Gang of Four

by Liz Byrski

  Isabel felt a burst of affection for his stoic adherence to the way things had always been done. ‘Are you planning to cook Christmas dinner, darling?’

  ‘Hey, steady on! I’m not that domesticated. No, I thought Mum would come and do it and we could all have Christmas here, same as usual, except that you wouldn’t be there, of course. So it won’t be the same unless … well, unless you thought about coming back early …’

  ‘No!’ she said, almost too quickly. ‘No, I won’t be back early. You come to Germany in January, it would be lovely to have New Year together. I’m aiming for Nuremberg and you’ll fly in to Frankfurt. I’d like you to meet Klaus, I know you and he will get along.’

  ‘That’s the fellow you met in Portugal?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Okay. Well, I’ll get on to Qantas and see what the flights are like. I’ll do it this week, it’s bound to be busy then. And you’ll stay on in Alicante until these papers arrive?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Oh, and Doug, could you have a look in that box of Mum’s old letters and stuff. It’s in the cupboard under the stairs. I’d like you to send me some things.’

  He let out the familiar sigh he always gave when she asked him to do something he found tedious. It was a little-boy trick designed to make her withdraw the request. Isabel didn’t withdraw it, she ignored the sigh, noticing how much easier it was to ignore it over the phone than face to face.

  ‘The box is easy to find, it’s right near the front.’

  ‘You don’t want all of it, surely!’

  ‘No, of course not, just anything that relates to the south of France, Paris, Germany and Lisbon. Places I’m planning to go to.’

  ‘But you’ve already been to Lisbon.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but I’ll go back, I think – not till after you’ve gone, but I will.’

  ‘Why? What’s in Lisbon? Some cute Portuguese toyboy?’ There was an edge to his voice but she wasn’t sure what it was. Not jealousy, but perhaps fear of not being part of her plans?

  ‘Not just one, darling, a whole bevy of them. Seriously, I loved it and it feels unfinished for me, I want to go back.’

  ‘Oh well, you know best, but it seems a bit of a waste to go back. You could go somewhere else instead, or come home sooner.’

  She ignored it. ‘So you’ll find those things for me? Letters, postcards – anything about those places – and send them with the papers?’

  ‘Why don’t I get Deb to sort them out for you and I’ll bring them in December?’

  ‘Look, Doug, I want them before then. It won’t take long.’

  ‘But I want to get these papers off to you tomorrow.’

  She took a deep breath. ‘I’m asking you to do something that will take an hour at the most. The stuff is in quite good order. And it will need a rather larger package than you were going to send. Surely you could find time to do that for me.’

  ‘Okay, okay, she who must be obeyed has spoken. I’ll get right onto it.’ His tone was curt now. He hated inconvenience, hated having to do for himself the things she or his secretary usually did for him, hated the service tasks of other peoples’ lives. For so long it had seemed natural to her, now it irritated her.

  ‘Thanks, darling.’

  ‘Yeah-yeah.’

  There was an awkward silence. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I must be running out of time on this phone card. How about I call again when I’ve put the papers in the mail?’

  ‘Yes, please do. And I better get a move on. I’m off to Deb’s for a meal.’

  ‘Okay, give them all my love.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Bye then. Love you.’

  ‘Yes, you too – bye. Let me know when you’ve mailed back the papers.’

  She sat in a cane chair outside the café, ordered a cappuccino and tore open the bulky padded envelope. The sheaf of papers from the bank were stapled together and her mother’s things had been carefully wrapped in a piece of calico and tied with tape. A small sealed envelope was tucked under the knot. She was impressed – how did he know to wrap the letters in cloth not plastic? He really could be so sweet and thoughtful when he tried. He must have sorted them out the same evening of their telephone conversation, for the package had been posted the following day. She glanced at the bank papers first, and the yellow Post-it note on the first page.

  Izzy

  Make sure you read this lot through and feel happy about it.

  Then sign and date in the places marked. You’ll need to get the signatures witnessed.

