Authors: Tim Winton
Georgie stepped up and kissed his hoary cheek.
One day, she said, you’ll have to tell me the story of your life.
Well, gimme time to go over me notes.
On her way upstairs Georgie saw Jim’s Cruiser parked in the bright-lit garage and she flipped the light switch off as she went. Jim sat in front of the flickering television with the newspaper and a weather fax in his lap. His face looked blue—you couldn’t tell if it was the TV or exhaustion. Despite all the open windows the house smelled of eggs and bacon. The sea shimmered with moonlight.
Sit down, Georgie.
I’ll stand.
In truth she felt weak enough to lie down right here and sleep.
Sit.
I’ll never forgive you for it, she murmured.
Well, I won’t be hangin out for your forgiveness.
I want you to call it off. Let him be.
I already have, he said.
How did you know?
Know what?
About me and Lu Fox.
Well. Jim folded the papers on his knee and threw them to the floor. It was hearsay until tonight.
And who told you tonight?
You did.
As Jim got up she felt herself backing toward the kitchen. He passed her on his way to the office.
Call your sister.
Don’t worry, I’ll go.
Call Judith, he said over his shoulder. She’s been trying to get you all day. Your mother’s dead.
Georgie’s earliest childhood memory was a shopping expedition with her mother. Herself a toddler in a white nylon harness. The smells of roasting cashews, of doughnuts, cut flowers, steely tinsel. A baby in the pram at her heels. The memory was so crisp —she could see herself plunging at the end of her leash in Hay Street like a Jack Russell terrier surrounded by the retail cheer of Christmas in the city. Both the image of her straining at her bonds and the nature of that expedition struck Georgie as prophetic; they summed up her character and her relationship with her mother.
She’d been a wilful little girl, and the older Georgie got, the more people said it. Wayward. If everyone wanted to go north Georgie Jutland went south. She was divergent as though by compulsion. At school she was regarded dubiously as “a bit of an individual”, the kind of phrase Australians still uttered with their mouths set in an uncertain shape, as though sensing something untoward. Nowadays Georgie wondered how self-conscious her maverick attitude had been. In class and in the quad she was recognized as a type and assigned a role that, instead of resisting, she’d embraced and embellished. Within the narrow confines of the prissy private school she became something of a tough nut. On the train in the mornings she knew she was just another princess from the lady-mill. But in her own circumscribed world she made people anxious. She considered herself popular and never understood until years later that girls and teachers disliked her. She read fear as respect. She didn’t see how lonely she was.
At home, however, she was under no such illusions. There it was clear. She was the odd one out. She loved her mother—Georgie supposed it should go without saying—but she said it to herself a lot because from an early age she realized that she would never please her. After a certain age she went out of her way to defy the old man—it was food and drink to her but disappointing her mother was a source of ongoing misery to Georgie.
She was the eldest of four sisters. Georgie, Ann, Judith and Margaret—the Jutland girls. She had felt loved in her way but it puzzled her to see the immense satisfaction her sisters gave her mother as they grew from infancy into girlhood. Their sheer ability to please was unnerving. Their very teeth and hair caused their mother happiness. The enthusiasm with which they wore their frocks and pinnies and their hunger to wear her clothes and paste on her cosmetics made her queasy. They were ladies in the making. Gels. Georgie’s tomboy streak was instinctive and unconscious but by the age of ten her resistance to girlydom had a bitterness to it. She began to dig her heels in. Besides grooming and deportment, her mother’s only passion was shopping. It was the shopping that finally cut Georgie off from the other Jutland women. Somehow it drew her sisters together and it kept them close to their mother. Twice a week the four of them laid siege to the boutiques.
Every few years, out of a grimacing loyalty she made herself go with them, but these interminable outings were indistinguishable from the excursions of girlhood when she’d tramped heavy-lidded behind her mother and hung in doorways stifled by competing scents, bored beyond reason. The swirls of fabric, the clack of nails on registers, the racks and tags and bargains, all made her want to lie down and sleep. Her mother was hurt by her lack of excitement and, long ago, her sisters took Georgie’s refusal to shop as a rejection they found hard to forgive.
She left home early, bombed out of Medicine, trained as a nurse and remained a bad example the others were supposed to rise above.
