The Lost Love Song

by Minnie Darke

  ‘I’m so sorry. This is really not . . . look, I can’t explain everything right now. There’s a woman in a car outside my house. She’s . . . look, she’s not . . . it’s nothing like you might think, but she just can’t see you. Not right now. Not . . . tonight.’

  Evie felt as if she’d been lying in a warm bath, and then someone had sucked away all the water at some incredible speed. Her limbs felt suddenly heavy, and her skin cold.

  ‘There’s a woman in a car outside your house,’ she repeated, ‘and she can’t . . . see me?’

  ‘Not tonight she can’t. Another time it would be different, maybe. Evie, can you just cut me some slack here? I have to go see to her, okay? I just need five minutes.’

  Evie tried to remain calm and to be understanding, but her brain was having trouble pulling all the pieces of this situation together. Five minutes. Did he need five minutes alone with the woman, and then he’d come back? Or did he mean something else?

  ‘I don’t understand. What exactly are you asking me to do?’

  ‘I am so sorry. I know this is entirely shabby. Worse than shabby. I need you to get out of the car, and just give me five minutes. Just wait here for five minutes until I can take her inside. That’s all I need. Just five clear minutes. Then you can just walk back to your place.’

  ‘I can walk back to my place?’ Evie said, her sense of humiliation beginning to override her desire to understand. ‘Can I just? You give me permission? Thanks a million.’

  ‘Please, Evie. I can explain everything, but not right now. If she’s here, she’ll be a mess. I’m so sorry. Please?’

  Evie nodded, because really what else was there for her to do? There wasn’t anything, she realised. Or at least, nothing dignified. She reached for the door handle.

  ‘Thank you for a lovely dinner,’ she said tersely.

  ‘I’m sorry, Evie.’

  ‘So you keep saying.’

  Evie stepped out into the street and closed the car door behind her, being careful not to slam it. She slung her small handbag – containing nothing but the house keys, her wallet and a lipstick – over her shoulder, and crossed her arms against her chest.

  The late-night breeze that rolled down the cross-street blew easily through the thin fabric of her cotton top as it fully dawned on her that she was standing alone in the street, while the man she thought she was about to go home with made a tight U-turn and drove away from her.

  Evie’s watch told her only that it was a few minutes to five o’clock. Its hands would not move in the next five minutes, or ever again, and since Evie had no phone to tell her the time, she had no way of measuring the minutes, except within herself.

  She went up the cross-street, but no matter how fast she marched only one part of her was warm, and that was her flaming cheeks. She continued until it seemed like a good idea to turn left, and then walked some more, sending a cat on the footpath streaking away underneath a car at the sound of her footsteps. So much for her prophecy. There was nothing simple about this situation after all. Nothing.

  Evie walked for a long time, until she had eventually traced a wide circle that brought her back to the bakery on the corner of Tavistock Row. From there, she could see the stretch of street outside 12 and 12A. There was no sign of Arie or the woman on the footpath or in his front yard. The white car was still parked on the street, its interior light now switched off; the Renault was parked directly behind it. As Evie approached on soft feet, all was quiet, all was peaceful, and it seemed to her in that moment that everything was in its place and as it should be. Except for her. As she had been so many times before, she was the extra piece, the wrong piece, the piece that didn’t fit.

  AT NUMBER 12 Tavistock Row, Belinda Clare sat in the middle of an armchair, her thin body compressed into a posture that seemed designed to minimise her even further – feet together, shoulders tight, elbows resting on her knees, chin in her hands. Her eyes were rimmed red, and there were crumpled tissues on the coffee table next to a mug of milky tea that had gone cold.

  Several times over the last hour she’d said the same thing, in various ways, through tears: ‘I just wish we’d been able to bury her. I hate having to think of her at the bottom of that bloody ocean. I hate that we lost every part of her.’ But Arie had been able to do nothing for her pain but brew the tea, place a box of tissues within easy reach, and search out the pillows and sheets and blankets needed to make up the sofa bed.

