Goodbye Sweetheart

by Marion Halligan

  Lynette was thinking, all these different Williams. This is Jack’s William. Jack’s Bill. There’s Helen’s and Nerys’s and his mother’s, once, then Ferdie’s, Aurora’s, Erin’s. Barbara’s of course. There’s mine, but not what I thought it was all these years. He tricked me. Fooled me. No lies. Ha.

  It’s another life, she said. Another person.

  I’ve never forgotten it. He saved my life. I wouldn’t have had one, without him.

  You were obviously wrong about no trains using the line.

  Never saw another one, before or since. It was an old engine, even for the time. The kind they called the old coffee pot, because it had a great big funnel in a sort of round triangle shape, a cone I suppose I mean, not that I’ve ever seen a coffee pot like that. There used to be one of those engines pulled coal wagons.

  Maybe it was a ghost engine.

  It caught my foot a fair enough whack. Had a ruddy great bruise on my ankle. Limped for days.

  You were a dreamy child. Lynette remembered William saying this about Jack.

  Yeah, that’s what people said. I just thought that was the way people were.

  Not hearing a train bearing down on you.

  Trying to concentrate. Too much like hard work. There never were trains there, though.

  Lynette had tried to persuade Jack to move on from beer to wine but he’d only had a sip. I’m not really a wine person, he said. Rosamund liked a glass of chardonnay occasionally. I kept one of those little casks in the fridge for her.

  I am a woman who has lost her husband, Lynette thought. But now it appears I didn’t in fact have that husband to lose. She looked at Jack’s hands lying loosely on the table. They were clean, with short pink nails, brown, weathered, hands that did hard work in the soil and on the sea. She wanted them to hold hers. She wanted him to put his long strong arms around her and hold her tight. She wanted him to lead her over to the bed with its shiny brown nubbly cover and make love to her. She’d come here this night with these things in mind but didn’t know how to make them happen. She’d thought that pouring him a glass of wine might warm him up, but he poured his own beer and not much of it. At home she could have lit the fire and sat beside him on the sofa, gradually slipping close. There wasn’t a sofa here, just two plastic tub chairs on either side of the table that served as a writing desk. They were a bit low for dining, she felt as if her chin was resting on the table.

  What do you think the most important thing in the world is? she asked. Jack looked nervous. She barely paused, because she did not expect or want him to answer. I think it is desire. William would have agreed with me. He was into desire. New, all the time.

  I don’t think it has to be new, all the time, said Jack. But what would I know?

  Lynette leaned over and touched his hand, lightly. Of course you’d know. Tell me.

  I don’t think desire has to keep changing. It doesn’t have to stop, or find different things. Fishing, he said, I’ve always wanted fishing.

  And what about . . . people?

  Rosamund, always. Still.

  Me with William, too. It was a bit of a shock to find out it wasn’t enough for him. I suppose I should have looked at the history, there was a message there. I suppose I thought I was the one would be different. Change the pattern. He moved on; I think I could, now.

  Do you think?

  Yes, she said, on a long sibilant breath.

  Jack shrugged his shoulders. Well. What would I know, he said again.

  You could find out.

  She thought, I could say, Let’s go and lie on the bed and make love and it might be a bit more obvious but not much.

  Jack said, I wouldn’t know how to start.

  His glass was empty. She said, Shall I get you another beer?

  I think I’ve had enough, thanks.

  She poured herself another glass of red, stood up, stretched, said, These chairs are vilely uncomfortable, and went and draped herself along the bed.

  Jack wrinkled his forehead. Do you want to talk . . . he paused, grimaced, well, about arrangements . . . things?

  No, said Lynette.

  I mean, I thought, the funeral . . .

  No, said Lynette.

  And there’s the will, and so on. I suppose he did leave one.

  William was a lawyer, of course he left a will. You mean, you think maybe it’s like doctors’ children being always sick?

  What?

  Professional men, neglecting their job when it’s close to home. Doesn’t seem like William.

  Don’t you want to know?

  He’ll have left things to me. To Erin.

  He has other children. What about Ferdie and Aurora?

  Jack! Are you trying to make me miserable?

  No. I’m trying to help. Be the man of the family.

  Yes, well, that’s another thing.

  She rolled on to one elbow and drank some wine. There’ll be time for all that, wills, funerals, the rest of my life. I want another now. She drank some more of the wine, then lay down on the pillow. Her eyes closed.

  Her mobile phone woke her up. It said, in a bored voice, ring-ring, ring-ring, ring-ring, over and over. Erin liked to try out different ring tones, which meant that Lynette was never sure it was her phone. Jack had been reading the paper, was looking up, mildly interested. Lynette answered. It was Ferdie, saying something about Nerys, and did she want him to come and get her.

  No no, said Lynette, I’m okay. She shook her head, but that made it feel funny, not clear. She said, Did I fall asleep? in an indignant voice, as though it were Jack’s fault.

  For a bit. You didn’t snore much.

  You should have woken me.

  I thought you needed a rest.

  It looks like I’d better go. That was Ferdie. On about something.

  I’ll drive you, he said, and insisted.

