‘My father never offered,’ said Hartley. ‘It was the farm first, second and third, yet he was mad keen on the All Blacks, of course, and liked to suggest, without being specific, that he’d been promising himself as a young guy.’
‘My parents were great, and the older I get the more I realise it. I was always made to feel special.’
‘I was just there,’ said Hartley. ‘I was just there in the family, like another chair. I don’t imagine there was any sense of loss when I left home. I didn’t feel any.’ When his father had taken him to the bus station in Invercargill, he hadn’t waited with him until departure, simply lifted the suitcases from the car boot and told him he’d be okay.
‘Don’t get pushed around up there,’ he said. He had to get on to see the bank manager, he said. Hartley had stood by the cases as the car left, but his father didn’t look back to see him, just gave a wave that was more an arc of dismissal than a farewell. It had been another of those cold, southern days, and Hartley was keen for the bus to be moving north through the frosted paddocks. ‘We were all separate in our family,’ he told Sarah. ‘Mum would’ve been different perhaps in other circumstances, but basically we were together by biological chance rather than affection.’ He smiled, to show he was realistic rather than bitter.
A girl with fat legs and a very short skirt came and asked Hartley the time. She was polite, but he found the silver rings in her lip and eyebrow offputting. ‘Jesus,’ he said when she’d gone, ‘I just can’t understand it. Why would you do that to your face?’
‘To be different to fuddy duddies like us maybe.’
‘You can’t tell me you like it?’
‘No.’
‘I bet we’d be in agreement on almost anything you like to mention,’ he said. ‘We think the same — we see the world in the same way. I knew it from the first time we met.’
‘We hardly said a word to each other.’
‘I knew it, though. There’re people who are on the same wavelength, just a few, and you get this shock of recognition, knowing that they see life in the way you do yourself. I love it when that happens. Most of the people I meet I feel no connection with, but you still have to smile, talk and maybe do business with them.’
‘I would’ve guessed you liked being with people,’ Sarah said. He had an open manner, seemed to engage with people with friendly ease, and she was surprised by his assessment of his own personality.
‘But how many really matter to you?’ he said. ‘That’s the thing.’
‘Maybe that says something about you as well as them.’
‘Oh, I’m as much a selfish prick as anyone. You might as well know that.’ His pleasure in being with her was unforced, and Sarah was conscious of it. ‘Sometimes at home when the phone goes, I don’t answer it, just sit and enjoy my own company. At work you have to accommodate all comers. At least it’s usually one on one. I don’t know how teachers put up with a whole swarm of kids at once, and day after day. Jesus. I couldn’t hack it.’
‘Maybe they keep you young,’ Sarah said.
‘I’ve been young and didn’t find it all that great. It’s better when you grow up, and get to choose your own food and occupations. Being a kid’s overrated, I reckon. The world’s run by adults for their own benefit.’
He was right, Sarah thought. He was right about a lot of things, or seemed so in his obvious pleasure in her company and the moment. She experienced a minor epiphany: an awareness that she was happier than she’d been for a long time. The air was warm, even though tainted with the fumes of traffic, the sky was blue, and she felt herself the centre of his admiration and the cause of his enjoyment. The illness, responsibility and apprehension that so shadowed her life were for once forgotten. She felt she would like to touch him — reach out and put her hand on his, or run a finger down his cheek as he talked. Just touch him, to get the feel of him. Not a sexual urge at all, but a sign of compatibility and pleasure.
They had come round somehow to speaking of the fallibility of memory when Sarah realised with a start that they had been together for almost two hours.
‘Would you like me to walk back with you?’ Hartley said.
‘No, thanks.’ Her apartment faced the street, and from the large window of the living room, and the balcony, the people and traffic passing were clear, and drew attention.
‘Well, give me your number and I’ll text you so that we can arrange to talk again, maybe have a walk.’ They stood together so that he could programme the number into his phone, and when that was done, he gave her a quick, friendly kiss on the cheek. He was her own height, she realised then, and that was what she remembered of the kiss; no particular frisson, but his face briefly level with her own. To kiss Robert, her face needed to be upturned, unless they were lying together.
‘What a good thing we met,’ said Hartley cheerfully. ‘I think so anyway.’ He wore an unusual sleeveless grey jacket, almost like a tunic, that she didn’t fancy as much as the red jersey. ‘You look after yourself,’ he said. ‘I’ll be in touch.’
‘I could be quite busy going with Robert to hospital,’ Sarah said. ‘It’s always the priority. Everything revolves around that and how he responds.’
‘Of course.’
He waited until she was on her way before leaving himself. She didn’t look back and so neither did he when he walked away. He didn’t know if anything much more than a friendship would happen between them. He hoped it would, but even what they already shared made him feel better than he had for years. For a long time there had been only him, and other people as a block at considerable emotional remove, and now there was an individual already special to him. ‘Yes,’ he said loudly to himself as he walked. He felt he was in a good place at a good time. Colours and sounds were sharper somehow around him. ‘Yes,’ he said again emphatically, oblivious to those who glanced at him in passing. Chance had favoured him and its touch was pleasing.
