Trust (20 page)

‘I could ask
Dad
to do it, for once,’ said Stella-Jean. There was a testing pause. ‘He never does any of the driving-us-around stuff.’

‘Your father’s very busy, you know that,’ Susanna said. ‘He’s got this New York trip in a couple of weeks, he’s trying to get ahead of things before he goes.
And
he’s working on plans for here, too.’

Stella-Jean snorted eloquently. ‘That’ll be the day!’ she muttered.

‘No, I think this time he really is going to make it happen.’ The ironic thing was, Susanna privately wished Gerry
wasn’t
so determined that this was the year for their big home renovation. A whole second storey, and the entire ground floor completely revamped. A showpiece! He’d declared he’d take out a mortgage to pay for it, if he had to, at the same time assuring her that Visser Kanaley was doing fine and a mortgage wouldn’t be necessary. All Susanna could think was,
more disruption
.

Stella-Jean lifted a corner of the blind and cast a look at the searing day outside. ‘First day back at school on Tuesday,’ she griped. ‘Why do they always start school again in the middle of a heatwave? Like,
every
year. And Dad reckons this is the worst heatwave
ever
, like, on record. Did you know that?’

‘Yes, I know.’ said Susanna. It was so hot she’d even relaxed her principles on running the air conditioner, even at night, although she continued to feel guilty about it. ‘It’s tinder-dry all over the state, it’s very worrying.’

‘Yeah, so – can you give me a lift over to Tessa’s now?’ asked her daughter hopefully. ‘So I don’t, like, melt into a puddle?’

Susanna agreed; what was a little more procrastinating, when her alleged work was already so far behind?

When she’d returned to the quiet and cool of the house, Susanna looked at her drawings.
Maybe I should give up on figures? Maybe I should concentrate on still lifes?
She wandered disconsolately from room to room, looking for subjects. Those ripe red tomatoes in their deep blue bowl? The pale yellow soap sitting slimily on its metal dish? Gouaches, perhaps, would suit those colours … But it all seemed so banal; nothing raised even a flicker of excitement. She turned on the computer and spent an hour flicking through the websites her students had introduced her to, checking out the latest work and admiring the insouciant disregard for boundaries of form and media.
I wish I was an art student now, it would be so much fun.
But here she was, bound by her own tedious limitations, without even a model to draw.

Tired of berating herself, she went into her bedroom to lie down. She decided she’d be cooler naked, and as she pulled the cotton dress off over her head and dropped it to the floor, her eye fell on the reflection in the long mirror on the far side of the room. She kept watching the woman she saw there as she unhooked her bra and stepped out of her underpants.
I could draw her. Look at all that flesh!

Observing her own familiar body so objectively, drawing it, she no longer felt disheartened by the rolls of flesh around her middle, the dimpled thighs, the sagging of breast and jawline. Rather, she felt grateful that this generously built, accommodating model was prepared to move in any way the artist wanted, assume a pose for as long as required, wait patiently while she shaded or erased or simply gazed consideringly.
As long as I’m prepared to be here and work, she will be too. And this
is
work. My work, at last.

Several hours went quickly by, and at the end of that time Susanna had almost a dozen sketches, a few of which, she thought, had real potential. She smiled to herself.
Portrait of the artist as a middle-aged frump
. Not cutting edge, or even fashionable, but something.

A few days later Seb returned from the tennis camp, and he and Rory became engrossed in planning their study regime – at least, that’s what they claimed to be doing. Gerry showed off his raft of plans for the house. All their lives began to pick up pace after the somnolent summer break, though summer’s parching breath was unabating. On the last Friday of January, a slight cool change came through; Gerry and Seb, about to attend their much-anticipated weekend of the world’s best tennis at the Australian Open, were volubly relieved.

Susanna kept waiting for Gerry to make some comment on her frank self-portraits, which she left clipped to her easel on the far side of the room, where his clothes were kept. But despite the fact that he’d begun his usual meticulous packing, and his suitcase was on the floor right next to the easel with all his warmest winter clothes spread about, he’d said not a word. She felt pretty sure, though, that he’d flipped through them, at least once.

His silence made her yearn all the more – childishly, perhaps – for feedback.
Just another adult’s comments. They don’t have to be an expert, just interested.
That made her think of her mother. So, within minutes of Gerry and Seb heading off for the Rod Laver Arena on Saturday, she dialled Jean’s number, but was disappointed to only get the answering machine.

