by Liz Byrski
‘The Prospect of Whitby,’ he says. ‘That was the most important night of my life.’
‘The what?’
‘The Prospect of Whitby. The pub—the pub where we first kissed.’
‘Is that where we went that night?’
‘Yes—the pub, down in the docks, the Prospect of Whitby! You can’t have forgotten.’
I admit to the black hole in my memory that lasts from the moment he came into the house and is not restored until we are sitting in the kitchen supervised by Jock.
He is devastated. It is as though I’ve smashed his most treasured possession. I have lost his most precious memory. There is an edge to his voice, he almost believes it’s deliberate and I know I’ve hurt him immeasurably.
‘Perhaps you forgot because it meant nothing.’
‘It’s not like that.’
‘Perhaps you were so used to being kissed in pubs.’
‘Look, I know it can have been neither of those things. It’s not that I just forgot, it’s something more—the whole evening has gone.’
He can’t let it go. He can’t laugh it off or shrug it away with regret. He is wounded and I am reminded of his extreme sensitivity, how intensely he feels things, how quick he is to attribute his own meaning to words and events. I’m fearful of his need for the past to be as he remembers it, for me to be as he has made me in his heart. And try as I do I can’t remember the Prospect of Whitby. As we talk each of us reminds the other of forgotten incidents, the memories are restored, the moments flash back and are revived, but for me the Prospect of Whitby remains a blank sheet. It is the first moment of tension between us, a wisp of dark cloud drifting across the face of the sun. There will be others, some will drift back and forth, while others evaporate in the warmth of the sun’s rays.
‘You were so honourable,’ I say. I’ve always cherished the fact that you protected my innocence.’
I’ve wondered if you thought me a fool,’ he says. ‘But I promised your father.’
‘Promised my father? Promised him what? When?’
‘That first weekend I came to stay.’
‘What did you promise?’
‘That we wouldn’t have intimate relations.’
‘Why? Why did you promise that? Did you two talk about me that first weekend?’
‘Of course—he was worried because I was so much older, he wanted to preserve your virginity.’
I am shocked, affronted. Thirty-seven years have passed and I react to the news with the indignation of a woman in her fifties who has spent the last twenty years writing about the rights of women to control their bodies and their lives. I can see them walking side by side together in the garden as they did that weekend, heads bent close in conversation—or was it conspiracy? Men’s business, too serious to be interrupted by or shared with women. They were talking about me, as though I was a child or a piece of property. They were deciding what would happen to me, how I would be managed and I wasn’t even consulted.
‘Your father was trying to protect you,’ he says. ‘And I loved you and respected you. Your innocence was precious and I respected your father too. He wanted the best for you. I assumed you knew about this, that he’d spoken to you and you’d agreed to it too. You said just now that you cherished the fact that I didn’t make love to you.’
‘But I thought that was your choice, not my father’s.’
‘He loved you, he wanted—’
‘He wanted to dictate what happened to me, what happened between us.’
‘And was that so wrong? You can’t blame him for wanting to protect you. Haven’t you had those feelings about your own children? Don’t you still want to protect them?’
‘Yes—but the thing is that you two had this conversation without me—behind my back.
‘Well we could hardly have had it in front of you. This was nineteen sixty-two—. it’s unthinkable that the three of us would have discussed it together, that’s how it was then. If it had been my daughter I would have done the same thing.’
I try to unravel my anger, questioning whether or not it makes any sense. Is it relevant? Is this a political reaction to a personal experience? But isn’t the personal political? Isn’t that the core of feminist thought?
‘I don’t understand,’ he says, cautious now. ‘I wanted to care for you. I had to go back to America—suppose I had died before we married, wasn’t it important that you retained your innocence?’
‘I suppose so—yes, it was in those days, but that should have been for me to decide. I thought you took control because it was what you thought was right.’
‘So I did. But without my promise to your father I might well have weakened.’
There is a pause as we both remember the day in Bobby’s house and all the other occasions on which we came so close to breaking the promise.
‘I know you would have allowed it,’ he says softly, almost shyly.
‘Yes.’
‘I knew it was my responsibility.’
I am locked in silent battle with my feelings.
‘If you had known then,’ he asks, ‘about our conversation, about your father’s request, would you have felt angry or insulted?’
I want to say yes. I want to say I was always a feminist at heart, that those things were always important to me—but I can’t and I have to struggle to tell the truth and not to rewrite the past as I want it to be.
‘No,’ I admit slowly. ‘I think I might have felt embarrassed that you were talking about me but I wouldn’t have been able to define it. And yes, I guess I would have accepted that that was how things were done. I couldn’t have put it in the broader context in which I see it now’
‘So does it matter thirty-seven years later? Does it matter to you and me now?’
