by Susan Duncan
'You ok? Everything ok?' we ask Ann.
'Yes. Yes, of course.'
'Nearly lost you overboard.'
'Not at all. No danger at all. Anyway, I'd rather die in a yacht race than in bed,' she says, grinning.
Later at home, I mutter angrily about the new machismo taking over our little club that was created thirty years ago. Anything that floats can race. 'Doesn't matter if you win or lose, it's how you play the game, isn't it?' I ask, remembering one of my mother's lines from the days when I played tennis in junior tournaments all over Victoria.
Bob is noncommittal. 'It's a race, Susan. Races are about winning.'
'Not at any cost, surely?'
'No, of course not.'
We drop the conversation.
A week later, when the wind's lighter than fairy floss and Bob's secret weapon, the Code Zero, helps us win the race by two minutes, I bounce around the boat in jubilation. 'We won! We won!' I shout, slapping backs. Then I look at the shocked faces around me. 'Not that it's important,' I add hastily. 'It's the experience that counts.' Not a soul believes me.
Over the years, we've cooked many different dishes for the end of season Annual General Meeting, from basic bangers with tomato, onion and basil salad to a fish stew redolent with fennel and garlic. The chicken curry laced with chopped peanuts and basil was by far the easiest for a big crowd. It's made from thigh fillets diced into big lumps and cooked on the barbecue. The meat's then whacked into a catering-size stainless steel mixing bowl and a large pot of pre-made curry sauce is tipped over the lot. I put a bit too much chili in one year, but sailors are a tough lot. The baked beans are a popular dish, too, although Stewart says septics all over Pittwater struggle for a few days afterwards.
The best meal ever, though, was when Tim barbecued tender lamb cutlets and made a lemon, thyme, green olive and butter sauce to dip them in, a sauce so deliciously pungent and rich we tipped it over the salad, dunked our bread in it and sipped it like soup from empty plates. Tim's used to barbecuing under pressure. At home in Towlers Bay, as soon as the chops go on, five svelte, drooling reptilian heads with glittering eyes peer longingly from the cliff overhanging his hotplate. Goannas. He stores a few old gumboots close by to chuck at them, but they keep coming back. Smart goannas. Tim's a great cook.
Bainy, the gifted local boat engine mechanic, is chief custodian of the Temprite for the beer kegs for the party, which he instals with passion and precision. And a few expletives if it's been borrowed and returned with dirty hoses or a missing washer. He's meticulous about the whole set-up: the table, the right size blocks of ice, the hoses, gas and even the type of beer (lager or pilsener). But he is especially fastidious about testing. 'When a beer's poured,' he says, 'the glass must be angled. The tap flicked quickly. On. Off. And no more than half an inch of froth, mate. That's it. Any more and you've poured it wrong. And, mate, it's gotta be cold.'
'Does anyone care, Bainy, if the beer's not perfect?' I ask him.
'Mate, everyone's a critic. Trust me.'
On the big night, he slips out of his blue singlet into a white dinner shirt, clips a bowtie around his neck, pulls on perfectly creased black strides and stands firmly behind the bar. Unrecognisable, except for his fisherman's cap.
***
A few weeks after nearly being T-boned, there's a message on the answering machine from an old colleague. A retired editor and editor-in-chief of The Australian Women's Weekly is dying. At one time, when she prowled the corridors at Australian Consolidated Press, she was indestructible. A tiny redhead with flashing green eyes who could flatten you with a look, she worked for the Packer family for fifty years to the day because she was a woman, she said, who liked neatness.
I ring her immediately. 'You up to visitors?' I ask.
'Of course.'
A few days later, I join a couple of friends who still work at The Weekly to beat through Sydney traffic to St Vincents Hospital. When we get to the swinging glass doors, memories of long nights with death hovering at the foot of the hospital bed, of tubes and sacks of fluids, of looking in the mirror and seeing a strange, distorted body with one breast instead of two, roar through my mind.
'You'll be right,' says Kay, seeing me hesitate. She grabs my arm, leads the way.
