by Liz Byrski
‘But it seems unfair . . .’
‘Now you’re being ridiculous,’ Kirsty said. ‘It’s only a week or two, and Nick and I will help him with the kids. What about that woman who went off to France for six months? You know, the gardening woman who wrote a book about it, we saw her on TV. And here you are feeling guilty about a week or two. Come on, Jill, get a life.’
‘I’m so glad you came, Diane,’ Barbara said. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Embarrassed,’ Diane said. ‘I want to apologise for dumping my life on you that morning. I had no right; after all, we hardly knew each other.’
‘We do now, and it was absolutely okay,’ Barbara said. ‘I told you, I’m a very nosy person. I always want to hear people’s stories.’
‘I just heard Stefan’s story,’ Diane said.
‘That really makes you think about priorities, doesn’t it? Are you going to see his garden?’
‘He’s invited me.’
‘Then go, it’s very special.’
‘He’s not like any other man I’ve met,’ Diane said. ‘And your friend George is lovely too. He told me you’re the light of his life.’
‘He does tend to say that.’
‘I think he means it.’
Barbara looked at her and smiled. ‘He does, and I reciprocate. It’s interesting how, as you get older, you appreciate things in people that you would have shunned in the past.’
‘Like what?’ Diane asked.
‘Steadiness, reliability, values – most of all, values.’
‘And you didn’t appreciate those things in the past?’
Barbara laughed. ‘Not in men, I’m afraid. I always went for raciness, danger, instant sexual chemistry with men who were terrific lovers, emotional cripples and totally unreliable.’
‘You’re kidding?’
‘Not at all. I was a thrill seeker – a reaction, I think, to a very austere religious upbringing. My poor mother would have turned in her grave if she knew what I got up to when I escaped from home.’
‘Well, George is pretty different,’ Diane said, ‘so presumably you’ve changed too. Are you and he . . . ?’ She hesitated, realising she was on the verge of embarrassing them both.
‘No,’ Barbara said. ‘We’re the best of friends, and yes, I’ve changed. Celibacy suits me. And I’ve discovered that one can have love and intimacy without sex. It suits me down to the ground.’ She turned to Diane suddenly. ‘Actually, I’ve never said that to anyone before. You can’t say that sort of thing to people who are your de facto children; it embarrasses them to even think you ever had a sex life at all.’
Diane laughed. ‘But you’re seventy-six today,’ she said. ‘Surely that entitles you to do whatever you want?’
‘Maybe,’ Barbara said. ‘But I think I shall hold my tongue. There are already a few too many secrets causing trouble in this family.’
‘You’re taking it all very personally, Adam,’ Heather said. They were sitting on the seat at the bottom of the garden, away from the group clustered around the barbecue. ‘It’s a very long time ago.’
‘And I have a very long memory,’ Adam said. ‘Look, Heather, it’s your life, your business. I’ve been civil to him but nothing is going to make me like Ellis, or forgive him, for that matter.’
Heather sat, looking over to where Barbara was letting Daisy open one of her birthday presents. She could barely remember a time when she and Adam had been seriously at odds about anything. She hated that she was both hurt by and hurting him. ‘Isn’t forgiveness part of what you believe in?’
‘Yes, but certain things I find impossible to forgive and this is one of them.’
‘Selective forgiveness, then.’
‘I’m not claiming to be God, Heather, we all have our limits.’
‘Look,’ she said, ‘I don’t want to hurt you, really I don’t. You were wonderful to me all through that time, and I’ll always be grateful for that. But I loved Ellis then, that was why it was so hard, and now . . . well . . . now I think I still love him, and he loves me. I want this chance to see if it can work.’
Adam nodded. ‘I know. Jill says I’m being selfish and I do want you to be happy, Heather, you know that. But this . . .’ He shook his head. ‘It makes me feel . . .’
