by Liz Byrski
‘But it’s true. Isn’t it?’
Grace put four slices of rye bread into the toaster. ‘I miss them, both of them, individually and the four of us together,’ she said.
‘Me too,’ said Robin, rubbing her eyes. They felt as though they were full of sand. ‘There’s a great big gap in my life. Do you think it will ever be the same again?’
‘No,’ said Grace. ‘What we had is gone … well, changed. We’ll still be friends, still be the Gang of Four, but it’ll be different.’ The toast popped up, making her jump, and she took it out, put it in a toast rack and handed it to Robin. ‘Can you get the plates off the shelf, please. There’s honey and Vegemite in the top cupboard.’
They sat facing each other across the breakfast bar. ‘Why did you come here this morning?’ Grace asked, spreading a minute amount of Vegemite onto her toast.
‘Because, despite the distance between us, I trust you. You’re tough, and you’re honest …’
‘And there was no one else?’
‘That too,’ Robin admitted.
‘Same for me,’ said Grace, turning to the window as she felt her face might be starting to crumple. ‘Maybe this is where we get to know each other.’
Robin nodded. ‘I guess so.’ She paused. ‘Thanks for being here, Grace.’
‘Thanks for coming.’
And as Grace turned back from the window Robin thought she caught a glimpse of a tear in the corner of Grace’s eye.
Grace was unusually late getting to the office. It was a nuisance because it barely left her time to prepare for a meeting at the health department, but although she had to rush she felt considerably better than she had at dawn. She had woken with the same Alice-falling-down-the-rabbit-hole feeling, but Robin’s visit had given her a focus. Now, as she sorted the papers she needed for the meeting, she remembered how close she had been to losing her grip. She felt a strange sense of gratitude to Robin, whose acute distress had enabled her to turn down the flame of her own feelings and pull herself together.
‘So when are they leaving?’ Denise asked, leaning against the filing cabinet.
‘Tim leaves on Thursday, and Angie and Emy a couple of weeks later.’
‘You’ll miss them.’
‘Oh yes. But it’s wonderful for them. And I get to go to Japan. They’ll be living in Kyoto and it’s supposed to be gorgeous. Angie showed me pictures on the Internet. I’m really excited about it.’
Denise raised her eyebrows. ‘And Emily? You’ll miss a big chunk of time with her. They change so fast at that age.’
Grace snapped her briefcase shut and put it down beside the desk. ‘Well, I guess I’m lucky to have had so much time with her thus far – not all grandparents do. One must make the best of things. I’ll be at the health department, in Stan Ledger’s office, if you want me. I’ve got the mobile and I’ll be a couple of hours.’ Denise nodded and opened the door for her. ‘If Robin Percy rings, can you tell her she can get me on the mobile. And can you ring Andrew Peters and ask him how much longer it’s going to take to finalise this probate for June.’
‘Yes, ma’am!’
‘And Denise …’
‘Yes, Grace?’
‘If you have a minute could you ring around and find out the price of wheelchairs. I think my dad’s going to need one very soon.’
Denise gave her a mock salute, and Grace smiled distractedly before closing the door behind her.
She turned into St George’s Terrace, tapping the steering wheel in annoyance at the heavy traffic. She would just about make it. And when the meeting was over she would call Robin. Whatever had happened since the early morning Robin was going to need a lot of support. Briefly Grace wondered why she suddenly felt so much better. Thank goodness she was not into taking pills. She could have let herself fall into an emotional mess with all the things that had happened in the last few weeks, but here she was coping splendidly despite that wobbly bit earlier in the day. You couldn’t let yourself fall apart when people needed you. No point being miserable about the kids, there was too much to do. Angie was always hopelessly disorganised, so she would just have to grab the reins. Grace slipped into a gap in the outside lane and cruised down to the traffic lights. She felt a surge of confidence and realised that the nice, hard, safe feeling in her stomach had come back. She wasn’t sure what had summoned it, but she welcomed it with a sigh of relief and a quick reassuring glimpse at her reflection in the rear-view mirror.
