Friends Like These

by Wendy Harmer

  ‘Michael! What a lovely surprise,’ she squawked. Michael stood and she leaned to air-kiss his cheeks. Peck. Peck.

  Michael returned the gesture with nods towards earlobes sagging under the weight of hefty diamond-and-ruby clips.

  ‘Lucy,’ he said smoothly. ‘Don’t you look terrific! And Charles, good to see you.’ A hearty handshake followed that seemed to knock Charles—in his seventies and brimming with vintage bordeaux—almost off his roost.

  ‘And where’s our darling Didi this evening?’ Lucy inquired. She deliberately stood between Jo and Michael, which was utterly rude, although Jo was rewarded with the amusing view of a price tag hanging from the collar of her XXL black moiré Max Mara jacket.

  ‘Didi’s not with us tonight,’ said Michael, offering no further explanation for her absence. ‘This is my daughter Gemma, and a business associate of mine, Mr Yoshinari Saito from Kyoto, and behind you is Mrs Jo Blanchard, whom I’m sure you know.’

  Finally there was a crisp nod in Jo’s direction from over Mrs Challis’s shoulder.

  ‘Mrs Blanchard.’ Charles was swaying, eyes almost closed. Jo guessed he was desperate to find the conveniences to relieve his ageing prostate.

  Jo nodded back and immediately thought of the Challis daughters. Two softly spoken and kind-hearted girls who had wanted to go into nursing. Their mother had sat in front of Jo’s desk and made teary pleas for some sort of revision of the girl’s exam results to give them the kind of marks that could see them at university studying brain surgery. But there was nothing to be done. Jo also recalled Charles donning his glasses and inspecting the photographs on her wall of the gymnastics teams for longer than seemed decent.

  ‘Mrs Blanchard is helping Yoshi with his English studies while he’s here visiting. I’ll be certain to pass on your regards to Didi. Again, nice to see you both. Good evening.’

  Jo saw Lucy stop to have a word at another table and Jo noted that this time two pairs of bird-black eyes flicked in her direction. So, that was that. The news of Jo’s dinner with Michael would be relayed to Didi by the time her ladyship was halfway through tomorrow morning’s Pilates class.

  But what did it matter, Jo shrugged. There was no sexual impropriety here. And as for the matter of the secret wedding—who knew about it? Jo’s stomach turned over as she thought of the two people she had told—Suze, who dearly loved a chat (especially after a bottle of chardy), and Tory, who was probably sitting at the dining table in Parklea at this very moment, telling Carol Bloody Holt every clandestine detail. Jo checked her mobile phone to see whether Tory had returned one of her many unanswered calls. Nothing.

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Michael had squeezed Jo’s hand under the table. The touch of his warm skin on hers sent a shocking shiver up her bare arm. ‘It’ll be as I said. Gemma is here as my partner at a business meeting with Yoshi. You’re here to help translate.’ Michael beamed at her. ‘You do speak Japanese, don’t you?’

  ‘Kanpai!’ exclaimed Jo, raising her glass of wine. There was laughter and a round of musical clinking. She had toasted Michael three times since she’d met him. What could that mean? The first was a celebration of a meeting of like minds. The second the making of a pact. And the third? Perhaps it was the sealing of a conspiracy. Jo set down her glass and tried not to think about it.

  Gemma had exchanged many grateful looks with Jo over the table as Michael and Yoshi chatted, discussed, agreed and seemed to get on well. Michael discreetly nodded his approval of the young man to Jo. She nodded back, but it was a decidedly odd situation to be in as an outsider. Jo reasoned that she was just doing her job. This was what civil celebrants did, didn’t they? Became trusted confidantes of the family? And lifelong enemies of the mother of the bride?

  The longer Jo sat at the table, the more she fidgeted and looked over her shoulder. It was as if Michael had read her mind when he waved away coffee and suggested they have an early night.

  He insisted on driving Jo home in his brand-new silver Jaguar XK coupé 5.0-litre V8. A good two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of vehicle, if Jo wasn’t mistaken. A JJ Blanchard sticker adorned the back window. When Michael parked in Woollahra and insisted on a visit to the wine merchant, what was Jo to do? Excuse herself from the pristine blond leather seat where she had been ordered to stay and listen to the remastered Beatles album he had left blasting on the sound system for her private enjoyment?

