by Liz Byrski
Resolve
4
England, October Nineteen Ninety-eight
There are two men in the hire car which turns into the driveway, two men in their sixties; one drives, the other holds the map. The driver turns off the engine and pulls on the handbrake. He sits a moment staring ahead of him at the Tudor house, the white lathe and plaster walls crossed with dark stained timber beams, the diamond cut leadlight windows, the mossy tiles on the sloping roof.
‘Is this it?’ asks the navigator.
‘This is it,’ says the driver. ‘Smugglers Cottage. Practically a national monument.’
‘Must be worth a fortune,’ says the navigator. ‘What do you want to do?’
The driver pauses a moment and taking a handkerchief from his pocket presses it against his eyes, then, clearing his throat, he says, ‘Let’s see if there’s anyone home,’ and he walks up to the front door. He is a tall man and must stoop slightly to stand in the low porch. He raises his hand to the circular iron doorknocker, running his fingers over it as though examining it for familiarity. Then he raps sharply a couple of times and stands back to wait.
There is the sound of footsteps and a small woman with grey hair piled on top of her head and bright birdlike eyes opens the top half of the stable door.
‘Good morning,’ says the driver. ‘I’m so sorry to bother you, but I hope you might be able to help me. I’m looking for a family that used to live here.’
The navigator joins his friend in the doorway and the woman looks them up and down shrewdly. She thinks they seem respectable, trustworthy.
‘You’re lucky to catch me,’ she says. ‘I usually go to work on Mondays, but we’ve got some workmen out the back so I stayed home.’
‘I used to stay in this house years ago,’ says the driver, and stepping back outside the porch he points up to a window. ‘That’s the room where I used to sleep.’
He is a slim man with a grey beard and dazzling blue eyes, the woman thinks him charming. He takes an envelope from his pocket and he draws out some photographs, smiling as he hands them to her.
In the photographs the house is neat and well kept, the bushes carefully trimmed, the paths are free of weeds, the huge cherry tree in the front garden, now long gone, is covered in white blossom. In one picture a man and a woman are standing talking by this same front door. In another a slim girl in the foreground smiles for the photographer and in another she looks down at him from a bedroom window.
‘I can’t see very well without my glasses,’ says the woman. ‘You’d better come inside.’
She is not given to inviting strangers into the house but these two seem genuine enough.
The two men step inside and she invites them through to the kitchen and picks up her glasses to look again at the photographs.
‘Sorry,’ she says shaking her head. I don’t know them. How long ago were these taken?’
Thirty-seven years ago, nineteen sixty-two,’ says the blue-eyed man. His accent is clearly American but there is also a hint of something European.
She laughs, ‘That’s an awful long time, should think the house has changed hands a few times since then. Would you like a cup of coffee?’
They exchange a glance and a nod.
‘That’s very kind of you,’ says the tall man reaching out to shake hands. ‘I’m Karl by the way, and this is Roger.’
‘And I’m Jess,’ she replies. ‘My son and his wife bought the house a few years ago, I live here with them.’
As she organises the kettle and mugs, she senses that the sudden silence is painful and that Karl is tense; his eyes wander the room searching out the ghosts of memory. Roger takes up the conversation, talking with her about the house, the weather, the garden, the large dog that is watching them through the kitchen window.
‘Would you like to have a look around while we wait for the kettle? My son has made a few alterations, it’s such a wonderful house, so full of history.’
She is lively and loquacious, with a Londoner’s warmth and humour. She leads them through the ground floor and then up the stairs to the bedrooms.
‘It’s just as I remember,’ Karl says. ‘This is the room where I used to sleep, this is where—’ but he stops himself, clearing his throat again. They go on through the rooms, ducking their heads in the low doorways, steadying themselves on the steep and narrow staircase.
Back in the kitchen Jess pours the coffee and they sit at the table. Roger asks her about her grandchildren. He admires the coffee mugs and she tells him where he can buy similar mugs.
