The Wrong Door (5 page)

Clare felt a dull ache in her chest. God how she missed him. Marla and Peg were getting worse and worse and it terrified her. Mr Sanjay would at least have been able to provide a different perspective. She had never been able to anticipate what advice he might give when presented with
a problem. It was part of what made him so endlessly interesting.

She remembered when she had first confided in him about her volatile sister. It was after a particularly ugly fight when she was about fifteen. Clare had been terrified Marla was going to hit her mother and had stepped between them. So Marla had hit her instead. Mr Sanjay had laughed. Not unkindly. But still it had shocked Clare. It had taken a great deal of trust and courage for her to confide something of what went on inside their home. It seemed so ugly and shameful and she had expected him at the very least to be sympathetic.

The memory made her smile. She had been so serious, so full of her own importance, speaking in a hushed, meaningful tone. In her mind she was sharing something profoundly raw and personal. She expected Mr Sanjay to give her an equally reverent response. At first Clare had been dumbfounded when Mr Sanjay, after listening attentively and nodding, had started to chuckle. Then she felt hurt. Then annoyed. How dare he not be suitably awed by such a revelation, she had thought. Her feelings must have shown on her face because Mr Sanjay started to laugh even more. It hadn’t been the jolly, belly-deep kind of laugh he gave himself over to when he found something very funny, which was quite often. It was more of a gentle chiding and Clare had been at a complete loss as to how to respond.

The comment he finally made was so unexpected, so bizarre, that she thought about it for
days, turning it over in her mind, trying to get to the core of what he meant.

‘You say your life is imperfect,’ he said. ‘You don’t like the way your sister behaves. She yells at your mother and treats you unfairly. You speak as if life is something that is happening to you. Well, if that is your life then choose it, all of it. Choose your sister. Choose your mother. Choose your school and the girls there who say nasty things to you. Everything in your life that you think is the cause of your unhappiness, instead of shying away from it and complaining about it, choose it.

‘The solution is not to blame the life that arises for you. The solution is to accept it all as if you had chosen it to be exactly that way.’

Then he had changed the subject, talking about his garden as if the conversation he and Clare had been having held no greater importance than his precious hollyhocks. Clare was completely flummoxed and spent the following days sitting in her bedroom trying to make sense of what he had said.

She tried to imagine choosing life with Marla. Sometimes her sister was fun, she decided – like those occasions when she got into bed with her on weekend mornings and told her stories about the cute things Clare used to do when she was little. She also liked Marla when she let her try on all her clothes and makeup, pretending she was a glamorous movie star. On those occasions Marla let her wear her very expensive Hermes scarf and showed her eight different ways to tie it. Then she was a great big sister, the best in the world. Even her best
friend, Susan Lee, with her perfect parents and perfect house, would have wanted a big sister like that. It was the other Marla that Clare couldn’t choose. The one that screamed abuse at Peg and locked Clare out of her room when she was suffering from one of her migraines and didn’t turn up to collect her from school when she was supposed to.

So there was some of Marla she would choose and other bits that no-one in their right mind would want. But Mr Sanjay had said choose all of Marla. That meant the bad bits too. Clare looked at her sister as a whole package. She wasn’t sure that the good outweighed the bad. In fact if she divided it up she decided she liked Marla one-third of the time.

After a few days of thinking about Marla this way, Clare realised she was behaving differently around her sister. No longer was she on tenterhooks waiting for the next explosion. Nor was she annoyed with her before she even walked in the door after school. What mysterious alchemy was this? Somehow, somewhere, something in Clare had shifted, without her consciously knowing it was happening. She was a lot closer to accepting her life as it was. She didn’t understand how it had occurred, but she decided Mr Sanjay was pretty smart.

It didn’t last, of course. Life with Marla soon returned to its rollercoaster pace. Clare loved her, hated her, pitied her, worshipped and despised her, depending on the day and her own mood.

The kettle whistle brought her sharply back to
the present. She made tea and took it upstairs. Peg was just closing Marla’s door behind her. She motioned Clare to follow her into her room and they sat side by side on the bed. The older woman looked exhausted.

Clare handed her a mug of tea.