Georgie was in Saudi Arabia when her father, Warwick Jutland QC, left their mother. So she wasn’t home for the tears and the confrontations, the handholding, and this too told against her.
Within a week of the divorce the old man married a woman only nine days older than Georgie. Cynthia—a nervous, decent woman with a beauty that must have reminded him of Georgie’s mother at the same age. She wondered what Cynthia saw in him. As a girl Georgie had adored him for his zest and his fun. They sailed together in river regattas and spoke as equals on the water. Yet one day she simply didn’t believe in him anymore. She’d thought that he enjoyed her company, that he liked her. But quite suddenly, there on the yacht club dock one Saturday evening with all those backslapping scions climbing up from their boats, she saw that she was a display, a piece of his success. The feisty sailing daughter destined to be the first woman doctor of the clan. She was a bit of spin, some shine on the Jutland ball. So she’d turned against him.
And now she was parked behind his Jag in Beaver’s ute on the glistening lawn, delaying the moment. Angled there beside the Saab and the two Beemers, the EH looked like a statement of the sort she might once have strained to make. She wished that she’d pulled in to the Fox place on her way.
The night was balmy. Before airconditioning, when she was a girl, you could have heard the river on a night like this and not simply smelt it.
Ann’s husband Derek opened the door with his sad family face on and Georgie heard herself sigh. Derek was tall and a little stooped and sincerity wasn’t his strong suit. In the river suburbs of Perth he was notorious as a bit of a pants man. Even had he not been a dermatologist, the word squamous might have come to mind. He greeted Georgie with an embrace of consolation from which he took more than he offered.
They’re out on the terrace, he said. Drink?
No. Yes. Vodka martini. She thought: My mother’s dead.
On the carpet in the livingroom was a long damp patch with an electric fan oscillating across it. It smelt of Pine-O-Cleen and very faintly, despite it all, of urine.
Cerebral haemorrhage, said Derek handing her a glass. Quick at least.
And how long was she there? she asked, realizing he’d put vermouth in with her vodka.
Twelve, eighteen hours.
God.
The pool man found her about lunchtime. Saw her through the french doors.
Where’s the body?
Gone.
Oh, she said strangely deflated.
We couldn’t get you. Jim said you were going through some kind— I would’ve liked to see her.
To dispute the diagnosis, no doubt, he said with a smirk.
She wanted to chuck her drink in his face.
It’s a human thing, Derek. You wouldn’t understand.
There’s a viewing tomorrow.
Sure.
Well. I’ll be out with the others.
Georgie stood thinking of her mother tottering around alone in her high heels in this big house. She felt guilty for not being here. Again. Letting it happen. Her lying there all night and half the day with no one but a stranger to find her.
Jude found her crying. She took the drink, hugged her, patted her back. You shouldn’t have favourites but Jude was the one. Georgie pressed her face into the soft bulk of her sister’s shoulder pad.
The linen jacket smelt of lavender, their mother’s smell.
How are you, sis?
Under-dressed, she said, noting that Jude was in Dior while she wore Cargo shorts. Where’s little Chloe?
We got a sitter. And she’s not so little. Ann’s kids are asleep upstairs.
How is she?
She’s okay. It’s Margaret who’s the mess.
Still the baby sister.
Christ, she was thirty-two last week.
Oops. I forgot her birthday. Gimme that drink back.
Well, a drink certainly cheers you up.
Got to set a bad example.
Oh, God, Georgie, Jude said crumpling. She’s really gone.
They stood clinched again for a while until her husband Bob came in and broke it up and steered them outside. Georgie watched how he moved Jude with a firm hand between the shoulderblades.
The yard was a series of terraces that descended toward the river. Lights in the trees looked weirdly festive. The pool was emerald. She thought: I grew up here.
Georgie? cried Ann, already peeved. What are you staring at?
The yard, she said. Seems bigger. I was here for Easter but I’d forgotten. How big it is.
You and your lapses of memory, said Ann. Come and meet Margie’s new bloke.
