Читать книгу Modern Interiors - Andrea Goldsmith - Страница 8

Philippa went into the front room to finish unpacking. She was pleased for Jeremy’s visit and grateful that at least one of her children understood her need for change. Which was fortunate, for the inclination was gathering momentum; each day had its share of new hopes and possibilities, some so bizarre they might have been borrowed. As the months passed, Philippa was discovering aspects of herself that were strange and unfamiliar, yet, at the same time, invigorating and curiously seductive. The discoveries did not help clarify her plans, but they did provide for a burgeoning array of options. Jeremy seemed to understand this mysterious alchemy that had, in such a short time, transformed his mother, not simply into a more lively person, but into a woman unknown.

Philippa smiled: an unknown woman with an unknown future, what a luscious prospect! And set about putting the house to order.

The front room had originally been designed as a second bedroom, but Philippa, determined never again to need a second bedroom, had converted it to a study. The cupboards intended for clothes, housed much of the Finemore finery, that reservoir of silver and crystal and linen and lace once so essential to Philippa’s lifestyle. Later, all of it would go to the children, but with her plans still so unformed, premature distribution seemed imprudent. She had installed book shelves along one wall, and, in front of the window with a view to the street, had placed George’s leather-top desk, a beautiful piece of furniture in dark, aged wood that George had inherited from his father, although it had been George’s mother, Dora, who had truly occupied the desk. Unknown to the rest of the family, Dora had written poetry throughout her married life. In the middle years of Philippa’s marriage when the days had dragged by in dreary repetition, Dora had taken Philippa into her confidence, and, until her stroke, Philippa had been Dora’s first reader, privy to the tentative pleasures of a new poem as well as the capricious joys of publication. And while Philippa admired the poems, and would return to them over and over again, what she valued most in those days was Dora’s choice of her, Philippa, as confidant.

When Dora died and her possessions were sorted, the family had been surprised to learn of Dora’s poetry, and not understanding it, had belittled it, referring to ‘Mother’s little secret’ as one might a bottle of brandy concealed at the back of a cupboard. Philippa had been furious, feeling the affront not only on Dora’s behalf, but as an insult to herself. Dora’s poems had taught her that in a life reduced to the basics, any foreign elements must be protected, that in a life already diminished, further reductions leave permanent scars. Philippa maintained her silence while George and his brothers passed their snide remarks, but she wanted justice. And three months after Dora’s death she got it. One evening, a rare solitary evening when Philippa was alone in the house, she stole all of Dora’s papers, her poetry, correspondence, recipe notes, even a few shopping lists, she stole the lot. And when, many years later, George wondered what had happened to ‘Mother’s jottings’, Philippa said they must have been thrown out. Now, from one of the cartons, she withdrew the folders containing Dora’s writings and placed them on the desk, out of hiding and safe in Philippa’s house.

Philippa’s house: she savoured the thought. For forty years of marriage, Philippa had never had her own space, despite the huge Finemore home. It had always struck her as iniquitous that children had their own rooms, and husbands had studies or workshops, but wives, who spent most of the day at home, rarely had a place of their own. It was a theft of privacy, she now decided, for if you define someone always in relation to others, define her exclusively as wife and mother, then the need to be alone is rendered otiose. Philippa had taken to visiting St Kilda pier for her solitude, secret trips, as if there were something shameful about wanting space for herself, wanting more when she already had so much. She would sit on the pier, together with the crusty old fisherman, a few truant boys and a couple of women whom she guessed were fugitives like herself, sit with her line cast over the side, listening to the waves breaking against the pylons. She would wrap herself in Dora’s afghan rug, pull on a hat against the winter wind (she never went to the pier in summer, the noise, the pestilential crowds were no better than home) and stare out to sea. She never caught anything, but that wasn’t the point, neither did she use bait. All she wanted was to sit quietly and allow her thoughts their itinerant fancies. The fishermen got to know her, would grunt an acknowledgement as she walked past them to her spot further down the pier. One old fellow used to talk to her, would regale her with tales of the old days when the ‘flatties were as long as yer arm’ and ‘yer could feed a family in less than an hour.’ She would sit quietly listening to his stories, watching the limp, stained cigarette dangling from his lower lip, and would suck in the scented wind of salt and seaweed and, from the kiosk at the end of the pier, the pungent smell of hot oil and freshly cooked fish and chips.

The incongruity of her sanctuary never escaped her; she had been forced to leave a large house to find a piece of territory that was neither the children’s, nor George’s, nor the housekeeper’s, nor the gardener’s. And it was not as if she hadn’t tried. Of an afternoon, she would perch on her side of the bed, feet firm to the floor, reading a book or writing a letter, but the effort of keeping to her own side simply reminded her she was trespassing. As for the laundry where she kept her sewing table, this was Julia’s domain, and although Julia was a kind person who was fond of her employer, she made it clear that, unless there was sewing to be done, it was best if Mrs Finemore stayed out.

