Gang of Four

by Liz Byrski

  She picked up the theatre programs Deb had mailed and found the twin of the one that Antonia had sent, the only difference being a seven-digit number pencilled onto the corner of Antonia’s. Isabel began to gather up the papers. She was determined now; she would go straight on to the Riviera. She would take the bus up the Spanish coast and into France and stop there for a while. She rewrapped Eunice’s papers in the calico and then sat at the table to read the papers from the bank, signed them and put them into the envelope. Then she went out into the cool evening and walked down to the bus terminal to find out the timetable of the buses travelling north.

  As she sat on the bus the following day, gazing vaguely at the warm-toned buildings and purple bougainvillea starting to drop its blossom, the spooky feeling returned. What had happened to make Antonia suddenly remember so clearly that she had once seen Eunice dance? She was lying, or at least she was holding something back. What did she know about Eunice, and was it related in some way to the incident in the cloister? Isabel closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the seat. She would go to the theatre, the Théâtre des Beaux-Arts in Monaco, see what she could discover there. But it was probably a fool’s errand. It was all so strange, so confusing – the gap in the diary, the program, Antonia. She was annoyed by it, frustrated by Antonia’s duplicity. Probably the only way she would find out was by going back to Monsaraz. In the meantime, though, she felt herself hardening with a determination to get to the bottom of it.

  FIFTEEN

  The flat was on the top floor of a seven-storey building, three blocks back from the sea, on the border of Brighton and Hove. It had two bedrooms, a lounge, kitchen and bathroom, and everything one could possibly need in the way of kitchen utensils, towels and linen. The windows of the lounge and the main bedroom looked out to the sea, and off the bedroom there was a balcony large enough for a couple of canvas chairs. The lounge window took up the whole of the wall; Grace had learned not to look straight down at the sheer drop, which made her feel she might just walk through the window and fall off the building. She had moved the black wrought-iron dining table with the glass top across in front of the window to make it feel safe. Because the flat was on the top floor the view of the sea was unbroken. On clear, sunny days, even when the wind was cold, the flat was flooded with golden light and on wild, wet days, the wind whistled and roared around the building and the rain lashed horizontally against the windows. As it was England and early November, the latter weather was more common. It felt, she thought, rather like living at the top of a lighthouse.

  Grace stood at the bedroom window looking out over the clay-tiled rooftops and windswept trees to the distant sea, barely visible through the haze of rain. What struck her, as she thought of the other members of the Gang of Four, was that three of them had all ended up near water. Sally’s card told her she could see the San Francisco Bay, Robin could see the Indian Ocean and here she was looking out at the English Channel. Even Isabel’s cards indicated that she had spent much of her time first on the Atlantic coast of Portugal and now by the Mediterranean. Grace had heard something once about water being healing, and she wondered if they had all unconsciously been driven to place themselves near large expanses of it.

  There was a tap on her bedroom door and Orinda popped her head around it. ‘I’m ready when you are, honey.’

  Grace turned with a smile. ‘Okay, I’m ready too. I wish you weren’t going, I’m going to miss you so much.’

  Orinda, wearing a white raincoat over a pair of navy trousers and a yellow jumper, perched on the edge of the bed. Her face seemed darker than ever above the white waterproof mac. ‘I’m gonna miss you too, Grace, but I gotta get back. I’ve already been here five weeks longer than I planned. And I can’t stand any more of this English weather.’

  Grace sat down beside her. ‘I know, isn’t it frightful! How do people manage to live here and be sane?’

  ‘Well, they’re not, are they?’ Orinda grinned. ‘They don’t have to be sane. They’re English, that’s different, they get to be eccentric.’

  Grace laughed and put her arm through Orinda’s. ‘It’s been wonderful being with you. And with Vivienne. You two have been just what I needed.’

  Orinda smiled and put her hand over Grace’s, where it rested on her arm. ‘Well, Grace, you can’t have enjoyed it more than I have. Y’know, I meant to go straight home with the others after the quilt was done, but I stayed because I wanted to be with you folks. And it’s been real good of you to let me stay here with you.’

