The Question of Love

by Hugh Mackay

  ‘No, you’re busy,’ Richard says. Amazing. He’s acknowledged that working on a score counts as being busy. Progress. ‘I’ll get something. Can I get you anything?’

  ‘No, I’m fine. I ate earlier.’ Don’t hide it. Don’t hesitate. ‘I had a late lunch with Daniel.’ As we often do after rehearsals. So what? Richard is silly about this.

  Is it really some weird jealousy of Daniel that stops Richard from asking how the rehearsal went? Or how Daniel’s new baby is? Well – that’s complicated. He wouldn’t want the word ‘baby’ to pass his lips in case it worked like a trigger.

  She lets him kiss her again, and it’s warm and reassuring and . . . Richard is actually a great kisser. One of the things she admires about him.

  She smiles and says, ‘You go upstairs and change. I’ll heat some lasagne and pour us a glass of something.’

  She rattles around in the kitchen. Richard loves that sound, she knows. Must be connected to his troubled adolescent home life. Well, it’s not hard to make a bit of noise with a few saucepans and plates, if it makes him feel securely loved. He is securely loved.

  Now he’s back in the convivium, they’re raising their glasses and he’s saying his crass ‘Cheers’. Does he only do it to annoy her? To assert what they both know not to be true – that he’s a regular Aussie bloke?

  At least he doesn’t begrudge her her practice time at home – at all hours of the day and night. And the studio is the Great Escape when Richard is eating and she isn’t. You wouldn’t call Richard a musical eater.

  Safely locked away in her studio, Freya takes up her violin, tunes it and begins to play. Richard loves to hear her play. She loves to hear herself play. An inheritance from her father had allowed her to purchase a gorgeous Cremona fiddle that had taken her to a new level. One day, when she’s rich and famous – ha! – Guarneri, Stradivari . . .

  Richard is funny with compliments. He tells her she has a bottom like a peach, never acknowledging that she dislikes peaches, has always disliked peaches and has said, every time he buys peaches and offers her one, ‘No, I don’t like peaches.’ So is her bottom furry? Slimy? Or just round? But most certainly not round like a peach. He used to compliment her on her hair until she pointed out the obvious problem – her hair, like her bottom, was a lucky genetic accident, barely distinguishable from Fern’s hair, though very different from Felicity’s lush red locks. (She and Fern think they know where that hair came from, but it’s a topic they won’t ever be raising with their mother.) Freya sometimes wonders whether she is too tough about such things. If Richard enjoys her hair – looking at it, stroking it, nuzzling it, smelling it – that’s fine. But it’s not an achievement to be praised. She’d much rather he praised her playing. And he does, though she always feels her concerts are more visual than aural for Richard. But he comes to all of them. That’s nice. No – be fair, Freya. It’s more than nice. He’s devoted to you.

  She runs over a difficult section of the score until it comes easily. That will have been long enough for Richard to have scraped his plate, belched, poured another glass of wine and scrolled through his texts and emails.

  She emerges from the studio and they go through their dog-walking ritual. Once in a blue moon, Richard agrees to accompany her out of some misguided sense of duty towards her, rather than Rondo. ‘We should spend more time together,’ he sometimes says. ‘We should talk more.’ He reads stuff about relationships. It’s that Socially Aware Architects mob. They have workshops about client relationships, and Richard comes home all fired up with the idea that they should work on their relationship. We’re married, Richard, she says to him. It’s fine. We’re in the very thick of a relationship. We love each other – or, at least, we act as if we love each other, and what’s the difference? We sleep in the same bed, clean our teeth in the same basin – though that’s no longer true since he had the bathroom redone and installed twin wash basins. We make love as if we mean it – though not as frequently or perhaps as enthusiastically as we once did. We squint through heavy lids and grunt at each other over breakfast. We do practically everything together except our respective jobs. Please don’t analyse our relationship, or goodness knows where we will end up. And don’t come dog-walking on my account.

  Freya had had to explain to Richard that, since he had insisted on choosing the breed of dog – a Turkish Kangal – it was only fair that she should insist on choosing the name. Rondo alla Turca. After a bit of prodding, Richard got it. But he never thought it was particularly clever. Or funny. Does Richard lack a sense of humour? It’s a question Freya prefers not to ask herself.

