Chapter 68

chapter sixty-eight

Joy could remember people in late January talking about some kind of dreadful virus creeping across the world, but she was too distracted by her crumbling marriage to take much notice, and besides, she never caught colds. She had an excellent immune system.

By the time she was ‘back on the grid’ the world had spun off its axis, and it was hard not to feel personally responsible, as if the moment she stopped supervising, chaos was the consequence. It was just like when she took her eyes off Troy as a toddler: the mayhem and destruction that followed!

Suddenly, everyone was ‘social distancing’, especially around Stan and Joy, who were supposedly ‘elderly’ and ‘at risk’. When they went for a walk, younger people leaped elaborately out of the way, off footpaths and into gutters.

‘If my time’s up, my time’s up,’ Stan told the children, and the children groaned and said all their friends’ parents were making similarly foolhardy comments, and Joy and Stan exchanged smiles and made solemn promises to behave.

Those first weeks after Joy returned home were like being on a honeymoon in the middle of an apocalypse.

They couldn’t stop touching each other or watching the news, which for the first time in Joy’s lifetime was global and enormous, yet personal and specific. You couldn’t shrug it off. You couldn’t say it was very sad but life goes on, because life didn’t go on.

They couldn’t stop saying they couldn’t believe it.

Prince Charlesgot the virus! No-one was safe. Not even royalty.

‘Lockdown’ took the pressure off retirement. Now their only responsibility was to stay home and stay safe, not to partake in a daily repertoire of wholesome, bracing activities. Now it wasn’t just their lives that had stopped, but everyone’s lives. Now it wasn’t just her formerly bustling home that had fallen silent but formerly bustling cities all around the world. People heard birdsong in places where they had once only heard traffic. Skies cleared. If only this beautiful global pause could have happened without the relentless suffering.

Joy kept thinking about her grandmother’s first husband, who had died of the Spanish flu a hundred years ago after he made the ‘silly decision to go meet his friend down at the docks’. It had always sounded like a fairy tale to Joy, and a necessary piece of her history. Of course that first husband had to make the silly decision to meet his friend at the docks, so Joy’s grandmother could go on to marry Joy’s beautiful grandfather and Joy would then come to be Joy.

For the first time ever, it occurred to Joy that her grandmother’s first husband probably would have preferred not to die of the Spanish flu, thank you very much, just like Joy would prefer not to die of this one. She wanted to see what happened next. Her grandparents and mother would have to wait at that arrivals gate for a little longer.

*

It took a while for Joy to fully comprehend what her family had been through while she was gone.

Stan told her that all four children initially withheld information from the police that they knew would make Stan appear guilty. He’d seen their doubt and fear increase exponentially as the days passed without their mother’s return. Their questions became increasingly pointed.

‘I started to feel guilty,’ said Stan. ‘I started to feel as if I had hurt you. I had dreams that . . .’ He stopped. ‘The dreams were bad.’

The children referred to their confused loyalties both obliquely and overtly.

In the middle of an impassioned lecture about hand sanitising and face masks, Brooke suddenly said, apropos of nothing, ‘I found that criminal lawyer for Dad because I knew he was innocent, Mum. Not because I thought he was guilty. I hope you both know that.’

Oh, my darling, thought Joy. You never could lie.

Once, after Troy dropped off a lavish twenty-four pack of toilet paper he’d naturally managed to procure during the bizarre panic-buying frenzy, and when he and Joy were alone, sitting on the back veranda at a safe social distance, he said, ‘I thought Dad might have done it, Mum. I actually thought it. And I was angry with Brooke because she was supporting him.’

He sounded just like when he was a little boy, confessing something unspeakable, and Joy said, ‘It doesn’t matter, darling, just put it out of your mind.’ Putting things out of your mind wasn’t the modern way, but where else could he put it?

Troy and Brooke patched up their differences, thank God, in the way that siblings and spouses sometimes did, with actions, rather than words.

Brooke bought Troy a box of chocolates.

Troy bought Brooke a car.

*

Joy and Stan didn’t talk at all about Harry Haddad, until one day when they were watching the news and it was announced that Wimbledon would be cancelled because of the pandemic, the first time that had happened since World War II.

‘I understand why you did what you did,’ said Stan quietly.

He didn’t say he forgave her, but she took it as forgiveness.

