A Few Days in the Country (14 page)

‘Hello. You're late. Dinner's ready,' Mary called as the back door closed.

Leaning round into the kitchen, he looked at her seriously and sniffed the air. ‘What is it?'

‘Iced soup. Your special steak. Salad with—'

He rolled his eyes. ‘There's the paper. Five minutes to get cleaned up and I'm with you.'

Mary was an excellent cook. The Freemans had always eaten well, but since Dan had come home from his six months' interstate transfer she had outdone herself. ‘I experimented while you were away,' she explained, producing dinners nightly that would have earned their house several stars in the
Guide Michelin
had it ever been examined in this light.

‘Experimented!' Dan laughed in an unreal, very nearly guilty, way the first time she said this, because he was listening to another voice in his head reply smartly, So did I! So did I!

Feeling the way he felt or, rather, remembering the name Clea, he was shocked at the gleeful fellow in him who could treat that name simply as something secret from Mary. And he thought, I am ashamed, although he did not
feel
ashamed to find himself taking pride in the sombre and splendid addition to his past that the name represented. Clea, he thought, as if it were some expensive collector's item he had picked up, not without personal risk, for which it was not unnatural to accept credit. At the sound of that guilty laugh or the puffing of vanity, Dan mentally groaned and muttered, ‘I'm sorry. I'm sorry.'

For the first weeks after his return to Melbourne he had blocked all memories of those Sydney months, since he could not guarantee the behaviour of his mind; and if to remember in such ways was to dishonour, he had emerged out of a state of careful non-consideration with the impression that to remember truly might not be wise. But lately, lately…He had realised that lately when he was alone he sat for hours visualising his own hand reaching to grasp hers. And each time he produced this scene its significance had to be considered afresh, without words, through timeless periods of silence. Or he pictured her walking away from him as he had once seen her do. An occasion of no significance at all. She had merely been a few steps in front of him. And he pictured her arms rising. For hours, weeks, he had watched her walk away. Then for nights, days, and weeks he had looked at the movement of her arms.

He could not see her face.

Wrenching his mind back with all his energy and concentration, he set about tracking down her face, methodically collecting her features and firmly assembling them. The results were static portraits of no one in particular, faded and distant as cathedral paintings of angels and martyrs. These faces were curiously, painfully undisturbing, as meaningless as the dots on a radar screen to an untrained observer.

In their elaborate dining room he and Mary sat at the long table dipping spoons into chilled soup.

‘Where are the kids?'

‘Bill's playing squash with Philip, and Laura's over at Rachel's. They're all going on to a birthday party together.'

‘At this time of night?'

‘They have to go through some records.'

‘What about their work? I thought they agreed to put in three hours a night till the end of term?'

‘You can't keep them home from a party, Dan. All the others are going.'

‘All the others don't want to be physicists! Or they've got wealthy fathers and don't have to win scholarships. These two'll end up in a factory if they're not careful.'

Mary looked at him. ‘You
are
in a bad mood. Did something go wrong at the office?'

‘They're irresponsible. If they knew what a depression was like, or a war—'

‘Now, don't spoil your dinner. How do you like the soup? At the last minute I discovered I didn't have any parsley and I had to use mint. What do you think? Is it awful?'

She hadn't altered her hairstyle since they were married. She still chose dresses that would have suited her when she was twenty and wore size ten. Her face was bare of make-up except for a rim of lipstick round the edge of her mouth. And there was something in the total of all this indifference that amounted to a crime.

How easily she had divested herself of the girl with the interests and pleasant ways. And what contempt she had felt for him and shown him, for having been so easily deceived, when she was sure of her home, her children. She had transformed herself before his eyes, laughing.

Anyway, he gave in when she wanted this house, which was pretentious and impossible for them, really. But he even thought he might find it a sort of hobby, a bulwark, himself. You have to have something.

‘What are you looking at? Dan? Is it the mint? Is it awful?' She was really anxious. He lifted another spoonful from his plate and tasted it. Mary waited. He felt he ought to say something. ‘Mary…' What had they been discussing?

