The Forrests

15. View





Only twenty-four hours since they’d finally determined to go, Dorothy and Amy found themselves halfway around the world. A different time zone, everything awry, from the row with Andrew about leaving in the first place to the dream-long flight to LA. Ruth’s husband Ben, a wealthy, pigeonish banker, met them at the airport, where they hired a rental and followed him through the haze and tangled freeway, humming with Amy’s buzz at the vast spread of city, Dot’s own ongoing meditation about observing the loss. A month ago her parents had moved across the country to California, to be nearer to Ruth. Two days ago, they had died. The car tipped head first into a shallow ravine; consensus was that Frank had suffered a heart attack while driving, Lee in the passenger seat beside him, neither of them belted in.

People Dot didn’t recognise gathered outside St Mary’s, the modest Episcopal church in her parents’ adopted neighbourhood. She embraced Ruth, whose hair was professionally set. A few rushed introductions while Dot tugged at her formless aeroplane cardigan: Ruth directed them to Frank and Lee’s friends and the second cousins, the other Forrests. ‘But you’ll come back to the house afterwards. There’s an afternoon tea. I’ve had it catered.’

‘Yes. We’ll see you there. Wait, Ruth – where are your girls?’

But Ruth had gone to greet more people, perfect in low heels and tan stockings.

A tall skinny young man, one of the cousins, blatantly appraised Amy through his tortoiseshell specs, worn in the style of Frank Forrest. He was disappointed to learn that she and Dot were not staying on.

‘The return flight leaves tonight,’ Amy explained. ‘We’ll sleep on the plane.’

‘Why not come for longer? I could show you round.’

‘We’ve got to get back. We nearly didn’t come. I didn’t really know my grandparents.’

‘Aha. Tell me more.’

Inside, caught in a patch of sunlight on the left of the aisle, Rena sat away from the other mourners, bolt upright in a special padded seat. ‘You came all this way,’ Dorothy said. ‘My god. You’re amazing.’ Light limned the wiry shock of hair, her skin, hair and bone just held together by her electric will, her rage.

‘Your mother was a dear friend,’ Rena said. ‘A dear, dear friend.’ Her hands twisted.

‘How’s Michael?’

‘He didn’t want to come.’

‘I know.’ After Ruth’s phone call Dot had rung him to break the news. He lived at the commune now, with Rena, ‘Until it’s her time’, as he put it, having been transformed by the rural life into someone who spoke like a medieval pastor, a crowing rooster in the background. When she told him about the accident there had been a long, long pause. Wind rushing the wires.

There they were. Ruth’s twins. In the doorway, a welcoming committee, teeth gnarly with metal braces but so poised, shiny brown hair and black dresses, shaking the hands of the elderly mourners, accepting condolences, giving them. Dot went to say hello and let them check her out, the weird auntie from that place they couldn’t find on a map. They were polite, told her about school and horse riding and drama class.

‘You must have been close to your grandparents?’ she asked, and both girls said together, ‘Oh, yes.’

She waved her daughter to come over from the speccy flirt, but before she reached them the minister took the podium, and the girls melted away, and Dot and Amy quickly ducked into a pew.

The service flowed with loving testimony from incredibly old people about Frank and Lee’s capacity for friendship. White-frosted men and women sticklike inside pressed cotton pastels, clean shoes. Maybe it was the jetlag, making her sway in her seat, as though one of the California fault lines had opened and was torquing the earth slowly. It wasn’t until the flirtatious cousin stood up to read a letter from Daniel, ‘who couldn’t be here in person’, that Dorothy really accepted he wasn’t going to come. No – even then a corner of her mind imagined him outside, smoking, ready to throw an arm out as she walked past. But this was a long way, no doubt, from wherever he now lived.

Overwhelmed by the gravity of the situation, the cousin lingered too long over Danny’s simple lines, delivered them in a suspenseful boom. ‘ “Lee and Frank gave me a home when I needed one most. They gave me a family”.’

‘He should do voice-overs for blockbuster ads. This summer . . .’ Dorothy whispered to Amy in the movie-trailer voice. ‘Two people . . .’

Her daughter looked at her. ‘Oh Mum,’ she said. ‘It’s all right.’

The pew rocked. Her body felt the motion of the plane, still sleeping in the awkward chair, holding there the knowledge of her own safe bed at home. In Auckland it was midnight. Little by little her parents’ car approached the bend in the road. Funerals go by so fast.



Later they sat outside Frank and Lee’s house in the rented car and watched people stream through the gates for the catered afternoon tea, rich yellow light dripping over the afternoon. ‘Come on,’ Rena said from the back seat. ‘Let’s go in.’

Dorothy turned to Amy. ‘I think this is what’s called losing your nerve.’

‘I’ll come in,’ said Amy. ‘Moral support.’ She kissed her mother’s cheek. ‘Follow when you’re feeling up to it.’ She helped Rena’s crabbed body out of the car and across the road, hobbling.

The magnolia in the front yard was broad and luscious, the white plaster freshly painted. Inside, Amy walked a cup of tea through the Forrests’ retirement bungalow, watching her aunt and uncle and an antique-dealer friend in conversation that threatened at times to reveal itself as negotiation, linger over this sideboard, that rug. Pieces she described later for Dorothy to visualise, furniture that had bobbed back and forth on the ocean and crossed this country by U-Haul.

When Amy appeared in the front doorway after about half an hour the tall cousin was with her, and Dot gripped the steering wheel and craned forward to see better. He kissed Amy on both cheeks and they made a false attempt at parting and smiled, her fingertips to his chest both deflection and touch. From the shadowed hall, Ruth joined them and embraced her niece. At that distance she looked just like their mother. When they were younger Ruth had most resembled Eve, but now she had long passed Eve in age, the little sister outgrowing the elder. Dot waited for Ruth to glance over, walk down the steps and cross the road, but she did not. After a moment Dorothy tooted and waved. Ruth, to her credit, just stood on the doorstep and looked evenly at the car, then was swallowed back into the house. Amy slid into the passenger seat and pulled a small framed square from the inside of her linen coat.

