The Good Parents (35 page)

He picked up the phone and once again tried M&D Flynn’s number.

After
Glad Rags
, he didn’t write anymore. He had a feeling of emptiness that stretched into the plains around him. There were times of a
free-ranging hunger, a sense of missing out. It was probably only the extremely limited field in Warton that had restricted
his passions over the years, shallow crushes in comparison with this. There was Lisa, the Norwegian physiotherapist in Tumbring
with the severe, polished planes to her face that made him fumble for similes with ice floes, fjords, northern light. He emerged
from her graceful but efficient
ministrations into the waiting room and there was Forbes Carpenter grinning at him. ‘You too?’ said Forbes. ‘A lot of guys
are having back problems right now.’ It wasn’t long before Lisa’s enormous Latvian husband got a transfer and whisked her
away.

Once when the kids were small, he nearly stayed the night at an English and drama teachers’ conference in Perth with a Canadian
exchange teacher, Hilary Mosel, who had spent a term in Warton. She was in her mid-thirties, short and dark and buxom, passionate
about her work. The whole school fell in love with her. Warton in spring erupted around him, magpies carolled in gleaming
trees, the wattles were heavy with blossom. As soon as he walked out the door in the morning, he started to whistle. Each
class Hilary took erupted into laughter, shouts, crashes, thumps, songs. He was aware of exactly where she was at any given
time around the school. After a while they could hardly meet each others’ eyes. She was a serious woman in spite of her bright
jokiness, honest about her emotions. For years they talked in Warton about the play Hilary’s students wrote and performed
on her last day there.

But then at the conference he found himself drawing back. Away from her work, there was something anxious and intense about
Hilary that was like a warning to him. She reminded him of Kitty! Why hadn’t he seen this before? Her professionalism covered
a yawning loneliness, a lack of self-esteem. He was overcome by a shameful archaic terror of being swallowed up. One more
step and he would feel responsible for her forever.

He still remembered the look in her eyes when he said he had to leave, made some excuse and drove home recklessly through
the night, half-hoping he’d be hit by a kangaroo.

He decided to ring Magnus.

‘How are you, matey?’ Strange the comfort that the sound of your child’s voice could give.

‘Good. Kitty made soup out of beetroots for lunch. It’s Russian.’

‘Bortsch.’

‘Yeah, that’s what Kitty called it. Tonight we’re having duck cooked in a Chinese way.’

‘I didn’t know you could buy ducks in Warton.’

‘Carlos knows someone who raises them.’

‘How is Carlos these days?’

‘Good. He’s coming to dinner. Right now he’s giving Kitty a driving lesson at the lake.’

‘Sounds like you’re all having a great time.’ Jacob was surprised to feel a little pang. ‘Heard from Maya?’

‘No.’ Magnus hesitated. ‘Kitty answered the phone the other night and she heard beeps but then the person didn’t speak.’

‘Was it Maya, d’you think?’

‘Kitty could hear cars, like when Maya calls. Now I always answer the phone.’

They both went silent.

‘How’s Winnie?’

‘Getting fat. Kitty gives her snacks all the time. She follows Kitty everywhere.’

Occasionally he and Magnus forgot themselves, Jacob as life-coach, Magnus as son always fending off the threat of advice,
and for a few minutes they talked freely in a way they couldn’t quite do with anyone else, which might be the poor form of
the Dockers, the politics of the Olympics or their deepest feelings about a piece of music or a film. Magnus’s revelations,
the maturity of his insights, always surprised him. They never spoke of school: neither of his kids had ever allowed him to
discuss their school work with them.

He was just about ready, Jacob thought, as soon as Magnus finished school, to drop the parental role altogether, and reveal
himself, his doubts, his truth, his past.

Along with his fear that he was going to die, or almost as bad, become a tracksuited, impotent senior citizen, was the fear
of dying without ever having been able to give expression to what it meant to live.

It had got to the point when, if he woke at night, he knew at once whether or not she was in the house. Subliminal signals,
the click of a switch, a faint luminescence beneath his door, seeped their way into his dark room and alerted his sleeping
consciousness. He must be waiting for her even in his dreams.

