by Liz Byrski
Connie feels a surge of pure joy, as though this place and the broader landscape have enfolded her with their beauty, their familiarity and their meaning. She is enchanted by the rediscovery of something old and precious, something unchanged since her childhood.
‘It’s just the same,’ she says, turning to Flora, eyes alight, cheeks flushed with emotion. ‘Just as I remember, no more buildings, not even a mobile phone tower or a telegraph pole, just the forest and the heath, the fields and that wonderful smoky distance blending into the sky. I can barely believe it. I’ve thought of this place so often, imagined it taken over by some hideous sports arena or shopping centre, but here it is, just the same.’
Flora smiles. ‘Well, it is Ashdown Forest,’ she says, ‘it’s been pretty much unchanged for centuries, so by comparison your lifetime memory is just the blink of an eye.’
Connie nods, still drinking in the landscape, still high on the nostalgia of homecoming. Standing here in this spot, the trees around her forming a dark border to frame what might be a painting by Constable, she is filled with a longing to share this with her children and grandchildren, particularly with Brooke, who has been foremost in her mind. ‘There were times when I thought I would never come here again,’ she says.
‘Here to the Enchanted Place or here to England?’ Flora asks.
‘Both, but especially here. It’s always had a sort of magic for me ever since Mum told me it was where Winnie-the-Pooh lived. Every time I read the books to the kids and then to my grandchildren, I dreamed of coming here again.’
‘We came here as kids too,’ Flora says, and taking a step back, she focuses her camera and snaps Connie in close-up, the landscape hazy in muted sunlight, and beside her the stone plinth with its bronze plaque engraved in memory of Pooh’s creator. ‘I do love it but it’s never had quite the same magic for me as it has for you.’
‘Mum and I came here often for walks and picnics; it was an important place in our life together after Dad left. When I was a teenager we’d cycle up here with our sandwiches and books, and stay for hours. I’m sure you came with us sometimes.’
Flora nods. ‘I think I did.’
‘We did it for years. The last time we came here I was home on holiday from Guildhall. It was the week before the accident, and of course she died a few days later. We sat here talking about how one day I’d travel the world with the opera and she’d come and visit me. Maybe we’d get a flat in London together, but we’d always come back here.’ Connie stops now, gazing down at the place where they had sat that day. ‘You were away then,’ she says, looking up at Flora.
‘I was indeed. I was seeking enlightenment, and devoting myself to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi,’ Flora says with a grin. ‘And I came home to find you’d got engaged to Gerald.’
Connie nods. ‘He was very good to me then, maybe too good. He went to a lot of trouble to find Dad in Spain – not that Dad was remotely interested – so Gerald organised the funeral, everything. But really I wished he’d let me do it. I wanted to, I thought it was the last thing I could do for Mum, but Gerald was dead set on doing everything. He had the best intentions, but it made me feel incompetent, and I didn’t know how to resist him.’
‘Mmmm. Well, I was amazed when I got home and you announced you were getting married.’
‘I do remember that,’ Connie laughs. ‘I remember you saying “So I suppose we’re going to be sisters now?” and I was thinking, “Well, you might look a bit more pleased about it”.’
Flora grimaces. ‘I was pleased, Con, of course I was. In one way I was thrilled because it meant we’d always be part of the same family. But I was jealous; you were my best friend, we had our own sisterly friendship, I wanted that, and I suppose I was a bit scared that although you’d be part of the family, Gerald might sort of co-opt you into his life. Which, of course, he did.’
Connie nods, silent now, gazing down at the spot where she had sat with her mother that last day.
‘Anyway,’ Flora says, ‘I can’t even remember now why this is called the Enchanted Place.’
