A Hundred Small Lessons

by Ashley Hay

  She’d have gone that far now, if she could.

  Off the plane, Lucy headed for a taxi, fumbling in her bag for her phone, for Linnea’s address. She wasn’t sure if it was the same house she’d visited, all those years before. She wasn’t sure what she’d say when Linnea opened the door—if she’s home, she thought for the first time.

  ‘This address,’ she said to the driver, ‘is it central, or further out?’

  ‘About as central as you can get,’ said the man, ‘give or take,’ and off they went.

  She glanced up and saw the huge bulk of Mount Wellington pushing high behind the town.

  ‘This is going to sound odd,’ said Lucy, ‘but has that mountain always been there?’ She had no recollection of seeing it the last time she’d visited.

  ‘About forty million years or so,’ the driver said, ‘give or take.’

  As she raised her phone to take a photo, it started to ring—not Ben, but a number with Tasmania’s code.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Lucy? Sweetheart? It’s Linnea. Your husband just reached me—terrible reception down here and I was out walking. Where are you? Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m in a taxi,’ said Lucy, as if this was a perfectly normal conversation, a perfectly normal day. ‘I’m on my way—should be with you in . . .’

  ‘Fifteen minutes,’ said the driver, ‘give or take.’

  ‘Fifteen minutes.’

  ‘I’ll see you then,’ said Linnea.

  Above the city’s pretty waterfront, the taxi stopped at a tiny cottage with huge, lush roses along the fence and a deep porch. Linnea opened the gate and pulled Lucy into a hug, hanging onto her and managing to get some money across to the taxi driver with her other hand.

  ‘No, no,’ she said as Lucy began to protest. ‘Nothing to say about it—it’s my pleasure. It’s good to see you. Let’s get you inside, and have a nice cup of coffee, and we can see what we need to do next.’

  ‘Thank you, Linnea,’ said Lucy, standing still on the garden path, as if the words required a certain solemnity or moment. ‘I didn’t know where I was going—and then I thought of you. I’ll have tea, if you’ve got it, if that’s OK.’

  Linnea smiled as she pushed the front door open, and Lucy saw the way the house opened out to a wide, light room at the back made almost entirely of glass. There was a deck, a garden, and a perfect view of the Derwent beyond. ‘You should bring Tom and Ben down for the yacht race,’ Linnea said, taking her arm and following her gaze. ‘It’s magnificent sitting on the deck as the sails rush towards the finish line. All that effort; all that spectacle.’

  Lucy walked across the room towards the view. Out on the water, there were boats making their way along the river, tacking one way, going about, and tacking again. There were so few yachts on Brisbane’s river, Lucy thought. You could sit and watch a whole reach and see no boats on the move.

  ‘Coming from the airport, when we turned the corner and saw the mountain, and now this; everything seems beautiful today.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s because you’re here unexpectedly,’ Linnea said as she cleared some papers away from a table beside Lucy. ‘Perhaps that changes the way things look. Swing it round.’ She pushed at a chair. ‘You don’t have to stop gazing.’

  ‘I could sit here forever,’ said Lucy later, taking her tea and cradling the mug in both hands.

  ‘You’re very welcome here.’ Linnea let her hand rest on Lucy’s head. ‘You always will be. But I think your lovely husband and your beautiful little boy would have something to say if I kept you that long. Do you have pictures? I haven’t seen him since the one you sent when he was born—and he must be, what, twelve months, fourteen or so?’

  ‘He’s coming up to two,’ said Lucy, reaching for her bag to pull out her phone. ‘Here: I took one of him last night before he went to bed.’ She was astonished at how bright and real her son looked in the photo. He was so far away. ‘Linnea,’ she said quietly. ‘What have I done?’

  There was a single beat of silence, and then Linnea spoke. ‘You’ve come to visit me,’ she said briskly. ‘You probably need a rest—most mothers do. There’s nothing else to say. You don’t even have to decide how long you’re here for. Now, drink that up while it’s still hot.’

  Lucy reached for the tea, feeling seven years old again. But as she shifted in her chair, she knocked her bag down, spilling its contents across the floor—her wallet, her glasses, a plastic car and a packet of sultanas.

