The Pause Between Knocks

"My husband gave me that name in a garden, leaning in half a second before the shutter went. Everybody has been handing it back to me ever since."

It was not a long drive from Liverpool Street round to Battery Point, and I had made it more times than I could ever have counted — coming home from university with a bag of washing and an existential crisis, coming home past curfew at seventeen with the headlights off before I got to the gate, bringing Nial for the first time with my hands going on the wheel and neither of us saying one word the whole way up Hampden Road.

And I did not know where I was.

Not once. Not one single street of it. I came down Macquarie and along Davey and out past the wet black shine of a city that still had not properly got up, with the Derwent lying flat and grey on my left like a knife somebody had left out on a bench — and every corner of it was a corner I could have taken with my eyes shut, and I had to read the signs. I had to actually stop and read the signs. My hands were on the wheel and my body was driving the car, and the woman sitting in the driver's seat had never been to Hobart in her life.

My phone was face up on the passenger seat, on that flat empty seat still pushed all the way back to the stop, and I had turned the ringer up to the top of its range before I came out of the car park because I had convinced myself I would not hear it over the engine — as though I would not have heard that telephone go off through a brick wall from the other end of the street.

It did not go off. It lay there being black, and every few seconds my eyes went down to it and came back up, and it did not go off.

The whole of the morning kept coming round again. Over and over. My mother used to sit at that piano for an entire hour going back to the same four bars — playing them and stopping and playing them again and stopping — and my father would put his head round the door and beg her, for the love of God, to finish the phrase, and she never could, not until she had it. I had never understood one thing about that until I was driving down Davey Street with my husband's last morning going round and round in my head and no way of getting to the end of it.

Linda's chin coming up out of her collar. The crack of my own hand on that counter. A man in a bad suit squaring a pen against a notepad and then moving it half a centimetre.

And underneath every bit of it, sitting there and not going anywhere, a name.

Luke Smith.

That was what I could not put down between the police station and my mother's gate, and could not put down for weeks afterwards.

I had told that man the truth. I had sat opposite him with my arms flat on cold steel and told him straight out that the name meant nothing to me — and it had meant nothing to me, and I had gone through it properly while he waited, and there was not one thing anywhere in me that it so much as brushed against.

And by the time I got to the bottom of Davey Street it had begun to itch.

Not a memory. Nothing so useful as that. The shape of one. I had sat at the back of a rehearsal room a hundred times and heard a girl give me a reading that I had heard somebody else give me years before, and been entirely unable to say who — and it sat there just behind the ear and would not come forward, and the harder I went after it the further off it got. Luke Smith. A parent? A supplier? Somebody at the theatre? The older brother of a boy in Year Ten? Had Nial said it — at the bench, into a phone, in the dark on the Friday night with his voice gone right down? Had I heard it and not heard it, the way I had been not-hearing things for eleven weeks?

Then the other thing arrived behind it, and I have never got out from under it.

I had spent two days catching myself in the act of building. I had built a car with blacked-out windows out of a car with tinted glass. I had built forty-eight hours out of twenty-four on my own mother's verandah, and stood there and watched her do the arithmetic on a number I had made up. I had built an entire morning of my own marriage out of nothing at all and handed it across a coffee table to a girl of twenty-six with a pen in her hand.

So how would I know? How could I possibly know whether that name was ringing because somebody had said it in my house — or because a detective had put the first solid object of the whole fortnight down on a steel table in front of me, and I was so starved for one that I had gone away and built somewhere to keep it?

I did not know. I have never known. And I drove up that hill with my hands going white on the wheel, unable to decide whether I was remembering something or manufacturing it.

There was a white sedan behind me from the top of the rise.

It had come out of the car park behind me and it was still there at the lights, three cars back, and it went with me through two changes and it did not close up and it did not fall away — and I watched it in that mirror the whole way down the hill the way I would have watched a spider on a ceiling I had to sleep under.

It turned off at Molle Street.

Of course it did. It was a white sedan on a main road in a city of a quarter of a million people, and I sat in a queue of traffic with my heart going and let out a breath I had been holding for four blocks — and I did not feel foolish.

That is the part that has stayed with me. Nine days earlier I would have felt foolish. I would have told Nial about it over the washing-up, and he would have laughed at me and called me the least convincing spy in the Southern Hemisphere, and I would have let him, and I would have laughed too.

