When my friend Ali Clark’s husband, Axel, died in 2001, one of the first of our contemporaries to go, his children put up a board with photos going back through his life. I was looking at them with Ali the day after the funeral. The board had been put back in the room that was still in every way Axel’s study. We were remembering events from when their children were little, times down on the South Coast, so much life shared and we were still only just into our fifties. Axel was fifty-eight when he died, a year younger than my mother had been when she died. There was a photo of two skinny youths standing in a doorway that didn’t look Australian. They had long thin legs in tiny shorts and hair that fell over their faces. Who are they? I asked Ali. That’s Axel and me, she said, and for a moment I wasn’t sure I believed her. They were in Rome, not yet married, not yet with children, not yet in the house where we spent so much time: Ali made huge pots of bolognaise or trays of roast chicken legs, big salads; there was always someone to help in the kitchen, chopping and talking and drinking the beers that one of the blokes had been out for. We talked about books and paintings, and the children did their homework. I met Helen Garner at that table. I have a photo of her with one leg up on the bench, one arm resting on her knee, looking across at the camera. Why was I taking a photo? I don’t remember cameras being there – or even, now I come to think of it, if it was me who took that photo. Either way it was a moment that now seems of more consequence than the anguish of Ross that had preceded it. Axel had met him in the street one afternoon during our short disaster and asked him how his ‘lady wife’ was, by which he meant me. Ross repeated this to me with a raise of the brow that I took as scornful, and I blushed as if at an obscenity; remembering it now brings the shadow of shame that I’d wished Axel hadn’t. That day after his funeral, I didn’t recognise Axel, and I didn’t recognise Ali standing in that doorway in Rome – though when I worked it out, I realised that when I first met them they would have been closer to that age than to the age we were standing there in the room lined with Axel’s books. The point being, obviously enough, that when we live alongside people we don’t see the changes – or we do, how could we not, but we accommodate them and discount them. Ali looks fabulous at the age she is now, and she says the same of me, and then we joke that the only people who think women our age look fabulous are women our age. But actually, she does. She looks fully herself – in her face, her posture, her demeanour: full of lived life, of knowledge, of wisdom, dare I say. Why not? Not everyone is wise in their late sixties, but Ali is.
The thing I found most interesting when I looked up Ross on the internet was to see that the courses he teaches have moved from the Marxism he was teaching when I knew him to – among other things – the concept and politics of memory. ‘Memory and its traces’; ‘Memory, identity and responsibility’. ‘The art of memory’, I read under one course description. Walter Benjamin and Proust are among his texts; the only listed writer I haven’t read is Bergson. ‘What is memory?’ I read under another course. ‘Why has the rhetoric of memory become inescapable in contemporary politics?’ Nothing more personal than that. Still, it makes me wonder. I looked him up on the internet that night because I couldn’t sleep. I had been tired for days, it was the end of the year, 2013, December already, and my niece Martha, who’d been living with me here in Sydney for much of the last few years, had just that week returned to England. A high-school drama teacher, she’d been offered a job in Singapore and was making a quick visit home before she started at the new school in January. While I was pleased for her – as we are for the young in our lives when they make a move that takes them forward – I was also sad to see her go. I missed the sound of the front door opening, her soft tread on the stairs. I could have gone to England for Christmas with her and our family, but something had kept me here. No, this was not a Christmas for England. And so there I was that night, in a strange drift, becalmed with no energy, and I didn’t realise, though it’s happened often enough before, that I was book-broody. I couldn’t sleep, it was hot, the cricket was on the radio and I’ve never liked cricket, so I lay there in the muggy air and as I did I could see words on a page, as fresh as paint, of that night I told Ross I couldn’t take it over the line, this misery, into the next decade, and he said, Well that’s a pity, because I’ve just told Elena you deserve a time of monogamy. And there he was, Ross, standing on the matting in the room with the table at the back of the house on the corner, its glass doors closed against the rain. I’d put those doors in with the money that came to me after my mother’s death, though there wasn’t enough to fix the damp in the floor so the matting, new only the year before, was rotting again, underneath. You couldn’t see it from above, it hadn’t yet made a hole as it had in the old matting, but it left a slight odour that needed the doors open for more air than we were getting that day with the rain. We went out to dinner to celebrate my birthday. There were other people, I can’t remember who, or the restaurant, but I do remember the feeling of breath coming shallowly, and the veil, though not of tears, not then at dinner. Not that it mattered, for it obscured my view out across the table, while everything within was dark and disorienting; frightening. Ross drove me home and we went to bed. We didn’t make love – love? – and before dawn he left, or maybe I asked him to go, I don’t remember, only that I awoke alone in my bed, alone in the house and forty years old, though because of the time difference with England it would be the early hours of the next morning that would mark the exact time of my arrival to my very young mother in a hospital in London.
