by Liz Byrski
Chapter Four
The Blue Mountains, end of July
Judy wheels her suitcase into the bedroom and closes the door behind her. They’d agreed to draw lots for the bedrooms, this being a house tradition done with coloured marbles drawn from a small black velvet bag. They had removed the white marble, which was the master bedroom and which they’d all agreed should be left unoccupied. Judy had dreaded the possibility that she might draw a pink room – she loathed pink, loathed it so much that if she did draw pink she felt she would have to ask someone to change with her. But there was no pink room, and she’d drawn green. There are three white walls and the fourth is painted to look like pale green seawater with ridges and flecks of crisp white foam above a line of pale sand. In the fading light from the nearby window the water has a luminous quality and she reaches out to touch it cautiously, as if expecting it to be wet. There are full-length curtains in pale green with white tassels, and a green velvet armchair, a white dressing table, and pale green and white bed linen. Heaven, she thinks, I must have died and gone to heaven. She kicks off her shoes, flops down on top of the doona and lies there relishing the comfort and the silence.
She and Simone had arrived half an hour after Adele and Ros, who were already ensconced in front of the fire with someone called Gwenda who, it seems, is a sort of caretaker in the owners’ absence.
‘Thank god you’ve arrived!’ Ros had said, as she and Adele got to their feet. ‘Gwenda’s made scones but wouldn’t let us start on them until you got here.’
There was laughter, and handshakes turned into awkward hugs, and as they settled near the fire Gwenda had wheeled in a tea trolley laden with scones, sandwiches and a carrot cake. They fell upon the food as though they hadn’t eaten for days, while Clooney sniffed around, checking them all out, and then gazing mournfully up at each woman in turn, as if trying to decide who was the best bet for titbits.
Judy had found it quite confronting to be suddenly face to face with all three of them. Meeting Simone at the airport had been pretty straightforward. Their flights had been due in at about the same time but Simone’s from Hobart was twenty minutes late, so when the carousel for the Hobart flight was announced Judy had moved closer to watch the passengers coming down the escalator to the baggage hall. Simone was easy to spot. On Skype she had always looked immaculate: her thick, dark hair, heavily streaked with grey, perfectly even features and those wonderful dark eyes, thanks, no doubt, to her Italian heritage. She was just as immaculate in person and taller than Judy had expected, but as she herself admits, everyone over twelve is taller than her. Simone was wearing tight-fitting jeans and a soft white shirt under a charcoal jacket. She looked stunning, calm, confident and so casually fashionable, like an advert for Country Road. Judy had felt her confidence evaporating, but Simone’s smile as she spotted Judy, and the way she had immediately waved and then headed towards her, made her seem more familiar.
‘Sorry about the wait,’ she’d said, hugging Judy. ‘Was your flight okay? Shall we get a cup of tea before we go?’
They stopped, with their baggage trolleys, at the small café and Judy found it helped to sit there and chat about the ordinary travel things, the crowd of pre-weekend travellers, the inflight meals, and she began to relax.
‘So shall we go and get the car now?’ Simone asked eventually. They set off for the hire desk, signed the paperwork, picked up the keys and headed out to the car park. ‘Would you like to drive, Judy?’ Simone asked, turning to her.
‘I’d really rather not,’ Judy said. ‘I’m totally stuffed – all the running around to organise things has suddenly crept up on me, so if you wouldn’t mind . . .’
‘I love driving,’ Simone said. ‘But I probably can’t talk until we get out of the city traffic. I think it’ll be a bit of a challenge compared to Hobart!’
Judy rested her head on the back of the seat in relief and they travelled in comfortable silence until they were clear of the city.
‘I’m really looking forward to this,’ she’d said eventually. ‘It’s so long since I had any sort of break or holiday.’
‘I think it would be incredibly demanding to run your own business,’ Simone said. ‘And your shop looks great, I had a look at your website.’
‘It’s going very well,’ Judy said, ‘but it’s too much for me really. I recently took on a lovely young woman, but I’m not good at letting go of things, so I keep checking on her, to see that she hasn’t missed anything. It probably drives her mad but she’s very sweet about it. She and her mother are looking after the shop while I’m away.’
