by Fiona Capp
I watched her eating hungrily, wondering what she would think of Sven.
Kate looked up from her pancake. ‘You’re whacked, Mum. You should go to bed.’
She was right. Much as I wanted to stay awake for the rest of the day, it couldn’t be done.
I closed the bedroom curtains and sank onto the bed, conscious of gravity at work, of the force of attraction between my body and the mattress. The magnetic weight of it. Not unlike, I found myself thinking as my mind began to drift, the weight of conjugal love. The kind of love which, over the years, becomes encrusted with all the accumulated intimate knowledge of the other, all the moments of joy and despair, all the grievances and the gratitude. The constant scarring of damage and repair. This was the barnacled love of a marriage.
The love I had found on Gotland could not have been more different. It was unencumbered, it had no past. It lived for the moment, for pure being; the lightness of it so intoxicating I could see why people gave up everything for it. Yet even in its afterglow, I knew that I couldn’t live with this lightness, that it would quickly become unbearable. The lightness of exile was not something that either of us could endure. Sven had done his time in Ireland, his penance, and could no more leave Gotland now and come to Australia than I could throw up my marriage to live on the island. And strangely, this knowledge freed us, gave our love necessary limits. It was something to be cherished as a reprieve from the weight of our other loves, of our pasts, of our daily lives.
I was in that in-between state, neither awake nor asleep. Happily sinking. Heavy though my love for David often felt – and it would only get heavier – I knew that I would be adrift without it. I would explain this to him when I told him what happened with Sven. Nothing between us was threatened, nothing need change. David was my anchor and I was his. What happened on Gotland only added to those layers of experience that encrusted our love. I could see David nodding as I spoke and knew we were of one mind. I could see it. He could see it. Of course, he would.
Then I fell into the deepest of sleeps.
Even with David shaking me, it was hard to surface. All I wanted to do was roll over and go on dreaming of the beach on Gotland where every fossil I picked up turned back into a living, pulsing creature in the palm of my hand.
I struggled to open my eyes. The room was darker than before. It was early evening. Somehow I’d slept through the whole day.
David wafted the Chinese takeaway he’d bought under my nose. ‘I have to leave in two hours, Est. You better get cracking.’
In the kitchen, the table was set and the wine poured.
‘I’m glad you had that time away, Est,’ David began as soon as I sat down, almost as though he’d prepared a speech. ‘You’re tired, I know, but you seem –’ He paused, searching my face for the right words ‘– more relaxed.’
I blinked, my head like a balloon on a string. I wanted to reassure him, to tell him what he wanted to hear. But I knew I couldn’t go through the whole meal avoiding what was uppermost in my mind, only to mention Sven later on, like an afterthought or a guilty secret. David and I had promised each other right from the start that we would never, ever play games. Other people might do lies and deceit, but not us. So it had to be now.
On reflection, I should have eased into the subject slowly, talking about Gotland and Rosalind and introducing Sven this way. Capturing how things unfolded. The naturalness of it. The Chekhov approach. But instead I dived in the deep end.
‘I did it.’
‘Did what?’
‘You remember our pact? The pact we made in that little wooden boat?’
David’s fork froze mid-air, as if he already knew what I was going to say. He slowly put it down on his plate and then looked across at me, his eyes narrowed. His jaw set.
‘Don’t tell me, Esther. I don’t want to know. I’ve been sorely tempted, believe me. Whatever happened over there, happened. And now it’s done. We’ve got more important things to get on with.’
Of all the ways he might possibly have responded, it never occurred to me that he would shut down the conversation. Dismiss the whole thing as a casual affair, a holiday fling. That he would refuse to take what had happened seriously or that he wouldn’t want to know.
I thought of the day David rang me at school to tell me of Gerald’s death. How, as we found ourselves arguing about the wrangling that had already started over the leadership, David had said to me, ‘Esther it’s me you’re talking to, remember?’ I wanted to say that to him now. David, it’s me.
Instead, I found myself whispering, ‘It’s not like that. What happened on Gotland will never be over and done. Don’t you remember what you said? As long as you come back to me.’