  It was ironic that ‘Norwegian Wood’ was playing when he returned, pleased with his rare find and keen to drink it with her. Jo had been complicit, at once terrified and thrilled by the excuse to take him home. But surely he wouldn’t crawl off and sleep in the bath.

  She couldn’t find anything to say as she turned the key in the front door, crossed through the dark room and flicked on the table lamps. It was still silent between them as they observed the ritual of finding glasses and pouring the wine.

  Jo had given thanks on finding blue cheese, a scrap of quince paste and a few dried muscatel grapes in her fridge. When she turned with the plate, she almost dropped it with surprise to see Michael stretched out on her sofa. He must have seen Jo’s eyes widen. He quickly sat up.

  ‘Oh, sorry! Sorry. I’m making myself at home again, aren’t I? It’s a bad habit of mine. I’ve been told, believe me. My wife...’ The topic had to be raised and he’d given her the cue.

  ‘Yes, your wife,’ Jo had said as she set the plate down and then found an armchair opposite.

  ‘It’s a good question,’ he’d said. ‘Well, it will sound very convenient I suppose, but we’ve been discussing a divorce. It’s more than the usual “married young, kids grown”. We used to make a good team. She’s very smart, has amazing energy and she’s a good mother. A terrific mother. But after the kids left home she started her own PR business. She’s been brilliantly successful. I knew she would be. But you know that show-business and society crowd she runs with now? I just don’t like them. I’ve never felt comfortable with all that.

  ‘I’d rather be poking around a museum or a gallery or out in the middle of the harbour on the yacht. I know there are a couple of auctioneers around town who are fixtures on the party circuit and I’m told that’s good for business. Didi says it is. But it’s not what makes me happy, and now that I’m in my fifties, I want to do what makes me happy. Like drink this bottle of wine...with you.’

  Jo had nodded. Willing herself to keep calm.

  ‘You will love this,’ he’d enthused as he handed a glass to Jo. ‘It’s Australian. De Bortoli Noble One, 2003. Although some say it’s not quite up to the 2001 vintage. You couldn’t tell it from a French sauternes. Look at the colour.’ Michael held his glass up to the light of a Tiffany table lamp. He squinted, trying to find an angle that wasn’t back-lit by the azure wing of a dragonfly.

  ‘Take a sip and tell me what you taste. Let your senses take you away. Being an art teacher, I’m sure you know how to do that.’

  Jo had sipped. Closed her eyes. She sank back into the armchair as an almost indescribable sweetness infused long-lost corners of her mind. ‘Peaches,’ she hummed lazily, as if she was a bee with its head in a blossom, ‘and honey.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘A burnt, sugary yellow. Orange marmalade, butterscotch, crêpe suzette with apricot jam.’

  ‘Very good. More?’

  If anyone could seduce her into saying more it was Michael Brigden. Jo had wanted to tell him everything.

  ‘If this wine were a painting...’ She took another sip and rolled the fat, luscious syrup around her tongue. ‘It would be Margaret Preston’s Implement Blue. I don’t know if you know it? It’s a still life of teacups, a milk jug and sugar bowl. All blue, white, grey and stark. Geometric. Then there’s this glass, on the left, with a lemon in it.’ Jo was sitting forward in her chair by then with her glass held up before her. She too was watching the mellow lamplight refracted through the liquid. ‘The lemon is the only thing in the composition which isn’t man-made, and your eye is drawn to it. It r
eminds us that beyond everything we can manufacture, nature will always triumph with something as humble as a lemon. Hard to explain exactly.’

  ‘You’re doing beautifully.’

  By now everything in the room had fallen away and Jo was in love. With herself. With her life. With her glass of wine. With just being alive. She wanted to go on with it.

  ‘But the fruit isn’t all bright, new, lemony lemon. It’s rendered in infinite shades. I always think of it as a late-summer sunset captured in the most unlikely place—on a tea tray, or as it is in our glasses, right now.’