‘So when did you last get away for more than a few days?’ Simone had asked, negotiating a bendy stretch of road.
Judy hesitated. ‘Well, not at all since I took over the lease on the property next door,’ she admitted.
‘And that was when?’
‘Um . . . well that would have been the late nineties. I sometimes go down to the Wheatbelt for a long weekend, or my friend Donna comes to Perth and we get a couple of hotel rooms and have a weekend in the city. That’s about it, really.’
‘You’re kidding,’ Simone said, turning to stare at her and swerving perilously. ‘But that’s ridiculous, that’s more than twenty years. Why? Why on earth have you done that to yourself?’
‘It’s just . . . become my life,’ Judy said. ‘I created it, and now I’m stuck with it.’
‘It sounds as though you need to make a change. Could you sell the business? Retire?’
Judy hesitated. ‘I do love the shop, the customers – at least most of them.’ As she said it she realised she was talking rubbish. Many of the customers drive her absolutely bonkers. And while she is very proud of it, she no longer loves the shop. She wondered if Simone detected her lack of conviction. ‘Oh, and admittedly I’m a bit of a control freak . . . and I’ve let everything sink into a bit of a mess, really. We look good in the shop but behind the scenes the business side is chaos. I think I’d have to sort all that stuff out before I tried to sell it. Sometimes I feel as though I’m drowning. So when Adele suggested this I jumped at it, and of course I’ve always hoped we’d all be able to meet one day.’
Now, lying on her bed, Judy wonders what it was that had made her suddenly confess all this to Simone, whom she barely knows, so soon after they’d met. She has never said any of it to anyone. Simone must have thought she was loopy, but she was such a good listener, and she had seemed genuinely interested and concerned. Maybe admitting it is good though; maybe it’ll do the trick, get it out of my system, help me relax, she thinks. And maybe I should change my style. I’ll have time to go shopping here. I should study Simone, stick to simple things instead of all these bright colours, wash and wear things, fewer frocks, something more casual. I look like a shopkeeper from the fifties.
‘Judy? Judy, are you okay?’
There is a tap on the door and she wakes with a start and sits bolt upright. ‘Yes,’ she calls. ‘Yes, I’m fine, come on in.’ Blinking and yawning, she rubs her hands over her face and picks up her glasses from the side table.
‘We thought you might be asleep,’ Ros says from the doorway. ‘Supper’s ready. Don’t feel you have to get up but Gwenda has made a very yummy-looking fish pie, enough to feed an army. But if you’d prefer to . . .’
‘No, no, definitely not,’ Judy says, swinging her legs off the bed and getting shakily to her feet. ‘Goodness, I’ve been asleep for almost two hours. I must wash my face and tidy up.’
‘Simone said you were exhausted. We’re all pretty tired so it’ll be an early night,’ Ros says. ‘No one else has washed or tidied, I don’t think. I certainly haven’t. Anyway, take your time, no rush.’ And she backs out of the door, closing it behind her.
Judy sits down again on the bed, longing to get back into it, to burrow down and sleep. The peace that she’d felt a couple of hours ago has evaporated to be replaced by her old fea
r about being away from home and the business. She is sick of the shop, but at the same time she yearns for it as the old fear of being elsewhere grasps her. Having longed to get away, all she longs for now is sleep, and then, in the morning, to find some pretext to escape; call a taxi, get on the next available flight home from Sydney. Being here in this gorgeous house, these lovely friendly women, and the prospect of the book discussions, it’s overwhelming. Everything that holds her life together is so far out of reach. She is now reliant on a group of comparative strangers for the next few weeks. Her chest tightens; she is giddy with panic, and her heart races. There’s no way I can do this, she thinks. I have to go home. Why did she think coming here would make things better? She considers leaving tomorrow but changes her mind immediately, knowing she is just too tired to cope with travelling again so soon. She’ll go to dinner, and tomorrow she’ll come up with some sort of reason why she has to leave on Saturday morning. In fact, she’ll book a taxi to pick her up; that will make her feel better. And tomorrow she’ll search for a flight. She grabs her phone, searches Google for a local taxi service and makes a booking for nine-thirty on Saturday morning to take her to Sydney airport. She puts her phone back in her bag with a sigh of relief. It was madness to come here, but she’ll be home in time to open the shop on Monday morning.
