Last Chance Café

by Liz Byrski

  And Emma, usually resentful of the accuracy with which he can still read her moods, now feels an overwhelming urge to confide in him. It’s an urge she manages to keep in check.

  ‘It’s complicated,’ Margot says later, while they’re sitting on a seat in the Central Park mall, watching Rosie bouncing up and down on the bumpy castle. ‘Phyl’s had a few nasty shocks,’ and she fills Emma in on the existence of May Wong and the missing money. ‘I want you to talk to her, Em, tell her that you know. She needs someone to confide in and she trusts you more than anyone.’

  ‘This is weird,’ Emma says. ‘Uncle Donald with a mistress! I can’t believe it. I can’t imagine anyone ever actually wanting to sleep with him, can you?’

  Margot allows herself a twitch of a smile. ‘Frankly no, I can’t. In fact I couldn’t even imagine it the first day Phyl brought him home to meet Mum and Dad. But there you go, there’s no accounting for taste.’

  ‘But she’ll have a fit if she knows you’ve told me.’

  ‘She’ll be mad at me, but she’ll get over it. It’ll be a relief to have someone on hand to talk to and you really are the best person to listen. She’s shocked and hurt, but the worst thing is that she’s embarrassed and ashamed.’

  ‘But it’s not her fault,’ Emma says. ‘She’s got nothing to feel ashamed of.’

  ‘You and I know that,’ Margot says, ‘but all Phyl can see is that she’s been made a fool of by someone she loved and trusted. Everything she believed about her marriage and their life together has been trashed. Donald has made her look ridiculous and no, it’s not her fault, but it doesn’t stop her feeling hurt and ashamed. You can help her, Em.’

  Emma hesitates, this is not a task she relishes. ‘Okay,’ she says eventually. ‘Okay, if you think so I’ll give it a go.’

  Laurence is packing books – Bernard’s books. He is putting them carefully into boxes, sealing them and sticking on the labels with Bernard’s address in Ho Chi Minh City. Then he carries them, one at a time, out into the hall and adds them to the pile ready for the courier who will collect them tomorrow morning. It is a painful task; with each box he closes he imagines Bernard opening it, slitting the tape with a knife, folding back the flaps, lifting out each book with that wonderful sense of rediscovering things one so often forgets about when they are on the shelf. Will Bernard think of him as he unpacks the books? Will he imagine Laurence’s hands holding them, stroking them lovingly? Will he remember his touch, as Laurence now remembers Bernard’s touch? But of course Bernard will not be thinking like this because for him it is over, he has chosen another life. Has Bernard found someone new? Apparently not, but then how would Laurence know? He has no spy network in Ho Chi Minh City.

  They had met the year he turned forty and Bernard, just twenty-three, approached him to supervise his PhD, because of his work on Henry James. From the moment Bernard walked into the office Laurence knew that his lifelong struggle to suppress his true nature was about to face its greatest ever challenge. The smart thing, of course, would have been to decline and send Bernard to someone else, but of course he didn’t. And in the end it was Bernard who was the first to declare his feelings and Laurence had counselled that for both their sakes these feelings should not be acted on. The Campaign Against Moral Persecution had been established in Sydney in 1970 and its Melbourne branch, Society Five, a year later, but homosexuality was still illegal.

  ‘It’s your career and mine,’ Laurence remembers saying at the time. ‘The risks are enormous, and I have to think of Margot and the girls.’

  ‘But this is who you are,’ Bernard had told him, ‘who you’ve always been. Are you really prepared to spend the rest of your life living a lie?’

  The truth of Bernard’s challenge that day had freed Laurence from the masquerade and enabled him to grow and work in ways he had never dreamed possible. Before that, however, it had cost him his job. Once he had left Margot and the news filtered out, Laurence knew his card was marked. Sleeping with students, even mature adults, was a disastrous career move especially, as the Dean had pointed out, when it was ‘illegal fornication’. Bernard completed his thesis and together they set off for a few years to Prague and later to Paris, and by the time they came home Australia had moved on.

