“Your sister is coming up from Sydney tomorrow.”
Katharine Close’s voice had a singsong matter-of-factness that suggested schoolteacher or marriage counsellor. In the early seventies, she had been a weather girl at a local television station—a shapely lodestone for the discussion of meteorological events in service station garages and on fairways. Katharine had just been offered the upward move to reading the six o’clock news when she fell pregnant with Nicholas. Motherhood then separation then widowhood conspired to pretty well put a bullet behind the ear of her fledgling television career. She raised her two children alone. When they were both old enough for school, she cleaned houses until she had squirreled away enough to buy herself a kiln and wheel. Then she sheeted up a small studio between the stumps under the house and taught herself the secrets of clay and flux and glaze. She paid for her habit by selling her pots and platters at farmers’ markets and teaching a handful of students when the mood took her. On the kitchen dresser, Nicholas saw berthed a small armada of perhaps twenty teapots.
Katharine handed him a steaming cup.
“Suzette’s coming up,” he said. “Why?”
“I have no idea. To see her brother?”
“I only just arrived.”
His mother tapped her spoon sharply on her cup. “Yes. Selfish bitch.”
They drank in silence awhile. Above the surf-like rataplan on the roof, Nicholas could hear the house ticking around them as it cooled. He felt his mother’s eyes crawling over his face.
“You look awful,” she said.
“Cheers, Mum.”
In his memories, his mother’s hair was perpetually chestnut, worn tight as a fiercely guarded nest. Now it was gray and loose.
He took a biscuit from a plate, scrutinized it, and put it back. Katharine tutted and whisked it up, then dunked it in her tea. It was a gesture Nicholas remembered from a frugal childhood—nothing wasted. Nothing, except time. Even after his father died, some two or three years after he left them, Nicholas never saw Katharine with another man.
“Seeing anyone?” he asked.
She scowled at him over the rim of her cup. “I see lots of people. None worth talking to.”
“Having a thing with the clay man? Dalliances with horny kiln repairmen?”
“No.”
“You’ll get a reputation.”
“As what? A cranky old dyke?”
Nicholas shrugged.
“Grand.”
They ate and drank in silence.
“You know they offered me five hundred thousand for the house?”
“Who?”
“People.” She waved the word away. “Not bad, though, for an old girl.”
“Not bad,” he agreed.
Rain gurgled in the downpipe outside, a visceral rush of cold water in dark places. He thought about mentioning the Carmichael Road woods, asking his mother how they could still be there, asking if she thought, too, that they lurked with the menace of a group of shadowed men on an otherwise empty street, men whose silhouettes were drawn taut with latent trouble. But he felt foolish trying to catch the words, and so let them swim away into the ocean-like patter outside.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t make Cate’s funeral.” Katharine said it boldly, but the silence that followed bled the words dry.
Nicholas ran his tongue around his teeth, as if hunting for a civil thing to say that might be caught there.
“No airline would have carried you, you were sick as a dog,” he said finally. “She liked you.”
Katharine smiled. It bloomed and died on her lips. “Poor man.”
He looked up. She was watching him carefully, wearing the same owlish look he knew from thirty years ago, when he was five and thinking of raiding the biscuit jar. A look that warned him against doing something he might regret.
“It was an accident, Cate’s death. You do know that, Nicky.”
Nicholas drained his tea, stood, and kissed the top of his mother’s head. She looked old.
“I’ll see you in the morning.”
K
atharine dried Nicholas’s teacup and put it quietly back on the shelf.
Well,
she thought,
the day has come. He’s here at last.
She flicked the kettle on and sat as it started to sigh.
It had been three weeks since Nicholas rang to say he was leaving England and coming home. Every day since, she’d wondered how she’d feel when he arrived. And every day she’d been forced to admit she was dreading his return. Then she saw him as he stepped from the car—a thin, long-legged man with a shock of dirty blond hair—and her heart had leapt like a pebble on water.
Donald!
Then she chastized herself. Donald had been dead thirty years. But, by God, Nicholas looked just like his father.
