Cooee (37 page)

Kate's sobs increase, multiply. People will hear. Dawn will hear, and anyone else who's around. I remember that Bea has an important meeting with clients in her office this afternoon. I look at Kate helplessly. I go over to her, pat her shoulder. I find my hand grasped with a ferocious strength. She pulls me down to her and hugs me wildly, hysterically. It's very uncomfortable, and I try gently to disengage myself. Irritated beyond enduring, I make soothing noises, glancing at the door and hoping Bea can't hear. Dawn probably can, out in reception.

‘I'm so sorry.' She weeps into my shoulder. ‘I'm so sorry, to get it all wrong.'

Gradually, she quietens. She looks terrible. I'm still livid with her, but I suppose I can try to get over it. I pat her some more, trying to quash my fury and despair. What more can she expect of me?

She grabs my box of tissues and blows her nose noisily, several times. She stands, regards me with an unreadable look on her face.

‘I love you so much, Mum,' she says. And is gone.

Part Five

The telephone rings just after three o'clock in the morning. My heart leaps from its normal position and rattles against my throat as I reach out of bed for the handset. I expect Frank, Frank ringing me in the middle of the night, ready to catch me adrift, to trap me. Instead, I hear Henry.

‘Isabel?'

‘Henry,' I mumble, blurrily cross as I surface from sleep. Here I am, badly frightened, thinking everything is over, that Frank is ringing me to say he knows it all, no use going on, and it's only Henry. What the hell is he ringing for?

His voice shakes. ‘I've got bad news, dear.'

Henry's never called me dear in his life. Suddenly I'm bolt awake.

‘It's Zoë.' He stops, choking.

‘Yes, Henry,' I say, keeping my voice steady. An accident, I think. She's hurt, that's all. A car accident, maybe. She can't be dead. Not Zoë, not my sturdy, vigorous sister. ‘Tell me, Henry. Tell me.'

‘Dead.'

‘How?' I ask, transfixed.

‘Heart attack. Acute myocardial infarction.' It's so Henry, to add that.

‘But
how
? I don't understand. Was she ill? Was there no warning? What happened? What in God's name happened?'

‘It was out of the blue.' He sounds apologetic, as if he has been uncharacteristically careless. ‘No warning. None at all.'

‘When, Henry? Where? Where are you ringing from?'

‘I'm at home.'

I picture him, alone in his study, in his big, faded, brown corduroy chair.

‘What happened?'

‘I don't know,' Henry says, suddenly sounding old and exhausted and confused, and with odd pauses. ‘I don't know, Isabel. We went to … bed as usual. She got up, went to … the bathroom. I heard her cry out. She was … on the floor.'

And that was it. She had lost consciousness even before he'd reached her. He rang the ambulance. He said they had arrived rapidly — not more than five minutes. But she was dead.

It is strange that Henry and I should have this bond, this powerful link of finding our spouses dead on the floor. It's different for him, of course: he didn't put her there. Well, I presume he didn't. I briefly contemplate the possibility of explaining the irony to him, but decide against it. He's not going to appreciate this.

My mind's in overdrive. I don't know why this happens to me, why this feverishness grips me in a crisis, why it crowds out my grief, my shock. Already I'm thinking, when will the funeral be? Has he told anyone else yet? Ought I to go over? I'm even wondering what I'll wear to the funeral. My brain's manufacturing thoughts to prevent it from thinking the things it doesn't want to confront. That must be what's happening. I try to concentrate.

‘Would you like me to come over, Henry?'

‘No,' he says, to my huge relief. ‘No, there's no point.'

‘Are you all right?'

He says he is. We exchange a couple of bleak remarks, promise to be in touch the next day, hang up.

It's so hard to imagine a world without Zoë. I lie in bed and think about it. I can't sleep, so I get up and make myself a cup of tea. For once, I don't feel like a drink: I'm not sure why not. Borrow pads after me and regards me sorrowfully.

