Free The Submerged Cathedral by Charlotte Wood Page B

downstairs.
    Over tea and marmalade on the living-room floor they unwrap the presents, Jocelyn and Ellen still in their dressing gowns. It is Sandra’s job to hand out the gifts, which she does solemnly, concentrating, only screeching when Martin takes his present from her politely and then, in contrast to the sisters who have been folding the discarded wrappings carefully, rips at his Christmas paper with a huge sweep of his arm.
    The present is from Jocelyn. It is a framed pastel drawing of Pittwater. The headlands and bays are geometric blocks of colour, curving in blackened greens to the grey-blue sea. She had kept it on her dressing table for a week after she bought it, staring into it each morning and night. Inside the cool, layered colours is their abandoned summer by the water. She had left it there until the last possible minute before wrapping it.
    Now Martin holds the drawing up, not speaking. On the back she has written: For Martin, Christmas 1963. With all my love.
    His eyes shine, he wipes them with his fingers. He steps across the carpet and kisses her, and sits on the armof the couch, his hand on her shoulder. He props the picture against the bookshelf, and keeps turning his head to look at it through the morning.
    Then Ellen and Jocelyn begin the cooking. Blowflies knock lazily against the kitchen window, and the garden beyond is bleached white with heat and lack of rain. The temperature in the kitchen rises, and steam mists the windows.
    After lunch Ellen takes Sandra with her for a sleep, and Martin and Jocelyn wash the dishes in the haze of the kitchen heat and lunchtime wine. He stands close to her, says, ‘I love my present.’ She turns to him, puts her arms around his neck. Then, hearing Ellen’s voice in the hallway, they separate.
    Jocelyn opens the door –
    And finds Ellen sitting with the telephone in her hand, biting her lip, nodding, tilting a smile into the receiver while she listens to Thomas’s voice from across the continents.
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    When Ellen finally comes into the living room and sees Jocelyn she says coolly that she booked the trunk call weeks ago. She adds, tapping a cigarette end on the packet in her hand, ‘It’s all right, I’ll pay for it.’
    Then Jocelyn’s rage, grabbing Ellen by the shoulders,shouting Why? , calling her stupid , shouting, Have you ever thought – and Martin calling after her to calm down .
    Ellen puts out her own hands and elegantly removes Jocelyn’s from her shoulders.
    â€˜It’s Christmas. He has a right to know about his baby,’ she says, cold-faced and tearless. Jocelyn stares at her, and has the blank realisation that she is outclassed, that Ellen is an old hand in the face of rage. And in the art of deception, writing back to Thomas on blue airmail paper all this time.

Eleven
    I N THE FOLLOWING days, when Martin has gone back to the city, silence fills the house.
    There is a rat in the kitchen, or rats. Jocelyn rummages through low cupboards in the laundry for traps, shuddering. She couldn’t tell Ellen that when she reached into the fruit bowl on the sideboard this morning her hand landed on a half-eaten peach. She saw the combed tooth marks as she tossed it into the rubbish, and then quickly brushed the rat’s droppings away as Ellen came in with the newspaper and took a peach in passing. And now, because Jocelyn let her eat the peach, she cannot tell her about the rat.
    The only sound in the house is Sandra, shouting somewhere upstairs, with Ellen’s voice a quiet, firm murmur against her yells. Ellen’s self-control sends a surge of anger through Jocelyn.
    She finds two greasy, fluffed traps at the back of a cupboard and drops them into the sink. Their size alone disgusts her. She pours boiling water over them to dislodge the fluff and wash from them the other nameless grease she doesn’t want to think about, not caring at the foolishness of washing a rat trap before