Snapshot

20

Ellen cooked lasagne for dinner, knowing that it would please her husband. She recognised the impulse, one familiar to social workers, counsellors and the police from endless domestic violence situations, in which women-and sometimes men-strove futilely to please their spouses, patch up squabbles, mend cracks, keep the peace-until it all blew up again.

She hated herself for it.

But did you just throw away twenty years of marriage without trying? She knew the pressure that Alan was under. The man she’d married-big, bluff, competent and cheerful-had gradually been ground down by disappointments. He felt left behind by his colleagues and his wife, and hadn’t the strategies to adjust to or rise above the situation.

He’d been an only child, that was part of the problem. Because his parents had indulged him, and he’d never disappointed their modest expectations, or encountered significant setbacks or challenges early in life, he’d coasted uncomplicatedly through school and later the police academy. Life to him was easy, predictable and not all that serious. But then had come the regular, mundane but testing responsibilities of full-time work, marriage, fatherhood and a mortgage. The world wasn’t small any more, but big, and full of ambitious, talented and hardworking men and women. He was ill-prepared and only moderately talented. He didn’t take to drink, drugs or sleeping around to make himself better; instead, he developed biting suspicions and grievances, which he kept barely contained. He fumed, his brow permanently dark. He hated the world and, Ellen suspected, hated himself.

There was a yellowing photo of him on the fridge, and she glanced at it while she cooked. Taken when he was twenty-two, he was a fine-looking man, grinning widely as he passed out of the police academy. It hurt her to think that so cheerful and invincible a man could be reduced to sourness and futility.

And so she was cooking him a lasagne, to make him feel better, to atone for the morning, to put the world right again. She hated herself for it. Once upon a time, she’d cooked lasagne out of love. Now she cooked it because love had gone. Did lasagne ever bring love back? She thought of Janine McQuarrie then, and wondered about her strategies for enduring a loveless marriage. Ellen and Alan ate early, a habit set years earlier, when they’d had a child in the house.

‘Like it?’

‘It’s delicious,’ he said, chomping away. It occurred to her then that he did eat more than he used to, and exercised less. Maybe he’s depressed, she thought, but she had no idea how she’d ever broach that subject with him.

Meanwhile he was comforted by the food he was eating, so she told him about her day: the circumstances of the murder, the unappealing personalities of the main players, the anonymous caller. ‘Hal thinks-’ she said.

He cut across her. ‘Hal thinks, Hal thinks. You’re always going on about what lover boy thinks.’

Alan’s head was full of sour imaginings, and he half believed that she was attracted to or had even slept with Challis. Fed up suddenly, Ellen said, ‘Keep it up, Alan, and you might get what you wished for.’

He flushed, scowled and looked away impotently, then swung his head back to her. ‘Do you want to know how my day has been?’

‘Why don’t you tell me,’ she said in an uninflected voice.

‘While you and lover boy have been swanning around the Peninsula, mixing with the rich and powerful, I have been measuring skid marks and collecting chips of glass and paint at accident sites. I’ve been sloshing around in blood and motor oil, getting my hands dirty. Welcome to the real world, Ellen.’

This was another old refrain, life as a competition. She didn’t buy into it but packed the dishwasher and settled herself in front of the TV, feeling small and alone. Alan joined her. At once she returned to the kitchen and phoned Larrayne, who was distracted and uncommunicative. The conversation faltered and then Alan was there, tapping his watch face to tell her this was becoming a costly phone call. ‘Have to go, sweetie,’ she said. ‘Want to speak to Dad?’

It was a small victory and she relished it. Alan took the phone from her and talked for a few strangled minutes, clearly counting the mounting dollars and cents. Eventually he hung up and said ferociously, ‘Why do women say in thirty minutes what can be said in five?’

‘She’s our daughter, for God’s sake,’ Ellen said.

She dodged around him and returned to the sitting room, where ‘The 7.30 Report’ was discussing legal definitions of the provocation defence in cases of domestic assault and homicide. ‘Poor bastard,’ said Alan feelingly of one of the studio guests, a league footballer and notorious wife-basher.

‘What would you know,’ muttered Ellen, aware that she sounded about fifteen.

Alan shrugged, strange, conflicting expressions passing across his face, as though he wanted to strike her and felt he had the right, as though he was scared to think he couldn’t control himself, and as though he had access to secret knowledge and courses of action. Fed up, and not trusting herself, Ellen walked to the kitchen pantry and dug out the jar of chocolate biscuits, eating one standing up at the sink and staring out at the night.

‘Don’t I get one?’ her husband said.

Wordlessly she nudged the jar towards him.

‘Cat got your tongue?’

Ellen was saved by the wall phone above the bench. ‘Hal!’ she said, her eyes hard on her husband now.

Challis explained, in his mild, pleasant rasp, that his car was stuffed and asked if she could give him a lift to work in the morning.

‘A lift? Sure, Hal, pick you up at eight,’ she said, her voice animated for her husband’s sake and her own.