Love as a Stranger

by Owen Marshall

  He did get a chalet, which despite its title was just a bigger cabin with its own plumbing and a small wooden verandah. On the table were three home-made dolls — small wooden figures without arms or legs, but with painted faces and knitted woollen dresses in assorted bright colours. A note said they cost six dollars each and were made by Amelia Talbot aged eleven. At the office Hartley had seen a line of similar dolls propped on the window ledge, and assumed Amelia was the proprietor’s daughter, showing entrepreneurial promise despite an incomplete knowledge of anatomy.

  He had left his bag in the chalet and taken a walk in the grounds in defiance of the weather, just to feel solid earth beneath him. The wind was getting worse and blew his hair back in such an unaccustomed way that it caused discomfort. He would walk down by the line of conifers and then go inside, he decided, but the wind noise in the pines was harsh, and bits and pieces from the branches were scattering down, so he turned towards several of the old cabins at the far end of the holiday park. They were army huts, no chimneys, like those he remembered on farms in Southland used for casual workers, or storage. The putty was cracked and lifting around their small end windows, some lower boards were missing, and each had a faded stencilled number above the wooden door frame. Number five wasn’t a sleeper, for as he passed he glimpsed through the dull window a jumble of palliasses.

  When he came from behind it, however, he almost stumbled into a man and woman fighting. The wind must have swept the noise of it away from him, because they were shouting at each other, pushing and slapping. The woman was thin and holding her own, verbally and physically, against a taller but equally thin guy with tattoos on his white, upper arms. ‘Fuck you then,’ she shouted.

  ‘Fuck you, bitch,’ he shouted back. Then they said something at the same time, emphatically but rendering both unintelligible, and the woman kicked his knee.

  Hartley was too startled to intervene, but the man had become aware of him, and after a brief stare as a challenge, he limped away.

  ‘Yeah, fuck off,’ said the woman triumphantly.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Hartley said.

  ‘Yeah,’ and she sat on the single wooden doorstep of number seven, with an overflowing rubbish tin beside her from which the wind flicked and tumbled tissues like injured doves. She seemed not at all surprised, or curious, at Hartley’s appearance. ‘The bastard spent the last of our money on booze and weed.’ She fingered beneath her left eye where redness showed the effect of a blow. ‘Just when I thought we were getting ahead a bit, too.’

  ‘Do you need to go up to the office? Call the police, or anything?’

  ‘They don’t want to know about domestics, and anyway it’s all happened before and blown over. He’s not so bad most of the time, until one of his silly-bugger mates gets shit for him.’ She wore dark jeans, and no shoes. Her socks were yellow and grubby, barely reaching to her ankles. She put her arms around her knees and rocked a little on the step. ‘Worse things have happened,’ she said, mainly to herself, and because of the sound of the high wind in the trees, Hartley couldn’t hear clearly.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said.

  What had occurred had nothing to do with Hartley, but having been a witness to it seemed somehow to create an obligation, and he found it awkward to disengage and walk away. ‘Well, if you need someone to back up your story …’ He let the offer hang there.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she said.

  ‘Hartley.’

  ‘What’s your number?’

  ‘Number?’

  ‘Yeah, the number of your cabin,’ she said. He took his key from his pocket and read out the number on the oval tag. ‘One of the chalets,’ she said. ‘If he comes back, I might have to come up and get the police. They might want to talk to you. I’m Ruth, by the way.’

  ‘Sure, okay then,’ said Hartley, and he felt able then to go, leaving her sitting on the worn step of the shed with her inadequate yellow socks and pale shins below the legs of her jeans. ‘I hope things work out,’ he said.

  She did come, later, but when there was still the last of the sun, and the wind had almost given up rocking the world. She stood on the chalet verandah, not much more than an extended step, and knocked on the door.

  ‘Has he come back?’ asked Hartley with some apprehension, and he looked over the rough lawns and shingle paths for her partner.

  ‘Nah,’ she said. He noticed that the bruise had come out below her eye and that she was wearing shoes. If there was no threat, why was she at the door?

  ‘Well, that’s good.’

  ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said and stood aside. ‘I’ve just had a bite to eat,’ he said in needless explanation of the KFC boxes on the table.

  Ruth picked up one of the wooden dolls still on the table. ‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘that kid must have these coming out her ears. She gets her friends to help, you know. It’s juvenile mass production. What do you think of the place?’

  ‘It’s just somewhere for the night, isn’t it.’

  ‘I clean a lot of these,’ she said. That’s what she did, she explained. She cleaned chalets and cabins when she was needed, and had one of the grotty ones to live in for very low rent, and had fallen behind even in that because the useless guy, Dylan, spent everything on booze and shit. ‘I used to work in a garden nursery in Nelson,’ she said. ‘I liked that. I was good at it, but Dylan had aggro with the cops and we had to disappear pronto.’ She looked about the room, and then voiced her conclusion. ‘You’re here by yourself.’

  ‘Yes, just the one night, I think, and then heading on south.’

  Ruth looked directly into his face and smiled. ‘The thing is I’m absolutely bloody skint just now. Dylan’s taken all I had, the bastard, and the Talbots here are kicking up about the back rent, though really I shouldn’t be paying anything for that shitshack. I’m at my wit’s end really.’

