by David Brooks
‘I still don’t understand. How are you more trapped now?’
‘Trapped! In this bloody country, this marriage!’
‘How have I trapped you?’
‘You wouldn’t bloody know. Or care. Why pretend? Why even pretend to care?’
‘But I do care! I love you!’
‘Ha. “Love”. The worst trap of all.’
‘You’re going in circles –’
‘Circles! Me? Circles? What else could you expect from a trapped animal?’
‘You’re not an animal –’
‘Ah. So, you admit it, trapped, but not an animal …’
‘I’m missing the point. Or you’re not making it. What is the problem? What can I do that I haven’t been doing already?’
‘You could get me the bloody hell out of here, out of Australia.’
‘We’ve talked about that. It’s always been an option.’
‘Talked about it. sure. All talk. You’ve never showed the slightest intention to do anything about it. Too dedicated to your precious work here. Building traps.’
‘It’s never been that precious. We could always have gone elsewhere. Back to Europe. You could have, you know. You have perfect German, perfect Italian, at least for the singing –’
‘Europe. Ha. Where? Where is there to go? Berlin? To sing for Mr Hitler? Milan, to sing for that other fat slug? Vienna? Doesn’t Mr Hitler come from Vienna? Europe. “Perfect German.” What a joke. Scheiss.’
‘Or London.’
‘London. Sure. The centre of great opera. Another Amy Castles. That would be good.’
‘So, you want to go, and yet you don’t want to go. You’re talking in circles.’
‘Circles again. Can’t you think of anything but circles?’
‘I’m sorry, but you’re losing me. What else could you have in mind? America?’
‘America! You’d love that. Be right at home with all the Greats of Modern Architecture …’
‘It’s a thought. Maybe you should try New York, or Chicago.’
‘Yes. Certainly. Sing to the bloody Yanks. Do they ever look up from their trough long enough?’
‘Then nowhere, darling. Nowhere.’ He would get to this point. Exasperated, not knowing what else to say. ‘I know you hate the word, but you are going around in circles again.’
‘Circles!’ And now she was shouting, her slack mouth taut and wide, dark. And suddenly he hated. Hated what he saw. The eruption, that cared for nothing but itself. He closed down, backed away. She must have seen it in his eyes, since he scarcely moved an inch in his chair. And she was gone. Inside again. A few seconds later a door slammed. The toilet door. So violently the whole house seemed to jar.
It was hard to tell how long he sat there. An hour, perhaps, before getting up and going into the kitchen, cutting himself some cold roast lamb, a tomato, some bread, taking it outside again. She was somewhere in the house. He need not look for her. Some nights he would – begging her to see reason, trying argument after argument – but tonight, although he felt there was something almost malicious in his not doing so (what was he trying to do? To short-circuit the process? To bring it to its head as quickly as possible, since it would come to its head? With the least expenditure of energy?), he was too tired, could not face another night of the futile, labyrinthine wandering with – such images would come to him – their hearts bloody in their hands.
He continued to sit in the dark, thinking. He could hear her moving about. Glasses. The liquor cabinet. At one point some furniture being moved, a chair being dragged across the lounge-room floor. Then silence, complete silence, for twenty minutes, perhaps longer, before the front door slammed. He looked at his watch for the first time in the evening, was surprised to find it already past midnight. Where had she gone? Out onto the front step? Into the street? After a few minutes listening he got up, walked through the house. The door had slammed but had not actually latched and was standing open onto the night. She was not on the steps. He went out and looked around the lawn and the large front garden, but could see her nowhere. Then he saw some movement under the large oak-tree on the other side of the street, and went over expecting her, but nothing, just a shadow. He looked up and saw that the moon was almost full again. He had the uncanny sensation that he had looked out only a week before, when they had had their last argument, and that the moon had been full then also.