‘But I thought you’d realise,’ Jim said, rubbing the bridge of his nose where his glasses had been resting. ‘Darling, I’m so sorry. I had no idea you’d be so upset or worried.’
Robin twisted the strap of her bag into a tight coil and then let it unravel. ‘I told you how I felt. I told you I was at the end of my tether and you said you would talk to Monica. You left my place last night to go straight home and talk to her.’
‘Yes, but …’
‘So why didn’t you do it?’
‘Well, as I’ve told you, I didn’t feel I could. I got in, Monica was watching SeaChange, Chrissie and Mike were doing homework, the house seemed really calm and peaceful and I didn’t feel I could just walk in and destroy everything.’
Robin’s head was pounding. She felt physically sick and desperate for fresh air, and fumbled with the car window.
‘Here,’ said Jim, switching on the ignition. ‘Now it’ll open.’ The air was typical of an underground car park, heavy with petrol and exhaust fumes. Robin’s stomach heaved.
‘The least you could have done was to let me know. I was frantic. Can’t we go somewhere else to talk? Come back to my place.’
‘I didn’t appreciate you’d be so upset. I thought you’d realise what had happened.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It’s turned six, Rob, I have a meeting at six-thirty. There isn’t time. I’m sorry.’
‘So when will you tell her?’
‘I don’t know exactly. But I promise to do it when it seems like a good time. When there’s an appropriate opportunity.’
Robin threw up her hands. ‘Jim, there is no good time to leave a marriage. It’s always going to be awful, whenever you do it. And what do you mean by an appropriate opportunity? Do you think Monica’s going to wake up on Wednesday and say, “Oh, by the way, Jim, if you want to leave me, today’s a good day”?’
‘You’re being ridiculous and unfair.’
‘And you think you’re not? For almost four years you’ve been saying you would leave and we’ve been considering every possible scenario. Not anymore, this is the end of the road. You have to tell Monica now. You have to leave. I can’t bear living in the shadows, having half a life, not anymore.’ She rummaged for a tissue to wipe away the tears. Jim passed her a box of Kleenex, taking some for himself.
‘I feel terrible having got you into this situation. It’s so unfair on you.’ He paused, reaching for the tissues again, and Robin could see how he was struggling to keep back his own tears.
‘You didn’t get me into this. I’m not a helpless child, I knew what I was doing. But we always planned that we would be together. You always said you would leave when the time was right. Well, the time is right now.’
Jim screwed the tissues into a tight ball and dropped them into the Greenpeace rubbish bag hanging from the cigarette lighter. ‘Not for me. The time is not right for me. I’m sorry, Robin … I need more time.’
‘Why, Jim? What’s going to change next week, next month, next year? You’ve had four years. How much more time do you want?’
He shook his head, swallowing hard. ‘I don’t know. I can’t answer that. I went home last night fully intending to tell Monica about us and ask her for a divorce. I’ve imagined doing it so many times, just walking into the house and saying it. But when it came to it, I couldn’t do it. Robin, you know it’s you I love. You know you’re more important to me than anything, but last night I felt I would destroy them, shatter their world, not just Monica, the kids too. I can’t do that to them.’
They sat side by side in silence staring ahead at the door in the wall that led to the back staircase up to the judges’ chambers. ‘You do understand, Robin, don’t you?’ he asked quietly, reaching for her hand. She snatched it away and pulled down the sun visor to look at her reflection in the mirror.
‘Yes, I understand,’ she said, rubbing her hands over her face. ‘I understand perfectly well.’ She reached into her bag, got out a comb and ran it through her hair. ‘I understand that although you say you love me more than anything and anyone, you are not prepared to give up anything to be with me. You think you’ll destroy Monica? It would take a full battalion of German tanks to destroy Monica and you know it.’ She snapped back the sun visor and turned to face him. ‘But I am less resistant, Jim. I love you and want you more than I ever wanted anything in my life, but I can’t handle this anymore.’
She opened the car door and gathered up her bag and jacket.
‘I only have one life and I am not going to spend it as a lady in waiting.’ And she swung herself out of the car and slammed the door behind her, turning back to look at him through the open window. ‘I can’t imagine that I will ever stop loving you,’ she said, her voice close to breaking. ‘But I have to look after myself.’
