Simply Heaven (44 page)

‘Poor bitch,’ I say.

‘Too right. And Tilly. Neglected’s not the word for it. Spent most of her time being brought up by Roberts, if she was lucky. Otherwise it was dump ’er on whoever came in handy – mostly the grooms and the ground staff.’

‘Mmm.’ Well, it certainly explains the constant need to apologise for her presence. ‘So what happened?’

‘It’s hard to say. It went on for a while like this. Obviously. As I said, Tilly was four by the time she went. But the AWOLS got bigger, and longer, and by this time the rows between her and Edmund could be heard all the way to the village. I mean, obviously, half of them would happen in the village. She’d come storming out of the place and he’d come after her, and she’d be going ‘You hate me! You want me dead! All of you! You’d rather I was just gone, wouldn’t you!’ and he’d be going, ‘Darling, you’ve not taken your medication’ and, ‘Come on. Come back. You’re making a fool of yourself’ and stuff like that. You can’t expect thirties man to know what to do in circs like that, but Edmund was particularly inept. And then one day she took an AWOL and just never came back. Poof. Vanished into thin air.’

‘How do you mean, vanished?’

‘I don’t really know. No-one knows exactly how she went. Chucked a spaz in the middle of a dinner party and by the time the men were done with the port, she was gone. Took a suitcase, not much else, and one of the cars was found at Moreton station a couple of days later.’

‘Good God.’

‘Yuh. Of course they all kept it quiet down at the house. Hoping she might turn up somewhere, I suppose. But there came a time when people started noticing that she wasn’t there any more, and eventually Mrs R let slip that she’d done a bunk, and that was that. That’s what I heard.’

‘Hold on. That was that? Are you serious?’

A roll of the eyes. She pauses to take another drag of her cig. ‘Well, no, of course that wasn’t that. But I wasn’t there at the time, so I don’t know the details overmuch.’

‘Surely there must have been some sort of kerfuffle? You’re not saying she disappeared and no-one did anything?’

‘Of course not. They had her on the missing persons’. Put up posters all over. Dragged the moat and everything, but they never found a sign of her. But to be honest, I don’t think they made all that much effort. She’d become, you might say, a bit of a burden. Truth be told, they must have been pretty relieved to be shot of her. So, no: he didn’t go chasing off trying to track her down. He just waited seven years and divorced her for desertion. Probably a pretty good solution as far as he was concerned. If there’s one thing Edmund can’t be doing with, it’s high-maintenance women. If anybody’s going to get any maintaining around here, it’s him.’

‘And her family?’

She spreads her hands. ‘I told you. She was dead already as far as they were concerned. I don’t suppose they even let them know.’

‘Shit,’ I say, bringing all my articulacy to bear. ‘Bugger me dead.’

‘Yeah. I don’t think it was exactly the top time for anyone. That was when Edmund took to the gin, of course. And Mary came to stay soon afterwards – she’d been here at dinner the night Lucy went, so there wasn’t a lot of dissimulating to be done about it where she was concerned – and sort of picked up the reins and got rewarded with the wedding ring.’

‘But good God! She was only eighteen! How could she possibly have taken a place like this over at eighteen?’

Nessa pauses to inhale another lungful. ‘Well, obviously it wasn’t just her. It was a nice cosy cabal of her and Beatrice together, with the dedicated backup of Mrs Roberts and Mrs Roberts’s mother. I don’t think she found it too difficult, especially as I dare say everyone was going out of their way to remind her that she was the Chosen One.’

‘Oh my God. Poor Tilly. And poor Edmund.’

‘Yeah. Sort of explains a bit, doesn’t it?’

‘I don’t understand,’ I say, ‘how Rufus could possibly not remember to tell me something as … well … significant as this.’

‘You would wonder, wouldn’t you? You know what? I think it’s all a matter of perspective. I mean, obviously it’s a big thing as far as pretty much everybody else would be concerned, but as far as Rufus is concerned, it’s something that happened a long time before he was born. After all, they’d hardly be the first family to gloss over history for the sake of convenience, would they? And Mary is Rufus’s real mum, after all, and she’d been in place for so long before he was born that it’s like the waters had long since closed over Lucy’s head.’

‘God, families. I have to say I never thought Edmund would’ve had it in him.’