A younger couple might have spent months in counselling talking it through but she knew they were done with it. Move on. Once you’ve hit a ball there’s no point watching to see where it’s going. You can’t change its flight path now. You have to think about your next move. Not what you should have done. What you do now.

She had betrayed him. He chose to still love her.

There was nothing more to say.

*

There were awful possibilities that kept her up at night.

For example, what if she and Savannah had been in an accident and their car had disappeared forever beneath the murky depths of some lake, and Stan had then been arrested and charged with her murder? What if he’d languished in jail for the rest of his life and only Brooke had visited him?

In the early days she made a lot of phone calls to that pretty, impatient and unsmiling Detective Christina Khoury.

Joy was mildly obsessed with her. ‘Leave the woman alone,’ Stan said. He looked traumatised whenever her name came up, which was why Joy felt a strange desire to continue convincing Christina of Stan’s innocence, even though his innocence was undisputed.

She needed the detective to know that her husband was one hundred per cent innocent. He absolutely did not murder her.

‘We did have a strong circumstantial case, Mrs Delaney,’ said Christina grimly.

But then Christina softened, and reminded her of all the reasons why her various fears would never have eventuated. For one thing, she said dryly, Joy and Savannah had not crossed any lakes on their drive so it was unlikely they would have ended up at the bottom of one. Furthermore, Savannah’s married lover or boyfriend or fling or whatever you wanted to call him (her mark?), Dr Henry Edgeworth, would have finally led them to Savannah and Savannah would have led them to Harry’s Off-Grid Challenge. More importantly, they would also have got that better-late-than-never statement from Caro’s daughter in Copenhagen. The case wasn’t built on truth so it would have inevitably collapsed like a stack of cards.

‘Your husband would never have been convicted,’ Christina told her.

Then Joy asked her if the pandemic was affecting her wedding plans and Christina said that her wedding was going ahead, but it was going to be a much smaller event than originally planned.

‘What a pity!’ said Joy sympathetically.

‘Such a pity,’ said Christina, but she sounded like she might actually be smiling.

*

‘What did you and Savannah do all that time you were away?’ Amy asked Joy. ‘That’s a long time to spend together. Did you get bored?’

‘Did you play games?’ asked Brooke, because that’s what the Delaneys would have done. There always had to be a competition going on. Someone always had to be winning and someone always losing. ‘Did you . . . argue?’

Joy understood that her daughters felt conflicted about the time she’d spent with Savannah, because Joy had never spent that much time alone with either of them, and they all three knew that if they had, they would have driven each other right around the bend.

‘Oh yes, it got very boring at times,’ Joy told her daughters. ‘And we did annoy each other sometimes, yes.’

It wasn’t true. She and Savannah had got on just fine.

Probably because Savannah wasn’t her daughter, although she did feel maternal towards her, and she wasn’t really her friend, although it was like a friendship. She felt fond of Savannah but she didn’t adore her in the fierce, complex way she loved her daughters, which meant, paradoxically, that she could spend three weeks with her no problem at all. Two tiny women in a tiny house.

Now when she looked back on those twenty-one days she first had to work her way through feelings of shame for the dreadful hullabaloo she’d caused, but once she got past that, she remembered that time like a sun-dappled dream, a holiday from her life and a holiday from herself, or the self that she’d become.

The wooden house where they’d stayed was surrounded by a four-hundred-year-old rainforest, waterfalls and walking trails. Kangaroos and wallabies regularly streaked past the oversized window, like passing cars on a quiet suburban street.

Joy slept deeply and dreamlessly in a single bed. There were no mirrors in the house, and without evidence of her own face, or a husband or children, it felt strangely as though she were once again Joy Becker, with most of her life ahead of her, not most of it behind her.

Every couple of nights someone delivered a basket of food to their doorstep. It was simple fresh food: fruit and eggs and bread and vegetables. Not much meat. All curated to give the wealthy guests their rustic ‘back to basics’ experience but knowing it was curated didn’t seem to matter.

She and Savannah took long walks on their own and sometimes together. They read, for hours at a time. The house had a shelf full of very old paperbacks, none of which had been published after 1970. Time slowed and softened like a long hot summer from childhood.

She noticed that Savannah seemed to settle on one personality and stick with it. It seemed to be the personality of a young, reflective, quiet girl. All those strange little quirks of speech vanished. Sometimes they shared stories of their childhoods. Just happy stories. Savannah spoke about when she and Harry were brother and sister, before tennis, before ballet, before their parents’ divorce, when an afternoon in a fort made of bedsheets could last as long as a holiday. Joy talked about her grandparents. One day she told Savannah that her grandmother always called her underwear her ‘unmentionables’, and Savannah got the most delightful case of the giggles.

