The Idea of Perfection (14 page)

Hugh looked at her again and smiled. She made herself nod. It was a small nod, just enough to make him look away. The smaller the nod was, the less the neck would crease.

In spite of her having nodded, Hugh was still watching her. Actually, she thought he was not so much watching her as keeping his eyes busy while he thought about something else. About citrus perhaps. He was trying to think of something to go on to.
In the fourth place.

She had heard him get up to nine, one night, ticking the points off on his fingers. It had been something about the old bridge and how
Heritage
was well and good in its place, but that place was not a public carriageway. She had got quite interested, wondering what he would do when he ran out of fingers, and had almost been disappointed when he stopped.

He was looking at his watch.

I’ll be off, darling, he said.

His face came over next to hers and his mouth did a little moist thing against her cheek. You called that
akiss.
It was what husbands did. Wives could do them too, if they liked, but kisses were probably wrinkle-forming.

 

 

Felicity had heard that a cockroach could live for a month on a single grain of sugar. That was how careful you had to be.

At any time of the day or night, anyone could eat off her floor. She sometimes imagined them, down on the floor, the knife and fork in their hands, looking up at her.
Delicious, Felicity!

When she had swept and mopped, she washed the broom and mop with boiling water and disinfectant. Then she liked to put them out in the sun to dry. She had read somewhere that sunlight had a
purifying effect.

But there was a problem. If you took the things out into the sun for the
purifying effect,
you exposed your skin to the damaging ultra-violet. It had been scientifically proven that ultra-violet was one of the quickest ways to get wrinkles.

She had timed herself, and even hanging up the mop and broom as fast as she could, she had worked out that it added up to nearly six hours of exposure to the ultra-violet in the course of a year.

Perhaps she should wait till sunset for that, too, but then where would she keep the wet mop and broom until then?

It was a bit of a dilemma.

The best she could do was to go into the bathroom straight away afterwards, and put on the special Creme Jeunesse from Honeycutt’s. There was a right way to do it, as there was a right way to do everything. You
smoothed
it in with a
gentle upwards motion.
You had to be careful not to
rub or stretch
the skin.

The thing was, if you were not careful, and did it the wrong way, the positive effect of the cream would be offset by the negative effect of the way you were
rubbing
and
stretching.

When you thought about it, nothing was really simple.

And actually, that was wrinkle-forming, too, thinking about the way nothing was simple.

It was not that she had any
lines,
much less
wrinkles.
For a woman of her age she had the most youthful face of anyone she knew. Other women of her age definitely had
lines.
Some of them had what could only be called
wrinkles,
although they called them
laugh-lines
to make it sound better.

She was not going to get
lines,
or
laugh-lines,
let alone
wrinkles.
It was simply a matter of thinking ahead, and being vigilant. The bending of the neck, for example. Until she had seen the damage it was doing to Hugh, she had not thought of that, but now she was aware of it, it was just a matter of adding it to the things you had to remember.

She had always been nice-looking. It was only sensible to acknowledge that. It was not boasting. Really, she did not care one way or the other. If it had been up to her, she would just as soon have been born plain.

Growing up, though, she had discovered that her smile had solved most problems. It had got her out of the frowsty little cluttered house, away from the smell of unwashed milk bottles and the worn-out, the second-hand, the patched-up, the home-made. She had climbed up and out — the Palmolive ad was going to be just the start of something really big in modelling — smiling her lovely smile, tossing her lovely hair, and had put her beginnings behind her as if they had never been.

Now she looked in the mirror and smiled that same smile, but it was not quite as it had been. It was hard to say just exactly what it was. Something around the eyes — or was it the curve of the cheek, or the set of the mouth? — was not quite the way it had been.

There were days when she was pleased she had always been a little vague about her age, even with Hugh. He never forgot her birthday, always had something pretty for her. But she was the only one who knew exactly what year the original birthday had been, and even in the privacy of her own mind, she was finding the precise name of the year softening and blurring.

Sometimes she thought she would rather be dead than old.

The Creme Jeunesse was shiny on her face in the mirror. She imagined the cells swelling rosily. There was some kind of special enzyme or protein in this one, that
replenished
the cells. She liked the idea of
replenishment.
It could make up for the damage life did to your skin.

Smiling, for example. Smiling did immense damage. People did not realise, smiling away recklessly. The corners of the eyes screwed up, the cheeks creased, the upper lip stretched. She had tried it in the mirror. The bigger the smile, the more lines it etched into your skin. The more often you smiled, the worse the lines got.

She was not going even to think the word
wrinkle.

Of course, a person had to smile from time to time. But you could be careful, and only smile when necessary.

 

 

There was always a time, just after her lunch — just a few lettuce leaves and a piece of tomato, it was perfectly easy not to have anything more, and you had to be careful not to clog your system — and before it was time to pick up William from school, when time seemed to slow down and stop.

The silence in the house could be suffocating then. She felt as if she was swelling like a balloon under so much emptiness. The afternoon, and her life, stretched away in front of her, every boring bead-like minute of every boring bead-like day lining itself up to be got through.

She walked from room to room, hearing her high heels on the polished boards. The clock ticked discreetly from the mantelpiece in the living-room and she heard the scrabbling sound of a bird’s claws over the iron roof of the laundry outside the kitchen window. A crow further up the hill mourned through the warm still air.

There were times when the afternoons threatened to last for ever.