‘You’re so kind to let us come in,’ says Karl. ‘I can’t tell you what it means to be back in this house again.’
Jess picks up the photographs.
‘These people,’ she says, studying them again. ‘Beard, did you say the name was? Why are you looking for them? Are they relatives?’
There is a long moment of silence and he shakes his head.
‘Years ago,’ he begins, a tremor in his voice, ‘years ago I fell in love with their daughter. We were going to marry but her parents thought her too young. They asked us to wait. I went back to America and—well I was a fool and—’ He looks away as his voice breaks.
‘You’re still in love with her?’
He nods, swallowing hard, pausing before he speaks. ‘I never forgot—I always loved her, I have to find her.’
The room is silent. In the garden the whine of an electric saw slices through the morning and the dog barks at the unfamiliar noise.
‘Well,’ says Jess, ‘I’d better see if I can help you.’
The tears are bright in his eyes. ‘Thank you, thank you so much.’
5
Western Australia, December Nineteen Ninety-eight
‘First of all Liz,’ says the interviewer, ‘tell us why you decided to write this book?’
My mind is a blank, a complete void; it’s as though the hard drive in my brain has suddenly crashed. I stare at her feeling the beads of sweat prick my forehead and my spine. I know her well, we’re old friends, we have worked together in the past, but suddenly she’s a stranger. I know this radio studio, I’ve presented and produced hundreds of radio programs from here over the years, but suddenly it is foreign to me. I am lost in space. I look down at the book in front of me which I have spent the last year researching and writing, I stare at the cover and have no idea what is inside it.
Verity realises I’ve lost it and jumps in to save me.
‘Was it simply the idea of the millennium that inspired you?’ she suggests, waving her arms at me encouragingly, begging me to pick up the cue.
I start to speak and something apparently relevant and sensible slips out of my mouth. The panic evaporates. I have already done this interview with other radio stations, I know why I am here. I talk about the book, about adjusting to life as a writer after life as a broadcaster. I am sensible, coherent, entertaining even, I know this stuff inside out. The hands of the clock move inexorably towards the hour and Verity steers us out of the interview and into a Eurythmics track that will carry the program through to the ten o’clock news.
‘So what happened?’ she asks when our microphones are switched off.
‘I lost it,’ I say. ‘Lost everything—sorry—it felt like half an hour.’
‘It was about seven seconds,’ she grins. ‘You’re forgiven, but are you okay?’
‘I’m fine, but really looking forward to my holiday.’
‘Hope the book goes well,’ she says, one eye on the clock, and her attention on the producer’s message which has just come up on her computer screen. ‘Give my love to Portugal and England.’
Totally disorientated I step outside the offices of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation into the blazing heat of the West Australian sunshine. Quite suddenly I realise how totally I have left behind the stress of live radio, the relentless search for stories and interview talent, the fearsome pace, the ghastly early morning starts, and the public profile, as intrusive as it is ego boosting. I
feel physically sick, as though I will vomit into the tree fern which spreads its fronds against the building.
For years I walked through these glass doors at all hours of the night and day, it was a second home. Two days off and I was bouncing off the walls, clamouring to get back in the door. Now the building and the life it represents are alien to me. I no longer belong here.
These days I work in the cool peace of my own study, with the trickle of the waterfall outside my window and visiting parrots chattering as they peck the seeds from the sunflowers in the garden. I work long days, taking brief breaks on the deck with a coffee or a cool drink. Sometimes I work all night. I always work weekends. I resent the telephone, or the ring of the doorbell that breaks the silence and shatters my concentration. How did I live that other life? A life surrounded by people, by noise and activity. A diary full of appointments and social meals from breakfast to bedtime. A dozen messages on the answering machine every time I got home. The mere thought of it coats my skin with a cold sweat. I craved solitude and I have learned to live with it. I have my life under control. I am answerable to no one. No more rat race. No more relationships. Never again the threat of intimacy and the complex dance of avoidance.
When I was young I believed in love, great romantic passionate love, but everything changed. After that I roamed the pathways of affection that led me always to failure and loss. I will not wander that route again.
