Love as a Stranger

by Owen Marshall

  Hartley hoped it was only just beginning. He lay on his bed, his face close to the slight indentation their bodies had made. He thought he could smell the perfume she wore, and something of himself, too. He relived the peak of sexual pleasure and the languid aftermath of shared disclosure that was almost as significant. She must be nearly his own age, he thought, but remembered the full breasts rather than the faint arc of crease lines low on her belly, or the loose flesh at her hips. He loved it that her body was large, strong and well contoured, that she showed little shyness concerning the use of it. He remembered the involuntary, high-pitched noises as she pulled with both hands on his bum to urge him in. He remembered her knickers on the bedroom floor, the light material still collapsed on itself just as she had stepped out of them.

  He didn’t wish to make comparisons with Madeleine, but they came nevertheless. His wife had been apprehensive and reluctant in bed, as she had been in life generally, one of those people fearful to strike out in their existence in case the fates are aroused to take revenge. She would make love only in darkness and anxiety. They had been happy enough in a subdued way that offered no means of comparison, but with a sense of necessary accommodation to each other’s natures that was unspoken disappointment.

  Hartley lay still dressed, the room warm, the window open and the moon giving a pale lustre to the bush. The city lights pulsated in the distance. He’d found someone to love, he told himself: and someone who loved him. He lay content, conscious of a complete relaxation he hadn’t experienced for a long time — perhaps never. He felt a strange and elevating sense of arrival, although the destination was still not clear to him.

  He sent several texts over the next days, but Sarah was busy accompanying Robert to hospital for his treatment and looking after him when it was over. There was nothing of avoidance in that, but it made a statement of priority that Hartley, alone and in love, found difficult to accept.

  After six days — Hartley had counted down each one — they met at Magnus again. A cool, grey drizzle in which nothing looked at its best, and people moved impatiently with heads down, yet both Sarah and Hartley felt a catch in breath when they met. Had Sarah not turned her head slightly at the last moment, he would have kissed her on the lips instead of the cheek. They took up their mutual concentration as before, oblivious of those drinking and talking close to them, the cars swishing by on the wet street outside, the amateur watercolours for sale on the wall. The intensity of awareness they had for each other sucked colour and definition from all that surrounded them. They were larger, brighter, centre-stage and more favoured in the world, as people in love feel themselves to be.

  They talked at first about the last thing they should have talked about as lovers — Robert’s health, his response to the treatment, his stoicism, the growing recognition of his dependence. Hartley was sympathetic because he understood Sarah’s need to share with someone, and because her choice of him as a confidant gave him a sense of advantage over her husband. He knew intimate things of the partnership, while Robert was not even aware of his existence. It wasn’t at first an assumed sympathy, for what most concerned Sarah was of importance to Hartley too, and he understood the ties of marriage. Later they talked of the time together at Hartley’s place, but not about the lovemaking itself. Instead they spoke of the view, his skills as a lunch-maker, further minor revelation of their lives. More and more they were filling in a picture of each other, both chronological and emotional, so that in every new conversation less had to be explained and much could be conveyed by a smile, a pause, a passing reference to things already held in common. In each of them the emotional space occupied by the other grew so rapidly that it seemed they had been close for years.

  To others they could pass as husband and wife, except perhaps to the more insightful observer of the close attention they paid each other. A tall, slightly heavy woman in what might tactfully be termed late middle age, well and casually dressed, the colour of her thick brown hair salon reinforced. A slim man, no taller, with darker skin, fine lines on his face, soft greying hair and quick gestures and movement in contrast to her calmness. An unexceptional, older couple with little outward sign that much was happening in their lives, as was the case with most of those around them.

  Only one person drew attention to himself. A thin, elderly man in gaberdine trousers who was reading a hardcover book when approached by the proprietor and told politely that the tables were for customers, not passers-by seeking a dry place to sit down. It seemed just the intervention that the reader had been hoping for, and he created a scene as he left, holding aloft the heavy, dark book, declaiming against the restriction of personal freedoms, walking off with an odd jerky action and the knowledge that he had, briefly at least, imposed himself on the attention of others.

