,’ he said, but he stopped when she pushed his hand away. ‘Can I see you back in town, when you go home?’

  And she said yes, of course she said yes. In her head she had already said, Do not leave me. Never forsake me.

  She has returned to it over and again, at different points in her life, the persistent refrain. The night we met. Like where were you the day the war ended (or began, as the case may be)? We should have been each other’s first love and left it at that.

  We never needed to get married. But they did, she did, he did. No, it wasn’t like that. In the end it was the only thing in the world to do at that time.

  BETHANY AND ABBIE quarrel over their meal. They eat in a restaurant near the lake front, a sixties kind of place, with tropical fish in the corner and red lampshades, offering sturdy steaks and chicken in a basket. Abbie picks at a vegetarian lasagne. Bethany is sure she eats meat when she’s not looking. She doesn’t care very much — she used to be a vegetarian too — but she worries about Abbie’s iron, her paleness and her lethargy. Surely she was more energetic and focused at the same age. Her daughter is clever, even brilliant, her teachers say, but Abbie doesn’t acknowledge their praise, their enthusiasm for her future. When Bethany looks ahead, Abbie’s success is always part of the scenario she sees.

  ‘So what’s the big deal about this place?’

  ‘Well, I’ve told you all I can think of about my aunt.’

  ‘You can’t have had much to do. It’s so quiet out there at her place, even now. It gives me the creeps.’

  ‘It was enough.’

  ‘Did you go out with boys?’

  ‘Kind of.’ Bethany watches Abbie push a piece of lettuce round her plate with her fork. ‘I met Peter here.’

  ‘Stephen’s dad?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Perhaps you should have stuck with him.’

  ‘That wasn’t the way it worked. Anyway, I wouldn’t have you if I’d stayed with him.’

  ‘Big deal. You might have got lucky.’

  ‘Abbie.’

  Her daughter gives up on the lettuce, pushes her plate away with most of her meal untouched.

  ‘Is this leading somewhere? Is it about Matt?’ Matt is her second husband, her third lover. Not a lot when you think about some women’s lives. Sometimes she thinks she would like to have been promiscuous.

  ‘He acts like he’s our father.’

  ‘To you and Stephen?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Stephen needed a father.’

  ‘Well, he’s got one of his own.’

  ‘So have you.’

  ‘You could try letting Stephen sort it out for himself — he’s an adult.’

  ‘Is that what you want for yourself?’

  ‘I have sorted it out. My father’s a crap artist.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says Bethany.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘It seems like it’s my fault.’

  ‘You’re impossible. It always comes back to you.’ Abbie pushes her chair back, her eyes full of tears. ‘You’re so amazingly self-centred, you know, I don’t even like you,’ she spits.

  Bethany sees that Abbie has had things on her mind, that she doesn’t value herself as she should, is careless about her future, and that now was the time when they might have talked about it, but that’s lost. ‘Abbie,’ she says again, but this time in a restraining, anxious way, desperate to take the conversation back to its beginning. Abbie walks out of the restaurant.

  In the motel, she touches her daughter’s sleeping face, without thinking, then pulls her hand away quickly. Waking Abbie now is not a good option. She thinks about going for a walk to the lake, but things have changed — she is afraid to walk in the dark nowadays. Although she has children and houses (three of them at the moment, for she and Matt have bought an architecturally delightful home, full of beams and texture and style), marriage and money, there are things that terrify her about being alive in the world, that cannot be restored by thinking about the past. She is afraid of rape and despoilment, of damage and violence, the way she
fears for the safety of Abbie, her only daughter, who has been, until now, her friend and ally. Instead, she sits and looks at her sleeping face, as if by sitting near her she can impress upon her the ever pleasing, endlessly transforming fact of her own existence, that she was born, that she, her mother, cannot imagine her life without her.

  In the morning, Abbie wakes and her face is innocent of the previous night’s anger. Bethany cannot get used to the speed with which she changes.

  ‘What are you going to do today?’ she asks. ‘I could give you some money if you want to go into town. Or do you just want to rest?’

  Abbie is eating a cooked breakfast she has charmed the motelier into bringing to the unit, even though they hadn’t ordered the night before. Scrambled eggs, toast and honey, a pitcher of juice.

  ‘I thought we were cleaning the house?’ says Abbie, her mouth full.

