The Woman Next Door

by Liz Byrski

  Joyce steps up beside her. ‘Now you can add the beans,’ she says, automatically.

  ‘No, no, you put them, because you are make the dish.’

  Joyce puts her hand on Marla’s arm. ‘I’m correcting your sentence, not discussing who is doing the cooking,’ she says.

  ‘Okay, but when we cook we must cook, this be done quickly. Then you correct sentence, now you put the beans.’

  Joyce adds the beans to the pan and starts to stir. ‘You’re a tough teacher,’ she says.

  ‘Just like you I am,’ Marla says with a smile, and proceeds to lead her through the next steps of the recipe.

  Joyce watches and listens, paying more attention to Marla than to the recipe. Her broad but somewhat shonky command of English works remarkably well and she has no fear of making mistakes. This woman, Joyce thinks, has the most indomitable spirit she has ever encountered. In the last few years murders and drownings have seared through the family’s long struggle to survive and reach a place of safety, and yet she keeps going. Marla is stoic; invaluable in the class, supporting the other women, encouraging them in their language learning, and chivvying them to venture out of the confines of their temporary accommodation and try new things. She and Joyce have become friends, and although Marla is almost ten years younger than her Joyce feels her presence as a wise, older woman, the same sort of presence that Stella has been in her life. Perhaps that’s a sign of my own ageing, she thinks, still stirring the beans. Perhaps as we get older it’s younger women who start to play that role.

  In recent weeks the students have progressed rapidly and the rapport in the group is a delight. Joyce knows she has done a good job but that without Marla’s contribution they would not have made it this far. Last week the two of them managed to persuade several of the shyest members, whose meagre wardrobes were wearing thin, to risk a visit to some of the Fremantle op shops. They had spent a morning cautiously fingering fabric, choosing things and using their new language with the shop volunteers. Joyce had been moved by their obvious pride in what they’d learned, and their pleasure at finding bargains. She’d remembered the stack of boxes of Helen’s clothes, currently stored in their garage, and the two huge trunks of clothes, costumes and fabrics that they had discovered when they cleared Stella’s studio.

  ‘Of course you can have them,’ Dennis had said when asked about Helen’s clothes. ‘I just didn’t want them to be thrown away, but I can’t think of a better use for them. Helen would approve!’

  Joyce thinks that when Polly gets back she’ll talk to her about Stella’s trunks. Maybe they can do another tour of the op shops and find a couple of sewing machines. If only Stella could be on hand with her skills at reshaping and repurposing striking combinations.

  Now, as Marla orders her to add spices to the pan, she realises how much she’s enjoying all this, how important it is to have something new and growing in her life: work, new ideas, new friends alongside the old.

  ‘People was going in that house next door?’ Marla says as Joyce tosses in the last pinch of spice.

  ‘Really? I missed that. What sort of people?’

  ‘I see only the big van, this morning. Some furnitures on the pavement.’

  ‘Well it’s about time,’ Joyce says. ‘First the sign went up, then it was taken down again and nothing happened. It’s been empty for more than a year now.’ The aroma of the spices stings her eyes and she pats them with a tea towel, just as her iPad starts to beep.

  ‘It’s Gemma,’ Joyce says, ‘she said she’d call today.’ And she hands the wooden spoon to Marla, wipes her hands on a tea towel and clicks on the icon.

  ‘Hi, Mum,’ Gemma says, ‘what are you up to?’

  ‘I’m cooking with Marla.’ She beckons Marla over so she can introduce her. And the three of them talk briefly before Marla returns to the cooking.

  ‘Is everything still going well, Gem?’ Joyce asks now. ‘You and the baby, you’re both all right?’

  ‘We’re both fine, Mum,’ Gemma says, ‘terrific. I’ve just been for a final check-up . . . I had to get a certificate from the doctor in order to fly.’

  ‘Fly?’ Joyce feels her heart jump into her mouth. ‘Why are you flying, you’re pregnant, do you have to . . .?’

  ‘I’m fine to fly, Mum, and so is the baby. And I’m coming home.’