Then there were days when she and Savannah exchanged no more than a handful of words.

Joy loved the silence. She knew that she didn’t have the personality to do this on her own – she wouldn’t have lasted – but having Savannah there, half-stranger, half-friend, was the perfect compromise.

For the first time in decades she stopped.

She thought she’d stopped when she and Stan retired, but she hadn’t stopped at all. She’d kept on running hopelessly towards some unspecified, unattainable goal.

She found that the less she thought, the more often she found simple truths appearing right in front of her.

For example, she had given up her dream of a professional tennis career with clear eyes. No-one could have convinced her to do otherwise, even if she found a way to travel back through time and tap herself on the shoulder and say, ‘He’s just a boy.’

He was never just a boy. He was Stan. She wanted him and she wanted his babies. She believed that Stan would not have been able to bear his wife’s success. She was probably wrong about that, because that was before Stan had ever coached. She didn’t know the man he would become and the pleasure he would take in seeing other players succeed. She was a girl of her time and she was a girl whose father had walked out and never returned. She believed men’s egos were as fragile as eggs. She believed that you needed to do everything possible to make sure that your man returned home.

She made the right choice for the girl she was then.

One day Joy might have a granddaughter who played tennis – all her grandchildren would play, it was impossible to imagine otherwise – and it wouldn’t occur to that precious girl of the future to give up her dreams of competitive tennis, or anything else, for a boy.

Also Joy wouldn’t let her.

*

One morning, while Savannah was still asleep and Joy sat on the veranda and drank a cup of tea and watched the sun rise – it was the same sun, but it seemed to move so much more slowly and elegantly than it did at home – she thought: I didn’t send Harry away only for the sake of the children, I sent him away because I was angry with Stan for the times he walked out, and I was angry because I was tired and because I felt responsible for everything: from Troy’s drug-dealing to Brooke’s headaches to tonight’s dinner and tomorrow’s laundry. It was secret petty marital point-scoring and she would never admit that to Stan, because if he was going to forgive her he would need to believe that her motives had been nothing but motherly, but there was relief in admitting it to herself.

Surely Joy’s clever granddaughter would know how to have it all without actually doing it all.

*

‘Why go away with her, of all people?’ asked her family. ‘After what she did to you? How could you forgive her?’’

Joy said, ‘She just happened to call at the right time.’

That was true but it was also true that Joy enjoyed not only her cooking but her company, and that Savannah’s intentions might not have been pure when she banged on their door that night, but most of her actions had been kind, excluding of course her unkind blackmail of poor Troy, but when Joy weighed that up against Savannah’s childhood and her family’s own actions that long-ago day when they’d all been so heedlessly cruel to a child in need, she found that she could forgive if not forget.

Forgiveness comes easier with age, Joy explained, full of her own wisdom and grace, but her children laughed at that and helpfully listed the many people Joy had still not forgiven, decades after the event, like that one very rude local council member and the teacher who only gave Joy seven out of ten for the Great Wall of China assignment she’d done for Troy.

The difference was that none of those people had ever made Joy minestrone or cinnamon toast.

There was only one time in the twenty-one days that Joy suddenly questioned why she was spending time with this person, and that was when Savannah admitted to other tiny, peculiar acts of revenge against Joy’s family.

For example, she’d called Logan’s college and complained about him.

‘I didn’t exactly accuse him of sexual harassment,’ she said, and she said she was pretty sure they hadn’t taken much notice. She’d also made a number of online bookings at Brooke’s physiotherapy practice so that she’d get a whole lot of no-shows.

Joy was incensed on behalf of both her children.

‘You were risking their livelihoods!’ she cried.

‘I could have done much worse,’ said Savannah. ‘I’ve done worse.’

‘Oh, well done to you, Savannah!’ snapped Joy. ‘Should I thank you for not doing worse?’

Savannah bowed her head as Joy continued, ‘So obviously you blackmailed Troy. What about Amy? What did you do to her?’

‘Nothing much. I just made brownies on Father’s Day,’ said Savannah, as if it were obvious.

‘But how in the world did you know that would upset her?’

‘You’d told me they were her signature dish,’ said Savannah.