‘What’s this?’

‘A memento. Do you want it?’

It was a needlework piece, a picture of a cottage garden, little blue and purple stitches for flowers and a yellow thatched pattern on the cottage roof.

‘No thanks. But you should keep it.’

‘Cool. I love it.’

‘Did you talk to your cousins?’

‘Yeah, they’re nice. Pretty upset. They kept talking about how their dog died only last year.’

‘No Rena?’

‘Apparently she’s staying a few days. I wouldn’t be surprised if the trip kills her. She’s absolutely crazy. She tried telling me he did it on purpose.’

‘Who?’

‘Your dad.’

Dorothy had a pleasing image of running Rena over in this car. Crunch. ‘What, he drove off the road on purpose, or had a heart attack on purpose? Or both?’

‘Exactly. I mean she’s nuts. When I left she was having a sleep on their bed.’

‘Frank and Lee’s bed?’

‘Yes.’ The children had never been sure what to call them; Dorothy knew this was her fault.

‘Did you have a nice talk to your aunt?’

‘She’s my aunt? I thought she was the real estate agent.’

‘Are you being funny?’ The car bunny hopped at the lights. She wasn’t used to a manual. ‘Sorry.’

‘Yes. But she did have that price-sticker vibe.’

‘Noting the value of things.’

‘Maybe it was just the pearls.’

‘I mean what things are worth. Not the value of things. That would be a different question.’ Dorothy turned on the radio. ‘How was it in there?’

Amy smiled. ‘Pretty nice house they ended up in.’

‘Oh, yeah.’ It would likely be sold now, she supposed. Ben had made sure to mention that there were complications with the will, which was fine with her; she’d rather that was all broached when they were safely home again through the sky, clouds reforming in the aeroplane’s wake, covering the trail. ‘They were privileged.’

‘Why didn’t they ever some to see us?’

‘Because they were cunts.’

‘Jesus, Mum.’ Amy leaned forward and turned off the radio.

‘Sorry.’

‘Oh, just let’s not talk about it.’ She put the radio on again.

‘Well, money sort of – bookended their lives. They came from money and they ended with it.’ Dorothy gestured around her. ‘Look at this neighbourhood. Do you see any graffiti, any homeless people, any social problems? No, it’s perfect, beautiful – see, people drinking cappuccino on the street, look at the little dogs, they don’t even shit, those dogs, they’re just little balls of fluff, it’s paradise.’ She leaned on the car horn. The people in the cafés and outside the boutiques looked over.

Amy yanked her mother’s arm away from the horn. ‘Stop it. Why did you even come? You’re so crazy.’

‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. It’s a nervous reaction.’ A small keening escaped from her, somewhere between a laugh and a cry.

‘Oh, whatever.’ Amy stared out the window as though she could melt it.

‘Amy. You know I’m one of four children too.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘That I love you. Thank you for coming with me. Now let’s just leave. Oh dear.’ Tears came properly now, slipping hot. She dropped a hand from the steering wheel to brush them away, and the car wobbled over the centre line and a passing horn blared.

‘OK crazy lady, pull in here. I’m going to drive.’

After a while cruising the balmy streets, taking in the high-end health-food shops and the bicycles and prams and pretty trees, the freeway loomed and Dorothy fell asleep, drifting off with her daughter at the wheel, clutching the framed tapestry in her hands.



With something like disbelief, Andrew and Dorothy looked back on their thirties as their financially comfortable years. Something had happened to money; not just theirs, other people’s too, even those like them without investments. There was less of it. Andrew was made redundant and the teachers’ union lost a pay dispute. The kids needed help with student loans. Petrol. Food. The cost of moving house. To take the pressure off they sold up the burn-scarred cedar place in Waterview and moved to a brick-and-tile rental in the hills thirty minutes from the city, a suburb with the outlier’s sense of itself, peopled by young hippies and retirees who liked their stories told. Donald and Hannah were in the thick of social lives, Amy was studying, subsisting in a fungal student flat in town, and Grace had become a series of South American postcards and video calls. This was the awful, dawning joke of parenting: that the early shock of children, their need and clamour and inescapable attachment, just as quickly became their blithe withdrawal. And they took everything. They took their friends, their jokes, their daily fresh discoveries, the gorgeous, ungraspable newness of the world. Look sharp, the tide’s gone out. There was room for Dot and Andrew to look at each other for the first time in ages, bewildered. She was no longer a young mother. She was not a hippy or a retiree.

Doggedly positive, Andrew approached unemployment in his mid-fifties as a self-improvement project. T’ai chi at the community centre; a men’s book club; canvas frames. ‘Now’s my chance to really paint.’ Their neighbour, Dennis, was a local noble, and Dorothy supplemented her practically voluntary job teaching art at the maternity home with work in his garden. A bit extra.

When he wasn’t working on his paintings, Andrew spent most of his time in the library, researching the area and reading books by middle-aged men who had found a new meaning for life through their dog, or their father’s diaries, or their dying football coach. In a few months he finished a series of local portraits in gouache. No mainstream dealer was interested, but he soon met Jennifer from the local art gallery, a community powerhouse in chunky necklaces and a smoker’s growl, a woman who moved and shook. She turned him on to the neighbourhood giveaway guide and got him sketching, unpaid, for that. ‘Promise you, darling, if we get our grant covered again next year and no counting chickens in these times, I’ll give you a show. Or you could hit up Dennis for some sponsorship? God knows we all need a bit of philanthropy.’ And she winked at Dot from beneath her pale-pink beret.



A postcard from Ruth adorned the fridge door, next to Grace’s latest from Guatemala. Ruth was coming to stay in the brick house behind the green hedge, the house flanked by dark cypresses like thick green flames. Soon she would appear on their driveway, suitcase in hand. The late summer holidays were perfect for a visit: long afternoons and less likelihood of rain, the sculpture park still open to the public.

