by AnonYMous
Once a year she would visit our parents, although never at Christmas, which was a relief. The only time Lori had come at Christmas, she had rebuked us for drinking champagne and sat grimly at lunch, without talking, as the rest of us pulled crackers and made rude remarks about turkeys.
It wasn’t that we were disrespectful of Lori’s religious beliefs; far from it. But as I once tried to explain to her, it was important to find joy in life, too. Lori had shaken her head when I said this, and rather than let old grievances surface—such as the way she had always ignored Sergei, on the rare occasions when we saw her, snorting at his accent whenever he spoke—I dropped the subject immediately.
Eve and Lili had similarly tried to get through to our sister, without success. Only once, when she suddenly turned up unexpectedly in Sydney and asked if she could come and stay for a few days did I wonder whether she might be lonely. But when I broached the subject as delicately as I could, she took great offence and once again I backed off. She startled me, though, by saying that she was considering becoming a nun. However, this hadn’t eventuated.
‘I’ll ring Lori before I go back,’ said Lili uncomfortably. ‘It’s too late to talk to her now, anyway.’
Which was true. We turned to other subjects in relief.
My spirits lifted, having Lili in the house. We took her out somewhere different every night, with the result that she begged Sergei to take her to the gym with him before she went off to stay for a few days with our parents who still lived on the peninsula north of Sydney.
‘I haven’t done any exercise all week, except pour myself huge glasses of champagne,’ Lili quipped.
The following afternoon—a Wednesday—I dropped her off at the gym at 4 p.m. Sergei had organised for Lili to check in as his guest, and would meet her there later, after work. Then I went home to begin cooking. Some friends were going to join the three of us for dinner.
When my sister walked through the door a couple of hours later, I knew immediately that something was up.
‘A weird thing happened,’ she said as soon as Sergei had disappeared to take a shower. ‘I went to the room where all the exercise machines were. The place was pretty much deserted. There was just some guy, and a girl who was leaving, and me. I was on the cross-trainer when a woman came in on her own. She just stood there and stared at me—and kept staring. I don’t know what her problem was, but that look of hers was so awful that I crossed over to the other side of the room, and used the equipment there. I could feel her malevolence. It was coming off her in waves.’
I chose my words carefully.
‘Then what happened?’ I said.
‘She got on the running machine and a few minutes later Sergei arrived, and that was the really off-putting part,’ added Lili. ‘Sergei knew her. The moment he walked in, she stopped exercising and went and kissed him hello. Sergei called out to me to come over. But I didn’t. Who on earth is she, Zara? She didn’t want to meet me—that much was obvious. She left almost immediately.’
I was trying to work out what to tell Lili, and was on the verge of giving her chapter and verse about Caitt, when Sergei walked into the kitchen and we both changed the subject.
At the end of the night, after our friends had left and Lili had gone off to make a phone call to Will, I asked Sergei whether Caitt had been at the gym.
‘Yes. Did Lili tell you?’ Sergei replied. ‘Of course she wouldn’t have known who Caitt was. I’d already told Caitt that Lili was there, and suggested she should go and say hi. You both look alike, so I knew she’d easily spot Lili.’
‘But they didn’t meet,’ I pointed out.
‘No, they didn’t,’ Sergei answered easily. ‘Caitt had to go somewhere else. She said that she didn’t want to interrupt Lili’s exercise routine.’
Lili returned from her phone call at this point, excited about her conversation with Will. He’d told her that he’d found some beautiful old doors for the house that the two of them were restoring in the village of Gümüşlük, in Turkey. I forgot about Caitt, and got some more champagne from the fridge. We spent the rest of the evening toasting future holidays on the Aegean coast.
The following evening, Sergei and I drove Lili to the old family house in a beautiful if more distant part of the city, on the northern peninsula—or more precisely, on the cliff top at the northern end of Whale Beach. When we all moved to Australia from Canada, this was my parents’ first choice of ‘suburb’, and there they stayed. A few days later, I drove back to the peninsula to collect my sister for the trip to the airport and her return to London and, while we were stuck in a traffic jam en route, she started talking again about the incident in the gym.
That was when I told Lili that the woman she’d seen was Joe’s sister-in-law—married to his brother Michael—and that she and Sergei had become good friends.
Lili raised her eyebrows. ‘She’s not after Sergei, is she?’ she demanded.
‘Why do you say that?’ I hedged, with a sideways glance at my sister.
‘I forgot to tell you, but just before she left the gym she embraced Sergei and put her head on his chest and closed her eyes as if they were old lovers from way back. I mean, honestly! Does she always behave like that?’
‘Well, yes,’ I replied. ‘She does. All the time.’
‘Why do you put up with it, Zara? I wouldn’t,’ said Lili. ‘Did you tell Sergei that I disliked her intensely on sight?’
‘No. It would only cause tension,’ I replied. ‘I can get on with her and anyway, I don’t feel I can tell Sergei not to see her anymore.’
‘Why not?’ Lili retorted, deliberately ignoring this reference to my own past. ‘She’s trouble.’