  ‘Yes,’ says Bethany, ‘of course, that’s what we’re going to do.’

  The house looks friendlier in the morning light. ‘We can’t really clean it,’ Bethany says. ‘I think I’ll just have to settle for hiring a bin and clearing out the junk.’ Already, she feels herself letting go of the stored contents of the room, Vera’s treasures are assuming a separateness from her. ‘I’ll have a look through it and see if there’s anything I really want to keep.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind the bookcase,’ says Abbie. ‘Will it fit in the car if we fold the seat down?’ The bookcase does fit. The rest of the collection they begin carrying outside, piece by piece, both of them methodical, working together. Abbie finds a ruby-coloured glass with a clear stem, and sets it to one side. Bethany uncovers a little Irish Belleek dish that has been used for an ashtray, old ash still clinging to its sides, and places it with the glass. A set of silver spoons with a ‘V’ and a ‘J’ in entwined engraving. Vera and Jack. One of the old-fashioned enamel colanders, in perfect condition, some empty preserving jars.

  ‘What I can’t understand, Mum,’ says Abbie, when they stop to drink lemonade out of cans, ‘is why you stopped coming here? I mean, how come we never visited?’

  They sit together on the sloping bank that used to be laid in lawn. The air is clear, and softer today. The stumps of old hydrangeas line the path that used to lead to the bath house. Cobalt blue hydrangeas. Each autumn, Vera planted a row of slutty, fleshy red begonias in front of them.

  ‘I kept in touch,’ says Bethany, defending herself. ‘I used to go and see her in the home. Remember, I took you once. You cried.’

  But that is not the whole story, and she doesn’t think she will tell it to Abbie. When she looks back, it was one of the more trivial turning points, a reason for Abbie not to like her very much.

  WHEN RITCHIE, HER first son was born, Bethany’s hair fell limply to her shoulders and her skin acquired a glassy pallor.

  ‘Let’s take a holiday,’ Peter said. ‘Where would you like to go?’

  ‘Rotorua,’ said Bethany, straightaway. Peter had met Aunt Vera at their wedding, which happened some years after their meeting in Rotorua, but that was the limit of their experience with each other. Bethany didn’t know why she hadn’t taken Peter to visit her aunt. Thinking back to the night when they met, she thinks she might have been ashamed of her aunt, that in spite of the heat of that night, warning bells were ringing already — ladies glow — and is, herself, ashamed of her own behaviour. Peter’s family were trade, like Vera and Jack — what was she thinking of? Not that she knew any of that until later. Besides, prejudice was a double-edged sword. I’ll bet they vote National, Vera said at the reception, unwrapping another piece of Wedgwood. She was bitter that Bethany’s mother had taken over the wedding. After all I’ve done for that girl of yours, she said the night before, when she thought Bethany wasn’t listening. How do you know, asked Bethany hoping that by humouring her she would quieten her. You can smell the blue ink on their voting fingers, you can just smell it a mile off, Vera said.

  Peter and Bethany had shifted away from the city by the time Ritchie was born, to Peter’s new job in the south.

  ‘I thought you’d want to go up to Auckland,’ said Peter, stunned.

  ‘No, really, Pete, please, I do want to go to Rotorua.’

  He appeared to have forgotten that that was where they met. ‘I want to stay with my aunt.’

  Perhaps he knew it wouldn’t work. But she and Peter were married, stuck with each other’s families. No, not stuck with them, she corrected herself. They had to get to know each other.

  Aunt Vera lent them her room because it had a double bed. The bath house appealed to Peter, chest-deep hot mineral water where the two of them could soak for hours, while Vera minded the baby and coo-ed.

  ‘People die in bath houses like this,’ Bethany said, floating on her back, and pushing her toes into his chest. ‘Poisonous vapours. It happens in seconds, they don’t know it’s creeping up on them. It happened to a honeymoon couple, they buried them in their wedding clothes.’

  He buried his mouth in her neck. ‘I’ll kill you,’ he said. ‘I’ll suck all the blood out of you.’

  ‘You already have,’ said Bethany. At the time she was very thin, for almost the only time in her life.

  ‘You don’t need your hair ironed now,’ Vera said, looking at her critically, over dinner.

  ‘It’s awful,’ said Bethany, pushing it out of her eyes. She had had it cut shorter, it was so lifeless.

