by Liz Byrski
The tears fill my eyes and I wipe them away with the back of my hand.
Tell me what he looks like Jess.’
That’s just what Karl asked me on the phone yesterday,’ she laughs. Tell me what she looks like Jess, and I said to him, she’s a beautiful woman Karl, a few grey hairs but a beautiful woman still.’
‘And him? ‘I press her.
‘He’s a real good looking man, Love. Very tall and upright, distinguished looking. Not a lot of hair but a nice beard and those lovely blue eyes, and very charming too, a real gentleman.’
‘I’m going to meet him in Germany for a few days on my way home to Australia,’ I tell her cautiously.
‘That’s wonderful, Darlin’, she cries, clapping her hands together in real delight. ‘That’s terrific—why wait, after all you missed out on all those years, why miss any more!’
‘You don’t think I’m rushing into it?’
‘Course not!’ she says. ‘It’s exciting, and what have you got to lose?’
‘Some of my friends in Australia think I’m crazy,’ I tell her. ‘They think I should wait and see how things work out first.’
‘Oh what rubbish,’ Jess says, thrusting her hands into the pockets of her jacket. ‘Why ever would you wait? They’re just scared they wouldn’t have the courage to do it themselves, or maybe they’re scared they’ll lose you. They might even be jealous.’
There is a pause.
‘Anyway Liz, you’re old enough to decide for yourself. Since when do you need them to tell you what to do? Look love—I don’t know you, I only just met you, but you seem to me like a woman who can make up her own mind what to do.’
Fine rain is falling as I make my way back to Little Smugglers and without going into the house I climb into the car, drive out of the lane, turn left and follow the same route that I used to take to work, and as I reach the green by Felbridge School I see the seat where I sat in the rain to read Karl’s letter. I pull the car onto the verge and walk over to sit down as the rain turns from a light film to a stronger shower. So here I am again—in this same place on this same seat in the rain, and in my pocket are his card and the photographs.
I look at the pictures and wonder if he will still love me when he sees me face to face; when he is confronted with a fifty-four year old grandmother instead of a teenager. A dream that I never dared to dream is about to come true and I am indeed ‘over the moon’ as Jess predicted.
But a morsel of fear also disturbs me. The rain soaks my hair and runs down inside my coat collar trickling down my chest and back making me shiver. What am I afraid of? My old life still waits in Australia. I’m not risking family, home or work, not money or security. My fear is of losing once more what I seemed to have regained. In our telephone conversations the years have evaporated but the love has remained, it feels as it always did but can it survive reality? That’s the risk—losing the dream.
But my friends’ reactions—that is something different. Jess is right, they are dealing with their own anxieties and disappointments, their reactions are about how this might affect them.
I see my mother sitting on my bed the day Karl’s final letter arrived. I hear her asking me whatever would have happened if he had ‘turned against me’ when I was thousands of miles away, alone in America. I remember the constant suggestions that he had not been serious, their relief that it was over because it had been wrong from the start. I could see Jackie, and Mrs Maxwell, Mrs Wilmot and The Secretaries with their cautions, their advice, their resigned ‘told you so’ expressions. Too old, too young, too divorced, too risky, too dangerous, too far away from us. He doesn’t love you, you threw yourself at him, keep your feet on the ground next time. Without those influences I would have pleaded in my letter, without them I would have spoken to him on the telephone and I would not have written that final letter confirming that I would not go to America.
I was the product of a narrow middle-class home and an even narrower and more conservative convent education. At eighteen I was a total innocent. Karl’s life had been so different. After the war, from the age of sixteen he was regularly smuggling fish and whisky across the Iron Curtain, and it cost him two arrests and several days of prison detention before he finally escaped to the west when he was eighteen. By the time I met him he had already been married and divorced, become a father, changed countries twice and had another important relationship that was still fresh in his memory. Our backgrounds were entirely different and it was that difference that had been so frightening to everyone except the two of us.
Mistrust of difference. Fear of the unknown. Anxiety about change—will I let it influence me again? In nineteen sixty-two I had felt powerless to influence the course of my own life: it was decided for me by others—by my parents, by Karl, by other people who professed to have my interests at heart. It had left me believing that I had not been good enough to deserve and keep his love, and that I must just take what was handed out to me. Those feelings had stayed with me despite the evidence that I had exercised power in my personal and professional lives, and despite the fact that I had inspired love in others. But it had become my belief pattern and I had continued to act as I had as a younger woman, disclosing too much, soliciting opinions, listening closely and following them, instead of pursuing my own instincts. Abandoning my heart and gut feelings in favour of something which I could safely intellectualise after I had canvassed other views. Only in recent years had 1/consciously started to break the habit and follow my own instincts.
Overhead the sky has lightened and a patch of blue, definitely large enough to mend a pair of sailor’s trousers, breaks through the cloud and a slim shaft of winter sunlight tumbles through the rain onto the wet grass and ignites a thousand tiny rainbows.
Well I am not that person any more. I need no other opinion than my own on this intimate journey. I am beginning to understand the change that has taken place in me, but I understand something else as well.
