Carnival Sky (26 page)

‘Coping bloody well. Andrew North has offered her pills, but she’s okay. Mind you, when all this is over and she has time to herself, things could be different. She hasn’t said much about immediate plans.’

‘I won’t come to the house if you don’t mind,’ said Jessica. ‘I’ve got a fair bit on and can’t be away long. But I’d like to help in any way I can. You know that.’

‘Any way at all?’

‘There are limits.’

‘Joking,’ Sheff said. ‘You don’t mind me coming round? Your friends don’t mind?’

‘Why should they? I’d like to see Georgie again before she goes back, too.’

Sheff wondered if Pamela Rudge was one of those friends, but Jessica was obviously short of time, and he needed to get Pamela sorted in his mind before mentioning her. Instead they talked about Georgie. How complete in capability she’d become, how suited she was to the profession she’d chosen.

‘Anyway,’ Jessica said finally, ‘I must go. Get in touch, okay? I hope things get better soon.’

Sheff wished he could leave with her, that they could both put
on casual clothes and walking shoes, head off somewhere together through the dry hills of rock, tussock and thyme, feeling at ease, talking casually of things that were of more than casual significance. Instead he watched her leave, waited for Belize to say when she wanted to return home. Georgie had already left to take the role of preliminary hostess.

Lucy came unobtrusively to talk to him. She and Nigel had waited for the opportunity, waited until most who offered condolences had done so, and then drifted away. ‘Thanks for coming,’ Sheff said. They made no move to exchange a kiss, and that wasn’t an expression of any antagonism. To touch their lips together was too sad after all that had happened between them. Sheff shook Nigel’s hand, and they gave each other a civilised nod and smile. ‘Good trip?’ Sheff asked him.

‘Well no, actually. Seemed to be some reunion day for big rigs, nose to tail,’ he said, true to his rebuttalist practice. Nigel didn’t know Sheff’s family, or any of the other mourners. He was out of place, but there to support Lucy so that she wouldn’t be left standing alone among strangers. His assertiveness was an unconscious justification of his presence.

‘I really wanted to come,’ Lucy said. ‘They’ve always been good to me.’

‘He liked you. He never seemed to quite cotton on to us not being together any more.’

‘I liked him, too. There was a sort of protectiveness about him, just in the way he was. Maybe I should’ve come down before to see him, but it’s not an easy situation.’

‘We want you both to come back to the house,’ said Sheff. He took care to look at Nigel as he spoke, for although he had no positive feeling for him, he respected his reason for coming. And Nigel showed surprising sensitivity by saying that he’d go and sit in the car for bit while Sheff and Lucy had a chance to talk.

‘It’s a long way to come,’ said Sheff when he had gone.

‘We’ll have another night in the motel here, and head off in the
morning. See a few of the sights on the way. What will you do? Still plan to go overseas?’

‘I might stay here for a bit, until things settle for Mum anyway. Georgie’s been great, but she has to get back for work.’

‘That’s good of you. What’s happened to your chin?’

‘Don’t ask. A skateboarder crashed into me on the main street. I’ve been having one of those runs when everything goes wrong. If I slice an apple it’s rotten in the middle. If I join a queue the slide goes down. Insects fly into my mouth. I don’t know. Even birds shit on me.’

‘Murphy’s Law,’ said Lucy. ‘Everybody has a bad run sometime. There’s days you shouldn’t get out of bed.’

How well they knew each other, yet the former closeness was beyond them. They looked into each other’s faces as they talked, and in that eye contact expressed a sort of hopeless acknowledgement, part sympathy and part despair, and quite distinct from the conventional sentiments they offered in conversation. She’d grown thinner, and was probably pleased with that. She was still attractive, but Sheff was sorry that she’d changed. Her face was tighter, her shirt loose on her shoulders. She asked about the house, and laughed at his story of offending Janice Wallace while tidying the garden. He asked about her tours, and was pleased things were picking up. ‘You didn’t tell Belize I got rid of a lot of her brass and silver things, did you?’ she asked.

‘No. Nothing.’

‘Thanks. She might be hurt, but it’s just keeping all that stuff clean and polished.’

‘I don’t imagine she ever thinks about it,’ said Sheff.