  And now Bernard has moved on; he wants the challenge of somewhere new and eventually perhaps someone new, while Laurence, almost seventy-five, wants to cling to the present, to preserve what he has or had. He wants the intimacy and tender comforts of familiar love, the cosy irritation of having his sentences finished by someone younger, the peace and the tension of living daily with the rough and the smooth of a partner for whom, until now, he has always come first. For this he left Margot devastated and bewildered with her life in shreds, left his daughters hurt and confused, and now it is over and he’s alone.

  In hindsight wisdom about the age gap comes easily, Laurence thinks as he adds a box to the stack in the hall. Years ago he had worried that the age difference would be a problem, that they would find they no longer had enough in common to keep them together, or that as he got older Bernard would find him boring, distasteful or just plain dull. But somehow he had assumed that if it was going to happen it would have done so long ago and he had ceased to worry. He had come to inhabit the comforting assumption that they would go peaceably on together forever. And now here he is, an old man alone in an empty house, where half the bookshelves are empty of books, half the wardrobe is empty of clothes and half the bed is still and cold. An old man too sad, too frightened, too shamed by loss to seek comfort by sharing his grief, and who feels he has hurt others too much to expect anyone to care.

  Laurence is not normally given to self-pity but it is hard to avoid it in his present situation. He would like something positive to do, something that would force him to focus on reorganising his life, something to distract him into action. He needs to come out about this just as he came out about his sexuality years ago, but so far he hasn’t been able to take the first step, and the longer he leaves it the harder it seems.

  He tapes up another box, attaches the label and carries it slowly to the hall, leaning back against the front door just as someone rings the bell and follows the ring with the thump of a fist. Briefly Laurence considers not answering, standing stock still, holding his breath, pretending not to be there. Whoever it is rings the bell again, more aggressively this time.

  ‘Come on, Laurence,’ a familiar voice calls. ‘I know you’re there – I saw you walk past the window. Open up.’

  Dot, dressed in her trademark black, this time a sleeveless linen dress with an emerald silk scarf, is standing on the doorstep taking a last drag on a cigarette.

  ‘No good hiding from me,’ she says with a grin. ‘Let me in – oh sorry, I’ll put it out.’ And she drops the cigarette on the step, grinds it out with her foot and retrieves the stub. ‘Where will I dump this?’

  Laurence opens the door wider and she steps inside and reaches up to kiss his cheek.

  ‘Haven’t you given up that disgusting habit yet?’ he says, taking the butt from her and leading her through to the back of the house and out to the terrace, where a few moths are darting around the citronella lamps.

  ‘Not quite,’ Dot says. ‘I keep trying. I cut it down a lot when I was in India. I can make a packet last a week now. By the time I get it to zero I’ll have died of something else.’ She hands him a bottle of red wine and he studies the label.

  ‘Grange!’ he says, looking at her over the top of his glasses. ‘I’m impressed. What are we celebrating?’

  ‘We’re not celebrating,’ Dot says, ‘we’re commiserating. Well, I am commiserating with you.’ She nods towards the mess of books spread on the floor, the boxes in the hall. ‘You’re packing Bernard’s books.’

  ‘Oh well – yes, he needs a few. They want him to stay on a bit longer.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Dot says, sitting down. ‘He’s gone for good. I bumped into his sister when I was getting petrol. She told me.’
>
  ‘Ah!’

  ‘Yes, ah! Go and get a corkscrew and some glasses.’

  Laurence sighs, puts the bottle on the table, pads back into the kitchen and returns to open the wine. ‘How long have you known?’

  ‘Yesterday morning. And I know he left before you went on your pilgrimage. Did all that walking and spiritual self-flagellation help?’

  Laurence feels as though his body is resisting a weight greater than he can manage and he sits down abruptly, pushing the bottle and the corkscrew towards Dot. ‘You open it,’ he says. ‘I don’t know really; weeks of walking unprepared in the heat was torture, far too much time to think about the past, the wreck of my life, and the way I’ve wrecked other lives. The most I can say is that there was some satisfaction in actually completing it.’

