The Woman Next Door

by Liz Byrski

  Eventually Stella stands up and makes noises about having to get going.

  ‘And I must get in the shower and get on too,’ Helen says. ‘So much to do.’

  They exchange pecks on the cheek and Helen closes the door behind Stella, and leans back against it in relief, eyes closed, arms folded across her chest. She stands there for a moment, then hurries back to the kitchen window from where she can see Stella’s red Honda edging out of the parking space below and into the street.

  The last half-hour or however long it was seems like a nightmare. She wonders what she said, what she did, how it will all sound when Stella relates it to Joyce, as she surely will. Could Joyce have sent Stella here, to check up on her? Check up on what exactly? Everything probably, because they haven’t seen each other since the night at Cicerello’s. It was Mac who had called to invite them round for supper and drinks before he left: ‘There’ll just be a few of us,’ he’d told Dennis, who’d answered the phone, and Dennis had accepted for both of them without consulting her.

  ‘Well I won’t be going,’ she’d said sharply. ‘You can do as you like.’

  ‘I think you’ve gone over the top about this, Helen, I really do,’ Dennis had said. ‘They’re our oldest friends, and they’ve a right to do just as they want about their living arrangements.’

  ‘That may be so,’ she’d said, ‘but as Joyce’s oldest friend I think I have a right to tell it how it is. It’s a ridiculous thing to be doing at their age. And it’s not just about them – what about us? Like you said, they’re our oldest friends, but they weren’t even going to tell us yet, and they’re breaking everything up, as though all those years mean nothing.’

  Dennis, who had been standing with his back to her looking out of the window, had turned around then. ‘We’re the ones who broke it up,’ he’d said. ‘We did that when we moved away, nothing’s been the same since then. And we did that because it was what you wanted. I warned you what it would mean, that what we had there, in Emerald Street, would just fade away, but you wouldn’t have it. Wouldn’t listen. You wanted all this so badly that you couldn’t talk about anything else. So now you’ve got what you wanted, your river view, your fittings and furnishings, it’s cost us a fortune, and you don’t like it and I never wanted it anyway. And now you don’t like Joyce and Mac trying something new? Well you can just stop whingeing about things not being the same because I’m sick of hearing it. Find yourself something else to do, like I have. I’m off to the Shed now, and I’ll be going to say goodbye to Mac on Wednesday and you can do what you sodding well like.’ And he had picked up his car keys, stalked off out the door and disappeared for the rest of the day.

  Helen stares at the hall table, the three novels Stella has returned, the full glass of wine. She presses her hands to her temples feeling a headache coming on. The rawness of Stella’s visit, the awkwardness, her own stupidity, crowd in on her, but at the heart of it all is the emptiness. The emptiness of her life, the yawning gap in herself that she’s always known was there, but which for so many years had been softened and then filled by everything about their life in Emerald Street. Every day since they moved here that gap has been reopening little by little, the edges eroding, slipping elusively away like soft sand leaving this black hole growing slowly bigger. Helen looks at the glass on the hall table, reaches out, picks it up and sips the wine. Sips it again. She walks back to the kitchen and takes another sip, then tosses back the remainder in one gulp, stares at the bottom of the glass, turns to the fridge, takes out the bottle, and refills it.

  *

  Stella pulls out into the street and drives back towards the bridge as though she is running from the scene of some crime. The shock of seeing Helen in her dressing gown, of smelling the drink on her breath, the wine in the hallway, the forced smile and awkward pleasantries, had left her feeling as though some evil fairy had scattered her with a cloying dust of unreality. She forces herself to concentrate on driving, tells herself to wait until she gets home when she can make herself a restorative cup of tea. It wasn’t only the instant coffee, like paint stripper, that had left a bad taste in her mouth, but Helen and instant coffee? That in itself was an unbelievable combination. By the time she has crossed the bridge Stella is wondering whether it was all her fault. Had she behaved badly, had she unwittingly done something to upset Helen? Her memory is so dodgy these days maybe she trampled on some touchy topic without realising. But it had started the moment Helen had opened the door.