  She stuffed the dirty plates and glasses into the basket. Jack offered to wash them and bring them back tomorrow but she said the dishwasher at home would do it. She put in the wine bottles, the full and the half drunk. When she’d done that she stood and put her arm around Jack and gave him a hug. He hugged back, like a brother.

  Kindness is no substitute for desire, she said.

  Isn’t it? I don’t know, it might be. Might be better.

  When he stopped his car in her driveway she turned and kissed him on the mouth. Like dates when she was a teenager, nervous and amateur and technically uncertain. Except then the boy did it first.

  Look after yourself, said Jack. And no, he wouldn’t come in, it was past his bedtime. But he carried the basket to the door for her.

  NERYS FLIES SOUTH

  Nerys sat on her balcony drinking orange and rosehip tea. The winter sun was warm in this sheltered place. She was looking at the sea. Watching it, you could say. Her partner Acacia did, she called this Nerys’s sea watch. She teased her, saying that she was gauging whether it was coming closer. Well, everybody knew it was, there was evidence of that, the dune washed away, the sand disappeared, and the council wasn’t going to do anything about it, not buttress the sand dunes, or wall the beach with rocks, or help people to deal with their houses gradually washing into the water. Her house was a series of pods on wheels, thanks to their architect, who had worked out what was happening to the fragile land’s edge; they had enough land to move back, for a while anyway. Or they could just uplift and go. This afternoon the sea was blue, aggressively blue, excruciatingly blue. Blue was supposed to be a soothing colour but not in this sea it wasn’t. The hard sparkle of the sun upon it could hurt the eyes, she always wore her sunglasses when she looked at it. Watched it. It was the colour of the lapis lazuli in the workshop. That was intense and richly dense too but in a comforting and restful way. No sparkle.

  People change, of course. Once Nerys had thought that living this close to the ocean was a lifelong ambition realised. Now she was inclined to listen to Acacia when she said, We could live in a cool green rainforest, think how spiritual it wou
ld be. Nerys did think about it. Maybe not move the pods: this was a sea house, close to the elements, breezes, winds, storms. They could build a new house that belonged in the trees, not on wheels to move back from the relentless attack of the waves. Sell the pods, start again.

  She found herself thinking of the Bhagwan, something she didn’t often do, lately. She remembered him saying, I am guru to the rich, because they can be easily awakened. The poor are asleep. They are no good to me. As he drove round in his fleet of Rolls-Royces. That was in the early days, when she’d just become an Orange person, and it worried her because she knew she was poor. That wasn’t the case now, thanks to the crystals. Not that she’d call herself rich, exactly, but money wasn’t a problem. She thought of the possibilities of a house in the rainforest.

  The Bhagwan would have liked it, provided it was luxurious enough. The Orange people: everyone thought they had died out. It was true that they didn’t get about in orange robes any more. The crystals had been Ma Sheela’s idea, and a very good one. Though the name, the Crystal Palace, had been all her own work. And the grounds, the tranquil pools and fountains, the grottoes, the statues, the secret themed gardens. All the different Buddhas, hidden among the plants. The Amethyst Cafe, with its gourmet meals and snacks and produce to take away, the obelisks, the labyrinth—not the kind you could get lost in, but paths you could trace to their centre of serenity. Lucky the business was no longer attached to her house, it would have been harder to move. The cleverness of the business owed a lot to her second husband, he’d been an accountant, and made sure it all worked financially. She’d learned a great deal from him, she was a natural, he said. And now the staff did the work, she mainly kept imagining it. Not to lose the vision which had begun it. Supervising, of course.

  The light was taking on that furry quality of the late afternoon, when the lowering sun shines through the sea mist and the colours become pale and haunting. Chillier, too, but not yet time to go inside. This was what would be hard to leave, this subtle cloudy light which was like living in an oyster shell, all faint pearly iridescence. She said that about oyster shells to Acacia once, and Acacia had grinned and replied, The world is our oyster. Well, so it was, so it was.

  Acacia would be home soon. This afternoon was her adult education class in how to have a fabulous funeral. People who have a lifestyle will want to have a deathstyle, her brochures said, and Acacia Solstice could help them to this. A lot of people came to the classes, she was a famous funeral celebrant. Nerys had met her when Acacia had organised the funeral of her second husband, his choice, he always had an eye for spiritual fashions.

  It had taken a while, but they had got together. I knew we would, said Acacia, I just didn’t want to rush it. Now Nerys did not want to think of ever being apart from Acacia. Tomorrow afternoon they would go to Canberra. Acacia had a funeral in the morning, a toddler who’d been run over in the driveway of her house by her father in his SUV. It would be a natural funeral, the child in a cardboard coffin which her cousins and all her little friends would spend some of the morning painting, and then it would be buried and a tree planted, no headstone, there would be coordinates that could be traced by GPS. There’d be a party in the field, not wailing and grief but a celebration of the child’s life; no easy task in the circumstances, but Acacia had her ways of managing that.

