Forty-Seventeen

by Frank Moorhouse

  This misconception still caught him out, still took root in his mental garden and, of course, was still the fallacy he had to work by.

  ‘You were pretty queer,’ she said, ‘but impressive in your own way.’ She pushed his arm playfully. ‘Don’t look so worried – we didn’t think you were a loony. We were more worried that you would think we were dumb. Did you think I was dumb back then?’

  ‘I married you. You got a better pass than I did.’

  ‘We know that examinations don’t count in the long run. Did you think I wasn’t an intellectual? And anyhow men marry women dumber than themselves for security.’

  ‘I was sometimes driven up the wall by your common sense. You saw through all the bullshit.’

  But she was never sure what was really bullshit and she had neither insight nor vision.

  He laughed. ‘I miss it now and then. We need you in Vienna.’ He didn’t believe that.

  She asked about schoolfriends, Carl, Sylvia, Friedman. ‘Do you ever hear from them?’

  ‘No, not at all really. Sylvia’s with the Schools Commission. She’s always being written up in those articles on successful feminist women.’

  ‘Sounds just like her.’

  ‘Let’s go into the school.’

  They got out of the car. It was vacation. The school was empty. Nothing as empty as a vacant school.

  ‘Let’s go to Room 14. The Prefects’ Room.’

  He was thinking of another room, where they had almost made love for the first time. Room 17?

  ‘Why not Room 17?’

  She turned to him smiling, almost a blushing smile. ‘Of course, I’d almost forgotten that. Oh yes.’

  They walked along the corridors, the smell of chalk, always oranges? or fruit-cake? Or were these smells in his mind?

  They stopped and looked into Room 17, the art room. She took his hand and squeezed it.

  ‘We came very close,’ she said.

  ‘The Gestetner’s been replaced by offset.’

  They went on to Room 14 where the flirtings, the brushings, the illicit hand-holding, the supercharged touchings of pre-courtship, had begun.

  The room was crowded with superseded household appliances, jugs, toasters, heaters, snack-makers.

  ‘They have more electrical gadgets than we had.’

  ‘We had a jug – for instant coffee – they’ve got a restaurant-style dripolator.’

  She leaned into him affectionately. ‘You wrote a story for the school magazine about nuclear war beginning the day you got your examination results – remember? And you end up being involved in all that even now.’

  ‘Not quite “all that”, but yes, that’s where I ended up.’

  ‘Though now you’re for using nuclear power aren’t you?’

  ‘Only because it’s inescapable for the time being.’

  ‘But you were aware of the threat before other people.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Before we were at school. You were a peace movement before there were peace movements.’

  ‘What it shows twenty-five years later is that I was politically wrong – the bomb hasn’t dropped – maybe it stopped war.’

  He realised he was slightly disturbed by her holding his hand; it was, he realised, irritation with himself, a fear of contact with her. Because she had cancer. He was angry with himself and took her other hand against this stupid gut reaction.

  ‘I think I was using it metaphorically – the bomb.’

  This idea seemed to be unacceptable to her. ‘How? Why?’

  ‘I think I was really writing about the bomb of puberty dropping on the peace of my childhood.’

  ‘I don’t think you were. I don’t think you were that clever.’ She laughed to avoid any offence.

  He let go of her hands and went to the window to look across at the playing field. She came up behind him and embraced him from behind, her cheek coming against his. Again he felt a resistance to her but suppressed it.

  ‘You haven’t mentioned my cancer,’ she said. She tried to say it in a comic voice but it threw a shadow of effort. ‘For godsake, mention my cancer.’ She laughed, and going to the window, opened it and shouted, ‘Cancer!’ and then closed it. ‘There, it’s mentioned. People won’t mention it. I didn’t think it would happen with you and me but it has. People won’t say the word. But I have to talk about it.’

  The effort at lightness was so colossal and so transparent and courageous he felt tearful.

