Love as a Stranger

by Owen Marshall

  The letter was in the box when Sarah and Robert came back from an afternoon chamber music performance at a former lodge hall in Ponsonby. Both the performance and attendance were poor, though as Robert slept during most of the selections he had little to criticise. The envelope bore the insignia of Hastings Hull Legal, which unsettled Sarah even before she knew the contents. Was it meant as a challenge to anonymity, or a hint not to open it in Robert’s presence? Was it just that Hartley had no other envelope to hand? She kept it beneath the other mail as they went up to the apartment, but Robert showed no interest. He had for some time resigned himself to the belief that good news from any source was unlikely.

  She read it that night, when Robert was in bed, and she sitting close to the large window with the changing city kaleidoscope of external colour and movement. ‘My darling Sarah, Now or never they say’ it began, and continued for several closely written pages. Nothing was held back, and through it all was a fixed, incontrovertible sincerity. Much of what he wrote was on their future, and regarding that he was as specific and confident as on their past. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he wrote, ‘don’t be afraid to rely on me. We have the chance to live in a way few people ever do.’ She couldn’t doubt his devotion, but rather than being warmed, or exalted, by that, she felt a sense of almost threatening constriction. He wasn’t going to let her go. He wasn’t going to accept her decision that it was over between them. She had welcomed love, believing it enriching, and now found its grip increasingly a threat. ‘I don’t care about anything else,’ he wrote. ‘Nothing matters to me at all except you, except us. If you’re honest you know you feel the same.’

  When she finished reading, she crushed the pages in her hands as a brief release. She still felt affection for him, attraction even, but also an increasing sense that his love was unreasonable. Maybe the greater love is, the more unreasonable it becomes. Love is an emotion resistant to management and common sense, but she must find a way through that had the least pain for all. Lovers everywhere survived break-ups without enduring despair, and sailed on through life. There were options, she told herself, and she was experienced enough surely to ensure the best outcome. She would be sensible, though Hartley was unable to be. She would impose conditions rather than be subject to them.

  Yet her hands gripping his letter were clenched, and she remembered his close imploring face when they were last together in the motel. Can love be ended without being lost?

  ‘It’ll be all right. I know it will,’ she murmured as she watched the lights of the city — pulsing reds and whites of the passing cars, the ripple of advertising, the abrupt change of traffic lights, the blank, yellow windows of the office blocks within which a nameless population of cleaners removed the routine daily stains of official residence.

  Robert was asleep when she looked in on him, on his back, his mouth open and the flesh of his face fallen away a little so that he looked thinner. His nose and forehead had a red flush that spread high on his cheeks, and the lower part of his face was creased and bore a grey stubble. He was an old man battling sickness, and he looked like it, yet how readily she could see him as he’d once been, and recall laughter and kindness, confidence and strength.

  She took her cell phone, went to the lavatory, closed the door behind her and rang Hartley. ‘Don’t write again,’ she said. ‘It only makes it difficult for me. Don’t write, don’t ring, don’t text, don’t come, don’t anything. I’ve told you. I don’t want to have to tell Robert, or the police, but I will if I have to. I’ll do it. Don’t ruin what we had by trying to hang on when it’s over. I mean it … No, I’m not going to talk about it with you. I mean it. It’s over. Don’t push me into something that blows up in our faces. You know in your heart, don’t you … No, it’s not … No, it doesn’t. It’s bloody over.’

  OVER? HOW COULD IT be over? Everything that he wanted, everything that he planned, centred on continuation. She would come to see that what he offered was greater than anything she’d experienced before they met. She was just faint-hearted because of her feeling of responsibility towards Robert, and even that was a sign of her decency and sense of obligation. He would love her all the more for it.

