Page 24 of The Mother-in-Law

‘Okay, just hang on a min—’

‘I’m serious, Ollie. And we’re not taking any money from them for the house. We’ll pay the mortgage insurance and buy it ourselves. This is a deal breaker for me.’

Ollie stares at me. ‘Seriously?’

‘Seriously.’

Ollie takes a deep breath, lets his head fall back against the head rest. Silence hangs between us and I can feel Ollie wrestling with it. It’s hard; I get that. It’s instinctive to reach out to your parents for help when you need it, it’s as familiar and comfortable as getting dressed in the morning. But at some point in adulthood, you have to teach yourself a new way to be. It’s infuriating that Diana had to be the one to point that out, but it’s true nonetheless.

Finally Ollie nods. ‘Okay, fine. We’ll pay for the house ourselves.’

‘And?’ I prompt.

‘And I’ll never ask them for money again.’

‘Even if we’re poor and starving and can’t find a crumb between us?’

‘Even then.’ He smiles, but there is great effort behind it. ‘There is no one I’d rather starve with than you.’

We laugh and I feel impressed with the speed in which Ollie came around. I wonder if it’s because, in the back of his mind, he knows that we will never have to starve. He knows that at some point a huge amount of money will be coming our way, more money than we could ever possibly spend. And, to access it, all we need to do is wait for someone to die.

13

DIANA

The past . . .

The kids have barely left the house before Tom starts pouting. I knew this would happen, with the same certainty thatheknew I was going to turn down Ollie’s request for money. When you’ve being married for as long as we have, while you may hope for different results, you stop expecting them. And if you want a happy marriage, you have to look to the other things, the things you do see eye to eye on. Lucky for me, when it comes to Tom, there are many of these.

Tom sits heavily in his wingback chair.

I hold up a hand, palm forward. ‘I know what you’re going to say, Tom, so please save it.’

‘Did I say anything?’ He lets out a long, world-weary sigh.

‘I don’t like being the bad guy. You know that.’

He shifts in his seat. His expression is resigned rather than annoyed. ‘Idoknow that.’

As far as arguments between Tom and I go, this is as heated as they get. Once upon a time Tom had more fire to him, but now there’s only a handful of things that really make him fly off the handle. Traffic. People leaving lights on around the house. Racism. The important things. Today, despite our differing views, Tom and I respect where the other is coming from. Tom grew up in the outskirts of Melbourne where the suburbs meet the country, a low socioeconomic area even before he was orphaned and had to move further out to live with his grandparents. He was schooled in a rough area, and dropped out at fourteen to do an apprenticeship with a local plumber. Once qualified, he found himself a job on a residential development project, befriended the owners and suggested they try their hand at retirement communities, which was a suggestion so profitable he wound up a business partner in of one of the largest residential development companies in Australia.

‘I would have thought that you of all people would understand that you don’t have to be given a handout to succeed, Tom.’

‘But things are different now,’ he says. ‘Everyone is going to university, working for free to get experience, using their private school networks. It’s harder than in my day to make something out of nothing. These kids need help.’

But of course this is just part of the waffle that private school parents tell each other to justify the exorbitant fees they pay. After Tom badgered me for years, I finally relented and allowed Ollie and Nettie to attend schools with term fees high enough to feed an entire Afghan village for a year. Years later, I’m still doubtful as to whether the schools were any better than the local ones. What Iamsure about is that giving children handouts—no not children,adults!—after they have already been privately educated and given every advantage in life, simply to keep pushing them further ahead of those who are trying to make their way without assistance, is not the right thing to do for anyone involved.

‘It’s always been hard, Tom. You were hungrier for it than our kids are, that’s all.’

Unlike Tom, I grew up in a middle-class family. We didn’t have the kind of wealth Tom and I live with now, but we were comfortable. The fact is, I wouldn’t have been hungry for it either if my circumstances hadn’t taken a drastic dive in my youth.

‘I think Ollie could do with being a little hungry. A little hunger is good for young people. It was the making of you.’

Tom slides over and I sit beside him in the wingback chair, which is generous enough for two middle-aged bottoms. ‘Actually,’ Tom smiles, ‘it was the making of you.’

1970 . . .

Cynthia and I called it the summer of the Falcon, mostly because the rest of our friends were in Europe and we wanted to make it sound more exciting than it really was. The Falcon XR GT was a car, and it belonged to Cynthia’s boyfriend, Michael. I knew, of course, what happened in the back of the Falcon, what Michael and Cynth had done in the Falcon many times. I wasn’t desperately in love with David, though I liked him well enough. He was tall, and he was studying engineering at university, which seemed to be enough back then. Height and smarts. What else could a woman want?