Gang of Four

by Liz Byrski

  ‘Phew!’ said Robin, refilling their water glasses. ‘Whatever got into her this morning?’

  Isabel leaned back in her chair, exhausted by the tension. ‘I knew this was going to be difficult, but I didn’t really expect such hostility. I seem to have upset her dreadfully. I’ll give her a call later.’

  Sally shook her head. ‘Let it go, Isabel. She’ll sort it out, it’s not personal.’

  ‘I know, but I didn’t want to upset her, or any of you – sorry.’

  Robin reached out to squeeze her hand. ‘There’s nothing to apologise for. I honestly think it’s wonderful. You’re very strong, Isabel. You must have thought about how difficult it will be with Doug, and probably the kids too.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I’ve thought about it endlessly but I keep coming back to the feeling that I am actually entitled to some time to myself after all these years.’

  ‘I suspect they’ll tell you that you can have time to yourself at home, that they’ll give you space,’ Sally said.

  ‘Or, like Grace, they’ll suggest you go away on your own for a couple of weeks,’ Robin added.

  ‘It’s not enough,’ Isabel said, hearing the note of desperation in her own voice. ‘I need more.’

  As they walked slowly from the coffee shop a gentle breeze swept in from the sea and whispered through the pines bordering the park that wound down to the beach. They paused in silence, looking down on the creamy white sand and the glittering blue expanse of the ocean, ruffled now to a slight swell of waves edged with crisp white foam.

  ‘Sometimes I look at this and think I’m in paradise,’ Isabel said. ‘And then I look again and think it’s a prison that I’ve chosen. Somewhere so fortunate and beautiful that to yearn for something else, for change, would be disloyal and ungrateful.’

  ‘There’s nothing ungrateful or disloyal about wanting time away, time to yourself,’ Sally said. ‘In fact, it can even be about renewing your relationship with the place and the people you’re retreating from. But I don’t think Doug and the family will see it that way. They’ll feel threatened, so they’ll almost certainly see it as selfishness.’

  ‘Is that how you see it?’ Isabel asked.

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Me neither,’ said Robin. ‘Look, I’m single, but I’m longing to be free from all the claims on my time and energy, so with all your commitments you must feel all that multiplied by thousands. I envy you having the courage to do it.’ She put on her sunglasses and searched for her car keys. ‘When will you talk to Doug? This week?’

  Isabel nodded. ‘Yes, it’s not fair to leave it any longer. I’ve booked for the middle of May. I’m dreading telling him.’

  Sally took her arm as they strolled across the car park. ‘We could meet next Saturday. Talk over how it went.’

  TWO

  Friendships hang together like a house of cards. One person takes a deep breath, the cards shift and flutter, none is untouched. Isabel took the deep breath and the cards shifted. They had known each other for years; Isabel first met Sally when she bought one of her paintings at an exhibition. Grace and Sally met at yoga and Robin and Isabel met when they sat beside each other at an International Women’s Day breakfast. They were extended family, easier to get along with and often more reliable than their own families. They were sounding boards, shoulders to cry on; they had given each other support, encouragement, understanding without judgment. They called themselves the Gang of Four. A dramatic action on the part of one was bound to affect the others.

  Grace could not quite explain the anger and sense of panic she had felt since Isabel dropped her bombshell. The following week she sat behind the large Tasmanian oak desk in her very comfortable office wondering why she was feeling so bad. Ever since the Sunday morning conversation she had been overwhelmed with pointless, unfocused anxiety.

  At fifty-five Grace was almost the same age as Isabel, older than the other two, and widowed ten years earlier. She had started her working life as a nurse and risen from the wards to become head of nursing education at the university. She had status, respect, high blood pressure, a passion for patchwork quilts (of which she owned some fine examples), a very active social life and a troublesome shopping habit. She was a small-framed woman with an olive complexion and thick, dark hair that she wore in a short, chunky bob. She liked the way that grey was starting to break up and soften the colour. Grace had a natural elegance and she dressed to enhance it. Today she was wearing an olive-green linen suit that had cost her an arm and a leg. She fingered the linen nervously. That particular arm and leg had been earmarked as an extra contribution to her negligible superannuation, but the long skirt cut on the cross and the neat shape of the jacket had seduced her.

