Friends Like These

by Wendy Harmer

  Most readers flipping the pages would be glad that the ‘bubbly’ and ‘fun-loving’ widow, tireless charity worker and social doyenne had found a second chance at happiness—and with the virile, ‘extremely well-connected’ businessman J.J. Blanchard, no less. Well, he was a noted philanthropist and still had a full head of hair. Look at them. What a great couple. Good for her! Good for him!

  As they turned to the real estate pages, most readers would have entirely forgotten that it was Mrs Blanchard who had been airbrushed out of the photo. If her name had rung a bell at all, it would have been with a hollow, dull clang.

  ‘I went past Darling Point this morning and I’ve still got this feeling that I’ve been excommunicated. It still upsets me. I just can’t seem to get past it,’ Jo admitted.

  Patrick grabbed his wine glass, leaped to his feet and energetically paced the courtyard as he spoke: ‘Bunch of stinking hypocrites! Believe me, there’s not one family at that entire college that isn’t hiding some filthy little secret. Your only sin was to name it in public. I’ll admit, it was a particularly theatrical way to go about it...’ he shot a look at Jo and her cheeks grew hot, ‘but you’re not the sinner, Jo. You’re the one sinned against.’

  Patrick surely spoke with some authority. After years of officiating at weddings and funerals, taking confessions and administering last rites, he knew, literally, where every body in the Eastern Suburbs was buried. He sat, lit another cigarette and puffed happily. ‘I reckon there’s more sneaking admiration out there for you than you know. I’ll bet half the silly tarts around here have raised a glass of French champagne to you in the past year.’

  Being the subject of salacious gossip at ladies’ luncheon parties over tiny plates of rocket salad and bottles of expensive wine wasn’t something Jo would have ever wished for. ‘Do you think I’ve done the right thing with agreeing to this commitment ceremony?’ she asked, to change the subject.

  ‘What?’ Clearly Patrick would have rather kept on discussing the scandal at hand, but for Jo it was like turning over a stinking compost heap. There was nothing further to be gleaned. Thankfully, he moved on. ‘The thing you have to find out is whether these two jokers are really committed to each other. That’s the point. Whether you feel comfortable with it and truly believe that they believe in the idea of a lifelong partnership.’

  Jo agreed. That was the point. Up to a point. In the end she wasn’t a clairvoyant. Who knew how long any marriage would last, civil, sacred or tribal?

  ‘I had this couple in the other night,’ Patrick went on. ‘They wanted the whole top-of-the-range Catholic job. I knew...

  I just knew—it made me so pissed off—that the only reason they wanted me and my church was because it would look good in the photos.’

  That was understandable, thought Jo. St Bernadette’s in Woollahra was a gorgeous birthday cake of rosy sandstone and spires, almost a Disneyland Sleeping Beauty castle, and the perfect backdrop for a ten-thousand-dollar bridal gown and a procession of pink Cadillacs.

  ‘As for the rest of it?’ Patrick was clearly agitated. ‘All that boring stuff about blessings and prayers, sacrament, eternity? They couldn’t give a rat’s arse. I sent them away in the end. Just told ’em to find another church. They’ll be ringing you next.’

  Jo opened her mouth to protest, but Patrick hadn’t finished. The twinkle in his eyes was now a sparking current of electricity. ‘You know me, Jo! You know how hard I’ve struggled with my chosen path day after day, night after lonely bloody night. And all of it to end up as some cheap ornament to a glittering social occasion?’

  Patrick was angry now. He snatched up the wine, upended it into his empty glass and then banged the bottle down on the wrought-iron table so hard Jo thought it might have cracked. ‘I never want to be something that’s hired along with the best man’s suit, the marquee and the table napkins! I’m not about to prostitute almost five hundred years of faith, sacrifice, brotherhood and intellectual life for a space in some crap photo album or a fancy picture on the social pages. But if you want to do that? It’s fine with me.’

  Jo was stunned. How had she been caught up in his angry rant? Was this what he really thought of her and her new enterprise as a civil celebrant? That she was there to somehow minister to the vain and insincere? The B-graders who didn’t qualify for the real thing? She was torn between mopping up Patrick’s blood and tending her own injuries.

