Love as a Stranger

by Owen Marshall

  ‘Well, it’s like that in the world at large. We’ve been so isolated, so focused on British heritage, that we think the world’s white.’

  ‘When you go south, though, it’s different. Even Wellington hasn’t attracted anywhere near as many.’

  ‘They come from big cities and they like big cities. So do I. And they work their arses off to succeed at school and afterwards. Most of the rest of us are slack by comparison. Just look at the cars coming past. Toyota, Nissan, Kia, Mazda, even Great Wall. When I was a kid it was mainly Austin, Morris and Ford. I suppose they come from places where it’s work, succeed or starve.’

  Sarah wasn’t sure quite what he meant, so moved on. ‘Tell me about the lecture,’ she said. ‘About the law of contracts. Was it good value?’

  ‘The law of contracts in relation to electronic commerce isn’t exactly sexy stuff. It’ll send you to sleep.’

  ‘Okay, but just an expert summary, Mr Lawyer.’

  ‘Well, he was talking about the rapid growth and change in electronically made agreements, whether they’re enforceable in the courts, and the significance of recent judicial decisions affecting such business dealings. Actually he was quite good.’

  Hartley and Sarah sat in the warm shade surrounded by garden plots, lawns and paths and he talked about his profession, patting the top of the shoe box from time to time for emphasis, but for both of them what they were experiencing had nothing to do with the law of contracts. The bustle and noise of the city was not far away, but they sat with flowers and grass close, and even butterflies that dipped and fluttered as if on puppet strings. Neither of them wished to be anywhere else, or with any other companion.

  Hartley was still talking about the lecture, and its application to his own work, when a woman and child approached. The woman was elderly, wore black tights beneath her summer skirt, and a knitted top, but she and the clothes were clean. The little girl, three or four years old, had a pony-tail and green plastic sandals. They came steadily closer, the woman gently urging the girl in front, hands on her shoulders, until awareness of their close proximity made Hartley stop speaking. There was a pause during which he and Sarah waited expectantly, the child watched the butterflies and the old woman grinned. Then she said, ‘No one cares about this one here. I’m no relation whatsoever, but I’ve taken her in, haven’t I. Fostered her because no one cares about her. There’s all this talk about people desperate to adopt, but plenty of kids like this one pushed from pillar to post.’

  ‘You’re doing a good job then,’ said Hartley tolerantly, yet unsure of what was expected of him. The little girl was fair, with a pear-shaped face and small blue eyes. Her toenails had been painted a variety of colours and showed clearly through the straps of her sandals.

  ‘And what’s your name?’ Sarah asked her.

  ‘It’s not right for them to go into one of them homes,’ the woman said.

  ‘I suppose not,’ said Sarah.

  ‘It’s not personal, you see. Kids need one on one, because that’s the natural way of it. Bonding is so important for little ones. It’s not as if any of it’s their fault. You wouldn’t believe what kids like this one have seen. You wouldn’t wish it on a dumb animal I always say.’

  ‘What’s your name, sweetheart?’ Sarah asked again, and the child slowly opened her mouth, but was forestalled by her foster mother.

  ‘Trauma,’ she said. They call it trauma, don’t they, the horrors that kids like this one have been through. I’ve twice been to talks on it by high-ups at the agency, and you wouldn’t believe what the kids themselves tell you. Shocking, shocking stuff. Really nasty things.’

  ‘It’s a credit to foster parents,’ said Sarah. ‘It can’t be easy.’

  ‘The one before this one was scalded all down her legs. Looked like a road map in white and pink it did, even when it healed up. Mind you, others have their scars as well, but not on the outside. Kids and elephants never forget, that’s what I always say.’

  The woman stood there, slightly formally, with the girl still loosely held before her, and for the benefit of Hartley and Sarah she explained the exigencies of foster children and her own role. Hartley, wanting to be alone with Sarah again, misunderstood the reason she’d approached them, and offered some money. The woman was affronted. ‘I thought you’d be interested in the cause. The work being done for little ones in peril. People need to understand, I reckon.’ She took the girl’s hand and began moving away.

