Love as a Stranger

by Owen Marshall

  In the weekends Titirangi was a favourite spot for city people to have lunch, or a coffee, but on other days it had only the natural pulse of local trade and people. Hartley chose an outside table at his usual place, which was set back somewhat from the traffic noise of the main road. The table had a wobble, so he shifted to the next, and explained the reason when the waitress came with his hot chocolate. They knew each other by sight and chatted briefly. ‘We have to take them in after closing,’ she said of the tables and chairs, ‘otherwise we’d fix them down permanently. People steal them, you know. People steal anything, don’t they. It’s the council won’t let us fix them down for good.’

  Most of the tables were unoccupied, and so Hartley was mildly surprised when a tall, young guy came and sat down opposite to him. At first he thought it could be a client from Hastings Hull, although most he dealt with there were older, at an age to require his realm of expertise in conveyancing and business practice, and with sufficient resources to afford it.

  ‘Another beaut day,’ the man said. He wore shorts and sandals, and stretched out his brown legs until they reached beneath the table and out again. His shorts and T-shirt were of good quality, but slightly soiled at the neck and the pocket openings. He carried no number to show he was waiting for an order.

  ‘It is,’ said Hartley, and he waited for an explanation.

  ‘Tim,’ said Tim. He stretched out his arm to shake hands.

  ‘Hartley,’ said Hartley. He accepted the offer without enthusiasm.

  ‘Most days I take up a challenge to come to a place like this,’ Tim said. Hartley just smiled. He knew the guy would come round to talking of God, or asking for money. Probably both.

  ‘The Almighty tells me to go out and bear witness to Him,’ said Tim. ‘He inspires me to make Christianity relevant in the modern world. It’s a form of declaration. An urban pilgrimage if you will.’

  ‘Actually I’m having a bit of quiet time. Recovering after a stinking headache.’

  ‘I know the feeling,’ said Tim. ‘So many pressures today, aren’t there. Is there anything that you’d like to share? Anything you’d like to talk about?’ Hartley noticed that he had a small, closely tended goatee beard, so reduced and fair that it blended with the mild suntan of his face.

  ‘I’m in love with a married woman,’ said Hartley. ‘That’s my problem. I’m in love with a woman who loves me, but can’t be with me. That’s my problem.’

  ‘Well, we can share in a meaningful discussion about that. God knows a lot about love. Jesus is all about love.’

  Tim leant back in the sun, put his hands behind his head as if he expected to be a listener for some time. He withdrew one long, bare leg from beneath the table and crossed it on the knee of the other. But Hartley didn’t want to give any detail. He wanted for once to state the truth aloud to someone, not receive any advice, or opinions. If he wasn’t able to talk about it with his son, he wasn’t going to tell a wandering pseudo-Christian evangelist what was on his mind. He’d just wanted to say it aloud, establish it as fact by having someone hear of it.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said, taking out his wallet, ‘I give you twenty dollars for a drink and bus fare back to the city, and you go and convert somebody else. How’s that?’ His tone was not vindictive.

  Tim started to speak, but Hartley held up one hand with palm towards him, and the other with the twenty-dollar note. ‘Now or never,’ he said gently, and Tim stood up, plucked the note, mouthed ‘Good luck’ and walked to his vehicle in the small parking area only a few steps away. He looked more like a surfie than a missionary, and perhaps he was. It was difficult to imagine him in theological conversation with the Almighty. Tim’s car was a battle-weary Mazda MX-5 with the wipers daubed with green house paint to delay the rust, but the seat covers were new, resplendent with rococo roses entwined with dragons. At least he didn’t need a bus fare, and he lifted a casual hand to Hartley, equal to equal, as he drove away.

