chapter forty
The day of the barbeque
‘Do you see it? Look closely!’ Oliver stood beneath a tree just outside the cabana, holding Holly up high, his hands gripping her calves as though she were a little circus performer.
There was a rustle of leaves and a flash of surprised bright round eyes as the possum suddenly emerged.
‘I see it!’ shrieked Holly.
‘It’s a ringtail possum,’ said Oliver. ‘See how he’s got the white tip on his tail? Little factoid for you: he’s got two thumbs on each front foot to help him climb. Two thumbs! Imagine that!’
Good Lord, Oliver would be a wonderful father, thought Clementine, pressing her lips to Ruby’s scalp. Maybe she could do it. Give them her eggs. She donated her blood, why not her eggs? And then she could just forget that the child was biologically hers. It was a state-of-mind thing.
Be generous, Clementine, be kind. Not everyone has your good fortune. Clementine thought of the time her mother invited Erika to come away on a beach holiday with them when they were thirteen, a holiday Clementine had been desperately anticipating because it would be two weeks without that shameful prickly sensation she’d been experiencing every day at school, when Erika would hurry up to her each lunchtime and stand far too close, her voice low and intimate, ‘Let’s eat lunch over there. Somewhere private.’ Clementine was only a kid. The necessary negotiations, all conducted within the parameters of her mother’s all-important code of kindness, felt amazingly complex. Sometimes she’d promise Erika she’d spend just half of lunchtime with her. Sometimes she’d convince Erika to join her with other kids, but Erika was happiest when it was just the two of them. Clementine had other friendships she wanted to cultivate: normal, easy friendships. It felt like Clementine had to make a daily choice: my happiness or her happiness?
She’d wanted a holiday with just her big brothers, where she would have been included in their adventures, but instead it had been a holiday where the boys had gone one way and the girls another, and every single day Clementine had had to forcibly suppress her rage and disguise her selfishness because poor Erika had never had a family holiday like this, and you had to share what you had.
She looked over at Erika, who had sunk down in her chair and was scowling into her wineglass. There was no doubt about it. Erika was tipsy.
Was she drinking more than usual because of the awful things she’d overheard? Clementine stretched her arm around Ruby’s curved little body to pick up her own wineglass again.
Vid and Tiffany stacked plates to take inside.
‘Let me do it,’ said Sam to Tiffany. He stood and held out his hands for the plates. ‘You relax for a bit.’
‘All right,’ said Tiffany, handing over the plates and sinking back into her chair. ‘You won’t have to ask me twice.’
‘You got the girls?’ called Sam to Clementine over his shoulder as he went to follow Vid out of the yard.
‘Yes, I’ve got the girls,’ said Clementine, indicating Ruby on her lap and Holly still with Oliver, checking out the possum.
‘I think Dakota has gone inside to read a book,’ said Tiffany, looking around. ‘Sorry. She does that sometimes, disappears, and you find her lying on her bed reading.’
‘That’s no problem,’ said Clementine. ‘It was great to have her playing with them for as long as we did.’
‘Dakota is obsessed with reading at the moment,’ said Tiffany, and Clementine could see by the way she pulled her lips down at the corners that she was trying to conceal her pride. ‘When I was her age I was obsessed with make-up and clothes and boys.’
Yeah, and I bet the boys were obsessed with you, thought Clementine.
‘Were you obsessed with music?’ Tiffany pulled at a strand of hair that had got caught on her lip. Literally everything she did was sensual. What would she be like as an old lady? It was impossible to imagine Tiffany elderly, whereas Clementine only had to glance at Erika frowning ferociously off into the distance to see the old lady she would one day be, the lines between her eyes that would become deep furrows, the slight stoop in her back that would become a hunch.
Imagining Erika as a grumpy old lady, full of complaints and refutations, made Clementine feel fondly towards her. Somehow she knew there would be an unspoken truce on their unspoken battle over God knew what when they were old. They could both surrender to their innate grumpiness. It was going to be a lovely relief.