My solitude, my creative space, my inner life have been hard won. I am a writer. My books are on the shelves of bookshops around the country, they get serious reviews. I’ve got what I wanted.
But something bothers me, nudges me, pricks me with fear, and bruises my complaisance. Isn’t there something more? Will you always be like this—comfortable, competent, alone, distant? What about the sadness? What will you do about this endless sadness that flows in a dark stream under the controlled calm of each day?
The day fades from blazing heat to gentle dusk and then the velvet softness of the night. The house begins to cool, it whispers to me as the timbers contract and the breeze from the sea rustles the showery leaves of the peppermint tree outside my window. Through the glass panels in the steep slope of the roof I can see the stars and the shadow pattern of the trees dancing across the ceiling. Sleep evades me, the nudging begins. In a couple of days I’ll be in Lisbon. A holiday is what I need.
By five o’clock in the morning it is already twenty-five degrees and my bags are in the taxi. I take a final look around. I feel like a tortoise creeping momentarily from its shell, safe in the knowledge that life in the shell can always be resumed. A sunbeam caught in the blue stained-glass dove hanging at the kitchen window darts its light across the room like a firefly in the silence. I close the door of my shell and get into the taxi.
***
From the dry heat of Perth, through a steaming day in Singapore, we fly above rafts of solid white cloud streaked with sunset pink into the darkness and towards restless uncomfortable sleep. And then a couple of hours at Frankfurt airport where ploughs clear the snow from the runways, dump it in piles where it will not be a hazard.
As the dawn breaks the snow turns to sleet and I watch from the window of the airport lounge as the crisp white piles sink, soften and discolour. The lounge is full of German businessmen with silver hair and double-breasted navy blue overcoats. They are quiet, courteous and totally single minded in their pursuit of coffee, bottled water, newspapers, an empty table. I sit watching a group of them talking quietly. Frankfurt. Two hours to wait until the connecting flight to Lisbon.
From the balcony of Neil’s flat outside Lisbon, I watch the Atlantic Container ships and fishing boats break the straight line of the horizon. The crimson sun sets, its remnant rays painting a backcloth of pink and gold.
‘It’s great to have you here Mum,’ Neil says. ‘It’s ages since I saw you.’
I am so overjoyed to be with him that I can’t stop the tears. We sit down with the maps and plan the holiday we’ll have when he finishes teaching at the end of the week. Five days travel to inland Portugal, back here to the flat for Christmas, and then England for a couple of weeks.
‘Are you all right Mum? You look a bit—well—I don’t know what really.’
‘Jet-lag. It’ll be gone by the end of the week.’
But the nudging, the niggling, the questions do not go away. They travel with me through the glorious hilltop villages of pristine white cottages, where church bells are the only sound to disturb the silence; and across the rolling plains covered with cork trees. They strike me with daggers in the cloisters of magnificent cathedrals, in marble cobbled squares, and on tree clad hillsides.
On Christmas Day Neil lights the fire and we play backgammon on the balcony, and eat our Christmas dinner as the sun disappears behind the cypress trees.
‘Would you like me to teach you to play chess?’ Neil asks.
‘I’ve only just learnt the rules of backgammon,’ I say. ‘I think I might leave chess for another day.’
‘You need an adventure Mum,’ he says. ‘I’m a bit worried about you, you need to do something wild and wonderful just for you.’
I think he’s right and I try to look enthusiastic, but at the moment I don’t think I have the stamina for an adventure. Sadness is so exhausting and a lifetime supply of it seems suddenly to have crept up on me and taken me by surprise.
I think a couple of weeks in England is all the adventure I can cope with right now,’ I say, as we sit in the brilliant Boxing Day sunshine, drinking coffee on the esplanade at Estoril.
The next day we board the British Airways flight for London, and on a dark, damp evening we pick up a rental car at Gatwick Airport.
