by J. C. Grey
As I drive slowly through the gates, the wind catches them and blows them shut, almost as though the house and I are of the same mind. Again, I stop the car and pull the new padlock from its packaging. I get out of the car, and click the lock into place. I rattle the closed gates to make sure they are secure against the agent or new owners. They are. I turn towards the car. The gates rattle again, and I spin on my heel. The gates are silent but a quick wind shivers through the trees and scuffs the gravel on the drive. As I stand there, it drops as suddenly as it rose so I climb back in the car and drive up to the house.
Hauling my groceries inside, I notice that great swathes of purple clouds are forming overhead, and wonder if the long, healing days of autumn are coming to an end and, if so, what winter will bring.
November, the year before last …
It is little more than a week before our wedding and Marc is distracted. He has been for days. His normally easy expression is troubled and there have been several phone calls to the apartment that have caused him to apologise and retreat to his study.
The open-plan layout doesn’t lend itself to privacy; his study is really just a space marked out by open bookshelves and a long, low leather sofa. So when this happens for the third time, I decide to listen in case it concerns me.
It does. Marc’s voice is lower than usual. Clearly he is as worried about being overheard as I am by the content of the call, which I gather is about money. His or the business’s, I’m not sure, but it doesn’t really matter. Marc is the business.
When he hangs up, I brazenly walk in and plonk myself down on the sofa, arms spread along the back. I cross my legs clad in loose printed pants and admire my pedicure.
‘So,’ I say brightly. ‘Have you lost all your money? Are you poor?’
‘Shit!’ Marc looks up. He must have been miles away not to hear my heels on the hardwood floors but he recovers quickly.
‘If I have, what would you do?’ he asks, sitting back in his desk chair and feigning the same nonchalance.
‘Oh, I don’t know. I suppose it would make sense to reappraise my options,’ I tease. Inside, though, I quake. What would I do?
‘Well, you don’t have to. I … we are not poor.’
‘So …?’ My eyes stray to the mobile phone discarded on his desk.
His eyes follow mine and he leans back against the desk, his dark eyes speculative. ‘My lawyer and accountant are concerned about your intentions,’ he says. ‘They want to set up a prenup.’
‘I see.’ On the surface I am calm but inside this revelation has cut a gaping hole. Why this should be I do not know. I expected it as a matter of course in the days that followed his proposal, if you can call it that, but when it didn’t materialise I forgot all about it.
‘You should,’ I say, finding the insouciant tone I’m aiming for. ‘This is exactly the sort of situation a prenup is made for: to protect a wealthy man from a grasping, gold-digging whore.’
He is around the desk and over to me in a flash, his hand on my jaw raising my eyes to his. ‘Don’t ever say that again.’ His voice is gritty and dangerous. ‘I won’t have anyone speak about my wife that way.’
There is such cold steel in his voice that I shiver. I have never, ever heard him speak like this to anyone, certainly not to me. I figure it is not the moment to remind him that I am not yet his wife, that I still have nine days, two hours and forty-eight minutes to change my mind. I have already pushed out Marc’s one-month deadline to a little over three; he will not delay another minute.
His fingers slowly relax on my face, stroking my chin. ‘There will be no prenup,’ he tells me.
‘And your money men?’ I ask.
‘They get a bonus.’
I gape at him.
His face relaxes, the anger gone as if it had never been. ‘They said what they did to protect my interests even when they knew it would piss me off.’
‘Loyalty.’ I nod as if it is a concept I have had passing acquaintance with. ‘It’s not my strong suit. I think we should get a prenup.’
He smiles, and those devil eyes are a dark chocolate. ‘I think not.’
My heart is disintegrating while it continues to beat. I cannot bear it, and even as he kisses me I know that it must all end in tears.
Present day, early morning
There is something I have lost, something important. Even though its identity is vague, I know I cannot find it anywhere and yet I must.
