by Susan Duncan
After all those years of work, the years of grief, the years of feeling lost, suddenly I am catapulted into a world where the only responsibility is pleasure. There are no commitments, no expectations, no demands. Unencumbered romance at a time of life when I thought it would never happen again. I defy any woman to turn her back on it.
The lover and I discover we have similar backgrounds. He grew up in a country pub. So did I. He enjoys thoroughbred racing. It was my brother's lifeblood. He worked as a journalist around the world. Me too. We wonder why our paths never crossed in London, New York, Cape Town, anywhere. And then we realise we did meet once, in New York, at a journalist's bar. Why didn't we click then? 'The time just wasn't right,' we agree, blithely ignoring the fact that he is married and the time is still decidedly not right.
I know, from the first, that this is not a man you would want forever and for a while I stop and start the liaison. But when he says, one day, that we are in a relationship, not an affair, I stop thinking about ending it and instead slide easily into the role of mistress. For a while, it gives me the illusion of belonging somewhere.
But there is never contentment, only gut-gnawing anxiety because he does not come home to me each night and he is mercurial and women are drawn to him. I cannot be sure he always turns away from their invitations. Yet every time there are hints that he is a compulsive womaniser, I become an old lady who sees and hears only what she wants. I am selectively blind and deaf to all the signs that this is a man who can never be faithful, not even to his mistress.
On days when I don't race to the city to meet him, I take long, solitary walks through the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, trying to switch off the monkey that spins in my mind in neverending loops. Will he call today? Will I see him tomorrow? Is it over already and I don't know it? I stride, hatless under the sun, from waterfront to escarpment, counting the steps, willing myself to be slim and fit. Often almost fainting with heat and fatigue.
Sometimes, when he lightly refers to a cyclonic week at home, firecrackers of hope explode wildly and brightly and I, the mistress without any legal or emotional rights, think, oh, the marriage must be coming to an end. But it isn't. And anyway, if hazy dreams of a future together even nibble at the edge of my mind, all I can see, rearing in anger and hurt, are the faces of children. So I switch off the most natural desire in the world, the desire to share and be with someone you love and respect. I settle for crumbs and tell myself each crumb is worth more than a whole cake with anyone else. But really, it isn't.
I walk so long and often, my weight loss is dramatic, and friends look confused when I say hello. As though they have a lingering memory of someone who looks like me that they can't quite place.
I preen. I like the new persona. The one that's ditched the apologetic insecurity of the overweight and unfit. Old clothes are flung into the charity bin at Church Point and my new wardrobe is fresh and sexy. Short skirts, tight trousers, stretchy fabrics become sudden favourites. I splurge on clingy little sweaters in the softest wool, buy toe-peeper shoes and get my toenails painted. I book a regular leg wax, change the colour of my hair and do not understand that I am reinventing myself until much later. My confidence blossoms. For the first time in my life I feel beautiful and clever, which means people react to me differently. And that reinforces my new, burgeoning sense of self.
'How did you do it?' people gush.
I do not, cannot, mention the lover. So instead, I talk about my exercise regime. I do not say that, often, tears mingle with sweat as I tramp the chalky pink and white tracks through the bush. Because up high on the escarpment where the world is pure, I see clearly the affair that has begun to rule every waking moment can never offer anything of value. Beneath the surface of stolen afternoons, devious weekends and quick snatches of time together are lies, deceit, a duplicity I never dreamed I could embrace, and a deepening distaste for the person I am becoming. I tell myself it is living but it is a slow dissembling.
Sometimes as I trudge along, I wave my arms angrily, demanding answers from a cosmos I think should arrange itself more tidily. 'What is right? What is wrong? What lies ahead?' I want to know. But the landscape is mute, the isolation intense. The sharp-edged, prickly bush, as ancient as the rusty pink sandstone it grows on, offers neither comfort nor peace.
