The House on the Hill

by Susan Duncan

  A week later – well, maybe a few days, perhaps two weeks, I don’t remember more than the fact that we’d been carefully tiptoeing around each other as though one of us was mortally ill – I slid a question across the kitchen bench that I knew was pure dynamite, but I couldn’t stop myself. ‘If we never had sex again, how would you feel?’

  ‘Never?’ he said, after a long pause.

  Nervous, unable to speak or quiet the roaring in my head, the nerves in my stomach, terrified I’d put the two of us in irretrievable emotional jeopardy by going to the extreme end of the issue, I shrugged, pretending it was a casual question. He wasn’t fooled for a second.

  ‘I’ve told you before, Susan, that if relationships depend on sex they’re doomed.’

  ‘But no sex. None at all,’ I insisted, unable to back off, testing him and the foundations of his love, wanting to know the answer and bite out my tongue at the same time. Expecting him to respond with the defensiveness that often conjoins with hurt and confusion when a man’s sexuality is threatened. I’d forgotten he was one of the few grown-ups I’d ever met.

  All he said, very calmly, was, ‘If you’re saying you never want to have sex again, you need to tell me the reason why.’

  ‘I’m not saying that,’ I said, ‘but I’m terrified the day will come. Nothing to do with you. My body. It’s changing. Changed. My head, too. God, nobody ever tells you about all this stuff. Everyone lies. I’m certain of it. As if admitting you no longer have regular sex is high treason, a hanging offence. Am I the only one who feels like this at my age?’ Adding, in a softer voice: ‘Is there something terribly wrong with me?’

  Was I damaged in ways I didn’t understand, is what I meant. One way or another, sex abuse defines your life, no matter how skilfully you learn to compartmentalise. I’d told Bob about my childhood, as I’d told my first husband and, once, an ill-advised lover. When Bob asked me to marry him, he had a right to know. Ghosts. Demons. Wounds. They shape your image of yourself. Influence outcomes. Skew fragile moments. I told him carefully and in a way that left him a graceful exit if that’s what he felt was necessary.

  He’d said nothing. Then he’d disappeared into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. ‘It’s all in the past,’ he’d said eventually. ‘That’s where we’ll leave it. It doesn’t change who you are.’

  ‘It’s best there are no secrets,’ I’d said. He’d nodded.

  Bob took my hand. I loved his hands. They were big, safe, warm on the coldest day, rough but not hard. Capable of intricate engineering or pulling apart rocks. With my hand in his, I’d follow anywhere. I held the heat of it against my cheek for a moment, eyes closed. Briefly considered making an offer I knew I couldn’t keep: have sex anywhere you like but come home every night to eat dinner and sleep. So I stayed silent.

  ‘There’s no point or pleasure in sex if both of us aren’t enjoying it,’ he said.

  ‘So you don’t want a divorce,’ I replied, trying to manage a grin.

  He looked to see if I was serious, and I believe I was. ‘Sex doesn’t mean much in the long run and I’m not the kind of man who gives in at the first barrier.’

  Bob understood what it cost me to have that conversation. I understood the gift he’d given with his response. Uncertainties, insecurities dissolved into nothing. We would redefine the quick, effortless, thoughtless, impulsive and compulsive emotional responses of youth that we’d carried into middle age, believing they would go on forever. Outlive particular desires. Find new ones to explore and develop.

  When the stars of late autumn were thick and bright across the sky and the dew settled by early afternoon, soaking forgotten washing so it had to be left for another day, Bob agreed to help friends deliver a yacht back to the west coast of the United States. While he was cruising the louche tropical islands of the South Pacific for six to eight weeks, possibly longer depending on the whim of winds and weather, I would finish my fourth book. If time allowed while Bob was still on the high seas, I dreamed of walking a section of the ancient Christian pilgrimage of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. Do it while you can.

  ‘You’re a terrible navigator. You’ll get lost before you even get started,’ Bob said when I told him my plan.

  ‘Hah! I’ve made my way around the world plenty of times and always ended up in the right place.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Eventually,’ I admitted. ‘Look, I’ll be fine. There’ll be plenty of signposts, and I’ll just follow the long line of pilgrims heading from south-west France to the coast of Spain. Easy.’

  ‘Where in south-west France?’

