The Landing

by Susan Johnson

  On the way back to The Landing, Penny did not speak but kept her eyes on the road, on the twisting bitumen, all the while thinking about how she might extract herself or whether, after all, she should give in gracefully. What was she saving herself for? A man? God forbid—surely not Jonathan Lott? For her art? For some time now she had cherished an idea of turning the area beneath the house into a studio and now, since that terrible drunken night at Jonathan’s, it was more than an idea, it was a sort of conviction. She had continued to paint—sporadically, unforgivingly, full of the usual doubts and failures—working in a makeshift space beneath the windows in Scarlett’s old bedroom, but now she carried an impression, some faint image she wanted to realise, an idea which felt like a compulsion, the same charged, excited feeling she remembered from the years when she still believed in the possibility of making something good. Ever since that drunken revelation—her life laid bare, herself the architect of her own disappointment—her desire had hardened into commitment. A mother, or an artistic pledge? A beating human heart, or a pig’s heart in a fairy tale? Who was she kidding? What were the chances of a middle-aged—no, older than middle-aged—of an ageing, older woman, rushing towards the future, bursting with excellence?

  ‘I should like you to consider my proposal carefully, Penny,’ said Marie.

  Ah, yes, Penny remembered how preferable it was to talk in a car, sitting side by side, no eye contact. They could drive from one end of Australia to the other without once looking into each other’s faces.

  ‘I will consider it carefully,’ she said.

  ‘I will pay for the extension, naturally.’

  ‘Naturally,’ said Penny.

  ‘Don’t be smart, Penny.’

  Penny sighed. ‘Honestly, Marie, do you really think you and I could ever live together? You’d be telling me not to be smart every five minutes.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, it might not drive you mad but it would drive me nuts.’

  Her mother gave a loud, theatrical sigh. ‘Mon Dieu. Where is this place where people do not drive each other nuts? It is nowhere on earth.’

  They did not speak for the rest of the trip, not during the long curling drive down into the dark of overhanging trees, not through the flash of birds, swinging high overhead, not even when the clouds swirled, drifting towards dusk, blowing homewards.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  This woman of many husbands

  Who knows a body until it is unwrapped, the scars revealed, the mapped skin laid bare? Who knows a body’s secrets even then? Certainly not the husband who lay for twenty-five years beside the wife, mixing their mutual breaths. Jonathan recalled the thin scar running along the length of Sarah’s left wrist, from where she fell on a barbed-wire fence as a child. He knew her particular, personal scent, the smell under her arms; he knew the way their bodies fit together in a bed. She slept on the left, he on the right; every night she fell asleep, one arm slung over him, her face pressed into his back. After she went, he had to learn how to sleep all over again, how to lie alone in bed. For a while, he had to learn what it meant to be built of separate bone and blood, the awful responsibility of it. His sorrow was his, it was his decision whether to keep breathing or not, the stoicism he found somewhere deep in himself, a willingness to endure.

  He had never asked her—and never would—if it was Cath who rose like the moon and him who sank. Perhaps it no longer mattered; perhaps it amounted to the same thing. If she didn’t know who she was when she married him, then was it Cath who told her? Who was the Sarah of the many happy years of their marriage, when he could have sworn their bodies loved each other, worshipping pleasure’s infinite dimensions? What happened to their sighs, their slippery joys, were they untrue, undone?

  Nothing prepared him for the shock of another body, another mouth that was not Sarah’s in particular. The first time he lay with someone who was not his wife it did not feel personal. It felt hallucinatory, weird, as if he had forgotten what his body was for, as if his body belonged to someone who was not him. He was returned to his forgotten fifteen-year-old self, to the oddness of the whole procedure, the importunate noses, the bra unfastenings, the mysterious panties. Her breath did not smell right; it was not Sarah’s breath, and the wild thrashing of the act so exquisitely mirrored the wild, aching thrashing within his chest that he could not tell where the sighing and the flailing ended and began. He feared he was constitutionally, fatally, monogamous.

