Love as a Stranger

by Owen Marshall

  ‘You know what, you’re looking great.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. As a young woman she had often worn shorts, or jeans, but now she considered that her legs had become too thick. Once, as he stroked them, Robert had told her that she had thighs like a wild mare. She supposed he intended it as a compliment.

  She admired the house, the conscious design, the abundant light without sacrificing privacy, the real wood and the quality of the curtains and furnishings, the deck that extended into foliage like a ship’s prow above a green sea. She did notice that Hartley was more fastidious about tidiness than cleanliness. Nothing gross, just that the Venetian blinds needed wiping, and the glass of the oven door was speckled. For a guy, he was doing well enough. She would have been surprised to know how carefully he’d prepared for her visit, how often he’d envisaged it.

  They sat on the large, dark leather sofa looking out over native bush towards the city, just as Hartley had imagined they would. They could see the Sky Tower in the distance, somewhat obscured by the shimmer of summer. He explained how he had come into possession of the house; about Irene and Madeleine. He embellished Irene’s faults and peculiarities for effect, but made no criticism of his dead wife. They agreed it was odd how things worked out sometimes — Irene and her husband building a home that meant so much to them, and it ended up the possession of a man one of them never met, and the other disliked.

  ‘I don’t know if Kevin and his girlfriend will ever come back,’ Hartley said. ‘I like to think the place will stay in the family, and he’s got more right to it than me. When you’re young, though, you’re more interested in moving on than coming back. I certainly was. I couldn’t wait to get out of Southland and come up here.’

  ‘But you don’t regret it.’

  ‘No, not at all. I was always cold there: that’s my first memory,’ and he told her of the damp, grey/green cold of the Southland farm, of standing shivering in gumboots and a hand-me-down Fair Isle jersey while his parents worked in the milking shed. He was so cold, even when in bed with the blankets to his chin, that his nose was like putty to the touch. All those boots on the back-door sack, and they were cold, too. The winter mist reluctantly revealing immediate landscape as he walked, and rapidly closing everything to obscurity again behind.

  The only consistent warmth he recalled, emotional or physical, was from the living-room fire that the family sat around during winter nights, he cross-legged on the worn carpet close to the hearth, with a board on his knees for his homework books. He’d found the fire almost mesmerising, and spent hours gazing into its red, coal-fuelled heart, watching the creation, and then collapse, of miniature fiery kingdoms, and the occasional wonderful scatter of firefly lights in the soot of the chimney-back.

  He remembered hardly anything before he was five, and was amazed and sceptical when people talked about their lives as small children. There was rivalry and disputation with his brothers, but their father was handy with the stick and they kept most battles out of sight and earshot. As the youngest, he became accustomed to the stark, offhand realities of power. As the youngest, too, maybe he took less interest in farm tasks; there were always others more competent to hand. The air between the pressing cloud and the receiving wet grass was odorous with shit, cow breath, sweat, moist hides and the fragrance of wild flowers. The half-eaten swedes in their soil sockets had the skeletal paleness of worn back teeth. Seagulls rode the high, bucking winds, and hawks patrolled for road kill. The willows had a sodden droop and the primary school football was always too heavy to kick over the bar. There were summers as well, but they were brief surely in reality, and even shorter in memory.

  All of that remained quite clear to Hartley, but could be only baldly represented in his description to Sarah. ‘When I left school I headed straight to Auckland for the warmth and city living, and I’ve been here ever since, apart from the year or so overseas and a few trips later. The family hardly noticed I’d gone. I’m not trying to suggest that I was ill treated, or neglected, more that it was a busy place and if you weren’t interested in the farm, then the farm wasn’t interested in you. My brothers run the place now, and there’s no reason I should say any more about it.’

  ‘I’ve gone the other way, but not so far,’ said Sarah. ‘I grew up in Wellington and I’ve ended in Hamilton: from little city to big town. A few years ago we talked of going to somewhere like Wanaka, or the Coromandel, when we retired, but Robert was keen to carry on working, and then he got sick. As you get older you have to think about how close you are to facilities. It pays to be practical then.’