And without looking back she walked swiftly away from the car and up the ramp to the street, where the rain pounded heavily onto the pavement and a wave of water from the wheels of a passing car drenched her legs.
FIVE
The railway line ran west from Lisbon, hugging the coast along the mouth of the River Tagus to the sea. On one side were neat back gardens filled with geraniums and bougainvillea, washing strung across balconies, and the service entrances of shops and small businesses. On the other side the Atlantic Ocean stretched to the horizon beyond the steep cliffs, sandy beaches and rocky outcrops. The route was dotted with small resorts running one into the other, old churches, and elegant houses of fading grandeur, peach and rose paintwork peeling in the sunlight, wisteria smothering the porches, and statues of the Virgin Mary watching silently from tiled alcoves.
Isabel sat on the ocean side of the train, staring out across the sunlit water, thinking of the beaches at home and trying to stave off the waves of panic that struck whenever she remembered that there were fifty-two weeks in a year and she still had another forty-nine to go. Her wonderful adventure was not evolving according to plan. And that, she thought, was the problem. The plan just wasn’t good enough. Her time and energy had gone into organising the life she was leaving, making arrangements for everything to run smoothly in her absence, and in the chaos of those last weeks she had neglected her own journey. The careful sorting of Eunice’s papers as the basis for an itinerary just didn’t happen, and she had grabbed haphazardly at a few old letters and diaries, stuffing them into the bottom of her case. She thought she would have time later, to sort out her priorities, plan and read. The stopover she’d allowed herself in Hong Kong would be a good time to start. But it didn’t work out that way.
She hated the noisy, clamorous streets and the humidity that devoured her energy the moment she stepped outside the airport. She couldn’t wait to move on, the physical and emotional upheaval of leaving home had left her too restless to focus on anything for more than a few minutes. Unable to concentrate, she tossed aside her books and maps and whiled away the time torn between anxiety about what might be happening at home and the enormity of what lay ahead. She wanted to be in Europe and to be a traveller, but she felt like the worst kind of whingeing tourist.
Lisbon’s infectious spirit revived her. She was fascinated by the big, jumbled city with its gracious boulevards, winding cobbled streets and steep hills where trams and funiculars rattled day and night. She had chosen Portugal as a starting point because it had been one of Eunice’s favourite places. From there she would go to Spain, then France and the Riviera, and Germany in time for Christmas: dark evenings, log fires, snow. There were pictures of Eunice in Munich, riding a sleigh drawn by ponies decked out with bells and ribbons. Isabel wanted a northern Christmas, the stuff of fairytales. The outline was drawn but the gaps remained to be filled.
She spent the first five nights at a hotel and then moved to the home of one of the women in 5W. Women Welcome Women World Wide was an international friendship network with several thousand members around the world. Women could contact each other to suggest a meeting and to ask for accommodation for a maximum of two nights. It was open to the hostess to offer a longer stay if she wished. Senhora Soarez’s first-floor apartment was in a three-storey ochre and white building in a street near the Castelo San Jorge. From the window of the spare bedroom Isabel had a narrow view across the rooftops to the harbour.
Carmen Soarez was in her sixties and looked as though she had been upholstered into the dark, neatly tailored business suits she wore to her middle management job in a bank. She was hospitable, formal and restrained in her welcome, but after the first night she invited Isabel to stay on for a week. She accepted with relief but felt some pressure to make other arrangements, to avoid lurching from one short homestay to the next. Carmen was not very communicative and Isabel felt a sense of clumsy displacement. She was disoriented, saturated with new experiences, exhausted by change and confused by the landscape and the language. She was ashamed of her foolish assumption that a few words of Spanish and French would ease her way in a country in which neither was the native language.
