by Hugh Mackay
‘I remember how it started. We all had to learn it after that. Under the wide and starry sky / Dig the grave and let me lie. Good God, I do remember it.’
‘Go on, then.’
‘Not sure of the next bit . . . Glad did I live . . . something, something . . . and gladly die, of course. And I laid me down with a will. It was pretty grim stuff.’
‘I forget how the second verse started, but I do remember the next line. Here he lies where he long’d to be –’
‘Except Babble said, Here she lies where she long’d to be. I’m sure he did. I can even remember the head reacting when Babble said that. I’m rather glad you brought this up, Bazza. This is really strange. I can see Babble’s face as if it was yesterday. Completely impassive.’
‘Not a word you’d have thought of in year ten.’
‘Quite. But I might have said dignified.’
‘Yeah, Babble was sort of dignified, wasn’t he? In spite of everything.’
‘Maybe because of everything.’
‘I’ve still got our class photo. I’m going to look it out.’
‘Come on. Who remembers the last two lines?’
‘Who could forget them? They haunted me for about six months after we learnt the poem in the Great Gaspy’s English class. Christ, I haven’t given the Great Gaspy a thought in forty years, either – I suppose he died of emphysema aeons ago. Anyway, the ending. Home is the sailor, home from sea – ’
All three joined in the final line: ‘And the hunter home from the hill.’
‘Yeah,’ said Russell. ‘Old Babble, eh? What a performance.’
They fell silent.
‘You remember how it ended?’
‘Vividly, now you’ve taken me back. He turned to the head and sort of half bowed. Then he stepped off the dais and walked back to his seat. Same thing – head high. Not a peep out of anyone. I think some kids were actually choking up.’
‘Then the eruption. Remember? Huge. Tumultuous applause. They clapped and clapped. It was like a sympathy vote. The biggest moment of Babble’s school career. No question.’
‘Richard Brooks the architect. Bugger me. Good old Babble.’
‘We should get in touch.’
‘Yeah, we really should.’
18
Coming Home –
9th Variation – ‘A Meditation’
The sight of his travertine-paved convivium gladdened Richard’s heart, as it always did when he came home, but tonight the thrill was fleeting. It was now clear to him that the space would be immeasurably improved if they were to rip up the tiles and replace them with . . . what? Travertine had definitely become a cliché, gone the way of plantation shutters. Parquet was having a revival but might already be passé. Polished concrete was probably the answer. The fad had passed, but there was a timeless quality about polished concrete that appealed to Richard. Untinted, of course. It could even look original.
He almost spoke, but then remembered.
Freya was usually home before him, and he was always disappointed when she wasn’t. Tonight, her empty chair seemed particularly eloquent. A little surge of disappointment, tinged with anxiety, flowed through him.
He knew where she was. He knew it could be a very long night.
Rondo, asleep on the floor of the convivium, raised his head to acknowledge Richard’s arrival. This was not the person Rondo really wanted to see, but he dragged himself to his feet, trotted over to Richard and allowed himself to be patted. On Fridays, he was walked and fed by the son of a neighbour, so there was nothing Richard could offer him beyond a pat. In return, Rondo nuzzled Richard’s crotch. Having thus exchanged tributes, Rondo returned to his corner, dropped to the floor and was instantly asleep again.
Richard stood for a moment inside the doorway. Then he said out loud, to the empty room, those lines that never failed to steady him: ‘Home is the sailor, home from sea, and the hunter home from the hill.’ How could the recitation of something so sad, so poignant, be so therapeutic? He knew the answer to that, of course. So why had he never explained it to Freya? Why was it so hard to reveal certain things to her – intimate things, significant things, deeply personal things? He wasn’t even confident of his ability to convey to her the true significance of the project he was trying to persuade Briggs to support – its emotional significance for him. Once or twice, when a project dear to his heart had failed to materialise, Freya had said, ‘It’s only bricks and mortar, after all.’ He assumed she meant it as a comfort, but it had felt like a body blow to him.
There had been a breakthrough over lunch in his negotiations with Briggs. It was starting to look as if Madrigo, their low-cost housing project, might finally become a reality. It was the thing he wanted to do more than anything else in the world. More than the extravagant renovation for Lincoln the Hunter and his still-invisible wife, Hermione the Doctor. More than yet another commercial high-rise, no matter how grand or how pretty. More than any concrete-and-glass bunker perched on some expensive hillside overlooking the crystal sea. Richard had always believed it was possible to put real style and real quality – real beauty – into low-cost housing, including public housing. He wanted Madrigo to be recognised as an example of medium-density housing design at its best, regardless of cost. That was the whole point. He wanted the occupiers – renters and owners, but especially renters – to be proud of where they lived. He wanted them to get an aesthetic kick out of coming home.
Once, when he was buying a car, the salesman had said that considering this was the second-biggest purchase most people made, you should only buy a car that gave you pleasure every time you sat in it. That was exactly the feeling Richard had always wanted to create for people who lived in low-cost housing. Too many people were trapped in those infamous little boxes. No charm. No style. No soul. It was all a matter of design.