  What had he said? Is there anything you’d like to share? Hartley was reminded of Rory Menzies, the counsellor, who had asked him the same thing when he went with Madeleine to seek advice. Menzies hadn’t understood that for Hartley the lack was not of things to share, but of people he felt he could confide in. He was an amiable enough man, but Hartley’s sharpest memory of him wasn’t of insightful counsel, but of his ginger eyebrows and hair, the consequence of a gene said to be prevalent among the Scots. Menzies had talked a good deal about sharing, especially within marriage, but Hartley and Madeleine had long before established frontiers for their intimacy, and were uneasy with any negotiation for change.

  Hartley thought of having a second drink and perhaps even a sandwich, but decided against both. He would make something light for himself at home. As yet he didn’t feel fully recovered. He was pleased that he’d talked to Kevin and been invited to visit. And Kevin seemed sincere in his response to the news his father had found a companion. There were so few people Hartley could tell about Sarah, and yet he felt a longing to do so. He took his cell phone and sent a text to her, asking when they could meet, saying how much he loved her, that he’d spent a lot of time thinking about things. His need to be in touch was greater than his awareness the message might create difficulty for her. His hand was trembling on the table. Maybe he wouldn’t walk home, but take a taxi back. Maybe he wasn’t right yet. The full sun was lulling, and he closed his eyes and consciously relaxed. Without images as competition, the sounds around him became more distinct and individual: cars at a distance, the soft flap of the umbrella in a puff of wind, the murmur of voices from the service area of the café. Even with his eyes closed he would know if Sarah replied — the unobtrusive ring accentuated by the phone’s vibration on the wooden tabletop.

  With his eyes still closed he counted slowly to twenty, hoping that he would hear the phone before he’d finished. He was feeling not too bad, but would still take a taxi home. There was no reply from Sarah. He remembered Menzies suggesting some sessions with him alone, no doubt to explain aspects of Madeleine’s behaviour without her presence, but she had died suddenly and so Hartley had seen no need to go again. He’d thought about it later when he found he could no longer work a full week at Hastings Hull, but decided that these things were best left to remedy themselves. After all, there had been only the two subsequent episodes and then no recurrence. He’d found Menzies’ ginger hair a distraction at their meetings, and didn’t want to talk about a lot of stuff that could never be changed. Simon Drummond in his tactful way suggested there may have been deeper emotional issues involved with the occasions of temporary amnesia and volatility, but Hartley was convinced that any troubles were the outcome of overwork and the loss of his wife. The business with the Mercedes driver, and later the complaint concerning his presence on enclosed premises, were just minor blips in an unexceptional and law-abiding life.

  The legally styled premises were in fact the backyard of Hartley’s neighbours, the Stanfords, where he had gone at twilight in pursuit of Zeus, their mongrel dog. The Stanfords’ place wasn’t visible from Hartley’s house, separated by a gully and tall trees, but Zeus, as befitted his name, considered all within roaming distance as his domain. The dog had a habit of shitting at the base of Hartley’s deck, which had led to an altercation between the neighbours, and finally a visit from a senior constable, who officially warned Hartley not to enter the Stanford property without an invitation. He obeyed reluctantly, but kept a store of stones on the deck, which he used to hurl at Zeus whenever the dog was trespassing.

  As a consequence of Robert’s obsessive winnowing, different photographs came briefly to the surface of the piles on the table, and then vanished beneath others in their turn. Generally Sarah paid little attention to them, and even that casual interest was often merely an obligatory response to her husband’s enthusiasm. The photos were a reminder of how much of value and emotional intensity she’d risked by loving Hartley; she preferred not to be confronted by them.

  One
evening, however, when Robert had already gone to bed, and she was making a cursory attack on his bits and pieces encroaching on the table space, she saw the photo of Jean, her mother, taken in the room by the sea where she had been placed to await death. Robert had written nothing on the back: maybe he’d wanted Sarah’s advice, maybe he realised the picture was one entirely beyond the power of words to encompass. Sarah didn’t pick up the photo, but sat down and hunched herself over it, glasses settled firmly, her face brought close to allow recognition of detail. She remembered the place well: a secure dementia unit in the large facility close to the ocean. When her mother could no longer look after herself, and was recognising less and less of the life around her, Sarah and her brother had arranged for her to be admitted. The speed of Jean’s decline was a surprise to both of them, and that was a great sorrow and also, towards the end, a great relief.