Instead I put it in the same room as everything else, and closed the door on it, and drove on.

The rain came off a little as I climbed, the way it always did up there, and Hobart came out from underneath it below me — that whole ridiculous little city wedged in between a mountain and a river, half of it built on ground too steep to stand up on, small enough to hold in cupped hands. A town where a woman could not have her hair cut without three people knowing the colour by Thursday. A town where I could not walk through Salamanca on a Saturday without being asked after my mother's hands by a complete stranger.

And a man had gone out of it in a white ute on Saturday morning, and not one single person had seen him do it.

My mother's house came up out of the rain the way it always came up. Eighteen seventy-eight, and built by a man who wanted the whole of Battery Point to know exactly how well he had done — two storeys of dark brick and a bay window and that iron lace along the verandah that cost more to restore than the whole of my kitchen — and it sat up on its rise looking down the hill at the water like a dowager who had decided that one century was quite sufficient, thank you, and would not be participating in the next.

Her garden went on regardless, the way it always did. Because that garden made no sense whatsoever and it worked anyway. Natives and English cottage rubbish thrown in on top of one another, hellebores under the correas, jonquils coming up three weeks early because nobody had told them not to, the last two roses of a bad autumn still hanging on out of sheer bad manners — and violets. Violets in the beds and violets in the gravel and violets coming up through the crack in the bottom step, because my mother had never once in her life pulled up a thing that was trying.

My father used to stand at that bay window with a cup of tea in his hand and describe it as a war crime.

The gravel came under the tyres and made the sound it had been making since I was four years old, and my whole body knew it before my head did — the sound of coming home from school, and the sound of coming home from London, and the sound of coming home with a nine-day-old baby lying in the back in his hat, and my hands shaking so badly that I had to sit in the car for ten minutes before I could carry him up the path.

I switched off the engine and sat in it.

And up at the bay window, the curtain moved.

She had been standing there since I left. I knew it the way I knew my own name. She had put my son down in front of something with a plate beside him, and gone to that window and folded her arms and watched the gate — and she had been there for two hours going over every syllable I had given her on that verandah and taking the whole lot to pieces. The pauses. The pitch. The number I had doubled. She would have finished with it long ago, and she would have arrived at a conclusion, and she was not going to tell me what it was.

I looked at my phone one more time. Nothing. And I got out of the car.

The path went up in that long shallow curve between the camellias and I did not have to look at it once. My feet found the whole thing on their own — the dip near the gate, the rise beside the second bed, the place where the gravel goes thin and the brick comes through underneath and had been coming through since I was small enough to go over on it.

I was not halfway up when the door came open.

"Oh, Jenny."

She came down those steps and had hold of me before I was even on the verandah.

My mother's embrace was not like anybody else's and never had been. It was not soft. It did not let a person sink down into it and come apart, because it had been calibrated over sixty years — one arm across the back and one hand up flat between the shoulder blades, and exactly enough pressure to hold a human being together, and not one ounce more than that. Because more than that and I would have gone, and she had never had the slightest intention of letting me go in a doorway where the neighbours could see it.

She had been putting that hold on me since I was five years old. Chickenpox. A boy in Year Eleven who did not deserve it. The afternoon the letter came from the Conservatorium about the place I had never applied for.

Chanel No. 5, since 1979. And underneath it the flour and the butter and the hot sugar of something that had come out of that Aga inside the last twenty minutes. And underneath that, the house itself — the lavender in the bowl on the hall table, the lemon oil she made herself every spring and would not be argued with about, and forty years of Sunday roasts gone up into the walls and never coming out again.

And I stood on my mother's path in the rain at thirty-two years of age and let her hold me together, and I was five years old, and I was thirty-two, and I did not cry, because my son was inside that house.

"Come in, love."

She stood back and made the room for me, the way she had been making room on a platform for forty years.

But I had heard the voice.

I had heard exactly what my mother had put into come in, love, and I knew precisely what it was, because I had done it myself. I had done it to a sixteen-year-old girl standing in a doorway with her arms crossed and her jaw set and a lie already loaded, and I had made my voice as soft as that and stood back and let her come through — and it was the gentlest thing in the entire toolbox and it was not kindness. It was the run-up. My mother had been reading the spaces between the notes since before I was born. She was going to get me inside the house, and get the coat off me, and get a cup of tea into my hands.