  Grace leaned back in her revolving chair. She couldn’t have felt more shaken if Isabel had slapped her in the face. She pulled out the bottom drawer of her desk, kicked off her shoes and put her feet in the drawer. It was a habit she had developed years earlier as night sister in a tiny hospital in rural New South Wales. Her feet got so cold in the early hours that she kept a stone hot water bottle in the bottom drawer of the desk and rested her feet on it to warm them. No need for a hot bottle in the middle of summer in this office, where the temperature was so finely controlled that it gave no indication of the season. But Grace still derived a degree of comfort from putting her feet in the drawer.

  She gazed at the campus lake and the sloping lawns where, on weekdays, students spread themselves on the grass pretending to study, and on Saturdays wedding groups posed for photographers before heading off to their receptions. She thought of Isabel talking about how often she cried with inexplicable anger and resentment, about tears shed with a sense of hopelessness. Grace was used to helping people get their feelings under control. As a ward sister, and later a director of nursing, she had been firm but compassionate, respected and popular with the nurses, able to combine the distance of authority with a reassuring presence. But Grace had never learned to manage her own feelings, or perhaps she had learned to manage them by cutting them off at the roots. In fact, she was so completely out of touch with her own feelings that she didn’t know what was hidden away inside. And she never cried. Never. Not even when she was alone.

  Occasionally her friends challenged her about the time bomb ticking away inside her. ‘That’s nursing training,’ Grace would say with a grin. ‘Can’t feel too much when the patients are dying or their limbs are dropping off all around you.’ But it wasn’t just the nursing training. ‘People rely on us,’ her mother used to say. ‘The vicar’s family has responsibilities, even you, Grace. We all have a role to play, dear, we learn to put others first.’ Her father was an Anglican minister, her mother a quiet, restrained woman who made being the vicar’s wife into a full-time job. It was a somewhat chilly and constrained household, functioning on politeness and a policy of not rocking the boat.

  ‘One day,’ Sally had said to her, ‘all those repressed feelings are going to come up and hit you square in the face.’

  ‘Probably,’ said Grace. She knew intellectually that Sally was likely to be right, but she didn’t understand it at a gut level, so she let it flow in through one ear and straight out the other. ‘But then I’ll have my friends around to help, won’t I?’

  Even when Ron died Grace barely shed a tear. They had been married for twenty years, and while it wasn’t the love story of the century, it wasn’t that bad either. Ron’s death was slow and painful: the chemotherapy had not only failed to halt his cancer but had poisoned his system with nausea and cramps. Grace took two years off to nurse him at home and when the end came she was sad and relieved, but she wasn’t sure which emotion was dominant, because she could only register them as names of feelings rather than identifying and experiencing them. But she did know that no longer having to be a nurse at home seemed like a new lease of life, and in her occasional quiet moments she apologised to Ron and hoped that wherever he had gone (up, she thought, rather than down) he could he
ar and forgive her for being glad about getting her life back.

  Right after the cremation she snapped out of being an efficient home nurse to being an equally efficient grief counsellor for her son, her motherin-law and her sister-in-law. And almost immediately she returned to work. Ron’s long illness and her home nursing had wiped out their savings. She swiftly became director of nursing and was soon offered the job at the university. So here she was, on this clear, warm March day, head of nursing training, member of numerous boards and committees, mother of Tim, a computer scientist, motherin-law of Angela and grandmother of Emily, nearly four, and legal representative for her father, who had Alzheimer’s disease, and her motherin-law, who had Parkinson’s, both in nursing homes. Here she was with her feet in a drawer unable to stop this scary, fluttery feeling in her stomach that had haunted her since the weekend. Well, at least it was on the inside, no one could see it, and so she could pretend it wasn’t happening. Hopefully it would soon go away and she would get back that familiar tense-but-safe feeling with which she was so comfortable. Come to think of it, perhaps it wasn’t Isabel’s irresponsible scheme. Maybe it was simply that she was attempting to give up coffee – it was almost thirty-six hours since she’d had any caffeine.