  Out the door, Rondo straining at the leash, the night air waiting to caress her face. Ah. The night air. Every house she passes contains a life. A tragedy. An ache. A loss. A disappointment. She’s not maudlin about this. Just realistic. She loves slow movements, minor keys, in music and in life. But, yes, vivace has its place and, yes, there is love inside many of those houses, too. Contentment. Joy, maybe. Even bliss, occasionally. Each life, like each piece of music, has a beginning, a middle and an end. But Music itself goes on and on and on.

  Ah. The night air.

  14

  Coming Home –

  7th Variation – ‘Am I Boring?’

  The sight of the travertine-paved convivium gladdened Richard’s heart, as it always did when he returned home, though he was beginning to warm to the idea of polished concrete. Freya was sitting with her back to him, and her shoulders appeared to be shaking, though whether she was laughing, shivering, coughing or sobbing it was impossible to tell.

  ‘You okay, Frey?’ Richard asked as he kissed the top of her head.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said, and Richard was relieved to hear it.

  ‘I wish I could say the same.’

  ‘Tough day?’ Freya was working on a score she had been rehearsing, but now put it aside.

  Richard grunted and headed for the bedchamber to change. Rondo, sensing trouble, slipped outside.

  When Richard re-emerged in T-shirt, jeans and loafers, Freya said: ‘Have you eaten? There’s some lasagne in the fridge. I can heat it up in a jiffy.’

  ‘Yeah. Great. Thanks. I had lunch with Briggs – probably drank too much and ate too little.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘Oh, Beppi’s. Where else?’

  Freya found Richard’s unwillingness to experiment with restaurants rather disconcerting. When he took her out for dinner at night, it was almost always Beppi’s. And always the same table. She assumed it was the very table where he sat with his clients. Not very romantic, though it had been very romantic on their first date, when Beppi’s was new to her and she’d had no idea it was so routine for him.

  ‘Have you ever tried any of the other restaurants nearby? Sagra or Verde? You must walk right past Verde on your way to Beppi’s.’

  ‘Beppi’s is comfortable. They know me. We run an account there. Does that sound boring?’

  Well, of course, it did sound boring to Freya. Dead boring. Freya and Daniel – and occasionally Olivia – never ate at the same place twice. Article of faith. But ‘yes’ didn’t seem like the right thing to say to a man just home, dog-tired, edgy, defensive. Tense. Coiled spring syndrome. Imagine saying ‘yes’ to a question like that.

  ‘Not boring, but I suppose it does say something about you. Loyal, perhaps? Loyal to a fault, maybe? A creature of habit? That’s probably true. A man of simple, straightforward tastes – except we know that isn’t true. Single-minded? Yes, but that’s more virtue than vice, I guess.’

  Freya was enjoying this little game. Richard had stopped listening.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘that uppity little bastard Noakes told me I was boring today. Came right out and said it.’

  Philip Noakes was a junior partner, something of a wunderkind in the profession. In his mid-thirties, pale-faced, hollow-chested, blond, prematurely balding – the polar opposite of Richard’s physical type. Hugely talented. Bold. Imaginative. Highly
sensitive to issues of sustainability and cost. And cutting a swathe through the profession. Awards. Articles written about him. An adjunct professorship. Recently appointed a partner in Richard’s firm though he was almost ten years younger than Richard had been when he was offered a partnership. And, Freya had been led to believe, something of a protégé of Richard’s.

  ‘Really? In front of anyone else?’

  Richard looked at his wife, reminded yet again that he didn’t quite grasp how her mind worked. In front of anyone else? Wasn’t it bad enough to be abused to your face by a younger colleague?

  ‘Just the two of us. We were out of the office, having coffee, talking over a concept drawing Philip is developing for part of the Briggs project. He might have been on something. Or hungover. But he’s been showing signs of becoming more bolshie. It’s a good thing, up to a point. That’s why we made him a partner. Gutsy. Feisty. Out there. Clients love being around him. I sometimes wonder if they think he’s so fucking creative, it might rub off on them. I don’t know.’

