But, still.
Georgie sensed it coming, his closing address on the subject of her mother. It hung there like a southerly on the horizon. You look well enough, she said, stalling him.
Cynthia’s got me on a treadmill.
Then Cyn’s been good for you.
Sin? He looked horrified.
Georgie laughed. Look at you. Sin? Moi? I meant Cynthia, you drongo.
Oh.
Mum’s dead, Dad. You don’t have to say anything.
He smiled then, his face a picture of heroic indulgence. I understand.
Georgie sighed. There were actual tears on his cheeks now.
God, I can still see her at Freshwater Bay, 1957. Some university bash. Mauve cashmere sweater, hair flying. So fresh and beautiful. Could have been Audrey Hepburn.
Well you’ll have to console yourself with Kristin Scott Thomas.
Who?
I just don’t want to hear it again, Dad. Can’t you see?
I have my memories, too, you know. What are you doing?
Undressing, she said kicking off her shoes and shucking her shorts.
Jesus Christ Almighty! he bellowed as she got out of her smalls and her sleeveless top. Have you lost all decency?
Georgie fell into the pool and lay on the cool smooth bottom beyond the sound of his voice, all their voices.
GEORGIE WAS BARELY twenty-one, a trembling trainee, when she’d first handled a corpse. The charge nurse called her in and explained the administering of last offices, the tidying up of the deceased. Think of it, she said, as housekeeping. Georgie knew the patient, an old bloke called Ted Benson whom she’d nursed for weeks. His death was expected but Georgie was aghast all the same. She was required to bathe him and to plug his orifices and to bind his limbs before he went downstairs to the morgue. Soon after Georgie began the task, the charge nurse was called away and she was left alone with the body. The room felt awfully quiet and the corpse too big for the space. Already it was cool to the touch and she began sponging briskly as though the dome of the belly was a Volkswagen roof, but as she did so she remembered Ted’s uncomplaining presence on the ward, his soft voice, his gentlemanly deference, and the memory shamed her a little and calmed her down. She began to pay a different attention to his remains. She rinsed his face and patted it dry as delicately as she had when he was alive. She found herself whispering to him soothingly as you do to a patient who’s submitting himself to your care. Georgie was no longer sorry to have the job; she was just sorry she’d been unable to save him. I liked you Ted, she said. I admired your dignity, you know. I miss you already. She wadded him, bound his ankles and jaw tenderly and knew when she was finished that she had found a pure part of herself. The room felt holy.
• • •
To the surprise and consternation of the others, Georgie refused all offers of a bed for the night and stayed on in her mother’s house when everybody left. The place felt desolate. It was just her, and her mother’s stain. In the morning she had an urge to swim naked once more in the pool. She began with a few lazy laps for the sensation of it, for the clean fizz of bubbles against her belly. Then she settled into a firmer rhythm, a hard stroke that caused her muscles to burn until she was swimming in a state of rage. It was that ghostly damp patch on the carpet. The sign of a final opportunity gone begging. None of them would understand but she really would have cherished just half an hour alone with her mother before the undertakers arrived. To undress her, yes, and wash her, to sponge away the cosmetic crust that had disguised her in life, all that lippy, the foundation and rouge, the pencil and eyeshadow. Gently. With reverence. Not in anger or triumph, but as a daughterly offering. To relieve each of them of their burden. All you ever wanted was to show her what you did best, to have her understand something about you. And to prove that you could love her. In a quiet room, alone. Before the essence of her was gone. Before your heart finally shrank to the size of a dried fig.
Georgie heard her name in the water. A hand appeared in the spotty blue haze.
Georgiana!
It was Ann. She was kneeling at the end of the pool, wriggling her hand in the water like a dolphin trainer.
For Godsake, Georgie.
Georgie stood with her head against the tiles and tried to breathe. She felt hot and faint in her sister’s shadow. Her body felt poisoned. She began to shake.
Wasn’t last night enough for you? Ann cried. The kids are here. It’s Saturday, the day of your mother’s funeral, and you’re skinny dipping like a teenager in her pool?
Georgie looked up at Ann in her Chanel suit.
And wipe your nose. God, here they come.
Hello Aunty Georgie, chimed Blake from the steps. Her sundress made her face look yellow. Her new teeth looked too big for her mouth. Beside her, young Jared smirked.
You’re a nudist.
The rudest nudist, Jared.
The kids covered their mouths and looked sideways at their mother as if for permission to laugh.
Jim called, Georgie.
Oh.
He’s coming down.
No.
I just assumed.
Oh, God.
I don’t understand you, Ann said. It’s noon already. Get out.
Georgie climbed up the ladder and stood a moment looking about for the towel she’d forgotten to bring down. After a moment she registered the kids’ eyes wide as anemones and she was just turning to Ann when her sister grabbed her in a blanketing hug that felt for a few moments like love but was, she realized, nothing more than shame.
Later that day Georgie sat in the baking black limousine while the others trooped in to view the body. Nobody spoke when they rejoined her in the funeral car.