  I looked at him blankly. ‘Well, wherever I choose to start.’ He gave me the same look I’d given my mother when she told me she planned to trailblaze from Sydney to Darwin on a motorbike to celebrate her 70th birthday.

  ‘You don’t own a motorbike,’ I’d said dismissively.

  ‘I’ll buy one.’

  ‘You’ve never even been a passenger on the back of a bike,’ I’d said, alarmed.

  ‘I won’t have any bad habits to unlearn then,’ she’d replied airily, with her trademark flick of the wrist.

  I’d been about to argue the absurdity and danger of the whole concept when my first husband, Paul, took me aside. ‘She’s baiting you,’ he said. ‘Tell her it’s a great idea.’ So I did. And motorbikes were never mentioned again.

  She never liked Paul, not even when he was dying of a brain tumour and helpless as a baby. He saw straight through her. The Compostela idea, I realised, was a whim worthy of my mother. I let it go, shamefaced, aware my fitness level was questionable and I may well have taken taxis from one section to the next at the first sign of a blister. As my mother probably would have if she’d ever attempted anything so foolhardy.

  Bob and I eventually agreed we’d fly into Rome on the same day, rent an apartment for a week, hit the high spots, catch up with someone I hadn’t seen since I was a journalist on the Melbourne Sun and then meet the Alans x 2 from Elvina Bay, who would join us on a trip to the wilds of Morocco. We’d compromise on the Compostela idea by returning to Italy, where we’d make our way to Umbria to walk through sunny vineyards, follow the crumbling remains of ancient Roman aquifers, traverse mountain tracks and explore medieval villages. Not quite the Compostela but much more realistic than trying to walk seven hundred and fifty kilometres on my own.

  Our adventure would culminate with a week savouring the magic of Venice. ‘Pittwater will be Venice in a thousand years,’ I predicted, after I’d booked an apartment built under heavy oak beams in the renovated attic space of a fourteenth-century building overlooking one of the smaller canals.

  ‘Only thing I can say for sure is that we won’t be around to see it,’ he replied. I fell silent. It happened more and more, this out-loud acknowledgement of the finite.

  ‘The building doesn’t have an elevator,’ I explained after a while, ‘but the boat slipway still exists on the ground floor. Lovely to think of mysterious boatmen sliding through foggy waters on romantic assignations in the dead of night centuries ago. Faded frescoes on the walls, too, if we can believe the pictures on the website. Six flights of stairs, but worth it, don’t you think? And we’re used to steps. It will be a doddle.’ Do it while you can.

  For the first time in decades I could leave my mother without a twinge of guilt. The carer, whom she adored, would do her shopping when she needed anything and continue to call in twice a week. Everything else was covered by her assisted care status. Even the doctor was just along the corridor. There were absolutely no grounds for her to complain.

  ‘How long will you be gone?’ she asked, when I told her about the trip.

  ‘Two months.’

  ‘I’m well taken care of. Everybody loves me. You needn’t worry.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Phew!’ I said to Bob. ‘She never once asked what would happen if she died while we were gone. She didn’t mention funerals or ask where we’d scatter her ashes. I’m beginning to wonder if she’s decided she’s i
mmortal.’

  ‘So am I,’ Bob said. ‘A world first, eh?’

  At the end of March 2011, Bob flew to New Zealand to join an all-man crew on board a sixty-four-foot yacht called Van Diemen.

  ‘If you meet someone gorgeous and willing on an island of swaying palms, don’t tell me about it,’ I said, half-serious, when I delivered him to the airport.

  He looked at me thoughtfully. ‘So you wouldn’t mind?’

  ‘Oh, I’d mind. But I’d understand. At least I think I would.’

  ‘A bunch of old blokes on a boat way out at sea? Doing four-hour shifts around the clock? All we’ll want in port is a cold beer and an eight-hour snooze.’

  ‘Yeah. Right.’ I knew I sounded cynical.

  Bob shook his head from side to side. ‘I’m in clover. Why would I mess with what I’ve got? Can’t you understand that?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said honestly. Without another word, he got out of the car. Hauled his gear from the rear. Started towards the terminal. Afraid we’d part feeling bad and shaky and unhappy and insecure, I chased after him, catching him by the arm.

  He turned towards me and dropped his bag. ‘Love you,’ he said, putting both arms around my waist.