  ‘You look so well – it hadn’t crossed my mind,’ he said, holding his voice normal, ‘but OK – how’s the cancer going?’

  His voice came out far from normal.

  She made physical contact with him again, leaning into him. ‘Oh I have my winning days and my losing days. It’s incredible that I can really say at the end of a day – I’m winning or I’m losing. But I’m not strong enough to count the winning days against the losing days. That’s where I’m a sook. But I’m not a defeatist.’

  She had never been a defeatist. But the word sounded too close to being crushingly, inescapably upon her. She stumbled over saying it.

  ‘Does it hurt a lot?’

  ‘Hellishly in the lower pelvis sometimes.’

  ‘I’ve heard that chemotherapy is rough.’

  ‘Oh I’ve given that up. I didn’t believe that anything that makes you feel that bad could be good for you.’

  ‘Louise said you were having Cobalt 60 inter-cavity irradiation.’

  ‘Yes, but I gave it up.’

  ‘But why, Robyn, why?’

  She squeezed his hand. ‘Don’t feel offended because your magic is being refused.’

  It wasn’t his magic – nor was it ‘magic’.

  ‘I changed therapies,’ she said, ‘as Susan Sontag said, all the medical therapies are like warfare – they bombard, they attack, they search out and destroy.’

  ‘But for godsake, Robyn, they work.’

  ‘Calm down, calm down. So does my way.’

  Her way.

  ‘I’m meditating and I have a vegan diet which is all I feel like eating anyhow – now hold on – don’t be so quick to make a mock of it. It works too, you know. I’m doing imagery therapy – the Simonton technique.’

  ‘The what!’

  ‘Calm down. I imagine the white cells eating the cancer, as simple as that. I believe in the power of the imagination. But I don’t see it as a violent act – I imagine it as peaceful. The imagination is a much under-used power.’

  She looked very tired from having had to put it into words against her sense of his opposition. She had stated it as a testament of faith. Oh he was still so zealous with her. He angered again against himself. He wanted to take both her hands and kiss them as a supportive gesture and as a way of dissenting from those negative responses his personality was giving to her. But still he could not bring himself to do it.

  ‘You’re not looking like an invalid,’ he forced himself to say, ‘so something’s working, maybe.’ He tried to bite back the word ‘maybe’. ‘I’m sorry I mocked you – you know me, always the schoolboy rationalist.’

  ‘But a rationalist who was sophisticated would accept that there are these grey areas in medicine and especially in cancer healing. Strange things do happen.’

  ‘Yes. I’m for anything that works for you,’ he said, feeling happier with that form of words, ‘but why don’t you try everything at once? The Cobalt 60, the alternative therapies, the lot.’

  ‘But don’t you see that if you try the medical things you’re being passive – you’re putting yourself in the hands of other people and saying “cure me”. With the other therapies you are active – it’s me working for my own cure.’

  But there was nothing in the book that said you shouldn’t put yourself in the hands of others when ill. Trusting, or involving others, might be part of being committed to your life. He didn’t want to argue with her. He was afraid of upsetting the balance of her will, in so far as he was granting validity to wil
lpower cures. He suspected, though, that do-it-yourself cures might be a diseased reaction to disease. We could not depend upon the beneficence of the unconscious. He wouldn’t rely on his.

  ‘Remember that last party we had here at the end of fifth year,’ she said, ‘no, of course, you were already in Sydney. We had my old gramophone here,’ she went over and stood where the gramophone had been, ‘we drank soft drinks and ate cakes which the girls had baked.’ She stood in reverie. ‘Gee …’ She became tearful.

  He wanted to go to her but the resistance was still there.

  They traced their school lives slowly as they wandered about the empty school.

  ‘I was truly deeply shocked that day in Room 17. I mean, I hadn’t actually seen a man’s … a penis before.’

  ‘It took you more than a year before you would look again.’

  ‘You’re lucky I ever looked again.’