Connie looks up at her. ‘In the Pooh books it’s the place where Christopher Robin and Pooh take their last walk together. Christopher Robin is going away to boarding school, and they know, somehow, that things will never be quite the same again.’ She points towards the memorial plaque and quotes from memory, ‘“and by and by they came to an enchanted place on the very top of the forest called Galleons Lap”, which is where we’re standing now. It was actually called Gills Leap, but Milne changed it, and since then everyone seems to have called it the Enchanted Place. I think it’s much nicer because, to me at least, it is enchanted.’ She’s silent for a moment, then turns back to Flora. ‘It means a lot that we came here together. Come on, I’ll take you to the place where Kanga teaches baby Roo to do his kangaroo jumps, and to Eeyore’s Gloomy Place, and if you like we can walk down to Pooh Bridge and play Pooh Sticks.’
They walk on over the pale mauve carpet of heather, down a steep slope along fern lined paths, towards the bridge.
‘I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to be here again,’ Connie says. ‘I came back looking for something I couldn’t define – still can’t. Australia is my home now, and I love it, but there’s always a little bit of myself that’s missing, that’s still back here in England. You must feel like that about Tasmania.’
Flora pauses, thinking. ‘Hmmm. I suppose I feel an affinity, but it’s different for me. I was just five when we left Australia, and the only time I’ve been back there was the eighteen months I stayed with you. I often think of it, and I’m curious about it. But it’s not the sort of feeling you’re describing. England and France have really been my life but perhaps there is a bit of me in Australia. We’re like the wild geese, aren’t we? Never entirely settled, always seeking out an idea of home.’
‘You might find that bit of you if you came back,’ Connie says. ‘You would certainly find your only remaining family.’
‘Yes,’ Flora says, ‘I guess I would. And I am thinking about that, but I’m not as good as you at expressing myself.’ She laughs then goes on, ‘I’m getting quite emotional. Suzanne wouldn’t approve of that at all. She would send me off in pursuit of some suitable task to stop me dwelling on things and upsetting myself.’
Connie nods and they walk on in silence. ‘Sometimes,’ she says eventually, ‘it seems important to upset oneself, or at least to allow oneself to be upset. It hurts like hell but it also heals. That’s why I’m here now with you, churning up the past, burrowing into it like woodworm into precious timber, pricking myself on the splinters as I go, believing if I dig deeper I will somehow discover something I left behind that will nourish me now, all these years later.’
*
At the rear of the shop in the half-glass cubical laughingly called ‘the office’, Bea, spectacles perched on the end of her nose, is reading a battered, leather-bound journal, while also keeping an eye open for intruders. The shop itself is a place where intruders are welcome – an intruder being a potential customer, a potential victim for Bea’s personal crusade to get people to expand their reading horizons, to discover or recapture the joy of turning pages as opposed to flicking a remote control. Today, though, she is on the alert for another sort of intruder – a person or people she would prefer to observe before meeting.
The shop is fitted with CCTV cameras that silently scan the shelves and tables, the corners and crannies, the walkways between the sections. They also scan the ever-changing mix of customers: tousle-haired Nordic tourists with backpacks, men and women in serious suits, nubile young women in skimpy skirts, Hasidic Jews, bag ladies with trollies, men in macs with canvas shopping bags, ageing women in flat shoes, smart baby boomers in stilettos they should have abandoned years ago, polite Asian students, Sikhs and priests, waiters and wealthy American tourists. The shop is, as Bea often tells people, London in microcosm: all human life is here, with the exception of children; very few children end up at Tonkin’s
unless their parents are seeking shelter from the rain.
Bea is very happy about the minimal presence of children; little people are, in her opinion, unsuited to bookshops. They whine and wheedle, they have sticky fingers and runny noses, absolutely no decent conversation and have been known to drop whole ice cream cones onto a pile of best sellers on the central display table, something which parents see not as sacrilege but as amusing and endearing.
Books are Bea’s life; she has edited and published them, promoted them, rejected them, marketed them and now she buys and sells them. Her garden flat, just a short walk from the shop, is full of books on shelves, in stacks, in boxes. When she finally retires, she says, she will have sufficient reading material to occupy her until death.
‘You’ll find my body there one day,’ she told Phillip recently, ‘mouldering away, infested with maggots, under a complete set of Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Reading that will, I suspect, just push me over the edge.’