  ‘So how did it come up?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Telling you that you were boring. There must have been some reason behind it, however misguided.’

  There was a longish silence.

  ‘I might have said he was being a pretentious prat.’

  ‘Oh, Richard.’

  ‘But it’s true – he is a pretentious prat. Actually, a boring, pretentious prat.’

  Freya had heard Richard use precisely those words on several occasions when he was complaining to her about Philip Noakes. But when Richard said ‘boring’ he often used it to express some more general displeasure. ‘How boring,’ he would say, when a flight was delayed, even though such disruptions were the opposite of boring, really.

  ‘So calling you boring was retaliation?’

  Freya found this easy enough to imagine – grown men calling each other names, half in jest, half in earnest. She’d seen Daniel and Jean-Pierre do it during tense moments in a rehearsal. She and Olivia had watched, fascinated, while Daniel called Jean-Pierre ‘a psycho Frog’ and Jean-Pierre, in an accent that charmed Freya (this being the only aspect of his style she found charming), called Daniel ‘a fucking Aussie bastard’, enunciating the words as if reading from a phrasebook. Daniel thought Jean-Pierre unacceptably, ostentatiously eccentric; Jean-Pierre thought Daniel a philistine at heart, a mere technician. Freya thought they each had a point.

  Richard shrugged. ‘I’m the senior figure.’

  Freya refrained from chanting: Mine’s bigger than yours. She settled for: ‘This all sounds rather untoward, I must say. I’m tempted to say it sounds rather boring. I’m surprised you seem to have taken it to heart. I can’t imagine Philip will lose any sleep over it.’

  ‘I just said it. He meant it.’

  ‘Surely not.’

  ‘He might have had a point. I was trying to pull him back a bit on some of his design ideas for the Briggs job. He thought my suggestions would make the facade a bit boring. Boring!’

  ‘The facade? The facade? Oh, Richard, he didn’t call you boring at all, did he? He criticised a design suggestion. The very thing you’re supposed to encourage at Urbanski. Frank and fearless – isn’t that the spirit of your partnership? Play the ball, not the man – or that poor single solitary woman? I’ve heard you say it a hundred times. Attack the work for all you’re worth. Don’t attack its creator.’ A pretty fine line, Freya had always thought.

  Another pause. Richard’s face was flushed.

  ‘So, am I boring?’ he asked his wife – a question no husband should ever ask his wife. Not after twelve years of marriage.

  Freya was astonished. She had never heard her husband raise such a question. Am I boring? This was uncharted territory. Was Richard, of all people, suddenly plagued by self-doubt? Suddenly insecure? Anxious? It seemed inconceivable. Richard the warrior prince. Her warrior prince. Of course he was boring – or at least predictable – much of the time. Perhaps most of the time. But you could equally say ‘reliable’.

  ‘You know what G.K. Chesterton says.’ Freya was treading cautiously. ‘There’s no such thing as an uninteresting subject, only an uninterested listener. It’s the same thing, isn’t it? Boring is in the eye of the beholder. A state of mind. No one’s inherently boring, Richard. It’s just that we are bored by some people. Even events aren’t inherently boring – they might be tedious, but tedium is a very different thing from boredom. We have to deal with tedium, but Mum always taught us that boredom was practically a sin.’

  ‘So, am I boring? To you?’

  Freya’s mother had not only taught her children that boredom was a sin, she had also taught them the virtue of kindness. Be kind, she would say, quoting some Scottish clergyman she admired; you never know what inner struggles people are contending with. Everyone lives with shadows. Everyone is at war with themselves. Everyone knows tragedy, or the fear of tragedy. Everyone is frightened of something. Everyone carries some level of heartache. Kindness is like a healing balm. Why not be kind, when there’s so much healing to be done?

  Kindness, yes. What about honesty, though? Why be honest about something like this, when a slight varnish would be less hurtful, Freya thought. Brutal honesty has its place, but not, surely, in the courtesies of everyday life nor in the peculiar vulnerabilities of intimate relationships.