It was also a matter of finding a developer who agreed with him and now, finally, he had found Briggs. It would be slightly less of a financial killing than Briggs was used to making, but he would still make a handsome return, and Richard had promised him that he would be rewarded in other ways. The gratitude of residents. His name on a plaque at the front of the building. (Briggs, who never smiled, smiled at that.) When it had sounded as if Briggs was going to insist on all the old familiar compromises, Richard had briefly thought of bringing Lincoln the Hunter in as a kind of advocate. But now it looked as if he was on the brink of pulling it off on his own.
He was exultant. Elation was not something Richard was accustomed to feeling, but he was deeply, deeply certain that if this project went ahead, it would cement his reputation, perhaps even internationally.
Beauty and utility. Take utility to the highest possible standard of refinement and it becomes beauty. He believed that.
Madrigo might well turn out to be the biggest coup of his professional life, but all he wanted now – all he wanted – was to be able to tell Frey; to share it with Frey; to see the pleasure he hoped Frey might take in his achievement, once she understood the unique character of this concept.
She might not be home for hours.
Throughout the twelve years of their marriage, the richest moments of his working life were the ones he shared with her. And she probably did not know that. Every one of his professional attainments only became a vivid reality for him once Freya had responded to it. And she probably did not know that. He knew the reverse was not true: he knew the satisfactions of her musical life existed independently of his response to it, and he thought he understood why. But, since marrying Freya, his own professional life finally made sense to him only through her reactions. Was that dangerous? Was he dependent on her to an unhealthy degree? Possibly. Too bad. That’s how it was. Frey was his muse, his confidante, his one-woman cheer squad, his comforter. The only woman he had ever completely trusted. He was dependent on her. That was the truth. And he experienced it as a beautiful truth.
Yet here was the strangest thing: he seemed quite unable to say any of that to her
. He had tried once or twice, haltingly, but it came out sounding stiff and contrived. He sometimes – often – fantasised about sitting at the farmhouse table opposite Frey, taking both her hands in his, looking directly into her eyes and telling her what she meant to him. But it had never happened.
Couldn’t do it. Too awkward. Too embarrassing. Couldn’t find the words.
He put it in writing, as best he could, in birthday cards. But he was not a wordsmith. He was an architect. He thought of himself and his colleagues as artists. And artists, he knew, were notoriously poor spellers – perhaps that was a symptom of their lack of facility with language. That kind of language. His buildings were his messages to the world, and they were his messages to Freya, too. And, increasingly, he saw that his work was his response to Freya. He knew she didn’t realise that. (How could she if he never said?)
Actions speak louder than words. Handsome is as handsome does. Was that meant as some kind of consolation, Freya saying those things? Or was there a wistful edge to these various aphorisms she recited? More than one woman in his life had insisted you had to put these things into words. On the day she deposited him at Grandma Davis’s house, his mother told him that his father had never once said that he loved her. As if that had been the most heinous of his crimes.
Richard climbed the stairs to the bedchamber, changed into his jeans and a T-shirt, and saw Freya’s long black skirt thrown over the back of a chair. He was irrationally pleased she hadn’t worn it to her rehearsal. He picked it up and buried his face in it. There was another way of putting all this: he was addicted to Freya. Cheerfully so, with his eyes wide open.
Downstairs, he poured himself a drink, then poured it back into the bottle and boiled some water for tea. The note on the fridge said there was lasagne (of course) to heat up if he needed something to eat. He didn’t. Lunch with Briggs had gone until almost five. Then there had been Friday drinks and a pizza with his colleagues. General – if somewhat premature – rejoicing over the Briggs job. Still no signature on the contract, but he knew they were already thinking about the fees. None of them, he felt sure, appreciated the scale of the contribution this project would make to Richard’s view of himself as a radical architect.
Now he needed Freya to know. He would try to explain the real meaning of this project to her, to excite her, but she would be tired – exhausted – and stressed from trying to fill Jean-Pierre’s shoes at short notice. Would he be able to restrain himself and say nothing about Briggs until the morning? Probably not.
He wandered into her studio, her perfume faintly in the air. This was her factory, he thought. This was where she really earned her living – in the endless hours of sweat and toil. Talent? Everyone said how talented she was. How gifted. But he had never known anyone to work as hard as Freya at honing her talent into something so extraordinary it looked effortless. He never spoke of this. Never gave her credit for what she put into her musical life; not in words, at any rate. It was tricky. If he expressed his wonderment at the amount of work she put in, it might sound as if he wasn’t properly acknowledging her talent. If he praised her talent, it might sound as if he was downplaying the effort or implying she got by on talent alone – a bit like her beautiful hair that was ‘only genetic’.
Why could he never find a way to say all this?
He always complimented her after a performance, and meant every word of it, though he often wondered if his compliments seemed shallow to her. He was quickly out of his depth when she analysed the finer points of a piece with her colleagues, or when she was fielding compliments from people who obviously knew what they were talking about. And let’s be honest, Richard sometimes said to himself, a lot of the new stuff they played was pretty borderline. Was it really music at all? He had tried to discuss this with Freya but she quickly grew defensive. She told him that any sound extended was a musical note. Any sound. And she said that music was about evoking an emotional response. Any response. Fair enough. Sometimes this stuff made him feel edgy, almost angry, and Freya seemed cool with that. But she didn’t seem so comfortable with the idea that staunch resistance, a tendency to mock, a squirming wish to get out of there, or a frustrated desire to hear something you could whistle also counted as legitimate emotional responses.
