The Woman Next Door

by Liz Byrski

  Stella’s hands are shaking as she sets down her coffee mug. Mac reaches out and takes them in his own. ‘But you remember it all now?’

  ‘I remember what I’ve been told about it. I don’t remember going to the cemetery. I have no idea why I would do that. I don’t remember being in the police station, and having to be collected by a friend. The friend I assume must have been Polly. Do you know anything about that?’

  Mac shakes his head. ‘I don’t, Stella, but I do remember Joyce saying some time ago, before . . . well, before Helen, that Polly was worried because you’d gone walkabout one night.’

  Stella nods. ‘That sounds right. Polly didn’t tell me . . . or maybe she did and I’ve forgotten.’

  ‘Have you told her about this business with the car and the cemetery?’

  ‘No,’ she shakes her head. ‘Not now, not while Leo’s there. I’ll wait until he’s gone. I know I need to do something, see a doctor, whatever. This is not something that’s going to stop or get better, Mac. And you do see, don’t you, that I can’t keep driving?’

  ‘I do,’ Mac says. He is silent a moment, then grasps her hands more firmly. ‘I think you’re right, Stella, and I’ll talk to Dennis about the car this afternoon. Can I tell Joyce?’

  She nods. ‘Yes, but I don’t want Polly to know yet. I don’t want Polly to worry about it while Leo’s here.’

  They sit there for a moment in silence.

  ‘Well there’s one more thing, Stella,’ Mac says. ‘I will definitely talk to Dennis, maybe bring him back here later today to look at the car, but . . .’ he hesitates, hating this moment, hating what he’s about to say but knowing he has to say it. ‘In view of what you’ve just told me, I think that you should probably give me your car keys now.’

  Stella is silent for a long moment, staring straight at him, stony faced, and he thinks she might be going to refuse. Then she clears her throat and nods. ‘Of course I should,’ she says, ‘of course that’s the right thing to do.’ And she gets to her feet, crosses the kitchen, takes two sets of car keys down from the key rack and stands there looking down at them in her hands. Then she turns back to the table and gives them to him with a huge sigh.

  ‘That’s it then,’ she says with a crack in her voice. ‘That’s the first step in losing my independence . . . just one moment of handing over some keys and it’s gone. So what’s next, Mac? What’s the next stage of diminishment, I wonder?’

  *

  It’s Sunday morning and Leo has set up his laptop in Polly’s spare bedroom. Like her he is unable to leave his work completely alone even when on holiday. This pleasant little room has a window that looks out over the greenery of the front garden onto the street, and under it is a desk perfectly placed to catch the light. He’s felt more at home since he’s grabbed this room for himself. It’s a bolthole and although he doesn’t really want to bolt, the room with his things in it feels like a zone of safety to which he can repair when necessary. This need must have been obvious to Polly as it was she who suggested it.

  ‘You could use it as a study,’ she’d said, ‘spread your stuff out, go and do your work in there.’

  Maybe she’s thinking that this is what she would want; what a bind if he has to organise something when she comes to his place. Leo doesn’t like people staying with him, though he can see that it’s part of the deal, so to speak, but it makes everything so complicated. In some ways the long distance thing is ideal, in others it’s difficult. Ideally Polly would have her own place in London, just a few minutes’ walk from his. Then they wouldn’t actually have to live together. Perhaps he could persuade her into this; a short walk is infinitely more manageable than the other side of the world. He wonders briefly whether she really would mind moving – after all, who would not rather live in London than here, miles and oceans away from anywhere?

  He thinks longingly of London, his place in the world, the world he has built for himself in which he moves in comfort and with confidence. In that world he manages the way that others see him: from his physical appearance and his clothes to the way he presents his work, that is the real world, that is what matters. He clings to what he knows, or professes to know, and sometimes says, about himself: I try to be a good person, I’m open-minded, smarter than most people, I like strong, feisty women, I have my principles, I don’t lie, I just say something that is as close as possible to the truth. It’s his personal statement to himself, one that can be, and often has been, delivered, in full or in part, to others as required.

  More recently, though, he’s struggled to respond to his own questions about how he might craft his life in old age. How shall I live? What will I do with my time? Who will care for me if I need it? Do I want to be alone? The questions circle him, waiting for answers, but he has none. He’s considered developing a position on this as a new area of expertise and commentary, but he doesn’t know what that position would be – so far he has failed to learn much about getting old, and can think of nothing to say about it. Is it because he’s a man? Women, as he understands it, are far better at being alone in old age than men. They do all sorts of new things, sometimes get into relationships with other women having previously only loved men, they socialise, travel, get new hobbies, even new jobs in their sixties. Men, apparently, fade away, live in a mess, forget to wash their clothes and themselves, spit on the pavement and wander about farting, miserable and depressed. Well no, he’s exaggerating here, but the outlook for men alone in old age is not pleasant. Could this happen to him?