She did some sightseeing, wandered through the markets, tracked down an art gallery featured on one of Eunice’s cards, and stopped to drink coffee in a tiled plaza, staring at a fading black and white snapshot of her mother sitting in almost exactly the same spot. Armed with another rather dog-eared photograph she set out to find what appeared, from a note on the back, to be the home of one of Eunice’s friends. Perhaps by some crazy chance the woman would still live there. But she had got hopelessly lost and returned to the apartment exhausted from trekking up and down the steep hills. What she needed was somewhere to be still and quiet, to make better plans and adjust to her new, albeit temporary, single state; to get used to the sense of time being her own, to the reality of her freedom. Perhaps she would be better away from the city. Perhaps the trip along the coast would reveal a place where she felt more at ease.
The train rattled on, stopping at every station, and Isabel got out at Estoril, the famed postwar haunt of exiled royalty and the idle rich. From there she walked the path along the sea wall, enjoying the midday sun and watching the waves breaking, white with foam, over the rocks, until she reached Cascais. Tourists browsed the market stalls in the square above the port, searching for bargains among the Tshirts, satin slippers, garish paper knives and crisp cutwork table linen. Isabel picked her way between the stalls, over the coiled fishing nets with their cork floats, and found a seat outside a café, where she ordered a salad.
Cascais was enchanting, and she felt better away from the city. At a nearby table a couple of younger women were tucking into fish soup. They wore white Tshirts and faded jeans with rope-soled espadrilles, like the ones on sale at the market stalls. They were speaking English but their confident manner and the fast and familiar exchanges with the waiter in Portuguese signalled that they might be locals rather than tourists. They finished their soup before Isabel’s order arrived and almost immediately one crumpled her serviette and stood up. She leaned over to hug the other before picking up her bag and setting off towards the centre of town. The other woman poured herself some water from the half-empty carafe and pulled a newspaper from a large leather shoulder bag. She had the ease and confidence of a woman comfortable in her surroundings; a woman who liked her own body. It was an ease that Isabel envied.
The waiter passed and Isabel asked for some butter, but he couldn’t understand her.
‘Manteiga, Fernando!’ the English woman called out to the waiter. ‘Senhora quiera manteiga.’
‘Ah!’ He smiled. ‘Manteiga!’ and he whisked off between the tables to fetch the butter.
‘Thanks very much,’ Isabel called. ‘I’m afraid my Portuguese only extends to coffee and bread at this stage.’
The woman smiled. ‘On holiday?’
‘Yes and no.’ Isabel hesitated. ‘More like a sabbatical. I’m just finding my way around.’
The young woman folded her paper and stood up. ‘Mind if I join you?’
Isabel moved her own bag off the chair and gestured towards it. ‘Please do. Maybe I can pick your brains – you seem very much at home here.’
Close up she was older than she appeared from a distance, thirty-two perhaps, Debra’s age. Slim and fit, with a pale English complexion that had taken on a light tan but still needed protection from the sun. Her corn-coloured hair was cut in a jagged Meg Ryan style that looked like rats’ tails on some people and a million dollars on others. This woman was in the latter category. ‘Sara Oakwood,’ she said, stretching out a hand. ‘I live here; at least, I have done for the past couple of years. Before that it was Birmingham, and I can tell you this is a whole lot nicer. You’re from New Zealand?’
‘Australia,’ Isabel said. ‘Been here two weeks and I could really use some advice.’
‘Sure,’ Sara said, ordering mineral water when the waiter returned with Isabel’s butter. ‘I live in Cascais now, but I’ve seen quite a bit of Portugal, mainly on foot and by public transport.’ Isabel felt the stab of envy she always felt when she met young women living lives so different from her own. At Sara’s age she had already been married for a decade, had three children, and had not been out of Australia. She sometimes wondered whether marrying young and having a conventional family life was some sort of reaction to Eunice’s absence during those years in Europe.
‘What a terrific thing to do,’ Sara said as Isabel explained how she came to be in Portugal. ‘How did your family take to the idea?’ She listened intently to the story of Doug’s initial resistance, Luke’s pat on the head, Kate’s encouragement and Debra’s hurt and anger.
‘She’ll get over it,’ Sara commented. ‘She’s just scared of you not being there – it’s only natural. I think it’s wonderful. My mum would never do it. She’s really stuck in a rut, although she’s divorced and got enough money. She could afford to just take off for a bit but she never would. So, what can I do to help?’