  Whiz it back soon as poss and give me a ring to let me know.

  Ta and love

  Doug

  She put the papers back into the manila envelope and turned to the package, smiling with affection at the image of him wrapping her mother’s papers. She slipped out the small envelope and opened it.

  Hi Mum

  Wonder where you’ll be when you read this. Dad’s been fussing around over this stuff of Grandma’s. He brought the box over when he came for dinner last night and asked me to sort out the things you wanted. He’s left the bank papers with me to send to you as well.

  I hope this is what you need. Isn’t it fascinating! I could have spent hours on it. I never knew you had all this. I hope you won’t mind but I’m going to hang on to the box and have a look at some more of it. I’ll be really careful. I loved the old programs from Grandma’s dancing days. All my life I saw her in the wheelchair so the dancing was never quite real, but now there are the programs and pictures and things. It brought me out in goose bumps.

  I think I can organise it a bit better. I know you said one should never keep old papers or fabrics in plastic, so I’ll wrap them all in cloth like this one. Hope you have a fab time going to those places, you are soooooo lucky. Still, you deserve it if anyone does. Everything’s fine here. We all miss you, of course. Honestly, isn’t Dad hopeless!! I can’t believe it, he’s got us all running round after him, me, Mac, Luke, Nana and Grandad Carter, AND did you know he’s got someone in to clean once a week! Lucky old Kate being in Sydney, but now he’s got her on the run too, looking for flights to Germany on the Internet. I mean, he’s the CEO of a huge government department and he can’t even organise his own life. I think it’s a learned helplessness, though, so it’s good he’s had a chance to notice what’s normally done for him. Of course, if we had any sense we’d all tell him to get on with it but he’s so lovely we all get sucked in!

  Luke has a gorgeous new girlfriend – her name is Cecilia and is she exotic! He’s such a dag, how does he get these amazing women? She’s really nice too. I know he’s emailing you from time to time so you’ll have his news.

  Thanks for your lovely letters. Have I grovelled enough about my appalling behaviour before you left? Just in case, I’ll say it one more time – I’m really, really sorry for being such a selfish brat (if one can be a brat past thirty), I was just scared of you going away and everything changing. Mac and the kids are fine, Danny and Ruth have started kindy two mornings a week and love it – thank goodness, I was dreading it. They’ve done these paintings for you – something else for you to carry around! Hope your new streamlined travelling self is surviving the journeys. I loved the pictures you sent – your new hairdo looks great and you look so much YOUNGER!

  Everyone here sends their love, specially me – and I send heaps. I miss you.

  Deb

  PS Ran into Denise (Grace’s sec) last week. She says Grace hasn’t phoned the office once since the first day she arrived in England! Just sent a couple of postcards and one – only ONE – email about work!!

  Isabel smiled to herself at the postscript. Dear Grace – so she really had taken the plunge. In Cascais she had got a letter from Grace posted in Australia before she left for the quilt retreat, and later, while she was in Córdoba, Sara had forwarded a card that Grace had posted on her arrival in England. Since then it seemed Grace was very busy enjoying her own adventure. Isabel wondered briefly how Sally was getting
on in San Francisco. Robin had emailed with more information about her retreat to the southwest, and said she had had an aerogram from Sally, who seemed to be having fun, loving California and enjoying the course. No word, though, of the friend she had hoped to find.

  Isabel stroked the calico wrapping of her mother’s papers and sipped her coffee. So Doug had got Deb to organise the package, and he had everyone else looking after him, including someone to do the housework. She felt strangely ambivalent. Her love for him was as solid as ever, but she was irked by his manner. ‘Learned helplessness’ was a good description, and she knew she was the one who had taught him, encouraged it over more than three decades. He was a wonderful husband and father, but she sensed that in leaving she had let go of the part of herself that always put the needs of Doug and the children first. Kate, Luke and Deb were obviously adapting to the change but it seemed Doug was playing the same old role, even though she was gone. She sighed and slipped his papers and the calico package back into the envelope. A strong breeze was whipping in from the sea. She would open her mother’s things back at the hotel.

