A Grand Passion

by Anne De Lisle

  When Georgie moves into the Babies’ Room, she moves in with her mother. Besides the cluster of photos I had expected, there is a cushion on the bed with her mother’s face superimposed onto the fabric, and the book written by a family friend detailing Jenny’s battle with cancer takes centre place on the dressing table. I’m not sure whether Georgie really needs these props, or whether she is simply sending me a message.

  We are all in new territory, thrown into a situation none of us have encountered before or had ever expected to encounter. We all tread carefully, negotiating the eggshells, but secretly I’m optimistic about the future. We are all adults. We are all sane. Nobody wants to be miserable. I can see no reason why things will not travel smoothly.

  I knew Georgie’s mother through my many years in Montville. Ian’s happy life with her made him the cheerful sort of man he always will be and for that I’m very grateful. I have no problem talking about Jenny with Ian when he needs to, or with anyone else for that matter. Wendy Ellerker, my oldest friend from school, set me straight on the subject before I’d even had time to fully consider it: ‘If you want someone without baggage, Anne, you’ll have to find a twenty-year-old virgin.’

  She’s so right, but then Wendy always is.

  The only time my confidence in my relationship with Ian wavers is when someone makes me feel that I am where I shouldn’t be, or that I have usurped the place of another, more valued human being.

  I feel immeasurably sad for Jenny that she died. The last time I saw her, she told me that the one thing she couldn’t bear was the thought of not seeing her grandchildren. Even today, this memory is enough to choke me with sadness. All the more so given that, though neither of us realised it at the time, it would be I, not her, who would know her grandchildren. It fills me with a great sense of responsibility. Sometimes I can’t help wondering whether she did somehow know what would happen. It was odd that she mentioned her future grandchildren to me when we didn’t really know each other that well. It came as a comment out of the blue one day when I hadn’t seen her for more than a year.

  Twice I’ve had graphic dreams about Jenny.

  Once was a sweet, calm sort of dream, in which she and I were sitting on a wall together, arm in arm. No words were exchanged, but there was a huge sense of comfort and unity. I woke from this dream awash with confidence and contentment.

  The other time, following a rare argument with Ian, I dreamed I was shouting at Jenny to come and sort him out. I remember feeling furious with her for leaving and letting him become my problem.

  I discuss these dreams with Ian. It’s strange that I’m the one to have the dreams of Jenny when Ian does not.

  The first few days go well. Ian is with us and we muck around the house, make good food, swig champagne and mutter our daily lament over the absence of the underpinners.

  Wednesday looms. Ian will be gone for two nights and three days. Georgie and I stand side by side waving Ian goodbye. Suddenly he’s gone and it’s just us. Ian’s really worried and I’ve promised to ring him as soon as I’m able.

  I wonder what we’re going to do all day. Of course there is always sanding and painting. The old scullery, first on our list, beckons, plus the other trillion and a half things to do to the house. But overshadowing this there is Us.

  We go inside for a cup of tea. We have something to eat. We chat. We quickly discover a mutual love of food, a fear of getting fat, a history of yoyo dieting. We decide to go for a brisk walk together every morning.

  Day one rolls on. We start to giggle, to tell each other things. I’m amazed at the speed of our opening up to each other. Perhaps it’s nerves, perhaps it’s the mutual desire for things to work out. I’m more buoyed up than I have been for ages.

  Before leaving Montville, I lost my best friend. It wasn’t that she died, but I lost her nonetheless. It has gone down as one of the biggest sadnesses of my life. What happened was simple enough, and has probably happened a million other times to a million other women, but it seemed to me at the time that none could have been as unhappy as I was.

  My friend’s husband was the possessor of a somewhat roving eye. Mine was the shoulder she cried on when his eye was caught by a pretty face. This had been going on for years, and it was an education to me to see how unfaithfulness did not have to involve acts of sex. It was awful to see how much pain could be caused by his casting of an admiring glance or by his voicing one misplaced compliment too many. There was nothing my friend could do to stop these tendencies but shun those women who had caught her husband’s eye. The list of the shunned was not a short one.