I had thought that I was free. My responsibilities were to my sons, Neil in Portugal, Mark and his wife and twin sons in Perth; and to my mother, eighty-seven years old, in a nursing home, also in Perth.
For years my friends have been an extended family with whom I have discussed the future, dreams, aspirations, disappointments. I have valued their friendship for its constancy and for its liberating nature. For me, while friendship carries certain responsibilities it does not include the confines of relationship. My expectation of my friends was that they would always be my friends wherever they or I went; whatever we did, the friendship would remain, closer at some times, more distant at others. But now I begin to see that some have expectations of me which exceed mine of them. I will try to temper autonomy with sensitivity, but this time nothing that anyone says will stop me. The subject is not open for discussion.
The rain stops and the sun jousts with the clouds as I drive back to the house. In the kitchen Irene is taking things out of the clothes dryer. I stand beside her looking out of the kitchen window, folding the laundry.
‘So,’ she says. ‘Did you manage to sort out the changes in Australia?’
‘The practical ones—yes,’ I say. ‘Some others may take a little more time.’
She nods knowingly and leans across to hand me a pile of dry clothes. As I reach out to take them she holds on fleetingly and looks down at them.
‘If you don’t mind me saying so,’ she says with a wry grin, ‘I think it may be time to buy some new underwear!’
The next day I buy new underwear, a lot of it, and it isn’t serviceable white cotton.
***
Neil has already gone back to Portugal, I will follow in a few days, but first I have to make a visit to Rye, on the Sussex coast. It is the background for a book and I need to take notes and photographs, check certain houses and views, walk the streets, absorb the atmosphere, confirm the wording on some plaques in the church.
Overnight in a tiny hotel, its external walls barely visible through the mass of cr
eepers, I sit on a bed made up with white linen and write to Karl.
In the unfamiliar surroundings I feel freer than ever to tell him what is in my heart and what his return to my life means. I write a love letter and in it I tell him that I have never written a love letter since the last I wrote to him. I explain to him that a part of me was lost when he left me, remained lost through all the intervening years.
I begin to ask him if he remembers the night we sat in the lounge at Smugglers Cottage and I read to him Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet— How do I love thee, let me count the ways. I start to tell him that I gave up reading poetry as well as writing love letters when he left my life, but no—I’ll surprise him—I have been searching for a gift to take to him in Germany, now I know what it will be. I stop writing, scrap this page and begin to write about other memories.
There are three bookshops in Rye’s High Street and early next morning I search their shelves for a copy of Sonnets from the Portuguese. It is the second time in my life I have tried to buy this book and I face the same problem again. I find the poem in an anthology but that’s not what I want. I want the complete series, just these sonnets, alone in one volume. Surely by this time there must be a paperback edition? I need them now and I don’t have time to wait for them as I had waited in nineteen sixty-two.
But such a thing is not to be found. I almost weep with disappointment—it would have been the perfect gift, but I must think of something else. Disappointed, I pick my way carefully over the smooth cobbles and up the hill towards the church, past the Rye Old and Rare Bookshop.
Something makes me hesitate, turn and look back. The shop window is full of boys’ story books from the twenties, there is nothing specific to lure me inside, except the lifelong seduction of old books.
The poetry section is right at the back of the shop and I walk straight to it, my eyes immediately seeking out the B’s.
There, among the crimson, black and olive leather spines with their gold lettering, there before Browning, Burns and Byron is a narrow gold spine without a title or a name. I reach up and take it from the shelf. It is a gold gift box and the book that slides out is a slim octavo size volume with no title on the cover. It is bound in crimson and gold corded silk. My hands shake as I open it at the title page. Sonnets from the Portuguese —I am holding a copy of the Folio Society’s nineteen sixty-two gift edition. Is this real or am I imagining it? There is a spookiness mingling with the delight, and it brings me up in goose bumps.
The elderly Irish woman who runs the shop is bursting to tell her stories of local writers, their books, their lovers, their indiscretions with money; she tells me stories of Henry James, and E F Benson, of Joseph Conrad and H G Wells and Rumer Godden who all lived and worked in or around this area.
‘I have a story about this book,’ I tell her as she wraps it. And I tell her my story and she comes from behind the counter to hug me, with tears pouring down her face.
‘Lord bless you, Sweetheart!’ she says wiping her eyes. ‘That’s the best love story I’ve heard in years. And to think you found the book here in my shop. It’s just like on the filums.’
The book costs me ten pounds and is worth every penny and more. I walk from the shop bursting with satisfaction. For once in my life I have bought the perfect gift. A birthday present, thirty-seven years late.
***
Ten days later Neil pushes my luggage trolley to the Lufthansa check-in desk at Lisbon airport. I am an emotional wreck. The sadness of parting from my children does not ease as we all grow older; alongside it is the anxiety and the excitement of what lies ahead.
‘It’ll be wonderful, Mum,’ Neil says, putting his arm around my shoulders. ‘This is just the best thing that could happen to you, there’s nothing to worry about.’
‘But what if he doesn’t feel the same when he sees me?’
‘He will. Of course he will. Anyway what have you got to lose?’
