Melting Moments Page 14

  They had set up the marquee out the front, with a twelve-inch gap beside the dance floor through which the guests could view their home. Ruby had opened up the entire house for this purpose, and left on all the lights, and it was clear how much everyone admired it, with the light spilling out and all those flowers and her lovely new carpets. It was a house that just lent itself to such an occasion. When she looks back at it now, she sees that this was her glory: that house ablaze, and full of roses.

  The following morning, she had been sitting at the kitchen bench drinking tea with Daisy, smug as a cat, reliving every moment and hoping that everybody else had been as taken with the wedding as she had been, when a man knocked on the front door. He introduced himself as Mr Kenneth Schmidt from Lancelot Avenue and asked if he might bring his wife around to see the marquee. Of course Ruby was only too happy to oblige.

  Fortunately, the guests had all conducted themselves in a seemly manner, and the marquee remained very presentable indeed, with the white tablecloths only slightly soiled beneath the silver candlesticks. Mrs Schmidt remarked that she had never seen so many flowers in her life.

  So when Christine revealed who she was, it was as if the whole thing had come full circle. As if she were inviting the family back into her marquee, to enjoy her roses.

  After they moved to the retirement home, it was several months before Ruby returned to Greenhill Road. She had been too busy settling Arthur in, and arranging the furniture into just the right configuration. A number of items were on consignment at Sotheby’s, but she had kept the best pieces, which if anything looked even more elegant in their pristine new surroundings.

  ‘It’s Greenhill Road in microcosm,’ Charlie had observed, in his clever way.

  It was only towards the end of the year, when bridge finished earlier than anticipated, that Ruby found herself with half an hour on her hands before Arthur would panic and start phoning everyone in the Rolodex. So as an early Christmas treat, she took a detour back towards Greenhill Road to see what sort of progress Christine had made on the house. Perhaps she would have painted the façade by now, or at the very least started on the salt damp.

  When she arrived, she saw that a construction fence had been erected around the entire perimeter. It was difficult to get a clear picture, so she parked the car and made her way across the nature strip for a closer look.

  She stepped back and double-checked the address.

  Then she moved forward and looked over the fence again.

  She felt numb. Really, she felt nothing at all.

  She climbed back into the car and drove home to Arthur.

  ‘Goodness, dear,’ he said. ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

  In a way, she had. Or perhaps she had been the ghost herself, witnessing a future without memory, without imprint.

  It did not bear thinking about, otherwise it would seem like the erasure of an entire life.

  She is glad the children persuaded her to bring the hydrangeas when she moved. Positioned alongside the roses, they make the courtyard feel like home.

  ‘My God, it’s heavy,’ says Charlie, as he carries the urn out to the wrought-iron table. ‘Feel this, Eva!’

  Eva lifts it briefly, then returns it to the table without comment.

  There is a sense in which Arthur’s body was a type of home for Ruby: the weight of his hand, the muted thump of his chest beneath her ear. It does not do to think of such things being burned.

  Charlie fetches a spade from the shed and digs a trench around the rose bushes. Then he takes a screwdriver and opens the top of the container. A small plume of grey dust rises into the air, and Amy starts coughing.

  ‘Ready to go?’ he asks.

  Ruby nods, and he lifts the urn, tipping the ash evenly into the trench. It is a heap of grey dirt, a little metallic. Some sort of speech is called for, but for once the children are silent.

  ‘He loved sitting in that chair in there,’ Ruby repeats, gesturing towards the window. ‘And looking out at these roses.’

  ‘He really loved you, Mum,’ says Charlie.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘He spent his whole life working to pay off that house,’ says Eva.

  ‘He really didn’t want to buy it because he thought we couldn’t afford it. But I loved it so much that he got it for me.’

  It is a mercy he never found out what happened.

  ‘Goodbye, Dad,’ says Charlie. ‘And may you blossom again.’

  It is a strange alchemy: that a husband can turn into dirt. There is no sense to it at all. She is not crying, but something is amiss with her vision.