  ‘Goodbye,’ Sarah said.

  The woman didn’t reply, but the child half turned, smiled and said ‘Shit,’ with a strangely adult emphasis.

  ‘Now, now,’ said her foster mother without alarm, and kept going without looking back.

  ‘What was that all about?’ said Hartley. ‘Why come up to us if she didn’t want something?’

  ‘She did want something. She wanted to share: to talk about the work she does. I suppose no one much ever bothers to listen to her. I admire her. We just shut our eyes to so much that’s going on.’

  ‘I thought for a moment the kid’s name was Trauma. Did she really say “shit”?’

  They laughed, but without voicing it, both were aware of a panorama of restricted, difficult lives beyond the comfort and security of their own. Hartley leant over and kissed Sarah on the mouth, squeezed her thigh quickly. ‘Thank God for the optometrist,’ he said. ‘It’s made my day.’ Even the thought of child misery and need couldn’t shake his enjoyment of the afternoon. You took happiness where you were lucky enough to find it, and you held onto it for as long as you could.

  They left the park and walked together into the city to find a taxi stand, and Hartley relinquished the shoe box, watched as Sarah was driven away. He had work to catch up at the office, but he gave in to a sudden quirky inclination, went back to the park and sat down exactly where they had been before. The sun was still bright, the air warm even in the shade, the flowers abundant. He was alone, but his senses were so heightened by the time with Sarah that he was able to prolong the pleasure of being with her in just that place, and he sat at ease and smiled, and regarded with goodwill all who came walking on the paths not far away. He took up a handful of gravel and flicked the stones away with his thumb one by one.

  Rather to his surprise, he also thought of the woman and the foster child: how the woman had approached them out of the blue to explain her calling, how the little girl had stood watching the butterflies and then sworn as she went away. For a moment their lives had intersected, and then spun on again with no effect from the meeting. In other circumstances he may have found sadness in that, but instead he remembered Sarah’s laughter.

  LATER, IN THE APARTMENT, Sarah put on the blue slippers, but they possessed no magic in that setting. She mentioned them to Robert as part of the recital concerning her eye test and shopping, and he made dutiful comment, before going on to say he wanted to talk to her about the possible purchase of a holiday home at Manaia in the Coromandel. A Hamilton friend was thinking of selling. ‘It’s nothing flash, but if we liked it, everything could be done directly with Greg and we’d cut out agents and limit the legal fees. He said there’s no bother letting it out on a casual basis if we wanted income from it.’

  ‘Why do Greg and Cath want to sell, then?’

  ‘All their children are overseas now except Andrew, and he flies helicopters in Antarctica.’

  ‘Have you ever seen it?’ Sarah asked. She was thinking of the park, the warmth, the foster mother with the child with painted toenails, Hartley close beside her. She was thinking of the brilliant, unblinking colours of the rings in the jeweller’s window.

  ‘No, I haven’t. He often talks about it, though. They’ve had it for ages. Anyway, maybe we could go over and take a look. I just thought it worth mentioning.’ Robert’s latest test results were encouraging, and he took that as incentive to plan positively for the future. He wouldn’t do any more fill-in work at the surgery when he was cured; he had money, and he’d decided that he would spend it on
easy and happy times for them both.

  ‘Well, we can think about it,’ said Sarah. ‘It is lovely on the Coromandel, isn’t it.’

  She felt dispossessed. Which of her lives was real? She was talking to her husband, but thinking of her time with Hartley. She would’ve liked to tell Robert about the little blonde girl — how she said ‘shit’ so decisively as she went away. Robert would have enjoyed that, but it was part of an increasing store of experience that she was unable to share with him.

  When she was with Hartley it felt quite natural, and she was happy. When she was back with Robert and living the old life, with so much that was indispensable, she could scarcely believe all that she was doing outside it, and how much risk that entailed. But what was life without some daring in it, some reach and peril of feeling, some promise and some giving?