Jess said this, and Irene, and now Neil, and of course in so many ways they are right. Except that they can’t know that what I have to lose is the dream of thirty-seven years, the same risk I ran when I took his first call.
‘Anyway,’ Irene had said. ‘Suppose you find it is all different—so you have a lovely week in Germany with an old friend.’
True—but that’s not what I want. What I want is the romance and the passion that I lost in nineteen sixty-two. What I want is Karl vintage nineteen sixty-two; the Karl to whom I thought I meant everything. I want that handsome, sensitive, strong and gentle man with the seductive blue eyes, and I want him loving me with all the fire and the tenderness of nineteen sixty-two. I don’t want a lovely week in Germany with an old friend.
‘It’ll be all right Mum,’ Neil says. ‘It’ll be the same as before—he always loved you, he never forgot, he went halfway round the world to find you.’
For a while my sadness at leaving Neil takes over. When will I see him again? Has my intense involvement with Karl, my reliving of the past, detracted from my time with him? Does he feel I have neglected him? But it is too late to start asking these questions now. I walk through the barriers and turn to see him walking away back to his life, his job, his friends, and I check the flight indicator for the number of my departure gate.
***
On that blazing hot January morning in Fremantle the sister on duty collects the mail from the postbox and sorts it on the desk in the Director of Nursing’s office. She picks up a postcard from Portugal and takes it down to a small two-bedded room where an elderly woman sleeps in a chair by the French windows.
‘Rob,’ she says, touching the woman’s arm gently. ‘Rob, look, there’s another card from Liz.’
The woman opens her eyes slowly, she looks around, confused at first but then reassured by familiar surroundings. She likes this nurse who treats her with respect, they have good conversations and a lot of laughs together. A pity she can never remember the nurse’s name, but then she can’t remember anyone’s name these days. In fact she can hardly remember anything and sometimes things seem to get completely mixed up. Only yesterday she had asked when her mother would be coming to see her and they had told her that her mother died years ago.
‘Goodness Rob,’ the nurse had said. ‘You’re eighty-seven, how old do you think your mother would have to be?’ She is surprised, she thought that she saw her mother just a few weeks ago before she went off on her holiday to Portugal. ‘That’s Liz, that’s your daughter,’ the nurse said.
Ah well, life is so confusing she can’t even remember where her room is most of the time.
‘Shall I read it to you,’ the sister says, holding on to her hand.
‘Yes dear, please. That would be nice.’
Dearest Mum
I’m going to add a few extra days on to my holiday.
Do you remember Karl, the German boyfriend I was engaged to when I was eighteen? He has tracked me down after all these years, and I’m meeting him in Frankfurt for a week on my way back to Australia. He remembers you and Dad so well and sends you his love.
I’ll be back soon. I think of you often and hope you re okay.
Much love
Liz
‘Well,’ says the nurse with some excitement. ‘Isn’t that lovely. Do you remember him Rob—this Karl?’
Considering the state of the old lady’s memory the question is almost rhetorical so she is surprised when, after a momentary pause, Rob fixes her firmly in the eye.
‘I remember him,’ she says. ‘I remember that she wanted to marry him and we wouldn’t let her. Afterwards I thought it was wrong,’ Len and I—we were wrong.’
The nurse hands her the card, its picture of Lisbon upturned.
‘Well isn’t that lovely,’ she repeats. ‘I can hardly wait for the next instalment, anyway Liz’ll be back soon and we can hear all about it.’
Rob turns the card in her hands a couple of times. It’s all so vague, Karl—yes he was German, but there was something about America. And Liz—s
he was so upset.
‘I think I liked him a lot, I wonder why we wouldn’t let her marry him,’ she says aloud.
The nursing home’s cat wanders in through the open window and springs lightly onto her knee, purring noisily. She strokes his head and he kneads the rug with his paws, his claws pricking her slightly through the light fabric. The startling clarity of the preceding few moments is gone.
‘I can remember what he looked like,’ she says to the cat. ‘But I can’t remember why we wouldn’t let her marry him. I’ll have to ask her when she gets back.’ And closing her eyes she leans her head back against the cushion and is soon drowsing again while the cat purrs on.
***
This is the longest flight of my life. It reminds me of a train journey to London and I am even more anxious and excited than I was that day. Our conversations have been intimate, the words, the feelings, the silences and the many tears have all conveyed so much, we have been transported back in time. A part of me is eighteen again, a part of him is thirty-one. I picture him—the man I knew and the description Jess gave me—the images like Chinese puppets blending and separating against a screen. I know how he will look, but I am so afraid of what he will see. When I last saw him he was a mature man, but I was a teenager. The difference between a man of thirty-two and man of sixty-eight seems far less than between a girl of eighteen and a fifty-four year old overweight grandmother. What will he think of me? I force myself to focus on my surroundings. This is one of the most important journeys of my life, I’m a writer, I must engrave this on my memory.
Below us Germany, a patchwork of greens and browns, is spread beneath a film of watery cloud. Slate and terracotta clothe the rooftops, cars slide along a silvery web of roads. What will I say to him? So many words brought us close on the phone, will they still flow face to face? The engines roar in reverse thrust and we speed along the runway. He will be there to meet me.