by Susan Duncan
In the weeks after Barbara's death, Bob and I fall into a routine. I cook and he brings the wine. The house up the hill is lonely, the memories of Barbara's presence too vivid and raw for solitary evenings. By coming to my home, he avoids those early hours of the evening that seem emptiest – the times he and Barbara would have a pre-dinner drink and prepare dinner together, discuss the day's events, tally what the children were up to, plan the following day.
As winter sets its course, the renovations move into high gear. Living in a house that's being ripped apart and resurrected in different stages feels like living in a derelict building and I have given up trying to keep life clean and tidy. Mid-June, the front wall comes down, the deck is ripped up and the cold whooshes through the gaps in the tarpaulin the builder puts up each night to block the hole. It's freezing. Stewart and Fleury offer their house in Towlers Bay and I gratefully accept.
'That's silly,' Bob says when I explain I'll be moving for a while. 'There's plenty of space at Tarrangaua.'
'People will talk,' I reply.
'Let them.This concerns only you and me. And anyway, I don't want to have to get in the boat every night to come to dinner at Towlers Bay. They're probably talking already,' he adds with a smile. 'That's what happens in small communities.'
So I move up the hill for the next few weeks, with the puppies of course, who are so used to being there they settle immediately. Bob gives me my own areas, turning one bedroom into my office, and emptying the closet in the spare bedroom. But I never feel completely at ease. It is not my space. After years of being my mother's gypsy daughter, I have finally found where I want to set my table each night. I don't want to feel as though I'm camping any more.
Bob builds a roaring fire every evening and we sit in front of it on different sides of the coffee table. He works, sketching ideas. I read. When I jump up and rush outside into the chill of the verandah to cool a hot flush, he gets so used to it, he doesn't even look up. I prepare huge meals and fat begins to cling to my bones. My energy levels lift a little and work gets easier.
Without being conscious of it,my panic attacks fade away and I walk with dogged routine every morning through the national park, as I did when I first came here what seems like so many years ago for Fleury's birthday party.
Often I meet neighbours on the track. Maureen from Towlers Bay with her old border collie. Caroline from Little Lovett with a sweet-natured cattle dog cross called Figaro. Tim and Leisa with Ponzer. And usually on his own, strolling as though the world is his for the asking, gorgeous Obi, the itinerant labrador. He wags his tail madly and greets me like a long-lost best friend. Sometimes he turns and joins Dolce,Vita and me. At other times the huge, boofy blonde dog continues on his way alone.
Over time, I learn Caroline has had two types of cancer, the first striking when she was in her early twenties, the second, in her early forties. 'I survived the first diagnosis so I never doubted for a moment that I wouldn't survive the second time,' she says as we talk on our walk. She is tall and slim, with a beautiful smile and a sharp mind.
'I thought I was going to die,' I reply.
Because we have been through similar crises we understand the unspoken subplot of many of our conversations.
'Got a shocker of a pain in my knees,' I say one morning as we push ourselves to walk faster and faster up 'heart attack hill'.
She stops immediately and turns to me because she knows what I am really asking is whether I should worry about it. Any bone pain could be a symptom of the dreaded secondaries, cancer spreading to the bone.
'Both of them?' she asks.
'Yeah.'
'Arthritis, perhaps?'
And the fear, nearly always irrational, is sponged away.
Sometimes Bob comes with me on my walks and points out what is all around that I never much noticed until, from her bed, Barbara opened my eyes. The exquisite little white flowers, fringed like Victorian lampshades, of the blueberry ash trees in Towlers Bay. The vibrant yellow flowering tips of geebungs. I love the word geebung so much, I ponder whether I'll name my house Geebung once the renovations are finished. GEEBUNG. Sounds joyful, with hints of amazement in it. And casual. Nothing grand and Latin about it at all.
If Bob and I walk early enough in the morning, when the earth is damp and the trees are still glossy with dew, the sunlight strikes massive spider webs spanning the track. They are more than six feet wide, and if they are not high enough, we have to duck low to avoid getting tangled in the sticky, gossamer threads.
