Dreams Before the Start of Time

by Anne Charnock

  He takes a paper napkin and, as best he can, he rubs the greasy smears off the plasticized menu. He hopes Catherine—he’ll call her Catherine—is a theatre-goer. With a bit of luck, it’s his love of the theatre that actually drew her interest, the real reason she wants to meet. When people put love theatre in their profile, it often transpires they only like bloody musicals. He decides he’ll clarify the matter this evening by amending his profile. He’ll add: Theatre buff (hates musicals).

  A woman walks in who could be Catherine. His heart—it frikkin’ palpitates! She twists around, looks lost, but then waves to someone at the far end of the bar. He’s relieved because he needs a couple of minutes to prepare himself, to remind himself to shake off the professional demeanour.

  Freddie, as a dentist, prides himself on his talent for holding one-sided conversations—a professional inevitability. On social occasions, he has to remind himself he can ease off, let other people steer the conversation. By Friday evening, after peering into people’s mouths all week, he craves a bit of physical distance—a second professional inevitability, he suspects. Hence his weekend run. Even at the theatre, he sits way back from the stage. Otherwise he finds himself critiquing the actors’ dental work. Sadly, that’s unavoidable at the cinema—so many damned close-ups.

  Eternity Playhouse is one of his favourite venues here in Sydney. Back in London, he booked tickets for most productions at the Donmar Warehouse and the Roundhouse. Toni was a great sport. Even if she’d flown back from a travel assignment and wanted nothing more than a night in with pizza, she’d go along with him. Stuck in his white-box surgery all week, he felt trapped in a white-box flat. Toni used to say, “You book the tickets and I’ll come along.” She knew he needed an escape. And, without fail, she went halves on the ticket price and after-show dinner.

  What he liked about Toni was that she tried her best to keep up, even though theatre wasn’t her thing. She talked about the shows afterwards over dinner, remembered the actors’ names and what they’d appeared in before, especially if she knew them from the screen. Toni preferred the cinema, which Freddie couldn’t comprehend. He tried to convince her that theatre was the higher art form because every performance was a new interpretation, whereas a film was static. The most you could hope for was a director’s cut. But she didn’t fight her corner. Toni tended to watch films while she was away on assignment. Then, if she’d watched a film she thought Freddie would like, they’d watch it together on the big screen at home.

  The waiter comes over, asks if he’s ready to order food. Freddie says he’ll wait for his friend.

  Freddie suggested the sports bar as a meeting place because he knew they could order a light bite instead of settling down to a full meal. There’s nothing worse than being committed to a one-hour-plus date when it’s obvious there’s no spark within ten minutes. He looks down at himself. Are his clothes too casual? Should he tuck in his T-shirt?

  He also suggested the sports bar because he doesn’t want Catherine to know he’s loaded with money. Which he is, by most people’s standards. Though he shouldn’t rule out the possibility that Catherine is wealthy and might hate sports bars. Has she walked in already, and walked straight back out? He didn’t tell her it was an actual sports bar. He told her it was a cool hangout.

  Where’s she got to? Fifteen minutes late already. Not a good sign. Toni was never late. She always knew exactly where she was going, didn’t get lost. Seasoned traveller, he supposes—second nature.

  It’s a year since he left London. He wonders if it’s too late to ask Toni for those other theatre programmes. He likes to keep them in case he goes to a new production. They’ll be online most likely, but he prefers the print copies. He imagines that in his dotage—he hasn’t shared this with anyone—he’ll spend many happy hours thumbing through his programmes and ticket stubs. When he goes home next summer to see his folks, he might drop by Toni’s place. He’d love to drop by her dad’s. How does that work? Visiting your ex-partner’s dad? Freddie had felt special being part of the Munroe family, so arty. Dominic could paint a landscape as perfect as a damned photograph. Freddie couldn’t understand why, when Dominic eased off on the private commissions, he’d started painting abstracts—when he had all those skills. Perhaps he was having a crisis.

  Toni bought tickets for all the blockbuster exhibitions, but Freddie let her enjoy them on her own. She didn’t like him traipsing five yards behind her. She accused him of, what was it? Intellectual laziness. That was it. Forever pushing him away like that.