Which brought her to another problem: the servants. In all the years with George, Philippa had never become accustomed to them. Her own background, while far from poor, certainly did not include housekeepers and gardeners and a clutch of cleaners. But from the very beginning of life with George, there had been ‘help’ in the house, and from the very beginning Philippa was on uncertain ground. As the years passed, she did learn to make her requests, to ask for rooms to be cleaned or silver to be polished, but what she never managed to do, and what appeared to be essential for harmonious cohabitation with servants, was become immune to their presence. For it seemed that only in that way could one go about one’s business, dress and undress, leave hair in the bath, soiled clothes in the basket and not feel the shame of exposure. It was absurd but true: servants were only compatible with one’s sense of privacy if one pretended they weren’t there – as human, as like oneself. In this, Philippa had failed; at the end of her marriage she was no more inured to servants handling her soiled clothes than she had been as a young bride, neither, for that matter, had she ever learned to erase the fingerprints of strangers from the garments that touched her body. With servants in the home and nowhere to hide, she was, at the same time, trespasser and trespassed upon.

But no longer. She patted Dora’s poems, stood a moment inhaling her solitude and left the room. Dusk had entered the narrow passage; grainy lightbeams shot through the stained glass panels beside the front door and another stronger shaft stretched like a pyramid from one of the skylights. Philippa leaned against the wall, the plaster cool through her blouse. That she was happy was undeniable, such an odd sensation, more consonant with the shallowness of youth than the insights of age; George was dead, her family were furious and Philippa was happy.

And, she realized, very hungry. She walked down the passage to the kitchen and prepared some food. She ate standing at the bench, looking across the lounge through the glass doors to the courtyard beyond, and, as night absorbed the tiny garden, saw, ever more clearly, her new life reflected in the glass: the smallness of the room, the old furniture from the den unrecognizable in a pale floral print that George would have dismissed as insipid, the black bundle that was Peach asleep on her sheepskin rug, the beige carpet so impractical with young children, and, in the middle of it all, Philippa Finemore, a widow of sixty-two, who had shirked her duty and deserted her home, a short woman with a gentle figure, greying hair now comfortably bobbed, and a face that with its high cheek bones and angular jaw, its olive skin and dark eyes, and the mouth, most of all the mouth, full and prominent with lips that pursed when she spoke as if her first language were French, had always distinguished her from the blonde, pale-eyed women of her acquaintance.

The face had changed in the past few months. She now resembled more closely the fifty-year-old she had once been rather than the ageing widow at George’s funeral; she felt better than she had in years. Tedium takes it toll, she thought, and habit shrivels the imagination, and if she were less than lively in those years, should she have been surprised?

How she envied today’s young women with their swag of choices, and how sad she was that her own daughter had taken so little advantage of them. Poor Melanie, so many opportunities discarded for so little, and now, after fifteen years with Selwyn, it was impossible for her to admit that, in choosing him and his ambitions, a bargain had been struck.

Philippa poured herself a fresh glass of champagne. Ever since Selwyn Pryor had entered Melanie’s life Philippa had worried about her daughter; now Melanie was thirty-six and still Philippa was worrying. Not that Melanie asked for her concern, on the contrary, she made a point of appearing satisfied; she was always surrounded by people, held successful dinner parties, was a regular guest at the parties of others, raised money for worthy causes, was demonstratively adoring of her husband. Yet she seemed to be wasting away; her large frame was pinched and her once expressive face was locked into a few essential masks, her voice was sharp and her smile increasingly rare; and still she insisted she was happy. Although wasn’t this the bargain struck by all wives? That, like Sisyphus, they would push their burden through the years, their brows creased with hope, their hearts bursting with anticipation, their minds forever closed to the futility of the task? Isn’t this what Philippa herself had done? But there was one fundamental difference between Philippa and Melanie and that was Selwyn Pryor: how anyone could even pretend happiness with a man like that was beyond comprehension.

The sense of having failed her daughter was still strong, even after all these years, and yet Philippa didn’t know what else she could have done. And it was not only Melanie, all her children condemned her as a less-than-successful mother; Gray, her oldest, was a sententious bore, Melanie had chosen a life of artifice, and Jeremy was a homosexual. She shrugged, a bad mother? Perhaps, and yet the extent of her children’s demands – not Jeremy’s, but Gray’s and Melanie’s, suggested they were satisfied enough. They were quick to ask her to mind the grandchildren, to cook, run messages, to lend her home for large functions – the old one not the new – still they wanted her to be their mother, and were reluctant to regard her in any other way. In all the months since George’s death, neither Gray nor Evelyn, Melanie nor Selwyn had expressed any interest in her well-being (with the exception of their irritatingly regular exhortations to ‘keep busy’), they simply added ‘widow’ to ‘mother’ and ‘grandmother’ and expected her to continue as before. Which annoyed Philippa, who believed she had earned the right to some consideration. It was as if she were invisible to them; Philippa Finemore, widow, mother, grandmother and a person who had finished with being an extension of other people’s lives, was outside their purview.