  ‘Oh,’ she said quietly, spinning the car’s wheels. ‘Oh no.’ ‘I’ll run you a bath,’ she heard Linnea say, brisk again, and she heard the water while she sat driving the little red car up and down her thigh, hating herself. It seemed no time had passed before Linnea called to her, ‘Come on, Lucy, it’s ready.’ As if she were still just a child herself.

  ‘Tom always asks if he can take his cars into the bath,’ Lucy said then, setting the toy down on the table. But then the bathroom was magnificent too, with a softly-velvet neck rest and a window angled to take in the river’s sweep. She chose one yacht from all the traffic on the water and watched it ply across the bright blue span.

  The rest of the day skated by, and Lucy settled herself again in the chair by the window, watching the change in the afternoon’s light.

  ‘All right,’ said Linnea at last, taking the chair next to her. ‘Let’s make a plan. How about I keep you for three days—long enough for you to have a break, but short enough that Ben won’t get too scared. They get scared, husbands; it took me years to work that out, and I’d lost three of them by then. Take your time, drink my tea, but tomorrow we’re going on an excursion to the sea cliffs you walked along with Astrid—do you know, I think that’s almost twenty years ago? We’ll take a boat along that coastline, so you can see what you were walking on. And the next day, we’ll run out to the new gallery and I can have you at the airport for the six o’clock flight back through Sydney. I told Ben you’d get a taxi home—too late for Tom to be on the road.’

  In the middle of the river, another small yacht tacked and turned, and as Lucy watched it, her finger traced its line. She’d drifted from the sound of Linnea’s voice entirely; the cliffs, the gallery, something about sending her home. She didn’t want to think about any of it now.

  ‘How many husbands did you have, Linnea?’ she asked when she realised her friend had stopped talking, watching her yacht muddle a turn and send its sail out wet across the water.

  ‘Just the three—the first one, and then Astrid’s father, and then the one after that. I talked myself out of them, you know.’

  ‘Why did you talk yourself out of them?’

  ‘I didn’t mean to, the first time. He left because he didn’t want a child—fair enough; and I was so sure I was right. He made leaving seem so simple. When I’d married him, I’d believed all that death-do-us-part stuff; I believed we would go on forever. When he up and left, after five or six years, nothing felt like it needed to be permanent, or like it could be. I’m not saying that’s right.’ Linnea held her hand up towards Lucy’s frown. ‘I’m just saying that’s how it felt. I never bothered to try to hang on to Astrid’s father—I was really just in love with having Astrid—and I knew too many women who thrived as single parents to be daunted by that. Then the next bloke, after you girls were grown up—well, he was very nice, and the wedding was fun, but I don’t think I ever expected it to last either. I was sick last winter and he came to see me—brought me some soup his new wife had made. I thought that was rather chivalrous, in a twenty-first-century way.’

  Without her thinking about it, Lucy’s fingers were working at her wedding ring, turning it so that it slipped up towards her knuckle, and then back down.

  ‘Tom’s gorgeous,’ she said. ‘I should have been more patient.’

  ‘Probably,’ said Linnea, ‘but they can make it tricky sometimes.’ She paused, pushing a photograph across the table towards Lucy. ‘This is Astrid now—well, last Christmas. America,’ she s
aid, before Lucy could ask the next question. ‘Manhattan—but Manhattan, Kansas. She works as a ranger. There’s something special about the grass, apparently. I was planning annual trips when she told me she was moving to Manhattan—but it was the wrong one. I suppose we talk once a month or so, but we’re not really close. I always liked it when you came round to play—and later, when you were bigger. I understood the things you were interested in: music, poetry, travel. I could suggest things that you thought were fun. But plants and plants—that’s all there was for Astrid. Perhaps it’s genetic: they named me for some great-great-somebody’s obsession with Linnaeus.’

  From deep inside her memory, Lucy saw Astrid, six or seven years old, frozen in the middle of a make-believe. ‘Come on, Astrid,’ she heard herself saying. ‘We’re supposed to be getting these babies into a bath.’ While Astrid crouched down on the garden path that Lucy had designated as their playhouse’s bathroom, staring at a tiny yellow flower.

