Last Chance Café

by Liz Byrski

  ‘Donald dropped it, that’s why,’ May says, getting to her feet. ‘He dropped it on the bathroom tiles and the stones were dislodged. He said he knew a good jeweller and he’d get it repaired for me.’

  ‘Go,’ Phyllida says, ‘get out of here now. How dare you come here with this ridiculous story.’

  ‘Phyllida,’ May says now in a low voice, ‘can we just drop the pretence? There’s no one here but us. Just promise me you’ll look for the brooch and let me have it back. I’m not asking you for anything that isn’t my own.’

  There is something about this woman which, in spite of everything, makes her seem plausible. She is quiet, dignified, and appears to be struggling to keep control, and her eyes have the brightness of imminent tears.

  ‘What pretence is it exactly that you would like us to drop?’ Phyllida asks.

  ‘You know exactly what this is about,’ May says. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t. I’ve never intruded on you, and all I’m asking for now is the return of something that belongs to me.’ She steps through the doorway and turns back at the top step. ‘When you find my brooch you can give it to John Hammond, he knows where to find me.’ She turns away and goes down the front steps to her car.

  In the doorway Phyllida, frozen with shock and confusion, watches her and as the bright yellow Volkswagen Golf pulls out of the drive she feels a tug like quicksand drawing her down to some intolerable unknown depths.

  ‘There are three levels of care here,’ the director explains as Dot, Margot and Vinka follow her around the retirement complex. ‘Independent living, assisted living and the nursing home. So when a person finds they have increased care needs the transition can be made with the least upheaval. The continuity of care fosters a sense of community and minimises the disorientation that can occur with moving as one gets older.’

  She leads them slowly along brick-paved paths lined with bottlebrush to a cluster of units grouped around a paved courtyard. ‘These are the independent living units and as you see they face into a central square with seats and gardens, a meeting place, a village square if you like.’

  Vinka looks around her, pausing for a moment, and then lowers herself onto one of the long wooden seats that faces a rose bed and beyond it a small gazebo lined with benches. It has, she can see, something of a village atmosphere. But Vinka is not a village person, she thrives in the city. She walks to the corner shop late at night to buy ice cream, or chocolate or a packet of tea. She walks to church and to the doctor’s surgery, she walks to buy a newspaper. And she gets on a tram and in less than ten minutes she is in the centre of Melbourne. No chance of doing that here, no chance of walking to civilisation or anywhere else from here.

  Close by the director is talking with Dot, telling her how much she used to enjoy her radio program, and that she is now following her blog. Margot joins Vinka on the bench.

  ‘So what do you think of it, Vinka?’ Margot asks. ‘The gardens are lovely, aren’t they?’

  ‘The gardens, yes, fine gardens, very pretty,’ Vinka says. ‘But it is a long way from town, Margot, almost half an hour on the tram. It feels like – like being put out to …’ she hesitates, ‘to pasture. It is so quiet.’

  ‘It is, and of course a lot of people want that. It’s a lovely place but I can understand if it isn’t your sort of place.’

  ‘Perhaps I have to learn to like it,’ Vinka says. ‘But that would be hard.’

  ‘If you’d just like to follow me I’ll take you into the unit now,’ the director calls, and obediently they get to their feet and follow her inside.

  The unit is light and modern with pale walls and carpets, a bathroom with gleaming tiles and safety handles in all the right places, a small but well planned kitchen, able to accommodate the demands of a Polish Christmas dinner. Vinka stands in the middle of the living area, which is painted a very pale pink, with a silver grey carpet and full length curtains covered with bouquets of pink roses. Can she learn to live here? Everything she owns fits into a different sort of place. Most of all she herself fits into a different sort of place. But there is not going to be a flat that looks out over the city in an old building of mellow brick and cream plaster. There will not be timber framed French windows with flaking white paint leading to a tiny balcony, just large enough for herself and her chair. That is her past life and she must learn to let go of the idea that she will somehow be able to replicate it elsewhere. Reality is a lead weight on Vinka’s chest, it almost stops her breathing. All her life she has taken her own decisions about where she will go and what she will do. Now she sees that her choices are diminishing. She can still choose, but for reasons of age, the threat of infirmity and limited finances, the range of choices is narrow.

