The Woman Next Door

by Liz Byrski

  ‘Well,’ he says, ‘well . . . I didn’t know this was a test of creativity or I’d have tried harder, but it is very long and very flat. And it’s breathtaking, is that better?’

  ‘Not much,’ she says, ‘but I’ll let you off the hook. This is one of my favourite places, certainly my favourite beach.’

  ‘How long is it?’

  ‘Honestly I’ve no idea, it’s just . . . well, like you said, it’s long. But I do know that the Busselton jetty is two kilometres long, which makes it the longest wooden jetty in the southern hemisphere.’

  ‘It is beautiful here,’ he says. ‘Shall we walk out on it?’

  She nods, happy to have found something that pleases him. The natural world is not really his thing; he would rather be hoofing it along city streets, browsing an art gallery or an ancient cathedral, all things that she also loves, but not to the exclusion of the natural landscape.

  He’d arrived tense and jittery, obviously pleased to see her but distracted, so that when she had kissed him at the airport he had ignored it and said simply, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ Although she sensed this was not about her it had still hurt, especially as all around them people were hugging and kissing, and squealing in delight at the sight of each other.

  ‘It’s just turned out to be a difficult time,’ he’d said later when she’d asked what was wrong. ‘Things building up, other things changing.’

  But it was clear that he didn’t want to talk about these ‘things’ that were bothering him.

  ‘Later,’ he’d said, ‘when I’ve got my head around it.’

  Polly’s initial impressions of Leo, first in Edinburgh and then in Hong Kong, were of someone supremely confident who, dumped anywhere, would instantly find a way to feel at home. But Australia seems to have challenged him. He had been to Melbourne a couple of years ago, he’d told her, and loved it, but the thing he had loved about Melbourne was that it felt something like a European city. Several times he has mentioned that Perth and Fremantle are fragile settlements clinging to a remote coastline. Polly suspects some sophistry here; it sounds to her like something he has read in a guide book or travel magazine, and she suspects that what he really feels is that he’s a long way from everywhere and everything that is safe and familiar to him, and of course he is.

  And it is not only concerns about his work and the location that have spooked him; he is having trouble adjusting to her friends. The night they’d had dinner with Joyce and Mac he seemed to be trying to establish himself as he might do in a professional situation. Here, though, it simply made him sound pretentious and opinionated. He’d talked a lot about himself, had virtually ignored Dennis, seemed most at ease with Mac, flattered Joyce in a rather patronising way on her cooking, and generally looked uncomfortable for most of the time. But it was Stella who had really spooked him. So it’s a good thing, Polly thinks, that they have come away to be on their own – away from those threads of her life that seem to bother him. But even as she thinks this she knows that this is something that can’t just be shelved indefinitely, it has to be sorted at some stage, because her friends, her home and her work constitute the life that she has chosen and which she loves, and Leo will have to accept this, just as she knows she will have to accept his.

  Together they stroll out onto the jetty above the clear, sparkling depth of the water. A light breeze ruffles the surface and gulls swoop and rise alongside them, their calls raucous in the silence. To Polly this is like a meditation, a walk she always takes in Busselton, a walk that calms and refreshes her.

  Finally, at the entrance to the observatory, she leads the way down to the glass-walled space that always takes her breath away. It’s quiet today, almost closing time, and only a few people remain, staring transfixed, like Polly, by the sensation of being submerged and surrounded by water. Dazzling shoals of vividly coloured fish drift past, weaving in and out of rocky outcrops and waving clumps of seaweed. Nearby several crabs crouch under the rocks, and sea anemones close over their prey. Polly puts her hands flat against the glass, overwhelmed as always by a longing to be actually swimming there, gliding silently through the water, weaving her own way between the rocks.

  ‘Isn’t it just magic?’ she says eventually, turning back to Leo.

  He is standing behind her, alarmingly pale; sweat has broken out on his forehead, he is breathing fast and seems unable to speak.

