by Liz Byrski
Oliver was hovering, moving cautiously from one group of people to the edge of another group. He was trying not to look like the original spare prick at the wedding, and not to look as terminally bored as he felt.
The ceremony had been very nice; in fact, he had been quite affected by the sweetness, the tradition of it all – the church, the white flowers, the old-style vows – but then there had been the endless standing about outside the church while hundreds of photographs were taken of various combinations of people from every possible angle. And now, here they were back at the Petersons’ place, standing about in this vast marquee, drinking champagne and waiting while more photographs were taken before the formal stuff could begin, and he still hadn’t spoken to anyone.
It was almost five o’clock and Oliver reckoned that it would be at least another couple of hours before he could reasonably expect to escape without offending Gayle or Angie. The guests’ tables were set for six or eight people. The bridal party’s larger table was decorated with swathes of white chiffon held in place by bunches of white lilies and trailing green ivy. On a dais near the entrance a string quartet played a familiar selection of chamber music but, stacked behind the players, a set of drums, wind instruments, an amplifier and large speakers threatened dance music. Oliver hoped beyond hope that he would be able to leave before the dancing began.
He had been surprised by Gayle’s home, the size of the house and the garden, the swimming pool, the general reek of money. Wandering inside he’d found himself in a marble-tiled entrance with a somewhat pretentious curving staircase. It was all so unlike Gayle, with her restrained, almost dull suits and pearls, and her unassuming manner. The house had the cold perfection of a display home, and it confused him; he wished that their friendship had remained within the familiar confines of the university campus.
She too was different in this environment. He observed her struggling with the roles of hostess and mother-of-the-bride and saw that the effort was taking its toll. She looked different too, in a full-length dress with long tight sleeves, a mandarin collar and tiny buttons that were covered with the same material. He thought of it as a dark red but he had overheard the woman next to him in the church murmuring to her companion that it was burgundy, and made of raw silk. Oliver thought she looked amazing: sophisticated, elegant, and so unlike her usual self as to be almost unrecognisable. It added to the impression that this, all of it – the house, the marquee, the wedding – was a sort of performance, that it was about something more than a family home, and a family celebration.
Oliver sighed and surveyed the crowds, wondering who he would have to sit next to for the meal. He ambled over to the table plan and pulled out his glasses, though even learning the names of his dining companions wouldn’t be much help as he didn’t know anyone.
‘Hello, Dr Baxter,’ said a voice behind him. ‘Can I interest you in a champagne cocktail, glass of champagne, soft drink?’
‘Simon,’ Oliver said in surprise, spinning round. ‘So this is why your essays are always late! I thought you worked at Mitre Ten.’
‘I do,’ Simon replied, ‘Fridays at Mitre Ten, Sundays and Mondays at the call centre, and this whenever I get the chance. Gotta pay the rent and stuff – it just means a bit of juggling. I should warn you that the champagne cocktails are lethal.’
‘Good,’ Oliver said. ‘I’ll have one.’
Simon grinned and turned the tray so that Oliver could help himself. ‘Weddings not your thing?’
‘A little out of the habit, I suppose, and I don’t really know anyone except Mrs Peterson and her daughter.’
‘There are worse things than being a waiter at a wedding,’ Simon said. ‘At least I don’t have to listen to the speeches. Well, I’d better get on . . .’ He turned away and was stopped in his tracks by a red-haired woman in a cream dress and jacket who looked as tense as Oliver felt.
‘What’s in the champagne cocktails?’
‘Heaps of alcohol,’ Simon said with another grin. ‘They’ll blow your head off.’
‘Give me one,’ the woman said, ‘and come back soon with some more.’ She glanced at Oliver’s glass. ‘You too?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I felt I needed something to get me going.’
‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘Or keep me vertical and awake. How long do you think this will go on for – oops, sorry. You’re not a member of the family, are you?’
Oliver shook his head. ‘No, a friend of Gayle’s from uni, and Angie used to be one of my students. I don’t know anyone else here.’
‘Really? Neither do I. Why don’t we stick together? I’m Sonya, by the way. Angie works for me.’