Dot mowed the lawn and hassled Andrew to fix the stuck window in their son’s bedroom and thought about a range of books – Dennis’s catalogues of pioneer watercolours, local poetry, a novel – to place on the wooden chair next to the bed. There was plenty of time, a day to go. But then, when she was making space inside the refrigerator for crocus and hyacinth bulbs, came a crunching sound from the drive and she ran to the door, feeling red-faced and oh, breathless and wild, and saw the car – not the airport shuttle which Ruth had insisted she would take, declining Dorothy’s offer to collect her, but a taxi. A woman got out and a man followed and at first she thought it was the driver, that the driver had emerged to help Ruth with her luggage, but then the bags were on the path and the taxi pulled away and the man and the woman both remained.

As Dot walked down the steps towards the couple who frowned at the house, at the cypress trees, the camellia bushes and clay roof tiles, it became clear Ruth was ageing in reverse. At the funeral she had been strung-out, dry-handed, efficient and too thin, and she now looked younger, the layer of dewy plumpness in the skin of her face at odds with the cage-bones above her unlikely breasts. The man at her side – it wasn’t Ben – could have been a younger version of Daniel, at least how Dan might have looked if he never took the drugs or hadn’t f*cked off overseas and acquired the terrifying agelessness of the constant traveller. All of this registered while Dorothy was being embraced by Ruth and this American, kissed once, twice, three times. There was a tussle over the suitcases, which Dorothy won.

‘We weren’t expecting you till tomorrow.’ Andrew marched up the hallway towards them. He would think he was being welcoming but Dot cringed at his tone. He kissed Ruth and clasped hands with the man, whose name was repeated – Hank – what a relief because it had flown straight out of her mind the first time she heard it, down there by the garage, and she could just see herself getting the name wrong, or never saying it for the duration of his stay, falling mute when the time came to introduce him to anyone else, Hank, Hank, and now they were not in the hallway any more but in the kitchen where she was pouring glasses of water from the jug in the fridge, which needed refilling, so she and Andrew had their glasses warm, from the tap. Ruth picked up the brown-paper bags of bulbs from the kitchen table and peered inside. She’d been confused by the hemisphere change. She often messed up dates, Hank laughed, it was tiresome, most of their friends were used to making allowances.

‘Just last week we arrived at a cocktail party, all,’ he gestured elegantly down the front of his shirt as if to say gussied up, ‘and the host and hostess are sitting there in T-shirts and jeans, super relaxed, feeding their two-year-old grandchild her dinner. Well, are we early, we ask? No. We’re a day late. A whole day. Because she doesn’t ever pay attention.’

Everyone laughed. Hank was nervous, Dorothy realised, and the tension in her chest relaxed a little. She showed them the shared bathroom and Donald’s room, the small view across the vege garden. She had been going to put lavender in a vase. ‘Are you happy sharing? There’s Hannah’s room but we’re painting it, sorry, I thought we’d be finished by now. The fumes.’ The house must be modest, compared to what they were used to.

‘Do you have a stretcher bed?’ Hank asked.

‘Yes, of course.’

They dragged it out from under Hannah’s bed, and wiped the metal bars free of dust and a few long blonde hairs. Eve’s daughter, Louisa, had used it last, when she’d begun nursing college. Now she lived at the hostel. Getting in to classes from here every day cost too much in gas. ‘I hope you’ll be comfortable.’

‘How many kids do you have?’

‘Four, just the younger two live here and they’re off camping with friends. We’re on our own!’

‘Practice run for the empty nest, hey?’

But it was too late, she had disappeared down the hall to rescue the bulbs and chill them.

She took a pot of cottage cheese from the fridge and misjudged the lid’s grip and it fell to the floor, splattering white globs up the freezer door and over the orange tiles. Andrew would say good riddance to high cholesterol but the waste made her so frustrated. Her hand as she wiped it up looked like somebody else’s, the skin cellophane-shiny in places and spotted, the fingers red and swollen at the knuckles, the nails beginning to ridge. The bench-top helped her heave upright. That cut in the crease of her right index finger had opened up again. She ran tap water over it, stingingly. Good.

They ate outside, as the light faded, and the clustered ox-eye daisies closed purple undersides to the day. Turned out Hank had a friend here, an American screenwriter who spent summers in the suburb across the valley, where house lights were gleaming through the dusk. Dot forced herself to meet Ruth’s eye when either of them were talking but even then she quickly looked away, and everything existed flat at the front of her face: normality as a performance.

‘Where’s Andrew?’ asked Ruth.

‘Oh, he’s about somewhere, sorry, he gets a bit brusque when he’s on an illustration deadline.’ That was how he called it, although the deadlines were self-imposed.

‘He’s still in IT?’

‘No.’ He was never in IT. She let it go. ‘Last year he was made redundant. Fifty-six, you know? I mean it’s happened to plenty of people we know but it’s meant to stay in that category of things that happen to other people. Turns out we didn’t have the magic password.’

‘That’s the thing with the unexpected knocks,’ said Hank. ‘They’re unexpected.’

‘Yes. Redundancy’s pretty awful. That quiet exit.’

‘Well.’ Ruth slapped at a mosquito on her calf, and Dorothy passed her the repellent. ‘I’m sure he has his hobbies, no?’

‘He wouldn’t call his painting a hobby! I mean, he will make money from it eventually . . . it’s hard for everyone.’ She felt a constriction of guilt. ‘He has to lock himself away. Don’t take it personally.’

‘Of course not.’

‘How are your girls?’

‘Horsy. Twinsy.’

Over the hills the air was yellow, a floating yellow cloak. ‘Have you got photos? I’d love to see.’

‘Your kids?’

‘Great.’ Dorothy drank some more wine. ‘The usual teenage stuff. I spent last Saturday night driving round Hannah’s friends’ houses to find what party she was at, had to haul her out of a bedroom with some boy. You know what she says to me? “Romeo and Juliet were fourteen.” ’

‘Smart kid,’ said Hank.

‘Not by any stretch.’

Ruth smiled. ‘I remember Lee waiting up for you and Daniel to come home. She’d sit in the kitchen and run upstairs to bed when she heard the car pulling up.’

‘Really?’ Her body reacted before her mind caught up. God, the rush dizzied her. It felt fantastic.

