by Liz Byrski
A young woman sitting at the back of the lecture theatre raises her hand. ‘What about the sexual freedom?’ she asks. ‘I read somewhere that the Push was all about free love. Can you tell us about that?’
There is a rustle of renewed interest in the lecture theatre and Dot laughs.
‘Well yes, I can tell you a bit about that. The Push did advocate sexual freedom and that was really radical. Theoretically everyone was equal – the women had the same sexual freedom as the men – but that freedom seemed to be measured by having a lot of sex rather than whether it was physically and emotionally satisfying. There was a lot of talk about it, but I don’t think anyone talked about what they really wanted or needed sexually. Sexual freedom in the Push, as in the broader sexual revolution of the late sixties, made more women available to men, but it was still the men who called the tune. It made it easier for women to say yes, but harder to say no, because it seemed unfriendly. It was all a bit mundane really. And it was largely the women who took responsibility for contraception and who usually found themselves on their own if they got pregnant.’
‘You were brilliant,’ Patrick says later as he steers Dot out of the lecture theatre. ‘See, I told you they love the personal experience, it brings the history and the theory to life.’
‘It did seem to go well,’ Dot says, elated but attempting modesty. ‘And they seemed to have stayed awake.’
‘Awake and attentive,’ says a voice behind them, and Dot turns to see the girl from the second row smiling at her again. ‘Hi, I’m Alyssa, that was really interesting.’
‘Thank you,’ Dot says. ‘Your thumb came up at just the right moment. Have we met before?’
Alyssa shakes her head. ‘No, but I feel as though I know you. We live in the same street. I often run past your house in the mornings.’
‘Of course,’ Dot says, fitting the face to the figure in a tracksuit or shorts waving to her as she passes the gate. ‘You wear those headphones. Well it’s nice to meet you, Alyssa.’
‘I saw that article in the Sunday paper a few weeks ago.’
Dot pulls a face. ‘Embarrassing.’
‘No, no! It was interesting. I wondered … there’s something I’d like to talk to you about, a campaign we’ve started …’
Margot, Vinka and Wendy are bearing down on them now making lunch signs, and Dot waves and nods. ‘I’m sorry, I missed that,’ she says, turning back to Alyssa. ‘You wanted to talk to me?’
‘Yes, could I pop in some time? I’d really like the chance to tell you about this.’
Dot, bathed in the glow of success, succumbs to the gratification of generosity even as she suspects she’ll regret it later. ‘Of course,’ she says, grasping Alyssa’s hand, ‘but not before ten o’clock. I’m not up to much earlier in the day.’
Dot thinks she has never been as tired in all her life as she is this afternoon. Since Margot and Vinka dropped her home after lunch she has sat here in her chair, looking guiltily out over the garden that is dying of neglect. That morning in the lecture theatre, once she’d really got going, she’d felt sharp again, energetic, absolutely on top of her game. It was the adrenaline rush of fear that did it, of course, fear of embarrassment, fear of sounding like a dotty old woman in front of a crowd of younger people.
‘I don’t know why I’m so tired,’ she’d said from the back seat of Margot’s car on the way home. ‘Not so long ago I’d have been able go back to work after something like that.’
‘It is actually a long time ago, Dot,’ Margot had said. ‘And none of us are getting any younger. We’re old women.’
‘But inside we are the same,’ Vinka said. ‘The same but different. We are young inside, I think, but we do not want the same things as when we are young. It is nice not to want so much.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ Dot had said. ‘Sometimes I just want everything I always wanted, absolutely everything.’
‘No!’ Vinka had laughed. ‘You want a boyfriend, Dot? You want a man in the bed, or waiting for you to make the dinner?’
‘Lord no!’ Dot shrieked. ‘Not that. Thank god I don’t have to do all that stuff again.’
‘It is a relief really, isn’t it?’ Margot said, catching Dot’s eye in the driving mirror as she pulled up at the traffic lights. ‘When you’re young you worry so much about losing what you’ve got – looks, I mean, sexual attractiveness. It feels as though life will stop when all that disappears, and then you get to a point where you couldn’t give a shit anymore.’