‘Well, I guess that’s where Rufus got it from, eh? And I think he learned his lesson pretty good. He’s not stepped out of line since. The only thing is, looking at you, and Rufus, and the way those women are going on, I can’t help but worry that history might be repeating itself.’

‘Oh, don’t. I’m not blind to the similarity. Still. Maybe I’m made of sterner stuff.’

‘I hope so. For Rufus’s sake as well as yours. I’ll tell you what: you’re amazingly patient. Haven’t you ever been tempted to lose your temper? Just really let rip?’

‘Er, yeah. I have that.’

‘Well, why didn’t you? I know I would have by now.’

‘That’s not my way of doing things. I don’t like losing my temper. It always causes more harm than good in the long run.’

She looks at me, speculatively. ‘Funny. I’d have got you figured for a chick with a bit of a mouth on you. Especially – don’t take offence – now I’ve had a look at your family.’

‘Yeah, well,’ I say, ‘you’ve got me figured wrong.’

And then I shut up, because the truth is that I haven’t lost my temper in over two years, because I know, when you do it, that bad things happen.

We think we’ve evolved so much as a society, but really, we’ve just moved the goalposts. We’ve developed a new set of pieties over the past fifty years that are just as abusable as the last lot, and we’re too damn arrogant to see it. So that, now that women have finally persuaded men – and each-other – to take rape seriously, we’ve also spawned a type of ruthless harpy who’ll scatter accusations about, for revenge, or for profit, regardless of the cost. And now women have hard-won the right to work, we use it as a justification for shirking our responsibility to the vulnerable, a cudgel as hefty as any of the old moralities.

And there’s the piety that has shaped my own life, has affected me the most: the piety that says that a man, any man, who hits a woman, any woman, is by definition a bad ’un. Straight up. Black and white. No ifs or buts or maybes or provocation. No second chances. You’re better off without him, girl. Your dad’s no angel, but he never hit your mother.

’Cause I’m no angel, either. Andy and me, it was bad towards the end: really bad. But I’m talking six to the half-dozen. It was a bad relationship, I understand that now. A spoiled princess and a princeling with commitment problems. A man who never, ever introduced me to his family, and a woman whose family were never out of the picture, not even for a day. A guy who reacted to pressure with brutal off-pushing and a woman who reacted to rejection with bursts of uncontrollable rage.

I’m a hypocrite: I’m such a hypocrite. I complain and complain about secrets, and most of my life has been about staying shtum one way or another. I guess I got so much early training in not letting people know how the land really lay, that I never really learned to do anything much else. I didn’t talk about the way things were deteriorating with Andy until they’d gone a long way down the road, and by the time people found out the truth, it was far too late. And they still don’t really know the half of it. To this day, the family think of me as the victim, as their hard-treated little Princess. And me? I’m scared. Scared to death. Scared of getting trapped in another situation I can’t get out of. Scared of people finding out about me, that I’m not as nice as they think. Scared I’ll drive Rufus off, make him leave me the way Andy did. And most of all, I’m terrified of my temper. I’ve not learned the happy medium. Where before I would have reacted like a wildcat, I now just roll over and play dead. I disgust myself, sometimes, with the way I just let myself be stomped on. But you see, I learned the hard way that if I don’t shut my mouth and take what’s doled out to me, that disaster will inevitably follow.

Love has a lot to answer for.

Saturday, 11.30 p.m., Brisbane. Driving home from the Mummydaddy’s. I’m driving because Andy always seems to need a drink to handle time with my family. Or so he says. I think it’s more of an any-excuse thing. Andrew has spent an hour in the den with my dad and Costa while Mum and Yaya and I cleaned up after dinner, so it can’t have been that much of an ordeal.

Except that, while we’re sitting at the lights on an empty junction, he announces, apropos nothing, that this has been his last visit to my family home.

He doesn’t say it quite so elegantly, of course. The phrasing comes out more like: ‘Well, that’s the last bloody time I bloody go there. You can stick your bloody family up your bloody clacker.’

Andrew’s speech has always been peppered with the Great Australian Adjective.

I count to ten, and reply: ‘Excuse me?’

Having had his little outburst, he adopts the accusatory-silence mode of expression, and glares through the windscreen.

I count some more, then say: ‘And would you mind telling me where this has come from?’

‘I can’t stick them,’ he says, ‘And I’m not putting up with it any longer.’