‘Oh yeah. Doing those f*cking crosswords.’ She mimed stab-scratching at a page with a pen.

‘She knew that we went out in the car?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You knew?’

‘I knew everything you did. I’m your kid sister, I was obsessed with you.’

‘I didn’t think anybody knew about that.’

‘Well, doh.’ Ruth scratched the inside of her ear. ‘Lee worried about you guys all the time. You, Eve, Michael. She always thought the sky was going to fall in, you know? I think that’s partly why she never came back here . . . Darling.’

Tears spilled from Dorothy’s eyes. ‘Sorry, Hank,’ she said.

‘Oh come on.’

‘I think it was a kind of love,’ said Ruth, clutching her hand across the table. ‘That fear. And then when Eve died, oh you should’ve seen her. Almost like she’d been waiting for it. The worst. Like she knew all along.’

‘I did see her. She was medicated.’

‘Yes. Of course. Oh, f*ck it.’ The tip of Ruth’s nose was red. ‘F*ck.’

‘What?’ In an ideal world her nose wouldn’t run in front of Hank, but it was too late, and now she was dabbing under her eyes with a paper napkin, checking for traces of mascara. ‘Are you OK?’

Ruth gathered herself, breathed deeply. ‘So, darling, I’ve got to tell you, you don’t feature in the will, all right? Ben and I tried to find an earlier version, but.’ A turn of the wrist, the wine tilting.

‘Ruthie, it’s fine.’ Dot glanced at Hank, who had discreetly become invisible as he ground pepper onto his salad. ‘I didn’t expect anything. You did it all, you were there for them for years in a way Michael and I just weren’t.’

Ruth’s head shook like a little bell. ‘It’s all just a bit,’ palms out, the brightness in her voice, a clear attempt to keep it together, ‘just bullshit, isn’t it. Bastards. Anyway I’m going to split my inheritance with you and Mike. It isn’t much. But that’s what I’ve decided.’

Smoke twisted from the table candle. Dorothy’s eyes smarted. ‘Oh. That’s very sweet. That’s very kind of you.’ She didn’t want the money, desperately didn’t want it, but to say so would be to ruin this moment.

‘OK. That’s done.’ Ruth’s phone beeped and she drew it from the inside pocket of her linen tote bag and said, ‘Oh, it’s Ben.’

In the pause that followed, while she texted back, there were the sounds of Hank’s cutlery tapping his plate, an air bubble glugging in the wine bottle as Dorothy refilled their glasses, and then Andrew’s car starting, driving away from the house.



They’d all gone to bed by the time he came home. Dot lay listening to the shower in the bathroom down the hall, wishing the shimmery sound of falling water would go on for ever. Once he’d climbed in beside her she whispered, unsure whether Hank and Ruth had left their door open, ‘She dyes her hair.’

‘So do you.’

‘And she’s had face work.’

‘You think?’

‘Her skin is so smooth. Look at my crow’s feet. She hasn’t got any, she hasn’t got any lines. There’s a picture of her in an attic somewhere, crumbling.’

Andrew rolled over. ‘Do you want me to find them a motel tomorrow?’

‘No.’ Dorothy wiped at her temple, where what she had started to think of as ‘old lady tears’ had slid from the corner of one eye. ‘Where were you?’

‘Sorry. Late night at the library.’

I don’t believe you. The words clogged in her throat. She woke at three, full of adrenalin.



As always the morning was better, the replenishment of faith that came with sunlight, and now in music – not hers, not Andrew’s or the kids’ – some fusion thing of Ruth’s that filled the house and bore her on a wave of sound in her nightie, through the open doors to the garden where there was enough air for all this drumming, the horns, the astonishing upbeatness of it like an announcement, music to accompany a spontaneous dance number on a promenade, umbrellas twirling, striped T-shirts, full skirts. Ruth contemplated the vegetable beds, a coffee bowl in her hands. ‘So,’ she said. ‘This is a lovely place.’

‘Thank you.’ Dorothy slung a wicker basket over her elbow, pushed her other arm into the sparsely bristled leaves and weighed a tomato in her palm, twisted it off the dark-green stem. ‘Do you still have your house in LA?’

‘Of course, Ben’s there now.’

‘Oh, I just wasn’t – sure – about you and Hank?’

Ruth nodded and blew at her coffee.

‘Sorry,’ Dorothy said. ‘If it’s private.’

‘Oh, yes.’ Ruth laughed. Her voice was moneyed and sounded like a lifetime of polished floors. ‘No problem, darling. No problem.’

Dorothy didn’t think Hank had been at the funeral. Perhaps that was another reason for Ruth’s antsiness at the time, her stress. She resisted asking.

‘Hey.’ He arrived by the pepper plants wearing gym shorts, a tank top and a baseball cap. ‘I’m going for a run. Then we’ll hit the markets, et cetera?’

Dorothy loosened her nightie away from the middle of her body, where it slightly clung in the heat of the morning, and fanned her face with her hand. ‘Be careful on the roads round here. There isn’t much traffic so people drive like dicks.’

‘You drive on the left, right?’

They watched him jog away.

‘I have to go to work,’ Dorothy said. ‘Will you be OK here?’

Ruth smiled. ‘Of course.’

‘So is that your music?’

‘Oh yeah, take it off if you don’t like it.’

‘Maybe just Andrew. The distraction.’



Dennis opened the door in his dressing gown, surprised to see her. ‘It’s Tuesday. I thought you were coming tomorrow.’

‘Is it all right? We’ve got houseguests, I thought I’d give them some space.’ She blushed at this self-serving lie. A whole day with Ruth would have killed her.

He took the bunch of sweet peas with wavering hands and kissed Dorothy on both cheeks. ‘These smell divine.’ He inhaled the flowers. A petal dropped, gone, to the cool slate floor.

‘I’ll go straight through to the back.’

Dennis frowned. ‘The pool man’s coming today as well.’

‘Don’t worry. I won’t let any clippings fly in.’