  She picked up Sara’s envelope and tore open the flap, taking out a one-page note wrapped around another envelope.

  Dear Isabel

  Hope you are fine and still travelling light! Remember, backpack and one small grip – don’t break the rules or you’ll regret it. So glad you liked Córdoba. I adore it, and Rafaela – what a character.

  Speaking of characters, I got a call from Antonia Peralta. She was in Lisbon last week and rang to know if you were here. When I said I didn’t know where you were she asked me to forward a letter when I heard from you. So I met her in Lisbon, we had a lovely lunch at a cafe in the Baxia. What a stunning woman. She seemed really keen to get this letter to you, so when I got home I rang your husband in Oz. He said you’d be in Alicante for another week or two.

  My sister’s on her way out here for a couple of weeks from her ghastly job in Manchester, I’m so looking forward to seeing her.

  Let me know how you’re going and if you really do plan to come back again in the new year.

  All good wishes and love

  Sara

  Isabel stared at the long cream envelope with her name on the front written in Antonia’s controlled and distinctive script, and took several deep breaths. She turned the envelope over slowly trying to anticipate what it might contain, but was too shaken by its presence to think straight. She had left Portugal with the heavy ache of longing that she had felt since the moment in the Évora cloisters, and the emotional chaos that it sparked for her. In the intervening weeks she had managed to let some of it go, along with her confusion at the strength of her attraction to another woman, and Antonia’s enigmatic reaction. But she still felt that something precious had slipped away from her.

  She slit open the envelope and took out a sheet of cream notepaper and an old, slightly discoloured theatre program.

  My dear Isabel

  I must first apologise for not responding sooner to your letter. I have been busy but it was not only that. I have been coming to terms with a rather difficult personal crisis relating to the past, which arose during your visit, and it has devoured all my emotional and physical energy. Forgive me for being rather withdrawn, a fact I think you attributed to something you had done. Not at all. It was entirely my problem and I trust it did not spoil your last days in Monsaraz.

  It was such a great joy to have you here as a guest. I hope that you will return as you suggested, before you go back to Australia. I should so much like to see you again. You mentioned that your mother was with Compagnie Fluide in the fifties, and as I sorted through some of my old personal papers I found this program, which I think you would like to have. It reminds me that I did in fact see your mother dance on a visit to Monaco, an occasion which, with the discovery of the program, I now remember quite clearly. She was a dancer of great grace and elegance. The night I saw her she was wearing a floating chiffon gown in eau de nil, and she took the audience by storm. I hope you will be happy to have this to add to your collected memories of your mother.

  I have a letter from Klaus in which he mentions how much he looks forward to seeing you in Germany before too long.

  For myself I look forward to your next visit to Monsaraz and I send you my warmest wishes for the remainder of your travels.

  Antonia

  Isabel’s hands were trembling, her skin prickling, as she read the letter again with a mixture of fascination and disbelief. If Antonia had indeed been experiencing a personal crisis relating to the past, then why had it so instantly and dramatically changed things between them that day in the cloisters? And why had she refused to talk about it? And the program? When Isabel had mentioned Compagnie Fluide, Antonia had been abrupt, uninterested, yet now not only did she have a program for one of their performances, she could remember seeing Eunice dance and even what she had been wearing when she danced that night. Isabel turned to the fading gloss of the program, which was for a performance at the Théâtre des Beaux-Arts, Monaco, on 14 April 1953. Eunice’s name as the soloist was on the front.

  Isabel’s heart beat faster as she turned back to the letter. Antonia was sixty-five now, which would have made her around twenty in 1953. Why did she have a theatre program for that year? None of it made sense. She was tempted to go straight to a phone booth, call Antonia and demand an explanation, but something warned her to hold back. She would spend a day or two looking through Eunice’s letters and diaries before taking the bus north. She picked up her mail, paid for her coffee and made her way through the now busy streets to the hotel.