  ‘Are you okay, Leo?’ she asks. He seems fixed to the spot and when she puts her hand on his arm she feels him trembling. In that instant she is catapulted back to Edinburgh, the hotel passage, the frozen, terrified soldier. ‘Leo,’ she says, ‘come on, take my arm, we’re going back up right now.’ And she slips her arm through his, grasping his hand, nudges him hard and steers him slowly back up the steps, out into the afternoon sunlight, and pushes him down onto a nearby seat. He closes his eyes and leans forward, burying his face in his hands. Polly wedges herself against him fearing he might fall forward. His shirt is damp with sweat. ‘It’s okay,’ she says, stroking his hunched back, ‘it’s okay, we’re out now,’ and with her other hand she reaches into the bag slung across her chest and pulls out a bottle of water.

  ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘Come on, Leo, sit up and breathe properly.’

  He straightens up slowly, obviously dizzy. ‘Here,’ she says, unscrewing the water bottle, ‘drink some of this.’

  He takes the bottle, gulps down some water, takes several deep breaths, then leans back against the seat. The trembling has stopped now, the colour is returning to his face. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘So sorry.’

  ‘Don’t,’ she says. ‘Please don’t apologise. Are you feeling a bit better?’

  He nods. ‘Yes, I just need to sit here a little longer. I shouldn’t have gone in there . . .’

  ‘I should have warned you,’ she says. ‘I love it so much I didn’t think . . . but I’ve seen that happen to other people – if you suffer from claustrophobia . . .’

  ‘I do,’ he says. ‘But I thought because it was water, because I would be able to look out for some distance, it might be okay.’

  They sit there alone, above the water.

  ‘If you’re finding all of this very hard, Leo,’ she says softly, ‘that’s really okay. Actually I’m finding it quite hard too and I’m on my own turf. Despite all those months of emails we’re still getting to know each other. It’s a big step for both of us, and we’re not young anymore so it seems there is more at stake.’

  As she says it she knows that it is only in this moment of his vulnerability that she is able to say this to him, able to acknowledge not only his fear and uncertainty but also her own; that until now she too has been ill at ease, hyper-alert for the things that aren’t working, instead of clinging to those that are.

  ‘It’s just the claustrophobia,’ he says. ‘And a bit of other stuff about work.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s time for both of us to think about how we do things. How we use our work to avoid other aspects of life. We’re both getting old. I’m trying to see it as just another stage of life.’ She stops for a moment, pulls back slightly to look him in the face. ‘Both you and I have friends who haven’t made it this far so I want to make the most of it. Work, a public life, is not necessarily a good fit with getting old.’

  And as she turns to look at him she sees that his expression has changed from vulnerability to something else entirely – something like fear.

  He shakes his head, gets to his feet. ‘Come on, let’s get going, I’m fine now.’

  *

  Joyce glances up at the clock at the front of the classroom.

  ‘Who can tell me what time it is?’ she asks.

  A young woman in the front row raises her hand. ‘It is four o’clock so we can go home now?’ she says, smiling, her inflection rising at the end of the sentence.

  ‘You may,’ Joyce says, and she smiles a
s they gather up their books, and prepare to leave. There are several Chinese students in this class, a few Japanese, two from Korea and six from Indonesia. They are courteous and conscientious, thanking her, smiling, some give her a little bow which she returns. They jostle out of the room, down the passage and out into the late afternoon sunlight. No one had told her how good it would feel to stand at the front of a classroom as a qualified teacher, to get to know a group of students, mostly in their very late teens or early twenties, from different backgrounds, to be in charge of that classroom, and to see, even after just three weeks, the rapidity with which their command of the language improved.

  ‘It’s powerful,’ she’d said to Mac at the end of the first week. ‘I know that sounds weird, but honestly it’s a great feeling.’

  ‘So I don’t need to worry about how you’re coping then?’ he’d said. ‘No need for rugged husbandly support?’

