Goodbye Sweetheart

by Marion Halligan

  All the way up the highway he felt ignoble, like a person who had spied on someone else’s intimate moment, he felt grubby and weighted down by what he had seen, and no matter how often he said to himself, it was a dream, you fool, it was your subconscious banging about, he could not rid himself of the sense that he’d done something wrong.

  He took out his book, he’d brought The Golden Bough, thinking he’d have a look at some things. The girl next to him put her phone away and said, The key to all the mythologies, hey.

  He thought he must have misheard. Pardon, he said. Why did you say that? He looked at her. She had a plait of long straight hair hanging over her shoulder, and brown eyes. She was quite pretty in a plain sort of way. He wondered if he was inventing her.

  I always think that’s the book that Casaubon wanted to write.

  And failed.

  Oh. She shook her head. That hypocrite Casaubon. All ego and image. Pretending he was doing the work, not even admitting to himself that it wasn’t happening. In his terms he’s rotting in hell.

  I sometimes wonder if I’m a Casaubon, said Ferdie.

  What? I don’t think so. If you can think that you aren’t. She laughed in a rather rude way. She got a book out of her bag. Daniel Deronda. On the back cover he saw the familiar portrait of George Eliot gazing out from her heavy loops of hair. This girl could probably fasten her hair like that. She had a pad of yellow post-it stickers and wrote copious notes with a fine felt pen and stuck them on as she read. She was right, he thought. He wasn’t a Casaubon. He ought to have known himself well enough to know that. The thought was so comforting that he didn’t try to talk to her again. That was enough. He wasn’t a hypocrite. He’d know and would admit to himself if he couldn’t do it. He closed his eyes and smiled.

  When the bus arrived in Sydney the girl stood on the pavement waiting for her luggage, which seemed to be right at the back. He suddenly said, Can I have your phone number? She looked at him, not unfriendly exactly, but not very keen. Oh, she said, I shall be in England next week. So shall I, he said, delight in his voice. She still gazed at him, then pulled the fine felt pen from her pocket and wrote an email address on the back of his hand. She shrugged on a vast backpack and walked off briskly, giving him a small wave as she went. He watched her, still delighted.

  He couldn’t see Helen. But actually he was looking straight at her. His eyes slid past her without registering and he stood waiting, thinking she must be late. He looked up and down the sandstone cloister of the railway station, wondering which direction she would be coming from. The arches were worn and nubbly, the keystones heavily marked. The traffic growled and hooted, the sun shone and there was a smell of salt in the wind, with car exhaust as well, and a gritty chill. The air was noisy and palpable, different from the stillness of Canberra, though he knew he would be used to it soon. People hurried past in that anxious way of city walkers, expecting no charm or pleasure, simply wanting to get somewhere else. It wasn’t until she waved and called, staying near her car which was parked in a dangerously illegal spot, that he realised that this young woman was his mother. He was speechless, and greeted her with a hug and a kiss and got into the car without saying anything.

  When he began with a tentative Ma, she said, Hang on a bit, dear, I can’t negotiate city traffic and talk at the same time. That’s the definition of a supermodel, isn’t it? Can’t walk and talk at the same time. Oy, watch it, she said to the car in front, which had changed lanes with a tricky sideways glide that made her brake drastically. So he took in the fact that she was wearing a soft and shapely jumper with close-fitting jeans in silence. On her feet were pretty little flat shoes. Ferdie thought, in astonishment, this is the woman William married. He didn’t remember ever seeing her before.

  When they got to the house she sent him to his room with his luggage. On his pillow was an envelope addressed to him. In it was a postcard from Berenice. A picture of the Arnolfini wedding. A tit for tat, he supposed. He wasn’t familiar with her writing. It was easy to read.

  Dear Ferdie, I want to tell you straightaway. I am getting married. Probably next spring. He is in IT too. He works in France. I know you will wish me well. XXBerenice.

  She drew circles over her letter i’s. He looked at the painting. He’d always thought it very beautiful. Green was Berenice’s chosen colour. The woman didn’t look at all like her. He remembered enough of what she looked like to be sure of that. He felt hollow, but calm as well. This is clarity, he said to himself. This sorts things.

  In fact it wasn’t just clarity, it was lightness, and it was certainty. Berenice turned into a woman who worked in a campus computer shop, who hardly cared for picnics and didn’t like reading. She stopped being a constellation in the heavens, an arty photograph on decoloured sheets. It was like being expelled from Eden: the world was all before him, where to choose. Entirely a good thing, really. Exciting. He didn’t think he was just telling himself this, trying to convince.

  When he went back to Helen she was sitting on the sofa with an opened bottle of riesling.

  I decided I wasn’t ready to join the angels yet, she said.

