Food, Sex & Money

by Liz Byrski

  ‘So you see,’ Fran said, ‘it’s an excellent plan in every respect.’

  Bonnie nodded. ‘It is if you’re sure that’s what you want.’

  ‘I’m sure. The idea of getting rid of that home loan, and having a smaller place, somewhere that’s entirely my own, no debts, a new start, it’s exciting.’

  ‘Yes,’ Bonnie said thoughtfully, ‘yes, I can see that. Well, that’s good. But have you done the sums? Worked it out carefully? You need to get a valuation on the house and work out what the sale and purchase costs will be, and then see if you could get something you’re happy to live in with what you’ve got left.’

  ‘Oh yes, I know that. What d’you think those costs would come to?’

  ‘Look, I’m out of touch but there was a real estate talkback program on the radio the other day, and I think they were saying that people should allow up to thirty thousand dollars to cover the costs of buying and selling. You know, agents’ fees, stamp duty, removals.’

  ‘Thirty thousand?’ Fran flinched. ‘I’ve lived in one place so long I’d no idea. But still, it’s a big house and a big block. Richmond’s becoming quite trendy. I think I’d have enough left for somewhere decent. Of course, this all hangs on you still being prepared to lend me the money for the tax bill, despite the fact that I refused it the other day.’

  ‘It’s done,’ Bonnie said, ‘don’t give it another thought, and I’m sorry for being so tactless.’ She paused, a big grin spreading across her face. ‘I’ve still got the weekend papers – shall we have a look in the real estate section?’

  They spread the papers across the dining room table searching the real estate listings to get an idea of what Fran might ask for her place, and then for what she could afford.

  ‘The boatshed is up for sale,’ Bonnie said, pointing to a large display ad at the foot of the page. ‘I was there this morning. Even the kiosk is closing.’

  ‘Remember how romantic we thought it was,’ Fran said, running her finger down the list of townhouses and apartments in St Kilda. ‘I dreamed of marrying someone with one of those big yachts. Wouldn’t give you a thank you for it now, the bloke or the yacht, rather be on solid ground.’

  ‘And single?’ Bonnie asked as the phone rang.

  ‘And definitely single.’

  Bonnie took off her glasses and padded in her socks to the kitchen to answer the phone. Fran read on, her spirits lifting every minute. Property prices in Richmond had rocketed; it looked as though she could ask quite a bit more than she’d thought and even with the associated costs she could still get somewhere nice and have money left over.

  ‘Fran!’

  She jumped and swung round to see Bonnie in the doorway, pulling on her shoes. ‘Get your coat,’ she said. ‘It’s Sylvia, she’s leaving Colin. We’re going to pick her up.’

  NINE

  Sylvia sat by the window on the staircase from where she would be able to see Bonnie’s car coming up the street. She felt as though she had been carved in stone, rigid, incapable of moving and cold, very cold. The house wasn’t warm at the best of times but this feeling was nothing to do with the temperature. For about the millionth time she wondered how she felt, why she wasn’t crying or shouting, slamming doors and breaking more porcelain. Maybe it was simply that the undercurrent of relief was dominant now.

  Colin’s infidelity had legitimated her longing to walk away from her marriage and that almost outweighed the humiliation of knowing it was the talk of the church community. For several days after her conversation with Veronica she hadn’t found the words or the energy to kick-start the action and she had wondered why Colin seemed not to notice her tension, or the fact that she was barely being civil to him.

  On the Thursday evening she was sitting in her sewing room, contemplating what this said, not only about his lack of sensitivity, but about their entire relationship over the decades, when Colin, just returned from officiating at a funeral, popped his head around the door.

  ‘Just wondering about dinner?’ he said, and she desperately wanted to punch the pleasant but tentative smile off his face.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, getting up. ‘It only needs reheating.’ And she passed him in the doorway, taking care to ensure that no part of her body touched any part of his.

  ‘Funeral went off well,’ he said, following her down the stairs. ‘Lot of people turned up. I’d no idea old Ted Watson had so many friends.’

  Sylvia ignored him, slipped the lasagna into the microwave and set the dial to reheat.

