by Jean Bedford
‘I don’t know.’ The anger had gone out of her. ‘Can we just ... talk? Can we simply be two women talking?’
‘No. You know we can’t. Not if you want to continue the sessions.’
‘So — I just go and lie on the couch now and try to forget that I’m telling you secrets about someone you know?’
‘Secrets. That word again. Look, Rosalind, I have patients whom I see socially. Not friends, I’d refer them to someone else, but people I know casually. To me the fact that my ex-husband — whom I haven’t spoken to for over ten years, by the way — is a friend of your husband, and that I once met Tom a few times, is irrelevant.’
‘What about the fact that both Mick and Tom could tell me things about you, if they knew I was coming here? Doesn’t that worry you?’
‘No. It might concern me slightly if they’d both been my patients, but even then, by the law of averages, some of my patients must have met each other and discussed me. Your friend Sally must have told you things about me. It’s not relevant. Only what happens in this room is relevant to us. Only the relationship we build here, if we manage to build one. But if it upsets you so much, then I should refer you elsewhere.’ She opened her Rolodex and began running her finger down a list of names.
‘No.’ Rosa paced the small room and came back to the desk. ‘OK. I don’t want a referral. If I don’t see you, I don’t want to see anyone. So I guess I’ll just go and lie on the couch.’ She moved away and took her shoes off, putting them and her bag on the shelf, then lay down.
‘You’re still very strung up,’ Fran said, aware of her own tension. ‘Why don’t we try some relaxation exercises today? Some light hypnosis? I won’t charge you for this appointment — we’ll schedule an extra one next week, if that’s convenient for you.’
‘All right,’ Rosa said through rigidly clenched teeth, then suddenly she was crying, loud helpless sobs. She sat up, clasping her knees and rocking herself. ‘I can’t bear it,’ she choked out. ‘I just can’t bear it any more.’
Fran let her cry. This was unexpectedly soon, but it was the breakthrough moment for her, the crisis she worked towards with every patient, when simple grief took over from the sophisticated self-explaining narrative. It was a pure moment in which she always felt a flicker of joy, an instant that vindicated all her methods. Finally, when the sobbing had quietened down somewhat, she said softly, ‘What? What is it that you can’t bear, Rosa?’
Carly sat staring out of her office window at the new landscaping and raw-looking plantings beside the drive. When the gums and callistemons grew it would be quite pleasant, but she still preferred the old place at Camperdown near the recycling depot and with the roar and screech of constant traffic along Bridge Road. No space for gardens there, only a few token flowerbeds overshadowed by huge, high-rooted Moreton Bay figs and the hardy pittosporums that managed to struggle up through the asphalt, but it had been in the centre of things, on the very edge of the city. She despised these sprawling outer suburbs, hated having to drive out here every day from Balmain through the streets of garish red and yellow brick houses.Homes, she corrected herself,lovely brick homes.
Her phone rang and she picked it up as Alastair came through the door. She listened to someone who had got the wrong extension, gave him the right one and gestured for Alastair to sit down. He was in his white coat, probably still on his rounds, and obviously angry about something. She sighed and put the phone down. She smiled at him.
‘Hi there. I wish Sonia would come back from leave — that new girl at Reception puts every Tom, Dick and Harry through to me.’
He didn’t smile back. ‘Where were you last night? You said you were having an early one because you felt ill. I rang and rang. You didn’t even have your answer machine on.’
‘No,’ she said patiently. ‘Because I wanted to sleep. I put a cushion over the phone and shut the bedroom door. I passed out for twelve hours.’
‘I don’t believe you. I drove by and the place looked empty. You’d left the hall lamp on, the way you do when you go out, and your car wasn’t in the drive, either.’
‘Jesus Christ, Alastair,’ she said, furious. ‘Don’t ever spy on me. I hate it worse than anything. I put the car in the garage for once. I must have forgotten the lamp was on. And for the record, I’ll never explain myself to you again like this, so don’t ever ask me.’
‘All right,’ he said, his voice pained, but still accusing. ‘I was snooping. And I know you’re lying because when I drove past again at three a.m. the carwas in the drive.’