There is a cave – actually, more of a rock overhang – a little beyond where the Towlers Bay track eases into the national park, and every three days or so someone places a fresh flower in it. The flowers aren't native, none can be plucked from the side of the track. Once it is a rose, once a gladioli, once a lily. There must be young lovers, I think as I march past, and this is how they arrange to meet. I find the ritual charming on some days and spooky on others. Then one day there are no more fresh flowers in the little cave and the last offering, a yellow lily, just fades into nothing. Has someone died? Is the affair over? I never discover what it is all about.
Mostly I am alone on my walks, except for the canting in my head. But often, I spin and look behind me, prickled by the sensation that the eyes of long dead generations are drilling into my back.
Once, this was a place where young Aboriginal boys were tapped on the shoulder as they slept near their mothers. The boys, about twelve years old, were silently beckoned to follow their elders higher and higher through the moonlit scrub to the sacred sites at the top of the escarpment, to be initiated – with the pull of a tooth – into manhood. When I walk to these ancient sacred sites that date back ten thousand years, there are never many people gathered around them. Perhaps because they have neither the glamour of grand architecture nor rooms filled with golden treasure.
There is an immense spirituality here, where Aborigines once used flat sandstone outcrops as sites for their rock engravings of fish, whales, echidnas,emus, goannas and wallabies. The engravings, smooth with time, simple and evocative, are etched on charcoal grey tessellated rocks where, when it rains steadily but not too heavily, little rivulets run rampant in the grooves, crisscrossing busily. The fish engravings seem to swim and it suddenly becomes clear why, thousands of years ago, it must have seemed a good idea to carve fish so far above the waters of the bays.
In one area, there's an etching of a half-man, half-animal that I learn the Aborigines called Daramulan. Today, his significance is guessed at by experts because the Garigal tribe, who carved his image on the rocks and who lived here unmolested for thousands of years, was wiped out when European settlers brought smallpox and venereal diseases.
In summer, the low buzz of insects provides a backdrop sonata to the random crackles and crunch of the bush. Then, just when it seems at its most still as I trudge, sometimes with a mantra running through my head exhorting myself to be happy and content, the silence is shattered by the raging screeches of sulphur-crested cockatoos. Huge, clumsy white birds that fly as gracelessly as old, fat-bellied seaplanes. The noise is deafening. Somewhere out of sight, a hunt is on.
To me, reaching the escarpment is like stepping into my own, private ancient art gallery where the walls are textured by needle bush, tea tree and dwarf apples; where the silver trunks of young scribbly gums glitter starkly against the bright blue sky. Where hundreds of shades of green are broken every so often by a strike of blood red from a rogue eucalyptus leaf. Where leaves are spiky, sharp, serrated, tapering, elegant, tufted, or rounded. Where the sky, its own ever-changing canvas, provides a dome for a gallery of subtle, timeless beauty.
On a day of misty rain, so gentle it seems to hang like a sigh before wafting to the ground, the achy smell of damp, charred black trees, the remnants of the 1994 bushfires, ignites pangs of undefined yearning so intense I double over. Up here on the escarpment, where my lies to myself sit like lead in my mind, I know the affair is wrecking me. It will leave me altered and stunted, like the burned-out stumps around me.
'Were you here, Stewart, when the bushfires roared through in ninety-four?' I ask one Friday not long after I move into the Towlers Bay house while I search for
one of my own to rent.
'Yeah.You could say that.'
'Jesus,' Fleury says. 'That was a time I'll never forget. We'd just bought the place.'
It was a week when the hot summer westerly winds sucked the last drop of moisture out of the air and the atmosphere felt like a powder keg waiting for a match.
'We'd just returned to Australia from the US and everything we owned was barged in,' Stewart says. 'Never forget what one of the removal blokes said. "Knowledge is heavy, mate. Knowledge is heavy." He was carrying the books. Boxes and boxes of them. Up the steps. Heavy as hell. A poet, in his way.'
Two days after the last box was unpacked, fire exploded all around them. The family agonised in a rush about what to save, what mattered most. The paintings? The furniture? Clothes? It was a big decision. They didn't have insurance. While they sat by the radio, waiting to hear whether their luck was running hot – or running out – they put the family photograph albums in the boat before anything else.
'Family history,' Fleury says. 'Everything else could be replaced.'
