by Fiona Capp
And now I can’t go back. I cannot go back.
As I closed the bedroom door behind me and headed down the dark corridor to the guest apartments, this refrain kept ringing in my head. I haven’t spent much time in this wing of the house, with its bedrooms, sitting rooms and drawing rooms. I’ve never known the difference between a sitting room and a drawing room anyway and, in the dark, I didn’t have a hope. This part of the house is directly above the staff quarters and what’s known as the service wing. I was worried that someone down there might hear me walking around and get suspicious, so I took my shoes off and put them down for a moment and then wandered off to another room and then another until I remembered that I’d left them behind. But where? I cannot go back.
After the phone call from the journalist it wasn’t necessary for David to warn me about what I should do from now on. Not that he would ever have said anything. Not directly. He isn’t the kind of man who tells his wife what she can or can’t do. And he didn’t have to. His fears had been vindicated. He knew I wouldn’t risk it, if only for Sven’s sake and my own. We both know that if I do, the media won’t hold back this time. They’ll follow me like the hounds they are and lay waste to my refuge just as surely as those bulldozers laid waste to my grandparents’ garden.
I was lost now. Having drunk a whole bottle and a half of red didn’t help. I could taste the tannin in the back of my throat. As to why I didn’t simply turn on the lights, all I can say is that I felt I shouldn’t, that it was safer to be in the dark. And so I continued to wander from room to room, searching for my shoes, the shoes I’d bought for David’s swearing-in ceremony. Then I thought, why bother? They never fitted me properly anyway. I tried to remember which hallway led back to our bedroom, the master bedroom, the one where I no longer belonged.
Somehow, after blundering about, I found my way to my study. In a few hours the sun would be up on another stifling summer’s day. In Gotland, winter had closed in and the sun was no sooner up than it was gone again. Sven said he expected it to snow any day now. It was something to see, he said. The whole island under a quilt of white, everything glowing in the darkness. A brief reprieve from the endless gloom. He sent me a snow dome of the cathedral, which I keep on my desk and use as a paperweight. When you shake it, a blizzard forms and everything goes white until the water clears and you see the tiny, shimmering flakes drifting lazily down. There is a touch of magic about it. But it’s a sad kind of magic because you’re cut off from it. All you can do is look in.
I was sitting contemplating the snow dome and its unreachable world when a noise made me jump. The door was opening. It was David in the striped dressing gown I had given him for his last birthday. His feet were bare.
‘Oh God, you frightened me.’
I remembered how, after he’d got the warning call from the journalist, I’d braced myself for the inevitable explosion. And how it never came. How fear silenced us: the fear that the staff might hear, that even our most private exchanges might find their way into the world. The fear of what was hanging over our heads. Fear made us mute. Instead of having a raging argument, instead of hurling recriminations and blaming each other, instead of venting our fury, we kept it in. We seethed and withdrew.
For over a month now, David and I had hardly spoken to each other, except at public functions where we had to play our roles as the smiling first couple, as happy husband and wife. As for when we were at home, it was amazing how easy it was to avoid each other in a house this size. I’d thought the past two years had been lonely, but this was something else. Rattling around this house, I finally knew what it meant to be utterly alone. I missed Ros desperately. There was no one I dared speak to, not even my closest friends.
Out the window, beyond the bullet-proof glass, stars peppered the sky above the shrubbery. David closed the door and pulled up the old winged armchair I had bought second-hand as a student and been unable to part with; it was so unlike anything else I possessed – ostentatious, oversized and enveloping, a bit like a medieval throne. He slumped into it and ran his hand through his hair. It struck me how much he’d aged over the past two years. It was clear he hadn’t slept, that his mind had been whirring despite his exhaustion. I thought of those fairytales where people dance themselves to death in the thrall of some evil music or spell. Even when they want to stop, they can’t. I thought of how, in recent months, the tempo had been ratcheted up to a frightening level. Every time I saw David on television or speaking publicly, I saw it in his eyes, how he was frantically dancing to this crazy tune.