  Hartley had no one to return to after his trysts with Sarah: no other life of significance to distract him from love, no personal obligations, no guilt or special ambition, to lessen his conviction that he had found the woman he needed in his life.

  However, for a time after he began making love to Sarah, memories, almost visions, of Madeleine came strongly when he was alone. Almost as if she were attempting to hold his allegiance from the grave. Their early days were the more vivid, when both of them knew each other less well and had high expectations of their marriage.

  Madeleine had not been beautiful, but she’d been attractive. She was short, thin, inclined to breathe through her mouth, always neatly dressed and well groomed. Her skin needed no disguise, her fair hair was lustrous, and she tended to smile as she listened to people, whatever the quality of the conversation. How was Hartley to judge the success of his marriage when he had no intimate knowledge of another to compare with it? It was placid enough, there was little dramatic unhappiness, but her subdued apprehension of life was constraining. After Kevin’s birth her interest in sex, which had never amounted to enthusiasm, dwindled further, until his own satisfaction seemed almost an imposition.

  Increasingly, her ever nervous energy had been spent on her work. Madeleine was accomplished, despite her trepidations, and became a policy manager at Auckland airport. Her salary was greater than his for most of their marriage, though that was never an issue. She died in her fifty-fourth year, as formal records like to phrase it, from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. A rapid death, as had been her mother’s, but even quicker. She was giving a PowerPoint presentation to staff, and in mid-sentence fell unconscious against the glass door of the meeting room. Hartley went to her office once after her death, to collect her things, but never again. The airport became a sad place for him, no matter what the reason for coming or going.

  He could recall their final conversation. ‘I don’t feel great,’ she’d said, sitting for a moment before leaving the car at the airport.

  ‘You don’t eat enough, don’t have a decent breakfast, that’s the trouble.’

  ‘I feel something’s going wrong somehow.’

  ‘You always do, but then the day turns out okay.’ There had been a strong wind that blew a cardboard pottle against the car — blat — and made her flinch. ‘You’ll be fine once you’re in there with your friends.’

  ‘I hate the wind,’ she said. ‘It pushes stuff out of place.’ He had watched her hurry away, clutching her coat close to her, always wishing to be somewhere safe.

  He wondered if perhaps she’d never felt completely well, and that had led to her constant anxiety. There had been something that prevented her from being fulfilled, prevented her from facing life full on, and neither of them had been able to work out what it was. Maybe it was him. There was a time in their marriage, after Kevin left home, that she cried a lot, for no reason that she could explain, or Hartley discern. It could happen at the table, in the car, or in the middle of the night. ‘Nothing. It’s nothing really, I’m just a bit down,’ she’d say.

  Once she started crying when they were in the showroom at Neenall Furnishings looking at carpets. She wept right in front of the salesman, and Hartley felt such a fool. ‘It’s nothing. I’m sorry,’ she had said. Not long after that they went to see Rory Menzies, the counsellor. He seemed more interested in Hartley than Madeleine, and had asked a lot about Hartley’s indifference towards his own family. Madeleine recalled the time one of his brothers had arrived without warning, and Hartley had gone into the bedroom and told her to tell his brother he was away. She said only Hartley’s mother had come up for their wedding.

  Rory, as he liked to be called, had encouraged them to be forthright in their comments, but Hartley couldn’t help but find disloyalty in his wife’s mild, truthful revelations. Maybe the sessions worked, because Madeleine stopped crying so much. Maybe that would have happened anyway, without Madeleine telling Menzies things about her husband. ‘He never got on with his father,’ she said, ‘never keeps in touch with any of them.’ Hartley had said it was just that he was self-sufficient, but she was right: he didn’t get on with any of them. Madeleine found relief in talking to the counsellor, but Hartley would have preferred not to have been drawn into it.