  Anna’s nipple in his mouth, the puckered pink scar in the valley of her body. ‘A botched job,’ she said. ‘An emergency caesarean.’ They talked the whole while, more or less, her dark, lovely voice, the cave of her mouth, his tongue inside. The act felt like an echo, too faint, a link in the chain of memories leading back to the ecstatic original.

  Her head on his pillow, the streak of her plait, her eyes shining in the growing dark. ‘I am made to be married,’ she said.

  ‘So am I.’

  He kissed her again, this woman of many husbands, of meandering words. He knew there was a difference between someone who was made to be married to the same person, and someone who was wedded to the enchanting promise of marriage, to its beguiling idea. She might be made to be married to the ceremony of flowers and lace, possibly she was made to be married to it over and over.

  All day at work, he thought of her. It was improbable, of course; she was a kind of mirage. She was not a proper grownup person with a job and a line of steadiness behind her, a profession, a row of stable, civic years of staying in the same place, doing proper things. She had lived in Paris, New York, in a souk; she had married impecunious men, actors, unsteady types, men who did not even own a house. Owning property was surely one of the cornerstones of adult existence; he feared Anna naturally belonged to that rowdy crew who lived by their wits, surviving by the skin of their teeth, freelancers, contract workers, artistic sorts, men who inherited money rather than working for it. Her natural constituency was risk, that wide-open place of impulse, exhilaration and chance, of haring off down any new path that looked more interesting. How could an adult not have had a proper job, even a good-looking female adult? She was a throwback to women who were courtesans, kept women, to clever mistresses of eighteenth-century French courts. What would he do with her? How soon before she grew bored with him, tossing him aside for someone racier, more rackety?

  When he came home he found Anna had been cooking, a Normandy bisque, heavy with cream, butter and Calvados, the prawn stock strained through a muslin-lined sieve; milk-fed veal, with tarragon. There was a pear tarte tatin cooling on a bench; the table was dressed, candles he did not know he owned in the centre, faltering in an unseen breeze. She kissed him, telling him about the particulars of the food, pouring him a glass of iced champagne. Where did she find a muslin-lined sieve?

  ‘Am I supposed to be impressed?’ he asked. ‘Consider me impressed.’

  ‘I had nothing else to do,’ she said. ‘And I love cooking.’

  It turned out she was a magnificent cook, as if she had been spending her many marriages at cooking school. ‘I helped out at a friend’s restaurant for a couple of months once, in Soho. New York Soho, not London Soho. Everyone was a drunk or a heroin addict, just like in that book,’ she said.

  ‘I hope you didn’t spit in anyone’s dinner,’ he said.

  ‘Only in the dinners of people I didn’t like. I wouldn’t spit in your dinner,’ she said, leaning over to kiss him. She tasted of cream.

  He had a giddy, sprawling feeling in his chest, as if he were about to do something rash. He might fall in love; he might lay himself out, as if at a feast, forget his terrors about remaining loveless the rest of his days, his fears about tourists walking past his house at The Landing, the last place on earth where he felt inviolate, himself, free of his useless, leftover love for a woman who no longer loved him. It did not matter if the tourists came, if they trampled his soft lilies underfoot or peered into his windows. He could live with a new wife; washed awake, clean
sed inside and out, himself turned transparent as a window. He felt alive with possibility, with crazed, unruly hope, even while he understood it to be madness. He wanted to be an idiot for once. He wanted to be rash, foolish, to really give them something to talk about, becoming the fifth husband of a woman blown in from God knew where, a woman with fine breasts and a plait down her back, which he would climb, as if scaling the soaring heights of heaven.

