and a fine business it was, knew too, of George’s investments in prime real estate – only a dozen properties but all very prime. Selwyn knew it all, had known all along.
‘A responsibility,’ Melanie was saying to her sister-in-law, ‘and her present behaviour is simply unacceptable.’
Evelyn went into the kitchen to make fresh coffee. She felt very sorry for the family and hoped she was managing to show it. Hers was a passionless, inert sort of face – she was too self-conscious to show very much – and while Melanie had been talking, Evelyn had tried to mould her features into expressions of sympathy: to purse the mouth, frown, raise the eyebrows at the nose end only, and while the tiny facial muscles were among the body’s most recalcitrant, the fact that Melanie was still sitting in Evelyn’s lounge room, suggested that the concern Evelyn felt had percolated through her naturally bland features. And feel it she did. Philippa was disrupting the family; Melanie was distraught and irritable, Gray was short-tempered, and unless something were done soon, there would be one of those dreadful Finemore family dinners seething with silent accusations and Jeremy would be there and he always made Evelyn feel so uncomfortable.
‘So what’s to be done,’ she said, as she took up her place on the leather two-seater. ‘We can’t forbid Philippa to leave home, it’s her money after all.’
‘Personally, I think she’s certifiable, but that would mean an awful fuss.’ Melanie watched Evelyn pour the coffee. ‘Just half for me, I’m trying to cut down.’
‘Oh?’
‘Wrinkles. I heard somewhere that caffeine causes wrinkles.’
‘Are you sure you don’t mean nicotine?’
‘Of course I’m sure. If it had been nicotine I wouldn’t have bothered to listen.’ She paused for another bite of almond bread. ‘We have to be firm with Mother, give her guidance. We mustn’t forget she’s used to Dad making all her decisions, so it’s not surprising she’s floundering now.’
‘Do you think this might only be a passing phase?’
Melanie shook her head.
‘A short-term reaction to your father’s death?’
Melanie shook her head again.
‘Perhaps she just needs to spread her wings a bit and then she’ll return to her old self.’
‘No, Evelyn,’ Melanie said. ‘Mother’s had five months of spreading her wings, and now it’s time she was brought back to the nest. It’s time for her to settle down.’
Philippa Finemore had no intention of settling down. She had been settled for the forty years of her marriage and was now ready for a change. Not that George had been a bad husband, but as the years passed, Philippa found she had little need of him, and as the children grew, she had little need for them either. As children that is. She had tried to steer them into realms more interesting than the usual mother-child relationship, but her children had resisted, preferring she remain exclusively in the maternal role – with the exception of Jeremy, always the exception of Jeremy. But now, by her calculation, with only twenty good years left, she wanted more than mothering, more than grandmothering too, and was determined to begin anew.
The need for change, while lurking for some time, had emerged clearly on the day of George’s funeral. After the cemetery, family and friends had returned to the Finemore home to drink to his memory. Philippa had managed to escape solicitous pats and sympathetic sighs and was standing on the landing at the top of the stairs watching the crowd of chattering mourners below. Her thoughts were of George as she watched his friends in his house drinking his liquour recounting his stories. How he would have loved this! And the very fact of his absence at a gathering of his friends marked his death more forcibly than the sprawling emptiness of his reclining armchair, the brazenness of the coffin, the dirge of a service and the hole in the ground. Here was a party in George’s own home and George was not playing convivial host, so George must be dead.
George would not have been happy dying so young. Such a lively man with so many plans, Philippa was sorry he would have to miss out. But she was not sorry for the loss of a husband. Theirs had been a marriage frayed by familiarity, a faded relationship with occasional patches of brilliance; but like an old neglected tapestry, patches of brilliance cannot reclaim the parts already lost. And lost they were, long before George’s death. It wasn’t his women or his devotion to football, it wasn’t even his long absences from home, rather it was his indifference to everything that was important to her, and consequently his indifference to her. He was kind and generous as men of his ilk were, and polite and sociable, but he regarded his wife as he would a pretty bird, and talked with her only to hear the sound of his own voice; if ever he noticed she needed a little air to breathe, a little music to sing by, he did nothing about it. So she pared her desires back, stripped them down until their original colours were faded even in memory; but while they became distinctly threadbare, she never discarded them. Under the dust of years they lay, years of doing the same things, seeing the same people, years when the passing seasons did little more than change her clothes, her hairstyle, inject new words into her conversation and remove some of the old, and still the ambitions lay quietly, and a small voice insisted there was still time. And at twenty there was still time, similarly at thirty, even forty and fifty, but at sixty-one, time is on its knees, and, in a burst of impatience, the dust of years is brushed away to reveal, still fresh and buoyant, the expectations and desires of a hopeful youth.
Which was not to suggest her marriage had been unsatisfactory, or, for that matter, unusual. It had been calm, George hadn’t interfered, he had been a good provider. It was the repetition that had been so trying, the long days gripped by habit. And while there had been occasions when she waved a hand in protest, the movement was always small and the direction invariably ambiguous. She seemed to lack the courage to protest with conviction until now, as if George’s passing had given her the strength to make her own move; or perhaps it was more simple, that, with George’s bulk no longer obstructing the view, Philippa could better plot the way ahead. There were things she would miss, his boisterous laugh, the powder on the bathroom floor, but overall, the passing of the marriage was long overdue, it was just a shame it had taken George’s death to bring it about.
She felt herself smile, so many possibilities, so much to look forward to, and then, just as quickly, the smile vanished as Lorraine Pascoe’s neat figure entered her field of vision. If anyone had lost a husband it was Lorraine.
Philippa had known about George and Lorraine ever since a dinner party about fifteen years before, when she had stooped to retrieve a piece of nineteenth-century silverware from beneath the table, and had seen Lorraine’s hand kneading George’s thigh. Kneading his thigh but precariously close to other parts. Philippa had never minded about Lorraine, indeed, disinterest in sex coupled with enjoyment of Lorraine’s company meant the affair quite suited her. But not so George’s other secrets, those heavy silences that occasioned a surprise gift – jewellery, a leather handbag, once even a new car-offered with a smile twitching over his great blond face and apologies clotting in his throat. At such times, Philippa would wonder at the secrets that could render him so coy. In the early days, she had interpreted the gifts as expressions of love, but it was not long before she realized that for men like George, gifts were nothing more than prettily-packaged apologies or anodynes for guilt. For men like George, love of a wife was implied, unspoken, axiomatic; love was caught in the emblems of marriage, in the shared house, the sons and daughters, the family breakfasts.
It might have been different for Lorraine, perhaps in the absence of marriage and its accoutrements, George had affirmed his love. And if so, how much worse for her now he was gone. Philippa wondered whether she would stay on at Finemore’s. An unofficial visit from the family lawyer