'They're golden orbs,' Bob explains, pointing to a large spider covered in golden hairs, with black, orange and yellow stripes on its legs. 'There's the male. See? He's tiny compared to her. Smaller than the nail on your little finger.'
'Do they bite?'
'No. Not unless they're cornered, but they're not poisonous. Mostly, if they're frightened, they shake their web. Trying to scare us off, I think.'
He reaches near a spider to show me what happens and the web vibrates, shimmering in the thin morning light like a huge, golden jewel. When he takes his finger away, the web settles into stillness once more. By the end of autumn, the track is thick with webs and it's like wandering through a strange, ephemeral kingdom.
One late afternoon, after a restless day, the sky is a mass of rainbows. More than I have ever seen at one time. A double rainbow stretches from the Elvina Bay side of the escarpment bang into the middle of Lovett Bay.
'I know exactly where to dig for the pot of gold,' I tell Bob as we look at the sight from his verandah.
He smiles, but his eyes are wet and I know he is thinking it is a sight Barbara would have cherished.
Without even noticing, I start adding Bob's washing to my own. And on days when I go off to do a story, Bob cooks dinner. Barbecued lamb chops, with the tails crisped. Four vegetables at least, of course. And once, a roast of pork with the crackling salty and crunchy. We ate every delicious bit of it. Ox tail stew is his favourite but because he is a man who likes balance, he makes it infrequently so it remains a treat.
We always sit at the dining room table with the fire burning in the background, and as we relax with each other, we begin to talk and talk. There is so much to sift through, in the months following someone's death. In the talking, it's as though an old skin is shed and a new one slowly acquired. The memories, once recounted out loud, are filed and stored making room, eventually, for a future.
If the nights are filled with talk, the days are consumed by watching my house creep closer to completion. Every day there are decisions to make. Should a window on the stairwell be much deeper? Should we put a window on the wall facing a lightwell? Is the ceiling high enough in the middle area? Should the kitchen bench, now sticking out into the main room like an overgrown thumb, be cut back? Should I finish the downstairs area instead of just getting it to lock-up stage? I've had plans drawn but I don't really need the space so I've told the builders just to enclose the area.
Sun is already spilling through the clerestory windows at the back of the house and there is a grand sweep of space that gives the feeling that the building is suspended above the water.
I begin asking about completion dates. Will it be finished by late spring? I visualise furniture in place, where to hang paintings. But deadlines for completion come and go, so often the way when you've a water access property and at the mercy of tides and weather. If the beginning of the renovation seemed to storm ahead, the end is dragging on in miniscule increments. I feel increasingly frustrated as weeks fly by. I wait for the corrugated iron specialists to arrive and clad the outside walls. The man who is making the stairs is running behind schedule. The fireplace is the wrong size. I remind myself that I have learned not to sweat the small details and that a glitch here or there is unimportant. They are little hitches, not life-threatening events. But I am impatient. I want my own home. Finally, it is time for the painters and the floor sanders to begin the final touches. Almost there!
One night, over a bottle of re
d, Bob tells me again that one way to solve the on-going problem of the puppies running off when given the slightest chance is to find one of them a new home. 'Please think about it,' he says. 'Right now, you have two dogs that add up to less than one because they are loyal first to each other, and only sometimes to you. If there is just one dog, all the dynamics change. You become leader of the pack and have some control.'
In my heart, I know he's right. But the thought of choosing is intolerable. I delay for weeks until a dead bandicoot turns up on the lawn. I can only assume the puppies hunted it down. One puppy must go.
'How can I choose, though?' I ask Bob. 'It's like deciding which child you love best.'
I delay making the decision for as long as I can but when I find a good home, it is crunch time. In the end, the decision-making is easy.Vita must be the one to go. She is the hunter, the ringleader. Beautiful, wilful, the animal who sleeps only lightly and keeps her distance on the bed. Who, when she picks up a scent, cannot be distracted from it.
When I pass Vita to her new owner at the Church Point ferry wharf, I am quite calm.
'She has two meals a day for another month and then you can cut it to one meal a day,' I say. 'She loves cheese and goes mad for bacon. But she's not greedy. She only eats as much as she wants and leaves the rest.'