‘What was that all about?’

Peg shook her head.

‘Why is she so angry with you?’

‘Leave it.’ Peg sounded tired but firm and Clare knew better than to argue.

The next morning when Clare got up Marla was gone.

Gwennie slept till late the following morning and realised she was still wearing her jeans, faded T-shirt with egg stains and Pete’s dressing gown. She must have been wearing it throughout the visit from the researcher, Ms What’s-her-name. She waited to feel embarrassment but it didn’t come. Who cares? Gwennie realised that she was free to behave exactly as she pleased and people would excuse her. She could run naked down the street and the neighbours would nod sympathetically. Yes, poor Mrs Darvill. Her husband just died you know. Very sad. So young. And from pneumonia can you believe? What are the odds of that? They would make clicking noises with their tongues. Sort of sympathetic and yet at the same time relieved that such a tragedy hadn’t happened to them. Death hadn’t come knocking on their door in the middle
of the night and they could go back to deluding themselves that it wouldn’t. Death was something that happened to ‘other people’.

Gwennie thought how she could dye her hair purple. Put it in crimping irons and wear it with a knife and fork sticking out the side. Why not? Or she could shoot a bullet through every window of the house. All that floor-to-ceiling glass that Pete had so painstakingly designed so they could see out and yet no-one could see in. The perfect symbol of their life together. Open and bright and full of light. She could shatter it all. Gwennie felt a ripple of excitement. It would be one way to deal with the fireball of rage that was growing inside her. She had an almost uncontrollable urge to wreak havoc on everything about her. To slash and destroy and burn and maim and kick and hit.

How terribly liberating grief was, she thought. She could actually do whatever she wanted to. The moment passed and she sagged again. Unfortunately she didn’t have the energy to do anything. Right now she just wanted to wear Pete’s dressing gown and stay here at home where she could still smell him and feel him all about her. So she would. Actually she might wear a few of Pete’s clothes. She looked through his shirts and pulled out all the ones she liked, the ones that he wore most often. She remembered him in them. What about trousers? She tried on a pair. Even with a belt they were uncomfortably large. She folded them and put them carefully into an empty cardboard box. His tracksuit. He loved it. She always knew he felt
relaxed when he wore it. That went onto the bed on top of the shirts. The pile of clothes to keep. His cashmere cardigan. She used to tease him that he looked like a grandfather in it. But he had said it made him feel cosy. So she put that on the pile too. A blue cashmere blazer. She could wear that with jeans. A couple of T-shirts. All his socks. They would be wonderfully warm on the cold polished floorboards in winter. She pulled on a pair over her bare feet. They were soft and snug. The pile of clothes she wanted to keep was growing and the cardboard box seemed hardly to fill. No matter. Finally she finished.

She looked at the box of clothes on the floor. What was she supposed to do with that? Give it to the local welfare agency? She couldn’t bear the thought of seeing someone walk past in Pete’s clothes. Nor could she imagine throwing them all in the garbage bin with the empty tins of tomatoes and the cheese wrappers. Could she post them to another country? Afghan Refugees, care of International Red Cross. Send them to the Brotherhood of St Laurence in Perth?

She felt a sudden blinding urgent panic. It had been hovering all day in the recesses of her mind and now it rose to the surface. Hardly aware of what she was doing, Gwennie telephoned Pete’s secretary Laurelle. She would know what to do.

When the other woman answered Gwennie had trouble expressing herself. Her thoughts came out in a bundle of disjointed sentences. Pete’s clothes. His shirts. There was so much. She was
babbling but even as she recognised that, she was unable to stop. Laurelle seemed to understand, replying with exaggerated slowness. She told Gwennie to sit down and write a list of Pete’s clothes. She would be over in ten minutes.

Gwennie raced around the kitchen. She had one thought in her head and she concentrated on it. Write a list. Write a list. Laurelle needed a list. She couldn’t find a pen. She couldn’t remember where she kept paper. She was staring at the dishwasher trying to think what it was she was looking for when ten minutes later Pete’s secretary knocked on the front door.