  I hated him for making her so unhappy. I never dreamed the dreaded eye would fall my way. I didn’t even notice it when it did. But my friend noticed. All of a sudden, the wonderful, eccentric, volatile, creative creature I had so loved, turned in all its fury on me. She did not accuse me of acting to encourage the eye, yet could not bear to have me in her presence. I was cut from her life, told never to cross her path again. When her daughter invited me to her wedding, I was told to stay away.

  It was bewildering. It was agony. She had meant the world to me, had supported me through my divorce, was my best friend, my sister and my mother all rolled into one. I felt as though my mother had cast me aside because my father had looked at me inappropriately.

  It was a double agony for the injustice of it all.

  She left a gaping hole in my life. Now, this gaping hole has been filled by Georgie.

  Georgie and I decide to take Topsy with us on our morning walks. Topsy is a blue cattle dog, an outdoor working-in-the-paddock-with-Ian sort of a dog. Belying her age and weight, she’s comfortable jumping in and out of utes, hunting snakes, being on the run and loose all day. She’s not used to being on a leash and doing domestic dog stuff.

  We find a rope and slip it through her collar, to act as the leash we haven’t yet got around to buying. Georgie and I take turns holding her as we set out on our circuit of the nearby golf course.

  Topsy is heavy, strong and totally unaccustomed to the restraint. She’s also unaccustomed to the other dogs we pass on our path: good, obedient little pets, trotting neatly at their master’s heels. Topsy, who is strangely timid of anything on two legs, reveals a hitherto unsuspected desire to lunge at and kill anything on four.

  It gets embarrassing. We brace ourselves every time we see someone approach with another dog. We get four hands on her rope, flex our muscles, ready ourselves for a tug-of-war.

  A man approaches with the biggest rottweiler I’ve ever seen in my life. Its head is about a foot across, its shoulders as thick as Ian’s. We try to steer clear, clutching Topsy’s hastily shortened rope. Rottweiler Man must read panic on our faces and smiles reassuringly as he and his leashed monster draw near. ‘Don’t worry,’ he says, ‘my dog’s not aggressive.’

  We are almost past, almost breathing again when Topsy, with great cunning, astonishing athleticism and perfect timing, leaps, twisting in mid-air to land on the rottweiler’s back, her teeth at its throat.

  The rottweiler is so startled by this unprovoked attack it doesn’t retaliate; just stands there while Topsy, in a frenzy of teeth, saliva and rabid growling, does her best to rip its trachea out.

  Georgie and I are screaming at Topsy and tugging on the rope with all our might to prise her free, which we eventually manage, suffering rope burns to our hands and shame on our faces.

  We stammer apologies to Rottweiler Man, who just stares open-mouthed at us. We slink off. It is Topsy’s first and last walk round the golf course.

  ‘Keegan’s got his eye on you,’ I tell Georgie one morning. Keegan is the floor sander’s apprentice who won’t dare remain in the house alone. He always waits outside, safe from ghosts, if his employer has to duck into town for something.

  We giggle and carry on. I know that Georgie has met someone in Sydney who no number of hunky or un-hunky apprentices will tempt her away from, but I’m experiencing a second adolescence and loving it. I can’t resist t
easing her and she teases me back.

  She laughs at what she sees as my strange ways. My habit of never stepping outside for so much as a second without a broad-brimmed hat and a long-sleeved shirt. My excessive punctuality, my fear of authority and getting into trouble. She doubles over in hysterics when we’re out one day. We are supposed to be at home painting but, when Ian is away, Georgie and I develop the habit of making illicit excursions from our duties. We’ve driven the half-hour to Hervey Bay – which, as a bigger town, is home to more shops than Maryborough – and are in a chain store’s lolly department, where you can pick up a carton the size of a potato sack and fill it to overflowing with assorted treats packed with fats, sugars, colours and other delicious poisons.

  She dares me to eat one before my carton has been weighed and paid for.

  ‘Go on,’ she urges. ‘Dad and I do it all the time.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I bleat self-righteously. ‘Your father might encourage such dishonesty, but mine would roll in his grave if he suspected I’d do such a thing.’

  ‘Just one,’ she prods.

