by Steve Low
Isobel had fallen against the back of her chair. She had stared at Margo’s face, the older woman’s lips pressed together in a teacher’s smirk, the smouldering cigarette held aloft like a smoking statue. The glee of revelation had flushed Margo’s cheeks and brought a pulsatile throb to her temples. It was all the more remarkable, because here was the victim telling the tale of her own betrayal, wearing a face of satisfaction.
“They did me a favour, you see,” Margo said, by way of explanation. “Francis was never going to settle. It was better I found out earlier, rather than later.”
But you never re-married, Isobel thought. You never had children of your own.
“I’ve have had a good life, “Margo said, as if reading a transcript of Isobel’s thoughts. “I was able to have this marvellous career. And there were so many people to meet in Wellington – the public service . . . Men to burn!” She winked then and Isobel recalled the Greek who had so incensed the reactionary Graham, many years before.
Isobel smiled weakly. “So they were caught?” she said. “Is that when Mum and Graham moved to Nelson?”
Margo nodded. “It was best for Julia that she was removed from the scene.”
“Mum must have been distraught,” Isobel said. “Was she really in love? . . . God I’m sorry, he was your husband after all.”
Margo had exhaled a long plume of blue smoke. A rushing noise through pursed lips and flared nose. “It‘s alright, a lot of time has gone by – I’m O.K about it now. But yes, Julia was absolutely besotted with Francis, and perhaps he was with her. But after she and Graham moved to Nelson, they conceived Gerry almost straight away. That must have eased the pain.” The words were clipped, like a telling point in the court-room.
The restaurant was on the second floor of the building. Through a dormer window, an orange street light glowed, lighting up a half of Margo’s face as she continued with her story. The two young couples had been neighbours in Wellington. They resided in the hill suburb of Kelburn which occupies the immediate vicinity at the top end of the cable car. The ambitious husbands were both newly unleashed onto their career paths of law and medicine. Margo herself was a trainee law clerk, while Julia, a former laboratory technician, was at home with her two children. “We began to spend alot of time together,” Margo said. “Julia and I became close friends. Francis and Graham, while being quite different in many ways, got on O.K. There were countless shared meals, weekends away and eventually holidays together. You see Julia was able to leave you and Richard with her mother.” She tapped her cigarette against the rolled edge of a glass ash tray. “Of course when you spend all that time together, everyone gets to know each other quite well. There’s always the danger that an attraction will occur. And that’s exactly what happened.”
It had started during a summer holiday. Francis had admitted that much to Margo. And bathed in the orange glare of the proximal street lamp, Margo’s mouth had become pinched, her thin nose pallid, her eyeballs black. “The bastard must have given her the look,” she had said, fixing my sister with a knowing stare.
For a moment Isobel had felt as though she was to blame for Julia’s misdemeanour. As a descendent of the wayward mum, Margo was apparently angry with her.
However, as quick as it had come, Margo’s frown was gone. “I don’t really blame Julia,” she said. She relaxed back in her chair, exhaling towards the ceiling. “It was him. He’d always been a flirt. I’d seen him at the Lawyer’s Ball, brushing up against the gorgeous ones. I guess I denied it then. I didn’t want to know. I just wanted to be Mrs Urquhart.”
Isobel had drained her wine glass, seeking anaesthesia – a numbing effect to cope with this woman and her revelation. Margo, who had once been idolised by Isobel, was now hard to take, her hair stiff with lacquer, her face gaunt and righteous, her story profound and disturbing. Margo was creating an embryo in Isobel‘s mind, giving life to a previously unknown reality – the genesis of a uneasy marriage, to which Isobel was inextricably linked.
“It was I who became suspicious,” Margo said, “and Graham who set the trap.”
Isobel had felt her insides go hollow. Her sympathies were with Julia. She had almost felt at that moment that she herself was Julia. She could put herself in Julia’s mind – this man called Francis calling up a fragile notion of happiness – the promise of loving arms and vibrant conversation. But a trap was going to end all that.
Sick with love after the first holiday together, it became routine for Francis to phone Julia at the Davenport home, once the two children were away at school and kindergarten. Daily, then several times a day, the phone calls continued to come in. Soon they were meeting in the lunch hour, drinking coffee in some anonymous cafe, hidden away in a shadowy corner, clutching hands under a protective table-top. Quickly their passions had ignited. It became unbearable to merely sit and look at each other. Of the whereabouts of the inevitable love-making, Margo had been unsure. All Francis had admitted to was the sheer power of it. As if the emotive force and desire excused the terrible betrayal. Away from the controlling Graham, Julia had been lascivious, her heat and desire palpable across the cafe tables, her urgent lovemaking a revelation to the inquisitive Francis.
Desperate for each others company, the lovebirds had had to surreptitiously arrange for more and more interaction between the foursome. At first Margo had welcomed this increased contact, as she usually took up any opportunity to socialise. She wasn’t to know that a burning passion was behind the illicit couple’s drive to bring the foursome together. However it wasn’t long before she began to notice the exchange of glances, the touching of hands, the coincidental need to use the bathroom. She observed how the two of them always ended up adjacent at the dinner table, their chairs positioned close, their hands often invisible, presumably at play below the table cloth. For weeks Margo seethed with jealousy and anger. She became consumed by the issue of who to confront with the problem.
