The House Within Read online

‘Always?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Your dry cleaning tickets, all that sort of stuff?’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘Why don’t you change your name if you hate it so much?’

  ‘I don’t,’ said Anna, with candid eyes. She looked faintly puzzled by her sister’s consternation. Bethany saw, then, that this was nothing to do with a play on words, but a deeper, more complicated kind of anonymity. She had always believed that, whatever happened, they would always be absorbed back into the dark shadowland of sisterhood, beyond the reach of strangers. But what Anna had just told her, in this offhand way, suggested there were places where Bethany might not be able to find her. There’s nothing criminal about an alias unless a crime has been committed, she told herself sternly, as she drove home.

  The logic of this still defies her, but she hasn’t changed her view. She believes she has failed a test, an unwritten, unspoken test with unlimited demands, that of big sisterhood, a responsibility she never asked for. She supposes, in an oblique kind of way, that her children will suffer the same torments and indecisions about what’s best for each other. It is hard for her to imagine what the boys will be like when they grow up. Will they live in other countries and only meet again when they are very old men? She has seen pictures in the papers of lost brothers reunited after fifty-year absences from each other’s lives, blinking in tearful embraces at airports. Or will they go on, as she and Anna seemed destined to do, keeping in touch, keeping things hidden, laying the ground for guesswork and misunderstandings and reconciliations? As for Abbie, she can’t begin to imagine where she will fit in. She would like to write blueprints for their perfect lives.

  She doesn’t know why Anna chose to come back to town, after she went up north. It surprised her, especially as her job was filled in her absence. Bethany expected her to make a new start somewhere else; sometimes she caught herself hoping that she would.

  2: WHERE WERE YOU LAST NIGHT?

  THAT YEAR, THAT summer when Anna went to live in the commune, was the first year Bethany found herself alone. Alone, that is, in the sense that there was no man living in her house. Her husband, Peter, had left her the previous winter. He said he felt trapped. Peter travelled in his job, auditing government offices in the area; not long periods away, but each time it seemed harder for him to settle back at home. She always sensed his excitement when he was due to pack his bag for the week, but she believed it would pass. She ironed his handkerchiefs and put them in little stacks beside his freshly laundered white shirts.

  Now she rose each day, her eyes red and heavy, to the demands of two small sons. At the end of the day, she read them stories and put them to bed on her own and couldn’t think where the hours had gone. When their lights were turned out, the house was so quiet she could hear herself breathe. After a while, she thought that the pain wouldn’t kill her. It was a summer when the grapevines she and Peter had planted together bore their first good crop. The leaves formed fans across the verandah, the weight and quantity of the fruit was excessive and smelled over-ripe.

  ‘I should make wine,’ she said to Gerald, the man she had begun to see. It was his idea. She hadn’t been looking for a man, but she liked the habit of sex.

  He offered to help but the skins had begun to split, the grapes past their best. Sometimes Gerald stayed late at her house but he still lived with Janice, which was difficult. Gerald and Janice believed in zero population growth, so they didn’t have children. Bethany thought she was falling in love with him but it was hard to tell whether it was just the desire to fill the odd empty spaces in her house. His bulk and a kind of ruggedness appealed to her. He used to play rugby but had given up macho pursuits. He spoke in a cultivated accent about the evils of racism, the virtues of the anti-war movement, and the exact site of her erogenous zones. Your plumpness is so erotic, he told her. She should have known then.

  When he wasn’t around Bethany sat on the verandah and smoked cigarettes and read books. She read Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and A Proper Marriage, novels in which she could sense her own uncut lawns and shaggy gardens, her children’s bodies, remembered heat, the weather, fevers, sex.