It takes a moment to recognise my old boss. No green eye shadow, no painted lips. The days of using eighteen different cosmetics at one time are over. No vibrant floral prints either, only a girly pink nightie with a tiny lace frill around the neck. But her toenails flash boldly, and jewellery glitters on her fingers and wrists. Still true to the old image. Although the core is waning.
'Tell me about cancer,' she says. To the point, as always.
'You leave hospital. Go home. Then you begin again with a new set of rules.'
She is silent for a moment. 'Not sure about any of that,' she finally replies. And I realise she has accepted that she will not get well.
Three weeks later, the funeral notice appears in the paper and the phone rings again. 'Can you pick up Sharon and bring her to the funeral?' asks a former colleague who's moved into the more predictable world of administration. 'She lives near you in a retirement village at Bayview.'
'No problems. I even know where it is. It's just up the road from where my mother lives.'
'I'll come with you,' Bob says, because he knows funerals make me feel like I'm standing against a brick wall while someone kicks me in the guts for an hour or two. Even after all this time.
Sharon is already waiting for us in the car park, dressed to kill in a beautifully tailored black suit and a black and white houndstooth scarf. She folds her walking frame and Bob puts it in the boot, but she keeps her matching walking sticks close by as she struggles into the seat. Her long, slim legs won't obey her orders. She uses her arms to lift them into the car, one by one.
I want to ask her age but I know she'll hate the question. I do a few mental sums. She must be in her late eighties or early nineties. Her skin, though, is so flawless she could be sixty, and her mind is razor sharp.
'I'm the person that journalists phone when they're doing a story on the history of The Weekly,' she says with a grin, 'because I go back further than almost anyone. Don't know what everyone will do when I go.'
'What was it like, when you were there?'
'It was a different world. More genteel, if you like. If Sir Frank [Sir Frank Packer, founder of The Australian Women's Weekly] were still alive he'd be appalled at the way I'm dressed for a funeral. No hat, you see. We always seemed to be rushing to funerals in Sir Frank's day. He felt it was important to show respect if a staff member died, even if you didn't know the person. Had to dash out to David Jones to buy a new hat nearly every time. I had a cupboard full of hats by the time I retired.'
Later, when I know her better and it becomes a habit to cook a little more than we need and then take Sharon a small plate or two, I ask why she never married.
'My own fault, really,' she says. 'I fell in love but the war came along. My friend gave me a ring but he insisted I wear it around my neck. If he returned from service wounded in some awful way, he didn't want me to feel tied to him.' She dabs her eyes with a corner of her linen handkerchief. Not crying, more as if to give herself time to get her story in order.
'Well, he returned unharmed, but he was not the boy I knew anymore. He was a man and very changed. I'd changed, too. I had a job as a journalist, I was free and independent and enjoying life. I wasn't ready to settle down.' He married another woman on the rebound, a staunch Roman Catholic who believed her vows were inalienable. They had a child, and when the marriage foundered, though they agreed to live apart, divorce was never discussed.
'I ran into him one day, years later. I was coming out of a hotel in Double Bay with a carton of beer. "Can I carry that for you," he asked. "No," I replied. "You're as independent as ever," he retorted.
'He told me he and his wife lived apart, so we saw each other from time to time. One day he took my hand and said that if
his wife would give him a divorce, would I marry him? "Yes," I told him. "Yes." '
By this time his wife was far less emphatic about the rites of her church. She still said no to a divorce, though, because she couldn't bear to hurt her devout parents. Sharon says: 'He told me the news, which didn't really matter to me. It was the sixties, life had changed. "I'll live with you anyway," I told him. But he shook his head. "I can't do that to you, Sharon," he said. "It wouldn't be right." And I never saw him again.
'When he died, his wife phoned me to see if I wanted to come to the funeral. I'd just had my hip replaced and couldn't walk but I thanked her for asking me. "Your name was on his lips as he died," she told me. Which must have cost her, I think. Such a waste, all of it. But my own fault. You see, I had the opportunity to marry him when he came home, and I refused it.'
I pick up my empty dishes from the kitchen to take them home to refill.
'If you are making those little lemon cakes . . .' she whispers shyly as I open the front door to leave.