  By the time she gets home, Stella is sure that her part in the debacle was in calling in on the off chance. Helen could always be touchy, take offence, feel slighted by something you didn’t even know you’d done, and she wouldn’t have liked being caught in her dressing gown, unwashed, hair all over the place, swigging wine at eleven o’clock in the morning. Stella pauses, kettle in hand. Should she say something to Joyce, or wait until Friday and talk to Polly when she gets back? Then, still contemplating action, she makes the tea, stirs in a large teaspoonful of honey, searches in every room for her glasses and, eventually finding them on her head, settles into her favourite chair on the back verandah. Maybe I’d just be telling tales, she thinks, but on the other hand . . . oh well, Polly will know what to do.

  She picks up her script and starts to read, not aloud, not silently, but in a very soft whisper to herself, which is the way she’s always found it best to learn her lines. Since Albany they’ve been given a longish break to allow a couple of the cast to finish off other commitments. It all starts again in . . . well she can’t remember when exactly, and this time they’ll be filming in Perth and Fremantle, so no more sitting around on the rocks in her nightdress. This script, she thinks, is crap. Polly would have a word or two to say if she read it. And she’s never had so many problems getting to grips with her lines and the character. She’d played Cassandra for so many years but this time Stella feels like she’s losing her grip. I should retire, she thinks for the umpteenth time, and this time I should mean it.

  She’d started to talk to Joyce and Mac about it when she’d got back from Albany.

  ‘But why?’ Joyce had asked. ‘You’re so good, and so many people love you. What about that article in The West Australian – the one about you being brought back for another series of Cross Currents? They said you were a television icon . . .’

  ‘Much loved,’ Mac had interrupted. ‘A much loved icon of Australian television, I think it said. I’ve got a copy of it somewhere. Anyway, you retired before and you’ve been asked to come back, twice, just like Frank Sinatra. This is the third time so that must tell you something.’

  And whatever Stella had said about it being time, about knowing it was time, they kept brushing it aside. She’d loved them for their belief in her, for their support, their offers of anything they could do to make it easier for her to keep going, but she had wanted them to engage seriously with her about it, to let her talk it all through. It’s best to go while I’m ahead, she thinks as she rests the script down on her lap and half closes her eyes.

  The thing is, she tells herself, that when it’s time to go you really do know it, and that’s the difference this time. This time I’m sure. Third time lucky.

  Through the filter of her lashes she sees the glorious greens of the garden that she has both tended and neglected over the years, the sparkle of the water feature that Mac installed for her a couple of years ago. I could sit here day after day, no scripts to learn, no bags to pack, no director’s foibles to accommodate, she tells herself. She has a house full of books still to read, when will she do that if she doesn’t start soon? And suddenly she longs for a sense of uninterrupted time to do exactly what she wants even if that means nothing at all. She feels the script slip to the floor but she doesn’t move to retrieve it, just sits there until her eyes close.

  *

  South Fremantle, April

  Polly pays the cab driver, grabs the handle of her suitcase and
wheels it in through the front gate, stopping only to glance up and down the street, which is bathed in midday somnolence. There is no sign of life at Joyce’s place or Stella’s, but outside the property next to Joyce and Mac’s there is a ‘For Sale’ sign. Hmm, she thinks, that’ll be interesting. And she lets herself in to the glorious, cool stillness of her own home, leaves her case inside the front door and wanders through to the back, sniffing the scent of the lemon oil that she always uses on her mother’s old dining table. In the kitchen she opens the back door and then, wandering into the lounge, throws open the French windows to freshen the air. Home at last, the joy of it never fails her. Wherever she goes, she knows she will always return to this, her own little piece of the world. On the kitchen table there is the stack of mail that Stella and Joyce between them have rescued from the mailbox – bills, circulars, letters, postcards – but she is not really interested in these right now. The first thing she wants is a shower and to change into some old jeans and a t-shirt, and then to see Stella, whose car is out there standing on the driveway in the sun.