“I couldn’t be sure how significant the problem was,” Margo said to Isobel. “Was it perhaps a brief flirtation, a mere ripple on the surface of my otherwise satisfactory marriage? Or was it much deeper than that? Were they planning something more serious? I was confused. You see at home, the behaviour of Francis was largely unchanged. He still apparently needed me . . . Oh he might have been a little distant. When I found out later, that he had also been all over her, that’s when I surmised that he was either an excellent actor or quite at ease with duplicity. Anyway, I should have confronted him . . . or Julia. But instead I divulged the story to Graham and I guess in retrospect that was a mistake . . . Yes it would have been better for Julia if Graham had been kept in the dark. For one, she wouldn‘t have had to play second fiddle to him all her life. And secondly, she might have had an easier person to live with. Of course, at the time I wasn‘t thinking about making life easy for Julia!”
Isobel had been mesmerised by the story. The lives of her parents! She sat forward, her elbows on the table edge, her chin cupped in her hands, eyes fixed on Margo’s face.
“As soon as I had told Graham of my concerns, I wished I hadn’t.” Margo had continued. She had frowned then, turning to look out the window at the street lamp.
Imagining Graham in possession of the information, and knowing his penchant for sarcasm, Isobel had felt a sudden chill. “Poor Mum,” she said.
Margo had glanced at Isobel with a look of annoyance, as if to say, Poor Mum indeed! What about poor Margo! But her face softened a little. “You see I didn’t really know Graham because he projected quite a front. Certainly, he seemed a bit reactionary, but not malignant or nasty. So I had no reason to suspect that he wouldn‘t approach the problem in a constructive way. I wanted the relationship to be terminated, but in a quiet way. I wanted my Francis back. But Graham went absolutely mental. I had gone into his hospital office to tell him. He charged around his office like a wounded bull, tearing down books off a shelf on to the floor. And then he flung the dregs of his coffee cup over a wall. There was this dripping brown s
tain . . . But then he calmed a little. I can still remember him looking down on me, his chin lifted defiantly. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll set them up. We’ll give them a little humiliation.’ I was dubious about that. We didn’t even know whether they were in a physical relationship. In fact I felt it was just a crush.” Margo had tilted her head to one side, her eyes still, like a canary alert to a new presence near its cage. Isobel had a feeling of helplessness. She wasn’t enjoying this portrayal of her parents.
Within a week the foursome were ensconced in a holiday house in the Marlborough Sounds. Although the first few days had gone by without incident, Francis and Julia’s fervour for each other was readily palpable to the enlightened Graham and Margo. Margo could surmise when the hands entwined under the tablecloth, could sense the momentary meeting of eyes, and noticed the non accidental touch of legs when the pair were doing the washing up.
Down at the bay there was more to endure. There was an idle-along yacht belonging to the house sequestered in a dilapidated boatshed. Francis was quite a passable sailor and had run the craft down the set of rusty rails to the water‘s edge where he had stepped the mast and hauled up the gaff rigged main. None of the other three could tell a mainsheet from a halyard, so he spent a few hours each day teaching them one by one the joys of sail. When it was Julia’s turn to take the tiller, Graham and Margo were overtaken by a feeling of unease; such was their paranoia at the prospect of Francis and Julia being alone. It was during one of these sailing trips that Graham hatched a plan. The yacht, with Francis and Julia aboard, had disappeared behind a headland. It was out of view for an hour or more. Perceiving that the disappearance was unlikely to be innocent, Graham set off in his car to ascertain the lie of the land. Driving east over the spine of the headland, he peered fruitlessly through gaps in the foliage for the yacht. He only found it by driving around to the outermost point of the next headland. There, standing on a grassy knoll above the road, the shore of a concealed bay was exposed. It lay at the termination of a heavily bushed descending gully. And on the beach, its sails furled, was the idle-along.
Sure that Francis and Julia would return again to the small beach, Graham talked Margo into conducting an ambush. The next day, they watched the departing yacht sail towards the point, propelled along by a freshening wind. When the figures on the yacht became indistinguishable, Graham and Margot hastened up the path to the house, climbed into Graham’s car and drove at speed over to the next bay. They parked the car on the roadside where a narrow wooden bridge traversed a dank gully. Graham led Margo away down the slippery creek bed, avoiding the steeper pitches by deviating out onto the wooded sides of the gully. By the time they reached the shoreline, the yacht was already around the point and making for the beach. Hidden by the overhanging foliage, Margo felt a flush of horror as she anticipated the truth of Graham’s prophecy. They separated for the landing, she to a high bush-clad rocky promontory overlooking the length of the beach, he into a dense thicket, not far back from the arc of fine stones and shells that sloped into the sea. Crouching on an uneven rocky surface, Margo watched the yacht plough towards her, a bow wave surging, the flying spray looking like shattered glass fragments of an exploding windscreen. Occasionally the yacht would surf down a wave and the water would engulf the bowsprit that carried the clue of the straining jib-sail. For a moment she entertained the notion that the pair were simply enjoying a favourable direction of sail – that soon the yacht would round up into the wind and tack back out into the sparkling lumpy sea. Instead the blood ran cold in her veins as the yacht surged onward to the beach. Francis leapt from the bow to prevent the wooden hull from bashing onto the stones. With the help of Julia, he heaved mightily, lifting the bow up the stony beach before easing it down gently to rest. He lowered the sails and tied the painter to a manuka trunk at the edge of the woods. And then they were in embrace, right there beneath her gaze, feet planted on the beach. Julia’s face was raised, her eyes closed, her lips ready to meet those of her illicit lover. Margo’s chest was held in a vice like contracture. She watched as the ill fated pair removed their life jackets and dumped them onto the pebbles. Francis offered a hand and they walked up the beach towards the rustling bush shelter. Margo’s pulse resonated in her eardrums as she waited for the moment. And out of the tress appeared Graham and immediately there was gesticulating and shouting – male voices fully charged. Margo jumped up and began her descent. She was clenching and unclenching her fists. She knew she was likely to hit someone.
Chapter 8
