A Place of Her Own

by Deborah O'Brien

  ‘Richie, I don’t think there’s much call for a make-up artist in Millbrooke.’

  ‘Of course there is, Di. You could rent a shop in the main street and set up a beauty salon.’

  The salon didn’t happen. Instead, they decided to have a baby. Diana purchased baby clothes, a cot and a change table, but her periods continued to come like clockwork. After six months she began to worry. There was a visit to a gynaecologist in Macquarie Street, followed by a laparoscopy, basal temperature charts, special diets. There was even a test where they were required to make love at midnight, then attend the clinic at dawn so that a sample could be taken from Diana to ascertain whether they were chemically compatible. When all the results were assembled, including an analysis of Richard’s sperm, the doctor couldn’t find anything wrong with Diana. Richard, on the other hand, was diagnosed with low motility. That didn’t mean he couldn’t father a child, it just made the prospect unlikely. The doctor suspected a low-grade infection and gave him a course of antibiotics. ‘Come back in three months,’ he was told, ‘and we’ll test you again. In the meantime wear boxer shorts and avoid tight jeans.’

  The second test, though better, was still unsatisfactory. Afterwards Richard threw himself into the consulting practice he had established since coming to the country and dedicated his energy to restoring Millerbrooke. If they couldn’t have a baby, he would give her the finest house in New South Wales.

  In the meantime, getting pregnant had become Diana’s obsession. She banned intercourse at any time other than fertile days, refusing to waste his sperm on the unproductive phases of her cycle. If she was a day or two late, they were exultant with hope. When the bleeding came, it was accompanied by tearful disappointment. Monthly increments of disappointment soon became full-blown despair. And the ties that had bound them from the start – the spontaneous lovemaking, her adoration of him, his role as her perfect champion – began to break under the pressure of timetabled sex, thwarted dreams and his shame at being unable to fulfil the most basic biological function – to father a child.

  As for sex, it disappeared by attrition. In the last month or two of their life together, there was none at all. Later Richard discovered her affair with Geoff Goodmann had begun during that time. He wasn’t sure what hurt him most: the disintegration of the love story between the young architect and the violet-eyed girl, or the fact that they had been trying to conceive for two years and the solicitor had succeeded in two months. The same day Diana told Richard about the affair, she packed her suitcases and decamped to the love nest Geoff had set up in the flat above his office. Like Richard, Geoff’s wife and two children had been abandoned in the wake of the romance. Just before the baby was born, the solicitor sold his practice, and he and Diana moved to the coast, while the wife and kids escaped the scandal by disappearing interstate.

  The last time Richard saw Diana was by chance in Miller Street. Her belly was so big that her navel had popped out – he could see it through her cotton dress. Afterwards he went home and drank three straight shots of whisky. It was the only remedy that could soothe the pain of knowing he had let her down.

  5 THE REUNION

  Although Diana had expected there to be a horde of visitors at Millerbrooke, it was five to two and there were only three other vehicles there. It was going to be an intimate tour. All the better for exchanging meaningful glances with him. He might even take her aside, at which point she would whisper that she was just passing through and had heard about the open day at the tourism office. She would tell him how shocked she was when he appeared at the door to greet his guests, that she couldn’t quite believe it. She could be very convincing. And Richard Scott had always been so trusting and gullible.

  The exterior was impressive. He’d done a great job. No doubt about it. The garden alone, with its rows of rose bushes, was a treat. The other visitors had assembled on the front verandah. He was there too. She recognised his tall figure and the familiar way of standing, with one leg bent, as if he were trying to make himself appear shorter. As she’d imagined, the hair was grey, but it suited him. Best of all, there was no sign of a beer belly. He was as lean and well-built as he’d always been. A little bolt of excitement ran through her. This was going to be fun. At that moment she made a bet with herself that she wouldn’t be returning to Angie Wallace’s creepy old house tonight.

