by Liz Byrski
Adele is about to laugh until she realises that what she wants is to cry. She swallows several times, to hold it all back, to lock down the desire to be the woman Simone describes, striding out into the middle of the room in her new clothes, flinging out her arms, twirling around and demanding to be looked at. Doing all that without embarrassment, without the everlasting concern that her hips are two sizes bigger than her bust, that there is a stubborn roll of fat that sits like a shelf above the waistline of her jeans, and the bulge of her stomach below it; most of all without the fear that she is showing off or making a spectacle of herself.
Simone must have realised that she has touched a sensitive spot, because she moves closer, puts a hand on Adele’s shoulder. ‘You’re a beautiful woman, Adele. And before we leave here we’ll have you shaking your booty.’
Adele laughs.
‘You may laugh now,’ Simone says, wagging her finger, ‘but booty shaking is on the agenda. You mark my words.’
‘And just what’s going on out here?’ Judy asks, appearing from nowhere. ‘There seems to be a lot of giggling.’
‘Indeed there is,’ Simone says, taking Judy’s arm. ‘How are you feeling now?’
‘Better,’ Judy says, ‘quite a bit better. I slept for three hours! I think it’s what I needed. Perhaps I was just exhausted, and then that stupid stuff with the taxi . . . anyway, I’m feeling more like myself now, just seem to have developed a bit of a cough. And I’m starving – did you bring anything for afternoon tea?’
Adele thinks Judy does not look as good as she sounds. This morning she had started coughing after breakfast, and now she looks pale and there are dark hollows under her eyes. ‘We did, but it’s a surprise,’ she says. She hurries through to the kitchen to help Ros with the tea.
In the kitchen she puts a carrier bag down on the table and Ros raises her eyebrows and opens it. ‘Goodies? Crumpets! Oh my god, crumpets,’ she says, ripping open a packet of six. ‘Heaps of crumpets, three packets! Goodness, how wonderful, I’m drooling already. I hope we have enough butter.’
‘We bought some more,’ Adele says. ‘And I know that there are several toasting forks in one of the drawers so we can open the stove, toast the crumpets and let the butter run down our chins.’
Ros grins. ‘You are a wise and wonderful woman, Adele. Did you get the things you wanted? The boots?’
‘I did, look.’ Adele walks over to Ros and thrusts out her foot. ‘In fact I wore them home. They’re really comfortable.’
‘They also look great,’ Ros says. ‘And flat ones are the thing this year apparently. So Leah tells me – Leah’s my de facto daughter, and she’s very cool. She’s just bought some purple suede ones with flat heels. Did you buy anything else?’
‘Yes. A lovely cashmere jumper.’ She hesitates, realising that Ros is waiting for something from her. ‘It’s . . . it’s um . . . well it’s really nice.’
‘So are you going to show me?’
Adele feels herself blushing again. ‘Er . . . okay, if you want . . .’
‘Of course I do,’ Ros says, lifting the kettle with both hands to pour boiling water into the teapot.
Adele picks up the glossy carrier bag and takes out the jumper that is wrapped in two layers of white tissue paper. She puts it down on the end of the table, carefully folds the bag two ways and smooths it flat, then unfolds the tissue.
Ros walks over to the neatly folded jumper and feels its softness. She lifts it up and shakes it out, then looks at Adele and smiles.
‘Beautiful,’ she says. ‘Go and put it on!’
Adele flinches. ‘Put it on?’
‘Yes, why not?’
‘Well I . . .’ She feels her face has flushed a deep red. ‘I’m not, um . . .’
‘Good lord,’ Ros says. ‘It’s not like I’m asking you to get your tits out, Adele! It’s just trying on a jumper.’
Adele stands there paralysed with embarrassment.
‘Okay,’ Ros says, ‘sorry, I didn’t mean to embarrass you.’ She holds the jumper close to Adele’s face. ‘This is a fabulous colour for you, do you often wear it?’
Adele shakes her head, still blushing. ‘Never, it’s . . . well it’s a bit bright.’
‘Bright! I think you mean it’s just not black or navy! It’s gorgeous, and it does wonders for your skin.’
She hands it over carefully and Adele folds it back into the tissue and then the bag. ‘It was awfully expensive,’ she says, ‘but once I saw it . . .’
‘Of course,’ Ros says. ‘And every time you wear it, you’ll feel more than a little bit special.’
Adele watches as Ros piles the crumpets onto a plate, then adds butter, plates and knives to the tray which is already loaded with the teapot, milk and cups.
‘Could you carry this please, Adele?’ Ros asks. ‘I’m not very reliable with trays.’ She walks briskly out of the kitchen with the plate of crumpets.
Adele stands there for a moment, staring at Ros’s retreating back, thinking how different, how much nicer it is to be here with these women than when she has stayed here with Marian and Brian, both of whom she is fond of. ‘Weird,’ she murmurs under her breath. And she picks up the tray and follows Ros into the lounge.
Chapter Six
The first Sunday
Judy is surprised to find herself still here and enjoying herself. Staying over until Monday morning was the right decision, she’d really needed the rest, and now she’s looking forward to their first book discussion.
