The Husband's Secret (2 page)

And then fifty years later, Cecilia wouldn’t have found this letter that was making her feel so . . . what was the word?

Unfocused. That was it.

She liked to feel focused. She was proud of her ability to focus. Her daily life was made up of a thousand tiny pieces – ‘Need coriander’, ‘Isabel’s haircut’, ‘Who will watch Polly at ballet on Tuesday while I take Esther to speech therapy?’ – like one of those giant jigsaws that Isabel used to spend hours doing. And yet Cecilia, who had no patience for puzzles, knew exactly where each tiny piece of her life belonged, and where it needed to be slotted in next.

And okay, maybe the life Cecilia was leading wasn’t that unusual or impressive. She was a school mum and a part-time Tupperware consultant, not an actress or an actuary or a . . . poet living in Vermont. (Cecilia had recently discovered that Liz Brogan, a girl from high school, was now a prize-winning poet living in Vermont. Liz, who ate cheese and Vegemite sandwiches and was always losing her bus pass. It took all of Cecilia’s considerable strength of character not to find that annoying. Not that she wanted to write poetry. But still. You would have thought that if anyone was going to lead an ordinary life it would have been Liz Brogan.) Of course, Cecilia had never aspired to anything other than ordinariness. Here
I am, a typical suburban mum,
she sometimes caught herself thinking, as if someone had accused her of holding herself out to be something else, something superior.

Other mothers talked about feeling overwhelmed, about the difficulties of focusing on one thing, and they were always saying, ‘How do you do it all, Cecilia?’, and she didn’t know
how to answer them. She didn’t actually understand what they found so difficult.

But now, for some reason, everything felt somehow at risk. It wasn’t logical.

Maybe it wasn’t anything to do with the letter. Maybe it was hormonal. She was ‘possibly perimenopausal’, according to Dr McArthur. (‘Oh, I am
not!
’ Cecilia had said, automatically, as if responding to a gentle, humorous insult.)

Perhaps this was a case of that vague anxiety she knew some women experienced.
Other
women. She’d always thought anxious people were cute. Dear little anxious people like Sarah Sacks. She wanted to pat their worry-filled heads.

Perhaps if she opened the letter and saw that it was nothing she would get everything back in focus. She had things to do. Two baskets of laundry to fold. Three urgent phone calls to make. Gluten-free slice to bake for the gluten-intolerant members of the School Website Project Group (ie Janine Davidson) which would be meeting tomorrow.

There were other things beside the letter that could be making her feel anxious.

The sex thing, for example. That was always at the back of her mind.

She frowned and ran her hands down the sides of her waist. Her ‘oblique muscles’ according to her Pilates teacher. Oh, look, the sex thing was
nothing.
It was not actually on her mind. She refused to let it be on her mind. It was of no consequence.

It was true, perhaps, that ever since that morning last year she’d been aware of an underlying sense of fragility, a new understanding that a life of coriander and laundry could be stolen in an instant, that your ordinariness could vanish and suddenly you’re a woman on your knees, your face lifted to the sky and some women are running to help, but others are
already averting their heads, with the words not articulated, but felt:
Don’t let this touch me.

Cecilia saw it again for the thousandth time: Little Spiderman flying. She was one of the women who ran. Well, of course she was, throwing open her car door, even though she knew that nothing she did would make any difference. It wasn’t her school, her neighbourhood, her parish. None of her children had ever played with the little boy. She’d never had coffee with the woman on her knees. She just happened to be stopped at the lights on the other side of the intersection when it happened. A little boy, probably about five, dressed in a red and blue full-body Spiderman suit was waiting at the side of the road, holding his mother’s hand. It was Book Week. That’s why the little boy was dressed up. Cecilia was watching him, thinking,
Mmmm, actually Spiderman is not a character from a book,
when for no reason that she could see, the little boy dropped his mother’s hand and stepped off the kerb into the traffic. Cecilia screamed. She also, she remembered later, instinctively banged her fist on her horn.

If Cecilia had driven by just moments later she would have missed seeing it happen. Ten minutes later and the little boy’s death would have meant nothing more to her than another traffic detour. Now it was a memory that would probably cause her grandchildren to one day say, ‘Don’t hold my hand so
tight,
Grandma.’