Heather swung round to face him, blazing with a sudden surge of anger. ‘It’s not about what you feel, Adam. Can you even begin to imagine how I feel? Someone who hates me and everything I stand for drove up in the dark and shot me, and that person is still out there somewhere, waiting to try again. Everything I do, everywhere I go, I wonder if he’s round the next corner, behind the next bush, outside my window, watching me in the supermarket, in the office, at home, everywhere. And you know how that feels? Well, it’s terrifying, more terrifying than you could ever imagine, and it makes me feel utterly and completely alone. And now someone comes along who just wants to help me through this; someone who loves me and makes me feel safe. And you want me to turn my back on that because of what happened in the past. You want me to throw it all away, because of the past.’
The tension strung out like fine wire between them. Adam got up.
‘I’m sorry, Heather,’ he said. ‘I really can understand that this must all be quite terrible for you. And I can also understand how unsafe you feel and how you want to grab at anything that eases that feeling. What I simply can’t get my head around is that at this really awful time in your life you are able to find safety with the one person who, in the past, put you at very great risk, a risk, I’d add, that has had lasting consequences for you. That’s what I can’t understand.’ And he walked away from her to where Toby and one of George’s grandsons were messing about with a box of matches and the burnt-out candles from Barbara’s birthday cake.
TWELVE
Barbara had grown up with hard work at school and at home and with the prospect of hard work in a boring job in a shop or a factory until she married and took on the hard work of looking after a husband and children. She was a girl in training to be a good wife, and Beryl Delaney was determined that the devil would not find any opportunities between school, prayers, bible study and domesticity to get his hands on her daughter. The interesting thing, Barbara often reflected, was that it had seemed all right at the time, the way things should be. She didn’t fight it, didn’t argue, didn’t even think about what she might be missing until just before her fourteenth birthday, when she came top in everything except arithmetic and her teacher suggested she should stay on at school.
‘You could get a scholarship, Barbara,’ Miss Wootton had said, ‘to allow you to stay on here, and then go to university.’
Barbara’s understanding of the world outside school, home and chapel was limited, but when Miss Wootton explained scholarships and opportunities and the sort of jobs for which she might be suited, Barbara was sold on the idea. Selling it to her parents was another matter.
‘Who’s going to pay for it?’ Stan Delaney asked Miss Wootton. ‘We’re working people, you know, proud of it. Her brother’s apprenticed to a cabinet-maker. I don’t know what she wants with all that education.’
‘And who’ll marry her stuck with her nose in a book all day?’ Beryl said. ‘It doesn’t do for girls to be too clever, and we don’t want her getting into trouble.’
‘The scholarship will pay for her,’ Miss Wootton explained. ‘It’ll pay the education costs, and leave something for her keep.’ But she chickened out on the subject of getting into trouble. That was a battle Barbara would have to fight alone.
It took patience and persistence to convince them that her morality and godliness were, thanks to their training, invincible. Smart enough now to navigate her way around her parents, she made sure she kept up with all those things which, if abandoned, would signal moral decline. She went to every prayer meeting and bible-study class, kept her place in the chapel’s cleaning roster and never shirked her share of the housework. Now, years later, it amazed her that once she had escaped she threw herself w
ith immediate abandon into a comparatively wild life for a young woman in the fifties. But learning had been her escape route and had remained a part of her life, so the first few hours of the ESL course really didn’t faze her. George, on the other hand, was having an anxiety attack after the first session on Monday morning.
‘There’s so much,’ he whispered to her as they stretched their legs in the corridor during a break. ‘I won’t be able to remember it.’
‘You don’t have to remember it all,’ Barbara told him. ‘The trick is in working out what you need to remember and what you just need to know is there. You need to learn process, method and practice. How, that’s what’s important. Listen for the how – the what you can always check on later.’
‘And they’re all so young. No one in there is over twelve.’
‘Rubbish. They’re mostly in their twenties – thirties, even – and that woman in the green dress is in her fifties. So is the man with the glasses. Stop panicking.’
‘But lesson plans,’ George insisted. ‘I’ve never written a lesson plan in my life.’
