My Candlelight Novel (15 page)

It's impossible to talk on the way home in a car; everything sounds banal and anti-climactic, as though you're saving the important things for later. When we got back to Samarkand, Kate got out of the taxi with Hetty still in her arms. She went slowly up the steps, staring at the house towering above her, as though it was something she'd only ever dreamed about and never expected to encounter in real life.

At the top of the first flight she met Tess, who stood anxiously wagging her tail. Kate leaned down and patted her. ‘We should have got a dog years ago,' she said, before continuing on, with Tess at her heels, to inspect the rest of the house. She walked slowly, looking about as though sizing everything up. I couldn't tell what she was thinking or feeling. I wondered what she'd make of the place after being away for most of the year; this was the first time she'd been back since going to university. I was worried, actually, that it wouldn't pass muster, that with her new city-accustomed eyes Samarkand would turn out to be utterly depressing and ugly and hopelessly passé.

Kate went first to my room, where she set the mobile above Hetty's cot swinging, and bent down to fan through the pile of books next to my bed. Next she went to Lil's, heading to the wardrobe and flinging the doors open. Lil's clothes had always held a special fascination for Kate; she'd always made free with Lil's make-up and perfume as well. ‘Is this new?' she said, tugging at a turquoise frock that Lil's friend Mavis had given to her because she'd bought it too big for herself. ‘Dreadful shade,' said Lil with a dismissive shudder, as Kate let the frock fall back in among its fellows. We were all following her around on her tour of inspection; she was like royalty.

Finally Kate arrived at her own room, where she relinquished Hetty to Lil, who carried her away for purposes unknown. Kate looked around quickly before meeting my eyes. ‘Everything's as wonderful as I remember it,' she said.

We headed off to the kitchen where she went straight to the jar of nuts in the cupboard. Lil came in, bearing Hetty on her hip. The two of them had an air of sailing inextricably together.

Kate bent down and looked into Hetty's face. ‘Do you talk yet?' she said. ‘Sophie says you won't deign to.'

Hetty pointed imperiously out the window. She had discovered that you could deflect people's queries by pointing at something; anything would do.

‘She'll talk when she has something worthwhile to say,' said Lil with grumpy satisfaction. ‘Unlike some. I'll put dinner on soon,' she said to Kate, who munched away inexorably on nuts. ‘So don't go ruining your appetite.'

After dinner, Kate's friend Marjorie turned up; she was down from Brisbane for the weekend.

She had changed. Only last year, at high school, she'd favoured little cotton frocks. Now, she stepped out of her father's black Saab wearing tight leather pants and a crisp white shirt, with her lips blood-red. Her black hair, always short and curly, was clipped close to her scalp in a style so severely smart that Kate and I simultaneously held our breaths in admiration.

Never demonstrative, she put her cool little cheek up for each of us to kiss. Taking Hetty on one hip without comment, as though she'd seen her only the week before, she said, ‘There's a cake on the back seat.'

Kate reached into the car and brought out a plate covered by a teatowel. ‘There's a jar of cream as well,' said Marjorie, over her shoulder. She led the way up the steps with Hetty in her arms.

In the kitchen, she rummaged in the cupboard for bowl and whisk. I noticed with greed that the cake had apple all over the top, with sugar and cinnamon.

‘How's Medicine going?' I asked.

‘I've given it up,' she said. ‘I'm working in a cake shop in Brisbane now – starting a TAFE course next year. I'm going to be a pastry chef.' She paused. ‘My heart wasn't in becoming a doctor.' Slicing into the cake, she said, ‘All that blood. And feeding people beautiful things is very satisfying.'

I didn't comment, though I wondered what her father thought of it. He was a surgeon himself, a tall, thin man with a nervously humorous demeanour.

We sat in the kitchen and ate while Hetty walked herself around, hanging on to people's legs and boldly letting go every so often to fling herself across the gap to the next person. She ate something from everyone's plate, until Lil came in to take her away for a bath.

Kate and Marjorie hadn't seen each other since the beginning of the year, so I said goodnight and left them in the kitchen to talk. Lil brought Hetty to my room, as warm and rosy as a peach in her bath towel, and I fed her. Then, while she slept in her cot, I read my favourite bits of
Shirley
until I heard Marjorie's car leave, quite late. There came a knock on the door, and Kate pushed it open.