Firemen and police swarmed in as the fire raced closer.
'Forced us to leave,' Stewart says. 'Threw handcuffs on people who refused to go.'
Stewart took Fleury and their two daughters to safety and then returned to watch from the middle of the bay as flames tongued their back door. When there seemed no way the house would survive, he felt the wind swing around to the south east. And in a click of the fingers, it was spared. His luck, that day, was running hot.
'Do you worry there will be another fire like that?'
'You don't worry about it. But you know it can happen,' Stewart says.
7
BY CHRISTMAS, I STILL HAVEN'T found a house to rent. And it's summer, the high season, when rents soar and houses that lie vacant most of the year suddenly roar to life. I cannot abuse hospitality any longer. The lover, anyway, has always refused to commute here and I am afraid our meetings in the city will eventually be discovered. I need a place of my own. In the end, the beauty of Pittwater fails to diminish the power of the lover and for a while, it becomes just another lightly touched location in a lifetime of them.
In Sydney I look for a house to share with a long-time friend, Pia, and my husband's youngest daughter, Lulu, who's in her twenties. I tell real estate agents that Pia is divorced. I am a widow. Lulu is my stepdaughter. I'm concerned about appearances. I'm not sure why.
While I worry they'll think we're an odd collection, they actually wonder if we're planning to run a brothel. Why else would three single women need a six-bedroom house? But Pia and I are new to sharing and we want various rooms where we can disappear. Lulu simply wants a roof over her head. She's just split with her boyfriend. When we find a house with three levels (one each), we cautiously move in.
To our surprise, we three dispossessed women have a grand time living together and evolve into a peculiar sort of family unit. Pia and I wave Lulu to work then sit down to a breakfast of tea and toast while we read our daily star signs in the paper. She tells me how to keep white clothes white and I tell her how to grow hydrangeas from cuttings. She likes to be lyrical in her appreciation of food while I enjoy cooking it. I mow the lawn. She polishes the kitchen. It's an ego-less relationship that revels in the mundane. We throw lots of boozy dinner parties but stay within strict budgets by cooking trays of grilled polenta and buckets of spaghetti bolognese. Lulu puts up with both of us but watches a lot of television after dinner in her own sitting room.
At weekends Pia and I join an old friend,Tony, a wonderfully wicked theatrical and literary agent, at his shack at Little Gairie Beach, in the Royal National Park. The shack, a relic from the Depression, is less than basic. No running water. No electricity. The loo is a plastic bucket under a toilet seat in an outdoor cupboard. It is Tony's job to dig a hole somewhere in the hills to empty the bucket but often he puts it off for too long. I learn to pee behind trees or I grab a shovel and head into the hills.
Whenever we take off, I load a thermos of soup, cooked legs of lamb, jars of gravy and mint sauce, kilos of sausages and large cakes, into a huge backpack so heavy it takes two people to lift it onto my back. 'This is Susan, our packhorse,' Tony says, making introductions to the shack community.
Tony, in his late fifties, is a sixty ciggies a day man, so he can't carry much of a load. And he loves a drink. Although to look at him, you would never know. His excesses leave no visible marks. He is slim as an athlete. Handsome, too, in the way that turns people's heads. And he could charm the balls off a brass monkey – as he was fond of saying.
Pia carries her share but has a bad back to protect. I relish my own strength and tell people with pride that I am strong as an ox, healthy as a buffalo. I lug our three days' worth of supplies a couple of kilometres from the car park along a goat track cut into the side of the cliff. The track ends where there is a two foot drop to a ledge of slippery, emerald green rocks. Stepping onto the rocks is precarious enough with a forty kilo load on your back. It's just plain life-threatening on an incoming tide with waves breaking only a few feet away.
'You'll be fine,' Tony yells one day, even though the surf looks treacherous. It's raining and he is impatient to get to shelter. He is way ahead, already past the green rocks and safely on the beach.
'Ok,' we shout.
But I pause. Some instinct holds me back. Pia, who is also wary, stands next to me.
'Do we go?' she asks.
'Nuh. Not yet.'
