Last Chance Café

by Liz Byrski

  ‘No, I was just going to make some tea and have a little break. I’m having a party this evening.’

  ‘And I’m not invited?’

  ‘Nope. Women only. Reviving the seventies and introducing them to the nineties and naughties.’

  ‘Nice,’ Laurence says. ‘Well I won’t hang about but I’ll have that tea.’

  They take a tray outside and sit on the end of the verandah alongside a huge old wisteria heavy with purple blossom.

  ‘No writing today then?’ Laurence asks, taking the mug Margot hands him.

  She shakes her head. ‘Preparations for tonight, but anyway I’m a bit stuck at the moment. I think I might have hit a wall.’

  Laurence tilts his head, watching, listening, waiting for more.

  ‘The characters are infuriating. They’re all at crucial points in the story where they need to change but every time I try to move them on it doesn’t work.’

  ‘Just like real life?’

  Margot shrugs. ‘I suppose. Certainly just as frustrating. What’s the good of inventing these people and breathing life into them if they don’t do as they’re told?’ She sips her tea and picks up a biscuit. ‘Anyway, how are you? I guess you’ve come to tell me that you and Bernard have split up.’

  ‘You know?’

  ‘Melbourne is a small world, and the circles we move in are smaller still. I’m only guessing but I think you knew you were breaking up before you went to Spain?’

  Laurence nods. ‘Even before I’d decided to go.’

  ‘That’s months ago,’ Margot says, frowning. ‘Well I’m sorry, Laurence, really, it’s very sad.’ She leans across to squeeze the arm closest to her and Laurence puts his hand over hers and grips it.

  ‘I should have told you before but I couldn’t make myself do it. I kept chickening out.’

  ‘Why? I don’t understand why you left it so long.’

  ‘Embarrassed,’ Laurence says, looking out across the garden to where Margot has set up some folding tables and chairs that Grant has brought over for her from his house. ‘It seemed awfully difficult and sort of delicate.’

  ‘Delicate?’

  ‘Well, I left you and the girls to be with Bernard. I turned your lives upside down. So it seemed important that it was all for something worthwhile, something that would last. Anything else seemed like an insult to you and them.’

  ‘But it did last,’ Margot says. ‘It lasted more than thirty years, of course it was worthwhile.’

  Laurence shrugs. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘No, not maybe. Of course it was worthwhile. Bernard is a fine person, I’ve grown very fond of him. It was the age thing in the end, I suppose?’

  ‘Age and ambition. Bernard is determined not to go gently into that good night. He’s fighting it – ageing isn’t part of his plan. Whereas I am rather enjoying it. I do understand his drive to wring every drop from the remaining years of his professional life. It’s commendable, and I suppose I did that myself, but I’m over it now. He’s revving up for the home straight and I’m cruising in the slow lane. I’m sick of conferences and vice chancellors’ drinks parties, and ethics committees and reading the latest scholarly articles. I’m even sick of Henry James and I’m a bit sad about that but I’m hoping it’ll wear off.’

  Margot is silent, looking across at him, searching his face for what is hidden and discovering it finally in the way his eyes flick away from hers, unable to hold her gaze.

  ‘You don’t have to make light of it with me,’ she says. ‘You don’t have to pretend you’re okay just because you still feel guilty about leaving me for him. I’m capable of compassion, Laurence, I am capable of respecting your grief just as I was capable of respecting your love. Give me credit for that.’

  She watches him struggling now, his hand shaking as he puts the mug down on the table and buries his face in his hands. She gets up and goes to the kitchen, returning with a large glass of water and a box of tissues which she puts on the table beside him. Then she moves her chair alongside his and slides her hand through the crook of his arm and down the inside of his forearm to hold his hand. They sit like this for a while; Darby and Joan, Margot thinks, although Darby and Joan would hardly have been discussing the sort of love and loss that once tore her and Laurence apart and which now seems to link them again.