  What?

  The marble creatures in the cemetery. Remember I said I’ve always had this fancy that they walk the streets and if they want to they can make you follow, you have to join them. You can’t refuse.

  I remember you said it. I wasn’t sure you believed it.

  Ah, well, probably not. But it’s a thought I’ve often had, that I would have to go with them. But I’ve decided to give it up.

  Ferdie was uneasy. Were you really worried?

  Helen looked at him, wrinkling her eyes. Lynette told me once that I looked like an angel on a tombstone, she said, carved in black basalt. Did she mean I was obdurate, I suppose. Hard. Things don’t have to be literal to be powerful images, Ferdie. You know that. I’ve seen—well, apprehended—those angels walking the streets round here; they don’t make you feel good.

  Figments, said Ferdie.

  Well, anyway, I don’t look like one any more.

  Too young to be an angel, too much of a girl.

  Her eyes sparkled. Ferdie smiled. He’d often tried to have what he would have called a real conversation with his mother but she always slipped and slid away. Superficial things were okay, she spoke in her serious and formal way about them, and listening you could think they mattered to her, but Ferdie knew they didn’t. She just liked the safety of the superficial. Whereas this conversation seemed quite trivial, but he knew it wasn’t.

  Now he thought she might be ready to talk to him he settled back with his glass of riesling, attentive. She was saying, and he could tell with what difficulty, Shallow. It’s a pretty word, isn’t it. Shallow water. Shallow rivers. Shallow pools. But then, when you get to people, or their responses, no, not attractive at all. Nobody would want to be described as shallow. I remember—and here she laughed—I remember a review of a book of poems by a man who used to go diving off the Barrier Reef, taking a waterproof pen and paper (I didn’t know you could get such things!) and actually writing the poems underwater. The heading on the review was: ‘The reports of his depth have been greatly exaggerated’. The whole piece went on like that, cruel but very funny.

  Were the poems any good?

  Well, apparently not. The poet I recall was considered promising in his youth, I even bought one of his books, but it seems he has not fulfilled that early promise. Helen sighed. Well, she said, what’s new.

  Ferdie looked at her, in the new rose-pink cashmere jumper that brought colour to her face and perhaps light to her eyes, the firm jeans that neatly fitted her slender figure. There was a cyclamen in a dark blue pot on the coffee table, thickly covered in flowers the same colour as the jumper. The flowers, the glasses with their round bowls half full of straw-coloured wine were beautiful to look at, like a painting. They were an illumination in the dark room, that made his heart lift and feel joyful. He smoothed his fingers around the dark blue ceramic pot.

>   I came for a death, he said, my father’s death. I don’t know what I hoped for. Some meaning, I suppose.

  Oh, we always want meaning. We want to find meaning. I’m thinking, meaning is what we make for ourselves. Do you know that T.S. Eliot poem, ‘Journey of the Magi’?

  The silken girls bringing sherbet. And the old white horse galloping away across the paddock. That’s death, isn’t it.

  The pale horse. I often think of those travellers wondering about being brought all this way, and was it for birth, or death? That they’d thought the two were different, but that this birth was so hard and bitter it was like death. And I was thinking of it working in the opposite direction, that we have come all this way for death but that it is birth we may be finding.

  Are you channelling William? asked Ferdie, and then wished he hadn’t.

  Helen was frowning. I think I can manage to quote the odd poem for myself, she said. I do read too, you know.

  Yes, I know, Ma. It’s just it seems to keep happening since William died. Lynette’s been doing it, and it’s not one of her habits. Helen looked gloomy. A birth . . . you mean Aurora, the baby?

  Well, of course there’s always birth to counter death. But that’s very literal. She paused, her eyes looked sideways at him. Hard, she said. I mean, well, me.

  Ferdie felt like crying. Instead he gave her a hug. The rose-coloured cashmere was very soft over her slender bones. She smelt of that elemental dry lavender he’d found in the bathroom cupboard, that he found disturbing.

  It shouldn’t have taken William’s death to do it, she said. But maybe that was only one of the things. She thought of Ruth, or Nellie, looking for her shilling.

  The Eliot poem ends with the old man looking forward to another death, said Ferdie, doubt in his voice.

  Possibly. But maybe another death/birth. She made the slash with her finger. They are hard to tell apart. But no angels, remember, said Helen. I’ve got other plans.

  Ferdie looked at her. She smiled, and told him.

  She was going to Italy to do a course in teaching English as a second language. Then she would get a job doing that somewhere in Europe. It might be Slovenia, or Romania. That would be an adventure.

  I got a flyer in the letterbox, she said. Azure blue, like the sky, very romantic. And I thought, why not?

  When?