  Hartley’s reading was that she was offering him a shag, but he wasn’t sure if he was right, or if he was, whether the offer interested him.

  ‘I’m not rich,’ he said. ‘I’d like to help, but I’m not rich.’

  ‘Two hundred bucks would get them off my back. I could keep you company for a while seeing you’re here by yourself. I’d rather not be in my own place anyway just now.’

  ‘I’d like to help,’ he said. This was how it was done, he thought. Advantage taken of circumstance for mutual benefit and with a verbal indirection that avoided embarrassment. She came to him unhesitatingly, and gave him a quick hug. He wasn’t tall, but she was noticeably shorter.

  ‘Two hundred makes such a difference,’ she said, stepping back, and then standing expectantly. He took his wallet from the table, and she watched with interest as he took out the notes. She folded them in half and placed the small wad deep in the pocket of her jeans. ‘Thanks,’ she said. She stood close to him, quite relaxed. The next move was up to him.

  Whenever he thought about the whole thing afterwards, it was almost as if he’d taken the opportunity and made love to her on the hard chalet bed: the active sinuosity of her thin, almost breastless body, the short yellow socks, the bruise on her cheek bone, the brief exultation of both possession and release. He knew how it would have been.

  It hadn’t happened, though. She was desirable enough in her way: the way that willingness arouses lust. He wasn’t even bothered by not having a condom, or the chance that Dylan might somehow turn up. What deterred him was a strangely powerful sense of random impermanence, that there was no future in it, nothing of consequence after achievement of ejaculation and her sense of obligation fulfilled.

  They had sat down and had coffee together, Ruth talking cheerfully and profanely of her life when she realised nothing more was expected of her. She ate some of the cold chips from the KFC carton, but didn’t touch the leftover chicken. She could tell a good story against herself, and even better ones against Dylan. She could’ve married an orchardist in Nelson, she said, but he was too ol
d. He was well over sixty and told her he’d never had a woman before. He had three hectares of apples and nectarines, and a three-bedroomed brick house, but he was a bit odd and too old. He’d cried when Ruth decided not to live with him, but hadn’t asked to be given back the nine-carat gold chain he’d bought for her during a weekend in Christchurch. ‘I’ve still got it,’ she said. ‘I hung onto it even when I was really skint. I had a soft spot for the old bugger.’

  Hartley thought at one point that she was working around to asking for more money, but she didn’t. When she left, it was black outside. The holiday camp had no lights outside the buildings. He had offered to walk with her, but she said she knew the place backwards. She’d vanished quickly, without turning, or saying any more.

  Ruth wasn’t a name he thought would have suited her, but it did. She would probably still be there in the shed at the Picton holiday park, contesting with Dylan the loser and his silly-bugger mates as the wind buffeted the conifers, getting by as best she could, and laughing rather than shedding any tears. Hartley was pleased he’d given her money, even though she would have forgotten him long ago. So that he wouldn’t do the same in regard to her, he wrote ‘Picton Ruth’ on a piece of notepaper and left it on the bench. Sarah would enjoy being told about Ruth, and he would make the most of it.

  Hartley glanced at his watch. Sarah would be hostess now, at the apartment table with Robert and their visitors: acting out a life in which he had no part whatsoever. He was determined to change that, and was sure she felt the same. Sarah wasn’t going to be like Ruth: someone flitting into his life by happenstance and then spinning away again. Someone driven by expediency into his company. She wasn’t going to be like Madeleine either: someone he’d lived with, but never really known; someone physically contiguous, without becoming emotionally familiar.

  The photo was great, though. He brought it up again on the computer and there was Sarah at the café table, smiling at him. At him. That was all he needed for the future.

  Almost all her life Sarah had been a good sleeper, reading a few pages of undemanding fiction, or magazine articles equally distanced from fact, and then switching out the light and rarely waking again until morning, but after her visitors had gone, her quiet routine with Robert re-established, and she was in bed with him asleep beside her, she felt an almost choking anxiety. It had little to do with the evening, except perhaps that the visit of their friends reminded her of the settled life that she and Robert had built with industry and care. It was different to the fearful apprehension that had come when Robert was first diagnosed with cancer. She’d thought nothing could be more harrowing than that, but now guilt had been added to fear. She was beginning to realise that the joy and pleasure she had with Hartley, had a counterweight of anxiety and confusion. Love had trapped her, and every way out demanded pain to herself and others. To continue the affair without intention to leave Robert was sluttish, and bound to end badly. To finish with Hartley was to break his heart and risk an irrational response. To leave her sick husband and go with Hartley was something affection, sense and obligation all absolutely rejected, despite its attraction.

  She should never have gone to Hartley’s place at Titirangi, or the Spanish motel. She should never have allowed the easy profit of their friendship to become the insistence of love. Yet how natural it had seemed, and how irrevocable it had become. She should have known that sharing love is not the same as understanding it in the same way, or seeking the same conclusion.

