They had laughed and laughed, but nonetheless they protected their stones. Elliot kept his in his pocket, moving it with his loose change from one pair of trousers to another. She kept hers in her purse. And once they were living together they each put their stone on their bedside table. The stones made it to the flat they rented when they first arrived in Melbourne, but Zoe has no memory of them after that. Perhaps the fortune-teller was right: the stones had drifted apart and so too had she and Elliot.
She had so wanted to believe that Elliot would come to occupy the space long filled by Ramsay, but now she wonders if she ever truly thought he could, for surely it would have happened. And quickly lets herself off the hook: no one would knowingly distribute disappointment and misery; her hopes back then had been real enough, she really did want to rid herself of Ramsay.
Outside the sun has disappeared, and the air is shuddery with dusk; she sucks hard on her cigarette and watches the garden sink into darkness. Thirty minutes pass before she pulls herself together: how much more pathetic can she get, sitting alone in a darkened house chain-smoking and drinking cold coffee? She pushes cigarettes and coffee aside, switches on a lamp, and pulls a magazine from low down in the stack. Listlessly she turns the pages. She reads headings, initial paragraphs, skims columns. Bret Easton Ellis’s latest is canned, a Craig Raine novel is similarly dismissed (why doesn’t he confine himself to poetry?), an article on Carthage holds her attention for a full page. Then comes an essay by an Alex de Waal on political deal-making in some of the world’s trouble spots.
She is reading because she is sitting in her empty house with time to fill and a pile of old magazines in reach, but something about de Waal’s article holds her. Like so many people she’d been horrified at the second Iraq war and even more horrified at its aftermath, not simply the lack of an exit plan nor the shocking suffering of ordinary people, but the absurdity of muscle-bound, self-righteous America trying to impose its own form of democracy on a country where power had long resided in local leaders. Even she knew that these leaders – religious, secular and tribal – operated according to a complex web of authority, patronage and power play.
According to de Waal’s article, a similar system of power-broking, exists in the Sudan. She knows nothing about the history and politics of the Sudan, but is fascinated by something the Sudanese call ‘Jellaba politics’. De Waal describes this approach to business as ‘retail patronage politics’, in which the price of an individual’s loyalty is calculated, and an offer made – with an eye to the future as to whether the price will rise or fall.
A futures market on loyalty, Zoe finds herself thinking, one which could easily apply to a marriage or, for that matter, any long-term relationship. A futures market for the personal sphere. And in her own small world, who has paid too much? Who too little? Elliot certainly paid too high a price when he married her; he would have made a far better deal if he had settled for a lively, short-term affair. And she – there was so much resistance to even a brief private acknowledgment – she has paid far too highly with Ramsay. As for Ramsay himself, he has shelled out to no one.
She lights another cigarette, sips the tepid coffee, and with her mind bucking against the gathering disquiet she reads on. De Waal refers to another process in brokering agreements in Sudan: tajil, or ‘delay’, and the refined skill of ‘tajility’, ‘strategic delay or the art of procrastinating until one’s counterpart is exhausted or removed’. Again Zoe is drawn to the personal sphere. Her husband, wherever he is, is worn to a shard; it is a question of not whether he gives up but when; she is exhausted and feels as if she is eroding. And Ramsay? He’ll get over George, she has no doubt about it, leaving him after all these years untouched and undisturbed.
She pushes the magazine away. She wants to run from her thoughts, she wants to run. Common sense is shouting at her. She can see it, she can hear it, she can taste it. All that’s now required is to swallow it even if it means admitting that more than half her life has been wasted on Ramsay Blake. But surely, as bad as this would be, it would be far worse to continue the waste.
3.
The woman, Beth, has invited him for dinner.
She and Elliot left the convent café, he to return to the van, she to head off in the opposite direction to work. They had said their farewells and started on their respective ways when he heard her call his name. He turned. She was walking towards him.
‘Would you like to come to my place for dinner tonight? A proper home-cooked meal?’ She looked doubtful, even nervous, but nonetheless pushed on. ‘It’ll give you a break from microwaved food. And for me …’ her voice faltered as she searched for a reason, ‘for me it’ll be a welcome change.’