Joy hadn’t remembered this. She’d been an old chook twittering away while Savannah took careful notes. She found herself unable to look at Savannah, because she felt, just for a moment, like slapping her.

‘And me?’ Joy suddenly remembered herself, because wasn’t she the worst offender on that day? She’d been the only grown-up.

‘I tried to seduce your husband,’ said Savannah. ‘While you were sick in hospital.’

‘Oh,’ said Joy. ‘That. But you wouldn’t have really . . .’

‘Yes, I would have,’ said Savannah. ‘Like I said, I’ve done worse, Joy. I’ve done far worse. I’m not a nice person.’ It was twilight and they were sitting on the balcony watching hundreds of black bats swoop across a huge orange sky. Joy breathed, and felt her anger rise and fall, and when she was calm again she said, ‘I think you are a nice person. You’re a nice person who has done some not so nice things. Like all of us.’

‘I might have broken up your marriage,’ said Savannah.

‘Well, yes,’ said Joy. ‘That was a terrible thing to do. You must promise to never do anything like that ever again, because some marriages couldn’t survive an accusation like that, but you know, I never believed for one moment that Stan harassed you.’

‘I didn’t mean that,’ said Savannah. ‘I meant what I told him about you and sending Harry away.’

It was true that Savannah may well have ended her marriage with that revelation. ‘Well, yes, but that wasn’t a secret anyone asked you to keep,’ Joy said to her. ‘That was entirely my own doing. To be honest, I never expected it to stay a secret as long as it did.’

Savannah sighed as if Joy really didn’t get it. ‘Okay, but I’m not a nice person.’

It felt like she was trying to tell Joy something more than she was saying, as if there was a hidden message in her words, and if Joy concentrated hard enough she’d be able to decipher it, but all she saw was a very damaged young girl who had been dealt an awful hand in life, who had come to her house and cooked and cleaned for her.

Joy waited for Savannah to tell her whatever she wanted to tell her. She could feel her desire to speak, the way she’d once felt her children’s desires to confess some terrible action or unspeakable thought, and mostly, if she was patient and gave them the space, they finally told her what they wanted to say.

But Savannah sat, one hand wrapped tightly around the key on the chain at her neck and watched the sky darken until the bats vanished into the inky blackness, and when she finally opened her mouth all she said was, ‘I think I’ll make a tomato and basil frittata for our dinner.’

A part of Joy was relieved. Savannah wasn’t her child. She didn’t want to know her secrets. She didn’t need to know.

When the twenty-one days were up and they said goodbye to their tiny house in the wilderness, Savannah drove them back to Sydney.

‘What are you going to do now?’ asked Joy.

‘I might call my brother,’ said Savannah. ‘Tell him I did his “challenge”, for what it’s worth, and then I don’t know what I’ll do. Make another new life somewhere? What about you?’

‘Oh,’ said Joy, ‘I guess I’ll just go home.’

For the first time she understood what a privilege it was to be able to say that.

*

‘Who cooked for you while I was gone?’ Joy asked Stan once, when they were eating dinner.

‘Caro sent over a horrible chewy lamb casserole. Brooke brought around some meals,’ said Stan. ‘But I told her I could cook for myself. Not sure where this “Stan can’t boil an egg” thing came from. I taught you to boil an egg.’

‘You did not,’ said Joy.

‘I did so,’ said Stan.

The memory floated to the surface of her mind, perfectly preserved, like an ancient artefact.

He did in fact teach her how to boil the perfect soft-boiled egg, and that was when he told her that as a kid he’d often had to cook for himself after his father left and his mother was ‘napping’, and Joy had been overcome with a girlish, sensual desire to feed her man, to nurture him like a real woman would, to mother him the way he hadn’t been mothered, and she’d kept him out of the kitchen, shoo-ed him away until he stayed away, and as the years went by, cooking stopped feeling sensual and womanly and loving and became drudgery.

‘Maybe we could take turns with the cooking,’ she said. ‘During lockdown.’

‘Sure,’ said Stan.

‘Careful what you wish for,’ warned Debbie Christos, who still had bad memories of the year Dennis decided to become a Cordon Bleu chef and spent hours preparing distressing fiddly French dishes often involving innocent ducklings.

Stan wasn’t interested in ducklings, thank goodness, but it turned out he could cook a perfectly adequate roast dinner.