The service itself was a model of discretion and taste. The presence of Warwick Jutland QC put the vicar into an obsequious tizzy and it seemed to Georgie that her father was eulogized as much as her dead mother. As she mouthed the tepid, tootling hymns familiar from school, she wondered why it fell to Derek to speak about their mother. During the sermon it dawned on her that she’d suffered a terrible sunburn to the buttocks and the longer the service went the tighter her skin became until, near the end, she had the feeling her arse had blown up to twice its usual size.
Later, at the crematorium, which had the décor and atmosphere of a three-star hotel lobby, Jim and the boys appeared in the upholstered pew beside her as though by arrangement. Jim’s suit fitted him perfectly but he still managed to look too big for it. The boys looked bewildered. Georgie wondered whether they’d been at their own mother’s funeral. Conversations of that sort had always been tacitly out-of-bounds. As the coffin descended through the marble floor, a handkerchief appeared in Georgie’s lap and she looked up, startled, to see Josh lean back into place beside his father. She knew the hanky—she’d once ironed it into its little square—but she’d never seen it leave Josh’s drawer before. She stared at it while the crematorium filled with the sound of Barbra Streisand.
The wake was at Derek and Ann’s. Jude lay on a bed and sobbed. Afterwards Jim drove Georgie back to her mother’s, and the boys sat downstairs to watch TV while she and Jim went to her old bedroom to talk. She felt numb. She didn’t know why he was there or why she’d consented to have him drive her. She felt conspired against and her backside hurt.
You’ve been talking to Ann, she said standing at the window while he sat on her narrow bed with its dire pink coverlet.
Hard not to, he murmured. Funeral and all.
She sighed. You could see the river glittering through the boughs of the lemon-scented gums. The flame tree was twice the size she remembered.
I didn’t realize you still kept your stuff here, he said.
When she looked back he was surveying the mountain of gear her mother must have been dusting all these years. He was right. On the rare occasions that she’d come up here in the past few years it just looked like furniture she’d acquired somehow. All this stuff accreted with her barely aware. The room felt progr
essively smaller but now she saw that it was the simple volume of junk not the passage of time that caused it. The suitcase with its sticker scabs, the rucksack and crates of souvenirs and knick-knacks. Poster tubes, boxes of LPs, the stereo. On the little desk the piles of postcards and photographs and a jambiyya dagger which Jim drew from its scabbard, to gaze solemnly along the blade the way men will. She looked away and saw the shelves with their rows of textbooks. Patterns of Shock, Key to Psychiatry, Oncology for Nurses and Health Care Professionals (in two volumes), The Lippincott Manual of Nursing Practice. They were thick and hard as hospital mattresses, and probably long-outdated. On the wall were framed photos that her mother must have put there. Georgie in school uniform with the Charlie’s Angels hair she had before she hacked it off and dyed it purple. Her in the Saudi desert somewhere with camels, her eyes like postal slits against the glare. And her in a miniskirt and Oakleys on the hood of a convertible in Baja California.
Your whole life’s here, he said.
I haven’t lived here since I was eighteen.
But you keep everything here.
She shrugged.
What’s happening to this place?
Who knows. I guess there’ll be a will.
Be worth a packet.
I suppose.
Georgie—
The boys have been good.
Yeah. Listen, I want to talk about the shamateur.
I can’t.
Fair enough. But sometime.
Maybe.
You’ll be back?
I need to think.
Right.
He got up from the bed. She looked at the Axminster and saw the furrows of the Electrolux still there. Her mother’s presence.
I’ll get going, he said. Before dark. Don’t fancy dodging the roos.
Thanks for coming, she said.
She went down for the sake of appearances to see the boys off. She stood on the neat lawn verge and waved like a relative. Before they’d rounded the corner she turned for the house but was ambushed by the sprinkler system.
About eight that evening she was sitting by the pool with a tall glass of mineral water and a few citronella candles when Ann came down the steps in her heels. The night was stifling hot and the garden heavy with the scent of frangipani and the stink of chlorine.
There you are.
Here I am.
Bob had to call a doctor. Jude was beside herself. Gave her a tranquillizer.
Poor Jude.
I half thought you’d be gone. Christ, it’s hot.
Have a swim.
No.
They sat at the table, their legs lit by the pool and their faces by the candles whose murky lemon odour rose into sweeter smells overhead.
I can’t bear to think of her gone, said Ann.
I know.
But you wouldn’t come in with us to see her. I just don’t understand you, Georgie. We wanted to go in together. Like sisters. And you’re doing this tough-girl thing, acting as though it’s all a bit of an inconvenience.
I didn’t want to see her like that, said Georgie, knowing that it was impossible to explain. If Jude didn’t understand she stood no chance with Ann.
You’re a nurse! Even Margaret managed.
I’m sorry, Ann.
Is that vodka? Ann asked, pointing at the glass of water.
Yes, Georgie lied.
Do you have a problem?
I have a number, as it happens.
Does Jim know?
Jim knows all, believe me.
I saw you talking to Dad.
What’s wrong, Ann? You look like you’ve come here for something specific. Honestly, I don’t want a fight.
So why are you staying here?
I’ve got a few things to sort out, sis, I just needed one night’s breather.
You’ve seen the will, haven’t you?
