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Nothing worked. Now I was playing my very last card. It was a mean trick, I knew. I felt its meanness myself. How cruel, how unfair, how totally unsporting, how unlike the stout mothers of public life, the mothers of fiction. You could never imagine Mrs Gandhi or Mrs Micawber or Mrs Thatcher or Mrs Weasley dying before their time and leaving their children unmothered. The prime minister’s wife – any prime minister’s wife – Nicole Kidman’s mother, Mrs Jellyby, Angelina Jolie, the Queen, Lady Jane Franklin, Mrs George Bush senior and junior…they would never have died young and left motherless children. They might have been doubtful, dominating or dysfunctional – all Dickens’ mothers were – but they stayed around. Even Lady Dedlock hung in there. Jane Austen’s Mrs Bennet would never have left five young daughters weeping over a coffin. The mother dying was a disgraceful breaking of every single rule and if I were Archie, I would have been outraged too. But that wasn’t going to change, and it certainly wasn’t my idea.
I wondered if my absence would make any real difference to the running of the household. As with the commander ofan army, or the leader of any enterprise, so it is with the mistress of a house. Like Mrs Isabella Beeton I had applied a strategic approach to the household, its contents, its routines, and its warm and breathing occupants. And how had I forgotten that Isabella Beeton, that wise, visionary, wellread, innovative woman, that young woman, had died far too early? Isabella Beeton had left her two children – one just a baby – motherless. She ought always to remember that she is the first and the last, the Alpha and the Omega in the government of her establishment.
But what once infuriated me about Archie I now admired. It hadn’t been his tendency to dally in flirtatious territory at dinners or parties featuring women with more impressive cleavage than I – and of course, more recently, with cleavage at all. Nor had it been his need to bond with members of the same gender and subspecies (semi-professional, rugby-loving) at the pub once a week. Nor his regular forgetting of birthdays and anniversaries. If this marriage were to have unravelled it would have been over something as trivial and tangible as a misplaced sock, or a forgotten school lunchbox. That indifference to the knitted fabric of the household. It might have been misshapen over time and ill-fitting but still, thanks to the one thread that was me, it all held together: the shopping, the bill-paying, the girls’ activities, their dental appointments, their swimming lessons, their need to dawdle in the park doing nothing at all.
However, I now saw a quality that I almost craved. Maybe Archie’s indifference to the household was restraint, a capacity for self-control and wide-gazing detachment. Something I couldn’t do, being forever focused on the crumbs on the kitchen bench in front of me, the emptying milk carton in the fridge, the multiplying dirty clothes in the basket.
I once heard a famous actor being interviewed on the radio about the breakdown of her marriage. When pressed to name its cause she replied succinctly: shirts. I knew instantly what she meant. The symbol of a married woman’s unscripted yet unavoidable role in the relationship. No clause in the contract stipulating the care and maintenance of the male shirt, yet somehow they took over, with their demands to be soaked, ironed, fresh and alert on hangers ready for the next excursion into the working world. It took a stout feminist to withstand the onslaught of the shirt.
My particular argument had never been with shirts, since Archie’s work gear was casual. And even if it had been, I would never have left him over a shirt because, despite his domestic blindness, Archie had given me more than I deserved. But there had been times when I could see how it might have been possible to leave. I doubted he had ever understood how tight a thread I had been all these years. And now that one thread was about to be snipped. And if on the very edge of that scission, I was still unable to fall back, stop being the commander of the household, what did that say about me? Control freak, I guessed. Yet I suspected there was something more to it than that. Yet another thing for which I could not find the right words.
