There followed a happy time of croquet and boating expeditions; then Alice went through her suffragette period, of which I pretended to disapprove. Things are more settled now. We read Darwin together, without telling her parents, and she’s discovered Marx. We take walks in the country, where my naturalist wife sends me scrambling into trees for birds’ nests. Things aren’t what they used to be, but there are consolations: a certain elegance to the way she stands at open windows, and longer, darker nights now that the town has switched from electricity to gas. But I’ve noticed in her lately a strange inability to see the resemblances between things: a tennis ball (she plays modestly, in white dresses) is nothing like the sun; a glass of water, she says, has no relation to the ocean; she scowls if I comment on the similarity between her neck and a swan’s. In fact she dislikes the similarity of things even without recognising their likeness, and can’t bear, for example, to see a brown short-haired dog on brown short-haired grass. The rest of the town is like this too. They have a horror of seeing photographs of themselves, even the hoary daguerreotypes they love so much. They’ve removed all the mirrors from their houses, and the paintings of jaded horses on hillsides, and the china that depicts, in blue and white, the far-flung tale of luckless lovers. It’s as if they’re allergic to the very idea of reproduction; or, at the very least, don’t wish to be reminded of it. What a singular world they live in, in which no thing has any relation to another! They no longer mention the movie. They no longer watch movies. They’ve taken up laudanum. They expect to live forever. They seem happy, however — timeless and happy. I watch them all, a little wistfully, in my fraudulent frockcoat. Meanwhile, the trees shake out their leaves in the wind, and in the evenings my wife walks through the spent garden. Her face is like a flag that says Surrender.
Cara Mia
Cara’s mother was at her best on Saturday nights. On Saturday nights she lit long white strings of Christmas lights and little candles in tins. She took the rubber bands off the wind chimes, which otherwise kept her awake at night, and hung paper lanterns from the clothesline. The back screen door opened and shut as the children ran in and out of the garden, to see the lanterns and bat at the wind chimes; the door snapped and thundered and let in gusts of mosquitoes until Cara told them to stop it, and Cara was the eldest, so they did. But their mother, Rachel, didn’t care how much noise they made, because it was Saturday night. She was black-haired and red-mouthed, she wore a sharp scent and a floating white dress, and now she produced her purse from somewhere (she always hid her purse, with so many children and so many boyfriends, though for the moment there was only one boyfriend, only Adam). She sent Adam out for fish and chips. Now that he lived with them, he could be sent on errands. Cassidy went with him, because Cass was the oldest boy.
Cara set the long dining table while they were gone. First she bundled away last week’s dirty tablecloth. The younger children bumped and ran and offered their help, and Cara had to calm them — she let them straighten the new tablecloth, carry knives and forks, salt and pepper, and, in a confident mood, the cool pink bottles of sweet chilli sauce. But only Cara was allowed to open the cabinet in the corner and choose the platters for the middle of the table, the special glasses in blue and green and purple, and the vases in milky silver. The children trailed Cara into the garden and watched as she cut flowers (she had little shining scissors expressly for this task, they used to be her grandmother’s, and they hung in the kitchen from a piece of velvet ribbon); depending on the season, she cut freesias or ferns or squat yellow daisies, swags of Christmas bush or oleander, and whatever she chose Rachel accepted and turned into bouquets, perfect, without even trying.
The guests began to arrive: friends of Adam’s, friends of Rachel’s, people Rachel worked with and people Cara had never heard of before, not always young and pretty but always with some distinguishing feature — an electric-blue hat, a foreign accent, a vast cosy beard — and they brought bottles of wine or beer and sometimes sweet-smelling dishes covered with tea towels, and baskets of bread. The children were introduced: Cara, Wallis, Marcus, Elsa; Cassidy is out with Adam getting dinner, said Rachel, don’t worry about remembering their names, nobody does. The younger children looked at their mother, anxious. They were shy for a minute and wanted jobs to do.
