A Magical Affair

by Victoria Gordon

  One weak mind, at the very least, she thought, and got up to make yet another coffee and peer out of the window. It would be just like Kurtis to arrive this early, she thought, then shivered inwardly at memories of the joyous dawns they’d shared, dawns when he was home and the sharing was too exciting, too purely exhilarating for both of them and they had found they simply had to get up, to do something, even if it was no more than go for a walk.

  Gulping at the steaming brew, Ruth read on, her heart lurching at various poignant phrases, her body restless now, becoming attuned to Kurtis’ words, his message. She squirmed in her chair, wanting to get the task over with, but unable to keep herself from loitering over some of what he’d said...

  ‘I can’t promise never to hurt you, because I try never to make promises I can’t be sure of keeping, and, because I’m only a man with human failings, I probably will hurt you some day in some fashion, however unintentionally. I can’t promise never to leave you, for much the same reasons. I can promise to do my best for you and for me and for us, and I do so. I can promise to love you as well as I can for as long as I can or as long as you’ll let me. And I do so. The logistics problems are quite irrelevant; we can sort out anything and we’ve got the rest of our lives to do it in, together.

  I miss you, I feel incomplete without you, because whenever we are together I’m aware of how we complement each other in terms of emotions and feelings and attitudes. I’m just so comfortable with you; I hardly know you and yet I know you, for what sense that makes. Know you and like you and love you and cherish you, as witch and woman.

  There was one remark my servant made that—miraculously—said exactly what it was meant to say, and thus hears repeating: ‘He wishes only to be the best person that he can be as he grows to become the best person he could be, and to find favour in your sight.’ That’ll do me.’

  Damn your servant, Ruth thought, inwardly cringing at the thought but unable to ignore it. Damn die master and the man, because she dared not do otherwise! Some of their writings were just too close to the bone for comfort, touched her in ways she had thought herself now immune to...

  ‘Well, it’s early Thursday morning now, and I’ve spent a restless night thinking of everything I forgot to include in the letter I finished about two a.m. So much I want to say, so much I’m not sure how to say, not enough paper in the world anyway.

  I love you. I cherish you. I need you. I respect you. I care for you. I want you. I want you with me. I want to share my life with you. I have to believe you feel the same way because otherwise I’m wasting my time writing this, although even that couldn’t stop me doing so.

  Before the day’s out, you may get a phone call demanding in the nicest possible terms, of course, that you go through your files and read all my letters in order, starting with the two intense ones that knocked you flat. I think you should; I wish you would. I haven’t, although tempted, because I know they’ll show the consistency of my feelings and my thoughts.’

  Why hadn’t she? Ruth could only sit and stare at those few paragraphs, her mind a whirl and yet blank, as if it were stuck in a snowstorm. It was—had been—a simple enough request. But she hadn’t done it, knew she hadn’t. But she couldn’t for the life of her understand why. Especially considering some of the stuff that followed...

  ‘I’m afraid that I’m pushing you too fast in this whole thing, or to be more correct I think we’re pushing each other too fast. But I don’t know how to slow down and I doubt you do either.

  I’m not being chauvinistic, Ruth, or if I am I don’t care because it has to be said. You’re a good woman, a fine woman, a woman with guts and a woman to be proud of. But you’re a loving, caring, delightful, flighty woman who needs a man to love and care for and who can take delight in you and love you for all that you are. And you know it! And I’m that man and you know that, too.

  I don’t want to see you old and alone; I want you old with me! If it’s what you want.

  I have to stop this or I’ll be on your doorstep this afternoon, which wouldn’t help anything. Just please, Ruth, don’t run! I know you’re tempted and I know why. We can cool it if you want to, if you have to; we can stop dead in our tracks if it helps, but just please don’t run. Don’t quit. Don’t give up just because you’re scared.’