‘Get fucked, then,’ she said softly. ‘I will not have anyone thinking he owns me, that he has a right to know what I’m doing every second of my life. Just fuck off.’
‘Oh Jesus, Carly.’ He put his head in his hands and spoke through them, his voice muffled. ‘I wouldn’t normally check up on you — but we did have a date, remember?’ He looked up.
‘And you cancelled it at the last minute, saying you thought you had the flu. I didn’t believe you then and I don’t now.’
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Now go away. I can’t bear you when you whine.’
‘Just tell me,’ he said, standing up. ‘If there’s someone else, just tell me. Christ, I was up all night and then I had to be on duty at six; I can’t live like this, my nerves are shot.’
‘Are you deaf?Go away.’
‘That’s it?’ He stood there staring at her. ‘It’s finished, then, is it? Just like that? No explanations, no nothing?’
‘Oh, close your mouth,’ she said. ‘You look like a fish.’ Her voice softened. ‘Go home after your shift and have a good sleep. I’ll come round later on and stroke your brow.’
He shook his head and left the room. He would do as she had told him; he always did. But she would have to make him promise he would never spy on her again. The thought of it, of him cruising her narrow street in the night, made her tremble with anger again.
She pulled the computer console towards her and began to go through her messages, but she couldn’t concentrate. Images from last weekend’s picnic kept recurring, especially of Rosa’s unhappy face. ‘Tom’s old problem,’ she had said, and Carly had kept to herself the fact that he had never had that problem with her. It was interesting, she thought, her present relationship with Rosa, like two women from the same harem, sharing intimacies about the sheik. She smiled to herself — Tom was an unlikely sheik, with his scholarly mannerisms, his tentative physical gestures. He had looked miserable on Sunday, too, haunted. She knew he would be tormenting himself with guilt at causing Rosa distress. She wondered what was really going on there, between them, and what Rosa talked about with Fran. She had never liked Fran and she resented her possibly knowing things about Tom that she, Carly, did not. But no-one knows him as I do, she told herself, especially not poor Rosa. He will come back to me in the end.
The phone rang again, this time a legitimate enquiry for her, and she began to turn her attention to her work.
*
In the staff canteen Alastair ate a sweet raisin-filled cake, washing down each mouthful with his coffee. He could hardly swallow it, but he knew he had to eat something. He hadn’t had a meal for twenty-four hours and there were his rounds to finish, then three operations to observe in the afternoon. He took his glasses from his coat pocket and read the advertising on the cardboard cup, aware of the tremor in his hands. He closed his eyes, trying to block out the scene with Carly. She could always do this to him, reduce him to trembling bafflement, and he felt contempt for himself that he let her. But she didn’t know that last night wasn’t the first time he had spied on her; that gave him some small mean satisfaction.
‘Brooding, Al?’ One of the ward nurses sat down opposite him. ‘Or getting over a late night?’
‘A bit of both,’ he said, smiling at her. ‘I’m glad you’re here, I was about to go over to your wing. Now I can have another coffee and wait for you.’ He was deliberately making his voice flirtatious, as he did with several of the fe
male nurses. Carly insisted that no-one at the hospital should find out about their relationship, so he tried to give the impression of a willing young bachelor boy. But he knew what the nurses were like, how they gossiped among themselves, and that they’d have soon worked out that he’d never actually followed up with any of them. He didn’t care — they probably thought he was gay, and that was OK, too. But occasionally he wanted to tell one of them, just to see the reaction. Perhaps that was what Carly was worried about, he thought, the gossip. Their age difference, and the fact she knew the nurses thought she was a bitch. They referred to her as the Madam, which she found amusing. No, he knew it wasn’t that — she didn’t care what other people thought. She just liked having secrets, from him as well as with him.
‘Would you like to go to a movie one night?’ he said on an impulse. ‘... Sue?’ He had to peer at her badge to remember her name.
‘Love to,’ she said. ‘Which night?’
‘What about tonight, if you’re free? I’ve got to have a sleep first, so we could make it a late show.’ Let Carly turn up and findhim not there, for once.