‘And all you can think of is the time – weeks, months, even years of your life you’ve wasted on trying to hang on to it,’ Dot agreed. ‘Time you could have spent doing much more interesting things.’
Vinka nodded, half turning in her seat to look at Dot. ‘Yes, but it is nice still to dress up, I think, to look good. We are old women, but smart. What do they say? Funky, we are funky old women.’
Dot smiles now, remembering how the three of them had laughed at the idea of being funky. Margot is right of course, it’s stupid to expect to be able to do at seventy-five what one was doing in one’s thirties or even fifties. The important thing, Dot thinks, is to enjoy what one can do, to be totally in the present and not constantly trying to grasp at what used to be. She sits forward in her chair to watch a couple of birds hopping around the birdbath. ‘But there are things it would be fun to do again,’ she says aloud, and the birds hear something through the glass, cock their heads towards her and take off. Flirting, she thinks, flirting was fun.
She leans back again and closes her eyes, remembering the thrill of a man moving in close to light a cigarette, eyes meeting over the flame, the intoxication of mutual desire. And then the word games, the signals, the gestures, the smouldering eye contact across a crowded room, and the dancing. Oh yes, the dancing! Dot sighs, recalling the intimacy of a hand resting just a little lower than the small of her back, the heat of a body moving against her own, a rough cheek and warm breath on her neck. She wonders vaguely how many men she has danced with in her lifetime and whether she will ever dance with one again. It seems pretty unlikely. And how many has she slept with? More than she’d admit to if asked, but that was all a very long time ago. Slowly she tries to summon them up but there are faces without names, names without faces, and then those she really remembers, with either distaste or pleasure, with shame or affection.
Laurence stands out of course, because the memory is preserved by their ongoing friendship. He and one other left their imprint on her life. It’s a good thing, Dot thinks, that she never kept a journal – reputations would have been at stake, her own included. And now Laurence is on a pilgrimage and, according to a card Margot showed her, is suffering from bleeding blisters and diarrhoea. Dot laughs softly: poor Laurence, he had good feet for dancing and she remembers too how it felt to dance with him, to be in his arms, knowing that very soon she would be in his bed. She remembers a party, low lights, Sinatra on the record player and a young woman she didn’t know watching them, her and Laurence, with a sort of hunger. In that moment Dot had felt a brief and triumphant sense of ownership; it was fleeting of course, monogamy was not a characteristic of Push men. Margot had got what she had wanted and what a disaster that turned out to be.
NINE
‘What a relief to be out of there,’ Margot says as she and Lexie stop off for a walk and a coffee at the Boatshed Café on their way back from the hospital. ‘I don’t know how Phyl can bear it but she won’t budge. How long do you think they’ll let this go on?’
Lexie shrugs. ‘Hard to tell, but not much longer I suspect.’
Margot nods and they walk in silence along the path, disturbing a flock of seagulls that rise in unison heading out over the choppy water. ‘I was going to say it feels as though everything has come to a standstill waiting for Donald, but of course it hasn’t.’ She hesitates, choosing her words carefully. ‘Rosie, who has a particularly good nose for news for one so young, tells me you’re going back to university.’
/> ‘Ah!’ Lexie says. ‘Sorry about that, I was going to tell you myself, this morning actually.’
‘She blurted it out while we were doing our survey of the Botanic Gardens,’ Margot says. ‘Naturally I pumped her shamelessly for details but you know Rosie, she only provides the headlines. Was it a secret?’
‘Not really a secret,’ Lexie says. ‘Rosie must have overheard me talking to Wendy. I wanted to get some advice from her and make up my mind before I told anyone.’
‘And have you?’
‘I think so. You know, Mum, if the practice hadn’t collapsed I would probably have stayed in the same rut, but it happened and now I’m forty-eight and unemployed, and it can either be a disaster or a chance to start again. Do something new.’