  ‘And you haven’t told anyone?’

  ‘Not a soul.’

  ‘Not even Margot?’

  He shakes his head. ‘I keep intending to but I always chicken out. I caused her enormous grief and great hardship – coming out, the scandal at the university, the financial problems, the burden of bringing up the girls. And now it ends like this. It almost seems like an insult to her.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ Dot says. ‘You and Bernard lasted thirty-four years. It’s not as though you left Margot for a meaningless fling. And it would have come out some other way; you can’t spend your life trying to pass as something you’re not. Of course it was bloody dreadful for Margot but you’re assuming that she still thinks she could have had a better life if you’d continued to do your straight man act.’

  ‘Well I think she’d have been better off if we hadn’t got married.’

  Dot pours the wine, pushes a glass towards him.

  ‘You did the honourable thing and that was really important to her at the time. I’d bet that it still is now. Lord knows what would have happened to her if you’d done a disappearing trick or sent her to some sleazy backstreet abortionist. And you have the girls. I don’t know how much that means to you, Laurence, but it means the world to Margot. Cheers.’

  ‘Cheers. Yes, it means the world to me too.’

  ‘She’s fond of you, Laurence. She loves you – not in the old way, but she knows who you are, she respects that. I probably shouldn’t be attempting to read her mind but I don’t think she’ll see this as an insult. She’ll be sad for you, but she does need to hear it from you first, not learn it from someone else.’

  He nods. ‘You’re right,’ he says, sipping his wine.

  ‘Good. I know about these things, of course, thanks to my vast experience of satisfying long-term relationships,’ and she lets out a hoot of laughter.

  Laurence almost chokes on his wine and they both laugh aloud, released now from the emotional tension.

  ‘Don’t you ever regret it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well it does seem as though you’ve spent most of your life alone or in relationships that you chose for their obvious temporariness.’

  She shrugs. ‘I was never into the marriage and happy families stuff – missing gene maybe. And anyway, who’d put up with me?’

  ‘So no regrets?’

  ‘You can’t get to our age without some regrets, can you? I mean I’d love to be able to say I’m such a free spirit that I regret nothing, but it wouldn’t be true.’

  Laurence nods. ‘Byron Bay nineteen sixty-six? We’ve never talked about it but I’ve often wanted to ask you how you feel now, all these years later.’

  ‘Secret women’s business,’ Dot says.

  He picks up the bottle of wine. ‘I thought you’d spent a fortune on this very fine wine so we could share our secrets.’

  ‘I didn’t buy it, it was a gift, and it’s been sitting in the rack for some time. I decided we’d drink it tonight so that you could tell me your secrets, not prise mine open.’

  She takes a long breath and sits for a moment, unmoving, staring at a moth that comes back time and again in an attempt to reach the light. ‘Okay, yes I do think about it. There are times when I’ve felt haunted by it and, yes, occasionally I regret it. But they’re the regrets of age, part of getting old and living in the last chance café, looking back and seeing how I could have done it differently. But I didn’t know that then, and I don’t dwell on it now – only when, perhaps, I’m a bit maudlin and self-indulgent. It soon passes and present reality seems pretty good. We’re still alive, Laurence, vertical, independent, our friends still speak to us, we even have our own teeth – that can’t be bad for three-score years and fifteen!’ And she pushes her glass towards him. ‘More please, and I need something to soak it up. Shall we dial a pizza?’

  Laurence refills their glasses and makes the call.

  ‘There’s something else,’ Dot says, ‘another reason I needed to talk to you. You know this campaign that Margot and Lexie and I are involved in?’

  ‘Of course, I’m avidly reading your blog, very reminiscent of the old ratbag Dot, terrific stuff.’

  ‘Good. Well I need you to get involved too.’

  ‘Me? I know nothing about it. I mean, I support you absolutely. If it’s money you want I’m happy to make a donation.’

  Dot shakes her head. ‘I’m not asking for your money, although of course I’ll take whatever you want to give. But what I really want is your time, your analytical skills and your advice.’