I wondered what happened when women disappeared from a family. Another woman enlisted to take their place? A paid housekeeper, or a wife? Despite his occasional flirtatiousness I couldn’t see Archie rushing into anything. That didn’t fit with the father in him. I knew he would be assisted by his mother and my mother, who between them would probably make life easier for him than I ever had. Then, after a while, depending on how Estelle and Daisy reacted, a new partner would come, followed possibly by marriage. Secretly I was hoping for Charlotte, Archie’s part-time bookkeeper, which seemed logical to me, although I’d tried and failed to discuss the subject with him. I liked Charlotte, I admired her. She was a serene young woman who was completing a diploma in business management. She worked with percentages and bottom lines and, I suspected, had never made a sponge cake or done French knitting in her life. She came one day a week and worked in the corner of Archie’s shed which was also his office, sending out invoices and settling accounts with suppliers, decoding then dispensing all the paperwork of the tax system that Archie found so mystifying. Estelle and Daisy adored her and only ever wanted her to mind them if Archie and I went out. If she married Archie it would be almost perfect.
Oh, and it would be cruel. Another woman to usher the girls into their teenage years, into their adulthood. To be there for their first period, to buy the most expensive hair products, to offer advice on skin care, to tolerate teenagegirl cravings for Nutella or obsessions with vegan diets. To pretend to understand how vital MySpace was. To be there when their boyfriends abandoned them. Gasp at their mobile phone bills. Shake a head over their newest piercing. Tell them, every day, how beautiful they were. And how much they were loved.
Cruelty. What exactly did Eliot say again? I found my undergraduate copy of the Selected Poems, and prepared to torment myself further with his gloomy words. But when I read ‘The Wasteland’ again I had to admit that Mr Eliot was right: it was winter that had kept me warm, in a strange sort of way. Muffled me in its state of suspended animation, kept me from the cold steel of memory and desire before they sliced through my soul in the expectant warmth of spring.
An attack of wind shook the wisteria so furiously the petals rained onto the verandah. Opening the office window wide I took in its scent. I heard the clicking of Mr Lambert’s wheelbarrow next door. This time of year, he was more than particular about his garden: he was obsessive. He would be sweeping up the leaves and blown petals as they dropped, cursing my messy flowering vines and clipping every tendril that sneaked its way past the fence. Instead of shaving his front lawn today, he was probably pruning, the mock orange hedge being his chief target. I never smelled the mock orange during the day, but some nights the entire atmosphere was saturated with it. It could not be just from Mr Lambert’s abject specimens, which he trimmed into order every week in the warmer months.
Winter would soon be just a chill memory. The scent on the wind told me that. It might have been the freesias, planted around the letterbox. The fragrance always filled me with a strange distracted yearning, a restless and aching expectation. Perhaps because it contained the promise of summer, the season I loved the most. I remembered the freesias which grew along the railway embankments and in vacant lots all the way down the south coast. The ones that filled a room with a scent at once wild and comforting. They brought suggestions of many things: memories of rough childhood holidays on the south coast beaches; weekends away in holiday shacks with friends; the evidence of the first garden I ever helped plan, plant and nurture into life, when we first came to live here. The garden hadn’t existed then: the house perched disdainfully at the front of a long narrow stretch of buffalo grass. There was a Hills hoist rotary washing line, immobilised by age, and nothing else. We brought clumps of the wild freesias and, after hacking away at the grass to uncover cracked but serviceable paths and the faint outlines of former garden beds, planted them here and there.
For all the years I caught their first scent each spring, I experienced a small stab deep within. A distinct physical ache, and one that always made me feel momentarily emotional, though whether on the verge of tears or shouts or laughter, I could never say. This seasonal feeling was so common I had always registered it unthinkingly. Until now. For I would no longer smell these flowers, and it seemed important to define accurately what the scent meant. And it wasn’t only the freesias. All the spring flowers taunted me in their postcard perfection, as unwelcome as the memory and desire that now encroached on the day. They all seemed to have come out of the dead land, the garden that I once revelled in.
On the desk beside me the phone rang.
Hello?
There was no one at the other end but I sensed a presence. I suspected it was the same person who also hung up after a few rings, before I could answer it.
Hello? I repeated more loudly, but the presence was not to be provoked by shouting. I slammed the phone down. I had no idea who it was. The caller ID function told me it was a private number.