‘We won’t stay long at the house. We’ll have a coffee in town beforehand, take our time coming so that hopefully most people will have gone. I’d just like the chance to talk with Georgie and your mum for a while without too many other people about.’ Sheff wondered if she and Nigel had hoped to have a baby in the time they’d been together, or if Lucy was too fearful to try. The clock must be ticking
also. He wanted happiness for her, while doubting she had found it.

There was awkwardness on parting, as if they wished for the absolution of the touch of flesh between them, but a kiss had become foreign to them and a handshake ridiculous. ‘I hope things work out for you. I really do,’ Lucy said.

‘I hope everything goes well for you too. I really do,’ he replied, and the deliberate repetition drew a slight smile as she turned away.

He could imagine no agony and sadness greater than his own had been, yet Lucy must have suffered more, for she had carried the baby within her, accepted the pain of birth, suckled her, had all those connections and more of which Sheff could never be part. Standing in the cemetery with Lucy, he saw clearly for the first time what had gone wrong, and that neither of them was culpable. They had once briefly and wonderfully been three and afterwards could no longer live as two. Nobody was at fault. Whenever he and Lucy were together there was a gap, an empty ache, and it was impossible to live that way. A single grief could be forced down in the company of people unperturbed, but the shared knowledge was too great, too pervasive, no matter what else they did, or talked about. They would manage for the time they spent together in the summer warmth and with others of the family not far away, but each knew that beneath the extended and genuine goodwill, loss still mouthed unbearably.

To be with Lucy was to think, inescapably, of Charlotte. Even as they stood with the sun like a warm iron on their backs, Sheff remembered the brief, happy arguments they sometimes had if both were home when Charlotte woke from her daytime nap, and he was usually allowed first into the room to lift her from the cot. The pleasure and recognition on the little girl’s face was a reward no other love quite equalled. He would lift her up in the darkened room, high towards the ceiling, and then hold her to his shoulder and carry her out to Lucy.

It was Sheff who had found her dead that Sunday, lying face-down on the blankets, scalp pale beneath her hair. Cot death, people said,
as if there should be some consolation in such fatuous and generic description of loss of life. For Sheff and Lucy it was something that had happened only once in the world, and it had happened to them. And whenever they were in each other’s company, it stood between them so that they could never again be whole and generous together.

CHARLOTTE HAD SHOWN A WILL OF HER OWN
from the first. Sheff had been amazed by the expression of it in both affection and defiance. She was decided in her preferences for baby food, even though to Sheff they all looked and tasted much the same. She would take a spoonful or two, bulge it in her mouth for a time in assessment, then swallow it all, or eject it with furled tongue. Her decisions were irrevocable, and Sheff and Lucy learnt not to oppose them unless they wanted a fight.

BELIZE AND GEORGIE took upon themselves the task of sorting Warwick’s things in the house. There was urgency because Georgie had to leave. Sheff wasn’t consulted, but on the morning after the funeral his mother put the bowl of polished stones in his hands and asked him to take them to the garage and have a sort-out there. It was the accustomed demarcation of responsibility: inside as a woman’s domain, and outbuildings as a man’s responsibility – and perhaps refuge.

‘Don’t you want to keep them? They were Dad’s favourites.’

‘Too sad,’ she said briskly, ‘and I never took to them. That tumbler often went night and day. Gave me the heebie-jeebies. There’s buckets of them out there. They don’t do anything, do they? Maybe we could give them to a school fair or something.’ But those in the bowl had been Warwick’s final selection, and the slanted sun dancing through them had made a shifting kaleidoscope of colour that he loved. ‘You’re welcome to them,’ said Belize.

Despite a sense of trivial betrayal, Sheff admitted to himself that he didn’t want them either, or not so many. At the garage bench he put his hand deep into the bowl, and the stones, smooth as medicinal capsules, slithered in his fingers as if lightly oiled. He took just a few of the most brilliantly coloured and slipped them into his pocket. Later he’d have time for sentiment concerning them perhaps. There were
many hundreds more in plastic containers with felt pen identification on the lids in his father’s writing: ‘Agate seconds’, or ‘Best citrine’. Other small bins held various grades of grits and plastic pellets. Sheff turned on the tumbler, and for a while stood at the garage bench listening to the sound. There were stones still in there that his father had never lived to see reborn in any form. He’d have to get rid of it all, perhaps as a job-lot on Trade Me, and then the garage would be more as Sheff remembered it, and his father’s golf equipment have pre-eminence once more: the trundler, the leather bag in which the Ping clubs were clustered, some with individual covers, the tonguing shoes heel-out on the shelf above. And, even higher and never disturbed, the dark and finely dusted leather of the case that held Belize’s abandoned saxophone.