  ‘Home? What, here?’

  ‘Well that is my home,’ Gemma laughs.

  ‘But you said after the baby was born . . .’

  ‘But I changed my mind, I want the baby to be born at home. I’ll be back in Perth next Wednesday. So do you think you’ll be able to find a space for me and your new grandchild in your busy new life?’

  *

  Mac draws back his arm and hurls the ball, sending it far and fast above the waterline to drop into the shallows where Charlie, thrilled by the chase, plunges to retrieve it. He stands there watching, massaging his bowling shoulder with his left hand; it’s been giving him a bit of trouble recently, old age probably, and he’s decided against trying to finish the painting this visit. Maybe Dennis will come down and help him with it sometime in winter. They can spend a few more days here together, breaking open a few cans, watching the footy, putting the world to rights. Dennis is doing fine, Mac reckons; he has his own place now and spends a lot of time at the wheelchair workshop. He also has a friend – just a friend, he has been at pains to assure them – who lives nearby. They go dancing twice a week. Helen, he’d reminded Mac, never wanted to go dancing but he’d won some ballroom dancing awards in his youth. Margaret, he says, has also lost her husband of thirty-six years within the last twelve months in similarly sudden and dramatic circumstances and this, above all else, has drawn them together.

  The summer has raced away from Mac; they never managed the planned break down here with Ben and Vanessa. Joyce’s work has taken more time than he had imagined, and now he too has been drawn into the support group in a small way, moving their meagre possessions into often grim accommodation, where his skill with a drill, a sander, a few planks of wood and some nails is appreciated. Sometimes he drives people to medical appointments or interviews, helps them to deal with the required form filling. He is humbled by their stoicism and determination.

  It is just over a year since he and Joyce began their year of living dangerously, and none of it has been as he had predicted. He can admit now that he has become an old man, doing the things old men do in an old man’s way – more slowly, more carefully, and often more thoughtfully than sometimes in the past. Savouring time, making hours and days matter. Even his grandchildren are old now; they have cars and boyfriends and live in shared houses with people he’s never met. A few years ago he had feared all this, closed his eyes to reality, trying to hold off this stage of life. He had worked on beyond retirement age, believed he would want to go on doing that forever. But now he takes pleasure in other things, savouring this last gift of time, which he had once struggled to hold at bay.

  Charlie bounds up to him, soaking Mac’s legs with salty spray, smiling his joyful doggy smile as he drops the ball at his feet. ‘Okay okay,’ Mac says, bending to pick up the ball just as his phone begins to ring. ‘Let me take this call first.’

  ‘Mac, I need you to come home,’ Joyce says. Her voice is strangely high-pitched and anxiety prickles through his veins.

  ‘Why, what’s happened? Are you okay?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Joyce says. ‘Totally fine, wonderful in fact. It’s Gemma; she’s coming home! She’ll be here on Wednesday; she’s going to have the baby here. And she’s coming home to stay.’

  Charlie barks impatiently, nudging the hand holding the ball with his hard, wet nose. Mac reaches up and throws it far enough for Charlie’s temporary satisfaction. His daughter is coming home. His heart soars and he longs to hug Joyce, to jump up and down with excitement like a kid.

  ‘But is that okay though?’ he
asks, suddenly anxious as he pictures Gemma squeezing into an airline seat. ‘I mean, she’s not got long to go, is it safe for her to fly?’

  ‘Apparently it is, she’s just within the restriction if she comes now,’ Joyce says. ‘The doctor has signed her off, she and the baby are fit as fiddles. We need to organise her old room, Mac, maybe we have time to paint it? Get some baby things and . . .’

  ‘I’ll be on my way in a couple of hours,’ he says. ‘And I’ll call Dennis, we’re a great painting team.’

  And he stuffs his phone into his pocket, whistles to Charlie, and strides rapidly across the beach. Being old is fine, he thinks, and it will be even better because he will have real time to spend with this new grandchild, time he missed with the others as he struggled to hold the future at bay. Charlie jumps up onto his old rug on the front seat.