The drive is familiar. It’s eighteen years since I left England for Australia but despite changes the landmarks are familiar. This is the golf course, this is the pub with the piano, there is the church, and the doctor’s surgery. This last stretch is the half mile I walked each morning to catch the bus to school. Smugglers Cottage is a little way further down the road—I know this road so well. The lights are on at Little Smugglers, the house which my father built for my grandparents and where I later lived when I was first married. Here is the old holly hedge that we raided for Christmas decorations; here is the field where the geese were kept; there is the shed for the goats and beyond it the tall fir trees that stand by the pond. This place is part of my history. Here I brought my babies home from the maternity hospital. So many nights I drove home from work to this house; so many times lifted sleeping children from the back of the car and carried them indoors. This is the house I left one day in nineteen seventy-two, to end my marriage. It has always belonged to my family. It belongs now to my ex-husband who rents it to a mutual friend, Irene. It is strange to return as a visitor.
Neil struggles to get the bags out of the car.
Irene flings open the door. ‘Come in, come in quickly,’ she calls as the rain grows heavier.
And we hurry over the slippery moss on the flagstone path to the door and into the bright welcoming warmth of the kitchen.
‘You’d better sit down,’ Irene says. ‘You might need a drink.’
She hands me a white envelope and I stare at the handwriting. Something strange happens to my heartbeat. I slit open the envelope and take out a Christmas card. Inside the card are some photographs and I am looking at myself, in one I am smiling shyly down from my bedroom window, in another I am standing by the front door of Smugglers Cottage wearing a white blouse with a pattern of long stemmed-roses, and a dark green skirt.
‘Who’s it from?’ asks Neil, still struggling to get the luggage inside. He looks at the writing on the discarded envelope. ‘Hmm. Architect’s writing,’ he says. ‘Do you know any architects?’
San Francisco December 19, ’98
Dearest Liz,
Some 10 people are standing in line here in front of me at the airport post office.
Just got your temporary address near Smugglers Cottage and hope to g
et these lines to you in time for Boxing Day—you know, the day you can return all the useless items—which might include this card—but I’ll take a chance.
More later
With love and a hug, Yours, Karl.
Everything is a blur, I can see nothing but the words on the card, hear nothing but the ringing in my head. I want to tear the words open—force them to tell me at what level I should read this message. What do they mean —these words—why has he written to me? What does he want? Could it be—could it possibly be that he still loves me? Dear God please let him love me.
‘He’s going to ring at eight,’ says Irene. ‘He phoned earlier. He tried to reach you in Australia but you’d already left.’
‘Who is this person?’ Neil asks me, and failing to get an answer directs his question to Irene.
Irene shrugs. ‘He’s been looking for her for years,’ she says. ‘He got a detective but they couldn’t find her. He tracked her down through the people at Smugglers Cottage.’
The phone rings, my hand shakes, my whole body shakes.
‘Liz,’ he says down the telephone from the other side of the world. ‘Remember me?’
I remember.
He is talking very fast and it takes me a while to realise that he is nervous—as nervous—more nervous even than I. This voice has whispered words of love, called me to him on the beach, has sung to me, has said, ‘Sweetheart, we have the rest of our lives.’ His English, almost always perfect, is more strongly American but spiced still with the trace of a German accent at which my heart lurches with familiarity. He talks about his daughter who is now ten years older than her father was when I met him.
‘It’s such a long time,’ I say when he stops for breath.
‘Thirty-seven years,’ he says.
Silence.
‘For twenty-five years I tried to forget and then twelve years ago I gave up trying and started to search for you.’
I am unable to speak and he begins again.
‘I had to talk to you,’ he’s hesitant now. His voice has dropped a semitone, bringing it to a more intimate pitch. I imagine him in a room somewhere in San Francisco, a large, light room looking out over trees and rooftops, across water and swirling mists. He is wearing the brown sweater he wore the day I first met him, his hair brushed back, the strong features, the eyes that could turn my ins ides to liquid. I can see the hollow of his throat that I had wanted to kiss that first day in Northumberland Crescent.