She’d watched him step through the shadows cast by the yellow streetlight, saw how unwell he looked. Like that painting by Sargent of Robert Louis Stevenson. Thin-limbed and long and pale. Harried into long strides by silent things in dark corners. Bright-eyed with something that could be fever or genius or madness. When the doorbell rang, she’d had to fight the temptation to turn off the lights, burrow into a corner, and pretend she wasn’t home. Why? Why did she want to avoid her own son?
Because he’s bad luck.
She’d fairly slapped herself for thinking that, and threw open the door and threw her arms around him before they’d both realized a nod and a kiss would do.
The electric kettle rumbled discontentedly and switched itself off. Katharine popped a teabag into her cup and drowned it in scalding water.
Bad luck.
Just like Donald.
She snorted, angry with herself, and sat.
Nonsense. She was unsettled because her boy was coming home after such a long time, and he’d want to be part of a life that she’d made very comfortable without him. Suzette in Sydney, Nicholas in London, a phone call each week, and that was fine. Her life was hers, and her children were loved well from a distance. A visit every six months from Suze and the kids. A flight to London every second year to see Nicky and Cate …
Ah.
Katharine sipped her tea. Cate was dead, and Nicky was home.
She’d almost wanted to see him burst into tears at the sight of his mother. It would have meant he wasn’t coping. She’d coped, when Donald left, and later when he died. She’d had to. She had two kids to raise. If Nicky had cried tonight, well, that would have proved something, wouldn’t it?
He looked so ill. Had she been drawn that thin when she made Donald leave? No: she’d known it was a war then, a war against time and the world, a war to be fought and won; and in war one ate what and when one could. She’d kept her strength. It was Donald who’d faded. Donald who’d grown thin and haunted …
She shrugged off the thought. Past. All in the past.
She took one more sip then poured the rest down the sink. Her boy was home, and he needed looking after. It had been a long time, but she’d at least
try
to be a mother again.
I
don’t see why he can’t come here.”
Suzette ignored Bryan. She was up to her arse in the spare-room closet looking for her second hairdryer, the small one.
“I mean, honestly, it’s just him, right? Couple of days with your mum, then he can fly down here—”
“Bryan,” called Suzette in a sweet voice. “Come here a minute, darling.”
There was a moment’s silence—long enough for Suzette to imagine Bryan realizing he’d really pissed off his wife. Then she heard reluctant footsteps in the room behind her. Aha! There was the dryer, in the Country Road bag. She wiggled out of the closet and turned to face Bryan.
“What?” he asked in a quiet tone that suggested he knew very well what.
“Are you going to keep harping on about this?”
She realized she was holding the hairdryer like a pistol, and so started rewinding the cord. She wasn’t really angry with Bryan; he was a good bloke. A funny bloke. A fabulous father. And it was always his business that played second fiddle when things needed to be done. He was a hydrology consultant and a reasonably successful one, but it was Suzette’s business that brought in the big bucks that allowed them to live in this beautifully renovated stable so close to the center of Sydney. Once again, she would fly out of town, and Bryan would have to put his appointments on hold to look after the kids. Normally, he was so easygoing she wondered if he’d taken up smoking pot. But he had a real bee in his bonnet about this trip.
“I’m not harping. I just don’t see why your brother can’t spend a couple of days with your mum, then fly down here. I mean, it’s not like he has any ties or anything—”
“Now his wife’s dead?” asked Suzette.
“You know that’s not what I mean,” said Bryan. “Forget it. Forget it …”
“No. What do you mean?” She could hear the curtness in her voice, and it reminded her of her mother. Now
that
was depressing.
Bryan sighed and put his big hands in his pockets.
“Why have you got to go straightaway? He’s hardly back in the country. And I really don’t see why he can’t come here. I mean, we flew all the way to bloody England for his wedding—”
“He did pay for our hotel.”
“—and he’s back for … I don’t know, for good, I guess. So …” Bryan shrugged. “Why have you got to leave us?”
Suzette looked at him. He was like a panda bear, and she felt a sudden wave of love for him. She put her hands around his waist and kissed the spot on his chest just below his neck.