  ‘Today I’d rather be romantic,’ Hartley said. He leant deliberately towards her, giving her time to forestall his kiss if she wished, but she didn’t turn her face away, or speak. At first they kissed with a sense of friendship sealed, even curiosity at the first press of mouth on mouth after all the talk that had gone on between them, the brief pecks on her cheek. He was surprised by the softness of her face, and she by the harshness of his breathing. He’d told himself that he should at first kiss and talk, put an arm around her shoulders, and not touch her elsewhere, but he couldn’t resist placing his free hand on her breast, allowing his fingers to follow the full shape, squeezing slightly.

  Sarah hadn’t been as urgently close to any man apart from her husband for years, and what she felt initially wasn’t arousal so much as novelty. For a moment she was reminded of those fierce, passing sexual encounters when she was single — back-seat contesting, skirts rucked up, insistent male bodies, premature ejaculations hastily sponged from her clothes, carpet burns, the heady awareness of desirability. But all that was over surely and didn’t the blood cool in maturity? Robert had been an almost relentless sexual partner for much of their marriage and she’d never felt the need for satisfaction elsewhere, accepting that his vigorous, self-focused and mute performance was how sex was meant to be. And she’d become reconciled to the end of it with his operation and illness.

  It was nice, though, with Hartley, kissing, talking, pressing closer so that she could feel the warmth of his body. ‘Have you been alone since your wife died?’ she asked him.

  ‘Yes.’ He bent down and surprised her by taking off her shoes.

  ‘Nobody at all?’

  ‘No one that I cared about half as much as I care for you. No one that I fucked, if that’s what you mean.’ He gave the word no emphasis, but it passed with a small charge between them.

  ‘I didn’t. I just thought it must have been very lonely for you, coming back to an empty house day after day.’

  ‘I’m in a share club, and a U3A, and an art film society. The sort of things you do to fill up your life. It’s not so bad.’ They kissed some more and she was relieved that he didn’t put his tongue deep into her mouth. She never liked that. He ran his fingers up her thigh, relishing the warmth, the smoothness, the expanse.

  ‘Aren’t we a bit old for this?’ she said. He took her hand and placed it on his crotch, pressed slightly.

  ‘What do you think?’ he said.

  ‘Not here, and not at all unless you’ve got a condom. Maybe we should wait, not do anything silly. It’s just nice to be together, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m tired of waiting.’ He stood up, took her hands separately in his own and pulled gently to encourage her to rise. ‘Come into the bedroom,’ he said.

  Why not go with him, please him? He was so easy to please, and it seemed wholly natural. The bedroom was warm, sun from the window laid a rich light over the cream bed cover, and the heat encouraged Sarah to undress quite deliberately, following his example, and they concentrated on that without talking. Then they stood clasped together full skin on skin for the first time, not kissing, but with heads side by side and their hands on each other’s back. She could see an angle of his shoulder blade beneath the slightly olive skin and feel his cock on her thigh; he was aware of her breasts and stomach against him, could see her large, pale bum. ‘Come on then,’ she said and they lay down, face to face but no
longer clasped. She watched him take a condom from beneath the pillow, gave a slight smile as recognition of his planning. He wasn’t an accomplished lover, however, and was clumsy in putting on the sheath.

  ‘Bloody thing,’ he said in exasperation.

  He didn’t keep going as long as she would have liked, but she enjoyed it, climaxed strongly and was glad to welcome back the sheer physicality of the act. The lifting arc of involuntary sensation, the tensing and the release, the spiral descent back to self.

  Most of all she loved the tenderness Hartley showed afterwards, the caresses and the gratitude expressed in words and touch, the closeness maintained and valued when the atavistic drive was satisfied. Robert had never been one for communing in a post-coital glow.

  She lay naked on the bed with Hartley, so close that she was aware of the gradual slowing of his pulse, and of her own.

  ‘Bloody marvellous,’ he said quietly and let his arm lie across her waist, while she gently brushed his grey hair back from his forehead almost as a mother would for a child. A fern swayed slightly outside the window, fracturing the light that played over the bed. He turned his head from the flickering in case it triggered a migraine.