  I look over my shoulder. I’m tempted. I know I’m going about it all wrong, drawing attention to myself by looking guilty. I eat one.

  The next second the P.A. system barks out: ‘Security! Security to Aisle 3!’

  I choke on my caramel and almost drop my precious carton. ‘What aisle is this?’ I croak, caramel cube lodged against my larynx.

  Georgie is weeping with laughter, totally beyond speech, and I quickly realise that it’s just a horrible coincidence.

  I slink to the check-out and pay for my remaining lollies, making a mental note to keep out of the shop for a good six months.

  Ian, Georgie and I start to host lunch parties in our cracked, peeling dining room. My Englishness makes me amazed that people are willing to drive the two hours here and two hours home just for lunch. My mother thinks twice about the forty-minute drive from her Cotswold village to Oxford once a year to do her Christmas shopping. It’s a major excursion. A long haul. Not to be undertaken lightly. Two hours for lunch? Imagine driving for two hours and having a cheese sandwich shoved in front of you. It instils great responsibility in me to produce decent food.

  Luckily Georgie is a keen cook too and between us we create feasts for our friends. We get lots of visitors from Montville, including the swimming girls, who make up for disappointment over the predator-riddled nature of our river with an extra glass of wine and slice of pudding. But our first lunch guests are David and Allie.

  David, Ian’s nephew, is a fit, muscly, sporty young man, so we make him earn his lunch by helping Ian carry the piano out of the dining room in anticipation of the day we start painting.

  Not that we can paint until after the underpinning, but I’ve already plastered the dining room walls with the contents of about six tester pots of red paint. I’ve been determined from the start that the dining room should be red, and luckily Ian’s just as keen. But which red? I don’t want it maroon or plummy, and the bright pillar box reds look awful. One red looks like we’ve daubed the walls in blood. My secret favourite is the colour of raspberries but next to the others it looks almost pink. There have been murmurs of disapproval from Ian over the possibility of pink walls. We live with our assorted red splodges for weeks, so get plenty of opportunity for feedback.

  All these lunches finish up with rich puddings so Georgie and I keep going with our morning walks. We talk and talk as we do our circuit around the golf course. She asks me about my family, the years surrounding my marriage break up. We talk about her mother a lot, about the happy pre-illness days, about Georgie’s childhood, about the tough years of her mother’s illness. We talk about death, we talk about reincarnation and whether we want to believe in it or not.

  We decide we’d like to believe in it, but are not sure if we can. It’s also a bit of a worry, we agree, about where and with whom you might get reincarnated. We know we’ve lived safe lives with families who love and are loved. It’s a big, bad world out there, and if reincarnation is totally random, we shudder to think of the possibilities. ‘Perhaps people who’ve known each other once cluster together,’ I suggest. ‘Perhaps we all pop up in each others lives again and again and again. Maybe you and I have known each other before and that’s why we felt natural together from the start.’

  We find this a happy thought.

  I tell her of a weird dream I had about meeting my father, who died about a month before her mother. No doubt some would say I had experienced more than a dream.

  It happened in the midst of a very difficult time of my life. My father had just died, I was newly divorced, I’d just lost my best friend and was being plagued by several other, more minor dramas. I’d had the worst of bad days, battling feelings of being unable to cope with all that was being thrown at me. Sleep was impossible. Thoughts tormented me into the early hours when, on the cusp of sleep, I felt as though I was floating up and out of my body. I was sure I was conscious, yet couldn’t move or control what was happening. Briefly, I looked down at my sleeping body before floating up and out of the window.

  The night sky dazzled, and I was soaring toward it. Suddenly I was in amongst the brilliance, stars zooming past me like an asteroid shower. It was an amazing feeling, one I would do anything to recreate. I was up in the mists of Orion’s belt, conqueror of the heavens, nothing could touch or harm me again – when everything abruptly went still, the zooming stopped and I was surrounded by an ocean of shadowy faces. Across the throng, I saw my father’s face and I stretched out one arm. His fingers caught mine and, for an all too brief moment, we clung. Then his hand slipped away and everything happened in reverse. Back through the asteroid shower at astonishing speed, back home and back to my supine body.

