Modern Interiors. Andrea Goldsmith
bathroom, Philippa knew she would sell the lot.
Exactly five months later, soon after her sixty-second birthday, Philippa Finemore announced to Gray and Evelyn, Melanie and Selwyn, and her younger son Jeremy, that she was leaving home. It was a Friday night and they were lingering over coffee and port at the huge mahogany dining-table George had bought soon after he and Philippa were married. The grandchildren were either in the sitting-room watching television or asleep in the cots that Evelyn and Melanie kept in one of the spare bedrooms. Philippa passed the coffee pot around, waited for a lull in the conversation and made her announcement.
‘I’ve decided to sell the house.’
In the silence that followed, Jeremy smiled and reached for his mother’s hand, while the others looked to Gray for a response.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said. ‘If it’s help you’re needing we can easily organize that.’
‘Of course,’ said Evelyn, looking at her husband, ‘we’ll organize that. Melanie and I can do the shopping, and we’ll arrange for a cleaning service to help Julia with the housekeeping. And we can increase John Slowe’s hours in the garden, perhaps hire someone else for the lawns.’
Evelyn was clearly warming to the task, but it was not help that was on Philippa’s agenda, it was change. Selwyn leaned over and patted his mother-in-law’s knee.
‘Now Philippa, we know how difficult these past months have been, but what’s required is a little more time, a little more patience.’ And patted her knee again. Selwyn spoke in earnest; he had plans for the property, located as it was in a prime residential suburb and ideal for a substantial town house development. ‘You mustn’t rush into a decision you might later regret.’
‘Besides, it’s our home,’ Melanie continued, ‘you can’t sell our home.’ For Melanie, too, had plans. The house was just the right size and in just the right location for her own family. The house was Finemore property as far as she was concerned, and Philippa had no right to dispose of it.
‘Perhaps it’s only a passing phase,’ Evelyn suggested a few days later as she and Melanie sat in Evelyn’s lounge room drinking coffee and eating home-made almond bread.
But it was not. The auction notice went up, six weeks later the house was sold for a respectable 2.4 million and two months after that Philippa moved into a single-fronted Victorian terrace, fully renovated, only a short walk from the centre of Melbourne and a long drive from the rest of the family. Except Jeremy.
‘I think it’s perfect.’
It was late afternoon and Jeremy had come straight from the university ‘to wet the head of the house,’ as Philippa had so neatly put it. After a day spent cleaning and unpacking and discovering the secrets of her new home, Philippa had retired to the couch while Jeremy opened the champagne. Now she watched him, enjoying the warm distance that tiredness often creates, seeing his dark skin and eyes, noticing how the heavy, almost-black hair fell over his forehead, the deft gestures, the compact body whose slightness had always worried his father, and knew he could be mistaken for no one’s son but her own. He felt her gaze, looked up and smiled, and with the bottle now open and the drinks poured, came and joined her on the couch.
The summer sun was still high in the sky, yet, due to certain architectural feats in the renovation of the terrace, the room was still cool. Philippa sipped her drink and sighed. ‘I’m going to be very happy here. I love the area, the house is extremely comfortable, and it’s just the right size.’
‘Which is what the others find so disturbing. Where can the children play? Where can they take their naps? Where are we to have our family dinners?’
‘At their places.’ Philippa stood and walked to the galley kitchen at the end of the lounge. She rummaged in a box for some rice crackers, returned to her chair, took a handful and passed the dish to Jeremy. ‘Do you think I’m being unfair? Do you think I’m being selfish?’
Jeremy smiled. ‘I’m absolutely the wrong person to ask. But,’ he held up his hand to deflect her interruption, ‘you do have a life to live, your own life and not simply that of grandmother and babysitter. Selfish? The word has a bad reputation. What you’re doing is looking after yourself. I think you’re being responsible.’
‘It’s not that I don’t love them—’
‘I know.’
‘Nor is it that I don’t want to see them—’
‘Of course not.’
‘But I don’t need to see them all the time. The fact of the matter is, Jeremy, I’ve got other things to do.’
‘I know, and I’m pleased.’
‘Only vague ideas at the moment, but a host of them. This,’ she raised her arms to the room, to the little house, ‘is only the beginning.’
TWO
Philippa went into the front room to finish unpacking. She was pleased for Jeremy’s visit and grateful that at least one of her children understood her need for change. Which was fortunate, for the inclination was gathering momentum; each day had its share of new hopes and possibilities, some so bizarre they might have been borrowed. As the months passed, Philippa was discovering aspects of herself that were strange and unfamiliar, yet, at the same time, invigorating and curiously seductive. The discoveries did not help clarify her plans, but they did provide for a burgeoning array of options. Jeremy seemed to understand this mysterious alchemy that had, in such a short time, transformed his mother, not simply into a more lively person, but into a woman unknown.
Philippa smiled: an unknown woman with an unknown future, what a luscious prospect! And set about putting the house to order.
The front room had originally been designed as a second bedroom, but Philippa, determined never again to need a second bedroom, had converted it to a study. The cupboards intended for clothes, housed much of the Finemore finery, that reservoir of silver and crystal and linen and lace once so essential to Philippa’s lifestyle. Later, all of it would go to the children, but with her plans still so unformed, premature distribution seemed imprudent. She had installed book shelves along one wall, and, in front of the window with a view to the street, had placed George’s leather-top desk, a beautiful piece of furniture in dark, aged wood that George had inherited from his father, although it had been George’s mother, Dora, who had truly occupied the desk. Unknown to the rest of the family, Dora had written poetry throughout her married life. In the middle years of Philippa’s marriage when the days had dragged by in dreary repetition, Dora had taken Philippa into her confidence, and, until her stroke, Philippa had been Dora’s first reader, privy to the tentative pleasures of a new poem as well as the capricious joys of publication. And while Philippa admired the poems, and would return to them over and over again, what she valued most in those days was Dora’s choice of her, Philippa, as confidant.
When Dora died and her possessions were sorted, the family had been surprised to learn of Dora’s poetry, and not understanding it, had belittled it, referring to ‘Mother’s little secret’ as one might a bottle of brandy concealed at the back of a cupboard. Philippa had been furious, feeling the affront not only on Dora’s behalf, but as an insult to herself. Dora’s poems had taught her that in a life reduced to the basics, any foreign elements must be protected, that in a life already diminished, further reductions leave permanent scars. Philippa maintained her silence while George and his brothers passed their snide remarks, but she wanted justice. And three months after Dora’s death she got it. One evening, a rare solitary evening when Philippa was alone in the house, she stole all of Dora’s papers, her poetry, correspondence, recipe notes, even a few shopping lists, she stole the lot. And when, many years later, George wondered what had happened to ‘Mother’s jottings’, Philippa said they must have been thrown out. Now, from one of the cartons, she withdrew the folders containing Dora’s writings and placed them on the desk, out of hiding and safe in Philippa’s house.
Philippa’s house: she savoured the thought. For forty years of marriage, Philippa had