by Pat Rosier
‘Look, Marion said I should mind my own business, but I think you should know.’
‘Know what?’ Half Isobel’s attention was on the boys in the next room, it sounded as though there was a squabble brewing.
‘Sorry, hold on will you,’ she put the phone on the shelf and it fell off and dangled while she went to see what was happening. Both boys were bouncing around to a tune on the radio.
‘Sorry,’ she said again, ‘I had to check on the boys.' Silence. ‘Are you there?’
‘Yes. Yes, I’m here.’ Then a rush of words, ‘I think you should know that Bob and Joyce are, you know, having an affair, have been for weeks. Everyone here knows, and Joyce is saying he’s just waiting for the right time to tell you he wants a divorce.' Silence again. Isobel held the phone away from her ear and looked at it until she heard the other woman’s voice.
‘Are you all right?’ She sounded anxious. ‘Oh God, I shouldn’t have said, but it seemed so rotten that everyone knew except you.'
‘I’m just fine.’ Isobel said, and it was true. ‘Thank you for telling me, it’s very helpful.' And she gently put down the phone. It had come to her, a whole fully formed plan, in the second she realised what Lois was saying.
Then she thought of her mother and father and that hit her like a punch in the stomach. She could hear her mother’s voice saying ‘it’s your life,’ in that tight voice, see her father’s face and hear her sister’s ‘How could you do this to them?’ all at once.
‘Mumma.’ She was sitting on the arm of the settee, bent over, clutching her stomach and Neil was pulling at her sleeve and she became aware of Andrew’s cries in the other room. The fall that had hurt his knee was fixed soon enough with a rub and a cuddle.
‘Who’s for a walk?’ Without waiting for an answer Isobel bundled them into socks and boots and extra jumpers and jackets and fastened them firmly in the pushchair. It wasn’t raining, but she stuffed the rain cover into the basket underneath in case. They played ‘boo! tickle!’ with each other while she got her own coat and a headscarf and changed into leather shoes.
‘Off we go, then!’ she announced cheerfully, bouncing them down the steps, and setting off in a brisk walk to nowhere in particular. Knowing what she would do — never mind the details — energized her more than she could remember since … well, she couldn’t actually remember at that moment any time when she had felt this cheerful. Except for knowing how hard it would be for her parents.
‘I’ll insist …,’ she began, out loud, and stopped, aware that she could insist as much as she liked it wouldn’t make any difference in the end. It wasn’t such a bad day for July, there was even some weak sunshine, so she walked all the way to the park, the one Joyce used to drive them to and pushed the boys in two swings side by side while they chortled and grabbed at each other. The wooden seats had gone, replaced by cut up car tyres. When they’d had enough, she sat on a damp bench and got her breath while they climbed up and slid down the slide, over and over and chased each other around the climbing frame.
Organising the practical details was surprisingly easy, thanks to having enough money in her own bank account, the one she had never mentioned to Bob. But then he had never asked, not once, not ever, if she had any money saved from when she was working, not when they moved into the flat, not since.
DC Day, Monday July 10, came and went. Bob was hardly home the week before or after, which suited Isobel.
The only person she told before her mother was Sally, on the Monday of the last week in July, when everything was arranged. When Sally said she’d have to tell Daniel Isobel was anxious, but didn’t manage to persuade her not to. Her brother came around that night. Sally had told him, he said, not only her plans, but that she wasn’t expecting Bob home that night, even though it was two weeks after DC Day. ‘Loose ends,’ was all the explanation he had offered. Isobel assumed he would be going to Joyce’s and would have a lot more excuses for not coming home until he got around to telling her about their affair.
Daniel kept looking closely at her as though he would find an explanation in her face, and asking if she was certain. ‘It’s pretty, well, unusual, to say the least,’ he said.
‘Very certain,’ she told him. And she was. ‘This way,’ she continued, ‘I’ve got some say in what happens, I’m not just waiting around to see what Bob does. And besides, it’s best for everyone, not just me.’
‘How can you know …?’
‘I know. I’m way past changing my mind.’ And she offered her brother a cup of tea.
