Remember Me

by Liz Byrski

  Well he will not let it happen again. He will not let Liz do to him what Melanie did. He can feel her power shackling him body and soul and dragging him into the darkness. She could destroy him. He reads the letter again. She has sent him a message to sound him out, to warn him. It is a trial balloon. She is letting him know that she needs other men, that he must expect to share her. She wants a flirtatious, promiscuous life but he needs exclusivity. He is shocked to his core by the stark conviction that he would be actually capable of killing her if she is unfaithful to him. He must escape while he still can. He reads the letter one more time, and then he sits down at the table, takes a pad and a pen and begins to write.

  The next day the letter begins its journey and he feels a reckless sense of pride that he has had the strength to free himself. He throws himself into his work, immersing himself in the drawings spread out on his drafting board. He is redesigning the chapel and the nun’s quarters of a hospital and his designs for the roof reflect the exotic shape of the nuns’ wimples. Turning his terrifying fear and rage into a fierce energy for the satisfying complexity of the work, he shuts out all thoughts of what he has done. Sheet after sheet of paper is filled with his calculations and drawings, and he smothers any thoughts of the devastating action he has taken. Music surges through his head as he works, and he loses himself in its power. Over and over again Beethoven’s ‘Ruins of Athens’ rises and falls in him; it floats on his breath and he works and walks to its time. It is a march with strongly masculine character, it subdues and crushes the grief and longing that struggle for recognition. It reinforces him, confirms his sense of Tightness about walking away from love.

  But as the days pass sadness begins to replace the pride. His anger turns its focus away from her to the culture from which she came. He comes from a tradition of modesty and continence but in England he had found a culture alien to him. There is a looseness between the sexes, a kiss is just a kiss, his values were offended. He had cherished exclusivity in love, but Melanie had rejected its burden and now Liz is flashing a warning. He knows he can’t live like that, knows he should never have got involved. Her parents had been kind to him but they didn’t want him; they wanted a younger man for her, an Englishman, a man without the complications of a previous marriage and a child, a man who would keep her near to them; they wanted one of their own. But even as he examines the anger it begins to evaporate and with it goes that reassuring sense of pride in his own strength. He is beginning to doubt himself.

  The days become almost two weeks and his heart pounds in his chest as he opens another envelope. He is longing for her to protest, to plead with him not to end it, to challenge him to reconsider. But there is no protest in her letter, no pleading, just acceptance and sadness, a deep and haunting sadness that seeps into his bones. She is confused and hurt, she says she doesn’t condemn Doreen’s behaviour, but does not aspire to it herself. She doesn’t understand but she seems to accept. Why doesn’t she condemn what is so abhorrent to him? He wanted to read something else. But he sees her sitting at the desk in her bedroom, writing her final words to him as the midnight chimes of Big Ben float from the radio. He reads the letter again. He sees her face as she waits for him at the station; the taste of her mouth is in his own; his body remembers the feel of hers. He must talk to her, discover her real feelings, question the nature of what she has written. Folding the letter into his pocket he walks out of the house and drives downtown to the phone booth.

  His hands are trembling as he lifts the receiver and dials the international operator. It’s not too late to put it right, she says she still loves him, if he can just talk to her, just hear her voice—surely she will tell him what she means, surely he can draw from her the reassurance he needs to stay his fear. He hears her father call her to the phone and there is silence as the receiver changes hands. Tension seems to hiss down the telephone line; across the thousands of miles that separate them the silence tells him that something has changed since she wrote her last letter.

  ‘Please come back to England,’ she asks him. Doesn’t she realise he hasn’t the money for that? Doesn’t she remember that his visitor’s permit expired. ‘I can’t come to America now,’ she says. The silence is deafening and is broken by the click of the receiver. Her longing and her sadness have turned to ice. It’s over, he knows it now. The international operator is demanding to know how he will pay for the call. As he walks out into the late morning sunshine, the ice starts to form in his own heart. He is in misery but he knows that he has done the right thing. At the point of drowning he managed to save himself, struggle ashore to safety. He slams the car into first gear and roars away down the street.