  She was a tall and stately woman with a cloud of white hair and she wore white garments, robes she called them, a bit Grecian, a bit Asian, flowing around and about her body, like a handmaiden of the earth goddess who welcomed the child into death. When Acacia’s topaz eyes smiled upon you, you could believe she was the goddess herself. Her ceremonies were not ecumenical, but somehow you believed in Elysian Fields. Nerys would attend the funeral, she loved Acacia’s ceremonies but did not go unless she had a reason. In this case she knew the family, the whole town did, and was distressed by the tragedy that had befallen them. They ran the aromatherapy shop, and were good citizens of the town. The mother did massages, she had magic fingers. The little girl who was called Willow had been known to everyone. Nerys knew Acacia was going to do her favourite reading from the Prophet, Kahlil Gibran, which always filled Nerys with such exultation she wanted to cry, and yet it was an exhortation to joy. Acacia said, Joy, tears; all life is one, you know that.

  For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?

  And what is it to cease breathing but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?

  Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.

  And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.

  And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

  She had already decided to have this at her own funeral. Acacia was big on planning your funeral well before you expected it to happen, so everyone knew where they were. A cardboard coffin, too; if—hopefully—Aurora had some children, they could decorate it. If not, maybe a shroud would be a good idea. The lightest possible footprint on the earth. And marked only by the coordinates recorded elsewhere. Much the best. She didn’t think anybody would care to visit. Her own parents had a plaque in a crematorium garden, with a yellow rosebush, she knew though she had never seen it.

  It was dark now. She shivered, and remembered to think that William was dead. A long time ago he had been her husband. There was a small pang of melancholy in that thought, not much sadness, as there hadn’t been when she left him, all the excitement of becoming an Orange person carrying her far from any faint prickle of regret. All the important things of her life had been after William. Well, except Aurora. Briefly she’d wondered if Lynette would want Acacia to do the ceremony, but she decided she’d have her own ideas. Better not get involved. Except by going. She would do that.

  She went inside and put together a meal for when Acacia came home. Pumpkin soup, Thai-style made with coconut milk; lettuce, avocado, tomatoes, a white bean salad with olives. Sourdough bread from the Amethyst Cafe.

  Acacia when she came zinging in was hungry. Her adult education classes were a performance, they took it out of her. In her class was a local councillor; he reckoned there would be forced evacuations from seaside properties before too long, she said. What with global warming, rising sea levels, all that.

  Nerys looked at her. I was thinking, she said. Time to do that tree-change. Move to the rainforest. Sell this while we can.

  Acacia returned her look, smiled. Yes!

  They hired a car at the airport in Canberra and drove to the Hyatt. Acacia intended to go straight to bed. A funeral always exhausted her, she gave so much, it is not easy to take a mass of grief-stricken people in the hands of one’s will and carry them into celebration; all Acacia’s energy had been used up. Then the plane trip, but first the drive to Coolangatta. And the plane needed a stop in Newcastle.

  Acacia put her nightgown on and got into bed. Nerys made her a cup of soporific herbal tea. Now Acacia talked about the funeral. It was hard, she said. I knew it would be, but it was even harder. She stared through the steam from the cup. I found out that Willow was an IVF baby.

  I didn’t know that, said Nerys.

  No. Nobody did. They’d been trying for years, and the IVF was long and slow too. They’d pretty well given up hope, then Willow was born. They talked to me about the joy of that. And I could see they were thinking that they’d killed her.

  Well, I suppose they did.

  You can’t think like that, Nerys. Life and death aren’t simple things. They are wondrous, beyond our understanding; we can only try to see them. We have to learn to accept. That’s my job, to help.

  Nerys held her hand tightly.

  Acacia said, I thought they were spiritual people, their business and all, and so they are, but their spirituality has taken a beating. I needed a lot of energy to get a small flicker from it.

  Nerys remembered how she used to think of Aurora, and what it w
ould have been like to lose her. An only child. Your single hostage to fortune. She didn’t think that now; maybe she had got into the habit of accepting Aurora’s life. But she remembered the nightmare thought of it, all those years ago. Willow, the beloved child, and no more possible now.

  You can’t replace one child with another, said Acacia, as though she knew what Nerys was thinking. You have to see her as the gift of herself, and the importance of that gift isn’t the length of time you have her but the strength of the love she brings.

  It’s hard.

  Of course. Nobody’s saying it’s not. We can help by thinking of her, the little bright creature she was. Holding her in our minds, still.

  Nerys wasn’t tired, plane travel agitated her, she knew she couldn’t sleep yet. She decided to pop up and see Lynette. If there were no lights in the house she wouldn’t knock.

  A young man opened the door. He was almost frowning. Hello, she said, I’m Nerys.

  He smiled then. Ferdie, he said. Seeing her blankness, he said, Helen’s my mother.

  Oh yes, said Nerys. She reached up and kissed him; she liked beautiful boys. In a motherly way. You are your mother’s son, she said to him.

  Ferdie didn’t know what this meant so he smiled a small smile. She meant slender and willowy but didn’t say so. They went into the kitchen. Aurora was there. Nerys hugged her and patted her stomach; Aurora wriggled her shoulders, shaking off the hand, the thought. Don’t go on, Mum, she said.