  She had hesitated at this, had been on the verge of challenging him, taking him back to their unfinished conversation, but her conviction that it had to be he who made the first move remained strong. ‘I’m fine,’ she’d said. ‘You should go back to Albany for a while.’

  ‘End of next week,’ he’d said. ‘Polly will be back then, meanwhile I’ll do my share of Stella-watch. And when I do go I don’t want it to be so long this time.’

  The awkward silence again, everything unspoken hanging in the air, and she had turned away and got on with folding the laundry. And so Mac had stayed another week. Polly and Leo had come home on Saturday, and they’d invited everyone over for dinner on Sunday evening. Mac had left the following day and Polly had driven Leo to the airport a couple of days after that. Life is, in some ways, returning to normal.

  Joyce puts her books and the students’ assignments into her bag, closes the zip, then picks up the cloth to clean the whiteboard.

  ‘Ah! I hoped I might catch you,’ Ewan says, appearing in the doorway. ‘Do you have a moment?’

  ‘Of course,’ she says. ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘Far from it,’ he says. ‘You’re doing such a good job that we don’t want to let you go.’

  Joyce blinks. ‘You want me to stay on? How long for?’

  ‘Well, we’d like to offer you a permanent full-time job starting next year, but I suspect you wouldn’t want that.’

  She shakes her head. ‘No, Ewan, I’d love to work here but not just yet, and not full time.’

  He nods. ‘I thought so, but maybe we could talk about what would work for you. We could fill that position with two part-timers.’

  ‘I’ll need to think about it,’ she says cautiously. ‘You see, the reason I took the course was because I wanted to teach English to refugees. I want to run a small class, free, in my own home.’

  It has been bubbling gently away in the back of her mind since her first visit to the support group. But passing the course had initially made her want more – to travel and live for a while in another country. Then Helen’s death had derailed her. ‘I’ve been going to the support group regularly,’ she says, ‘getting to know people, helping a bit, learning more about what’s needed. Now I think it’s time to do something.’

  ‘Well, if you need any help with organising that just let me know. But think about it for a while. I don’t need a decision now. We’re very flexible.’

  The next day Joyce starts to shift the furniture in what was once Ben’s bedroom. All his personal things were gone years ago of course, but the basic furnishings are still there, grandchildren had stayed from time to time and, more recently, Dennis had occupied it in the weeks following Helen’s death. She strips the linen off the bed and covers it with a big colourful quilt that Gemma had bought in India. Then she clears the desk of the books and magazines she had put in there for Dennis, and takes from the cupboard some of Mac’s unused file boxes, filing trays, a box of pens and markers. She hangs Ben’s old whiteboard back on its original fixings, and turns the desk so that it sits under the window, looking out across the back yard. So, she thinks, standing back to admire her handiwork, I have an office, and she takes her treasured certificate in its frame and fixes it to the wall. Now all I have to do is figure out how to do it. And she sits down at her new desk to start work.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  London, Late October

  Leo lets himself into his apartment, puts down his suitcase and walks straight through to the kitchen. He takes a glass from the cupboard, ice cubes from the fridge and pours himself a double scotch. Then, leaning back against the sink, he takes a large swig and sighs with the relief of being back again in civilisation. Everything in the apartment is immaculately clean and tidy, there is fresh milk, cheese, a packet of smoked salmon, a carton of salad, and two ready meals from Marks and Spencer in the fridge, rye bread in the appropriate container, and a selection of his favourite fruit in the bowl in the middle of the table. The super efficient and hideously expensive housekeeping service that he’s used for years has triumphed once again. He is restored to life.

  The flight home was appalling, but not as bad as it had been on the way out. In a sudden and uncharacteristic mood of prudence he had decided that as he was paying for this trip himself he would risk economy. Bad decision. His hips and back protested at the confines of the seating, the food was terrible. The small child in the seat behind him seemed to be practising goal kicks against the back of his seat and his personal screen failed, dropping him out of movies several times. And that was just in the short leg of the journey to Dubai. He’d tried to upgrade for the second leg to Perth but there was nothing available in business and so for more than eleven hours he had to tolerate the large sweaty man in the adjacent seat, sniffing, coughing, belching and completely commandeering the shared armrest.

