‘THAT CHAP OLDERS CAME again when you were away,’ said Robert when Sarah returned. He was back sitting at the table with his photographs.
‘Who?’
‘From the outpatients back-up service, or whatever. I thought you must have asked them to call again. Odd sort of a bloke.’
‘I know nothing about them. What did he want this time?’
‘Same as before. Just any ways they can make it easier. I suppose it’s a good service for some people who aren’t able to cope, or are going through it without any support, but I’d already told him things were okay for us.’
‘Obviously he hasn’t got enough to do.’
‘Maybe. He wasn’t in any hurry — just gawped about, and asked about dentistry and Hamilton. I guess they have quite a file on everybody.’
Sarah didn’t answer. She had been to see an exhibition of architectural drawings, and been disappointed that the impact hadn’t been sufficient to take her mind from Hartley and what he might do. Almost certainly there would already be texts on her phone, and God knows what follow-up if she didn’t reply. She wasn’t going to, though; she would be strong, day after day, until he got the message and let go.
Robert was concentrating on the photos again, sorting little piles that stood by the albums like packs of cards. Among them he came across occasional newspaper photographs, clippings that were faded, and wrinkled from competition with the firmer backed images. The more recent ones were of Donna’s school achievements, or her fortuitous background presence in a gala shot, maybe a Santa Claus procession. One of the oldest, on jaundiced, seamed paper, showed Sarah and Robert among the finalists for the provincial sports person of the year award. Forty years ago, and there they were among their peers, proud yet self-conscious, scrubbed up for a special night. Robert had known he had little chance of winning, but at the dinner he’d met Sarah for the first time and so the night was in retrospect a victory greater than he could have envisaged. He was partly obscured in the photo, but they all looked into the camera with the bravado of youth and optimism.
Apart from themselves, Robert recognised only one person: Marie Sellers, who had gone on to win a national tennis title and maintained a sporting profile. The others, like Robert and Sarah themselves, having reached the limit of their moderate sporting talent, had moved on to everyday careers that merited no special publicity. Perhaps they, too, had cut the photograph from the paper and would come across it some day, look at the forgotten faces and wonder where time had led them. A pissed guy had set off the fire alarm, Robert suddenly remembered, and the night had ended in some confusion. That and meeting Sarah were his only enduring memories of the occasion. He’d forgotten even the night’s main speaker, who must have been someone of note at the time.
Robert flourished the newspaper cutting, and told his wife he hadn’t realised they still had it. ‘All sorts of stuff is turning up,’ he said, but Sarah remained standing at the glass doors to the balcony, looking out without attention, wishing she was at some happier point in her life.
Robert fossicked some more, found another photograph of interest. ‘Here’s one I know you’ll like,’ he said, and she made herself come to him and lean down to see. It was the beach at St Clair, and the two of them ankle deep in the sea with Donna between them, a hand in each of theirs. All of them in togs. Sarah’s mother stood a little farther up the sand, fully clothed and with a smile towards them, knowing she was not the focus. It was a picture that flattered Robert.
‘She loved the water,’ said Sarah brightly as a deflection.
‘She became a good swimmer. Won prizes at school for it.’ Recognition was important for Robert. Most of his life had been reckoned in terms of measurable achievement. Staying alive had become the most recent goal.
‘Here’s another one.’ He held up one of Sarah and a friend in ballgowns, lifting fluted glasses as if to toast the camera. ‘Lydia and you at the festival ball. Remember the damn car wouldn’t start afterwards.’ The photograph was black and white, but Sarah saw the dress in its true lilac. The strap on the left shoulder kept working off and she hadn’t worn it much afterwards; maybe not at all. She had no recollection of the problem with the car that Robert had found so annoying.
‘You must be about finished sorting all these,’ said Sarah. ‘It would be good to clear up the mess on the table. It seems to be getting worse all the time.’
‘Here’s another,’ said Robert, paying no attention. ‘You and that crazy woman who was in the DOC office with you.’