  During the last weeks, Sarah had stayed with her brother and visited most days, sometimes twice, ringing the bell to have the door opened, and then locked behind her, walking through the bright, modern corridors to her mother’s room. There was a living room for the dementia residents, with a television, sofas, a piano and a life-sized pony made of felt stuffed with newspaper. The pony’s teeth were made from yoghurt pottles and its hooves from black irrigation sprayers. It had been created by those residents who still enjoyed freedom, and staff encouraged those in their care to pat it as a therapy. But Jean refused to spend time watching television, or to show affection to a stuffed horse, and sat in her room close to the large window with a view of a strip of green lawn, then the untamed marram grass, the dunes and the sea.

  In the picture Jean was sad and diminished, just as Sarah recalled her being in the last weeks, and in painful contrast to the person she had been for most of her life. Jean hadn’t been able to remember Sarah, and rarely spoke, rarely ate, occasionally swore fiercely in a way quite foreign to her. In the picture her mouth was closed and she sat stiffly in the chair with the slightly affronted look that was typical of her during the final days. What was missing, Sarah realised as she bent closer, was the noise of the sea. Hour after hour she had sat with the woman who used to be her mother, that wonderful, caring, intelligent person who had gone away and left a simulacrum in her place. There was only so much Sarah could think of to mention when her mother made no contribution that would enable conversation. The last thing that Sarah could recall her saying was, ‘I’m afraid there’s no accommodation for you here, lady. Some people have taken over my house. I tell them they have to leave, but nobody takes any notice. I expect my sister any minute. She’s coming to visit me, and if you don’t mind I’d like to be alone with her. No offence.’

  Despite all the time Sarah spent in the secure unit, she wasn’t with Jean when she died. Sarah had been having lunch when the home phoned, and she had to spit out a mouthful of quiche onto her side plate before she could answer. The news added little to her grief, because her mother had left them months ago. She had done nothing to deserve such an end, and had feared the very thing that was imposed on her. There had been no justice in it.

  Sarah made a final scrutiny of the photograph, placed a finger below Jean’s face in both affection and acknowledgement. Yes, all that was missing was the sound of the sea. Hour upon hour they had sat together, mother and daughter, sometimes with the shore visible outside, sometimes with it cloaked in darkness, but always with the sad, incessant, sucking sound of the sea.

  It had been a small funeral. Jean had outlived her husband and most of her acquaintances. Sarah found it hard to recognise in the few rather doddery mourners the hearty and assertive friends who were often about her parents’ home when she was young. None of them cried at the funeral: their mien was rather that of detached resignation, and their subdued conversation centred on ailments and medication rather than memories of Jean.

  ‘Life’s a parabola,’ Bronwen Hughes told Sarah, ‘but you’re never aware of the high point when you’re living it.’ They had been at the funeral parlour after the ceremony and Bronwen had been smiling up at Sarah, an egg sandwich in one hand, the service sheet in the other, conscious that she was being philosophical. She had once been Jean’s bridge partner, but it had led to a falling out. She’d shrunk, and her sparse hair was the colour of candy floss. ‘Poor Jean,’ she’d said, with the faintest implication that poor bidding had played a part in the tragedy.

  THEY KISSED WHEN THEY MET again, when the door of unit seventeen had closed behind them. They kissed with intensity enough, especially on Hartley’s part, but also with a shared sense that the kissing was not a prelude to the pleasure that usually followed in that room.

  ‘I’m not getting undressed,’ Sarah said. ‘I don’t want to get on the bed.’ Yet she kissed him again before he could reply.

  ‘So we’re not going to fuck?’ It was unlike him to say that, but it came quickly and before subconscious censorship, perhaps because he wanted to shake her composure.

