Honour & Other People's Children Read online

  Contents

  About the Author

  Honour

  Other People's Children

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  About the Author

  Helen Garner was born in Geelong in 1942, and has been writing and publishing since her first book, Monkey Grip, came out in 1977.

  ALSO BY HELEN GARNER FROM PENGUIN

  Monkey Grip

  Postcards from Surfers

  The Children’s Bach

  For Jennifer Giles

  ‘. . . Things mattered

  and love, anxious love

  rose and put forth it’s flags.’

  Chris Wallace-Crabbe

  The Emotions are not Skilled Workers

  Honour

  On summer nights they walked through city gardens.

  The air stood thick in their nostrils, a damp warmth lay upon their shoulders. Water dripped somewhere, randomly, without rhythm. On the other side of the banked plants people were murmuring idly in a foreign language. Jenny’s head swam in the heat: her pores opened for the sweat to break. She saw his face floating by the fleshy flowers, eager, sharp and gentle. She wanted to take him in through her skin.

  ‘What is that tree? What is that plant?’ he asked her, and she told him the names. He did not try to remember them much, asked merely to hear her say the words in her English accent.

  ‘How is it you know their names?’

  ‘Oh, my father. And there are days,’ she said, ‘when the only things that don’t look sad to me are plants.’

  ‘Why are women so sad?’ said Frank.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t think it’s catching. Is that what you’re worried about?’ She stopped walking and looked him in the eyes. Behind her an iron fence with spikes rose up against the sky, which was deep blue with points of yellow light.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said after a moment. She was looking at him. One of her eyes was set very slightly higher than the other, as in some Cubist painting he may have once seen. He stepped off the path and cartwheeled lightly away over the springy grass. Once he had seen his daughter, on a sandbank in a desert, do fifty cartwheels in a row under moonlight.

  *

  When Kathleen answered the phone, Frank’s sharp voice said,

  ‘Hullo. It’s me.’

  Kathleen laughed out loud. Only a husband would announce himself thus.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said, sobering up.

  ‘Listen. Can you come over tonight? I’d like to have a talk.’

  ‘Anything wrong?’

  ‘No. Just some stuff I’d like to clear up.’

  The front door of the long house was left open for her and Frank was writing something in his violent, swooping hand at the kitchen table.

  ‘Time one of you swept the hall,’ she said from the doorway.

  ‘Well, I won’t be here much longer.’ His cackling laugh rang out among the teacups hanging from their shelf. He sprang up nervously, took two big steps around the table and leaned against the stove with his bare arms crossed. He stared down at his feet with an assumed air of perplexity.

  ‘Listen, Kathleen!’ He leaped forward, gripped the table edge with both hands and leaned over it, but kept his face turned up to where she stood on the step. She noticed with a small shock that his hair was quite thickly grey at the sides. He narrowed his greenish eyes and stretched his thin mouth sideways like a man at the start of a hundred yard dash. The familiar drama caused her stomach to start trembling with the desire to laugh.

  ‘Things have got to change! They can’t remain the same!’ he cried.

  She laughed in confusion. ‘What, Frank?’

  ‘Sit down. Do you want a cuppa?’ He would bounce wildly to the ceiling.

  ‘You’d burn yourself. Spit it out.’

  He gathered himself into a bunch and threw it at her. ‘There’s something I want. I want a divorce.’

  He propped in front of the cupboard door, staring round at her to watch her cop it. She remembered suddenly how a dog they had once used to catch a thrown stick in his mouth – it stopped him dead at the moment of impact, whack between his black and pink jaws, but fitted: he regained his stride and ran on.

  ‘See?’ he burst out, pacing up and down with one forefinger laid against his cheek. ‘It won’t be any different between us. Just on paper.’

  ‘But – what’s put this into your head?’

  She felt blankly curious, looking down at the bandy curves of his legs, brown and stringy in baggy khaki shorts.

  ‘It wasn’t my idea.’ He spun round as if accused. ‘Jenny wants me to – sort of – clean up my past.’ His laugh was high-pitched, almost a giggle. He pulled his mouth down at the corners.