She came in barefoot, and padded softly around the room with her hands in the back pockets of her trousers. Finally, she perched on the windowsill. Black sky stood out behind her. Hair as red as hers was a perfect foil for the black. And the short cut suited her, even if she had done it herself. Red walls, red hair, black sky. Perfect.

‘Marjorie in leather pants,' I said. ‘Who'd have thought it?'

‘Why do you say that?' said Kate. ‘It's exactly what I'd have expected of her. She can't remain Snow White forever, you know.' She ran her fingers through her short hair. ‘By the way, we've got plans for Hetty's party. You can leave it all to us.'

‘Right-ho. I thought Lil was doing it.'

‘We planned it all out with her while we fed her cake.'

A mobile phone rang, and Kate pulled it from her back pocket. She looked at the screen and pushed a few keys, and put it back again.

‘Julian,' she said. ‘He's on the desk at the motel where I clean. He just wondered if I'd arrived okay.' I raised an eyebrow. ‘He's gay,' she added, casually.

‘When did you get
that
?' I said, indicating the phone.

‘Oh, not long ago. I
rang
you on it and gave you my number, don't you remember?'

Tess, who'd been asleep on the floor, lifted her head and thumped her tail. Kate jumped down to give her a pat, then parted the mosquito net above Hetty's cot to drop a kiss on her forehead. She came and lowered herself onto the bed next to me. There was something about her that made her different from the Kate who'd gone away at the beginning of the year, something more than the superficiality of the short hair and the acquisition of a mobile phone and a new friend called Julian, whom she'd never mentioned. In some obscure and subtle way, she had begun to grow away from us – from me, from Lil, from Lismore, and from Samarkand.

Rolling onto her stomach, Kate hung over the end of the bed and delved among the midden of books that lay heaped on the floor, reading the back cover blurbs and discarding one after the other. Coming up with
The Bay of Noon
(that browned, dry leaf of a book), she sprang to her feet and took off with it. At the doorway she paused. ‘Didn't we have a border collie once? You know.
Before
?'

Before
, when we lived near the beach, in the stuccoed block of flats. We were happy there. Mostly. Our lives were only marred by the arrival of Michael O'Farrell, who darkened our door from time to time and stayed as long as he thought fit.

Sometimes my mother would walk with us on the beach, with Kate on her hip and me beside her. And the dog, Jess, would run on ahead, stopping when she got too far away from us, doubling back to wait with wagging tail for us to catch up, then shooting on ahead again.

Sometimes
. What a wistful word, the most wistful word in the world. But always (always!) our mother would run into the waves with her skirt tucked up into her knickers. She was laughing, always, with Kate on her hip squealing with delight and shifting her plump feet up and away from the splash of water. Jess would bark and dart forward and try to catch the spray in her mouth.

While I…what did I do?

I suppose I stood on the edge and watched, so that I would eventually be able to write about it.

C
HAPTER
N
INETEEN

W
HEN
H
ETTY FELL
asleep mid-morning, Kate and Marjorie surrounded her cot with balloons, and so when she woke she knew that it was a special day. She was full of a delighted gravitas that I'd never seen in her before; at age one, she had come a long way from the newborn she'd been a year ago.

I took her onto the verandah, and we looked down to the grassy area in front of the house. The girls had set out two tables, and hung lengths of coloured cloth from the trees like mediaeval banners. At our appearance, the people below raised their glasses and cheered. It was a blue and gold day, fuzzy at the edges.

So who was there, at Hetty's party?

There was Lil, of course, with several of her rowdy friends: Mavis, Norma, Margaret and Bathsheba (not her real name, but if you can't get to age seventy and choose your preferred name, then what hope is there for any of us?).

Phoebe came, and Hetty's friend Tom, and his mother Colleen, whom I barely knew. Colleen and Phoebe sat and soberly compared their experiences at university as mature-age students, and I was pleased to have acquired such sensible and respectable friends. Tom sat next to Hetty's high chair and they amused each other enormously by opening their mouths wide and showing what food they had in there.