  ‘How about I get out my curlers?’

  ‘Curlers, my God,’ said Peter covering his eyes, in mock horror.

  ‘Whatever,’ said Bethany. ‘Aunty Vera always did my hair for me.’

  ‘We should do it tonight. Tomorrow I’m singing down at the Palace.’

  ‘You sing?’ said Peter, with interest.

  ‘Sing? You mean Bethany hasn’t told you about me and the Good Time Gals?’

  ‘I’m sure I did,’ said Bethany, ‘he’s just forgotten.’

  ‘You must have told him.’

  ‘It’s a singing group,’ Bethany explained. ‘Aunt Vera was their star performer.’

  ‘I still am,’ Vera said, wheezing with her smoker’s cough, ‘I’ll show you.’

  ‘It’s all right, Aunty V, he believes you.’

  ‘So what did you sing?’ A little smile hovered around the corner of Peter’s mouth. He had caught on that Bethany didn’t want him to know any more.

  But Vera had disappeared into the spare bedroom to get changed. In a minute or so she re-emerged, splendidly clad in her sailor suit, a little tighter round the hips, the jaunty hat perched on the back of her head. She set the arm of the gramophone on a record, and placed one hand beneath the opposite elbow and the other above. She skipped to the music from one foot to the other and sang:

  There’s cheese, cheese

  with shocking dirty knees

  in the stores, in the stores.

  There’s cheese, cheese

  with shocking dirty knees

  In the Quartermaster’s stores.

  Bethany should have laughed. When she was young she used to laugh and applaud. Instead, she sat there with her face frozen.

  ‘I think I’ll get a breath of fresh air,’ said Peter, looking for a way to escape.

  ‘There’s eggs, eggs that walk about on legs,’ sang Aunt Vera, relentlessly, all the way through to kippers that walk about in slippers, until a fit of coughing brought her collapsing to a halt.

  ‘There, now wasn’t that something,’ said her aunt, still gasping for breath. ‘I’m a bit out of condition, but when I get a few drinks in me I’m still fine.’

  Ritchie had begun to cry in the bedroom. ‘I’ll fix him,’ said Peter, ‘and then I’m turning in.’

  ‘I’ll come through in a minute,’ Bethany said.

  ‘Don’t hurry. You’ve still got to get your curlers.’

  ‘I don’t need them.’

  ‘Oh yes you do.’

  ‘He didn’t like that, did he?’ said Vera, carefully taking the needle off the record.
/>   ‘Of course he did. We’re just a bit tired with Ritchie, he’s been so scratchy at nights.’

  ‘You go along if you want to turn in,’ said her aunt.

  ‘Aren’t you going to do the curlers?’

  ‘Only if you want me to.’

  ‘I do,’ said Bethany. ‘I want you to fix my hair.’

  She sat in the firelight, while her aunt rolled up her hair and pierced the wound-up skeins with plastic pins to hold the curlers in place. She thought she had never been so loved and understood, and might never be again. In the bedroom, she climbed into her nightdress without turning on the light, moving very carefully so as not to disturb Peter, although she suspected he was not asleep. He reached out, pulling her towards him, then stopped. ‘You’re still wearing these bloody things,’ he said, pulling at her curlers.

  ‘What did you think,’ said Bethany, ‘you have to sleep in them.’

  ‘Not in bed with me, you don’t,’ and Peter began tearing at the curlers so that her hair felt as if it was being stripped from her scalp.

  ‘Stop it, you son of a bitch,’ she whispered, tearing herself away from him.

  He let go of her, and reached out for the light. She saw herself in the dressing table mirror, streaked with tears, a bruise forming on her cheek. The beginning of the wars.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s all right.’

  She began to take the pins out of the rollers one by one.

  ‘Leave them in. Please. I didn’t mean it.’

  ‘Yes, you did,’ she said. By the time Peter left her, the habit of Aunt Vera was gone. Her neighbours rang Bethany a year or two later. There had been a fall, hospitalisation, she wouldn’t be able to go home. When Vera saw Bethany she held her hand. She didn’t say anything.

  ‘MUM, YOU MAKE this.’ Abbie is holding a scruffy, mildewed pile of bound books. They are Vera’s recipe books. ‘Cape gooseberry jam. Remember how you used to get us to collect cape gooseberries out at Freeways when my dad lived out there?’