She didn’t attempt to hide her pleasure and he liked her for that. ‘Great. Will we meet there, or ... ?’
‘No, I’ll pick you up.’ He went to buy more coffee while she wrote down her address for him. Balmain, he saw when he got back. He hoped they passed Carly on the way and she saw them. But by the time he’d finished his drink and Sue had borrowed a paper to check what films were showing, he already regretted the invitation. He thought wearily that he knew how it would turn out — either a one-night stand, with the consequent awkwardness around the wards, or the equal awkwardness of a platonic kiss-off. He gave an inward shrug. So what? His life was turning to shit, anyway. It would give him something to think about apart from Carly.
Rosa scraped off the breakfast dishes and piled them on the sink. Let Tom put them in the dishwasher when he got up, she thought. He’d been home late again last night and used the excuse of her being already asleep to bed down in his study. She stood motionless at the bench in that short spell of quiet before the kids would come racing downstairs with their schoolbags. She gazed at the backyard, hardly noticing that the pink camellia was in flower, only seeing the patch of weeds by the fence and wishing she could find the energy to do something about them.
Tom startled her, coming silently into the kitchen on bare feet. ‘Oh, you’re still here,’ he said. ‘The house felt empty.’
‘The kids are upstairs, and this house has felt empty for a while,’ she said. ‘Tom, we have to talk.’ She turned around to look at him, knowing he would avoid her eyes, knowing he wouldn’t have got up if he’d realised she hadn’t left yet.
He fiddled with the coffee pot. ‘Not now, Rosie,’ he said in a tired voice. ‘I haven’t any talk in me.’
‘Mum, I can’t find my sports tunic.’ Jessie came running into the kitchen. ‘Hi Pops, how ya doin? Mum?’
‘It’s probably still in the laundry,’ she said. ‘Get a move on, and give your brother a yell, or you’ll miss the bus. And I’m not driving you.’
‘Pops?’ he said. ‘What on earth has she been watching?’
‘Some American crap, as usual.’ Her voice was cold, she was not going to allow him to divert her into their comfortable family patterns of speech, the mundane almost unconscious dialogue that passed for communication these days between them. ‘I’m not going to work today,’ she said, as Jessie scrambled back between them, screaming to Jack to hurry up. She waited until the children shouted their goodbyes from the door and she and Tom had both called theirs back.
‘Did you hear me? I’m taking the day off, and I know you haven’t got a class till this afternoon. I want to make a big pot of coffee and then for us to go and sit in the garden. Andtalk, Tom. We’re going down the gurgler, and I need to know why.
‘Rosa,’ he finally looked at her, and she could see the effort it took. ‘There’s nothing new to say. It’s all the same old stuff. I hate it. I hate the way it’s making you so wretched, but I can’t do anything about it. And I’m obsessed with it, with myself. I know that — I just can’t make the space anywhere to cope with anything but my own misery.’
‘Well, we’ll go out and sit in silence together, then,’ she said, taking the percolator away from him and filling it with freshly ground coffee. She kept her voice steady, dispassionate.
‘I’ve made up my mind about how we’re going to spend this morning, and you know what I’m like when my mind’s made up.’ She put the pot on the hotplate, still watching his face.
‘Juggernaut,’ he said with a weak smile. ‘OK. Let me have a shower first. I’ll see you out there.’
She heated him a croissant and took a tray with it and the coffee out to the back deck. She moved the table into the warm morning sunlight and sat waiting.
‘We should do something about those weeds,’ he said when he came out, dressed in his teaching clothes: jeans and a soft shirt.
‘Everything you say feels like a metaphor,’ she said, laughing slightly. ‘That shows you what sort of state I must be in.’
‘I can see what state you’re in,’ he said, moving the croissant around with his fingers, then pouring himself a coffee. ‘And I feel rotten about it.’
‘Shakespeare, now,’ she said, feeling herself becoming mildly hysterical. ‘Rotten. State. Denmark. Hamlet,’ she went on to his blank look. ‘Oh, never mind. Tom, are you in love with someone else?’ The blurted words sounded hackneyed now that she actually said them, meaningless, though she couldn’t imagine the next second of her life after his answer.