‘Fuck this, Est. What’s happened to us?’
Us, I thought wearily. What ‘us’? There was something I hadn’t dared tell him because I was afraid of how he’d react, afraid it might finish us for good. And now I thought, Why not? What have we got to lose? And so I told him. That much as I had dreaded that phone call, part of me had secretly longed for it. Was there still any of the megaphone revolutionary I fell in love with left in my husband? Was there still something of the us that had made our pact? The us that had discovered the rules we would live by, not somebody else’s. By being honest inside this pressure-cooker life, we were living in truth. There had been no betrayal, no deceit. Surely it was possible, at this point in the twenty-first century, for us to look ourselves in the face? Not to pretend we were other than we were.
It was the wrong time for such a confession – at this hour of the morning, when we were both so frayed and bone-weary; my head fogged by grief and alcohol, his by the manic music that never let him be. Both of us sadder than we could say. But the thought of what lay ahead for us, with Gotland out of reach, had stirred up those old fissures and cracks, and the tenser I became, the more I felt I might shatter if I didn’t tell him.
I waited for signs of scorn on his face, scorn at my lack of real politik, my refusal to accept the way things were. ‘It was just a fantasy I couldn’t help entertaining. That you would take some kind of stand,’ I finished.
To my astonishment, he leaned forward in his chair, suddenly keyed up, alert. Suddenly right there, with me, in a way he hadn’t been for a long, long time.
‘If I do, you will be in the thick of it, too.’
I nodded cautiously. We held each other’s gaze. A feeling of wonder came over me. The old David was still there. I thought of that night at the restaurant when he first talked about going into politics. And how persuasive he’d been, how he’d won me over in spite of my doubts. Perhaps it could still be done. Perhaps, like God, political change could work in mysterious ways.
‘When I was lying in bed waiting for you just now,’ he said, ‘wondering where the hell you had gone, it finally dawned on me that we don’t have to live in fear. Always waiting for the storm to break. If we’re brave, we can do things differently. We can do something new. We can tell the truth.’
He sat back in the chair, his arms resting on its massive wings, calmly looking at me as if we were students back in the tutorial room: that cloistered and yet boundless space where the mind could wander freely, could countenance possibilities that were unthinkable anywhere else. Did he mean it? Or was he simply defying that music in his head that told him it was hopeless, impossible, dangerously naive?
The thing was that it didn’t matter. We were in it together. It was just the two of us in the lamp light, talking freely, daring to entertain ideas that would not survive the light of day. Didn’t all the important shifts in human affairs, the fundamental changes to the way people thought and lived invariably begin as wild implausibility, as reality-defying twists of plot? It all started with someone thinking ‘what if …?’ But most politicians weren’t free to do this – the creaking machinery they had to work with got in the way. And yet those like David still needed – no, craved – the freedom to let their minds range. To escape, if only briefly, the confines of the art of the possible and inhabit a space, their own private Gotland, where the unthinkable could be thought.
David smiled the slow breaking smile I rememb
ered from the days when we used to smoke joints. Just the sight of it made me light-headed, full of that youthful conviction that the best of life still sprawls ahead of you like the open ocean. In this mood of abandon – he lounging in the winged chair, me sitting on the desk – having ditched our normal roles, we raved and argued and dreamed up our own private tale of how the truth got to be told.
And so, the King and the Queen sat down one morning and agreed they would talk to the people in a manner in which the people had never been talked to before – honestly. There were many ways to live and love, many ways to be a family, many ways to be a leader. And no need to be afraid any more.
David waited, an eyebrow raised.
‘And once this story was told, the evil spell was lifted and the Queen was free to go back to the island, and the hounds left her alone?’
‘Something like that.’
‘And the country began to talk in a whole new way?’
David glanced out the window. The horizon glowed in anticipation of the rising sun. He looked back at me, shaking his head. ‘Imagine.’
And for now, the act of imagining was enough. It was what we desperately needed, more than sensible words or hard-headed deals. Through the labyrinth of political life, we had found our way back to each other.
