by Liz Byrski
The rain has stopped at last, and while Simone makes the tea Clooney leads the way into the garden and bounds off through the sparkling grass and fallen leaves. The wind has dropped too and the scent of the sodden ground – of damp old logs and dripping branches – fills the air. The light has almost gone and the trees are slowly becoming silhouettes against the sky.
Ros inhales deeply. ‘At last,’ she says. ‘I love that smell and the wonderful stillness. I hope it’s a clear bright day tomorrow. Maybe if it is you’ll be tempted to stay a bit longer, Judy?’
Judy smiles, thinking about the book she’s chosen. When they go back inside they’ll draw the marbles to decide who’ll be first to introduce their book. She almost wishes she’d be here to be a part of it – almost, but not enough. Although she’ll miss them; they’ve listened and heard her, and they understand how she feels. Best of all they’ve made her laugh, even at herself.
As they go back into the house she pauses, admiring, for the first time, the beauty of it, the thick stone walls and the dark polished timber floors, the soft light from the lamps on side tables and the glow of the wood stove alongside the huge basket of logs. It really is a lovely place. She sighs as she admits to herself that today she is feeling a sense of calm that she hasn’t felt for a long time. As she heads for her chair nearest the fire she notices that they are all returning to the places where they’d sat earlier, the same places they had sat in yesterday, and when they had arrived on Thursday afternoon: Ros in the big armchair, Adele on one side of sofa, her legs drawn up to one side, and Simone at the other end, though often also cross-legged on the floor. How strange, she thinks. They’re like a group of nuns who have their own special places on the pews and never sit anywhere else. How easily and naturally this has happened.
Adele fetches the bag of marbles. ‘Who wants to go first?’
‘I will,’ Ros says, and she draws the same purple marble she drew before. ‘Breathing space,’ she says with a smile. ‘Who’s next?’
Simone reaches for the bag. ‘I’ll do it.’ She draws pale green, then turns to Judy. ‘Yes or no?’ she asks, about to pass the bag in front of her to Adele.
‘What happens if no one draws white?’ Judy asks.
‘We’ll start again,’ Adele says.
Judy hesitates, raises a hand to the bag, and then drops it. ‘I won’t be here,’ she says.
‘Go on, just for the hell of it,’ Ros urges.
Judy laughs, reaches into the bag, takes a deep breath and is shocked to find the white marble in the palm of her hand.
‘Fate,’ Simone says. ‘Perhaps it means you are meant to stay a week and talk about your book.’
Judy, frozen with shock, looks around the room. The others are smiling at her, waiting for her, and she can see that they want her to stay. She buries her face in her hands.
‘It’s just a white marble,’ Adele says. ‘You can put it back and pass the bag on.’
Judy looks up again, swallows several times. ‘I don’t know . . . it’s complicated,’ she says. ‘I don’t know how to explain . . .’
‘Take your time,’ Ros says. ‘And you don’t actually have to explain anything. But there is a question I’d like to ask you. Is that okay?’
Judy nods.
‘What will going back solve? To me it seems it would just drop you back into what you’ve described as a mess of your own creation, and one that’s draining the life out of you. Do you think there’s a chance that by staying away you might be in a better position to find a solution? To find ways of changing things?’
‘That’s three questions,’ Adele says, ‘but they are good questions, Judy. And I know quite a bit about business management and budgets and so on. We could talk about it, try to get to the root of the problem or problems. Only if you want to, of course.’
Judy leans forward, forearms on her knees, hands clasped, staring down at the floor, trying to work out what she feels, and what she wants to say. Everyone else is silent, waiting.
‘I’ll try to explain something,’ she says eventually, looking up. ‘You’ll think I’m stupid but you might understand.’
‘We all know you’re not stupid, Judy,’ Simone says. ‘Just tell us whatever you want.’