  Half an hour later, revived after her shower, Polly goes down the back steps, across the lawn and opens the side-gate.

  ‘Stella,’ she calls softly. ‘Stella, are you there?’

  She steps in, closing the gate behind her, turns to walk up to the house and stops abruptly. Stella is sitting uncannily still in her cane chair, eyes closed, a cup beside her, some papers at her feet, and Polly’s heart pounds . . . is she . . .? Could she have . . .? She reels backwards, turning her ankle as her foot sinks into the soft earth of the rose bed, then straightens up and looks again. Stella shifts her position very slightly and Polly relaxes, takes several deep breaths and walks softly up the verandah steps to stand beside her and pauses for a moment. How old Stella looks, sleeping like this. The eccentricity of her appearance evaporates without the vibrance of her personality to carry it. Polly stares sadly at the folds of skin barely apparent when Stella is awake: the way her mouth droops, the greying eyebrows, the silvery hair once thick and lustrous which is thinning now, and her hands mottled with age spots, raised veins and thickening knuckles. She wonders if Stella herself sees all this, if she is immune to changes in her appearance, or struggles to live with the uncomfortable reality of it all. What will I feel, she wonders, when I’m Stella’s age? Will I mind these obvious signs of ageing, the sense of dilapidation, or will I slowly learn to live with it?

  ‘Stella,’ she says again, this time putting her hand gently on Stella’s arm.

  ‘Oh!’ Stella opens her eyes and sits up straight. ‘Oh, I . . . Polly, oh Polly, I was asleep.’ She blinks, puts a hand to her face. ‘What are you doing here, you’re not due back until Friday, or did I forget? Is everything all right?’

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ Polly says, leaning forward to kiss her, then pulling the other chair closer to sit down. ‘I always planned to come back today.’

  ‘But I thought Friday . . .’

  ‘It is Friday,’ Polly says.

  ‘Is it really? Are you sure? I thought today was Wednesday . . . I was going to get you some shopping, goodness what a mess, I must have mixed up . . .’

  ‘Don’t get up,’ Polly says, gripping her arm to stop her. ‘It’s fine, I can pop out later. Besides, you shouldn’t be running around after me.’

  Stella flops back in her chair. ‘But I like doing that. Anyway, it’s lovely to see you, what a wonderful surprise. And you look so good. Did it all go well, the conference, the research, and Alistair? Would you like some tea, or a cold drink?’

  Polly senses that Stella’s delight is also tinged with relief. This friendship has sustained them both over so many years and she knows that her friend has come to rely on her presence. Now, as age closes in on Stella, Polly thinks, her own unusually long absence has stirred something in her; a sense of herself as vulnerable, a foreshadowing of the loss of autonomy, a fear of dependence.

  ‘You know what?’ Polly says, taking her hand. ‘I’ve had a shower, changed my clothes, and all I need to do is sit here quietly with you and catch up on all the news.’

  *

  ‘It was weird, it really was,’ Stella says later that evening. ‘The drinking, not being dressed, the tension . . . I didn’t know what to make of it while I was there but now I think it was unhappiness – Helen’s unhappiness – that I felt. And an awful brooding sort of anger.’

  ‘That anger has been smouldering for a while,’ Joyce says, stirring the risotto with one hand and reaching out with the other to take the glass of wine Polly is holding out to her. ‘But the night we went to Cicerello’s was when I realised how bad it is. Helen’s never found it easy to apologise for anything but I hoped she might make some sort of mute apology by turning up to say goodbye to Mac. But she didn’t, and she hasn’t returned my calls.’ She pulls the pan off the heat and carries it to them at the table. ‘I think you’re right, Stella, she is very unhappy but she can’t admit it.’