  ‘You’ll understand that we do have a waiting list,’ the director says. ‘You do have priority, Miss Renska, as you are required to move from your present home. I know you need to think about this, talk with your family, but I’m sure you’ll understand that we will need an answer soon. So, shall we say close of business on Friday? If I don’t hear from you by then the unit will go to the next person on the list.’

  ‘I have been lucky,’ Vinka says to Margot as they walk out. ‘All my life I decide what I want. Now I have to decide from what other people can allow me to have.’

  ‘You can turn it down,’ Margot says.

  Vinka shrugs. ‘I must think more. I know I am fortunate to live in a country where there is a good place for me. But to start again, at eighty, this is so hard. Those politicians, they say eighty is the new sixty? They know nothing, I tell you, Margot, nothing at all.’

  SIXTEEN

  By the time Phyllida announces her arrival to John Hammond’s receptionist she has run through various scenarios arising from May Wong’s visit. The first, and she feels the most likely, is that there is no brooch and this is the first step in an elaborate con trick to get money out of her. But, if there is a brooch, the woman must have been wearing it at some hospital function and Donald perhaps asked to look at it and dropped it. And it’s possible too that May was obsessed with Donald, perhaps bothering him at work and, now that he is dead, is attempting to claim some place in his life and death. The final possibility is that Donald did drop the brooch in May Wong’s bathroom when he took a shower after having sex with her. The latter is, in Phyllida’s opinion, so unlikely as not to merit further consideration. The con trick is the obvious explanation and can probably be dealt with by a stern letter from Hammond telling the woman to stay away and not bother her in future.

  But she’d had a moment of doubt just as she was about to leave for her appointment. She remembered that May had referred to Hammond by name. That was certainly odd, but if the wretched woman is a con artist then she would have done her homework first, and that would explain it, although that afterthought had rocked Phyllida’s conviction sufficiently to make her question her choice of outfit: by the time she left she had changed her clothes four times. The final choice – an olive green suit with a cream silk shirt and her Broome pearls – says tasteful, confident, dignified and not to be messed with, which is somewhat at odds with the way she feels.

  The lawyer’s office is flooded with midday sunlight pouring in from the window behind his desk. It settles on Phyllida, making her flush with heat as she sinks into the leather armchair, blinking at Hammond’s silhouette behind the desk.

  ‘So sorry,’ he says, adjusting the blinds, and the light turns from dazzling white to dappled amber, reflecting the tone of the wood panelling, and he slips back into his swivel chair. ‘Thank you for coming in, Phyllida,’ he continues, opening a file and shifting some papers. ‘I do apologise for chasing you up so many times but there are some things I need to discuss with you – we need to get on with the probate. So, I won’t beat about the bush. We need to go through it all together so I can familiarise you with – well, the state of the estate, so to speak.’ He hesitates, leaning across the desk, papers in hand. ‘Here’s a copy of the will so that you can follow it as we
go.’

  The butterflies in Phyllida’s stomach assume the weight of a lead balloon, the print swims before her eyes. ‘Just before we do that, John,’ she says, ‘I must tell you that I had a visit earlier this morning from a woman by the name of May Wong. She’s a nurse at the hospital and she claims to know Donald, and possibly you too.’

  ‘Ah!’ he says. ‘Miss Wong, yes … well she is on my list of issues for us to discuss this morning. I’m just sorry that we didn’t have a chance to talk about this before the two of you met.’

  And in that instant Phyllida knows without a shadow of a doubt that her world is about to change in ways that she has never previously imagined.

  ‘Can you believe it, Margot?’ Phyllida says, her hand shaking as she takes the cup of tea Margot is holding out to her. ‘The treachery of it; she will have put him up to it of course. He was always a pushover with women, and this Wong person has just taken advantage of him.’