‘It's—extra good,' he said suddenly. ‘
Extra
good.'

She gave a little scoffing laugh. ‘You sound like Bill.'

Not raising his eyes, he asked, ‘What sort of a day have you had?' and Mary began to tell him while the creamy soup slid weirdly down his throat, seeming to freeze him to the marrow. He shivered. It was a warm summer night. Crickets were creaking in the garden outside.

‘—and Bill wants to start golf soon. He asked me to sound you out about a set of clubs. And while I'm at it, Laura's hinting she'd like that French course on records. She says it'd be a help with the accent.'

‘
Mary
,' he protested bitterly and paused, forgetting. ‘For God's sake!' he added on the strength of his remembered feeling, gaining time. Then again, as before, the weight descended—the facts he knew, the emotions. ‘What are you trying to do? You encourage them to want—impossible things. Why? To turn me into a villain when I refuse? You know how we stand. Your attitude baffles me.'

Mary's expression was rather blank but also rather triumphant.

He went on, and stammered slightly, ‘I want them to have—everything. I grudge them nothing. But these grown-up toys—it can't be done. If Laura would stay home and work at her French—and Bill already has so many strings to his bow he can't hold a sensible conversation about anything. They'll end up bus conductors if they're not careful.'

Mary looked at him sharply. ‘Have you been drinking, Dan?'

‘Two beers.'

‘I thought so! Really, if I have to hear you complain about the cost of their education for the next six years, I don't think it would be worth it. Not to them either, I'm sure.'

He said nothing.

‘
We
aren't going without anything. We've got the house and car. And the garden at weekends. It isn't as if we were young.' Mary waved an arm. ‘But if you feel like this, ask them to repay you when they've qualified. They won't want to be indebted to you.'

He stared at her heavily, lifted his formal-looking squarish face with its blue eyes and stared at her, saying nothing. Mary breathed through her nose at him, then collected his plate and hers and went away to the kitchen.

‘Clea…' It was a groan. Tears came to his eyes. It was the night he had thought to go away with her. They could
not
be parted. How could he explain? It was against nature, could not
be
. He would sell everything, and leave all but a small essential amount with Mary and the children. Then he and Clea would go—far away. And great liners trailing music and streamers sailed from Sydney daily for all the world's ports. Now that he'd found Clea, he would find the circumstances he had always expected, with their tests that would ask more of him than perseverance, resignation. They would live—somewhere, and be—very happy.

Common sense had cabled him at this point: this would all be quite charming, except for one minor problem that springs to mind.

What would they live on? A glorified clerk, his sole value as a worker lay in his memory of a thousand details relating to television films bought by the corporation. Away from the department he had no special knowledge, no money-raising skills. Could he begin to acquire a profession at forty-five? Living on what, in the meantime?

‘There. At least there's nothing wrong with the steak.'

Mary looked at him expectantly, and he looked at the platter of food for some seconds. ‘It's—done to a turn.'

‘
Over
done?'

‘No.' He thought of saying to her pleased face: I thought of deserting you, Mary. And he had, oh, he had. ‘What? Yes, everything's fine.' The only trouble was that unfortunately, unfortunately, he was beginning to feel sick.

‘Dan, I forgot to mention this since you got back. You're never here with all this extra work—'

‘Yes?' Here it came: the proof that he had been right to return, that he and Mary
did
have a life in common. How often had he pleaded with Clea in those last days, ‘You can't walk out on twenty years of memories.' (Not that she had ever asked or expected him to.)

‘It's the roof. The tiles. There was a landslide into the azaleas while you were away. I thought you'd notice the broken bushes.'

‘Oh.'

‘So, do you think I should get someone to look over the whole roof?'

‘Yes, I suppose so.'

‘Well, it's important to get it fixed before we start springing leaks.'

‘Yes. All right. Ring Harvey. Get him to give us an estimate.'