  Freddie reckons that he and Toni could have worked out had she come to Australia. He tried to explain, with a job like his, he had to make changes in his life. Otherwise his years would be lost in repetition. Same surgery, same surgery hours, same commute to work. It’s already getting same-y here in Sydney. He could move to a different area of the city every twelve months—create a new journey to work, find the local bars and better routes for his Saturday run.

  He checks the time and calls over the waiter. “Bring me some nachos, will you, mate?”

  “Sure thing.”

  Freddie dreads having children. He’d have to settle down—schools and all that. He’d have two decades of the same commute, same everything.

  He slaps the table with his menu. Millie could get the programmes for him! She’s his friend, after all. He knew Millie before Toni did. He’ll tell her exactly where Toni kept the programmes, second shelf in the living room. Toni probably wouldn’t even notice if they disappeared. That’s another thing that pissed him off about Toni. His friends all became her friends. They all seemed to forget that he was their friend first.

  That was the spark for their final argument. Toni claimed he let his friends drift across to her. She said it was his own stupid fault. He never returned messages; he was lazy. She said his friends all learned that the best way to organize anything social was via her, not him.

  Freddie reckons none of the bastards ever mention his name.

  A TRAIL OF CRUMBS

  September

  The car locates a parking space thirty-seven metres from home. Anna Robecchi does not disembark. She has fourteen minutes before the hire period expires, and she ought to give Dominic a little more time with his daughter. She guesses they’ve had forty-five minutes to talk—assuming Toni arrived on time, which she usually does; Toni says punctuality is a habit she can’t break after ten years as a journo.

  Since the beginning of Anna’s relationship with Dominic, she has ensured, to the point of religious observation, that he spends regular one-on-one time with his daughter. Anna avoids being cast as the intrusive stepmother. Today of all days, Dominic and Toni need time to chat. He’s had a week to assimilate the news of her pregnancy. He wasn’t shocked as such because Toni had occasionally talked about starting a family. That is, while she and Freddie were still together. And Dominic likes children.

  Toni had dropped by without any warning to break the news—she never needed to warn them, they loved her turning up on spec—and she sat with Anna at the kitchen island while Dominic chopped vegetables for dinner. She made no preamble. She delivered the news as simply as she might place a shiny red apple at the centre of the island. “Atticus and I are having a baby.”

  They couldn’t help but fire questions at her: How was she feeling? How many weeks? With a white-knuckle grip on the chopping knife, Dominic asked, “Was it an accident?”

  Toni fended him off. “You know I want a family.” She didn’t linger—said she would let them absorb the news for a few days. Although she addressed the comment to both of them, she looked directly at Dominic.

  After Toni left, Dominic put the knife aside and placed his palms flat on the island as though needing support. Anna expected him to cry at that point. It was only natural he’d want Toni’s life to follow a more conventional arc. It swiftly transpired that though he was upset, it wasn’t for the reason Anna expected. He started dissecting the events of the previous few weeks and expressed his opini
on to Anna that Toni had stage-managed how to break the news. Anna read his downcast mood—he felt offended, hurt.

  Toni had called around—three weeks previously—with the new boyfriend, Atticus. Toni had said, offhand, they were passing by en route to a party in East Dulwich. In his naivety, Dominic admitted to Anna, he had assumed Toni was trying to put his mind at rest; she’d moved on from Freddie and wasn’t angry any longer about the years she’d wasted on him. Then, the following weekend, Toni invited them over for dinner at her flat, which she hadn’t done for a while. Dominic had clearly taken the invite at face value. He’d thought Toni was out to impress the new boyfriend—to display her close friendship with her father and stepmother. But in light of the news about her pregnancy, Anna watched him brood, even quail, as he realized Toni had been preparing him, her father, trying to put him in the best possible frame of mind. He hated it.