  Scared? I should have been terrified, Ruth thought. I should have been running like a rabbit, just as I finally did do. But even more, she realised with the wonder of hindsight, she should have been somehow responding to Kurds’ concerns, should have been communicating with him as he had so obviously been trying to communicate with her. She should have — but she hadn’t! She had instead concealed her worries, kept her concerns from him, hidden them even from herself, where she could. They were too real, too much a part of her she hadn’t wanted to face at the time, still didn’t. Too far from the magic, too real to fit in her concepts of romance.

  It wasn’t as if they couldn’t talk to each other; when they were together. Both before the wedding and afterwards, one of the nicest things had been their aptitude of companionable talk. But, she realised with a flash of insight, those times had never lent themselves to the sort of serious, intense discussion Kurtis must have sensed was required.

  He had tried; these letters revealed how hard he’d tried. But she hadn’t. She hadn’t tried at all, had found it all too easy to throw her worries aside, to ignore the problems, ignore the feelings that had eventually built up to the explosion that made her run.

  A passage in yet another letter caught her eye, and she read it thrice over because somehow, now, it seemed so apt...

  ‘It seems every time we start talking seriously you take your flighty little dance closer and closer to the precipice, only to find some tricky little pirouette that rescues you just as you’re about to tip over and fall for my warlock’s charms. Very frustrating, it is, especially when all I want is for you to admit we might have a future and that you want us to have a future and we both want it to be a long and fulfilling future- together. However unconventionally in the short term!

  But I’m a patient type, even if it mightn’t seem so. I shall addict you to my loving, to my touch, to my caring and sharing and to the person that I am, which is the right person for you just as you’re the right woman for me. And once I have you addicted—as I am—it’ll be maintenance rations—with just the occasional flare-up to keep things interesting—to make sure I have enough reserves to last the distance. So be warned, this is a long-term campaign you’re being threatened with.’

  ‘Be warned’! Well, she had been. And had ignored the warning in ways that now seemed terribly important, even more terrible in the way she felt uncomfortable, almost ashamed at how she’d failed to see the letters for the seriousness that was in them.

  Ruth continued to work her way through the stack, finding them less intense, increasingly so in the days leading up to their wedding, and almost all the intensity gone in those she’d received afterwards, from a husband more often away than home. The later letters were more frivolous, far lighter, clearly designed to entertain, not to raise serious doubts or provoke serious discussions.

  It was almost as if, having got her to the altar, Kurtis had decided she must have known what she was doing and chosen to accept that. As she had, until the pent- up, unrelieved cauldron of emotion inside her had finally boiled over. Until she had, as he said, run like a rabbit. Suddenly, unbidden, his voice seemed to come into her mind, and she could hear him explaining what must be done if they were going to have, as he put it, a ‘more or less conventional relationship’.

  He was, he had explained, like a juggler with a thousand pretty glass balls in the air. One slip could bring the whole lot smashing to the ground, but sufficient fancy footwork and a very, very careful attitude would allow him to reduce the number slowly until he ended up with a tidy, manageable business structure that would allow him to work from Hobart, or wherever they might choose, without the incessant travel and insane hours he’d been w
orking when they met.

  ‘It will take the best part of a year, maybe longer,’ he’d said, launching into rafts of detail Ruth couldn’t understand, didn’t particularly want to, and really didn’t think she needed to. If that was what Kurtis said, it would be all right, she’d thought. But it hadn’t been.

  He had spent far more time away from her during that ten months of marriage than he’d spent with her. Had it not been for her work, things might have been different — certainly he had encouraged her to go with him whenever it was possible. But she had loved her work, had retained her concepts of a nursing career, even through the headiest days of their romance. And he had agreed. She liked Hobart, loved living in Tasmania despite an admitted lack of knowledge about other places. Kurtis, with his worldly experience, also loved Tasmania, saying it was the best part of Australia and suffered only from the fact that most of its residents had never been anywhere else and couldn’t therefore appreciate how good a life they had.