  THIRTY-NINE

  The blue egg

  Giselle was beginning to understand stories. She was beginning to create links in the fabric of existence, to connect the material world with the world in her head and make meanings out of everything she witnessed. She was starting to see that this led to that, that a kiss might be evil or enchanted. If she closed her eyes tight, almost closing them, leaving a tiny strip open, she could see her trembling eyelashes and, beyond them, tiny dust motes or very, very small dots that joined up to make the colours of the world. There were millions and millions of dots joining up, millions and millions of people and stories, millions of moments that did not yet make sense.

  She left fairy traps in the garden. Her fairy trap was a bower of leaves and frangipani flowers, a bouquet for them, scented botanicals so loved by fairies. She found a bright blue egg in the fairy trap, which she carried carefully inside and placed inside a plastic takeaway container, covering it with a cloud of cotton wool balls she found in a drawer in the bathroom. She let Dan hold the egg and she made him lie at eye level on the ground next to the fairy trap, dancing above him, casting a spell. Dan was an only child like her, with only a mother, no father, no brothers or sisters.

  The blue egg floated in its spun cloud; the spell was cast.

  Giselle was watching her blue egg when she saw the mother and the babies come home. Her mother was asleep again, on the couch in front of the TV, a half-drunk cup of coffee beside her on the floor and a pile of butts in an ashtray. Giselle’s egg had a tracery of fine black lines running across the blue surface. Any moment she expected the egg to crack, revealing not a bird, but a fairy.

  She lifted her eyes from the egg and saw the mother. Scooping up the container, careful not to shake it, she opened the front door and moved swiftly across the grass.

  ‘Do you want to see my fairy egg?’

  ‘Sorry, Giselle,’ said the mother. ‘Now’s not a good time.’

  One of the babies was crying. Giselle moved across to show him the egg and he stopped crying.

  ‘He likes it,’ she said.

  The mother didn’t answer; opening the door, she pushed the stroller inside.

  ‘I have to get dinner now,’ she said.

  ‘I can help,’ Giselle said.

  And so she found herself inside. She liked being somewhere else, pretending to be a girl in a different life. Now, when the mother took the smallest baby from the stroller, she tenderly placed her fairy egg on the bench and lifted him up.

  ‘Careful,’ said the mother. ‘He’s heavy.’ And he was, a giant head, as big as her own, rocking on a fat neck. His neck had rings of dirt around it. The baby smiled and pulled her hair. His breath smelled nice, of nothing, but also of something she could not quite name or remember.

  She was still there when the father came home. The mother ran towards him and started to cry and no-one noticed Giselle. She watched closely: the crying mother, the crying baby, the father sh-shing and patting her on the back. She was used to crying, it was the background noise of her life. Tears burst from you, an internal font, perpetually full. Tears lived in your body, like blood, waiting to spill. The other baby started to cry; the mother, the two babies and Giselle, sitting there, half hidden under the bench, picking her scab.

  She heard the word ‘pregnant’. She listened to them talking, crying; she watched the father open a bottle of wine. She could see her blue fairy egg f loating on the bench and she knew something exciting was happening. A fairy might appear, a blue fairy, matching the blue of the bluest sky, the blue eyes of the baby with the enormous head. She longed for it, for the fairy to appear, for the cupboard to open into a forest.

  It was growing dark and Giselle hated the dark, the long, endless hours, the moving shadows, the scratching of trees like fingernails against the windows rattling in the wind. Every night distorted faces gathered around her bed; the breath of something foul upon her. She could not get up and run from her bedroom into her mother’s room because there was something, or someone, beneath the bed and the minute she stood up, her feet would be sliced off at the ankles.

  Every night she wanted her mother, every night she wanted to sleep with her mother, please, Mum, I won’t wake you up. I promise. Oh please, Mum, please, and every night her mother said no. ‘You’re too old to sleep in my bed. You’re a big girl.’ But she wasn’t, she was a girl shivering beneath blankets, her whole head covered, the tiniest hole for her nose. Even then, the finger coming towards the hole, the nail, the spike, the gleam of an eye. She was suffocating, boiling, imprisoned by her senses, her ears like a bat’s, picking up sounds from the room, from the house, from the yard outside, from the road, the village, from space. She heard every sound in existence, every hideous yelp, every cry, every whimper, her nose inhaled every possible smell. Her burning eyes saw light through the hole, or rather not light but a lighter shade of dark, a paler shade of blackness. She tried not to look, she tried to close her alarmed eyes, but every time they sprang open, as if someone prodded her with a stick.