  Back in her room she spread the papers in order across her bed and over the floor. Deb had organised them chronologically. There were letters from Eunice to her mother and father, and theirs to her. Among them were letters written in Isabel’s own round, childish hand, and there were photographs they’d sent each other. Eunice in a ruched satin bathing costume on the beach in front of a hotel in Nice; rugged up with scarves and mittens against a background of snow; in a halter-necked evening dress leaning against Eric with a dangerously tilted champagne glass. Isabel recalled the long-forgotten thrill of their arrival in Australia and the time spent staring deeply into the tiny images of Eunice’s face, waiting for it to deliver to her some tangible sense of the mother she could barely remember. And then there was Isabel herself playing under the hose in Grandpa Pearson’s garden, sitting on the old hammock leaning shyly against her grandmother, embarrassed by the camera; dressed as an angel in the school nativity play, and standing bolt upright with pride displaying a cup and certificate won for swimming.

  Isabel felt what she had not felt for so long, that complete sense of aloneness that she had known as a child. The feeling that she was waiting for the waiting to be over and to have her mother there, just like all the other girls, and her mother would be hers and hers alone. She sat cross-legged on the floor among the letters gazing at a picture of Eunice, laden with packages, outside a department store in Berlin, and remembered that there was a message on the back.

  Darling Isabel

  This is me shopping for your Christmas present. I wish I could be there when you open it but I know you’ll have a lovely Christmas with Grandma and Grandad.

  All my love, sweetness,

  Mumma

  2 December 1952

  Isabel flicked away the tear that was threatening to drip onto the picture, remembering Christmas Day 1952 when she opened the card attached to her present and found the photograph inside. She stared at it now as she had stared at it then, recalling how carefully she had read the message aloud and asked, ‘Will Mumma be back for next Christmas, Grandma?’

  ‘Oh, baby, I’m sure she will. She promised. And you and she can go Christmas shopping together.’

  ‘And will it be snowing like in Germany?’

  ‘Not here,’ Grandad laughed, stuffing tobacco into his pipe. ‘Not in Australia, Izzy, you know it doesn’t snow here, and it’s always hot at
Christmas.’

  She had taken the card, the photograph and presents – a white blouse with big puffed sleeves, embroidered with little blue flowers, and a pink-cheeked doll with long fair plaits dressed in German national costume – over to her favourite rose velvet chair. To the background of the voice of the new Queen coming from the radio she dreamed of Christmas shopping next year in a Perth that was strangely covered in snow and where children with sledges slithered happily back and forth across the pavements. But by the next Christmas, Eunice was married and recovering in a Monte Carlo hospital while Eric sat beside her reading her the cards and letters from home; and Isabel was opening another gift on the promise that Eunice and the new daddy really would be home in February.

  She slipped the picture back into place and stared in frustration at Eunice’s diary for 1953. The entries were scrappy but consistent, three or four brief entries a week, special performances, parties, trips along the coast, exhausting rehearsals, dreadful dressing rooms, appreciative audiences, and the search for new dance shoes. Piecing together the evidence, she discovered that the company had left Germany in January 1953 and after a short stay in Paris, where they had a two-week booking, they travelled on by rail to Nice for a long series of performances that would last until the latter part of the year. It was all there, the whole journey, the arrival, the problems with the hotel suites shared with other dancers, the glamour of the Riviera, meeting Eric at a cocktail party and falling in love, even the performance that matched Antonia’s program, all tying in with the letters home from the time, but a month later there was nothing. From mid May the pages of the diary had been torn out leaving a gap until the beginning of October, and although the diary entries commenced once again on the Riviera, the letters from those missing months came from Lisbon.

  Isabel sighed and slid her finger down the yellowing strip of Sellotape that had been used to secure the pages each side of the torn-out gap. Why had Eunice suddenly gone to Lisbon while the company stayed on in France? Why had she torn out the pages, and what about Eric? He was a feature of the narrative until the middle of May and then again in October, but there was no mention of him in the letters from Lisbon.