Looking, looking, looking. I am muttering to myself as I scour the house. I open all the kitchen cupboards one by one, peer into the dark hole of the old washing machine, sweep back the drapes in the library. It is in none of these places. Absently, I right the bear on his window-seat and stomp upstairs, my footsteps loud on the hardwood treads.
Coming ready or not! I hear the words echo as I reach the landing. I am getting warm now, I can feel it. In the smaller bedrooms, I make a show of peering under beds and inside wardrobes, even though I know where I will find it.
As I walk to the master suite and through into the dressing room, I hear a shuffling and a whisper. I smile to myself, knowing what I will find. Just as I open the door to stroll in, another nearby slams shut and I am propelled from sleep with such force it leaves me gasping.
Dreaming. I must have been dreaming, so deeply asleep … but, no, that can’t be right. We dream when we are in shallow sleep, don’t we? Anyway, it was a dream. The house has virtually no furniture, certainly no beds to peer under.
I am chilled—the autumn nights are longer and cooler now—and reach to pull up the sheet and rug that must have fallen away. It is then I realise that I am not on the chaise. I am in the master bedroom’s dressing room, standing in front of the small locked door that is still shuddering slightly from the force of its closure. Sleepwalking.
Closing my eyes, I put out a hand to the door knob, even as the lock clicks into place on the other side.
‘Let me in!’ I mutter, twisting the knob repeatedly. ‘Who’s there? Let me in now!’
Of course, the door remains shut, and the fact that I am terrified just makes me angrier.
‘I know you’re in there!’ I yell at last. It is childish, but that is the way fear makes me feel. Excluded from a game I did not know I was playing. ‘Be like that!’ I kick the door, not hard as my feet are bare but it is enough to stub my toe a little. ‘I don’t care!’ I grumble in retreat.
But I do, I realise as I retreat, hobbling.
As I walk from the room towards the stairs, I pass the long landing window and my gaze flies out and down the long drive as watery light glimmers over the trees.
A man is standing outside the gate.
November the year before last …
Four-and-a-half days before the wedding on the first of December, I finally come to my senses and tell Marc it’s all off. It sounds brutal but it is the culmination of hours spent floundering in a rising sea of panic. What on earth am I doing? Marriage isn’t something for half-formed creatures like me. It’s for grown-ups, or it should be. Why isn’t there a marriage test? You shouldn’t be able to embark on something this serious until you’ve earned the right in some way, proved you have the mettle. Someone should have stopped it before now.
Feeling as though I can’t breathe, I give it to him straight as he comes through the door, exhausted after the series of sixteen-hour days he has been working in order to take two weeks for our honeymoon in Morocco. The wedding can’t go ahead.
‘Okay,’ he says agreeably, shrugging out of his jacket and loosening his tie. ‘I need a beer.’
‘Not until we phone everyone and cancel it.’ I stand, one hand on either side of the doorway to the kitchen, preventing him from reaching the fridge.
The venue is not a problem, I know, as we are being married at Palm Beach on the sands outside Marc’s small weekender. Still, there are around twenty-five guests, caterers, florists and myriad others who will need to be notified. He has organised much of it, although I chan
ged the floral arrangements and menu when I recognised his mother’s hand in the arrangements.
‘Em,’ he warns before lifting me bodily out of the way. He drags a beer from the fridge, twists the top off and downs it there and then in front of the open fridge.
I find the movement of his throat compelling and find myself staring, fixated by both the sensual undulation and by the implicit admission that Marc is feeling the pressure, too. He has never, to my knowledge, exhibited any prior need for an alcoholic prop.
A little uncertain, I stand there, not sure how to react to this Marc and how fair it is to do this to him right now. I recall that on the day he proposed, I had half-expected him to call the whole thing off before things got out of hand.
‘Possibly I should have mentioned this a few days ago,’ I acknowledge aloud. ‘But you do see that we can’t go ahead for all sorts of reasons.’ I waft my hand through the air to indicate multiple insurmountable barriers.