  ‘It’s not going to be the same without you.’

  ‘No, but you and Viv will still have a good time together. Y’know, she’s waiting for me to go so she can get you in on this scheme of hers. Don’t let her bully you, you gotta have a holiday.’

  ‘I know, but I feel like a different person since I got here. Like I discovered a part of me that’s been shut up for years.’

  Orinda patted her hand. ‘I know. It’s so easy to get stuck in a rut, ‘specially when it’s a nice comfortable one. Promise me you’ll keep singing?’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘Promise me you’re gonna come visit me in New Orleans? I’ll take you down to the Three Coins Club and we’ll sing together and wow ’em.’

  ‘Just try and stop me.’

  Orinda stood up. ‘Well then, let’s get going. I gotta plane to catch and you’re my chauffeur.’

  They hugged each other with tears in their eyes.

  ‘Don’t start crying yet,’ said Orinda. ‘We ain’t even got to the airport. For a dame who hadn’t cried for years, you sure got good at it now!’

  Grace picked up Orinda’s suitcase, opened the door, and they went out to the protected rear landing of the block and pressed the button for the lift. ‘You take care of yourself, honey,’ Orinda said to Grace with a final look back at the flat. ‘Think about taking a bit more time away. Wouldn’t do you any harm to stay on till the New Year.’

  ‘I can’t say it hasn’t crossed my mind,’ Grace said as the lift doors slid open.

  Grace had to pull off the road three times driving back from Gatwick Airport because she couldn’t stop crying. She cried almost every day now – Orinda was right, she surely had got good at it. Sometimes she would wake up crying without even knowing why, without even feeling sad. She would lie still in her bed letting the tears flow. ‘Sometimes,’ she had said to Vivienne, ‘I feel that all this crying is healing me, isn’t that stupid?’

  Vivienne had let out a noisy hoot of laughter. ‘Grace, it’s not stupid at all, that is just what’s happening. These are the tears that you haven’t shed for decades, the ones you didn’t shed when your mum died, when your husband got cancer and died, when your kids left home, when your granddaughter was born. They’re the sadness and grief and joy tears. Of course they’re healing. Honestly, Grace, for a really smart woman you sometimes say the dumbest things.’

  But the tears left her weak and exhausted. She couldn’t believe how much she had slowed down. Back home she was always up between five and six, doing yoga, taking a shower, doing the housework, and after work she was out, having dinner with someone, going to a meeting, a concert or a movie, babysitting Emily. Even when she was at home she was reading minutes and agendas, position papers or reports, making notes, working out how to solve problems. But these days she made coffee in the small white kitchen and took it back to bed. There she’d sit, propped against the pillows with the curtains pulled back so she could see the sea and the weather, reading magazines, novels and short stories.

  Sometimes it was ten o’clock before she got up and then she’d discover Orinda just emerging from the small second bedroom with her book, watching morning television in the lounge or writing a letter to her daughter in Oregon. It felt to Grace like the greatest luxury she had ever known, and as though, at present, she was incapable of doing anything else. She had lost interest in shopping and spent her energy instead on walks along the seafront, occasional sightseeing to Arundel or
Chichester, a brief drive with Orinda to Vivienne’s place for lunch or dinner. And there, with Vivienne at the piano, she and Orinda would sing their way through everything they knew, laughing and dancing until they were both exhausted. Then back home for more books, more tears, more sleep.

  On the day she had decided not to fly to Japan, she had phoned Tim and told him she would be happy to help out, but not for a few more days. She would stay until the quilt was finished and then take a flight to Tokyo. It had taken a huge effort to overcome her guilt and indecision and make the call, but as she put down the receiver she felt overcome with anger and disappointment, anger that so much was always expected of her, disappointment that despite the fact that she was a mature single woman, she still felt trapped, still felt she had no freedom to do what she wanted. Later in the day, after contemplating her conversation with Vivienne, she called back and told them that she had changed her mind; she wanted to stay on in England. They would have to get some local help.