  Michael was silent. Jo took this to mean she had overplayed her hand and revealed herself to be some kind of weirdo, arty bag lady. The kind of lonely woman she sometimes spotted in galleries staring at a painting for hours on end. The kind of woman she imagined she would be one day.

  She was raving. She must be drunk. She excused herself from the room.

  That’s how Jo found herself staring at her reflection in her bathroom mirror. She splashed cool water on her neck where the skin was now blooming rosy red. It was impossible to douse that unfortunate rash that crept up her neck whenever her passions were aroused.

  Tonight she couldn’t take cover behind collars or buttons.

  She was wearing a low-cut velvet little black dress Suze had talked her into buying, and there was nowhere to hide. She attempted to reposition the mounds of her breasts, which seemed to have crept higher up her rib cage and were threatening to spill over the black velvet rim. Her fingers were trembling.

  Jo leaned over the basin, cooled her forehead on the mirror and breathed deeply. She had to get back. Michael would be inspecting the art on her walls, assaying her side tables and reading the spines of her books, trying to complete his portrait of her. Jo was anxious he might detect some flaw in her character that might see him gone by the time she returned to the room. The daffodil needlepoint cushions and Tiffany lamps decorated with dragonflies would tell him she was a single woman who didn’t have to accommodate the tastes of a man. But then, he knew that already. Did he also know that she hadn’t had sex with anyone but her husband for the past twenty-two years? Did he understand that the thought of sharing a bed with him was filling her with utter dread—and feverish excitement?

  Jo ran her hands over her body, tugged at her plain black bra again and smoothed her skirt over her sensible matching knickers. She considered for a moment hunting through one of the cardboard boxes at the bottom of her wardrobe to find a set of lacy undies from years ago.

  ‘Stop it,’ she reprimanded her reflection. ‘Go back into that room and send him home. He’s not yours to think about.’ And then a small rebellious voice added: ‘Not yet.’

  Jo only had to think of the hurt JJ’s affair with Carol Holt had caused for her to put the brakes on the fantasy. And no matter how little she cared for Didi, there would never be any justification for her doing the same. To anyone. What a fine, moral woman she was! If only more women could conduct themselves the way she did.

  She walked back to the main room with a renewed sense of purpose. Michael would finish his drink and she would show him the door.

  She found him, as she’d expected, leafing through one of her heavy coffee-table art books. His jacket, tie and shoes were lying in a heap on the floor and Jo imagined his shirt and trousers added to the pile.

  ‘So which is your favourite gallery?’

  Art was a topic Jo never tired of. Michael had found a gap in her defences.

  ‘The Museo del Prado in Madrid.’ Jo took up her wine glass and carefully sat two chairs away from him this time.

  ‘Mine too.’

  He arranged himself on the sofa once more. Calpurnia appeared around the corner and, sly opportunist that she was, leaped on his feet. Jo rose at once to wave her away.

  ‘Calpurnia! Shoo! Go on.’

  ‘No, no, she’s fine. Leave her. She’s comfortable. So am I. Calpurnia. After the cook in To Kill a Mockingbird?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Jo wasn’t surprised he recognised the reference.

  ‘It’s one of my favourite novels,’ he said.

  They made a matching pair lying on the couch—Michael and Calpurnia. Both of them had a lazy, feline ease in their surroundings. A sense of entitlement and independence. An innate belief that the world had been fashioned purely for their enjoyment. They just had to wait and all would be delivered on a platter. It was an attitude to life that Jo had a sneaking admiration for.

  Michael sipped his wine. ‘The Velázquez portraits are my favourites in the Prado. His paintings of Philip’s royal court are magnificent, but it’s those little portraits of the jesters and the dwarves I love the best. They have this quiet dignity about them, don’t you think?’

  Jo was, again, astonished to hear her own opinions come from someone else’s mouth. She couldn’t recall when this had ever happened to her in her whole life.

  Michael continued, speaking to the ceiling: ‘He’s telling us that, despite all the money and power upstairs, he finds more truth about life from the misfits below deck.’

  Jo nodded as if in a trance. She remembered standing in front of those portraits and almost weeping.

  ‘And, then, just around the corner, the lunacy of Hieronymus Bosch—The Garden of Earthly Delights! And Bruegel’s Triumph of Death, let’s drink to that too!’