  Leo’s life has been one of short and disappointing relationships. Now he wonders if he could have learned more from these experiences, but he’s never really had time to think about that sort of thing. There have always been other, more pressing matters on his mind and in his view. He has, for example, never thought much about love, although when younger he thought a lot about sex. But surely, hopefully, if you have love, a woman who loves you, then you will always be relevant, as well as cared for. So love has now appeared on his agenda at a time of uncertainty, something he may have to incorporate into his life to stop him crashing over the cliff edge into decline. Does he love Polly? Does Charles love Camilla? HRH is not providing much help these days; just wandering around smiling and waving, like an ageing squire. Sometimes Leo wishes he had an old love tucked away somewhere, ready to leap out in front of him like the Easter Bunny and take charge of him. Except of course that if that actually happened he’d hate it: hate to have a Camilla hovering, smothering him by her mere existence. Relationships seem to require tiresome adjustments, Polly’s friends and neighbours have to be factored into the whole thing. Leo has little to do with his neighbours; there are mutual agreements about holding keys and keeping an eye on each other’s places while they are away, joint action on problems with the local authority or failures of services, but friendship is not a part of it. He knows lots of people and it’s pleasant, this knowing and being known, not infrequently being recognised by people who have read and admired his work; this fuels his belief in who he is and what he does. So although he speaks about his many friends he is coming to understand that friendship means different things to different people.

  ‘You just don’t understand, Leo,’ Judith had said to him some years ago. ‘Friends are not just people that you know. Friendship involves connection and commitment, support, loyalty, give and take. You have to work at it, cultivate it, give it some loving attention. It’s more than just having a list of people who know you and whom you occasionally bump into somewhere in the world.’

  And so now he throws an occasional dinner party for a few people to whom he owes hospitality. He cooks one of his ‘signature dishes’, as he refers to them – osso buco, a curry or perhaps a fish stir fry – opens some good wine, and hopes the guests will turn up with cheese or fruit, even a cake for dessert, and they usually do.

  ‘That,’ Judith has told him, ‘does not constitute friendship. You have
to be there for your friends, reach out, stand by them and help out when things are hard.’

  ‘I’m not good at that,’ he had said. ‘It’s not my thing.’

  And she had laughed out loud. ‘Well you’re right about that, you can’t even do it for me. You just don’t have a clue, do you!’ It was a statement not a question.

  But the dinner parties fit with his liking for a compartmentalised life; guests are selected from the same compartment so that they don’t cross-fertilise and become confused with those from other compartments. And he makes it known that he is always very busy, always in demand, so they feel that being invited is an indication of their value to him – at least until they discover his limitations.

  So this life of Polly’s, this interconnectedness in which the neighbours are also close friends who know your business and can drop in and out when they choose, in which they seem to feel a strong sense of responsibility to one another, is alien to him. It’s the same when he goes down to Cornwall: Judith and Rosemary thrive on all this cosy friends-and-neighbours-as-extended-family stuff, while he feels smothered by it. When he turns his mind to the future Leo realises that he is going to have to get to grips with a bit of this blurring of boundaries if the Relationship Thing is going to work.

  On his first day Polly had suggested they walk to Fremantle for a late breakfast. Leo had felt totally out of place. Fremantle is too small, a parochial version of a small Californian coastal town, albeit more prosaic, lacking, in his opinion, any sense of cool.

  ‘The light is beautiful here,’ he’d said awkwardly, trying to find something to say to counter his discomfort at the feeling of being in a place where the tools of his real life seem useless. ‘It would be wonderful for artists. I used to paint a bit myself, years ago.’

  ‘Fremantle is seething with artists,’ Polly had said. ‘You might want to take up painting again when you come for longer stays.’

  ‘Mmm, maybe,’ Leo had said, but the prospect horrified him. He has no desire to dabble in anything amateur. While he can see that the place does have its charms, he feels exiled from the real world of European cities, central London, or buzzing regional centres steeped in centuries of history. The prospect of hanging out here for long periods of time among amateur artists is not in the least attractive to him. Polly, he thinks, will have to be encouraged to spend most of their time together in his world, and he’ll have to work out how to fit her into the rest of his life. Tomorrow they are heading off even further from civilisation for a few days, to the southwest where, from the map, it looks as though there is nothing but . . . well . . . nothing but scenery.

  Leo opens his email and begins to check his messages. A few days ago he had emailed Kurt, a friend in Berlin, asking for information on the next international conference on atheism. It’s an event held each year in different European cities, and at which he has, for more years than he can remember, been an invited speaker. He has usually heard from Kurt by now as the conference is in January. He scrolls quickly through the list of emails and sees that Kurt has responded from the convenor’s email address. He opens it, reaching at the same time for his diary so he can enter the dates. The message, he sees instantly, is not from Kurt but from someone whose name is Andreas, who tells him that Kurt retired earlier in the year and that he is now the convenor. There have been some changes in the structure of the organising body, Andreas writes, as well as in the approach to conference streams: While the organising committee has very much appreciated your contributions in the past, we will not be extending an invitation to you to address us this year, although of course we will be delighted to see you if you choose to join us. I attach a document which outlines details of the registration fees, and suggested conference hotels.