Judy takes a deep breath, sits up straighter. ‘Okay, well, I have a history of running away. It began on my second day at school. I hated it, and we lived really near the school, only a few minutes’ walk away. So at lunchtime on the second day I just walked out and ran home, no one even noticed. My mum had a fit when I walked in the back door and told her I’d run away from school like a girl in a story she’d once read to me. It didn’t go down well. The next time I ran away was when I was nine. My best friend Margie and I were in the Brownies and there was a four-day camp at the seaside. Margie wanted to go so I said I’d go too. But when we got there I decided I didn’t like it and told the Brown Owl. She said I had to stay one night and see how it went, but I sneaked out to the phone box and called my dad, and persuaded him to come and get me. Margie was terribly upset. I saw her crying as Dad drove out of the car park. It was weeks before she spoke to me again after that.’
She stops, feeling slightly stronger, takes another deep breath and sees that the other three are all listening to her attentively. ‘It’s pathetic, I know,’ she says, ‘and it doesn’t stop there. I ran away from my first job. It was a Saturday morning job in the local grocer’s shop. I was thirteen or fourteen, and I hated it, so I ran away after four Saturdays but I didn’t dare tell Mum, so I just went out as though I was going to work and stayed out all morning until it was time to go home. I got found out then too.’
Ros laughs. ‘So you really do have form!’
‘I do,’ Judy admits, even managing a smile. ‘And it gets worse. I ran away from the little town where I lived and went to London. I didn’t tell my parents I was going, just phoned them when I got there. In London I fell in love with an Australian from the Wheatbelt, married him and came here to live, then I ran away from him and that life too. I guess . . . I guess that when things get tough I’ve never learned the art of staying put and finding a different solution. You could even say that in coming here I was running away from my life with the shop. And now I want to run away from here. It’s my first reaction to feeling out of place, being an outsider, not being able to cope. Run, run, run. But I guess there has to be a time when I stop running, although I’ve left it rather late in life, haven’t I?’
‘But not too late,’ Ros says.
Judy nods, and very slowly takes more deep breaths. ‘So yes, I will, I’ll stay a bit longer and maybe, Adele, it might help to talk about the business. Thank you, all of you, for being so kind and patient. And I’m sorry for being such a “soppy date”, which is what Mum called me when I ran away from Brownie camp.’
‘And you don’t have a taxi, or a helicopter rescue, booked for tomorrow?’ Ros asks.
Judy feels something heavy lift from her chest and she laughs, a lot now, laughs until tears run down her face and the others laugh with her. ‘Nothing, Ros,’ she says, ‘nothing booked at all. You don’t need to start building barricades.’
‘And you’ll be okay going first with your book?’ Adele asks. ‘We can always draw again.’
‘I’ll be okay,’ Judy says. ‘I’ll go and get it now.’ She gets to her feet and goes slowly up the stairs to her room. She is still on the verge of tears, but it’s a good feeling, as though she has got past something that was standing in her way. Talking about the shop with Adele might really help. This morning she had taken the three copies of the book out of her suitcase and put them on the dressing table. She’d intended to give them to the others before leaving; just hand them out and ask that they consider it for the reading list sometime. She glances at her face in the mirror. I look at least a hundred, she tells herself. She’s had a bit of a rest but it probably isn’t enough. Feeling she’s made
a good, if somewhat scary, decision she picks up the books and heads back down the stairs.
‘Okay,’ she says, standing still, holding the books in front of her, marvelling that she now feels so comfortable, and . . . what else is it? Thankful, yes, thankful – that most of all. ‘So here are the books,’ she says, handing each one a copy. ‘Sacred Country by the English writer Rose Tremain. It’s set in a small Suffolk town, similar to the place where I spent my childhood, and it starts on the fifteenth of February nineteen fifty-two, which was the day that the whole of England stopped for two minutes’ silence in honour of the king, who had died about ten days earlier at Sandringham. Sandringham, in case you don’t know, is in Norfolk, so actually not very far away from Suffolk.’ To her own amazement she thinks she is sounding different, stronger and more confident.
They study the cover, flick through the pages, stare at the author biography.
‘I think it might be one of those books that people either love or hate,’ Judy says. ‘Of course I love it and I’ve read it several times. So . . . I hope you enjoy it. And thanks for being so patient with me.’