Her name was Pam. In the photograph she had her arms around Sarah from behind and was grinning theatrically over her shoulder. On the wall beyond them was a poster soliciting money for pest-free island habitats. It was a glimpse of a time in their lives when everything seemed so much simpler, and difficulties were laughed away. Pam wasn’t crazy: she was just a woman friend in a way that men found hard to comprehend. She wasn’t a lesbian, but women were more important in her life than men, not because she was unable to gather male attention, but because she preferred the company of her own sex. Pam was fun, both open and intense. She was also supportive and confiding. Robert had been quite attracted to her initially, but came to resent his sense of exclusion when the three of them were together. ‘Why is she always laughing?’ he used to say, and Sarah in reply had to avoid the truth that she was laughing at him. Sarah could do with Pam’s comfort now, someone close, to whom she could tell the story of Hartley and herself, and the predicament to which it had led.
‘Dear old Pam,’ she said. ‘All we do now is exchange Christmas cards. I miss her.’
‘She was always laughing, though. See, she’s laughing here.’ He put his finger to the photo.
‘Why not?’ said Sarah sharply. ‘Good on her. I hope she’s still laughing. I wish to God I was.’
Robert took that as an expression of concern for himself. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We’ll come through this okay. You’ll see.’
There was no set lunch hour at Hastings Hull, but Hartley and Simon Drummond occasionally went out together to a nearby café, and if they had no appointments they would sit for an hour or more and in their talk make no distinction between professional and private life. Without conscious acknowledgement, they felt greater freedom to pass judgement on both their colleagues and their clients when they were out of the office. Simon was more than an acquaintance, almost a friend, but, at the café only days after the phone call in which Sarah had dumped him so decisively, Hartley found little in the conversation to hold attention.
Simon was mocking the senior partner of the firm by recounting the strenuous efforts he made each half-year to gain nominations for a gong in the honours list. Simon and Hartley had both been obliquely approached, and indicated they would give support, without any intention of doing so. ‘I know he gave a sizeable donation to the Nats, and Gillian found a draft of a letter in which he complained that the judiciary were over-represented in the honours lists at the expense of those in private legal practice. No individuals mentioned of course!’ said Simon, his large head nodding on his shoulders, a smile on his pale face.
‘Pompous old prick,’ said Hartley. ‘I can never work out what he does in that office hour after hour. When he does write a letter it’s so stuffed with obsolete legalese that it’s unreadable. He never remembers what days I’m in, and moans that I’m never there when he needs me.’
‘Who else bothers with a waistcoat, for Christ’s sake?’
‘You’re right.’
‘And who else has a bottle of port in the office cabinet?’
‘Yes.’
‘He got lost in the carpark at the club.’
‘Lost?’
‘You know he’s just bought the Audi, and he came out late and a bit pissed, and wandered around in the dark looking for the car he had before: the red Beamer. They found him almost in tears.’
The man deserved ridicule, and Hartley would normally have enjoyed joining in, but only Sarah was of real interest to
him, and the nagging ache of his abandonment distanced all else. Why was he sitting there with pleasant, smiling Simon Drummond when his happiness was at stake? Sitting on his arse instead of fighting for his life, for without Sarah the world had no lustre. He felt his throat constrict, and Simon’s voice and those of people seated further away had an echoing inconsequence.
‘I’ve got to get back,’ he said. ‘I have to go out soon,’ and he was impatient with his colleague’s staid progress as they walked back to Hastings Hull. Once there he hunted out a black permanent marker pen, told Gillian he’d be away for an hour or so, and drove to Sarah’s apartment. He couldn’t get a park close by, and had to leave the car on yellow lines and walk several blocks. It was Murphy’s Law, he told himself. One thing goes to Hell and everything starts to crumble. A lanky kid in a Disney T-shirt swerved past him on a skateboard, shouldering him and sweeping on without apology. Little prick. Hartley felt like ramming him, at least shouting after him, but just pulled a face and hurried on.