  Grace took her feet out of the drawer, and went to her secretary’s office and surveyed the coffee pot, which was, as usual, comfortingly half full and hot.

  ‘I don’t know how it is, Denise, that you always manage to have fresh coffee in the pot, it’s always hot and never tastes as though it’s been standing for ages. It’s an extraordinary talent.’ And she filled both their mugs and put Denise’s down on the desk beside her keyboard.

  ‘Not really,’ said Denise, who was twenty-eight, deeply attached to Grace and saw her as a fine role model. ‘It’s easy – you and I drink it so quickly it never has to stand there and get stale. Although I must say you seemed to be ignoring it the last couple of days, so I had to drink your share.’

  ‘I got a bit carried away with the idea of giving it up,’ Grace admitted, sipping the very strong Arabic blend. ‘Or at least cutting down. Do you think we drink too much coffee?’

  ‘Grace, you’re the nurse, I’m just a minion. What do you think?’

  ‘I think we probably drink too much coffee,’ Grace replied, feeling the comforting lift of real caffeine flooding through her system. ‘But it doesn’t seem to be doing us any harm. After all, we both exercise and neither of us drinks or smokes, so I think we can probably tolerate it okay.’

  ‘Best rationalisation I’ve heard,’ said Denise. ‘Are you okay? Your hand looks a bit shaky.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ Grace snapped, turning back to her office. ‘Steady as a rock. Could you get me the midwifery standards files, please,’ And she went back into the office and put her feet straight in the drawer.

  Sally, meanwhile, was taking a party of Year 11 students to the art gallery. She was covering for a colleague who taught Year 11 photography and who had come down with shingles two days earlier. Sally, who found it hard to say no, had agreed to take both the photography group and her own art students to the exhibition with the help of a student teacher. The idea was that the photography class would go around the photojournalism exhibition with the student teacher while Sally took her own class around the gallery’s permanent exhibitions. But Sally had done those exhibitions many times before and she wasn’t in a mood for Charles Blackman or Sidney Nolan or Arthur Boyd, or even any Aboriginal artists. So she told the student teacher to take charge of her group while she went to the photojournalism exhibition. It was the sort of outing that many teachers dread, because of the potential for the kids to get lost (inadvertently or deliberately), upset gallery patrons and staff, and generally be obnoxious or simply boisterous and high-spirited. But Sally was popular with the teenagers and she rarely had discipline problems.

  She was a striking woman who looked younger than her forty-nine years, and she wore her unruly grey-blonde hair to her shoulderblades, controlling it with two large tortoiseshell combs. She had started life as a mousy child with mousy curls that had gone blonde in her teens and turned rather suddenly to grey in her early forties. Even Grace, who believed that as a general rule women over forty-five should wear their hair short, made an exception in Sally’s case.

  She had a talent for distinctive clothes, most of which she made herself. ‘You’re into textures, aren’t you?’ sales assistants would say, more as a statement than a question, when they baled her up in fabric shops, fingering offcuts of velvet, short lengths of paisley patterned wool, or the ends of rolls of embroidered silk. Sally was indeed into textures but she was also into colours. Rich colours, purples and aquamarines, burnt orange and cerise, olive, lime and cobalt, and she mixed them courageously. She was easy to spot from a distance, swinging along in skirts made from panels of different fabric, long, loose jackets, chunky silver jewellery, or unique colourful pieces that she picked up at craft exhibitions. She looked interesting, somewhat eccentric, and more confident than she felt. In fact, she was in many ways rather conservative and surprisingly conformist, painfully shy but good at concealing it, and certainly interesting. She was the only one of the Gang of Four who had managed to stay single all her life.

