After the Door Closed

The sound of Karl Jenkins's sedan retreating down the gravel left two women alone in a house designed for entertaining. Neither of them had chosen the arrangement, and neither of them quite knew what to do with it. Sarah Lahey stood in the entrance hall with the particular stillness of a person who had just been set down somewhere by someone who was no longer thinking about her. Sharon Pafistis, watching from the living room doorway, recognised the posture from a different context — the look of a woman trying to absorb being left behind without making a scene of it — and offered the only response her upbringing had ever taught her to offer at such a moment. She would put a pot of tea on.

The kitchen was Adrian's, in the precise way that the rest of the house was Adrian's: granite he had chosen from a quarry near Devonport, a gas range he had insisted on against her protests, an island bench long enough to host the dinner parties their marriage had been built around. Sharon moved through it without looking at any of it. Her hands knew the kettle by feel. From the cabinet she took down the bone china her grandmother Iris had given her in St Ives the year before she left England — white porcelain with gold leaf florals, hand-painted, one of the few things from Cornwall that had survived seventeen Australian years and four interstate moves. Special occasions only, Iris had told her. Save it for when it matters. A police interview about a missing husband qualified, she supposed, as mattering.

What followed in the living room was, by any technical definition, still an interview. Sharon poured for two and arranged her ankles at the angle her mother had taught her forty years earlier, and Sarah accepted the cup with the small private gratitude of a woman whose body had not slept properly in days. Without Karl in the room, the questioning loosened almost without either of them noticing. Sharon offered the use of her first name and Sarah accepted it, and the conversation began to drift away from the procedural channel Karl had been keeping it in and into the older, slower waters of two women talking to each other in a house too large for either of them.

Sarah's questions, when she returned to Adrian, were quieter than Karl's had been and harder to deflect for that reason. She asked about the business. She asked who came to the house. She asked, eventually and gently, whether there had been any kind of trouble. Sharon answered each question with the practised composure of a woman who had been hosting clients in this room for two decades, and heard herself answering, and heard the careful editing in her own voice, and could not quite stop it. Adrian had kept his work in a domain of its own. She had not asked. She had called the not-asking respect for his professional autonomy, and she had called the closed door of his study at night the price of his success, and she had called the late phone calls that nothing to do with her. Articulated aloud to a stranger drinking tea on her sofa, the language of the arrangement began to sound less like a healthy marriage and more like an accommodation she had been making with herself for years.

The tense slipped a second time, then a third. Were for are. Had for have. Sarah noted each one without unkindness and named the second of them aloud, and the naming undid something in Sharon that the formal interview had not been able to reach. The composure she had been holding together since five that morning — the chignon assembled in the dark, the lipstick applied to a face she had not been able to look at properly in the mirror, the bangle from the tenth anniversary turned and turned again at her wrist — finally cracked along its weakest seam. What came through was not a confession, because there was nothing to confess. What came through was the slow recognition that some part of her had stopped trusting her husband long before he failed to come home, and that she had been refusing to know it.

Sarah, watching this happen across an inherited tea service, did not press the advantage. The interview had crossed into something else — into the small, exhausted recognition that passes between two women who have been left alone in too-quiet rooms by men who had decided their absences were necessary. Sharon spoke about her mother for the first time since the morning had begun: about a tearoom in Cornwall, about an upbringing in which tea had been taught as the proper response to most catastrophes, about a death three years gone that had left her without the one person whose advice she would have asked first. The grief of it laid itself down quietly beside the larger, newer grief, and made room for itself there.

The doorbell, when it sounded, broke the moment with the pleasant melodic chime of an expensive system. Sharon rose to answer it on instinct, smoothing her hair, wiping beneath her eyes, reassembling the hostess by the time she reached the marble of the entrance hall. The performance resumed because the performance was the only thing she had ever been taught to do at the door of her own house. Behind her, on a coffee table of hand-carved Tasmanian blackwood, two cups of half-finished earl grey from a supplier in Truro sat cooling beside a teapot whose interior had been stained by a hundred previous afternoons that had not, until today, been understood as evidence of anything in particular.