  ‘Now, I won’t be in for dinner tomorrow evening,’ Colin said, pouring two glasses of red wine and putting them beside the place settings on the table. ‘In fact, I’ll be out most of the day – meeting in the morning, then the lecture series, then the old social welfare stuff in the afternoon, could go on for a long time so I might have a beer and a sandwich with the others when it’s finished.’

  ‘Really?’ Sylvia said, feeling strangely giddy. ‘That’s odd. I thought tomorrow was the day you usually met your girlfriend.’

  The words rolled unexpectedly off her tongue and drummed into the silence. She moved to sit down, feeling her legs turning to jelly, but recognised in an instant that she had more authority while standing, so she leaned back against the sink.

  The colour had drained from Colin’s face. Sylvia had read books in which that happened to people but she had never really thought it could happen quite so fast. He went from a healthy colour to deathly pallor in seconds.

  ‘I … er … I don’t know what you mean,’ he said, looking down at the table, starting to fiddle with the cutlery. ‘Lecture series … you know, I did tell you …’

  ‘Don’t do this, Colin,’ she said softly. ‘At least do me the courtesy of not telling me any more lies.’

  ‘So you know?’ he said, looking up. She thought she knew him so well and now she realised that she was seeing an emotion she had not seen in him before – fear. ‘Who told you?’

  ‘No one,’ she said. ‘I saw you, two weeks running, the first time by accident, the second time by design. How long has this been going on?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ he said, defensive now. ‘You saw us twice – does time make me more or less unfaithful?’

  ‘Don’t play games!’ Sylvia snapped. ‘How long?’

  ‘Two years, maybe more.’

  ‘Two years! And everyone knows, not surprisingly as you don’t seem concerned about walking hand in hand down the road and kissing her in a city where a hell of a lot of people know just who you are. The first time you were even wearing your dog collar.’

  He stared at her, his defensiveness crumbling, and he seemed to shrink into the chair. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry, Syl. It must sound ridiculous, but I never wanted to hurt you. I was lonely, I started to feel lonely and lost, as though I didn’t fit anywhere.’

  ‘You’re right,’ she cut in sharply, ‘it does sound ridiculous. You always fit, you’ve tailored yourself to an exact fit with the church’s cloth; it’s your life, it’s your skin. Don’t tell me you don’t fit anywhere.’

  ‘But that was it, you see,’ Colin said, looking up at her with a new and unfamiliar desolation in his eyes. ‘It doesn’t fit me anymore, or I don’t fit it. The faith – it isn’t working anymore. I’m a sham. After all these years I no longer know what it’s all been about, and then – ’

  ‘Just a minute,’ Sylvia cut in. ‘Are you telling me that you’ve … you’ve lost your faith?’

  Colin nodded, his expression bleak and exhausted. ‘Yes, I was at my wits’ end. I’d dedicated my life to my faith and then I found it was ebbing away. There was doubt, more doubt, and then … nothing … I battled it for ages, found a spiritual director … but I was getting nowhere.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me,’ she began. ‘You never said a thing.’

  ‘I didn’t want to worry you,’ he said. ‘You seemed quite content with things so I …’ He paused. ‘We didn’t talk much about that sort of thing.’
>
  Sylvia’s anger exploded. ‘That sort of thing? No, we didn’t much discuss that sort of thing, why would we? How could we if you didn’t even tell me?’

  He shrugged. ‘I didn’t know how to tell you, and then, when I met … when I met Jenny, I started to feel different, as though there was hope … you know?’

  ‘What do you mean you know?’ Sylvia said, feeling as though she was trapped in a nightmare. ‘Know what? What do you mean, hope? Hope of what, finding your faith?’

  ‘No,’ Colin said, shaking his head. ‘No, not that, just hope of … of something different to believe in.’

  The microwave stopped with three loud pings that startled them both and digital letters flashed the word ‘Enjoy!’. They stared at each other, shocked first by the noise and then confused by the sudden silence.

  ‘I know there’s no excuse,’ Colin said. ‘No excuse for deceiving you, but it’s a reason, don’t you see? Can you imagine what it’s like to devote all your life to your faith and then find it gone?’