  Richard Scott was greeting his visitors and offering them plastic socks to wear over their shoes in order to protect the Millerbrooke floors when he looked towards the gate. Walking down the path some thirty metres away was a woman who might have been a ghost. It couldn’t be, could it? She was wearing one of those raffia hats, which concealed her hair, and large Jackie Onassis sunglasses covering half her face. But it was the way she walked that identified her. Confidently, with a little wiggle. In the early days after she had left him, he was sure she would return. Even when he knew she was pregnant to the solicitor, even after the baby was born, he’d still imagined she would turn up one day and he would take her back, no questions asked. He would even have welcomed the child.

  After she was gone, he had continued to restore Millerbrooke, hoping it would bring her back. He was the Great Gatsby, creating a pleasure palace to lure her to him. When the restoration was finished, it won several architectural awards – surely she must have read about them in the newspapers or the decorating magazines. Yet she didn’t return.

  He used to dream about her, arriving without notice, wearing a picture hat and a white dress. She would be entranced by the polished floorboards, run her hands over the beeswaxed furniture, exclaim at the wainscot panelling. Then she would forgive him for his neglect of her, and, in the way the two of them communicated best, they would adjourn to his bedroom and make love.

  He watched Diana walking ever closer. It was clear she hadn’t been expecting to see him because suddenly her lips were parted in surprise. More than twenty years had passed. Perhaps she had thought he was long gone and it was now safe to visit. How should he react? What should he say to her? Then the questions dissolved like a fade-out in a movie and he knew what he had to do – just allow everything to unfold in the manner of a dream.

  Angie was alone. The Americans had finally woken from their jet-lagged sleep and were having a late lunch in town. Diana was doing her tour of Millerbrooke. So Angie made herself a mug of tea and curled up on the sofa with a women’s magazine. Her head was too full of tomorrow’s visit to Richard to read anything serious. The magazine’s cover featured an Australian actress ‘of a certain age’. Angie’s age. The heading read: ‘Fifty is the New Forty. Proof There’s Life after Menopause’.

  Either the photo had been airbrushed or she had had her face tweaked because there was not a single blemish or even the faintest line on her complexion. Baby skin. Still, she looked beautiful, and who was Angie to criticise? One day she might even consider having a little injection of filler here and there herself. Then she laughed out loud. No, she wouldn’t. She didn’t want some technician injecting foreign chemicals into her skin. And anyway, your skin was just a covering – a mask indicating nothing about the personality underneath. In a superficial society with a short attention span, people too often dismissed someone on the basis of their looks and never searched any deeper. She had done it herself for almost a year. With Richard Scott.

  Because there were nine other people present, including two children, it wasn’t the appropriate time for a full-blown reunion. Diana didn’t even have a chance to explain why she was there. Then again, he didn’t appear to be curious. He just seemed to accept that she was back, as if she’d been deposited by an alien spaceship following a lengthy encounter of the third kind. He hadn’t taken his eyes off her, not since she had appeared on the path. The other visitors were irrelevant.

  When he handed her a pair of blue plastic socks, an electric spark passed between them. The old magic was still there. She gave him a smile and removed her sunglasses. No
doubt he would marvel at the way she looked exactly as she had twenty years ago, except for the short hair.

  In the hallway, as he made a little welcome speech, he was looking only at her. In the study he told them about Captain Miller and how his compact Chinese desk would have fitted perfectly in a ship’s cabin. He suggested they might like to visit the museum to see Captain Miller’s uniform. And as he spoke, she knew he just wanted the tour to be over so the guests would leave and the two of them could be together. They visited the grand drawing room and the dining room. He showed them the silver used by John and Charlotte and their three children. Upstairs they inspected the bedrooms, including the one with the four-poster bed. He pointed out that the smallest bedroom had belonged to a girl called Eliza, who became one of Australia’s first female doctors. Then they toured the old kitchen and the schoolroom where a governess had taught the Miller children. Finally they removed their blue plastic socks and he took them out to the family graveyard shaded by a stand of elm trees. There he related a story about a Scottish girl and a Chinese shopkeeper, but Diana had stopped listening. Instead, she was planning her next move.