'She'll be fine,' says my friend, holding her up to his face.Vita covers him with tiny licks, her little pink tongue darting in and out.
Will he learn quickly that she only does that when she's frightened or nervous? Will he learn to soothe her fears with a tummy rub? Then I shut down these thoughts. I am strong and my body and mind are strong. This way, the puppies will both survive. If they stay here together, one day they'll find the fox baits in the national park and that will be the end.
'You'll be wonderful for each other,' I say, waving goodbye and reversing the boat away from the wharf before turning back to Lovett Bay.
Bob is waiting at the dock with Dolce when I return and he puts her in my arms.
'Do you think she senses Vita is gone?'
Bob shakes his head. 'You're not going to like this, but she already seems pretty happy to be an only child.'
'Tonight will be the test. She's never spent a night away from Vita before.'
'Maybe. But I reckon she won't miss a beat.Vita was the leader of the pack. Now she's king pin.'
Bob looks at me closely. 'How are you coping?'
'Fine. Absolutely fine.'
That night, I jam my finger in a cupboard door and although the pain is slight, I sob and sob. Every past grief erupts and I feel like my world is caving in around me.
Bob hands me a cognac, which I gulp down. He brings another.
'I am so sick of bloody loss,' I say between sobs. 'Oh God, sorry. Sorry about Barbara.That's real loss. I know that. But Jesus. When's it going to end?'
'Never,' Bob says. 'Because that's the way life is.'
But I keep crying until I fall asleep on the sofa. When I wake in the morning, Bob's put a cover over me and Dolce is curled in the crook of my legs.
'Hey, little puppy. There's just you and me now.'
My face feels like a football, my eyes are claggy. Dolce doesn't stir.
'Do you miss your little sister?' I ask her.
Her eyes don't open. When I rub her ears, she stretches happily and sighs loudly. But her eyes stay closed. This is not a dog that's unhappy.This is a dog that thinks she's won the lottery.
A few days later, when there's still no sign of any moping, I decide to rename her.
'I can't have a dog called Dolce without a Vita to follow,' I explain to Bob.
He shrugs.
It takes a few weeks, but eventually, by a kind of osmosis, she is named Chip Chop from all the times I've called her chubby chops for the fluffy whiskers around her cheeks. And life becomes much simpler, as Bob said it would.
I love staying with Bob and he is thoughtful in every way, but I am always a guest, mindful of keeping someone else's sense of order. I long to be in my own home, leave dishes in the sink and stay up all night playing music. Mostly, though, I want to be surrounded by my own past. All I have to do is look at a rug from Samarkand and I see my brother, young, gorgeous, on the eve of his wedding to Dolly.
I bought the rug as their wedding present in the 1970s, when I was on the almost obligatory pilgrimage overland from London to Katmandu. After haggling for two days, I finally paid $100. It wasn't until we were leaving town that I discovered the rug trader had fleeced me. The rough kilim was worth about $25, another trader told me. For $100, he went on to tell me, I could have bought a beautiful, soft silk and wool rug. It was the roughness I liked, I told him. And he shook his head as if to say he would never understand foreigners.
When I gave the kilim to my brother, Dolly, whom I was meeting for the first time, explained bluntly that they preferred silk rugs, thank you. When I thought about it, my brother was always immaculate, had superb taste, looked gorgeous and was a perfectionist. I was the messy, disorganised one who always got back to the office from lunch with splashes of spaghetti sauce on a white shirt. After Dolly rejected the gift, I bought them a couple of incredibly expensive Japanese carved ivory netsuke representing gambling. For luck. As I recall, my brother went on a historic losing streak and eventually sold them or put them away.He never told me exactly what he'd done.
I kept the rug, now with holes chewed in it by various puppies, because it reminds me of those events as no photograph could do. Kept too, my big heavy table that every removalist has cursed, because when I am alone I can conjure up a memorable dinner or two and feel cheered by the images. I've kept some wineglasses that are a bugger to wash but were given to me by my brother. They stand alongside the delicate Limoges dessert plates my mother brought back from Paris and gave to me on the day she said,'I don't think I'll be giving many more dinner parties. 'The day I realise she is getting old and the fight goes out of me (and her!) and a new tenderness creeps into our relationship.