  Anna had always admired how, up until now, he and Toni had talked plainly to one another. But Anna felt grateful, even warmed, that Toni broke the news to the two of them—surely intentional. Since then, as though a silent pact had been agreed between herself and Toni, she keeps her comments to Dominic to a minimum—sage and conciliatory murmurings. After all, she repeatedly reminds Dominic, Atticus is a sweet, considerate man. He’ll make a good father. She also points out that Toni hadn’t thrown a teenage hissy fit when Dominic broached their engagement all those years ago. Anna’s clincher: “How can a baby be regarded as bad news? Once the baby’s born, you’ll be the doting grandfather.”

  This morning over breakfast, Anna said to Dominic as he churned over the sequence of events yet again, “What did you expect Toni to do? Turn up with a man you’d never met before and announce they were having a baby? Obviously, she wanted to break the news gently. It was far better you formed an opinion of Atticus before they dropped the bombshell.”

  Dominic mulled this over, chopped the top off his boiled egg and said, “Well, no one’s died.” Given the history of sudden death in the family, Anna felt he’d established a new, unshakeable perspective. Well done, you, Dominic. Without looking up from his breakfast, he asked, “Anna, what do you think her mother would have said?”

  The car sounds an alert; the hire period is close to expiration. Anna lifts the bouquet of flowers off the back seat—buying the flowers had been an excuse to leave the house before Toni arrived—and she slides open the door. Dominic probably has no idea that Anna keeps a respectful distance from his relationship with Toni. She never questions any of his decisions in regard to Toni—paying off her university debts, paying a hefty deposit on her flat. Connie would have approved, and it’s a portion of Connie’s life insurance that he’s spending on Toni.

  Anna can’t claim to miss Toni’s mother as much as they do. That would be ridiculous. She misses Connie, but in her own particular way, and she keeps this to herself. It’s nearly—she squints as she subtracts the dates—twenty years since the road accident. So it’s seventeen years since Anna married Dominic. But Connie doesn’t hang over their marriage. Not at all. Anna realizes she’s shaking her head, and she smiles. Dear Connie.

  Connie would have haunted a second marriage, Anna feels, if Dominic’s new wife had no previous connection to the family. Anna, as a neighbour and close friend, was already a part of their lives. So much didn’t need to be said. She went to the funeral but stayed in the back pews of the church. And in the aftermath, she cooked the occasional meal, as much as anything to keep a close eye on Toni.

  Anna had never thought she’d be a stepmother. It isn’t a burden. It suits her fine. Of course, her mother doesn’t approve, but then, disapproval is her mother’s life’s work. A work-in-progress, you might say. She disapproved when Anna turned down a job at Fiat headquarters in Turin, disapproved when Anna left Florence to teach Italian in London, disapproved when she didn’t marry in a timely fashion, disapproved when she didn’t have children of her own. One day, Anna will do something so outrageous that all her previous transgressions will be nullified, obliterated, forgotten. It will probably take a murder conviction. Or, attempted murder—the prison sentence would be shorter, but the disgrace would be just as devastating. Anna reaches into the bouquet, snaps the stem of a red carnation, and pushes the red flash behind her ear. “Fuck you, Mama,” she murmurs. “I’m nearly sixty years old.”

  She lengthens her stride. Anyway, as the eldest, she escaped with relative ease. Thank God. Her mother had been so preoccupied with Anna’s younger brothers and sisters, she didn’t stop to consider that Anna would never live in Italy again.

  It’s a shame Toni doesn’t have siblings. As one of five children, she’d have learned while growing up, as Anna had, that parental attention came in short rations. And the corollary, of course, would be equally true. As one of five, she would owe less to her parents. Toni is too anxious over her dad’s disappointment. If Toni’s prepared to take a risk with Atticus, then that’s her decision. It’s her life. Dominic needs to understand: it’s not about him.

  Anna finds Dominic and Toni drinking tea in the back garden, sitting on the small bench, silvered with age, that’s positioned in the natural suntrap by Dominic’s studio. Anna is pleased to see them soaking up the autumn rays. Dominic waves Anna over and calls out, “Toni’s been saying this is a great garden for children.”

  Anna looks around. “Good job we sold my house and not yours.” She smiles. “We didn’t consider the garden itself, did we? Just the studio.”

