It was not until the first glimpse of the ocean just past Anglesea that Elliot’s rant slackened and finally abated. It didn’t mean that he’d said all he wanted to say, or that he needed to concentrate on the winding road, rather an ocean panorama was one of the few known panaceas to his fevers. The water today was glassy with a gorgeous swell, the surfers were tiny blots on the shining sea, the sun shot sparks off the water, the water was fabulously blue. Elliot opened his window and inhaled the salted air.
‘Glorious,’ he said. ‘Heaven on earth.’ And no more was said about the drunk man.
The Jameson cottage was one of the last old-style homes in the hills above the Great Ocean Road, the byway of twists and curls that traced Australia’s south-eastern coast through Victoria all the way to the South Australian border. Most of the old cottages had been mown down in the construction stampede of the past few decades, replaced by huge houses, two and three storeys high, sheathed in glass, with wraparound balconies for 360-degree views of ocean and inland bush, houses that had cost millions to build and by the time the paint was dry were worth a great deal more.
The Jameson cottage was a quaint low-lying structure nestled within a clotted garden of tea-tree, agapanthus and aged she-oaks. The beach was just a short walk away, and the ocean a perpetual and peaceful white noise. With just a few kilometres remaining before they reached the house, Nina felt exactly the same excitement and anticipation as she had as a child, the same happiness too.
Childhood memories are so indulgent of nostalgia, Nina was well aware of this, but the fact was those long-ago days spent by the ocean were among her happiest memories. Every summer for several years both the Jamesons and the Blakes would pack up the cars and drive down the Great Ocean Road where each family rented a cottage for the summer; later, when the Jameson rental was put up for sale, they bought it. For the entire holiday the two families shared their days. They took long walks together, they shopped together, cooked and ate together, played numerous games of Monopoly and table tennis together. Only when both Michael and Marion were gone was the pattern broken. Sean continued to spend the summer at the coast with Nina’s family, while Ramsay remained at Raleigh Court with George.
Before George wrecked it, those stretched summer days were perfect. Away from home and humdrum routine, whatever divided the four children melted away. They’d rise early, pull on their bathers, and after a quick breakfast head straight to the beach. There they would pass day after easy day, swimming and surfing, building sand sculptures, and playing endless games of beach cricket, regularly disrupted when one of the dogs ran off with the ball. For lunch the four of them would go to the Blakes’ or to the Jameson house, or one of the parents would bring sandwiches down to the beach. On overcast days they’d explore the coastal bushland, collecting spiders and insects, geckos and one summer a magnificent blue-tongue lizard. They’d pretend to be ship-wrecked, the Raleigh Posse forced to live off the land and daring each other to eat plants that might be poisonous. Once they came upon a man and a woman naked on a rug in a small clearing; they’d watched in hushed fascination at what looked like violent combat, and afterwards all of them were too embarrassed to discuss what they’d seen. Those summer days were filled with thrills, and when the holidays were over and they returned home, Ramsay to his music and the others to their sophisticated city pursuits, they’d partition off their childish fun until the next summer.
How fresh those memories were. The lunches on the sand, comparing and sharing Christmas presents, the salt-tight skin after swimming, the dangerous undertow, sand mixed in with sticky white sunscreen, squishing jellyfish between your toes, pruney fingers and blue-tinged lips after hours spent in the water, and the friends who were the best part of her world. Friends for life, they pledged back then, forever friends.
It’s ironic that childhood, the period of life that’s all change, so readily assumes permanence. This is, perhaps, the most trenchant of childhood’s delusions. And it occurs despite blatant evidence to the contrary: school friends change from year to year; favourite subjects, favourite sports, even hopes and ambitions regularly change; families move house, a father dies; the body grows and reshapes; there are new fashions – in clothes, in music, in possessions; childhood’s pains – bullying, neglect, shyness, acne – all eventually pass. But the immediacy of childhood experiences and the smallness of the child’s world result in the child assuming – there is little reflection on these matters – that these friends, these moments, these possessions, these sufferings will endure.
