Questions of Travel Read Free

There were evenings when they sat on and on, homework and washing-up neglected. By the time the sound of a car could be heard in the drive, it was a point of honor not to move. It was not that Donald criticized Dallas or fish fingers. But he stood there, jingling his keys, before retreating to his room.
    Wielding his electric toothbrush in the en suite, Donald Fraser was reliving the moment when he had looked in on his daughter and his aunt. One was a glazed wooden goat, the other…he rinsed and spat, traversed by pity for the female morsel he had engendered. His daughter’s eyes were coins of a lowly bronze denomination. Crossing a room, she caused him to fear that she would collide with the furniture. He couldn’t conceive of the absence of beauty in a woman as anything other than a misfortune and had no doubt that he was responsible for Laura’s affliction. Long before her birth, mirrors had presented him with lips as coarsely suggestive as a double entendre. He pressed a hand towel to them. Yet they excited women. For context is all. It was a mouth that would constitute an invitation on an attractive girl; on his poor child, it was an obscenity from which her father flinched.
    She was the repository of all that was massive and defective in Donald’s lineage. He had escaped the worst of it. Even so, as he peered over the towel, he fell far short of his own ideal. Beautiful young women— stunners —were therefore necessary to him. His wife had been one. Her radiant fairness had passed to the boys, adulterated by the Fraser motif of thickly turned limb. But it was the girl who had suffered the full force of the paternal theme. The runt had copped the brunt. At her birth, Donald had thought of a piglet he had dissected as a boy. Loving his sons, he showed them no quarter. Laura, whom he didn’t like to touch, raked in money, extravagant presents, indulgence in all things except the failure in which she had played no part.
    Donald put the thought of his daughter from him by recalling the image of a succulent oncologist who was driven to adjust her goldilocks if ever they met in the lift. But her smile contained a pink expanse of gum. So he had pretended not to understand when she “accidentally” called his extension. Emboldened before the bathroom mirror by this proof of standards, he dared to let the towel fall.
    In the rumpus room, they were eating Tim Tams straight from the packet. An ad break interrupted a Ewing machination—something involving a secret and a lie. It must have been the reason Hester chose that moment to confide that she hadn’t always been the last after a run of boys. A sister had contracted diphtheria in India at the age of three. Pinafored Hester, lingering outside a window, heard her mother say that the child’s throat seemed to be lined with gray velvet. “That was the infected membrane,” said Hester to Laura. “Dr. Norris had ridden through a cyclone to reach us but he was too late. Ruth choked and died.”
    Yuk! thought Laura. The unfairness of being saddled with an old bag as companion had recently begun to oppress. Thankfully, the Ewings had returned to cavort and divert. Hester went on holding half a Tim Tam. Eventually, she placed it on her saucer and drew a hanky from her sleeve. Laura thought, If you cry, I’ll have to kill you. She waited, sliding her eyes sideways and holding a cushion like a shield. The whole hanky thing was disgusting, too—what was wrong with a Kleenex?
    Hester was in the grip of a senseless thought: Death runs in our family. For a long time, the space occupied by Ruth had remained visible; the child Hester had to step off a path or choose a different chair. A Ruth-shaped form, something like a mist but less definite, still moved now and then along a passage or across a window. Back teeth together! said Hester to Hester. It was the only salve known to her childhood: offered when a funny bone collided with a cupboard, when a sister died. Over the years