  Kathleen turned blind with rage for two seconds. This time it took her a good moment to swallow it, spit from the caught stick. Frank squinted at her and suddenly the speed went out of him. He sat down at the table.

  ‘That was a bit undiplomatic,’ he remarked quietly, as if to an invisible audience.

  She stared, blank as blotting paper.

  ‘Come and sit down, Kath.’

  She needed to, and obeyed.

  There was a pile of papers, written on, between them on the table. Frank shifted his feet on the matting. A meek breeze came down the hall from the open front door, slid loosely across the papers and confounded itself with the warm air in which husband and wife sat. The top sheet of paper lifted as if to move sideways. Frank dumped the sugar bowl heavily on to the stack. In the fluorescent light the grains glittered.

  ‘You see,’ he began in a gentler voice, with his head on one side, ‘I’ve always thought I’d go on being related to you, for the rest of my life.’

  Normal existence began to tick steadily again. Someone had cleaned the louvre windows over the sink, and the panes gleamed darkly. In fact, the kitchen was full of shining surfaces. Frank was a great cleaner. When she was sick, even years after they had separated, he would burst into her room with broom, dust-pan and brush and whirl about like a winnowing wind, setting all to rights, placing objects in piles and at right-angles to each other.

  ‘We will be, won’t we? Related, I mean. Because Flo will relate us.’

  ‘Yes.’ His face turned soft at the name. ‘But Jenny – well . . . she hasn’t lived like we have all these years. “Smashing monogamy.”’ He laughed bitterly. ‘She wants things to be resolved. “Resolved” is a word she uses a lot.’

  ‘You don’t mean you want to get married again?’

  ‘If I do, it’ll only be to get European work papers,’ he said hastily.

  ‘I thought one reason why we never got a divorce before was so we wouldn’t make the same mistake again! Remember what you always used to say? “Getting married isn’t something you do – it’s something that happens to you.”’

  ‘That’s true. The first time, anyway.’

  She hung dangerously, as if the other half of a high-wire act had failed to show up for work. He looked down at his hands.

  ‘You know one thing she’s done for me – she’s made me cut right back on my drinking.’

  ‘How’d she do it? She must have something I haven’t got.’

  ‘I’ve been living like a maniac for five years, Kath. Not just when you shot through with Perfect-Features – but afterwards – doing nothing but work, drink and fuck – look at my hair!’ Getting back into his stride, he indicated his grey temples with a gun-like gesture. ‘Look at me! Thirty-two years old and grey as a church mouse!’

  She laughed with a twist of the mouth.

  ‘I’ve been bullshitting myself all these years,’ he went on. ‘I want a real place to live, with a back yard
where I can plant vegies, and a couple of walls to paint, and a dog – not a bloody room in a sort of railway station!’ Breathless with rhetoric, he sat smiling shyly at her, one arm resting on the tabletop.

  ‘Does Jenny want that too?’

  ‘Yes.’ He might have blushed.

  She would have to be mingy indeed to stay hard-faced against his hopefulness. ‘What about Flo?’

  ‘Jenny loves her. Can she come and live with us for a while? For a month or so? It would be a home. I’ll drive her to school.’ He looked eager, leaning over his arm.

  ‘Does she want to go?’ It was only a formality.

  ‘Oh yes. I think so.’

  Some half-gagged splinter-self in the depths was twisting in protest: what about me? but Kathleen kicked the door shut on it. There were no demands or protests she might rightfully make. He had always treated her honourably. In five years she had never given it one moment’s conscious thought, but had lounged upon the unspoken assumption that she was still somebody’s, even when she was most alone.

  She looked up and saw a tiny liquid twinkling in the inner corner of Frank’s left eye.

  ‘Look!’ he shouted, pointing to it. ‘A tear! It is! I can still squeeze one out!’

  *

  Kathleen ran in from the glaring street. Through the screen door she perceived dim shapes moving at the other end of the passage. The wire smelled coldly of rust as she pressed her nose to it and rattled her fist against the wood. Jenny was calling back over her shoulder as she approached the door.

