The Idea of Perfection (6 page)

Overhead the roof ticked and creaked in the afternoon sun.
Woman with Afternoon Light:
a still life.

 

 

Sunset had come and gone, and a big country darkness had absorbed the backyard when she woke up.

She was large and inefficient in Lorraine Smart’s roomy kitchen, opening every cupboard to find the tea-bags, then opening them all again to find the jam. She walked backwards and forwards as if pacing out the distance, taking the bread over to the toaster, the tea-bag over to the mug. Her movements were stiff and polite, as if Lorraine Smart, and the family squinting out from their photos on the fridge, might be watching.

Standing at the sink, she could see that the dog was still out there, just within the band of light that fell from the kitchen window, a darker shape against the darkness of the yard. They stared at each other through the glass.

There was no point in thinking it could not see her.

The feathery tail began to wave slowly from side to side as the dog cocked its head on one side, its large ears pricked forward keenly. Its mouth was closed, giving it something of an anxious look. Quickly, like a soldier getting back into step, it shuffled its back feet and settled again. But it was not going to go anywhere. It was certainly not going to pack its little suitcase and go home.

The thing was, even someone who had never owned a dog could see that it was expecting to be fed. It was expecting to be fed, and it was expecting her, the woman in the kitchen, to do it.

All at once, it was not simple any more. It was not
woman
and
dog,
tastefully arranged in various poses in the lights and shadows of a country evening.

The trouble was, even as
woman
looked at
dog
and
dog
looked back at
woman, still life
had turned into life. There was no escaping the fact that
dog
wanted something from
woman.
Like it or not,
woman
had to make a choice. Already, it was getting complicated.

In fact, it was in danger of turning into a
relationship.

 

 

Her sons had all wanted a dog. One by one, at a certain age, like clockwork, they had asked. She had reluctantly agreed to other animals. They had had a succession of short-lived goldfish, and rabbits, and mice, more of them every time she looked in the cage. They’d had a cat that dribbled when you stroked it, and for a time they’d had a hen out in the backyard, until it started crowing and they had to pay the butcher to take it away.

Mice and cats were all very well, but what the boys had really wanted was a dog. They had put a collar on the cat and tried to take it for walks, to show how well they would look after a dog. They had tried to teach the mice to sit up and beg.

She had gone on saying no. She had talked about the fleas and the smell and the problems with holidays. She had talked about responsibilities. Three husbands, three sons: it was already too much. With each son, each husband, the argument was stronger.

It was not untrue about the
fleas
or the
smell,
or the
responsibilities,
either, but none of that was why she went on saying no. It was the dogs themselves. It was the way they
adored
you. That was the thing about dogs. Mice did not
adore
you, and nor did chickens. But dogs did.

Husbands
adored
you, too, at least at first.

Being
adored
was something she had come to mistrust.

She felt
adoration
to be a small and lovely-looking bomb that could blow up in your face at any time.

It was not that she disbelieved. Eyes certainly brimmed with tears, voices grew reedy, faces soft.

But it could not be Harley Savage who was being
adored,
because Harley Savage was not
adorable.
She was not even a particularly
nice person.
She was not
generous
or
unselfish.
She was not a
sunny soul.
She was not especially
talented
or
creative,
except in a limited way. She had certainly never been pretty, much less
beautiful.

But they kept on and on, hammering away at her with the words:
I love you. Oh, how much I love you.
Her heart sank when they started in with all the words, and she hated having to look deep into someone’s eyes. She was always the first to look away.

After a while the whole thing started to feel like a terrible misunderstanding, or an exam she could never pass. She knew that she herself, Harley Savage, was not the Harley Savage they
adored.
That Harley Savage was someone she could try to be, but in the end it was too difficult.

Someone had once asked her why she had had so many husbands.
Only three,
she had thought in surprise. Then she had found herself saying,
I’ve got a dangerous streak,
and her mouth had laughed.

I’ve got a dangerous streak.
She had said it lightly, as if it was nothing important.

It had just popped out, surprising her, but it had stuck.
Harley Savage. Watch out, she’s got a dangerous streak.
It was like a curse.

The first husband had soon found someone else to adore, a pretty little woman with a sweet fluting voice so soft it disappeared into the furniture. It was easy to see he had been after someone as different as possible from big plain Harley Savage, with her abrupt ways.

The second one, the one with the nice smile, had been taunted by Harley’s air of cool amusement, her refusal to look deep into his eyes, until he had got his hands around her throat one overheated night. He had been frightened, then, of what he was doing. She had seen it in his eyes, the surprise.
Me
,
doing this?

That was when she first saw that she could be dangerous.

She had tried once more, marrying the third husband. He had not taken any of the easy ways out. He had never been interested in other, sweeter, kinds of women. He had not tried to look deep into her eyes, had never allowed her to provoke him out of the calm he carried around with him like a shield.

Until, at last, the calm turned out to be as brittle as the sheet of ice on a puddle, and had snapped. In the end, he had chosen the hardest way out he had been able to think of, and it had taken up residence within her like a living wound.