‘Since when?’

This has genuinely come as a surprise. Andrew has been coming with me on the weekly home visit without a complaint for years. Matter of fact, I had always been under the impression that he enjoyed them: clapping people on the shoulder and calling my father an old bastard. He showed all the signs of an Australian male in his element.

‘Since for bloody ever. Anyway, I’m not going back there. Wild horses wouldn’t drag me.’

‘What’s eating you?’

‘Nothing. I’ve just had enough, is all.’

The lights change. I move off, hang a right through dark suburban streets.

Neither of us says anything for a bit, then he starts up again: ‘They think a whole lot of themselves, your family. You’d have thought they were royalty, the way they go on.’

My father was wearing a string vest this evening. And my mother was wearing a towelling playsuit in frosted pink. Not a tiara between them.

‘Bullshit.’

‘And that’s another thing. Where do you get off being so bloody foul-mouthed?’

‘You can bloody talk.’

‘It’s not bloody ladylike. Just shows the sort of family you come from.’

‘Well, make your bloody mind up, Andrew. They can’t be the scum of the earth
and
royalty at the same time.’

This is not, by the way, a political viewpoint I particularly subscribe to, but the point itself is reasonable.

‘Well,’ he says, ‘you can let them run your life if you like, but they’re not bloody running mine.’

‘What’s got into you?’

Andrew suddenly starts gesticulating. The alcohol he’s consumed during the evening exaggerates his gestures, so that I find myself ducking around his hands as I try to keep an eye on the road.

‘No, I guess you probably wouldn’t see any of it, would you? That’s the trouble. You don’t see anything wrong with it.’

I find myself thumping the steering wheel. ‘Of course I bloody don’t! What do you want me to see?’

‘That’s it,’ he says. ‘Bring out the threats. Typical. Daddy’s little girl. Bloody princess bloody Melody, can’t get her own way so she goes berko. Can’t take criticism, can’t take the truth. Things get a bit hot so she goes running to Daddy.’

‘I never—’ I begin.

‘Stuff it,’ he interrupts.

‘Has something happened I don’t know about?’

‘I very much doubt it,’ he says meaningfully.

‘Don’t talk riddles,’ I say.

‘I’m just telling you,’ he says, ‘that I’m sick of the way your family interferes. They’re bloody stickybeaks. Can’t keep their bloody noses out of anything.’

‘Well, at least you’ve
met
my family. Yours might as well be dead as far as I’ve seen of them.’

‘Well, are you surprised? If they met you, they’d have to meet your family, and—’

‘
Now
who thinks they’re bloody royalty?’

‘Well, we’ve gone a bit higher up the social scale than kebab shops,’ he says crushingly.

I realise I’m grinding my teeth. ‘I never realised you were a snob, Andrew. Anyway, I don’t know what you’ve got to be so proud of. A photocopying franchise and a guesthouse. It’s not a lot to write home about.’

‘Well,’ he says, ‘I don’t suppose
you
write home at all.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Well. At least
my
old man can read.’

This really stings. None of this has ever been a problem before.

‘Yeah. And you know what? I’m proud of him. Not many people get as far as he has when …’

‘Well, you’ve got to ask,’ says Andrew, ‘how he managed it.’

‘What? What do you mean?’ I say, stomach lurching because we’ve been respectable for years now; I’ve never needed to let him in on things because there’s plenty of cover been built up.

He shrugs. An insolent, slumping shrug. ‘Nothing.’

‘Well, you meant something.’

‘No. Nothing. Forget about it.’

‘How can I forget about it?’

‘Oh, stop nagging me, willya?’ he shouts. ‘You and your bloody mouth. Yap yap yap yap yap!’

Firday. 3 a.m. Lord Howe Island. Milky Way Apartments. Andrew lies in bed, silent, arms folded, back turned to me. I know he’s awake. After four years sharing a bed with someone, you’re so attuned to the sound of them sleeping that their insomnia is, usually, catching.

He’s not spoken to me for two hours. I didn’t really notice while we were still with the others, but the silence since we’ve been alone has been oppressive, has filled my ears like white noise. The inconsequential exchanges of going to bed, shared bathrooms, finding spare pillows in a new hotel room, have been one-sided, my words dropping with thuds into the tropical night like rocks into sand.