Dorothy cut back the box hedges until her back and arms ached and the ridges of the secateurs’ handles were imprinted in her hands. The garden was full of exotics; this was how Dennis liked it, the anachronism, wearing his coloniser heritage with pride. She deadheaded roses and picked the flower heads off the last of the zinnias and marigolds and put them in her basket to store. An attack of breathlessness hit. She sat for a while beneath the umbrella of the willow tree, looking through the overhanging leaves at the sunflowers on the other side of the garden, ungainly freaks leaning against the fence. She stared at the sunflowers for a long time. The seeds would be ready to shake out and dry. A white sheet spread out on the grass. Cracked feet. Her father’s bewildered squint, Lee emerging from the bush, Ruth in Daniel’s arms.

The pool guy vacuumed the bottom corners of the pool and stroked the water’s surface with his long unwieldy poles. Dorothy waited till he was in the pool house before she crawled out from under the willow branches, so as not to startle him, or look like some kind of creature. She spread chopped leaf mulch under the new shrubs and found a small brown lizard on one of the potted plants and flicked it into the bushes. Some of the plants needed to be shifted indoors to Dennis’s conservatory. She checked the undersides of the leaves for bugs. The old terracotta pots were so crumbly it was hard to wipe dirt from their bases without gravel-sized pieces of orange clay coming away on the cloth.

‘Are you free tonight?’ she asked Dennis, who was sitting at his dining-room table eating a sandwich.

‘Yes.’ Dennis’s head swung side to side as though he was saying no. He grasped for the linen napkin that sat in front of him on the table, his hand batting the table twice before his fingers curled and gripped it, brought it to his pursed, trembling mouth.

Dorothy rode her bike slowly home along the unmarked road, suede hills on her right, that twinge in her knee shooting sciatically up to her hip. A vanload of German tourists stood where the tourists always stood, taking the necessary photograph of the sea nestled between those hills across the valley, hot blue in the afternoon sun. When they first moved here Dennis had talked about putting in a swimming pool at their place but then he needed more medical care and the expense was too great. Sweat ran down the backs of Dot’s knees.

She rested in the corner doorway of the closed butcher’s shop, where the blinds were drawn. The triangular junction was free of traffic. Two rental cars sat parked outside the deli and aside from that evidence of human life an atomising bomb could be dropped and you would know no different. A tree with polymer-lace bark like camouflage, and knobbled, amputated branches, stood in front of a second-storey sash window, which was open, the slight breeze up there sucking the filmy curtain in and out, in and out. Geraniums, fluorescent splats of red paint, clustered in the window box. As in a puppet show, a pair of hands appeared on the window ledge, the room behind them darkness. She couldn’t take her eyes off the gripping fingers, the zigzagged light on the raised glass, the bright flowers. What was that, a couple in the afternoon, f*cking.

In the welcome shade of the house Dorothy made some calls then spread out on her bed by the open window and slept for most of the afternoon. Hank and Ruth were still sightseeing when she woke, and showered, and put the chickens on to roast and made the salad and rice. She was lighting candles on the outdoor table when Andrew came through the back door, arms raised above his head, cracking his shoulders.

Dorothy shook out the match between her fingers and walked slowly towards her husband. His bristled cheek felt unfamiliar to her lips. ‘Will you be home for dinner?’

‘What’s going on?’

‘I’ve invited half the neighbourhood. I don’t know what I’ve done. Is it the last thing you feel like?’

‘Go for it.’ Andrew tugged at one end of the wrought-iron bench seat, which made a harsh scraping noise along the patio. ‘What are you wearing?’

Dorothy smoothed her hands down the front of her dress. ‘I found it in the back of the cupboard. Too young for me?’

Halfway through dinner she leaned back in her chair and felt as though a flower, a peony or hibiscus, was blossoming inside her. The wine maybe, or the toke on Andrew’s cigarette that she leaned over for, feeling his fingers against her lips as she quickly sucked, the hot prickle of the smoke on her tongue. How amazing to see her sister in the glow from the tea lights, powerful in her way, purring into Jim Wang’s neck. Music played from the speakers that Ruth had shifted to stand in the French doors. Down the other end of the table Hank and his screenwriter friend were deep in conversation. It amazed Dot that people had these lifestyles, that you could own a holiday house a twelve-hour flight away from home, but she supposed it shouldn’t. Hank smoked like a demon – like an American photographer. The screenwriter’s wife was pregnant, and had eaten none of the cheeses that Hank and Ruth brought back from the market, and Dorothy shook the bread basket at her. ‘Everything’s pasteurised. But I understand. No point taking chances. Have some bread, you must be starving.’

The girl thanked her and almost shoved the roll into her mouth, just as Dennis asked her a question, his illness making it look as though he really cared for each word and struggled to find it precisely, ideas brimming in him before the body would allow them out. Dorothy carved and plated chicken for Dennis, Ruth, Hank, Hank’s friend, Hank’s friend’s wife, Terry from the bookshop, the Hansens, the Wangs, Mareta and her teenage daughter, Andrew and herself.

‘If I wasn’t here,’ said Destiny, the teenager, ‘you’d be thirteen at the table.’

‘Do you think that’s dangerous?’ Ruth laughed.

‘All teenagers believe in that BS,’ said Mareta. ‘I’ve had a houseful of Ouija boards and spirits and creepy little rune-y relic-y things all summer. I’m over it.’

‘Don’t say over it,’ Destiny said.

‘Whatever.’

Hank nodded his head towards his friend’s wife. ‘What about her? She’s pregnant, does that count as another person?’

Pontoon lights hung in the trees behind the table. The golden-whiteness shining from them made the sky look darker than it really was, and the stars couldn’t be seen. Night-blooming jasmine opened its perfume onto the courtyard. There was a pause in the music, between tracks. Andrew was telling Ruth an anecdote, a piece of history Dot had heard a gazillion times before, and Ruth was laughing. The scent of the flowers was so elusive, there one moment and then gone. Dorothy gestured to her husband, twiddling her fingers to ask for another rolled cigarette. The compromises and frustration and loss were worth it, she thought, her eyes meeting his – if they could only stay in this.