The thing he clung to was that these performances were as much about seeing the beauty of Freya on stage as about the music. The grace of her movements. The way she leant forward or back, or tilted her head. The vigour of it. The sheer fluidity of it. Beauty and utility – when they were both of such a high order, you couldn’t separate them.
Only once, very early in their relationship, did he admit to Freya that he got a thrill out of thinking of her in bed with him while watching her perform on stage. She was displeased. Back then, she used to say that, for Richard, everything was about sex. And, back then, he conceded, everything was pretty much about sex.
Twelve years on? He desired her as much as ever, but of course it was different. Deeper. Less urgent. Sometimes troubled. But better. Definitely better.
He accepted that he would never be ‘musical’, in her terms. He would never be really comfortable in her world. But he really admired what she did and how she did it, and he hoped that was enough.
He looked around the studio. He could improve this space, he thought, with a minor bit of reconfiguration. Make it more beautiful, more compatible with what went on in here. The carpet was actually quite tacky, now you looked at it. Perhaps, post-travertine, some of the convivium pavers could be salvaged and re-laid here, with that rug Freya was always wanting him to find. He would raise that with her, and he would acknowledge that acoustics would of course be a factor in how they redesigned the space. But, mainly, he would try to express how he felt about her work. He knew that, if you totted it up, you would find he talked far more about his work than about hers. And he probably didn’t listen as attentively as he should, but that was partly because he couldn’t appreciate music the way serious musicians did. (Non-architects, including Freya, had the same problem appreciating the nuances of his own work. He had learnt to live with that.)
That business with the French second violinist. That was outrageous. But once something like that had happened, all you could do was work around it. Richard realised, in retrospect, that Freya hadn’t wanted his advice at all. All she had wanted was sympathy – and he did feel sympathetic, but also, he had to admit, a bit impatient at her reluctance to find a solution and move on. He acknowledged, too late (always too late), that she and her colleagues were perfectly capable of dealing with the problem. The fill-in woman they’d managed to find sounded a bit of a handful, but what did he know?
It was funny, Richard reflected, that it was so hard to say the deep things you really wanted to say – the things Freya probably wanted to hear – and so easy to say all the stuff she didn’t want to hear, like how he might go about solving her problems. Crazy.
The house was unnervingly silent. Richard briefly contemplated turning on the television before rejecting the idea and heading for his study.
His inbox contained a strangely guarded message from Briggs asking for another meeting next week – not cold feet, surely? It was all about selling, Richard reflected, not for the first time; it was all about closing the deal. The brightest ideas in the world soon lost their lustre without a backer. Even a poet needed a publisher. He had once quoted on a home renovation for an IBM executive who had a framed sign hanging in his office: Nothing happens until someone sells something. He had never quoted that to Freya, though it was as true for professional musicians as for architects.
He shut the computer, checked his phone in the vain hope of finding a message from Freya and went upstairs.
Are marriages always as unequal as this? he wondered. I am the luckiest person in the world when it comes to marriage, but who would say that of Freya?
She made him complete, but he knew he didn’t make her complete. Not even music did that. She wanted a baby, on top of everything else.
He kicked off his shoes, threw himself on the bed fully clothed, and waited.
19
A Twilight Harbour Cruise
The sun was still high and bright in the western sky. Sydney Harbour was sparkling. A large and sleek white cruiser was tied up alongside a wharf in Rushcutters Bay, waiting for the forty-odd staff of Urbanski, with their spouses or partners and a handful of clients, to embark on a Friday twilight cruise.
This was the idea of Urbanski’s senior partner, Paolo Sartori, the only member of the firm who had actually worked with Stefan Urbanski, the firm’s founder, and who therefore felt he had some kind of apostolic link to the great man. He had decreed that all staff should attend, with partners. He had personally selected the charter boat, which he insisted, in his Mediterranean way, on calling a yacht, confusing his Australian colleagues for whom ‘yacht’ connoted masts and sails.
Freya was not the only spouse to have been a reluctant starter. Most spouses and partners had voiced their opposition to this expedition, mainly based on their resistance to the idea of being stranded on a boat for four or five hours, bobbing around the harbour with people they might have met once or twice at the firm’s Christmas parties, but with whom they had nothing whatever in common, except, perhaps, the experience of living with an architect.
Freya’s reluctance ran deeper than that. Though she had been a champion swimmer at school and still trained regularly, though she held a bronze medallion in surf lifesaving, though she loved the water, she simply hated boats. Even a mild chop was enough to induce nausea and she feared that if the weather turned at all rough, she would embarrass Richard by throwing up.
‘It’s just your anxiety,’ Richard assured her. ‘It’s not true seasickness.’
‘That makes no difference to the look or the smell of the vomit, Richard. Or to the depth of my humiliation. Why can’t you all go off and have a jolly bonding experience on your own?’