  Her second letter arrives a few days later, cool, firm and final. He folds it away with all the other letters thinking it is the final chapter. He has no idea that there are other chapters still to be written. He has no idea that what he now sees as freedom is a captivity that will enslave him for decades. He stacks together the letters, the cards and the poems, taking a last look at each one. Unable to destroy them he wraps them in his own sadness.

  A few months later he gets a letter from Charles, and it reminds him of his friend’s misgivings about him leaving Liz in England. ‘It’s not a good idea Karl,’ he had said. ‘Get married, take her with you, or stay here. I worry about you being separated.’

  Now Charles is telling him that she is in Paris and his heart hardens further. She could not go to America with him but now she is in the city of love and lovers, doubtless living the promiscuous life to which she aspired. She says it broke her heart to lose him, Charles writes, and his scepticism turns to scorn. She never loved him, she never wanted him v he is well free of her and all that she represents.

  But time goes by and she won’t let him go, the letters stay folded but her words will not let him rest. They torment him until the day that realisation steals cold and terrifying through his body.

  He rifles through the bundle of letters looking for the one she wrote at midnight in response to his, the letter where she tells him of her confusion, tells him that she loves him, and his eyes settle on the offending word and he sees his mistake. He was convinced that she had written that she did not ‘condemn’ that woman’s behaviour, but now, very clearly, he can see that the word is condone, she is telling him that she does ‘not condone’ it. He reads the sentence over and over again. The leaden ache of remorse and grief engulfs him, he curses his careless reading, his poor English, his weakness, his volatile temper and he allows himself to feel the pain. But it’s too late.

  Now, two years into a loveless marriage that he had hoped would save him from the agony of love, he is caught in a cycle of despair and hostility. Before long his cache of letters is gone, burned by his wife in her rage at his inability to love her.

  But the fire doesn’t destroy his memories, and he still has some photographs and the birthday card that he has always carried with him. ‘You’re nobody till somebody loves you’ the card says. ‘Happy Birthday Somebody!’ Beneath it the message written in her neat sloping hand is a constant reminder of the love he lost.

  My Dearest Darling,

  Have a wonderful birthday. I shall be thinking of you as always and longing to be with you. I love you so very much. With all my love and thoughts.

  Liz.

  Sometimes over the years he sees a woman who looks like her, hears a voice like hers, he thinks she speaks to him in the words of a song, or calls to him on the sea breeze. But it is always illusion. Everyone comes to San Francisco, surely one day she too will come. She will call information and get his number and he will pick up the phone and hear her voice again. But perhaps she already knows his circumstances and he curses himself for creating a life that can only alienate her further. Time does not ease the loss and he can’t forget. He muses on finding her, on walking up to her door, seeing her face light up with pleasure at the sight of him, seeing tears of joy, arms opening to welcome him, her voice whispering that she always loved him. But
it is a hopeless dream for he knows that it was his own immaturity and lack of courage that have robbed him, his own fear that tore them apart and she will never want him back. He believes he was insane when he wrote that terrible letter. His fear of the power she had over him drove him to run away. Time and again he tries to crystallise, in a poem, the feelings evoked by her final letter, but time and again the words turn to dust as they reach the page.

  The days turn to weeks, to months, to years, to twenty-four years until, in nineteen eighty-six, he stands on the deck of a ship approaching the coast of England for the first time since the day he had kissed her goodbye at Three Bridges Station.

