David had the address scribbled in the margin of an article he wanted to finish reading in the car. Ellen didn’t know the suburb. The name was familiar — one of those roads that stretched for miles, sometimes a main artery, at other times dwindling into little more than a street.
‘You’re going to have to direct me,’ she told him, and he sighed as he folded up the paper and pulled out the street directory.
‘I wish we didn’t even have to go,’ she said, glancing at herself in the rear-vision mirror.
‘Me, too,’ Evie agreed from the back seat, and Ellen winked at her.
‘At least you’ll have a friend there,’ Ellen said, as she turned the key in the ignition.
‘Sienna is not my friend,’ Evie said. ‘We’re not even in the same class.’
It was midwinter and dark already. The road was busy, a line of cars, white headlights beaming as they inched their way home. Ellen turned the heater up, the rush of air stale and gritty, but warm on her feet as they edged out into the traffic, heading south over the river.
‘You just follow this road forever,’ David said, before turning back to his article.
If they were staying home tonight, she thought, David would have made minestrone, or a pasta. Unlike her, he enjoyed cooking. The three of them would have eaten it in front of the television, blinds down, gas heater on. After dinner, when Evie went to bed, she would have gone back up to her studio to add the next layer to the piece she was working on, or maybe she would have let it rest tonight, lying on the couch with David instead, watching a movie. He had his head bent low, still attempting to read in the dimness of the car light.
A few metres on, the road diverged and she didn’t know which branch to take. ‘You’re meant to be navigating,’ she said as she pulled over, and David looked guiltily at the map. He traced the line and told her she had to go back.
‘I need you to watch for the house numbers,’ she said when they were on the right road, traffic thinning, neat suburban bungalows lining each side of what had become a wide street.
‘That’s 420,’ Evie called out.
‘So it can’t be far now.’ Ellen leant closer to the windscreen, trying to make out the digits on the low brick walls or the front doors with 1940s portholes. It was going to be a matter of counting, she decided, and as they drew near to what must be 522, she turned to David and rolled her eyes.
‘In and out,’ she said.
He shrugged helplessly. ‘What could I say?’
When David had picked Evie up from school two days ago, Matthew had asked them all over for dinner.
‘Why us?’
‘I don’t know.’ David had seemed as dismayed as her. ‘I guess he’s lonely. And he knows me vaguely through the paper.’
Ellen had only recently noticed Matthew in the playground. She had never spoken to him, although she had talked twice to Cath, his ex-partner. They all waited together under the shade of the few wattles that grew in the schoolyard, mothers and fathers, sometimes making conversation, sometimes choosing to sit apart until the bell rang.
Like Ellen, Cath often sat on her own. Ellen would try to hold on to these last minutes of being alone, moments to work out a technical problem, or a question of surface that had been plaguing her. She only talked to Cath because she happened to glance over, and saw she had her arm in plaster.
‘How did you do that?’ Ellen had asked politely. She had been expecting an ordinary answer — in fact, she hadn’t even really wanted to know — so she was surprised when Cath had turned away sharply, wiping at her eyes.
Ellen muttered an apology, coupled with an attempt at reassurance, hoping the bell would ring soon. It did.
The next time she saw her, Cath said she was sorry. ‘About the tears,’ and nodded at her arm.
It was fine, Ellen had told her, but Cath interrupted: ‘I’ve been splitting up with Matthew, Sienna’s father.’ Her words were blunt, as though she were daring herself to utter them without crying.
Ellen didn’t know what to say.
‘It’s a good thing,’ Cath said. ‘Ultimately.’
They were engulfed by a swarm of children, Evie pulling on Ellen’s sleeve as she held up her merit certificate. But as they walked outside the school gates, Ellen saw Cath again, holding Sienna’s hand and heading down the hill towards the river.
‘Do you reckon you’d ever want to have Sienna over to play?’
‘No,’ Evie replied.
That night Ellen mentioned the conversation to David. They were sitting out the back of the house, enjoying the last warmth of a late-summer evening.