  What time was it? In the Titirangi hall the flower class members might be comparing their morning bouquets with politely suppressed rivalry. In the apartment Robert might be eating his cold lunch, the bean salad, coleslaw and sliced ham, and watching television as was his habit.

  ‘We’d better get dressed,’ she said.

  ‘Not yet. You don’t regret anything, do you?’

  ‘Not yet,’ she repeated. Not yet, but although the situation was new to her, she feared somehow that regret would come, the realistic corollary to the pleasure.

  ‘I love you,’ Hartley said. ‘Do you know that? I love you so much.’

  She got up first, went to the bathroom with her underclothes and then returned to dress, but he was quicker to finish and went off towards the kitchen. ‘I’ve made lunch,’ he said cheerfully as he went. ‘It’s all done.’ The crumpled condom lay on the bed, opaque against the cream cover. It had been a signal precaution against disease rather than conception, more a gesture of responsibility than either. It looked forlorn, and she found that thought strangely inappropriate.

  In the living room Sarah saw her shoes still lying casually by the sofa, as if nothing of importance had happened since she left. She and Hartley sat there again, with a tray on the bow-legged wooden occasional table, and globed wine glasses. He’d made egg sandwiches, and tomato ones: he had bought a small, circular quiche and dark chocolate biscuits. She knew they were all signs of the value he placed on her visit. He came back from the kitchen a second time with a bottle of wine in each hand. Without a word he held out first the merlot and then the chardonnay and she pointed to the white. They didn’t talk in detail about their lovemaking, not because of embarrassment, or guilt, but because it had been complete pleasure in itself, and any discussion was inadequate. Words added nothing to the fullness of the experience. They sat close, felt the intimacy that comes only after bodies have joined, and which then imbues all the other forms of contact. It occurred to Hartley that no matter how rich a friendship is between a man and woman, it’s never complete until they have been to bed together.

  ‘We’ve still got more than a couple of hours before you have to go,’ he said. ‘I’ll run you home.’

  ‘No. I need to arrive in a taxi. Robert could be watching from the window.’

  ‘I’ll take you close, and then you can get a taxi from there.’

  ‘No.’ It was very definite, more so than she intended, but she didn’t want to talk about the subterfuge that was increasingly part of their friendship, an element best suppressed. ‘Tell me how you came to be a lawyer,’ she said. ‘How on earth you ended up in a suit and black leather shoes after starting in gumboots.’

  ‘You don’t want to hear all my boring life story.’ But she did, and he, naturally, was flattered. Most of us like to talk about ourselves. It’s the most natural topic in the world. And having claimed each other’s bodies it was natural to assume free range of each other’s lives.

  He had a job in retail when he first came to the city, assisting with stock records and replacement at a plumbing and bathroom warehouse in Grey Lynn, and retained a fondness for the gleam of new chrome and pristine whiteware. While there he did a secretarial and management polytech course that was largely extramural, and having completed that he joined the office staff of Central Legal, moved within three years to Butland, Reeve and Purvis, and finally to Hastings Hull Law, where he was a legal secretary and ran an office of five people, mainly women, while also doing law papers at the university.

  How quickly much of that had melted away, even in memory, most days as indistinguishable as the routine conveyancing documents he photocopied year after year, so that decades were reduced to a few cameos that captured spikes of humour or tension, or were conscious turning points. These Hartley tried to make revealing for Sarah. The file loss disasters immediately after the office went fully over to computers, the earthquake that shook down the bookcase, Mrs Vallance dying on the loo after being told her savings had been lost in the collapse of a finance company, Michael Leen, a junior partner, punching Barry McIntosh in the face because the latter was preferred by the best-looking woman the firm ever employed. After-hours they would occasionally go into the records room together. Renee Cooby she was then, Renee Simm later, and an absolute stunner. Guys would hand-deliver letters just to get a look at her.

  Hartley knew that, gloss them as best he could, his anecdotes were a dull reflection of his experience, and blatantly self-referential. ‘I’ve rabbited on long enough,’ he said.

  ‘No. It’s interesting, really. I want to know all about you.’

  ‘What haven’t I told you?’

  ‘Tell me the worst thing that’s happened to you, and the best.’