‘Dan? Where are you going? You haven't touched your dinner!'

‘I'm sorry. I've got to get some air. No, stay there. Eat your dinner.'

‘Aren't you well?' She half-rose from her chair, but he warded her off and compelled her to sink back to the table with a large forbidding movement of his arm. Mary shrugged, gave a tiny snort of boredom and disdain, and resumed eating.

Sydney…At the end of a week he had begun to look forward to getting back to Mary's cooking. The department wasn't lavish with away-from-home expenses for officers on his grade, and he had the usual accounts flying in from Melbourne by every post, in addition to an exorbitant hotel bill for the very ordinary room he occupied near the office. The hotel served a continental breakfast and no other meals. At lunchtime he and Alan Parker leapt out for beer and a sandwich which cost next to nothing, then by six o'clock he was famished. Somehow, surreptitiously, he started to treat himself to substantial and well-cooked dinners in restaurants all over the city. In Melbourne he only patronised places like these once a year, for a birthday or anniversary. He felt rather ill at ease eating, so to speak, Mary's new dress or the children's holidays, and he was putting on flesh. But—everything was hopeless. You had to have something. Yet money harassed him. He felt a kind of anguished dullness at the thought of it. It made him dwell on the place where it was cheaper and less worrying to be: home.

As the representative of his department, he was invited one Friday evening to an official cocktail party. A woman entered the building as he did, and together they ran for the row of automatic lifts, entered one, and were shot up to some height between the fourth and fifth floors and imprisoned there for over half an hour. Clea.

Dan's first thought was that she looked a bit flashy. Everything about her looked a fraction more colourful than was quite seemly: the peacock-blue dress, the blonde hair—not natural, the make-up and, in another sense, the drawling low-pitched voice. (This would certainly have been Mary's view.)

Then, while the alarm bell rang and caretakers and electricians shouted instructions at one another, they stood exchanging words and Dan looked into her eyes with the usual polite, rather stuffy, slightly patronising expression.

He was surprised. Under gold-painted lids, her blue eyes glanced up and actually saw him, with a look that twenty years, fifteen years, ago he had met daily in his mirror. It was as familiar as that. She wasn't
young
. It wasn't a young look. It was alarmingly straight. It was the look by which he had once identified his friends.

At the party when they were finally released, however, Clea treated him with wonderful reserve, recognising nothing about him. She remained steadfastly with the group least likely to succeed in charming the person Dan imagined her to be, smiling a lazy gallant smile, bestowing gestures and phrases on their sturdy sense. Showing pretty teeth, laughing huskily, she stood near them and
was
. When Dan approached, though, that all appeared to have been illusory. She was merely quiet, watchful, sceptical, an onlooker.

Ah, well! He put her from him. He expected nothing. It had been a momentary interest, and this wasn't the first time, after all, that circumstances had separated him from someone whom he would in some sense always know.

But he met her one day in the street accidentally. (Though Sydney is two million strong, people who live there can never lose touch, eager though they might be to do so.) He remembered they said something about the party, and something else about the lift, and then they said goodbye and parted. It wasn't till he had gone some eight or nine steps that Dan realised he had walked backwards from her.

The following Saturday night they met at another interdepartmental party and after that there were no backward steps till this inevitable, irrevocable return to hearth and home.

Clea had a flat—kitchen, bathroom, bedsitting room—in a converted harbourside mansion, and a minor executive job with a film unit that paid rent and food and clothing bills. Once she had been an art student, but at the end of four years she stopped attending classes and took a job.

‘You were too critical of yourself,' Dan said. ‘Your standards were too high.'

She smiled.

In her spare time she had continued to paint, she told Dan, and he had an impression of fierceness and energy, and he felt he knew how she must have looked. So she had painted. And it was why she was sane. And why people who knew nothing whatever about her liked to be near her. But ages ago, and permanently, she had laid it aside. That is, laid aside the doing, but not the looking, not the thinking, not finally herself.