  Jo didn’t raise her glass this time. She was sliding into a place beyond her control and was unable to put her arms out to brace herself from the fall.

  ‘I’d love to be there right now,’ he said dreamily. ‘Sitting under a starry sky in the Plaza Mayor with a jug of sangria and a paella...no...a plate of sesame-anise torta de aciete. It would go perfectly with this wine. Have you travelled much?’ He was sitting up now with his elbows on his knees, his fingers tracing patterns on his glass and looking intently at Jo.

  ‘Well,’ she began. ‘Not as much as—’

  ‘You look like a portrait by Modigliani. Did you know that? The paintings he made of his lover, Jeanne. Your almond eyes. Long, perfect face. Your graceful limbs. You just seem to always arrange yourself in a classical pose.’

  Jo could not move an inch. She was pinned by the soft low tones of his voice and couldn’t look away.

  ‘You think that your curls ruin the picture. I’ve been watching you all night trying to tuck them back, but for me they just add this wonderful...liveliness to what most people might mistake for a portrait of a woman in control. You’ll never tame them, you know. You’ll try, but they’ll always give you away.’

  Michael set down his glass, stood, walked to where Jo was sitting and stretched his hands out to her. She placed her hands in his and let him raise her to her feet. His arms slid around her waist.

  ‘You’re lovely, Jo,’ he whispered in her ear. And the round sound of her name in his mouth was already an aching ‘oh’. She hadn’t heard her name uttered like that for such a long time. ‘I’ve been watching you for years.’ He reached for a thick strand of her hair and formed the curl around his thumb.

  ‘I always wondered if there was ever going to be a way to snatch a kiss from you behind the shelter sheds.’

  ‘Behind the shelter sheds is out of bounds.’ Jo held up an admonishing finger. He captured it with his lips and tongue and sucked hard and Jo let him.

  SLAM!

  The bang of the front door startled them both.

  ‘Hey, Mum! You up?’

  Jo and Michael instantly resumed their positions—on the couch and in the armchair—as if they had indeed been sprung behind the shelter sheds. Michael scrabbled for his shoes. The languid mustiness of the room evaporated. Jo, even from where she was, could smell Tory’s signature odour of stale cigarettes and alcohol.

  Her dishevelled head appeared. ‘Ooh, crap. Sorry!’ she slurred.

  ‘Tory. Hello, darling. This is Michael Brigden.’

  ‘Oh yeah. Gemma’s dad.’ Tory thrust a hand at him then withdrew it. ‘Nah, don’t get up, I’ll come down.’ She
slumped on top of Michael and licked his cheek.

  ‘Tory!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Stop it!’

  ‘What? What’d I do?’

  Michael was shrugging on his jacket, halfway to the front door when Jo caught up with him.

  ‘I’m so sorry. I...’ Jo, flustered, angry and embarrassed, couldn’t find any words to cover the situation.

  ‘You’re forgetting I’ve raised three kids. It’s no problem.’ He was adjusting his tie and Jo could see by the amber light emanating from the lounge room that it was still off-kilter. She resisted the urge to straighten it for him.

  ‘It’s probably for the best that you go anyway,’ she whispered.

  ‘Yes. For the best.’

  Then he took Jo’s face in his hands and kissed her.

  Later, in bed alone, when she thought back on that moment, it put her in mind of Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss. She was kneeling on flowers. Her curling fingers, toes and rapturous face were the only things to be seen. The rest of her was lost in a sumptuous swirl of gold.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  It was Friday night, the eve of Simon and Kim’s wedding, and Jo was sure she was more nervous than the groom and the...er...other groom could possibly be.

  That morning she had gone on her walk, as usual. But if she’d been hoping to lose herself in the nothingness of physical activity, the expedition had been an abject failure. Her limbs were heavy, sapped of energy, and she had been desperately thirsty. She’d ended up just sitting on a bench in Rushcutters Bay in the shade of a fig tree, draining her water bottle and watching the usual army of personal trainers gleefully berating their paying customers. Their spirit was willing but their flesh was weak. And, she thought, that was the perfect aphorism for her exploits from the night before.