As Elliot drove the coast road, the glistening ocean to the left, the scrub and cliffs to the right, Nina was aware of the warmth and happiness emerging from those ancient days and filling her now. And she was struck with the power of childhood, how it manages to seize the better part of memory for itself, and no matter how far you have travelled, it can ambush you and pull you back.
The first part of the day passed predictably enough. Zoe’s friend, exhausted by cancer and its treatment, and her husband exhausted by everything else, had left the house in a mess.
‘I’ve told you not to lend the place,’ Elliot said to Zoe. ‘Not that you listen to anything I say.’ He made himself a cup of coffee and collected the morning papers. ‘You clean up,’ he said. ‘It’s your fault not mine.’ When Zoe reminded him her friend had cancer, he merely shrugged as if to suggest the cancer was irrelevant. He called to the dog and he and Adelaide headed out to the verandah.
Nina helped Zoe restore the house to order. They took their time, and when Elliot yelled out he was hungry, Zoe said he should help himself to a snack. It was another hour before they joined him on the verandah. Zoe had made sandwiches at home that morning, perfect sandwiches of several varieties, one large platter and another in the kitchen, sufficient for a party.
Nina praised the sandwiches: they were delicious.
‘Most people aspire to more than the perfect sandwich,’ Elliot said with a glance at his wife.
Nina, too, looked at Zoe, but if the insult had registered, her sister hid it well. As for Elliot, he was happy enough to eat the maligned food, tossing whole triangles into his mouth one after another.
They sat in silence, eating the perfect sandwiches and sipping Zoe’s home-made lemonade. There was a sea breeze that eased the summer heat, from the distance came the flop and purr of the surf, and at the bottom of the garden scrub wrens darted in the brush. A sweet, gentle day, Nina was thinking, and turning out much better than she had anticipated, when she heard it, they all heard it, the crunch of tyres on gravel, and each looked towards the driveway. Adelaide barked and raced down the slope. A car, an ordinary white sedan, came into view. Nina did not recognise it, but Elliot certainly did. He turned on his wife.
‘What have you bloody done now?’
The sun shone on the windscreen, it was impossible to see who was in the car. The vehicle mounted the drive and pulled into the parking area below the house. The engine was extinguished. Elliot stood up, silent and bristling; he glared at his wife. Zoe, also on her feet, was turned towards the car. She was smiling.
The passenger door opened and Ramsay bounced out. He waved, shouted a greeting and strode towards the house. His old dog waddled over to Adelaide and the two animals threw themselves at each other with much boisterous yelping. George unfolded from the driver’s seat, steadied himself against the side of the car before moving round to the passenger side and shutting Ramsay’s door. Then he started up the rocky path. He was listing to the left; his shoulders, hunched forward, were pathetically shrivelled. George was an old man, Nina was thinking. Ramsay should be looking after him, not the other way round.
Zoe welcomed them warmly, Elliot was slower to come forward; more time to calm himself, Nina decided. Although a moment later she was marvelling at his control, for when he did speak, his furies were well coated with hostly courtesies. As for Nina, the day that a short time ago had found its satisfactions was spoiled.
The new arrivals were quickl
y settled, drinks were dispensed, the second platter of sandwiches appeared, and after that came cake and fruit; these guests had been catered for. Nina was appalled at what her sister had done. Ramsay might still be her great weakness, but it was such an old weakness and Zoe in all other respects so sensible, Nina would never have thought she would indulge it in so public a manner. And so carefully planned, too, even down to Nina’s own presence.