“I’m going
because
he’s come back,” she explained. “Mum’s not going to be much of a comfort, they’re like dogs and cats those two.”
“I like your mum.”
“Well, you’re a member of an elite minority. Nicholas …”
Suzette pulled away from her husband and looked up into his glum, handsome face.
“I just think Nicholas is going to need a bit of an eye on him. Just for a couple of days.”
Bryan took in a long, slow breath, then nodded.
“Quincy’s going to miss you. You were going to make apple pancakes Sunday.”
“You can make them.”
“I really can’t.”
They smiled at each other.
“You’ll be fine,” said Suzette. She paddled his bum with the dryer. “Now, go get me the blue suitcase.”
T
he rain on the roof grew louder until it was as steady and manic as applause at a rock concert.
Nicholas lay staring at the ceiling boards. This had been Suzette’s bedroom—lying in his own old room would have made the image of a failed artist too complete.
His mother was wrong.
No one
had regarded Cate’s death as an accident. Certainly, Cate’s brother, her parents, her friends, their mutual friends, even his own London friends, had all said the word “accident” aloud, but the silences that followed debased its currency. An undertow of quiet blame dragged the time along whenever he met his in-laws. They
knew
he could have taken the car, if only he’d bothered to speak with the neighbor. They
knew
he’d already come off his bike once in the rain, on a roundabout in Wembley. They knew that
he
knew Cate would be up the ladder when he telephoned. Their daughter’s death may have been an accident, but it had been an avoidable one. Cate’s had been a cruelly swift ending, and the blame for it would roost forever darkly on Nicholas’s shoulders.
The Nicholas Close “Welcome to Widowerhood” freeze-out had been choreographed with a subtlety that was a credit to London society. It began with a dwindling of phone calls, ratcheted to a sharp decline in dinner invitations, and climaxed complete as a solid, glacial wall of quiet.
Nicholas had tried to keep working. But it was hard to be productive and persuasive when one kept seeing things that, logically, shouldn’t be there.
The motorcycle accident had left him almost unscratched but not without injury. After the crash, headaches came as unbidden and unwelcome as evening crows. After hitting the car and sailing through brisk London air, the bolt-of-pain landing had rammed his teeth together (slicing out a nice chunk of inside cheek) and jarred his brain like stewed tomatoes in a can thrown against a brick wall. His growing panic about Cate not answering the phone shoved the bright headache to the wings, and later the hollow business of the funeral preparations kept the nagging pain in the background. But as sad days spun out to sad weeks, the headaches made permanent nests in the dark eaves of his skull.
The decision to sell the Ealing flat was the only easy one he took. He listed it with a tall and jolly estate agent, found a room to rent in nearby Greenford, and began excising his life from the rooms he’d planned to share for years with Cate.
The one mercy was that Cate’s brother and his girlfriend had volunteered to box up Cate’s and Nicholas’s belongings. Nicholas knew this wasn’t to spare him more grief, but rather so that almost everything of Cate’s could be taken back to the family home in Winchmore Hill without the need for a scene. He didn’t argue. The idea of packing makeup brushes that would never again touch Cate’s skin and dresses he would never again pull from her shoulders had been filling his chest with a cold and stultifying mud, so he was grateful to find the small hillock of boxes marked “N” packed in the front hallway.
He’d been carrying a last and cumbersome pile of boxes, topped with a framed photograph of him and Cate on their honeymoon in the Orkneys, down the front outside stairs when he stepped on a discarded plastic grocery bag. His feet snapped out from under him. He felt a brief and quite lovely sensation of weightlessness before the concrete steps hit him brutally hard in the small of his back and the rear of his skull. The world skipped forward a few seconds—moments lost in an inverted lightning flash of darkness.
When his eyes fluttered open, his headache was gone.
True, it had been supplanted by a severe slug of hurt between his hipbones and a burning gravel-rash throb on his scalp, but the black worms inside his skull had suddenly been exorcised. He lay motionless staring at the slate sky, enjoying the sensation of feeling—at least for a moment—that pain for once was all on the outside. The sky was as gray as an old headstone, and a small flock of starlings hurried across it.