And then she was going to open me like a parcel.

The hall had not changed since 1988, when she won the William Morris argument by attrition, and my father hung it himself over the course of one very long weekend during which nobody in that house spoke to anybody else. The Waterford vase still on the console. White roses out of the garden in the last week of July, because they were flowering and she was not about to let them go to waste.

And the photographs.

Nial called it Rowena's Gallery of Genetic Propaganda, once, at Christmas, with a glass in his hand — and she laughed so hard that she had to put her drink down on the sideboard, and she repeated it to strangers for four years afterwards as though she had thought of it herself.

They went the whole way down that hall in order. Her wedding in 1980, all hair and hope. My father getting some honour or other from the university and looking as though he had been caught at something. The three of us as children, Robert with his chin out and Kevin looking off at something outside the frame, and me straight down the lens, dead centre, every single time, in every photograph, for eighteen years.

And then ours.

And I stopped so suddenly that my mother nearly went into the back of me.

The gardens at Shene, about half past four in the afternoon, when the light had gone gold and the photographer had become quite excited about it and made everybody move twice. My grandmother's dress — nineteen-forties silk, and Rowena spent four months on it at that dining table with the lamp pulled over and would not let me so much as hand her a pin. Nial in a hired suit that fitted him because he had been back to the tailor three separate times and never told me. His grandfather's cufflinks, two little silver trowels, because his family had been building things in that state since 1904 and he was not going to get married without saying so out loud.

And I am looking at him.

Not at the camera. The photographer had asked us both for the camera and I am not giving it to him. I am looking up at my husband with an expression on my face that I have never once been able to stand the sight of since — because that woman is certain. She is completely and entirely certain. She has no idea that certainty is a thing a person performs, and that she is performing it, and that she will go on performing it for eleven years and never once get down on her knees and look underneath.

And the reason I am looking at him is that he had just leaned in.

The photographer had us set. Everybody had been arranged and rearranged and told to stop moving about. And half a second before the shutter went, my husband put his mouth down beside my ear and said:

"I love you, Mrs Triffett."

Trying it out. Handling it. Turning it over in his mouth to see whether it was really his — and the photograph caught the instant afterwards, when his mouth was on its way back to a smile and had not quite arrived, and a piece of that private joy is still stuck to the corner of it, and will be there for as long as anybody keeps the photograph.

Mrs Triffett.

I stood in my mother's hallway in a wet coat and could not get any air into me.

Because that name was a gift. It was given to me in a garden in the gold light by a man leaning in — and in the last fifteen hours it had been taken out of my hands twice by people who had no idea at all what they were holding.

I'm sorry, Mrs Triffett. There's nothing more I can do right now. My brother's wife, behind a sheet of security glass, reaching out and taking my family off the table and putting it into a drawer and shutting the drawer.

But they didn't seem too worried about Nial. Did they, Mrs Triffett? A detective from Major Crime, steering me back onto the road with a hand under my elbow.

The only name my husband ever gave me, and it had become the word people used when they were about to do something to me.

"Jenny? Are you alright, dear?"

I turned round, and she was standing there with her head slightly on one side, and she had come into full sail.

Concern and determination, in the same face, at the same time. Nobody else I ever met could hold those two things together without one of them going false — and I had watched my mother do it to a nineteen-year-old boy who had not practised, and to a specialist at the Royal who had tried to be vague with her about a scan, and neither of them survived it, and neither of them so much as understood that anything was happening to them until it was over.

She was going to have it out of me. And she was entirely prepared to be kind about it, for exactly as long as being kind was working.

"I—"

And it went.

Because where was I supposed to start? He is missing but he sent a text. The police will not help but one of them will. There was a list on his desk with my son's doctor's name struck out on it, and I put it back where I found it so that my husband would not know I had been in the room, and now it is gone, and I have not told one living soul about any of it. And there is a name in my head that I gave a detective and swore blind I did not know, and I am no longer certain that I do not know it, and I am no longer certain of one single thing that has come out of my mouth in two days.

And underneath the whole of it, the thing I could not have got past my teeth in that hallway with the roses on the table and my mother's eyes on my face:

I am not only frightened that something has happened to him. I am frightened that he chose it.

Then the floorboards went at the other end of the house.

