Invented Lives

by Andrea Goldsmith

  In the months since the Grim Reaper Saturday, theirs had been a ragged and often forlorn time. The revelations had taken them to the edge of a precipice where they had teetered for several weeks, before pulling back — together. While there was much that continued to upset and confuse her, she was absolutely certain she wanted to stay married to Leonard, and equally certain she wanted to keep loving him; she suspected that thinking too deeply about their problems jeopardised both. Lately, Leonard had been ringing her during the day just to chat, and arriving home early from work. Despite the improvement in their relations, he seemed anxious and generally on edge. When she questioned him, he mentioned a large contract requiring delicate negotiations, a contract, as far as she could judge, no different nor more complex from others he had managed, and requiring, she would have thought, more, rather than less time at the office. And some time ago he had stopped his Saturday golf — a pity, as it had helped him unwind. Just this last weekend, when his irritability was testing even her patience, she suggested he return to his Saturday game. He shook his head. Golf had changed, he said; some of the other fellows had left. And, he added, Winston had left too.

  She didn’t think Winston was a member of his golf group.

  And neither he was, that was not what Leonard meant. Winston had left the company, he’d left Australia. Winston had returned to Hong Kong.

  Winston Leung, central to Leonard’s work life for a decade or more, had left the country with apparently no plans to return. Leonard refused to give any details, but he was clearly upset. Sylvie assumed there had been unpleasantness, which would explain why Leonard had waited until now, apparently months after the fact, to tell her, and why Winston, a member of the Morrow extended family, had not said goodbye to her. Of course Leonard would be suffering, was suffering.

  She continued her stroll among the dead. Each headstone told a story, many possible stories; in this sense, Galina was right, they were like letters. She lingered in front of a grave where a man and woman were buried with their three young children, all having died in a single month in 1893 — of some ghastly disease, she supposed. Further along the path was an unmarried woman of forty-one buried for all eternity with her mother, and what disappointments oozed from that sad arrangement.

  In another section were two men with foreign names in a single grave, cousins who had died months apart in 1944, both in their early forties. If theirs had been war-related deaths, surely this would have been mentioned on the headstone. Perhaps they had been gangsters operating the black market, two men hated enough to be murdered, yet loved and mourned by their own family. Perhaps they were like Leonard, men with feelings for each other — although she couldn’t imagine any family being so free-thinking that they’d accept such a relationship, much less advertise it to the rest of the world by burying the men together.

  Many of the epitaphs were very moving — even to tears, in some cases. Such powerful feelings for long-dead strangers alongside her adamantly muted feelings about her husband’s … what? His lifestyle? His infidelity? His perversity? There was so much she didn’t understand.

  It was while she was tramping through one of the more overgrown areas of the cemetery, where headstones were askew and many inscriptions were so weathered as to be illegible, that she came across a Mary O’Donahue, not the first Mary O’Donahue she had seen, but this one a possible match for her Mary O’Donahue.

  MARY O’DONAHUE

  BORN BALLARAT, 1894,

  DIED 1945, MELBOURNE.

  AND THE DAUGHTER OF THE ABOVE,

  GEORGIANA O’DONAHUE,

  1912–1946.

  Sylvie had in her collection a 1911 letter written to a Mary O’Donahue at an address in the mean streets of Fitzroy, a letter of sadness and harsh condemnation from Mary’s father, also an O’Donahue, from a Ballarat address. Mary had brought disgrace upon the family, he wrote. He prayed for her soul, and he mourned the loss of his only daughter.