Luckily the traffic started moving again or else I might have blurted out that the situation with Caitt was by no means straightforward, and that nothing had been the same since we’d met her four months earlier. I had never told either of my sisters about what had happened in Thailand, and I didn’t want to tell the story now, in a rush.
But later, driving away from the airport, I kept thinking. About the way Lili had reacted to a woman of whom she knew nothing when she’d first set eyes on her at the gym and, more to the point, about the word that she’d used when this woman, a complete stranger, had stared at her.
That was the extraordinary thing. Both Lili and I had exactly the same feeling on our first encounter with Caitt. For Lili, it was when Caitt walked into the gym. And me, when Caitt’s canoe came around the peak in Phang Nga Bay.
Malevolence.
Everyone was taken aback when Michael and Caitt split up at the beginning of April. Certainly, Michael seemed to have been absent from home rather a lot, and he’d been missing at the last two Sunday lunches that Sergei and I had attended. But there was no reason to think that something was wrong. We knew that he often went away sailing for days at a time as part of his yacht brokerage business and Caitt seemed fine whenever we saw her.
Which was all the time.
Then, out of the blue, she announced that their marriage was over.
There was no animosity. No one else was involved. Michael hadn’t met another woman. They would always remain friends.
At least, this is what Sergei told me when he got home early one evening from the wine bar. Caitt had arrived and given them the news, he added.
My immediate reaction was sympathy. The end of a marriage can be devastating, and perhaps this one had been deteriorating for a while without Caitt giving anything away. She may have been deeply unhappy but hiding her feelings from friends. It might even have explained her flirtatious behaviour with Sergei.
However, when I suggested that he ring her immediately and invite her to spend the evening with us, Sergei replied that Caitt had gone home to pack. She was going away the next morning to the Freycinet Peninsula in Tasmania for a break.
We didn’t see Caitt for the next fortnight. Then one Saturday morning, we were having a coffee at a neighbourhood cafe when Caitt suddenly walked past. She w
as accompanied by a girl of about seventeen, a stranger I hadn’t seen before.
Sergei jumped up and called out to them, but Caitt kept walking—unusually fast—until he hailed her so loudly that she had to turn around.
Hadn’t she seen us? Apparently not.
To my surprise, her pretty companion greeted Sergei warmly and then looked at me, obviously puzzled—whereupon Caitt introduced us in an oddly rushed manner. ‘Zara, this is my god-daughter, Caroline,’ she said, adding urgently in the same breath, ‘Zara is married to Sergei.’
‘Really?’ said Caroline, clearly startled. Her discomfort at the situation was telling. She thought that Sergei was her godmother’s new boyfriend; it was written all over her face.
It was also clear that Caitt was panicking. The last thing she wanted was for Sergei to catch on. If he realised that Caroline was under such an impression, then Caitt would have some explaining to do.
I wasn’t surprised when Caitt pleaded some urgent shopping as an excuse not to join us for coffee.
Only when she and her bemused god-daughter were gone did Sergei explain that Caitt had phoned him a couple of days earlier, asking if she could borrow one of his cameras while Caroline was over from London. Her own camera was broken, she had explained. He had dropped off the camera on his way home the next evening, which was when he’d met Caroline, he added. ‘Perhaps we should have them over for dinner,’ he then suggested.
I couldn’t refuse, for how could I tell Sergei what I’d observed? A certain look on a teenager’s face? Caitt’s consternation? The way in which she had almost gabbled that he was married to me?
We duly invited the two of them over to dinner—and that night, I met a dramatically different Caitt. Gone was her flirtatious, suggestive manner with Sergei, her habit of acting as if there was no one else with him. She behaved normally, and with great warmth towards me, as did Caroline.
I can only speculate that Caitt must either have confided in her god-daughter about her game plan—which was unlikely—or had pleaded some temporary bad behaviour, because she’d been so unhappy with a marriage on the rocks and a husband ready to leave home. Ultimately there’s no way of knowing what she told Caroline and it’s not relevant to the story.
The dinner is, however, because it marked the moment when Caitt changed her tactics. For the next few months, she worked diligently to create the impression that she and Sergei were no more than good friends. She did this in public, but also in private, in front of me, whenever she came over for dinner or we saw her socially. This was the period when, as I’ve already written, there were moments when I sometimes imagined that we’d become allies.
Perhaps she even thought the same about me. Perhaps, in other circumstances, we could have become friends.
Consequently, it didn’t seem untoward when she mentioned one day that her regular tennis partner was being posted overseas, and asked Sergei if he would play tennis with her on Saturday afternoons instead.
Caitt knew perfectly well that I liked to spend that time writing, and that I probably wouldn’t object. And I didn’t. It was about the only time of the week when I could sit down over fragments of writing—separate from my work—that I hoped were slowly turning into a novel.
Little did I know how I would come to dread the solitude and shadows of an empty house. Nor how much time I would spend reflecting on the part I played, however unintentionally, in shutting Sergei out during all those weekends when I entered the realm that all writers know: total immersion in a place where fiction and life merge.
I thought he understood the ‘illness’ of writers: that we have to write, and that we write despite everything, and that the act of writing is necessarily selfish. Besides, Sergei had his own artistic pursuits, too. He would often disappear for hours on end with his cameras and photograph the sea and the landscape.