‘My god, Esther, that was over thirty years ago!’
‘But you meant it, didn’t you?’
‘Of course I did. But then I grew up.’
Was I so hopelessly naïve? Or was he afraid of what it might mean for us? Was he simply attempting to contain the threat it might pose? I tried to explain there was nothing to fear, that I didn’t want to end our marriage or go and live with Sven. And that Sven didn’t want me to, either. My love for him hadn’t changed. I’d be the wife he needed me to be. But there would be times when I needed to go back. When I had to go back. That was all.
He looked at me incredulously. ‘I’m not your fairy godfather, Esther. This is the real fucking world. Have you any idea of the risks you’d be taking and the price we could pay?’
‘I didn’t do it lightly, David,’ I said, trembling yet calm. ‘And I know it’s the real fucking world. With one real fucking life.’
A preternatural stillness came over him. From his clinical gaze, I could tell he was weighing up how to handle me. ‘Esther,’ he said quietly, ‘you’re not thinking clearly. You need to rest. When you’ve had time you’ll realise how unreasonable you’re being.’
‘Unreasonable?’
‘What you’re asking is insane!’ His expression hardened. ‘Do I have to spell it out in a headline? PM’S WIFE’S SECRET LOVE LIFE. It would be hell – for all of us!’
22
CANBERRA
December 2012
I will always remember the day we moved into the Lodge. It started bright and clear, but by the afternoon great, high-topped cumuli had crowded out the sun. There were occasional flashes of lightning and the dark sky rumbled like gunfire for hours on end, but no rain came. Two years later, I still sometimes imagine I can hear that rumbling, that sound of gunfire – even on the sunniest days. I find myself looking towards the deep purple mountain ranges in the distance and wondering what is brewing there.
Once, I asked David if he heard it, too, and his coal-dark eyes flared for a moment. It was the nature of our circumstances, he said, of the life we were living, of the decisions we both had made. Blue skies meant nothing in politics because the weather could so quickly change.
It became my habit to have my coffee in the courtyard of the Lodge in the mornings. The air would be crisp and still before the heat, and it was the only time of the day that felt like mine. David would be long gone to meetings or parliament or whatever he had on, and I would have the place to myself, before my public duties began. I don’t mean to sound grand about it. It’s not as if I’m the Queen, although I find myself feeling for her these days in a way I never did before. I sometimes wish I could ask her things, such as how she keeps her marriage alive. Or whether she has. Or how she copes with the fact that you’re always being shadowed, wherever you go. How you can be in the most private of places and still haunted by those watchful eyes. Even when David and I are in bed, nothing but skin between us, we’re never alone. He brings the whole nation in with him.
Nothing is easy or spontaneous any more. Every day is organised and planned down to the minutest detail. For all this busyness, the past two years have been the loneliest of my life. Although I am often surrounded by people – launching this or being patron for that – I have never felt so cut off. I
know it must seem as if I’m at the very centre of things, mixing with heads of state, travelling overseas in a private jet, living between two big houses. It must look so incredibly privileged. And, of course, it is. As the Greek chorus in my head is constantly demanding, What do you have to complain about? Look at you, in your glittering world, all gala events and sequinned frocks! Except that I don’t want to be at this ball. These are not privileges I have sought or want. They are a burden I cannot begin to describe.
What I struggle with more than anything now is the unreality of my existence. Some days I wake up feeling as if the person I was no longer exists, that I am just a smiling husk, a mannequin playing the role of the prime minister’s wife. All these people and events swirl around me, and I’m there but not there. It’s not really me making small talk with that diplomat or laughing at the trade commissioner’s joke. I know all about protocol and doing and saying the right thing but I often feel like a child sitting on the stairs, watching the grown-ups having a dinner party, wondering what it all means.