  Hartley enjoyed the incident, especially as he wasn’t alone himself. ‘You know what often occurs to me,’ he said. ‘Peculiar people walk in a peculiar way. I reckon it could be a test in psychiatric diagnosis.’

  ‘But you only noticed the way he walked after he’d kicked up a fuss. If he’d just gone past us you wouldn’t have said anything.’

  ‘It’s more than that. There must be some close connection between the motor centre in the brain and the behavioural one. I visited the Acute Mental Health Unit once with a client, and every inmate there walked in a strange way, often a sort of clockwork awkwardness.’

  ‘Just your expectation of peculiarity I’d say.’

  ‘Not at all. I bet there’s medical literature about it.’

  They amused themselves by commenting on people passing hurriedly in the drizzle outside, and then their own manner of walking. Hartley possessed an unusual sharpness of observation that Sarah enjoyed. She’d decided that they wouldn’t have sex again, but his pleasure in their being together again was so sincere, and her own so much greater than she expected, that she went with him the short distance to a motel in a somewhat incongruous Spanish stucco style. She stood out of sight, and uncomfortable with that need, while Hartley made arrangements, telling the proprietor that he had a friend arrived from an international flight who would need to freshen up before they went on their way.

  They made love in a studio unit with prints of Basque fishing boats on the walls. When they were young their expectation would have been two, even three, energetic climaxes, but now both were content with one long bout with more time spent on foreplay, and gentle, restful caresses when they were side by side again. Neither made any further demands, regretted the reduction, or mentioned it. Hartley felt a certain pride that he was capable of one good stand without recourse to any pills. He wished that they could lie beneath a single sheet and talk and touch and laugh for much longer. He noticed again the flush that lovemaking brought in patches to Sarah’s pale, soft body, and even as he watched her dressing he wished that she was again taking off her clothes.

  ‘Don’t put anything on for a bit. You look great. You’ve got the tits of a thirty-year-old. Jesus, I just love to feel you.’

  ‘I’m getting fat,’ she said, but she paused in unconscious response to his flattery so that her boobs were bared for a moment longer before she scooped them into her bra. ‘I don’t eat as much, but I still seem to put it on. I never used to. I suppose it’s not getting the same exercise, and I guess your metabolism changes as well.’

  ‘You’re beautiful. Absolutely.’

  ‘You don’t have to say that.’

  ‘I could do it all over again.’ It was said in admiration and bravado, for his cock was a soft droop when he too got up to put his clothes on. Given more time, though …

  ‘There’s no time,’ she said, abetting his false pride. When she was a young woman, when she and Robert used to have what they called their ‘sessions’ before Donna was born, she had often remained naked for hours at a time and enjoyed the provocation of it, the confidence of her own physical allure, even of those parts of her body not visible to her. It was different now, whoever she was with.

&nb
sp; ‘I feel great,’ he said. His chest was flat, the symmetry of bones clear, a small patch of grey hair between his nipples, and rather more at his crotch. She noticed again the colour of his skin, liked it, and wondered if far back there were some Spanish or Italian blood to account for it. ‘After we make love, time seems to slow down. Don’t you think?’ he said. And following her laugh, ‘It’s true. There’s all this flurry and then a sort of drifting suspension.’

  ‘And I’ve got to be drifting home,’ said Sarah, speeding up her preparation.

  They walked together some of the way back to the apartment. He would have gone farther if she’d wished. ‘We must look different,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘After a fuck as good as that I bet we look different to all these ordinary people. It must show, surely? We must be lit up like Christmas trees.’

  But Sarah was in the process of bringing herself back to the everyday reality of being a fifty-nine-year-old woman with a sick husband and a settled life. And fuck was a coarse word, even though she had to allow that it was an apt one for what they had experienced.