He walked down the street slowly, a full block or two, not with any real hope or expectation of finding her. Rather to the contrary. It was a beautiful night. the air was soft and fresh, a slight moistness in it, a hint of frangipani and jasmine. Their fighting was ridiculous. Whatever the cause. Surely, if he found her, and approached her with the right softness, gentleness, he could soothe her – take anything she gave without responding, until she had exhausted herself or it had exhausted her, then soothe her. It was appalling to think how much this must take out of her. They were so young. He was thirty-seven, she only thirty-four. How could they waste their lives like this?
As he went back through the house he could hear sobbing. She had come along the driveway, through the gate at the side of the garage, and was in the darkness at the bottom of the yard somewhere. The fern-garden probably. They had put a seat there, in a tiny clearing, a glade, where they could read in the summer amongst the great fronds of the tree-ferns that had been there, for all they knew, since the place had been bush.
The sobbing was so loud that he was surprised he had not heard it from the street. A part of him, as he approached, was wrenched by the wild anguish in it, so out of proportion to anything that had ever happened in his life. And another part was furious at its extravagance, its indulgence, as if it were being done deliberately to call him, from wherever he was – and not only to call, but to affect, convince, bludgeon – or to wake the neighbours – for surely they were lying awake, listening; how could they not be? – to insist they bear witness to the horror of her life.
But the street-mood prevailed. The sobbing may have been loud but she looked so lost and helpless, wracked by it as it came through her. And so beautiful. He wanted to hold her, tightly, clasp her until it passed. He put his arm out in the moonlight – there was a space of moonlight, amongst the ferns – and bent toward her, but it was as though a spring trap had been released. As if she had been ready, known all along that he was approaching in the shadow, her arm shot out and her sharp nails slashed at him, as if she had been trapped, cornered, and he the attacker. A grunt of effort, and a word in German, from a voice barely hers, and she was gone.
He walked back to the house and there was the sound of furniture again. In the bathroom, checking in the mirror, he found, much as he had suspected, three long welts across his left cheek, parallel and slightly curved, like a fern frond. A trickle of blood from one of them had already reached his shirt-collar. He staunched it with the styptic pencil he used for his shaving, then checked his watch again. It was almost one. He tried the door of the bedroom but it was jammed shut. The chest of drawers. He could push it open easily and noiselessly enough, once a slight snoring indicated that she was sleeping. And that would not be long. Five minutes. Ten at the most.
He went out to the verandah and poured himself the last of the wine, lit one of her cigarettes. It was getting cooler. There was a slight chill in the air. He drew in deeply, exhaled slowly, looked up, cued by a chirring in the sky, to see a large fruit-bat crossing the face of the moon, saw it circle in a wide arc in the silver-blue light before settling in a large tree two or three houses away. He tried to see himself from the bat’s perspective. Had it seen him? Had he figured on its radar? Probably not.
Late. But tomorrow – today – was Saturday, and he could sleep in a little. With luck, a little luck, he would wake to bright sunshine, and calm, and the sound of her singing.
III
The Guest House
He had often wondered about Ellen, the intensity of the friendship, and the real nature of Margaret’s feelings for her. Sh
e and Ellen had been closest friends since early childhood, would even speak sometimes of each other as sisters, almost as if they really were that. Even in their thirties and forties Margaret appeared to pine, somehow, if they did not see each other for some time, and it seemed a good idea to encourage visits and meetings whenever the opportunities arose. Long ago, when Margaret was in Berlin, Ellen had married a Gary Patterson from Bangarra west of the mountains, and a year or two after Margaret’s return Ellen and Gary had moved to the north coast to take up a lease on a dairy farm. There they were only an hour’s drive from the railway line and, three periods of childbearing aside, coming to Sydney was not so difficult. Ellen would try to get down whenever Margaret had been away singing, to welcome her back and catch up on the news, and live some of her different life vicariously.