  Margot, to whom the idea of Donald being a pushover with women is frankly ridiculous, takes a deep breath. ‘That does seem unlikely,’ she says, feeling her way as cautiously as she can. ‘After all, you did say that they’ve been … well, that this … this relationship … started fifteen years ago. So he bought her a car and he left her twenty-five thousand dollars in his will – it’s not a great deal for a relationship that lasted so long. She doesn’t really seem like a gold-digger.’

  ‘Well, how would we know! He’s been drawing large sums in cash for some time and there’s no trace of where it’s gone, so I think we can assume that some, or all of that, may have gone to her. According to her and to Hammond, Donald told both of them that we had an open marriage and that I had agreed to this continuing relationship as long as I didn’t have to know anything about it. It’s rubbish, Margot, complete rubbish. You know I would never agree to something like that. I can’t believe that Donald would have done a thing like this.’

  ‘Well I can understand that you don’t want to believe Miss Wong,’ Margot says, ‘but I think you have to believe Hammond. He and Donald go way back, they’ve been friends for years, they played golf every week. If Donald lied to him then it seems likely that he would also have lied to her. I know this is terribly upsetting, Phyl, but it does look as though Donald was deceiving you and lying about it to her. What about your neighbour? Did you say Donald had transferred some money to him?’

  ‘Two payments of five thousand dollars each. I’ve no idea what this is about – perhaps we’ll find something in the files in the study. He bought both the cars from Trevor, but I knew that – although Hammond says in his view the price he paid for them was somewhat inflated. And he bought her car from Trevor too.’

  Margot shakes her head. ‘So he lied about that too. Or lied by not telling you what he was doing.’

  ‘Actually,’ Phyllida says, ‘Donald was always a fool with money. He couldn’t hold on to it. When we got married I took over all the accounting, the banking, everything. It was only when I had the cancer scare and the hysterectomy that he took it over. It was just going to be until I was back on my feet, but somehow I never got around to picking it up again, and I assumed everything was going along as I’d left it. And that was the time when he seems to have started pouring money into a black hole.’

  ‘So let’s get this clear,’ Margot says, struggling to understand the scope of the problem. ‘The things you didn’t know about were the bequest to May Wong, the two lump sums to Trevor, and then a lot of big cash withdrawals?’

  ‘Yes. Then there are bequests of twenty-five thousand each to Lexie and Emma, which is what Don and I agreed upon ages ago.’

  ‘Perhaps more of it went to Trevor,’ Margot suggests. ‘Maybe he got Don to invest in some shonky business. But there are still some investments, and the house and the superannuation are safe and in your name?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I’m not a destitute widow by any means. It’s the deception that’s so appalling. That woman, it’s all her fault. How dare she … and turning up at the house this morning, well I …’

  ‘Phyl,’ Margot says, moving over to sit on the arm of her sister’s chair, putting a hand on her shoulder. ‘You have to stop this. I realise that the shock of Donald’s affair is as bad or worse even than the money business. But it was Donald who set all this up, and May Wong has also been taken in by his lies. Blaming her won’t help one bit – in fact it just confuses matters and takes your mind off the bigger picture and what you have to do.’

  ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me he loved her,’ Phyllida says angrily.

  Margot sighs. ‘I’ve no idea but it does seem odd that he should have been involved for such a long time, at considerable risk of being caught out, if he didn’t care for her pretty deeply. And why would she stick with him under such difficult and limiting circumstances if there wasn’t more to it than a VW Golf? It’s hardly compensation for having to live out your relationship in hiding. I suppose you haven’t gone through his desk and the other stuff in his office yet?’

  Phyllida shakes her head. ‘Couldn’t face it. It wasn’t like the clothes, I always looked after his clothes, but the study was his empire, it seemed like such an invasion. Or rather it did seem that way until today.’

  ‘Well when you’re feeling a bit better we should sit down and go through everything,’ Margot says. ‘Who knows whether we’ll find things are better or worse than they seem, but either way you’ll be clear about where you stand.’