What are you—
It just makes me wild. The cool attitude. You suddenly hanging around our mother’s house.
Ann?
It’s just so…brazen. Sitting here by the pool as though you already own it.
As she uncrossed her legs Ann’s stockings crackled with static.
You’re just tired, sis.
Some of us have responsibilities.
I know that, love.
No, you don’t. You don’t know what it’s like to be trapped.
In a marriage, you mean.
No, Georgie. Financially.
You and Derek have money trouble? Georgie asked in genuine surprise which probably sounded to Ann like amused disbelief.
Me.
You mean debts?
Try not to sound so blinking superior.
How did this happen?
I went into business with Margaret. Well, I was the silent partner.
Oh, no.
You want us to beg you?
And that’s why you came to see me tonight?
You hardly even knew our mother. And we need the money.
So have the money.
Ann began to sob.
Georgie found herself unable to comfort her sister and curiously unwilling as well.
I’ll be gone in the morning, she said.
WITH ALL THE SYMPTOMS of a hangover that she hadn’t earned, Georgie packed everything she wanted from her old bedroom into Beaver’s ute and drove down through the dress circle suburbs to the river at Crawley where she pulled in for a moment to see an old bloke dive from the jetty and set out in a gentlemanly crawl across the shining water. In their pens the boats at the yacht club were a scene from a Sunday painting, their masts a thicket of silver and white.
She thought of the mirrors and moths she’d sailed from there. The Australs and Robertses and Farrs the old man’s friends raced. The Swarbrick they once had. The twilight meets. The mad, ploughing reach in from Rottnest.
As she wheeled the EH back onto the road, she glimpsed the arches and ovals of the university and wondered if those two years when she blew Medicine were the sabotage she presented to her father or the real failure she privately suspected.
She drove down Mounts Bay Road and watched the river between the date palms. At the old Swan Brewery site the Aboriginal protesters seemed to have packed up and gone back to their camps. Around the bend the commercial district loomed. There was nothing left in this city for her. She should never have come back from abroad. She’d never live here again.
It was noon when she pulled in off the highway at the old fruit stand and her mood began to evaporate as she thought about Luther Fox and all her chattels in his house. They needn’t go into White Point anymore. They could shop in the city once a week and use the short cut to the beach. And there was the river. The peaceful silence of the place. And music. A houseful of books. She needn’t rescue him; she’d just be with him. They’d plant trees and he could grow melons again. It was a real chance, wasn’t it?
The chooks fluttered from beneath the house when she got out. We’ll compare sunburns, she thought, feeling her butt. The hens threw themselves at her shins in a way that startled her. She saw the back door closed behind the insect screen. She caught her breath a moment and stepped up. It was locked. She went round to the front, blood ticking in her throat, and saw that it too was bolted. Before she even began to call and knock she knew he was gone.
On the verandah table a couple of riverstones stood in the dust left by mosquito coils. Crows gave out single syllables from the clump of casuarinas. Georgie took the sounds as irony. How else could you hear it?
She took up a stone and pitched it out into the paddock and then followed up with its companion. They made little thuds in the dirt. Pats, really. Tiny, taunting pats. She stood at the rail and held it and did not cry for some time.
She hadn’t pride enough to resist a tour of the sheds and the riverbend. She checked the hill above the quarry despite the certainty of his not being there. She told herself it might be temporary. But where does a man without a car go to for a day or so? He doesn’t pop off t
o the shops, for Godsake. She knew he’d bolted. He’d left her to the wolves.
A last, sputtering hope stayed with her until she pulled in to Beaver’s. It was faintly possible that he’d hitched in to look for a vehicle, could even be waiting there. But Beaver didn’t say a word. He seemed disinclined. She drove to Jim’s because she had nowhere else to go. She had a car full of junk and no clean clothes. She could not think.
The house was empty but, as ever, unlocked. She saw that the squalid remains of her night in the spare room had been cleaned up. Between the exercise bike and the recliner-rocker that was forever about to be re-upholstered, a bed was neatly made and at one end of the mattress stood the carton she’d half packed days before. She went down and unpacked the car.
It was two hours before Jim came in. He dropped a plastic bag of something in the sink and saw her there on the sofa.
Took the boys trolling for tailor, he said.
Any luck?
Yeah.
Where are they?
Down the jetty. Hot as hell.
I’ll cook, she said.
If you like. I’ll fillet them out.
Yeah.
You orright?
Georgie shrugged.
Want a drink?
No.
How your sisters takin it?
Fighting over money.
Already. Gawd.
Who skippered today? Who took Raider out?
Boris.
Oh.
I didn’t really expect to see you, he said.
You want me to go?
You don’t have to.
Georgie watched the big boats snuffle up to their moorings bronzed and silhouetted by the westering sun.
I think I’m quite within my rights in not being prepared to beg, though, he said.
Beg?
You can stay on your own terms. Really. I don’t mind.
Georgie looked at the dry white skin on her knees.
The boys and I, he murmured, we appreciate what you’ve done for us.
Sounds like you’ve had a team meeting.
Sort of, he said turning to wash his hands. Josh feels like he’s been giving you a hard time and he’s feeling bad about it.