The Idea of Perfection (25 page)

She felt her face swelling, shiny with the desperate lies, and hated Gran then, with her puzzled loving smile.

 

 

When Gran died, Harley and Celeste were not told for a long time. They were not taken to the funeral, or to the funeral of their grandfather, who
went
soon afterwards.

Grandfather left a display case of war medals, up on the wall near the bookcases, and three leather-bound school prize books in the glass-fronted bookcase. But of Gran there was very little left. There was an ugly Chinese vase that turned out to be worth a lot of money, and there was a rather good
piece,
as Mother called it — a cedar knife box that she used for the second-best set.

The memory of their grandmother faded quickly.

She asked Mother once what had became of the rest of Gran’s things when the farm was sold. She made her voice casual. Mother was vague. Oh, she said.
Those things? They went to a good home, darling.

There was one thing in particular that she was thinking of: the old bedcover. She would never have admitted to it. It could not be compared with the valuable, though ugly, Chinese vase or the cedar
piece.
Mother would think it was rather odd to care about a smelly old thing made of rags.

But the loss of the bedcover was a grief to her.
Light, dark, light, dark.

There was a tightness in Harley’s chest when she thought of her grandmother. It was that she had not said goodbye. She wished she had just five minutes of time back — just two, or even one would do — to kiss her goodbye.

And tell her she loved her. That was the main thing. She had never told her she loved her. Instead, she had lied to her, and been silent when she should have spoken, and curled away when Gran had stroked her hair, or given her a kiss smelling of flowery old lady.

Yet Gran was the one who had always loved her. She was the only one who had never judged or scorned.

It was like a hole at her heart, when she remembered her.

 

 

 

As a child, cloth had always been a comfort. At night she had soothed herself to sleep by imagining that she was in a warehouse full of rolls of fabric, row after row into the misty distance, and no one watching her. Gloriously alone, she felt each kind of material as she wandered, or unrolled great lengths of it and watched it furl around her feet: crisp cotton, crackling with starch, silk that floated away like water as she went to grasp it, springy muscular wool with the warm thick smell of winter. Something about yards and yards of it, that was the thing: something about unreeling it off the bolt, hearing the thump as the bulk of it hit the wood of the counter, polished by thousands of bolts of fabric sliding over it.

Lying private in bed she could take her time, and no one was there to think she was a fool. After even the worst of days, thinking about rolls of fabric brought sleep.

She had asked her friend Gillian once what she thought about when she was going to sleep, and Gillian had said Oh,
what I did in the day, what I’ll do tomorrow.
She had suspected that Gillian had some secret comfort too and was not telling, so when Gillian said
What about you,
she said,
Me too, what I did in the day, what I’ll do when I get up.

They were best friends, but they did not share anything that mattered.

 

 

At home there were no pieces of men’s suiting, but there was a rag-bag of expensive scraps left by scrupulous Mrs Longfellow who made Mother’s frocks.

She waited until Celeste was out and the house was quiet. Then she tiptoed into the Sewing Room to find the rag-bag, and took it back to her own room. She closed the door, and listened again to make sure no one was near before she got them out and spread them over the floor. She had not really planned to, but found herself cutting them into triangles, and arranging them next to each other on the floor.
Light, dark. Light, dark.

It was interesting, the way a piece that looked lovely on its own could stop looking lovely when you put it alongside another piece.

But also, a dull piece could become a jewel next to certain other pieces.

And it was a kind of magic, the way no piece was either a
light
or
dark
by itself. Any of them could be a
light
or a
dark,
depending on what it was next to.

She had to remind herself to go on breathing, the pleasure of it was so private.

When there was a tap on the door she jerked around in fright, knocking against the lamp so it toppled off the table, and there was Celeste, standing in the doorway, staring.

God, Harley, she said. What are you doing here crouching in the dark?

She came in and looked down at the pieces of cloth arranged on the flowered carpet.

What’s this, a still life or something?

She was amused, prepared to patronise.

Harley felt the heat coming up into her cheeks. The room was suddenly hot. Celeste was staring, waiting, smiling a little.

She looked at her lined-up scraps through Celeste’s clever eyes. As a
still life
they were very dull.

All at once the wish to talk about it was impossible to resist. Once she explained, how could Celeste fail to see the loveliness of it, the lights and the darks, the pattern, the way the light
darks
and the dark
lights
sorted themselves out if they were part of a pattern?

No, she said. This is my patchwork. There are lights and darks. See?

She had not finished arranging them, and there were gaps in the pattern where flowered Axminster showed through.

You have to stand back, she said. To see.

It was clear that Celeste could not see, although she stepped back and put her head on one side so her hair swung against her cheek.

Lights and darks! she exclaimed in a falsely interested way. How do you mean?

It was not very clear, with the carpet showing through, and the way the dark
lights
were similar to the light
darks.

Well, Harley said.

She could see it was a mistake to try to explain.

This one — see? — goes with this one.

Separated from the rest, the bit of material was just a fraying scrap.

Celeste put it down and picked up another.

And this?

In Celeste’s long-fingered pale hand it was just a limp dingy thing.

That’s a light, she mumbled. If it’s with a dark.

Celeste tossed it back on the carpet and looked at Harley, hunkered down beside her scraps, twisting up awkwardly at her.

But patchwork! Celeste said. Harls, that’s just craft!

 

 

Celeste was famous now, fascinating, she had
openings,
was long-legged in tights from Berlin and a haircut like a sculpture. She was in the paper now and then and always looked good in the photo.