Gayle’s face ached from the effort of smiling; she felt as though she were trembling but the hand holding her glass of champagne was impressively steady. It was the tension, she supposed, and the fact that she’d had nothing to eat since a slice of toast at seven that morning.
All around her, family and friends milled happily, greeting each other, laughing, talking and shedding the odd tear of surprise or joy. Gayle longed for a comfort zone, someone with whom she could be herself. At any other time she and Angie would have been companionably spotting relatives or friends, commenting on clothes, sharing their own jokes. But today there was no comfort zone, because not even her best friend was privy to the sense of desperation Gayle felt when she stared into the black hole of the months and years ahead.
‘You look fabulous,’ Trisha said, slipping her arm through Gayle’s. ‘Even the superintendent of the fashion police is impressed.’
‘You should be – after all, you helped me choose it,’ Gayle replied, looking down at the burgundy silk. ‘D’you think it’s all going all right?’
‘Absolutely, it’s perfect,’ Trisha said. ‘Angie looks gorgeous, the ceremony was lovely . . . Just look around you – everyone’s having a wonderful time.’
‘But it’s all so – well, so over the top. Angie and Tony didn’t really want anything so big. It was Brian, really, insisting on everything.’
‘And it’s lovely, honestly, Gayle. Relax, enjoy yourself. It’s your only daughter’s wedding.’
Gayle swallowed the last of her champagne and watched Brian talking to his brother, who’d flown in from Darwin. For the moment at least, it all seemed to be going well. They were still in the stage of backslapping one-upmanship that passed for goodwill, not yet at the point where family tensions and pent-up aggression strained the seams of their suits.
She looked around for Oliver and spotted him on the far side of the marquee, talking to Angie’s boss. He was wearing a charcoal suit with a white shirt and a silvery blue tie. She had never seen him in formal clothes before. He seemed almost alien, at odds with what she knew of him. He was concentrating on what Sonya was saying, his rather long, beaky face turned towards her, one elbow on the table, his tortoiseshell-framed glasses dangling from his hand.
Gayle wished that she hadn’t invited him, or that he’d had the foresight to refuse. If she’d left things as they had been for years, confined by unspoken agreement to meeting on the campus, she could have related it all to him later; toned down the family tensions and the embarrassing excess. But he had seen her here, at the heart of it, and she could not disclaim her part. She was exposing her other life and she feared Oliver might not like what he saw. She sighed and made her way across to his and Sonya’s table, cementing the smile back onto her face and wondering how she could talk pleasantries about the ceremony, the flowers, the music and how beautiful Angie looked, with someone to whom she normally talked in such different terms, and with Sonya, who, she suspected, was feeling as out of it as Oliver must have been.
Brian was surprised by the way he felt. In the church he had thought himself dangerously close to tears, an entirely unfamiliar sensation. The pride he had felt as he and Angie walked together up the aisle had evaporated quite suddenly once the ceremony was over and she walked back down it on Tony’s arm.
Since his return from Sydney t
wo days earlier, Brian had gained considerable satisfaction from the throb of activity; the house and garden were full of people, cutting grass, setting up tables, delivering presents. The phone rang constantly and teams of workmen were erecting the marquee and laying the dance floor. He had strolled around feeling like some feudal lord, questioning Gayle, Angie and various contractors about who was doing what and why. The pleasure he derived from knowing that it was all down to him, his money, his status, proved an antidote to his unease about what was brewing at work. He watched with pride as Angie phoned bridesmaids, and hurried from the florist to the manicurist and back again, and as Gayle, with an absence of fuss and a large number of colour-coded lists, directed everything. It was women’s stuff, of course, and best left to them, but Brian enjoyed his sense of ownership of it all.
But now, standing near the entrance to the marquee, the stiff white collar biting into his neck, the dove grey waistcoat uncomfortably constricting his gut and the champagne glass turning warm in his hand, Brian felt a sense of sadness, an emptiness that was totally unexpected and somewhat unnerving.
‘This’ll set you back a bit,’ his cousin Baz said, helping himself to another drink and splashing some of it onto Brian’s lapel.
