Brothers and Sisters (13 page)

Wendy looked out at the sea, and at the great walls of limestone shearing up on either side of the little bay. There would be a private small space out there, between the rocks, for a person’s ashes. If she was even going to do anything with them. She didn’t yet know. The force that had thrust the little tub into her bag was not reason but some quick flare of fear. She had never travelled abroad without Jim. She could not leave him behind.

Eventually, the waiter standing by, Ruth stabbed a finger at a picture. ‘
That
.’

Wendy and Leonie each ordered a salad of feta and tomatoes and oil-soaked toasted bread and chopped olives, and glasses of beer.

As she looked out at the gritty beach, an image formed in Wendy’s mind, of herself crouched by a rock pool after dark, after the wedding, when others were dancing. But Jim had never even been to the Greek islands, let alone with her. It would be strange, and wrong, surely, to leave even a tiny bit of him mixed here in the sand.

‘
Efkharisto
,’ Wendy murmured to the waiter as he set down their glasses, while the others said
thanks.

As he walked away, Ruth, her plump arms folded, looked at Wendy with open dislike. ‘What did you say to that fella?’

‘I said thank you.’

Ruth raised her eyebrows and drew her mouth into a long pout to show that Wendy was being pretentious. Leonie sat back with a half-smile, watching them both. Ruth shook her head and said to Wendy, ‘You’re a mystery to me, you really are.’

Leonie spoke at last. ‘So, how’s the house, Aunty Wendy? Your room sounds gorgeous.’

Wendy felt her cheeks grow hot at the accusation.

Ruth’s chef’s salad came; a small plateful of waxy yellow cheese cubes, chopped green lettuce with no dressing and half a dozen squares of cubed ham from a tin. Ruth tucked in cheerfully.

It was too late now to insist about the room, Wendy supposed. Should she insist? Change the sheets and just move Ruth’s things in there? But this would be accepting Ruth’s way of never saying what she wanted, of always stepping back with lips pressed together, arms folded, and then complaining about being made to wait. It angered Wendy to think of bowing to it.

‘Derek is nice,’ she said, to change the subject.

Leonie groaned. ‘Bloody Derek.’

Ruth said, through a mouthful of ham, ‘He nearly killed us!’

Leonie groaned again, leaning forward to lay her head melodramatically on her outstretched forearms on the table, then sat up. ‘He’s Jeremy’s old friend from uni. He’s lived here for years. He’s a pain in the arse—sorry, Wendy—but he’s sort of useful.’ She sipped her beer.

She gazed thoughtfully out across the water, with her chin in her hand, and then said, ‘Derek’s alright. He’s just sort of . . . depressing.’

Wendy felt a surprised stab of pity, and solidarity, for Derek.

The day before the wedding, while they slept after lunch, there was a knock at the door. Wendy groped her way down the dark stairs and padded across the flagstones. When she opened the door, Leonie strode in with another woman, and called up the stairs to her mother as she went to the fridge and pulled out a jug of iced water.

The other woman’s name was Lucy. She had thick bushy hair and a loud sharp voice, and wore bangles that clacked up and down her arms when she moved. Lucy was her make-up artist friend from London, Leonie told Wendy, and she had offered to
do them
all for the wedding.

Ruth, clambering down the stairs, was already calling, ‘Oooh, lovely.’

Wendy had never really worn make-up, except the occasional smudge of lipstick and some rouge, as they used to call it. When she was younger she scorned make-up; it was a thing suburban women like her sister were interested in. But also, more secretly, Wendy had found that any make-up other than lipstick—the other things: foundation, and mascara, and eye shadow—made her look strangely like a dressed-up man. So now while the other women discussed make-up Wendy laughed lightly and waved her hand
no thank you,
as she refilled the water jug and returned it to the fridge.

The woman Lucy met her eye across the room, and shrugged and said, ‘Well, if you change your mind.’

Then Ruth’s son Paul came striding in, carrying a heavy-looking cardboard box. Wendy had not seen him for eighteen months, and he looked even taller, and now tanned and more masculine. He was forty-three now, and married with two children, but Wendy still thought of him as a wastrel university student, full of potential and wit and unbloomed talent.

She hurried around the table towards him, calling his name. He grinned and said, ‘G’day, Wendy,’ and leaned his head down sideways for a kiss, before kneeling at the fridge to put the box down. When he set it down, he didn’t then get up to greet Wendy properly, but began tearing open the cardboard box and stacking bottles into their fridge, carrying on a conversation with his sister and mother that seemed to have been started without Wendy.

It had been decided that tomorrow Wendy and Ruth’s house would be ‘the girls’ house’; that there would be a champagne breakfast, with Lucy and her cosmetics set up on the terrace, where any of the women guests could come and have their make-up done in the hours before the wedding.

The house was to be overrun. Nobody had asked Wendy’s opinion about this, although her money was paying half of the rent. As she stood in the room and listened to them all talking, it galled her to think that since Jim died she was no longer a person to be consulted.

She didn’t say anything. She knew it would be ridiculous to complain. It was a wedding.
Ruth’s
daughter’s wedding. She was lucky to be here at all.

She left Leonie and Paul and the friend and Ruth, and went out walking.

The steep streets of the town were populated by hundreds of slender, pretty cats. They crept along balconies and strolled the shadeless stone stairs. They swarmed around the orange plastic bags of garbage that appeared on odd days at selected laneway corners.