Obviously there was no connection between little Spiderman and this letter.

He just came into her mind at strange times.

Cecilia flicked the letter across the table with her fingertip and picked up Esther’s library book:
The Rise and Fall of the Berlin Wall.

So, the Berlin Wall. Wonderful.

The first she’d known that the Berlin Wall was about to
become a significant part of her life had been at breakfast this morning.

It had been just Cecilia and Esther sitting at the kitchen table. John-Paul was overseas, in Chicago until Friday, and Isabel and Polly were still asleep.

Cecilia didn’t normally sit down in the mornings. She generally ate her breakfast standing at the breakfast counter while she made lunches, checked her Tupperware orders on her iPad, unpacked the dishwasher, texted clients about their parties, whatever, but it was a rare opportunity to have some time alone with her odd, darling middle daughter, so she sat down with her Bircher muesli, while Esther powered her way through a bowl of rice bubbles, and waited.

She’d learned that with her daughters. Don’t say a word. Don’t ask a question. Give them enough time and they’d finally tell you what was on their mind. It was like fishing. It took silence and patience. (Or so she’d heard. Cecilia would rather hammer nails into her forehead than go fishing.)

Silence didn’t come naturally to her. Cecilia was a talker. ‘Seriously, do you ever shut the hell up?’ an ex-boyfriend had said to her once. She talked a lot when she was nervous. That ex-boyfriend must have made her nervous. Although, she also talked a lot when she was happy.

But she didn’t say anything that morning. She just ate, and waited, and sure enough, Esther started talking.

‘Mum,’ she said in her husky, precise little voice with its faint lisp. ‘Did you know that some people escaped over the Berlin Wall in a hot air balloon they made themselves?’

‘I did not know that,’ said Cecilia, although she might have known it.

So
long
Titanic,
hello Berlin Wall,
she thought.

She would have preferred it if Esther had shared something with her about how she was feeling at the moment, any worries she had about school, her friends, questions
about sex, but no, she wanted to talk about the Berlin Wall.

Ever since Esther was three years old, she’d been developing these interests, or more accurately, obsessions. First it was dinosaurs. Sure, lots of kids are interested in dinosaurs, but Esther’s interest was, well, exhausting, to be frank, and a little peculiar. Nothing else interested the child. She drew dinosaurs, she played with dinosaurs, she dressed up as a dinosaur. ‘I’m not Esther,’ she’d say. ‘I’m T-Rex.’ Every bedtime story had to be about dinosaurs. Every conversation had to be related somehow to dinosaurs. It was lucky that John-Paul was interested, because Cecilia was bored after about five minutes. (They were extinct! They had nothing to say!) John-Paul took Esther on special trips to the museum. He brought home books for her. He sat with her for hours while they talked about herbivores and carnivores.

Since then Esther’s ‘interests’ had ranged from roller-coasters to cane toads. Most recently it had been the
Titanic.
Now she was ten she was old enough to do her own research at the library and online, and Cecilia was amazed at the information she gathered. What ten year old lay in bed reading historical books that were so big and chunky she could barely hold them up?

‘Encourage it!’ her schoolteachers said, but sometimes Cecilia worried. It seemed to her that Esther was possibly a touch autistic, or at least sitting somewhere on the autism spectrum. Cecilia’s mother had laughed when she’d mentioned her concern. ‘But Esther is exactly like you were!’ she said. (This was not true. Keeping your Barbie doll collection in perfect order hardly compared.)

‘I actually have a piece of the Berlin Wall,’ Cecilia had said that morning to Esther, suddenly remembering this fact, and it had been gratifying to see Esther’s eyes light up with interest. ‘I was there in Germany, after the Wall came down.’

‘Can I see it?’ asked Esther.

‘You can have it, darling.’

Jewellery and clothes for Isabel and Polly. A piece of the Berlin Wall for Esther.

Cecilia, twenty years old at the time, had been on a six-week holiday travelling through Europe with her friend Sarah Sacks in 1990, just a few months after the announcement that the Wall was coming down. (Sarah’s famous indecisiveness paired with Cecilia’s famous decisiveness made them the perfect travelling companions. No conflict whatsoever.)

When they got to Berlin, they found tourists lined along the Wall, trying to chip off pieces as souvenirs, using keys, rocks, anything they could find. The Wall was like the giant carcass of a dragon that had once terrorised the city, and the tourists were crows pecking away at its remains.