Cara turned ice cubes out into glasses. She found bags of nuts in the cupboards and poured them into smooth wooden bowls; the kids could pass them around. Elsa was naked and it didn’t matter. Marcus had unearthed two old Christmas crackers; they snapped, people shouted and laughed, Marcus and Wally wore tissue-paper crowns for the rest of the night. Cass and Adam returned, laughing in the steam of their hot parcels, Cass self-important because he had been allowed to burrow into his for salty chips on the way home. Into the dishes on the table: piles of battered fish, potato scallops, chips, and lemons cut in wedges. Coleslaw out of a plastic container. Then the long meal, the arms crowded onto the table, everybody swinging plates and lifting drinks, using their fingers, kicking each other without meaning to. Apologies, jokes, music to which no one listened. Elsa spilled her drink; Cara mopped it. Cara found more lemons. Stains bloomed on the white tablecloth, the ice all melted. Send Adam for more! Adam went for more ice; Cara offered to go with him. Out into the dark streets, the running traffic, people walking to the pubs or walking their dogs or walking arm in arm and who knows where. The service station was only two streets away, and Adam smoked as he walked; he said very little, sang one time, turned his head from Cara to blow smoke. Cara hung back as he bought the ice. She watched as girls came into the service station swinging the keys to their little cars; she watched as they spotted Adam, looked again — some of them knew him and approached with cries and squeezes. Sometimes he would introduce her as ‘my Cara mia’, and these girls would smile and squeeze her too. Once, some girls from Cara’s school were there; they asked who he was and Cara said, ‘He’s Mum’s boyfriend,’ but she would have preferred to say ‘I’m his Cara mia.’ And the girls from school gaped and said, ‘I thought he might be your brother,’ which was a compliment, because he was so good-looking, but it also meant he was too young to be any mother’s boyfriend. The best part was coming home: the house lit up behind the trees, all the windows wide, and everyone inside quiet for a moment as the man with the beard told a story or the woman with the accent sang a song; then, just as Cara and Adam passed through the front gate, all the voices started up, sometimes applause or laughter, and the people walking on the street would see and hear and wish they could go into the house and be welcomed there; and Cara could.
With the help of the children, Cara carried the dishes to the kitchen. The greasy fishy paper curled in fantastic shapes on the floor beside the rubbish bin and flower cuttings littered the table. Cara washed and Cass dried. The other children wandered in and out — into the lounge room, where the adults drank and talked, and Rachel leaned into Adam on the couch; into the kitchen, where Cara clattered in the sink, where Cass might snap them with a tea towel; out into the garden, where the snails crawled on silver paths, until Cara told them again to stop banging the door. The adults made drowsy, wistful talk. Rachel lifted her arms to push the hair out of her face and her children heard the jangle of gold bracelets. The younger ones tiptoed in and volunteered for goodnight kisses, which they received from Adam and the woman in the electric-blue hat — Rachel blew kisses from the palm of her hand. Cara made the children brush their teeth before bed. She closed their bedroom doors herself. The candles were slugs of light curled in the bottom of the tins and the tablecloth was sticky wherever the chilli sauce had touched it. The guests called: Leave the table, Cara. Come and sit down, said the woman in the blue hat. Her hair was tightly curled, she wore yellow stockings. How old are you, Cara? she asked. Only fourteen? She looks older, don’t you agree? Adam agreed, and Rachel smiled with a yawn. Someone had brought a tray of pastries from the Greek café. Cara spilled icing sugar on the carpet, it didn’t matter. The children slept. Adam moved his thumb over Rachel’s forearm, up and down and slowly. The Christmas lights above his head were a crown of stars. Cara, shy, laughed when the adults did. One of them wanted to smoke. You don’t mind, Cara, do you? It isn’t cigarettes. Cara shook her head. Nobody told her to leave, but she went to bed. Now that Adam had moved in, Cara was the only person in the house to have her own bedroom. Outside, the palm trees shrugged and struggled in the wind. That was Saturday night.