  ‘Love a duck,’ she says finally. ‘When I think of that 21-year-old boy I met at the Palais. I can just see him before my eyes. And now look at him.’

  It is clearer than this mound of ash. It is clearer than the house on Greenhill Road. Arthur’s earnest face before her own, in the front bucket seat of that car he was so proud of, that Essex sedan. On their first date, she had mentioned she enjoyed gardening, and he had looked ever so pleased. That’s a turn-up for the books, he had said, just before the car sputtered and ran out of petrol. We’ll be sure to have a lovely garden in our future home.

  3

  When Ruby was a child, Bobby McInernay acquired a bicycle from somewhere and taught her how to ride it. She practised in the back paddocks, with Daisy perched on the handlebars, plucky girl that she was – somehow it never occurred to either of them that it would be more sensible for Ruby to master it alone. The most wonderful thing was when Bobby let them ride the bike to school. There was no joy like it. Ruby would donkey Daisy on the handlebars, careering down the driveway and past the ghost gums Father had planted at the edge of the paddock, and then pedal through the mallee and down towards the township, ringing the bell if a sheep strayed across their path.

  The only problem was that she didn’t have the strength to push off, and so she always needed Father to launch them from the front of the house. He would run alongside them for a while, his giant farmer’s hand on the back of the bike, with Ruby concentrating so fiercely on the track that she never quite knew when he let go, or if indeed he had. The important thing was to keep going and on no account to stop, otherwise they would have to abandon the bicycle at the side of the trail and walk the rest of the way to school. Ruby fancied she could still feel Father there – the push of him – as she crested the final hillock and glided to a stop outside the classroom.

  Often she still feels Arthur’s presence in the sunroom. She catches herself talking to him as she tidies the kitchen or dusts off his collection of military histories. Oh, you stodgy old boy. Neither of the children had wanted the books, but they were such distinguished volumes she didn’t have the heart to dispose of them. You dear old spotty dog. She had always faulted his heavy-handedness with the aftershave, but now she opens his empty wardrobe and inhales, just to remember. Just to feel the security it implied, the containment. Then she shuts the door quickly for fear of using it all up.

  It is not that she wants him back, exactly. It is just that where there was once a presence, there is now an absence. The night after they had taken him away – after the ambulance had come and she had insisted they not revive him, on his express orders – she had woken with a start.

  Husband removed from the premises.

  That fact, in itself, was incomprehensible.

  Had she ever previously slept alone in a house?

  Where was she?

  Who was she?

  She felt a type of vertigo, at her aloneness, at the fact of her advancing years.

  Eighty-one!

  The asymmetry of it: tilting towards the end.

  Where was the stable ground?

  Then she heard Mr Windsor padding around next door, no doubt having trouble with his prostate. There was the flush of a toilet, and it restored a grammar to her environment, and she was able to sleep.

  Early in September, Mrs Windsor invites her over for afternoon tea. It is her first time
inside her neighbours’ home, which is a mirror image of her own but done out in the modern style, with large canvases and pale leather sofas, though Mrs Windsor hardly seems the lounging type. She has wonderful posture; Ruby has to admire it. Balletic, with that long straight torso, and her hair pulled back in a simple yet elegant bun.

  ‘And have you read any good books lately, Mrs Jenkins?’

  Curiously, she pronounces books as if it rhymes with spooks.

  ‘As it happens, my son Charlie brought me over a pile of reading matter. I suppose he was anxious I might be at a loose end.’

  Mrs Windsor asks what Charlie does; when Ruby replies that he works for the radio, it turns out that Mrs Windsor knows his work very well indeed.

  ‘You don’t say!’ She calls out to her husband. ‘Wilf, you’ll never guess! We’re only living next door to the mother of Charlie Jenkins!’

  ‘I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,’ says Mr Windsor. ‘Haven’t we come up in the world all of a sudden.’

  Mr Windsor has overgrown eyebrows that would benefit from some pruning. It is the only mark against Mrs Windsor, as far as Ruby can see: that she has let her husband go a little to seed.