Georgie let herself be propelled from exchange to exchange. None of her sisters had much happiness from men. Ann seemed to endure Derek for the money, and Judith, who looked bombed on Valium again, was miserable with Bob but afraid to leave him for fear of somehow losing her daughter. Margaret’s ex was serving time for tax fraud. The youngest of them, Margaret specialized in a kind of petulant neediness that had served her well since infancy, but Georgie, who still remembered having to change her nappies, was finally inured to it. Her new squeeze wore a fez and satin slippers—what was he, an arts bureaucrat?
During every conversation Georgie was aware of Himself QC lurking by the pool, awaiting his sententious moment.
And the conversation—Jesus what was it? There was talk of the arrangements, but little about Vera Jutland. What can we say? thought Georgie. A compliant if distracted wife. A competent and distant mother. Feminine. Good skin, nice manners. Yet how did she distinguish herself? What stories could you tell? It was awful. Even so, it was worse, this suddenly not having her, much worse than not knowing how to be with her.
In the end the old man cornered her by the pool.
Georgiana.
Learned Counsel.
She pecked him on the bricklike cheek. Beneath the stink of his cigar you could smell Bulgari, Cynthia’s scent. He had his tartan socks on with the tux. He’d come from something else the moment he heard. Cynthia, out of deference to sensitivities, had stayed on.
Good God, he said. Look at the tan on you.
Life of the fishwife. Got a bit of colour there yourself, she said tilting her glass towards his florid complexion.
Ah. The Tipperary Tan, he said. Every drink you ever had decides to take up residence in your nose. Still, some of it’s probably sunburn. We take the boat out to Rottnest most weekends. You still get out?
Georgie shook her head. Think my sailing days might be behind me.
Turned forty, you know.
Yes, he said as though he remembered. I know. Shame your mother never liked it. Sailing, I mean.
Well.
But you were a demon for it. I’d love to see you back on the waten Christ, girl, you sailed to Indonesia.
That’s what cured me of it, she said with a hollow laugh.
But, still.
Georgie sensed it coming, his closing address on the subject of her mother. It hung there like a southerly on the horizon.
You look well enough, she said, stalling him.
Cynthia’s got me on a treadmill.
Then Cyn’s been good for you.
Sin? He looked horrified.
Georgie laughed. Look at you. Sin? Moi? I meant Cynthia, you drongo.
Oh.
Mum’s dead, Dad. You don’t have to say anything.
He smiled then, his face a picture of heroic indulgence. I understand.
Georgie sighed. There were actual tears on his cheeks now.
God, I can still see her at Freshwater Bay, 1957. Some university bash. Mauve cashmere sweater, hair flying. So fresh and beautiful. Could have been Audrey Hepburn.
Well you’ll have to console yourself with Kristin Scott Thomas.
Who?
I just don’t want to hear it again, Dad. Can’t you see?
I have my memories, too, you know. What are you doing?
Undressing, she said kicking off her shoes and shucking her shorts.
Jesus Christ Almighty! he bellowed as she got out of her smalls and her sleeveless top. Have you lost all decency?
Georgie fell into the pool and lay on the cool smooth bottom beyond the sound of his voice, all their voices.
Georgie was barely twenty-one, a trembling trainee, when she’d first handled a corpse. The charge nurse called her in and explained the administering of last offices, the tidying up of the deceased. Think of it, she said, as housekeeping. Georgie knew the patient, an old bloke called Ted Benson whom she’d nursed for weeks. His death was expected but Georgie was aghast all the same. She was required to bathe him and to plug his orifices and to bind his limbs before he went downstairs to the morgue. Soon after Georgie began the task, the charge nurse was called away and she was left alone with the body. The room felt awfully quiet and the corpse too big for the space. Already it was cool to the touch and she began sponging briskly as though the dome of the belly was a Volkswagen roof, but as she did so she remembered Ted’s uncomplaining presence on the ward, his soft voice, his 175 gentlemanly deference, and the memory shamed her a little and calmed her down. She began to pay a different attention to his remains. She rinsed his face and patted it dry as delicately as she had when he was alive. She found herself whispering to him soothingly as you do to a patient who’s submitting himself to your care. Georgie was no longer sorry to have the job; she was just sorry she’d been unable to save him. I liked you Ted, she said. I admired your dignity, you know. I miss you already. She wadded him, bound his ankles and jaw tenderly and knew when she was finished that she had found a pure part of herself. The room felt holy.