  ‘I think,’ Margot says after a while, when Laurence is calmer, ‘that you might be assuming that if you hadn’t fallen in love with Bernard everything might have gone on as before and you and I would still be together. I actually doubt that.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Of course. You couldn’t have gone on trying to pretend you were a straight man. It would have destroyed you. The tragedy is that you felt you had to do that in the first place. No one tried harder than you, Laurence, to prove you were straight – my god, all those girlfriends.’ She smiles and squeezes his hand. ‘You must have been exhausted.’

  Laurence manages a rueful laugh. ‘I did make an effort, but coming out in those days just seemed impossibly hard. Perhaps I thought I could convince myself as well as everyone else.’

  ‘Well I’m glad you found the courage to be who you really are, even though it was awful at the time.’ She hesitates. ‘But there’s another thing,’ she says, turning in her chair to face him now. ‘I think you assume that I’ve been unhappy ever since you left.’

  ‘Well I …’

  ‘I haven’t. At first of course, yes, I was very unhappy, but as time went on, no. More, well … discontent, and that’s not your fault, although for a time it was easier to believe that it was. Easier to blame you for the fact that I abandoned my writing, didn’t go back to university, was always struggling financially …’

  ‘Well that at least was my fault,’ Laurence says.

  ‘Partly, but no more so than for any couple who split up, and you were more generous than most. It’s me – I was the cause of my own discontent. All through that roller coaster of the women’s movement I could talk the talk, get out and fight for it, but there was so much that I didn’t internalise. I never stopped feeling and acting as though being all things to all people was my role as a woman. I’ve kept on doing it and resenting it and using it as an excuse to avoid risking what I really wanted to do, right up until recently. And I let all those other pressures about how women should look and behave exploit my anxiety and take up my time, when I could have been just me, warts and all, getting on with my own life.’

  ‘Like you’re doing now?’ Laurence says, his face almost restored to normality; the normality of a person adjusting to grief rather than fighting it.

  ‘Yes, and it’s taken me until I’m this age – must be a slow learner.’

  ‘I doubt I would forgive with such wisdom and generosity were the situation reversed, Margot,’ Laurence says. ‘I doubt I deserve it.’

  Margot laughs, getting up from her chair. ‘Well, if you still have vestiges of guilt you can help me sort out some lanterns and chairs. It’s going to be a glorious evening.’

  ‘Perhaps you need to let go of them,’ Laurence suggests later when the bulk of the preparations are complete.

  ‘Let go of what, whom?’

  ‘Your characters,’ he says. ‘Perhaps you have to let them decide what’s right, let them find their own direction. Just sit back and wait and maybe they’ll tell you where they want to go.’

  ‘Like people?’ she says with a sigh.

  ‘Yes, just like people.’

  ‘But what if I made them up just so that for once in my life I get to call the shots?’

  He shrugs. ‘Then you find another way to call the shots, I suppose. But characters have to be true to themselves, don’t they? Just like people. Isn’t that what you were telling me earlier?’

  ‘Do come outside, Phyl,’ Margot says from the kitchen doorway. ‘Everyone’s enjoying the food so much and they want to tell you that and to nick your recipes.’

  ‘In a minute,’ Phyllida says. ‘I’m waiting for a batch of s
pinach and ricotta puffs. I’ll bring them into the garden when they’re ready.’ She is way out of her comfort zone; all those women talking, laughing, hugging each other, introducing their daughters, sitting on the wall, on the steps, on the grass, at the tables, eating, drinking champagne. Margot has always done this warm fuzzy stuff about friendship, but Phyllida, older and – she has always believed – wiser, never trusted it. Their parents hadn’t trusted it either, all that getting involved with other people. Family was what was important and you never knew what might happen when you opened yourself up like this to others.

  ‘Ridiculous,’ their mother had said one day when Margot, then in her fifties and divorced, had gone away to a women’s retreat in the Blue Mountains. ‘I can’t imagine what she thinks she’s doing.’