  So Sarah lay in the darkened room, her mind a treadmill on which she pursued brief, phantom solutions, suffered over and over the pulsing apprehensions and angry bewilderment that she should find herself in such a predicament. She had to resist the urge to get up and wander through the apartment as some physical release at least. She squeezed her eyes closed and moved her hands on the cover, but there was no change in the rhythm of Robert’s heavy breathing, except for a single cough now and again. What to do, what to do, what to do? Fuck. What to do? She was in some deep pit, and the light from the surface far above seemed to be dimming. She slept fitfully, and woke often to the problem worrying at her again with almost physical insistence.

  The morning was some relief. The light, the routine activity, the presence of other people, provided some distraction. It was better during the day, and in typical human inconsistency she could even look forward to having time with Hartley. That’s how it is with love and life. Tidal swings of confidence and insecurity. Things would work out, she told herself, as the alarms of the night subsided. All those involved were sensible adults with no wish to cause harm. Things would work out. Life could be lived on more than one level.

  Sarah felt a special consideration for her husband, as if she’d already told him everything and been reassured by his understanding and forgiveness. She made scrambled eggs for his breakfast, and suggested that in the afternoon they go and choose some DVDs. Robert liked historical dramas and films based on real events. He had no interest in aliens, the undead or young Americans in dance academies and frat societies. Sarah was concerned that his cough had returned. It seemed to follow the chemo treatments, although Mr Goosen didn’t think there was any connection. Just keep an eye on it, he’d said.

  For the moment, however, Robert was more interested in his own memories than in DVDs or his oncologist’s advice. Donna had couriered up the rest of the photographs, and Sarah was surprised by the intensity of his enthusiasm. He had increased his section of the table permanently for the sorting of them, and liked her to be involved as well. He wished to identify each of them, but often couldn’t recall where or when they were taken, or who the people were. Sarah’s memory was better, but even she found some photographs meant nothing, and could have been palmed into the folders by a complete stranger. This was especially true of the images taken on their overseas trips: vistas, classical ruins and quaint cobbled streets that evoked no more personal feelings than picture postcards, or the illustrations in a travel magazine. For Robert, those he did recognise conveyed a sense of transience, almost of loss, as he saw their earlier, more robust selves, smiling at him from the past. Some of the people had since died, some captured in the background of the photographs were utter strangers, as in the shot taken at Delphi that had in the left corner by a colonnade a fat man with walk socks, glancing their way with a self-deprecating smile. For that moment he was on the periphery of their lives, but transfixed there by the camera as a sign that he too had existed. His physical appearance was detailed, even to the sweat patches on his shirt, but his life a mystery.

  Some of the most familiar pictures acted like swipe cards to open up whole rooms of memory. Robert found one of long-time friends Phil and Harriet standing together outside their house in Dunedin, and it brought back to him an oddity of experience that kept him silent at the table while a sun shower drifted across the city, and Sarah tried to convince herself that things were okay by the repetition of trivial and customary domestic tasks.

  Phil and Harriet had recently moved to Invercargill and their Dunedin house was empty. Robert was to attend a conference at the dental school, and his friend invited him to stay at their former place. He could have gone to a motel. It wasn’t the money, though in those days that was a consideration: Phil seemed keen to help, and sometimes it’s a strengthening thing in a friendship to accept a kindness. ‘The people aren’t moving in until the weekend,’ Phil had said. ‘The power’s still connected, and the phone.’

  ‘Thanks, but I’ll get a motel. It’s only for the night,’ Robert had said.

  ‘Just take a sleeping bag and turn the water on. We did a deal and some of the furniture’s still there. The key’s on the nail under the garage window.’

  So after the meeting in the afternoon Robert drove to St Kilda, let himself in and turned on the water heating. The house was rather forlorn, as if it realised that the family it had protected for many years had callously abandoned it. Robert and Sarah had visited often, and its hollow silence seemed strange to hi
m. The house was vulnerable, like a woman caught still in her dressing gown and with hair undone. Most of the living room furniture was gone, leaving small indentations in the carpet and a red wine stain that had been hidden by the sofa. Harriet had cleaned the kitchen drawers and left them to dry, stacked on the bench. On the sills of the sunniest windows were a few dead flies, like currants against the white surface.

  He could have spread his sleeping bag on what he knew had been the marriage bed, but instead chose one of the other rooms. He walked to the Thai restaurant and brought back a takeaway that he ate in the kitchen where the table and six chairs still stood. Normally he took milk, but he just used one of the tea bags from his case and sat with the mug at the table, looked over the agenda points for the next morning, and then rang Sarah, aware of the unusual taste of the tea as they talked.

  ‘So how’s the place looking?’ she asked.

  ‘A bit sad and empty, though the kitchen’s still got table and chairs, and they must have sold the beds and mattresses to the new people as well.’

  ‘Yes, Harriet told me. Good on her. Not all the old stuff seems to fit a new place. When you’re back make sure you ring and thank them. It would be great if they could come up some time. Invercargill’s such a long way away.’

  ‘How’s Donna?’

  ‘She misses you. After school Sharon came over and they vanished into her room as usual, just coming out to ask for something to eat.’ An easy pause. ‘I miss you, too,’ Sarah said.