Sheff turned off the tumbler, but remained standing there as the noise died away. His mother was right about the stones. They didn’t do anything, even though there was a tactile pleasure to be had from them and the colours of many were splendid. He wondered if maybe the local secondary school would like them, or if he should just pour them into a glittering heap at the gate and see how many were taken away. He rather liked the idea of a voluntary dispersal of the trove, passers-by carrying off personal choices until the magpie heap was gone and unwitting mementos of his father spread throughout the town.

Georgie came out while he was fossicking on the shelves to see what else would have to be sold, given away or thrown out. ‘All these stones,’ she said. ‘Mum will be glad to be rid of them.’ She had a mug of coffee for him.

‘I thought she might’ve waited a while before having a clear-out. What’s she like with his clothes and personal stuff?’

‘We’re going through it all. She’s not keeping much. I know she’s going to give you the good watch, and me the wedding ring. She’s been a bit tearful, but she doesn’t want to be left with lots of stuff to deal with by herself when I go back tomorrow. What about you?’

‘I can stay a while. Maybe I’ll do an article or two.’

‘You’ll miss Jessica when you go. You two have really clicked.’

‘It’s odd, isn’t it?’ Sheff said. ‘A lesbian woman with a child, and I like being with her more than anybody else.’

‘She understands people. She hasn’t had an easy time of it herself, but she’s come through. I think the two of you are good for each other just now.’

‘You’ve talked with her about me, I suppose?’

‘Not much. She’s closer to you than me now, but that’s fine. She likes you. She feels for you. Just because someone’s not sexually into men doesn’t mean they dislike them all. Guys seem to find it hard to get their heads around that.’

‘I don’t know much about all that,’ he said. He wondered if perhaps his sister did.

‘Neither do I,’ she said, ‘but it’s not all that mysterious surely. A friend’s a friend – that’s the main thing. You make the most of it.’ Georgie touched some of her father’s things, lightly, but as if in both contact and farewell. ‘All of a sudden most of it’s just junk, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Dad’s gone and this stuff’s meaningless without him.’

She made as if to leave, and then turned back and watched him sipping his coffee. She came a step closer, and after another short silence spoke again. ‘We’ve never really talked about Charlotte, have we?’ she said. ‘It was the worst possible thing that could’ve happened to you and Lucy – and it did happen, and we all knew both of you were heartbroken, but there was nothing we could do to make a difference. I did say I’d come up, remember? Mum and Dad, too.’

‘Yes.’

‘But you just buttoned-up.’

‘We couldn’t share it with each other, so it was impossible with anybody else. She tried, I couldn’t.’ Sheff was aware how still he was. One hand felt the slowly diminishing warmth of the coffee mug, the other was in his pocket and the stones he’d selected from his father’s bowl slid skink smooth in his fingers. He was glad the light wasn’t great
in the garage, but he met his sister’s gaze without evasion. ‘Somehow nothing that other people said was appropriate, or adequate, and just seemed strangely to diminish Charlotte. No one else really got it, really understood. I know that’s arrogant and untrue, but I think Lucy in the end felt the same.’

‘I won’t go on about it, and we’re both just coping with Dad’s death anyway,’ said Georgie, ‘but I just want to say I think you need to let go of a lot of that stuff. You don’t want it to become an itch, but neither do you want it to be too tender to touch. A pity you didn’t persist with the counselling, though I know the guy rubbed you up the wrong way. Your trouble, I reckon, is you had no chance to fight for Charlotte: it was over before you and Lucy were aware of any threat. Even a losing struggle is a form of catharsis, like with Dad, but you wanted to fight for her and you couldn’t, and you’re still angry about that. You were powerless, and being pissed off at the world is your expression of it. Anyway, that’s all I’ll say. Okay?’

‘Yes. It’s okay.’ And it was. He was able to hear his daughter’s name from Georgie without any pain, or anger.

‘And I’d better get back to Mum. I haven’t got any of my own stuff together yet.’

‘I’ll miss you. You know that?’ said Sheff. ‘We couldn’t have got through without you. I’ll never forget what you did for Dad.’

‘I wouldn’t have done it if you hadn’t agreed.’