  When Anna said she was going to live in the commune down Five Mile Road, Bethany was surprised but not shocked. Anna had been through some devastating times — she had said goodbye to her baby without ever holding him, she had lost her job at the school. The Freeways commune was on the outskirts of town, based in a neglected apple orchard. The trees were old, some of them planted at the turn of the century. They should have been taken out, local orchardists said, when the place went bust. Just because they were spreading and picturesque, covered with lichen, did not mean they should be allowed to stay. Their rot infected new trees when they were planted. Anna didn’t know all these details. What she knew was that, in the spring when she visited an old friend from her teacher training days, now living in the newly established commune, the orchard seemed enchanting, branches shimmering with blossom as far as the eye could see, petals falling on her face, an almost intolerably penetrating perfume surrounding her. As summer progressed the orchard became a dense green haven. Bethany, alone in her solitude, among her grapes and summer’s swollen plums, could see how it would appeal. The two sisters seemed not unalike in their circumstances.

  THERE WERE TWO houses in the commune, one large plain two-storey dwelling, early twentieth century, with box-like joinery and bad plumbing, and electricity. Five bedrooms, one tiny kitchen, an enormous dining room with the same old kauri table that had been there since the house was built. Everyone on the property ate there together once a day, some sitting on battered chairs with rush-woven seats, others squatting, their backs against the wall as they balanced their plates in front of them. Further down the orchard was a worker’s cottage and, beyond that again, a packing shed. It was the packing shed that locals objected to — twelve people were sleeping in it, without sanitation, when the first petition was circulated.

  Anna slept in the cottage, sharing one of its two rooms with a woman called Sheryl. On the window ledge stood a row of orange candles that provided the only light at night. The candles had dripped over the ledge and down the wall, leaving bright trails of wax. Papier-mâché peonies stood in an acid jar with ‘Poison’ printed in black letters on its side. Posters lined the walls. One said ‘Today is a new day’, and another, ‘Présence est immortalité: To exist is to co-exist’, and yet another showed a picture of a young man with long hair wearing glasses that reflected light — ‘You Can Hold it in Your Hands but Not in Your Mind’, the caption read. Other pictures were simply psychedelic collections of colours. These belonged to Sheryl.

  The room next to them was occupied by Chris and Donna and their baby, Lucky, who had translucent skin and eyes like pools of dark honey. When he heard music his hands clasped and unclasped themselves as if they had a life apart from him, his delicate fingers tracing patterns in space. Chris and Donna both wore medieval clothes, their long hair falling from centre partings. They believed in astrology and Tarot cards, and in the spring, when Anna first met them, they stood in the orchard and read Shakespearean sonnets under the trees. Donna was learning to weave. Anna, who had relieved in homecraft classes when she was teaching, thought they could work out some patterns together. Chris was planning to make mandolins. Within a year, they reckoned on selling their wares in a yet to be set up craft market in town.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind living here myself,’ Gerald said. He and Bethany had driven over in Bethany’s rusting Beetle to look the place over.

  Bethany had brought gifts, a pot of mint for Anna to plant near the stream, though Gerald said he thought this was ecologically unsound, and Anna looked equally doubtful, a platter of dolmades, because none of them ate meat, and a dish of spread made from aubergines and garlic.

  ‘You are getting exotic,’ said Anna with a laugh. She had collected a bowl of small, newly ripened tomatoes warmed by the sun. They spread out the food on the long table and
rang a bell. The members of the commune emerged from various houses. At the time there were twenty-seven people living there. Most of them looked young and eager, although there were one or two older men and women accompanied by children, who looked more cautious and slightly bemused.

  At the head of the table sat John, the commune leader, a cocky, fair youth with long, matted hair and a ginger beard. Bethany wondered why he was the leader. Anna muttered something about John having the economic savvy to get his hands on the property. Anna looked flamboyant, dressed in a gypsy dirndl. Her skin was dark and tanned. ‘When I think of the staffroom at high school. God, if they could see me. Uptight, thank God it’s Friday mentality, let’s all get boozed and discuss little Johnny’s problems, and then talk about our own. I’m out of all that. Yes.’

  To her left was a girl called Cindy, a misty, apparently dreamy girl who had done well in school and was now walking around barefoot in a muslin dress. She smiled now and then, saying little.

  ‘Did you make these?’ Cindy asked, speaking to her for the first time, through a mouthful of dolmades.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bethany, ‘I did.’