  Standing at this grave, which might well be her Mary O’Donahue’s, Sylvie imagined a sweetheart, unbridled passion, and an unwanted pregnancy. The sweetheart turns sour and disappears from the scene long before the birth of a baby girl, Georgiana. Mary raises her daughter alone. She works hard to support them both, and when Georgiana is old enough she goes out to work too. Georgiana never marries; she dies a year after her mother, both women succumbing well before their time to poverty, hard work, and neglect. It was a common story, with the single peculiarity of the daughter’s fancy name. The only Georgiana known to Sylvie was Darcy’s sister in Pride and Prejudice. Was Mary O’Donahue educated, at least to the extent she could read Jane Austen? A daughter of a middle-class family who might well have made a good marriage, or, with the Great War just up ahead, might have travelled to Europe to work as a nurse on the battlefields, but instead had been condemned for her sins to a hard life, festering disgrace, and an early death?

  Sylvie made a note of the location of the grave before moving off in a deliberate search for long-married couples who had died within a short time of each other, exactly as she would like for her and Leonard. She would still choose him above all others, which meant, she supposed, that she was also choosing their unorthodox marriage. It had been a surprisingly compatible arrangement, one enriched by gentle passions. And that was the truth. It had only corroded when she discovered Leonard’s secret — a secret that had been there all along.

  Equally unorthodox, she expected, was her major passion, her letter collection. She had wondered if her letters revealed a sneaky streak in her; that, rather than being a conventional wife with too much curiosity and a penchant for making up stories, she was simply a snoop and a spy. From early girlhood, she’d been taught that to open a letter not addressed to you was a monstrous transgression verging on the criminal. Yet she collected the letters of strangers, she relished these letters, and she did so without a skerrick of guilt. The writers and recipients of her letters were, after all, long dead and out of life’s copyright. They were, she told herself, fair game.

  An hour later, with a contemporary letter in her grasp, her certainties about what was fair game had become distinctly ragged. The name of the sender was Mark Asher, and, according to the return address, he lived locally. The letter was directed to a Zoe Asher, at a location a couple of suburbs away. The envelope carried a stamp and was unsealed; Sylvie guessed that the writer, this Mark Asher, was yet to decide whether to send it.

  In twenty-five years of collecting, nothing like this had ever happened. Her letters were old, and the lives they revealed were over; this letter was today’s news, or perhaps today’s woes. And it had just appeared. She had left the cemetery and driven the few blocks to the small shopfront café that was Galya’s local. She had sat at a table bordering the window, beyond which was the street. On a narrow ledge about half a metre from the ground, where the window slotted into the supporting wall, someone had left a newspaper. She rearranged her coffee and focaccia, and spread the newspaper on the table. It was not the daily paper with its bicentennial flag-waving and reports of nuclear tests (the Soviets, the French and the Americans were all setting off bombs), but a periodical called the New York Review of Books, a couple of months old, dated March 1988. She read down the index, a list of articles about books and authors unknown to her, and written by people similarly unknown to her: Isaiah Berlin, Gabriele Annan, John Gregory Dunne, and no woman writer unless Aryeh Neier was a woman. The titles of the articles intrigued her, and two in particular: ‘On the Pursuit of the Ideal’ written by this Isaiah Berlin — she wondered if he was related to Irving — and ‘The Gorbachev Prospect’.

  Before Galina entered her life, Sylvie would have glanced at headlines about the Soviet Union and, at best, skimmed the rest. Now she read every article she came across and, of course, she talked with Galya herself. Her astonishment and admiration over what this young girl had experienced continued to grow. Compared with Galya, she may well have passed h
er own life in a prettily painted biscuit tin.

  Being privy to Galya’s courage, however, seemed to be making her braver. Sitting alone in a café, for instance, was something she would never have done before meeting Galya. Too self-conscious, she would have preferred to go hungry. And wandering a cemetery by herself would have been no more likely than a visit to a nudist beach (even that analogy would not have occurred to her six months ago). And she would never have had the confidence to start a project, a proper work project, if not for the girl. And it seemed, as she glanced down at the literary newspaper, that the more she stepped outside her usual life, the more new experiences presented themselves.

  She decided to start with the Gorbachev article. It was when she raised the paper to fold the pages back that the letter from Mark Asher to Zoe Asher had fallen in her lap. She retrieved it gingerly between thumb and index finger, checked front and back, and placed it on the table.

