by Liz Byrski
‘Wonderful,’ Bonnie said, not turning around, concentrating on pouring tea. ‘It was great to see them again, hard to believe it’s been so long. I thought it might be awkward at first but after the first glass of wine we were well away, just like old times.’
Irene nodded, reaching out for the cup Bonnie handed her. ‘Good, that’s splendid. You must have enjoyed it, you’ve been gone for ages.’
‘Yes, I’m sorry, but after lunch we went to the kiosk,’ Bonnie said, sitting across from her mother. ‘You know, the grotty little place at the boatshed we used to go to for hot chips when we were kids. It hasn’t changed much. Now that the boatshed’s not used any longer I don’t suppose it’ll be able to keep going. But we had a lovely walk along the beach. Sorry I was gone so long. Were you all right?’
Irene gave herself a mental kick for referring to the length of Bonnie’s absence. ‘I was fine, Bonnie dear,’ she said, reaching across the table to pat her daughter’s hand. ‘Absolutely fine. You must stop fussing about me. I’m used to living alone and not seeing people for ages.’
Bonnie looked down into her tea and nodded. ‘Of course; yes, of course. Well, I thought I’d make us some pasta for tonight …’
‘No need,’ Irene said. ‘I’ve made some leek and potato soup, I was just out in the garden getting some parsley to pop in it. I’m in charge tonight, Bonnie. Go and put your feet up and watch the news.’
TWO
Bonnie lay in bed watching the patterns on the ceiling. There was a full moon and the night breeze sent clusters of cloud scudding across its face, shifting in shadowy shapes above her. So, she had done it, actually reached out and done it, arranged the lunch, turned up, behaved as though she was a normal person. She had hugged, talked, laughed, eaten three courses, drunk too much wine, and now it was over. All three of them had been nervous at first, feeling their way, but by the time dessert was served it felt almost as though they had picked up where they left off. But it hadn’t solved anything and she had been foolish to think that it could.
Bonnie had felt a flash of shock as Sylvia got up from the table to greet her. She looked so much the same and yet so different. The once dark hair, now silver grey, was loosely caught on top of her head, a few escaping strands softening the line of her face and neck. She was always slim but that now seemed like lean strength, and while her face was lined, it simply added to her beauty. Elegance was in her DNA and Bonnie, who felt she always had to struggle to achieve it, felt a familiar flash of envy.
Sylvia looked her age, perhaps a little less, but the most striking thing about her was her self-assurance. Sylvia measured her words while still sounding spontaneous. Even after they had knocked back a couple of bottles of wine, and walked along the beach in the late afternoon breeze, Sylvia had remained serene. She had told them about a row with Colin that morning and how she had smashed a precious ornament, but she seemed to tell it with detachment, as though talking about someone else. Obviously she found much of what was expected of a minister’s wife tedious. Even so, she was clearly in remarkable control of her life. Bonnie was impressed.
And then there was Fran, who had sailed out of the ladies’ room and into the restaurant a few minutes later. She was still big of course, but that was Fran, it was impossible to imagine her any other way. Bonnie had thought she looked remarkably youthful; her fair complexion was fresh and glowing, and those striking hazel eyes and her smile drew attention to her face and away from her body. Bonnie had almost forgotten Fran’s curiosity and the way she would draw together the most unlikely fragments and make interesting connections. Being a person who tended to think in straight lines, she envied Fran’s ability to crisscross, to duck and weave, with ideas and language.
Bonnie stretched her arms above her head feeling, as she had so often felt as a teenager, that intellectually both Fran and Sylvia left her standing. She closed her eyes against the shifting moonlight wondering what they were thinking. They were both so clever, so competent, so complete. There had been a brief period in Bonnie and Jeff’s marriage when they had weathered a terrible crisis and, as they clung together in their grief, their relationship had become the most important thing in Bonnie’s life. Jeff had urged her so often to find something of her own, but she had always resisted.