  Hartley admitted to himself that he had needed to do more, but was unable to say, during the marriage, or since, just what it was that required augmentation. Selfishness must have been his failing. How often he read in books and articles, and saw in films, that women accused men of selfishness. He hadn’t cheated on her, beaten her or ridiculed her, so it must have been his selfishness, and Madeleine’s conviction that life was hostile, that prevented greater happiness. And she was right: something terrible did happen to her. If you wait long enough it always does. At least for her it was sudden.

  Life with Sarah would be different. Already Hartley was sure of that; when he was with her he wanted nothing else, and when he wasn’t, she remained in his thoughts. He felt their love was so natural that the random meeting that had led to it assumed special significance for him. How she should happen to be standing by the Grafton Gully grave of Emily Keeling and he come walking by. It was surely meant to be, he told himself. Make the most of it whether it was fate, or chance.

  Every morning and every afternoon he sent at least one text, often in the evenings also, as a sign he was thinking of her, and also, unconsciously, to prompt evidence that she was aware of him no matter where she was, or what she did. Sarah responded when she could, but increasingly his messages occasioned anxiety rather than giving pleasure. What if Robert became aware of the numerous chirpings? How would she explain them? Most of the time she left her cell phone turned off to minimise the risk, and that meant delays in reply that Hartley interpreted as unconcern on her part. It was the cause of their first argument, during a coffee meeting, when they sat at a table without shade, and next to them two women talked of bridge hands.

  Maybe the disagreement wouldn’t have happened if there had been time for them to go to the motel as Hartley hoped, but Sarah and Robert were expecting visitors from Hamilton who had notified them only hours before. She knew it wasn’t an ideal time to mention the texts, but she’d promised herself she would. ‘You know I like to keep in touch,’ she said. ‘I always do, it’s just that often Robert’s there, and if he hears he might ask about it. A few times doesn’t matter, but you send so many and it could get difficult. That’s why I sometimes turn the phone off, and it takes a while for me to get back to you.’

  ‘Tell him then,’ said Hartley. ‘Why not? Tell him you’ve made a friend that you need to spend time with. Someone who’s important to you. Tell him the truth.’ For days he’d been looking forward to being with her on the bed in the sparsely furnished motel room, and now they would have just an hour in the café, and then she would go back to a semi-invalid and a fat-arsed couple from Hamilton.

  ‘I can’t always do what I want. You know that. I can’t just live as if I’m not married, as if I’m not a mother and grandmother.’

  ‘You could, though. You could if it meant enough to you. We haven’t got years and years, you know, and if we’re going to
be together then the sooner we make it happen the better.’

  ‘I never promised I’d leave him.’ She had never said it, rarely permitted herself to think of the possibility, for there was too much to lose. Hartley’s face was intent as he leant across the table, as if to somehow compel her acquiescence.

  ‘Call the director, that’s what I say. I never hesitate to call the director if there’s any argy bargy whatsoever.’ It came from the table close at hand, but Sarah and Hartley didn’t glance towards it, their own presence all that mattered. Even a sparrow, cheeky enough to perch a moment on the table, was no distraction.

  ‘So this is all we’re going to have, then,’ he said in a voice both low and urgent. ‘This is the lot. Chats and coffee, walks, a few motel shags, and then it’s all over when Robert and you go back home. Thanks very much.’ The sun was behind her, and he turned a little from the glare, dropping his eyes at last. It was the end of the first careless bloom of their affair, the beginning of its scrutiny for a future, the confrontation of diverging needs and expectations.

  ‘How can we know what to do after only weeks? At our age you don’t ditch everything all of a sudden. We’ve got lives, with a lot of other people involved.’

  ‘Everyone’s got lives.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’ She paused to let the bridge players pass close to the table, noticing automatically that one of them had a bag of soft Italian leather, just like those she’d seen in Florence and Sienna. ‘We’ve got families, that’s what I’m saying, other people we’ve committed to for all sorts of reasons.’