Harley had learned to call cloth
fabric.
What she did now was called
Textile Art,
and there were books about it. Some people called it
craft,
and some people called it
art,
but Harley had stopped caring about what you called it.

She had made a career out of it, the
lights
and the
darks.
She had made a name for herself out of suiting fabrics.
Harley Savage’s monochromes.
They were not real scraps, of course, or even real tailor’s samples. These days they were just pretending. She bought the fabrics, had them sent from Milan and Hong Kong.

You would not have gone to bed under any of her patchworks, but the PM had bought one, and the Museum had several stored away in the basements.

In the back of her mind there was always Gran’s bedcover. Every patchwork she made was an attempt to reconstruct the way Gran had put the lights and darks together, the way they had not been absolutely regular, the way the pieces had not quite lined up so the whole thing seemed to vibrate. It seemed so simple. It seemed there was nothing to it.

But Harley had found that there was no end to the ways you could put
light
and
dark
together.

HE WAS GOOD at the window now. He could go over to it confidently and hold on to the frame, and once or twice he had actually put his head all the way out, although he had been careful not to look down. The books all agreed that you never got over vertigo, but you could learn to accommodate it.

He grasped the frame now and put his head cautiously out into the night. The slice of Parnassus Road he could see from his window was stone-coloured in the light of the moon. The shadow under the shop awnings was like a solid substance. A streetlight outside the Mini-Mart stuttered and sputtered.
Defective tube,
he thought.
Shire being stingy with the maintenance.

A hot little breeze gusted down out of the grey hills beyond the town, bringing dry medicinal smells in from the paddocks, catching up a sheet of newspaper and spinning it along until it flapped around an awning-post. Somewhere above his head something creaked and scratched against something else. He would have liked to look up, but looking up could be even worse than looking down, especially if you were twisting out of a window.

Instead he looked down at an angle into the window across the alley. Tonight the curtains were pushed back and the room was full of brilliant white light. He could see quite a big piece of lit-up floor. The white sheet was still there, with the shirt spread out on it. As he watched, a man’s legs came over and stood beside it, and a hand reached down with something he recognised after a moment as a light meter. He went on watching, even when the legs and the light meter had gone, but the shirt stared blandly up into the lights and nothing further happened.

He turned back into his room. He tried lying on the bed reading, but the light was so grey the print started to dance in front of his eyes and the way the bed sagged made his back ache. He wished he had brought some light reading. He had finished the piece on
Hydration in Portland Cement,
but although there was something on Flash Set that looked interesting, he did not feel like it at the moment.

The
Engineering Digest
was a good read, but you had to be in the mood.

He sat up and pulled his boots on, then crept down the stairs and past the bar, where he could hear a companionable burr of men’s voices and the cricket results being read out from the TV.

A normal man would go in there now, and not be worried by the way all the faces would turn to look at him. A really normal man would not even notice that they were looking.

As he passed the alley, he glanced up and saw that the thing that had creaked and scratched above his head was the D of CALEDONIAN, swinging from its screw.

By night, there was something sinister about Parnassus Road. As soon as you left the circle of light cast by the Caledonian, you were in a world of glimmerings and strange shadowed movements. The butcher’s shop was lit only by a small globe that dimly illuminated the containers of dripping in the window. You would never guess that upstairs, light was blazing. As he turned to cross the road he caught the flicker of his own movement reflected in the stainless steel of the display.

He went along under the awnings, staring into the window of the Mini-Mart where a dim blue bulb lit up screwdrivers, tins of paint, some fly-swats, a row of buckets. Behind them cold white light glowed from the fridges along the back wall, filling the shop with sombre shapes and shadows.

He supposed that, prowling along the footpath, his hair stiffly disarranged by the wind, he could seem as shadowy and sinister as the street.

Where Parnassus Road met Virgil Street the strip of shops ended with the Acropolis Cafe on the corner. Across from the Acropolis was a park with a big elaborate cairn in polished granite, and in front of it a garden bed where, by the grey light of the moon, he could make out the word ANZAC done in marigolds.

A rusting wire circle from a florist’s wreath leaned against the base of the cairn, dried stems still sticking out like barbed wire. Cut into the stone and done with gold leaf that gleamed in the moonlight were the words:
To Our Glorious Dead,
and under that an alphabetical strip of names:
Allnut, P.J., Anderson T.F., Edwards, M.A.
At the bottom, like a bureaucrat’s curt stamp: REMEMBERED, with the gilt fallen off the B.

He had never liked the gold-leaf lists, but you could not admit that to anyone.

His own father had been a famous war hero. Was in all the books. His was a name everybody knew.
Douglas Cheeseman,
VC. The
other
Douglas Cheeseman. Even now, when people heard his name, they’d look thoughtfully at him.
Douglas Cheeseman,
they’d say. His mouth would stiffen up, ready for it.
Any relation of THE Douglas Cheeseman?

He had never felt his name was his own. It was always as if he had borrowed the name of the famous hero, or stolen it.

He himself — the
second
Douglas Cheeseman, Douglas Cheeseman
the lesser —
had been born a month after his father was killed. He knew it by heart:
ensuring the safety of his men at the cost of his own life.
He knew every detail. On its way home after a successful mission, the Lancaster had caught fire high over France and no one had been able to get the extinguisher to work. There was a business of a jammed pin. The crew got out by parachute while Douglas Cheeseman
the first
had stayed at the controls, and by the time they were all out, it was too late for him.

Douglas Cheeseman
the second
admired courage as much as the next man, of course. It was a quality he knew himself conspicuously to lack. He had hung his head, hearing the story of his famous father yet again, guilty in the knowledge that he would not have had that kind of courage.