  Finally, Belinda’s tears had stopped, and Arie had put on some music. It was Arvo Pärt’s ‘Spiegel im Spiegel’, which Diana had recorded with her cellist friend, Naomi Koh. Out of all Diana’s recordings, this was perhaps Arie’s favourite, and it was the most soothing thing he could think of to play for Belinda this night.

  Diana had once told him that the name of the piece meant ‘mirror in the mirror’, and she had made him pay attention to the progressions of notes and the way they moved away from each other, then converged again, like mirror images, although they were subtly different each time.

  The long, slow bowing of the cello and the simple sequences from the piano – which sounded like soft plinks of dripping water – flowed around and through him, and Arie remembered Diana’s pale wrists rising and falling, and the way she closed her eyes as she played, making herself into a conduit between the place the music came from, wherever that was, and the ears of the listener.

  Pärt’s composition was gentle and inexpressibly sad, and as it played Arie’s thoughts shifted to Evie. This house and the neighbouring one were separated by nothing but a single wall, a handspan’s worth of paint, plaster and brick, and for all he knew she could well be in the mirror-image living room, only metres away from him.

  He could see how it must have looked through her eyes: a woman in a car outside his house, his panic, the shameful way he’d driven her around the corner and left her there. If he’d thought calmly for a moment instead of reacting blindly, he could have handled the situation in a hundred different ways. A hundred better ways. He knew he needed to apologise and explain. But how? And when? Tonight, Belinda would be here, and tomorrow – Diana’s birthday – was spoken for.

  On the stereo, ‘Spiegel im Spiegel’ slowed to a halt. Arie remembered that although Diana had generally not liked music without what she called a ‘proper’ ending, this was a piece for which she had been prepared to make an exception.

  ‘I don’t think you’re meant to believe that it really does end there,’ she’d told him. ‘I think you’re meant to believe that it goes on and on, forever and ever, although maybe in another room.’

  In the wake of the cello and the piano, the room fell silent.

  After a moment, Belinda said, ‘It wasn’t me, you know.’

  Arie didn’t know. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘It wasn’t me. I was never the musical one,’ Belinda said, and Arie felt something opening between them. Something new. ‘She didn’t get the music from me. She got it from her father.’

  ‘You’ve never talked about Diana’s father,’ he said carefully. ‘Diana never talked about her father.’

  ‘No, she didn’t. She went easy on me,’ Belinda said. ‘She asked me about him only once, and I told her what I could. After that, she dropped it. It was this strange, tacit thing. She just . . . left it alone. We had each other, and that seemed to be enough.’

  The questions in Arie’s head wrestled with each other to be the first in line. Who? When? Where? How?

  Belinda bit her thumbnail, and a small spark crept into her eyes. ‘I met him in a pub when I was travelling around the country with a girlfriend. In her panel van, if that tells you something about the time in my life it was.’

  Arie tried to imagine a young Belinda on a road trip. Sandy feet on vinyl seats. The smell of coconut-scented sunscreen. Pulling on tight jeans in a space where it’s impossible to stand up, laughing.

  ‘Did he ever know about her?’

  ‘No. Never, nothing.’

  ‘You don’t ever think o
f looking him up?’

  ‘I don’t know that I could.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘I don’t have much to go on.’

  ‘How much is not much?’

  ‘He played in a band, and his name was Rory. Don’t look at me like that, Arie. I was so young.’

  ‘I’m not looking at you like anything,’ Arie protested.

  ‘You are.’

  ‘All right, maybe I am,’ he said, risking a smile. ‘It’s just that I hadn’t pegged you for a groupie. I’m trying to imagine you in a mosh pit.’

  ‘He was pretty gorgeous,’ Belinda said, with a smidge of pride.

  ‘And you’ve really never thought of finding him?’

  ‘When she was alive there was never any need. She never pressed me about it. And now, after everything that’s happened, it seems like a pretty miserable thing to do. What would I tell him? You had a beautiful, talented daughter. But you’ll never meet her.’