  In truth Robert was a pain in the arse. ‘A pain in the arse,’ Hartley said aloud to himself after the thought came to him. He was sitting with his legs up on the leather couch, the phone still in his hand after her abrupt ultimatum. The lights were on, but the curtains still open, and the yellow glow spilled weakly towards the bush, beyond which the far, compressed and multi-coloured lights of the city glittered. Sarah was there, too — in the photograph so much closer. ‘Robert is a pain in the arse,’ he said again, looking directly at the photograph.

  Hartley had no doubt of Sarah’s love: no woman could give so generously and not mean more. It was just that she needed his resolve to help her make the break with the old life, and he wouldn’t fail her. He would text in the morning, despite what she’d said. He wondered if Robert were still able to fuck her, and hoped that he was too weak and growing more so. Even the thought of them sharing the same bed was almost unbearable.

  It came to him suddenly that he needed to see Robert again, not so much to witness the hoped for decline, but to gauge his adversary. On his first visit to the apartment he’d relished the sense of greater knowledge; Robert accepting him at face value as a hospital agency visitor and having no idea of the contest being waged. What name had he used when they met, Hartley wondered. Olders, that’s what it was, and Martin the first name? Or Colin? Yes, Colin. Surely it didn’t matter much because he’d left no card, and Robert had shown little interest. But he would write that down before going to bed — Colin Olders from outpatients services.

  He sent texts each morning and afternoon over the next two days while at Hastings Hull, but received no reply. On the Friday afternoon he drove into the city and parked by the real-estate agency where he couldn’t be seen from the window of Sarah’s apartment, but had a clear view of the entrance to the building, even the small lawn and the seat there. A little after two, Sarah and Robert came out together and went away in a taxi, so Hartley drove to his work, although it wasn’t one of his office days, and caught up with things there. On Saturday morning he returned to his watching post and settled to wait. He didn’t read because he might become absorbed and miss Sarah coming out. Instead he watched the passers-by for a time, and the observation of a dark-haired power-walker with green shorts became the segue to thoughts of the sessions he’d had with Rory Menzies.

  He had gone to counselling expecting to dislike Menzies. Even the name, for some reason, predisposed him to antipathy, although he had no particular dislike of the Scots. Maybe he’d been too much swayed by the portrayal of psychologists and psychiatrists in films and books of fiction. Menzies was young and didn’t look at all Viennese. He was something of an athlete and jogged to work some mornings. Hartley had seen him once, in green shorts and a loose tracksuit top, maintaining a clockwork rhythm. In the office he provided no couch, and no ink shapes for Hartley to morph into representations of his life. He and Madeleine both had issues with their parents, Menzies had said, issues of communication, expectation, but mainly love. Disappointment and loneliness within a family were like tidal surges, he said. At one session ginger-haired Menzies had placed one leg on the knee of the other, and Hartley had noticed on the sole of his shoe a round paper sticker promoting a charity for the sufferers of autism. As the counsellor discussed the need for commitment in therapy, Hartley had pondered possible explanations for the small blue and red advertisement beneath his foot.

  Hartley was shaken from his reverie by the sight of Sarah coming unaccompanied from the apartments. He felt the familiar surge of emotion at recognition, and for a moment thought he might follow and approach her, rather than go up to 3B and meet her husband again. But as intended he waited until Sarah was out of sight, then went up to her apartment.

  Robert, dressed but unshaven, came to the door. ‘Colin Olders, outpatients ser
vices,’ said Hartley, as Robert at first showed no signs of recalling his last visit. ‘I’m making a second check to see that all’s going well.’

  ‘Fine, thanks. Did my wife get in touch with you about something?’

  ‘No. It’s just a follow-up policy that we have.’ He remained, expectantly, in the doorway.

  ‘Do you want to come in?’ said Robert finally.

  ‘Maybe a moment or two. I don’t want to be a bother,’ said Hartley. ‘Just a couple of quick things.’ He watched Robert closely as he turned and led the way into the main room. He looked no worse than on Hartley’s last visit: better perhaps. Probably that was because of the stage in the present round of treatment, Hartley thought, rather than any lasting improvement. At his age he could hardly expect to pull through such a serious illness. ‘How have you been feeling?’ Hartley asked.