I know this question is crucial. It’s about separating the past from the present, about who I was at eighteen and the world I lived in then and who I am at fifty-four, and the knowledge I have gained and the views I have formed in the intervening years. This is the challenge in matching the two selves, in interpreting the past and living the present. This is the challenge of ideology versus the reality of experience. What does she really feel, this woman that I have become? How much of what I have written and spoken in my public life have I integrated? How much is rhetoric and how much is feeling? Will I allow the past to interpret the future? Will I allow theory to dominate or capitulate to instinct and feeling?
‘I think it doesn’t matter,’ I begin. ‘I think that I’m confusing the way I was then, with how I would feel now. In those days I was happy for you to take control of everything. All I wanted was to marry you and the girl or woman I was then wouldn’t have questioned anything you said. I was very submissive—I was happy to do as you said.’ I pause and he waits in the silence for me to continue.
‘What matters is the love and respect you showed me, and indeed my father. What matters is the sort of person you were and what motivated you. That’s what’s important.’
‘The fact that you were so submissive placed a special responsibility on me,’ he says. ‘A special responsibility not to abuse your trust.’ Now he, in turn pauses, gathering his thoughts.
‘I was in a kind of madness in my possessiveness. When I got your letters I was terrified of you needing other men. I’m not sure if you understand the emotional power you had over me. After Melanie—well I couldn’t face that again. I truly felt I could not survive it. There was another architect in the office whose younger wife had just left him for someone else. It destroyed him. He was incapable of working; he would sit every day at his drawing board gazing into space, unable to live any sort of life and he became a shell of a man. I knew that could happen to me and I had developed a sort of emotional radar so sensitive it could detect a mosquito flying over Siberia—you had that power over me and I had to escape.’
The enormity of the things we were unable to tell each other at the time astounds me. The vulnerability we had both felt, never fully expressed. How
different it might have been had we both felt safe to reveal the full extent of our fears and our feelings for each other. Years before ‘dependence’ became part of the popular jargon to define ‘unhealthy’ relationships we had censored the expression of our need and dependence in order to protect ourselves and preserve our foolish pride.
I take a deep breath and ask him the question I have so often asked myself.
‘I understand how vulnerable you were,’ I say. ‘But what would have happened if you had broken that promise—if we had slept together?’
He pauses for what seems a long time and I can hear him struggling to gain control of his voice.
‘Don’t you see,’ he says, softly. ‘If we had slept together I could never have left you. I would have felt a moral obligation to return to England and marry you. I could not have walked away. Now do you still admire me for taking control? Are you still glad that I didn’t make love to you?’
I see thirty-seven lost years. Years lost for so many reasons; interference by other people, prejudice, misunderstanding, immaturity; pride, good intentions and fear—most of all fear—my parents’ fear, Karl’s fear, my own fear. I admire and cherish his honourable restraint as an expression of his love, but part of me chafes at the knowledge that it is sexual possession that could have brought him back. The message is as old as time. It is about ownership. What will feminist theory do with this one?
Slowly, lovingly, sometimes painfully the layers are peeled away, the gaps are filled, the perceptions exchanged; confusion moves to clarity; anxiety is replaced with confidence. And through it all shines the brave and beautiful truth that for thirty-seven years he has loved me, and he had the courage and the commitment to find me and to step back into my life.
A week has passed since he first called. It is a week that has changed my life, changed the past; changed the present: but what does it mean for the future? In another week I will go back to Lisbon, and ten days later return to Australia. I will go back to the life I made for myself, back to my hard won solitude, back to my safe house, to my work, my friends, my dog, but I know that these clothes of my old life no longer fit. For I am changed, totally and completely changed and although I can’t yet define that change I know it is fundamental. I don’t want to leave England, here in the places he knows, in the places we were together I feel close to him. I’m frightened to leave, frightened to burst the bubble, frightened that when I step off the plane in Perth this magic will disappear on a hot summer breeze and it will all be over. Once again he will be gone, leaving a great void in my life, a loss so great it cannot be repaired.
What does this all mean? I walk the boundaries of a fantasy future in which we are together, beginning now the life we should have shared years ago. But I dare not venture into the centre of this particular emotional whirlpool.
During our first conversation he had told me he wanted to see me and I dream of meeting his flight, driving him home to Fremantle and watching him move around my house. I know he will love the angles, the space, the rammed earth walls and the rich tones of the jarrah, the sunlight splashing through the big windows, the harmony of colours and textures, the sunlit deck and the small garden with its iceberg roses, lavender and citrus trees. I dream of swimming with him in the early mornings off South Beach, and walking there hand in hand as the sun sets and steals away the daylight. I picture sitting with him at a cafe on the cappuccino strip, introducing him to friends, shopping in the markets, cooking a meal together, sharing breakfast with him on the deck in the early morning. I dream of leading him through the damp green forests and vineyards of the south west, and the endless white dunes of the southern coast.
But most of all I dream of the way he was and the way he now might be. I dream of the tenderness of his touch and the sweetness of his smile, and the way the hard edge of his voice softened when he spoke to me, and of how he kissed me and touched my face and told me he loved me all those years ago. Through those dreams a thread of fear weaves back and forth, it questions whether he will still love me in Australia as he had in England and in memory, or whether he is just in love with a dream that he had thought was lost forever.