  ‘It doesn’t change anything though,’ she said. ‘We shouldn’t get silly. Being friends is the most important thing and we’re entitled to that.’

  ‘I love being friends and I love being lovers.’ Hartley put his hand briefly low at her back just for the pleasure of touching her.

  ‘I do, too,’ she said.

  They felt that sense of privileged exclusion that lovers feel when among people of less entitlement. They parted with a quick kiss; the faint, moving drizzle brushing with their lips. Who was there among all those passing who would recognise them, or care?

  So a new pattern was set. Hartley’s numerous invitations by text, her acceptance when circumstances allowed, and sometimes their rendezvous in the same motel — the small, clean and stark room that was a cell for happiness, but ruled by the clock. Both of them would have preferred to meet in his home, but the travelling time was better spent otherwise. There was, however, a furtiveness about their coming and going that Sarah in particular disliked, and could never quite banish. It was there like the slightest of odours as she approached the unit, was there when she left until she regained the street. Once they were together behind the closed door, though, nothing of their other lives mattered much at all, and what they did there was of no concern to anybody else.

  Her time with Hartley, his attention and affection, his gratitude, his openness concerning his feelings, all gave a balance to the unnatural life she had with Robert since his illness. Rather than growing impatience, she felt better able to support him, more resilient. Sarah didn’t think guilt was involved, but if it were, the consequence was to her husband’s benefit. She was of an age to be realistic, she told herself. Surely if she had happiness in her own life then it would spread to all those for whom she cared. There was nothing to Robert’s detriment in friendship, even love, had elsewhere. Her trysts with Hartley were not a response to grievance in her marriage.

  Robert had always approached his life with confidence that was in the main justified. He had succeeded in his profession, in his recreations and in his family; not in spectacular ways, but sufficiently to feel satisfaction. The prostate problem, the consequent operation and then the more sinister complications didn’t cower him. Sarah admired his fortitude, and he seldom sought sympathy, despite realising what he faced. He knew his stag days were over, and liked to talk of the trips they had shared, the home in Hamilton they had created together, their daughter, son-in-law and granddaughters who seemed to prosper, and even more important, seemed happy together. His own parents had been selfish, preoccupied with their own lives, and Robert had grown up ambitious and self-sufficient, but also with something of the detachment that marked his mother and father.

  Increasingly he’d come to value his marriage, even as his ability to contribute to it was eroded. No partnership is ideal, and if there are no passing disagreements, or tensions, within it then the likelihood is that one person is subjugated to the other. Robert had, in the way of his upbringing, often put himself first, but he had learnt from mistakes. The sexual advantage he took of his dental assistants still came as arousing memories, but the liaisons had stopped years before when he saw the greater value of what was threatened by them. And in more subtle growth he came to experience the pleasure of contributing to the happiness of others, without expecting reward. But what was done was done, and part of the mesh of admiration, loyalty, reliance, disappointment and acceptance that is a marriage in continual transition.

  ‘When I’m better, we’ll go overseas again,’ he promised her, after one of the more difficult and unsettling treatments. Sarah had just returned from the supermarket, and, although she had taken a taxi, she was wet from a sudden squall that caught her as she reached the apartment building, and that still pelted on the glass of the window and French doors, and bounced on the surface of the small balcony beyond. She pressed her hair with a towel.

  ‘It seemed to blow in from nowhere,’ she said. She looked at her hands, which had red marks on the palms from the weight of the shopping bags.

  ‘Where would you most like to go?’ He was trying to summon up the energy to get out of his chair and take the bags into the kitchen, but Sarah, with a touch of impatience, had it done before he moved. ‘Where’s your favourite place?’ he said.

  ‘Germany, I suppose,’ she replied from the kitchen.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Germany,’ she said more loudly, and came back to be closer to him. The noise of the rain was still in opposition, but she knew he was making an effort to interest her, and that it was a form of gratitude. She sat on the sofa, ignoring the slight dampness of her clothes. ‘Bavaria,’ she said. ‘I’d like to do some of the less well-known walking trails. The weather’s better in the south. I remember a fun couple of days in Füssen, close to the Austrian border. The food’s good, too.’

