Goodbye Sweetheart Read online

  There was something spiritual in this accumulation of objects. They were material things, but somehow the number and diversity and usefulness ancient or modern of them transcended the mundane, gave them power.

  It’s a cult, kitchenware, said Janice.

  Down the back were the foodstuffs, the jams and preserves, the olive oils, the vinegars, the array of marvellously named pastas, the black cooking chocolate, the tiny tins of truffles, the foie gras, the goose fat.

  Beautifully packaged heart attacks, said Janice.

  Not the way the French eat them. In moderation, with a little red wine.

  Sometimes Lynette’s daughter Erin came into the shop after school and they went home together. Lynette didn’t often stay until the end of the day, she came in the morning and liked to get home to make dinner. Janice didn’t care for mornings and didn’t do much dinner-making. They had people who worked for them, but they liked to have one or other of the owners there. Sometimes they had lunch together in one of the local cafes; they teased one another and laughed a lot. Lynette enjoyed Janice’s insouciance. No husband, children nicely settled, she didn’t care for any of the old rules she’d once lived by.

  You’re not really thinking of a retirement home yet, are you? said Lynette.

  Not of doing it any moment soon, but you’ve got to think ahead. Especially if we create our own. I like that idea. Who’ll we have? We should make a list.

  We’re organising a sale, remember? After that’s done.

  I’ll send Angus an email and ask him does he want to be in it, said Janice.

  Oh, are we asking ex-spouses?

  Could be fun.

  Malice often is.

  Malice? Generosity, I’d have thought, said Janice. But her smile was malicious.

  Janice became aware of dark figures at the doorway of the shop, peering as though they wanted to come in. She shook her head and waved her arms to indicate it was closed. The figures didn’t go away. She noticed that the cumquats on either side of the door hadn’t been brought in. It was dark outside. The figures loomed. The light inside shone on the glass, making them dim shapes in the darkness. Now one was knocking on the glass.

  Lynette stopped sticking on cut-price labels to look. They don’t believe no, she said.

  The door rattled with the knocking, making it very loud. I’ll tell them to go away, said Janice.

  When she got near the door she saw that the figures were police. A lean young woman and a stocky man. The woman asked for Lynette by name. Would you like to sit down, she said. Perhaps your friend would like to make a cup of tea? I am afraid . . .

  Lynette said, Erin? in a voice that rasped in her throat, and the woman said no, that it was her husband, and explained about the swimming pool and William being found dead.

  There were no chairs in the shop so Lynette slumped against the counter. No, she said, not William. Not William. Saying his name as though it had a particular music she’d spoken before. And a magic that would not let harm come to him. The policewoman said, Tea? And Janice got the step stool for Lynette to sit on and made a mug of peppermint tea and brought it to her, thinking it is always the same: bad news, disbelief, tea. She put her hand on Lynette’s back and rubbed it gently; Lynette’s head sagged against Janice’s hip bone.

  She didn’t cry, she just repeated small phrases in a faint, disbelieving voice. Not William . . . so much . . . so much . . . he can’t . . . dead? . . .

  Janice kept rubbing. Drink the tea while it’s hot, she said. I know you don’t like sugar, but I put a bit in, it’s good, you know, when there’s shock . . . The policewoman nodded.

  Desolation. And always now the sweet minty sharpness of this tea will be the taste of desolation. Lynette sitting on the step stool in her shop tastes the absence of William. Words come into her head. He is drowned. Oh he is drowned. Where do they come from? Drowned, drowned. William will know. And with a flush of peppermint nausea to her throat she sees: no William, ever again. To know, to tell, to smile, to offer words like jewels heaped rich and gleaming in her open hands. He’s taken the marvellous words and left her with desolation. Loss. Grief. But first of all, drama. The production of death and funeral. The command performance. For whatever else you thought you were going to do, like having a sale in your shop, is suddenly not any kind of consideration. The burial must take place. William is dead, the peppermint tea is harsh in her throat, she must bear it. All the curious and erudite objects on their shelves, in their baskets, mute as always, but no help any more. Smug, impervious, quotidian, and grief does not compute. William is dead, who kept the words, and they have gone with him.

