The Question of Love

by Hugh Mackay

  ‘She won’t respond to non-medical phone messages, but if you leave me an email address, I’ll pass it on. I can’t promise she’ll respond, but I will see she gets the message. Her professional name is Dr Bayley, by the way.’

  From: Hermione Bayley

  To: Richard Brooks

  Subject: Lincoln Hunter

  Mr Brooks,

  I understand you were trying to contact Lincoln Hunter regarding some architectural matter. I assume that if Mr Hunter wishes to discuss this matter with you, he will know how to reach you.

  (Dr) Hermione Bayley

  Clients, thought Richard. He once overheard a young teller in the local branch of his bank saying to a colleague: ‘All these customers stop us getting on with our work.’ He knew what that kid meant. Clients were always the problem. Hunter, vanished; Briggs, wavering. The uncertainty of it; the insecurity.

  Thank God for Freya, thought Richard: my rock, my fortress, my solid core. May she never falter.

  24

  ‘Would You Ever Leave Him?’

  Whenever I meet Fern away from the rest of the family, the conversation almost always becomes either conspiratorial or confessional. When our husbands are present – with or without Fern’s two kids – we tend to revert to rather girlish behaviour, teasing each other and even occasionally giggling. It amuses the blokes. When Felicity is present, we tend to be rather stern and defensive. She likes to spend time with us more than we like to spend time with her.

  And Mum? Unalloyed adulation is what she expects from us, and what she gets, mostly. Extravagant, hypocritical expressions of admiration and gratitude. It’s an unattractive habit, except to Mum, but we’ve both developed it as a kind of pre-emptive strike. You should hear our little gasps of pleasure at the sight of a new pair of cushions, or a new cashmere pashmina . . . or her new dog. Perhaps we actually enjoy playing the game: it’s better than having to defend or explain ourselves all over again. When Mum is present, we even make charitable remarks about each other.

  But when it’s just us, it feels almost as honest, almost as frank, almost as naked as gazing into a full-length bathroom mirror. Sometimes we eat. Mostly we just drink.

  A question we always ask each other is: ‘Did you feel like leaving him this week?’ It’s like a little ritual; a checkpoint; a way into the heart of things. We’ve been doing it for years. I don’t think we ever mean it literally – or not usually. But it’s not exactly a joke, either. Ever since high school, Fern has been a fan of Albert Camus, and that question is her own personal version of his assertion: ‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.’ Fern has never contemplated suicide – and I’m tempted to say she never would – but when she sees a couple destroying their marriage, whether by slow and painful strangulation or by a quick, lethal shock, she regards it as a form of suicide. So she thinks the Camus question applies to any discussion of our marriages.

  ‘If we are our marriage and our marriage is us,’ she likes to say, ‘then killing it off is a form of suicide.’

  Marriage has always been a bigger thing – even a grander thing – to Fern than it has been to me. At least, I think that’s true. I admit I was desperate to be married to Richard, just as I’ve become desperate to have his child, but I don’t think I’ve ever had quite that sense of utterly merged identity that Fern seems to have with Mike. I hope he feels the same. I assume he does. He acts as if he’s still devoted, after all these years. I’d call Fern committed rather than devoted, but there you go – I guess there’s more to Mike than meets the eye. There’s always more to everyone than meets the eye.

  Except with Richard: I sometimes feel, unkindly, that there’s slightly less than meets the eye. I’d never say that to Fern, of course. And there’s so much good in Richard – in who he is and especially in what he does. Professionally, I mean. He’s a good architect. And he’s a good man, too. Don’t get me wrong. When I occasionally hanker after something more, I don’t even know what I mean by ‘more’. More dangerous? No, thanks. Richard is safer than he looks, and that’s fine by me. Debonair – even dashing – on the outside; pushing the boundaries in his work; yet a frightened little boy inside, I sometimes think.

  Anyway, Fern sees the destruction of a marriage as the removal of a big part of your identity: hence the Camus/suicide analogy. She’s drawing a long bow, it seems to me, but it’s fun to play the game. For Fern, the biggest question of all is: ‘What would it take to make you leave him?’