  I woke in the morning feeling strong, calm, and capable of taking on the world.

  I begin to realise that Georgie and I cope with grief in very different ways. I don’t need to surround myself with the physical trappings of my grief, the photos and mementos, as much as she does. With me it’s all locked up in my head. There is, I feel sure, no right way or wrong way. It’s an individual thing, perhaps influenced by age, perhaps by personality. I am no longer bothered that the Babies’ Room has become a shrine to her mother.

  With so much time to talk, Georgie and I leave no stone unturned. I believe it is really therapeutic for us both.

  CHAPTER 9

  ELECTRICS AND OTHER MATTERS

  THREE WEEKS LATER, we’re still waiting for the underpinners. Ian finds the frustration harder than I do because he was born with a desire for everything to be done yesterday. He’s like a caged beast, pacing the house, making phone calls, huffing and puffing and stamping his feet. We console ourselves by getting on with what little we can.

  Cyril, our new-found relation-in-law (thrice removed) is a regular presence. He’s been chipping away at endless repairs since we moved in. He has fixed loose skirting boards, replaced missing skirting boards, repaired vandalised fireplaces and rotten window frames. He has mended the cut-in-half door.

  Countless times when an apparently insurmountable problem arises, Cyril says, ‘let me think about it,’ and every time he comes up with a solution. Perhaps his brain is stimulated by the numerous cups of tea we share.

  Nothing can be hung on the walls. We learn this very quickly when our largest and most valuable painting comes crashing down, taking a fist-sized lump of plaster with it and smashing a precious Chinese bowl on the sideboard below that had belonged to my mother. Miraculously the painting escapes serious damage. It slams down onto the sideboard then slumps forward onto the back of a sofa. There is minor scratching to the canvas from shards of the shattered bowl, nothing that can’t be repaired. We are slow to catch on. We hang it again with a bigger hook. This time it lasts for a week before crashing down, nearly collecting Georgie.

  We discover that, though the brick walls are solid, the plaster covering them is extremely thick and extremely crumbly. Even the lig
htest of pictures has to be attached with a mammoth Dynabolt driven deep into the solid brickwork. Cyril hangs our oversized painting by driving about six Dynabolts through a wooden mount and into the depths of the wall, before attaching the painting to the mount.

  We can’t do a great deal else. We know the underpinning will crack the plaster, maybe even break a window or two, but there is one other thing we can tackle, and that is the electricity problem.

  Apart from the need to re-wire, there are nowhere near enough power points in the house. Some rooms have none. Baddow was, of course, built before the days of domestic electricity supply. But even though the house was later connected, it’s as though when those early electricians first came to Baddow they took one look, threw their hands up and said too hard let’s not bother here.

  Calvin Hannam, electrician extraordinaire, enters our lives.

  Calvin is slender, agile, ingenious and brave. He’s willing to negotiate the darkest, scariest places. He smokes like a chimney, but only outside the house, and drinks his coffee very black and strong enough to stand the spoon up in. He needs his coffee so, in the interests of both human kindness and of a task well done, I make sure a steady supply is on tap.

  The job is a nightmare for him, but he never complains. He performs acts above and beyond the call of duty, squeezing through tiny crevices to get under the floor and dragging himself around on his elbows like a commando, tools of the trade clamped between his teeth. He goes where no man has gone for a very long time and discovers hundreds of metres of mysterious wiring that seem to have been placed without logic or method. These have to be traced, identified, removed if they are obsolete, replaced if in use. It’s pitch black down there, so we feed torches and lamps to him, but we don’t join him.

  Ian doubts that he’d fit through the hole in the floor. He might lodge halfway and never get out. I suspect I’d fit, but there’s no way on earth I’m entering the bowels of Baddow House. God knows what could be down there. I’m thinking trapdoors to tunnels, rats, pythons, toads, cockroaches and a trillion other creepy crawlies. And I’m thinking the body of Baby Joey Aldridge who, we’ve been told on good authority, is buried under the house somewhere. He died at six months of age and was buried in the part of the garden that our house was later built on. We admire Calvin hugely.