  So his plans had been made on the basis of consolidating his business activities there. He could do it easily, he’d said, given time and luck and skill. Ruth had blindly accepted, had never questioned even, she realised now, just how much time and luck and skill he might need.

  Much less how much help she might be able to provide, should provide.

  ‘Sometimes I wonder who is leading whom down this garden path,’ he had said to her not long before the wedding. She hadn’t really understood then, hadn’t bothered to.

  With a frightening flash of insight, Ruth realised for the first time how much work Kurtis had put into trying to make a difficult relationship workable, and how little she had really done. From the very start, he’d taken a romantic but still adult approach to their love-affair; she had started — and ended it — as a child with a child’s immaturity!

  The romance part of it all had overwhelmed her, or she had let it! ‘But I ran when it got too tough,’ she muttered to herself, and shivered at the acceptance of that thought.

  Rising briskly, she found herself striding to the hallway and that mirror, the one she used only to tuck in a stray strand of hair, the one she had tried to avoid so often in the months of her separation. And in it she saw a different person ... looked into pale grey eyes and shuddered at how close she’d come to throwing away everything. Everything she’d wanted and needed, everything Kurtis had worked so hard to try and give her.

  ‘Foolish child,’ she sneered, then recoiled not from the expression of the image, but from the unexpected knocking on the door only metres away.

  Filled now with a sudden excitement, a world away from the terror and hostility she’d felt the night before, Ruth plunged to the door and opened it, her eyes wide, a smile plastered across her face. To find her husband standing there, hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans, a bulky sweater cloaking his muscular torso, and an expression of total disinterest on his face!

  ‘Nice to see I’ve been expected,’ he said, and his voice was as cool as his eyes, eyes that roved across her housecoat-clad body with the same dispassionate look he might have had for a dog in the street.

  ‘I ... I’m sorry. I got caught up in...’ Ruth stopped, knowing she could never get the words out without further stammering, knowing she shouldn’t bother to try.

  ‘Uh-huh. I don’t suppose there’s a chance of some coffee while you get yourself together?’ he said, that gravelly voice, Ruth realised, almost totally devoid of expression or emotion. Just like his eyes.

  ‘Yes, of course. Come in.’ She let him in, followed him into the small living-room, noticed how his glance took in the enormous sheaf of his letters, but noticed also how he showed no indication of pleasure that she’d been reading them as he’d asked. Showed no indication of ... of anything. He was a stranger, suddenly, a stranger with tired, familiar eyes, an all too familiar body, but a stranger none the less.

  Ruth made coffee for both of them, trying as she did so to make conversation. It was like talking to a stone. Kurtis nodded, grunted occasionally, but gave her no help, did nothing at all to ease the growing tension.

  Only after he’d drunk half his coffee in that frightening, chilling silence did he deign to string more than four words together, and that only in reply to Ruth’s query — a stupid one, really — about whether she ought to get showered and changed.

  ‘It might be an idea, unless you fancy going out like that,’ he growled, and his eyes said that held little attraction.

  ‘Yes ... I ... well, I’ll go and do that,’ she finally managed to say, fumbling against his coldness, uncertain of what was going on, but totally certain it was not what she wanted, not what she had hoped for.

  ‘I could come give you a hand,’ he said, ‘but I won’t bother. This isn’t the time or the place for it.’ And his demeanour made the words superfluous. Despite the fact that her housecoat gaped alarmingly, that it showed too much bosom and a great deal of leg, Kurtis’ expression was like a huge neon sign flashing ‘Not Interested’!

  Which did nothing for Ruth’s nerves as she fled to the bathroom, where standing beneath the shower didn’t help either. Kurtis’ coolness bewildered her, following as it did the obvious passion he’d shown the night before. It was such a dramatic change, now, to find him so totally unresponsive, especially now that she was ready to talk about his letters, ready to talk, somehow, about their relationship and its problems. Problems, she now realised, that had been greatly of her own making.