  By the time Phyllida leaves, Margot’s energy and goodwill is wearing thin. It’s not that she doesn’t understand how devastating this is for her sister, but understanding and sympathy are diluted with resentment at being drawn once again into someone else’s crisis. It’s family stuff, after all, she tells herself – who else would Phyllida go to? But her intense involvement with her writing has forced her to create some of the boundaries she has previously lacked, so that now she is less willing, resentful even, that her time and energy are being siphoned off into Phyllida’s problems. Phyllida has, after all, been less than helpful in Margot’s own times of crisis, and so Margot can’t help but think of all the times when her sister has not been there for her.

  ‘You’ve only got yourself to blame,’ Phyllida had said when, at twenty, Margot had confided that she was pregnant. ‘Don’t think I’m going to help you with this, Margot. You got yourself into this hanging around with that fast crowd from the Push, so you can get yourself out of it. I’m having nothing to do with it.’

  And she hadn’t. It had been a torturous time; both sets of parents had been shocked and had proved themselves experts in the art of apportioning blame. Margot’s memory of her sister at that time was of her in the background tuttutting and shaking her head with disapproval every time Margot’s condition or the forthcoming baby was mentioned.

  Some years later, when Margot was pregnant again, Phyllida had learned that she would not be able to have a child of her own and developed instead a passionate interest in her forthcoming niece. And when Emma arrived and turned out to be a particularly enchanting baby, Phyllida took an almost maternal interest in her, often passing judgment on the way that Margot and Laurence were raising their girls. And in that terrible time when Laurence had left to live with Bernard, Phyllida’s support had been notably absent.

  ‘You’re better off without him,’ she’d said. ‘Don’t waste any more time on Laurence, Margot. It’s you and the girls now, that’s what you need to focus on.’

  Margot has always known that Phyllida loves her and would do anything for her if she asked, but her emotional distance, her air of knowing what’s best and her failure to step into her sister’s emotional space have always made asking impossible. Phyllida has lived her well-ordered, well-heeled life close by but at a distance, while Margot has trodden water in the financial stress and messy unpredictability of a broken family. In those self-obsessed notebooks she has seen a picture of herself that she doesn’t like. It is a picture of a disappointed woman who, while appeari
ng to cope admirably with the loss of her dreams and her husband, has actually been burning with resentment and incapable of being honest about it. Now, writing about characters that are figments of her imagination, she has learned a great deal about herself. If the deck chairs are being shifted in her relationship with her sister, something has to give. She can’t do this alone. She’s willing to be the sister she has always wanted Phyllida to be to her, but she knows she must find a way of doing that without donating her bone marrow in the process.

  SEVENTEEN

  ‘It’s not going to work,’ Dot says, banging her fist on the table. ‘You have to trust me on this, it simply won’t work. It’ll be a waste of money and effort if we rush into it now.’

  Alyssa, who, like Dot, has a sense of the dramatic and enjoys large gestures, sighs noisily and throws her arms in the air in exasperation. ‘So you’re saying we just put everything on hold, stop the campaign and go off and paint our toenails until after the summer holidays?’

  They are gathered around the cluttered table in the house that Alyssa and two of the others share, three blocks down from Dot’s own home. As well as Dot, Alyssa and her housemates, Karen and Lucy, there is Sam, an internet studies student who built the original CASE website, Alyssa’s mother Jean, and Lexie, who has also enlisted Wendy. There is an awkward silence around the table as everyone watches Dot and Alyssa, two drama queens who both hate to lose an argument. Lexie wonders how long the stand-off will last and whether this is how all the meetings have been so far.

  ‘I’m not suggesting that you paint your toenails, Alyssa,’ Dot says. ‘I’m not even suggesting that we take time off from the campaign, I’m simply saying we should use the time to plan it properly. Yes, we need to have an attention grabbing event of some sort, but we can’t do it in a shopping centre just before Christmas.’