  In her own case, there’s no question: infidelity would do it. If she found Mike had strayed, she would unhesitatingly commit marriage suicide – and quite possibly homicide, as well, she says.

  I mostly go along with that, or I try to sound as if I do. But I’m not so sure. For a start, I’d like to think there was a bit of leeway in a long-haul marriage. Would one indiscretion necessarily sink the whole enterprise? If it coincided with a very serious, very explicit withdrawal of love, perhaps even its replacement by hatred or cold indifference, then sure. But I’ve always been drawn to the view that if one partner becomes seriously involved with someone else, that is surely a symptom that all was not well anyway. But I know I’m less rigid than Fern about such things. And we’re both convinced Mum is less rigid about such things than she lets on, though the straying – if there was any – was her own, not Dad’s. Mum is brilliant at talking the talk, but she is capable of walking a very different walk.

  Whenever we have these conversations, I wonder what I could possibly say if Richard confessed to having strayed – or if I found out some other way. Would I be up for a reciprocal confession, admitting to those two (or was it three?) mad afternoons when I succumbed to Daniel and found he was just as hopeless as he had been at nineteen? More experienced, of course; less tentative; but no more accomplished. Richard is my gold standard in that department. No question. Ten out of ten for quality, if not for frequency.

  I’ve never said any of this to Fern, though I have chastised her for her lack of generosity and understanding in her hypothetical response to Mike’s hypothetical philandering. (Fern is not by nature a forgiver. Neither is Mum. Dad was. I want to be. But I also don’t want to be put to the test.) I occasionally ask her to reverse the roles. How would she expect Mike to react to some indiscretion of hers? But she won’t go there, though she did once blush when I pressed her.

  As far as Fern is aware, Daniel and I remain close friends and professional colleagues. I admit (though never to Fern) that his adoration is sometimes a tonic, but I know it would have become deeply tedious if we had ever lived together year after year: eventually I’d have wanted to slap his silly face. Either that, or he’d have become disillusioned by the reality of being constantly with me, up close. At least Richard has never shown any sign of being disillusioned, though he sometimes lags a bit when it comes to sustaining the adoration.

  ‘Anything else?’ I ask her. ‘Would anything else drive you to commit marriage suicide?’

  She says not, though she did once concede that sexual abuse of their children would cross the line.

  ‘What about drugs? Addiction to internet porn? Squandering the family finances?’

  All those things could be dealt with somehow, she claims, with the confidence of someone who’s never had to deal with any of them.

  ‘What about boredom?’ I’ve only ever asked this once. She unleashed such a furious attack on that idea, I never mentioned it again. Fern is inclined to a certain inflexibility and she’s as inflexible as a dry stick on this point: ‘Partners make each other boring. I’m sure of it. I’ve seen it over and over. If I thought Mike was becoming boring, I’d take a good hard look at myself.’ There was more than a hint of warning in it: I had once, when Richard was deeply immersed in a new project, unwisely mentioned to Fern that I feared he could become boring.

  Whenever Fern presses me – ‘What would make you leave?’ – I often find myself inwardly melting at
the realisation that Richard really is a one-off. A treasure. A lovely, lovely man with some deeply irritating qualities. I admit I have contemplated violence when he has said, for the thousandth time, ‘Home is the sailor, home from sea, and the hunter home from the hill,’ but otherwise . . .

  ‘Go on, Frey. There must be something. He’s already been divorced once, so we know he’s capable of suicide. What about you?’

  I should never have mentioned it, of course. Once these things are out, there’s endless scope for teasing or even ridicule.

  ‘He’s such a noisy eater, it drives me completely nuts. I sometimes think that could possibly drive me away.’

  ‘You’re not serious.’

  ‘Of course I’m not serious. We’re playing, aren’t we? But I must admit there are times when –’

  ‘Oh my God, you are serious! Frey! Noisy eating? Why don’t you just put on some background music? A bit of ambient noise?’