Brian squared his shoulders. ‘Plenty more where this came from, Baz,’ he said, unable to resist rising to the same old bait. Everyone in his family pushed his buttons with their snide comments about how well he was doing. Normally he’d really rub their noses in it, telling them he was paying for the honeymoon and about how he was giving Angie and Tony a big deposit for their house. But somehow his heart wasn’t in it today. His heart, it seemed, had been left behind at the altar and now there were hours of talking and dancing and celebrating ahead and all Brian wanted to do was lie down alone in a darkened room with a bottle of scotch. He set his half-empty glass on a table and beckoned to a waiter, who rapidly materialised beside him with a tray.
‘Look, son,’ he said in a low voice, guiding the young man out into the garden, ‘do me a favour. In through the front of the house, first door on the right, there’s a bar. Pour me a very large Johnnie Walker with soda and ice, and stuff some fruit or something in it so it looks like that fruit cup. Then keep an eye on my glass for the rest of the evening and keep ’em coming.’ And Simon, pocketing a generous tip, headed off towards the house.
Sonya, only slightly the worse for wear after her diet of champagne cocktails, had claimed a vantage point on a low stone wall by the marquee and watched as Angie and Tony came down the front steps of the house towards a white Rolls Royce, its bumper decked with old cans and saucepans. It was already after ten and it was clear that as soon as the bridal couple had left for the airport, the nature of the party would change.
‘I’m going to get some water,’ Oliver said. ‘I think I’ve done my dash on the dance floor for tonight. Would you like to head off soon and have a coffee down by the jetty?’
Sonya smiled, watching as Angie, dressed now in comfortable clothes for the honeymoon flight to Fiji, tossed her bouquet towards a cluster of young women who leapt in unison to catch it. ‘Sounds good to me,’ she said. ‘Let’s wait for a dignified moment to thank Gayle and what’s-his-name, and then do a runner.’
Catching her eye through the crowd, Angie waved and Sonya, struck suddenly by a bolt of unexpected envy, blew her a kiss. It was the excitement, the newness, the adventure that seemed, in that moment, so desirable. Marriage did not figure in Sonya’s fantasies – she had already vowed not to make the same mistake again. It was the promise of change that she envied, the feeling that Angie was setting out on a different journey, an opportunity for reinvention. It surprised her that despite her own cynicism about marriage, a wedding still had the power to revive those feelings. Perhaps the champagne had got to her after all.
Near the open passenger door of the Rolls, Angie stood on tiptoe to hug her father, and then turned to Gayle. Mother and daughter clung together briefly until Gayle stepped back, holding both Angie’s hands, speaking to her under the cheers and the laughter, and Angie, with a final wave, slipped into the rear seat and the door closed behind her. A cheer went up as the car moved smoothly out of the drive, pots and pans trailing noisily behind it.
At the foot of the steps to the front door, Gayle and Brian stood side by side not touching. He was rigid and red-faced with a smile so taut it was almost a grimace, and she was dwarfed by his bulk, her earlier pretence of happiness stripped away to reveal an expression that bordered on misery.
‘She looks so . . . so lost – forlorn, really,’ Sonya said, turning to Oliver and discovering he had gone in search of the water. ‘Bereft, totally bereft.’ She sighed, there was, of course, something far worse than feeling adrift in one’s own life and that was to be shackled to someone for whom your feelings had become unbearable.
As the clanking of pots and pans faded into the night, Gayle bit her lip and tasted her own blood. It was over; before long the older members of the party would drift off home, while the younger generation danced on and Brian and his brothers drank even more of the night away.
‘How are you feeling?’ Trisha asked, slipping an arm around her shoulders.
Gayle shrugged. ‘I’m trying hard to be happy for her, for them . . .’
‘I know,’ Trisha said. ‘Letting go is a bugger, isn’t it, but honestly, it gets easier in time. In a couple of weeks they’ll be home from the honeymoon and you can be a fully fledged mother-in-law, and interfere to your heart’s content.’
Gayle managed a smile. ‘I guess so . . .’ She marshalled her energy. ‘It did go well, didn’t it? No dramas, not even any embarrassing moments.’