Small feet at an enormous volume — that thunder a three-year-old somehow gets out of a hallway while weighing less than a bag of spuds — and he came round the corner at a dead run with both arms already up.

"Mummy!"

He went straight up off the floor at me from a metre out, with total and complete and entirely unexamined confidence that I would be there to catch him, and I caught him, and went back two steps, and got my heel up against the leg of the console table.

And my son's arms came round my neck and locked. And he held on far too hard.

That is what I noticed. Not the running. The holding. He had both fists in the collar of my coat and his face jammed into the side of my neck, and he was hanging on to me exactly the way he had hung on to me in the sandpit on Saturday night, after he asked me whether he had done bad — the same grip, the same fists, the same face driven in under my jaw — and neither of us had said one word about that evening since it happened.

Biscuit, and shampoo, and warm scalp, and the sandalwood.

For about four seconds there was nothing else anywhere in the world. No husband. No name. No file with my name typed across the top of it in a building on Liverpool Street. Nothing but the weight of my child in my arms and his heart going against my collarbone and his curls in my mouth, and I stood in my mother's hallway with my eyes shut and would have stayed in it for the rest of my life.

But he did not let me.

He pushed himself back with both hands flat on my shoulders, the way he always did when he wanted the whole of my face, and he looked at me.

And he was reading me.

He was going over my face feature by feature, exactly the way he went over a page he could not read yet, hunting for the picture that would tell him what the words were doing — and his forehead had come right down into a knot, and he was three years old and he was working.

"Mummy, where's Daddy?"

And it went in under my ribs and took every single thing I had.

Because I had got away with it. In my own kitchen, over the toast, I had heard the beginning of that word coming out of him and talked straight across the top of it and given him an exciting day instead, and he had taken it and put it away and gone off down the hall to find his shoes. And I had told myself, driving down that mountain with his bag on the back seat, that I had done my son a kindness.

He had not put it away at all. He had carried it round my mother's house for two hours, with a cat and a plate of biscuits and a grandmother down on a Persian carpet playing hide-and-seek, and he had spent every minute of it listening for the gravel.

And the tears came. All of them, all at once. Everything I had held down in a car park and a public lobby and an interview room and a corridor full of faces and on a gravel path in the cold — and I could not stop one single one of them, and I pulled him back into me and put my face straight down into his hair, and I did it to comfort my son and I did it so that he could not see me, and I could not have told anybody which of the two mattered more to me at the time.

"Daddy's... Daddy's not here right now, sweetheart."

Every word of it had to be shoved past something in my throat.

"But he loves you so much, Sammy. He misses you terribly, I'm sure."

I'm sure.

And I heard it come out of my own mouth, and I very nearly put my fist through my mother's wallpaper.

Because I had spent ten years teaching girls that a qualifier is a confession. I think. I suppose. I'm sure. I had stopped them mid-line for it, over and over, and made them go again without the prop — take it out, take it out, you don't need it, and the second you put it in you have told six hundred people the sentence can't stand up on its own — and I had stood behind a shaking fifteen-year-old with both hands on her shoulders and got her to say I love him instead of I think I love him, and watched an entire hall come forward in their seats when she finally did it.

And I had just put a prop under my husband's love for his son. In a hallway. In front of a three-year-old.

And he heard it.

Not the word. The half-beat underneath it. He heard it because he had been hearing it for days — he had heard it in the car on the way home from the doctor when I promised him that nothing would happen to him, and he had heard it in a bathroom doorway when I told him the doctor was going to make the bad dreams go away, and he had never once said a single word to me about any of it.

He pushed back again, and his face had gone, and he was fighting it. I watched my son's bottom lip go and I watched him take hold of it and stop it, because his father had told him that he was a big boy and my son had believed him.

"But why did he go away?" It came out cracked and high and much too loud for that hallway. "Doesn't he want to be with us anymore?"

And there it was.

Out of the mouth of a three-year-old, in a hall full of photographs of my entire family, in one sentence and eight words. The exact thing I had not been able to say to a police officer on my own sofa, or to my mother on her own verandah, or to my own reflection in a bedroom mirror that morning with my fingers up on the glass.

Doesn't he want to be with us anymore.