At once, without thinking, he pulled on his jeans and went out towards the light below the stairs. In spite of his resolutions,
he was flooded with happiness as he looked down on her, the slight black-clad figure at the desk, sitting very still, intent
on something on her screen.

‘I can’t sleep,’ he said as she looked up at him, though he was instantly aware that he must be the image of someone just
woken, blinking and puffy-faced. ‘Still at work?’ he said throatily, descending. ‘Aren’t you tired?’

She turned back to the screen, but not before he noticed that her eyes and cheeks were wet.

‘I never finished this piece on Clarice.’ Her voice was very flat and quiet. There was no music playing a soundtrack for her.
‘I had an email from her tonight.’

‘She wants it soon?’

‘She doesn’t want it at all. She doesn’t want anything more
to do with me.’ To his horror he saw a small tear roll over her cheekbone. He stood behind her, clenching his hands.

‘A cup of tea? I’m making one for myself.’ As quietly as he could he filled the kettle, sprinkled the green leaves into the
black pot in the way she’d taught him, all the time alert to her every move. Years in a pastoral role had taught him to approach
on the oblique. He stirred a loaded teaspoon of honey into her cup, the way she sometimes liked it, and put it on her desk.
He pulled a chair up, not too close, for himself. She was slightly shaking.

‘Are you cold?’

‘No. It’s shock.’

He went to turn up the heating. Cecile sipped her tea and after a while she sat back and looked at him.

‘How’s the script going for
The Prodigal
?’

‘Without Clarice, it isn’t going.’

‘How come?’

‘I began to see I had to go back to the roots of it all. To the personal. My true passion is the story of my mother, an unmarried
Chinese girl, a double outcast in her own society. Which of course leads to the story of Clarice and me. I planned to use
everything to tell this story, interviews and photos, archival footage from the KL anti-Chinese riots in 1969.’

‘How does it start?’

‘With a return to the orphanage. My mother left me there when I was born. She had no choice. I remember a beautiful young
woman who used to visit me sometimes before I was adopted, and of course it would have been my mother. And I loved her, I
remember loving her with a passion. Her name was Phyllis Wong. I think my adoptive parents paid her money to let me go. About
the same time that I came to Australia, she bought a little hairdressing business. She would have thought it was for the best,
for me. A few years later Clarice was born. But
this time she was married and after her husband left, there was Auntie to look after Clarice while she worked. In a way, Clarice
was raised on the money paid for me.’

‘How did you meet Clarice?’

‘When I came to Melbourne I started to try to find my mother. I went to KL and found out she had died three years before,
and that I had a half-sister. We met. Clarice’s English wasn’t good, but she told me she lived with an old aunt of her father’s
and worked in a department store to support them. She’d left school young and wanted to work as a model. She had photographs
of herself. Last year I finally persuaded her to fly out here and live with me. I enrolled her in an English course and a
drawing course and promised her that next year she could try out for fashion design. I sent money to KL for Auntie.’

Cecile sat with her shoulders hunched, her hands clasped in her lap, like a little old lady herself. ‘But she hated it here!
She was so homesick. She hated the English classes and the weather and she thought the people were rude. She missed Auntie
and felt guilty for leaving her. She missed her friends and their outings. I couldn’t make her happy. In fact she was angry
with me. I saw her getting thinner and paler like a dying plant. I told her of all the opportunities for her here. I told
her that I couldn’t bear to live without her. She was brutally honest and told me that I’d done to her what had been done
to me. For selfish reasons. I put her on the plane home. A few weeks ago I went to visit her, as you know. I thought we were
building our relationship. I felt hope. Then tonight, this email.’

She sat shivering, not looking at him.

‘You talk of her as if she is a lover,’ Jacob said.

‘Because I do love her! Apart from that tiny memory of my mother, I’ve never loved anyone before. From the moment I met Clarice
I loved everything about her. I feel I understand
her, that no one else sees her as I do. Isn’t that how a lover feels?’

‘Yes.’ Jacob stood up and went to the cocktail cabinet. Over the weeks he’d familiarised himself with its contents and now
he poured them each a shot of ancient saki into little green porcelain cups and put one down on the desk in front of her.
He wanted to put his arms around her and brush her hair with his lips. He could feel her small sad body tucked into his. He
sat down again.