A new song started and Mareta pushed her chair back and held her hands out to Terry and he bowed his head, rose from his chair and they started dancing. ‘Shame, Mum,’ Destiny called, but as Dorothy crossed the courtyard to the kitchen, everyone was getting up to join them.

She poured more water into the large earthenware jug. Hank appeared in the kitchen with the glass one from the table. ‘Great minds,’ he said. Dorothy asked how he was getting on and he said fine and leaned against the sink bench, the water radiant in his hands through the blue glass, and, ‘You?’ And she said yes. Yes. Hank poured a glass of water and held it out to her and as she reached for it she looked through the open doors at Dennis being led around the courtyard by Ruth. Hank’s fingertips brushed hers as they released the glass and she turned in surprise, jolted.



In the heat of the day Ruth stayed indoors to protect her face. ‘The light here is unbelievable. For sure it’s stronger than when we were kids. I mean like, what f*cking ozone layer?’ Hank wanted to record Dorothy and Andrew. He showed them examples of his work in a black-leather portfolio; in the glaring afternoon of the garden the photos seemed stagy and stiff, and the people in them looked as though that was probably not how they imagined themselves. Andrew said, ‘Not for me. I’d crack the lens.’

‘You’re a good-looking couple,’ Hank said. ‘Something for the future grandkids? Get a record before your teeth fall out.’

Andrew barked a laugh and headed back into the house, calling over his shoulder, ‘Long gone, buddy, long gone.’ Not strictly true; his teeth were mostly bridge but they were still in his head, they didn’t come out at night, thank God.

‘Where in the States are you from?’ Dorothy asked.

Hank shrugged, and turned the heavy pages of his portfolio to the very back. ‘Connecticut. There’s the house.’ A wooden mansion, with numerous windows, that must have been enormous, but he’d taken the photograph from far away or with a clever lens so that it looked like a model, a trick of perspective enhanced by the child he had placed in the front of the frame, looming hugely, his hand out as though to pat the roof. On the facing page was a picture of the same boy, wearing a striped T-shirt, a woman with long blonde hair, a golden retriever, and a younger version of Hank.

‘Wow,’ said Dorothy. ‘Your family.’

He nodded. ‘Yep. Actually, my son’s in London now, studying. I’m going to see him in the winter. He’s a great kid. You’ve got girls, right?’

‘And a boy, yes.’ It had always amazed her when people spoke of their children in this detached way – London, I’m going to see him – but now she knew that was what happened as they got older, just as her children now were all adult-sized and the family had changed shape, become a model of six people on the same scale. In fact the children looked bigger than the adults even though they weren’t, their features yet to settle, hair abundant, full of life. ‘How did you and Ruth meet?’

‘In a French dentist’s, believe it or not. We were both on summer holidays and we got talking in the waiting room. So I’m in Paris and my wisdom teeth are giving me hell, so a friend gets me an appointment with her dentist, and I’m sitting there in the worst kind of pain, you know it feels like someone is f*cking me in the ear, and then there’s some changeover with the receptionist and the new one doesn’t speak English, et cetera et cetera, and thank God this woman comes to my rescue.’

‘Why was she there?’

‘Teeth whitening.’

‘No, in Paris.’

‘Oh. I don’t know. Antiquing? The twins are in school, right, boarding? Anyway, I was in there for hours, they only got one tooth, told me I was going to have to come back the next day and go to some kind of terrifying overnight dental hospital, have a general et cetera, so I head downstairs, there’s a bar. It’s Paris, right? I’m going to drown my sorrows, a little preliminary numbing, and there, also drinking, white wine naturally, is your sister. And you know this year we thought we may as well do it again, only head south.’

‘Is photography your full-time job?’

‘I’m always a sort of editor at large for some website or other. They keep me in train fares and cappuccinos.’ It was a practised line.

Perhaps it wasn’t so strange that he and Ruth had found each other, two people on holiday from their lives. She was burning to ask if Ben, the banker husband, was cool with funding the trip, but instead said, ‘I’ve tried for a long time not to be vain and now my face is falling off and I’ve just given into it. I can’t have my photo taken. Sorry.’

He shrugged. ‘That’s fine. I would have given you free copies, for having me to stay.’

‘Oh, there’s no need.’ A crestfallen moment. She’d been fishing, she discovered, for a compliment.

‘And you, Ruth said you’re a teacher?’

‘Yes. I was full-time in schools but the admin nearly broke me. The constant testing. Now I work at a home for pregnant teens, doing art classes. Sort of therapy.’

‘OK, I’m going for a run. Can you take this back into the house?’ He passed her the portfolio.

‘Now?’ They’d been drinking sparkling wine in the sun. The lawn smelled of the new high-nitrogen fertiliser. ‘Don’t go now.’

But already he was jamming his feet into his running shoes, screwing ear-buds into the side of his head, touching his toes a couple of times in the cursory way he said ‘et cetera et cetera’, and gone, taking the curve of the road like a piece of film running on double speed, swallowed by the corner. Dorothy pulled her knees up and tucked her skirt around her ankles to keep from being bitten, and thought about getting a cardigan from the house, and rubbed at the goosey flesh on her soft upper arms, and pushed her forehead into a knee to press the alcohol burn away, and looked at the pink cotton of her skirt in the dark shadow made by her head and the way it lost its colour and became grey. There was a touch to the nape of her neck, the line drawn by a single finger. She raised her head and looked around, but nobody was there. Shouting came from the house.

It had stopped by the time she got inside, then started again – a sound that she followed to the living room, where Ruth and Andrew sat in front of the set watching football. Dorothy recognised the All Whites, but not the other team.

‘Come on!’ Andrew yelled, his voice gravelly. Neither he nor Ruth looked up from the screen.

‘My girls play soccer,’ Ruth said. ‘At college.’

‘I’m just going to make dinner.’