  When he sets foot on English soil her absence oppresses him. He sees her all around him, turns constantly at the sound of a voice. A red London bus reminds him, a policeman on point duty reminds him, green hills and woods in dappled sunlight, rows of red brick houses their roofs gleaming with recent rain, old stone walls, timber beams, daffodils in a vase, all remind him. He remembers how it was, remembers not just in his head but with his whole being. She was the spring and the sunshine, she was beauty and life to him and as the wheels of the train click over the points they sound her name constantly in his head—Liz, Liz, Liz. All the old cliches were true. He has to find her, to explain. He is certain shell be married to a wonderful man who loves her as he loved her, she will be living the lifestyle her father wanted for her, the lifestyle she deserves. He won’t try to interfere, she may not even agree to speak to him, but if she does he will explain, he will confess his weakness and tell her that he has always loved her.

  Perhaps she will remember him; perhaps even in some small corner of her heart she will have kept a tiny gem of affection for him; perhaps—but no—he has learned not to dream impossible dreams. To speak to her, to tell her—that will be enough.

  It’s nineteen eighty-six, and it will be another twelve years, there will be a detective agency, and enquiries through churches, parish registers and estate agents. It is not easy from the other side of the world. And as the difficulty of the task Increases he begins to fear that she may have died. He believes that if he goes to Smugglers Cottage he will find the answer, but now he procrastinates for fear of hearing that the answer is that she is dead.

  It is twelve years before he can bring himself to go back to the house, and then back once again in California each day, he expects to hear the worst. But within a few weeks he is staring incredulously at a letter from Smugglers Cottage, a letter that tells him her address and phone number in Australia, and the news that she will be in England in just a couple of weeks time. And a few days before Christmas he stands in the post office at San Francisco airport writing the card that he hopes will be waiting for her when she arrives in England.

  Several days later, he tries to calm his nerves by writing a script for his call and stands frozen beside the telephone trying to muster the courage to dial the number.

  Thirty-seven years after he had walked from the phone booth after his last call he hears her voice again, and through the waterfall of his own words he hears her say, ‘Lost love is the most precious,’ and his spirit soars.

  Part Four

  Restoration

  7

  ‘Is he going to call again?’ asks Neil the next day.

  ‘He already called again this morning,’ Irene tells him. ‘Before you were awake—that’s three times in less than twelve hours.’

  They stand looking at me and fleetingly I feel that I am back in the kitchen at Smugglers Cottage with my mother questioning me about kissing in the pub.

  ‘So,’ says Neil ‘What next?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’

  ‘You could go to San Francisco and see him!’

  ‘He says he’ll come to Perth.’

  ‘You should go there, it’s the adventure you need.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Whoops! Sorry!’ says Irene racing to the compact disc player as Nat King Cole launches into ‘Too Young’ and tears run down my cheeks. She whips Nat back into his case and puts on a Beethoven piano concerto unaware of its even greater poignancy.

  ‘How do you feel?’

  I shake my head and gaze out onto the windswept fields at the back of the house; fields where I had so often walked with him; where we had kissed under the oak trees, their branches as bare then as now.

  ‘How strange that I was here, when he found me. It’s only the second time I’ve been back to England in eighteen years. I wouldn’t dare put it in a book, no one would believe the coincidence.’

  Irene wraps the bread and puts it away. She wipes the worktop and shakes crumbs into the bin.

  ‘Perhaps it’s not coincidence, perhaps it’s fate.’

  She surprises me, Irene is not given to conversations about fate. She’s a realist and a sceptic, a business woman, independent, strong minded and down to earth. ‘He called last week and again before you arrived, he sounds delightful, he thought you might not speak to him. How do you feel?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  We decide to go to Brighton and Neil takes the road past Three Bridges Station.

  ‘This was where I last saw him, where we said goodbye.’

  To Neil it is only of passing interest as he negotiates the traffic. To me it is re-enactment. Thirty-seven years ago his eyes burned black with sadness as he walked away from me here and I never saw him again.

  ‘Do you actually want someone in your life?’ Neil asks. ‘You like being single, it suits you. You’ve been very clear about that.’

  ‘Yesterday I was very clear about it. I didn’t want anyone. I wanted to be alone. But this is different.’

  ‘So what do you want?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  I know nothing. I am numb with shock.