  Toni asks, “Can you fix a swing, Dad, to the bough of the cherry tree? Is it high enough?”

  “Should be fine for a toddler’s swing.”

  Toni fetches a garden chair. “You shouldn’t be lifting that,” says Anna.

  “I’m fine. I’m not an invalid. Here, sit down with Dad, and I’ll make you a cup of tea. Dad, tell Anna what we’ve been discussing.”

  Anna watches as Toni wanders along the curving path, past the raised beds, under the rose-covered arch and past the small water feature—a lion’s head set into the boundary wall, spewing water from its mouth into a chipped Belfast sink filled with shells. The shells were brought home from each visit to the coast. Anna tries not to look at the shells when she’s in the garden; they remind her that she missed out on Toni’s baby years.

  “It is a kid’s paradise, this,” says Dominic. “Toni and her friends used to run around the paths, and we had a sandpit by the studio entrance. Perhaps I should make another one.”

  They sit facing the sun. Anna tips her head back and closes her eyes. “So, what were you discussing?”

  He sighs. “Honestly, Anna, I feel Toni’s laying a trail of crumbs. I’m following, picking them up one at a time.”

  “And the latest crumb?”

  “She thinks it might be easier to spend a few years overseas—somewhere they could afford childcare, and somewhere interesting for her work. The thing she’s worried about is losing ground with her career.” He leans towards Anna, though there’s no one to overhear him. “Between you and me, the way I read this . . . I don’t think she’s prepared to depend on Atticus long-term.”

  “How do you feel about them going overseas?”

  “Bad. But then, I never considered my parents’ opinions.”

  “Is it Toni’s idea to go abroad? Atticus might be driving it.”

  “She seems pretty keen. She can work anywhere as a freelancer, but she might need a pseudonym—work permits might be a problem.”

  Anna is still soaking up the sun, eyes shut. “Where, though?”

  “She’s not saying. Not yet anyway. She’ll probably throw me another crumb next week.”

  “Smart girl.” Anna laughs softly.

  “At least she didn’t have a baby with Freddie. Never really liked him.”

  “Neither did I.”

  He nudges her arm with his elbow. “Well, you never said anything.”

  She opens her eyes. “It wasn’t my place to comment.”

  Toni returns carrying a tray with Anna’s t
ea and a plate of buttered fruit loaf. “I’m starving.”

  “You’re not eating for two yet,” says Anna.

  “I don’t have morning sickness like Millie. Just hungry all the time.”

  “And these travel plans,” says Anna. “Would you wait until after the baby’s born? Or go abroad beforehand and come back for the birth?”

  “Nothing’s definite yet.” She devours half a slice of the fruit loaf and pipes up, “You know, with both of you having more time on your hands, this could be a fantastic opportunity. You could both visit us.”

  Dominic clears the table after dinner. He says, “It’s a shame Toni couldn’t stay for the evening.”

  Anna tried to persuade Toni to stay, but Atticus had already invited her over for a family dinner. As Toni made to leave, she said she needed some advice. “Atticus hasn’t told his parents about the baby. I’ve met them a couple of times. What do you think? Should we tell them together, or should he tell them on his own?”

  Dominic grimaced and looked to Anna.

  “He should tell his family on his own,” said Anna. “We stayed calm when you told us, but if his mother or father react badly, if they say anything harsh, it’s best you’re not there to hear it. You can never unhear it, and that wouldn’t be a good start, would it?”

  Toni nodded. Anna looked across at Dominic and opened her eyes wide, encouraging him to speak. Dominic stepped forward, hugged Toni and said, “Once the baby’s born, everyone will be fine. Try not to stress. Your mum used to say that babies need happy vibes.” Toni pulled him close.

  With the table cleared and the kitchen tidied, Anna asks Dominic if he’s planning to go back to the studio.

  “For an hour or so. I want to look through some reference books this evening. I’m going to copy a Mary Cassatt drawing for Toni. As a gift.”

  “Wouldn’t she like a more personal painting—one of your own abstracts?”