Hannah said, ‘Mama, I want it,’ and lunged towards a randomly floating orange flutter board, so that Dorothy had to follow or let go of her. At the dring of an electric bell the woman spun towards the pool’s edge and marched through the water, arms extending and retracting as though pulling partners towards her in a square dance. She called something over her shoulder as she reached the metal steps. ‘Tell Evelyn.’
Maya Kumar’s house was in a new subdivision near the school. The taxi dropped Dot at the end of the road and she walked the wide clean path past half-built houses on bare sections, under street lights endowed with pretty curves and hexagonal glass bulb-protectors, as though they were flowers that had grown there since Victorian times. Light blazed orange from the open front door to Maya’s house and several cars were parked on the street, cars that looked modest but more reliable than the rusting Beetles and shark-like Holdens of the school days. There was one black-tinted four-by-four.
Dorothy put a bottle of wine on the kitchen bench.
Maya kissed her. ‘It’s so great you’re here. Mandy said you’d pike out. Also, I told her about Eve. She didn’t know. We’re all so sorry.’
Something about this environment, the pressing sense of a past with Evelyn in it, made the stock response impossible.
‘Wait, I’ll get you a drink. My husband has vanished for the night, wise move.’ Maya had married one of their old teachers, which for a while had been a scandal. She’d quickly got him out of teaching and into computers. ‘Can you believe he was younger then than we are now?’
In the large picture window beyond the kitchen, Amanda Marshall stood silhouetted, a man at her side. Dorothy caught her eye and waved and Amanda resumed animated chat with the man as though she hadn’t seen. Through the window was a view of the school’s top field. Maya slid a wine glass into Dot’s hand. Her perfume smelled of jasmine and gardenias. It was time to brave the living room, where about twenty people in small groups stood dotted around, not all identifiable without staring. Many of the women had moved to the short, bran muffin hairstyle of the forty-plus.
An air of the Principal’s office hung over the closest group as they stood in silence, casting around for what to do with olive pits and dirty paper plates. Someone said, ‘We live at the end of the train line now, isn’t that awful?’ A conversation started about children. None of them were sending their kids to the school where they’d all met.
‘Not even me,’ said Maya, ‘and I could probably hit the roof of the common room if I threw something from here.’
‘You should try it,’ Dorothy said. ‘Maybe an egg.’
Maya glanced around and spoke as though to herself. ‘I wonder if this is everyone.’
Later, when Dorothy was talking to Nicky something and Elaine Woods-now-Rogerson, she heard, ‘Is Daniel coming?’ and the women’s words churned and bubbled over the floor, all the sound of the party underwater except Maya’s response.
‘Yes of course! He’d better be.’
Jason’s group exchanged information about Philip Lloyd, who had become a dealer in Australia. ‘Really?’
‘A car dealer,’ said Jason’s wife, who had been a few years behind their group at school, ‘not a drug dealer.’
Jason said Daniel was definitely out of jail and someone else said he’d never actually been in jail and a third person said apparently he’d found God since getting off the smack. ‘The NA God, where everything’s a pathology. You can’t sneeze without wanting to make it with your mother.’
‘I always wanted to make it with your mother,’ said a man Dot knew but couldn’t name.
Jason laughed. ‘Yeah well we’re about to move her into a unit at the bottom of our garden so come round any time.’
‘Where’s your dad?’
‘He passed away last year.’
‘God, sorry.’
The conversation shifted to choosing funeral directors and Dorothy drifted on. A man who didn’t look familiar sat in the corner of a black leather sofa and a woman with great legs sat next to him and held a champagne glass to his lips. Down the hall in a room that might have been a study four or five people murmured and laughed over a wall display of photographs from their time at school. The outgoing cluster squeezed past Dot in the doorway. The room was empty now. The photos were on the walls. Evelyn would be there, and Daniel, and Michael,