  ‘Really? Actually made them?’ Cindy said it as if she was sending her up. Although it was not how she saw herself, Bethany guessed she looked conventional, dressed in an above the knee skirt and white boots.

  ‘It’s easy if you’ve got the patience,’ she said, a trifle more sharply than she intended. ‘And plenty of vine leaves, which I have.’

  ‘First catch your leaf,’ said Cindy, rolling her eyes, and somebody laughed.

  ‘No, listen.’ Bethany was suddenly determined. ‘They’re really simple. You just cook the rice and add some fried onions and enough olive oil to make it moist.’

  ‘Olive oil. Don’t you put that in your ears when you’ve got wax?’

  ‘I do buy it at the chemist’s,’ Bethany admitted, and hurried on, sensing the ridicule in their expressions. ‘Blanch the vine leaves in boiling salted water. And then, inside each leaf, lay a teaspoon of your rice mixture. You fold the leaf up like a little parcel.’

  ‘Do you?’ asked Donna, who was sitting to her right. ‘What stops the parcels from falling apart?’

  ‘You squeeze them together in the palm of your hand.’ Finding that she had captured the group’s attention, Bethany began to mime a fist curling into a cup. ‘Squee-eeze them, so.’ Following her, they bunched their fingers, visualising handfuls of the food they were eating. Slicks of the foreign oil had formed on their chins. She saw how they savoured the subtle flavour of the sauce.

  ‘Hey, that’s so clever,’ Donna said. She had torn an end off a newspaper from the couch behind her, and was jotting the information down with a pencil supplied by John. ‘Squeeze them together,’ she murmured, her voice lingering over the phrase. There was a rising heat of sexuality and sexiness in the room, to which Bethany could see she was somehow contributing. Gerald’s eyes were fixed on her face, John balanced a little tomato on the tip of his tongue and sucked it into his mouth.

  Bethany, describing the addition of lemon and tomato juice to the dish of prepared dolmades, felt restored and maternal, as if she had created the harmony at Freeways on her own.

  ‘Wow,’ said Cindy. ‘Très compact. Uh-mmm.’ Again Bethany had the feeling of being mocked, but everyone else was rapt in their attention, as she gave Donna quantities to write down.

  ‘My sister’s experimental phase,’ said Anna, breaking the spell, and their attention turned to her. Gerald’s eyes slid over her face and back to Bethany’s.

  ‘DON’T YOU HATE not having hot water?’ Bethany asked her when they were leaving. The kitchen had become overcrowded and steamy. She had begun to feel headachy and dull, as if the effort of freedom was too much to sustain. They began to walk back to the cottage.

  ‘Trust you. I don’t even notice. We bathe in the stream half the time.’

  ‘So do you think they could make room for me?’ Gerald asked.

  ‘I expect so,’ Anna said. ‘I’ll have to ask John.’

  John had disappeared into the upper part of the main house.

  ‘Shall I phone you?’

  Anna looked fazed. ‘Come and see us next week, there’s only one phone at the main house. There’ll have to be a meeting about it, I guess.’

  ‘John seems a pretty laid back kind of a guy,’ Gerald commented, hoping to encourage her.

  ‘Yeah, he’s okay, when he doesn’t think he’s Jesus Christ.’ They couldn’t tell whether Anna was joking.

  ‘You wouldn’t really, would you?’ Bethany asked Gerald, as they were driving back to town.

  ‘I’m going to leave home,’ Gerald said, taking her hand in his. ‘It would be a good way to move on.’

  Bethany understood what he meant. If they were going to be together, and Gerald seemed to have decided on this, an interlude at Freeways was better than a direct transfer from one household to another. Bethany was still married to Peter, although she supposed that was a technicality, one Peter had abandoned. Gerald stayed nearly until morning. ‘My wife is a heavy sleeper,’ he told her. They drank wine in bed. ‘Nobody holds things up to rigorous observation any more,’ Gerald said. ‘Your sister’s right, we’re too hung up on materialism. Who needs flash houses to be at one with the universe?’