Just ten minutes later, while she was bucketing grey water in the back garden, Stella-Jean came out, holding out the phone.
Mum
, Susanna thought as she took it, but Stella-Jean said, ‘It’s Auntie Ange, they’re back,’ and she was mouthing Finn’s name and making gestures that said,
Tell her to come over.
Susanna asked her sister to come by, adding quickly but casually, ‘Gerry’s out for the day.’

‘Okay,’ said Angie happily.

Ten minutes after
that
call came another, and when Susanna heard her mother’s voice she felt slightly panicked. This was not the moment for Jean, who had not mentioned the Christmas fiasco since it happened, to meet Ange again. Even as she was trying to think of a reason why, having just left a message inviting her mother to visit, she must now put her off, Jean said apologetically that she couldn’t come over, as she and Leonard were just about to leave for a few days out of town. ‘We’re going to stay in a guesthouse up at Marysville. It’ll be so much cooler up there. I’m sorry darling, we only just decided.’

Susanna felt relieved, and then immediately ashamed of her cowardice, and wished things weren’t so darn complicated. Yet when Angie arrived, full of good spirits, her holiday tan set off by a lacy white shirt, Susanna felt only pleasure to see her again. As they sat talking at the kitchen table, it dawned on Susanna that her sister was inserting Gabriel’s name into almost every sentence.
She’s in love,
she realised, and her heart gave a little skip of gladness.
Angie with Gabriel, Mum with Leonard, Seb with Aurora …
The notion that every person she loved should themselves be loved was like a vision of heaven to her.

Finn, so tanned he appeared to have been rolling in dirt, had scampered off the moment he arrived to join Stella-Jean in the games room, and soon they both came barrelling back out to the kitchen. ‘Can I take Finn in to the city with me on the train? Just for, like, an hour,’ said Stella-Jean breathlessly. ‘I just got a call from the place that’s making my labels, they’re ready to be picked up!’

‘What labels?’ asked Susanna and Angie together.

‘Clothing labels. For my range.
Stella-Jean
,’ she said, tracing a short line with thumb and forefinger in the air. ‘I’m going to sew them into every single garment I make. Can Finn come?’ she asked, directly of Angie this time. ‘Two hours, max.’

Angie agreed and minutes later, the cousins were yelling ‘Bye!’ from the front door, and clattering off.

‘I think we’ve just witnessed the birth of an empire,’ Susanna said.

Angie agreed. ‘A Coco Chanel moment.’

Now.
Susanna stood up. ‘Come with me,’ she said, beckoning her sister down the hall. ‘There’s something I want to show you.’

Angie went through all the self-portraits, twice. Looking at the drawings with her, Susanna could see them afresh: their weaknesses, but also their strengths.
Not bad
.
Not bad at all
. But Angie’s praise seemed hesitant, uncertain.

‘What is it?’ Susanna asked. ‘There’s something you don’t like about them, isn’t there? It’s okay to tell me.’

‘It’s just that …’ Angie’s teeth caught at her bottom lip as she looked again at the topmost drawing: an unsmiling Susanna standing with one hand fisted on a hip, tummy pouching, cellulite dimpling her upper thighs. ‘Susu, you’ve made yourself look …’ But she couldn’t bring herself to say it.

‘Fat,’ Susanna said for her, and then went the step further. ‘Ugly?’

‘But you’re
not
!’ Angie cried. ‘I
love
the way you look, I think you’re beautiful!’

Susanna chuckled. ‘That’s so sweet of you,’ she said. ‘Bless your little cotton socks, Ange. But this
is
the way I look. I want to draw what I see. No: I want to see who I am.’

SEVENTEEN

Stella-Jean and Tessa were as noisy and gleeful as a pair of rainbow lorikeets when Susanna picked them up from the Sunday market. The owner of a boutique in Degraves Street had approached them, wanting to stock Tessa’s felt cuffs and Stella-Jean’s elaborate floral brooches. ‘We’re
made
,’ they crowed. ‘It’s the hippest location in the city!’ Susanna glanced in the rear-view mirror at the two jubilant girls, enjoying the endearing contrast between tall Tessa with her heavy-lidded goth elegance, and Stella-Jean like a little tan terrier, all yap and energy.

