Love as a Stranger

by Owen Marshall

  A broad, low, modern place that gave little to the street view other than an expanse of metal garage doors and an entrance protected by walls of glass blocks. Because the section was flat, there was no panorama such as his own home possessed, and it seemed strange to him to see houses stacked one behind another in that way.

  He walked to the front door, saw through the frosted glass beside him the colourful blur of the garden, rang the bell, and although he expected no one to respond, imagined Sarah coming in answer, happy to see him. He then went around the side of the house, opening a wrought-iron gate so low he could as easily have stepped over it. A glasshouse without plants, a tin shed, a brick barbecue area and a well-kept lawn with silver birch trees at its end. Nothing distinctive, yet the woman he loved lived here, and so it should possess a special gloss, a shimmering montage of Sarah about her day. No shadow, or outline, of Robert, however. Hartley went to a window close to the back door. He could see into the kitchen, which had the total neatness of absence. There were the touches of her favourite colour just as he expected: on tiles above the hot-plates, and blue ceramic containers in diminishing size at the end of the granite bench surface. ‘Blue, blue,’ he murmured to himself, and craned his neck in an effort to see the far end of the room where there were a table and chairs.

  ‘Can I help you?’ It was a neighbour to his right; her head and half-torso showing above the wooden fence. A tall woman, well made-up with pendant ear rings and bright lipstick, as if she were about to go out, or had recently returned.

  ‘Hi. I’m a friend of Robert’s and Sarah’s. I’m passing through and thought I’d call in.’ He moved towards the fence and smiled to show his good intentions.

  ‘They’re in Auckland,’ the woman said. ‘Robert’s having treatment there so they’re staying for a while.’ She was pleased to have personal information to pass on and saw him as no threat. ‘He hasn’t been feeling great for a while, but he’s in the best place he could be now.’

  ‘They did tell me he had cancer,’ Hartley said, ‘but I’ve been overseas for a few months and haven’t caught up on things. I didn’t know they had to stay up there.’

  ‘All that coming and going, so they thought they may as well rent a comfortable place for a few months and be done with it. It’s going as well as can be expected. I think it’s marvellous what they can do these days. You read in the paper almost every day of some breakthrough, and not just in cancer. Keyhole surgery, growing whole livers and hearts in a test tube. Where will it all end, I wonder?’

  ‘You’ll be missing them,’ said Hartley. He imagined Sarah coming into the section and this neighbour scuttling out to share her magazine wisdom.

  ‘We keep an eye on the place,’ the woman said with conscious modesty. Close up she was older than his first impression suggested. Her face was thin and subject to a slight but continuous vibration that made the jewelled earrings shake and catch the sunlight.

  He was about to say what a well-matched couple Sarah and Robert were, in the hope of drawing out personal information to the contrary, but the odds were that the answer would be discouraging, so he thanked her and went back to his car. He checked his phone, found nothing from Sarah, resisted the urge to ring, or text, and say he was outside her Hamilton home, yet he felt a secret advantage to be there, holding her place in view — the flowers she nurtured, the windows she washed, the letter box she visited to collect written evidence of her existence.

  How much would the place be worth, if Robert didn’t come through the treatment, or met with misfortune, and Sarah came to live with him in Titirangi? A lawyer naturally has such practical thoughts. House prices were much higher in Auckland, but this place was large, contemporary and well kept. There were those financial advisers who were sceptical of investment in real estate, and the politicians moaned about the obsession with home ownership, but Hartley believed in concrete assets, had a rental property himself in Mount Roskill. He’d witnessed too many company collapses to be happy handing his money to others to manage.

  There was nothing else in Hamilton that he wanted to see: its only existence for him was as the location of Sarah’s home, yet he decided to stay the night there rather than go on to Wellington. The farther he moved from Sarah, the less interest he felt in his surroundings if they shared no connection with her. He found a motel nearby, and the sparse, utilitarian order of the unit reminded him of number seventeen in the Spanish motel, the time with Sarah there, and also of his present isolation. He placed her silk scarf on the hard, white pillow, her photograph on the table, spent time by the bench checking the varieties of coffee and tea sachets in the neatly divided wooden tray, hung his jacket in a wardrobe like an upright coffin, flicked through the brochures that offered him pony rides, group discounts at ethnic restaurants and local minibus tours, skimmed the cellophane-enclosed sheet that gave instructions for the telephone and the television.