As for Elliot, for the first time in all the years she’d known him, she felt sorry for him. Once he had loved Zoe, probably still did, but how very distressing to love someone whose own passions are directed elsewhere. Not that Ramsay would ever return the feeling – romantically, sexually or in any other way, but that made it even worse for Elliot. There are many forms of infidelity, and adultery – the very fact of sex providing something concrete to anchor your fight – is far from being the most painful. Emotional absence is far worse, and while this is bad enough when a spouse dumps you as Nina well knew, how much worse to have to live with the absence day in and day out, suffer it while you sleep with your absent lover and eat with her and go about your daily life together. This was Elliot’s plight, and whether he still loved his wife or not, and Nina assumed he did or else he would have left her, Zoe’s detachment and her emotional hoarding must confine him to an internal exile, a form of home detention without reprieve.
Just the previous day when Elliot had lashed out at Zoe over some minor slip-up, Nina had asked Zoe how she put up with his constant bruising.
‘I’m used to him,’ Zoe had replied. ‘We’re used to each other. I’d never leave him.’
Watching her sister chatting with Ramsay, lively, engaged and responding to him in a way she did not her husband, it was not difficult to understand Elliot’s attacks on his wife: this was a man burdened with his own hurts and seeking to armour himself against more of the same. It didn’t excuse his behaviour, but it did explain it. What masochistic hunger would make people party to this sort of deal, Nina wondered.
‘I suffered his drinking days,’ Zoe had said several times over the years, as if that would justify any poor behaviour of her own.
Zoe believed Elliot had already dealt her a full hand of harm, but how much more, Nina wondered, did Elliot think he owed his wife? Or was his drinking a debt that could never be properly repaid? Elliot had been a shocking drunk: angry, unpredictable, threatening, a man beyond reason and control. But he had given up alcohol when Hayley and Callum were toddlers and both were now nearly adults. Zoe, it would appear, had never given up Ramsay. How to measure and compare two entirely different wrongs?
Daniel had been a brute at the end, but for all the years they were together theirs had been a warm and affectionate marriage. They would touch each other as they passed in the house; they held hands in the street; they left loving notes for each other on the kitchen bench, on pillows, in the car, on desks. She had kept all his notes, and even now one would occasionally turn up, flimsy memorials to a past love, she called them, but still she could not bring herself to throw them out. There was a trip she’d made to Sarajevo, never had she been so nervous about a job nor so doubting of her abilities to pull it off, and Daniel, recognising her fears, had slipped notes into her luggage to bolster her during the trip, ‘I love you and think you are wonderful’ notes slipped into her wash-bag, between the pages of a book, in the cup of a bra, the toe of a sock, a dozen notes that sustained her through the week she was away. She would prefer to be by herself than live cold like her sister and Elliot.
If Zoe was universally cool it might be more tolerable for Elliot, but she demonstrated great warmth to everyone else – a suspect warmth, Nina had often thought, given she dished it out so indiscriminately. She was glowing with Ramsay, and friendly with George, a man she did not much care for; she was a loving and affectionate mother, a loving and affectionate sister too; with her friends and colleagues, with acquaintances, even with strangers working in shops or travelling on the tram Zoe was generous, responsive and empathic. And again Nina wondered about Elliot, denied what his wife gave so readily to everyone else and, she suspected, hungering for it.
With lunch finished, Elliot called to Adelaide and took himself off to the beach. George settled into his chair, closed his eyes and soon a faint, irregular snoring showed him to be asleep. Zoe and Ramsay chatted together about the relative merits of the latest Xbox (Nina was coming to believe that Ramsay could talk about earthworms in India and her sister would be a willing participant), there were a couple of his crude jokes, and then he turned to her.
‘So, are you still making your memorials?’
If Ramsay had ever asked her a question it was so long ago she had forgotten. As for her work, she was surprised he even knew what she did.
She nodded. ‘Although I don’t make the memorials. I help people bring their projects to fruition.’ And was about to continue when Ramsay launched into one of his lectures.
Ramsay was an expert on memory. ‘It’s what makes me a pianist – not the only thing of course, but crucial. And it’s got nothing to do with statues or monuments or any concrete reminders. It’s here,’ he tapped his head, ‘and here,’ he held out his hands. ‘Memory’s physical, it’s in the body. Memory’s a matter of will. Practice and willpower. If people forget, it’s because they’re lazy, or they lack concentration, or they lack determination.’ He went on at length how he memorised his pieces. ‘I play them over and over. I analyse the notes, the phrases, the tempi, the interaction between the musical lines, the key changes; I listen to the music, and as I come to understand it, it settles in my body.’