 

 

After the little
awkwardnesses,
Hugh had thought that she had needed an
interest,
and she had tried many
interesting
things. Pottery had seemed promising, but the clay ruined your hands. Her hands had been like crocodile skin while she had been doing the pottery.

She had liked the idea of being able to speak French, and improving the French she had done at school had been a nice
interest
for a while, when they had been in Lismore. Accent
aigu! Lips back everyone!
Miss Marshall at the Evening Class had cried, and spat enthusiastically, getting her own lips right. Miss Marshall was a big-bosomed vulgar woman with no inhibitions, and the class had all laughed and tried it, watching each other.

But in her own quiet house after the classes, all by herself, the blinds drawn against the afternoon outside, she had never felt like getting her lips around French.

Quilting had been good for quite a while. She had done the quilting when Hugh had been in the Bathurst branch. It was complicated and fiddly, which was a good thing for an
interest
to be. And if you followed the instructions to the letter, you could get it absolutely perfect. She liked that about it. She had read that
the art of quilting is the
art
of fudging,
and had closed the book. She preferred the books that made it sound hard.

She still had them all.
My research,
was the way she thought of it. To start with, she had arranged them in alphabetical order by the author’s name. But that had looked untidy because they were all different sizes, so she had put them in descending order of height instead. That looked much neater, although it was a little bit hard to find anything.

She’d had all the proper equipment: the rotary cutter and the self-healing cutting-board and the plastic templates and the special needles and special thread for the quilting. She had liked to think of them as her
tools of the trade.

She sometimes regretted all the fabrics. She’d had them in clear plastic boxes on the shelves that Hugh had got the man to build in the sewing room of the Bathurst house. The plains had been graded in colour from ROY to BIV, and each box was labelled according to whether it held
yardage,
or
fat quarters
or
skinny eighths,
or
scraps.
There was a section for
Checks
and one for
Spots,
and another big one for
Florals.

There had been a bit of a problem, with fabrics that had both
spots
and
checks,
or
florals
that were also
stripes.
Would you call a checkerboard a
Check
or a
Black-and- White?
It had worried her until she had hit on another category:
Overlaps.

She used to go in there sometimes, just to look. Sometimes she had wondered whether that was really the thing she liked best about quilting, filing the fabrics properly.
You should be running the Land & Pastoral, darling,
Hugh had said.
You’re so efficient.

They had a good laugh about that, the idea of her running the Land & Pastoral.

He was always tremendously encouraging about her
interests.

Only God can make something perfect,
was the idea, according to the books, so a quilt was supposed to have a little mistake in it. Putting the mistake in had always given her a lot of satisfaction. You put a blue triangle in where it should have been green, that kind of thing, or a stripe instead of a check.

It was just another part of the perfection, really, not being perfect. But it only counted if you were not being perfect on purpose.

She had stopped quilting when she realised how it aged you. The problem was the tendency of your mouth to purse as you sewed. It was the concentrating, and the getting it right, and it was important to get it right, but getting it right made fine lines appear around the lips. The other thing was that you could get into the habit of hunching over the hand-sewing. She had watched other women, sewing and pursing and hunching.

 

 

 

Having a baby had been a wonderful
interest
for her, and in the beginning it had all gone wonderfully well. In the antenatal classes the teacher had praised her belly-dancing exercise and even asked her to demonstrate it to the class. She had memorised all the special words:
dilation
and
perineum
and
vulva.
They were like
tools of the trade,
if you were having a baby.

The only problem had been that Hugh would not pinch her hard enough for the pain-practice. Sometimes he could be almost too kind-hearted.
Go on,
she had to hiss.
Harder.

All over the room men were grimacing as they pinched the soft skin on the upper arms of their wives, as if it was they who were being hurt. The wives had their eyes closed, breathing through their noses.
Breathing through thepain,
it was called, while the men screwed the skin round.

When the teacher told them to stop, everyone smiled bravely, and glanced around at all the other couples smiling bravely. The women looked uneasy, thinking
but that was only my arm.

One couple was not smiling bravely. It was the couple who had been half-hearted about the belly-dancing. The woman was the one who had gone
Urgh
during the video. Now she was sitting white in the face, rigid, tears rolling down her cheeks, and her husband, a big beefy man with a belly cut in two by his belt, folded his hands over and over each other as if he was washing them.

There was a silence in the room while the tears ran out of the woman’s eyes. The man looked down at his lap. Outside a siren wailed past the window and skirled away on a diminishing note down the avenue.

Her labour was going to be perfectly straightforward. She knew that when the time came she would know that the pain was only the muscles of her uterus squeezing the baby out like toothpaste. It would not be
pain,
it would just be
contractions.
It was very simple.

 

 

The labour room shone, the floor waxed and gleaming, the bedclothes stiff with cleanness, and she was
coping
well. The doctor came and told her how well she was
coping.
She was breathing,
one two three release, pant-pant-pant pause,
and she was doing the belly-dancing, hanging on to the back of a chair, feeling the hospital gown, open down the back, swing against her calves.

Night came on. There was a sense of buses full of people grinding along home outside, everyone hurrying, anxious. She kept looking at the big white-faced clock on the wall, as if she was running late for something important. When Hugh, that anonymous person she knew to be her husband, put the lamp on, there was no escaping the fact that a whole day had gone by.

They made her lie down on the bed while they looked up inside her, and when they told her she was still
only two centimetres dilated,
she was confused. How was it possible, when she had been doing everything perfectly?