by Liz Byrski
Joyce turns in his direction and opens her eyes. Alongside the stove is a rocking chair and Mac has grabbed the patchwork cushion that Stella made for her birthday years ago, and dropped it at an angle on the gorgeously polished wooden seat.
‘Oh Mac, it’s beautiful, beautiful, just what I always wanted.’ She walks over to the chair and around it, strokes the curved arms, the top of the railed back, and finally sits down in it, leaning back, feeling the perfect balance, the ideal shape and angle of the seat. ‘It’s gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous, a work of art. I’ve wanted one like this for so long. Wherever did you find it?’
‘Find it?’ he laughs. ‘I made it, Joyce, I made it for you, just as I always promised.’
*
It has been the best of times, this bright and breezy Sunday, Mac thinks. He is high on the pleasure of being home with his family. Ben and Nessa had arrived soon after with Lucy and Kara, both home for a couple of weeks in the mid-year break. They had opted for lunch at the big table in the yard, protected from the breeze, and tucked into a ham cooked by Nessa, cheeses, bread that Ben had baked, olives, salad, and some excellent wine. There are changes of course, Mac keeps spotting them: small things in the house have been moved, some new plants are in the pots, a slight shift in the lounge room furniture, but only one change that unnerved him. A magnificent oil painting of Fremantle Harbour, on the big wall near the wood stove.
‘I went to an exhibition at the Arts Centre,’ Joyce had said, ‘and I loved it so much I had to buy it. You do like it, don’t you?’
‘I love it,’ he’d said, ‘and we always said we wanted something sensational there. It’s perfect, who’s the artist?’
She’d told him about the artist, showed him the certificate of provenance, and as she talked about the painting, Mac felt a growing tension in his gut. This was so unlike Joyce, to buy a painting, an expensive painting, without conferring with him, without even mentioning it. He loves it, he’s fine about the money, it’s the fear of what this uncharacteristic behaviour might mean that bugs him.
Later, before the family leave, they gather around the computer to Skype Gemma, and have a rambling and hilarious conversation in which everyone talks over each other, and ancient jokes and family anecdotes are unearthed and replayed.
‘You all sound drunk,’ says Gemma, for whom it’s early in the morning. ‘My whole family is plastered, even my nieces. And it’s not even breakfast time yet.’
‘Come home, Gem,’ Ben calls, ‘we miss you.’
She shakes her head, grinning. ‘Next year,’ she says. ‘Next year, I promise.’
It’s almost six o’clock when they have the house to themselves again, and Joyce sinks into her new chair and leans back, closing her eyes.
‘What a great day,’ she says. ‘It’s so lovely to have you back, darling.’
Mac takes a deep breath; the longer he leaves it to tell her about Carol the more difficult it will get.
‘Look, darl,’ he says, sitting down on the squishy old chair by the stove. ‘There’s something I need to tell you,’ and he feels like a naughty child owning up to the headmistress about some misdemeanour.
‘Mmm, okay,’ Joyce says without opening her eyes.
‘Well, remember I told you about Carol?’
‘Yes, she brought Charlie.’
‘Yes, and she and I . . . well, we had a . . .’
‘A hot sweaty night in a tent in Mandurah years ago.’
Mac opens his mouth to speak, closes it. ‘How did you know that?’
‘Oh, someone told me, years ago; that scrawny blonde that your friend Tony used to go out with. She told me quite soon after we got married that you’d had a hot and steamy night – her words - in Mandurah with a girl in your tent. She was always trying to stir up trouble somewhere.’
‘You never said anything.’
‘No, because at the time I chose not to believe it. Then when you told me that you’d met her again I remembered the name. And of course you’ve just confirmed it!’ She opens her eyes and grins at him. ‘It’s an awfully long time ago, don’t worry about it. I think it was that time I had German measles and couldn’t go crabbing.’
‘You weren’t upset at the time?’
She shrugs. ‘As I said, I didn’t believe it, but I did believe in you.’
‘And now?’