  ‘We saw Charlie present a concert last year for the Symphony,’ Mrs Windsor explains. ‘And we both just took to him.’

  This doesn’t much surprise Ruby. People have always taken to her Charlie.

  ‘It’s frightfully remiss of me not to have had you over earlier. Particularly now you’re all on your own. You must forgive me, but I keep terribly busy, what with all of my commitments and obligations.’

  In fact, Ruby had been under the impression that Mrs Windsor rarely left the house. Her car always seems to be in the carport regardless of Ruby’s own comings and goings, but perhaps this is the nature of life for the childless.

  ‘Come along then, Wilf. Offer Mrs Jenkins a scone.’

  Mr Windsor lurches towards her with the tray.

  ‘I’ll leave you to your own devices now, ladies. You’ll be better off without me.’

  ‘Indeed we would,’ says Mrs Windsor. ‘Off you go.’

  Behind her, on the dresser, stand two pewter statuettes of greyhounds which – in their sinewy form and stillness – bear a striking resemblance to their owner.

  ‘How do you like the scones?’

  Ruby is somewhat taken aback by the question. She has always considered it bad form to procure compliments.

  ‘They’re very nice indeed.’

  ‘And of course it’s a most superior jam. I drive up to the hills especially to get it.’

  In fact, the jam is over-sweet and somewhat generic. The best jams were those that Mother used to make, with Ruby’s own a close second, but she is not one to boast.

  ‘I must tell you.’ Mrs Windsor leans forward confidentially, regarding Ruby over the top of her glasses, which have slid to the tip of her tiny nose. ‘It was a frightful relief when you moved in. I have very sensitive ears, you see. Perfect pitch, in fact. They discovered it when I was a girl. So the previous residents troubled me terribly, with people coming and going at all times of day and night. Sons and grandsons and heaven knows who else. One day, there was even a motorcycle driven into the crescent.’

  Ruby clucks sympathetically, and Mrs Windsor abruptly changes tack.

  ‘I haven’t seen much of your daughter recently. The tall one.’

  ‘Oh, you mean Eva. She’s moved down to the beach. A lovely home, with an entire wall of glass given over to the northern light. The most commanding views of the sea.’

  Ruby offers this to Mrs Windsor as some sort of achievement, but it is seized upon as an opportunity for pity.

  ‘I’m so sorry to hear it, Mrs Jenkins. With you newly widowed and all. Even more of a reason to keep an eye on you, when I can. I’m sure we’ll be wonderful friends.’

  She reaches out to grasp Ruby’s hand, so that their rings clang against each other. It is an awkward moment, though clearly well meant.

  ‘I realise we haven’t known each other for long enough, but I’ve never been one to stand on ceremony. Please do call me Phyllis.’

  ‘And of course you must call me Ruby.’

  She reclaims her hand as graciously as she can, feeling quite pleased. Phyllis is a most impressive woman indeed, and the fact that she is such an admirer of Charlie is only further commendation.

  When Bill calls to say he has finished working on the Vauxhall, Ruby’s first instinct is to walk into the sunroom and tell Arthur. Six months on, it is still there: the reflexive pivot, the orientation. This is the loneliness. The news – all the news, whatever it is – now stops with her.

  Throughout the day, she keeps putting the kettle on, before she remembers and takes it off again. Sukey take it off again, they’ve all gone away. The endless cups of tea, stacked one upon the other for more than sixty years, have come to an end. There is some relief to the domestic burden: she no longer has to wrestle with bed linen several times a week, or even bother with dinner if she is not hungry. But the deficits are also becoming clearer. There is nobody to compliment her when she returns home from the salon. Nor does she need to hurry home, though she finds she is inclined to, regardless. There is no longer any touch in her life; her children – dear as they are – are scarcely the affectionate types. Most importantly, there is no one to whom she can report her days. When Arthur was still alive, those few things she didn’t tell him – a handful of moments, really – had a dreamlike quality, as if they never quite belonged to reality. And this is the way her entire life now feels: a third act, a posthumous existence.