  The motel complex had one living thing that distinguished and ennobled it — a spreading magnolia tree by the office with a wooden seat round all of its circumference. Hartley could see it from the window of his unit, and imagined how wonderful it would be in spring with the creamy flowers set like candles among the glossy leaves. He went out and sat there in the dappled light from the low afternoon sun, and thought how pleasant it would be there if Sarah were with him: how they would talk and laugh and feel that nothing was lacking in the world.

  A woman came out of the office with a tray of milk pottles and sachets. ‘How are things?’ he asked idly.

  ‘Travelling for business or pleasure?’ she replied with a smile. She wore jeans, and shoes that looked like sandals, but had quite high heels. She was so blonde that she appeared to have no eyebrows. Her attractive face had no flush of blood, or sun, or cosmetic, could have been carved from chalk, and even the colour of her irises was indistinguishable.

  ‘Business,’ said Hartley. Was there real pleasure to be had alone?

  ‘Enjoy your stay, then.’

  ‘This tree,’ he said before she could move away. ‘I’ve never seen a magnolia as big. It must be marvellous in flower.’

  ‘They say it’s been on the site almost forever. Evidently, long before the motels there was an estate here, and the magnolia was outside the stables. Everything’s gone now except the tree — it’s got a protection order from the council. The boss moans that it pushes up the paving. The flowers are beautiful, but they bruise so easily we don’t pick a lot for vases.’ She smiled once more and, before he could speak again, clattered away on the shoes surely unsuitable for work. No doubt she was used to single guests wanting to while away the time with talk.

  Hartley stayed beneath the magnolia for some time. It was a living thing of comfort among the cloned motel units and oil-stained asphalt surfaces. Maybe, too, he hoped the white woman would come by again after completing her duties, but he didn’t see her again. He returned to his unit and had a shower, from habit placing the provided shampoo and conditioner sachets in his bag and using his own. Then he sat and chose a restaurant from those recommended by the motel. No hurry: there was a whole night to be got through without company. Sarah would be talking with her husband as she prepared a meal. Maybe they would have friends to stay. Hartley knew his name wouldn’t be mentioned, but hoped she would think of him. She was so central to his life that it was unimaginable he wasn’t vital to hers.

  He went to a Chinese place with red and golden dragons above the door, not because it served his favourite food, but because as a single diner he would be less conspicuous there. Unlike his experience at lunch, the room was well filled with people rather than irritating music, and he had his wontons, sweet and sour pork and a dark ale. He was accustomed to being alone, but not reconciled to it, especially since meeting Sarah. He had a second dark ale. Two years a widower, and even in Madeleine’s company before that he had often felt solitary. She had possessed barely enough emotional capital to sustain herself, let alone bridge strongly to a partner. ‘I’m just not up to
it somehow,’ she would say of so many things. She feared life too much to enjoy it. ‘I’m just so pushed at work,’ she would say. A third dark ale, which was unusual for Hartley.

  During their married life, Madeleine had many short-lived hobbies and activities that seemed to offer enrichment, or escape, but all fell by the wayside in disenchantment. Pilates, quilting, hospice visiting, estuarine habitat recovery, reflexology, tarot reading, soap making and stained glass. She even fostered a Labrador pup that was to become a guide dog for the blind, but sent it back in dismay when she discovered little Kevin with one of its turds in his hand. Hartley had learnt to make no comment as each enthusiasm failed to provide fulfilment and was cast aside. Madeleine came ill suited to life, as if programmed for a more generous existence.