Robert was on the phone when Sarah got back. She could tell immediately by his tone of voice that it wasn’t their daughter. She took off her shoes, then went into the kitchen and began preparing lunch. Their meals were usually light. Long gone were routine family dinners with full settings and meat every day. Their age, their comparative inactivity, their waistlines, Robert’s illness, all disposed her to calculated moderation and ease of preparation when she considered meals.
Sarah made tomato and cheese sandwiches for them both, spread margarine on halved apricot muffins and took from the fridge what pasta remained from the evening before. ‘You’d like that?’ she asked her husband, pointing to it when he came in. ‘Do you want it in the microwave?’ He shook his head, picked up the bowl and wandered back into the living room.
‘That was Margaret, wondering how things were going,’ he said as he went. ‘They may be up in week or so. Hugh’s thinking of going in with his partners to buy a place on Waiheke Island, and they want to have a look at it.’
Sarah came with her plate and sat beside him on the sofa, looking down on the busy street. She was happy to talk with Robert about the things they always talked about, because she’d been for a time free of them. The interlude with Hartley had been a stimulating change that she needed, and the awareness that he found her attractive was flattering. He was a different sort of man to her husband, engaging aspects of her nature to which Robert rarely appealed. The contrast wasn’t consciously made, and wasn’t judgemental, it was just that she’d enjoyed the new companionship. Nothing was threatened, or denied.
‘You were a fair while this morning,’ said Robert later. ‘I was half pie waiting so that I could ring Donna.’
‘I went on to the shops for a bit.’ It came readily, as if produced for her by another self before she could provide an alternative. It was the first lie.
Hartley would text, and Sarah would reply, agreeing to a meeting when that was possible. Robert’s hospital treatments were not opportunities, because he liked her to come with him, and she would never have felt comfortable choosi
ng to be with someone else while Robert faced the trial on his own. There were times, though, when he just wanted to rest up at the apartment, and gaps between visits when the doctors wished him to have a chance to bounce back a bit from the necessary assault of drugs and radiation therapy.
Usually she and Hartley met at Magnus, and most times they stayed there, but not always. Once they went to a film, they had several walks and gallery visits, and listened to a free concert by a quintet in the Ramsay Hall. Mainly they sat and talked. Sarah was never away more than two hours, and that became so much the accustomed span that their conversations evolved to have a natural conclusion then, without the need to refer to their watches. They would have their brief kiss and part. They never ran out of things to share, each gradually unfolding a life before the other without conscious deceit. Because their time was short and opportunities were difficult to predict, the meetings possessed a heightened quality, and a concentration on each other lacking in the extended and routine companionship of marriage, when interaction and attention are sometimes stretched thin to cover all the time spent together.
Because Hartley lived alone, the interludes with Sarah became central emotional experiences: more important than neighbours, or long-standing professional acquaintances, more immediate than the occasional calls to his son in London. He found himself intently observing oddities of event and personality in everyday life not just for his own comprehension, but to pass on to Sarah when they talked. He became more conscientious in his housekeeping, vacuuming the spare rooms, lifting the door mats to sweep dust away, aligning rows of spice and herb jars that had a faint yellow tinge to the glass, and had been rarely touched since Madeleine’s death. He never asked himself if it was logical to think that Sarah would ever visit him, or if she did that a spare bedroom would be entered, or a coir mat lifted for inspection.
A house with street appeal near Titirangi isn’t cheap. In many people’s estimation Hartley would be considered well off, and that wasn’t so much his doing, or even his wife’s, but the unintended generosity of her parents. Madeleine’s father had been a successful manufacturer of battery plates. He was dead before Hartley could know him, but his wife, Irene, had initially taken a shine to Hartley, mistakenly thinking he was then already a qualified solicitor.
The three of them had met on the Devonport ferry. He was on his way back from delivering significant documents to the naval base. Madeleine had been close to him on the moving deck, the silver bracelet on her left wrist. ‘I’m pleased to see you have the bangle on,’ Hartley had said, and was a little surprised that she recognised him, although only days had passed since their meeting in the café.
‘Thanks to you I’m still able to wear it,’ she said, lifting her bare arm with the bracelet, and in a friendly way she corrected his reference to it. Bangles don’t open, she told him. Irene’s presence may well have been the reason she felt comfortable about being approached. Her mother kept the conversation going by listing the features that made Devonport unique, and then the superiority of her own part of Auckland. It was an early indication of the sort of woman she was — preoccupied with the instruction of others and the emphasis on her own significance. Because of that inattention to anything apart from herself, she formed the impression that he was a lawyer and so someone to be encouraged. Without her to prolong their talk, Hartley might never have asked them if they would like a coffee after the ferry ride, or later had the opportunity to arrange to see Madeleine again.
He and Irene never became close, but learnt to accept each other’s company for Madeleine’s sake. Irene held him responsible for her initial misunderstanding concerning his status within the legal profession. No doubt she had hopes of a more charismatic and successful husband for her daughter, and was dead before he qualified, later than most, and so saved from the need to revise her opinion.