Joyce laughs again. ‘It’s history, I still believe in you.’
Mac’s embarrassment seems to be setting fire to his face. ‘It was only once, Joyce. There’s never been anyone else . . .’
She rolls her eyes. ‘Duuh! I never thought there was. Relax.’ Joyce leans her head back again and closes her eyes.
‘Okay, well that’s a relief, but the reason I mentioned her is that, as you know, she brought Charlie around and then . . . well, since then we’ve been seeing a bit of each other.’
Joyce opens her eyes. ‘A bit?’
‘Yes, well, you know, walking, swimming, breakfast, coffee sometimes, lunch a couple of times . . .’ Mac’s newfound relief is beginning to fade.
‘Walking, swimming, breakfast, lunch, anything else?’
‘No,’ he says firmly, ‘absolutely not. She’s nice, you’d like her . . . we talk about a lot of interesting . . . look, there’s nothing in it, Joyce, don’t think that, nothing at all . . .’
Joyce narrows her eyes. ‘How long?’
‘Well . . . well . . . a couple of days after I got Charlie we met at the beach . . . so . . . well, since then.’
There is a brief excruciating silence.
‘You’ve been meeting this woman, several times a week for weeks, no, months, and you never thought to mention it?’
Put like this it sounds appalling and Mac’s face catches fire again. He clears his throat, twists his hands together, sighs.
‘Why?’ Joyce asks. Her tone is low and unusually harsh. Is she angry or wounded or both? Her eyes are dark, unreadable.
Mac is lost for words, words that can make this right, can fix what’s happening. ‘I kept trying to find the right time, you were busy and then you were pissed off and hung up on me . . .’
‘This is not my fault, Mac. I can’t believe you would do this, have this relationship . . .’
‘It’s not a relationship,’ he cuts in. ‘It’s just . . . well it was . . . we started talking about the past and she’s really easy to talk to . . .’
Joyce rolls her eyes. ‘So what else is there that I don’t know, that you haven’t told me? I thought you were supposed to be toughing it out on your own. Solitude, you said, time to think about the future and at the first opportunity you get involved with this woman . . .’
‘We’re not involved,’ Mac says, ‘just . . .’
Joyce gets up, turns, looks at the rocking chair, then back at him. ‘So what’s this Mac? This chair; is it your guilty conscience, a peace offering, just what exactly is it?’
Charlie, lying on the floor between them, lets out a big sigh and drops his head gloomily onto his front paws.
‘I was making the chair before I even met Carol, I promised you years ago that I would. Honestly Joyce we just started talking and I just never found the right moment to . . .’
The phone rings suddenly and Charlie, not yet fully accustomed to the noises of the house, leaps to his feet and starts barking wildly at it.
‘Shut up, Charlie,’ Joyce says. ‘Answer it, for god’s sake, Mac.’
He gets to his feet and picks up the receiver with one hand, patting Charlie to calm him with the other.
‘Mac,’ Dennis says, ‘Mac, I . . .’
‘Dennis, can I call you back? I . . .’
‘No, no. Mac, don’t hang up . . .’ Dennis’s voice is strange, shaky.
Mac feels a prick of fear at the back of his neck. ‘Is something wrong, mate? Where are you?’
‘Home,’ Dennis says. ‘I’m home. I just got home. It’s Helen . . . she’s . . . she’s dead, Mac. Helen’s dead.’
Chapter Twenty
At the end of the first week in October, Polly wakes early, slips out of bed and pads out to the kitchen to make some tea. She loves the early mornings; the silence and stillness in which she does some of her most effective reading, or thinking. Sometimes she walks on the beach or into town for an early coffee, focused on what she’s writing, trying to get inside the heads of the women whose lives she is working on. This morning, though, she is thinking, yet again, of Leo and the fact that he is quite high maintenance, both emotionally in time spent worrying about him and whether he is okay about being here, and practically in all sorts of small ways, she seems to be spending an inordinate amount of time and energy trying to accommodate him and adjust to his presence. She wonders, too, whether he has given any thought at all to what sort of experience this might be for her. She suspects not. She is constantly running up against small challenges to the way she lives her life; challenges so small that it seems petty to mention them. And so she keeps reminding herself that this is new, and special, and that it is unreasonable to expect things to be otherwise.
