by Liz Byrski
It had brought that meeting to a strange and somewhat awkward close. Adele had thought this was just plain rude, but then Ros could be blunt like that. Adele has often found her quite confronting and wonders if Ros has any idea of how rough it can be to be on the sharp end of her opinions. On this occasion it had seemed that they’d all held their breath for a month wondering whether the tension would bleed through into the next meeting. Adele had feared that this latest thoughtless comment might bring the club to an end, but it hadn’t. As soon as they were next assembled online Ros had apologised. ‘Foot in mouth, so sorry,’ she’d said, and they had laughed about it and moved on.
And now they do have that chance to meet because Marian – who had dropped out of the club years ago – had emailed Adele this morning.
We’re heading off in July to visit the children and grandchildren in Germany, and then spend a couple of weeks in Spain, Marian had written. You mentioned once that you wouldn’t mind housesitting for us, so I thought I’d see if you’re still up for it. I think you said you were retiring this month so maybe you’d be free to come over here? I know how you love the Blue Mountains. You’re welcome to bring a friend or friends with you. It occurred to me that you might want to bring the remaining stalwarts from the book club. Now it’s down to four you could easily fit in. Gwenda would still come in to clean and doesn’t mind doing some cooking if you want, so you could organise that with her. And Ray is always willing to help out with any maintenance problems. We’d be so happy if we knew you were looking after the place for us. Anyway, let us know what you think.
Adele had read the message through several times. The timing was great – the house would be free from late July until mid-September. She could be there all or part of the time. She pictured herself in that beautiful old house with its glorious views, popping out for coffee or lunch, browsing the lovely little shops in Leura and the galleries in Blackheath. And then she thought more about Marian’s suggestion. Should she invite the others – Judy, Ros and Simone – to join her? There were great walks, a huge wood-burning stove and shelves full of books, CDs and DVDs. If she could persuade them to come for four weeks they could each choose a book and discuss one each week. All the things she would do alone they could do together or individually. As she’d thought more about it Adele decided that Judy and Simone would go for it, but Ros . . . well, Ros might be tricky. She was the sort of person who could dismantle any argument, see through the gaps in any plan and give you that sceptical, sometimes withering, look over the top of her glasses. But by then Adele was committed. The more she thought about it the more she liked the idea and she’d whizzed off the email.
Now, as she reads it yet again, she thinks it embarrassingly naive, as though a breathless teenager, rather than a woman of more than a certain age, had written it. She’ll be on tenterhooks now until they respond. The old anxiety about what other people might think of her – about looking stupid, or ignorant, or pushy, too assertive or not assertive enough – surges through her. Sometimes she thinks she’s overcome this burdensome characteristic, but then she finds herself once again at its mercy.
‘Basically it’s about wanting, or needing, complete control of what people think of you and that, inevitably, comes down to trying to please everyone, usually at considerable personal cost,’ a counsellor had said to her some years ago. The woman’s name was Astrid and she was just the sort of person who sent Adele into a flurry of anxiety: confident, eccentric, outspoken and brusque. A bit like Ros, really, Adele thinks now.
‘The thing is, Adele,’ Astrid had continued, after pausing to light up a cheroot, ‘it’s quite hard to get a grip on who you are, because you try to be all things to all people. Someone who might like to get to know you better could find it difficult because you flip flop around trying to please them. There’s no consistency. You say you’re fine in a role – your job, for example – when you are being . . .’ She stopped to consult her notes. ‘At work, when you’re being the director of the bureau, you know how to do the job, you know what’s expected of you, so that’s who you become. The same when you’re chairing that committee you talked about. It’s when you have to be just you, just Adele Grainger, you find yourself in trouble. So what we need to work on over the coming weeks . . . well, months really . . . is who the real Adele is. We will discover this together and work on your sense of your core self.’ And she leaned back, crossed her legs, took another draw and gazed up at the curl of blue smoke as it drifted towards the window.
Adele had stopped breathing at this point. ‘Mmm,’ she’d said. ‘I see what you mean, Astrid. Look, sorry, could I just pop out to your toilet?’ And she’d got to her feet and hurried out of the consulting room, through the waiting room and down the steps into the street, hopped into her car and driven away.
‘I knew she was right so I ran away and never went back,’ Adele told her daughter on the phone later. ‘I couldn’t face the prospect of sitting there, baring my soul to her for months, while she smoked her bloody cheroots.’
‘Well, I think that says it all really, Mum,’ Jenna said. A few weeks later she’d sent Adele a book in a padded envelope. I think this might help, Jenna had written on a postcard slipped inside the cover. Don’t worry, it’s a novel, not a self-help book – enjoy! Love Jen. PS I love you to bits just as you are! Xxx.
It was a Canadian book, not surprisingly as Jenna lives in Quebec, by a writer called Carol Shields, and the title was Unless. When Adele read it she felt it was telling her something much bigger than the story, something she sort of knew, so she read it again. It was all there – the feeling that things weren’t right, that she wasn’t quite right.