When he reached the apartment building he stood for a time looking up at the balcony and window of Sarah’s rooms. He was in plain view, and deliberately so, but there was no indication that he’d been noticed. He went up to 3B, waited briefly, regarding the light wooden expanse of the door, then he took the marker pen and wrote in extravagant printing ‘LOVE ME I AM DYING’.
He could feel himself shaking slightly, but had a sense of exhilaration in making such a public declaration. He knocked on the door and went quickly to the stairwell, where he wasn’t easily seen. No one came to the door so he went back and knocked again, retreated again. No one came. It was an anti-climax, and for a time he remained standing, several steps down, rather foolishly staring at the closed door. ‘So you’re out,’ he said softly. But the message was there, wasn’t it, waiting for Sarah and Robert when they returned.
Hartley felt relief in having done something positive to show Sarah the depth of his love, and encourage her to acknowledge openly that she felt the same way. He felt free for a time from uncertainty and the inability to make life conform to his expectation. He went back to the office, sat awaiting a three-thirty appointment that Gillian came through to confirm. ‘Do you ever wish for a different life?’ he asked her.
‘Not really,’ she answered. Why would she reveal her dreams to him when he had shown so little interest in her everyday existence?
‘Most people settle for too little.’
‘Right,’ said Gillian.
‘I don’t intend to give up so easily.’
‘Okay. Anyhow, so you’re set for Mr Friedland, then?’ said Gillian. She knew that Hartley was really talking to himself. She’d grown accustomed to having words bounced on her without her replies being given value.
Maurice Friedland came to discuss the purchase of the building in which he’d operated a fish-and-chip shop for twenty-six years. His name was pronounced ‘Freedland’, but when written made a visual pun connected with his trade that normally Hartley would have appreciated. Now he wasn’t in the mood. The day was one of the most significant in Friedland’s life, and he was aware of it. Finally he would own the premises in which he’d laboured for so long. He wore a tie, and was both uneasy and borne up with the unaccustomed formality. He carried a cardboard box containing his papers, and talked with great enthusiasm of his intended purchase.
Hartley nodded his head, and offered the occasional phatic comment, but his own life was his concern. He would provide the necessary legal service, which was more rudimentary than Friedland imagined, with professional competence, while his real self was elsewhere. He was thinking of Sarah, the message on the door, the life that was possible if she returned to him — the emptiness if she didn’t.
He had never smoked, but had on his desk a ceramic ashtray with a reddish glaze in which he kept paper clips, rubber bands, parking meter coins and a couple of memory sticks. He picked up a stubby pin with a plastic top and pushed the point into his thumb. When he withdrew it a small, dark orb of blood followed, didn’t run, and remained glinting in the round. Hartley’s hands were below desk level and Friedland noticed nothing, continued talking of the scale of mortgage payments he could sustain. As his client went on, Hartley replaced the pin in the bowl, and took up one of the memory sticks. The orange plastic cover was clear enough for him to see the intricate circuitry beneath, like the innards within the translucent body of an insect. With his index finger he made a small smear from the blood on his thumb. Despite the sun slanting into the office, despite the peerless, blue sky of summer, despite the rising fortunes of Maurice Friedland, who leant smiling towards him, he felt cold. What was the value of anything if you weren’t loved?
‘I wish my father was alive to see the day I take possession of the building,’ Friedland was saying, easing his tie slightly. ‘Even in his eighties he’d come in well before six o’clock to do the chipping, and he had gout and rheumatism so bad that sometimes he’d shout out despite himself. Right out loud no matter who was there, the pain was so bad. He slogged all his life for us kids and for bugger-all. Owning the premises was his dream, and he’ll never know it. Mind you, I had to create a different sort of business model to the old man’s.’
‘Where would we be without a good father?’ said Hartley, savouring the irony.