  I knew it was a mistake to mention it, because it’s not the literal fact of the loud chomping, the gulping, the barely suppressed belching, the cutlery on teeth or the clicking jaw, is it? All that is bad enough. But it’s what those things signify. It’s the lack of sensitivity to . . . well, to me, really. It feels like a demonstration, every single time, that he doesn’t get how irritating it is on the surface, or how deeply it offends me. No one who really knew me, who really loved me, who respected my hyper-sensitivity to sound, would persist with that behaviour. Especially not after I had actually raised it. Of course, I raised it in the form of criticism of him – an attack, really – rather than describing how it made me feel. My therapist has told me I got that totally the wrong way around. (My therapist. That’s another thing I don’t share with Fern. Fern is not what you’d call psychologically minded. She likes philosophical puzzles, not actual psychodrama.)

  Fern persists: ‘You don’t think you’re being a teensy bit neurotic about this, Frey? I’ve never noticed Richard being such a noisy eater that I had to leave the room or anything.’

  Better, really, to leave it on the surface and let Fern think I am a bit neurotic. Okay, I am a bit neurotic. More than a bit. Who isn’t? Of course I would never leave Richard because he’s a noisy eater. Of course I wouldn’t. But it’s that kind of thing – noisy eating, leaving the fridge door open, clapping at the end of the first movement of a work – that could tip you over the edge if other, bigger things were becoming a problem.

  Fern wouldn’t let it go. ‘Why not turn on some music? Isn’t that the easiest way out of this? You’re the expert. Get the level right and you simply wouldn’t hear poor Richard munching away.’

  There’s another thing which would probably strike Fern as neurotic. I refuse to use music as background noise – whether to mask Richard’s rowdy mouth-work or anything else. I also hate it when music is used to create an ambience that will encourage people to chatter and, in the process, drown out the music. Music as white noise? Elevator music? Supermarket music? This is the abuse of music. It’s the prostitution of art.

  Go on, say it: when Continental Drift plays at parties and weddings and conference dinners, we, too, are prostituting our art. Correct. Inconsistent? You bet. We’re shamelessly doing it for the money. Just as supermarkets are shamelessly trying to lower shoppers’ defences by the very scientific programming of music. It’s an awful abuse of the art, because it’s so transparently driven by dollars. But if I turned on some music in my own house as a way of disguising my husband’s disgusting eating habits, that would be just another form of music-abuse, to my mind.

  All I say to Fern is that I hate to think of music being used in such a utilitarian way.

  ‘What about the famous Richard mantra – beauty and utility? Can’t music still be beautiful when you’re using it for such banal purposes?’

  I smile and shrug. ‘The bottom line, Fern, is that I’m not leaving him over this. I’m not leaving him period. For a start, I’d have to go back to teaching. Or busking. At my age?’

  Most times when we meet, that recurring question – ‘Did you feel like leaving him this week?’ – doesn’t lead us into deep water. And we don’t only talk about men and marriage, of course. That’s just a kind of nudge, to get the conversation going and put things into perspective. We long ago agreed that if we didn’t feel like leaving our husbands this week, then everything else could be coped with.

  Fern juggles two kids, a part-time job, many more visits to Mum than I ever manage, and a marriage that seems to make her and Mike completely happy. I sometimes have to pad out my account of the week to make it seem as if I’m pulling my weight; Fern is a bit like Mum when it comes to music.

  Naturally, I told Fern about the harbour rescue episode involving poor Philip Noakes. Naturally, Fern reported it to Mum. Naturally, Fern reported Mum’s reaction to me. She was deeply unimpressed. Naturally. That’s why I wasn’t going to mention it to Mum myself.

  So unladylike, she had said, according to Fern; nothing more. I could have predicted that, right down to the tilt of the chin and the almost imperceptible sniff. But Fern and I both knew the real problem: to engage with that story – let alone to actually praise me – would be to risk one of those moments when she might have felt outshone by one of her daughters. In any case, she was always as dismissive of my swimming prowess and my lifesaving qualifications as she was of my music.

  I almost wish Fern hadn’t told her. But I get sick of saying to Fern, ‘Don’t mention this to Mum.’