‘I wonder whether he broke her arm.’ She said the words idly, slapping at a mosquito as she did so.
‘That’s something of a leap.’ David finished his beer and turned to go into the kitchen.
Ellen felt ashamed, which only made her continue. ‘There’s something about him I don’t like,’ she said. ‘He’s so …’ She searched for the word. ‘Masculine.’
‘Masculinity doesn’t make someone a wife basher.’ David shut the door behind him, leaving Ellen outside alone. I know, she wanted to say, but then she couldn’t be bothered.
Later that evening she stood at the entrance to her studio, one hand on the light switch. She had been working on a sphere, painstakingly created from leaves and twigs pinned together, the inner structure built from fallen branches. Under the overhead globe, it looked dead, the range of colour fading into a single dull brown, brittle to the touch. Sitting on the floor with her back against the doorframe, she glanced down to the house. David was in the kitchen, putting away the remains of the meal. Beyond was darkness: the room where Evie slept and, at the front, their own room. She rolled a cigarette from the secret supply of tobacco that she kept stashed at the bottom of her filing cabinet. The match flared too bright, dying as suddenly as it had come to life.
She had been with David for twelve years now. He was, she often told people, the only man she had ever loved. They had met when she was at art school and he was in his second year as a journalist. He reviewed her final-year show, picking her work as the most promising. At an exhibition about a month later, they were introduced and she asked him out. He was seeing someone, and it wasn’t really appropriate — people would think he had given her such a good write-up because he was sleeping with her. She didn’t know whether he was serious or not, but she didn’t give in. They drank until closing time.
At four in the morning, he was telling her about growing up in a country town and wanting to be a guitar player in a band. He spent a year hitchhiking his way around Australia before he settled in Sydney. She had never left anything or gone anywhere, she said. She now lived only two streets from where she had grown up with parents who had always let her do as she pleased. And then she remembered she had completed four years of architecture before she realised it wasn’t what she wanted. ‘So I guess I left that,’ and she tried to stand, giggling at her poor balance. He helped her up, pulling her in as he did so, and they kissed. It was like perfection, she thought. Sweet, essential. She had told him that she adored him.
The light in the studio was bad, but she had an idea, a change in colour gradation to bring the work back to life. She began to unpick a fine line of leaves across the sphere, leaving her cigarette burning out on the edge of the step. Carefully storing the shortest twigs that held the surface together, she worked slowly, wanting the shape to be right the first time round.
Ellen slammed the car door shut behind her. A white gum stretched up into the darkness, its limbs smooth and pale, bent and graceful, as it swayed, silvery leaves shivering.
‘Look,’ she said, and David and Evie turned to glance up at the tree, remarkable for its survival along a road that boasted no more than the occasional grevillea or bottlebrush, and even more extraordinary for its singular beauty.
&nb
sp; David stepped back, and she could see that he, too, found the tree worth stopping for. He took her hand in his.
‘I could cope with living out here,’ Ellen said, ‘with a tree like that.’ She uttered the words more to herself than to the others. As she started to walk through the low iron gateway, Evie stopped her.
‘It’s not that place,’ she said. ‘It’s there,’ and she pointed further up the road.
David knocked on the door and Sienna opened it, peering out at the three of them. She was a small child, thin limbs, straight hair in two tight pigtails, and dark eyes.
‘Hi, Evie,’ she muttered, when behind her Matthew bent down to whisper in her ear, his instruction to say hello audible to all of them.
‘Hi.’ Evie kept her eyes fixed on the ground, pressing backwards into Ellen.
Inside, they stood too close in the hallway, until Matthew led them through to a sunroom off the kitchen, where a table had been set, with five mismatched chairs drawn up. Ellen could hear the faint hum of a cello concerto in the background, and she found the stereo next to her, on top of the pine bookshelves. She ran her finger along the titles while, from the kitchen, Matthew asked if they wanted a drink. There were books of poetry, and this surprised her. She pulled one of the paperbacks out, only to hastily replace it as she heard Matthew coming to give her a glass of white.