  They stood in the grassy fields where twenty-three years earlier they’d made tentative pre-sexual love. If his mother or her mother were not at home they would sometimes go there and pet more until they ached and were almost sick from arousal without release.

  As they stood there in the long grass, she said, ‘I sometimes wonder what gave me the cancer, was it – this is silly I know but I have to say it – could it have been men’s penises not being clean enough?’

  He tried to joke. ‘I don’t think so – British women would all have cervical cancer.’ It was a typical idea for her to have, and, who knows, maybe right.

  ‘I don’t mean you,’ she touched him, ‘you were a good middle-class boy and clean, but well, others …’ She gave a small guarding smile as if he might even now be upset by mention of other men, ‘others after you weren’t always good middle-class boys.’

  ‘Did a doctor suggest this?’

  ‘No, it’s a private theory, I have lots of private theories these days. Being ill in a serious way gives you a special sense of knowing your body.’

  They left the school. ‘I always remember the Head saying something that was very important to me,’ she said, ‘remember him saying that school wasn’t preparation for life – it was real life, real living. It’s true, and school is an important part of living.’

  In the car she suggested she’d like to go to the church where they’d been married.

  Outside the church he said how normal their lives had looked then – church, fellowship, Sunday School, confirmation, débutantes, engagements, balls, marriages, births.

  ‘I missed out on confirmation,’ he said to her, ‘that was one of my protests.’

  ‘But you were confirmed,’ she said, ‘I was the one who refused to be confirmed and caused all the ruckus.’

  ‘No,’ he said, feeling determinedly sure, ‘I was the one who refused to be confirmed.’

  ‘No, sorry, I was the one who held out, you were forced into it by your mother but you were certainly confirmed.’

  He flushed, she was right, he’d been rewriting his history. Why? When had he started that legend – lie – and then forgotten to correct it?

  ‘You talked about doing it,’ she said, ‘you talked of rebellion but your mother put great pressure on you. My mother oddly enough was a bit against it for some reason. Low church – found it too popish.’

  He was embarrassed, he must have made up the story when he was a teenager in Sydney as part of the picture of rebellious adolescence in a country town.

  ‘Are you honestly confused?’ she asked.

  ‘What does it matter now,’ he said, ‘yes, you were the one.’

  They went into the dim church and walked up the aisle where they’d walked as nineteen-year-old bride and groom. ‘Is this the altar?’ he asked her. ‘I never quite knew where the altar began.’

  ‘Yes, but Rev. Benson called it the communion table.’

  ‘The altar was where they once sacrificed animals.’

  ‘Not in this old town,’ she said, ‘here we sacrificed kids. Kids like us.’

  She turned to him then with tears and came to him. ‘Hold me.’

  She held on to him.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he said, ‘you’re OK, Robyn.’

  ‘I’m dying,’ she said, ‘I know it.’

  ‘You’re fighting it – you’ll win, you were always a winner.’

  ‘We will at least know all the answers then,’ she said.

  Towards what end?

  She looked up at him hopelessly. ‘Marry me again – just for today – let’s marry for the day. We may never see each other again anyhow, whatever happens.’

  He strove to get her meaning.

  By ‘marry’ he assumed she meant they should pledge to each other some vow of affection.

  ‘We were little children together,’ she said, ‘and we went through all that stuff of adolescence, and we were each other’s first love, and I did bear your child – even if you never claimed her.’

  He had lived as if this child did not exist. He had decided years back that he could not be a father for the child because of the circumstances, his alienation from Robyn, his emotional deficiency. But he’d also made the decision to protect himself from the pain of being held away from the child. If he had once permitted his fatherly feelings free rein they would have tormented him forever. He had still to keep them unreleased. He had explained this to Robyn on a number of occasions but she had never accepted it. He wouldn’t try again.

  He knew then for the first time, or faced for the first time, the fact that parenthood had passed him by.

  He’d passed through another of the doorways.