When he put the plate down in front of her, he’d set up his new phone to play ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet’ from 1974, when they were entirely different people, and also exactly the same.

‘Haven’t I?’ asked Joy.

‘Nope,’ said Stan.

*

Sometimes, at two am, it was always two am for some reason, Joy would sit bolt upright in bed because a kind of horror had seeped into her dreams and she would find herself thinking about Stan in handcuffs, and the lines of coffins on the TV news, and Polly Perkins, who had not gone on to live happily ever after in New Zealand as Joy had always believed, but whose body had been discovered while Joy was away, and people had briefly thought it might have been Joy’s body, and she would find herself thinking about all the women who assumed their lives were just like hers, far too ordinary to end in newsworthy violence and yet they had, and all the ordinary people, just like her and Stan, who had been planning ‘active retirements’ and whose lives were now ending cruelly, abruptly and far too soon.

She tried the ‘techniques’ suggested by Amy, who was handling lockdown far better than her friends because they had never experienced the permanent low-level sense of existential dread that Amy had been experiencing since she was eight years old.

Eight! Joy wasn’t completely sure what existential dread was but it sure didn’t sound good.

First, she tried Amy’s breathing exercises but they always reminded her of being in labour, and as her labours had all been very aggressive and fast – those four children of hers barrelling their way into the world – that wasn’t exactly relaxing.

Amy also suggested ‘practising gratitude’, which was a technique where you listed all the things for which you were grateful, and Joy was good at that.

There were many things for which to be grateful. For example, Indira and Logan were not only back together but were also engaged. The ring was awful! But Indira seemed to like it, and the girls said Joy should absolutely not say a word about the ring’s awfulness, so she was keeping her lips zipped. She just hoped that one day, years from now, when their marriage went through a bad patch, Indira wouldn’t suddenly shout, ‘I’ve always hated this ring!’ Joy could hardly bear to think of poor Logan’s hurt feelings if that happened. ‘Yeah, I think he’ll live, Mum,’ said Troy.

Brooke’s clinic was still afloat, thank goodness, because physiotherapy was considered an essential service and Brooke said people were giving themselves dreadful injuries trying to do their own exercise routines at home and undertaking overly ambitious DIY projects, so that was great news.

Troy’s ex-wife, Claire, was pregnant with Troy’s baby, and because of the pandemic she had decided she wanted to make a life in Australia and her Poor Husband had reluctantly agreed to move here. Troy had decided he wanted to share custody of his child, and Claire had agreed. The Poor Husband wasn’t too happy about that.

‘Stop calling him the Poor Husband, Mum,’ said her children with blithe partisan cruelty. ‘It’s Troy’s biological child.’

(Joy’s first grandchild was due Christmas Eve. That son of hers always did give the very best gifts.)

Joy hadn’t met the Poor Husband yet, but she was going to be particularly nice to him when she did, because she had a terrible secret suspicion.

She remembered one particular match when Troy was playing against his nemesis, Harry Haddad, and Harry sent a cross-court shot so impossibly wide any other player would have let it go, but Troy went for it. He had to run almost onto the next court, but he not only made that impossible shot, he also won that impossible point, and the small crowd of spectators whooped like they’d gone down a rollercoaster. Even Harry grudgingly clapped one hand against his strings.

Troy always went for the impossible shots.

Well, Claire wasn’t a tennis ball.

She was a sensible, intelligent girl who would make her own life choices, and if Troy did somehow charm her out of her marriage, it wouldn’t be Joy’s fault, would it?

There was nothing Joy could do to change the outcome of her children’s lives, any more than she could have changed the outcome of their matches, no matter how hard she bit her lip, which she used to do, sometimes until it bled, or how much Stan muttered instructions they couldn’t hear.

Sometimes their children would do everything exactly as they’d taught them, and sometimes they would do all the things they’d told them not to do, and seeing them suffer the tiniest disappointments would be more painful than their own most significant losses, but then other times they would do something so extraordinary, so unexpected and beautiful, so entirely of their own choice and their own making, it was like a splash of icy water on a hot day.

Those were the glorious moments.

That’s how she finally made herself fall back to sleep: by remembering all the glorious moments, one after the other after the other, her children’s ecstatic faces looking for their parents in the stands, looking for their approval, looking for their love, knowing it was there, knowing – she hoped they knew this – that it would always be there, even long after she and Stan were gone, because love like that was infinite.