Eventually, mug of tea in hand, she walks back to the bedroom and pauses by the open door watching him sleep; curled protectively into himself, he lies perfectly still, undisturbed by the fact that she has quit the bed. Indeed, he appears not to notice that she frequently moves out during the night because she seems to have lost the art of sleeping in occupied territory. She turns away from the bedroom and wanders outside to sit on the back steps contemplating the fact that Leo is, in many ways, an intrusive presence. In her thirties or forties much of what Leo does would not have bothered her, just having a lover or partner staying with her, even living with her, had never seemed so disruptive. Perhaps then she was too caught up in the belief that the mere presence of the man in her home, in her bed, meant he loved her and wanted to be with her.
Leo seems to be trying to organising things to suit himself, and she wonders if this is just a male thing. With former lovers she has given ground on far too many small things that mattered to her, has been too ready to concede or compromise in the name of love, and ended up feeling exploited, and resenting it. She wants to believe that she has now moved beyond this, that there are certain things she will concede, but others that are not negotiable. At the same time she knows that she is set in her ways, accustomed to everything being where she wants it, okay with any mess of her own creation, uneasy with anyone else’s. Leo, she suspects, is much the same. He is used to owning his own space, and in the six days he’s been here he’s been making adjustments, some of them not particularly subtle. So this morning Polly is considering the rules of engagement – how to establish them, how to respond to irritations without being petty and nagging – before they become entrenched and lie between them like little bombs waiting to explode.
Stella thinks the long distance factor is eccentric and rather romantic, ‘in theory’, she had added. ‘It sounds ideal, although it might be hard to make it work. But if you both want it badly enough you’ll both do the work. Just make sure you’re not the only one making the adjustments, Polly.’
Leo has considerable intellectual arrogance, a tendency to talk over her, an uncompromising position on some issues on which her own boundaries are more porous, and an infuriating habit of explaining things that she already understands or about which she actually knows more than he does. While it’s easy to write off some of this by ascribing it purely to gender, Polly suspects there are some tough conversations to come. But what she is sure of is that he is a good person who wants to do the right thing but frequently doesn’t hit the spot. She relishes the constant ebb and flow of their conversations, which are wide ranging and robust, threaded with argument, discovery and humour. Except, that is, if Leo ventures into the subject of faith. A belief in any sort of higher power is, according to him, naïve, simple minded, rooted in the superstitions of ignorant peasants. In their early days in Edinburgh she had told him that her faith was important to her, but he has either forgotten, or chosen to ignore it. Polly has vowed to herself not to engage with him on this. She is comfortable with and confident about her own beliefs and feels no need to defend this nor desire to discuss it with someone who simply wants to dismantle it. The air is still and in the cool morning sunlight the only disturbance comes from a flock of parrots in the top branches of the peppermint tree in Joyce and Mac’s garden. Joyce and Mac, she thinks, really are the couple who made the right choice decades ago and have worked to keep it that way. But Helen’s death has hit them hard, Joyce riven with guilt and obsessed with having failed her old friend, Mac shocked, bewildered, fiercely concerned for Joyce. Both seem unsure what to do next, their year of living dangerously is disrupted and they are both committed to supporting Dennis. It’s almost three months now but they are still trying to work out how to pick up the threads of the new sort of life they had been trying to create.
‘I just hope Joyce won’t let herself be derailed by this,’ Stella had said a few weeks ago. ‘She’d begun so well with her course, she was talking about teaching the asylum seekers, or even going away somewhere. Now here she is, back doing what she’s always done, looking after other people.’
Just as she thinks of Stella, Polly hears a rattle at the side-gate and Stella herself sticks her head around it.
‘Is it okay to come in?’ she says in a loud whisper.
‘Of course,’ Polly says, beckoning her.