I turn and smile. 'As it happens, I am.'
Impulsively, I return and lean to kiss her cheek. Why can I never do that with my mother? What is the dark abyss that stretches between us sometimes? I have no idea. No memory. If there even is one.
13
FLEURY TELLS US THAT Katie is having an exhibition in a gallery in Canberra. Desert art, inspired by the return trip to Perth after her show at Tarrangaua.
'Tell Katie we'll be there for the opening,' Bob says.
'How you doing?' I ask when we all meet up on a stinkingly hot summer evening.
'Fantastic,' she replies.
'Good.'
She has done prints of red sands and blue-green spinifex, and brought the desert alive. But alone on a wall there's a massive, powerful print of a vast, grey ocean. Empty, except for a single, small rowboat. A wordless revelation.
***
On New Year's Eve, a night so explosively hot even the frantic castanets of the crickets slow to a tepid beat, the round table in the western corner of the long verandah glows in the flickering light of a single candle. It is set with my grandmother's white lace tablecloth, my brother's crystal glasses, my mother's silver cutlery. And the expensive silver ice bucket she hid from my father for about two years before she found the courage to tell him she'd bought it.
Near the candle, in an old blue vase, roses from a friend's garden in the high, cool ranges west of Sydney flop in riotous colours: red, yellow, orange, hot pink. Only Bob's table napkin ring is new, a Christmas gift. Because he once mentioned that he liked the idea of them. You can use a napkin three or four times before it has to be washed.
'Seems appropriate, don't you think, to surround yourself with the past when you're about to begin a new year?' I ask Bob.
'Prefer to look forward,' Bob replies. 'Always have.'
Earlier, we sat neck high in the cool green shallows of Lovett Bay to escape the prickling noon heat. Skittish baby bream with flirtatious tails swam around us. Gentle waves spilled over a starfish, mute and motionless on the sandy bottom near where the seawall holds back the erosion of time, tide and weather. But nothing ever really stops time.
'We'll be hot and sticky after we climb the steps back to the house,' Bob murmured, waving his arms slowly below the water to keep afloat.
'Worth it,' I replied.
He heaved a deep breath and slipped his head under, blew bubbles. Came up laughing because he reckoned I'd fall for his trick.
'Saw you blowing.'
He grinned and let rip with noisy wind. 'Gotcha that time!'
'Bastard!' I swam away from him, towards Jack's second boat, a gleaming wooden skiff called Dorothy, after his mother. He is passionate about the boat and cares for it reverently. He glides through the water single-handedly when he's going off fishing alone, his long body curved into the same quilled shape as the headsail. If he's not going far he rows, dipping his oars into the water with long, even strokes. Stretching forward, leaning back, stretching forward, leaning back – so perfectly rhythmical that to watch him is like meditating.
Saw him in the skiff with one of his children a few days ago. White-haired with skin seared by the wind and sun and folded into deep lines. His son beside him was satin smooth, his face already losing the jellied edges of boyhood. Jack threaded a sail shaped like a wing into a track on the mast, explaining each step. The boy watched, nodded, intent. He was about to go solo in his father's precious boat for the first time. A rite of a kind.
After our swim, Bob and I climbed eighty-eight steps to the back door in the lurid glow of the setting sun. Bob opted for a shower while I set the table. For two. These final hours of the old year are about counting blessings, not wishing on the future. What could we wish for anyway, beyond health?
'Still scorching,' Bob says, coming into the kitchen. His hair is wet. Water trickles down the deep grooves in his face. 'Where's the sea breeze when you need it?'
'Never known it this hot.'
'Yes you have. You've just forgotten.' He is right, of course.
'The table looks beautiful,' Bob adds hesitantly, lifting the bucket to fill it with ice and a bottle of champagne. 'Sure you don't mind just the two of us?'
'Can't think of anything better.'