Gwennie stood in the centre of the doorway, limp and beaten. She made no move to let Laurelle pass. It had taken all her strength to open the door. Laurelle put her arm around Gwennie’s sagging shoulders and led her to the kitchen.

‘When did you last eat?’ asked Laurelle.

Gwennie looked at her mutely, tears rolling down her face. She shook her head.

Laurelle helped Gwennie onto a stool then bustled around the kitchen making a sandwich from what she could find. There was bread in the freezer, a small tin of tuna in the cupboard and one solitary cheese slice in the fridge. She threw mouldy vegetables and fruit into the rubbish bin as she went.

She studied Gwennie closely. Gwennie was usually such an elegant woman, beautifully manicured and coordinated. It was one of the things the women in Pete’s office disliked about her. No
matter the occasion, she made them feel underdressed. But not today. Laurelle was shocked by the change. Gwennie’s clothes were smelly. She reeked of stale sweat. Her hair was dirty and clearly unbrushed. Her eyes seemed to have sunk back into her head. But it was the expression that was most worrying. It was blank. Unfocussed.

‘Have you been out in the past few days?’ asked Laurelle.

Gwennie didn’t reply. She sat on the stool in the same slumped position as Laurelle had placed her. She seemed hardly aware of the other woman’s presence.

‘I thought not.’

Laurelle stayed for an hour. She made Gwennie eat and then she took the box of Pete’s things with her to the car. She promised Gwennie that she would treat them with respect, that Gwennie would not see someone in the supermarket wearing Pete’s trousers, nor would they end up rolling around with the orange peel and cheese wrappings in the back of the local garbage truck. Gwennie also made Laurelle promise she would never ever tell her what she had done with them. On this point Gwennie was resolute to the point of hysteria.

When she got home Laurelle made a few telephone calls. She called Gwennie and Pete’s doctor, and related her concerns about Gwennie’s state of mind. The doctor promised to call on her. Late in the afternoon, just as the northern hemisphere was waking up, she called Gwennie’s sister Beth in London.

Beth said the family was in chaos. Her father had put his back out and her mother was run off her feet, looking after the family pub on her own. However, she would see what she could do about taking some time off and trying to get down to Australia. It would take her a few weeks to organise her job but she would try. Her tone made it clear what a sacrifice she considered that to be.

Laurelle hung up the telephone, shaking her head in frustration. ‘Selfish, selfish, selfish.’

Gwennie forgot about Laurelle as soon as she had gone. She closed the door behind her and walked into the bedroom, wondering what to do with herself for the rest of the day.

The pile of Pete’s clothes she planned to wear was lying on the bed and it cheered her. She carefully rehung each piece in the wardrobe, mixing them with her own shirts and jackets. It felt good, intimate, like she was absorbing some of Pete. In a reflex action as she hung the blue blazer, she emptied its pockets. In one was a clean, unused handkerchief and an American Express slip. She supposed she should keep that. Their lawyer had told her to keep anything financial or legal of Pete’s, no matter how insignificant it appeared, and just put it aside in a box for him to sort out. She glanced at the receipt. It was dated Wednesday, 6 March, the week before Pete died, and was for petrol and a can of Coke from a petrol station in Katoomba.

Gwennie had travelled little outside Sydney but she knew damn well where Katoomba was. It was
where one of the women who taught with her at school had her wedding reception. Lilianfels in the heart of the Blue Mountains. Her colleague had fussed and carried on for weeks beforehand till Gwennie thought she would go mad. She was on the telephone to them every day arranging what colour flower petals she wanted sprinkled in the finger bowls. Then there was the saga over the size of the bows on the linen napkins. Gwennie doubted she would ever forget it.

She didn’t think she had ever heard Pete mention the Blue Mountains and yet it had popped up twice. First the researcher, Ms What’s-her-name, and now here it was again. So maybe he had been up there. That wasn’t so odd, and yet it was. Perhaps he had gone up there for some sort of work project. It was an awfully long way for him to go and not mention it to her. They used to speak a few times a day on the telephone. And Gwennie knew all the projects Pete was working on. Or she thought she did. He cheerfully brought his work home and talked through with her what he was doing and why. It was how he made some of his decisions, explaining the problems to her and solving them as he talked.