  ‘Good man,’ Mac says as he starts the engine. Charlie is smiling again, panting, eager as ever for a ride in the car.

  ‘We’re going home, mate,’ Mac tells him. ‘We’re going home and we’re having a baby.’

  Chapter Thirty-four

  April

  Polly settles into her seat on the Eurostar to London with a cup of coffee. She’s earlier than planned but their two week stay in Paris together had already been disrupted when, at the start of the second week, Leo checked his email only to discover an invitation to launch an exhibition of photojournalism in Brighton.

  ‘It’s a bit last minute-ish, isn’t it?’ Polly had asked. ‘If it’s such an important collection why didn’t they organise the launch earlier?’

  ‘Apparently they did,’ Leo had said, ‘but I seem to have overlooked the invitation.’

  Polly had turned away to hide her smile. The thought of Leo, currently desperate for relevance, overlooking such an opportunity was inconceivable. Besides which, the way he’d delivered this information – his eyes drifting from hers, the tension in his voice – was less than convincing. Doubtless someone had dropped out and they were grabbing Leo at the last minute, and as she thinks of it now Polly hates herself for not calling him out. But since the big argument following the visit to the Louvre, things had been going really well and she had not wanted to rock the boat. Leo, having apologised, seemed warmer, more relaxed. The weather improved, and so did he, to the extent that Polly felt he was at his best, just as he had been when they first met.

  ‘Well of course you must go,’ she’d said. ‘You’re the obvious person to do it.’

  Two decades earlier he had published a small but influential book called Eyes on the World, on the power of photojournalism and its impact on understandings of twentieth-century history. She had now read all four of his books and many of his long form essays and op eds; Eyes on the World was, she thought, outstandingly original and undoubtedly his best work.

  ‘I’ll come back with you,’ she suggested. ‘We can go to Brighton together, then to London as we planned. Then I can stop off here and spend a few days in the archives on my way home.’

  He’d seemed startled, as though her suggestion had somehow wrong-footed him; he had mumbled about schedules and complications.

  ‘No, no, you should do it now,’ he’d said, ‘no need for you to change everything too. I’ll go and do this and meet you back in London.’

  And so he left early and Polly had sailed through her work in rather less time than she expected. She had called him to let him know she’d be arriving on Tuesday instead of Friday, and left a message when he didn’t answer. She’d left the same message again yesterday.

  ‘No need to call back, I’ll see you tomorrow,’ she’d said, and she added the time of her arrival at St Pancras, hoping he’d be there to meet her.

  Now, as the train speeds north through the suburbs of Paris towards the coast, she rests her head on the seat back and closes her eyes, remembering how badly their time there had started, and how dramatically it had improved. He had been, once again, the Leo of the hotel and the emails, attentive, more affectionate, he had held her hand, from time to time spontaneously put his arm around her. And although they had not made love he seemed comfortable in bed, curling towards her, holding her. There were a couple of occasions when he’d seemed detached, dismissive, but they had soon passed, and she’d begun to wonder whether his life, which seems so devoid of anything except work and professional self-promotion, has simply led him to forget how to behave, how to manage more personal relations, how to live with intimacy or express affection. Perhaps she just needs to hold him to account more often, help him to learn to rebuild a part of himself that he has neglected. Hey ho! Stella whispers into her consciousness – trying to fix a man again, Polly?

  Her phone rings, jerking her out of contemplation, and she rummages for it in her bag.

  ‘Where are you now?’ Alistair asks, his voice as clear as if he were in the seat alongside her. And her first thought is that she should have asked Leo to meet her in Bali, or taken him there last year, because Alistair is the one person who could understand Leo, translate him for her, help her to learn his language.

  ‘On the Eurostar,’ she says, ‘about an hour into the journey.’

  ‘And how was Paris?’

  She hesitates.

  ‘Uh-oh, what’s happened?’

  ‘It’s not really a question of what happened,’ she says. ‘Lots of it, most of it, was really lovely. But we did have a big row early on when I spat the dummy.’