  ‘But why?’ Tim had asked, sounding hurt.

  ‘Because I want to stay on here, do as I planned,’ she’d said.

  ‘We thought you’d love to come, and we really need you. I thought you’d want to see Em and help Angie a bit.’

  ‘I would love to come, I’d love to see Em and help Angie, but it doesn’t suit me to do it right now.’

  ‘But we need you,’ he said again, with just a hint of the wheedling ten-year-old asking her to wash the whole team’s football gear.

  ‘You need some help, darling,’ Grace had said, and it had required an iron will to hold her ground. ‘But, as you said, the company has offered to provide that. I know it’s horrible for Angela, and awkward for you, but it’s not as though she’s seriously ill. The local help will probably be far more efficient than me.’

  ‘Oh well, if you feel your holiday is more important –’ he began.

  ‘Actually, at the moment, Tim, that is exactly what I feel,’ she cut in. They had hung up a few moments later, the tension humming down the line across the thousands of miles that separated them.

  Well, Grace had thought, despite the fact that her whole body was shaking, that is what I feel – I was perfectly honest and Tim is just going to have to put up with it. And she had walked back into the conference room thinking about all the commitments that had seemed so intractable and important and now just seemed irritating.

  ‘No good bitchin’ about it,’ Orinda had said to her a couple of weeks later when Grace started talking about how trapped she felt by all the things she’d have to return to. ‘You set it up yourself, honey. Now you’re the only one who can unpick it – it’s like taking the papers outta the patchwork. Know what I mean? You make the templates, you stitch on the fabric, then you join all the pieces to make the quilt, but you can’t move on to the quilting. The quilting is the best part because it gives the quilt texture, fullness, character. But you can’t do it until you unpick the first part you set up; you gotta take out the tacking and remove all the papers. Those things worked for you for a while, Grace, now you’re moving on to another stage. Gotta do the unpicking first.’

  Beside her now on the car seat were five airmail envelopes, stamped and addressed to Australia. They were her resignations from five committees and Grace had written them before Orinda left, knowing that her presence in the flat would serve to strengthen her resolve. As she headed on through the rain down the A23, she slowed at the sign pointing to Hurstpierpoint and, pulling across into the inside lane, she decided to pay Vivienne a visit. There was a mailbox on the corner and she pulled over and picked up the letters. For a few moments she sat shuffling them, staring at the names and addresses on the envelopes. Then she opened the car door, and leaned out in the rain and slipped them into the red box. Orinda would never forgive her if she didn’t mail them. More importantly, she might never forgive herself.

  Vivienne was sitting by the fire, her feet on a stool, surrounded by lists and piles of fabric. ‘So she got away all right?’

  Grace nodded, feeling the tears start again.

  ‘Sorry I couldn’t come to the airport, but if I missed that hospital appointment, God knows when I’d get another.’

  ‘I know, it was fine, Orinda understood, and I cried enough for you and me!’

  Vivienne grinned. ‘Cup of tea?’

  ‘Please,’ Grace said. ‘But stay there, I can make it. What did the hospital say?’

  ‘They said I’m as good as new – well, more or less. I don’t have to go back unless I feel I need to. I can throw away the stick when I feel okay without it.’ She cleared the papers from her lap and clasped her hands across her stomach watching as Grace poured water into the teapot. ‘So what now?’

  ‘Huh?’ Grace looked up.

  ‘What about you now? You’ve still got four weeks left, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Grace, setting a mug of tea down in front of Vivienne. ‘Until the first week of December.’

  ‘And what will you do?’

  ‘Well … I guess the things I came here to do.’

  ‘Which are?’

  Grace grimaced. ‘Not really sure. I mean, I wanted to get to know Brighton a bit because it was Mum’s home. It’s where she and Dad met. I wanted to be away from home for a little while.’

  ‘So are you happy about going back in four weeks?’