He shook his head, ‘No thanks, I’ve got to go.’ He stood up and started towards the door, then stopped. ‘It’s not best for Mum and Dad, you know.’
‘That’s the hardest thing.' She would not let herself cry. ‘I’ll tell them on the day. Will you go and see them, after, and — I don’t know — try and explain or something.’ Daniel said he’d do what he could. He also said he admired her gumption. There was a pause and Isobel thought that maybe he would talk some more if she encouraged him but the moment passed. At the door he hugged her and told her to take care and keep in touch.
On Tuesday she sat her driver’s license test in Sally’s car and passed. When Sally dropped her at her mother’s to collect the boys she didn’t come in. ‘Daniel and I decided it’s best not to see them until afterwards,’ she’d said, and Isobel felt bad for a moment at putting them in a difficult situation. Walking home with two tired boys happy to stay in the pushchair, she was astonished at how calm she was.
Calm but tense she realised, starting at the sound of Bob coming in at exactly the time he had said he would. Watching him playing with the boys, all on the floor with various cars and trucks, she felt herself near to tears so she got busy folding the inevitable pile of washing. ‘When they’re asleep,’ Bob said, ‘we’d better talk about things.’ Not yet. Not yet. Isobel took deep breaths. She’d ruin everything if she panicked now. By the time the boys were in bed and they had eaten – watching the television news and Town and Around as had become their habit — she had recovered herself and suggested that she spend the rest of the week looking at what flats were available in the paper and they talk some more on Friday night.
‘Yes,’ he’d agreed, ‘we’ll make a date to talk about things on Friday night.’ She thought he was relieved and supposed he would be getting up his courage to tell her about Joyce. ‘Talk about things,’ he’d said, twice, not talk about where we’ll move to she noticed.
It took all of Isobel’s courage to walk to her mother’s house and tell her over a cup of tea on Friday morning. She started with the phone call from Lois about Bob and Joyce, information met with the particular snort her mother usually reserved for politicians. And then explained what she herself planned to do. It was hard to hear, ‘You always were a contrary child,’ with no touch of indulgence, and, ‘your father will be terribly upset,’ and, ‘I don’t know how you can …,’ and, finally, harshly, ‘It’s your life.'
Two days after she arrived in Sydney Isobel had work for a temping agency and a bedsit near King’s Cross. Because she had no work history she had to sit a literacy and numeracy test for the agency and start with reception and filing. She had a lie ready, about looking after a sick grandmother, but didn’t have to use it After three weeks in her first job she was taken off reception and given more office work. Her employer, who ran a vehicle spare parts company, took her on as a permanent employee within two months and made her his personal assistant. It was easy work, she thought, boring even, but well paid and as she was always willing to work extra evening hours or a weekend day her savings grew.
The sure knowledge that Bob and Joyce would care at least as well as she had for the boys was all she had needed. Any thoughts about missing them, any wondering what milestone they had reached, any twinge of feeling could be brushed aside with that. What she had in no way anticipated was her body missing them; waking up longing for the feel of a small warm body, yearning for the weight of a sleeping boy against her
shoulder, the tears that prickled her eyes when she saw a toddler putting its hand in its mother’s and her hand felt empty and bereft. Once, on a bus, she had sat a girl, maybe two, on her knee while the harassed mother tried to deal with a fractious baby and felt a sob forming when the girl wriggled into her lap and grasped the arm Isobel put around to stop her slipping. But never for a moment did she regret. She waited for her body to get used to the absence and it did. Being active helped, keeping moving, going for walks, catching a ferry, any ferry to anywhere in the harbour and walking through suburbs she would never recognize again. Sometimes she got lost but never for long.