‘Would you do the same degree?’
Lexie shakes her head. ‘No. I know I did well in the sciences at school but it wasn’t what I was most interested in. I’m going to do art history.’
‘Art history?’ Margot stops walking and turns to her. ‘Lexie, how wonderful. It’s been your passion for so long. Of course that’s what you should do.’
‘Really? You don’t think I should be a bit more responsible, go for something vocational where I can get a job when I graduate? After all, by then I’ll be over fifty. I’ll get something part-time of course … while I’m studying.’
Margot laughs and slips her hand through Lexie’s arm as they walk on. ‘I’m sure you will, and you’ve spent more than twenty-five years being hugely responsible in every way. Now it’s time to do something you really want to do. I’m delighted, Lex, really I am, and your dad will be too. Will you get any credit for what you did before?’
‘Probably not, it’s too long ago. But Wendy’s arranging for me to talk to a colleague of hers at university to get some advice. Oh look! There’s a table free on the deck. You grab it and I’ll go and order the coffee. Will you be warm enough out here?’
Margot nods and claims the table, watching as Lexie disappears inside the café. It’s such a relief to have her back, and not just back home but more like the old Lexie, the one she was before Ross, before she embarked on the struggle of trying to make that relationship work. Well now she has the chance to start again and no one, in Margot’s opinion, deserves it more.
‘I’ll have to get a part-time job,’ Lexie says, bringing the coffee back to the table, ‘but I’ll be okay. All these years I’ve been putting my money away and now I feel as though I know what I was saving for. So you really think it’s a good idea?’
‘The best. And we always said we’d go to Florence together, so now we absolutely have to!’
‘We certainly do. But first of all we just have to hope they’ll let me in.’
‘Of course they’ll let you in,’ Margot says, scooping the froth from her cappuccino. ‘I’m so pleased for you; it’s the next best thing to doing it myself. I always wanted to go back and finish my degree.’
‘So why didn’t you?’ Lexie asks. ‘I mean, I know you dropped out when you got pregnant with me, but couldn’t you have gone back later, when Em and I were at school?’
Margot shrugs. ‘It wasn’t that easy. Laurence and Bernard were in Europe and I was on my own with you and Emma. It was all a bit of a struggle. I did think about it in the late seventies after Whitlam abolished university fees. There were a lot of women my age who went back then and I actually got accepted.’
‘I remember that now,’ Lexie says. ‘I remember you talking about it and asking me how I’d feel if my mum was a student.’
‘That’s right.’
‘What did I say?’
Margot smiles. ‘You were horrified. You said you’d be terribly embarrassed and you wouldn’t know what to tell your friends.’
Lexie groans and hides her face in her hands. ‘Oh, Mum, I’m so sorry. How awful of me. That wasn’t what stopped you though, was it?’
‘No,’ Margot says, laughing now. ‘I thought you’d survive the embarrassment. What stopped me was the money, or rather the lack of it. Laurence was paying maintenance but Emma wasn’t far off high school and you were a teenager and planning on going to uni yourself. I think I was just kidding myself when I applied; I needed to keep working. I was working for Derek Matthews at the time, the lawyer, do you remember him? He was a lovely man and it was a good job with decent pay. It was him who pushed me to do that paralegal training in the eighties, a bit like Dr Faraday sending you on the management course, so I just stayed on there and kept working.’
‘And you never made it back to finish the degree.’
‘No, too late now.’
‘You must have felt terrible when I dropped out.’
‘Oh well, it was a bit disappointing but I kept hoping you’d go back. And now you are. And what about Ross? You’re still sure you did the right thing?’
‘Absolutely sure,’ Lexie says. ‘The right thing for both of us.’
‘You’ve seen him then?’
Lexie nods, and sips her coffee. ‘He rang and asked if he could come by and pick up a few things he’d left in the garage. It was really weird, we actually had a proper conversation, something we hadn’t done for ages. I think we were both just relieved that we didn’t have to pretend anymore.’