But once they’d dropped Tessa off at her place, she noticed that Stella-Jean, now in the front seat beside her, went quiet. ‘Is there something about the offer from this boutique you’re not happy with?’ Susanna asked tentatively.

Stella-Jean kept tapping her fingertips together. ‘It’s just that … Tess’s cuffs are brilliant: really clever, really simple. We can make ten of them in, like, a couple of hours. But my brooches take
days
. They stop the traffic all right, but my return on them is just …’ She blew out noisily through her lips, like a pony.

‘But won’t you be able to sell them for more, in a boutique like that?’

‘I
wish
! No offence, Mum, but you really haven’t got a clue about retail, have you?’ She shook her head at her mother’s naivete. ‘They’ll
sell
for twice as much, but we won’t
make
any more. The shop’s gotta put on their mark-up.’

‘I see.’ Pausing at an intersection, Susanna cast a glance at her daughter, who sat now flicking her thumbnail back and forth against her front teeth, narrow-eyed, cooking up some scheme. There was a contradiction, Susanna mused, between how her daughter looked, rounded and soft-haired as a kewpie doll, and her personality: direct as an arrow from the bow.
Stella-Jean
: she’d stayed up last night till who knows how late, sewing those new labels into all her garments. They would be in the outfit she was wearing now: one of the ‘headlights’ singlets that had been her best seller of the summer – this one’s panel splashed with ric-rac braid and a scattering of cute buttons – and an elastic-waisted flippy rayon skirt.

‘What are you thinking about?’ Susanna asked.

Hitching one leg up onto the seat, Stella-Jean shifted around to face her. ‘I’m thinking, if I got a half-a-dozen Knitting Nancys and maybe twenty of the
big
spools of ribbon in different colours, and took them over to Bali with a couple of samples, the girls who work for Putu could be whipping up those brooches in no time.’

Susanna looked at her, mouth agape, then back toward the road. ‘You have got to be kidding me,’ she managed.

‘No,’ said Stella-Jean. ‘Why would I be? I’m not asking you and Dad to pay, I’ve got the money. I can go by myself, it’s not like I’m going somewhere
foreign
.’

‘Okay, that’s it,’ said Susanna grimly, and pulled over. They faced each other. ‘Stella-Jean, you are
not
going to Bali on your own. It
is
a foreign country, no matter how familiar you feel you are with it, and you are fifteen years old.’

‘Nearly sixteen,’ her daughter muttered.

Susanna held up one hand. ‘Enough. Apart from the …
absurdity
of the idea, has it slipped your mind that you started back at school a few days ago?
I
may have a couple of weeks more holiday before college resumes, but you, my girl, are now in Year Ten and you are going to focus on your schoolwork.’

‘Oh, Mum, we’re not doing any
serious
classes yet. I’d just be gone, like, a few days! And I’d take some other samples too, like this skirt for instance.’ She plucked at her bright rayon hem. ‘The whole trip would pay for itself in no time.’

‘Stella-Jean, are you
deaf
? I am saying
no
. En–oh. No!’

Her daughter harrumphed, slumping into her seat and folding her arms crossly. Susanna put on her blinker and rejoined the stream of traffic.

‘Well anyway, there’s something else I wanted to talk to you about,’ said Stella-Jean after a couple of minutes. ‘A family thing. And it’s really important.’

Susanna slid her a sideways look. ‘Go on.’

‘Yesterday with Finn … Mum, I know you and Dad think his manners have improved and Gabriel’s been a good influence and everything, but I’m
really
worried.’

‘Why?’ asked Susanna, deciding to give her the benefit of the doubt. ‘What is it, exactly, that’s making you feel worried?’

‘Haven’t you noticed how Finn’s got this kind of …
hunted
look?’

Susanna hadn’t. ‘Honey, they’ve been away for a month. He’s probably just unsettled.’

‘But this was before they went away, too. And it’s worse now. And also, it’s the way he’s clammed up. With
me
! It’s like he’s scared to talk.’

‘He’s always been a bit like that. He’s just not the world’s most communicative child.’

Stella-Jean made an impatient noise, but pressed on. ‘And, Mum, when we were on the train, I was mucking round with him and I went like this —’ she demonstrated an arm raised as though to deliver a smack ‘— just kidding, you know, and he ducked. Not just ducked, he went all white around his mouth. He was really
scared
.’