  ‘It’s what you’re doing with this whole celebrant stuff, isn’t it?’ He rocked forward and stamped one boot then the other on the brick paving. ‘You want to look after the poor bastards who, for whatever reason, have decided not to take up the challenge of a full religious blessing.’

  Jo could feel her temper rising and was just about to give her own sermon on the state of modern faith, marriage and, as he himself had just said, the people who were excluded, when Patrick exclaimed: ‘Don’t answer that!’ He grabbed for Jo’s hands and squeezed them hard. It was as if he had reached right through her rib cage and taken hold of her heart. ‘I’m sorry.’ His head dropped onto his outstretched arms. ‘I’m just worn out. I’m exhausted. I had a big funeral this afternoon. She was only thirty-seven, three little kids. Ovarian cancer.’

  Patrick sighed again and the last crackles of energy dissipated into a deep weariness. ‘Are you sure you’re ready to do this?’ He looked up and for the first time Jo noticed by the light from the kitchen window there were wrinkles in his forehead etched deep and black. ‘Because sometimes I wonder if I can. It takes so much out of you. Sucks all your emotional energy. You give so much and you wonder what, exactly, you get back.’

  Jo was used to Patrick’s declarations of despair after he had buried a child or a young parent. Such events tested his faith mightily and she always carefully steadied him until he regained his balance.

  ‘What you have is faith.’ She eased her hands out of his grasp and circled his forearms with strong fingers. They had always supported each other by turns like this. ‘Deep and abiding faith and all the rewards that brings. Respect, belonging, certainty.

  ‘You’re lucky. Most people, no matter what they say, are envious you’ve found something that gives your life so much purpose and meaning. It’s what we’re all searching for and look at you...you’ve got it.’

  He nodded and sighed deeply, seeming to find some solace in Jo’s words. Sure that he was not going to fall any further, she released her hold.

  ‘You know why I want to be a celebrant, Patrick.’ She really needed him to hear it this time. ‘I spent so long where every moment was ruled by timetables and memos and forms. Where every human interaction was formalised. “I say this, you put your hand up and tell me the right answer. I give you a mark out of ten.”

  ‘Now I want to get out there and experience the real stuff. I want to be where there’s great joy or deep sorrow. Where people are really alive. I want to get to the heart of things. And if it “sucks my emotional energy”, that’s good. Because I’ve got a lot of it right now and no-one who wants it. I can’t go on feeling I’m useless like this. As for what I’ll get back? That’s the last thing I care about.’

  ‘You’re right. Of course you are,’ he agreed humbly. ‘“Teach us to give and not to count the cost,” that’s what St Ignatius of Loyola said. It’s a bloody hard lesson and takes a lifetime to learn. It’s my struggle. Thanks for reminding me.’ He ground out his cigarette. ‘Don’t listen to me. I’m talking nonsense. Look, I know what you’re on about and it’s a good thing. Really it is. Because the fact is, there are so few priests left that if it wasn’t for civil celebrants half the kids in Australia would be born out of wedlock and the only people saying words over graves would be parking officers.’

  Jo relaxed, smiled. Felt she’d made her point.

  ‘And you do have so much to give,’ he said. ‘I can see that. You’ll be magnificent at whatever you turn your talents to.’ He took up his glass of wine. ‘You’re coming closer to the church, Jo. I can feel it.�
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  ‘Don’t start that again!’ she complained. ‘I’ve got nothing to say to God right now.’

  ‘That’s fine. He’s patient.’

  Patrick leaned back and clasped his hands over his belt buckle, smiled, sure of himself, in a pose that reminded Jo of a happy, all-knowing Buddha. She didn’t have the heart to tell him that he would probably wait for her in vain at the Heavenly Gates, but she did want him to know that her affection for him was eternal.

  ‘I’ll say one thing,’ she said. ‘If I ever get married again, I’d want you to marry me.’

  Patrick grinned as he took a knife from the platter and hacked at a lump of cheese. ‘I’m celibate, Jo. I know you want my body but...’