You were born within the sound of Bow Bells, my father would say, a joke he enjoyed, which makes you a Cockney, though as a girl raised in Hampshire from the age of two nothing was further from the truth – hence the joke – except perhaps that I was born an Indian, which was what I wished, or am said to have wished, as a very small child.
Thursday’s child has far to go, my mother used to say, and far I went, all the way to Papua New Guinea, married at twenty to a handsome young anthropologist. It would be a long time before I returned – returned, that is, not in the sense of getting on a plane, but of learning anew the ground on which I was born.
The weekend after my fortieth birthday there was a party. It was a good house for parties, the house on the corner, and that Saturday the sun shone and the doors and windows were open, people spilled out everywhere. Garry who, until recently, had worked at the same university as me was there; tall and thin with his hair tied back in a band, he brought me a book by Thich Nhat Hanh. I let him admire me, his eyes a balm. Ross was furious. He was flirting with you, he said. In front of me. I was pleased, vengeful, though when Garry came into my bed, not that night but soon – far too soon – I wept, lost under the veil that he was powerless against. He said he’d marry me tomorrow, which he can’t have meant literally, and didn’t help either of us; those tears just kept pouring. The next week his mother rang looking for him and I was curt, inexcusably so. I felt cramped and claimed. All in all not a propitious beginning, and it didn’t take long for Garry to realise that marrying me wasn’t such a great idea, and that anyway it was a projection of his, and unlike me with Ross, he recognised it quickly enough and returned to contemplating the crash that had come in his life and had to do with a woman who’d left, a small boy he adored, and the sadness that came oozing up through the floorboards of the Zen centre where he lived.
I hadn’t thought about any of this for years until the other night when I couldn’t sleep. I hadn’t thought of writing a memoir, and certainly not one that would begin at this lacerating moment. During the decade of my fifties, I’d developed an abhorrence of the first person: I, I, I, I, the sledgehammer of the controlling policeman, or colonialist, or conductor, if you prefer a more artistic image. But that night when I couldn’t sleep, there was the first person, returning in the opening words of a memoir, and a title Second Half First, mocking. Would I have the nerve, could I use real names without being cast off forever? Well, in the case of Ross it hardly mattere
d seeing as we’d spoken not a word in almost thirty years, and though I sometimes wondered what he thought of that long-ago past, which I don’t suppose he does, it was rather like wondering if there’s life on another planet. But what about Lynne – our friendship restored, a story for later – and Ali, Garry, all the ones I haven’t mentioned yet; could I write of them without breaking the bounds of confidence? All I knew was that I didn’t like the current tell-all genre of memoir, yet how was I to write of those who’ve shaped my life without exposing what was not mine to expose? Where did the line fall? To that question I had no answer. For the time being I kept on writing as the words that had started so unexpectedly kept on coming: a pour of a very different kind. I’d think about what it meant later – a strategy that in other areas of life hasn’t always been successful, but better than succumbing to the inner critic that used to haunt the house on the corner when Helen Garner came to live there. We’d have to flap and snap the tea towels to drive him out, for there it’d be, always male, this ghastly creature saying, That’s no good. You can’t say that, they’ll tear you apart, and the reviews came rushing at us – awful all of them – and I, at least, didn’t even know if I had a book. And when we talked of what we were writing, full of anxieties that we’d gone too far, or said too much, Helen would say, Well, it’s not as if someone is going to rush in and snatch it off our desks and publish it right now today. This was way before the internet and the temptations of blogs and Facebook. It was before faxes, and the phone was still on a cord and you had to sit in the chair in the room with the mouldy mat and the opening doors to talk, and anyone else in the house could hear every word unless we tactfully retreated, which mostly we did.