‘My mum used to call me a soppy date too,’ Ros says quietly. ‘I think that’s our vintage, Judy. I’m looking forward to reading this.’ She picks up the champagne bottle and holds it out to Judy. ‘Why don’t you open this? Your turn to pour.’
Chapter Seven
It’s still dark when Simone gets up on Wednesday morning and she takes her time, enjoying the early morning stillness of the house and focusing on her body: the way she is moving, walking without shoes, monitoring her breathing and being absolutely in the moment with no other distractions. In the kitchen she pours herself a large glass of water and sips it slowly, standing by the window and gazing out towards the narrow line of pale dawn light on the horizon. Clooney joins her; he has taken a liking to her because she is usually good for a walk and always has treats in her pockets. She, in turn, has fallen in love with him. She opens the back door to let him out, watching him as she finishes her drink. When he wanders back inside Simone gives him some treats, then he follows her to the games room and sits on the bottom step watching as she rolls out her yoga mat. Once she is sitting cross-legged on the mat he gets up and walks over to lie down beside her.
At the sound of footsteps on the stairs Simone looks around to see that Adele has come to join her.
‘It’s only me,’ Adele says softly. And she picks up a mat from the stack by the wall and rolls it out so that she is horizontal with Simone, with Clooney in the space between.
‘I’m so glad you decided to come,’ Simone says. ‘Have you done any yoga before?’
Adele shakes her head. ‘No, but when you said you’d help me I started reading quite a lot about it, so I’m not totally ignorant.’ She names a couple of books and Simone nods approval.
‘That’s a really good start. So let’s begin with some breathing exercises . . .’
She leads Adele through the basics, demonstrating each position and then watching as Adele follows. For the next half-hour they work through a range of moves and positions and Simone is impressed by how intently Adele listens, retains information, and can then put it into practice. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever had a person new to yoga who took to the basics as quickly as you’re doing, Adele,’ she says. ‘Your schoolteachers must have loved you.’
Adele laughs. ‘Not really. I didn’t have the same powers of concentration in those days – besides, I’m very motivated to learn now and I want to make the most of the time we’re here.’
‘Okay,’ Simone says. ‘Let’s do it all again.’
It’s almost an hour later when they make their way back up to the kitchen.
‘I’m not sure I like this,’ Simone says, studying the breakfast roster. ‘We all get up at different times, and I don’t always want a cooked breakfast anyway. What say after today everybody gets their own breakfast when they feel like it, except perhaps for Sundays, when we could all have breakfast together?’
‘Fine by me,’ Adele says. ‘I’d like to walk some mornings too so it would be good not to be tied to a particular time. I didn’t allow for that when I set up the roster.’
‘Which, of course, you did weeks before we got here,’ Simone says, turning to her with a smile.
Adele blushes. ‘How did you know?’
‘I didn’t, but I’m getting to know you, Adele, so it was an educated guess.’
‘Please don’t tell the others,’ Adele says. ‘They’ll think I’m a complete control freak.’
‘I won’t. But I think they’d just tease you about it,’ Simone says. ‘And I’m on the roster for today, so I’m going to make lemon pancakes.’
*
When Adele gets back to the kitchen after a quick shower upstairs, Simone is whipping up the batter, squeezing and slicing the lemons and hunting for the caster sugar. Ros is sitting at the table reading yesterday’s paper and looking rather glum.
‘I drank too much white wine last night,’ Ros says when Adele asks if she’s feeling okay. ‘I should know better, it always upsets me. I can drink red until it comes out of my ears, but white is no good for me.’
‘Then we’d better stock up on red next time we go shopping,’ Adele says and Ros gives her a wan smile.
Outside in the passage she can hear Judy heading for the kitchen, coughing.
‘Morning all,’ Judy croaks, dropping into a chair opposite Ros. ‘Oh pancakes, Simone, what a treat.’
‘Still coughing, Judy?’ Ros says, glancing up. ‘Do you feel okay?’