‘So here we are – face to face,’ Ros says as they settle in. ‘We should get started, but I’ve got a housekeeping suggestion first. This house is gorgeous but it’s making me nervous – the Chinese vases, the crystal birds over there on the low table, other ornaments. Frankly I’m concerned that either Clooney or I will knock something over and break it.’
‘Oh, thank goodness,’ Adele says. ‘I always feel like that here.’
‘We could probably put some things out of the way,’ Simone says. ‘There are heaps of cupboards.’
‘Exactly, rough it up a bit,’ Ros says. ‘As long as we remember where things go so we can put them back.’
‘Let’s do it in the morning,’ Adele suggests, ‘and next time I see Gwenda I’ll explain. She knows the place so well I’m sure she’d help us sort it out again before we go.’
‘That’d certainly make me feel more relaxed,’ Ros says. ‘Anyway, let’s get going.’
As Ros tells them something about the author, Jessica Anderson, and that the book is considered an Australian literary classic, Judy leans back in her chair and thinks how very different this is from switching on the computer and hoping that Skype won’t bomb out and disconnect them midway through the conversation.
‘It won the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 1978,’ Ros says. ‘And I’m ashamed to tell you that despite having been born in Australia and spending most of my life here I had never even heard of it until I saw an article in the weekend paper a couple of months ago. Do you want me to read the cover blurb? No? Okay then, who’s going to go first?’
There’s a brief silence.
‘I will,’ Judy says, thinking that this is a book she understood and really enjoyed so she might as well do her bit now and if she doesn’t make a complete fool of herself they may remember her kindly when she’s gone.
‘I loved this book,’ she says, ‘and for all sorts of reasons. Primarily I think it’s because Nora, the narrator, is an old woman who has lived away from her original home for a very long time, and comes back towards the end of her life. It made me think about the time it was written, and how interesting it is that a book by a woman, about an old woman’s life, won that award then.’
‘I thought that too,’ Ros says. ‘Most of the awards went to men in those days, probably still do.’
‘I looked that up,’ Adele says, puttin
g on her glasses. ‘Did you know that since nineteen forty-five only three women had won it – Thea Astley, Christina Stead and Elizabeth Harrower. Imagine that – only three women in thirty-three years, and then in nineteen seventy-eight Jessica Anderson won it, and Helen Garner won a big national award for Monkey Grip, which I guess we’ve all read at some stage since then because we all love Helen Garner.’
Judy feels her confidence growing. ‘I think it’s great that this book made it, because it’s a real treasure. I took to it because I left my home in England in my early twenties and I’ve never been back, so I understood that part of Nora. She grabbed me right from the start. I love this way of telling her story too, that she’s old and she’s returning to her original home to take stock of things, to reflect.’
‘I do too,’ Simone says. ‘And I especially like it that Nora’s life is not exceptional, but the way the story is told, the insights into her inner life, make it fascinating. She’s tough and persistent, she survives and escapes from the awful marriage and the mother-in-law, at some cost to herself, but she carries on. And in the end she’s working out what she knows about the past and trying to fill some gaps. Because, after all, we all forget things about the past and if you’re in an entirely different place, a different country, there are gaps, and things are hidden within them.’
Judy listens to what Simone is saying; she herself has been here in Australia for half a century and her memory is full of holes, fragments she can’t recall, most of all gaps about the actual place she came from, how it felt to be there, how she once knew it so intimately that it was always home. She wonders what sort of place it is now, how it would look and feel to go there.
‘For me,’ Ros says, ‘this is a perfect example of what I love about novel: the fact that you get the character’s inner life, their thoughts. I mean, we can all know Nora better than we could have done had she been a real person, because we can see inside her head. Sometimes that sort of insight makes me wonder what was actually going on in the writer’s head when they wrote it, whether it says something about their own state of mind at the time.’
‘I think Nora is really trying to discover who she has been and who she is now,’ Judy says, realising as she does so that she is actually talking about the questions she is trying to answer for herself. ‘She needs to do it before she dies, although even when she gets sick she doesn’t seem to realise that this might be sooner rather than later. I particularly loved the significance of her work, her craft or art – call it what you wish. She’s a dressmaker and an embroiderer – personally I believe that makes her an artist, although that sort of work is often described as craft when women do it!’
‘Too right,’ Adele says. ‘Whether it’s tapas or tapestry, when the men start doing it it’s elevated and professionalised.’
‘That aspect of Nora’s life, the times when it’s almost hand to mouth, was really interesting,’ Ros says. ‘It’s the creative work that keeps her going and makes Nora who she is. It’s what gets her up in the mornings, this compulsion to make beautiful things, whether they are clothes or hats or wall hangings. They’re her mark on the world . . .’ She hesitates. ‘It’s a classic story of a woman’s life at the time – that struggle to make meaning in her life, to rise above the disappointments and the hardships and simply do what matters to her.’
