The Families Read online

  VICTORIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

  Victoria University of Wellington

  PO Box 600 Wellington

  vup.victoria.ac.nz

  Copyright © Vincent O’Sullivan 2014

  First published 2014

  ISBN 978-0-86473-919-3 (print)

  ISBN 978-0-86473-995-7 (EPUB)

  ISBN 978-0-86473-996-4 (Kindle)

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without the permission of the publishers

  National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  O’Sullivan, Vincent.

  The families / Vincent O’Sullivan.

  ISBN 978-0-86473-919-3

  NZ823.2—dc 23

  Published with the support of a grant from

  Ebook production 2014 by meBooks

  For Sokushin Ezawa

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Several of these stories have been published in Best New Zealand Fiction 3, Best New Zealand Fiction 6, Lost in Translation: New Zealand Stories, Harvard Review, Warwick Review and Sport.

  ‘On Another Note’ was in a collection of stories in which each writer was asked to take a section from a given unfinished Katherine Mansfield story, in this case ‘Second Violin’. The italicised final paragraph is from the Mansfield text.

  ON A CLEAR DAY

  I don’t quite know how one is supposed to tell something like this. Stories about husbands falling out with friends who become keen on their wives are two a penny, to use a phrase my mother was fond of. There are husbands apparently who get a kick from such a situation, which I suppose is a combination of flattery at one’s own good taste with a dash of perversity thrown in. I imagine the ways of responding are considerable. I don’t read much fiction and don’t talk that intimately with male friends, so I’m limited in assessing such things to the odd scrap of gossip one can’t help but hear, or to what I’ve seen in movies or on television, things which in any case I usually forget within a few days. So you’ll appreciate my saying that: ‘I don’t quite know.’ I have no other experience to base comparisons on.

  ‘Nothing new under the sun’—yes, I know how casually you hear someone remark that what we think so unique to ourselves isn’t so at all, if one knows a little about the way the world works. Well, I don’t, that’s the point. This is the situation. One of my friends was blind, and in love—or was he?—with my wife. And I don’t quite know what to do with it, now the story has come to an end.

  Claire used to think it was something of a joke, in her easy-going way. She liked Peter far too much to condescend to him, so joking all round was the way to cope when he flirted in an obvious, good-natured way. ‘If dear Peter could actually see me I doubt he’d last until tea-time.’ Or a little more seriously, she said, ‘I simply can’t imagine anyone without having some picture of them. How can you like someone you’ve never actually seen?’ Another time, soon after the four of us had been at a play, she thought, ‘It’s amazing apparently what words can do, if that’s all you actually have. Words and tone of voice. Expression. Even saying nothing at all. Silence can do a lot.’ But all this, you might say, is post hoc.

  To go further back. She said an odd thing early on. It was a Sunday afternoon after we had drunk a bottle of rosé at lunch and I stood behind her as I hadn’t done in quite some time. I leaned down and kissed her hair and slipped my flattened hands across the front of her blouse. She said that afternoon as we lay in bed and the half-tilted slats of the blinds barred our skins with strips of light and shadow, ‘Close your eyes. Make love to me with your eyes closed.’ Then afterwards she asked me, ‘Was that more intense?’

  ‘Than what?’ I said.

  ‘Was it? With your eyes shut?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It was just as if the light was switched off. That’s about all.’

  Peter was tall and good-looking in so far as one man can judge another, and clever, which was obvious from everything he did. If we were in a restaurant, or anywhere else for that matter, he was the one who handled the figures. He knew French. He played the piano. He remembered the names of characters in the books he liked Rose, his wife, to read to him. And—a strange thing perhaps to say about a blind person—he was elegant. He was so sparing in his movements when we ate together, for example, which we often did. I don’t mean he was careful, which of course he was, or practised in the long habit of sensing where objects were. At least I understood that blindness atones with the sharpness of other senses. I’ve noticed that time and again. His awareness of someone, a waiter say, entering, no matter how quietly. His memorising a room, the placement of furniture; the caution that somehow never seemed so direct as that. It was an apprehension taken into himself, and returned as poise. You might even think, as I did, it was as though he might see but chooses not to. That phrase surprised when it occurred to me. Claire is much sharper about such things than I am. ‘But that’s exactly it,’ she said when I told her. ‘I’ve never thought of it but that’s the impression he gives. As if affliction is a choice.’