  He hadn’t planned to return to Sarah’s home, but when he passed under the golden dragons and walked back to his car, summer’s dusk had barely begun and he wasn’t ready to go back to the motel and watch the small television screen on the wall bracket. He walked up one side of a street of shops and down another, looking at the window displays, sometimes even stopping, but with no genuine interest whatsoever. People passed their lives that way and he had no wish to be one of them. A selfie, he decided. It came to him as a small inspiration. He’d take a selfie in front of Sarah’s house and send it to her as a lark, saying he’d been passing through.

  When he got there, dusk was merging the outlines of trees and buildings, colour was leaching from the day. He parked the car at some distance so as not to attract the attention of Sarah’s neighbour. The houses seemed lower, settling down for the night in the fading light. No people walking, but the sound of birds disputing in a roosting tree somewhere close at hand. He paused at the gate briefly, and then went up the path and stood close to the door, shielded from view by the alcove formed by the walls of glass blocks.

  He found it hard to accept that he’d been unaware of Sarah until recently; that she had been coming and going from this house for years, living a full life that had nothing at all to do with his own. He couldn’t remember how to take a flash photograph with his phone, and gave up on the idea. Instead he had an urge to break into the house somehow, as he had broken into her life, walk through the rooms as a form of possession, open drawers and cupboards that would display aspects of herself, touch things that she was accustomed to use, recognise in her ornaments of choice the personality he had come to know and love. The most he allowed himself was to test that the door was locked, and feel unavailingly for a key beneath the raised wooden plant holder. He would ring though, and surely the novelty of his being at her home would overcome any inconvenience she felt at being disturbed while with Robert.

  ‘It’s me,’ he said. ‘Can you talk?’

  ‘No.’ She had picked up the phone from the broad arm of the sofa. Robert, in a chair close by, was watching a film about adultery.

  ‘But you won’t guess where I’m calling from. Guess where?’

  ‘I don’t care,’ said Sarah. ‘I’m not interested. Don’t call again.’

  ‘I’m at your place in Hamilton,’ said Hartley. ‘I’m right at the front door and—’ but she’d rung off, and told Robert that she was sick of being bothered in the evenings by people who wanted donations, or to sell you something.

  She tried to calm herself by rearranging the magazines on the coffee table and plumping a velvet cushion, when what she wanted was the release of crying out at Hartley’s persistence. What the hell was he doing at their place in Hamilton — assuming he was really there? If she went to the window, would she see him at the street entrance in the gathering darkness, staring up to claim her attention? ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ she said under her breath while still stroking the cushion. Robert sat placidly before the television. His flings were well past and expiated, at least to his own satisfaction. He was in a lottery with death, but watched the drama on the screen with a clear conscience. Sarah turned her face away and screwed up her eyes. She was caught, trapped, and could think of no way out. To see Hartley was to prolong the affair and fuel his obsession; to refuse was to lose all influence over his actions.

  Sarah made a sudden sound — half-sob, half-hiccup — and it startled both of them. Robert heaved himself from his seat and came to her, putting a hand on her shoulder. ‘You’re crying. What’s the matter?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just feel sad all of a sudden. It’ll pass, though. I’m okay.’ Her tears caught on her jaw line, and he smoothed them away.

  ‘I don’t want you to worry about me,’ he said. ‘Things will come right. We’ll be okay, you’ll see.’

  ‘I don’t know how much longer I can cope,’ Sarah said. ‘Life seems to have turned sour on us, don’t you think? Everything seems to be turning out wrong.’

  ‘We all live in degrees of failure.’ It wasn’t something that Robert would have said before his illness, not something that he would have believed then. He sat down on the sofa with her and wondered how to give comfort without shallow optimism. ‘We’ve got each other, haven’t we? We’ve got family,’ he said. ‘I’m coming right. I feel it, really. Whatever happens, nothing can take away the good times we’ve all had together.’

  He misunderstood the reason for her unhappiness, but Sarah still found comfort and reassurance in his concern. She loved him. She loved him in the settled, clear-sighted way that people in successful marriages love each other.