‘Not too bad. I might get something for it if we go out later.’
‘I was thinking,’ Simone says, flipping the first pancake onto Ros’s plate, ‘about going into Blackheath. When we were in Leura the other day I picked up this flyer for an exhibition by local artists, and today all the artists are going to be there in the gallery to chat about their work. Anyone fancy coming with me?’ She pulls a flyer from her pocket and drops it onto the table.
‘Oh yes, I will,’ Adele says. ‘I picked up one of those too and then forgot about it. I’ll definitely go with you.’
Judy draws the flyer across the table, stares at it and turns it over.
‘Yep, looks good,’ she says. ‘I’m in, what about you, Ros?’
‘I might see how I feel after breakfast,’ Ros says. ‘This might be a staying home day for me.’ She picks up her knife and fork and tastes her pancake. ‘This is delicious, Simone, thank you. Absolutely perfect.’
‘Simone and I were talking about changing the breakfast arrangements,’ Adele says when they’ve all had one pancake and Simone is back on her feet cooking the second round. ‘We’re wondering whether it might be better if we all do our own thing for breakfast except for perhaps on Sundays. We all get up at different times, after all – sometimes we might not want to get up at all.’
‘Good idea,’ Ros says. ‘We eat our other meals together, so independent breakfasts make a lot of sense.’
‘I agree,’ Judy says. ‘I’m actually better if I stick to my usual cereal for breakfast. I seem to have more energy after that. Mind you, I’m loving the pancakes this morning, Simone.’
Simone has cooked another small stack of pancakes and she puts the plate in the centre of the table. ‘Help yourselves,’ she says. She flips a pancake onto her own plate and sprinkles it with lemon and sugar. ‘Here you are, Clooney, just a taste for you.’
Adele looks nervously at Ros, who doesn’t approve of titbits at the table. But Ros just rolls her eyes and says nothing.
They sit for a while, sipping their coffee, and Adele feels herself relaxing into the conversation, noticing how normal it feels, how different from the other occasions when she has been away from home with her work colleagues. In the past she has set up brief planning retreats for the bureau staff when they would all go off to a hotel together and spe
nd two or three days sorting out new options for the study tours, matching them to specific partners, and deciding how and when to schedule them. She would always try to bring in a guest too, either a local celebrity, or a motivational speaker of some sort. It was clear the staff enjoyed this mix of work and socialising for a few days, free of other domestic responsibilities. Adele always booked the best facilities where they could use the swimming pool and the gym; everyone seemed at ease, they worked well together and she felt it strengthened the sense of goodwill and trust that she wanted to foster. Everyone looked forward to the retreats – everyone, that is, except Adele herself, who always felt awkward and exposed outside the safe, predictable confines of the office and the regular pattern of working. Adele had thought about this while planning the book club retreat. She’d been pretty sure she could organise it so that the others would enjoy it, but the anticipation of being in such close proximity to people she barely knew had borne down on her in the last few weeks and only now is she starting to truly relax; even to feel a little bit confident that there will be no nasty surprises and no awkward cases of people falling out.
Ros has finished her pancakes and coffee, and she gets to her feet and starts rummaging for something in the pantry. ‘The red and black tin,’ she says, ‘the one with Clooney’s treats in it, has anyone seen it?’ She pushes jars and packets around trying to find it. ‘I’m sure I put it in here but now I can’t find it.’
‘It’s on the next shelf down, Ros,’ Simone says.
Ros bends over, retrieves the tin, straightens up, and backs out of the pantry, holding it up with a puzzled expression. ‘That’s odd,’ she says, shaking the tin. ‘I could have sworn it was about three-quarters full the other day. But this feels almost empty.’ And she carries the tin to the table and opens it. ‘It is, it’s practically empty!’ she says, shocked. ‘I must have . . . no . . . no, I remember quite clearly it was more than half-full, so where . . . ?’
‘Sorry, Ros, my fault,’ Simone says. ‘I always put some in my pocket when I take him for a walk. And I’ve slipped him some at other times too. I’ll replace them, get some more when we’re out.’