  Belinda let this thought hover for a moment, then said, ‘I should let you get to bed.’

  ‘Want a hand with that sofa?’

  ‘No, I’m fine with it.’

  ‘Well, night then.’

  Arie stood, and as he passed Belinda on the way to the stairs, another to-hug-or-not-to-hug moment passed between them, resulting in Arie making an awkward gesture that was somewhere between a salute and a wave. When he was almost out of the room, she said, ‘Arie, I do know this isn’t how you planned to spend your evening.’

  Arie, feeling a little stab of guilt, looked back to scan her face, but it didn’t appear that she was referring to any specific circumstances; she had only meant to say that she was sorry if she had inconvenienced him.

  ‘It’s fine. Really.’

  ‘I know I’m fortunate,’ she said. ‘That you’re here for me.’

  ‘Always,’ he said, and while he meant it, he also suspected there was a mismatch between her expectations of him and what he could truly promise. One day, he knew, he was going to disappoint her. It had almost happened tonight.

  No music played in the living room of 12A. All Evie could hear, as she stood looking at her map of Australia, was the faint electronic hum of appliances and the swoosh of her own blood in her ears.

  Either the map was large or the table was small – or both – because the northern tips of the Australian land-mass listed off the edge of the table and drooped, Dalí-esque, towards the floor. The four markers she had pushed into the paper were still there, but now Evie removed the small star from Esperance. It was such a far-away place, and tonight the prospect of crossing the entire country and setting herself up in a town where she knew nothing, and nobody, only made her feel unbearably weary.

  For much the same reason, she plucked the silver moon from Bellingen. All the adventure had gone out of her. Now, what she really wanted was a safe, warm burrow in which to curl up, away from the world.

  In the past hour, Evie’s thoughts had already done several circuits of the same set of thoughts, and they began again now. First came the questions. Who was the woman in the car? And why had Arie not wanted her to see Evie? Then came the assumptions. Obviously, the woman was someone who would take a dim view of Arie being out for dinner with Evie, not to mention kissing her. Was she his lover? Or one of his many lovers, for that matter?

  After that came the tempering thoughts. She shouldn’t make assumptions; she didn’t know all the facts; Arie didn’t owe her anything. They had gone out to dinner together, that was all. One kiss was hardly a diamond ring. Men who were divorced or widowed – they never stayed single for long. Evie knew that. For a lot of women, a grieving man was a special kind of emotional challenge – a real fixer-upper. A man in Arie’s situation? Women probably threw themselves at him.

  Evie was well aware that dating more than one person at a time was a thing people did, although she had never done it herself. She was, and always had been, an all-or-nothing kind of person, to the point where an ex-boyfriend had once described her as ‘one of those girls who bring their furniture along with them on the second date’.

  Then the questions started up again. If Arie had been comfortable with whatever he was doing – if he was just playing the field in a way that seemed reasonable to him – then why had he reacted so? Why take Evie around the corner and leave her there unless he was ashamed of something? Or afraid of something? She didn’t know, and maybe she would never know, because she certainly wasn’t going to go next door and ask. Not tonight, not tomorrow, not ever.

  There was one thing, though, that she was sure about: whatever there was, or had fleetingly been, between herself and Arie Johnson, it wasn’t simple. Not at all.

  With some effort, Evie turned her attention back to the map. Melbourne or Hobart? Big city or small city? Edge of the continent or south of the island? Here or there?

  Not here, her heart said. There is nothing for you here.

  The decision was made.

  Half an hour later, she and the Beetle were booked on the Monday sailing of the Bass Strait ferry. Five more days and she’d be on her way.

  Now the computer clock read close to midnight, but Evie knew Reuben had a habit of sitting up late at night trawling the internet and listening to songs by obscure bands on YouTube. She still hadn’t organised her phone service. It was on her never-ending list of things to do, to choose an Australian provider and get herself a local SIM card. In the absence of a phone, she launched Skype.