I thought that we understood each other.
By the end of May, the Saturday afternoon tennis games had settled into a routine. Caitt let me know from the start that she and her previous partner always played doubles with the same couple, and that this pair didn’t want to change the arrangement. I realised this was her way of letting me know I wasn’t welcome to join in—which contradicted the idea, of course, that we’d become allies. But it also meant I could use the time to write.
Caitt wasn’t a common-or-garden seductress. Her ‘ownership’ of Sergei beggared belief. Over time I began to question her emotional stability, but in many other respects she was more ‘normal’ than I was, in the sense that she had a more practical nature. I remember being totally bemused by a conversation that I had with her once, about the benefits of having a phone app to keep track of her spending.
Bemused, because many writers merely pretend to understand the strings attached to everyday life, and I was no different.
Caitt did not live in her imagination as I did a lot of the time. She did not forget to shop for dinner. Or to put petrol in the car. And she knew how to change the cartridge in the printer, which always ran out of ink because of my aversion to poking under the bonnet or lid of anything.
Printer, car, pressure cooker.
More importantly, Caitt never left anything to chance. Men, especially.
The tennis courts where they played were next to a gym, and in no time at all, Caitt suggested to Sergei that the two of them should join up. This gym had a better swimming pool, she said, and they could use the change rooms to shower after tennis rather than wait until they went home.
I realised that this was a ploy, a way of bringing Sergei closer into her orbit. I belonged to a gym in the city and Caitt knew this—and knew it was unlikely that I would change memberships. She was right. Apart from anything else—as she also knew—I rarely swam in swimming pools, preferring to swim in the ocean. Sergei loved the sea, too, and before he started vanishing at weekends for hours at a time—in the latter part of 2006—we often went for a swim together when he came back after tennis in the late afternoons, driving to Manly and walking along the beach afterwards once the crowds had begun to thin out, and when the light started to soften and the waves hit the sand with a particular rhythm.
Caitt occasionally accompanied us when we went ocean swimming. So the gym change-room excuse was a bit weak. In the meantime, she had a beach of her own planned for Sergei, one hidden away in Middle Harbour and where no one they knew would see them. I’m guessing that eventually they started going there straight from the gym, by which time Sergei and I were spending more and more time apart.
Coincidentally, Sergei had often taken me to the same beach. It lay in a pretty curve of cliffs, with pale grey rocks and a lagoon at one end. I’d seen a painting of it once, years earlier, and it turned out to be just as magical. I love swimming, but can only lie on a towel for so long before I get bored, even with a good book. This little beach, though, I loved. It had wild flowers, and the only noise came from the gulls and the cries from the sea eagles we occasionally spotted circling in the sky overhead.
When Sergei suddenly seemed to lose interest in keeping up our trips to that beach, I didn’t think anything of it, even though it was quicker to go there than to Manly. Then, one weekend, I suggested that instead of sharing the ocean with half the city, given the crowds that Manly attracted, we should revisit our enchanted beach instead.
Sergei went blank. He didn’t answer. At the time I put it down to lack of interest. No big deal. It never occurred to me that it could have something to do with Caitt.
We saw her a lot. More often than not, we socialised for part of each weekend with Michael’s ex-wife. If she missed her marriage and Michael, she never said so.
But as time went on, she started to have more and more difficulty controlling her emotions when I was around.
One night Sergei and I went out for dinner with Caitt and one of her temporary boyfriends—whom she went on to virtually ignore for the entire evening. The four of us arrived at the restaurant at exactly the same time and were shown to a small table
for four people. I took the chair next to Sergei, and Caitt’s boyfriend took the one opposite him. Caitt, white with anger, pushed the remaining chair away from her, hard.
She did this so forcefully that a waiter came over and asked if anything was wrong. Aware that Sergei and her boyfriend were also looking at her askance, Caitt went into damage control and claimed that she thought she’d seen a spider on the seat of the chair. She even managed a forced laugh. Sergei looked at her strangely but said nothing. Caitt avoided looking at me altogether. The atmosphere remained strained and I think we were all relieved once dinner was over and we could go our separate ways. She broke off the ‘relationship’ with her boyfriend the next day.
This incident marked the moment when our civility to each other began to slide. I think Caitt was put out by my presence that night because, by this stage, she and Sergei had begun having the occasional meal together if I happened to be away overnight—as I had been a few times, interviewing people in preparation for the new biography that my publisher had indeed commissioned me to write.
Sergei told me from the start about his dinners with Caitt. They ate in the brasserie that was attached to the wine bar, so it wasn’t as if they went anywhere special, he said—for the first time sounding a touch defensive about his friendship with Caitt.
We had just entered the danger zone, and still I didn’t react. Apart from anything else, Sergei always rang me whenever he got home from these ‘dates’. I knew that he disliked being at home on his own, and that he needed people around him. He had always been an extremely sociable man, and it wasn’t a problem, in the same way that my work sometimes took me away from home, and this wasn’t a problem, either. Or so it had always seemed.