The Household Guide to Dying

What about into town?

Well. He scratched under his bandanna. There is a caravan and camping park, a few people live there. Some holiday units, a couple of old-timers in vans. A guy called Mitchell runs it.

I’m staying on for a while, I said. I’ll need a place to live.

He looked from me to the caravan, then back to me again.

He’s a decent guy, he said, I reckon he wouldn’t charge you too much to rent a site.

I gazed at the van. The modest curves, the unrelieved shabbiness, the air of simple hope. I asked him again how much, and it was a matter of moments before he told me I could have it for one hundred dollars. I’d be doing him a favour.

I could tow it in for you, he said.

So, that very evening, I had become a caravan owner. For one hundred dollars it was empty, apart from a thin mattress on the bed, but I made do without a blanket or towel until the next day. Inside it was not nearly as dirty as I’d expected, having been shut up tightly for years. The stale air vanished soon after I opened the door and prised apart the doll’s house windows on each side. Over the following weekend I walked into the centre of town and back, gradually stocking up on the essentials, which, I discovered, were few when you stripped life down to the most important things. What I needed, more than anything, were books, and by the time I was ready to have the baby, the second-hand bookshops had supplied enough to line the caravan. It was like living inside a cubby house. Surrounded by books, I felt safe, secure.

Nine (#ulink_5e5489b7-2662-5785-bc8b-d1dcf4149511)

Dear Delia

Do you have a good recipe for a wedding cake? I’ve tried several but found them dry and tasteless.

Mother of the Bride.

Dear Mother of the Bride

Dried fruit, obviously. Raisins, sultanas, mixed peel. Preserved ginger if you like. Brown sugar, flour, spices…Oh, for god’s sake, do I need to list everything? Surely you can work it out. And don’t ask for weights and measurements. That is tedious in the extreme. In fact it’s probably why your cakes have always failed. By the way, several cakes? How many weddings have you had?

Modern mothering was a snap.

Here I was agonising over my daughter’s wedding at least twenty years too early and trying to decide between linen napkins (more stylish, but more laundering) or paper ones in shades matching her outfit (it would be palest pink, more cream than pink, like the flesh of a white peach) that would be much less stylish but more efficient (no ironing), and then I recalled Jane Austen’s Mrs Bennet.

I often thought of Mrs Bennet when the going got tough in the blood sport that the game of raising daughters had become. Mrs Bennet’s daughters might have displayed more respect for their mama, might not have spent hours in their bedrooms plastering their faces with gooey make-up, rereading the same Girlfriend or Total Girl magazines over and over, or listening to obscure punk bands; they might not have insisted on dressing like child prostitutes from the moment they could do up buttons on their own, refused to eat meat from the age of eight and made prepubescent demands to have their navels pierced. But I had to admit there was a plus side to my experiences.

First, she had five daughters, and I only had two. And poor Mrs Bennet’s entire commission in life was, after raising them, to marry them off to suitable husbands. I might have been planning a wedding, but it was in an age where husband hunting had long dropped off the agenda. Daisy could get married or not as she pleased. Not so Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Kitty and silly little Lydia. Oh yes, Jane and Elizabeth might have had an element of choice, and Elizabeth may well have exercised her right to reject the absurd advances of Mr Collins and the first astonishing proposal of Mr Darcy without a single reference to her mother’s wishes, but neither she nor any other Austen heroine was going to slum it with the love of her life in an artist’s studio in the East End of London (a place of such unredeemed vulgarity it was, I suspected, never once mentioned in the entire Austen oeuvre), or marry a man she’d met on the bus or down the pub on a Friday night.

True, Mrs Bennet had household help, and I had none. But Mrs Bennet’s obligations far outstripped mine. I didn’t have to run our lives to a rigid social and domestic schedule. We didn’t have to make tedious calls upon parish spinsters or endure visits from patronising social superiors. We could, and did, spend our evenings lingering over any book we wanted, reading The Wind in the Willows or Where The Wild Things Are, again and again whether they or I had grown out of them or not. True, it was important to feed my daughters with nutritionally balanced foods, monitor their homework, supply a few extracurricular activities, such as Estelle’s netball or Daisy’s recorder lessons, and ensure they didn’t watch too much television. When the time came, caution them against the more unsanitary forms of body piercing and advise on the use of condoms (if I were there, but perhaps I could expect Charlotte to do that – they wouldn’t listen to Jean).

But poor Mrs Bennet had the responsibility of making all her daughters proficient in dancing, card games and needlework. At least one – Mary – had a workable grasp of pianoforte, Italian songs and Scottish airs. They all had to demonstrate parlour and drawing-room etiquette, and have a familiarity with the historical epic poems of Sir Walter Scott. She had to ensure that every daughter’s complexion remained clear and fine and fair, that the circumferences of their waists remained within an acceptable twenty-four inches, that their hair stayed dressed in coils and ringlets (Lydia, for sure, would have wanted to shave, spike, streak or do all three to hers). Mrs Bennet was responsible for their deportment, posture, manners when in church or at table, behaviour while strolling down to the village haberdashery (Lydia would have had tattoos, and belly piercings too). She had to foster polite and appropriate discourse in a variety of contexts from the vicar to the scullery maid. She had to teach them about bowel movements (without stooping to vulgar terms), menstruation (without so much as mentioning blood), sexual relations between husbands and wives (without being able to refer to the intimate physical act, let alone uttering, let alone thinking of, words like penis or vagina), and then initiate and oversee the vast, all-consuming business of finding the appropriate man attached to the end of the unmentionable organ – the whole reason, culmination, justification, of a woman’s life. Poor Mrs Bennet. The task was gargantuan. And she did indeed fail in many of her duties. I don’t think even Jane, of all the daughters, managed decent piano playing (though I imagined Lydia taking up drums). Not one of the Bennet girls was schooled and, as there had never been a governess, the level of education had clearly been hit and miss. But Mrs Bennet did her absolute best, and one of the worst difficulties she encountered was the benign indifference and sarcastic humour of her library-closeted husband.