  ‘Madeleine died so suddenly. No warning, justification, or farewell. No chance to say stuff. The best thing has been meeting you. Absolutely. Again something right out of the blue. What about you?’

  ‘I suppose the worst of all was watching my mother die and not be able to say a proper goodbye because she no longer knew us. The best was having Donna. Nothing beats having a child and having her grow up well and happy.’ She wondered if he’d hoped she might have ranked meeting him as equally important.

  ‘I’ve never understood people who don’t want kids,’ he said.

  ‘Unless you’re especially religious, it’s the only way you have a sense of continuity.’

  ‘It’s the busiest time of your life and then suddenly they’re off.’

  ‘But you never stop loving, or worrying,’ said Sarah.

  ‘You do get more time again for your own life, though. Important stuff.’ Like this, he thought. Like being close to Sarah on the sofa after making love on a sunlit bed. Like finding someone to share everything with after being alone for too long. Always maybe — until now. ‘What’s your favourite colour?’ he said. He was eager to know everything about her.

  ‘Blue,’ she replied without hesitation. ‘Powder blue, like the blue of a clear winter sky after frost. What’s yours?’

  ‘The same. Exactly the same.’ The choice was made in that instant, but he felt it sincere.

  The time soon came, however, when she had to go back to her husband and a life firmly established in the past. Once a taxi was called, they began the slight distancing that was essential to move from being lovers in private, to appearing before others as merely friends. Her careful scrutiny of herself in the bathroom mirror, the check that nothing had been left in the house she didn’t live in, a change in the tone of voice they used, an awareness of how they touched each other, an assumed brightness that disguised the small, real pain of necessary separation. There was her token resistance to his insistence she accept fare money, the look between them when they parted that was more meaningful than the conventional words of farewell in th
e presence of the taxi driver.

  Robert was at the table with his laptop when she came back, and in the moment that he was turning to welcome her, she had a sudden jolt of fear that what she’d done would somehow be undeniable: that written on her face, or manifest as an overpowering scent, was the glaring evidence that another man had been inside her. But Robert’s brief, friendly glance was the same as always. ‘How did it go?’ he asked, and before she could reply, ‘I’ve just had a call from Mr Goosen and he thinks I’m okay for the next treatment.’ And so apprehension left her as swiftly as it had come, and she asked him more about Mr Goosen the specialist, and then what he felt like for their meal. Nothing was false in that. Having given and received pleasure, she wanted Robert to be well and happy, too. Only moralistic convention insists that love for one person excludes love for another.

  ‘Did you eat everything I left for your lunch?’

  ‘Yes.’ He had been a big man, tall, solid, resisting stoutness, but illness had stripped muscle from his limbs and added weight to his torso, his features seemed to protrude from his face and his shoulders to slump. He tended to sit for long periods in the first posture assumed, rather than making adjustments as fit people do. Sarah knew he mourned the loss of the man he once was, but neither ever talked of it.

  ‘No flowers?’ he said, wanting to show his interest in her day.

  ‘I didn’t make anything worth bringing home,’ she said. ‘I learnt heaps, though.’

  ‘It’s good for you to get out like that. Were they a pleasant lot?’

  ‘They were,’ she said. ‘As a group they were.’

  In the evening they watched a documentary on the Nepalese people, and Robert commented on their teeth. As a dentist that was the first thing he noticed, whereas Sarah, who had majored in geography, was always drawn to landscape, even if it featured only as a backdrop. Your occupation becomes the lens through which you see the world. As they sat together, watched mountains and yaks, talked over the commentary occasionally, as was their way, Sarah felt comfortably distanced from what had happened in Titirangi. It was later in the shower that the lovemaking with Hartley returned most strongly, perhaps prompted by nakedness and the touching of her own body. She was slightly tender from the unaccustomed penetration. The recollection was pleasure, but while lying in bed soon after, with Robert’s heavy and irregular breathing as familiar background, she decided she wouldn’t go all the way with Hartley again. It was a burst of sensual experience best sequestered from the rest of life, and with no future in it. No, she thought, they could carry on as friends, but the sex was over.