For several minutes, Philippa had been staring at the windows at the end of the lounge room, glancing across her new life as if it didn’t exist. Family is like that, she thought, it insinuates itself where it doesn’t belong and blocks out everything else. She brought the room back into focus, made a cup of coffee, and, with Peach at her heels, walked along the passage to the front door and out to the verandah. She leaned against the wrought iron railing and sipped her drink. Her children accused her of being selfish, but what about them? They only wanted her as bedrock to their own lives. Families could be such shabby cells of deceit, Philippa decided, and yet she’d devoted most of her life to hers. Was she a hypocrite then, or merely stupid? Because she had not been miserable, or at least not often. Had she confused stability with boredom? Satisfaction for a lack of choice?

From her first meeting with George, Philippa’s life had been set on the solid rock of his certitude. ‘Don’t worry,’ he had said on their first date when she had tripped and torn her stocking. ‘Don’t worry,’ he had said when he proposed to her and she told him she didn’t love him. ‘Don’t worry,’ he had said when the children started school and she complained of her empty life. ‘Don’t worry,’ George had said throughout the years of their marriage, because he would take care of things. So she didn’t worry, but neither did that remove the pain and the irritation and the fatigue, she had to learn to live with those. And, in the process, they acquired highly specific labels – life, marriage, motherhood – labels more acceptable than misery, habit and disappointment.

Which is not to suggest there hadn’t been a struggle to keep misery at bay. She had silenced her youthful dreams because they made her dissatisfied, and searched instead for a little sparkle amongst the blandness of her days. She came to notice the first spring buds and the subtlety in the sun’s shadows, she heard the dry autumn leaves, felt the hesitation of a changing wind. She saw the new hairstyle of the dressmaker and the pallor of the butcher, the smile of the grimy fellow with a full bottle of plonk, the ageing man at the wheel of his gleaming red Porsche. And only later, after George was gone and there was time to think about such things, did it occur to her that the common belief in women’s natural disposition for detail was quite wrong: when you are tethered to routine you need to notice the ordinary in order to stay alive.

There had been occasions when her vigilance had flagged and she would find herself in a prowling darkness that sent her reeling, but no one ever noticed – except, of course, Jeremy who noticed everything; George was always happy, Gray too, and so was Melanie in the years before Selwyn came along.

From the moment Selwyn entered the Finemore home Philippa had not liked him. He was unctuous to a degree rare in one so young, dispensing flattery with an extravagance incompatible with sincerity. Then there was his smile, so plastic, so utterly nauseating that Philippa had been convinced within five minutes of meeting him that this was a man bereft of integrity. Like most arrogant people, Selwyn lacked any deep feeling towards anyone other than himself, or rather himself and his father, a hard, mean man whom he adored. When it came to his mother, a shrill, nervous woman, Selwyn paid more attention to his neckties. As for love, Philippa was sure its very immateriality made him doubt its value.

Selwyn was, however, deeply interested in authority. Several years as an academic and a lifetime of ambition had taught him everything that could be known about authority, and while he knew that the bigger the pool the more seductive the power, he also knew that even a small amount of power could be highly rewarding. From the beginning then, Selwyn was intent on changing Melanie, pressing her to make what he called ‘personal improvements’. He suggested less weight so she lost several pounds; he was critical of boisterous women so she dampened her laughter; he liked bright colours so Melanie wore oranges and yellows which made her look sickly. And while Philippa knew that such actions were part of the disturbed syntax of marriage, the old Melanie ran the risk of disappearing altogether.

These days, Philippa would look at the shallow, judgemental woman Melanie had become and strive to remember the outgoing, joyous girl she had once been, and if this was what was required to love her daughter, then so be it. Although it was not always easy. Since George’s death, Melanie had become more overbearing than ever, issuing demands and dispensing directions, yet, at the same time, being curiously absent – or perhaps she was simply becoming less familiar to Philippa. Melanie seemed to be fully acquainted with the appropriate posture of a wealthy widow, and when Philippa was seen to veer from the right path, would swoop down and correct her. Melanie clearly had much invested in Philippa’s doing the right thing, but whether it was for personal gain or fear of nonconformity, neither of which was particularly palatable, Philippa did not know. But of all Melanie’s changes, it was her loss of warmth that was Philippa’s greatest sorrow. Melanie failed to distinguish between people; she used the same demeanour for her closest friends as for the electrician, and none of them was given any affection; like Selwyn, it seemed she had identified emotion as an inessential commodity. Only with her children was she different; she channelled all her love into these two young things, and, being young they lapped it up, but when they were older it would be a different story, and what would Melanie do then?

Philippa looked up at the night sky. It was cramped with clouds and only a thread of moon, a murky sky with neither pattern nor direction. It reminded her of her family-cluttered mind. Mind cluttered with her family. For no matter who they had become, her children were still her children, and the grandchildren more precious than anyone alive. Philippa sat on the cool bluestone of her front step and Peach jumped into her lap. She rubbed her face against the woolly fur and breathed in the dog’s familiar smell; soon Peach settled down and went to sleep and Philippa was left staring into the darkness, determined to clear her mind of the family but unable to think of anything else.