In the bathroom she grips the edge of the hand basin and stares at her reflection in the mirror. She looks like the walking dead: her hair messed up, her face grey with exhaustion, the panic obvious in her eyes. In a distant part of the house she can hear Ros calling to her dog to come inside. The bathroom starts to spin and she leans against the wall and lets herself slide down to sit on the floor, resting her head on her knees. The panic starts to ease almost as rapidly as it arrived. Getting up again she pours a glass of water and gulps it down, sloshes water on her face, dries it, brushes her hair, and sits for a moment on the toilet lid. ‘Am I actually going mad?’ she whispers. I just have to get myself through this evening and then I can think about how to tell them that I’m leaving. She takes a deep breath and, feeling as though some connection between her head and her body has gone on strike, she walks out to join the others.
*
A little cheer goes up as Judy takes her place at the table.
‘Sorry, I just went out like a light,’ she says.
‘Don’t apologise,’ Ros says. ‘You’ll probably need to do a lot more of that in the next few weeks. Maybe we all will.’
Despite the lightness of her tone Ros is watching Judy closely. They are the oldest of the group; Judy, at seventy-three, is four years younger than her. Earlier, Simone had mentioned a conversation in the car from which it seemed clear that Judy was close to breaking point. Ros feels for her, she knows how hard it is to be with strangers when you’re worn out. She’s feeling a bit that way herself; getting all her own and Clooney’s things packed had been tiring, and then there’d been the journey. A few years ago she started to accept that not only can she not do what she once could, but also that the things she can do take longer and require more energy. And for Ros, being with other people adds new levels of exhaustion. She had anticipated this when she made the travel arrangements with Adele, and she’d been prepared for the effort of making conversation on the drive up. But although Adele had obviously felt awkward and ill at ease when she first arrived to collect her, by the time they were on the road she’d seemed more relaxed.
When she’d arrived Ros had made tea and as she sat opposite Adele she could both see and feel her tension, from the obvious stiffness in her shoulders to her neatly crossed ankles and her hands which, when not holding her teacup, she constantly curled into fists, stretched out and then curled again. Those fists fascinated Ros, because she can no longer make strong fists like that. Now, glancing at the varied pairs of hands around the table, she fears her own shaky ones will soon be noticed, and she grips her knife and fork as tightly as she can to steady them. But of course it’s not just her hands. Ros wonders if her own state of health is as apparent in her face as Judy’s is in hers. She thinks not, but the loss of muscle strength and stability that had sent her to the doctor some weeks ago has slowed her down dramatically. She knows she is walking differently, and generally moving more slowly. For so long she’s assumed that she appears to others as she has felt within herself – an ageing but energetic and competent older woman. But she is no longer that person, at least in a physical sense. What others see now cannot but be an old woman who walks and moves cautiously, who no longer trusts her physical self, who, and this is the worst part for Ros, is clearly vulnerable. How desperately she hates that word – vulnerable – and the others that cluster in its wake: unsteady, frail, wobbly and fragile. Losing it. She tries to focus on the fish pie.
*
Adele is telling them that some weeks ago, knowing she was about to retire, she decided to stop colouring her hair. ‘It seems like a significant thing to do,’ she says, ‘but it’s difficult to get used to it. It’s pretty noticeable. I’m trying to get myself to accept that it’s okay to look my age, to be a retired woman of sixty-five with greying hair.’ What she doesn’t tell them is how strange and out of character it is for her to be revealing this.
‘I think your hair looks great,’ Simone says. ‘It looked a very solid chestnut colour on Skype, but this is softer, more flattering.’