‘I discovered Gerard Manley Hopkins when I was at university.’ He brushed by her as he took the book out once more, the cover dog-eared, the pages yellowing. ‘His angst spoke to me, but more than anything it was what he did with language. Turning it on its head. Stirring up years of soft romanticism with harshness and vigour.’
Ellen asked him if it was true that Hopkins was gay.
‘There was a school of criticism that emphasised the possibility.’ Matthew took a careful sip of the wine, tasting it slowly.
It was, Ellen soon discovered, very dry and very good. She commented appreciatively, and he held up the bottle for them to see. It was a favourite, he said, from a tiny vineyard in the south of France. He had hunted it down from a specialist wine shop near work, giving half-a-dozen to Cath when they split up and saving the other half for himself.
‘Cheers.’ David held out his glass and they all clinked.
Ellen said she would check whether the children were okay. Outside Sienna’s room, she could hear them talking. They were playing Monopoly, and she asked them both, a little too brightly, how the game was going. When neither of them replied, she went back to the kitchen.
David had pulled his chair out from the table, his legs extended in front of him. He had already finished his glass and was discussing a film he had seen the other night. It had been a slow-moving piece about the last day in a man’s life, a film in which not much happened, although its very emptiness had a certain resonance when you knew the end.
‘I can’t say I enjoyed it as much as you did,’ Ellen said. ‘Although I’m not as anti-narrative as you are.’
Matthew turned to her. ‘I’m glad to hear some people are still partial to the story. I’ve been writing a novel.’
She murmured something encouraging, and David asked him what it was about. ‘Or are you one of those writers that hates saying?’
He wasn’t. It was about a French anthropologist, a man who lived with Aboriginal people at the beginning of the twentieth century. ‘He turned his back on white society and then couldn’t return when he wanted. It’s loosely based on a true story.’ He took a large dish out of the oven, and lifted the lid briefly. ‘I hope you like cassoulet?’
‘Can’t say I’ve ever had it,’ David confessed, and Ellen could only admire him for his straight-faced reply. It was not a meal either of them had been expecting. The invitation, she thought, had been for a quick dinner with the kids.
‘I learnt to cook it when Cath and I lived in Paris,’ Matthew told them.
‘When was that?’ Ellen felt obliged to ask.
‘About four years ago. We took leave so I could research my book.’ He looked at her. ‘You’ve been there,’ he said. ‘For six months in a studio.’
She tried to conceal the surprise she felt at his knowledge of her life. ‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘We both went before Evie was born.’
‘I read it in your biog.’ He began to serve up the food as he spoke. ‘At your last exhibition.’
David offered to call the kids, and Ellen found herself alone with Matthew. She asked if she could help. Perhaps she could carry the plates over? He was placing each serve in the centre with perfect precision, and as she reached to take the nearest, he turned slightly to rest the ladle on the edge of the sink, his other elbow knocking her.
The plate did not shatter, but the cassoulet covered her suede boots and spread across the lino on the kitchen floor. She swore without thinking, bending down to wipe the sauce off her feet as he, too, crouched, their faces so close that she felt the warmth of his breath and the brush of his thick black hair against her cheek.
‘I’m fine,’ she said, stepping back as Evie and Sienna came into the room.
‘Your boots will be wrecked.’ Evie surveyed the damage from the doorway, and Ellen wished they had never discussed how easily suede could be marked.
Ten years later, when Evie left school, she told Ellen how much she had disliked Matthew. The year in which he had come to live with Ellen had been the worst, she said.
‘I know,’ Ellen said. ‘I didn’t like him much either.’
‘Then why did you do it?’
