MODERN INTERIORS
Andrea Goldsmith was born in Melbourne in 1950. She has lived and worked in the United States and Britain. Her two other novels, Gracious Living and Facing the Music, are both published with Penguin.
Also by Andrea Goldsmith
Gracious LivingFacing the Music
Andrea Goldsmith
First published by Penguin Books Australia, 1991
Copyright © Andrea Goldsmith, 1991
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Goldsmith, Andrea, 1950-.
Modern interiors.
ISBN 0 14 014726 8 (pbk)
I. Title.
A823.3
The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote from I, ETCETERA, copyright © 1978 by Susan Sontag. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. and reprinted by permission.
eBook edition published by Andrea Goldsmith, 2013
ISBN 9781742982854 (ePub)
Digital Distribution: Ebook Alchemy
It’s not our faults that trouble me.
It’s our virtues.
SUSAN SONTAG
ONE
After a meal of rare roast beef, potatoes au gratin and green beans, George Finemore poured himself a Scotch, settled in front of the television and died. A premature death on a wet June night – although tidy enough, the doctor said, diagnosing a massive and efficient stroke. But tidy or not, it was clearly too much for his wife. Philippa Finemore, formerly so dignified, changed overnight; and while a husband’s death is a terrible thing, Philippa’s reaction was judged as extreme, even perverse, and quite unacceptable for a woman with position to maintain and name to consider.
People tried to be kind. Eccentric, they called her, Philippa Finemore has become quite eccentric since George’s passing. But in private mutterings they mentioned senility, in crackling whispers they said she had lost her mind.
‘Crazy. Mother’s gone crazy.’ It was Melanie Pryor who was speaking, and she was definitely not whispering. ‘I simply don’t know what’s got into her, and if she’s like this now, just a few months after Dad’s death, what can we expect in a few years time!’
Evelyn Finemore, Melanie’s sister-in-law, sat shaking her head. What indeed? And, for the first time since marrying Gray, was grateful for her own utterly ordinary parents, such dismally genteel people whom she knew would never cause embarrassment.
‘And we thought Dad would be the one to crumble if Mother went first.’ Melanie clenched her jaws and tightened her fists. ‘She used to be so dependable, now it’s as if none of us existed.’
Evelyn agreed. Philippa had lost her senses, and, along with them, any thought for the family. Her behaviour had been atrocious, beginning with the trip to Japan less than a month after George’s death. George had refused to visit Japan; nothing to do with the war, he said, rather he disapproved of the Japanese attitude to alcohol. Surely there was more to a nation than the drinking habits of its people, Philippa had protested, to which George Finemore, managing director of Finemore’s Fine Wines and Spirits, had replied, that to know a man’s drinking habits was to know his character. But with George dead, there was nothing to stop Philippa from going to Japan. So off she went, and while that had been bad enough so soon after the funeral, it was her going with Lorraine Pascoe, head of Finemore’s retail division and George’s long-time mistress, that was truly indelicate. Then, on her return, she had resigned her voluntary work at the nursing home (too close for comfort, she said), taken up yoga and joined Friends of the Earth. The Mercedes had developed a farrago of stickers advertising her new interests: ONE NUCLEAR BOMB CAN SPOIL YOUR WHOLE DAY, THE AMAZON FORESTS ARE THE WOMB OF THE EARTH, and, worst of all, SAVE A GAY WHALE FOR CHRIST.
‘You can’t have that on your car!’ Melanie protested.
‘Be sensible,’ Gray pleaded.
Only Jeremy, the second son and middle child, approved, and not merely of the gay whales but of his mother’s whole new orientation; but, unfortunately, Jeremy carried little weight in the family circle.
Even Philippa’s conversation changed. Suddenly she seemed more interested in fluorocarbons than family, in the homeless rather than her own hearth, and when the Society for the Handicapped approached her for the three dozen aprons she always made for their annual fête she politely refused. Of course, they said, they understood, her terrible loss . . . But it was not her terrible loss, she said, rather her priorities had changed and aprons no longer claimed favoured status. The charity work went, the lunch parties ceased, and so, too, the nice little biscuits long associated with Philippa Finemore’s home. Now, when the grandchildren asked for a snack they were given biscuits from a packet. Melanie was not impressed and said as much. Philippa explained again that her priorities had changed; besides, she had never liked all those sweet things.
‘But we did,’ Melanie said.
‘Good darling, I’ll give you the recipes.’
And so she did.
But in the light of her latest aberration all the previous ones were as leaves in a storm. Exactly five months after George Finemore’s death, Philippa announced she was leaving home.
‘Leaving home! A woman her age!’ Melanie helped herself to the coffee pot and another piece of Evelyn’s home-made almond bread. ‘Leaving our home, the place where we grew up, for an inner-city hovel where no one in their right mind would live!’ Melanie paused for a mouthful, patted her lips with an embroidered napkin, breathed deeply and began again. ‘She has a responsibility, and I don’t mean just to us, although that’s not irrelevant, she has a social responsibility. She’s not just anyone, people look to her, to people like her to show an example.’
What Melanie meant, but considered it in poor taste to say, was that wealth brings responsibilities, wealth sets one apart, and there could be no doubt that Philippa was very well off. Both Melanie and her brother Gray had been pleasantly surprised at the reading of the will to discover their father had been an extremely wealthy man. Melanie’s husband, Selwyn, had looked similarly surprised, although he was, in fact, the only member of the family to know the exact extent of George Finemore’s fortune. Indeed, Selwyn Pryor had acquainted himself with George’s worth more than fifteen years before when evaluating Melanie’s credentials as