  ‘You know what I mean!’ Jo pelted him with an olive. ‘Be married by you. Forget it! You’re not even in the race. You’re scratched!’

  ‘Poverty, chastity and obedience...Now there’s a trifecta!’ He sat back and raised his wine glass to her. Jo was reminded that he had also toasted her when she first left Darling Point. ‘Finally, you’ve left the cult,’ he had declared. ‘I thought the day would never come. Hallelujah!’

  There was a slam and a clatter from an upstairs balcony.

  ‘Fuck off!’ a female voice screamed.

  ‘Why don’t you just piss off, you shithead!’

  ‘Ah, yes!’ Patrick exhaled. ‘“Real life.” Welcome to it, Jojo!’ He leaned back, arms behind his head, and recited: ‘“How bright will seem through mem’ry’s haze, those happy, golden bygone days.”’

  ‘Sorry?’ said Jo.

  ‘Some rancid old school song. Most of them make the very good observation that life on the outside is a bun-fight and school is as good as it gets. It’s wasted on the students, of course. They’re too young and self-obsessed to get it. Most school songs are sung by pissed fat-gutted blokes at reunions who’ve squandered their potential and gone on to ruin their lives.’

  Jo thought of a line from the DPLC anthem: ‘Youth is brief and time is winging.’ That sentiment was appropriate for many of the mothers there who were desperately clinging on to their youth by any means possible. They were still in their ‘salad days’. That’s all they ever ate.

  But Patrick had made her revisit a persistent thought. Was it only now that she was graduating from Darling Point? Would she always think of her time there as the best days of her life? She had to trust that the best were yet to come, and right there resolved never again to stand morosely outside the front gates of the college.

  ‘Right! So you want to experience a bit of rough trade, do you?’ Patrick grinned. ‘How about giving me a hand serving lunch to the homeless derros, old girl?’

  I’m an ‘old girl’ alright, thought Jo. Maybe not a Darling Old Girl, but then, like Suze said, they can all go to hell.

  ‘Sign me up,’ she announced. ‘I’m all yours.’

  This time it was Jo who held up her glass, and by the light coming from next-door’s balcony, she could see that it was, unexpectedly, half full.

  Chapter Nine

  Jo closed the door behind Patrick at midnight and kicked off her flat shoes. She was always mindful of her height. It had been extremely useful when she wanted to tower over miscreant teenage girls, but another matter entirely when it came to adult men.

  Jo classified the fathers she had dealt with at DPLC into three categories—those who treated her equally and respected her as a professional; egotistical bullies who dismissed her as a hired governess; and those who sat in her office glassy-eyed and distracted as they imagined her thrashing their naughty bare bottoms with a bamboo cane.

  Sex. She was thinking about sex again. It was becoming a recurrent theme. The antsy frustrated energy and vague tingling of tender skin often propelled her out the door for a walk around the block, into a warm bath or to reach for a glass of wine. Of course, given her best friend was a priest, she should have asked Patrick how he coped with celibacy. She suspected that a close reading of the Gospel of St Matthew would be grimly recommended. She could never, in a month of Sundays, talk about sex with Patrick. As for Suze? She would probably drag Jo off to a sex shop in Kings Cross to purchase something in nasty pink plastic with batteries and an eco-friendly recharger.

  Jo hadn’t had sex for...she cast her mind back...almost two years. She too might as well have taken a vow of celibacy. How would sex ever happen again? Where and with whom?

  She couldn’t imagine being naked in front of a strange man, and, she realised, he would have to be a stranger. In the past thirty years she’d met, one way or another, almost every man in the east of Sydney—all of them acquaintances, clients, colleagues or family of someone she knew. Perhaps she should do a Shirley Valentine and leave a note on the kitchen bench: Gone to the Western Suburbs. Back in two weeks. Except, she remembered, there would be no-one to read it.

  Jo padded across her thick cream carpet to the kitchen sink and began rinsing glasses and plates while Calpurnia supervised from the bench. ‘So, we have a wedding to attend to,’ she said. Calpurnia rubbed up against her shoulder and purred by way of reply.