But today Bea is reading not a book but a journal. Her own journal, one of the many she has kept intermittently through her life and rather more regularly in her youth than she does now, in her seventies. She’s been going back through the journals since the day Phillip shoved a copy of his old school’s newsletter in front of her, and stabbed his finger at an obituary.
‘Gerry Hawkins has died,’ he’d said. ‘Did you know?’
And Bea had shaken her head and picked up the paper and stared at a photograph of a much older Gerry than she remembered, and her heart had lurched with that blend of nostalgia and regret that is felt when the best and the worst creases of the past have been ironed out by age and time. She had started to read the obituary while Phillip waffled on about having written to Gerry’s sister in France. And while he dashed out to post the letter she had read the whole thing, twice, searching for a fragment of the man she knew amid the biographical details and bland prose.
They had all been at university together, she, Gerry and Phillip, and had remained friends once they graduated, even one year setting off together to Morocco with a few others, in a battered Kombi. They were a motley collection of individuals, declaiming about politics and free love, drinking far too much cheap local wine and anything else they could get hold of – the exception being Gerry, who was in the middle of his very boring teetotal ‘I think I might be destined for the priesthood’ phase. The thing with Gerry was that you never knew whether he was serious or just wanting to stir things up.
And it was those memories that had sent her, that evening, to search the crammed bookshelves in the spare bedroom for the old journals, and to bring them in to work, one at a time, in order to dip into the memories, in between chiding the shop staff, chivvying Phillip about the state of the accounts and persuading customers that they could buy a lifetime of enjoyment for less than it cost them to have lunch at the pub.
‘Got a letter from Flora,’ Phillip had said a couple of weeks later, shoving it into her hand. ‘She lives at that place in Brittany where we camped – remember? Extraordinary coincidence, she and Connie are in Sussex now and coming up to town next week. They’re going to pop in. I can’t remember if you ever actually met Connie.’
‘Never,’ Bea had said, shaking her head and not taking her eyes off the letter. ‘Gerry was a master at compartmentalising his life. But I heard an awful lot about her.’ She’d heard so much in fact that she was quite sure that she would recognise Connie even though they had never met, and she has never even seen a photograph of her. She remembers everything she has ever heard about Connie, remembers her presence, her subtle insinuation into Gerald’s life after the tragic death of her mother that had driven Gerald to acts of emotional heroism. She remembers his stories of Connie’s fragility and need and she has imagined this nervous, clinging young woman on whom she had bestowed pale wispy hair, large, haunting eyes and a tragic demeanour. In addition to all this Connie had ridiculous pretentions to become an opera singer. Gerald, while acknowledging that she had both talent and commitment, had been adamant that she did not have enough of either, and was also emotionally unsuited to the rigours of such a life. Connie, he had once told Bea, was a needy and dependent girl, unlike Bea herself – whom he had called a feisty, voluptuous and assertive woman. It was only when he’d announced that he felt obliged to marry Connie because she needed someone to look after her that Bea had paused briefly to wonder whether those qualities that he claimed to admire in herself had actually scared him off. So – yes – she remembers Connie, whom Gerald courted out of sympathy and married out of duty, while Bea suffocated her passion under a pile of bullshit about not needing any man, and certainly not ‘a self-centred knob-head like you, Gerry’. She’d actually written that in her journal in red biro illustrated with a roughly drawn heart stabbed with a knife and dripping biro blood. Yes, she does remember Connie.
And now it’s the Wednesday of the week when they might pop in, and in between snatching snippets of the past from her journal, Bea watches with suspicion each time two women appear at the entrance to the shop, hover for a moment, and then head together or separately for fiction or non-fiction, biography, academic or travel. She searches the faces for Connie’s wispy pallor and aura of neediness that she has imagined for decades. Bea is confident that her antennae will immediately detect this presence in the shop and there will be time to study her before she is required to shake hands, offer condolences, smile affectionately at old Gerald-related jokes and pretend that this is a delightful moment of nostalgia and remembrance.