I try to cry. I actually do squeeze out a tear or two. What am I feeling? It's hard to say. I'm surprised, certainly. I recall Zoë's stocky figure, her positive stride, her firm, strong voice, her annoying way of articulating words very clearly in case the person to whom she was speaking was mildly retarded. Well, that's how it sounded. She didn't look like a candidate for a heart attack. What has Henry been thinking of? How has he allowed this to happen?

I manage not to ask him these questions when he rings me the following day. I still feel stunned, trapped in the ice in some frozen hinterland where the full realisation of Zoë's death is withheld from me. Soon I will comprehend it and cope with it.

‘We're all getting together to talk about the funeral, Isabel,' says Henry, sounding weary. ‘Would you like to come over?'

Who's
we
, I wonder? Henry's an only child; he and Zoë are childless; all our parents are dead. I suppose Zoë had friends who want a say in it all. I don't like Zoë's friends, most of whom are authoritarian women who have spent their lives bellowing in classrooms, and Henry doesn't sound as if he especially wants me there anyway. I excuse myself and ask him to keep me in touch.

‘You don't want to speak?' he asks, surprise inflecting his voice.

‘At the funeral? God, no.'

‘Are you sure, Isabel?'

I tell him I am sure.

I hate funerals. In fact I remember once saying this to Zoë, who replied sarcastically that there was nothing special about me; nobody actually enjoyed funerals.

I think she was wrong. I think some people do enjoy funerals. They remind us, after all, that we're still alive, a condition not applicable to the person at the centre of the occasion. I've been to lots of funerals now, and I've often observed a kind of avid relief rampant in the congregation, an ungodly solace perhaps derived from outliving the deceased and perhaps from finally being able to speak frankly of him or her with impunity.

When we marry we take on other people's families, their births and deaths and traumas, their scandals and skeletons. This is a fact that certainly hadn't revealed itself to me when I skipped so smugly down the aisle to Steve, awaiting me with a goofy look on his square face.

It started to become clear when we'd been married only a year or so. An elderly aunt of his died and I discovered to my alarm that Steve and his entire family confidently expected my attendance at her farewell. I'd never been to a funeral. It sounds silly: I was twenty-one, after all. I suppose I had remained unusually untouched by death. Two grandparents had died during my childhood, but nobody had expected me to go to their funerals. I didn't think funerals were my business. I panicked at the thought of this one.

‘I didn't even know her,' I said to Steve. ‘I only ever met her once. Why do I have to go?'

He had that pained expression I was starting even then to resent so sharply.

‘She was my aunt, lovely. Of course we have to go. We both have to go.'

‘But I didn't
know
her,' I wailed, despairing of making him see reason. ‘Can't you say I've got morning sickness?' Already I was pregnant with Kate. ‘It wouldn't be a lie.'

I was not certain why my response was so negative. Normally I did what Steve asked me to do: I regarded docility as one of the wifely panoply of virtues to which I aspired. But this time my alarm was disproportionate: I passionately did not want to be a strand of the tapestry of this dead woman's life; I did not want to be caught up in a grief that was none of my business, a loss that I had never felt.

‘It wouldn't be true either,' said Steve. ‘You're over the morning sickness, lovely: you know you are.'

I could not withstand his obduracy. So he hauled me off to his Aunt Bessie's funeral, where, ironically, I did indeed feel nauseous, although this was (as he pointed out) probably because of the heat of the day and the closeness inside the church, rather than because of my pregnancy. I hated it all but I was morbidly fascinated by it, too.

And I understand now what I didn't then, that in marrying him I assumed for him (as he did for me) afflictions and encumbrances such as illnesses and deaths and funerals, that marriages entail families and joining in what families do. When we marry, we share lives; we learn customs; we adopt relations; we inherit deaths.

Except marriage to Max, of course — or at least what passed for marriage to Max. Max had no family: no mother to terrorise me (as Steve's had), no father to glance appreciatively up my legs and down my cleavage (as Steve's had), no sister to patronise me (as Steve's had). No family at all.