‘So, no regrets?’
‘No. But I do feel quite sad about wasted time, and about the fact that I’ve got to this age and still can’t get the relationship thing right.’
‘You’ve got plenty of time,’ Margot says. ‘And you know, Lex, some people are actually better on their own. Being single has quite a lot going for it. Anyway, there are other things to think about now – being a student again, what a challenge that’ll be.’
Laurence seeks out a flat shelf of rock near the lighthouse and sits on it. It’s a relief to get away from the rest of the party. Tempers have been wearing thin over the past weeks and exhaustion, blisters, cuts, torn muscles and aching limbs are only a part of it. It’s the sociability. Friendships pushed to the limits by too much time spent together in strange and difficult circumstances, but most of all, he thinks, it’s the Camino itself; the very nature of the country, the tracks, the history and the traditions around it do seem, inevitably, to create the sense of a pilgrimage. Even those, like Laurence himself, who began as sceptics seem to surrender to it as though recognising that it really was the emotional and spiritual challenges that brought them here. It’s decades since Laurence gave up on religion and started speaking of himself as a humanist, but now he’s not so sure. There’s something about the places they’ve passed through, the peaceful villages, the cool and silent interiors of the churches at dawn, the swish of cassocks and rosary beads, the incense curling blue-white above altars, the stillness of the countryside. And there’s the obvious, unapologetic faith of the people – the locals and the pilgrims themselves, their commitment, their respect for the journey and what it means, people doing this for the third or fourth or, in a couple of cases, the eighth time – that has made him think again. From the end of the first week, as he struggled with pain, exhaustion and many dark nights of the soul, Laurence has felt himself drawn into the spiritual power of the Camino, and its consolations and challenges have made him question what he does indeed believe.
He leans back again against the rock enjoying the silence and the cold salt wind off the ocean. Finisterre. The edge of the world some guide books call it, the most westerly point of Europe: finis terre, the end of the land. Before him the ocean stretches westward to the coast of America. He had thought he might have to give up once they made it to Santiago, the final destination of pilgrims, but once there he knew he wanted this, this strange remote fishing village perched high above the Atlantic on the edge of the continent. Somehow he’d convinced himself that if he made it here it would be a significant marker – an epilogue to his life with Bernard, a sign that it was time to start again. And so, he thinks, he will leave it here, the burden of loss and sadness, and when he turns away from the ocean to the land a new stage begins
, the solitary life which he must now learn to live after almost half a century of being a husband and then a partner. Tomorrow a bus will take them back to Santiago and from there a coach trip and the start of the tedious airborne journey home.
‘One hundred bucks,’ Griff says, appearing alongside him and choosing a slightly lower level of rock. ‘I suppose I’ll have to pay up. I honestly never thought you’d make it, mate. I thought we’d be shipping you off home by the end of the first week.’
‘To be honest so did I,’ Laurence admits. ‘In fact I was desperate for an excuse to escape in the first few days, but pride got the better of me.’
Griff nods, looking out across the ocean. ‘Thought so, but I’ve got to hand it to you, Laurence, as the least fit, most underprepared person in the group you’ve made a fist of it. Better than some of the others.’
‘Odd, isn’t it,’ Laurence says, ‘the effect it has, the power of it. I feel changed by having done this.’
‘I said that to Sheila just this morning,’ Griff says. ‘And she said “Oh you’ll soon forget all about it when you get back home.” But I’m not so sure. I’ve thought about things, felt things these past weeks on the road that I’ve never thought about or felt before. I don’t want to forget about it.’ He clears his throat and his voice is gruffer when he speaks again. ‘I want to use it … for the future … for as much of it as we have left at this age.’
In all the years he’s known Griff, Laurence has heard him talk about almost everything. He could probably recite Griff’s views on foreign policy, the future of China, the need to develop a nuclear power industry and everything that’s wrong about soccer and right about Aussie rules, but he’s never heard him talk like this before.