They were sitting in the back garden, sharing a bottle of champagne and cigarettes in celebration of Evie having finished her exams. Her daughter’s face was like David’s, Ellen thought, taking in her pale green eyes, wide mouth, and slow smile, blurred by the late-afternoon sun and too much drink. Her temperament, too: she was even-natured, reasonable and strangely distant. Ellen considered Evie’s question. It was one she used to ask herself whenever she gazed at the raw wound of missing the life she once had, flesh no longer covered by the paper-thin layer of breathless excitement. But each time she had come face to face with that question, she had quickly shied away. The answer was too difficult to find, and probably not worth the search. I don’t know, she was about to say, but then she didn’t.
‘He appalled me,’ she told Evie, ‘and that was what I found fascinating.’ She looked out across the overgrown garden, weeds creeping into each of the beds, rocket gone to seed, nasturtiums tangled sickly sweet around the base of the lemon tree.
Evie did not respond.
It was not an explanation, or at least not one her daughter would understand, just as David had found a similar attempt she had once made for him far from satisfactory. She reached across the table, about to pour them both another glass of champagne, but stopped. Opposite her, Evie was crying, silent tears that slid down her cheek, wiped away as quickly as they appeared.
‘I’m sorry,’ Ellen said, and she was truly sorry as she laid her own hand over Evie’s. A line of ants trailed across the tabletop between them, running straight until they reached a pool of spilt drink. The branches of the giant wattle next door creaked in the breeze. She glanced up at the sun and closed her eyes, the memory of that year with Matthew still strong enough to make her shake her head, wanting to physically remove any trace of him from her life.
‘I was so happy,’ she said. ‘With you and David. And I was making these perfect beautiful sculptures that were so complete. When total destruction knocks on your door, sometimes it’s very tempting to take a look.’
Wiping the last of her tears, Evie ran a finger across the table. ‘You know I saw a review for his book the other day?’
Ellen didn’t.
‘It was good,’ Evie said. ‘It even made me want to read it.’
Ellen smiled, and as she did so, she contemplated the explanation she had tried to give
. It was close, she thought, but there are parts of life that evade words. There are countless choices — and you always choose to do the right thing: to drive without crashing the car, not to walk into the oncoming traffic, to stop drinking, not to say what you think.
She remembered standing just inside Matthew’s bedroom, undressing him as he undressed her and knowing that a month earlier, on the night they had eaten cassoulet, she had stood outside this room, aware of how little it would take to step over into a life that repelled her, and also fascinated her. In the sunroom off the kitchen, Matthew had opened another bottle of wine, and David had relented, sitting back and letting his glass be refilled. She had sat with them, listening to their conversation, participating occasionally, only to withdraw again, her gaze turning to the dishes neatly stacked in the rack, the new fridge, and the three saucepans sitting on top of the stove. Beyond was the lounge room, the carpet floral, the walls painted a violet that had been popular in the fifties, a new television in the corner, and a cheap two-seater couch in front of it.
She had got up to go to the bathroom, wanting to look. Inside the cupboard there was a razor, soap, toothbrush and toothpaste, and a packet of Panadol. She had stood for a moment, leaning against the shower screen. In the room next door, the girls were talking about school. Sienna was asking Evie which of the boys she liked and Evie was being evasive. ‘All of them,’ she answered. ‘It’s wrong not to like everyone.’
As she stepped out into the hall, she could see Matthew’s room at the end of the corridor. The blind was drawn, but the bed was visible, neatly made, with four pillows at one end, a bedside table on one side only, and on it two books and a white metal light clipped to the edge.
‘I think I need to get going,’ she had told David when she sat back down in the sunroom.
He was remembering the editor of the paper when he had first joined. ‘He was completely straight. Middle-aged — well, probably the same as we are now — suit, tie, neat hair, very traditional, apart from the fact that he meditated. For half an hour every lunchtime. He would just shut the door and sit there, eyes closed. Everyone knew what he was doing, and not to disturb him, and no one ever mentioned it. But it was bloody strange. I mean, it was so unexpected from him.’ David topped up his glass. ‘He was the calmest, easiest boss I’ve ever had.’
The Secret Lives of Men Page 9