‘You were the only one of us who could help him at the end. You had the power and you used it for love.’ It was difficult, almost pretentious, but he needed to say it, because maybe they would never talk about it again. ‘It was the right thing. I’m sure about that,’ he said.

A few weeks earlier he would have resented her analysis of his feelings, whatever the accuracy, but now he accepted the truth of it, and acknowledged the concern and affection that prompted it. He stood with his sister in the comparative dimness of the garage, and for some reason he had a heightened perception of physical context, although there was no connection with their conversation. His
father’s orphaned recreational possessions, the subdued sheen of the Commodore, the fruit trees of the old orchard framed by the single garage window and bowed in the heat.

Georgie let a silence lie for a time, and then took up a handful of Warwick’s favourite pieces from the bowl. ‘What is it with all these bloody stones?’ she said. ‘I never really got that. It isn’t the sort of thing I thought he’d go for.’

‘Carnival sky,’ said Sheff. ‘I think he just loved the colours, how they could be released from the stone. How it could just be there as something beautiful. The sun striking the colours through the bowl.’

‘Weird, eh?’

‘I’ll drive you through to Dunedin tomorrow,’ said Sheff, but Georgie didn’t want Belize to have the long trip there and back, or to be left alone in Alex. She’d take the bus. She gazed about the garage and puffed her breath out noisily.

‘Anyway, I’d better go in again,’ she said. ‘But all this stuff. Will you keep the golf clubs?’

‘Well, in some ways I’d like to, but they’d just sit around my place as they sit around here. And there’s the hassle of getting stuff to Auckland. Probably better to flog them off. Maybe a garage sale? What do you reckon?’

‘Mum wouldn’t want a lot of people poking around. Not now. I’d just clear everything to an auction house. Up to you, though.’

‘So Mum’s giving me the gold watch? I’d love to wear that sometimes for Dad.’

It was a Tissot with intricate links on the strap. Belize had bought it for Warwick in Switzerland as a wedding anniversary present, and he wore it only on special occasions. As a boy Sheff would watch him take it from the box, fasten it and leave his steel watch on the table until he resumed an everyday world. He would do the same, he decided: wear it when he was clean, well dressed and going somewhere special. And while there he would think of his father wearing it in similar circumstances and with the same pleasure. Not solid gold of course,
but gold nevertheless, and elegant, with just the clear face, and none of the gimmicks that festooned some watches.

At lunch he thanked his mother for it. ‘His name’s engraved on the back,’ she said.

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘We did it recently. I won’t give it to you now, but remind me when you go. He wanted you to have it. The wedding ring’s for Georgie. She’ll end up with mine as well, but that’s what your father wanted. You can have his Omega too, if you want it, but I thought I might keep that.’

‘That’s fine, Mum. We can swap if you like,’ said Sheff. Talk of his father’s personal belongings was beginning to upset Belize: her lips tightening and a little shiver coming into her face. Sheff and Georgie turned the conversation to the crop in the old orchard. So much good fruit lying rotting in the long grass.

‘When we’ve got them so has everybody else,’ their mother said. ‘The market price doesn’t even cover the picking and transport.’ And so for the moment they led her from grief to common grievance. Without spraying, the bugs got into most of them anyway. Then the birds.

What was it like to lose someone with whom you’ve experienced life for fifty years? Lucy and he had Charlotte for less than eleven months, and the loss of her had broken both of them. Belize would go on because she had no choice, as Sheff and Lucy had gone on, but not together. Sheff had never made any objective assessment of his parents’ marriage, as boy or man. He’d always known them together as part of the natural state of things. They argued sometimes, even on rare occasions provoked each other to anger, but there was no threat, or vituperation, no sense they wished to live in any other way than together. Whatever disappointments and failures each experienced were not blamed on the other. ‘If you’d like to go away for a few days, that’s fine by me,’ said Sheff. ‘I’d look after things here.’

‘When I get used to being here by myself, then I’ll think of going away for a while perhaps,’ answered Belize.

PEOPLE HAVE THEIR FOIBLES AND FLAWS,
often the result of vanity, and Sheff’s father wasn’t immune. He disliked wine bores, but in his undemonstrative way considered himself something of a connoisseur. Once, when Cass was visiting, the sisters switched labels and trapped him into praising as a reputable Bordeaux, a bottle that was merely vin ordinaire. Belize was quite capable of taking him down a peg or two occasionally. He joined the laugh against himself, but Sheff could see that he was a little affronted all the same.