  ‘Look, Lucy, it’s a buttercup—but can you see? There’s something odd about it. I think it’s a different sort of species.’ As if this was some great thrill.

  ‘It’s different how?’ Lucy held her position, her imaginary baby propped against her shoulder, her foot and hip jutting impatiently, the way her own mother stood when she didn’t want to be kept waiting. ‘What’s a species?’

  ‘Ranunculus lappaceus—the common buttercup. I’ve got to get my book—come on, Lucy, this is much more important than your silly game.’ And Astrid had run inside calling, ‘Mum? Mum? Where’s my plant book? I think I’ve found something interesting in the garden.’

  ‘Does she have kids?’ Lucy asked now, placing the photograph of Astrid flat on the table and tracing the flick of her hair. ‘I should know that, but . . .’ So familiar, yet so long out of touch.

  Linnea shook her head. ‘One of our many points of difference—not that I mind her not having children, although that would have been lovely. But I asked her once about it; she’d had some boyfriend for a while, and she was heading for her thirties. I just wondered if it was something she’d thought about, in among the seeds and the soil, you know. And she said . . .’ It took Lucy a moment to look up and realise that Linnea was trying not to cry. ‘She said she hadn’t liked childhood that much and wasn’t interested in doing it again. I might have had a few regrets about things that happened but, you know, I always thought that we had fun.’ Linnea wiped at her eyes with her sleeve. ‘What a thing to say.’

  ‘I had fun,’ said Lucy quietly. ‘I had the best fun with you two.’ The Astrid of the photo was almost smiling, pale sun on her face, and one hand reaching off to the side, presumably to hang on to whoever was standing there, not included in the image.

  ‘Is she happy?’ Lucy asked. ‘Don’t you miss her?’ If Tom ever said such a thing to her—but then she couldn’t imagine anything would cut her off from him.

  Except when he wouldn’t eat an egg on toast, and you ran out the door.

  Linnea shrugged. ‘There’s a new guy,’ she said, taking the photo back and stroking one finger along its frame. ‘He has a daughter. We’re civil now, at least—for a couple of years we didn’t talk. But that was no good; it made it worse. Now, well, we keep in touch. But it’s not the old age I’d imagined.’ She reached out and touched Lucy’s knee. ‘Another reason I’m pleased to see you.’

  Lucy took Linnea’s hand. ‘I always thought you were a wonderful mother,’ she said. ‘I always wished my mother was more like you. And I probably said something just as terrible to her along the way. Maybe we’re always just cruel.’ She closed her eyes, picturing Astrid in the photo. ‘It’d be nice to catch up with Astrid—I always think of her when I see buttercups.’

  ‘She’d love to hear from you.’ Linnea let go of Lucy’s fingers. ‘When you go home, you do that.’

  Home—just that one word, and Lucy cried, sobbing out a muddle of flood and Elsie and Ferdi and flowers and break-ins and possums and more.

  ‘I used to be so good at moving to new places,’ she said when she’d run to her end. ‘This time, it’s felt much harder.’ ‘The Elsie thing,’ said Linnea after a moment. ‘What do you think that is?’

  Elsie was an idea, a comfort—Lucy knew that. She pulled her wedding ring off her finger and set it spinning on the table. ‘At first it felt friendly,’ she said, ‘like she was welcoming me there. I liked to think we’d been chosen for her house or it had chosen us. I guess I just took it too far—she can’t have been standing on the footpath in the dead of the night, or in the park this morning, can she?’

  Linnea leaned back, her arms stretched above her head. ‘Well, I wouldn’t want to leave if it were me,’ she said. ‘Would you? “They can carry me out in a box,” as my grandfather used to say. Perhaps they’re both hard things, coming into new lives, or going out of old ones.’

  And as Lucy reached to stretch too, she saw, outside the window, Linnea’s neat lawn, trimmed and tidy. Its surface was spotted with buttercups, like a cluster of stars in the grass.

  •

  The next day, engulfed in her slicker on the sightseeing boat, Lucy felt exhilarated by the salt and the speed.