  Sylvia closed her eyes, took a deep breath and sat down at the table. ‘Yes, I can imagine that,’ she said. ‘Actually, I can feel it. I also dedicated my life to faith. For almost forty years my life has revolved around your faith. I gave up everything to support you in what you believed was being asked of you. How long has this been going on?’

  Colin rubbed his eyes. ‘I told you – ’

  ‘Not the affair, your apostasy.’

  ‘Oh! I see, longer, much longer, four years, perhaps a bit longer. It was after we went to the ecumenical conference in London, when we stayed with Kim.’

  Sylvia gasped. ‘Four years! And you didn’t even tell me? Don’t you think I had a right to know? Don’t you understand what your faith and your ministry demanded of me?’ He looked confused, as though he couldn’t fully comprehend what she was saying. ‘How could you, Colin? How could you go on with the ministry, go on with all of it … pretending? I don’t understand.’

  ‘I’ve lost everything,’ he said, and she suddenly despised the childish whine of his voice.

  She slammed her hand on the table. ‘No you haven’t,’ she shouted, peering more closely into his face. ‘You’ve given up on God and replaced him with a woman who’s young enough to be your daughter. And you don’t even understand what this means to me.’ She paused. ‘Do you love her?’

  He looked up confused. ‘I think so.’

  ‘You think so? You think so! Well, you’d better make up your mind because now you can have her. Her or God, neither or both, you can be an adulterous apostate or a monk, whatever you damn well like, but you’d better sort this out with the Dean or the Bishop or whoever you need to, because tomorrow I’m going to find a divorce lawyer.’

  That night she left him sitting in the kitchen, went straight up to the bedroom and, consumed with manic energy, moved all her things into the spare room. The days that followed were a cold war, hostile, calm and terrifying. She didn’t go to a lawyer because she simply hadn’t the energy; the shock paralysed her.

  As the next week passed, there were conversations about the future. Colin went to see the Dean and the Bishop; he tried to tell her about the discussions, about the processes that he must now go through to determine his own position before finally deciding to relinquish the ministry. But Sylvia couldn’t listen, she didn’t want to know. She no longer cared, she could no longer consider him and she wasn’t interested in the other woman. She didn’t hate him but she could not forgive him and to be in the same house was torture.

  ‘Let’s be sensible about it,’ Colin said a couple of days later. ‘Don’t rush into anything. You can’t just move out – anyway, there’s nowhere to go. We need to sort out our assets, all that business. The best thing is if you stay here for a while.’

  But a week later to the day, Sylvia knew that she couldn’t spend another night in the house: the church’s house, the house that had existed for Colin to be who and what he had so desperately wanted to be. In all the stilted conversations of the last week neither of them had suggested trying again; they both knew that the time for that was long past. It was over and there was no going back.

  She pulled out a suitcase from the cupboard under the stairs, packed it, disconnected her sewing machine and put it into its case, put her sewing things into some fabric bags, and dialled Bonnie’s number.

  ‘On the third day she rose again from the dead,’ Bonnie said as Sylvia came downstairs fully dressed and with her hair swept up in its customary roll. ‘Oh sorry, is that blasphemous? It wasn’t meant to be.’

  Sylvia smiled. ‘It’s okay. It does feel like that, actually. I do seem to have spent the last few days suspended in some awful sort of tomb.’

  Fran, who had just arrived carrying a large cake tin, put the tin down and hugged her.

  ‘You look heaps better. When we brought you back here you looked like a basket case. I couldn’t believe you hadn’t even cried.’

  ‘She’s made up for it since,’ Bonnie said and Sylvia nodded in agreement.

  ‘Absolutely, I’ve cried most of the time since. But this morning I woke up feeling different, as though it had lifted. Now I just feel fragile, like I’m getting over a long illness, but recovery is in sight.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Fran said, opening the cake tin. ‘Coffee and walnut. I’ve been experimenting – it’s got mascarpone and a dash of Baileys so I’ve brought it along for the expert tasting team. How about you, Bon? You look really good.’