  ‘So I told her I considered my contract fulfilled,’ she was saying in a tone of such dry resoluteness that Kathleen envied her a firm life: orderliness, self-esteem. She saw Kathleen and said, ‘Oh!’ They had never met, but stared at each other through the clotted wire with suddenly quailing hearts.

  ‘I’ve just come for Flo,’ said Kathleen.

  ‘Would you like to come in? We’re watching the news.’

  Frank was hunched forward, elbows on knees. ‘Come to check up on me, have you,’ he said, not taking his eyes off the screen where a man’s face opened and closed its mouth.

  ‘Who’s this clown?’ said Kathleen, ignoring the jibe.

  ‘Lang Hancock.’

  ‘What’s he on about?’

  ‘Sssh!’ said Frank. ‘Watch and find out.’

  ‘He claims,’ said Jenny tactfully, ‘that he flew through a radioactive cloud thirty years ago and that it didn’t do him any harm – thus, that it’s all right to mine uranium. A fine piece of Australian political reasoning.’

  ‘But who’s the woman?’

  ‘His daughter. He’s brought her along to show that his genes didn’t suffer.’

  ‘What! He reckons he didn’t suffer genetic damage, and that’s his daughter, with that huge polka dot bow round her neck?’ Kathleen started to giggle.

  Frank turned round crossly and said, ‘Sssh, will you? This is serious!’

  Kathleen put her beach towel over her mouth and pulled a chastised face. She picked up a newspaper and flipped through it.

  ‘My God,’ she said. ‘It says here that a lady went into hospital in France to have a baby, and when she came out of the anaesthetic they’d cut one of her hands off.’

  Frank switched off the television. ‘Do you ever read the actual news, Kath? Apart from Odd Spots, death notices and so on?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Kathleen, obviously bluffing.

  Jenny stared at her, and thought in a vague blur of fear, ‘Is it being a mother that makes her head racket round like that? Will this happen to me?’

  The two women sat in similar poses, limbs arranged so as to appear casual. They did not perceive their striking similarity; they both made emphatic hand gestures and grimaces in speech, stressed certain words ironically, cast their eyes aside in mid-sentence as if a sustained gaze might burn the listener. Around each of them quivered an aura of terrific restraint. If they both let go at once, they might blow each other out of the room.

  ‘This is a nice house,’ said Kathleen recklessly. ‘Why doesn’t Frank just move in here, instead of both of you having to look for another place?’

  The air bristled.

  ‘Because then he would be living at my place,’ enunciated Jenny carefully, ‘and we would like to start off on equal terms.’

  ‘We’ve found a place, anyway,’ said Frank.

  ‘I’ll give you a hand to move then, whenever you like,’ Kathleen charged on. There was a short hush.

  ‘Will you have a beer, Kathleen?’ said Jenny.

  ‘No thanks. I was going to take Flo for a swim.’

  ‘It’s a scorcher, all right,’ said Frank, shifting in his chair.

  Light filtered through drawn curtains, the three characters floated in watery dimness. Pale objects burned: cotton trousers, a dress faded as a flour bag, a flash of eye-white in a turned head. There was a faint smell of lemon.

  Flo ran in, dragging a white dog by its collar.

  ‘I heard you talking, Kath. See? This is Jenny’s dog. She loves me.’

  ‘I bet she does. Come on – we’ll go to the baths.’

  ‘Come into my room and get your things, Flo,’ said Jenny.

  Flo took Kathleen’s hand. ‘Come and look at Jenny’s things. She’s got jewels, and a special thing like scissors for your eyelashes.’

  The brown floor in the passage creaked under them. Jenny snapped on a lamp in the front room and the heavy double bed sprang into the light. Flo edged her way round its obtrusive foot to reach the treasure box by the empty fireplace. The two women stood awkwardly, embarrassed by the meaning of the bed, but Flo turned round with a tweezer-like object in her hand and applied it brusquely to her eyelashes.

  ‘Careful!’