  ‘Yeah. Me too. Sorry.’

  ‘Nothing to be sorry about. I’ll call you from Auckland.’

  ‘Stay safe.’

  ‘Always.’

  I locked myself in my office to finish work on my book. It was my first attempt at fiction and I’d approached it with an airy and totally unfounded confidence. Discovered it was a weirdly topsy-turvy way of thinking for a former journalist who’d been trained to chase facts, stick to the truth, simplify and never exaggerate. Fiction upended those rules. Very quickly, I felt overwhelmed, out of my depth and deeply afraid that I would fail spectacularly, letting down publishers, booksellers and the whole gamut of people who’d had enough faith to offer a contract.

  ‘Wear it away,’ Bob had advised, over and over. But from the beginning I’d felt almost disoriented. As confronting as it was to write emotional truth in memoir where there was nowhere to hide, I found it more difficult in fiction where there was everywhere to hide. In memoir, even though writing about real people meant using words carefully and with consideration, it was less fraught than creating believable characters out of thin air. Plot followed fact in memoir, whether it was interesting or boring. In fiction, plots were limited only by imagination. I sank into one clichéd scene after another, bamboozled, in the end, by my own dastardly twists and turns. Ditching the doctrine of journalism, it turned out, was like being forced to swap religions or speak in a foreign language. But each day I sat at my desk in my office with views through gum trees of boats, birds and bays, and persevered to the point of exhaustion. At some point, I can’t remember when, I suddenly realised fiction was a revamped version of truth and heavily disguised. It was like an awakening.

  When I’d finally put together a beginning, middle and end, Caro, a friend and neighbour who’d been instrumental in the previous three books, came and sat beside me while we dissected every page, paragraph and word until it was finished. But instead of setting off with a box filled with typewritten pages as I’d done five years earlier with my first book, I pressed a computer key and, in seconds, one hundred thousand words landed deep in the heart of a cubicle in a skyscraper in North Sydney. It was like letting go of a child without having a clue whether you’d ever see her again, or even being sure where she might end up. I missed the personal contact, ceremony, and celebration of delivering a manuscript by hand. And yet, if I had to go back to using a typewriter, I’d probably give up writing books. Like Old John at the brickworks, technology had unquestionably extended and broadened my working life.

  On the high seas, Bob emailed when he could and called when the boat slid into port in Tonga, Samoa and Christmas Island (in the Kiribati Line of Islands). Then there was silence for a week. I emailed: ‘If you don’t get in touch soon I will keep shopping.’ There was no response. I began to worry. I called the wife of another crew member.

  ‘Their communication system has broken down,’ she explained. ‘They’re all fine, but the winds aren’t helping and it’s slow going. They won’t reach Hawaii on schedule.’

  Two weeks after their due date in Honolulu, the phone rang. Before I even picked it up I knew it was Bob.

  ‘How are you? How was it?’ I asked, relieved and happy to hear his voice.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Oh yeah. Good.’

  ‘Ok, tell me all about it when we meet.’

  He went on to explain the timing was too tight for him to complete the last leg to Los Angeles. He’d leave the boat in a day or two, visit his son in Pittsburgh and meet me in Rome. He’d found a flight from New York that landed forty-five minutes after I arrived from Sydney.

  The day before I was scheduled to fly to Rome, the bank sent me a notification that my credit cards had been hacked and they’d been cancelled. ‘But I’m going overseas tomorrow,’ I said, horrified at the thought of travelling without the security of plastic money.

  ‘We’ll issue new ones. They’ll be waiting for you when you arrive.’

  Fat chance. I didn’t even have an apartment number, just a street address. The plan was to meet the owner at a café in the Campo dei Fiori for the key handover.

  8

  BOB WAS TANNED ALMOST BLACK, hair bleached white. There was a lovely, loose, muscly fitness in his stride. I picked him out of the crowd at the airport in Rome in a second and waved him over. He took my hand in his. Laced fingers. Held on. The balance. It’s back, I thought.

  At Campo dei Fiori, the famous market hummed. Food. Flowers. Crafts. Clothes. Set out like artwork. We breakfasted on pastries and strong coffee, waiting for our contact. She appeared typically, unhurriedly, Roman-style late, wearing a low-cut black linen dress with a scarf tied casually at her neck. Magnificent cleavage. She was incredibly sexy in an understated way. I felt a pang of envy. We’re still breathing and we’re here. Get over it.

