Cooee (16 page)

I was having enough difficulty in coping with my mother's death. It wasn't that I missed her. It was that I didn't. I was depressed and upset, but not because I had lost a loved and loving mother. I suppose she did love me, and I suppose I did love her, but it was hard somehow to recover that love, to recall it fully and experience it again as part of what people like to call the grieving process.

I kept pushing away the knowledge of her death; I kept thinking that I would deal with it later, when I could accustom myself to it and think about it properly. But when I tried to think about it properly, I found I couldn't.

Questions of death, questions of life. How they torment us. Dominic as a child was fascinated by the bad banksia men and adopted the term ‘deadybones' until it drove us mad. He made it the subject of one of his rhymes, along with his old teddy bear Fred.

Ned the Red shot Fred the Ted
in the head
as he lay in bed.
Beddy-byes, Teddy dies;
Teddy bones all deadybones.
Ready, steady, Teddy, go!

He would chant it again and again, capering and spinning like a dervish, shouting the last line in explosive glee, grinning evilly.

‘Do you ever worry about Dominic?' Steve asked me once, tentatively, after one of these performances.

‘No,' I lied.

‘You don't find that teddy rhyme of his ... well, a little disquieting? He's only six, after all.' Steve scratched his head, regarding me with ill-concealed anxiety.

‘No,' I said, calmly, though I agreed with Steve, deep down.

It
was
disquieting. But, now, as I look back, I think it might have taught him to understand death, not to fear it, to live with it. I couldn't live with it, not at any rate with my mother's death. Perhaps one needs to be a touch disquieting to survive. Perhaps being disquieting is something to be fostered.

I actually tried to make myself cry, by hauling out all of the best memories I had of my mother. I remembered, for instance, the time Zoë had bossed me about the garden. I suppose I was about five, which would have made her ten. I think we had been given a children's gardening set; or perhaps it was only Zoë's. There was a little, wooden-handled rake, I recall, its prongs painted red, and a blue spade. Somewhere there is a photograph of Zoë holding these items, smirking.

Our father had dug us a space in the backyard so that we could plant our own flowerbed. He went to a good deal of trouble: the bed was kidney-shaped and beautifully edged. I can't remember now what the cause of the quarrel was, but perhaps we wanted different flowers, or perhaps Zoë regarded me as slave labour and forced me into too much digging and raking.

At any rate, it all ended in tears and I recall my mother sweeping me, sobbing, into her arms and bearing me off. It is this feeling of being suddenly swooped upon and borne off, a shred of dandelion upon a great maternal gust, rescued, safe, that principally stays with me.

As I clung to my mother, startled by her action but relishing it, I can remember a gush of emotion for her, a kind of grateful daughterly access of affection, which I now tried unsuccessfully to re-create.

Recollection of other, similar incidents was equally unavailing: I didn't understand why. One loves one's parents: of course one does. One is sad when they die. Isn't one?

I wanted to grieve; I wanted to mourn. I wanted to deserve the kindness and mute concern, the slightly deferential consideration people like Bea and Dawn were extending to me. The discovery that I couldn't plunge myself into these processes made me abstracted and bad-tempered. I tried to explain this to Max.

‘I don't feel it as I think I ought to.'

‘Is there an “ought” about how you feel grief?' he asked.

‘Possibly not, but even I feel there's something unsatisfactory about my response.'

‘Why?'

‘Well.' My brain was sluggish.

It was late, time to go to bed. We were sitting in the living room, on the milky leather lounge suite with its long curves that were somehow both sumptuous and pristine. I picked up the meteor stone from the coffee table and rolled it from one palm to another, absent-mindedly relishing its coolness and density, its clean spherical perfection.

‘It's so hard to know how to put it, Max. I expect to feel sorrow, and I look inside myself for the place where the sorrow ought to be, where it's kept, so to speak, and I can't find it there.'

‘What do you find instead?'

‘A kind of blankness, to tell you the truth. Almost an emptiness.'

‘Mightn't that be an aspect of sorrow?'

‘I don't know? Might it?'

‘Tell me, my beautiful Belle, why does it worry you so?'

‘Because I worry that I'm a monster,' I said, hearing my voice break. ‘Because I worry that if I can't properly register grief, I can't properly register love, I can't love. She was my mother, for God's sake: why can't I feel her death more, like Zoë does, like Kate does? Even Dominic is more upset than I am, Max. I ought to be inconsolable; I ought to be bursting into tears; I ought to be devastated, and I'm just not.'

He came and sat beside me, and held my face in his hands. ‘Do you love me?'

‘You know I do.'

He kissed me, warmly, tenderly. ‘You are the most loving, most caring, kindest, dearest woman in the world. I adore you. You mustn't do this to yourself.'

That seemed to terminate the conversation. We went to bed. We didn't make love that night, but we lay like spoons, me fitting into the contours of his lean body, him holding me. I fell asleep like this.

He brought me such peace, such confidence.

He brought more than that, too. He came home one day, perhaps a month after my mother's death, with a large white box. He set it on the kitchen bench and looked at me with his beguiling crooked smile.

It had been a rough day at work: I was peeling potatoes, I think, and drinking wine, and trying to overcome the dragging depression that continued to tug me downwards, some days.

‘Where's Katie?' he asked. They often attached the suffix to each other's names. She was Katie; he was Maxie. I don't know why.

‘In her room,' I said, eyeing the box and feeling a faint thud of disappointment that it evidently wasn't for me.

He called Kate and she came running down the stairs.

‘Now,' he said, in a considering way. ‘What are we going to do, here?'

A faint scuffle came from the box and Kate's face lit up.

‘A pet!' she cried. ‘Maxie, have you bought me a pet?'