‘I guess it was important to me,’ said Clementine. Music wasn’t her obsession so much as her escape. She didn’t have to share that world with Erika, except for when she came to watch her perform, but there was enough space between them then – both literally and figuratively.
‘Were your parents musical?’ asked Tiffany.
‘Not in the slightest,’ said Clementine. She laughed a little. ‘I’m surrounded by the unmusical. Mum and Dad. Sam. My kids!’
‘Is that tricky?’ asked Tiffany.
‘Tricky?’ repeated Clementine.
What a funny choice of word. Was it tricky being surrounded by the unmusical?
Nobody could accuse Clementine’s parents of being unsupportive. They’d helped her with the money to buy her beautiful Viennese cello (she’d paid back a little over half, and after Ruby was born, her dad had told her not to worry about the rest, he’d ‘take it off her inheritance’): an instrument that aroused so many conflicting emotions in Clementine it sometimes felt like a marriage. Her dad was proud of Clementine in a distant, awestruck way. She’d been so touched that time she’d discovered him watching the tennis with a copy of Classical Music for Dummies face down on the couch next to him. But Clementine knew that nothing she played would ever come close to a Johnny Cash song for her dad.
Clementine’s mother was supportive too, of course she was – after all, she’d been the one to drive Clementine to lessons and auditions and performances without ever a word of complaint – but over the years Clementine had come to feel that her mother had complicated feelings about her music. It wasn’t disapproval – why would it be? – but it often felt like disapproval. She sometimes wondered if Pam saw Clementine’s career as flighty or self-indulgent, more like a hobby, especially when compared to Erika’s solid, sensible job. When Pam talked to Erika about her work she nodded along respectfully, whereas she seemed to find Clementine’s job amusing, a little outlandish. ‘You’re imagining it,’ Sam always said. He thought it said more about Clementine’s resentment towards her mother for making Erika part of her family and thereby forcing a friendship upon her.
‘You probably felt supplanted by Erika,’ he’d once said.
‘No,’ said Clementine. ‘I just wanted her to go home.’
‘Exactly,’ said Sam, as if he’d made his point.
And what about Sam? Was it ‘tricky’ that he wasn’t a musician? Sometimes, after a performance, he’d ask her how it had gone and she’d say ‘Good’ and he’d say ‘That’s good’ and that would be it, and she’d feel a little wistful because if he were a fellow musician she would have had so much more to share with him. She knew lots of couples who worked together in orchestras and talked constantly about work. Ainsley and Hu, for example, had a pact that they were only allowed to talk about work up until when they crossed the Anzac Bridge because otherwise it just got ‘too intense’. Clementine couldn’t imagine that. She and Sam talked about other things. The children. Game of Thrones. Their families. They didn’t need to talk about music. It didn’t matter.
Now Erika sat up straight, as though rousing herself. ‘I was there when Clementine heard the cello for the first time,’ she said to Tiffany. There was an unmistakeable sloppiness to her speech. ‘One of the boys in our class had a mother who played the cello, and she came in one day and played it for us. I thought it was nice enough, but then I looked over at Clementine and she looked like she’d found nirvana.’
Clementine remembered when she’d first heard that luscious sound. She hadn’t known a sound like that was possible, and the fact that an ordinary-looking mother had the ability to make it! It was Erika who’d told Clementine she should ask her parents if she could have cello lessons, and Clementine often wondered if it would have occurred to her to have asked. She thought perhaps not; she would have tried to find a way to listen to the cello again, but no one in even her extended family played a stringed instrument.
Erika must not remember that she was the one who suggested it or else she would have found ways to mention it at every opportunity, to take ownership of Clementine’s career.
‘So you two have known each other since you were kids,’ said Tiffany. ‘That’s great to have a friendship last all these years.’
‘Clementine’s mother kind of adopted me,’ said Erika. ‘Because I didn’t have a great “home environment”.’ She made air quotes around the words ‘home environment’. ‘It wasn’t really Clementine’s choice, was it, Clementine?’