When she was discontented she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news.

I honestly couldn’t claim that taking Daisy to recorder lessons for half an hour once a week was onerous, compared with Mrs Bennet’s commitments. Readers might have been tricked into thinking that she was a silly shallow woman and that her husband, with all his dry sarcasm. was a self-effacing, long-suffering man, but Mrs Bennet was a champion among women, among mothers, a pearl of great price. I was going dizzy at the thought of linen versus paper napkins, but she – strong, determined and single-minded – was faced with the entire box of dice from the cradle on. Times five.

So why was I thinking about marriage? Did I really desire that my daughters had husbands? My present obsession with Daisy’s wedding no doubt had a lot to do with my own. Archie and I were married, certainly, but in the austere political and secular correctness of a registry office. Here we banished all suggestion of offensive sexist symbolism such as white veils or floral bouquets. There were no demeaning vows involving words like obedience. And yet, without an audience beyond our witnesses, there were no obligations to quote mystical Lebanese poets or play chamber music.

I began to question if I was not unhealthily fixated on an entirely imaginary husband, the sort of husband who, if he existed, you wouldn’t want for a husband anyway. I could admit now that the perfect husband resembled a wife. I often yearned for a wife. I yearned for one right at that moment, a wife who would bring me a cup of tea, then go and hang out the washing that I knew would be creasing itself after the centrifugal force of the washing machine had plastered it to the insides of the drum. A wife who was me. That person who was, right now, tired. And, I admitted, weary of the housework, which had never really bothered me, which I’d never found difficult or mysterious.

But whether or not it was now too many years of loads put on or hung out or gathered in, wrinkled and all, or if it was an increasing resentment that flowed like the toxic chemicals that I tried to flush out of my system, or just a simple matter of being too tired and too busy all at once, I could no longer tell. All I knew was, today I would be leaving the washing there in the machine while I wrote my list.

Dear Delia

About the wedding cake. I’m afraid I need more precise ingredients than that. And how long would you recommend I cook it for? Hopefully you will be able to help me. Mother of the Bride.

Dear Mother of the Bride

As with the wedding itself, hope is the chief ingredient of a wedding cake. You are right to be hopeful. Hope will keep a marriage going for a long, long time. Have a go. I’m sure you can manage it.

Ten (#ulink_3849efea-b0f3-5374-97e9-6fa42084012a)

The centre of Amethyst was in a hollow, streets angling down towards the main roads, the clusters of shops. The streets were full of enormous trees and then, on the west of town, there were large open spaces like natural parklands along which sauntered a lazy river, bordered with willows and reeds. In autumn, the place was enchanting. In the cooler months it was perfect, and in summer it was shady enough to give the illusion of coolness. Along the main street into town the palms were enormous, dense, and in the late afternoon crammed with brightly coloured parakeets monstering the fruits in a cacophony of greed. They shot back and forth across the road boldly, forcing me to steer the car from side to side to avoid them.

The Paradise Reach Motel, a small family business, was still there. It had quiet, spacious rooms, a palm-crowded front garden with a pool, and a friendly watchdog, whom I noticed as soon as I pulled up. Surely it wasn’t the same one from years back – he’d have been well over sixteen by now: did labradors live that long? The woman at the desk wasn’t familiar, but she told me the motel was still in the same hands.

You’re from Sydney?

Somehow, up north, people always knew.

Yes, I said. But I lived here once, years ago.

Oh, and are you on holidays now? Visiting relatives?

Something like that.

I checked into my room, threw my bag in the corner and myself on the bed. I lay there for a long time, resting, thinking. Until it became dark enough that I had to get up and turn on the lights.

I found Mitchell upstairs in his bar. He appeared to be interviewing a new pianist. I started to tiptoe out again when I realised what was going on, but he waved to me to stay, and without asking what I wanted, fixed me a drink.

This is Chris. He nodded to the man sitting at the bar. He might be playing here.

Chris held out his hand and shook mine. In profile he revealed a lean tanned face, but as he turned, I glimpsed the other side, a mottled mess of dark birthmark, more raspberry than strawberry, spreading from his nose to his ear and disappearing under his hair, which was black and curly. He continued talking.

I’ll do requests, but there are certain tunes I won’t play.

Fair enough, Mitchell said.

‘You Must Remember This’.

Okay.

‘Candle in the Wind’.

Yep, fine.

And especially ‘Piano Man’. Come to think of it, nothing by Billy Joel. Not a note. Or I walk out that door right there and never come back.

Sure. Okay.

I glanced at Mitchell, who was sounding oddly acquiescent, though he didn’t look it. He looked, with his sleeves rolled to the elbows, polishing wineglasses which he periodically held up to the light for exaggerated inspection, like a man with more important matters on his mind than what a temperamental pianist might condescend to play.