  It is three years since we met. It was the kind of coincidence that occurs when you are in another country. Peter and Rose were across at a niece’s wedding; we had been to a cousin’s fiftieth. The Monday after these occasions the four of us, two couples who had not yet met, stood at the stone wall at Katoomba and looked out to the amazingly blue distances, the exposed escarpments and the ravines, the valleys and slopes with their million on millions of gums. It was late afternoon. The shadows were deep, the cliffs still alive in light. Without at first paying much attention to it, I heard the middle-aged man beside me explaining how the air for as far in the distance as one might see was packed with infinitesimal refracting particles of vaporised eucalyptus. It was this that explained the famous blueness that tourists came to see. By now I was interested in what he said. He told the woman beside him about other things. He spoke about Darwin the great scientist coming up here when he visited the continent he found compelling, but disliked. He said, ‘He wrote as he sailed out, “I leave you without sorrow or regret.”’ There was a pause then when the man said nothing, and the woman with him spoke too quietly for me to hear. But I heard the man laugh, and tell her, ‘I agree. He must have hurried when he hiked up here.’

  Claire too was listening, although the man was not speaking in a raised voice. Yet the afternoon was so still, the air so laden with blueness, that he might well have been addressing us. Then two coaches pulled up not far from where we stood, and in the babble and shouting and herding towards a vantage point, the couple near us moved away. We saw them again later that evening, in the dining room of the hotel. We looked at them and nodded and the woman, who was short but rather lovely and wore a peacock-shimmering frock, smiled back at us from the other side of the room. We were seated near a window, the other couple some distance away, beneath a huge Victorian sideboard you see in advertisements for the hotel. Towards the end of the meal Claire said, ‘I simply do not believe it.’ She had been glancing across the dining room for some time. I should not have taken a Drambuie with the black coffee I ordered after our dessert. All I could think about was falling into bed. I was dog-tired after the day’s long drive, the walk down from the hotel to the mountainous waves of blue towards the descending dark, and then back.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked. ‘What don’t you believe?’ And she told me the man whose talking at the lookout area had made me see the country with a clarity I otherwise would have missed, was blind. She said, ‘You’d scarcely think so until you watch carefully. His wife touches him differently. Odd how that gives it away.’ Which I understood as I later took it in, how Rose�
�s hands would hover and lightly rest and discreetly direct. I am still surprised when I think of it, how intensely close she and her husband are, the ease that is not predominantly one or the other, but the quiet pooled intelligence of both.

  We live in the same city, and so later on saw a lot of each other. I used to read aloud for Peter once or so a fortnight. Rose reads to him every evening, but she preferred biographies and novels, rather than the military history books he also likes to hear. In the eighteen months we were close, when the four of us were friends and went to concerts together and drove up the coast in summer, I became quite interested in what otherwise would not have come my way—Blunden’s and Graves’s accounts of life in the trenches, Massingham’s and Montague’s essays, Davin on Crete. I once asked him why he was drawn to such books. ‘It’s what people think,’ he said, ‘under duress. I don’t mind Rose’s novels but of course for all the puppetry they’re only one person’s take on life. I like those parts of books where people can’t lie. When what they say has to be the truth.’

  ‘The facts?’ I say.

  ‘Even if they’re lies they become facts,’ Peter laughs. ‘That’s why wars hold us even though they’re vile.’

  I don’t quite understand him. Nor does Claire, when I repeat what he said. This surprises me, as she is far more at home with thinking about such things than I have ever been. After all, she teaches teenagers about books, how to read them carefully, how not to be taken in; how to imagine further than you’d ever go alone. She sometimes reads to Peter as well. Historical novels that would have bored me stiff. He asked could she find another one like that, after she read him Wife to Mr. Milton.