  ‘See? They make your eyelashes curly.’

  Jenny laughed and flicked a glance at Kathleen to see if she disapproved. Kathleen did, but was also curious, and looked to see if Jenny had used the tool on her own eyes, which were brown and unevenly set.

  ‘When are you coming here to spend the night, Flo?’ said Jenny.

  Flo looked shyly at her mother, not wanting to make her jealous. ‘Can I, one day?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’ll phone you,’ said Jenny.

  Jenny and Flo took a step towards one another and Flo raised her arms as if to kiss her goodbye. They both stopped at the same instant and looked at Kathleen with identical expressions: waiting for dispensation. Kathleen smiled and nodded, they were released and kissed smackingly.

  Outside the front door the hot afternoon enfolded them in its dry blanket. The gate disturbed vegetation and set free a dizzying wave of privet smell and the peppery scent of pink climbing roses.

  Halfway down the lane Frank caught up with them and took hold of Flo’s other hand.

  ‘Hang on, Kath! I’ve got something to ask you. Don’t you ever walk slowly?’

  ‘No. Do you?’

  ‘No.’ He fell into step beside Flo. ‘I’d like to be able to saunter. I read that in a book of aphorisms: “It is a great art to saunter.” Anyway I have to go down to Mum and Dad’s.’

  ‘Is anything wrong down there?’

  ‘Mum’s a bit under the weather.’

  ‘What? Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I only found out last night. Dad rang up. Poor old blighter can hardly see to dial the number.’

  ‘What’s actually wrong with Shirl?’

  ‘I don’t know. Some sort of nervous complaint. Quite painful. She’s had the doctor.’ He lashed savagely at a hedge. ‘I don’t think Dad can manage by himself. He’s never asked me for help before.’

  They walked along in silence.

  ‘Do you want me to come down with you?’ said Kathleen. ‘Unless you’re taking Jenny, of course.’

  ‘Would you? It’d get the load off me a bit. They haven’t met Jenny yet. Mightn’t be the moment to break that one to them.’

  ‘Can I come?’ Flo inserted the request purely for for
m’s sake.

  ‘No,’ said Kathleen. ‘You can’t miss school. You can stay home with the others.’

  ‘Well, can I go and live with Frank and Jenny in their new house, then?’ She was only flying a kite, barely listening for the answer, lining up her sandal toes with the cracks of the footpath so that the end of each fence fell upon an even number.

  ‘Yes. If you want to.’ Kathleen was trying to smile.

  Flo seized her round the waist with her wiry arms. ‘But what if you miss me too much? You won’t cry or anything, will you?’

  Her teeth were uneven and her forehead at this anxious moment displayed five horizontal lines of wrinkles so exactly like Frank’s that Kathleen was all at sea.

  ‘I can come and visit you,’ she said. ‘You can invite me over for dinner and we can both cook.’

  Kathleen looked up from this bony embrace and saw Frank leaning against the fence with a strange smile on his face. ‘He must be happy,’ she thought. Flo pranced about. The parents’ faces were stiff and their expressions inappropriate. Kathleen felt old, and perhaps bitter, but not against these two creatures whose separateness from herself, no matter how many times it had been demonstrated, she could never really bring herself to believe in.

  *

  Frank and Kathleen stood side by side like children in the doorway. Shirley was asleep, her head turned sharply to one side on the pillow, her mouth open as if she had just cried out.

  ‘The doctor says it’s called psoriasis,’ offered Jack in the kitchen. ‘She sleeps most of the time.’ He smiled helplessly at them, bewildered, wanting to be appeased and approved of. Age had shrunk him, and he hardly reached Frank’s shoulder.

  ‘What’s the doctor giving her? I mean – she shouldn’t be knocked out like that, should she?’ Frank moved agitatedly about the room, pulling open cupboard doors and slamming them again without looking inside.

  ‘Blowed if I know, Frankie,’ said the old man. His knotty hands were resting on the back of a chair. ‘The doctor’s a young chap, ’bout your age. I s’pose he knows what he’s talking about.’