She took Elliot by surprise. Sociality was not factored into his van life and meals with strange women not an aspect of his life in or out of the van. He did not know what to make of the invitation, and yet he was glad of it.
‘It’d make a welcome change for me too,’ he said.
The doubt immediately vanished from her face. She told him her address, suggested he arrive at seven, said that he was to bring nothing but himself and Addie.
She waved a goodbye and then hurried off to work; he turned and strolled back along the river path. At Dight Falls he hopped across the rocks, found a smooth one and sat down. Addie soon joined him. Seagulls flew over the water and two pied cormorants fished from a fallen branch. And there he remained until the sun forced a retreat, buffered by wind and water and the unexpected pleasure of a woman actually wanting to cook for him.
He arrives exactly on time. Beth is wearing the same bright dress she wore earlier in the day, but now her feet are bare and the bushy hair is caught in a knot on top of her head. She has applied fresh lipstick and smells of something fresh and flowery. Since giving up alcohol he notices scents. She thanks him for the flowers – bright like her dress.
Her house is a timber Victorian dwelling, and typical of the area. He follows her down a central passageway with two rooms off to each side and enters a large open area at the back comprising the kitchen and living room. Beyond glass doors is a deck and a small garden. He knows from their conversation earlier in the day that Beth has lived here for thirty years, that she and her husband raised their two children here and ‘survived two major renovations’. Now she stops in the middle of the living room and with her arms flung wide takes in the house.
‘I know it’s way too big for one person, but I’ve no intention of leaving – despite what people advise.’ She shakes her head in disbelief. ‘People don’t understand. I’ve lost my husband, it’d be a lunacy to get rid of our home as well.’
There are two pillowy couches upholstered in a deep blue corduroy, the sort of seating you sink into and which holds your shape, the sort that has no place in his own home. The walls are covered in an array of paintings, prints and photographs; ornaments are dotted throughout the room. While Beth busies herself with the flowers he wanders around. There is a circle of fossils arranged on a shelf, and nearby stands a cluster of stone animals – a polar bear, a hippo, a crocodile, a blue frog. On top of a bookcase is a gathering of sacred figures – an ivory Buddha, a clay Minoan goddess, a black Madonna and a half-dozen other pieces carved in wood or stone.
‘This is quite an extraordinary ecumenical gathering,’ he says.
She joins him at the display, her bare feet are silent on the polished floorboards. She picks up each carving in turn, explains its provenance and what it represents. Her favourite is an Inuit spirit made from a dark green mottled stone called serpentine. She puts it in his hand. It has the face and upper body of a woman; from the waist down she is a buxom mermaid. The sculpture is solid in his palm.
‘I could believe in the power of this spirit,’ he says with a smile.
Beth and her husband bought it in Churchill. ‘On Lake Hudson, in central Canada,’ she says. ‘We were there to see polar bears.’
Each year in late autumn, she explains, after the long summer fast,
bears arrive at the shores of the lake and wait for it to freeze over. Once the ice is hard enough to support them they go hunting for seals.
‘The ice is forming later and later,’ she says. ‘The bears are starving. They’d prefer seals, but they’re opportunistic feeders and they’ll forage for other food.’
‘People?’
She nods, ‘It’s happened. But don’t blame the bears. The people were stupid to get in the way.’
‘That’s not particularly Christian of you.’
She shrugs. ‘We’re all God’s creatures.’
She has cooked a vegetarian paella. He’s a meat man, but these vegetables are not only tasty they’re substantial too. He used to enjoy cooking, but it’s been years since he joined Zoe in the kitchen and he can’t remember when he last cooked for the family. Beth has a nip of whisky and then swaps to sparkling water for the rest of the night. Dessert is fresh pineapple and a hunk of sharp Tasmanian cheddar – his sort of dessert given he does not care for cakes and puddings.