  Only one safe course.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You are adorable, and adorable isn’t remotely boring. But are you projecting, by any chance? Am I boring to you?’

  ‘Don’t change the subject.’

  ‘You haven’t touched your lasagne. I’ll heat it up again. And I’ll make some tea. You’ve probably had enough to drink for one day.’

  15

  Dinner with Daniel

  ‘Time for a quick bite, Oli?’

  ‘Sorry, gotta dash.’

  After most rehearsals, Freya and Daniel had a meal together, or coffee, or occasionally a drink, depending on the time of day. Olivia sometimes joined them, but she usually had to race away to pick up one of her kids from somewhere. They never invited Jean-Pierre.

  Daniel had been in love with Freya since their high school days. Freya had loved him too, back then, but used to say that it was more like a brother-and-sister thing, not a romance. She knew him too well.

  Daniel never stopped being in love with Freya, right through their time at the conservatorium and beyond. For a short time, Freya felt such a rush of affection for her old friend, she imagined this might pass for love. They began sleeping together.

  When Freya discovered she was pregnant at twenty-two, it was a rude awakening. She declared they were both too young to become parents, too young to make any sort of commitment to each other, too young to know what the hell was going on. Daniel’s protests were dismissed. He might enjoy dreaming of a life together; she didn’t entertain it for a moment.

  She told no one except Daniel about the pregnancy and had it terminated as quickly as she could arrange it. Then she went back to being Daniel’s closest friend.

  Daniel was still in love with Freya when she fell wildly, if briefly, in love with a trumpeter called Dave. The Freya and Dave Show was very full-on while it lasted, even though Daniel thought she was being rash. She discounted Daniel’s opinion, on the grounds that he was still in love with her. Both her sisters loved Dave. Fern loved his energy and his ability to drag Freya out of what he called her ‘string-quartetishness’; Felicity, then seventeen and already showing a wild and rebellious streak, loved his recklessness. Her father, by then terminally ill, just wanted to see his second daughter happily settled in a relationship. He had no particular objection to Dave. Freya’s mother, on the other hand, found Dave too brash and arrogant, and too often either drunk or stoned. She thought his effect on Freya was generally negative. She thought Freya was too gentle to resist him, too forgiving of his many gaucheries.

  Freya was only fleetingly besotted with Dave; she had never swooned over him
the way she later swooned over Richard Brooks. But she moved in with him soon after they met, and when Dave rather unexpectedly declared he wanted babies, she was quite prepared to go along with it. Why not? She was at that time drawn to the idea of motherhood, her own mother was dying for grandchildren to fill the looming void of widowhood, and Fern was showing no inclination to reproduce. Two miscarriages followed in rapid succession, with high drama – medical and emotional – attending both. Dave, rather like Henry VIII, really did want an heir, and he soon found a more reliable foetus-carrier than Freya.

  So Freya moved back home, traumatised but far from heartbroken. She had some inconclusive tests, but came to think of herself as a poor pregnancy risk, and was relieved when, in the early weeks of her romance with Richard, she learnt that he had absolutely no desire for another child. Her powerful desire to try again came much later.

  Daniel lived through all this with Freya. Having taken her to the abortion clinic when she was pregnant the first time, he had devotedly sat with her and her older sister Fern in the hours and days after each of her miscarriages. Dave was on the road with his band both times.

  Daniel was still in love with Freya when she married Richard, but he could see that this was a serious matter for her. She was determined to make a good marriage and to be a good wife. This time, Daniel kept his reservations to himself. He never wanted to lose Freya as a friend.

  He met Lizzie at Freya and Richard’s wedding. She had been invited at the last minute to accompany a cousin who was a friend-cum-client of Richard’s. Daniel was feeling as if he had been thrown over by Freya in favour of Richard. Though he knew that did not accord with the facts, he clung to it as a narrative that helped account for his bleak sense of vulnerability. Lizzie, a few years older than Daniel, was also in an emotionally fragile state, having just ended a five-year relationship with a married man who, for four of those years, had talked of leaving his wife. She told Daniel the story on their way from the ceremony to the reception.