  ‘Good, I suspect more of that is what’s needed. Everything you’ve told me about him makes him sound like a man who always gets his own way. You have to stand up to him, Poll. Don’t keep letting him get away with stuff because you think he’s having a hard time getting old. Most of us do, especially men. But you’re not his mother and it’s not your job to try and fix things or find solutions for him. I’ve seen you do this before. Tough love, remember? Be tough.’

  When Alistair hangs up Polly looks down at her phone again, at the list of times she has tried to call without success. Could he have gone away? To see his sister perhaps, and fallen into that weird state that sent him into silence over Christmas? Or maybe Judith is sick, or there’s some other sort of crisis. Of course, that’s what it is. It’s a relief to have a reason for this silence. But Polly wonders about Judith. What sort of person exerts such a powerful and apparently negative impact on her brother? She thinks of the photograph of the house that she and Steve had studied on Google Earth, imagines Judith in her wheelchair, helpless but demanding, and Rosemary, the old school friend, short of funds and thankful for a live-in job as carer. Eventually, quite soon in fact, these two women will become a part of her own life; she’s determined to get Leo to take her there before she leaves. His descriptions of Judith and Rosemary are somewhat off-putting and she pictures them as older – quite a bit older than her; two of those rather haughty, horsey, elderly women with head scarves and raincoats who occupy the villages in Midsomer Murders and hold sway over book clubs, annual fetes and planning applications, terrorising lesser mortals.

  It’s mid-afternoon when she arrives to find that Leo is not waiting for her at St Pancras. Once again she calls his flat without success, and she contemplates turning up at the door, but what’s the point? Tough love, Alistair had said. She needs to be less accommodating, stronger, more demanding, like she was after the Louvre. She wonders now whether she comes across as pathetic or needy. If she does then perhaps he tries to distance himself from her when she’s like that. But Stella is in her head again. This is not you, it’s him, this is who he is, get used to it or get out. But for Polly it’s not as easy as that. Leo is a complex person, she tells herself, and she does know who he is: he is the man in the hotel, taking the soldier’s other arm, strong, compassionate, a person of integrity. And I love him, she tells herself, and love is often hard work but worth it.

  Polly hails a cab and tells the driver that she wants to find a hotel in or near Sussex Gardens. In t
he great tradition of the London cabbie he is a mine of information, and they make their way through the traffic to the one he recommends and she is soon ensconced in a spotlessly clean, comfortably furnished, second floor room with a bay window from which she can see down the street to the corner on which Leo lives. This arrangement makes her feel stronger, in control of the situation, in control of herself, and she takes a shower and then flops down on the bed and sleeps for a couple of hours, before trying Leo’s number again, but there is still no response.

  For a full fifteen minutes she sits on the side of her bed contemplating her next move. She would like to be able to step back from this, to treat it as though it doesn’t matter, but it increasingly does matter, very much. This is not reasonable behaviour; they are lovers, partners, they are planning a future. Tough love. She takes a deep breath, picks up her mobile, and dials the number that Steve had found for the house in Fowey.

  Almost immediately a woman answers by announcing the number – an old-fashioned habit now. She has a slight South African accent almost identical to Leo’s and the sound of her voice seems to suck Polly’s breath away.

  ‘Oh, hello,’ she says. ‘Could I speak to Leo Croft please?’

  ‘He’s not here, I’m afraid,’ the woman says. ‘Who’s speaking please?’

  ‘Polly,’ she says, ‘Polly Griffin. I think Leo’s told you about me, about us . . .’

  The silence is freighted suddenly with tension.

  ‘He doesn’t live here, you know,’ the woman says, eventually. ‘In fact we don’t see much of him at all.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ Polly says, playing for time. ‘Well you see I arranged to meet him in London, but he’s not answering his phone. Do you know where I might get hold of him?’

  ‘If he’s not at his own place then I’ve no idea. He doesn’t usually bother to tell us what he’s up to.’

  ‘I see . . . am I speaking to his sister?’