Adele never knew her mother, who had died from a heart attack just hours after her birth. She often wonders who she would be now had she been brought up by her mother, rather than being caught between the twin powers of her very controlling, widowed father, and the stony-faced woman he had employed to keep his house and raise his daughter. So many women Adele’s own age seem confident and empowered, as though they knew something she didn’t or had found some sort of guru who taught them how to become their true selves. Adele, always needing approval, always anxious not to cause offence or do the wrong thing, is still struggling to find her own confidence. Astrid had been her attempt to find a guru and that hadn’t turned out well at all. She wished she could have talked to Carol Shields – in fact some time ago she decided to write to her about this, but worried for months about saying the wrong thing in the email, and when she actually drafted it and went to the author’s website for a contact address, she found that Carol Shields had died years earlier. Adele felt this keenly, as though she had been a personal friend, although she knew that she was confusing the writer herself with Reta, her character. Sometimes the way writers conveyed information could be oblique, and that annoyed Adele, who liked things to be clearly articulated. It’s now many years since she first read the book and she still hasn’t found a way to switch off her need to please; how to flick the switch of feeling she is answerable to everyone, and always on the threshold of making a wrong decision. Neither her spotless work record, nor the esteem in which her employers and her staff hold her, has changed this.
As she stares at her email on the screen Adele begins to wonder whether, having set this up, she will actually be able to cope with spending all that time in close proximity to these book club friends who are, in many ways, strangers. In her head the spirit of Astrid speaks to her from behind the old cloud of smoke.
So who, or what, will you be in the Blue Mountains, Adele? Astrid asks. You’re retiring in a few weeks, so who will you be in the mountains and beyond? Do you think you’re going to find something to fix your life? You’ve left it very late to establish your identity. This is your big chance to break through, to be yourself. Get it wrong and you may end up still lacking a sense of yourself, but now also without a book club.
Adele feels the fear creeping up
her spine. No one has replied to her invitation yet but it really is too soon. She stands up and paces the room to shake the spirit of Astrid from her. Calm down, she tells herself, they need to think about it before they reply. But suppose they all say yes and then it turns out to be a disaster? Adele’s stomach lurches in horror. Abruptly she logs off the computer and hurries out to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of wine and to solve the more straightforward problem of whether she will have cheese on toast or warmed-up soup for dinner.
Judy in Mandurah, WA
Judy lets herself in through the back door of the shop, puts her handbag on her desk in the rear office, and walks through the stockroom to open the door into the shop itself. From there she can see the glass front door, with the Closed sign in place, and beyond it the street. This morning she has deliberately arrived half an hour early to do some paperwork, but the sight of her desk, piled high with catalogues, bills, receipts, spreadsheets and goodness knows what else, has already brought on the sick, trapped feeling that has been haunting her for months. The fact is that she has no idea where to start; there is so much of . . . well, of everything, and it’s all a mess. She looks back out to the street, where the postie is making his way towards her mailbox, and beyond him she spots Maddie heading towards the shop clutching her usual bulging plastic bag full of scarves. Judy dives back into the stockroom and closes the door. If Maddie sees she’s there opening hours will mean nothing. Judy has, in the past, invested some time and patience in getting Maddie to understand that opening hours are just that and it largely works. But chances are that if Maddie sees her in the shop she will be hammering on the door. Judy is very fond of her, but . . . it’s complicated.
‘I don’t know how you cope with her,’ said Pearl, who had helped out in the shop for a few days when Judy had flu last winter. ‘She’s so demanding and relentless, and she never stops talking. I couldn’t get rid of her.’
‘That’s Maddie,’ Judy had said. ‘She has no boundaries and she doesn’t understand the effect she has on people.’
‘I don’t know why you bother,’ Pearl said. ‘You should just ban her.’
Judy smiled, imagining what a process of banning Maddie might involve. ‘I like her,’ she said simply. ‘I care about her and I know that coming here means something to her. We . . . well, we value each other, each in our own way, I suppose.’
Pearl had thrown her hands in the air. ‘I give up,’ she said. ‘Really, I give up. Maddie is the right name, she’s mad as a coot.’
‘Maddie,’ Judy said, inhaling sharply and drawing herself up to her full, but unimpressive, height, ‘is an abbreviation of her name – Madeleine. She is not mad, that’s offensive.’ And she had determined then and there that she would never again ask Pearl to shop-sit, and she would reduce contact with her to a polite minimum.
Feeling treacherous Judy hurries back to the office and switches on the computer. Business has boomed since her early days here, thanks to a revival of interest in knitting. It had come at the right time for Judy, whose basic business was already well established. When the lease on the small shop next door became available, she had grasped the opportunity to expand. As soon as the contracts were signed she cut through the adjoining wall to turn the two shops into one. It gave her more than half as much space again, and soon she had a design and activity room with some tables and chairs and a coffee machine for people to help themselves. Within just a few months she had set up knitting groups and classes, developed an online presence with a website and Facebook page. The surge in the business had initially amazed and eventually overwhelmed her. People come to her shop not only from Mandurah and its surroundings but also from as far away as Perth and Fremantle in the north and Bunbury and Busselton in the south. What she needs now is a person with a commitment to the business. But the right person would be one who would want to share some of the decision-making, and before she can think about finding that person she has to sort out the chaos she herself has created. Melissa, the new part-time assistant who is now working with her two afternoons a week, is young, very bright, and super keen. It’s helped, but not enough. When Judy stops to think about it, which she does as rarely as possible, she knows that if she could somehow reorganise and de-clutter the way she runs things, life would be a whole lot easier. She has a management system on her computer, but she doesn’t know how it works, and the prospect of having to learn to use it is daunting. She longs to turn her back and walk away.