  There were other friends we shared. Peter’s cousin Kevin, a solicitor from Masterton, whose passion I believe was grafting roses towards shapes and colours they would never arrive at without interference; Rose’s unmarried sister from Silverstream, who taught at the same school as Claire. There was another friend called Rory who worked at the Foundation for the Blind, a volunteer who visited homes and made what he called ‘talking letters’, tapes that could be sent to friends overseas. Peter and this friend went jogging in the park above Newtown. They ran side by side on the footpaths there and back. Claire had passed them more than once. She said you would never have guessed. Rory ran on the outside, and she saw that he was talking as they ran. She supposed he kept up some kind of commentary on where to turn, what to look out for, kept an eye out for dogs. But no one would guess, Claire said, from looking at these two men running side by side, that one of them was seeing for both.

  Claire from time to time read to Peter on Saturday mornings, while Rose played squash with her sister before lunch, as she did on the morning I come back to. I had been to see the exhibition from Pompeii. Our son in Melbourne insisted it was not to be missed. Claire visited twice with groups from school but I had left it to the last minute. I couldn’t face telling Rob that I’d not got round to looking at it, although when I did go with the crowds on that last weekend I found it unpleasant. You don’t live where we do, in a pole-house above a cliff, and sit through a vivid presentation of earthquake and destruction, then join the crush attending to the scraps that survived, and walk out as though you’d just watched Shortland Street. When I handed back the special glasses one wore through the fifteen-minute film with its fractured pillars and its piling ash, I found myself three-deep with those taking in the ancient oven and its carbonised bread, the oxidised mirrors, the figures of votive gods whose names no doubt were appealed to as the roofs cracked and the air thickened to paste. The casts of bodies in their final throes, the half-naked young woman with her fists clenched, her clothing dragged over her head, the contorted dog wrenching at its chained collar as its lungs burned—you could see why queuing Wellingtonians were absorbed. I moved quickly through the exhibition. I was glad to get back to the push of the southerly as I left the big cavernous building. The wind whacked the cord against a high metal flagpole. I needed to clear my head.

  Instead of going through to the car park beneath the museum I decided to enjoy the pelt of the wind. It was twenty minutes to Peter and Rose’s along Oriental Parade. I kept to the harbour side of the road. The spray rose and its saltiness was flung above the railings. The gusts lifted the collar of my jacket and whirred it against my cheek. I felt the elation of it as I had when I was a boy and the winds came up and rocked you in a life bigger than your own. I had forgotten Pompeii, the thoughts that inevitably come to you as you stand above a crouched contorted man, his cloak muffling his face, or another with iron brackets on his feet, unable to run with the rest. They are good things to forget.

  Peter and his wife lived halfway up a hillside you come at by a zigzag from sea-level, following ribbons of white-painted railing through trees that seem almost black as the wind tugs and belts them. But from the house you looked over them to the harbour and the hills. ‘We’re here for the view,’ Peter liked to say. The path from the gateway to the house cut through branches tangled overhead so you walked along a green tunnel to the white side of the house. If it recently had rained your shoulders were soaked by the time you reached the porch with its swathes of fuchsia in huge Aladdin pots.

  ‘I hear everything,’ Peter would joke. ‘I know when someone’s even thinking about calling in.’ But not this morning, Peter, as the wind dashed the trees against each other and there was the sound of a loosened iron strip banging on the fence between our friends and their neighbour. I opened the back door as I always did and walked through the kitchen to the lounge, towards the glassed-in porch where Peter sat when he was read to. How strangely still it seemed for a moment, as I stood on one of the handsome Persian rugs. As the gust lessened I heard Claire’s voice as I moved towards the porch. There was nothing dramatic in the way she read, nothing of the exaggeration that I dislike at times when a story is heard on radio. There was an attractive modulation as she followed the meaning through, the merest lift and fall as the words demanded—a sense of rhythm, that was it, not imposed so much as taken from the sentences she read. You could tell one voice was guided by another, the reader by the writer who had set how it might sound.