Occasionally, when I have some time to myself, I’ll wander around the Lodge with its forty rooms and feel like Bluebeard’s wife. Which room is it, I wonder, where the bodies are stored? I have decided that the bodies must be in the safe room, a kind of bunker that can only be reached through elaborate security measures. There are cameras everywhere – in the house and in the garden – and the glass I am sitting behind right now as I look out the window is bulletproof, in case there happens to be a sniper in one of the trees. But who is responsible for the bodies? The bodies of all those wives sacrificed in the national interest? David says my sense of humour has turned rather dark.
Sometimes an ironic commentary starts up in my head as if I’m telling Ros about whatever is going on and then I remember, and this terrible ache wells up in my chest and I tell myself it can’t be true even though I know it is. The worst of it is that I can do nothing for her and can’t undo what I’ve done. She is beyond all reach.
One morning, I was about to sit down in the sun with my coffee when I thought I saw her at the far end of the pool, her arms raised ready to dive, her long wavy red hair hanging loose at her sides. A cry flew out of my mouth just as she hit the water and dove deep, rising then to part the aqua blue in dramatic sweeps. She travelled this way for the length of the pool, moving in dream-like slow-motion.
I knew it couldn’t be and yet I couldn’t help hoping against hope, suspending all disbelief, all thought, all sense of time, watching her red hair fanning out behind her in a mysterious veil, just as it used to when we went swimming as girls. The image is imprinted on my brain because I was always swimming behind her, always straining to keep up.
When her head broke the surface, I was kneeling by the edge of the pool, the coffee still clutched in my trembling hand.
‘Mum!’ Kate cried in surprise when her uplifted face met mine only a handspan away.
Of course it was Kate. And I had never felt so sad to see her.
She had been living in New York for almost two years, waitressing and finding her way in the world of street art. Doing all sorts of underground projects. She would send me photographs of herself standing next to them but I hadn’t quite registered how much like Ros she had grown.
‘I wanted to surprise you!’
I carefully laid my coffee cup on the paving and put on a bright smile. ‘Well, you certainly did that.’
She hadn’t been due back until the end of the week. It was only her second trip home since she’d fled overseas straight after her final exams. She went to London first and spent a lot of time with Ros, but afterwards she couldn’t stand being there and headed for New York.
I knew she wouldn’t stay with us for very long because she hated the Lodge and everything that went with it. It was stuffy and old-fashioned, she said, and must be like living on a stage set for one of those fusty drawing-room dramas where everyone was buttoned-up and proper, even when they were seething inside. She said she didn’t know how I did it, living in a place where there was nothing of me in it, except for the odd photograph or piece of furniture I’d brought up from Melbourne. I reminded her that I think of myself as a house-sitter. That there’s no point trying to make the place feel like home.
Even with my tendency to imagine the worst, when I said goodbye to my sister in London it never occurred to me that I would not see her again. If anything happened, I was only twenty-four hours away. And what was one day, especially at our age? When we were children a day went forever, but now it was something that disappeared when you blinked. I hadn’t reckoned that people can disappear just as quickly.
Ros told no one about the secondaries, not even Sven. We found out later that she’d been told her situation was hopeless, that the cancer was everywhere. Apparently, she’d been remarkably accepting. Then, one of her specialists prevailed upon her to be part of a trial for a new experimental drug and she gave in. Who wouldn’t? I don’t really understand what happened or what the treatment was, except it had something to do with boosting white blood cells. Perhaps her system was too weak by this stage, although she was still managing to fool her colleagues, friends and Kate, who was living a few streets away. One day, she went into a clinic to have the toxic treatment, she started to bleed internally, and within hours she was dead. She died alone, except for a young nurse who was holding her hand.
When I got the call, it came like a blast of arctic air down the telephone line. The icy aloneness I felt at that moment still hasn’t left me. Then came the guilt: that I hadn’t known how ill she was, that I wasn’t there, that I had come between her and Sven. And the bewilderment that she didn’t tell us. And the anger. I felt it most when Kate berated herself for not noticing that things weren’t right. Didn’t Ros realise how cruel it was to keep us all in the dark? Then I remembered how we had colluded to do the same to her when our mother was dying. Ros was only trying to protect us, as we had tried to protect her. I am told the doctors and nurses at the clinic did everything correctly, that she was warned about possible side-effects. There was a great list of them covering pages, which she had to sign.