Though we rarely kept in touch, my old friends from high school, Carmen and Raffaella, had come down from the Gold Coast for the occasion. They sat and drank wine with abandon, puffing on cigarettes and cracking jokes that only they could understand. Both had had a spray tan and looked as though they were covered with gold dust.

And after a while Lawson turned up. He gave Hetty a kaleidoscope, one that worked with mirrors and transformed whatever you aimed it at into multifaceted jewels. Of course, Hetty didn't yet know how to look through it properly, but she was fascinated by it. After he'd eaten a few sandwiches, Lawson took Tess off for a walk. He returned with his camera and photographed all of us, which made Lil's friends go all girlish and flirtatious with him.

Kate and Marjorie had made food to please everyone: fairy bread, little quiches and cakes, flatbread rolled around camembert and rocket, rice-paper rolls, and sandwiches filled with egg and lettuce or peanut butter. In the midst of it all Maggie Tulliver wandered up the drive, and we invited her to join us; she did so and was pleasant with everyone, but I noticed she left as soon as was decently possible.

Hetty was passed about from one person to another. After a while, getting the hang of this birthday business, she needed no help to unwrap the presents she was given. She knew she was the centre of attention, and was quietly pleased with everything that day.

I only wished that Becky Sharp had come. I'd called in to the house to invite both of them, and only Lawson had been there, but I'd left a note under her door. It surprised me, how disappointed I was.

The party ended, as parties do, with the first people saying goodbye and setting off a chain reaction of departures, until finally the only ones left were Kate and Hetty and me. Lil went to the kitchen with her gang of bawdy old women and drank red wine till well after dark. I left them there reminiscing about which of the men in their lives they'd loved the most (‘I will never, as long as I live,' Bathsheba said tipsily, and I thought rather insincerely, ‘forget Harry'). I noticed Lil took little part in this conversation, confining herself to listening and laughing.

Then they, too, finally left, and we had cheese on toast for dinner, and Hetty fell asleep in my arms. Later, leaving her sleeping in my bed, I walked round the verandah and past the kitchen window to my place on the back steps. Maggie Tulliver was standing at the sink doing her dishes, saying something to Kate. I saw Kate standing there self-consciously, obviously wondering whether to stay or go. I couldn't hear what they said, but Kate laughed. Glancing in on the way past (all this took but an instant; much less time than describing it does), I saw that laugh was tugged from her reluctantly, as though she was being charmed against her will.

At about midnight, Maggie Tulliver came onto the verandah below and sang, just for a little while. I could swear she did it to wake me. I heard her turn on her heel and walk away. Then Kate came from her room and down the stairs (what a restless household we were!). Hetty woke and fussed, but wasn't really hungry and fell asleep at my breast. I rolled her into her carry-cloth and slung her from my front (she was a small child, quite petite, unlike my own strapping self), and went out as well.

Kate was sitting in her fig tree near the river; I saw only the dark outline of her back. I went and stood beside the tree, looking down into the water.

‘That woman who calls herself Maggie Tulliver,' she said. ‘I don't like her. She looked at me as though she knew something about me.'

I didn't reply.

‘You didn't tell her anything about me?'

‘Of course not.'

The water was black. I turned and took Hetty back to bed. On Sunday, her last full day with us, Kate spent the morning dying Lil's hair; she coloured the front part magenta for a change – Lil loved the effect, and kept prancing around showing it off. Then Kate bathed Hetty, and she and Marjorie lay about for ages in the hammocks talking in secretive voices. ‘I miss Alex,' I heard her confide.

She mooched about, ate biscuits, examined her haircut in the bathroom mirror and snipped off a bit more. An old suitcase was packed with books to take back. She and I played Scrabble and she won.

Late that night I lay in bed and listened to all the sounds of the house.

Inside Lil's wardrobe, one of the moths fluttered, and settled itself again. A hair belonging to Kate fell from the bathroom washbasin onto the floor. Lil dreamed and ground her teeth. Kate rolled over and put her arms above her head, her hands making soft cotton fists, just the way she had when she was a baby. In the dining room the breeze rustled the Sunday paper left near the windowsill.