‘Name one.’
I smile. I only have one but it’s a biggie. ‘I don’t have a wedding dress.’
Admittedly, it’s because I deliberately haven’t been looking.
He comes across to me where I still lurk by the door, and drops a friendly peck on my forehead.
‘No prob,’ he says and drains his beer, wandering past out onto our deep balcony that looks north over the city sprawl.
‘No prob? That’s all right for you to say!’ Following him, I am working overtime to manufacture horror, even though I think my heart might never recover if he calls my bluff. When I wring my hands together theatrically, he bursts into laughter.
‘Gorgeous girl, your never-ending delays and attempts to extricate yourself from our impending nuptials are both charming and amusing, alas utterly without hope of success.’ As he sinks tiredly onto a wooden bench and props his right ankle on his left knee, he pats the seat beside him.
Fuming silently, I slink into it as he throws a casual arm over my shoulder. ‘In any case, you do have something to wear.’
It’s true, I have any number of things suitable for a beach wedding; long floaty numbers are my signature look. Then I consider the shock value of wearing a bikini. Or board shorts. Or strategically placed seaweed. My mood picks up at the thought of Yvette’s response.
‘Claire will bring it over on Saturday morning.’
‘What?’ I am visualising Yvette’s face when I appear before the celebrant in a wetsuit.
‘Claire has your wedding dress,’ he repeats, far too smugly for my liking. ‘You really don’t think I’d failed to notice you hadn’t bought one, do you?’
Six
Present day, morning
He is gone, the man. By the time I dash downstairs, shrug on a long cotton cardigan over my pyjamas and unlock the front door, he is nowhere in sight. To be sure, I go to the gates where the rusty chain is still padlocked. There appears to have been no attempt to cut through it.
A bushwalker, perhaps. Maybe someone else funnelled in by the mist—except that the weather is crisp and cool today, with little trace of humidity. Yesterday’s wind seems to have swallowed it whole.
I know for sure the man wasn’t Marc. My brief impression of the man was of someone middle-aged with a receding hairline and too-short trousers. It occurs to me that perhaps this is Lammermoor House’s new owner come to inspect his acquisition. But I dismiss the possibility. The man I saw hadn’t looked like the representative of a superannuation fund, either, more like someone who worked for a living. Instant guilt strikes me at the thought. Marc’s company runs investment and superannuation funds, and I know the hours he and his senior management team put in—constantly alert to any tiny upturn or downturn in the financial markets. There are just different sorts of work.
What I mean is that Harry High-pants appeared like a man who worked with his hands, and maybe outdoors. Now I think of it, his face had a weather-beaten look about it, his shoulders slightly hunched as though against inclement weather.
I consider whether to open the gates and walk as far as the road, but my feet are bare and, if he means me ill, out in the green wood I am at his mercy.
Instead, I retreat down the drive on my cold feet, carefully relocking the front door behind me, and rush through my shower. When I have finished and at intervals throughout the following hours, I peer from the steps or the upstairs window, but there is nothing to see. By the afternoon I am still jittery, the morning cooped up inside having worn on my nerves.
My phone memory has all the photos it can take. I will need to offload some before I can take more. In any case, I have an urge to be outside in the weak sunlight. There is a shed in the western corner of the back garden. To date, I have done no more than stare through the window but today I slide the bolt and push open the door.
Inside, the loamy smells of potting mix and mulch make me cough. As I stand, gazing about me, a ray of lemony light thrusts through the dusty window, illuminating thousands of motes that hang suspended in its beam. How long have they remained that way, floating? An errant breeze spots the open door and buffets its way in, and instantly the dust motes are flung hither and thither. I am an agent of the first change this place has seen in at least thirteen, or possibly thirty, years.
