by Liz Byrski
She thinks about the book she’s taking. If they don’t like it, it doesn’t matter, she tells herself; they don’t have to like it, they just have to read it and try to understand what it means to her. It’s pretty bloody straightforward, and it’s a really good read. What might the others bring? she wonders. Hopefully they won’t be really hard to read. There have been books like that over the years, books that she just didn’t get, that were way above her head, and she’d put in her apologies and missed a meeting to avoid the embarrassment of trying to be part of the conversation. Oh well, if there is a book like that when we’re all sitting together in a room, I’ll have to come clean.
Quite a long time ago, and certainly well before Adele came up with this idea, she’d read her chosen book again and really wanted to talk about it, but she knew Donna wouldn’t enjoy it. She might even laugh at it, it was an odd sort of book, but she’s become so fond of it, she wouldn’t be able to bear it if Donna thought it was rubbish. She doesn’t think the book club will laugh or think it’s rubbish. They’re used to discussing books, they might not like it but they would never laugh at anyone’s choice. It’ll be good, she tells herself, such a relief to get away. No shop, no customers, no stupid questions, no one asking me to sort out what they’ve done wrong in their knitting. Bliss, just what I need and when I get home I’ll feel better about everything again, and I won’t wake up each morning wanting to set fire to the bloody shop! But when she thinks of coming back here afterwards she feels the panic start to rise again.
*
‘Well if you’re staying we could order a pizza or pop down to the corner and pick up fish and chips,’ Ros says, pulling a beer from the fridge. ‘But Clooney still hasn’t had his walk.’
‘I’ll take him,’ Tim says, getting to his feet, ‘and I’ll have that beer when I get back. I vote for fish and chips.’
Ros puts the beer back in the fridge. ‘Thanks, Tim, that’d be good. Yes, fish and chips is my preference. Leah, what about you?’
‘Fine by me,’ Leah says. ‘If we ring the fish and chip shop and order then you could pick it up on the way back, Tim.’
‘He is the best ever tenant,’ Ros says, handing Leah a glass of wine as the front door closes behind Tim and Clooney.
‘Not better than me, surely?’ Leah asks, grinning.
‘Well no, let’s just say more useful,’ Ros says. ‘After all, you were only a teenager at the time. Tim’s a grown-up.’
‘He’s always been like that,’ Leah says. ‘Boringly responsible and well balanced.’
‘Exactly. Rather like James, totally reliable and responsible, unlike you or me. And you’ve known him for years and never introduced us before he turned up at the front door. On that first day I thought he was a James-type man, and wondered why you didn’t marry him years ago.’
‘Because, perversely, I married Ivan.’
‘Indeed you did, against my advice.’
‘I loved Ivan. You can’t argue with that.’
‘Sure I can,’ Ros said. ‘Seductive as it is, love is not always enough.’ She knows she’s sounding like a boring old woman but she’s always been edgy about Ivan, despite his good looks, smooth talk and obvious generosity.
Leah gives an awkward laugh. ‘I’ve never really understood why you don’t like him.’
‘I do like him,’ Ros insists, ‘I just don’t quite get him. All that dark Slavic brooding. It’s always unnerved me. But I suppose it’s all in my head. Love is strange, isn’t it, and it’s often so incomprehensible to other people.’
‘It is, although of course James and you – that wasn’t incomprehensible at all.’
‘No, that was about as straightforward as it comes,’ Ros agrees, wishing he were here now to be part of this conversation. It had always seemed so easy for both of them; they were, as James had once said, ‘a perfect fit’. ‘Mutual love at first sight,’ Ros says now, ‘and we were just so lucky that, despite some difficult periods, we managed to keep it that way. All this time and I still miss him every day. Especially now in view of the circumstances.’
‘What circumstances?’ Leah asks, suddenly alert.
‘Oh well,’ Ros says, mentally kicking herself for not thinking before she spoke. ‘Well, you know . . .’ She looks out of the window into the shadowy garden to avoid eye contact, gathering her thoughts. ‘You know, getting old and doddery and all that stuff.’
Leah leans forward. ‘You’ve heard from the hospital, haven’t you?’
‘No,’ Ros lies. ‘No, not yet. I said I’d tell you.’
The silence is loaded with Leah’s disbelief. ‘It’s taking an awfully long time.’
‘Mmm. Well there were tests to do, and no news is good news, isn’t it? I mean, if I was about to drop off my perch I’m jolly sure I’d have heard something by now.’
Leah takes a deep breath. ‘I’m not sure I trust you on this, Ros.’
‘I’m fine, honestly,’ Ros says, still avoiding eye contact. She really does not want to get into all this with Leah now, not before she goes away, not before she’s ready. ‘I’ll tell you when I know anything. By the time I get back from my holiday in the mountains I’m sure there’ll be some news.’
Awkward silence again, a silence weighted with everything that Ros is not saying.
Leah picks up her phone. ‘I’ll order the food.’
‘And I’ll get Clooney’s dinner ready,’ Ros says, relieved to change the subject, flexing her right hand in the hope of stopping the shaking, ‘or he’ll be wanting to share the fish and chips.’
