forever closed to the futility of the task? Isn’t this what Philippa herself had done? But there was one fundamental difference between Philippa and Melanie and that was Selwyn Pryor: how anyone could even pretend happiness with a man like that was beyond comprehension.
The sense of having failed her daughter was still strong, even after all these years, and yet Philippa didn’t know what else she could have done. And it was not only Melanie, all her children condemned her as a less-than-successful mother; Gray, her oldest, was a sententious bore, Melanie had chosen a life of artifice, and Jeremy was a homosexual. She shrugged, a bad mother? Perhaps, and yet the extent of her children’s demands – not Jeremy’s, but Gray’s and Melanie’s, suggested they were satisfied enough. They were quick to ask her to mind the grandchildren, to cook, run messages, to lend her home for large functions – the old one not the new – still they wanted her to be their mother, and were reluctant to regard her in any other way. In all the months since George’s death, neither Gray nor Evelyn, Melanie nor Selwyn had expressed any interest in her well-being (with the exception of their irritatingly regular exhortations to ‘keep busy’), they simply added ‘widow’ to ‘mother’ and ‘grandmother’ and expected her to continue as before. Which annoyed Philippa, who believed she had earned the right to some consideration. It was as if she were invisible to them; Philippa Finemore, widow, mother, grandmother and a person who had finished with being an extension of other people’s lives, was outside their purview.
For several minutes, Philippa had been staring at the windows at the end of the lounge room, glancing across her new life as if it didn’t exist. Family is like that, she thought, it insinuates itself where it doesn’t belong and blocks out everything else. She brought the room back into focus, made a cup of coffee, and, with Peach at her heels, walked along the passage to the front door and out to the verandah. She leaned against the wrought iron railing and sipped her drink. Her children accused her of being selfish, but what about them? They only wanted her as bedrock to their own lives. Families could be such shabby cells of deceit, Philippa decided, and yet she’d devoted most of her life to hers. Was she a hypocrite then, or merely stupid? Because she had not been miserable, or at least not often. Had she confused stability with boredom? Satisfaction for a lack of choice?
From her first meeting with George, Philippa’s life had been set on the solid rock of his certitude. ‘Don’t worry,’ he had said on their first date when she had tripped and torn her stocking. ‘Don’t worry,’ he had said when he proposed to her and she told him she didn’t love him. ‘Don’t worry,’ he had said when the children started school and she complained of her empty life. ‘Don’t worry,’ George had said throughout the years of their marriage, because he would take care of things. So she didn’t worry, but neither did that remove the pain and the irritation and the fatigue, she had to learn to live with those. And, in the process, they acquired highly specific labels – life, marriage, motherhood – labels more acceptable than misery, habit and disappointment.
Which is not to suggest there hadn’t been a struggle to keep misery at bay. She had silenced her youthful dreams because they made her dissatisfied, and searched instead for a little sparkle amongst the blandness of her days. She came to notice the first spring buds and the subtlety in the sun’s shadows, she heard the dry autumn leaves, felt the hesitation of a changing wind. She saw the new hairstyle of the dressmaker and the pallor of the butcher, the smile of the grimy fellow with a full bottle of plonk, the ageing man at the wheel of his gleaming red Porsche. And only later, after George was gone and there was time to think about such things, did it occur to her that the common belief in women’s natural disposition for detail was quite wrong: when you are tethered to routine you need to notice the ordinary in order to stay alive.
There had been occasions when her vigilance had flagged and she would find herself in a prowling darkness that sent her reeling, but no one ever noticed – except, of course, Jeremy who noticed everything; George was always happy, Gray too, and so was Melanie in the years before Selwyn came along.
From the moment Selwyn entered the Finemore home Philippa had not liked him. He was unctuous to a degree rare in one so young, dispensing flattery with an extravagance incompatible with sincerity. Then there was his smile, so plastic, so utterly nauseating that Philippa had been convinced within five minutes of meeting him that this was a man bereft of integrity. Like most arrogant people, Selwyn lacked any deep feeling towards anyone other than himself, or rather himself and his father, a hard, mean man whom he adored. When it came to his mother, a shrill, nervous woman, Selwyn paid more attention to his neckties. As for love, Philippa was sure its very immateriality made him doubt its value.
Selwyn was, however, deeply interested in authority. Several years as an academic and a lifetime of ambition had taught him everything that could be known about authority, and while he knew that the bigger the pool the more seductive the power, he also knew that even a small amount of power could be highly rewarding. From the beginning then, Selwyn was intent on changing Melanie, pressing her to make what he called ‘personal improvements’. He suggested less weight so she lost several pounds; he was critical of boisterous women so she dampened her laughter; he liked bright colours so Melanie wore oranges and yellows which made her look sickly. And while Philippa knew that such actions were part of the disturbed syntax of marriage, the old Melanie ran the risk of disappearing altogether.
These days, Philippa would look at the shallow, judgemental woman Melanie had become and strive to remember the outgoing, joyous girl she had once been, and if this was what was required to love her daughter, then so be it. Although it was not always easy. Since George’s death, Melanie had become more overbearing than ever, issuing demands and dispensing directions, yet, at the same time, being curiously absent – or perhaps she was simply becoming less familiar to Philippa. Melanie seemed to be fully acquainted with the appropriate posture of a wealthy widow, and when Philippa was seen to veer from the right path, would swoop down and correct her. Melanie clearly had much invested in Philippa’s doing the right thing, but whether it was for personal gain or fear of nonconformity, neither of which was particularly palatable, Philippa did not know. But of all Melanie’s changes, it was her loss of warmth that was Philippa’s greatest sorrow. Melanie failed to distinguish between people; she used the same demeanour for her closest friends as for the electrician, and none of them was given any affection; like Selwyn, it seemed she had identified emotion as an inessential commodity. Only with her children was she different; she channelled all her love into these two young things, and, being young they lapped it up, but when they were older it would be a different story, and what would Melanie do then?
Philippa looked up at the night sky. It was cramped with clouds and only a thread of moon, a murky sky with neither pattern nor direction. It reminded her of her family-cluttered mind. Mind cluttered with her family. For no matter who they had become, her children were still her children, and the grandchildren more precious than anyone alive. Philippa sat on the cool bluestone of her front step and Peach jumped into her lap. She rubbed her face against the woolly fur and breathed in the dog’s familiar smell; soon Peach settled down and went to sleep and Philippa was left staring into the darkness, determined to clear her mind of the family but unable to think of anything else.
THREE
Evelyn Finemore pulled into the curb to consult her street directory. It was bad enough that Philippa had left the home where she belonged and the family who loved her, but how much worse to have chosen this particular area with its rows of identical houses and its network of closed and one-way streets, euphemistically called ‘traffic-controlled’. The family would have come to accept a nice villa unit or a high-rise apartment, but a tiny inner-city Victorian terrace was beyond the pale.
And it was impossible to find! For the past fifteen minutes, Evelyn had been driving towards floral fences and bluestone barriers that, according to her ageing street directory, did not exist. And all the while the Finemores were falling apart and there was Evelyn’s usual appointment at three o’clock with Brother Trevor and she didn’t want to be late for that.