  Leo re-reads the email several times. A fluttery, nauseous feeling stirs in his stomach and he takes several deep breaths and opens the attachment. The four topics are all areas on which he has spoken and written, although admittedly the questions posed have a more contemporary and specific focus. Leo looks at the program, and the names of the speakers – Dawkins is there of course, and Grayling, but the rest of them are new and young, only vaguely familiar. He checks the names of the new organising committee and finds not even one friend or acquaintance on it. The old guard, his old guard, has gone, phased out presumably, put out to grass. Déjà vu. Just before he left for Perth he had received a similar email from people in Canada with whom he had worked regularly for the last five years. He sighs and checks the fees and hotel costs, and is jolted unceremoniously into the world of the uninvited participants – it’s a shock. He is used to being provided with business class travel, free five star accommodation, complimentary registration, free wi-fi, goodie bags and often a healthy fee.

  The nausea becomes a hard knot of anger, and he knocks out an immediate and deeply offended response. Fortunately he holds back from sending it for when he reads it over he can see that it sounds petulant, too much like what it is – the outrage of a man who suddenly finds he has become superfluous. Leo gets up, walks around the room, takes lots of deep breaths, then returns to the computer and deletes the draft message. But the anger still burns, and surging up behind it is panic: irrelevance is snapping at his heels. For several long and painful minutes Leo is paralysed, and when he does break through the paralysis it is into self-preservation. It’s their loss, they always were a bunch of tossers. So what? Fewer responsibilities, more time to do what he wants. And he does not allow himself to venture towards the reality that what he wants is to keep doing what he has always done, in just the way he has always done it.

  ‘Leo?’

  He breathes deeply, trying to bring himself back to where he is this minute, this day, in Fremantle with Polly. Judith’s words about connection and commitment flash like subtitles across the image of Polly standing in the doorway.

  ‘Leo? Did you hear what I said? Joyce and Mac are walking into town for lunch at Gino’s, they wondered if we’d like to join them.’

  Leo clears his throat, smiles, pushes back his chair and gets to his feet. ‘That sounds great,’ he says but he can hear the artificiality of his own voice.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Stella is sitting on the bed in the spare room surrounded by papers. She’s been promising herself for ages that she will sort out all the papers that, for the last few years, she has dumped into shoe boxes. The other day when Mac came in to fix the new fan, he’d kindly got the boxes down from the top of the cupboard. She’s quite proud of the fact that she’s actually made a start: it’s important, she thinks, because if something happens to her then Polly, who has her power of attorney, will need to find things. But now that she’s looking at them she’s finding it hard to work out what Polly would need. She wishes she’d asked Mac about it, he’d been so helpful with fitting the fan and the following day he’d brought Dennis over to have a look at the car and drive it.

  ‘It’s in lovely nick, Stella,’ Dennis had said. ‘I’ve always liked the Civic and this will do me very nicely.’

  So they had sat at the kitchen table and done the paperwork together, and Dennis had given her a cheque, which Mac later took to the bank for her, and came back with the receipt.

  It had been horrible watching Dennis drive away in the car which now, in its absence, seems to represent so much more than just a handy way to get around. She had stood at the open front door, Mac alongside her with his arm around her shoulders, watching with a sense of despair as Dennis backed out of her drive and headed off up the street.

  ‘You okay?’ Mac had asked.

  ‘Not really, but I think I’ve done the right thing.’

  ‘You have, Stella,’ he’d said. ‘And it was good to do it straight away. You told Polly, didn’t you?’

  She’d nodded. ‘I did, but I didn’t tell her about . . . well, about the cemetery. I’ll tell her that later, when they come back from their trip, when Leo’s gone. I’d be e
mbarrassed . . .’

  Mac squeezed her shoulders. ‘There is nothing to be embarrassed about,’ he’d said. ‘This sort of thing can happen to any of us at any time as we get older. You’ve dealt with it very responsibly.’

  It was then that she’d asked him to get the ladder and lift down the boxes, and now here they are lined up neatly on the spare room bed, ready for the big cull. But she should have asked him to help her with that too because now none of the contents make sense to her. Stella closes her eyes, her confusion and rising panic makes her head spin and prickles her skin. Could she just throw it all out, dump everything in the recycling bin? But no, because Polly might need something. Stella sighs, she can no longer sit here with all this stuff around her, and she gets up, and rapidly stuffs everything back into boxes at random, and stacks the boxes into the narrow space between the bed and the window. There is just one box, filled with theatre programs, and this she carries through to the kitchen, this alone makes sense to her. Then she goes back to the spare room, looks with satisfaction at the neat stack of boxes and closes the door on it with a sigh of relief.

  *

  ‘Wow, that’s some beach!’ Leo says, raising his hand to shade his eyes, looking along the seemingly endless curve of coastline. ‘So long and so flat.’

  Polly laughs and punches his upper arm. ‘Well I’m glad it inspires such poetic language. So long and so flat! Really, Leo, is that the best you can do?’