The Last Anniversary (8 page)

F
rom inside the warm restaurant, Sophie looks down at the crowds of people walking back and forth along the quay, heads bent against a chilly wind. A non-descript couple rugged up in black coats, hurrying and holding hands, slowly meta-morph into the familiar figures of her parents, like a special effect in a movie. Sophie smiles involuntarily and tries to keep watching them with the eyes of a stranger. A perfectly ordinary middle-aged, quite stylish, definitely married couple with a relaxed, happy air about them, as if they are on holidays. They are both on the short side, giving them a cute, compact look. The woman stops and demonstrates something: a hammering movement with hands. The man shrugs, grabs her hand and pulls her along towards the restaurant. Sophie laughs to herself and feels the anticipation of relief. She is going to read them Aunt Connie’s letter and let
them
decide what she should do. Whatever they say, it will be said with unconditional, soothing approval of Sophie.

She watches them come in the door, pink-faced and peeling off their coats. Her father, in a smart grey suit with a red tie, has a roundish face, old-fashioned gold glasses and a lovely smile, which he gives his wife as he helps with her coat. Her mother, who is wearing a soft blue dress, is checking herself in the glass-mirrored wall and trying to smooth down her irrepressibly curly hair. The wind has given her a slightly crazed look. They chat away to the maitre d’ as if he is an old, dear friend and there is a loud burst of laughter. Sophie’s parents create flurries of laughter wherever they go.

Finally, they look Sophie’s way and she raises a hand. Her parents beam in unison, as if it has been months since she’d seen them last, not a mere two weeks.

Sophie’s friend Claire, on meeting the Honeywell family for the first time, said, ‘Now I get it why you’re so popular. You’ve always been adored. You expect to be adored and so you are.’

‘I do not expect to be adored. Anyway, all parents love their children,’ retorted Sophie, feeling embarrassed because she knew it was true.

‘Not like yours love you,’ said Claire. ‘It’s borderline dysfunctional.’

‘Hello, darling,’ says her mother. ‘That’s a gorgeous new top. Can you believe my hair? I look like I’ve been electrocuted.’ She bulges her eyes and vibrates her head to demonstrate her point.

‘Hello, Soph,’ says her father. He pulls out a chair for his wife and kisses Sophie on the cheek. ‘Your mother accepts full responsibility for our lateness. No drink yet? Two points off? This lighting is a bit
too
moody I think. I can hardly see you.’

Every third Thursday, Sophie’s father takes his wife and daughter out for dinner at a carefully chosen restaurant. The Honeywell family specialises in fine dining. They’d applied their own elaborate rating system to restaurants in Paris, London, New York and, of course, Sydney. It is one of their shared family hobbies, along with opera, Scrabble and reality TV.

Her mother, Gretel, enjoys telling people about how they used to take Sophie out to restaurants when she was just a toddler. They would prop her up on two cushions so she could reach the table and she’d be ‘
good as gold!
’, solemnly pretending to read the menu which was ‘
twice the size of her!
’. The waiters made her pretend cocktails exactly the same pink colour as her mummy’s. Sophie also smoked pretend lolly-cigarettes, just like Mummy and Daddy’s, blowing pretend smoke out the side of her mouth (‘
little actress
’), but Gretel generally leaves out that part of the story because it makes people stop saying ‘Ohhhh’ and say uneasily ‘Oh?’ Plus, Gretel doesn’t actually like to think about the number of cigarettes they smoked in their daughter’s presence. Sophie only has to give the tiniest cough before Gretel is clutching her husband’s arm. ‘Listen to that! Passive smoking! What were we thinking? We probably destroyed her poor little lungs!’