Trisha hugged her. ‘Not one. It was perfect. And now it’s time for you. Angie was like my Lindy, really independent, but somehow when they get married and leave it’s quite liberating.’
‘I suppose so,’ Gayle said, hearing her own lack of conviction. Across the garden she saw Oliver clambering awkwardly onto the wall alongside Sonya. He handed her a plastic bottle of water and unscrewed his own, chatting as he did so and then taking a long drink. She was glad he’d found someone to talk to – it might have taken the edge off the tension she had felt in him earlier in the evening.
Sometimes, Gayle thought, you could make silly mistakes mixing one part of your life with another. Sometimes it was best to keep things safely separate, in neat little compartments where they couldn’t contaminate each other and create a cauldron full of messy emotions to challenge the boundaries of friendship. All she hoped now was that any damage to her friendship with Oliver was minimal.
FOUR
On Saturday morning a week after the wedding, Oliver wandered down into Fremantle, bought the weekend papers and sat at a table on the cappuccino strip, sipping a flat white. The town was already busy with early morning walkers and sociable coffee drinkers. At the far end of South Terrace the market traders were unloading merchandise and uncovering their stalls, and the smell of coffee, croissants and bacon wafted from the cafés. This was one of his favourite times of the week: good coffee, the town gearing up for the day, the mildly superior sense of ownership that comes with living in a place to which people flock for its unique atmosphere.
Apart from his frustrations about his failures with women, Oliver enjoyed a relatively peaceful life free of anxiety. He owned a small, tastefully renovated stone house on high ground close to the war memorial from where he could see across the rooftops to the port. He lived simply and quietly, socialised occasionally with his friends from university, and although he reflected gloomily on issues of national and international importance, from American imperialism to the lack of a compassionate immigration policy, he generally found little to worry about in personal terms. This morning, however, his pleasant Saturday routine was overhung with mild anxiety.
Returning home the previous evening he had found a message on his answering machine from Sonya, asking him to call her. It was the second message she had left that week. Oliver liked Son
ya very much. She had rescued him from boredom and alienation at the wedding, they had laughed a lot, and she had managed to coax him onto the dance floor, where he had caught a brief glimpse of his younger self; of those days when he had enjoyed dancing for its subtle foreplay and the promise of what might lie ahead. But Sonya was not his type. She was a robust woman both physically and in her personality, and Oliver was attracted to quietly spoken, small-framed women with finer features. It must have been the excess of champagne cocktails followed by several glasses of wine that had blurred his judgement, because they had ended up at Sonya’s place just before midnight and Oliver was surprised to find himself with his hand up Sonya’s skirt, and her hand unzipping his fly.
‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ he remembered asking at one point and Sonya, kicking her shoes across the bedroom floor and throwing her skirt after them, had assured him that she was absolutely certain.
It was so long since Oliver had had sex that he suffered a moment of sheer panic as the prospect of embarrassing failure flashed before his eyes. But Sonya’s ample breasts released from a cream lace bra restored his faith in himself, and despite the fact that he had always claimed to be a small-breast man, he abandoned himself to the moment. Indeed, to a considerable number of moments that lasted well into the wee small hours. It was only when he woke with a mild headache, gritty eyes and a taste like rusty nails in his mouth that Oliver cursed his own lack of self-restraint and wondered what would happen next.
Together they had sipped black coffee in Sonya’s kitchen, trying to make conversation and failing miserably. Transformed by sobriety from the unexpected lust of the previous night, they seemed to Oliver to be two well-mannered but seriously mismatched middle-aged people struggling to escape from an awkward situation.
Later that day and throughout the following week, Oliver remained convinced he had made a fool of himself, and hoped he hadn’t been offensive. Initially he thought he would hear nothing from Sonya, which was a relief on one level but disappointing on another, as he had really enjoyed her company. The phone calls had put him on edge. What did she want? What should he do? He clearly couldn’t just ignore her messages, but if she were calling to suggest an action replay, how would he extricate himself without causing offence? He stared at the Weekend Australian with the discord of his uncharacteristic indiscretion disturbing his usual sense of calm.