‘No.’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘Me? Impotent old me? What woman would have me? I loveyou, Rosa. I always have. And I can’t do anything about it.’ He stared down into his mug, his hands clenched around it so that his knuckles showed white.
‘I don’t believe you,’ she said, her voice shaking. She had a strong feeling that this had all happened before, had all been said before, and of course, she reminded herself, it had. ‘You lied to me in the past, remember? Over Carly. You said you’d never lie to me again.’
‘Rosa, you know what I’m like now, what I’ve been like for most of the last year. I don’t even dare kiss you in case it leads to something I can’t finish. How can you possibly imagine I’d have the confidence for an affair with someone else?’
‘Are you seeing Carly again? Is that it? Perhaps you feel safe enough with her. Perhaps you can get it up with her.’ She went on doggedly with the things she had prepared herself to say, not caring about being tactful or not hurting him.
‘No. I’m not seeing Carly. Last week at the picnic was the first time I’d set eyes on her in months. And you were there the last time I saw her, too. Besides, she had some toy-boy in tow. Didn’t you see him? Handsome young doctor who arrived late ...’
‘Tom — were you ... did you have the same problems with her? Before?’ She waited, seeing that he didn’t want to answer. Finally he put his cup down and looked at his clasped hands.
‘No,’ he said tightly, knowing this would cause her pain. ‘That was about the only problem I never had with Carly.’
She felt it like a punch, felt herself reel from it, then there was the blankness of shock. She would deal with the hurt later, she thought, when the shock wore off. She would probably deal with it for the rest of her life. They had never talked about the years Tom lived with Carly. When they had come together again there had been a tacit agreement that nothing in those years was relevant to them. They were the stars of the show, Tom had said. Carly was just an aberration, offstage, something he’d needed at the time, a certain sort of space to grow up in. Rosa had become pregnant with Jessie in the first year they were back together, to their mutual delight, but there were uncomfortable periods at the beginning, when she’d wondered if it wasn’t a mistake, a romantic clinging to the idea of them as a couple. Now, coolly, she forced herself to confront that feeling again.
‘Tom, do you want
us to split up? Again.’ She was still mentally numb. She thought she wouldn’t care what he answered now, but her hands were sweaty and her heart thumped so strongly she was surprised she couldn’t hear it.
‘God, no. Rosie — you and the kids ... it’s all that gives me a reason to go on.’ His face was open to her now, agonised. ‘I just wish I was man enough to love you properly.’
‘Love isn’t only fucking, Tom,’ she said. ‘Though you seem to think it is. I get no affection of any sort from you these days, no sharing of anything, no sense that you value me at all. Just because your dick won’t stay hard when you want it to.’ She turned away from him. She had determined to say these things for once, to make concrete her loneliness and resentment, but she found she couldn’t look at him while she spoke. ‘I know,’ he said quietly. ‘I can’t help it.’
‘I want to know what you do on these nights you say you have meetings, or work to do in your office.’ She forced herself to plough on. ‘If you’re not having an affair, then where are you? You come home freshly showered — I can tell, you know. I know the smell of you after a day, and it’s all gone. All clean. Not even your usual aftershave. You have to tell me, Tom, or I’ll go mad.’
‘I can’t.’ She looked at him again then. His face was pinched and once more closed against her. ‘Rosa, you just have to accept that I can’t tell you. You have to trust me that it’s got nothing to do with you, that I’m not being unfaithful. It’s just a problem I have to work through myself, and I need to be away from you to do it.’
‘You’re asking too much, Tom,’ she said softly. ‘I simply don’t believe you.’
He made a helpless gesture, knocking the table and spilling coffee from the cup he’d hardly tasted. ‘Then I don’t know what to do,’ he said.
‘You leave. You go away, now, today and sort yourself out.’ It seemed to her that someone else was speaking in her voice. She had not intended this. ‘Take all the time you need to be alone and work through yourproblem.’ She got up, feeling stiff in every muscle, and headed for the house. ‘I’m going to the shops,’ she said. ‘I want you gone when I get back.’