He slips an arm around my waist, leans his head against mine. I kiss him lightly, this quiet man with fine instincts, this man who is the real reason my mother found the faith to pass on her cherished silver. She trusts him to always be around as she has never trusted me. With good reason. 'Here! You can clean it now,' she huffed when she handed it over. What she meant, though, was that I'd finally come of age. Settled. She can safely give me her knives, forks, spoons and the ice bucket knowing I won't abandon them in some far-flung corner as I chase the next assignment. 'My gypsy daughter,' she called me once. But I suspect my restlessness was inspired by her. On my twenty-first birthday, she handed me wings she'd drawn on a card. 'Fly,' she said. And the word twanged with her own awful longing. She'd never been further than interstate, then.
Looking at the table, I suddenly understand why she refused to buy all new furniture when she moved from her home to the retirement village.
'I'm old,' she snapped when I tried to drag her around stores to see lean couches and sleek sideboards more suited to her new, small space than the pink chintz granny couch and recliner armchairs, and Dad's old writing desk with the wonky drop board. 'I want old things around me.' And she defiantly plonked her faded burgundy Carlton Ware vase with the gold trim that she was given as a wedding present on the too-big dining table. 'When you're eighty-three,' she added, 'you can do as you damn well please.'
I'd sighed with the automatic intolerance that children have for their parents and given in to her. Yet here I am, no different really. Grey-haired, like her. Surrounded by the past, like her. When did I stop desiring new? Sometimes I catch a fleeting image of a tall woman with a matronly bosom in a plate glass window. I do not recognise her until much later when I realise it is me, as I am now. Not as I still think of myself – a red-headed thirty-year-old with the strength of an ox.
The champagne cork pops – is there any sound so universally celebratory? Bob pours two glasses, hands me one.
'To us,' he says.
'To health,' I respond. To me, us is a given.
'Garlic and lemon prawns, with a hint of chili. Pasta. Salad. That suit you?'
'Yep.'
Without fail, Bob tells me, I have never kept to a food plan. By lunchtime, the menu has changed at least three times. By dinner, it's anybody's guess. So he nods in agreement to every suggestion at every stage of the day. I mentioned snails once, hoping to trick him into a debate, but his eyes lit up enthusiastically. 'With lots of garlic butter?'
'You don't like snails, do you?' I asked in disbelief.
'Love 'em.'
'Well bad luck, there aren't any.'
'What about the garlic butter? Can we have that? It's the best bit.' And I love the way he plays the gam
e.
Water boils for the pasta. Steam rises to the ceiling then drops like sweat. Or rain. Summer in Sydney: clammy skin, slippery legs, clothes clinging wetly. The humidity is suffocating. No rain, though. None that counts anyway. Just a light drizzle when the dogs swam from Scotland Island to Church Point in the Christmas Eve race. But the clouds drifted away, as though it was too much effort to perform.
When dinner's ready, we turn off the lights in an attempt to lure buzzing Christmas beetles, suicidal moths and flying insects out of the house and back into the bush. It's too late for the termites. Thousands of their fragile dismembered wings make the floorboards shimmer like shiny fabric.
'Music?' asks Bob.
'Nah. Clash with the rhythm of the crickets.'
'Thought about next year?'
And it is peculiar to think it is only a few hours away. Like my mother, I have always loathed the fanfare of New Year's Eve, the pressure to party. It is, after all, only another day. But rituals stick, even after they have lost their meaning.
'Nope. Not much. Have you?'
Bob coils linguine on a fork, the wine and butter sauce dripping from the pasta. The seaweedy smell of seared prawns lolls in the air with the nutty scent of garlic. 'Everything seems to be heading in the right direction,' he says finally.
Bob mops the dregs of the sauce with a piece of bread. When he finishes, I pick up our empty plates and take them into the kitchen.
'There's dessert,' I call out, when I hear him getting up to help clear the table. 'Stay where you are.'
It was too hot to go shopping for supplies, so dessert, like our main course, is made out of ingredients from freezer and pantry staples. Another sign I'm slowing down – or perhaps simply shifting priorities. Once, nothing short of an earthquake would have stopped me from slogging around Mona Vale in search of fresh produce. Today it's mixed (frozen) berries cooked in a friend's homemade cranberry sauce (pantry) then poured over small cubes of brioche (freezer). On top, I've piled a heart attack amount of heavy cream lashed with honey melted with a whisky liqueur called Glayva.