  At eighteen she had left Australia with a group of friends for the great Aussie descent on London, and lived in a shared house in Islington where she never knew if she would come home from art school to find her bed occupied by a new arrival. In England she had fallen in love. Simon was fifteen years older, a product of Harrow and Cambridge; he was a lawyer with a tiny mews cottage in Gray’s Inn. He also had a seriously bad memory because he forgot to mention to Sally that he had a wife, two children, three labradors, a horse and an elegant house with six acres of land near Bristol. When Sally found she was pregnant, she was naive enough to think that she and Simon would work things out together. His angry instruction to ‘get rid of it’, the five hundred pounds in an envelope he stuffed into her hands and the parting shot that she’d better not try to contact him ‘or else’ were shattering. Unable to face Australia she stayed on in London for a couple of years, moving to a pleasant flat shared with another girl in Earl’s Court and trying to repair her ravaged life.

  She was almost twenty-two when she finally made her way back home to rural Victoria. A couple of months later, the town and the house where she had grown up seemed stifling after London, and she moved to Melbourne, completed her degree, and soon had a quiet and exemplary career as an art teacher. Towards the end of the seventies she had lived with an Irish mining engineer and had moved with him to the west. From time to time she thought she loved him and perhaps she did, but not enough. They parted with some acrimony when he wanted her to move again, this time from Perth to one of the most remote communities in the Pilbara.

  A few years later she fell headlong into a chaotic relationship with a fellow teacher. Harry was an alcoholic, delightful when sober, fascinating and entertaining after a couple of drinks, abusive, melancholic and incredibly tedious when drunk. As he was drunk most of the time it was an extraordinarily painful and complicated period, and on reflection Sally wondered why it had taken so long to extricate herself. Even now, five years later, Harry had not really let go. For her part Sally was relieved to be alone, except for those very occasional days when she wondered just how it would be to wake up beside someone she truly loved.

  Sally had not slept well since the day Isabel broke her news. It had made her restless and envious. The night before the gallery trip she had sat up late finishing a Doris Lessing novel, The Summer Before the Dark, which increased her restlessness. It was after one before she put out the light, she was up at six and she was a woman who needed her eight hours a night. She worried about Isabel having to break the news to Doug and her children, and she worried for Doug, of whom she was fond, and for Debra, Kate and Luke, whom she had known so long they seemed like nieces and nephew. But most of all she wanted Isabel not to change her mind.

  The studen
t group dissolved into the crowd and Sally browsed the catalogue and paused for a while in front of pictures of the women of the Save Our Sons campaign. She studied the passion in their faces, the tension in the bodies, the press of the crowd marching behind the leaders. Photography was art but very different from the art with which she spent her days. That morning she was moved by the intensity of the photographic images; spontaneity and transience transformed into something fixed and lasting. There was so much the camera could do that brushes, oils or pastels could not. It wasn’t that one medium was more or less than the other, simply that she cherished the difference and had long yearned to know both.

  ‘Were you at those demos, Miss Erskine?’ said a voice over her shoulder.

  She turned and smiled. ‘Yes, Adam, I was in the anti-Vietnam marches, but I was too young to have a son there.’

  ‘I know that,’ Adam said, adding conspiratorially, ‘I just wanted to get away from the others and see some of the photos.’

  Sally nodded and they moved on side by side, past images of election campaigns, of Mrs Petrov at Darwin airport, of Gough Whitlam maintaining his rage on the steps of the old Parliament House.

  ‘I always wanted to do photography,’ Sally said in a rare moment of self-revelation.

  ‘Yeah!’ Adam nodded. ‘Great, isn’t it? Takes you right into the moment. Why didn’t you?’

  She shrugged: ‘You know how it is, life takes you on a certain course and you get caught up, suddenly the time has gone by and you never got around to it. Come to think of it, you don’t know you probably haven’t had time to experience that yet.’

  Adam shifted his backpack from his right to his left shoulder and shoved his hands into his pockets. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But Mum and Dad used to talk like that. Dad used to say he wished he’d learned to play the guitar. He used to say that when he retired he was going to buy a guitar and learn.’ Sally turned to him in concern. ‘Yeah! Well, he never got to retire, did he? I thought about that, at the funeral, you know. I s‘pose I should’ve been thinking more uplifting stuff but all I kept thinking about was Dad waiting all those years to have time to learn the guitar.’