‘So what book did you decide to take?’ Leah asks when she has made the call.
‘I’m still weighing that up,’ Ros says, wondering how many more lies she will have to tell this evening. ‘I thought first about taking On Chesil Beach, have you read it?’
‘Oh lord, yes I have, you lent it to me, remember? I hated it. It’s all so uptight and restrained. I almost ended up throwing it at the wall.’
Ros laughs. ‘It’s because you’re so young. You have no idea how difficult anything to do with sex was for those of us who were young in the fifties. And even the early sixties – not all of that decade was swinging, you know.’
‘But the book was so dull,’ Leah insists, ‘so grindingly prim and dull.’
‘It was spot on,’ Ros said, laughing. ‘Absolutely spot on and very moving. Life was pretty dull then, especially for the young. Anyway, I decided against it, because much as I enjoyed that book and related to it, it didn’t really fit the criteria.’
‘Which is?’
‘It has to be a book that tells the others something about ourselves.’
Leah raised her eyebrows. ‘Sounds like Chesil Beach would have done that for you.’
Ros studies the dog meat, grips the knife and cautiously begins to chop it. ‘There’s a difference between the contents of a book being something that you can relate to, and something that actually tells other people something about you – don’t you think?’
Leah shrugs and takes a swig of wine. ‘Maybe. I’m not sure that I can tell the difference. I might, of course, if you’d tell me what you’ve ended up choosing – because you obviously have chosen something.’
Ros stops chopping and looks straight at her. ‘Well okay, yes, I have, and I don’t want to talk about it now, because I am thinking about the reasons I feel so connected to it. I’m just not ready to discuss that yet. I’ll tell you when I get back.’
She looks away again, hoping that Leah can’t see her fear, can’t see how vulnerable she feels. Despite knowing that Leah’s probing is driven by love and concern, Ros just wants to shake her and tell her to shut up, stay out of it, until she, herself, is ready to talk.
‘I see. Like you’ll tell me about the test results, which you also obviously already know, when you get back?’
The silence is leaden
, and Ros seesaws between fierce resentment and the need to burst into tears and tell Leah everything. She puts down the knife and looks her in the eye again. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Exactly that. I will tell you everything when I get back. I promise.’
‘Okay,’ Leah says, slowly and very deliberately. ‘And if there is anything in the meantime, anything at all that I should know, you’ll call and talk to me?’ She gets to her feet and walks to face Ros across the bench top. ‘You’re like a mother to me, Ros. You and James were like parents, the best sort of parents that you can talk to, be honest with, totally trust. I was fourteen and heading off the rails, and you dragged me and my violin back from that. I am always here for you, always. I hope you understand that.’
Ros puts down the knife. ‘I do, darling,’ she says, ‘and it means more to me than you’ll ever know. But do you remember how long it took you to tell me that you’d actually agreed to marry Ivan? In case you’ve forgotten, it was seven months.’
Leah’s face twitches in an awkward smile.
‘Seven frigging months,’ Ros continues. ‘So you’ll understand that sometimes you have to hold back on talking about really important things to the people you love most. And sometimes you really don’t want them to be the first people you discuss it with because it’s simply too hard. It has to be processed elsewhere first, somewhere not so close to home.’
‘I suppose.’
‘No! You don’t suppose, Leah, you really do know. So can you let me off this hook and trust me to find the right time?’
Leah nods, looks up at Ros. ‘Of course, if that’s what you need, of course I can.’
‘Good. And just so you know, the other book I had in mind was Julian Barnes’s Nothing to Be Frightened Of, which is all about the fear of dying, and I didn’t pick that either, so I hope you’ll find that reassuring.’
‘I do,’ Leah says, ‘I really do. But of course I’ve never understood why you are so obsessed with some of those English blokes, to me they’re boring old farts. What’s wrong with Tim Winton or Tom Keneally?’
Ros laughs. ‘Nothing, nothing at all, they’re brilliant, but they just don’t speak to me in the way that Barnes and McEwan, or Blake Morrison, do. Now let’s get some plates in the oven to warm. Tim and Clooney will be back in a minute and we’ll still be here navel gazing about books.’
*
Adele wanders around her little courtyard, noticing how bare it is: just the paving, a built-in brick trough for plants, a table and a couple of chairs and nothing else. She hasn’t really noticed how bleak it looks until now. That’s what giving up work does, she thinks, now I’ve got time on my hands I suppose I’ll notice all sorts of things I ought to do. I need flowers in that trough, and some big pots with plants or a small tree or something. As soon as I get back.
She has been restless since she walked out of the office for the last time a week ago, restless and directionless. It wasn’t as though she’d wanted to retire, it had just seemed to be the thing she was supposed to do – that she was actually supposed to want to do in her sixties. She hasn’t given much thought to how she’ll adapt to not working or what she wants at this stage of her life. It ought to be exciting but having been locked into working so long, she’s more concerned now with how she’ll adapt to being without it. How will she structure her days? What will she do now that she can actually please herself? Her habits are so ingrained and some will have to change, but what and when? She is still getting up at six every morning, making tea, and drinking it sitting at the bench top while she listens to Fran Kelly terrorising politicians and captains of industry on Radio National. Adele loves Fran Kelly: she’s tough and relentless, and she sounds as though she knows what she wants and how to get it. No one, however internationally famous and important, seems to faze her. Sometimes Adele tries to imagine what it would be like to get up every morning in the wee small hours (does Fran Kelly ever actually sleep?), walk into that studio, put on her headphones and grab the world by the throat. For Adele, the fascinating thing about Fran Kelly is that although Fran can do all that, she also sounds like a nice person. Just a thin slice of that, she thinks, would do me very nicely.