‘Nor has anyone else, George,’ Robert Sachs said, materialising beside them. ‘Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that the others know more than you do just because they’re younger. They don’t, and neither do they have the wealth of life experience you bring to it. Stay cool, you’ll be fine. Worn to a frazzle, but fine.’
But by the Friday of the first week, even Barbara was feeling the strain. ‘This is the most intense learning experience I’ve ever had,’ she said as they sat on a seat in the park at lunchtime eating their sandwiches. ‘Thank god it’s the weekend.’
‘You too?’ George said. ‘That’s a relief. I thought I was the only one who was swamped.’
She shook her head, her mouth full of tuna and cucumber on rye. ‘No way. I spoke to some of the others and we’re all in the same boat. I could happily lie down under that tree for a nap.’
‘We could lie on my coat,’ George suggested. ‘I could set the alarm on my phone so we don’t miss the next class.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Barbara said, glancing around at the other people in the park. ‘We’re a bit old for that, aren’t we? What would people think?’
‘Who cares?’ he said, getting up, brushing crumbs off his trousers and shaking out his raincoat.
‘We’ll look like tramps.’
‘Couple over there are lying on the grass and they don’t look like tramps.’
‘But they’re young,’ Barbara said, ‘and they’re necking.’
‘And we’re old codgers and we’re having a rest. You can sit up there if you like but I’m having a catnap,’ and he started fiddling with his phone.
‘My mother would be horrified.’
‘Your mother,’ George said, lowering himself onto the raincoat, ‘is having her own afternoon nap watched over by angels. We’ll be back in class before she wakes up.’
Barbara didn’t hear George’s phone beeping forty minutes later. She was so soundly asleep that when he shook her arm and called her name repeatedly, she felt as though she were being dragged up from the bottom of the sea.
‘Come on,’ George said, reaching down to give her his hand. ‘Stone the crows, that ground’s hard. Let’s get moving or we’ll be late.’
Barbara struggled to her feet and straightened her skirt. ‘We should bring bedrolls on Monday,’ she said, ‘then we could lie about under the trees in comfort. I had the weirdest dream, about Adam and his cello –’
‘Never mind that now,’ George said. ‘Let’s get going, you can tell me about it on the way home.’
But Barbara didn’t tell him about the dream because, before it evaporated under the pressure of the next class, it revived the memory of something previously forgotten.
‘Are you on your own, Jill?’ she asked on the phone that evening, feeling conspiratorial. ‘Or is Adam there?’
‘Sorry, Barb, he’s out, back in about an hour. Thanks so much for the weekend. We all loved it, and the kids are still eating up the remains of your birthday cake. D’you want Adam to call you when he gets in?’
‘No, it’s you I want to talk to. But before I forget, what did you think of Ellis?’
‘Well, he wasn’t what I expected,’ Jill said cautiously. ‘I actually thought he was a bit up himself, but I’ve decided to reserve judgment. What about you?’
‘The same, really,’ Barbara said. ‘I didn’t warm to him much but I didn’t dislike him either. It must have been difficult for him with all of us sizing him up, and Heather seems so happy that I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt. Anyway, what I wanted to tell you was that I remembered something today, about that time . . . you know, what we were talking about – Heather and Adam, the Ellis time?’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, today I realised that it was about the time that Dorothy and I went on a cruise.’
‘A cruise, Barb? You?’
‘Yes I know, not my sort of thing, is it, but Dorothy was dying to go, so I agreed. I got rather bored on the ship but the stops were interesting, and the final one was in Fremantle and we got off there and had a look at Perth before we came back to Sydney on another boat, so we were away for several weeks.’
‘So what are you saying?’ Jill said, puzzled.
‘When we got back – the most extraordinary thing, Adam had pawned his cello.’
‘Pawned his cello?’