  The tour finished at the graveyard. Diana looked at her watch. It was only three o’clock. He had rushed through it so he could be with her.

  ‘You’re very welcome to explore the garden,’ he said to the group. ‘And if you want to see Captain Miller’s naval uniform, the museum doesn’t close for another hour and a half. While you’re there, I recommend the Gold Rush Room, where you’ll find a miniature portrait of Charles Chen, the young man I told you about.’

  Everyone thanked him and they dispersed into the garden.

  ‘Come inside,’ he said to Diana and took her hand.

  Angie must have fallen asleep on the sofa because when she woke it was five o’clock and Diana wasn’t back. Maybe she’d decided to do some extra sightseeing following her visit to Millerbrooke. The Ameri­cans were still out too. They had probably rallied after their sleep.

  During her nap Angie had dreamt about Richard. They were together. No disagreement, no parting. It seemed not to have happened. The setting was his study at Millerbrooke. She was kidding him about the titles of his books on alpaca breeding. Studs and Maidens, for example. It sounded more like pornography than livestock husbandry. Then he had taken her in his arms and kissed her. That was when she woke up, wishing the dream wasn’t over, thinking she might be able to fall asleep again and continue where she left off, as you did with a DVD. But it was only the bad dreams that pursued you through the night, not allowing you to escape, no matter how many times you woke up.

  Richard hadn’t let go of her hand. Then he locked the front door. That was a good sign. They didn’t want lingering tourists wandering back into the house and finding them locked in a passionate kiss.

  ‘I can’t believe you still live here, Rich. I thought you would have moved back to the city years ago.’

  ‘I waited, in case you came back.’

  That was what she wanted to hear. So were his next words.

  ‘You’re still so beautiful, Di. You haven’t changed. Except for your hair. But I like it.’

  All that worry about concocting excuses had been for nothing. He was so caught up in the moment that he wasn’t thinking of anything else. Still, once he got over this dreamy stage, he was likely to ask questions and she needed to be prepared.

  ‘Would you like to stay for dinner?’ he asked in his newsreader voice.

  He wasn’t movie-star handsome any more, but he was still attractive. And he owned a magnificent house on five hundred acres. It must be worth . . . well, a helluva lot. It wouldn’t be so bad living in Millbrooke, if it was in a house like this.

  After the dream Angie didn’t think she could wait until tomorrow to apologise to Richard. She would summon up all her courage and phone him now. Then she could have a good night’s sleep, instead of lying awake as she had done over the past few nights playing Monday’s conversation over and over in her head. Would he choose to forgive her? Richard had a generous spirit and she felt certain he would. He might even invite her up to Millerbrooke for dinner.

  She dialled his mobile and waited. Six rings and then the message bank picked up.

  ‘Richard, it’s me. Please call me when you have a chance.’ She was about to add: ‘I’m sorry’, and then decided she would tell him in person.

  Just as Richard was pouring Diana a glass of wine, his mobile rang. He had barely removed the device from his pocket when she snatched it away and took a surreptitious look at the screen. No name, only a number. She turned it off and put it on the coffee table.

  ‘We don’t want any interruptions tonight, do we, Rich?’

  After dinner she took his hand and led him upstairs to the master bedroom.

  ‘There’s something we need to discuss first, Di.’

  The recriminations. It wasn’t as though she hadn’t been expecting them.

  ‘You broke my heart when you left me. Didn’t you realise how much I loved you?’

  ‘I know that now, Rich, but back then I felt abandoned. You were always so busy, so caught up in the house and your work. And I had nothing. No job, no b . . .’

  ‘I knew you were unhappy, but I didn’t know how to make it better. Was that why you took up with the solicitor?’