A pair of wellingtons captures my attention. They are a murky olive green, a point in their favour as I cannot abide leopard-skin and floral wellies. Although they are on the large side, when I tip them up, only a little loose soil comes out so I put them on. As I knew I would, I feel differently when they are on, purposeful.
People say that clothes don’t matter, but they are wrong. Moreover, they are ridiculous. Would Queen Elizabeth have held on to her position for sixty years had she preferred balaclavas to designer millinery? Would Gandhi’s message have resonated so profoundly had he worn Armani instead of a loincloth? Of course not.
Clothes, for me, are more than a skin or a disguise. They allow me to see the possibilities, and allow me to act the part until I am it. They can fit you in or keep you out. They are not to be underestimated.
In leopard-skin print boots, I might not have felt the confidence to grasp the cumbersome old rake and spade and trowel—hung neatly side by side on hooks and decorated with spider webs—and heave them outside. Wearing olive green is a sign, to the world and to myself, that I am about to do more than smell the roses—not that there are any, but you get the drift.
Until this moment, I had never intended to make a project of the garden, and I am a little surprised to find myself in this position. I am not given to taking pointless action and the chances are that I will be here no more than a few weeks or months. Really, I don’t even know enough to be effective, although it takes no experience to see that some plants are strangling some others. Removing their chokehold will give their victims a fighting chance.
I tell myself it is a one-off act of mercy rather than a gardening project.
Where to start is the immediate problem. I suddenly realise how big the garden is and how small my armoury of ancient tools. In fact, none of them is of any help with what I decide is my first task—dealing with the smothering jasmine. It is one of the few plants I know the name of. In Sydney, its pink buds tumbling over fences across the city seem to summon spring in their wake. Now, though, at the opposite end of the year, its slender twining stems disguise a ruthless strangling machine.
Without shears, I tug and the jasmine tugs back, burning my palms as the stems slip free. But I am not defeated. I stomp inside and return, brandishing a pair of kitchen scissors, with which I snip and slash industriously at the killer, partially freeing the three plants within its snare—shrubs with broad flat leaves, some turned to copper. For good measure, I chop off the end of each stem to remove the browning leaves. Of this I’m sure; the old must go for new life to grow.
After an hour wrestling with the jasmine, I turn my attention to the weed-filled herb bed, clearing out any growth that looks as though it has no right to be there.
The work is swe
aty but addictive. Before I realise it, the sun has almost set and a sharp little breeze whips my neck and cheeks. I will need a serious scarf to go with the serious boots. Standing back, I take a second to admire my work before returning the tools and boots to the shed.
As I walk back to the house, clutching the scissors in hands that tingle with recent activity, I feel buoyed by the physical exertion. The house is in darkness as I enter the kitchen, thinking that I feel together enough to text Marc tonight to assure him all is well. He has kept his word and has not called the police or … I remember the man at the gate. A spy? I doubt it, but I will ask him.
I shower and pull on a clean T-shirt and loose yoga pants. Back in the kitchen, I put a serve of chicken and vegetable stew on the stove to heat and clean the scissors before returning them to the drawer. Casting my eye around for my phone, I cannot see it in its usual place on the kitchen table. Neither is it in my bag, the pocket of the jeans now in the washing basket or anywhere else I look.
Frowning, I try to remember if I had it in the shed. I don’t think so and I really do not want to go hunting for it in the dark. I will check in the morning.
It means I cannot phone Marc and he is on my mind as I turn in. Little surprise, then, that he appears in my dreams.
Wedding day, December the year before last …
‘But oo is giving er away?’ The whisper is pitched perfectly for me to just hear as I arrive downstairs from the attic bedroom of Marc’s weekender. Yvette makes me sound like an unwanted microwave but this moment, this day is not hers to ruin.
‘I am, but—a word of warning—I don’t come free,’ I answer. I would have preferred to glide down an elegant staircase as I make my entrance but the weekender is just a beach shack and the stairs are little better than a ladder tucked inside the front door, so I have to make do with gliding into the living room.