What are you drinking? he asked, although it was obvious.
Moselle. I took a sip. It was too sweet, but Jean drank Lindemans Ben Ean at home and it was all I could think of to order.
Old ladies’ drink, he said. You should try some of this.
He was drinking Jack Daniel’s and Coke. I watched him as he chatted, envious and far too admiring to notice that he talked only about himself. When he told me that he was a music student but had been dragging out his degree for several years, that he found the lecturers conservative and boring, the work a complete pain, and the program designed to stifle real talent, and when he confided that playing his own style of music was so much more creatively fulfilling, I couldn’t have agreed more.
I returned the next Friday night, and afterwards we went back to the terrace house he shared near the university. I didn’t go home for the rest of the weekend. Jean was furious.
Van’s mystique only deepened. He laughed at her job as a hairdresser, my vague ideas about becoming a teacher or librarian when I left school. His parents were circus performers, living up north in a town that had a personality of its own, a town that was famous for its circus. That sounded exotic to me, but he insisted that the place was just another small town. And he felt confined by the circus: he was a musician and singer, not a novelty performer. He’d left when he was sixteen.
My dull sense of inferiority, of having missed out – on something, I wasn’t sure what – only sharpened. I began to spend more time with him. I was too keen to be his girl. Too eager to embrace his creatively fulfilling world.
It took me years to understand that it had all been veils and mirrors, the stuff of tinsel and papier-mâché and smoke machines. What he’d come from, a circus background. What he did, pretending to be an artist of the calibre of Van Morrison. Illusions that were necessary for performing, dangerous in real life.
In Amethyst, his home town, nothing was imaginary. Young motherhood was palpable, at times painfully real. From time to time I’d thought about moving south, back to the inner city, where it was common for children to have no fathers, no mothers, serial fathers or even two mothers. Or back to the suburbs, to be near my mother. But although I had written to Jean to let her know where I was, and again after Sonny was born, I made it clear I wanted nothing from her. Jean being right about Van made it harder. As Sonny grew I sent her the occasional photo along with a note. I was independent and capable, and yet so painfully young. The truth was I didn’t know what I wanted from Jean, didn’t feel I owed her any apology, yet knew in my heart she didn’t owe me one either. She and Van had met rarely, as he hated coming to my place, and the first time I invited her to the bar to see him perform she left early and refused to come again. She hated his recreational drug use, his vague ambitions, his nocturnal lifestyle, even his diet. She was suspicious of his past, contemptuous of his unconventional family, scathing about his musical talents. At sixteen, seventeen, I embraced everything my mother loathed. I left Sydney and travelled north, towards the town from which Van had come. There had been no fight, no scene, nothing to suggest he was going to leave. And so I didn’t believe it. He would have gone back home to Amethyst. I believed that. I needed to. He was from the circus, and circus stays in the blood, calls you back home. That’s what he’d told me. And it was getting on for winter then. I would go north too, it would be warm there. I would find Van and convince him we were meant to be together and to have this baby. When I arrived I found that the place was stamped with his absence, the circus empty of him and all his family, probably the only circus family ever to leave for good. But after some weeks, after settling into the caravan, I felt like staying. And was unwilling to go back and face my failures, which were several. My friends going on to university without me. Jean being right again, then being too reasonable, to make me feel better for being so wrong. Me being scoured by my own gratitude when she helped me out, as she would. Me being bitten raw by my pride.
Once I’d settled in Amethyst, I discovered I had no real attachment to the city where I’d lived my short life, and I was still ripe for adventure, burning with a thirst for independence that I felt would sustain me wherever I would go, whatever I did. In a few months I would give birth, and I would be the best mother ever. I would more than make up for my baby’s lack of a father. My child would be born there, and it would belong there and if its father never returned at least it would be in its home.
For a long time I was filled with that arrogant confidence of youth, the conviction that you are desired as much as you desire: Van would want me and his child sooner or later, and would find the prospect of coming home irresistible. For years, part of me believed that, though there was not the slightest scrap of evidence for it. Van’s parents had moved further north, and his great-aunt had recently gone to a convalescent hospital by the coast. The only remains of his family in town were underground. All I had were Sonny and a fierce determination to make everything as right as I could.
Dear Delia
Okay, I’ll forget about the wedding cake, but I’d like your advice on another matter. My daughter will wear my old white silk veil, edged in lace. But it is spotted with brown stains and has yellowed around the creases. Should I bleach it?
Mother of the Bride.
Dear Mother of the Bride
Never use bleach on silk! Buy some old-fashioned yellow laundry soap. Wash the veil in a tub, preferably outdoors one fine day. Rinse it with half a cup of white vinegar in the water, and roll it up in a towel. Spread it on the lawn to dry, where it will look beautiful as it soaks up the day. Let the light do the rest.
Spring meant that Mr Lambert next door commenced a rigorous routine of lawn maintenance. He devoted every Monday morning to front-lawn weeding. I didn’t need to go out and look over the fence to know what he would be doing: lying prone on the lawn and digging out feral vegetation with an old paring knife. Dandelions, bindi-eyes and other unidentified weeds were ritually extracted this way. Mr Lambert was a retired tax accountant, and I was sure he treated his lawn with the same humourless precision as he would have a column of figures. The lawn remained the blue-green shade of the fairest couch all summer until it turned brown in winter. He must have had his reasons, but I did wonder why he selected wintergreen couch for his front lawn, with its tendency to fade in the cooler months. Maybe because it was a more compliant grass, less inclined to provide asylum to refugee weeds that drifted in with the birds and the breezes. Soon after Mr Lambert moved here several years ago, he embarked on a clearing of the property environs that allowed no resistance. Palms, prone to messy explosions of seeds that banked in drifts and rotted odorously. Fence-hugging vines: morning glory, star jasmine and potato. Shrubs and grevilleas. The one large camphor laurel tree out the back. All were hewn, chopped away, chipped, mulched, removed.
A Mrs Lambert once existed but had passed away. He was never inclined to tell me more than that, except to mention that there was a son, and grandchildren, and I knew visits were few. I wondered if, had his wife not died some years before, his attitude towards the garden might have been more benevolent. But knowing nothing about her, it was impossible to say. Over the years Mr Lambert and I had only a few conversations, and in recent times none. But at one point he told me that he disliked trees. Too untidy. He replaced the front wattle tree with the murraya, and permitted a lone clump of agapanthus to loiter meekly by his front doorstep. His final act of garden cleansing was to dig up the front lawn and replace it with the wintergreen couch. He lovingly sowed it by hand and watered it obsessively, first with a fine mist spray gun so as not to disturb the seeds, then with a watering can. Within weeks it grew into a grey-green velvet carpet.
Archie, the lawn specialist, observed all this with a mixture of envy and disbelief. Lawn was a fine thing if you intended making use of it. Finer if you had the water resources to maintain it – but who had these days? Children playing, summer backyard meals, or just sitting by gazing at something soothingly green. But Mr Lambert’s lawn, huge in proportion to his small