Expertly assessing the room for recent acquisitions, Audrey declined a cup of tea. She was running late; Iris had misplaced her eyebrow pencil that morning.
Audrey patted the back of her head: ‘I can’t imagine why you use one in the first place. People should age naturally, if you ask me.’
She stood before them, the product of skilled professionals-hairdresser, manicurist, orthodontist, podiatrist-and delivered herself of this view.
Iris Loxley, née de Souza, had triumphed over pain, rain-slick pavements and the treachery of bucket seats to accomplish the repositioning of her flesh from her living room to her son’s. The successful completion of any journey represented a victory. A girl who moved like water was present in her thoughts from time to time, but in the detached way of an actress familiar from a long-running serial.
Her double-handled handbag of imitation leather on her lap, Iris sat motionless as an idol. A picture was sliding about in her memory of a grey stone half sunk in tough-bladed grass. Matthew Ho from next door squatted on his heels in front of it, reading aloud. His stubby finger, moving over the writing cut into the stone, was green-rimmed from scraping moss. Iris could see the ivory silk ribbon threaded about the hem and pockets of her blue batiste dress. She could hear Matthew saying, Snowflake. Then he said, A Merry Companion. She could remember a date, 1819. One hundred years before she had been born.
By the time Iris was seven, that part of the de Souza compound had disappeared under concrete. Matthew said the stone had marked the place where a small dog was buried. He said that the labourers working on the new extension had dug up its remains. He had seen them, he said. ‘Three bones. And an eyeball.’ He put his face close to Iris’s: ‘Now its ghost will haunt you forever,’ he hissed.
Audrey, disliking waste, never disposed of a grievance that had not been squeezed dry. She wished to impress upon Tom that his mother had inconvenienced her that morning; and so, following him into the kitchen to complain of delay, delayed further.
He said mildly, ‘We’d be lost without you, Audrey.’ And added, ‘Shona coming over for lunch?’
Audrey was eyeing a circle of French cakes on a plate. ‘Cost an arm and a leg.’
‘Help yourself. Please.’ Tom was wondering where he had put the empty food containers. In Audrey’s codebook, takeaway was an offence that compounded profligacy with neglect. Love merited the effort of indifferent home cooking.
‘No time, thanks, Tommy. I’ve got to get my lamb in the oven.’ She picked up an oval dish, turned it over to check the brand name, replaced it on the table. ‘You know what Shona’s like about her Sunday roast.’
Tom spooned leaves into a wicker-handled pot.
Audrey observed that there was nothing wrong with bags in her opinion. She lifted the lid of a saucepan.‘I knew I smelled curry. That’s the thing about curry, isn’t it: the smell. Gets into the soft furnishings. I suppose you don’t notice if you’re born to it.’
Still she would not leave. Tom slid pastries fi lled with vanilla cream into a paper bag and offered them to her, setting off an operetta of surprise, remonstrance, denial and a fi nal yielding.
Yet at the door she came to a halt. She had remarked the absence of the dog.
Misfortune brought out the best in Audrey, providing scope for pity tempered with common sense. She was twelve years younger than Arthur, and the great regret of her girlhood was having missed the war. Clean gauze bandages, wounded offi cers wanting to hold her hand: she could have managed all that, she felt. She had trained as a nurse for six months before her marriage, and for the rest of her life would check a pulse against a watch, lips professionally tightened.
Audrey was always quick to extend what she called a helping hand; and, finding it grasped, to detect exploitation. Muggins here; a soft touch: so she described herself. Debit and credit were computed with decimal precision, each benign gesture incurring a debt of gratitude that could never be paid in full.
Her brother’s death she judged a piece of characteristic foolishness; yet it opened pleasant avenues for dispensing favours. There she might stroll, vigilant and loved as a guardian angel. She was of a generation that had attended Sunday School and the word raiment came into her mind. She pictured it as a kind of rayon that cost the earth.
It was decided that Arthur’s widow was to stay on in Audrey and Bill’s annexe; Bill wouldn’t hear of Iris moving, said Audrey. In time it would transpire that he would not hear of Iris cooking curry more than once a fortnight, and then only if all the windows were open; would not hear of Tom turning up the volume on the radio, nor of replacing the orange and green paper on the feature wall in the living room with white paint. It was a catalogue dense with prohibitions communicated piecemeal by Audrey. Bill, the silent source of so much nay-saying, took Tom to the Test every Boxing Day, and slipped him five dollars now and then, with a fi nger laid along his nose and a music-hall wink.
Charity, as those who have endured it know, is not easily distinguished from control. Audrey gave Iris and Tom a lift to a multi-storey shopping centre on Friday evenings. Here, everything from cornflakes to flannelette sheets could be acquired with Audrey’s approval. Brands were crucial, a novel concept; the Loxleys’ vocabulary expanded to take in Arnott’s and Onkaparinga. They were grateful for guidance. Iris, fi ngering pale wool, was informed that cream was not a winter colour. Silver escalators carried them to new heights of consumption.
A few of the girls in Filing invited Iris to join them for tea in a coffee lounge in the city after work the following Friday. Audrey asked how Iris was going to get her shopping done; or did she imagine that Bill and Audrey would rearrange their whole timetable to suit her? Iris ventured the notion that she might walk to the shops on Saturday; a street two blocks distant containing a butcher, a baker and so on.
Audrey concentrated on economics: the wastefulness of eating out amplified by the extravagance of neighbourhood shopping. Did Iris realise the delicatessen was run by Jews? She possessed the despot’s talent for representing oppression as benevolence, and was herself entirely swayed by the performance. The pain she suffered at the prospect of Iris squandering her resources was genuine; but its source, the bid for independence she sensed in her sister-in-law’s plan, exceeded her diagnostic skills.
It was a pattern repeated in Audrey’s dealings with all she encountered. In the theatre of her mind, as in the classical drama, brutality occurred offstage. What was on view, above all to herself, was only the aftermath of invisible carnage. So Tom observed, with the cold-eyed scrutiny of adolescence. It left him resolved to be clear about motive. Which, admirable when directed inwards, strengthened his cynicism about motive in others.
That was the impress his aunt left on the minds around her. Audrey had the inquisitorial approach to innocence: subjected to enough stress, it was bound to crack.
Sixteen-year-old Tom, dazzled by Julie Vogel who had just started at the newsagent’s, discovered in himself the desire for new plumage. He bought a T-shirt: rich blue, trimmed with scarlet at the neck and sleeves. It was a garment pleasing in form and hue. It would in any case have drawn his aunt’s eye, for everything the Loxleys acquired was by defi nition not Audrey’s and therefore resented.
‘That’s a nice T-shirt, Tommy. Looks expensive.’
‘Four bucks.’ Tom’s thoughts were busy with the golden Vogel but he knew what was required, Audrey pricing every
item that entered the Loxley household.
‘That’s good value for money. Where’d you get it?’
He told her.
‘I might get one for Shona. Did they have other colours?’