ROBERT AND SARAH HAD been close at hand during Hartley’s visit to the apartment, but unaware of it. They had been one floor down, at the Ellisons. The rooms were much the same, but the outlook was not of the street, but a carpark and offices. Robert was feeling better than he had for some time. He’d enjoyed the lunch, especially the apple crumble, and even more the discussion with Tony Ellison on the bureaucratic encroachment of government on private business enterprise. Tony was a retired importer of veterinary equipment and medications. In Auckland Robert had little opportunity to talk with other men about business and politics. He appreciated his wife’s intelligence and knowledge, but there were times in his new setting when he missed his male friends and colleagues. His one reservation about Tony was the beard; the colour of cigarette ash and untrimmed down his neck. Robert considered beards an affectation, like cravats, or kissing women on both cheeks.
Rather than take the lift when they left, Robert walked up the stairs in a minor display of fitness, but even so Sarah reached the apartment ahead of him, and there was her lover’s unmistakable message. Love me, I am dying. Sarah knew what it meant. Hartley’s challenge to her decision, his demonstration of how easily he could reach into her world. The flaunted expression of unrelenting devotion.
‘What the fuck is this?’ exclaimed Robert, half in astonishment, half in annoyance. He took his handkerchief, wet it with his tongue, and rubbed at the L of love. It smudged only slightly, and was otherwise unchanged. ‘And it’s permanent too. Someone’s playing silly buggers.’
Where was he? Was he watching? She glanced at the stairs behind them and at the closed doors of the lift farther down the hall. She knew it was one of Hartley’s office days and he must have been agitated to leave work and come to the apartment to make his graphic plea. Sarah felt angry with Hartley, but also concerned for him. He was changing, mutating in some disturbing way from the man she loved. She didn’t wish to consider what responsibility she bore for that.
She had the illogical and unpleasant thought that he was standing on the other side of the door, waiting for her to open it. It was an appeal, of course, she could recognise that, but it was also a violation of sorts, an intrusion into a part of her life he had no right to enter.
‘I’ll get the maintenance guy up,’ said Robert. ‘I wouldn’t have expected this sort of thing here.’
‘Just ring him,’ said Sarah. ‘Just ring him when we get inside.’
‘Yeah. It’ll come off all right I suppose. There’ll be some cleaning stuff for it. But “Love me I am dying”, what sort of nonsense is that?’
‘Kids probably.’ She remembered the grave beneath the trees, spangled with sunlight, and the story of Emily an
d Edward as Hartley had later told it, and the sympathy they had expressed from the safety of their own happiness. ‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ she said. ‘Just kids’ rubbish.’
While Robert busied himself with arrangements to have the words removed, Sarah went out onto the small balcony and stood there in the sun, her face raised to its reassuring warmth. No, she wouldn’t ring, she thought, suppressing her desire to hit back. That’s what he wanted — to force her to get in touch again so he could persuade her to see him. But if she didn’t contact him then next he would come round, wouldn’t he? Knocking on the door he’d defaced, telling Robert all that had happened between them, standing in love-stricken vulnerability to demand she admit their affair.
In her confusion and anger there was love and sadness, too. Behind Hartley’s increasingly erratic gestures, she could still recognise the man she’d been so attracted to, still glimpse the ideal future he imagined for them together, despite the circumstances that must prevent it.
Hartley saw that Sarah was pulling away, more and more retreating to the safety of her old life, and away from the venture and commitment required by love. Maybe he should let her see that he, too, had alternatives, an existence apart from concern with her. He decided to go away for a few days, regain a sense of individual balance. He would drive south for distraction and not keep in touch with her. Maybe distance would give him perspective: at times he was shaken by the intensity of his love. Perhaps she would value his affection more when she saw it wasn’t guaranteed.
So on Friday he drove south, and didn’t examine his decision to stop in Hamilton for lunch. He would go on later, maybe all the way to Wellington even, and have the weekend there. Sarah was right. Hamilton was a town that had grown large without growing up, still without the sophistication of a city. After sandwiches in a café with loud background music, but no customers except himself, Hartley found the location of Sarah’s house from the phone book, told himself that it was merely idle curiosity that drew him there.
Love as a Stranger Page 19