Overhead Bea hears the thud of Phillip’s feet as he runs down the bare wooden staircase from his third floor flat. The sound of his approach is distinctive, because unlike the footsteps of customers or staff going up and down to rare books, first editions and foreign literature on the second floor, Phillip runs. The customers don’t run, the staff don’t run, only Phillip runs. It is, Bea thinks, a matter of pride, to prove he still can run up and down stairs. He wears soft-soled shoes mostly, like moccasins, with cream or beige twill or linen trousers and usually something blue, a t-shirt or shirt with a blue linen jacket, or a navy sweater in winter. Someone must once have told him that he looked good in these clothes – Bea wonders if it was Lorna, his ex – because he rarely varies his wardrobe, and indeed they do suit him. He is still a good-looking man, quite fit for one in his seventies who smokes and takes only moderate exercise. Bea keeps expecting him to turn up with an attractive woman of more than a certain age on his arm, but he never does.
‘Ah! You’re there,’ Phillip says, appearing in the cubicle doorway. ‘You okay for dinner Friday night?’
Bea raises her eyebrows. ‘Dinner? I imagine you mean fish and chips while we go through the accounts.’
Phillip shakes his head. ‘Dinner, proper dinner. I thought we’d go to the Italian place on Judd Street.’
‘We’re dating now, are we?’
‘It’s Flora and Connie, we’re having dinner with them.’
‘I thought they were coming to the shop.’
‘They were, but they’re still in Brighton, coming up by train on Friday morning, so I asked them to dinner. Are you on?’
‘Wouldn’t miss it,’ Bea says, shuffling papers on the desk. ‘Flora, weren’t you and she … ?’
‘Never,’ Phillip says, ‘but not for lack of trying on my part.’ He hesitates and looks awkward. ‘You … well, you won’t … ?’
‘Of course I won’t.’
‘Good. So Friday, then, that’ll be lovely,’ and he is gone, out through the shop and into the street.
‘Hmmm,’ Bea says softly. ‘Not sure about lovely, but it’ll be interesting, that’s for sure.’
*
Andrew, in a window seat, puts on the headphones, tunes to the classical music channel, gazes out onto the rumpled bed of cloud and tries to imagine himself lying in all that cool soft whiteness. The last few days have been truly awful: meetings with his counterparts from other states, stultifying discussions about f
unding for the arts at state and federal level, and a tedious lunch at Parliament House as guests of the local minister. It was during that lunch that he’d felt his phone vibrating inside his jacket pocket and, murmuring apologies, had left the table to take the call.
‘Can’t you come back now?’ Brooke begged when she’d explained what was happening. And he’d had to tell her that he couldn’t, that he had to visit two regional arts projects and it would be late on Friday afternoon before he could get back to Melbourne.
‘Listen, Brooke, please listen to me,’ he’d said. ‘The worst has already happened, so just hang in there until I get back. Stay out of his way, don’t pick any fights with him or your mother. I’ll come and see you on Friday evening, I promise. Do this for me, darling, please. Friday evening.’
She’d been extremely grumpy with him but he’d called her back later in the afternoon and told her that he would look around for somewhere for them both to live. ‘I’ll call when I land in Melbourne and come straight over,’ he’d told her. ‘And don’t tell Mum that you’re going to move in with me. I’ll talk to her when I get there.’
And then he’d talked to Linda – well, shouted at her down the phone. How dare she move that prick into his house with his daughter! How dare she do anything in his absence! What gave her the right to move his personal possessions out of his own home and into that grotty little studio above the gallery? And Linda had shouted back, enraged about his calling Zachary a prick when he was actually a sensitive artist. She was adamant about her right to have whomever she wanted staying there because she was the joint owner of the house, so there was little he could do about it. Andrew wasn’t so sure about that, but from the other side of the country all he could do was call his solicitor, who turned out to be lounging around in some exotic Balinese resort and not returning calls.