  Peter stood behind her, bending over her, his shape dark against the hurl of the sky and the veils of rain. He turned, and I remember thinking, if he hears everything, as he says, why has he heard me only now? As he stepped aside Claire’s head too turned, and Peter’s hand withdrew from her breast, which she quickly covered with her lowered sweater. I assumed Peter thought I had seen nothing, although how could I know?

  ‘Odd’ is a word I later kept saying to myself, that I’ve said several times to the marriage counsellor when she insists I need to talk it through. ‘Odd’, when of course I meant I had not been so startled by anything in my life as I was by the feeling that I interrupted some deep moment of privacy, that I was the one who needed to excuse myself as I saw the white scoop of my wife’s breast released, the dark uncovered nipple. I in fact had said ‘Sorry’ from the half-opened glass door. The memory of that sears more than what I saw. Then Peter was facing me with the eyes that took in nothing, and asking, ‘Pompeii over already, then?’

  Claire closed the book she had been reading from, took her cellphone from the small table beside her, and stood up. ‘I was going to phone but the story was longer than I thought.’ Then her embarrassment only then, her shame at that, I think, at saying something so inane. ‘Odd,’ I said to the counsellor. ‘I’m convinced that was it. Far more that, than that I’d seen our blind friend touching her.’

  ‘You’ve asked her about it?’ the counsellor said. ‘Talked about it properly?’

  ‘I don’t think either of us would see much point in that.’ I could see that Toni, who is the woman I talk with, did not think much of my answer. I expect it failed to tick the right box, seeing as ‘talking a problem out, frankly’ is pretty near item one of what they call essential advice.

  I’m not sure about this counselling business. I am usually sceptical when I hear th
at kind of thing, grief counsellors being brought into schools when something unfortunate happens, soldiers even, can you credit that, needing psychologists when war turns out to be exactly what the word ‘war’ means. Odd, too, that my walking in on whatever it was I interrupted seemed not at first to bother either of us as much as you might expect. Neither Claire nor myself, that is. We are not the kind to shout and throw things. Not surprisingly, though, neither one of us was in a rush to get in touch. I can only guess that Peter must have spun Rose some line. I’ve no idea. It seems so obvious to me now, although it had not entered my head before, that all this talk you hear sometimes about the mystery of another’s personality, the unlikelihood of truly knowing even those close to one, really does stack up if it means a friend who has never in fact seen you, but the darkness of that, as it were, is transferred from him to you, he is the one you have never seen.

  I said to Toni over our herbal tea—there is always that, a Chinese-patterned teapot and two handle-less cups we drink from as we talk—I said, ‘Thank God that Claire and I don’t use phrases like “We need to be grown up about this” or “It simply looked worse than it was”. We at least don’t play games like that.’

  ‘Better to say nothing, then?’ she asks.

  ‘In our case, I’m sure, yes.’ I tried to explain that Claire and I, after all, we both knew exactly what it was, and it is nonsense to make out it was anything else. It was a woman letting a blind man fumble her tits, while the spouses of both believed that all that was going on was reading a book, another man’s wife reading a book out of the kindness of her heart, and another woman’s husband grateful for the kindness. I tried to get Toni to see. What is the point going on about confusion, when clarity is already there?

  The next morning was stunning, one of those autumn days when you feel you are in a hollowed diamond, everything calm and sparkle, it seems wind is what you once heard of, but scarcely remember. I stood at our kitchen window watching the small boats in the bay, the kids in their yellow lifevests ducking as the sails swung slowly across them, although there was scarcely breeze enough to puff them along. I heard Claire come into the kitchen and open the fridge door, the muesli shaken from its packet, the scoop of her spoon against the plastic container of yoghurt, then the pouring of milk, almost a whisper. The images from yesterday, my walking back through the swathes of sodden fuchsias after the absurdity of my ‘Sorry’, the inanity of what she had said, and my leaving without speaking to Peter, not waiting for my wife—these ran over and over in my mind as I watched the drift of the little boats and the children leaning forward, as though that would somehow edge them ahead.