‘Perhaps I could come to Lisbon,’ he says. ‘Perhaps we could meet before you go back to Australia?’
‘Not Lisbon,’ I reply, knowing that there I will have to divide my attention and my energy between him and Neil. Knowing that the best place is one where we can be alone.
‘But my ticket takes me through a stop in Frankfurt on the way home to Perth.’
‘I’ll fly to Frankfurt,’ he says without hesitation. ‘Will you meet me in Frankfurt?’
8
And so I make the arrangements to delay my return to Australia. An extra week means reorganising some work. There are book proofs to check, appointments to re-schedule, writing deadlines to meet. But the professional arrangements are straightforward, it is the personal that prove more complex. Quite suddenly the phone lines between England and Western Australia hum with excitement, encouragement, affront, confusion and advice.
‘Fantastic!’ Jan says. ‘Do you need me to do anything? I’m so happy for you. Have a wonderful time and don’t take any decisions without me!’ She is my dearest friend and she is joking but serious. Her support and encouragement are wholehearted, her concern is genuine.
‘Of course we can wait another week to plan the workshop,’ says Carolyn. ‘But what about your writing? Has this disturbed it? You’ve worked so hard, don’t let this throw you off course.’ As a writer she understands the need for solitude, for sacrosanct personal space. As a woman and a writer she understands my need to follow my heart.
Thousands of miles from where I stand the story spreads like wildfire and other friends call or email to tell me how happy they are for me. But not everyone is delighted.
‘Why have you never told me about him?’ asks one, and I am not sure whether it is annoyance or resentment that I hear. ‘He can’t have been that important—you never even mentioned him. Don’t you think you’re getting a bit carried away? Why don’t you wait and let him come here?’
‘You can’t be serious,’ says another. ‘You’ll miss my birthday party. Look I know it must seem very romantic but you can’t really mean you are going to race off for a week in Frankfurt with a man who dumped you thirty-seven years ago. You must be crazy, it’s an awful risk. I thought you never wanted to have another relationship, now you’re throwing yourself at this man who gave you the flick once before. He only has to snap his fingers and you come running.’
It’s so exciting, but you’ll be careful won’t you!’ says another.
‘Careful of what?’
‘Well—well just be careful and don’t make any commitments. You have to come back, you can’t leave Australia!’
It is a statement not a question and I feel I have been here before, but the last time it was a room full of Secretaries whose own fears and aspirations, whose own dreams, desires and disappointments informed their reactions and their comments. She will not let go.
‘I’m really happy for you, you deserve it. You can have a fabulous week and then you have to come back and tell us all about it.’
‘Of course I’ll come back, I have a workshop to run on the tenth of February,’ I say truthfully, in an effort to divert her with basic facts. ‘And Karl has to go back to work too.’
I know, but what I mean is if this is going to go on you have to find a way of seeing him, being with him, that doesn’t involve leaving here.’
Again I try to deflect her, this time with some humour.
‘Good heavens—we haven’t even seen each other yet. He’s worried he’s too old and I’m worried I’m too fat!’ I laugh.
‘He is and you’re not!’ she replies with a fervour that sounds like hostility.
I put down the phone feeling wounded, and picking up the photographs Karl sent me in his card, I walk out of the house, down the lane towards Smugglers Cottage. From the footpath I gaze up at the house, to th
e window of what used to be my bedroom, the window where I am standing in the photograph. I remember that spring morning when I heard his voice call up to me from the garden.
‘Hello Liz,’ Jess calls from the front door. ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’
We had met a few days earlier, when she told me about the day Karl knocked on her door in October last year, and of how she was so moved by his story that she decided to see if she could help him to find me. She combed the village with her four-year-old granddaughter asking in shops, stopping strangers to find someone who might remember my family. Eventually someone directed her to Irene. Despite her proximity, they had never met. It was from Irene that Jess got my address and phone number and learned that I would be arriving in England just after Christmas.
Without Jess’ persistence Karl might never have found me. She succeeded where one of the most efficient detective agencies in the world had failed a few years earlier.
‘Have you talked to him today, love?’ She asks getting out the cups.
‘I talk to him every day, Jess. He calls me twice a day.’
‘I’m not surprised—he was calling me practically every day once I’d given him your address. He wouldn’t call you in Lisbon, decided to wait till you got here. He was in a terrible state, so nervous—thought you might not talk to him.’ She makes the coffee and brings the cups to the table. ‘I told him—Karl, just stop worrying about it—she’ll be over the moon. Even without knowing you I could tell—I have these feelings you know—I can foresee the future.’
The sceptic in me smiles and says nothing.
‘I can see you grinning and thinking—O yeah Jess, who do you think you are, but Liz, I know! The minute he told me the story I knew. He’s still in love with you and he has made up his mind that he had to find you. He’s a good man Liz—don’t you let him go a second time my girl.’