‘You’re good at looking after people, Jacob.’

‘Am I? Years of living in a family.’

‘I have friends whom I understand, like Dieter, but I don’t have intimate attachments. I’ve tried, but I lose concentration.’

Was she warning him off? If so, he was almost flattered.

‘When I visited Clarice and Auntie in their little house, and saw how close they were, I envied them. But they don’t want
me. Clarice has made that very clear. If it was just about the film, I’d gladly give it up. She said some pretty nasty things.
She told me to leave her alone, called me a lesbo – she must have picked that up in Australia.’

Jacob sat back, sipping his saki. He was suddenly on safer territory. Saving a woman again.

‘In my experience – as a teacher – some young women, especially pretty ones who want to be models, are extremely interested
in celebrity, in the lucky break, in being noticed and given their chance.’ He wondered if it would be obvious to her that
he had peeked at Clarice’s poses and fantasies on her computer.

‘If I were you,’ he went on, ‘I’d mention contracts, agents, publicity, Cannes and Venice, Sundance, LA … It’s a gamble of
course, but I’d hint you had a beautiful young actress who was begging to play the half-sister.’

Cecile sat very still. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

‘All this is not, after all, outside the realm of possibility. It may very well come to pass. Isn’t the Prodigal story about
redemption? Doesn’t it have a happy ending?’

S
he was growing accustomed to a simple, regimented life. She would have done quite well in the army. Five o’clock reveille.
Tidy barracks. Assemble on parade ground. The ashram regime, so quiet, so calm, was no less authoritarian. Life arranged around
fixed points. Tasks. Practice. The covert pleasure in small things: meals, walking alone. But the strict rhythm of the days
was doing its work. She was no longer missing Maya or anyone. The outside world seemed very far away.

Each of the evening talks had a title. The Four Noble Truths. The Six Perfections. The Seven Point Mind Training. The Eight
Steps to Happiness. Buddhists were very numerical. She’d become fond of the young Venerable, his black horn-rims, his shawl
thrown casually across his broad shoulders. His Aussie
voice intoning Tibetan words was rather pleasing, like the promise of some cross-cultural fusion.

But when the old Tibetan Geshe, with his small round head, bright eyes, and crooked, haunting smile arrived to address them
one evening, his words opened up vistas of peace, like long avenues in a garden. Happiness was very simple, he said, a transformation
in the mind. She felt dazed, on the verge of making that transformation. Afterwards, crossing the melancholy courtyard back
to her room, it was hard to remember exactly what was said. All the lights in the house went out. The moon was very high,
a moving glow behind the clouds. She watched it, lying awake in her little cell.

To be happy, the Geshe said, you have to break attachment to life.
I know
, she thought, lying in her little moonlit cell,
I’ve always known what that meant.
It was how she felt looking out her bedroom window at the cold lonely beauty of the paddock running down to the creek. Pushing
her babies along bumpy country roads, she had heard the wind run through the trees like a parallel energy rushing past her.
It was the strange, intense satisfaction of observing something quite ordinary, grass along a wire fence, the weeds around
the broken-paned projection booth, the gravel back lane behind the shops on Cannon Street with their clusters of rusting iron
sheds. As if for a moment a light came on inside the scene. And when it happened she was reminded that these little fits had
been part of her since childhood. Then she forgot them again.

For many years she had forgotten the moment on the highway, when she was a schoolgirl waiting for a bus, just before a storm.
Yet now it seemed to her that all the other experiences were mere precursors to or aftershocks from this, the defining moment.
What had happened? First the silence, the stillness, the unhooking of the everyday. Then came the
will-less spaciousness of it, the calm understanding that everything was in its place.

Then Cy Fisher came along and interrupted her and her life as a woman began. How long had she been waiting for that to be
over?

She lived with silence now.

Was all this breathing in and breathing out just another way to be good? A sort of insurance policy?
Above all else be good.
What you’ve been taught in childhood always comes back. After Cy Fisher she’d craved purity. She’d scrubbed and ordered,
saved water, recycled, visited the sick. Not just to be good, to be
seen
to be good.