  Is there someone you could stay with tonight? asked the policewoman. You shouldn’t be on your own.

  Come home with me, said Janice. I’ll look after you.

  Erin. Lynette jumped up, pushed the mug into the nearest hands. Erin. I have to go home and tell Erin.

  She stopped and sat down again. Erin would be at home, doing her homework, watching the television, talking on the phone. Safe in the fixtures of her world. No need to hurry to tell her that one of its pillars is gone, that it is all tumbling down.

  I have to try to hold it up, said Lynette. But it’s going to be lopsided. She swayed. She felt dizzy. Can’t even hold herself up and she the only prop in this edifice of family, friends, work. Former wives. Other children. Breathe deep, strong reviving oxygen. Be strong, to tell Erin that her beloved father is dead. And then, all the others.

  What’s Erin’s favourite takeaway? asked Janice. You go, I’ll finish here and come round with some food. It’s late, you need food. Turkish? Okay. These people will drive you home.

  Mostly Lynette walked down to the shop. Her house was just about as close as parking.

  The phone rang. Janice picked it up. Your ma’s on her way, she said. Food’s coming. And to Lynette: Off you go. I can manage here.

  Death. Hospitals. War. They are the same. A mixture of boredom and fear. Terrified boredom. Bored terror. And it is not you dealing with it, it is another person that you have become, that has taken you over, whom you watch with your chest caving in and wonder, what is happening? What is she doing? The real you is happy, her loved ones are safe in her care, this other person is demented and bereft. Poor thing.

  Erin cried. She sat at the kitchen table and sobbed. Not my daddy, she howled. My dad. He wouldn’t do that. She hiccupped. Not my daddy, she said, over and over. Lynette put her arms around her and the girl buried her head. So many tears. They were both soaked.

  You did say Thai, didn’t you? said Janice, carrying in a plastic bag packed with boxes of food and another clanking with bottles of wine. Lynette picked up morsels with a fork but her mouth didn’t seem to want to take them in. Though it readily swallowed the wine.

  Don’t let me get drunk, she said to Janice.

  Best thing for you.

  No. Then I’d have a hangover tomorrow. No.

  Enough, then. Not too much.

  Erin pushed her bowl away. How can anyone eat at a time like this, she said.

  You need to keep your strength up, said Janice. And Thai food, your favourite.

  Erin looked surprised. She said, The food’s delicious. It’s me. I’m not hungry.

  I should telephone, said Lynette. She sat at the kitchen table and pictured herself doing that. Crossing the room to the telephone. Picking it up. Pressing the buttons for the numbers.

  Shall I get the phone? said Janice.

  The picture: dialling the numbers. It froze there.

  I don’t know the numbers, she said. Ex-wives. Who knows the numbers of her husband’s ex-wives?

  I’ll look in the study, said Janice. But when she saw the impossibly tidy room she wasn’t hopeful. It was a nominal study, a space furnished by a wife for her husband because that’s the appropriate thing, but not looking as though it was ever used. A cedar desk, on it some beautifully bound notebooks with marbled covers. All empty. A stand with pens and an antique inkwell. A small
colour-coordinated notebook computer. New Yorkers in a pile. Bookshelves. The armchair in the corner beside them looked as though it might have been sat in, sometimes. She looked in the desk drawers: sticky tape, a stapler, paper clips, a tray of perfect sharp pencils. No addresses.

  Lynette pictured William leaving the house in the morning. Picking up his wallet, keys, phone from the vide-poche on the dressing table. He laughed at that, saying, How very posh. I can’t help it if there isn’t an English word, she said. A pocket emptier, he said. It was of course a present from her. A present for the man who has everything. Very useful it had turned out to be. It was a ceramic bowl, made by Vic Greenaway. If you put things into it too roughly you might break it. So, William picking up his bits from the dressing table. His satchel from the chair in the hall, which would have his Filofax in it. The satchel. Where was that? In his car. Where was his car? At the pool.