Gradually she achieved a state she thought of as neutral, like when the engine of a car was running and the gears not engaged. When her boss started inviting her home to family barbecues and trying to set her up on dates she left and went back to the agency. There were always jobs. She said she liked short term ones and went to a series of places that over time blurred into each other. She gave herself a year, then she’d start planning. News of the boys came in letters from her mother, letters written every second Sunday. Joyce had given up work, Bob had been promoted again and he’d bought a house, several suburbs distant from Isobel’s parents but at least they were so far making sure that their maternal grandparents saw the boys once or twice a month. They were pleased to be keeping contact with their grandchildren. Daniel and Sally, Isobel learned, reading between her mother’s lines, felt they had nothing in common with Bob and Joyce and seldom saw them. She, Isobel, had become an aunt, and didn’t enquire how the various relationships would be explained to the boys as they got older. There were occasional letters from a lawyer; Bob would divorce her for desertion. She signed everything, didn’t see any point in getting herself a lawyer. Joyce sent her photos on their birthday and at Christmas, with the shortest of notes – thought you’d like to see these - photos Isobel kept in the box from some expensive pantyhose she had bought herself as a present, but never took them out to look at once she had put them away.
~~~~
Part Three
What Is Passing Is Here
a shiver, a delight
that what is passing
is here, as if a snake went by, green in the
gray leaves.
Denise Levertov, 'The Coming Fall"
~~~~
Chapter 17
‘Isobel! What a surprise! How …? Where are you ringing from?’
‘At home, in Wellington.' She hadn’t thought that Joyce might answer the phone. ‘I’m fine,’ she said, ‘and you?’
‘Pretty good, considering.'
Isobel asked to speak to Bob.
‘Is everything all right, Isobel? There’s nothing wrong with Neil or Andrew?’ Joyce always called them by name, she had never said ‘my children,’ or ‘our boys’ to Isobel. Her voice rose an octave with the question.
‘No, no of course not, you’d surely hear anything before I did.’
‘Of course, silly me. It’s just that with them being away from home now, I do worry sometimes.’ Pause. ‘I’ll get Bob then.’
‘Thanks,’ said Isobel as the receiver clunked onto something hard. She thought they’d have a cordless, with Cherwin’s Cash Registers becoming Cherwin’s Office and Shop Supplies. Marion was running the firm now, Isobel saw her name in the business pages now and again. And surely the boys had been away from home for years, they’d be thirty-five later this year. If Iris had ever had a chance to notice, she would have made much of Isobel knowing how old they were.
‘Isobel? Hello. How are you doing these days?’ Would she have recognized his voice? Maybe. The uncertainty in his tone was familiar.
‘Yes, hello Bob. I’m fine, thank you. And you?’
‘I’m good.’ Pause. Did he feel as awkward as she did?
‘Uh, I’ve been thinking it’s a long time since I’ve been in touch with the boys,’ — damn! she’d meant to use their names — ‘and I don’t have, you know, current contact information.’
‘Oh, yes, sure, Joyce has all that. Just a sec.’ He must have put his hand over the phone, she could hear him calling as though he was a long way away. Why hadn’t she asked Joyce?
‘Hello again, Isobel,’ her voice was cheerful now. ‘Bob’s hopeless with the details, I’ve got them here. Oh, you wouldn’t have seen that, I keep them in my head, I was tapping it.' The last with a bit of a laugh. Neil and Sophie were away at the moment, Isobel learnt. He was between jobs and had gone with his wife to a high-powered meeting in Paris, or was it that city in Belgium. Anyway…. Joyce was prattling on as though they were comparing their children’s achievements at a cocktail party. Isobel thought how she’d amputated many such conversations with a flat, ‘Oh really,’ followed by, ‘and what are you doing?’ ‘Doing,’ as everyone knew, meaning work or overseas travel; what you really wanted to know was how important was this person, what contacts did they have, where were they influential. People who went to cocktail parties always had influence somewhere, or they wouldn’t be invited to cocktail parties.
‘What were you saying, Joyce?’
‘Sophie’s gone international now she’s a director of the firm, you know that big dairy export company. Neil says it’s useful for him, too, getting more or less free trips when he’s not involved with a show. He hasn’t had one for a while.' Joyce finally spelled out an email address she was sure they cleared regularly and an Auckland phone number. She didn’t know exactly when they were back, but it wouldn’t be more than a few days. They were all going to the theatre together at Queen’s Birthday Weekend, Neil often got tickets. She couldn’t remember what the show was exactly, something musical …’ Isobel grabbed a pause.