I closed Mr Eliot, more carefully than I otherwise might, adding him to the collection of books on the bedside table. They probably wouldn’t make their way back to the bookshelves in the hall.
Dear Delia
Don has been very good to me, and my husband has neglected me for years for his work. You still didn’t advise if I should bleach my lace tablecloth or not. And as well as the red wine it is smeared with green stains where Don knocked over his avocado and prawn entrée.
Uncertain.
Dear Uncertain
Don, Don, Don. It’s all about Don, isn’t it? And why is it that you are attracted to such clumsy men? I advise you to sever relations with Don and concentrate on your husband. Maybe he works too hard because you are the sort of person who uses lace cloths and makes avocado and prawn cocktails. What were you thinking? It’s not 1975 any more. Of course soaking an antique lace cloth in bleach would be crazy. Try lots of salt, cold water, then hang it out in the sun for a day. Let me know how you go.
Eight (#ulink_55bff7a1-b87a-5f60-a0fd-2fb34b8849c2)
By the time it was nearly dark and the families had come and gone in the late afternoon rush with their Happy Meals and movie-deal specials, I felt ready to drive off again.
I’d see if I could find Mitchell. If he was still around he would be at one of three places. The first was the café on the way back to Amethyst. It had a new name, and when I pulled up and saw the sign I assumed it was a facetious one. But when the waiter, dreadlocks flying, rollerbladed to my table with the menu, I understood it really was the Roadkill Café. She explained that they were out of wallaby.
We’ve got python instead, chargrilled. And the specials are rabbit casserole – or rat, if you like. In one movement she yawned slightly and shifted her chewing gum across to the other side of her mouth.
Rat?
Both types. Native and rattus rattus.
Oh.
I wondered if there was a difference. Only in price, she told me, scanning the rest of the room and chewing her gum. The native rat, antechinus, was five dollars more, and it wasn’t written down because Parks and Wildlife might be alerted and even though it was genuine roadkill, guaranteed one hundred per cent fresh…
Look, could you come back in a few minutes?
It had been a long day’s drive, and I had barely eaten, and should have been hungry. But the whole place and menu had changed. It used to be called Mitchell’s café, just like his place in town was Mitchell’s bar, though neither had a sign to explain that. People just knew. But it didn’t surprise me to find a marginal sort of dining experience here, this strange diner that fed its patrons off the very road that brought them to its doors. Amethyst had always been like that. Nothing ever conformed. It was one reason why I chose to stay all those years back.
I studied the menu again, hoping to spot a salad or soup. Apart from the thought of eating any rat, the threat of the Parks and Wildlife department was off-putting. Would they raid the café and confiscate my meal between mouthfuls, prosecute me for eating a national or state emblem? Or worse, a sports mascot? I thought about taking out my mobile phone and turning it on. It had been four days and I expected the message I’d written for Archie and the girls was by now insufficient. I took the phone out of my bag, stared at the blank unlit screen for a few moments, then replaced it. Not yet. Not until I was really there.
The waiter was getting annoyed.
Is Mitchell around? I asked. A foolish question. She was probably two years old when I was last here.
Mitchell? Never heard of him. Steve might know, he’s in charge.
Could you ask him?
Sure. Steve! She yelled so loudly I thought the gum would shoot from her mouth.
A man appeared through the fly strip curtain, wiping what looked like fresh blood from his hands onto a tea towel.
Hi. I was wondering if Mitchell was still around. I used to work for him.
I took over the place from him, Steve said. But that was over ten years ago. Not sure where he is now. I’m from Garnet, back down the highway. But he could still be in that bar in town.
Sure, I said. Thanks.
Are you ready to order yet? the waiter said.
No thanks, I said, getting up. Sorry, I’ve changed my mind.
I passed Lazarus’s Vehicles again. It had barely changed. The same collection of shabby trailers and caravans sitting at angles, having been left by their previous owners without the bricks to prop them up. Peeling reminders of holiday aspirations, plans and dreams that were never realised.