  With the tip of her finger, she raised the flap of the envelope. She could see a single folded sheet inside — good-quality paper, as was the envelope with its lining of brown tissue. The writing covered both sides of the page. She probed a little deeper: a fountain pen had been used, black ink, spidery script, neat enough, but she guessed not easy to read.

  The letter lay in its envelope on top of the newspaper. Sylvie didn’t move; her hands gripped the edge of the table. The prohibition against reading other people’s mail was wrestling with the ravenous heart of the collector. She stared at the letter, stared so intently it seemed to move under her gaze, willing her, goading her to read it. She lowered her hands, clenched them together in her lap, and directed her attention away from the letter to the view beyond the window. A man was hurrying across the road, heading this way. He slowed down as he approached the café, peered through the window, saw the letter, glanced at her, and a moment later was standing by her table.

  ‘I was afraid I’d lost it,’ he said, gathering up the letter and holding it to his chest. ‘If someone had found it and posted it,’ he was shaking his head slowly, ‘I don’t know what I would have done.’

  He was breathless from stress, or relief, or the dash through the streets. His tie was awry, his collar button was undone, and his copious hair sprang wildly about his face. He was a trim, compact, broad-browed man of about her age, not conventionally handsome, but quite attractive, a middle-aged version of Art Garfunkel.

  He stood by the table, the letter still pressed to his chest. Gradually, his breathing slowed and his face shed its distress. He did not move away. Sylvie wondered if he were in a state of shock.

  ‘I was about to order another coffee,’ she heard herself say. ‘Would you like to join me?’ The words slipped out easily, as if she made a practice of inviting strange, stressed-out men to have coffee with her.

  He accepted immediately, more with an explosion of breath than actual words, and dropped into the chair opposite. He placed the letter on the table, buttoned his collar, straightened his tie, and made an attempt to tame the pesky hair. The proprietor came over and greeted him by name, took their orders, and then, without any prompting from Sylvie, Mark Asher began to talk. He talked in a way one can only do with a stranger never to be seen again, he talked as if he had needed to for a long time.

  It was a sad story. His wife, a woman with a long history of mental illness, had killed herself while he was away for a weekend, his first holiday in years. His daughter, his only child, Zoe, blamed him, not for her mother’s illness — he’d been a devoted and patient carer — but for her mother’s death. For Mark was not alone on his holiday. Zoe was convinced her mother knew he was with another woman and it was this that drove her to suicide.

  The wife had died two years ago. Within a couple of months, Zoe had dropped out of her final year of high school; a few more weeks, and she had left home. Since then she had been living with what Mark termed ‘low-life’. He offered an apologetic shrug. ‘I don’t know how else to describe her new mates.

  ‘But at least she’s talking to me now. I’ve been writing to her regularly since she moved out. Chatty letters with news about friends and relatives. And I write about her mother too. I might include a photo, and once I enclosed one of my wife’s handkerchiefs — it smelled of her perfume. It was after I sent the hankie that Zoe finally responded.

  ‘That was about nine months ago. A few more months passed before our first face-to-face meeting, and now we get together for a meal every second Tuesday, and,’ he pointed to the letter, ‘I write to her on the alternate week.’ He let out an audible sigh and swiped again at the unruly hair. ‘I let her set the rules. Despite the chaos in which she lives, or perhaps because of it, she insists on order and predictability with me.’

  ‘And the people she’s living with?’ These were the first words Sylvie had uttered since Mark had begun his story.

  ‘I’ve never met them, nor am I likely to. One of the guys has actually been in prison.’ He was shaking his head in disbelief. ‘They’re all seasoned shoplifters, none of them has finished high school, and all are on the dole. When Zoe mentions them she seems to be bragging, as if she deliberately wants to shock her middle-class dad.’ His face opened into a smile. ‘She’s certainly succeeded in doing that.’