  ‘We’ll go then,’ Robert said. ‘We’ll have a decent European trip and not stint on anything. Not only Germany, but all over, eh?’ It was a promise to her for all that she was putting up with, also a challenge to his illness. If his plans were unequivocal enough, surely they must come true? ‘And we could have one of those long cruises where you stop off at great places and come back to the ship at night. There wouldn’t be a hell of a lot of walking, would there?’

  ‘I guess not,’ she said, but it was Hartley whom she could imagine accompanying her. Hartley energetically in step with her on excursions off the beaten track; Hartley with his quick conversation, always attuned to her own interests, and his undisguised pleasure in her company. She admitted to herself the unaccustomed thrill of getting to know a new man in an intimate way.

  Robert was waiting for an answer, smiling, teeth seeming enlarged. He was in the slumped, head-forward posture that had become typical. Most of his hair was gone, and what remained was dry and lifeless. She remembered the dark, glossy hair he had had when younger. When he was handsome and unaffected by it; when he was resolute and made a bow wave in his progress through life. Sarah felt suddenly that she could cry for him quite easily, but resisted doing so because it would dismay him. ‘A trip would be fantastic,’ she said. ‘When you’re over all this, we’ll treat ourselves to something really special.’

  ‘We will,’ he said, still smiling. ‘We bloody well will, Sarah.’

  ‘If it ever stops raining,’ she said lightly. And that was happening: the squall cloud moving away, the rain no longer driving on the windows, even shafts of sunlight glittering, flashing, on the wet and busy street.

  ‘I love to travel, even though things change so quickly,’ Robert said. ‘So much goes by before you get the chance to understand it.’

  ‘Sensory overload, I suppose, though that’s certainly not a problem for you here. Maybe we should try a holiday not too far away at first. Perhaps Aussie for a few days. One of those wine and river tours. Anyway, I’d better put this stuff away.’ She
went back to the kitchen.

  Sarah’s mention of Australia brought Robert sudden recollections of Gareth, the guy originally from Penryn in Cornwall and then Liverpool, who for almost a week had been his constant day and night companion and then left his life for ever.

  Robert had crossed the Tasman after the end of his second university year, hoping to combine a change of scene with earning money. He got a job with a renovation firm in Mildura and was sent with Gareth to paint shearers’ quarters far out of town. They drove there in a VW Kombi loaded with gear, and lived in the building they were working on, the smell of paint with them constantly. They used sleeping bags on the uncomfortable box-frame beds, and cooked mostly on a barbecue so as to be in the fresh air. In all the time he was there, Hartley never saw one kangaroo, or wallaby. There were, however, flocks of parrots so brilliant they could have flown out of a kids’ colouring book, and with harsh, jarring voices as the trade-off for their beauty.

  Robert and Gareth had contact with the owners only when one of them went up to the farmhouse to get vegetables and meat. A tall, purposeful, rather watchful woman of few words and formidable elbows, who always stood on the verandah, or behind the fly-screen door, after Robert’s visit to ensure he drove away. Her husband was in hospital for heart surgery.

  Gareth was in his forties, a British ex-soldier who had served in Northern Ireland. Robert had thought that military men didn’t like to talk about their experiences, but Gareth talked about little else. In his reminiscence he made no distinction between Catholic and Protestant, hating the Irish indiscriminately, and the officers of his own unit almost as much. He went on about house searches, protest marches, brutality and reprisals, the inaccessibility of young Irish women. After a day or two, Robert ceased to pay much attention, deciding that he was a bull-shitter of the first order. He was slap-happy as a painter, too, and even Robert, who lacked any trade experience, knew they were making a poor job. Gareth did the minimum of preparation. ‘Paint over it,’ he’d say. ‘We’ll be well away before any fooken bastard twigs.’