  And Phyllida, who had always found it hard to make friends, felt entirely justified in agreeing with her. She had been aloof as a child, and had become an aloof teacher distancing herself from the breathy crushes of teenage girls and cautious of the various alliances between nuns and lay teachers in the staffroom. But whatever else she was doing, it was always as Donald’s wife. By grounding herself in that identity and the social status it provided, Phyllida had established a solid foundation in a role in which she excelled. She was the perfect hostess, making Donald’s friends and colleagues feel at home, getting the men to talk about themselves, making them feel important and interesting, she’d always been good at that. And her voluntary work was part of it too. Looking back now it seems strange, outdated, almost embarrassing, like some Edwardian gentlewoman, keeping to herself but performing wifely and social duties appropriate to her position. Watching these women, the pleasure they take in each other’s company, the ease with which they mix across the generations, their openness to each other, Phyllida’s own life now seems like a performance.

  And what if she does go out there? Nudges perhaps, whispers? Perhaps they are talking about her right now, sly remarks under their breath. Have Margot’s friends heard about May Wong? Phyllida honestly believes that she could have dealt with the financial shocks had it not been for the revelation of Donald’s infidelity. Was she the only one who never suspected anything? Had everyone at those endless dinner parties been pitying her? Did everyone at the hospital know? A part of her is determined that she will not allow Donald to define her future as he defined their life together, but she has no idea how to change things. And the shame she feels at having been deceived for so long is crippling her. How, she wonders, is she expected to leap this huge gap between her and the women out there? The mere thought of it makes her nauseous and weak.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Shepperd,’ says a voice behind her. ‘Those little quiches were to die for – in fact all the food is divine. I’m Alyssa Dunne, by the way. You know my mum, Jean Dunne – she plays golf with you.’

  Phyllida dries her hands on a tea towel and takes Alyssa’s outstretched hand. ‘Oh! Yes, I do know Jean,’ she says. ‘She’s a terrific golfer, far better than me.’

  ‘Better than most I think,’ Alyssa says, then, dropping her voice, ‘but between you and me she can’t make a quiche to save her life. Anyway she sent me in to get you – she’s over there by the lantana, with my gran, Glenda. She knows your sister from years ago. And I know Margot too because she and Lexie and I are in the CASE campaign together.’

  Phyllida looks confused. ‘The what?’

  ‘CASE,’ Alyssa says. ‘Oh, you don’t know about it. Wow, well, we have heaps to tell you then. Come on over and join us and we can tell you about it. Time to get out of the kitchen.’

  ‘But there are spinach and ricotta puffs in the –’

  ‘Lexie and Wendy are going to look after them,’ Alyssa says. ‘Change of shift – look, they’re on their way.’ And she slips an arm through Phyllida’s and leads her out of the kitchen and into the intimidating company of the women in the garden.

  Perched on a low wall and partially concealed by an overgrown lantana, Margot watches as Alyssa comes out of the house arm-in-arm with Phyllida. They pause at the top of the verandah steps, talking for a moment, and as Emma joins them, they head for the table where Alyssa’s mother and grandmother are sitting with Dot. Margot’s toes curl and her stomach clenches with tension as Dot turns to her sister and stands up to greet her. She can’t actually hear what’s being said, and she’s praying that Dot will not revive the Falada disaster. She watches as Dot offers Phyllida her own seat, next to Jean Dunne, and others shuffle their chairs to make room for her. Phyllida looks awkward, nervous and rather vulnerable, and while she understands that her sister is totally out of her element, Margot is also irritated by her unease. ‘For goodness sake, get over it, Phyl,’ she whispers, ‘they’re just a group of women.’

  Watching them Margot wonders how it must feel to be so ill at ease. Why, she wonders, does her sister not feel that thread of connection and understanding that works when women – well, at least some women – get together? She wants to shake Phyllida out of the prison she has built for herself, force her to see what she has missed, and what is there for her now if only she will grasp it. But Laurence was right, she can no more control these women than she can her fictional characters – she’s created a situation, and all she can do is hope that Phyllida recognises that it has something transformative to offer her. In the same way, Margot supposes, that starting to write again is transforming her: ‘Better than a makeover,’ she had said to Dot a couple of days ago.

  ‘But it is a makeover in a way,’ Dot had said, ‘because you’re transforming your inner life – it shows, Margot. And it’s a far better look than you’d get from cosmetic surgery and a whole lot cheaper!’