‘The trouble with running your own business,’ someone had said to her the year she had acquired the shop, ‘is that it never stops. There are no days off, no proper holidays. Not smart for a woman on her own like you, who hasn’t got a man around to sort things out.’ Judy resented the comment, and it made her more determined than ever to do everything herself. And she had done it all herself, and in doing so she is now drowning in her own creation.
In her youth she’d dreaded the parcels of hand-knitted jumpers, gloves, hats and scarves that arrived regularly from her grandmother, who had taught her to knit as a child. In the late fifties and early sixties homemade was not remotely cool, and you wouldn’t be seen knitting for quids. Judy had grown up in a small Suffolk town and was nineteen before she moved, with a former schoolfriend, to a shared flat in London. It was there, two years later, that she met Ted, who had been brought along to a party by another housemate. Tall, blond, tanned and fresh off the boat that had brought him to London from Australia, he captured the attention of almost every girl in the room.
He’d grown up, he told her, in the Western Australian Wheatbelt, on a family property where they had wheat and sheep. He talked lovingly about his home, his parents, the neighbours, and the town where they drove to get their shopping. Judy, raised as she was in a small country town, identified with all he said. Despite the fact that she had virtually run away from Suffolk, she knew she was a country – or at least a small-town – girl at heart. Ted showed her black-and-white snapshots of himself with his father alongside a tractor; there were photos of sheep and a sheepdog, and Ted’s mother bottle-feeding a sheepdog pup. When he told her it was a long way to town she assumed he meant about twenty miles. When he said the family got on well with the nearest neighbours, she presumed they lived a short walk or bike ride away.
It didn’t take long for Judy to fall in love. Ted was gentle and softly-spoken, somewhat intimidated by London, and she took him sightseeing, to the movies, on pub crawls, and to lots of parties.
‘He seems nice,’ her mother said when Judy took him home with her to Suffolk. ‘But Australia is so big, and such a long way away.’
‘He’s a big man with a big heart,’ Judy said. ‘I love him and I’m going to marry him.’
And just over a year later they were married in the local church with Judy’s family and some of her London friends, celebrating in the parish hall. A couple of months later they were on a ship back to Australia.
‘You might find it a bit remote,’ Ted mentioned, as the ship approached Fremantle.
‘It’s exciting,’ Judy said, leaning against the rails. ‘I’m so looking forward to it all: meeting your family and hanging out with the neighbours, going shopping in town. And the sheep! One of our neighbours back home had a sheep, she kept it tethered in the garden, like a pet.’ Much later she remembered that Ted’s face had changed when she said this. He’d looked more than surprised; awkward, she’d thought, or perhaps anxious.
‘Mmm. Well it’s not quite like that, Jude,’ he said. ‘We don’t really make pets of them – there are an awful lot of sheep.’
Judy’s naivety, her own ignorance about her future home, still amazes her. How could she ever have convinced herself that it would be similar to her life in Suffolk? The enormity of Western Australia was paralysing – the family property seemed hundreds of times bigger than her hometown. Nothing was as she had expected. They lived by the weather – the heat, the dry, the rain or the lack of it, t
he fear of drought. The nearest neighbours were miles away; the nearest town more than an hour-and-a-half’s drive. The distances and the oppressive silence of this vast country weighed heavily on her.
At first Judy had felt some pride in working alongside Ted and his parents, or spending a day baking with her mother-in-law, and driving miles to take the cakes and scones to the CWA. She made a friend of Donna, the eldest daughter of the Indigenous family who had worked the property with Ted’s family for decades. Donna was three years younger than Judy and this was her country, and through her Judy learned more about her new home than she ever did from Ted and his parents. Sometimes they went together on the fortnightly drive to and from town for the shopping, but more often than not Judy did that trek alone. One Wednesday when she had loaded everything into the car she decided to get a sandwich and a cup of tea in the little café and ran into two women from the CWA.
‘Come and join us,’ they said, indicating a spare place at the table. ‘How are you settling in?’
‘Oh . . . okay . . .’ she said, half-heartedly, and to her dismay she felt her voice break and had to struggle not to burst into tears. ‘I’m . . . well, I’m trying to adjust, but it’s all very different . . . everything’s different, and not at all what I expected.’
One of the women, Edna, reached out and patted her hand. ‘I do remember what it’s like,’ she said. ‘I met my husband in London during the war. And when it was over John had to come back to Australia, and some months later I flew here with a bunch of other girls, all of us war brides. I thought I’d arrived at the end of the earth. But I got used to it, love, and so will you.’
They talked on and when they all got up to go Edna’s friend Val said she wanted to go to the haberdashery to buy some wool. ‘D’you knit, Judy?’ Edna asked.