‘And Andrew, where can I contact Andrew?’
‘The flat in Grafton, same firm in the city. He’s steady like his father, Andrew.’
‘Oh, right. I’m not sure I have the contact information though.’ Joyce rattled off a phone number, street address, email address and the name of the accountancy firm where he worked, ‘It’s such a shame there’s no grandchildren, Bob would so love that …. Oh, sorry,’ her voice trailed away. ‘That’s tactless of me ….’
‘It’s all right.’ It probably wasn’t all right, but what else could she say? ‘Thanks for the information.’
‘Do you want to talk to Bob again?’ Apology given and accepted.
‘No, that’s fine thanks, I just wanted to ….’ What she didn’t want was to explain anything, so she repeated her thanks and rang off, feeling unaccountably upset.
Two years in Sydney had begun the drift away from Neil and Andrew that had worked best for everyone; even her parents had gradually passed on information less and less and she never asked. She had given up any right to curiosity when she walked out the door to that taxi, tossing, ‘Ring Joyce,’ over her shoulder. Never, until Chris’s accident, had anything other than that the boys were and would be all right occurred to her. She could — not forget exactly — but tuck their existence away in a remote, untroubling corner of her mind. Chris’s accident and William Borsholdt between them had ruptured the membrane that had kept the past out of her present. William B would be startled, Isobel thought, if he knew he had sent her back into her childhood for — what, exactly? — explanations maybe, understanding of the Isobel who left her children.
She had never, ever, since 1967, thought of herself as a mother. Acquaintances lost children in custody disputes, or struggled as lesbian mothers or took positions in debates about boy children; none of this had anything to do with her. While she might express an opinion from time to time and she always supported mother-friendly – now morphed into family-friendly – work practices, it was as a concern quite apart from her personal experience.
Her parents had told her Andrew was gay, on one of their Christmas trips to Wellington. He still visited them regularly, they told her. Her father had made one of his rare comments on personal matters, something like — with a nudge to his wife — ‘must be in the family, yours or
mine, d’you think?’ and her mother had blushed. Even Andrew’s gayness had seemed no concern of hers; she was already making regular donations to the Aids Foundation and assumed he knew the safe sex message. How could any young gay man miss it? Equal pay, then pay equity and equal opportunities were her issues, they could be argued on facts, facts about gender-based pay levels, and who took up what work and the false impression promulgated when a woman won a high-level position. She would debate these with anyone. When Ruth Richardson, a National Party MP with financial and political views that Isobel strongly disagreed with, returned to parliament with a baby she was breast-feeding in early 1984, Isobel was uncharacteristically vocal in her support for parliamentary facilities for breastfeeding. She argued they should be made available to any woman working in parliament, which they were not. If asked, she would assist any group working for child-care provision. Her arguments were about equity and fairness, they were never personal.
Andrew had been at both her parents’ funerals. She thought she remembered Neil at her mother’s, and hadn’t he sent extravagant flowers to her father’s? And that was – omigod! she thought– more than ten years ago. They had greeted each other, then, like friendly, unfamiliar relatives and Isobel had no memory at all of what any of them had said.
Iris had tried, persistently for a while, to meet the boys. She even wanted to organize a dinner with the three, Chris and Andrew and Neil, but it never happened. At the time Isobel was sure that was because of the distance between Auckland and Wellington, a series of accidents of timing and generally busy lives, now she wondered whether she herself had sabotaged her partner’s efforts. Why had she resisted? Habit? Because, she answered herself, she was reluctant to unsettle something that had worked ever since what she now saw as her bold move — though she hadn’t felt bold at the time. What she had anticipated — not planned, that would be putting it too strongly, she’d just guessed what everyone would do — had been what happened: Joyce had stepped in to care for the boys and she and Bob had married as soon he was able to divorce her, Isobel. Everything had worked out fine. And she had resisted Iris’s attempts to change any of it.