Dorothy carried the portfolio through to Donald’s room. She knocked on the door, although she knew that Hank was running and Ruth was watching TV. In the pause after her knock, a feeling of dread beset her. Someone absent, returned silently. A clotted shadow. Sitting on the bed. She turned the handle and opened the door fast. The room, postered with ancient Communist propaganda, was empty. The stretcher at the foot of the double bed was neatly made up, looking like no one ever slept in it, and the novel she’d left out for Ruth splayed face downwards on the floor next to a spread treasure of discs without cases, tiny silver coins. She crossed the threshold to set the portfolio on the mattress; leaving it on the stretcher seemed somehow pointed. A red-and-white plastic wallet on the chest of drawers bore the words Travel Documents. The exit strategy, a plan to move on. Dorothy sat on the bed and reopened the portfolio. The dark-paper backing pages were thick between her finger pads and thumb. Her parents, in black-and-white, stared at the camera, airbrushed, their teeth neat, a page Hank had skipped over out in the garden. She last saw them – it must have been ten years, alive. After their accident, everyone agreed closed caskets were for the best. This handsome old man had been her father, with thinning white hair and Photoshop space where his wrinkles would be. Her mother’s high forehead.

With clumsy thumbs Dorothy turned the pages. Who were these people who had their hair set especially? What kind of project was this, portraits of the well-to-do? There were numbers in silvery graphite on the top of the pages. They might have been dates but her glasses were not strong enough to decipher them. Out the window the hedges cast a deep-angled shadow half the length of the garden. When she looked back at the folder there was another photo that Hank hadn’t shown her, and a fond, warm feeling suffused her. It was Daniel. She glanced at the doorway as if someone might come in, and carried the book closer to the window to get more light on his face, there, touched a finger to the digitally removed scar, his crooked inward smile, the huge black irises. There he was. She peeled the corner tabs from the page and lifted the photograph out leaving the page empty, dotted with residual glue. Abruptly, the hallway went silent – the television switched off – and she put the portfolio down, tucked the stolen photograph into the folds of her skirt and quick-stepped from the room.



Rainclouds enveloped the hills, promising the lightning storms of deep summer evenings. Dot was bunching up sheets from the washing line when Hank stumbled into the garden, gasping, a hand glued to his side.

‘You look like a stabbing victim about to utter your last words,’ she said.

‘I like your friend Dennis,’ he said when he’d recovered his breath, sweat still budding from his skin. ‘I dropped in on him. He’s very grand.’

‘I don’t know if he’d describe us as friends. He’s our landlord. I do his garden.’

‘But he came here for dinner.’

‘He’s lonely.’

‘So be his friend.’ He cocked his head and smiled at her. ‘You’d be welcome company, I’m sure.’

God, was she blushing? Hank reached for the corners of a king-size sheet and together they shook it out and folded it, coming together as though in an Elizabethan dance. Dance lessons – when was that? Early girlhood in America, prehistory – and she raised her heels stepping forward, sank her feet down slowly in their house slippers into the dewy grass and bent as far as her knees would allow into a curtsey. In the trees the birds were raucous.

‘You know what I’d really like to do here?’ Hank said. ‘Go scuba diving.’

She twiddled through the wire basket for the warm wooden pegs. Like a box of dolls. ‘Hank, has Ruth talked much about our family?’

He nodded. ‘Oh sure, that whole thing about your father. Not for a while now.’

‘What thing do you mean? The accident?’

‘Ah . . . no. I feel weird I said anything. It’s nothing.’

‘OK.’ Together they looked into the shrouded hills. ‘You know I think I would like a photo taken. If that’s all right?’ She wondered whether he’d looked in his vandalised portfolio. If he would say anything. How she would respond.

‘Hold still –’ He turned to face her, removed something from her collarbone. ‘Bit of grass. Let’s see your hands?’

She looked away as he examined them, traced his fingers over the calluses and pragmatic fingernails, her heart banging. Nerves all over her body hummed. Hank took a step closer, eyes full of evening light, his body smelling sharply from the run, and it was ridiculous how much he reminded her of another time, and she said, ‘I have to go inside.’



The dive centres up north had either closed for the season or were fully booked. Hank and Ruth announced a plan to head south for whale watching, ‘while they still could’. They were going to drive and take the ferry, and even Andrew snorting and saying, ‘Overrated,’ couldn’t dampen their enthusiasm. The screenwriter friend would join them, a last fling before the baby came. Dorothy promised to call in on his wife. ‘It’s gone so quickly,’ she said, ‘your visit.’

‘We’ll be back.’ Her sister smiled. ‘I’ve got to see your kids.’

On the day before the departure, Ruth and Dorothy dropped Hank at the screenwriter’s house for a swim and drove on to the sculpture park. An elevated wooden path extended between rimu and kauri trees. They passed a set of human figures that stood in a large half-shell, like a giant conch. Away from the sun, the air was cool and moist.

In silence they walked slowly down the side of the hill, abstract red shapes and bronze beasts rising from the first layer of bush, resembling deer or giant birds, not so much modelled as gestured at. Dot thought of the sweat welling on Hank’s skin, in the hollow of his throat. The unseasonal cold ached in her joints and she didn’t mind that Ruth seemed to be passing through the experience too quickly, ignoring the atmosphere, consigning it to recollection, doing the sculptures.

‘Incredible,’ Ruth said when they were out in the sun again, crossing an immaculate lawn towards the road. ‘So what, those are someone’s private collection? Is there any information, is there a shop?’

‘Over there,’ said Dorothy, pointing to the building that housed a gift shop and café. She had wanted to – what, to keep something of her sister but now Ruth was leaving and she was once again glossy, so controlled, and since the mention of the will they hadn’t had a meaningful conversation and she felt stupidly scared of sitting in a café with her, of ordering watery quiche and attempting to introduce the real things, the state of her marriage, the hole left by Eve, her fear that she lived her life on the inside, ruled by the fantasy that someone out there knew her, held her true self.

‘Any good?’ Ruth asked.

‘Not really, just smaller versions of the sculptures, maquettes, models.’

Ruth was halfway to the shop. Dorothy tugged at her sleeve. ‘No, don’t, Andy’s girlfriend might be there.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘She’s not really his girlfriend. I don’t know. Just this local arty type, she’s everywhere.’

‘But not his girlfriend.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Can’t you ask him?’

The door was locked; a sign read Open After 12.