  ‘This isn’t a flash house,’ Bethany said protectively, leaning back against the pillows and sipping her Velluto Rosso.

  ‘Well, of course it’s not,’ said Gerald, offending her. She rather liked her house. ‘It’s the principle I’m talking about.’

  ‘So we give in to chaos. Isn’t that where anarchy begins?’

  ‘Does it matter? That’s a rationale for not breaking loose, Bethany. Even Peter saw that. Bloody old Pete.’

  ‘Perhaps you should go now,’ said Bethany. ‘Your wife might have a bad dream.’

  Gerald groaned, running his hands through his hair. ‘Think about pure nothing, Bethany. Perhaps Einstein was right. Perhaps the mountains aren’t mountains.’

  But he made her laugh, he made her come. He said, I love you, which men who are screwing women on the side don’t always say. Pretty well never. She felt less lonely than she had for a long time. She had been reading another book, about a woman who travelled the country in a feckless way, following love and heartbreak. ‘It is hard to explain what I want to be and do and belong to, something that I cannot put into words, and if someone else puts it into words for me I say, “No, not quite that …”’

  Her own certainties overturned. This felt closer to her experience than the faraway heroines in London. But Peter was the one who left.

  There was a phrase that haunted her at the end of the novel. She returned to it over and again, and heard it in her head when she least wanted to. It was about ‘the road unwinding dreamlike before her’.

  Perhaps, really, they were all heading in the same direction.

  ALL THE SAME, things were moving faster than she anticipated. The next night, when Gerald wasn’t there, both the boys were fractious and heat beat down on the iron roof, keeping her awake. She felt afraid of the dark, not because she sensed danger, but rather because it would just catch up with her. Solitude didn’t sit well with her, after all, she decided. Perhaps she could go to the commune too, but there were the children to think of and that would defeat the point of Gerald’s move. Besides, there were some things she couldn’t get used to the idea of sharing, and she had never been able to recite sonnets. Although she remembers the line ‘for thy sweet love remember’d’.

  As it turned out, Gerald didn’t go to Freeways. He came and went and their lives turned into a private commune of their own. Bethany took to wearing long, colourful dresses and let her hair grow down past her shoulders. Free and easy, it felt to both of them, until his marriage, if that’s what it was (they were learning to talk about relationships these days), wore itself out, and she was pregnant and the house felt filled with new presences, or ones to come. They were so poor they drank Chianti
from basket-covered bottles and listened to Saturday Night at Home for entertainment.

  YOU COULD TELL there was going to be trouble. Cindy’s parents came to visit with a box of food, and the next thing there was a fuss going on in town. Her parents were so upset about the defection of their clever daughter that they wrote to the local newspaper about the place. There were people sleeping on mattresses on the floor, and goodness knows what going on including, for all they knew, smoking dope. People wrote back and said if they couldn’t keep their cat in their own back yard there must be something wrong with them. The parents wrote another letter to the paper and said that the local council should be stopping the whole thing. As it turned out, John had done his homework, the commune was outside the borough limits.

  The trouble came to a rolling boil when Freeways announced that it would host a rock festival. This was the second year of the commune’s existence. Posters sprang up round the town, stuck to telephone poles and walls. The city newspapers began to run stories. Five thousand expected at Freeways, said one headline. Ten thousand, said another. Young people are preparing for a mass exodus from the cities to the country, blazed another report.

  Anna began appearing at Bethany’s round meal times, for the night, even to stay over for the weekend. She showered until the water went cold. Beneath her tan a gaunt look was beginning to emerge.

  ‘How many people are there now?’ Bethany asked one evening.

  ‘About fifty. It’s the kids sleeping in cars that gets to me,’ Anna admitted, in a rare burst of confiding that all was not well at Freeways.

  ‘I guess they’re old enough to make up their own minds.’

  ‘No,’ said Anna, wrapping her arms around her chest. She was wearing a skimpy buttoned cardigan, even though it was a warm night. ‘I mean little kids, three or four of them in a car with their parents. There’s grass growing up through the seats of some of the cars. They never go anywhere.’