Without any tools it was almost impossible to chip off a proper piece, so Cecilia and Sarah decided (well, Cecilia decided) to buy their pieces from the enterprising locals who had set out rugs and were selling off a variety of offerings. Capitalism really had triumphed. You could buy anything from grey-coloured chips the size of marbles to giant boulder-sized chunks complete with spray-painted graffiti.

Cecilia couldn’t remember how much she’d paid for the tiny grey stone that looked like it could have come from anyone’s front garden. ‘It probably did,’ said Sarah as they caught the train out of Berlin that night, and they’d laughed at their own gullibility, but at least they’d felt like they were a part of history. Cecilia had put her chip in a paper bag and written MY PIECE OF THE BERLIN WALL on the front, and when she got back to Australia she’d thrown it in a box with all the other souvenirs she’d collected: drink coasters, train tickets, menus, foreign coins, hotel keys.

Cecilia wished now she’d concentrated more on the Wall, taken more photos, collected more anecdotes she could have shared with Esther. Actually, what she remembered most
about that trip to Berlin was kissing a handsome brown-haired German boy in a nightclub. He kept taking ice cubes from his drink and running them across her collarbone, which at the time had seemed incredibly erotic, but now seemed unhygienic and sticky.

If only she’d been the sort of curious, politically aware girl who struck up conversations with the locals about what it was like living in the shadow of the Wall. Instead, all she had to share with her daughter were stories about kissing and ice cubes. Of course, Isabel and Polly would
love
to hear about the kissing and ice cubes. Or Polly would, maybe Isabel had reached the age where the thought of her mother kissing anybody would be appalling.

Cecilia put
Find piece of Berlin Wall for E
on her list of things to do that day (there were twenty-five items – she used an iPhone app to list them), and at about two pm, she went into the attic to find it.

Attic was probably too generous a word for the storage area in their roof space. You reached it by pulling down a ladder from a trapdoor in the ceiling.

Once she was up there, she had to keep her knees bent so as not to bang her head. John-Paul point-blank refused to go up there. He suffered from severe claustrophobia and walked six flights of stairs every day to his office so he could avoid taking the lift. The poor man had regular nightmares about being trapped in a room where the walls were contracting. ‘The walls!’ he’d shout, just before he woke up, sweaty and wild-eyed. ‘Do you think you were locked in a cupboard as a child?’ Cecilia had asked him once (she wouldn’t have put it past his mother), but he’d said he was pretty sure he hadn’t. ‘Actually, John-Paul never had nightmares when he was a little boy,’ his mother had told Cecilia when she’d asked. ‘He was a
beautiful
sleeper. Perhaps you give him too much rich food late at night?’ Cecilia had got used to the nightmares now.

The attic was small and crammed, but tidy and well organised, of course. Over recent years, ‘organised’ seemed to have become her most defining characteristic. It was like she was a minor celebrity with this one claim to fame. It was funny how once it became a thing her family and friends commented on and teased her about, then it seemed to perpetuate itself, so that her life was now
extraordinarily
well organised, as if motherhood was a sport and she was a top athlete. It was like she was thinking,
How far can I go with this? How much more can I fit in my life without losing control?

And that was why other people, like her sister Bridget, had rooms full of dusty junk, whereas Cecilia’s attic was stacked with clearly labelled white plastic storage containers. The only part that didn’t look quite ‘Cecilia-ish’ was the tower of shoeboxes in the corner. They were John-Paul’s. He liked to keep each financial year’s receipts in a different shoebox. It was something he’d been doing for years, before he met Cecilia. He was proud of his shoeboxes, so she managed to restrain herself from telling him that a filing cabinet would be a far more effective use of space.

Thanks to her labelled storage containers, she found her piece of the Berlin Wall almost straightaway. She peeled off the lid of the container marked
Cecilia: Travel/Souvenirs.
1985–1990 and there it was in its faded brown paper bag. Her little piece of history. She took out the piece of rock (cement?) and held it in her palm. It was even smaller than she remembered. It didn’t look especially impressive, but hopefully it would be enough for the reward of one of Esther’s rare, lopsided little smiles. You had to work hard for a smile from Esther.