‘Well, now,' he said, stroking his chin.

Max loved these situations. He was never happier than when he was opening his wallet and throwing hundred-dollar bills around. Partly this was a matter of pure generosity; partly it was a case of an innate love of splendour, of luxury, of abundant surprise and lavish gesture.

‘Well, now,' he said, pulling a comical face. ‘There's a bit of a problem.'

Kate and I laughed and he grinned back at us.

‘The thing is, you see, I have a present and I'm not sure who it's for.'

‘Show it to us,' crowed Kate. ‘If you show it to us we'll work out who it's for.'

‘Ah, no,' he said. ‘It wouldn't work, you see. You'll both want it.'

He was teasing Kate, but his eyes sought mine and smiled in the manner of someone who was sharing a superb and immense secret with the only person who mattered. He could always do this to me; he could always make me feel that everyone else in the world was peripheral: I was the core and the heart and the centre of everything for him.

Kate's excitement was becoming uncontrollable, and he started to lift the box's lid, only to pause and say anxiously: ‘You'll have to share it, mind. You'll both have to share it. You'll have to borrow it from each other.'

And there he was, Borrow, a golden Labrador puppy with impeccable lineage and huge floppy paws and a heart-melting smile. He scrambled out of the box and into Kate's plump and eager arms, wagging his tail and whimpering with enthusiasm and wriggling and licking her face while she issued rapturous little screams.

Borrow was to become so integral a part of our lives that it was hard to believe we had not always had him. Noble and stupid, he treated Max and Kate with all the adulation his giant heart could muster, which was considerable. They were his favourites; me he tolerated.

And yet he has finished up, happily enough, with me and with neither of his heroes; it is with me that his days will amble to what I hope will be a benign and pain-free end. Old and venerable now, with white whiskers, increasingly cloudy eyes and a gammy hip, he limps after me and good-naturedly pretends he doesn't remember the dark side of me. Do dogs remember? I am sure Borrow does.

It wasn't only the dog that arrived in my life with such panache, such bold munificence. Addicted as he was to the grand entrance, the dispensation of gifts, Max kept on spoiling himself and me. He walked in the door one evening with a large, flat, silver box, an extravagant crimson ribbon jauntily tied on top of it. I eyed it inquisitively.

‘I bought you a wedding dress,' he said, all crinkly grin, presenting it to me.

It was so like Max. No preliminaries, no questions. There was no question, of course. No proposal. We were head over heels, still; then and always. We both understood that we were partners forever, that we couldn't live without each other.

‘Who am I marrying?' I asked, undoing the box. ‘When?'

He laughed.

It was a floaty, fine thing: layers of shimmer, lilac and aquamarine, crystal and snow. It had drifted right out of the silky expensive-smelling pages of
Vogue
into my delighted arms. The material was so delicate you could have passed the entire dress through a wedding ring. He had bought shoes, too: fragile jewelled sandals, with soft leather soles and sleek gleaming straps.

He was extraordinary like that: how many men are there in the world who could walk into a dress shop or a shoe shop and choose so unerringly, with such imagination and confidence? He always knew sizes and colours; he understood my preferences and my style and everything about me.

‘They're not my colours,' I said, marvelling, letting the fineness of it slip through my fingers, like bright shadows of silk, almost no substance to it.

‘They're not the colours you usually wear,' said Max, dropping a kiss on the back of my neck. ‘It doesn't mean they're not your colours.'

‘It'll make me look sallow.'

He snorted. ‘Try it on and see.'

I did. I didn't look sallow.

‘I thought a beach wedding,' he said, while I twirled in front of the mirror, craning to see different views, liking them all. ‘Twilight.'

‘When?'

‘Whenever you say.'

I tried to describe all this to Zoë. I made a real effort.

‘I couldn't bear it,' she said.

‘Couldn't bear what?'

‘Such an overbearing attitude. I don't know what's happened to you, Minky: once upon a time you wouldn't have put up with being pushed around like this.'

‘He's not pushing me around,' I snapped. ‘He doesn't push me around.'

‘I couldn't bear it. It's not natural, for a man to act that way. How is it he knows so much about women's clothes? You ask him that.'

‘You're just jealous.'

She laughed, nastily. ‘Jealous? Of you and your con man? Don't be silly.'

‘I'd be jealous,' I said, spite getting the better of me. ‘If I was married to Henry, I'd be jealous of just about every other woman on the face of the earth.'

She gave me a wounded look. ‘Anyway, those colours don't suit you.'

Well, it's no wonder I didn't invite her to the wedding, which happened about four weeks afterwards, just as he'd said, on a fine, still evening, on a beach down on the Peninsula, near Point Leo, at twilight.

I got Bianca Crawford and her husband to be witnesses; no one else came. I didn't want anybody else. Bianca was about the only one of my acquaintances not to resist Max. We had coffee once, and I told her about how unfair everybody was, and she laughed and leant forward and tapped my cheek. Bianca was half-Italian and when she felt like it she would become very European.

‘Don't you worry about it,
cara
. You go and live your own life. Don't you give a damn about any of them, old killjoys.'

‘You like him, don't you, Bianca?'

She rolled her eyes. ‘Like? Like? I fancy him, my dear, and so do they, if they were only honest. Oh, but he is a dangerous man, you mark my words, Isabel.
E uomo molto pericoloso
,
cara
. Believe me. You take care with your Max.'

I laughed, knowing how safe Max in fact was. I could see why she called him
pericoloso
: it had to do with the sharp edge of his sexuality, the vertiginous quality of it, the physical frisson he generated, the quiet sizzle of his mere presence. But he wasn't really dangerous at all. I'd never felt safer with anyone in my life.