  Tomorrow, she said to Janice. I’ll have to get his car. And I have to go and identify . . .

  All those grim movie moments. The trolley wheeled in. The drawer rolled out. The sheet pulled back. The stricken face which perhaps a second before had been hopeful: of course it was all a mistake.

  Janice made Sleepytime tea. Fifteen somniferous herbs. Have you got sleeping pills? she asked.

  Lynette shook her head. I’m asleep on my feet. I won’t need pills. She gave Janice a nightgown and a new toothbrush. Use any of the gunk you feel like, she said, waving at the shelf of bottles in the bathroom. There was a big fluffy towel on the heated rail. Excellent House and Garden orderliness. Janice wished her own apartment was quite so just-so. The sheets smelt of lavender. The books by the bed looked interesting.

  Lynette lay for a long time in a scented creamy bath, her head on a pillow, inert while the water cooled and had to be topped up with more hot, picturing William. Pushing back the chair in his office, standing, tidying papers, putting things in his satchel. Turning off the lights. Walking down the corridor. Past the reception and waiting room. Calling the lift. No, walking down the stairs. He liked to exercise when he could. Down to the parking lot. Pressing the button on the remote to unlock his car. Plucking the knees of his fine wool suit to keep the creases sharp. Wearing his cashmere overcoat? The weather was cold. Driving to the hotel. Picking up the bag with his swimmers, the shampoo for washing his hair after. The pool . . . No. Stop there. With all those small daily acts, and not ever thinking they would be the last time ever.

  She shivered, and got out of the bath. She was too tired to dry her body. She wrapped herself in a big bathrobe and sat on the edge of the bed. Janice had turned the doona back. Not quite chocolate on the pillow. She gazed at the tall cedar chest of drawers. One of the knobs had a little V-shaped nick in it. At what stage of its life, spanning two centuries now, had that happened? In anger, somebody throwing a heavy object? Or accidentally, on one of its moves in or out of the many houses it would have lived in? So many things you couldn’t know, and each one of them part of a narrative that had been important to someone.

  She pulled her nightgown out from under her pillow and let the bathrobe fall off her shoulders. She was so tired, if she didn’t lie down soon her flesh would slide off her bones and slump to the floor in a glistening mass of folds and coils, leaving her skeleton sitting there trying to work out how to put it on again, one foot into the leg, the other; pulling up the shapeless weight of her hips, fitting it to her buttocks; shrugging her arms in; then smoothing her face on to her skull, shaking her hair into place. Arranging her breasts. Making sure her heart was in the right place. Her lungs, her stomach. What a frightful effort all that would be. She’d never manage it.

  The bed, her bed, didn’t have William in it. Never would again. But if she began to think this, William not here, or there, never ever again William anywhere, each absence would be like a footstep in quicksand, sliding away and swallowing her up. She tipped herself over so her head was on the pillow, dragged her legs up on to the bed, pulled the doona over. Asleep before your head hits the pillow, her mother used to say, though she had never been so easy a sleeper as that.

  Wynken, Blynken and Nod one night

  Set sail in a wooden shoe—

  Sailed on a river of silvery light,

  Into a sea of dew.

  Her mother had said that, too, in a voice soft and low, making a soothing music to send her to sleep. But they weren’t asleep, Lynette said, they were sailing away and having adventures. And so can you, my precious, sail away into sleep and have lovely dreams. Dreams are adventures, you know. And you can tell me all about them in the morning.

  Sometimes it worked, sometimes she sailed off into sleep. Tonight she waited for tides of unconsciousness to carry her into oblivion. She heard the gruntling roar of a motorbike speeding past. The man up the road. The midlife-crisis Harley, William called it. And suddenly she was bolted awake, her bones skittering, her skin itching. Full of anger.