He had chosen his way out fifteen years ago, and since then she had not let anyone get very far. She did not wait for the familiar words or the looking-deep-into-her-eyes to start. As soon as she felt them coming on, she moved on smartly, and after a while they had stopped being offered. Sometimes it was a little lonely, but it was safe.

Her sons were like trophies, a neat set, one from each husband. They were a different thing from husbands. Children adored you, but in their case it was not a test. There was no need to get anxious about not being perfect. No matter how unlovable a mother you were, they still loved you. It was just a biological thing. It had nothing to do with your personality.

She had not had any choice but to love them too. It came naturally. You did not have to look deep into their eyes or talk about it all the time. No matter what they were like, and what kind of people they turned out to be, she would have loved them. She did not need them to be perfect. Her feelings for them went deeper than loving them because they were lovable. Her love for them was just an uncomplicated fact of life, like needing to breathe.

She had been a soft-eyed proud mother who knew how to cherish a necklace made of painted macaroni. She had kept some of the macaroni, and all their primitive drawings and their little letters to her when they were learning to write, that said,
deAR MUm
,
I LoV yoUo.

Sometimes, when she needed to remember that she could love, just like anyone else, she got these things out and looked at them. They brought about a kind of swollen feeling in her heart that went on for a long time after she had put them away again carefully in their special box.

There had been times when her love for her sons had been so great it was painful. She had dreaded it then, as another thing that could be dangerous. At times it felt like something separate from herself, a parasite that had her in its grip, something that could turn on her at any moment and destroy her.

You could not leave children behind, the way you could leave a husband behind. Your children were something you carried around with you for always. You could not push them away, explaining that you
had a dangerous streak.

But you could hold back your love for them and not let it show. You could pretend it did not really matter very much. So she had not paid as much attention as some of the mothers did. She had not gone to all their little school plays and got teary from how sweet they all were, or helped them with their homework, and had never known where they were after school or who their friends were. She had overheard someone saying that her boys had had to
drag themselves up.

The youngest, Philip’s boy, had got the worst of it, and had spent time out at Badham. But he had met a nice girl on the day-release scheme and was doing all right now with the water-pump business.
Back on the rails
was the expression he used.

They were all grown up now, and in spite of having missed out on a dog, and a motherly kind of mother making sandwiches in the tuck-shop, they had not turned out too badly. They were far from perfect, certainly, but then so was their mother.

It was hard to understand why she had mentioned
family
to Coralie Henderson. She must have been in a strange state from the hours on the freeway. They could have that effect, the freeways, the landscape unreeling, bland, colourless, unconvincing, all those shining shark-shaped cars screaming past in a blast of air, the semi-trailers with flapping tarpaulins grinding alongside until they could tuck themselves in ahead.

You could get yourself into a buzzing unreal frame of mind where you might forget and let anything come unawares out of your mouth to a total stranger. She had not really been thinking about
family
at all.

Perhaps the freeway trance also explained why she had let the dog come along with her in the car. It made no sense. Three sons, three husbands. It was already a long unhappy history.

She was definitely not going to add a dog.

 

 

Outside, the night was making many small unfamiliar noises. Lying stiffly on Lorraine Smart’s lumpy daybed, she felt her ears straining for the endless soft roar of distant traffic they were used to, up and down Alfred Street, Mount Street, Carlotta Street, and now and then a siren to let you know people were out there, being rescued. Here between Lorraine Smart’s unfamiliar sheets she felt the strangeness of this other planet, and herself in it.

Here it was the foreign indifferent sound of the wind in the trees: all those stiff leaves rubbing over each other, making a whispering like a conversation that excluded you. And those hollow ponking noises. She thought they must be frogs because what else could they be? But frogs were supposed to
croak.
This was not so much a
croak
as a sound like someone hitting a cardboard box with a stick at irregular intervals. Sometimes several people with several sticks hit different-sized cardboard boxes all together. It did not sound like frogs, but it must be, unless there were people out there, hitting sticks against cardboard boxes in the darkness.

DOUGLAS CHEESEMAN WAS woken up by a rooster somewhere nearby that seemed to have no faith in itself.
Cock-a-doo!
it would go, then try again.
Cock-a-doo!

In the end he got up, although it was miles too early, and got dressed. Then the only thing to do, until it was late enough to go down to breakfast, was to stand at the window and look — cautiously — at the view.

Across and slightly below him was a grey tin roof and below that the faded blue paint of a brick wall. Funny how you could come to the country and still be facing a brick wall. There was a window in the wall, but a curtain was drawn over it. The fire escape that ran down beside his own window passed so close to the window opposite you could almost step across. Terrible security hazard, but in the country he supposed security was not an issue.

He did not lean out, but over the top of the grey tin roof he could see along Parnassus Road, heroic in scale, tapering majestically away to a vanishing point like the exercises in perspective they had done in Technical Drawing.

You could see that Karakarook had once taken it for granted that it had a big future. Wool and beef had poured out of it, along the old highway or down the barges on the river. The founding fathers who had wanted to show off their classical education would never have guessed that the river would silt up, the new roads leave them marooned, the price of wool make it hardly worth shearing the sheep.