  We followed her swinging hips, her rope-soled shoes, slim brown legs smooth as silk, along cobbled lanes to an ancient door that swung open on rusted hinges to reveal a small courtyard. Inside, a courier stood searching mailboxes in vain for a name that matched the envelope. He asked our guide for help.

  ‘For you!’ she said, not quite sure what was going on.

  ‘Our new credit cards. Bloody miracle,’ Bob said.

  ‘Fantastic,’ I responded joyfully. We signed a form. The courier took off. Without offering to help with our bags, our guide led the way up four flights, while we followed dragging, grunting, puffing. After a quick tour (one bedroom, tiny bathroom, well-equipped kitchen, small but adequate living area), she left us alone.

  We showered, slept for an hour and hit the street with an address on a piece of paper. As it turned out, my former colleague lived about two blocks from our apartment. And another colleague, a woman I’d once shared a house with in London and who once baked authentic Spanish tortilla to temp my chemo-bastardised palate, was her house guest. Instead of feeling like a tourist, I felt as though we belonged.

  Lorraine was thin, stylish, apparently ageless, and she lived in one of those fabulous apartments with frescoes painted on the walls and terraces that overlooked angels, gargoyles, warriors, chariots, spires, domes, terracotta roofs and the whole extraordinary cacophony of two thousand years of architecture. Another quick pang. But I’d trade a thousand Romes for Pittwater – no matter how heretical that sounds.

  We dined on sweet, dripping rockmelon wrapped in tender prosciutto. Melting slices of fresh buffalo mozzarella sitting dreamily on thick slices of ruby tomatoes, topped with a single green basil leaf. Tangy and creamy all at once. Fragrant salamis. Robust meat loaf. Crisp salad greens. Clean Italian white wines. We yabbered on and on about the old days. Funny stuff, mostly. Then inevitably: ‘What ever happened to?’ A rollcall. So many dead. We looked at each other around the ta
ble. Does everyone wonder, as I do, at the quixotic nature of fate?

  Two days later, we joined the Alans x 2 to wander through the treasures of the Vatican. Followed English travel writer Georgina Masson’s beautifully detailed Roman walks. Under her guidance, we found tucked-away treasures, understood nuances in a staircase, a lintel, a dark and gloomy painting in a church. We dined on good, and once awful, food.

  At the end of every day my feet yowled and my back felt poleaxed. Do it while you can. I’d once loved travel for its freedom. But there was nothing in my life anymore from which I longed to be set free. Occasionally, prompted perhaps by exhaustion or cultural overload, I wondered what we were doing handing over another fistful of euros to visit yet another monument when the one we’d just investigated was already a fading memory. As I write now, the moments I held dearest were the ones spent with friends. I needed to flick through photos to recall nearly everything else.

  A few days later, Bob and I, the Alans x 2, boarded an afternoon flight for the souqs, kasbahs and exotic wildness of Morocco. Our goal was Amassine, a village so remote it barely registered on the most detailed maps but renowned amongst dedicated rug lovers as the home of very fine, traditional Berber weavers. I am, I confess, a rug nut. Not in a sensible, knowledgeable, investment kind of way. It’s pure instinct. Some rugs make my heart beat faster. Some rugs I can gaze at for hours on end and never get bored. Some rugs make my spirit soar. I blame a visit to Afghanistan and Iran in my early 20s, when I went to my first rug bazaars. The noise, smells, dusty light and darkness. The haggling, hard-eyed men in flowing shirts, faceless women in long robes tying knots at looms. So seductively mysterious to a little Aussie country kid. I’ve been spellbound ever since.

  I once even travelled to Turkey to find the weaver of a colourful rug on the floor of my office, her initials woven into the design. A mad whim (worthy of my mother?) but it was a great trip. My weaver, whom I’d envisaged as a wild nomad with flashing brown eyes and flowing robes, turned out to have the cutthroat instincts of a goat trader and was middle-aged, plump and desperate to find a husband for her daughter. She’d skinned me alive during a trade for some embroidery I’ve long since misplaced. Or perhaps the fiancé existed and the money was for a wedding dress. I’ve forgotten the details. Remember only laughing uproariously when I handed over the money. You’ve got to respect determination and grit.