  Bonnie lifted the cake from the tin and cut into it. ‘This is really appalling, but looking after Sylvia has made me feel better. There’s been a lot of organising, I’ve had to fend off Colin, the Bishop and the Dean, who all say they have to talk to her, and then I’ve had to sort out a solicitor. We’re going to see her this afternoon. I haven’t had time to feel lonely or panic about Mum. So much for the great lesson of being alone in the house and not looking after people.’

  ‘Taking care of someone who desperately needs it isn’t the same as compulsively looking after someone who’s perfectly capable of looking after themselves,’ Fran said.

  ‘Exactly,’ Sylvia added. ‘Bonnie’s been fantastic; I’ve been waited on hand and foot, she’s listened to me for hours on end and fought off intruders with a whip and chair. I don’t know how she managed it.’

  Fran leaned over and took a piece of cake. ‘Have you talked to your daughter?’

  ‘Yes, a couple of times,’ Sylvia said. ‘And I know she’s spoken to Colin. It’s a wee bit awkward because a few years ago Brendan, her husband, had an affair and Kim was on the point of leaving. I was the one who persuaded her to stay and give it another go. She hasn’t actually said anything but I’ve got this feeling that she thinks I’m a bit of a hypocrite.’

  ‘That was different,’ Bonnie said. ‘They had a baby of six months and a three year old, and from what you said he was full of remorse and desperate for her to stay.’

  ‘And Colin?’ Fran asked. ‘Is he full of remorse and wanting you to stay?’

  ‘Absolutely not. Colin is caught up in his own self-pity. He’s suitably guilt-ridden over his infidelity but he sees himself as the victim in all this. Don’t you think, Bonnie?’

  ‘Yes, I spoke to him a couple of times. All he seems to see is his dilemma with the church, the fact that he won’t have a job, and he’ll have to get out of the house.’

  ‘He could hardly go on ministering or canoning or whatever if he doesn’t believe in it anymore,’ Fran said with a laugh.

  ‘It’s a mystery to me that he kept up the pretence for so long,’ Sylvia said. ‘He won’t know how to cope. I suppose this woman replaces God, and certainly replaces me, but there’s nothing to replace the responsibilities and the status and the framework of the church. He’s never done anything else.’

  ‘How will you cope without the church, Syl?’ Fran asked.

  Sylvia shrugged. ‘I’ve resented it for years. I know you two gave it all away when we left school, but I’
ve hung on to my faith – just crossed the floor, so to speak. I don’t have a problem with God, and I’ve struggled to separate that from the resentment I feel about the church. That hasn’t been easy. Now I guess I’m free to work out what I really feel.’

  ‘Weird, isn’t it,’ Fran said, ‘how quite suddenly we’re all in this transition. It’s like limbo.’ She laughed, raising her coffee cup. ‘Must be your fault, Bonnie. It all began with you coming back here and organising that lunch. In the last few weeks everything’s changed for all of us.’

  ‘I thought it was you two who’d changed everything for me,’ Bonnie said in amazement. ‘Anyway, I like it. Here’s to change. More cake?’

  TEN

  David put the box of books down in the middle of the polished floor and looked around. He liked the way the ceiling beams cast intersecting lines of shadow through the shafts of light that slanted in through the tall windows. Behind him he heard Matt struggling up the stairs with more books and he went back to help.

  ‘So what d’you think?’ he asked.

  Matt straightened up, nodding slowly, taking in everything from the newly polished floor to the cedar blinds and the Japanese rice-paper screens that separated the living and sleeping areas. He let out a long, slow whistle. ‘Tasty, very tasty.’

  David grinned. ‘Suitable bachelor pad?’

  ‘Perfect! I’m almost jealous.’

  ‘Go easy, mate, I’m only renting it. You own yours.’

  Matt shrugged. ‘Yeah, well, whatever. But it’s great. I love these warehouse conversions, so much character. Are you going to have enough stuff?’

  David sat down on one of the boxes. ‘Mum’s giving me some things – she’s decided to sell the house – but I’ll have to buy some stuff too.’

  Matt ran his hands through his hair and wandered over to the window. ‘Better let me come with you. You always had lousy taste in furniture.’