He clears the table as she stacks the dishwasher; she washes the pots and pans, he dries them. While she puts things away and wipes the benches he goes to a display of photos that covers much of one wall. He has wanted to look at these pictures ever since he arrived, but it seemed too personal, too intrusive so he held back. All the photos, displayed as collages in large frames, are of her and her husband. Each large frame contains a dozen or more pictures taken in an exotic location: Central Australia, the Galapagos, on safari in Africa, and somewhere volcanic. He turns round. ‘Where’s this place? This volcano?’ he asks.
‘Arenal in Costa Rica. And here,’ she joins him in front of the photos and points to the safari pictures, ‘here we’re in Botswana and Tanzania. And here –’
‘I guessed the Galapagos.’ He laughs, ‘The iguanas are a giveaway.’
‘And probably the best trip we ever made, although they were all marvellous.’ She smiles at some private thought. ‘We always travelled well together.’
Elliot gazes around the room. ‘It looks as if you made a home well together too.’
Her eyes fill. She nods and turns away. ‘I miss him terribly.’ She speaks so softly he only just hears.
The house is full of him. ‘Mausoleum’ leaps to mind but just as quickly Elliot rejects it. The husband belongs here, he’s part of this place. He and Beth would have chosen the furniture together; the paintings and prints and ornaments reflect their life together. As for the photos depicting their travels, Elliot expects they have hung like this, in this spot, ever since the trips were made and the photos printed. This place is their home.
Beth is sitting on one of the couches and he goes to join her. It is a surprisingly companionable silence for two strangers. The shared meal, the conversation, even the after-dinner chores, it’s all been companionable. He has learned to live without this sort of togetherness, but like that single drink for an alcoholic, having a taste of it makes him want more. He has longed for Zoe, how he has longed for her, but what fills him now is wistfulness over what he has missed. They don’t take trips together, they don’t shop together, they rarely eat out together and when they do it is with a crowd; they don’t sit on the couch together, they don’t even talk together, they talk past each other like deaf people whose hands are tied. He and Zoe are simply and always not together.
‘You look sad,’ Beth says.
He meets her gaze, this woman who is mourning her husband. ‘My sadness is nothing compared with yours.’
She reaches out and touches his arm. ‘Sadness doesn’t work like that. Reason may construct a hierarchy of sadness, but whether your sadness, my sadness, or the sadness of the child down the street, every sadness feels bleak and oppressive. Every sadness feels sad.’ She shuffles closer and puts her arms around him. He feels himself stiffen, but as she relaxes against him, he realises the physical contact is as much for her as it is for him. He lets himself go and leans into her too.
They remain locked together, nothing is said. He is aware of her breath drawing slower. He relaxes too, holds her gently, and when a few minutes later she pulls away, he doesn’t want her to move. She looks at him; her expression is utterly lucid, a combination of inevitability and an acknowledgment that they each understand the other.
‘You can stay if you’d like,’ she says. And as if to make herself perfectly clear, she adds, ‘You can stay here, for the night.’
She installs him on her husband’s side of the bed in a room that flagrantly exposes its long-time inhabitants. His and Zoe’s bedroom is so impersonal, but here there are two dressing gowns hanging on the back of the door, more ornaments and photos on shelves, and a variety of clutter on the bedside tables. On his bedside table, the husband’s bedside table, there are a pair of glasses, a stack of books, mainly modern history and science – the husband, Scott, was a chemist, not the shop-front variety but a university researcher and lecturer – and an old-fashioned handkerchief, one of those medium-blue ones with a border of darker blue stripes that he associates with his own father. An unused handkerchief never to be used again. A man’s wristwatch is partially hidden by the handkerchief, and there’s a crystal water glass, empty. All these things freighted with meaning are laid out like a shrine. He feels like an imposter: he can’t understand how she could put him where her husband has so recently been. And then there’s Beth herself. She doesn’t have her own church – she works in the Uniting Church’s social justice division – but still, he’s in bed with a priest, a woman of God. What seemed so simple just a short time ago is fast being overwhelmed with complications.
Stop, he tells himself. Stop. He’s here and he’s glad to be here. He closes his mind to all intrusions and takes her into his arms. She fills his embrace – Zoe is so slight – and there’s a softness to her, no angles and bones, and she smells different, not just her perfume, but the scent of her hair and skin. Her lips are plump and less muscular than Zoe’s, her taste so strange, and he’s reminded that of all the things two naked people can do together kissing is more idiosyncratic and more intimate than anything else.