It was some years after the Ross debacle that Helen moved in. The first person to live there with me in those years after forty when I started out towards the me that I am now was Sophie. She was English, like me, and had come here for love. She was in Australia for a decade, and unlike me she went back, and I sometimes think I should have too. That disastrous year of 1986 – which was also disastrous for her – she was living in Canberra, where she’d been for two years on the post-doctoral fellowship she’d taken in order to be with the Australian lover she’d met at University College, London. When the lover, whom we called the Economist, got a smart job with the Australian Government, Sophie came too. After working with housing associations in London, the suburban order of Canberra was a shock for Sophie, and it was partly that which precipitated the end of the relationship. The Economist took up with someone else while Lynne was in Sydney staying with me. Sophie knew Lynne from London, but the first I knew, or saw, of Sophie, was late one afternoon when she knocked on my door. I took in her springy blonde hair, her beautiful eyes, her legs in white jeans. Hi, she said. I’m Sophie. Is Lynne here? She wasn’t. She’d moved over to Ross’s house as James was about to arrive, and Ross was meant to be in my house, but wasn’t – and at that very moment was probably in the pub with Lynne or Elena, unless she’d gone back to Melbourne. The only other time I saw her, she was pushing a stroller at a conference at my university. Her husband was beside her. I can’t remember a thing about him, but her back was straight despite the stroller, and her dress was classy. Ross was sitting with me in a sort of sunken concrete courtyard, very badly designed and since built over, and they walked across on the path into the building at the other end. Ah, there’s Elena, Ross said, and while I glowered and a great heavy boulder of misery came thumping down on me, he sauntered over, cool as anything, shook the husband’s hand, a demonstration of how one was meant to behave in these circumstances.
‘No,’ I said to Sophie that day on the doorstep. ‘Lynne is not here.’
And with that I closed the door. I didn’t actually slam it, but as the story has come to be told, I might as well have done.
Fortunately, as things turned out, I met Sophie again that Christmas, the one after my fortieth birthday when I was left in the house by myself with Garry as an occasional salve, and not feeling any improved for all the meditating I was doing with him at the Zen centre, legs crossed on a hard mat looking at a wall. Follow your breath, Garry would say. Let the thoughts pass through. But it wasn’t thoughts that were passing through my head; instead long monologues of great and dramatic eloquence addressed to Ross. That Christmas there was a party on the roof of a small apartment block where several friends lived overlooking Bondi from above the cliff walk to the south. It was windy up there looking out over the ocean and though it was pretty with the lights coming on across the water, and the stars, and maybe a moon – I don’t recall – I wasn’t enjoying it, the wind whipping around, and because it was summer and hot over in Enmore away from the sea breezes, I hadn’t brought anything warm. All I could think was that at least in England there are fires, and then I recognised Sophie. I watched her for a while, wondering what to do, whether to go over to her, or go home. Her hair was blowing around, and when she put down her glass to pin it back, the glass blew over.
‘Your first Christmas in Sydney,’ I said, rescuing the glass. ‘What a disaster.’
‘Disasters all round,’ she said.
And I said, ‘You must have thought I was awful slamming the door on you like that.’
She laughed. Sophie laughs a lot, it’s one of the many things I like about her, and she doesn’t hold grudges.
‘You were pretty awful,’ she said in a direct, un-English way. ‘I didn’t know anything about what was going on for you. It sounds even worse than the way I was dumped.’ And then she told me the story of the Economist who’d brought her to Canberra and then taken up with a girl with a bow in her hair.