Sophie’s Dad’s name is Hans. Hans and Gretel. When they were teenagers they had mutual friends who found the idea of them becoming a couple so uproarious that they engineered a meeting. Hans and Gretel were determined not to like each other but accidentally fell hopelessly in love the moment they were simultaneously pointed out by chortling friends on opposite sides of the Prince Albert Park ice-skating rink. If it had been a movie, it would have switched to slow motion and a romantic soundtrack as Hans and Gretel glided over the ice into each other’s arms. In reality, neither of them had been skating before, so they bravely made their way across the rink with spaghetti legs and flailing arms, met in the middle, went to shake hands and crashed to their bottoms on the ice. ‘I hit my tailbone,’ said Gretel. ‘I was in excruciating pain but I was so blissfully happy it was like I was drunk. I
knew,
you see, and I knew he knew too. I quickly peeked a look at my watch so I’d always remember the exact moment that I met my husband. Twenty past two, eleventh of June, 1962.’

It doesn’t matter how many times Gretel tells Sophie this story, they both still sniff at the end. Not that it takes much to make mother or daughter sniff. They are, after all, addicted to anything romantic: romantic comedies, regency romances, romantic TV ads.

The Hans and Gretel romance ended with them living happily ever after–well, pretty much, anyway. The only mildly unhappy thing in their lives is that they couldn’t have any more children after Sophie. Both Hans and Gretel came from small families and they had planned to have ‘a few dozen kids’, but as her mother says cheerfully, it just wasn’t meant to be, and besides which they hit the jackpot first time.

It seems to Sophie that her parents are the sort of parents who should have had a whole brood of shouting, messy, sticky-fingered children. Her mum should have been one of those distracted mums serenely presiding over a crammed table, dishing out gigantic, nutritious casseroles, ruffling one kid’s hair, slapping another one’s knuckles. Her dad should have been one of those dads flipping sausages on the BBQ in between tossing kids in the air like juggling balls and saying funny things to visitors like, ‘Who are you? You one of mine?’ while his own children squirmed, ‘Aww, Dad!’ Sophie herself would have been the perfect older sister: kind and loving, firm but fair. She would have let her younger sisters use her make-up under supervision and dispensed judicious dating advice. She would have driven her dear little brothers to their soccer games and helped them with their homework. She probably would not have had a blushing problem if she had been an older sister.

But instead there is just Hans, Gretel and Sophie. They are like three guests at a party where no one else has turned up, doing their best to create the impression of a much larger, rowdier group, and doing so well that it turns out to be the party everyone is sorry they missed. People always comment on how extraordinarily close a family they are, how much fun they have, how they seem like three best friends. When Sophie was a child, her friends were thunderstruck when she invited their parents to join in with games, just like her own parents did. She thought all parents were just extra-large-sized kids. (How she blushed when this terrible faux pas was pointed out to her. ‘Mum isn’t even
allowed
inside the cubby house, Sophie. She can’t play with us. That’s sort of…weird.’)

This Thursday night the Honeywells are trying out a new restaurant at the quay, with ceiling-to-floor windows revealing the white sails of the Opera House like a gigantic, gold-lit sculpture. The three of them sit in grave silence, studying heavy, hard-bound menus, with sighs of indecision and lots of flipping back and forth of pages. They put their menus down, frown, pick them up again and continue flipping. Finally, hands clasped over closed menus, they each present their selections as if they are explaining complex mathematical solutions.

‘Confit of Tasmanian ocean trout with roe,’ says Gretel. ‘Followed by marinated scampi with pawpaw, cucumber and tonburi.’

Sophie and Hans shake their heads in admiration.

‘Salad of sea scallops,’ says Sophie. ‘Followed by–if you’re thinking the salmon, Dad, you’d be wrong–lobster ravioli with tomato and basil vinaigrette!’

‘Oh, no!’ Her father puts a hand to his forehead. ‘I had the ravioli!’

‘Back to the drawing board, darling,’ says Gretel.

There is a rule that nobody ever has the same dish. It is an unfair rule because Hans always chivalrously insists that Gretel and Sophie say their choices before him.

He heaves a dramatic sigh, pushes his glasses back up his nose and picks up his menu, squeezing his bottom lip with two fingers. In the meantime Sophie’s mother has tipped slightly back on her chair with a dazed expression on her face. It means that a conversation at the next table has caught her attention. She, like Sophie, is an avid eavesdropper.