When the bus had dropped me off some twenty years ago, it wasn’t a scheduled stop. The driver had said he couldn’t take me any farther, but that I could get to where I wanted to go if I waited here by the side of the road. Someone would soon drive past and give me a lift for the final few kilometres into town. He’d seemed very confident of that.
I waited for an hour, then, hot and thirsty, started to walk. I eventually came to Lazarus’s yard. He agreed to take me into town when he shut up shop at five. He dropped me at the Kingfisher Boarding House, a block from the main shops and just shabby enough for someone of limited means.
Early the next morning I started looking for Van. Three days later I checked out and returned to Lazarus’s. This time I had a proper look, walking around the whole site, investigating cluttered corners of the yard and peering into vans and trailers I doubt he remembered he had. I spotted the most endearing caravan I had ever seen. A comic book caravan. Curved, aluminium, a dull sky blue. It was perched on tufts of grass amid the graveyard of vehicles, most of them decrepit. This was old, but it looked sound enough.
How much? I asked him.
That? Not much use to you, he said. It won’t travel, not far anyway.
What about into town?
Well. He scratched under his bandanna. There is a caravan and camping park, a few people live there. Some holiday units, a couple of old-timers in vans. A guy called Mitchell runs it.
I’m staying on for a while, I said. I’ll need a place to live.
He looked from me to the caravan, then back to me again.
He’s a decent guy, he said, I reckon he wouldn’t charge you too much to rent a site.
I gazed at the van. The modest curves, the unrelieved shabbiness, the air of simple hope. I asked him again how much, and it was a matter of moments before he told me I could have it for one hundred dollars. I’d be doing him a favour.
I could tow it in for you, he said.
So, that very evening, I had become a caravan owner. For one hundred dollars it was empty, apart from a thin mattress on the bed, but I made do without a blanket or towel until the next day. Inside it was not nearly as dirty as I’d expected, having been shut up tightly for years. The stale air vanished soon after I opened the door and prised apart the doll’s house windows on each side. Over the following weekend I walked into the centre of town and back, gradually stocking up on the essentials, which, I discovered, were few when you stripped life down to the most important things. What I needed, more than anything, were books, and by the time I was ready to have the baby, the second-hand bookshops had supplied enough to line the caravan. It was like living inside a cubby house. Surrounded by books, I felt safe, secure.
Nine (#ulink_5e5489b7-2662-5785-bc8b-d1dcf4149511)
Dear Delia
Do you have a good recipe for a wedding cake? I’ve tried several but found them dry and tasteless.
Mother of the Bride.
Dear Mother of the Bride
Dried fruit, obviously. Raisins, sultanas, mixed peel. Preserved ginger if you like. Brown sugar, flour, spices…Oh, for god’s sake, do I need to list everything? Surely you can work it out. And don’t ask for weights and measurements. That is tedious in the extreme. In fact it’s probably why your cakes have always failed. By the way, several cakes? How many weddings have you had?
Modern mothering was a snap.
Here I was agonising over my daughter’s wedding at least twenty years too early and trying to decide between linen napkins (more stylish, but more laundering) or paper ones in shades matching her outfit (it would be palest pink, more cream than pink, like the flesh of a white peach) that would be much less stylish but more efficient (no ironing), and then I recalled Jane Austen’s Mrs Bennet.
I often thought of Mrs Bennet when the going got tough in the blood sport that the game of raising daughters had become. Mrs Bennet’s daughters might have displayed more respect for their mama, might not have spent hours in their bedrooms plastering their faces with gooey make-up, rereading the same Girlfriend or Total Girl magazines over and over, or listening to obscure punk bands; they might not have insisted on dressing like child prostitutes from the moment they could do up buttons on their own, refused to eat meat from the age of eight and made prepubescent demands to have their navels pierced. But I had to admit there was a plus side to my experiences.