  She was surprised to find that she was mostly content to be living in the small unit with just Calpurnia for company. When she first moved in a year ago she had felt like a mouse in a cardboard box. Now, standing at the kitchen bench and scraping left-over salmon mousse into the cat’s bowl, Jo could survey her entire domain. There was a living room with full-length glass doors that slid open onto the courtyard. To her right a compact laundry; to her left a short corridor which led to a fair-sized bedroom and a bathroom and a second bedroom where Jo had set up her computer and bookshelves. It was all freshly painted, sun-filled, stylishly modern and, she had to admit, ‘easy to keep tidy’. Her mother would approve of that.

  A few good pieces of furniture from her former life at Parklea were crammed into the unit. A handsome rosewood dresser, a satinwood cabinet, a pair of mahogany side tables furnished with two lamps with Tiffany shades and her lovely oak table. There was her most cherished artwork—a small Margaret Preston woodcut of a burst of creamy rock lilies with spiky olive-coloured leaves—and a treasured collection of paintings, drawings, small sculptures and bric-a-brac.

  Then there were Jo’s own paintings, only a few of which she thought accomplished enough to be on display. They were the best ones from the innumerable outdoor art classes she had taken with her students on the lawns at Darling Point. An oil of a green and gold ferry ploughing across Sydney Harbour to the landing at the bottom of the grounds; two watercolours of St Anne’s chapel with the rose garden in riotous bloom; and a tidy portrait of the school itself, its gracious honeyed curves warm and welcoming in the late-summer sun.

  She had made a cosy home for herself and Calpurnia and there was room for the children if they came to stay. In fact, she was so comfortable that she doubted she would move to somewhere grander when her financial settlement from JJ was negotiated. And she really must talk to him about that.

  ‘Aren’t you still married to that bastard husband of yours?’

  Jo was. The past year had gone by so quickly and neither of them had called in the lawyers. Jo was still bruised and didn’t have the courage for it. The two times she had rung JJ’s secretary, he was away or busy and she’d been relieved she didn’t have to speak to him. She had been attending training for her celebrancy certificate whenever he called. And so here they were, twelve months on, irrevocably parted, but still shackled by various uncomprehending computer databases that addressed them as ‘Mr and Mrs JJ & J Blanchard.’

  What could she expect from their settlement? Jo had no idea. Money—who was worth what—had been the currency of gossip for so much of her life at Darling Point that Jo had resolved never to ask after the family finances. It had been drummed into her from childhood that discussing money was ‘vulgar’, and she had never heard her parents make mention of it. Even the value of the humble contributions to the wooden plate at St Luke’s had been kept secret. So she had never asked. But what
she knew of JJ’s business dealings—and she assumed that, along with his two successful car yards, he’d made something of a success of his new career in property development—she could reasonably expect to receive enough money to make her ‘independently wealthy’. Only she didn’t care so much about the ‘wealthy’ bit. She had some savings and if they ran out she could always go back to teaching or take up some new profession. It was the ‘independent’ part that troubled her. It was just another way of saying she was alone.

  Calpurnia nibbled on the scrapings of mousse and Jo, haunted by the afternoon’s exchange about spinster witches and black cats, changed into her pink silk pyjamas (an extravagant birthday present from Suze). She poured herself the dregs of the dessert wine and sat in front of her computer.

  There was a ping that indicated she had mail. Her first thought was that it would be a message from James—he would be up and about in London at this hour. Her heart thumped with excitement as she read:

  Hi Mum,

  I’ve made a big decision. I know Dad will be disappointed, but I’m not going on with business school here this year. I’m going to take some time to travel.

  The most amazing thing happened to me yesterday.

  I went to visit Westminster Abbey and I felt something incredibly powerful. I felt like God was calling me. I want to find out if serving Christ is my true purpose in life.

  I have decided to visit some other beautiful churches and temples in the world to think about it all over the next month.

  I want to go to France next and see Notre Dame and Chartres Cathedral. I’ll need some more $$$. I know you would want me to follow my heart, whatever the cost.

  Love,

  James

  Jo read and reread his email. It came as something of a shock that her son should be off on some kind of religious treasure hunt. It didn’t seem that long since she’d hidden Easter eggs in his slippers.