  ‘It feels better, getting off the land for a while,’ she said, and Linnea nodded, pulling her beanie further down around her ears.

  ‘I love these cliffs. That’s what you went stomping on with Astrid.’ Her whole face was lit up, and as Lucy turned to look at the edge of the land, she understood why.

  Behind her, the skipper was deep inside geology—she heard the words ‘dolerite’ and ‘sandstone’, ‘mudstones’ and ‘granites’ as she took in the landscape in front of her. ‘They’re so tall,’ she whispered, trying to remember how high she must have felt as she’d walked this coast all those years before.

  ‘Three hundred metres, the highest ones,’ said Linnea. ‘I love it when we’ve got the best or biggest something—and these are the highest sea cliffs in the southern hemisphere. Look at that, the way the rock changes so sharply, the way the dolerite shines. I forget how glorious it is when I’m not here.’

  Lucy tilted and craned her head, trying to take it all in. ‘My husband’s got this thing about space travel,’ she said. ‘The Americans made the first orbit of earth on the day he was born. Anyway.’ She took her time, aware that she was reaching for some new idea. ‘It’s this, isn’t it. It’s like the first images of the planet from outer space; you forget where you are—the big picture—when you’re stuck in your kitchen or your backyard or your office. You forget how breath-taking it is, and how beautiful.’

  Linnea held her hand. ‘I thought you’d like it,’ she said.

  •

  It was four in the morning when she woke in Linnea’s spare bed, and the house was quiet and dark. Her body was stiff from being buffeted on the water and she swore as she frowned at her watch. Reaching for her phone, she called Ben’s number, and waited.

  ‘Lu?’ he said, the phone not quite close enough to his not-quite-awake mouth.

  ‘I want to come home.’

  ‘Great.’ He coughed. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Four? Sorry. Linnea took me on this amazing boat trip—you should have seen the cliffs. I fell asleep in the car coming back, but I wanted to talk to you. And to Tom.’

  ‘He’s just here—you want me to wake him?’ She could hear the joke in his voice—the thing you never do, wake a sleeping child.

  ‘What do you mean he’s just there? Is he OK? Is everything all right?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Ben. ‘I brought him in when he woke up earlier. Seemed reasonable—we could both use the company.’

  ‘I wish you were here.’ Lucy twitched the curtain at the window and the brightness of a streetlight flooded in.

  ‘Me too.’ Another cough. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘I wasn’t ever really not OK,’ said Lucy carefully. ‘You know, I make too much of things sometimes.’

  ‘You don’t say.’

  ‘You do too.’

 
; ‘Yes. I do.’

  Through the window, Lucy could see the light spots of the flowers in Linnea’s smooth green grass. ‘Wasn’t luminescent one of your favourite words?’

  At the other end of the connection, Ben laughed. She loved to make him laugh: things were all right.

  ‘It’s four in the morning,’ he said. ‘Go back to sleep. And your possum’s gone home too. I got it out last night—another adult. There was no baby. I’ll see you when you get here—it’s tonight, now. It’s tonight. You’re almost home.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘almost there.’

  •

  She was on edge for the rest of the day, from the moment she woke and saw daylight. She sat with Linnea eating breakfast and on they went, through the morning, through the gallery, the artworks Linnea wanted her to see.

  A room of all-white books. A waterfall that spelled out words. A snaking hall of prints.

  Lucy took her friend’s arm. ‘Linnea?’ she said. ‘I really just want to go home.’

  ‘One more thing.’ And Linnea steered her into a dark, quiet room.

  At its centre, a single flame burned, steady and perfect. There was something hallowed about the dimness and the silence. Lucy stared at the fixed point of the candle’s flame until her eyes had multiplied its image again and again in the darkness. Then she blinked and the flame collapsed back into itself.

  There were no other Lucy Kisses in the darkness. There were no Elsie Gormleys in her world.

  Blow out the candle and make a wish, she thought, and as the idea formed, she made herself take a step back. This is always here, she thought, just like the cliffs. And she felt the calm happiness of her stolen day in Paris—but not when she was in the gardens, or thinking about children. Where else had she been?