First, she had five daughters, and I only had two. And poor Mrs Bennet’s entire commission in life was, after raising them, to marry them off to suitable husbands. I might have been planning a wedding, but it was in an age where husband hunting had long dropped off the agenda. Daisy could get married or not as she pleased. Not so Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Kitty and silly little Lydia. Oh yes, Jane and Elizabeth might have had an element of choice, and Elizabeth may well have exercised her right to reject the absurd advances of Mr Collins and the first astonishing proposal of Mr Darcy without a single reference to her mother’s wishes, but neither she nor any other Austen heroine was going to slum it with the love of her life in an artist’s studio in the East End of London (a place of such unredeemed vulgarity it was, I suspected, never once mentioned in the entire Austen oeuvre), or marry a man she’d met on the bus or down the pub on a Friday night.
True, Mrs Bennet had household help, and I had none. But Mrs Bennet’s obligations far outstripped mine. I didn’t have to run our lives to a rigid social and domestic schedule. We didn’t have to make tedious calls upon parish spinsters or endure visits from patronising social superiors. We could, and did, spend our evenings lingering over any book we wanted, reading The Wind in the Willows or Where The Wild Things Are, again and again whether they or I had grown out of them or not. True, it was important to feed my daughters with nutritionally balanced foods, monitor their homework, supply a few extracurricular activities, such as Estelle’s netball or Daisy’s recorder lessons, and ensure they didn’t watch too much television. When the time came, caution them against the more unsanitary forms of body piercing and advise on the use of condoms (if I were there, but perhaps I could expect Charlotte to do that – they wouldn’t listen to Jean).
But poor Mrs Bennet had the responsibility of making all her daughters proficient in dancing, card games and needlework. At least one – Mary – had a workable grasp of pianoforte, Italian songs and Scottish airs. They all had to demonstrate parlour and drawing-room etiquette, and have a familiarity with the historical epic poems of Sir Walter Scott. She had to ensure that every daughter’s complexion remained clear and fine and fair, that the circumferences of their waists remained within an acceptable twenty-four inches, that their hair stayed dressed in coils and ringlets (Lydia, for sure, would have wanted to shave, spike, streak or do all three to hers). Mrs Bennet was responsible for their deportment, posture, manners when in church or at table, behaviour while strolling down to the village haberdashery (Lydia would have had tattoos, and belly piercings too). She had to foster polite and appropriate discourse in a variety of contexts from the vicar to the scullery maid. She had to teach them about bowel movements (without stooping to vulgar terms), menstruation (without so much as mentioning blood), sexual relations between husbands and wives (without being able to refer to the intimate physical act, let alone uttering, let alone thinking of, words like penis or vagina), and then initiate and oversee the vast, all-consuming business of finding the appropriate man attached to the end of the unmentionable organ – the whole reason, culmination, justification, of a woman’s life. Poor Mrs Bennet. The task was gargantuan. And she did indeed fail in many of her duties. I don’t think even Jane, of all the daughters, managed decent piano playing (though I imagined Lydia taking up drums). Not one of the Bennet girls was schooled and, as there had never been a governess, the level of education had clearly been hit and miss. But Mrs Bennet did her absolute best, and one of the worst difficulties she encountered was the benign indifference and sarcastic humour of her library-closeted husband.
When she was discontented she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news.
I honestly couldn’t claim that taking Daisy to recorder lessons for half an hour once a week was onerous, compared with Mrs Bennet’s commitments. Readers might have been tricked into thinking that she was a silly shallow woman and that her husband, with all his dry sarcasm. was a self-effacing, long-suffering man, but Mrs Bennet was a champion among women, among mothers, a pearl of great price. I was going dizzy at the thought of linen versus paper napkins, but she – strong, determined and single-minded – was faced with the entire box of dice from the cradle on. Times five.
So why was I thinking about marriage? Did I really desire that my daughters had husbands? My present obsession with Daisy’s wedding no doubt had a lot to do with my own. Archie and I were married, certainly, but in the austere political and secular correctness of a registry office. Here we banished all suggestion of offensive sexist symbolism such as white veils or floral bouquets. There were no demeaning vows involving words like obedience. And yet, without an audience beyond our witnesses, there were no obligations to quote mystical Lebanese poets or play chamber music.