‘Suppose anything happened to me, Bon,’ he’d say. ‘What would you do? You need something for yourself. It’s not as though we’re hard up, after all; you could do more or less whatever you want. A little business, perhaps? Some charity work? Learn the piano? Travel, anything.’
‘But I’m happy as I am,’ she’d reply. ‘I like doing odd bits of work for you, running the house, and entertaining, playing tennis, going to the book group.’
But to please him she had made an effort to learn French, and then some German. She’d been proud of her efforts, but they weren’t much use to her now. Languages, entertaining, tennis and reading did nothing to fill the gap Jeff had left. His death had robbed her of part of herself, leaving a terrible emptiness and the sense that she, Bonnie Logan, was not a woman at all, but just an empty shell.
Fran sat on the sofa in the dark, wearing her pyjamas, watching the late movie and eating her way through a packet of Custard Creams. She had told herself she would just have two and then stop, and when she’d said it she had, fleetingly, believed it, the same way she believed that each one she ate would be the last; but at the same time she knew that the whole packet was destined for consumption and that this would be followed by a stodgy and painful period of self-disgust and massive guilt. Fran often felt she was like a madwoman in her desperation to find something sweet to eat. She had been known to get the car out and go down to the petrol station at midnight to buy a Mars Bar, a Twix or a Fry’s Turkish Delight, or all three, or possibly two of each. It wasn’t even as though she particularly liked Custard Creams, she had bought these in preference to Tim Tams or Kingstons on the basis that she was less likely to binge on them. It was a plan with a long history of failure and always, when she was left facing the empty packet, she wished that she had, after all, bought the biscuits she really loved. It wasn’t even as though she was hungry. Lunch had been adequate and really delicious, and after coffee at the kiosk they’d bought large chocolate ice creams and scoffed them as they walked. She hadn’t needed a meal but, as always, once she had eaten anything sweet the craving for more simply grew and grew until she succumbed, and then she ended up hating herself and vowing never to do it again.
Fran tried to visualise Sylvia munching her way through a packet of biscuits, but it was impossible to imagine her doing anything so undignified. What a stunning woman Sylvia had become, and she didn’t even seem to realise it. She looked like a skin care advertisement for mature women. Fran thought she had rarely seen a woman who seemed so composed, so at peace with her life, so centred. Was it something to do with God? She didn’t seem all that keen on the churchy stuff but maybe she’d found some sort of relationship with God, like the nuns at St Theresa’s.
Fran had wanted to interrogate her about it but managed to restrain her unfortunate habit of informally interviewing interesting people. It had got her into trouble in the past. Although she appeared confident and outgoing she was actually shy and self-conscious, and dealt with it on social occasions by pinning people against the wall and interviewing them until they began to make desperate eye signals at their friends to rescue them. Well, she’d restrained herself on this occasion, but her desire to discover Sylvia’s secret and bottle it was still there. Now they were in touch again, Fran certainly wasn’t going to let her go.
Bonnie was something else. Smart – who wouldn’t be with that sort of money to spend? Not beautiful but handsome and, Fran thought, close to the emotional edge; a stitched-up woman starting to come apart at the seams. She’d talked a lot about Jeff, which was understandable given he hadn’t been gone long, but her sudden decision to sell everything in Switzerland and run back to Melbourne seemed a bit odd. Fran sampled a corner of the last Cust
ard Cream and considered the fact that if you had lived more than thirty years in a place, surely it must seem like home. Bonnie must have had friends in Zurich but here she was living with her mother in the old family home.
Fran took a deep breath and offered a fleeting arrow prayer of thanks to the developers who had established the retirement centre where her own mother was happily installed in her one-bedroom unit. Lila was fit and lively but her memory was increasingly unreliable, and a broken ankle the previous year had confined her to the house and dented her confidence. Finding the unit had eliminated one of Fran’s worst recurring dreams: having to look after her mother while still working and trying to pay off her mortgage and save for her own old age. She crumpled the empty biscuit packet. There was no way now that she would be able to sleep having scoffed all that sugar.