  ‘At the moment I don’t know how to. I can’t even visualise it and it seems quite scary.’ She paused. ‘I feel I’ve changed quite a lot in a very short time but I’m still grasping at that change. It’s as though I can be this new person here but I’m not sure if I can sustain it at home. You know, it feels so bad because I resent all the things that I was so committed to. I’m frightened that when I go back they’ll swallow me up again, that this new feeling, this emerging, different self will get drowned.’

  Vivienne put down her cup and stood up. She went over to the fireplace and threw a couple more logs onto the fire, jiggling them into position with the big iron poker. Grace noticed how much more easily she was moving, as though the clean bill of health from the hospital had given her the confidence to move more freely. Vivienne leaned against the shoulder-high mantelpiece for a while, looking down into the fire.

  ‘I think you should honour that feeling. You felt you needed to be away for a while so you left. Then you nearly took off in the middle of everything in order to be the perfect mother, or motherin-law, or grandmother, or all three. But you got through that. You’ve changed, Grace – dramatically. When I first saw you I thought you were the most uptight woman I’d ever met in my life, but each day you unravelled a little – in fact, sometimes it seemed like each hour. Have you ever seen those speeded-up films of a caterpillar turning into a chrysalis and then a butterfly emerging? It’s been like that. So fast. You have to give yourself time to adjust, to feel confident in it. You trusted the feeling that told you to get away, I think you have to trust the feeling that says it’s too early to go back.’

  Grace carried her cup to the window and stared out through the diamond-shaped leadlights at Vivienne’s sodden garden, which a month earlier had still been colourful with the last of the roses and wisteria. ‘I told you, when I left Australia I was running away, I just wanted a holiday.’

  ‘I know that. And there was no way you wanted the inner journey stuff that your friends were interested in. But now?’

  ‘Now it feels different. I don’t really understand it …’

  ‘It feels different because you’ve started on the journey, a retreat sort of journey. Just being out of your space, working with the other women on the quilt, has jolted you. Without realising it you put yourself in a situation that was bound to have an effect on you. It cut through all that superficial manic energy and dumped you somewhere else – on a journey. On the sort of journey your friends are making. Without knowing it, Grace, you kick-started the same process for yourself.’

  Grace turned to look at her. ‘But all the things that happened to me happened becaus
e of you, you and Orinda.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ said Vivienne unceremoniously, tossing her tea-leaves into the fire and walking over to the teapot to refill her cup. ‘The only person who could make the change was you. Sure, you saw and felt things here because you were in a different environment with different people. But you were ripe and ready for it, Grace, however much you tried to convince your friends and yourself that you weren’t. The way you’re feeling now is proof of that.’

  Grace shook her head. ‘I don’t understand it. What the others saw in it was an inner journey. They kept talking about spirituality, about having a spiritual life. I didn’t really know what they were talking about.’ She paused. ‘Now I wonder … What do you think a spiritual life is, Viv?’

  ‘I think,’ said Vivienne, ‘that a spiritual life means different things to different people and that rather than knowing what it means for me, maybe you should work out what it’s going to mean for you.’

  ‘I always thought it was something about religion, about being a Christian or a Buddhist or something else. You know, my father was a minister but I never inherited his faith.’

  ‘But you inherited a role: your mother’s, probably.’

  Grace looked at her in surprise. ‘I’m not at all like my mother. What do you mean?’

  Vivienne smiled. ‘Now I’m in hot water – don’t we all hate that feeling that we might have turned out like our mothers! I think I’d better shut up.’

  ‘But I know I’m not like my mother,’ Grace protested. ‘And you can’t know differently because you didn’t ever meet her.’

  ‘True. But I have known lots of minister’s wives – Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists – and mostly they follow the mould.’

  ‘What mould?’

  ‘Running the parish. Organising everyone, being indispensable, putting everyone else first, making sure everyone is supported, that things run smoothly. Thinking everything will fall apart if they relax their vigilance for a moment. It’s inevitable, I guess – or, at least, it would be very hard to fight the expectations.’