Sometimes she stayed with them in the house in Strathfield, but as often as not – particularly when she had the children with her – with her mother, Katherine McKenzie, or with other friends, the Gardners, in the Blue Mountains, although she would come down on the train every second or third day and occasionally stay the night. She and Margaret would go out to lunch, drink wine by the Harbour, visit the Art Gallery, go to concerts, come home with piles of books – Ellen’s great indulgence – to tide her over at the farm until she could next get down, and sometimes take a day trip to visit Katherine at Mount Apex and all the while they would be deep in their endless and endlessly renewable conversation. Ellen knew every opera Margaret sang in – could sing it along with her, and would, for in Ellen’s company, as only rarely in his, Margaret sang. They seemed to know each other’s thoughts, tried to read every book the other read, and when not together would write to one another almost weekly. He used to tease Margaret, in the early stages, with how much she must be learning about dairy farming. If only Ellen could sing, he said, they could almost swap lives. It was a kind of jealousy, clearly enough, but not serious, for he could never begrudge Margaret’s buoyancy when Ellen was with her, and only be grateful for Ellen’s influence this way. But there were depths even to their silences that he could not get into. There was also a precarious balance. He knew that if he pushed too far or too hard he might disturb it utterly. Each was intensely loyal to the other. Even, as he had seen just once, in the briefest flash, aggressively, almost dangerously so.
There was a time at a guest house on the south coast. They had been told about the place by a university friend, Ron Allison, who’d said that his colleagues took their lovers there, for the wonderful beach, the food, the romantic seclusion, the discretion of the management. Margaret had been intrigued and had begun almost immediately talking about a trip down there. It would be a chance to road-test the ‘new’ car – a four-year-old Humber 12. And somehow right from the start it had been assumed that Ellen would be coming with them. They hadn’t seen her for almost two years. Things had been difficult at the farm. The marriage was in trouble somehow. She could bring the children down and leave them with Katherine or with Annie Gardner in the mountains – they were old enough now – and so have a few days utterly to herself. ‘Utterly to you!’ he might have joked, but that was understood.
Mooney Point was a day’s drive down from Sydney. They had picked up Ellen from Central Station the evening before, had a celebratory dinner at home, then left at seven in the morning, breaking the trip in Kiama for Steak Diane at the pub and a chance to show Ellen the famous blow-hole. The weather was fine and warm and, dust allowing, Daniel drove with his window down, enjoying the breeze on his face, the sunshine on his arm. Margaret sat in the front at first, but then, when they were out of Sydney, she asked him to stop so that she could sit in the back – she was getting a crick in the neck from all the twisting around to talk to Ellen – and so for much of the trip he drove them like a chauffeur left to the sunshine and the road and his own thoughts, glancing at them now and again in the rear-view mirror, deep in a vibrant conversation that, but for the occasional wisp of song – it seemed Margaret was teaching Ellen the role of Orfeo, to sing her own Euridice to – the wind and the sound of the engine kept him from hearing.
Much of the route south of Nara was unpaved, and the driving, on roads rutted by logging trucks, far slower than Daniel had anticipated. They arrived just before seven, over an hour later than planned, but since other guests had arrived not long before them the manager and his wife were happy to keep the kitchen open – it was not, they said, as if they were going anywhere themselves – and suggested they take a short pre-dinner walk on the beach, to stretch their legs and sharpen their appetite after the long drive. And they did so, barefoot, for twenty minutes or more, picking up shells, investigating the wrack, enjoying the salt air and a stiffening sea-breeze on their faces. Rounding the small headland at the northern end Daniel was delighted to see, in the gathering dusk and far off across the grey water, the lighthouse he remembered from his childhood, and realised that on the other side of the same peninsula must be the place to which he and his cousins had come, with his mother, for school holidays almost thirty years before. Then, having walked some distance ahead of the two women, who stood considering something in the wrack, he looked back and wished he had the camera, they looked so alive, so happy, Margaret especially, in a way their own day-to-day life didn’t seem often now to bring out in her. The thought was uncomfortable to him – did not belong in this place – and he pushed it from his mind. She was, after all, happy now, and he was here, was part of it.