‘As a rule,’ Adele says, ‘I’m not keen on books that use that device of an old person looking back on their life. But I suppose that writers sometimes do it because having the person reflecting means they don’t have to tell the whole story from start to finish, just sort of illustrate it with significant moments and turning points. By about the third chapter I realised that I started to read this book a long time ago, and I stopped because I was bored. But this time it grabbed me from the start. I wonder if that’s because I’m older, because that’s a thing you do as you get older, isn’t it? You start asking yourself questions about the past but, as in Nora’s case and my own, the people who could actually help you to answer them are gone. I also wonder if one just becomes a slightly more sophisticated reader with age too. What do you think?’
‘I think both are true,’ Ros cuts in. ‘But why does anyone actually make the physical journey as opposed to . . . well, I suppose an inner emotional journey? I mean there are lots of books in which a character goes back to a place of childhood, or where something dramatic happened. I wonder if it solves anything? Does it actually solve anything for Nora?’
Judy has stopped thinking about Nora. She had seen vague parallels with her own life in Nora’s, and she is now taking it all more personally. She is about to step back into the conversation when Adele cuts across her.
‘Of course it does!’ Adele says. ‘It enables her to see herself and her life retrospectively. But are you talking about whether it works in the book or in real life?’
‘Oh I think it works beautifully in the book,’ Ros says, ‘because the story is crafted to make it work for Nora. But does it work for people like us, for example, as opposed to fictional characters?’
‘I think it does work in real life, sometimes in quite dramatic ways,’ Adele says. ‘You can see that on television when people are interviewed about the war and they go back to places where they were imprisoned, or perhaps a relative died, something like that. It helps people to deal with their memories, and their losses, even if it’s only in terms of laying a few ghosts.’
‘Yes, and finding out about families is important too,’ Judy cuts in. ‘Like on that program Who Do You Think You Are where people don’t even know what they are going back to, but when they make the journey they find that all sorts of aspects of their lives are drawn together by threads and then they have to think not only about the past, but who they themselves are because of that, or perhaps in spite of it.’ She’s been coughing a lot today and it starts again now. She’s almost thankful for it because the others won’t think it’s her emotions but the cough that’s responsible for the tears in her eyes.
‘That’s exactly right,’ Adele says. ‘Are you okay, Judy? Do you want something for that cough?’
Judy shakes her head. ‘No, no I’m fine, thanks,’ she says.
‘I think this journey for Nora was like completing a jigsaw puzzle,’ Adele continues. ‘She tried to come home earlier, she couldn’t afford it and then when she could she got sick. She always wanted to make sense of the past, to get some clarity and resolution around it. I understand that completely. Haven’t you ever wanted to go back to where you came from, Ros?’
Ros smiles. ‘I suppose I’m being unreasonable in this because where I originally came from is two streets away from where I live now and have done for most of my life.’
‘But haven’t you lived in some other places?’ Adele asks.
‘Well yes, a year in London in my twenties, and then James and I lived for a couple of years in Germany, when his research took him there. We did the same again in London, it was supposed to be for two years so –’ She stops abruptly.
‘So don’t you ever think of going to one of those places?’ Simone asks. ‘Lifting up the lid and peering inside again, so to speak?’
Ros hesitates, and Judy watches her, wondering what Ros is feeling, if she too is experiencing this in a very personal way.
‘I have thought about it in that way, yes, I’ve thought about going to London . . .’
Judy can see that Ros is trying to get past this moment, and she almost stops breathing.
‘You see, James died while we were there,’ Ros continues. ‘It was a horrible, sudden, accidental death and I was devastated, and I came home, perhaps too quickly. So I have thought about going back, to . . . well, to think things through, I suppose, to honour him. But I am not sure whether I would find any meaning . . .’
There is a brief and slightly awkward silence.
‘What I think Nora’s life demonstrates,’ Simone says, ‘is the subtle and
not so subtle ways that, back then, women were put down and trivialised, and not always by men but often by other women. This really gets under my skin, because I think we all do it from time to time. We try to find someone to look down on, in order to feel better about ourselves. That has to be one of the nastiest things people can do to each other. To me it’s as bad as physical violence because it can destroy your sense of who you are.’
‘Yes, I agree with that,’ Judy says, ‘and one of the lovely elements of Nora’s character is her sense of herself. She’s getting physically frail, but her ability to know herself enables her to withstand that sort of undermining, as well as the challenges of her age. She has great endurance and dignity, and you can really see both of those characteristics very clearly by the end of the book.’
As the conversation continues and broadens, they laugh and argue, cutting across each other, apologising, punching the air, burying faces in hands. At one point Simone doubles up with laughter, and as she straightens up and throws her head back Judy catches a brief glimpse of a big scar down the side of her face that is usually hidden by her hair. She is about to say something and then stops herself. If Simone wants to tell them about it she will, she decides. And she looks around again and senses a change, not only in herself, but in the group. So much of what’s been said has struck home for her. She’d really enjoyed the book but this conversation has made it all seem more significant.
‘How are you doing, Judy?’ Ros asks.
‘Okay thanks,’ she says. ‘I’m glad I stayed for this.’
It’s almost two hours before the last word on Nora’s story is spoken.
‘Great choice, Ros,’ Simone says. ‘I’m tea lady today. Ready for it now?’