  At the present time, Zoe was working days in a supermarket and taking night classes at a local high school. ‘She’s always been a high-achieving student, though I expect she’s not shared that with her new mates. Then last Tuesday, to my great surprise and pleasure, both of which I tried to hide, she mentioned the possibility of university study next year.’ A hesitant, hopeful smile slipped into his face. ‘And she put out feelers about coming home.’ He picked up the letter and slipped it inside his jacket. ‘That’s why this letter is so important. I’ve made some suggestions, the first time I’ve dared. I need to reread it before I send it, make sure I’ve said the right thing, struck the right tone.’ And with an ironic raising of his eyebrows, he added, ‘I suspect I’m still a couple of drafts from the final one.’

  ‘So,’ Sylvie said, ‘what do you have in mind?’

  At the back of his house, he said, were old stables. The ground floor was currently filled with junk, and he used the upper floor as a study — he was an academic at the university. He could shift his study into the house, and the stables could be modified into a self-contained flat for Zoe. Close but separate. If, on the other hand, she’d prefer to live in college, he would be happy to provide any support she wanted. ‘I mean for next year, should she complete her HSC, should she pass, and should she decide on university. Not that I wrote any of that.’

  He’d hardly touched his coffee. Now he reached for it, took a sip, grimaced, and pushed it away. ‘I have to be so careful. In an earlier version, I wrote I’d be happy to pay her college fees, but this was far too intrusive, far too controlling. In the next draft, I wrote something like, “I’m happy to pay your college fees should you fail to get a scholarship.”’ He was laughing. ‘Fail? What on earth was I thinking? I can’t be critical about her clothes or lifestyle, so to be critical, even conditionally critical about her studies, well, I’d find myself back at first base.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘I take more care over letters to my daughter than I do writing academic papers.’

  He slumped back in his chair. At last, it seemed he was finished. In the silence, he toyed with his coffee cup, twirling it in the saucer, he rubbed the back of his neck, and then returned to his twirling. Sylvie hadn’t coped particularly well when Andrew decided to live on the other side of the city, goodness knows what she would have done if he’d opted for an utterly alien lifestyle. She was wondering if she would have had the patience, the wisdom too, to handle the situation as Mark Asher had done, when she saw him looking across the table at her. He was shaking his head slowly, his lips pressed together, his embarrassment obvious.

  ‘I’m usually reserved,’ he said, ‘and most especially about personal matters. I can’t i
magine what possessed me. I’ve been sitting with you,’ he checked his watch, ‘for close on thirty minutes, and I haven’t even asked your name. I can’t imagine what you must think of me.’

  As it happened, she thought rather well of him. So much so that when he suggested he treat her to lunch to thank her for being such a good sport, she accepted without hesitation. It was her decision they make the arrangement there and then. And so they did, a week from that day. He invited her to University House and the staff restaurant there. It would be a first for her, as everything about Mark Asher would prove to be a first.

  Sylvie was up in her office when she heard Leonard come in from work. Spread across her desk were several pages of a letter, together with the clean copy she was making. She quickly covered the papers with her grandmother’s hand-embroidered cloth kept exactly for this purpose (it often happened she was called from her desk without time to put her work away) and switched off the light. She stepped onto the landing, closed the door. And stopped.

  Leonard was home early, very early; not only was she in the middle of some work, but after this quite extraordinary day, she wasn’t quite ready to face him. Where was it written that a wife must spring to attention as soon as her husband walked in the door?

  From the top of the stairs she called out she was busy and would join him in a short while. He called back that she was to take her time, perhaps equally pleased to be left alone. Sylvie re-entered her office and resumed her copying.

  She had arrived home with her mind in a riot. She might have read through the ‘Pillow Talk’ pages of her letter project, or started the next section, titled ‘Safe Trespass’ — it was to focus on the clandestine quality of letters — but both would have required an intellectual effort that, in her current state, was beyond her. Making a fair copy of a hard-to-read letter was a task with clear and limited boundaries, it was totally absorbing, and exactly what she needed after meeting Mark Asher.