  HARTLEY WAS ANGRY, MORE he was despondent, cut off by the woman he loved and left standing on the step of her empty house in the darkness. He had eaten and drunk too much at the restaurant. Was he going mad? Not berserk in some tumultuous outrage at misfortune, but losing touch with reality, drifting into a realm of echoes, cyphers, self-deceiving mirrors and unattainable expectation. But what was it they had if it wasn’t love? Surely it was love? It must be.

  As a consequence of Sarah’s rebuff, the house seemed less receptive to him. Its emptiness became sterility, its modernity a lack of character. Robert would have made most of the choices regarding it, Hartley decided. Before he went, however, he felt an atavistic impulse to mark the place somehow, as a dog marks a post in passing, and he took his car keys and worked scratches into the dark wood of the door, close to the lock.

  He was ashamed of the action even before he completed it, and rubbed hurriedly at the marks with his finger. ‘Jesus, what’s this about?’ he admonished himself. ‘Jesus, come on.’ A man nearly sixty, a lawyer and a father, defacing property as a thirteen-year-old kid might do. He was gripped by a sudden sense of the absurdity to which he had been reduced by infatuation. A fool, that’s what he’d become, and he was fixed in the role. He walked through the garden fragrances of the summer darkness to his car, and drove back to the motel. What he’d done was such a trivial indiscretion, yet he felt demeaned by it.

  People in the adjoining unit were making a lot of noise: loud talking and frequent, careless laughter. Children’s voices, too, which he found jarring in pitch and frequency. And all reminding him that he was alone. He made a coffee and took it through the night to the large magnolia tree, sat on the wooden seat with his back supported by the massive trunk. It wasn’t comforting, and he began to feel cold. Why was he alone in the world when he had found someone to love? And surely she would be thinking of him just as he was of her?

  He remembered a visit he’d made to the zoo when he first came to Auckland, and the otter alone in a netted compound. It had a scuttling, almost manic routine of movement, and patches of raw skin on its feet. The keeper who was observing it told Hartley that the otter was injuring itself, overgrooming because of loneliness and imprisonment. Sitting under the magnolia, alone in Sarah’s city, Hartley felt his predicament was much the same, the futile restlessness, the isolation, the self-harm that was in his case internal rather than displayed.

  He decided he would go home the next day and see Sarah again somehow. Nothing else mattered much in his life. He could feel tears on his face, and made no effort to check them or wipe them
away. He felt sorry for himself, and considered he had justification for indulging in such commiseration. He was sitting alone in the night under a magnolia tree within the precinct of a motel in a strange town, and the woman he loved, and who surely loved him, would no longer talk to him, walk with him, or lie down with him. He tipped his head back and looked into the mass of branches overhead, through which he could see the hard glitter of a single star. ‘Ah, Jesus,’ he said softly. ‘What to do, eh?’

  When he returned to his unit, the noise was worse, unrestrained and convivial, laughter and overriding interruptions, all an unwitting mockery of his own silence and isolation. Hartley thumped on the wall. The racket dwindled for a brief time, then recovered. He thumped again and longer, and someone began banging back, someone called ‘Shut the fuck up’ and people hollered. Hartley said nothing, but beat on the wall again, a rhythm of defiance more against life than temporary neighbours. It was answered with laughter and calls of derision, and he heard a door slam and almost immediately there was a pounding on his own locked door. He turned off the light and lay on his bed in the small, dark room. He heard someone return next door and be cheered in, and the noise continued, as if he had no existence. Hartley gave no further resistance. He wished he had remained in his own home, where he could feel that he was of some significance, and could control the immediate surroundings as he wished.

  Simon Drummond came to the open door of Hartley’s office, and as a courtesy made a knocking gesture without contact with the surface, then carried on to one of the chairs before the desk. ‘Christ, it’s hot,’ he said. His large, pleasant face had a sheen and his glasses were misted slightly. Despite the heat he wore a tie close around his short neck so that it seemed to tongue from his chin. But his sleeves were folded neatly partway up his forearms. ‘Busy?’ he enquired.