My son had walked straight up to the middle of it and put his hand flat on it. And I stood in that hallway with my mouth open and nothing whatsoever inside it. Nothing at all. I had spent ten years talking terrified adolescents through the worst nights of their lives, with my hands on their shoulders and my voice down at the bottom of my chest — and I could not find one syllable for my own child.

Then my mother's arms came round the pair of us.

She did not ask, and she did not hesitate, and she did not check whether it was wanted. She simply came in and gathered the two of us up inside her arms and held on — and there we were in that hallway underneath my father's photograph, the three of us, and I felt her chin come down onto the top of my head. She had not held me like that since I was a child. She had not held me like that when my father died.

"Now, now," she said.

Then she began talking to my son over my shoulder, in a voice I had never once heard out of her in my life, and every word of it was aimed at him, and every word of it was meant for me.

"Let's not jump to conclusions. Your daddy loves you both very much, Sammy. Sometimes grown-ups have to go away for a little while, but that doesn't mean they don't love us or want to be with us."

Let's not jump to conclusions.

She was telling me off. She was standing in her own hallway with her daughter and her grandson gathered up inside her arms, and she was telling me — very gently, in front of a three-year-old, where I could not answer her back — that my fear was about to become his. That whatever I settled on about my husband was going to become what that boy grew up believing about his father. And that I had better be extremely careful what I put down on the floor in front of him, because he was going to pick it up, and he was going to carry it for the rest of his life.

And she was right. She was the only person in Hobart who could have said it to me. And it went in between two ribs.

Because she had done it herself. She had stood in that hallway five years earlier with three grown children and a coffin to arrange and a house full of people she had to feed — and not one of us ever saw the bottom of her. Not once. Not in eleven months.

I looked at her over the top of my son's head, and she looked back at me, and neither of us said one word.

"Why don't we all go into the kitchen?" she said, and everything in her voice went up two full tones and came out as bright as a bell. "I've just taken a batch of your favourite chocolate chip biscuits out of the oven, Sammy. And I think we could all use a nice cup of tea."

"Biscuits!"

And he was gone. Straight down out of my arms and off down that hall and round the corner at a flat gallop, with the tears not even dry on his face. Three years old, and the entire thing wiped clean out of him by a plate of biscuits.

I stood there and watched my son go and did not know whether to be grateful for it or to sit down on the floorboards and stay there.

The kitchen had not changed in thirty years. The cream Aga my father imported at ruinous expense and defended to the end of his life. The dresser with her blue and white on it. The scrubbed pine table where I had done my homework, and cried about a boy, and sat with a red pen and a school production budget the week before I got engaged. And out through the window, down and away, the whole of Hobart, laid out flat and grey underneath the cloud like a map of my entire life.

Sammy went up onto the chair with the booster on it — his chair, permanently, in that kitchen, the only grandchild there was ever going to be — and had his hand out for the plate before he was properly sitting down on it.

"Just one before lunch," she said, without turning round.

Which meant three. And everybody in that room knew that it meant three, and one of us was too young to know that everybody knew.

And I sat down.

Not in a chair. In my chair. Third from the end, on the window side, which had been mine since I was old enough to get my elbows up onto the table, and which not one member of that family had ever once sat in — not my brothers, not my father, not Nial, not in eleven years — and nobody had ever said a word about it out loud, and nobody ever will.

I put my elbows down on the pine and my face into my hands, and I sat in my own chair in my mother's kitchen and listened to my son eating a biscuit.

She went to the Aga and filled the kettle and set it on the hotplate. Then she began putting cups onto a tray.

She took her time about it. She put out the good ones, and she matched every saucer to every cup, and she moved a teaspoon about a quarter of an inch and then moved it back again — and I sat at that table and watched my mother's back and understood exactly what was coming, and had absolutely nothing left in me to meet it with.

"Now then," she said.

And she did not turn round.

"Why don't you tell me what's really going on?"

She stayed precisely where she was, with her back to me, arranging cups on a tray that did not need arranging.

Because she knew. Of course she knew. My mother has been getting things out of frightened people for sixty years — out of nine-year-olds who have not practised, out of nineteen-year-olds who cannot get through the second movement and have started lying about the reason, out of a consultant at the Royal who did not want to tell her what the scan actually showed — and she knew, standing at her own bench with her hands full of saucers, that the moment she turned round and gave me her face, she would have given me an audience.

And she knew exactly what her daughter would do with an audience.

So she took it away from me.