  It was made worse, too, by the way the reading of his letters had somehow reawakened her sensitivity to him. As she stood with the water pouring down her hair and body, memory of showers shared kept intruding. She could almost feel his sensitive fingers moving along her body, soaping her, caressing her.

  The touch of his fingers was like a racial memory; her breasts responded, her tummy suddenly got all hollow and she knew it wasn’t the endless cups of coffee through the night, could feel that her sleeplessness contributed not at all.

  The water trickling down her spine had his touch in the soft hollow at its base, droplets on her shoulders were like his touch, warm, soft, gentle. Before the brief shower was finished, her legs had suddenly gone all weak, almost unable to support her. He would have supported her, had done so many times. Too many, and yet not enough. Never enough.

  But when she emerged from her bedroom, finally, clad in jeans and jumper, her hair still a damp jumble that would eventually dry in its usual chaos, Kurtis’ disinterest continued unabated.

  ‘I’m ready now,’ Ruth said, trying to force some brightness into her voice, trying to somehow dispel the pallor of gloom that hung over the small living-room.

  ‘For what?’ he replied, not even bothering to turn from his staring out of the window and face her, oblivious to her expression, to her mood, to her.

  ‘Well ... to talk. Isn’t that why you’re here?’

  ‘Not now.’

  Blunt, direct, unarguable. Ruth stopped her next words before they passed her lips, caution and something approaching real fear thrusting tremors through her body.

  ‘But.. .what, then?’

  He shrugged. ‘Go for a drive, a walk. Does it matter?’

  ‘I guess not,’ she replied, lying. It did matter. It mattered desperately. But what could she do? She didn’t dare try to force the pace, not now. Not after all she’d done to him, to them.

  All she could do was follow him, a moment later, out to his Porsche, mud-stained and grotty from last night’s rain, and, she presumed, the long and wet trip up from Hobart the day before. He didn’t bother to hold the door for her, simply slid into the driver’s seat and waited silently, icily, as she fumbled her way into the once familiar car and eventually got herself strapped in.

  Where are we going? she wanted to ask. But didn’t. In this mood, one she’d never, ever seen with Kurtis, he might not even bother to answer. He might not know, and, worse, Ruth realised, might not care and would say so.

  Or might not. Certainly he said nothing else as
he drove out along Talbot Road and then turned down towards the Punchbowl, a sort of natural amphitheatre which had once held a zoo but was now simply a highly popular summer picnic spot and playground, enhanced by the small rivulet that flowed through en route to the North Esk River.

  He stayed silent as the Porsche negotiated the narrow bitumen track down into the Punchbowl, although Ruth noticed him wincing at each of the myriad traffic humps installed to slow down those drivers who had been wont to use the twisty road as a racetrack.

  And, once in the lower car park, he again seemed totally preoccupied, leaving Ruth to get out of the car on her own, and, eventually, follow along behind as he wandered towards the rivulet.

  They crossed on the road bridge, then turned right and began wandering along to where a duckboard foot path led to a narrow cleft in the wall of the Punchbowl. Past the end of the duckboards, the track was so narrow, they had to walk single file, and Ruth couldn’t help but recall their first walk together, when Kurtis had insisted on going behind — to appreciate, as he had put it, the view.

  Not this time. He strode alone before her, seemingly oblivious to her very presence, climbing sure-footedly up the rocks to the single vantage point from where the small waterfall could be properly viewed.

  Ruth followed, only too aware of his athletic stride, of how cat-like he seemed when climbing, how sure his balance. She felt almost clumsy, now feeling the effects of having been up all night, and twice slipped on the rocks, although not seriously.

  Kurtis stood looking at the water for long minutes, then moved aside to let Ruth down to the edge while he climbed even higher to a narrow ledge that offered a comfortable, sunny seat once he’d cleared away a few vagrant blackberry strands.