‘I heard him last night, having a rant to you about the art world. “Gate-keepers”. You know,’ Dorothy said, ‘it’s funny that all that time ago I thought Andrew was so different from our father. And now he’s kind of becoming him. Ruth –’ quickly before they reached the car, before the outing tapered to a close. ‘Hank said something about Dad, and I just wondered. What he meant?’

Her sister frowned. ‘What did he say?’

‘Nothing, but – was there . . .’ It was stupid to feel of all emotions embarrassed in this moment, that she should already know, was exposing her ignorance, but she did. ‘Was there some thing about Dad?’

Ruth was very still, squinting in the late-morning light. ‘You know he liked men, don’t you.’

‘Men?’ Dorothy blinked. The word hopped the boundary of her known world. ‘Dad was gay?’

‘Yeah, I guess you could say that. I thought.’ Ruth shrugged. ‘I mean obviously he wasn’t out, but Mom knew, and some of their friends, it was a kind of side thing, but, you know – why did you think he left New York?’

‘I don’t know. I thought. Money. But what about Mum?’

‘Well, she loved him. And they had us, and you know, they wanted to stay married.’

‘Jesus.’ The morning really was extremely bright. Dazzled, she fished in her bag for her sunglasses, wiped them free of dust and put them on, the ordinary movements happening at a distance. ‘How did you find out?’

‘Mom told me.’

She felt made of raffia, like she might float away in the sun. ‘Is that why they left here, as well?’

‘I don’t know – there was that inheritance, remember – but it wouldn’t surprise me. If there was someone Mom wanted to get him away from. She kept a damn close eye on him when we were back here for Eve, despite her beautiful Valium haze.’

Dorothy had never imagined Ruth talking about their parents like this. She felt so grateful suddenly, that Ruth had been able to live alongside them, be a daughter. ‘But what about in the States, all those years, I mean you don’t just relocate to change who you are. Surely there’s always going to be someone.’

‘I never met anyone. I think there were a few times Mom got jealous. But it was mostly only sex. At least, that was their story.’

‘God. It’s like seeing him as a person.’

‘Yeah, I thought you knew.’

How odd that Eve never would. Dot felt a tug inside, the need to share it with her older sister, hear her incredulous voice on the end of the phone. ‘Poor Dad,’ she said. ‘Not able to just be himself.’

‘Yeah.’ Ruth looked away, into the wooded part of the garden, where the walkway stretched under the canopy they had just emerged from. ‘But I kind of think it was him, to have the two lives. Or it became him. He wasn’t unhappy.’

The sisters walked to the gravelled parking bay, Dorothy still weightless, two-dimensional, held in place by Ruth’s arm around her waist. Hers was the only car. She came round to unlock the passenger door, and pushed the sunglasses up onto her forehead. Up close you could see the reassuring wrinkles in Ruth’s face. ‘What about Daniel?’ she said. ‘How is he, where did you see him?’

‘Yeah, about a year ago. Barcelona? We had dinner. He seemed well. Had a nice girlfriend. Think she was an architect.’

‘I stole his photo from Hank’s portfolio.’

‘Yeah. He told me.’

‘Does he want it back? I should pay him for it.’

‘Don’t worry.’

As she passed the front bonnet towards the driver’s door Dorothy said, ‘Now you know all my secrets.’

‘Oh, I’m sure that’s not true.’ Ruth slid into her car seat and jumped up again, stung by the hot vinyl.



The rental car was electric, completely quiet, Hank and the screenwriter waiting behind its milky windows for Ruth to get in. ‘Sorry to miss Andrew,’ Hank called, winding down the glass. ‘International man of mystery. Tell him thanks.’

‘Sure.’ Her basket was laden with baby squash and rocket and she wanted to give Ruth something for the trip, a memento, but she couldn’t take vegetables, no.

‘OK.’ Ruth unhooked the basket from Dorothy’s elbow and placed the basket on the gravel at their feet. They hugged. Dorothy felt her sister’s body against hers.

‘Have a great time,’ she said.

‘Thank you,’ said Ruth. ‘I’ll miss you.’ She drew away.

Dot nodded. ‘Miss you too.’ Ruth folded herself into the back of the car and the screenwriter backed down the drive, drove out of sight. The edges of the silence filled with a tinselly buzz of cicadas. Dot’s sandals crunched on the gravel as she took slow steps back round the side of the house, towards the garden.



The photograph that came a few weeks later, from the States, had caught both sisters unawares through a soft-focus crinkle of peach-tree leaves. Amy stood at Dot’s side, studying the picture. ‘You do look alike,’ she said.

Donald walked through the kitchen, carrying paint-splattered dustsheets from the girls’ room. He followed their gaze to the picture and said, ‘Who’s that?’

‘Auntie Ruth. I’ve met her,’ said Amy in the airy tone of sibling one-upmanship.

‘Why haven’t I?’

‘Come on, Donald, you didn’t want to leave the beach.’ She should have insisted that the kids come back early from camping. It hadn’t even entered her mind, which now seemed inexplicable. ‘OK, give me a hand to clear the table, it’s dinnertime.’

‘Where’s Dad?’ said Donald. In her peripheral vision, Dorothy could tell that Amy was giving him a look. ‘What?’ he said. ‘I just asked where he is. I need the key to the shed.’

‘It’s in the door, you fool.’

He humped the dustsheets out there, calling, ‘Your face is the fool,’ over his shoulder.

Out of habit Dot slid her hand into the card-backed envelope that Ruth had sent the photo in, to check it was empty before it hit the recycling pile. Her fingers met paper edges: she reached in and drew out a cheque. The skin up her back tingled as she made sense of the amount. It was a lot. She turned it over and read scrawled on the back, in her sister’s handwriting: Your share.

After she’d washed up and everyone had gone to bed, in the creaking, darkened house, Dorothy sat in the pool of light cast by the kitchen-table lamp and wrote five cheques, one for each of her children and one for Lou. She finished and put the pen down, rubbed at the ink smudge on her index finger. On the table lay a disc Ruth had left behind, a little silver moon. She put it on the stereo and listened.