  Polly watches in silence as Joyce serves the risotto. This meal was a spur of the moment decision made when Joyce had turned up at Stella’s place this afternoon and found them sitting on the verandah.

  ‘Dinner, my place at seven,’ she had said. ‘I’ll throw something together.’

  ‘I gave up trying to work Helen out years ago,’ Polly says now. ‘And what you and Mac decide to do is entirely up to the two of you. It’s no one else’s business.’

  ‘Except ours,’ Stella says, laughing. ‘Polly and I, as your best friends, expect everything to be run past us first, don’t we, Poll?’

  ‘Of course,’ Polly laughs. ‘But seriously, I really admire you both for having a go at this, giving each other the freedom. It must be a challenge after all these years.’

  ‘Mmm. Well I have to admit that I haven’t quite got a grip on the challenge yet but I think I might be getting there,’ Joyce says. ‘I went to the refugee support group yesterday evening. It was all a bit vague – people wanting to do something useful but not sure what or how. But one thing they badly need is people to teach English. I thought I might talk to Ben about the course he did before he trekked off to Europe after he graduated.’

  Stella nods. ‘You’d be good at that.’

  ‘You would,’ Polly adds. ‘By the way, you have to tell me what’s going on next door.’

  Joyce looks puzzled. ‘Oh, you mean the “For Sale” sign? It went up a couple of weeks ago, that’s all we know. Let’s hope we get some nice, interesting neighbours. A quiet older couple or a single woman would be good.’

  ‘Or a quiet older man, for Polly,’ Stella says, winking at Joyce. ‘But it may be too late. I have a feeling she’s already met someone.’

  *

  Perhaps it’s jet-lag, or simply the readjustment to being home, but whatever it is Polly’s restlessness will not let her sleep. One moment she’s determined to keep her distance from Leo, the next she is feverishly re-reading his emails, measuring each word for its exact meaning, studying the way the correspondence has escalated from friendly and light-hearted to something deeper. They haven’t spoken since they parted company at Heathrow, but Polly feels she is learning to know him better than might have been possible on the phone. She wishes now that she had followed her instincts when, at St Pancras, she had hesitated and considered texting him to say she had decided to stay on in London for a couple of days. But the Eurostar departure announcement had cut across her thoughts, and she’d taken a deep breath and walked straight through the gate and onto the train. Now she feels herself being drawn into a sort of intimacy, not sexual but certainly very personal, cultural and intellectual, and each day she vacillates between wanting more and wanting to turn away before she invests too much in whatever this is or might become. Men make life so complicated, or is it just her response to them that complicates things? There is nothing in her past that gives her confidence that she might make the right choice or the right
moves. Her relationships have always begun on a high and veered steadily, often rapidly, into decline until she has escaped back into her single life and the sense of congruence it gives her. But sometimes she gets a treacherous feeling that it must be possible for her to have at least one functional relationship after so many disasters. The odds must be in her favour, mustn’t they?

  ‘Don’t sell yourself short, Poll,’ Alistair had said, hugging her as she left. ‘Be open to the possibilities. This could be the time you really get it right.’ But even as she remembers this she shrinks back again into all the old fears harvested from a lifetime of disappointments.

  Chapter Five

  Albany, April

  Mac plunges into the water off Middleton beach and starts to swim out against the incoming tide. He’s been doing this every morning since he arrived, a swim, then a walk to the café for coffee, then home to cook some breakfast. He swims vigorously this morning, pushing himself against the current and then turning onto his back to look up at the clear, early morning sky. He loves being down here on the south coast, loves the strong cold wind off the Southern Ocean, the air that seems so pure you can feel it doing you good. And he loves the way he spends his days. He’s supposed to be renovating the cottage but he hasn’t touched it yet because he has this burning desire to do something he’s been thinking of for ages – make a rocking chair for Joyce. Years had passed since he’d promised he would do this, so hopefully it will be a nice surprise.