Other things too. A potato peeler that works brilliantly, white bed linen I lugged home from New York that I spray with lavender water before I iron. They crunch fragrantly, the way real linen does, and have a heavenly scratchiness. The big, cast iron pot I carried from Paris.
Odd, I think, as I pack away stuff so the builders can paint the walls and sand the floors, that I have so few framed photographs. So I go looking for old envelopes stuffed with prints and sift through them for a moment or two.Then I put them away again. They trigger a flash of mad hope that if I pick up the phone and dial the right numbers, perhaps my brother will answer. Then, when reason surges in again, it brings with it the old, familiar anger of loss. No, it's better to stay away from photos for a while longer.
To make the house empty enough for the floor sanders and the painters, furniture is stacked in piles outside in the yard, wrapped in plastic and tarpaulins. Every time it rains, I cross my fingers there isn't a leak caused by a little rat-like marsupial called an antechinus. They love plastic – especially yellow plastic – and chew the tops off olive oil bottles and jars of mustard. I saw my first antechinus at Bob's house. Bob had caught it in a trap in the pantry, where all the yellow tops had been chewed to bits. One of his daughters took the trap to Barbara's bedroom for her to identify it. There's a rodent hierarchy in the bush, it turns out.
'Bush rats are ok,' Barbara told us. 'Antechinus are very ok. But rattus rattus are a no-no.You can tell the difference by their tails. Bush rats have hairy tails about the length of their body. Antechinus have short, hairy tails. Rattus rattus have long, hairless tails.'
When Bob's daughter opened the trap for Barbara to take a look, it leapt out of the trap and onto the bed, paused and looked her straight in the eye, cheeky, arrogant, as if to ask what she was doing in his house.
'Antechinus,' Barbara said, unperturbed while the rest of us screamed and hopped from foot to foot (why do we do that?). 'Leave it alone.'
And off it scooted.
Cute
or not, I would prefer them to leave the plastic that protects my furniture intact.
It is my habit, every evening after the workmen have gone home, to do a tour of the house, getting a feel for how it will be to live in it. One afternoon I arrive a little early, just in time to see one of the painters, the older, more arrogant one, slapping a second coat of high-gloss white paint on the bathroom door. Gordon Andrews' fabulous painting of a bright red rooster has been obliterated. I had told them not to touch the door. Now it is white.
'Oh, sorry, love,' he says, casually. 'Do you want me to see if I can get the white off? It's a bit late, and I don't think it will work, but I'll give it a go.'
Visions of an extra week spent trying to restore the rooster flash through my mind, so I shrug and tell him 'no'. But I am incensed. I've already destroyed a lot of Gordon's touches in the frenzy of putting my own stamp on the place, and only quite late into the changes realise I am destroying some lovely, quirky work. Why do I always go like a bull at a gate? Why don't I ever try to understand what's there before I rip it out? Why don't I see what's under my nose until it's too late?
Still angry and upset, I go into the bathroom to remove the mirror over the basin for the painters. So it takes me a couple of seconds to notice what is behind the mirror. In a few black lines, Gordon has drawn an irreverent self-portrait, full of humour and life.
I whirl on the painters. 'Touch that, and you will both be dead!'
The portrait is there now, hidden behind the mirror. A secret. Gordon's little joke. He may have sold the place, but his presence will remain.
Later, I wonder if he drew the picture after I asked him, in the days just after I agreed to buy the house, to leave one little piece of his art behind.
'I don't care what you leave, Gordon,' I told him. 'An old card, an old invitation, a postcard – anything. Just a bit of you to leave in the house.'
Looking back, he was remarkably restrained in his response. I mean, the whole house was a reflection of his creativity. Everywhere you looked, there were the most stunning little nuances. How crass I'd been and how polite he was not to point it out. Which must have been hard. Gordon was not renowned for being overly polite.