‘I’ve given up on mine,’ Ros says. ‘In fact I’ve got used to being completely grey and I quite like it – it’s fairly forgiving, I think. It was already quite grey in my fifties. And it’s one of the things I remind myself of when I think about getting old – life just seems to get better as one ages. We all worry about it, but I try . . . have tried always to think positively about old age, and about making the most of it. It can be a really precious and enjoyable time of life.’ She’s tempted to add until some blasted twist of fate kicks you in the gut but restrains herself.
‘No doubt about that,’ Simone chips in. ‘This is certainly the best time of my life.’
‘Really?’ Adele says, startled. Every woman she knows seems to think that the most important thing is to stay young and hide any signs of age, and she wonders what it is, what special quality Ros and Simone have, that she does not. What gene makes them so positive about ageing? ‘I feel as though it’s all downhill from now on,’ she says, ‘as though I need to hang on to youth, or rather to middle age, and not let go. I even thought about cosmetic surgery but I’m hopeless with pain, and frightened of looking like those “worst celebrity facelift” photographs. I know it’s silly and unrealistic, and I thought the hair thing might help me face reality.’
‘The trouble is,’ Simone says, ‘that wherever we look there is so much crap about old age, particularly about women, our bodies, our faces. I think it takes an effort to resist that, and . . . well . . . claim oneself and one’s age: be in the moment and stop worrying about what people think of us, what they see when they look at us.’
Ros smiles. ‘Simone, I have to say that most people looking at you would see someone tall, elegant and beautifully dressed, and many women would be somewhat intimidated or envious.’
‘Goodness, I hope I’m not intimidating,’ Simone says, laughing, ‘and I’m certainly no fashion plate. I spend very little on clothes because these days I mostly wear the same things all the time. Look, I know I’m lucky. I’ve always been slim and had good hair. But it’s really about how you feel that matters.’
Adele drains her glass of wine. ‘I’d love to stop worrying about how I look and particularly what people think of me. But I don’t know how to do that. ’ She hesitates, wondering if she really wants to go ahead and say this, but if she doesn’t do it now she might never get the courage. ‘For years,’ she says, ‘I’ve run a really significant organisation. It’s been a huge responsibility, a big budget, forty-odd staff, a board of academics and business people, mainly male. It’s been very demanding and I’ve organised the rest of my life down
to the most neurotic small details so I can fit everything in, make it all work seamlessly. Somehow I was that person, and now I’m not, and I’m supposed to work out what’s next, and who I am without all that. I don’t really know who I am without the job, never have done, I don’t know how to be comfortable or confident with myself.’ She stops suddenly, feeling bewildered. ‘I can’t believe I just said all that . . .’ she says, feeling her face glowing with embarrassment. ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t . . .’
‘It’s all related, Adele,’ Ros says. ‘How we look in relation to how we think we ought to look and how we ought to be. And the pressure comes on in so many ways.’
‘Yes,’ Judy cuts in, ‘I was thinking just the same earlier, that I should try to find a style, like Simone has, simple but elegant, and then maybe that would help me sort out the rest of my life because I’d feel better about myself! Single female of seventy plus! What does it mean, what does it look like? It’s just something else to worry about.’
Simone glances at Ros and then at the other two. ‘Well I have no formula,’ she says, ‘no plan. But I can tell you that in the time I’ve been teaching yoga to older people I’ve heard a lot of them say things like this about wanting to change their lives, their looks, the way they feel about getting old. It’s the reason some of them come to yoga in the first place. And what I’ve learned from it is that you have to create space for yourself, spiritually, mentally and physically, to allow new positive energy to come in so we can embrace our age. And I really do love getting old and observing it and seeing what I can get from it.’
Ros helps herself to more fish pie. ‘I remember trying to push it away – age, I mean – even though I’d always looked forward to getting older. But I learned a lot from James, who was older than me. He did what you said, Simone, deliberately set aside time to think about it, talk about it. He wrote in his journal what he wanted for his old age. The sad thing is that he died before he could really put it into practice. It made me determined not to postpone making a move to save my own life and get it into the shape I wanted. But of course I did keep postponing it, I should have started years ago. But when I got your message, Adele, I knew that this was a chance to kick-start myself. I felt it was the right thing to do at the right time. If your invitation had come even three months ago, I would probably have run a mile.’