  William! her mind shouted. What have you done? He should be lying in bed beside her, curled up warm and comfortable, not making love with their bodies—William’s health, she worried about that—but close, so close, with the loving threads of their voices weaving the tough gorgeous fabric of their marriage. And now William had destroyed it. William, how could you!

  Linnet. He always called her Linnet. His sweet little singing bird. The first time they met he said she looked like a portrait of Iris Murdoch painted by Gauguin. She didn’t take a lot of notice at that moment because she was flat out doing lunch, but when she thought about it she was suspicious. Iris Murdoch she’d heard of but not read, Gauguin she knew painted idol-like naked brown boxy women. Later she asked him, and he said, It was the planes of your face. Carved, and dreaming.

  He’d stayed behind, after the others had left, and complimented her on her food. It’s a miracle, he said, after the stuff we’ve had. I was convinced that boardroom lunches were the nightmare of modern times. The desiccated and diabolical open sandwich.

  Lynette knew about bad boardroom lunches, which was why her business was successful, offering fresh vegetables, salads, fish dishes. Busy executives didn’t need stodge, or wodges of heavy protein. She smiled at William, and he made the Iris Murdoch/ Gauguin comment about her face. Her hair was dark, then, and cut in a shapely twenties bob, whereas Murdoch’s—she thought when she saw pictures of her—looked as though it was cut with a knife and fork.

  After that he often stayed behind and talked to her while she finished up. One day he kissed her. Then they found themselves making love on the floor between the island bench and the sink. Anyone could come in, she said. I know, he said. Isn’t it wonderful?

  Danger, and passion. It was hard to tell them apart.

  Found themselves. It’s a good way to put it. Sounds as if they had no choice. So lovers like to think.

  Danger. Passion. Damage. In the end. Other people suffered. They couldn’t help that. Couldn’t help themselves. They needed to be together. William’s wife; the man Lynette was living with: couldn’t they understand that? It was too strong, they couldn’t resist, love couldn’t be denied.

  Ah, William. Lost lover, lost husband, lost father.

  Ah, Linnet. Her little-bird round smallness, her neatness, her smooth brownness. All lost now, too. Nobody to see that, now. Nobody to call her sweet singing bird Linnet.

  William found it amusing that someone as little as Lynette was so good at her job, cooking for large numbers of people. Lugging heavy pots. Great bowls. Iron griddles. Trays of food, utensils, plates. I am strong, she said. Fit. A tough little urchin. Lucky. The shop wasn’t any easier. Still lugging heavy pots. Boxes, now, of utensils, food, plates. Janice was rather vaporous when it came to this kind of work; she faded away. She was the money, the figures. She balanced the books, a weighty job in its way. Lynette always imagined two tall piles of books on the brass pans of a pair of scales, teetering, tottering, one side overbalancing, falling down, smashing things as it went. Dangerous things, unbalanced books. Never the ca
se with Janice. Her books always balanced, impeccably. Always healthily in the black. The shop made money. Lynette would lose her way of life by the death of William, but not her livelihood.

  She didn’t cry. Her bones skittered in her body, her flesh twitched, her head was swollen up, fragile and aching, her eyes, shut or open, itchy and awake. As though they were filled with sand. And not the soothing sleep-giving sand of the Sandman—once she’d asked her mother, Why does sand put you to sleep? Sand in your eyes hurts. Her mother replied, It’s magic sand, it melts and brings you beautiful dreams. It’s not the kind that hurts so much when it is blown into your face by the sea wind. Tears could flush out that stinging sand, but she didn’t have any.

  William was ten years older than Lynette; it wasn’t unlikely that he’d die before her. But not yet. Not at sixty-four. Why not seventy-four, eighty-four, ninety-four? His heart was okay; he had angina pains sometimes but they needn’t be a problem the doctor said, diet and exercise were the answer there and William paid attention to both. Lynette cooked vegetables and fish, made salads, used olive oil, avoided butter. William was trim and fit. He worked long hours, often didn’t finish until eight or so, but that was good for him, he’d claimed, it wasn’t stressful dangerous work.