‘Let’s go to bed, Est. I’m utterly wrecked. You must be too.’
As we walked along the carpeted corridors to our bedroom, I wondered whether, once we had slept, we would look back on these past hours and ask ourselves what had come over us. Would we laugh about it, make it a private joke? And yet, we would still know what it meant to us, that it was the beginning of something important, like an elusive thought that can’t be quite grasped. And that won’t go away.
As I lay drifting off to sleep as the day was breaking, the fox David had spoken of in his alumni address crept into my mind. I thought of the way it inhabited another dimension, the way it looked at our world as a fleeting distraction. The way it survived. If only I could learn to think like a fox.
I sniffed the air as a fox might. The room no longer smelt stale and foreign as it had when we moved in here. It smelt of our bodies, of the distinctive musky scents by which we knew one another. And for the first time since we’d come to this poky palace, this temporary lodging, I almost felt at home.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My profound thanks to Colleen Keene, Anna Murdoch, Lena Pasternak, Jason Steger, Andy Kerr, Linus Alfredsson, Rebecca Alsberg, Jacinta di Mase, Jo Butler, Amanda O’Connell, Jo Jarrah, Belinda Yuille and Kate Steinweg. Most of all to Steven Carroll for his advice, support and belief in this book, and to our son, Leo.
The lines by Leonard Cohen from his song ‘Hallelujah’, copyright 1984, quoted on page 113, are used by permission of Sony/ATV Music Publishing.
About the Author
Fiona Capp is the internationally published author of three novels: Night Surfing, Last of the Sane Days and Musk & Byrne, and three works of non-fiction, including That Oceanic Feeling, which won the 2004 Kibble Award for Women Writers.
Praise
Praise for My Blood’s Country
‘A book of rare beauty’ – Sydney Morning Herald
‘Compelling and lucid’ – Australian Book Review
‘An excellent entry point for understanding Wright’s poetry’ – The Australian
‘Fiona Capp’s pedigree as a critically acclaimed novelist shines through this exquisitely rendered memoir’ – Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, Judges’ Report
‘Superb … The book deserves to be read by all for the vividness of the insights into its inspirational subject. In Capp’s hands, they transcend biography and history’ – The Age
Praise for Musk & Byrne
‘With Musk & Byrne Fiona Capp has created a new Australian literary heroine in the tradition of Sybilla in My Brilliant Career’ – Good Reading
‘By turns sensually evocative of the Australian landscape, horrifying and sad … Well-paced, well researched … and gratifying.’ – M/C Reviews
‘Unforgettable’ – The Age
‘A refreshing intelligence … allows the heart-rending sadness of artist Jemma Voletta’s story to unfold naturally and with considerable power’ – Australian Literary Review
Praise for That Oceanic Feeling
‘an intimate, uncategorizable and often haunting exploration of surfing and its place in [Capp’s] imagination … It is a brave, intelligent and heartfelt piece of writing’ – Sydney Morning Herald
‘A beautifully written exploration of the lure of the ocean’ – Sun-Herald
‘In the tradition of other great paens to our continuing fascination with the sea, That Oceanic Feeling is quietly magnificent’ – Australian Financial Review
‘Fiona Capp’s That Oceanic Feeling is a warm, insightful journey of discovery’ – The Age
‘That Oceanic Feeling is a subtle, original deciphering of the dream … She is a Wordsworth of the beach’ – Daily Telegraph (UK)
Copyright
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
First published in Australia in 2013
This edition published in 2013
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
harpercollins.com.au
Copyright © Fiona Capp 2013
The right of Fiona Capp to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Capp, Fiona.
Gotland / Fiona Capp.
978 0 7322 9757 2 (pbk.)
978 1 4607 0009 9 (epub)
A823.3
Cover design by Darren Holt, HarperCollins Design Studio
Cover images: Woman © Paul Knight /Trevillion Images; Rocks in Calm Water by Toby Maudsley /Getty Images; cover texture by shutterstock.com