  She was so tired, she was so scared, night after night after night. She hated night, the way everything fell in, collapsing, the everyday bright world of school and little lunch and big lunch and drawing with chalk, the way everything hidden awoke, coming alive. If she wasn’t so frightened, she would leap out of bed, but she couldn’t, she couldn’t, she was condemned to lie there, suffocating, deafened by the roar, until she awoke and found darkness turned to light.

  PART

  VI

  FORTY

  Clouds uncovering the moon

  ‘Tell me everything,’ Anna said.

  ‘Everything?’

  ‘The story of your life,’ she said.

  They were entwined, back in The Landing for another weekend, seeing no-one, laced together over the balcony, looking down. In the darkness, the lake made a sound like children splashing in the bath. There was just enough moonlight to make out lilies dancing on the surface of the slapping water, the grasses and rushes waving in the wildness of the wind. The whole world was moving, rushing, splashing, passing. He felt poised on the brink of a decision, this way or that, he could not tell.

  ‘I was born feet first,’ he said.

  She laughed. ‘You know more about me than I know about you. Why don’t we start with why you haven’t got divorced yet?’

  He instinctively drew back. ‘Oh, it’s a long story. Anyway, you can’t talk. You’re still married.’ He poked her in the ribs playfully.

  ‘Only in theory,’ she said.

  ‘Well, I’m only married in theory too. My wife’s getting the divorce papers to me soon.’

  ‘Your wife?’ she asked. ‘You still think of her as your wife?’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘She seems to have a lot of power over you, your wife,’ she said.

  He leaned over and kissed her.

  It appeared he was now living with Anna. She was a sort of event, a phenomenon like weather, a stroke of fate that had happened to him. He did not consider himself a passive man, yet in this matter he appeared to be inert. One morning at breakfast in his flat at Southbank, he looked up, surprised to find her sitting at the other side of table.

  They never discussed her moving in. She simply stayed, and he did not ask her to go. She drove his car back up to The Landing to pick up the rest of her things. Her wordly goods amounted to two suitcases, clothes, a framed photograph of her son, Gaspard—who looked uncannily like her—which she set up on a dressing table in the bedroom, and an old, dog-eared copy of a book of poems by Rumi, which she rea
d aloud, lying on the bed, her head resting on his chest.

  ‘When someone quotes the old poetic image about clouds gradually uncovering the moon,’ she read in her low, lovely voice, ‘slowly loosen knot by knot the strings of your robe. Like this.’

  She took his hand and placed it between her legs.

  It was as if he had been hypnotised. She was the proffered apple, a sort of sorceress, a blessing or a curse he could not tell.

  Jerry wanted to meet her; Will wanted to meet her; everyone wanted to meet her. His parents were dead so he was saved from that; his only sibling, Phillip, an unmarried doctor—whom their late mother always referred to as a ‘playboy’—worked for Médicins Sans Frontière on a tuberculosis eradication program in Phnom Penh. Did Phillip even know Sarah had left him? His brother regarded Jonathan’s life as insufferably bourgeois—the wife, the house in the suburbs, the children at private schools—and lived his own erotic and emotional life recklessly, taking up with young student doctors for several months or sometimes a year, or else sleeping with local women from whichever region he happened to be working in. He stayed with a woman for however long it took for the state of being lovestruck to fade, and only once stayed with someone for five long years, a coldly beautiful linguistics academic from Boston he met irregularly in hotel rooms all over the world. He was not made for intimacy.