Charade was almost finished; Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn were gazing into each other’s eyes outside the American Embassy in Paris. The plot had seemed really thin and Audrey Hepburn’s character irritatingly dippy. Fran’s eyes filled with tears as Cary took Audrey in his arms. She was never going to be sinking into some hero’s arms again, that was for sure – that part of her life was definitely over. There had been a couple of robust sexual encounters about ten years ago but other than that there had been no one since she and Tony split up seventeen years earlier. No self-respecting man fell in love with a whale, and she had proved herself incapable of losing weight, only of getting fatter. Besides, the older she got the more she felt men were a strange species with whom she had little in common. Having a relationship with one seemed incredibly complicated and overrated. Being with Bonnie and Sylvia had been both wonderful and agonising, more agonising than in the past, for much as she loved them – and she realised, with surprise, that it was love that she still felt for these sisters of her childhood – she was always going to be the fat, breathless one who could never match their style and sophistication. In her youth there had been the hope of change, the prospect that it might really just be puppy fat that she would grow out of, that one day a fully fledged greyhound might suddenly emerge from this puppy: slim, graceful and elegant. That was clearly not going to happen, and Fran wondered just how she could balance her desire to reconnect fully with her friends with this haunting sense of failure.
Sylvia sat alone in the small bedroom she had converted to a sewing room. On the table sections of a skirt pattern lay pinned to a length of fine, silver grey wool. She had intended to cut it out this evening but instead she sat there in the half-light, in the old armchair she had rescued from a second-hand shop, too distracted even to consider the skirt. By the time she’d got home to Box Hill, Colin had already returned from the Deanery lunch and gone out again to a meeting. She was thankful to have the house to herself, not to have to talk about what had happened, not to have to prepare a meal.
Heading straight up the stairs to the sewing room she had glanced through the open door of his study. The broken pieces of the Lladro were spread out on a sheet of newspaper, a new tube of glue on sentry duty beside them. Sylvia stared at them for a while before going on up the stairs, wondering what Colin had thought he was doing when he collected up the pieces. Was he simply mending something she had broken in what he probably saw as a burst of irrational anger? Sylvia thought about the shepherdess’s partner, the lonely shepherd still whole on the dressing table. Did Colin realise that the shepherdess was simply a sign of more profound and irreparable damage?
Sylvia leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. She had almost told Bonnie and Fran when they were down on the beach, walking along the waterline as they had done so often as teenagers. Well, of course she had told them about the incident that morning, but what she hadn’t told them was the context. She hadn’t used any of the words – like boredom, resentment, disappointment, frustration, hurt, emptiness – that really described how she felt. Oh, and she’d forgotten one – anger – but then, convent girls always knew that anger was an unmentionable emotion, because nice women got hurt instead of getting angry. How deeply ran the rivers of the past. Over the years Sylvia had developed a patina of serenity and composure, had perfected myriad little ways of making it all look right. Today, of course, she had sanitised the Lladro incident in the telling, used a whimsical tone, and made it sound like a commonplace marital tiff. Had Fran and Bonnie sensed the turbulence raging beneath her calm exterior?
Alone in the softly lit room that she had made so essentially hers, Sylvia flushed with embarrassment recalling her own well-concealed response to Bonnie’s newly widowed state. There was the restless envy of her sudden and complete freedom and independence and, alongside it, fierce jealousy of a marriage that had so completely fulfilled Bonnie’s dreams and desires; the love that lasted through time, that changed and grew and matured, becoming richer with each passing year. Trapped as she was in the grief of losing Jeff, the possibilities of her situation were lost on Bonnie: freedom and independence only meant loss. Clearly she had built her life around Jeff and everything else had been incidental to that, and while Sylvia was uncomfortably aware that she too had allowed her marriage to dictate her life, she thought her own situation was a far more complex mix of responsibility and duty than Bonnie’s, which had been fuelled by love.
‘I know I’ve been incredibly lucky,’ Bonnie had said, sipping her second glass of wine. ‘I was twenty-four when I met Jeff, and that was that. I had a perfect husband, a perfect life. Now he’s dead and it’s as though everything’s died with him.’