  Thrilled? Excited? Confused? Terrified? What if I let myself feel again? What if instead of just looking at those jewels of memory I let myself wear them? I have grown so good at defence, will I protect myself now, or will I open it all up again? Will I declare myself or wait in the tension to see what happens? I will wait, I have to, I’m incapable of anything else at present.

  ‘I want you to understand,’ Karl says, ‘that I don’t expect anything. I just had to find you, to explain, to tell you how sorry I am for my stupidity.’ He pauses. I can hear his breathing, he swallows hard. I wanted to tell you that I really loved you, that you were the love of my life and I was never able to forget. I always loved you, I still love you.’

  I dare not answer. I cannot tell him what I feel because I am so frozen with shock. All these years I knew how I loved him, now1 am incapable of saying so; incapable of feeling anything, paralysed by the fear of the consequences of speaking it, stunned by his frankness and by the feeling that nothing—absolutely nothing—has changed but everything is different.

  The next day, Tuesday, flowers arrive, masses of flowers. It takes two people to carry them in: orchids and lilies, carnations, roses and tulips; pink, white, cream, lemon, mauve and the palest green.

  ‘Good heavens,’ says Irene. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. I don’t have enough vases.’

  ‘We couldn’t actually get any more flowers in the van,’ says the florist climbing back into it.

  We search cupboards and the loft for vases and pots which. We fill and carry into every room. The house is like a diva’s dressing room on opening night.

  ‘I wanted a sea of flowers to be waiting for you when you arrived,’ he explains. ‘A sea of flowers with my card on them. I thought they might persuade you to speak to me when I called, but no one would deliver on Boxing Day or on Monday.’

  ‘They’re so beautiful,’ I say. ‘So beautiful, thank you.’

  ‘I hope they tell you something. I don’t have the words.’

  And still the great block of frozen tears remains cold and heavy inside, protecting me.

  While it is there I am safe, I can turn and walk away, I can put down the phone. I can pack my b
ags, go home to Australia and pretend this never happened, everything will be just as it was before, safe, manageable, intact.

  On Wednesday morning at seven o’clock the telephone rings. Irene has gone back to work after the Christmas break. Neil has gone to London. Still half asleep I run downstairs in the dark to answer it. I wrap a blanket around my shoulders and sit on the floor in the hall.

  I loved it so much when you played the piano for me,’ I say.

  ‘Really,’ he says. ‘I never knew, you never said anything.’

  I am shocked to discover that I never let him know what I felt when he played to me, how it thrilled me to see his hands on the keys, to hear the music he made. Perhaps there are other things I never told him. Did I ever really let him know how much I loved him? Did all that coaching in ladylike restraint hold me back from an honest declaration of all that I felt? Perhaps.

  ‘Do you remember playing “Wooden Heart”?’

  “Muss i denn”? Yes I remember:

  Muss i derm, muss i derm,

  Zum Staedtele hinaus,

  staedtele hinaus,

  und Du mein Schatz bleibst hier.’

  ‘That song is in my heart for you, always, always,’ I say.

  ‘Sweetheart!’ he says and with that one word the ice shatters. I am eighteen again, I am back in the park at Northumberland Crescent, back by the lake, back on his bed in Bobby’s house, and in Smugglers Cottage. I am back again to a wet July morning with the rain smudging the words from the pages of his letter and my life disintegrating before my eyes. He has broken into my heart, stripped away my defences and forced me into my feelings. Even the illusion of safety is gone and through my tears I tell him what I should have told him on the telephone thirty-seven years earlier.

  ‘I love you. I’ve always loved you. It was always you.’

  ***

  Twice a day he calls. Twice a day we talk for hours as the San Francisco telephone company counts its blessings and offers him a special rate for calls to England. Twice a day we sway joyfully, perilously back and forth across the miles, across the years. We fill in the blanks of memory, breach the gaps of time. We piece together the past we share, we share the past we lost. Our conversations are rich with rediscovery, frustrated by memory, woven through with regret.