  ‘The relationship with Geoff wasn’t something I planned. One day he asked me to join him for coffee. He was our solicitor, our advisor, someone I trusted. I didn’t see anything wrong in having coffee with him. We chatted about all kinds of things and he was a good listener. So I told him how we were trying for a baby and how lonely I was. I certainly didn’t expect him to make advances. I’m not blaming him for what happened next. I shouldn’t have responded. But I was so depressed. It only happened a few times, and I felt awful about it. I never stopped loving you, Rich. But when I found out I was pregnant, what could I do? Geoff was the father of my child.’

  Richard looked into her face for several seconds. When he finally whispered, ‘I’m so sorry for not being there for you, Di’, she knew he believed her. Richard Scott was full of guilt. Now it was simply a matter of allowing him to make up for his past mistakes by devoting himself to her.

  Despite her afternoon nap, Angie was still exhausted. Perhaps it was the emotional trauma of the past week, not to mention the news about the emporium. She felt as if she had to preserve the building, for Charles and Amy’s sake. It was the last significant vestige of their life together, except, of course, for the letter written to Amy during the prelude to their elopement. That humble sheet of paper was a piece of history, an item with provenance and value, which should probably be displayed in the museum. Yet it was also very personal and intimate, something the rest of the world didn’t need to see. It gave her shivers whenever she read it. The handwriting was exquisite, like the man himself. Ever since she’d discovered his portrait in the museum, she’d had a crush on him. Silly, really, to be infatuated with a man who’d been dead for a century and a half, but she couldn’t help it.

  When the Americans returned, they watched TV for a while and then went to bed early. Diana wasn’t back. She must have been dining at the Indian place. She had a key – she could let herself in. So Angie went up to her bedroom with its walls of Naples yellow hue, removed Charles’s love letter from the drawer and read it several times before replacing it in Richard’s envelope, on which he had written ‘For Ange’ in a copperplate script that might have been Charles’s. Then she turned off the light and went straight to sleep.

  In the morning there was a message on the landline from Diana. She’d gone out for the day and wouldn’t need breakfast. That was odd. Angie hadn’t heard her car, either last night or this morning. Then again, she’d been lost in a deep, dreamless sleep and hadn’t even woken to go to the loo.

  After she cooked breakfast for the Americans and completed her morning chores, she changed into
something more suitable for her visit to Millerbrooke. A pretty cream jumper, a skirt and boots. She would even pop into the bakery on the way and buy some of those Danish pastries Richard liked so much.

  As she drove along the main street, there was hardly a parking spot left – it was always busy on Sunday mornings. After she bought the pastries, she ran into Moira.

  ‘I’m on my way up to Richard’s to apologise.’

  ‘Good for you. It would be a pity not to patch it up. You two are right for each other. Everyone thinks so.’

  Had the painting ladies been discussing Angie’s relationship with Richard behind her back? Probably. They’d done it with Jack. Anyway, this morning Angie didn’t care. She felt free of the sadness which had afflicted her during her week away from him.

  ‘Good luck, Angie.’

  ‘Thanks, Moira. And don’t forget our special painting session tomorrow.’ It was a catch-up class where everyone could bring along an unfinished artwork and complete it under Angie’s supervision.

  She drove up Miller Street to the War Memorial where the name of Amy’s son, Charles Junior, was engraved in granite, along with the thirteen other Millbrooke men who had died in the First World War. Then she turned right and headed for Millerbrooke. When she parked the car, she noticed a blue sedan already there. It looked like Diana Goodmann’s car, but it couldn’t be.

  Carrying her bag of Danishes, she walked along the path to the front door. The rose bushes were in their first spring flush. She would pick some yellow ones later and put them at the base of Charles and Amy’s shared headstone. When she reached the massive front door, she was reluctant to use the big brass knocker because it made such a booming sound it might startle the alpacas. Instead she tapped with her knuckles on the wood. When nobody came to the door, she knocked again. Just as she was about to give up and go home, the door opened. Richard was wearing a dressing gown at ten in the morning.