‘But what about remembering events and people from a nation’s past, things about which you mightn’t have direct experience? Remembering as against memorising?’
He shook his head. ‘You’ve got the web for that. Everything you want to know is online – you don’t have to remember things from the past, not any more. But that aside, I don’t agree with your distinction. Memory, remembering, lodges in the body; it’s always personal.’
‘And history?’
He shrugged. ‘What about history? History is history, it’s not memory.’
Zoe was listening, shifting her gaze from one to the other, a faint smile on her face. Nina should have left him to his opinion, she knew this even while she argued on.
‘You’re reducing memory to a process without intelligence,’ she said. ‘But what would happen to human progress without our ability to step out of the here and now? We need memory and imagination for that – reasoning too.’
Ramsay would have none of this. ‘I don’t know about progress, but I do know about memory.’
He subjected her to yet another account of how he learned complex pieces of music. Nina persisted for a bit longer before giving up: it was like arguing with one of those mechanical talking toys programmed with a finite collection of statements. His lecture continued unabated. She looked towards Zoe – how do we stop him, she was wanting to say – but Zoe was so enthralled she was not even aware of Nina’s gaze. In the end it was Ramsay’s dog that silenced him; Horo was barking at something down near the bushes.
‘Quick,’ Zoe said. ‘It might be a snake.’
Ramsay was out of his chair, down the steps and running over the slope with Zoe following close behind. He grabbed Horo and peered into the bushes. And then he started to laugh.
‘The great guard dog,’ he said, ‘is protecting us from a piece of foil caught in the banksia.’
‘He’s protecting us from the big bad banksia men,’ Zoe said, and she was laughing too.
They were pushing each other towards the snake in the bush and carrying on like kids, and foremost among Nina’s thoughts was how fortunate that Elliot did not have to witness this.
When the laughter stopped and with the foil added to the garbage, Zoe suggested they join Elliot on the beach. George roused himself and then decided to stay behind; Horo exhausted from the excitement settled himself in a patch of shade. So it was just the t
hree of them who set off, Nina and Ramsay with Zoe in the middle.
There was no sign of Elliot down on the beach. The wind had picked up and the sea was now messy with foam; most of the surfers had called it a day. Ramsay set a rattling pace, and with the hurtling wind and the churning sea it was impossible to talk. Soon Nina dropped behind, dawdling at the edge of the waves, digging her toes into the cool soggy sand. As she ambled along she slipped into that dream-like state that a raucous sea can produce, and it was some time before she was aware of having fixed on the two figures striding ahead of her, tall and slender and surprisingly similar from behind. The two of them were walking close enough to be touching, their heads bent towards each other. Zoe and Ramsay looked like a long-established couple.
In the distance, sitting high on the beach in the low dunes was a man with a dog; too far to be seen clearly, Nina knew it was Elliot. Directly in front of him down at the water’s edge, walking in step with each other were Zoe and Ramsay. Elliot must be watching them, how could he not? By the time Nina had drawn level with him he was sitting with his head in his hands, a drooping, dejected figure, monumentally alone. She slowed down, hesitated, then walked up the beach. Adelaide stood up, her tail wagging.
‘Elliot,’ she said.
He raised his head. His eyes were hidden behind sunglasses but his mouth exposed him.
Pointing to the sand next to him, she said, ‘Do you mind?’
He shrugged, an almost imperceptible movement, yet the futility was unambiguous; this was a wounded man, a man of aristocratic sadness. Nina loved her sister, the only person in existence she loved unconditionally, but she felt sorry for Elliot, desperately sorry for him. How much better it would be if he did not love his wife.
The Memory Trap Page 11