  ‘It was torturous,’ he’d told Polly when she met him at the arrivals gate.

  ‘Welcome to the world of travel as I know it,’ she’d laughed. No sympathy there.

  The first thing he’d done when he switched on his laptop the next morning was to upgrade his flight home. Now he relishes the feeling of sinking back into his own comfortable, well ordered life. ‘Fuck you, Australia!’ he says, raising his glass and swallowing the remains of his whisky. ‘Never again!’

  Since his visit to Melbourne a few years ago he’d had high hopes of Australia, and when he met Polly the prospect of dividing his life between two sides of the world seemed inviting and timely; and he’d thought it would add a certain cachet to his profile in all those mini-biogs one had to provide for conferences and other events. ‘Leo Croft divides his time between London and Western Australia,’ he liked the sound of that. So he had assumed he would cruise into this new environment and adjust with ease, find his level there as he has elsewhere. But within the first few days he knew that there was nothing there that he wanted, except Polly of course. He is always discombobulated away from his public life, but in Fremantle, with the desert in one direction and the ocean in the other, he had felt unknown, adrift and, worst of all, ordinary. Leo abhors ordinariness. That was what had first appealed to him about Polly, she was far from ordinary, and somehow he had felt that her lifestyle would be similar to his own. But while Polly is, in her own way, as professional and involved in her work as he is in his own, her life is cluttered with friends and neighbours, responsibilities and attachments. She is an exceptional woman, but her life is so suburban, so ordinary. He felt stifled by it. It had all come to a head for him in the underwater observatory, the claustrophobic effect of that enclosed space symbolising the same sort of feeling that he’d felt in her house in Fremantle. Trapped in there he realised he was also trapped outside, suffocated by all those vast open spaces. The endless deserts, the dense forests, the ocean. He’d told Polly about that when they had been walking back down the jetty, and she had been amazed.

  ‘But you haven’t been to the desert, or any vast open spaces yet,’ she’d said. ‘The mid-west, or the
northwest, or the Nullarbor – those are the vast open spaces.’

  She didn’t seem to understand that he didn’t have to visit them to feel trapped by them, just looking at a map was enough. And he hadn’t mentioned the suburban feel of her life, her overbearing involvement with people who really didn’t interest him. The whole experience was one of too much of nothing that he could relate to.

  Despite his relief at being home now, the difficulties of this are nagging at him. Wild horses won’t get him back there, so what to do? And at the same time life here is changing. His friends and acquaintances are either falling off their perches or withdrawing from the things that matter to him. They are retiring to their places in the sun, to live happily with the spouses who have waited patiently for them, and who will help them learn to live different lives. The prospect of domestic bliss in retirement has always appalled Leo, but now, faced with the black hole that seems about to swallow him, he is aware that he is entirely unprepared for old age and unwilling to change any aspect of his life to accommodate it. He had thought that Polly could solve this for him in a variety of ways, but now he wonders . . . And there is always the threat of Cornwall. Judith and Rosemary are always telling him he should go down there more frequently. Rosemary in particular had reprimanded him recently for his neglect of Judith, and urged him to visit more often, take more responsibility for her.

  ‘Who’s going to look after her if something happens to me?’ she’d asked. ‘You can’t ask her to accept a stranger moving into the house at this stage of life. You’re perfectly capable of looking after her. And really, Leo, it wouldn’t be that hard for you to pop her in the car or on the train sometimes and take her to London to stay with you. It would be a change of scene for her. There’s a lift in your building, she just needs help getting in and out of the chair, dressing, putting on shoes and so on. You should get some practice in now.’

  But Leo has never been able to cope with close proximity to Judith’s condition for more than a day or two at a time, the tasks of a carer are often unpleasant, tedious and demanding, it is a very burdensome life and far too ordinary for him.