  Frequently, she dreams of flying. All she has to do is keep her hands in motion, as if sculling in water, and she never touches the ground. The dream becomes so habitual that its promise lingers even when she is awake. It is the glancing thought – an alternative! – as she labours around the block each morning, vexed by the increasing resistance of the ground. One could always hover. There’s always that.

  She wonders now if she had felt the tremor coming on before she saw it, like something very far away. A subterranean event that had not yet made it to the body’s surface. At Arthur’s funeral, she had attributed it to the pressure of the day. Later, when there was no denying it, it seemed a manifestation of her dream: an opportunity, perhaps, to be airborne. Now her hand wavers constantly throughout the day, as a relaxed swimmer might remain gently in motion to stay afloat.

  ‘You should get that seen to, Mum,’ says Eva.

  ‘I will. Quit your pestering.’

  Of course she will get it seen to, but not yet. She has already had more than enough on her plate for one year.

  The following week, when Bill drives the Vauxhall up the crescent and into the driveway, she can scarcely believe her eyes. She cannot remember the car ever looking so fine, even in its heyday. Its platinum grey has become opalescent, like one of those fascinating gemstones that at once reflect light and draw you in. It’s right that you should be called Ruby. Your eyes glitter like gemstones. The car is grey, then blue, then grey, then blue, as if a piece of the sky itself had driven into the crescent.

  ‘Coming out for a spin?’ he asks.

  ‘Don’t mind if I do.’

  He opens the door with a flourish, and she settles comfortably into the reupholstered interior. As they reverse, she notices a movement at the window next door, and hopes they have not disturbed Phyllis, who is a fine lady indeed but can be a little sensitive about cars arriving or leaving too loudly.

  ‘How in heaven’s name?’ she asks finally.

  ‘Elbow grease.’ He grins proudly. ‘Stripped her off and patched her up. And no stinting with the paint. I set up my own dust-proof room, you see, with plastic sheeting. And you’ve got to get the number of grits right, when you’re sanding. Learned that the hard way. Trial and error.’

  It is certainly diverting, being driven by Bill – quite a different experience from being driven by Arthur. She is reminded of what it was to dance with him: the animation
and competence and endless chatter.

  ‘Then I found the chrome fittings at a swap meet. Mint condition!’

  As they glide down the Parade, they could be driving backwards through time, to versions of their previous selves. Bill overtakes a young mother in an oversized four-wheel-drive, and toots his horn in triumph.

  ‘Didn’t think she had that in her, did you? Molasses is the secret. Nothing beats it for cleaning out an engine. Three parts water to one part molasses, and then leaving the parts to soak for a fortnight.’

  ‘Just like Tiger’s Milk,’ she says.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A wonder drink I used to make for the children to help them grow. Arthur was concerned they weren’t thriving.’

  He laughs uncertainly. ‘And how has Arthur handled the move?’

  She had climbed into the car today without much in the way of preliminaries and had assumed he already knew. Had he realised she was a widow, he may have thought twice about taking her out. People do talk, after all.

  ‘Arthur took to the move better than might have been expected,’ she says carefully. ‘But he’s moved on now. It’s been a good six months.’

  To her surprise, Bill removes a hand from the steering wheel and pats her on the knee.

  ‘Sorry to hear it. Coming up to a year since Mavis passed on.’

  At the traffic lights he turns to her and grins.

  ‘Tell you what. Us bereaved folk should stick together, I reckon. How about you let me take you out for lunch?’

  When she returns home that afternoon, she has an unfamiliar sensation in her cheeks. They are aching from smiling so much. The whole thing is absurd – absurd! – but she needs to tell somebody and she can hardly mention it to Phyllis, who is out the front pruning the geranium. So she calls Eva and finds herself giggling like a schoolgirl.

  ‘And he’s asked if he can take me out again next weekend. I just said I’d need to check my dance card and then I’d let him know.’