When he was drinking there was a tangle of drunken mistakes when he would find himself in the back seat of a car, or a bed in a strange flat, or a room in a hotel with a woman he could not recall meeting and a mouth full of garbage. He could rarely remember the sex and he was always desperate to leave. The guilt was so aggressive he’d try to make amends to Zoe; mostly he ended up grovelling to her. When he gave up alcohol the anonymous sex went too; there has been only Zoe these past many years. Yet as he adjusts to this new woman, he feels again that his current life, his van life, runs at a tangent to his real life, so that having sex with her doesn’t strike him as betrayal at all.
But the dead husband, Scott, is another issue. He is a real presence. If Zoe died, Elliot wouldn’t want anyone on her side of the bed for a long time – at least he doesn’t think he would. And because this situation with Beth is one with neither expectations nor repercussions, he asks her, in the dark and after the sex as she lies with her head on his shoulder, her left arm flung across his chest, he asks about his being here in the bed she shared with her husband.
She takes her time in answering, so long that he’s about to apologise for intruding.
‘It’s as if death turns you slightly mad,’ she says at last.
He wishes he could switch on the light, it would help if he could see her.
‘You want moments of forgetting,’ she continues. ‘And you want comfort. And you want not to be alone while sleeping.’ Her voice sounds quite calm, but he feels her take two or three deep steadying breaths. ‘The absence, Scott’s absence, it scrapes like barbed wire. Sometimes I think I’d do anything for respite.’
She moves even closer. Her body is pressed against his, her face is buried into his neck.
‘Until now,’ she says, ‘this night, the only man I’ve ever been with is my husband.’
Maybe losing a beloved – a husband, a wife, a child �
� is one of the few things in life that actually needs to be experienced to be understood, for Elliot cannot imagine doing as she is doing. And yet he wants to be here, feels fortunate to be here. She falls asleep, it takes only a few minutes, while he remains awake, strangely contented. The room is lighter than his and Zoe’s and a bright half-moon stencils the branches of a tree on to the bedroom wall; a faint breeze ruffles the shadows. Curled on a blanket on the floor, Adelaide snuffles in her sleep, and on his shoulder this sad, sweet stranger sleeps on. After a while he, too, drifts off.
He wakes in the small hours to find himself turned on his side away from her; her body is curved around his, her breasts are soft against his back. He reaches for her arm and pulls it more tightly about him; he falls asleep again, his hand over hers.
It was not that he was embarrassed in the morning, nor did he think was she; rather, whatever they had both wanted had passed with the night. He declined her offer of a shower, he didn’t stay for coffee. As they stood in her doorway she seemed unsure what to say. There was a pad and pen on the hall table and Elliot wrote down his mobile number.
‘I could come back if you wanted,’ he said.
She gave an almost imperceptible shrug, her gaze did not meet his.
‘I’d like to,’ Elliot said. ‘Really. But I’ll leave it up to you.’
He stepped forward and embraced her. They stood together in each other’s arms. It was she who drew back.
That evening in the van after dinner as he was reading one of Koestler’s mediocre books, of which he was beginning to think there were far too many, Beth texted him. He collected a few things, locked the van, and together with Addie walked to her place. The following afternoon she telephoned. After that it was understood they would spend the nights together. There was no sex after the first night, it was not what she wanted, nor as it happened did he. Sex was something he and Zoe had always done with ease: they mightn’t talk to each other, but their bodies managed to communicate very well. Affection, however, was quite another matter. Zoe had never been the type to give him a spontaneous hug, she’d never stretch out her arm along the back of his seat as he drove, it would be unthinkable for her to hold his hand in the cinema. She was affectionate with friends and of course with the children, liberal with her hugs and kisses. What about me? he wanted to ask. What about me? But should he reach for her, she would brush him off. As for sleeping in his arms, she said he was far too hot, and would turn away from him to curl up on the far edge of her side of the bed.
The Memory Trap Page 24