‘Leo won’t mind?’
‘Leo is still asleep and probably will be for a couple of hours.’
‘So,’ says Stella, settling alongside Polly on the steps and lowering her voice, ‘how’s it all going?’
‘It’s going really well,’ says a voice behind them, and the two women swing around in unison. Leo is standing in the kitchen doorway in jeans and a long sleeved black t-shirt, rubbing his chin. ‘Are you checking up on me, Stella?’
‘Of course I am,’ she says, laughing. ‘Polly is like a daughter to me, which means I’m sort of your de facto mother-in-law. I’m looking after her interests.’
‘I thought that was my responsibility,’ Leo says with an edge to his voice.
‘I am perfectly capable of looking after my own interests, thank you,’ Polly says, ‘so you two can stop sizing each other up for fisticuffs over my supervision.’
They had both generated hostility since the moment they met at dinner at Mac and Joyce’s place the night after Leo arrived.
‘Everyone will be checking you out, of course,’ she’d warned him.
‘I’m sure I can handle it,’ Leo had said.
But although the evening had passed without incident, it was awkward at times, and Leo seemed ill at ease. Jet-lag, she’d thought, he’ll soon adjust.
‘You’re up very early,’ Polly says now.
‘Mmm. Thought I’d join you for a walk, Polly. What’s the tea situation?’
‘Um . . . well, the kettle is recently boiled and the tea bags are in the canister,’ Polly says, smiling and holding her mug up to him. ‘And yes, thanks, I’ll have another one.’
Leo looks slightly affronted and then seems to decide not to be. Had he really expected her to jump to her feet just because he’d chosen to join them?
He took her mug. ‘Stella, tea?’
‘No thanks, Leo,’ she says, getting to her feet. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’
‘You only just got here,’ Polly says.
‘Yes, I needed your advice on something,’ Stella says, grasping the handrail and descending the two remaining steps. ‘But we can do that another time. Should be beautiful at the beach this morning.’ And she sets off down the garden and turns at the gate to wave. ‘Have a lovely day.’
‘Stella doesn’t like me,’ Leo says when he returns with the tea. ‘I can tell.’
‘It’s not that I don’t like her, it’s just . . . well, perhaps I haven’t quite got her measure yet.’
Polly suppresses a grin. ‘She’s eighty, Leo, and she doesn’t give a toss how smart or important you are, just whether or not you’re going to be good for me. She’s my oldest, dearest friend and yes, she is like a mother to me, but she’s not my mother. That’s Stella, so just get over it.’
The silence is freighted now with mutual resentment.
Leo clears his throat. ‘It’s pretty early in the morning to turn up on the doorstep.’
‘In your world maybe, but not in mine,’ Polly says, ‘and right now, Leo, you’re in my world. Live with it for a while before you start trying to adjust it to your own liking.’
‘I didn’t like finding her here so early.’
‘And she didn’t like you walking into our conversation. Look, I usually see Stella almost every day, but she has stayed away since you arrived, until this morning. So – as I said, get over it.’
Leo is silent. They sit sipping their tea.
He shrugs. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘It all feels strange, different here, from Edinburgh or Hong Kong.’
Polly sighs. ‘Of course it does, we barely knew each other in Edinburgh, the circumstances were entirely different. No expectations. In Hong Kong I was in your space, your room, it felt weird for me to move into that so I know this must seem strange to you. But Stella is family to me, she, Alistair and Steve are my family, Joyce and Mac too.’
‘I liked them.’
‘Good, I hope you’ll like Alistair and Steve too. Sometime when you’re here we’ll go over to Bali together.’ The tension has evaporated now, it feels like a natural, useful conversation.
He hesitates. ‘Maybe,’ he says. ‘I’ve never been to Bali.’
‘Look,’ Polly says, ‘we’re teething. We both like our own way; we both like not having to consult anyone else about what we do. But if we’re going to stick with this we’re both going to have to adjust. You’ll get used to Stella and she to you. Just as I’ll have to get used to your family.’