And so I go to my sister's funeral. It is a typical Melbourne day — cool, bleak, grey, with the occasional perverse flash of sunshine disrupting the dismal threat of drizzle.

I sit in the funeral chapel, front pew (membership of the deceased's family offers me these privileges), and gaze at the coffin, which undertakers always insist in calling a casket. (I note that these undertakers wear brass badges on their lapels that identify them as
bereavement consultants
, whatever that might mean.)

The coffin is bright and smart and snazzy and rather too ornate, its decorated brass handles gleaming and its dark mahogany veneer polished to the clean, brilliant gloss of a new mirror. She would have thought it tacky: Zoë had taste, after all, and she wouldn't have liked the tawdry dazzle of the brass, the fussy curlicues on the handles, the insufficiently solid look the whole thing somehow has. It is so narrow, it is hard to believe Zoë's robust figure is contained within.

The taped music is Vivaldi, and seems too sprightly for the occasion. I don't think Zoë had any particular affection for (or indeed knowledge of) Vivaldi, and presume this choice is Henry's flight of fancy. Zoë was a Mahler person, a Wagner person. The Valkyries might have farewelled her, or the Meistersingers, not Vivaldi.

Henry is out in the foyer, looking solemn and burdened, thanking people for coming. Who knows? Probably he does indeed feel burdened; perhaps he is genuinely grateful.

I remember the last time I sat in a church for a ceremony at which Zoë was a central participant. It was her wedding, some thirty years ago. A little more than thirty years. Well, I hadn't much enjoyed that, either.

I find myself glancing around, every so often, to the back of the church. I pretend to myself that I'm doing this out of interest in who will attend. But it's Frank who's on my mind, Frank's shadow I expect to see lurking at the back, sliding behind the door, treading up the aisle in that measured, weighty way he has.

The Vivaldi finishes and the service begins. It is quiet and unexceptional. Henry (always technically proficient, as becomes a science teacher) speaks with the accompaniment of a powerpoint screening that shows photographs of Zoë at various stages of her life. Zoë as a baby, toddler, schoolgirl, teenager, debutante, graduate, bride, daughter, sister, wife, aunt, teacher. All the roles of her life, neatly clipped out and presented. I am in some of them, especially the early ones. I feel oddly uncomfortable about this, and find myself thinking that Henry should have asked me if I minded. I don't like it, being on show in this way: it's one thing in a family living room or a photograph album, quite another in a funeral chapel with a coffin next to one.

Here we are, Zoë and me, neatly attired in our school uniform, our hair freshly combed, standing awkwardly together, holding hands (a thing we never normally did, as I recall). Here we are sitting on our father's knee, too old to be doing so comfortably, displaying forced grins. Here is Zoë in a long dress, going to her first ball. Here she is marrying Henry in his silly tie, looking for once as if she mildly likes him. Here she is being auntly, holding Kate as a newborn. There she is, in her coffin; here I am, in my pew. It is bothersome.

My thoughts stray as Henry speaks. I cannot believe Zoë has died: I am cross with her for doing so. She is — was — only five years older than I am, and it seems to me she had no business relinquishing her spirit so easily, with so little warning to the rest of us, so little fight.

I know they say the grief issuing from bereavement takes you inexorably through several stages, of which anger is one. This isn't like that, though: it isn't profound, burning anger, but exasperation, much as I might feel if we were playing Scrabble and I knew she wasn't trying. It worries me that I cannot tap any deeper feeling than this for my sister. I have not grieved for Zoë, any more than I grieved for my mother. Can it be that I do not feel grief? Surely I loved her. She was crabby and annoying and difficult, but surely I did love her?

Why can't I
feel
?

Henry is saying something about Zoë always having wanted children of her own, about her being a fond aunt, about the fondness deriving partially from her own dashed hopes, her profound disappointment at her own barrenness.