I began to question if I was not unhealthily fixated on an entirely imaginary husband, the sort of husband who, if he existed, you wouldn’t want for a husband anyway. I could admit now that the perfect husband resembled a wife. I often yearned for a wife. I yearned for one right at that moment, a wife who would bring me a cup of tea, then go and hang out the washing that I knew would be creasing itself after the centrifugal force of the washing machine had plastered it to the insides of the drum. A wife who was me. That person who was, right now, tired. And, I admitted, weary of the housework, which had never really bothered me, which I’d never found difficult or mysterious.
But whether or not it was now too many years of loads put on or hung out or gathered in, wrinkled and all, or if it was an increasing resentment that flowed like the toxic chemicals that I tried to flush out of my system, or just a simple matter of being too tired and too busy all at once, I could no longer tell. All I knew was, today I would be leaving the washing there in the machine while I wrote my list.
Dear Delia
About the wedding cake. I’m afraid I need more precise ingredients than that. And how long would you recommend I cook it for? Hopefully you will be able to help me. Mother of the Bride.
Dear Mother of the Bride
As with the wedding itself, hope is the chief ingredient of a wedding cake. You are right to be hopeful. Hope will keep a marriage going for a long, long time. Have a go. I’m sure you can manage it.
Ten (#ulink_3849efea-b0f3-5374-97e9-6fa42084012a)
The centre of Amethyst was in a hollow, streets angling down towards the main roads, the clusters of shops. The streets were full of enormous trees and then, on the west of town, there were large open spaces like natural parklands along which sauntered a lazy river, bordered with willows and reeds. In autumn, the place was enchanting. In the cooler months it was perfect, and in summer it was shady enough to give the illusion of coolness. Along the main street into town the palms were enormous, dense, and in the late afternoon crammed with brightly coloured parakeets monstering the fruits in a cacophony of greed. They shot back and forth across the road boldly, forcing me to steer the car from side to side to avoid them.
The Paradise Reach Motel, a small family business, was still there. It had quiet, spacious rooms, a palm-crowded front garden with a pool, and a friendly watchdog, whom I noticed as soon as I pulled up. Surely it wasn’t the same one from years back – he’d have been well over sixteen by now: did labradors live that long? The woman at the desk wasn’t familiar, but she told me the motel was still in the same hands.
You’re from Sydney?
Somehow, up north, people always knew.
Yes, I said. But I lived here once, years ago.
Oh, and are you on holidays now? Visiting relatives?
Something like that.
I checked into my room, threw my bag in the corner and myself on the bed. I lay there for a long time, resting, thinking. Until it became dark enough that I had to get up and turn on the lights.
I found Mitchell upstairs in his bar. He appeared to be interviewing a new pianist. I started to tiptoe out again when I realised what was going on, but he waved to me to stay, and without asking what I wanted, fixed me a drink.
This is Chris. He nodded to the man sitting at the bar. He might be playing here.
Chris held out his hand and shook mine. In profile he revealed a lean tanned face, but as he turned, I glimpsed the other side, a mottled mess of dark birthmark, more raspberry than strawberry, spreading from his nose to his ear and disappearing under his hair, which was black and curly. He continued talking.
I’ll do requests, but there are certain tunes I won’t play.
Fair enough, Mitchell said.
‘You Must Remember This’.
Okay.
‘Candle in the Wind’.
Yep, fine.
And especially ‘Piano Man’. Come to think of it, nothing by Billy Joel. Not a note. Or I walk out that door right there and never come back.
Sure. Okay.
I glanced at Mitchell, who was sounding oddly acquiescent, though he didn’t look it. He looked, with his sleeves rolled to the elbows, polishing wineglasses which he periodically held up to the light for exaggerated inspection, like a man with more important matters on his mind than what a temperamental pianist might condescend to play.