  ‘Not so bad.’ Robert didn’t sit down, but stood by the window and looked rather quizzically at his visitor.

  ‘We have a new programme of volunteer visitors,’ said Hartley. ‘People who are happy to spend a few hours with out-of-towners, or people who lack support. Often a bit of company can be a lift to people during treatment.’

  Robert said he was okay, didn’t feel any need for more support than he was already getting from Mr Goosen and the team at oncology. In fact, he said, one of the nurses there came from Hamilton.

  Hartley asked him about his career as a dentist, just to delay departure, and enjoyed again the feeling of being in the place where Sarah lived, of having links with Robert’s world and wife of which Robert had no knowledge. How easily he could step into Sarah’s life, whether she wished it or not. And he felt entitlement.

  The familiar red case of Sarah’s reading glasses was on the leather armrest of the sofa, a magazine was folded open at pages depicting summer salads, a green and yellow silk scarf was a soft heap on the end of the table farthest from Robert’s photographs. There, too, was the Matakana blue jug, the Quisling among the ornaments, loyal surely to its purchaser. Hartley should be the incumbent, the one in possession of the room and all it signified. He wanted to tell Robert to bugger off, that he was unwanted and unnecessary, that it was best he give up on the treatment and die quickly. Hartley felt exasperation rather than hatred, the sort of impatience morphing into anger that arises when some knucklehead is holding you up in the queue and time is running out. He wanted to encourage Robert to the balcony, have it no barrier, and propel him from the third-floor height so that his bulk finished on the concrete below.

  Instead, Hartley agreed that those who complained of the charges for dental care didn’t realise the level of overheads. ‘The hidden costs of running a professional practice are much greater than people realise,’ said Robert. ‘Office staff, insurances, accountants, KiwiSaver contributions, ACC, rates. It goes on and on. And the price of specialist equipment and materials has sky-rocketed: all sourced overseas, you see.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ said Hartley.

  ‘And the years of training without an income. That’s conveniently forgotten.’

  ‘Good point.’ Hartley was well aware of all the arguments, and the defensiveness they disguised, but he adopted the tone of the converted.

  And when Robert turned to lead him out, Hartley adroitly whisked the silk scarf from the table and put it in his pocket. ‘It’s good of you to come again,’ said Robert, ‘but no need. We’re okay here and I don’t require anything. We’ve got things pretty well sorted, I think.’

  ‘Great. That’s fine, then. Good luck with it all.’

  As on his first visit, he had no apprehension that he might meet Sarah returning. Almost he wished it, and stood for a time by the gateway as people flowed by, and beyond them the traffic, faster, noisier, and tainting the warm air. In the car he took Sarah’s scarf and laid it on his shoulders. Its weight was barely discernible. He expected it to have Sarah’s fragrance, but there was only the faintest hint of face powder, and the original, exotic smell of the silk. He gave no thought to how he looked, seated in his car with a woman’s green and yellow scarf at his throat. No one paid any attention; few even glanced at him as they passed. How very ordinary the people were, all purposeful on errands of trivial significance, and lacking the sustaining love that he had found.

  At home, he spread the scarf on the pillow of his bed. The sunlight gave a shimmer to the silk, and the glint from the green reminded him of the bright bodies of the large flies of his boyhood: iridescent blues and greens that were quite beautiful, although borne by insects inhabiting a morass of shit and mud. That ambivalence was clear in almost every memory he had of childhood, and as Hartley sat on the deck of the fine house that had become his through family deaths, as he enjoyed a glass of Marlborough wine in the late-afternoon warmth and listened to the tui and native pigeons in the bush that surrounded him, it wasn’t at first Sarah and Robert whom he thought of, despite his visit to the apartment, but the far Southland dairy farm where he’d grown up.