A moment later a huge, rogue wave comes out of nowhere and crashes at our feet. If we'd stepped from the track, it would have snatched and dragged us along the rocks to the ocean. Damaging us badly or even killing us. But it didn't.
Pia and I look at each other and laugh. 'Jesus!'
'Not meant to cark it yet,' Pia says. And we laugh and laugh.
When we reach Tony a few minutes later, the cigarette in his hand is shaking. 'Ker-rist,' he says.
'Tone, you nearly lost your shack sheilas!'
Our laughter calms him.
'I don't suppose,' he says, 'that you feel like a drink?'
'Do we ever!'
And we follow him up the hill to the shabby shack with its peeling paint, crooked windows and holey flyscreen door. We're still laughing as we shoo a herd of feral but friendly deer away and search for the door key. Joyful, I suppose, with relief.
Tony's routine when we arrive at the shack is always the same.
He immediately lights the old kerosene fridge that takes about six hours to work up a decent chill. Then he shoves ice trays in the freezer so he'll have cubes for his late morning gin and tonic ('with lime, dear, not lemon, if you don't mind'), and assembles the bar (rum, gin, whisky, wine).
His shack, with its 1950s kerosene heater and ragged linoleum floor, is fitted out with flotsam and jetsam thrown out by other households. Multicoloured crockery, mismatched cutlery, a wobbly kitchen table and a laminex-topped dining table that resides in a spot that looks out on a glorious view of the surging surf. It's like the tatty holiday shacks of my childhood where the roof leaked and the boards rattled when the wind blew, and where you were allowed to run riot and if anything got damaged no-one yelled.
At Little Gairie Beach, Pia and I sleep in an alcove separated from the living room by long strands of beads hanging in the doorway. It has two bunk beds, one above the other, covered with brightly coloured, crocheted Afghan blankets. Tony sleeps in the kitchen-cum-sitting room on a blinding orange divan, also a refugee from the fifties. Every night he coughs in violent, racking spasms. When they finally abate and we call out to make sure he is still alive, he's immediately cranky.
'Whadya wake me for?' he grumbles.
In the mornings, we urge him to quit smoking.
'Why?'
'Because you cough all night!'
'What rot!' he says.
In less than a year, the landlord turfs us out of the three level home we share so happily because she wants to move in. So we set off again, th
is time to a big white house on a main road that overlooks a park. Here, there are no places to escape from each other and bathrooms are communal. For me, the move is disturbing, almost disorienting. A reminder that I have no roots. No place where I belong. I am still floating aimlessly and it's scarier than ever.
The affair has long passed the point of being thrilling. Putting yourself last in the queue for attention creates anger and resentment. Too often, now, the euphoria couples with depression. What good, after all, can come from any course that is taken without care for the damage it may do to others? Yet every time I feel I can no longer continue, the dark spectre of loneliness smothers my shaky shreds of courage and I stay on and on.
Pia, who knows about the affair, watches the highs and lows with disbelief. 'Have you always been like this in a relationship?' she asks one night as we dine together. I pick listlessly at food,my stomach roiling with anxiety, the greatest appetite depressant in the world.
'Never,' I reply.
And because it is the truth, I excuse the madness by telling myself this is a grand passion, the one we all seek, believe we are entitled to, dream about.
Much later, a woman tells me: 'I had an affair outside my marriage and sometimes I wished my husband and children dead so I could be free. It was madness. And yet the thought was there. Lust is not rational.' Nor can it satisfy beyond the moment.
I begin going out with other men but it feels like an even bigger duplicity and I badly hurt an old friend whom I allow to misinterpret the time we spend together. To blur the edges of a useless, careless life, I party harder.
When I'm offered a job two years after my bid at 'retirement', I grab it like it will save me and give me stability, as it did for more than twenty-five years. The work is the stuff of dreams. Travel editor for a national women's magazine. I sail on the luxurious Queen Elizabeth 2 and watch rich, lonely old women in couture ball gowns snapping at each other jealously over the attentions of the paid gentlemen who are there to be dancing partners. Do we ever lose the desire for romance, I wonder? No matter how foolish it sometimes makes us look?