  The funny thing is, Mum obviously mentioned it to Flick, who then rang me in a state of high excitement and breathless admiration.

  I want to love Flick. I want to be nicer to her. Kinder. I wish I could trust her. I wish she felt more like a sister. The Monk gets in the way of that, which isn’t Flick’s fault, of course. (I doubt she’s ever paused to wonder why ‘Uncle Charles’ is so nice to her and not to us.) Mum calls Flick her ‘freedom child’, which I suspect carries even more freight than it appears to. I do envy the way Flick handles Mum so much better than Fern or I seem able to do.

  I have a recurring dream about Flick. (I’ve given up discussing dreams with Fern: she thinks they are merely the drainpipe of the mind, flushing away the day’s detritus. I disagree.) In this dream, I’m swimming in very deep, very murky water and Flick emerges from beneath me, her arms stretching towards me and that red hair streaming behind her like a mermaid’s. She is pleading: ‘Don’t leave me.’ Over and over. Even though we’re underwater, I can hear her voice clearly: plaintive, haunting. I usually wake from that dream sobbing. Fortunately, Richard never hears me. Deep and peaceful sleep is one of his many accomplishments.

  Would I ever leave Richard? I know he fears that very thing, and I wish I could find the words to convince him that it will never happen. This is a strange kind of love we have, but maybe no stranger than any other kind of love. Sometimes I think the gaps between us are like unbridgeable chasms; sometimes I think they are mere fissures. I fear I could become a very unpleasant person if I didn’t have Richard in my life.

  25

  Coming Home –

  12th Variation – ‘A Visit from Angelina’

  The sight of his convivium gladdened Richard’s heart, as it always did when he came home (in spite of the clichéd flooring), but the gladness was short-lived.

  Seated at the farmhouse table were Freya, with her back to him, and Angelina, the progeny of his disastrous first marriage. Angelina, now twenty-six years old, was precisely the age Freya had been when Richard first met her. He tries not to dwell on that fact.

  To make matters worse, the two women were laughing in a way that seemed to Richard, coming suddenly upon them, to be somewhat conspiratorial. (He would never know what had amused them, of course. If he asked Freya later, how could he trust whatever answer she gave? He might be a slow learner in such matters, but he was making progress.)

  Freya turned to face him, and both women let their laughter subside into warm smiles.

  ‘Hello,
my darling,’ said Freya, to Richard’s surprise and her own. She never greeted him with a term of such endearment when they were alone, though she couldn’t explain why. She stopped short of ‘How was your day?’, though.

  ‘Hi, Dad,’ said Angelina, also to Richard’s surprise. He never really thought of himself as a father, and was always slightly shocked when he heard Angie’s voice on the phone – now the voice of a mature woman – calling him Dad. It was slightly easier hearing it from her in person, though he couldn’t explain why.

  It was possible that Freya had mentioned Angie was coming tonight. It was also possible that she hadn’t. It was perfectly possible that this was an unannounced visit, or the result of a last-minute exchange of texts with Freya. Angie now worked in Melbourne as a travel agent and made frequent trips to Sydney, often at short notice, and she had taken to calling in whenever she had a free evening.

  Richard bent and kissed each woman in turn, Freya on the lips, Angie on the cheek.

  ‘How has your day been?’ asked Angie, as if this were a routine homecoming, a standard domestic ritual. Or perhaps as if Richard were a client of her travel agency.

  ‘Oh.’ Richard hesitated. It had been a particularly difficult day. Briggs still seemed reluctant to give final approval to Richard’s plans for Madrigo, although Richard had believed it was virtually a done deal a week ago. No one but Richard himself – and certainly not Briggs – had any idea how important Madrigo was to him. ‘Fine. Thanks.’

  ‘Gosh. That sounded pretty unconvincing.’

  Between meetings with his daughter, Richard always forgot how direct Angie could be. It was an unwelcome echo of her mother, though he acknowledged that Angie was a far nicer person than she. In fact, between meetings, he tended to forget what a nice person she had become. His groans whenever Freya told him that Angie would be calling in were reflexive, rooted in the past, rather than fair and reasonable, based on more recent experience.