  It doesn’t matter at all what the star signs were on the day you were born, who came with small, home-made gifts to see you, or that much earlier some great-grandmother with a reputation for bad temper left an Irish bog to come to the south seas. Life starts with your first memories and ends with the last of them. Whatever the nature of a family, it is accepted as normal by the children within it until there is opportunity for comparison.

  Hartley had left home before he understood that his father’s failings had warped the relationships of them all. He wasn’t an alcoholic, or a wife-beater, just a sour and selfish man who had no time for those who didn’t share his own views and interests. He showed little affection for his children, and gave greatest attention to those who proved most like himself. Hartley was the youngest and bore the brunt of his father’s impatience. A son either wishes to imitate, even surpass, his father, or by a process of negative charge is driven to the opposite in everything. They had almost stopped talking by the time Hartley moved north: not as the result of any specific confrontation, just the tacit acknowledgement that they had nothing in common beyond a kinship that was biological rather than emotional. He’d gone back occasionally, briefly, to see his mother, and when his father died he had felt no grief, not even the inclination to attend the funeral. And he received nothing in the will.

  His father did a great deal of hard, physical slog and considered any other activity of lesser value, even an evasion of effort. He derided any occupation, or recreation, that didn’t bring on a sweat. There must have been an inner life, but Hartley caught no glimpse of it. ‘Getting stuck in’ seemed his father’s response to everything. He was once persuaded to attend a theatrical performance to raise funds for the local primary school, and reacted dismissively; laughed in the wrong places, scoffed at the sentiment, and rapidly stacked all the chairs at the conclusion of the show as a physical release. Hartley had done well at high school. Most subjects came easily to him, especially maths. He received awards at senior prize-giving, but his father was more impressed by his brothers’ sporting achievements.

  Only many years after he’d left home did Hartley understand the significance of the apparently trivial preferences that distinguished his parents. His mother always drank tea, his father always asked for coffee: his mother loved egg sandwiches, his father said they stank of farts. His mother left the television on whether watching it or not, his father said it drove him crazy. His mother always put an orange cushion on the chair by the phone, and his father always took it off. All such divergences were subtle instances of psychological recoil, although the marriage carried on with dogged resignation. They were a Jack Sprat couple without the benefits.

  Oddly enough his father kept a diary. Hartley came across it on the sideboard on one of the last visits he made to the farm, and flicked through the entries. Each day’s weather was noted, tasks accomplished, or intended, prices and purchases, stock tallies, but nothing of his family, or his feelings, nothing of his hopes and fears. The single sustained reference
to his community was the record of the deaths of those around him. Old Reg Trumpeter snuffed it today, Will Nicholl’s oldest boy crushed by a stock truck in the yards, Adele Brownlie hung herself Thursday. His father had no close friends, and even his dogs didn’t love him, although they’d learnt to obey. Hartley had only one reason to wish his father still alive, and that was to have him witness his youngest son’s material success, and be forced to acknowledge it.

  Hartley had no nostalgia for childhood, and when he did return, it was to re-enter a memory of separateness tempered only by passing affection from his busy and fragile mother that was never enough for his needs. She had been especially protective of the one daughter in the family. A man needs a woman’s love all to himself. He’d hoped for that in marriage to Madeleine and been disappointed: with Sarah he was convinced it would be different.

  Hartley could feel the heat of the low sun on his shirt. He leant back in the deckchair, closed his eyes so that the bright light became just a reddish-gold glow through the lids. He thought of sitting beneath a table umbrella at Magnus, with Sarah laughing at some shared absurdity. He thought of strolling with her in the city, among people less fortunate and less happy. He thought of the coloured silk on his bed and imagined Sarah lying with it, and he there with her. There was nothing he wouldn’t risk for that.

  There was time for a different and better life: a decade before he reached the biblical span of three score years and ten, which modern living and medical science had pushed out much farther. He and Sarah could have twenty years of close companionship, and with the resources to make the most of it. Hartley kept his eyes closed and paraded in his mind scene after scene of imagined pleasure.