Irene’s main interest in life appeared to be the correction of other people — their dress, their taste, their political and spiritual views, even their speech. On one occasion when Hartley was visiting, he heard her admonish an electrician who had come to fix her water cylinder.
‘I rung up the workshop guy for the part,’ he said.
‘No you didn’t,’ said Irene.
‘What?’ he said.
‘You didn’t rung him up, you rang him up. Now you have rung him up.’
‘Whatever,’ said the man, who had no idea what she was on about, but realised he was being ridiculed. Hartley had rather hoped that the cylinder’s subsequent persistent malfunction was the electrician’s revenge.
Another time, when the three of them were at a concert, she had leant forward and told the man in front she wanted him to shift. ‘I can’t see,’ she’d said. ‘Your head’s too big.’
‘There’s no other seat,’ the man said.
‘Slump down then,’ said Irene. ‘For goodness’ sake, I can hardly see a thing.’
Once, when she’d been drinking, she told Hartley he didn’t smell like a winner. He was surprised she’d ever been close enough to make the distinction. Irene was thin and always well dressed, but age ravaged her, and although she kept out of the sun her skin darkened and loosened until it seemed as if she wore stockings over her limbs. Towards the end there was so little of her that she appeared in the process of mummification, with only her dark, jewelled eyes glinting from the wrappings.
She had a heart attack while watering the flower pots on her deck, was found soaked and speechless, and died in hospital within a few hours, without being able to give any farewell to her daughter, or any reprimand to Hartley. He felt no unease afterwards whenever he sat on the wooden boards where she’d collapsed. He could never quite decide which was the more crucial in bringing Madeleine and him together — the silver bracelet, or Irene. The rather fine, architecturally designed home was left to Madeleine, and they were able to sell their own and move there, amid the kauri and ferns and with a view back to the central city.
It wasn’t the ghost of the battery plate manufacturer that Hartley imagined in the house now, not his resolutely pained and alienated mother-in-law, not even the presence of his dead wife. He liked to think of Sarah sitting by the large living-room window as they talked; maybe walking with him into one of the more intimate rooms.
That may never have happened if she hadn’t gone to Titirangi, ostensibly to be part of a class in flower arrangement. She knew what it meant as soon as Hartley suggested it. It was the next level, as they say, a cover, an assignation quite different from the café, the walks, even the cinema.
‘You mean come to your home,’ she had said.
‘Yes, if you could. I’d love that. I’d love you to see the place.’
‘And then?’ she said, with a slight smile that banished pretence.
‘Whatever,’ Hartley said. ‘Whatever you’re comfortable with. We’re not kids, are we? Mainly I want to be with you for a while in my own place and be able to show it to you.’
It took two days for Sarah to decide. What attracted her wasn’t the possibility of sex, and what deterred her most wasn’t guilt regarding her husband. She hadn’t made love in the fullest sense since Robert’s prostate operation, but felt no urgent deprivation. Copulation had been a customary and regular thing during many years of marriage, and no longer had mysterious allure. As to guilt, she knew of two affairs that Robert had enjoyed with nurses at his dental surgery, and the marriage had survived them. As husband and wife they had become reconciled to deficiencies in each other that were outweighed by proven, admirable qualities.
No, the reason she decided to enrol for the floristry course, with the knowledge she would meet Hartley in Titirangi, was that when she was with him she felt she was at the surface of life again, with fresh experience and possibility, with the sense she was in some way courted. A woman is never too old to appreciate that. She was surprised by the effect his open admiration and desire had on her: the power of it caused a quickening. She began to understand why some ugly men were nevertheless su
ch successful lovers. There is a fascination for a woman in seeing herself magnified and exalted in a man’s fierce adulation.
On Saturday she left Robert with lunch prepared, and took a taxi to the War Memorial Hall in Titirangi. Hartley was waiting there in his car, but she just waved and went on in to see the organisers. The tutor hadn’t arrived. A woman of about her own age was placing buckets of long-stalked flowers and greenery on the trestle tables, a few early arrivals for the class were making themselves known to one another, and a young guy in jeans and a T-shirt announcing ‘ART MATTERS’ was at a desk by the door. Sarah gave him her name, said that family sickness meant she couldn’t spend a whole day away, but that she had come to explain and pay. He was embarrassed to accept the money, but didn’t have the authority to waive the fee.
When she came out, Hartley was standing by the passenger side of his car, ready to open the door for her. ‘Everything okay?’
‘All set. They have some lovely blooms, even orchids. I’m sorry to miss it,’ she said.
‘But a day, nearly a whole day together. Fantastic.’
‘Yes,’ she said. She would make the most of it and not do anything silly. No sex. She would relax and for a brief time be somebody other than her regular self. For just a day she would put herself ahead of any responsibility for Robert. For just a day she would see herself as Hartley saw her.
Love as a Stranger Page 3