On my desk here I have a photograph I took of Rosalind sitting on the prow of that longship grave, staring off into the distance with a half smile on her face. That’s where we scattered her ashes. It was the only request in her will: that I go to Gotland and scatter her ashes at this spot. When David learned of her wishes, he knew he couldn’t object.
This time, Sven was waiting at the dock. I had thought it would be a subdued reunion, both of us silenced by grief and by our uncertainty about what lay between us. I hadn’t counted on the rawness of our emotions, on how grief flays you and leaves you defenceless. One look at Sven and I knew he felt the same. We flung ourselves at each other and it was like an eerie replay of our laughing fit the night we got together, only this time we were convulsed by tears. Any doubts I’d had about whether I should have gone back disappeared. There was a bond between us now that nothing could break.
When I got home, I had to be careful because my mind tended to wander to Gotland at inappropriate moments. My body would be at some political function, with important people to my right and left, but the rest of me would be sitting by that longship grave with Rosalind or collecting fossils on the beach with Sven.
The last time I went back, just a month ago, David made no effort to stop me and I started to believe that he had accepted the necessity of it. We both knew it had changed something between us – and that this something was for the good. Whenever I returned from Gotland, we made love with an intensity that rivalled our earliest days. You could say that Gotland saved us. Saved our marriage. That it gave us a way of being true to each other while being true to our needs. We had, it seemed, reached a compromise.
Somehow I managed to forget that the very thing that made my life bearable was also the thing that could tear it all down.
Then one day, not long before Christmas, the phone rang. It was David and he sounded so dist
ant he might have been speaking from Mars. His press officer had been contacted by a respected journalist from one of the broadsheets. This journalist told David that he needed to talk to him about rumours going around the Press Gallery. No one had known what to think of them at first, had thought it best to ignore them – until the tabloids sent their news hounds to investigate and the rumours started gaining substance and looking more serious than they had before. The journalist told David he regarded it as a private matter between the prime minister and myself, but the tabloid journalists were now insisting it was bigger than that, that it raised questions about the prime minister’s and the government’s commitment to family values, and about the first couple’s integrity and the example they set. The story was bound to come out and the journalist was warning David to be prepared.
As for Gotland, I knew that it might as well sink beneath the waves.
EPILOGUE
CANBERRA
January 2013
You wouldn’t think this house was big enough to get lost in. Not when you look at it from outside. When the public come here once a year, the most common response is disappointment. Too modest, too unimposing, too lacking in stateliness. Not even as grand as one of those old seaside hotels. Everyone remarks on the dining room, how small it is. How could you have dinners befitting heads of state in a poky room like this? Even I have found myself apologising for it when we’ve had to cram too many people at the dining table. The problem, I tell them, is that the place was built as a temporary measure. It will always feel temporary to me. Never more so than now.
And yes, I did get lost. In the early hours of this morning. I will admit I’d had a bit to drink. More than a bit. After staying up late watching some Western, I headed up to the master bedroom – now there’s a phrase. The light was out and David appeared to be asleep, so I decided to let him be.
It’s a month now since the whole thing was hushed up. To be honest, I didn’t think the news hounds and the rumour-mongers would let it go. Apparently Jasper found out about my breakdown from someone I went to school with. He gathered the media together and told them that I had been under great strain since my sister’s death, that I had been ‘fragile’ and not myself. (David swears he knew nothing about it and I believe him.) After that, they sensed they had to back off. This was sensitive territory. Miraculously, the government’s honeymoon period hadn’t ended. And David and I as a couple were still the honeymooners. The hounds knew they would come out of it looking shabby. They knew the people would want them to leave us alone – at least for now. In the meantime, I will be watched like a hawk. And not just by the media. The opposition will have its own reasons to claim, when the moment feels right, that something is rotten in the state of Denmark and that the rot has its origins in the moral corruption of the King and Queen. How one breakdown leads to another.