  He felt no deep affection for her. He felt a sympathetic bond of, probably, a unique kind. He didn’t feel caught up in a rush of new affection or restored affections. Perhaps he felt sentimental. What he felt most was recoil from her disease. This continued to make him angry with himself.

  ‘You do still feel something for me?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, a lot.’

  ‘Do you feel some love for me?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ he lied, softly, searching for some validation of this in whatever fudged and twisted way, yes, there was a unique place for her in his personal history. ‘Yes, you are in a special place in my heart.’

  Why not lie? He was frightened that a lie would be detected by the antennae of her unconscious and hurt her more.

  ‘Do you take me,’ she whispered, ‘as your spiritual wife for this day and for all days until we die, from this day forth?’

  All he could react to was her extension of the make-believe vows from one day to ‘until death’. She was taking pleasure from the pseudo-ecclesiastical wording of it too.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No,’ she said with insistence, ‘say it to me, say the words.’

  ‘I take you as my spiritual wife for this day.’ He wanted to conclude it there.

  ‘… and for all days until I die, from this day forth,’ she instructed him.

  At first he noted that she changed the wording to refer to her death, but when he said it, it made it his death, ‘… and for all the days until I die, from this day forth.’

  ‘Now ask me.’

  He was acutely uncomfortable, worried that someone might come into the church and come across them doing this.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, sensing his reluctance, ‘do it for me.’

  ‘Do you take me as your spiritual husband for this day and for all days until I die, from this day forth?’

  ‘Yes, yes I take you, Ian, as my spiritual husband for this day and for all days until I die, from this day forth,’ she said with a forceful sincerity.

  ‘You may now kiss the bride,’ she said, smiling, and he was ashamed that he could not give himself to the kiss with a wholehearted spirit, instead he changed the kiss into a brotherly kiss but it was enough of a personal kiss for her to believe it to be, for it to suit the prescribed kind of love and the vows of the occasion. He sincerely hoped she would accept it as the kiss she wanted.

  Maybe if he’d be
en able to give her that kiss passionately without withholding, maybe if he had been able to make love to her on that visit to the home town – or at least give her physical embraces of a wholehearted kind – she would have stayed alive. Maybe with her method those gestures by him would have been enough to tip the balance. Maybe she died because of people like him in the world. Maybe he was a negative cell. Or maybe this was egocentric thinking and placed him unrealistically large and unrealistically close in her personal galaxy.

  He was in the bar at the UN City in Vienna, drinking alone, when he heard of her death from Mark Madden, an American chemist with the NEA who had been her lover at some time after the marriage.

  Madden and he also had been close for a few months when he’d come to Australia as a young student drop-out. They’d re-met on the IAEA circuit at times. Despite these close links and their respective distances from their homelands, he and Madden now usually avoided each other in the bar. This night Madden had come across to him and said, ‘Robyn died this morning, I thought you mightn’t have heard.’

  Why would Madden think that? But yes, Madden was right, he hadn’t heard.

  ‘God,’ he said, ‘that’s rotten.’

  He felt a real sadness and a regret for her now permanent absence from his life, or to be precise, the ‘absent presence’ she’d been in his life since they’d separated.

  ‘She was a sweet, sweet person, a very special sort of human being,’ Madden said, as they had a drink together. That sort of talk, he thought, was why he didn’t drink with Madden.

  ‘I knew her as a giggling hockey-playing schoolgirl,’ he said to Madden, ‘that is my enduring memory.’ It was a way of asserting the superiority of his knowing of her over Madden’s knowing of her. Two male egos still clashing like stags over her dead body.

  ‘She was essentially a poetic person.’

  ‘Poetic? I never saw her as poetic. I didn’t see that side of her.’ Nor did he believe it.

  ‘It wasn’t a “side of her” it was the whole damned person.’

  ‘I’m not doubting you, Mark, just that I knew a much different Robyn. How do you mean poetic anyhow?’