  Laurence raises his eyebrows. ‘Really? You have an opening for a grumpy old man with a background in literary criticism?’

  ‘Exactly! Lexie, who turns out to be a brilliant strategic thinker and an absolute stickler for detail, has pointed out that if we are going to take this thing to the next level we need to be really well prepared. She’s taking over, preparing a business plan, and working with Alyssa on some projects to take to the bank. But we need to do some research – facts, figures and strong arguments, some idea of what’s happening elsewhere – the US, the UK. Margot’s on the committee but I don’t want to ask her to do this, because after all these years she’s finally into her writing. I thought you might be willing to help.’

  Laurence stares thoughtfully out across the darkness of the garden, considering his loneliness, his apathy, his unwillingness to do anything other than mope and feel sorry for himself. It’s been going on too long, so long it has become a habit, so long that the effort to involve himself in something new seems monumental. He wonders if he is clinically depressed or whether this is just a normal state of grief. Either way, he thinks, the only way to shift himself out of it is to get involved in something that will occupy his time and perhaps jolt him out of gloom.

  ‘Okay,’ he says, turning back to Dot. ‘I imagine I can get to grips with that and it might stop me wallowing in self-pity. When do you want me to start?’

  ‘How about tonight?’ Dot says with a grin. ‘I’ve got a heap of stuff in the car. I can talk you through what we’re doing after we’ve had our pizza.’

  EIGHTEEN

  The first thing that Phyllida sees when she opens the top right-hand drawer of Donald’s desk is a small velvet pouch with a drawstring, and she is shocked that Donald had taken so little care to conceal it. The drawer is not even locked. Clearly he was confident that she wouldn’t dream of opening his desk drawers.

  ‘More fool me,’ she says aloud, staring at the pouch and wondering if she really does want to open it. It has taken her almost a week to get this far. After that first meeting with John Hammond she had walked blindly back to her car and leaned against it numb with shock, the car keys in her hand. She must have looked upset because a woman pushing a shopping trolley with a toddler in the seat had stopped to talk to her.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she’d asked. ‘Do you need some help?’

  Phyllida shook her head. ‘No, no thanks, I’m fine, just a bit shocked.’

  The woman took the car keys from her hand and opened the driver’s door. ‘Why don’t you sit inside and I’ll get someone …’

  ‘You’re very kind but I’m all right,’ Phyllida sai
d. ‘I’ve had some bad news but I’m not ill. I’ll be fine now.’ And she slipped into the driving seat and put the key into the ignition.

  ‘Well, if you’re sure …’

  The woman gave her a cautious smile and walked on, looking back a couple of times as Phyllida buckled her seatbelt. Her hands were shaking, not just with the shock but with the sudden realisation that the young woman had seen her in a way that she has never seen herself – an elderly woman, a bit doddery, having a nasty turn in a car park, someone who might suddenly need a wheelchair or an ambulance, someone who might be unsafe to drive. The realisation, coming as it did on top of the news of Donald’s betrayals, made her grip the steering wheel in panic; she was old, she was alone, she did feel decidedly shaky and terribly vulnerable and might not be safe to drive. So, in an effort to disprove all of this, she started the engine and drove straight to Margot’s house where, in giving her sister a full account of the morning’s revelations, she was able to mask that vulnerability with outrage, for which May Wong proved a handy focus.

  Margot had been her usual sympathetic, supportive self, although in the end she hadn’t pulled any punches when it came to where the responsibility and the treachery really lay. But Phyllida had clung to anger – so much more empowering than the shame and vulnerability of a elderly woman deceived by a husband of fifty years. By the time she left Margot’s place to head home she was determined that she would go straight to Donald’s study and look for the brooch. Dropping her bag and jacket onto the chair where May Wong had sat just that morning, Phyllida strode to the study, flung open the door and then stopped. This was something so raw and final. Searching for and perhaps finding the brooch would mean that they – the Wong woman and Hammond – were telling the truth. She quickly closed the door and hasn’t opened it again until today, and the fact that she is here now, sitting at Donald’s desk staring down into the drawer, is entirely due to Emma.