‘Yes, it’s odd, isn’t it? I can’t believe I’d completely forgotten about it, but there you are. It’s surprising what one forgets. He told me the day after we got back and he begged me not to tell Dorothy. He said he’d needed money and that was all he could think of to do. He asked me to lend him the money to get it back and not ask any questions.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘I gave him the money of course, and I didn’t ask any questions, although I do remember being quite worried about it. Anyway, he retrieved it, and a couple of months later he paid me back the money.’
‘How much was it?’ Jill asked.
‘That’s what I can’t remember,’ Barbara said. ‘I remember it seemed like quite a lot, although I suppose it wouldn’t be in today’s terms.’
‘And you never found out what the money was for?’
‘Never. Well, I never asked. In fact, I must have forgotten about it quite soon after, and I haven’t thought about it for years. He didn’t seem to be in any trouble and I can’t remember any consequences, so I suppose I just forgot.’
‘I see,’ Jill said. ‘I mean, I don’t really see, it’s such an extraordinary thing for Adam to do. You don’t think there was a girl, perhaps . . . could he have got someone pregnant?’
‘I was thinking about that on the way home today,’ Barbara replied. ‘But it doesn’t make sense. Adam was still in his religious phase then. He was twenty-one, and I’m sure I’ve heard him say that he was a virgin until he was twenty-three.’
‘That’s right,’ Jill said. ‘He laughs about it, says he was a late developer.’
‘There you are,’ Barbara said. ‘And, Jill, I’d rather you didn’t mention this to Adam. I’d prefer to ask him about it myself sometime when we’re together, when it feels right.’
‘Of course,’ Jill said thoughtfully, ‘no, I won’t mention it.’ And as she hung up, Jill was already pretty sure who and what Adam might have needed the money for, and that it might have been very much to do with Ellis Hargreaves.
Heather, surrounded by pressing tasks, felt incapable of starting on anything. She sat, shoes off, her feet resting on a pile of Hansards, staring at the desk calendar, the one that showed the parliamentary sitting weeks blocked out and highlighted in yellow: sixteen weeks, three sitting sessions since the shooting. Sixteen weeks ago she had been in the hospital bed, confident that before she was released an arrest would have been made and that by Christmas it would all be over and forgotten. If only. Alex Roussos kept assuring her that the police regarded her case as a high priority
and were still working on it but it was hard to believe as weeks passed with no further developments. She had given up pointless speculation about who might have been responsible and was simply waiting for something to happen.
Outside the office window a car door slammed and Heather leapt to her feet, adrenaline pumping, heart pounding. Was there no end to it? It was easy for Ellis to talk about how catching the gunman wasn’t the issue, how she had to learn to feel safe within herself. He didn’t see the shadows, hear the noises, feel the sweat break out on his skin as hormones charged around his body; he hadn’t been shot.
‘You must try to put it in the past, Heather,’ he said. ‘He may not come back. Didn’t the police say that if he was going to try again it would have happened sooner rather than later?’
Alex had, indeed, said that this was the most likely scenario but he also said, in a roundabout way which was supposed not to scare her but to make her alert, that there was always a chance that the person would try again – weeks, months, even years later.
‘It’s like driving,’ Ellis had persisted. ‘Every day we have a very high chance of getting killed or injured on the roads, yet we drive confidently to and from work, or the shops, or wherever, and don’t give it a thought. You have to make it like that in your mind, awareness without a sense of persecution.’
‘That’s easy for you,’ Heather had said. ‘You can’t know what this is like. Even Shaun feels it just because he was there, and they weren’t shooting at him.’
‘I can’t help you if you resist everything I say,’ he’d said irritably. ‘Healing only works if you are open to the message of the healer.’
‘And don’t talk to me as though I’m one of your clients,’ she’d snapped back. ‘I told you on day one that I didn’t need a counsellor.’
Heather’s heart settled again, and she dropped heavily back into her chair. Why did everything have to be so hard? Why did she always seem to be struggling? The one time she had actually gone to see a therapist, years earlier in her thirties, she’d asked those very questions, and the woman had questioned her about her birth experience.