They caught up with him, almost at the moment that the thought had come to him, and, each taking an arm, turned him around and walked him slowly, deliciously, affectionately back to the lodge, talking about the sea air, their sudden hunger, the dinners they had heard of, the things they hoped they could have.
The guest-house, a converted station homestead, was a two-storeyed brick-and-weatherboard building on a foundation of sandstone that must originally have been carted south from the Hawkesbury shelf. It had ten guest rooms, only three of which seemed to be currently occupied. Their rooms were upstairs at the back, facing the open sea. Although at different angles – he and Margaret had the end and larger room, with its door at a right angle to the rest, while the windows of Ellen’s, a middle room, opened directly onto the view – each of the rooms issued on to a long, open corridor that was in fact a closed-in upper verandah, windowed all along the eastern side to catch the maximum morning light. In high summer it might have been a furnace but for the wide-opening shutters and heavy, insulated curtains, but in mid-spring the light was softer, and in the evening the wide floor and circulating air and proximity of the waves below gave the area the feeling of a ship at anchor, or just setting sail.
That night they ate abundantly – oysters from further down the coast, local fish, imported cheese, hock from one of the best vineyards in the Hunter Valley – in the almost-empty dining room beside an open fire, drank coffee and port by another fire in the lounge, talking about earlier visits to the sea, and then retired, to wake late the next morning to warm, strong sunshine and a sky without clouds.
Borrowing a beach umbrella, they spent most of the day by the sea, indolent and warmly sensual, rubbing each other with tanning oil, swimming when the sun grew hot and they needed to cool themselves, taking photographs with the camera he had bought Margaret the previous Christmas. The two women included him as they had never yet done, asking him about parts of his life he could not recall ever speaking of to them before. Toward mid-afternoon, engrossed in an aspect of architecture that Margaret claimed to know already more than enough about – she was in any case almost asleep under the umbrella – he and Ellen went for a walk in the same direction they had all gone the evening before. He pointed out the lighthouse, which he had since learnt from the hotelier – he had never known its name before – was called the Point Upright light, and told her of his childhood summers, and how he had longed to go out to see it but had never had anyone to take him. He was surprised by how engaged Ellen was, how interested not only in this, but in
things about his work, his aspirations. He said as much, as they walked back, and was momentarily unsettled to see her eyes flash for an instant, before – had it been only an aberration, a trick of the light? – taking him firmly by the shoulder – he was surprised what a grip she had – and kissing him just as firmly and decisively on the cheek, telling him what a fool he was.
Drained by the day in the sunshine, they went to bed early, he and Margaret to make, as it turned out, lazy and unexpected love, Ellen perhaps to continue reading the thick American novel she had begun down on the beach. He went to sleep listening to the waves, thinking over an architectural problem that had been preoccupying him for a week now, working it out with such surprising ease that he did not even trouble, as he normally would, to note down the solution lest he not remember it in the morning.
He woke in the early light, just after dawn. Margaret was not there. He waited for her, thinking that her rising must have been what had woken him, and that she had gone to the bathroom at the other end of the corridor and would be back soon. When, after half an hour or more, she still had not come, he rose quietly and went to the door, intending to look for her, concerned that she might be ill or distressed, for sometimes it was like that: sometimes he would wake, in the house at Strathfield, and she would not be there, but sitting somewhere in the cold early light, staring bleakly before her as if the middle distance contained some vacuum, some great, mesmerising negative he could not see.
The door was just slightly ajar, as though she had not wanted to disturb him with the sound of it closing. He had opened it only a few more inches when he glimpsed her, with her back to him, leaving Ellen’s room, pausing there as if trying to close that door with an equal care, not wanting to waken, or re-awaken, the person she was leaving. He brought his own door – their door – swiftly and quietly back into place before she turned, and by the time she re-entered the bedroom seconds later he was back in the bed, his heart pounding, feigning sleep.