  It is as though she can only find her way now through the writing. Rather than chasing that old need for certainty, the heart of the adventure of writing lies in its uncertainty, the way it moves with its own momentum. Almost daily she asks herself if this is what other writers feel, the desperate grasping at the threads, the terror of returning each day to the keyboard wondering will it work again or will it evaporate? She sees everything now through a writer’s eyes; it makes her a ruthless carpetbagger poised to cull what she can, store it, taste it, experiment with it; fragments of other lives, shards of strange light, flashes of insight and moments of confusion, a phrase, a sentence, a sigh, a gesture – nothing will be wasted. Everything has possibilities.

  ‘All my characters are parts of myself, I’m all of them and none of them,’ she had heard one of her favourite writers say once in an interview. ‘Whatever I am writing it’s always about me, although of course, it’s not me. “Madame Bovary c’est moi!” as Flaubert said. Writing is my way of learning to know parts of myself.’

  At the time Margot had thought him pretentious. How, she wondered, could everything be about him, what arrogance, and he even had the hubris to admit it in public. She had almost decided to boycott his next book but had finally succumbed and buried herself in it, searching for that man – the author – at its heart, but all she could detect was an occasional faint whisper of him like a distant sound carried on a breeze. The book still delighted her and she read on, ceasing to think of its creator. And now she understands what he meant. It is lonely, incredibly lonely, because if she could speak about this to anyone here in this garden a furrow would appear between their eyebrows, there would be a tilted head, a questioning look and a cautious, guarded response. They might well be thinking she was losing touch with reality, but maybe that is just what she needs – less reality, more creative fantasy. Perhaps this is what her resentment has been about all these years, too much reality, or just too much attention paid to it. Margot sighs, gets up and walks over to talk to her guests. Writing, she thinks, is like a benign virus; it infects everything with possibilities, one just needs to learn how to harvest them.

  Dot is feeling her age, or possibly more than her age, she has never been good at late nights. Margot’s party was a mix of nostalgia, pleasure and subtle attempts to recruit people to the campaign. Now
, as she sits here on her bed, almost too tired to bend down and take off her shoes, she thinks again about Phyllida, who had appeared beside her and took her place at the table, silent, nervous and ill at ease. Dot would almost rather have been sitting with the old, superior and distant Phyllida than this wraith who seemed to want to disappear. It was only when the conversation turned to the campaign that she began to take an interest. She had read an article, she said, about teenage girls who wanted to be glamour models.

  ‘They go along to these revolting sessions run by men’s magazines, strip off to those awful thong things and crawl all over a bed while a load of boorish drunken men vote for the one who looks the most sexy. And guess what the prize is? The chance to model naked. Free of charge, for the magazine. Can’t they see they’re being exploited?’ she’d said. ‘Glamour modelling, I ask you! What a misnomer that is.’

  ‘It’s sickening, isn’t it?’ Dot had said. ‘At one time I believed we’d never have to fight these same battles all over again, but it’s worse now, because the tentacles of this new sexism are everywhere, even reaching out for little girls. What’s so worrying is that so many people just don’t see how dangerous it is.’

  ‘I’m going through a difficult time at the moment,’ Phyllida had said later when Dot gave her a flier and suggested she join them. ‘But I’ll think about it. I do need to find something new and useful to do.’

  To her own surprise Dot had rather admired Phyllida tonight, had even thought she’d like to get to know her a bit better.

  ‘Why are you so keen to sign her up?’ Alyssa had asked later.

  ‘Well, originally I wanted her as a route to Emma,’ Dot had said. ‘The two of them are really close. Emma’s a PR person so she could be really useful. But tonight I was thinking more about Phyllida in her own right. There’s lots of energy simmering there and I suspect she’s a great organiser.’

  ‘I am so manipulative I almost disgust myself,’ Dot says aloud now, finally relieving herself of the shoes by kicking them off. They fly across the room and land by the door and she topples backwards onto the bed. ‘But the ends do justify the means, or will do, I hope.’ Lying there, spread-eagled on her back in the darkness, the business of getting ready for bed just seems too hard and she hauls herself further up the bed and crawls under the quilt with relief.