  While the familiar chimes rang, Evie tried to find a flattering camera angle for her face, but before she could – and knowing that such a thing was probably mythical, anyway – the screen opened like a doorway into the living room at Rumsfeld Street. There was Reuben, with his rockabilly sideburns, two-day stubble and lopsided quiff of sandy hair.

  ‘Eve-star!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘Hey, Roo.’

  ‘How’s things, girl?’

  ‘Not bad. Not bad.’

  Stella appeared at Reuben’s shoulder in her pyjamas, her face red from being washed and shiny with before-bed moisturiser.

  ‘Hello, love!’ Stella said. ‘It’s pretty late. Everything okay?’

  ‘Fine, fine. It’s just, I’ve got news and I thought you would want to be the first to know.’

  In tandem, Reuben and Stella asked, ‘What?’

  ‘I’m coming home.’

  It did Evie good to see these slightly pixelated versions of Stella and Reuben high-fiving each other with joy, but it didn’t entirely take away the ache that had settled in her heart. With every beat she was reminded, not quite enough, not quite enough, not quite enough.

  DIANA’S BIRTHDAY HAD come and gone. Now it was Thursday evening, and Arie – head bowed in thought – was standing at the front door of 12A Tavistock Row. In one hand he held a box that was wrapped in marbled paper and tied with a ribbon. The other hand was poised in readiness to knock, its knuckles suspended a short distance from the timber. He had been standing there like that long enough to feel as though he were a living statue.

  Ideally, he’d have come over and done this before now. But it was impossible, he told himself, in the same breath that he argued back, Actually, you just didn’t make it possible. In his lunch hour, he’d gone to a florist. Looking around at the display, he’d realised he didn’t know what kinds of flowers Evie liked, or what kinds she didn’t like, so he’d walked out without buying anything.

  After that he’d gone from shop to shop with the vague hope that he would catch sight of something that would say ‘I’m sorry’ in a way so perfect Evie would have no choice but to forgive him. Unsurprisingly, he found no such irresistible thing, although in a shop full of intricate model ships in bottles, an idea did occur to him. It had taken him the rest of the afternoon to find and make all of its parts.

  The box felt light in his hand, and Arie didn’t know how Evie would receive its contents – whether she would write it off as a cheap gesture, or if she would understand. Overwhelmingly, he felt like walking away, fa
cing this at another time, or on another day, but he knew that he had to do it now. Tomorrow, he would set off on the long drive north to Heidi’s wedding.

  He took a deep breath. Then another. And knocked.

  Silent seconds passed before Arie heard distant noises that eventually became the sound of bare feet on floorboards. When Evie opened the door, it was only to the extent that a chain-lock might allow, although no such thing was in place. She leaned against the wall inside, her calves bare below the skirt of a patchwork dress, and her hair once again held back with a scarf. Her face was completely free of make-up so that he could see the freckles on her nose and cheekbones.

  In her expression he detected hurt, anger, and reservation.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, and that same mixture of emotion was audible in her voice. There was something else too, though. Something that gave Arie heart. As well as everything else, she was – he could see – curious.

  ‘I’ve come to apologise,’ Arie said. ‘To explain.’

  She raised her chin slightly, as if to say, Go on, then.

  ‘Could I come in, do you think?’

  He watched her features subtly shift as she considered this. Then, without saying any more, she opened the door wider.

  Evie reached the dining room ahead of Arie, wishing that she was better at nonchalance – that her heart did not speed up at the slightest prospect of awkwardness, that her hands didn’t shake when she felt nervous, that she wasn’t so prone to blushing at the slightest provocation. She looked around the dining room for anything that needed clearing away. If she couldn’t be inscrutable, she might at least stop her environment from giving too much away.

  She was pleased that her dinner dishes were washed and stacked in the drainer, and that the music on the stereo was none of the compilations of schmaltzy ballads she’d been listening to in the past couple of days. It took her only a moment to fold up the map that still lay on the table.

  ‘Have a seat,’ she said, gesturing to one of a pair of white leather wing-back chairs.