  ‘I don’t think so. Not until we’ve talked anyway, as we promised. And it’s not just fucking, is it.’ Did he imagine that she would blush like a girl, that she wasn’t practised enough to equate the vulgarity of the word with the vulgarity of the physical act; the noises, the close smell of breath, the secretions, the contest at times awkward and selfish and at other moments an almost other-worldly release. ‘Let’s sit,’ she said, ‘and talk.’

  ‘And lie down afterwards, I hope,’ he said.

  ‘First things first. We could make love all day and it wouldn’t solve the problem, would it?’

  In that small, impersonal room there was only one comfortable chair. Hartley insisted she take that, and he sat on a hard-backed seat by the table. It could be a turning point, he told himself, a time that they would look back on when they had been long together, and recognise its importance. That was the moment, they would say complacently: that was crunch time.

  ‘Are we in session now, then?’ he asked lightly, but she didn’t smile as he’d hoped.

  ‘It’s becoming too much for me,’ she said. ‘All that’s happening between us and all that’s going on with Robert. It’s as if I’m living in two bubbles that can’t join and sooner or later one will burst, and I can’t make a choice. I’m talking with Robert about the photos that he’s got so keen on and suddenly I think of you, and wish I was here, right here, and when I’m here I worry about him, I think of how hurt he and Donna would be if they found out. And the texts you keep sending make it difficult to keep the lives apart.’

  ‘I want to know you’re okay, that we’re in touch even if apart.’

  ‘How would it look, though? It all seems so natural, so separate from responsibility when we’re together. Harmless even. But think how it looks from the outside — a grandmother with a husband fighting serious illness, and she’s having it off with someone she met during his treatment.’

  ‘Who gives a bugger what people think? It’s no crime to be in love, or to leave a marriage. Half the world does it. Everyone’s entitled to be happy, and there’s no little kids involved.’

  She knew, however, that not everyone who leaves a marriage finds what they hope for, that a second love faces perils and regrets just the same. She had friends who had made the choice and not all had found happiness. Sarah watched him as he was talking, responded to his intensity and enthusiasm. She had no doubt that he was sincere, but what did they know of each other after a few months of sporadic meetings that could justify cutting loose from all she had been gifted and had earned in a long marriage? And it wasn’t just what she might find in his character that was a disappointment, but what deficiencies he might discover in her.

  ‘I don’t think I can do it,’ she said. ‘I’d be lying to you if I let you think I can just walk out. I love the time we have together, the talking and laughing as well as the sex. Until I met you I didn’t realise how much my life was narrowing down, everything focused on illness and treatment and tests and reports and bottling feelings up. A sort of sub-surface
life. You become the back-up person who’s lucky to be okay. Your partner has the significance that comes with serious illness.’

  ‘Well, that’s all you’ll have forever unless you make a break. It’ll just go on and on.’ Until he dies, was what Hartley wanted to say, but she understood without the words. Hartley was moving slightly on the chair, his hands restless also, as if words alone were inadequate to express his feelings.

  ‘I shouldn’t have started it,’ she said, ‘but we’re good for each other, aren’t we. We’re easy and natural together. We could’ve met years and years ago. Maybe then — who knows.’

  ‘But we’ve met now. That’s what matters.’

  ‘Would you feel the same if Madeleine were still alive?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You don’t know that,’ she said. ‘It’s easy to say, but you don’t know. You don’t have to leave anyone, hurt anyone, and I have to give up on a marriage. It’s not the same. It’s not your fault, I know, but it’s not the same. I don’t think I can cope any more.’

  ‘I’ll do anything you ask,’ he said, ‘any bloody thing at all. I’ll shift to Hamilton when you go, and come round and mow the lawns for you. Anything.’

  ‘I don’t think I can do it, and that’s the truth, and if I can’t do it then I can’t carry on either, because there’s even less honesty in that.’

  ‘We’d be happy. You know that, and we’d be unhappy any other way.’

  ‘But actually we don’t know that. We’re hurting each other already.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes we are,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Hurting is a sign of being alive,’ he said, changing tack. ‘Only kids think love is all about happiness.’