Adele is well aware that since she gave up work she no longer has to listen to RN sitting at the worktop in the kitchen, drinking tea and eating her two slices of wholemeal toast with sliced avocado, salt and a squeeze of lemon. She could make her tea and take it back to bed with her. Indeed, she could stay in bed all day if she wanted, or sit in an armchair with her feet up in her dressing gown and watch the ABC morning news program. It would, however, be a poor substitute for Breakfast with Fran.
Adele knows nothing about leisure, because she has become a manic workaholic. In recent months she’s tried to get to grips with her doctor’s suggestion that she was burning herself out. That, and the whole thing of the sixties being the decade of retirement, is why she is home today, retired, but still listening to Fran at six in the morning. So perhaps it’s too soon; perhaps the best thing to do until she goes away is to stick with the old routine, and try to change things when she gets back. In any case, she would still always want to listen to Fran Kelly, so maybe she’ll get some headphones – or are they called earpieces these days? Whatever! It would mean she could listen while she goes for walks in the mountains, assuming, of course, that she can get a signal. She almost stops breathing at the prospect of not having access to RN, but of course it’ll be okay in the house, just perhaps not while walking. Since her conversations with Simone about the program Adele has been feeling pretty comfortable with the arrangements. She is used to making plans for strangers, and feeling confident about them until the final few days, when her anxiety starts to mount. By the time I get to Ros’s I’ll be a dithering mass of insecurity again, she thinks. Perhaps Simone would teach me a bit of yoga.
‘You are, of course, addicted to this state of confusion and anxiety,’ the ghastly Astrid had told her all those years ago.
But Adele had already known that and still does. You are a lost cause, Adele, she tells herself now, which was probably what Astrid had been thinking at the time.
Back inside the house she turns the radio off. Fran finished her shift an hour or so ago and The World Today is still a couple of hours away.
‘Do you think you might be a bit obsessed with Radio National, Mum?’ Jenna had asked when she flew over from Quebec for a month last year. ‘You do tend to talk about the presenters as though they’re your friends.’
‘I know,’ Adele said. ‘I mean, I do hate the summer when all my favourite presenters go on holiday and I’m expected to listen to strangers. It’s like being deserted by one’s family.’
‘Like your daughter falling in love, getting married and taking off to live in Canada, you mean?’ Jenna said, grinning.
‘Well yes, I suppose so . . . a bit anyway.’
‘Mum!’ Jenna said firmly. ‘It’s time to get a life.’
‘When I retire,’ Adele said. ‘When I retire I will get a life but I’m not yet clear about what that life will be.’
Since then not much has changed. Although she has now retired, she still has no idea how to get a life, or what sort of life she wants. And although it feels quite odd, not having work to go to, she realises she’s not actually missing it, in fact she might even be a bit relieved.
‘It’s great that you’re going to this book club thing,’ Jenna had said when she’d Skyped at the weekend. ‘It hasn’t been healthy for you, this focus on work to the exclusion of everything else. I mean, when did you last go out to lunch with a friend, or go to the movies, or do something normal like that? And please don’t bother trying to answer that because I know it’s been an unbelievably long time, years probably. Please, Mum, now you’ve retired just try to work out what you want. Something that will be good for you, something that will nourish your soul.’
Adele wonders if Jenna has any idea how daunting, how total
ly beyond her that sounds. Simone, she thinks, maybe she could help. She’d been so nice and helpful on the phone, and Ros was nice too. And quite suddenly Adele does something that is so out of character that she can barely believe she’s doing it. She goes to her contacts, brings up Simone’s number and writes a text.
Any chance you could give me a bit of coaching to start me on yoga? She clicks ‘Send’. She is immediately so horrified by what she’s done that her neck and armpits begin to prickle with sweat. Fortunately Simone replies straight away.
Love to. Looking forward to it. x
Adele blinks and looks again at the message, or at least at the little x at the end. Simone has sent her a kiss, just as Jenna always does, though Jenna sends about ten. How unexpected is that, a kiss from Simone? It makes her feel stronger somehow. What a relief it will be to be able to think about just one thing at a time.
‘What book are you taking?’ Jenna had asked.
‘The one you sent me when I flunked out with Astrid,’ Adele said.
‘Really? That’s great. That’s just what you need to talk about with book club friends. It’s the start of getting a life.’
Is it really? Adele wonders now. Will the next few weeks help her find out how to change? And she is suddenly so anxious about it that she has to run upstairs to the spare room, where all her travel stuff is lined up neatly on the bed, and check that all four copies of Unless are still there, although of course they were all there when she checked them last night, and earlier this morning.