  In a couple of months. I have to give notice at school.

  You can come and see me, he said.

  Would you like me to?

  Of course. It’ll be a squeeze, but so good. We’ll do wonderful things. You can meet Pepita.

  Not Berenice. Somehow he hadn’t pictured introducing Helen to Berenice. Was that Helen’s fault, or Berenice’s? Or quite likely his own. But of course, now, she might be a friend, perhaps . . . But somehow he couldn’t imagine her being a friend. He looked at Helen gently smiling, and realised he was taking her new appearance for granted, and that he would be proud to walk around London with this handsome woman.

  I like your new clothes, he said.

  Isn’t this pink a great colour. I feel good in it.

  After the widow’s weeds.

  She blushed, and frowned, and laughed a bit. And now I’m a real widow I’ve given them up. Oh yes, I know that’s not true, that Lynette’s the widow. But somehow I’m free now.

  Of yourself, said Ferdie. He was liking this new daring way of speaking to his mother, without self-censoring or bowdlerising.

  He was my father, he said. I came for his death. But I expected grief. And there’s not. Just sadness. Maybe I wanted a birth too.

  Sadness is good, said Helen. I think sadness is nourishing. Ferdie . . . maybe it’s my fault. Maybe I kept you away from your father.

  He considered. But you didn’t, did you. Remember those car trips to Sydney. And all that time staying with him.

  I reckon staying with him was staying with Lynette, really.

  You’re right, I suppose, said Ferdie. But you didn’t keep me away. I was there for his taking.

  But sadness, you know, I think that’s enough. Respect, remembering, taking thought—it includes all of them.

  Mm, said Ferdie. I expect I wanted revelation.

  His mother sighed. Don’t we all.

  You found it.

  From an old woman under a bush.

  Ferdie looked at her.

  I think it was a kind of epiphany. Always hard to explain epiphanies, they seem so unlikely. Helen poured out more wine. I think there’s a time in your life when you’re ready to do something, change or something, and you get sort of nudged; something you’d not even usually notice speaks to you.

  Yes, he said, I see . . . hoping he would.

  And it’s most often not where you expect to find it.

  You’re lucky, he said. I need to get back and find some epiphanies of my own. I’m getting very anxious about not getting any work done.

  You can think on the plane, said Helen.

  A fine thought. I always find it’s more like suspended animation.

  I wondered if we might walk down to the pub for dinner, she said, it’s fish and chips night, they do good flathead tails. They’ve fixed up the old upstairs dining room and now it’s got views over the water. Not that that’s much help at night, unless there’s a moon. My shout, she said. I looked in the bank and I’m really not short of money. Shillings aren’t a problem.

  Careful, said Ferdie. We’ll have you recklessly spending.

  Oh, I think old habits die too hard.

  Ferdie wasn’t so sure. There was a new phone on the table. Helen blushed a bit. It’s a clever thing, I’m getting the hang of it, she said.

  Ferdie said, Can I send an email?

  Do you know how?

  I think so, said Ferdie, reading the address off the back of his hand. Hardly stopping to recall that in all the days he had been at Lynette’s he hadn’t wanted to write to Berenice, but now, this woman with the backpack, he couldn’t wait. He typed her address: dot@dot.com. Funny. Maybe her name was Dorothea? That would be a bit much. He put his own address in the message, his big computer at home in England, explaining that this was his mother’s phone, that he would be here for a day or two. Please tell me your name, he said.

  They put on their coats to walk down to the pub. The streets had a winter emptiness. No stone angels whisking about. Helen put her arm through his and walked swiftly, easily, as though she were enjoying the journey. There was a moon, rising big and yellow out of the sea. Ferdie did think of William, but with a kind of finality, that he was really dead and not there any more and that his remembering would become more and more vague. Perhaps for some people the recollection of him might be grateful, for others anger, perhaps, or disappointment; some would smile, with tenderness, or grief, but he did not imagine any more weeping. There were a lot of people who would feel something, and perhaps the alternative to that could be a few people feeling a great deal, but that wasn’t how it was, you couldn’t choose, William’s life had done that. Some small number of his family had stood on the headland by Ben Boyd’s tower and watched his ashes shake down into the sea, to become part of the shredding of the water on the rocks below. Melancholy, the moment had been, but no one had wanted to cast herself into the water and join his mortal remains.

  Look, said Helen, the path of the moon on the water. We should watch it while we can.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The epigraph is from Stéphane Mellarmé, Divagations, from a small piece called ‘Long Ago, in the Margins of a Copy of Baudelaire’. Translated by Barbara Johnson, published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  ‘This story begins by water’ is the opening line of a story, The Division of Love, by Margaret Barbalet, in a collection of the same name (Penguin Books).