‘Well, at least you’re not hard up, Bon,’ Fran had cut in. ‘Imagine if you had to struggle financially. That would make it a whole lot worse.’
‘I don’t know, really,’ Bonnie had said with that vague, rather unworldly look she got sometimes. ‘Something to worry about might take my mind off what’s happened.’
‘Take it from me,’ Fran had said in a surprisingly crisp tone, manoeuvring her fish off the bone. ‘It’s better as it is; everything is easier if you don’t have to worry about where the next mortgage payment is coming from.’
Sylvia bit her lip trying to stop the tears. Bonnie may have shelved her accountancy career but she had made a success of her marriage; she, on the other hand, had failed to live up to any expectations, her own included. How willingly she had turned down the coveted design apprenticeship in the fashion house and taken a job behind the counter in David Jones, selling what she had once hoped to create. The job had supported them in minimal comfort while Colin finished his PhD. And, having given up her career, she had also turned her back on her Roman Catholic upbringing to marry this ambitious embryonic Anglican priest. At the time love was all that mattered, and love inevitably seemed to involve sacrifices for Colin’s ambitions. So she had devoted herself to supporting his work and being the perfect clergy wife, and later the perfect mother.
Colin was a good clergyman, and he tried to be a good husband and father, so long as it didn’t interfere with his commitment to God and to the church. For a time Sylvia had found his dependence endearing but eventually it had turned around to bite her. She felt she had no one to blame but herself. She had allowed herself to be subsumed by the man and his job, and now she resented her captivity and yearned for escape, for freedom – something so simple but so utterly impossible.
Sylvia thought about Fran leaving Tony, seventeen years earlier.
‘Boring, boring, boring,’ she’d said, ‘and he never got beyond expecting me to accept his views, his priorities, his way of doing things. I just couldn’t hack it any longer.’
Now Tony lived with a small and beautiful biologist from Japan, who lectured at the university where he was a history professor. Fran had been single ever since; and however hard she might be struggling financially Sylvia envied her chaotic life of interviews, recipe and menu planning, of knocking up beautiful dishes in demonstration kitchens, and standing by to spray them with mists of oil or water to keep them glossy while the photographers changed their lenses and experimented with angles.
Of all of them, Sylvia thought, Fran was a woman of the times, strong, independent, outspoken and confident. The weight that worried her so much seemed unimportant – she needed a big body to accommodate that big, warm, vibrant personality. Beside her Sylvia felt like a ghost, a wraith inhabiting a sham of a life in which she no longer believed.
She had come so close to confiding in them – it would have been such a relief to talk about it – but it was too soon, this first meeting after so many years apart. Her mother had died twenty years earlier and the only other women she knew well were so involved with Colin and the church that such confidences would create conflicting loyalties, and Sylvia would be the villain of the piece. Bonnie and Fran were different, they were hers alone; they seemed to offer change, new possibilities. But despite the pleasure of restoring their precious friendship, Sylvia was not at all sure that she would ever be able to muster the energy or resources to change anything.
THREE
‘So how soon will it start to show?’ Caro asked, flinging herself on the couch. ‘How long before people look at me and think, that woman’s having a baby?’
Fran, struggling with her tax return, looked up from the stack of receipts and bank slips. She shrugged, trying to remember. ‘Four to five months, I think, certainly by five. But you’ll feel it on your waistband before that.’
‘I think I can already,’ Caro said, staring down at her stomach. ‘I wish it would hurry up. I don’t think I can bear to wait, I want it now.’
‘Everyone feels like that once they know,’ Fran said. ‘And the last three months are the worst. Every day seems like an eternity.’
‘I haven’t had any morning sickness, and twelve weeks is up so probably I won’t,’ Caro said.
‘Lucky you.’
‘Did you, Mum?’
‘I threw up regularly every morning until sixteen weeks with David, and on and off all day for almost nine months with you.’