Sophie looks to see who she is listening in to. It is clearly a family group. Grandparents, daughter and son-in-law, or son and daughter-in-law (Gretel will confirm in a few minutes), together with a silent, unseen baby in a pram. Sophie can sense by the way they are all sitting slightly self-consciously, with their heads cocked towards the pram, that the baby is a new addition to the family.

It is bad enough that Sophie’s parents have only one child, but now they are in their early sixties, when they can quite reasonably expect to be grandparents, their only daughter isn’t even in a relationship. Sophie’s mother has a group of friends who she has been playing tennis with for over twenty years and Gretel is the only one in that group who isn’t a grandma. Sophie can’t bear to think about her mother politely listening to all those women showing off about their grandchildren. The worst part of it is that her parents never put pressure on her. There are never any loaded questions like, ‘Met anyone interesting lately?’ Sophie would feel less guilty if Gretel was like her friend Claire’s pitiful mother, who nags and cajoles and begs, accusing Claire of deliberately not having children just to spite her.

‘The mozzarella and chilli salad followed by the slowly poached veal shank, if anyone is still interested.’ Hans closes his menu. ‘Your turn to choose the wine, Soph.’

Gretel leans forward and lowers her voice to a hoarse secret-agent whisper. ‘First night out with colicky new baby,’ she informs Sophie. ‘Mother-in-law about to make daughter-in-law cry.’

‘Fascinating.’ Hans doesn’t approve of his wife and daughter’s eavesdropping habits. ‘Do you think we could concentrate on our own family now?’

‘I am
terribly
sorry,’ says Gretel in a Royal Family accent.

‘How
frightfully
rude of me.’

‘I happen to think it is,’ says Hans sternly, although Sophie knows he is trying not to laugh. Nobody chuckles louder than Hans at his wife’s repertoire of accents and funny voices.

Sophie watches her parents acting as if they have just reached that nice stage in a relationship where you pretend to be annoyed with each other in public. There is a mean feeling in her chest like heartburn. It takes her a few seconds to identify that it is actually envy. She puts down her glass of water with a thud. Well, this is getting beyond a joke. Yesterday she’d been pounding away on the treadmill at the gym watching a documentary on one of the television screens. It was about a woman with no arms and no legs who had to get around on a skateboard. A touching story of courage in the face of terrible odds. But even while she was blinking back tears of sympathy, Sophie had, just for a second, actually felt a tiny bit
envious
of the woman. Why? Because of her nice, good-looking (fully limbed) husband! As punishment she had given herself an extra twenty minutes on the treadmill to show her appreciation of her two rather short, but perfectly functional, legs. (Still, she couldn’t quite get the thought out of her mind: if an arm-less, leg-less woman on a skateboard could find a man, surely Sophie was doing something very, very wrong? How did this woman meet him? Pull on his trouser leg as she rolled by him in a nightclub?)

Now here she is, feeling jealous of her own sweet parents. She is a very bad person. A spoiled only child. A brat.

She says, ‘Don’t you want to hear my letter from Aunt Connie?’

‘Oh,
yes
!’ Her parents are immediately all attention.

Sophie takes the letter out of her handbag, clears her throat and reads,

‘
Dear Sophie…’

A waitress appears at their table as though she has been waiting for this very signal. ‘Good evening. Did you need any more time, or may I take your order?’

‘My daughter is just reading a letter from someone who left her a house,’ Gretel beams up at her. ‘This woman barely knew her! It’s all very intriguing.’ Sophie’s mother believes discretion is the height of rudeness.

‘Oh, well, that is–ah–intriguing.’ The waitress is obviously unsure whether to make her face happy or sad about this revelation and settles for confused.

‘What’s more intriguing is whether the veal comes with vegetables?’ Hans looks up over the top of his glasses and treats the waitress to his sweet smile.

When their orders are taken and Hans and Sophie have managed to restrain Gretel from generously inviting the waitress to stay and listen to the letter, Sophie begins again: