by David Brooks
16
The Garden
(1951–1973)
They had met at a bus stop. There was little dignity in it. And they met laughing. He had driven to Clovelly to inspect the proposed site for a set of apartments, not a project in which he was particularly interested, but which he would have to assign, and the plans for which he would then have to oversee. The traffic had been so slow and the day so warm that the car had overheated with half a mile still to go. Already late, he left it where it was and walked the rest of the way. When he returned, the car, although cooled enough, would not start: a manifold-hose had split, and the moment he tried the ignition it slipped from its housing; the engine was gasping for air. The client’s agent, an older, portly, red-faced man with a too-tight necktie, had insisted on coming back with him, in case there was just such a problem, and in the end gave him a hand pushing the gleaming new Holden – the ‘pride of Australia’ – the two-and-a-half blocks Cityward to the nearest garage. On the way, suit-jackets draped through the back windows, sleeves rolled up, ties loosened, perspiration pouring from their back-tilted hat-brims, they passed a young blonde woman at a bus-stop. She was watching their manoeuvres with amusement, and when he glanced up she seemed unable to resist calling out an ironic offer of help. A middle-aged man and another, even older, trying to bring on heart-attacks. He smiled, called out something about needing the exercise, and was thankful, in truth, as he bent again to the boot of the car, that his profile was somewhat more youthful than his companion’s up there by the steering wheel.
The popped hose was a symptom only. The problem was not major, but would require a part that might take two or three days to come. It was unlikely he would have the car before Friday. When he reached the bus-stop, twenty minutes after he had first passed it, the young woman was still there. ‘Just as well the bus is late,’ she smiled as he reached her. ‘What’s wrong with the car?’ And he told her, as best he could, exaggerating his mechanical incompetence a little, and they both laughed, and boarded together when the bus came, and talked much of the way to Central Station.
She lived in Clovelly, in an upper-storey flat overlooking the beach, and was a secretary in the local council chambers. He was surprised at how much she knew about his project already, and about local building procedures and regulations. But now she wanted to work in the City, in the state public service, where there were greater opportunities. She had been given the day off to go into town for the qualifying examination. When the bus reached Central Station they took the same train into the City, he to Wynyard, she on to the Museum Station. He shook her hand as he prepared to get off, said what a pleasure it had been to meet her, and wished her luck in her examination. They had introduced themselves, but by the time he made his way up to George Street through the concessions – the shoe-repair place, the watchmaker, the tobacconist, the newspaper stand, the chemist – he realised that he had forgotten her name.
That might have been an end to it – would have been, had they not met two months later on a street corner, waiting for a Walk sign, on a day when neither had a pressing need to be elsewhere. It was a fine day, mild for Sydney in early December. A slight breeze wafted the harbour up George Street. She expressed surprise at seeing him and he explained that he had just heard from a client cancelling a planned business lunch. He had, suddenly, some time free and was now on his way to a sandwich shop. Having done well enough in her exam, she had just had an interview at the Parliament Buildings and had been given the rest of the day off. On impulse – it seemed as if he had trapped himself – he asked her whether she would like to have lunch with him, and when she accepted, saying that she had herself been thinking of eating somewhere near the water, he told her of the pub at McMahons Point where he had intended to meet his client. They could get a fair sit-down lunch there, and almost touch the water as they ate. Within half an hour they were on the ferry, passing under the Harbour Bridge. It seemed innocent enough. All they did was talk. There was no flirtatiousness, no innuendo. In fact he studiously avoided it. Mentioned Margaret. They styled the lunch a celebration, in advance, of the job she was sure to get, and he gave her his work number, so that she could let him know. After the lunch and a long, relaxed silence watching the gulls squabble for bread under the Port Jackson figs only a few yards from their table, they left for the ferry, travelled back together, and parted, again with a handshake, outside the station at Circular Quay. Each hoped to see the other again, as new friends might, but beyond that there were no further thoughts.
***
That had been in what he and Margaret characteristically spoke of each year as the calm before the storm, the last week before the heady season of pre-Christmas parties and wind-up drinks at the opera company, the firm, client companies, government agencies. And then there was Christmas itself, and the holiday week, and the yearly and obligatory suspension of Sydney business during the heat of January when colleagues took their families to the north or south coasts, or up into the often-illusory cool of the mountains. Ellen had come down with her now teenage children to stay with the Gardners, and there had been an excursion to the Zoo, a day at Manly, another at Bronte Beach. Otherwise, hot as January could be – and because he in fact found February worse – he preferred to work while the interruptions were fewer, holding the fort for his partners in order to earn some time later in the year when there was greater actual pressure to seek relief from. It made sense, after all, he and Margaret being the ones with no children, and so not bound like the others to arrange their lives about school holidays.
She called him in the third week of January. To wish him a prosperous 1952. She had got the job and had been working since the second of the year in the State Parliament offices, only a few blocks from him. She would have called earlier, she said, but had assumed he was away. They talked briefly, making the appropriate enquiries about one another’s Christmases. Now that they were neighbours, she said in closing, did he think it would be alright – not a breach of etiquette – to invite him for a drink, one day after work, to celebrate? ‘No,’ he laughed, ‘I don’t think it would be a breach. I’ll even tell Margaret if you like. I’m sure a celebratory drink would be acceptable.’ Although, in the end, he had not told. It was not that he had made any conscious decision not to; only, perhaps, that some things are intuited before they are given clear shape by the mind, since the unconscious, too, makes choices. And in any case it had not quite happened like that.
The second of February was viciously hot in Sydney. By lunchtime the temperature had reached ninety-eight degrees. There were bushfires in the Blue Mountains and spot-fires on the north shore of the harbour; a smoke haze hung over the city and the faint smell of burning forest was in every room and corridor. He managed to continue working, with every fan in the office purloined and turned in his direction, the edges of his plans pinned securely to the drafting table and the test match from Adelaide on the radio, but the desire for one long, cold beer before setting out home, and the chance that, by such means, he might wait out the rush hour on the Parramatta Road, a torture in this weather, brought Jennifer to mind, and the promised drink. He called her office but the person who answered could not find her and presumed that she was not there. Deciding to have the drink nonetheless, he then called Margaret. He had forgotten that she had agreed to talk to a music appreciation group at the church. ‘Do what you like,’ she said, evidently irritable in the heat. ‘It might even be an idea to stay in there and have dinner at Lorenzini’s, if you find you can eat at all in this weather. There’s nothing here.’ Jennifer called a few minutes later. Although he had left no message, she had guessed the call was from him, or hoped so. Wasn’t the heat terrible, and the fires? And yes, she would love a drink. Where?
The drinks at the Imperial on Macquarie Street, just across from the Botanic Gardens, were the most expensive in the City, but for that reason the place was less likely than others to be crowded after such a day. Just below street level and behind walls of thick sand
stone, it was cool and dimly lit. Cigars luxuriated in their humidors. Large fans turned slowly overhead. The beer was ice-cold. He drank the first quickly and slowed down over the second while she nursed hers. Her hair was loose, clean, shining as if it had just been washed, her face soft and fresh and showing no signs of having been through a day such as this. Her dress looked as if it had just been put on. Her hands, her long fingers, were as unblemished as new porcelain. His own, he noticed as he took out a cigarette, were darker, weathered, an embarrassing mass of lines. The black hairs on the back of his fingers, scarcely noticed before, seemed suddenly porcine. He felt crude, ugly, out of place even in his own suit.
They talked about her job. About his. The projects he was working on, the State Parliament. He asked about her past, her family. He was curious that she seemed so independent, at her age – what was her age? – living alone – was it alone? – and wondered how long she had been doing so. Did she have a boyfriend? Surely she must. Her stepfather had died two years before, she said; she had never known her actual father; and her mother already looked as if she would marry again – a man Jennifer had met and did not like at all. Not that she had liked her stepfather either. Far from it. They had never been a close family. She hadn’t seen her mother in twelve months. He sensed that there were other difficulties there, as well as the dislike of the prospective second stepfather, and did not pursue the matter. And, yes, she did live alone. She had been left just enough, when her stepfather died – guilt money, she called it – to buy the flat in Clovelly, and with no rent to pay was able to live quite comfortably on her salary. She had just turned twenty-two, she told him, after a brief pause in the conversation, as if sensing his need to know. He was surprised. He had been trying to guess, had fixed on twenty-five or six, perhaps even a little older.
She turned the talk toward him, asked about his wife. She was intrigued, she said, since he had hardly mentioned her before, and he found himself talking about the opera, Margaret’s voice, the way he had first heard it, and then her teaching, her career, the disappointments, the war. Even the dream of the Opera House, how it came and went.
‘You seem so lost,’ she said, and it shocked him, with the force of an intrusion. It had not occurred to him that he might be. He had not thought of himself that way. Nor had he imagined that someone else might think such a thing, let alone give it utterance. It felt like an abrupt and unexpected intensification in their dealings with each other, something he had not thought to guard himself against, as if he had been swimming, at the beach, and just discovered that he could no longer touch bottom. He was suddenly self-conscious, realised, glancing around, that he must look like a father with his daughter, hoped that this was so. And, as a father might – but how could he know, not being one? – he rose, and looked at his watch, and said something about not keeping her, about needing to get home.
It was just after six. Out on the street it was much cooler than it had been. A breeze in from the ocean coasted to them through the wide gardens opposite, or perhaps it was a southerly that had arrived, bringing them a sense of plants recovering, awakening green. It was too late to go over there – the gates shut early – and he fought the temptation to tell her that he still had hours free, that they could go out to dinner if they pleased, that the evening was theirs if they wanted it, that they could walk for miles under the huge trees somewhere beside the dark waters of the harbour. Instead they stood awkwardly for a moment on the corner opposite the State Library before going – absurdly, he thought – towards separate stations, in all likelihood to catch the same loop train.
He went home to Strathfield. To the large, dark house. Bleak as it at first appeared, however – the hard light of the hallway, on such a night, exposed only emptiness – it was not difficult to make the place thaw, especially on so warm a night. He turned on other, lesser lights, opened windows and drew the light curtains over them, then sliced ham, made a salad, opened a bottle of wine, found some classical music on the radio, eventually set himself up by lamplight in the armchair on the enclosed part of the verandah, reading, accompanied by a possum in lower branches of the apple tree outside, a hundred moths of all sizes battering the fly-wire screen. When Margaret came home, given a lift by the teacher who had invited her, he was almost asleep over Antic Hay. They sat quietly for half an hour, finishing the wine, speaking of the students and what she had told them. He wanted to tell her about the drink, the girl, what they had talked about, what she had said – sensed that it was somehow the time to do so – but would have had to twist the conversation, and was afraid that if he did so it would give the matter undue emphasis, make it seem as if he were needing to confess. They went to bed, holding each other’s hand a few moments on their backs in the dark before turning each in their separate way, she without asking, he without mentioning. He told himself, as he drifted to sleep, that there was, after all, no need to, that things would go no further, that in fact nothing, so far, had happened. It was some time later that he found himself breaking from sleep, his heart pounding furiously. They had been standing, he and Jennifer, in a shadowed room. A breeze from the bright day outside had been gently stirring the curtains over open glass doors. He had been holding her, most delicately, by the elbows, and she had kissed him, not on the mouth but on the side of his neck, beginning low, near the shoulder; not once, but many small, soft, delicate kisses that had made him think of a bunch of cool, ripe grapes – rich, small kisses that thrilled him almost unbearably. And at last, in the dream, he had reached up, taken her face in his hands.
Something warned him, or at least tried to. Waking up beside Margaret a few mornings later, to bright sunshine and birdsong, finding her still sleeping, he looked at her and thought how much he loved her, and how stupid his brief fantasy of Jennifer had been. He got up, made Margaret her strong, milky coffee, woke her with it. And then, days later, saw Jennifer emerging from St James station with a tall, darkhaired young man. They paused on the top step, laughed about something, and she leant forward and pulled him down to her, kissed him on the cheek before they went separate ways. Daniel was relieved at this indication of normality, this sign of his folly, or at least he told himself so, but all day he was unable to get the scene out of his mind, nor curb very successfully his annoyance. His secretary drew his attention to his irritability. Reflecting upon it, realising its cause, he determined to have no contact with Jennifer again.
The resolution did not last – or, rather, it did, for almost three weeks, but then she called and asked him directly if there was something wrong, and whether she had offended him. In reassuring her, he somehow committed himself to another meeting. When it took place – a late-morning coffee in the Strand Arcade – he mentioned seeing her outside the station and asked, as casually as he could manage, about the boy she’d been with. Michael, she said, a boy from the country whom she’d met a year and a half ago at night school, and somehow taken under her wing. He’d come up to Sydney to get away from his parents’ dairy farm and was working for the Railways, though that had hardly been the adventure he’d been looking for and he was about to join the Army. His father was against it. He’d been in the first war and didn’t want any son of his going through the same thing in Korea. She was inclined to agree with the father, but there was no dissuading Michael and she thought it best to be supportive. She’d been invited down to the farm for a few days last year but hadn’t been able to go in the end and had written a letter of thanks and to apologise, and had found herself in a kind of correspondence with the boy’s mother. They seemed to be good people, but it sounded like a remote and hard life down there; she could see why Michael had wanted to get away from it. From the way she spoke of the boy Daniel could tell that there was no more to it, or – another thing entirely – that there was a lot more, that it was a real, and innocent, friendship.
At first it would be she who would call, not often, perhaps less than once a month. To ask him whether he would like a walk. Because it had been a hard week and s
he needed the air, or to see the autumn colours. Once – he drank in the news, thirsty for it – it was simply that she had been thinking about him, wanted to see him. They would meet just inside the gates of the Botanic Gardens or down by the kiosk, or if after work, with the Gardens soon closing, near the Art Gallery or elsewhere in the Domain, to walk about Farm Cove and once, for a change, the docks at Woolloomooloo. And, eventually he too began to telephone. The calm, the chance to talk in this particular way with someone who wanted so little of him, braced him, gave him a kind of energy he had long gone without. And he very quickly told himself that there was a clear correlation to his marriage. If he had been able to talk like this with Margaret, if they had this calm, quiet wonder at things, this sharing – had they ever had it? of course they had, though it now seemed irrecoverable – these other conversations might not have begun.
He would try it: he would go home with some simple thing to share, some word or idea or incident that seemed touched, somehow, with this lightness, this peace, but although he could see that Margaret sometimes tried, that she reached out toward it, it would be swamped, inevitably, in some new anxiety or business or irritation, as if reality, this reality, had no place or time for such things. And if he spoke of it directly – that they had lost an old intimacy, an old simplicity, a capacity for wonder – there would more likely be an argument than a resolution to try. On one occasion she laughed, and her clear, ruthless logic was cruel, missed the point utterly. How could she unknow all she knew? she asked him. How could they forget that they had shared all they had shared together, like people suffering a chronic memory loss, needing to be told the same old stories, over and over? There were stages in knowledge and feelings, she said, and he heard himself saying the same. They could not be a boy and girl together again, with the world again opening wondrously before them – they had never been that: they had known too much, seen too much, before they had even met. There were certain things that young people felt and knew, other things you felt only when you were older. They were older, he was older, and he might as well face it. And he had no answer, there could be no answer, because this too was true.
