He would settle into a beanbag and watch cartoons with them, utterly absorbed, producing great hoots of laughter at things even they thought silly. Then in the middle of one of his rambling tales, full of grunts, whistles, clicks, and hums, the mood of boisterous hilarity in him would lapse and go underground; he would ease off his lap whichever of the littlies had climbed there and, without a word of explanation, go off. They would wait a moment to see if it was just a call of nature, in which case he would be back. But mostly it wasn't. He had been struck. Just like that—kazoom, as Tom put it.
You got used to it, of course, but it was disconcerting. Annoying too. They couldn't have got away with it.
So however much they stood in awe of whatever force it was that he had given himself up to, they resented it, and took their own form of revenge.
Asked what it was that their father did, Miranda would say blandly, "Oh, he works for the council. He's a sewage inspector.” Or as Tom once put it, "He's a burglar.”
Intimidated by his father and puzzled by a side of him that did not keep to the rules, Tom had conceived a picture of Sam as an anarchic schoolboy, pretending to be hard at work behind closed doors but in reality reading a comic, or picking his nose, or no longer there at all but off robbing a bank.
It was a boyish vision, to be explained not only by Tom's easy ten- dency to attribute to others what he would most wish for himself but by the resentment he felt at being the odd man out. Not only because he was the only boy in the family but also because, through some quirk of nature, he alone among them had no ear. He suffered this affliction without complaint, and even allowed himself to be teased about it with clownish good humour, but in a household where singing was as natural as speech he felt disabled, and since his first inclination was to conform, it unnaturally set him apart. He also felt, painfully, that Sam, whom he longed to please, was disappointed in him.
Lately, out of defiance, not of his father but of fate, he had taken to sneering at every form of “artiness” “female business.”
It would have surprised Tom to know that his father understood his perplexity and was undismayed. Composing, for Sam, was work — it was the only thing he had ever been good at — and music a condition that could manifest itself in other ways than as notes on a page or in flights of calibrated sound. He was waiting for Tom to stop feeling sorry for himself and discover his own form of the thing.
They must have had some inkling, Sam felt, of what nature was up to in Tom's case, when they named the girls Miranda, Rosalind, Cres-sida and — in a moment of recklessness — Cassandra, but for the boy had immediately settled on Tom. Not even Thomas, but Tom. Tomtom. There was, from the beginning, something wonderfully bull-like in him that would not be rarefied — even, Sam suspected, by time. He had grown up around his own literalness, and to Sam was all the more precious for it.
As for Maggie, though she believed without question in the energy Sam poured into his work — always had, from the first note he struck in her presence — the deeper music of the household flowed, for her, from what each of her children, with all their different natures and needs (even the twins, Ros and Cressie, were of contrary colour and temperament), brought to the routine and daily muddle of their lives: hurt feelings, tantrums, head colds, the shooting pain of a new tooth pushing into the house, complaints of misunderstanding and unfairness, squeals of protest at a shampooing against head lice or as a strip of Elastoplast was ripped off. For all the time and fret this cost her she would not have had it otherwise. Not one little difficult nature, or demand, or crotchet. Not one. Though she was glad she did not have to find a system of notation for it, and even more that she did not have to sing it.
Sam,looking sleek and youthful, his locks wet-combed from the shower, wandered into the kitchen, on the prowl now that he was done with work for the day, for something he could pick at — a stick of celery, a sliver of carrot, something one of the children had been up to.
“Where is he, anyway?” he demanded, meaning Tom. He was still fretting over that business with the bike. “They'll be here any minute now. Can't we eat as a family for once?”
“He's taken his surfboard to Manly,” Maggie told him, busying around behind him. “He did ask. I said it was okay. He's to be back by five.”
“And the girls?”
“They're at the pool.”
There was an open-air saltwater pool just ten minutes away, on a walk along the Harbour.
“Miranda should have stayed,” he grumbled. “You shouldn't have to do all this.” Including the guests, there would be more than a dozen of them. He picked a round of cucumber out of the tuna salad, ruining one of her attempts at symmetry, and leaned with his back to the refrigerator.
“What can Ido?”
“Open the wine and get me something to drink.”
Instead, he came up from behind, put his arms around her, and buried his face in her hair. Maggie laughed.
“That was lovely,” she told him, "but what about my drink?”
He opened three bottles of red, set them on the bench with the corks laid across their mouths, then drew her a glass of flagon white with soda.
For a few minutes they moved easily together in the space between table and cupboards, her stacks of empty egg boxes, the spilled waste from the bin; not touching, but in an easy association of bodies that was a kind of dance before the open-mouthed wine bottles.
The upper part of the house, its rooms all disorder and stopped noise, hung above them like a summer cloud, dense but still, alive with events that were for the moment suspended. The door to his workroom was closed for the day, its flow of sound also suspended, but on a chord that continued to reverberate in his head and teasingly unfold. It was there, humming away, and could wait. He would find his way back to it later.
Maggie turned and looked at him. Seeing herself reflected in his gaze, she brought the back of her hand to her forehead where a strand of hair had come loose.
It was difficult to say at such moments, she thought, whether this was before or after; whether the children were about to come bursting back into their lives from the pool, from the surf, all wet towels and hair, complaints and appetites, riddles, the smell of suntan oil and Bacon Crispies — or whether they were still waiting in youthful expectancy in that one year when there had been just the two of them, in the long nights, the short days. Not so long ago really.
They stood for a moment outside time, outside their thickened bodies, in renewed youthfulness. He nibbled. She sipped. The chord moved out through the house, discovering new possibilities in what might have passed for silence.
The doorbell rang.
“Damn,” she said. “That'll be Stell. They're always early.”
At the same moment, from the back porch, came the voices of the girls, little Cassie's breathless with grievance.
“Mummy, they tried to run away from me.”
“We did not.”
“They were chasing boys.”
“We were not”
The bell sounded again.
“You get it,” Maggie told Sam, and turned to face the onslaught.
“Now, Cassie,” she told the child, who was clinging to her hip, "stop whinging We've got visitors. Lars and Jens are here. Cressie — Ros— you should be ashamed of yourselves.”
Miranda, hair dyed pink and green in the punk style she now affected, stood in the frame of the doorway, frowning, unwilling to be drawn in.
“And so should you, miss,” Maggie told her. “I let them go with you because you're sixteen and supposed to be responsible. Sometimes I wonder.”