Wendy had been told by one of Leonie’s friends that a man with a donkey came clopping down the stairs to collect the rubbish, but in three days she had not seen or heard any donkey, though the rubbish disappeared every day or so somehow. She heard the little motorbikes, bumping noisily up and down, their sound coiling off into the distance. And yesterday she heard the sonorous, yearning prayer-song of a priest in the church far above them. There was a clock somewhere that struck bells on every hour. But no donkey.

In a small shop of antiquities and folk art, looking for a wedding present for Leonie and Jeremy, Wendy bought a small beaded handbag. She had not thought before, but she would need something to take to the wedding that was not her workaday leather handbag. This one was small enough to be elegant, but large enough for tissues, lip balm, keys and money. And for the little container, she thought. In case. Why had she brought the ashes, otherwise?

She had begun to feel a secretive, low-level anxiety about the container, as if she were carrying some prohibited substance with her through the holiday. Above all she did not want Ruth to see the ashes when she came bustling into Wendy’s room, as she would, to rummage through her suitcase to borrow a scarf or a pair of earrings. For since Wendy had accepted the best room it was clear, though unspoken, that Ruth must have anything she pleased for the remainder of the holiday, including choosing for herself the earrings Wendy had planned to wear to the wedding. To keep the little Tupperware tub from Ruth’s appalled discovery Wendy hid it at the back of her bedside table, slipping it inside a shopping bag beneath some holiday brochures.

As she wandered around the shop, Wendy came across a display case of small beaten-metal votives. The proprietor told her in his beautiful English that these were called
tamata
in plural,
tama
in the singular. They mostly depicted a part of the body that was ailing, he explained, and a person would make the
tama
and take it to the church as an offering, a symbol of what the prayers were needed to mend.

There was an ear, two separate hands, a heart, a baby, a foot, and a shoulder. Wendy chose the heart. It was made of fine, pretty silver. Leonie would put it on a shelf and think it exotically decorative and romantic. Origins did not matter to people like Leonie and Ruth, who had mass-produced cement Buddhas and ‘Moroccan’ lanterns from Ikea around their swimming pools.

Ruth liked things that were
cute
: a dish-scrubber that looked like a giraffe, a knife-block in the shape of a man being stabbed. Wendy knew her private derision of Ruth’s taste was snobbery. But she couldn’t help it. Whenever Ruth showed her some decorated household object—washing-up gloves with fur cuffs and a diamond ring, or a leopard-print doormat, or a chicken-shaped egg-timer—and said gleefully, ‘Isn’t it fun!’, Wendy wanted to shout at her that they were not children
.
Why must everything be entertainment?

Standing in the shop with the little beaten heart in her hand Wendy tried to remember if she had always been this ill-tempered with Ruth, or if it was only since Jim died that she had said goodbye to the possibility of trivial, empty pleasures.

She paid for the little heart, and the man wrapped it in soft green tissue paper. It was a good present; pretty and romantic and Greek. And Leonie would never know that the
tama
had been made because someone once thought their heart might be broken.

On the morning of the wedding Ruth’s mobile rang time and time again. In the late morning, women began to appear at their house with their hair held in outlandish shapes by large rollers, giggling and hooting, disappeared again, then reappeared holding an electrical extension cord or a pair of hair tongs, or a paper bag full of pastries.

Still others came and went with armfuls of olive branches and red bougainvillea, to be dumped for a time in Ruth and Wendy’s bath, and then taken away again. Jeremy showed up briefly, cleanshaven and smelling lovely, and kissed Ruth and Wendy before he left, calling,
See you when I’m a married man!

There was an air of holiday excitement. The house and the terrace echoed with high voices and light laughter, and the smell of coffee and the popping of champagne corks. Wendy stood on her bedroom balcony and looked down at the throng of women seated around the terrace.

Lucy, her long hair loose and her bangles shoved high on her forearms, sat on a stool in jeans with her legs wide to accommodate the knees of another woman perched on another stool before her. The woman chatted and laughed as Lucy smoothed her fingers upwards over her cheeks, or told her to look up while she painted her lashes.

Other women were arranged about the terrace, some standing, some lounging in chairs. They held champagne flutes aloft, and munched on pastries held away from their bodies so as not to catch any sticky flakes. Some were half-dressed in slips and jeans, while others wore glamorous frocks that sparkled, and shiny jewelled sandals.

They were beautiful. They shone. They had an ease with sensual pleasure—an unquestioning, guiltless talent for it—that women of Wendy’s generation lacked. Women of her age had either spurned this preening as vanity, or else borne the effort of grooming as something dutiful, hard-edged. But these women were different. Physical delight came to them as naturally as breathing.

Wendy stepped back into her room and saw her face in the mirror: dried-out, colourless, pinched.

She sat on the bed for a minute. Then she went down the stairs and out onto the terrace. Some of the women called happy greetings to her as she sidled across the paving stones to Lucy.

‘Of course, Wendy,’ Lucy said. She looked at her watch. ‘Get dressed; I’ll do you after Ali, and then I’ll have to get out and get the bride done.’

Someone handed Wendy a glass of sparkling wine, and she sipped it, and took it up to her room. She felt some flush of freshness tingling over her. She was beginning to enjoy the girlishness of this occasion without, for once, feeling foolish and fraudulent.