‘A bow?’ I said. ‘Really?’
‘Yes, a bow,’ she said, making a gesture with her own blowing-around hair to demonstrate the dimensions of the monstrosity. I never met the girl with the bow, and Sophie never met Elena; they became cartoon figures in the talk at the table in the room that was filled with light from the doors that needed to be open if the dank smell wasn’t to build up. Dank. It’s a good word, I like it. There were girls at school with dank hair; it was the weather and only one hair wash a week. At the house on the corner we had a shower with an open window beside it, at enough of an angle not to be seen from the street, so we could shower with the sun streaming in, or lie in the bath and read looking out into the apricot tree that never had apricots.
I don’t remember when Sophie moved in, but when she did everything changed: the air, my mood, the rooms we slept in. Even the lemon tree, after struggling for years in the tub I’d got cheap at a place near the dump, produced a harvest of five juicy lemons.
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We were into allegory in that house, and metaphor, anything symbolic. If this was fiction, which it isn’t, I could call it The Lemon Tree. It could be one of those recovery novels. All the ingredients were there: Zen, the house on the corner, Sophie, and the friends who gathered for meals around the table, the herbs I planted in pots and the lemon tree that finally came good. A house in Enmore doesn’t have quite the allure of Provence, nor Zen with Garry the appeal of spiritual quest in Bali. But something happened there in those years that was restorative. I moved out of the big bedroom at the front upstairs so Sophie could also use it as a study, and into the smaller room next door. My desk was in the large, downstairs room where the television was and the grate we used for a fire in winter. Most of our time was spent in the room at the back, with the doors and the table – or else in our beds. Maybe it’s being English and the cold we grew up with, for we both liked to retreat to bed. Sophie worked in hers. I read, and tinkered in my notebook. As our rooms adjoined each other and were arranged in such a way that our beds were head to head with the wall between us, we used to say there should be a hatch through which to pass the teapot to save us trundling round when we wanted another cup. The house was shabby, with patches of peeling paint and rattling window frames and, as I say, the damp floor in the room with the doors opening out to the side. A small kitchen had been tacked
on at the back long before there were council regulations, and so badly built that its walls bowed. But the house itself was solid and generously proportioned, and being a corner terrace with the long side facing north, there was plenty of light. There was an outside lavatory which meant it didn’t matter if someone was in the upstairs bathroom – which was just as well, as the small room at the back beside it, which also looked out onto the non-fruiting apricot tree, became a favoured transit-stop for people visiting from Melbourne, Adelaide, London, all over.
When it came to my work, the big downstairs room suited me well. If I shut the doors no one came in to bother me; if I left one door open I could see who came in and out, and join them at the table if I wanted to, or close the door if I didn’t. Writing a book, which at first I wasn’t but eventually I was, can be a good excuse for pleasing oneself, at least in those sorts of ways.
With Sophie in the house, something loosened in me. The walls seemed lighter, the ceilings higher, as if there were more space, and in her company I stretched into it. Well, she’d say, there must be some advantages to our situation – and one of them was that without the encumbrance of live-in partners and children, we could get in the car on a whim and drive out of town. We went to places I’d never been, to towns in the bush with nothing but a pub and a row of houses. We went to the beach house on the South Coast, four hours away, and she fell under its spell as I had done on first coming to Australia. It’s rocky, that stretch of coast, with hills covered in eucalypts coming down to small coves. Like Wales, Sophie would say, though it wasn’t; it is like nowhere but itself, with its great crocodile rock brooding across the sandbar. We’d walk over headlands, across small, shingly coves, to a beach that was long only in the context of that area – unlike Australia’s celebrated beaches that extend for miles with nothing behind them but exhausted dunes. It took ten minutes to walk the length of our longest beach, with its small dune where the creek came in and boathouses under the cliff at the far end. Sophie loved the sweep of the tides and made sure she walked in a zone that she taught me to appreciate – between the high tide and the low; that liminal space, betwixt and between, with its own life of crabs and seaweeds and feeding birds.
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