by Liz Byrski
‘Please, darling,’ Tom says, reaching for her hand. ‘Don’t go on . . . I started out trying to do the right thing and then I just couldn’t bring myself to . . .’
She is completely undone by this. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, Tomo,’ she says. ‘It’s my guilt talking; I was so focused on Hilary, and then the stuff with Zoë, that I didn’t even notice that you were worried.’ She kisses him first on the forehead and then on the lips, and he holds her into the kiss, stroking her neck.
‘I’ll be fine. Raheem says it’s a piece of cake, and you know what a bloody good surgeon he is.’
Raheem had not, in fact, said anything of the sort. What he had said, earlier that morning, was, ‘You are a fucking idiot, my friend. I warn you when you come to see me. I send you two letters telling you get your frigging finger out and let me organise the tests, and what do you do? Ignore me. Now we are a very dodgy, complicated, elevated risk level for negative outcomes.’
‘You mean, like dying?’ Tom had said, keeping an eye on the door in case Julia came back from her trip to the cafeteria to get a coffee.
‘If you want to put it like that,’ Raheem said. ‘You one lucky fucker, Tom, I am the best urologist in the known universe.’
‘And modest with it.’
‘That too. So, probably you are being okay. But you are too old for being so stupid.’
‘But my heart’s in good shape, and my lungs. I’ve got a good constitution. I’m otherwise very healthy and in good shape for surgery,’ Tom had said, not sure whether he was reassuring Raheem or himself.
‘These things are good, yes. Just your brain is obviously in question now.’
‘You are the best urologist in the known universe and I love it when you’re angry,’ Tom had said with a half smile.
Raheem broke into a laugh and did some air punching. ‘Okay, silly old bugger. We do the surgery at four o’clock, and I save your life and am a hero, okay?’
‘It’s a deal. But listen,’ Tom says, lowering his voice. ‘I know I’m an idiot but can you just tone it down a bit in front of Julia? I’m in enough trouble with her already.’
‘Okay, buster.’ Raheem’s early knowledge of English came from reading Biggles novels. ‘See you later when I am hero. Chin Chin.’
Fortunately, Raheem’s and Julia’s paths did not cross.
‘So, they’ll be along shortly to give you the pre-med, I suppose,’ Julia says later. ‘Did Raheem say how long it will take?’
‘Up to four hours, barring complications.’
‘I’ll be here when you wake up. I’ll stay up here, at Richard’s place, tonight.’
‘But Zoë’s coming tomorrow,’ Tom says. ‘You wanted to go shopping, sort out the spare room.’
‘Richard’s driven down there to do the shopping and make up the bed, all that stuff.’
‘That’s kind; didn’t he mind?’
‘He minds about you and he minds that he might not get to see Zoë.’
‘But he might; after all, she hasn’t said she doesn’t want to see him.’
‘But she hasn’t said she does, which I think is significant,’ Julia says. ‘And, anyway, she’s married to someone who sounds really nice. Richard can’t go through life hoping to kidnap his ex-wives.’
‘There was only one other, and he was very upset about Lily.’
Julia sighs. ‘But he was crazy to even think she’d have him back. I did warn him.’
‘Well, now that he’s back here and living in the flat, perhaps life will settle down for him,’ Tom says. ‘Maybe some wonderful woman will fall madly in love with him.’
‘Mmm. Maybe, but it’s more a question of whether she’ll stay in love with him when she finds out about the drinking.’ Julia looks at Tom and kisses him again. ‘I do know how lucky I am, Tom,’ she says, and tears spring up in her eyes again.
A nurse holding a medicine cup, tablets and a glass of water materialises between the curtains.
‘I’ll have to ask you to leave now, Mrs Hammond,’ she says. ‘Time for your husband’s pre-med.’
‘Could I stay just a little bit longer, if I’m nice to him?’ Julia asks.
The nurse laughs. ‘Well, five minutes, if you’re very nice and very quiet. We want him really relaxed.’
‘And ready for the slaughter,’ says Tom, swallowing the tablets.
‘I’ll just sit and hold your hand,’ Julia says, her voice wavering with emotion. ‘And I’ll be sitting here holding it when you wake up too.’
‘So they had to rush him off up to London last night,’ Richard explains, standing awkwardly in the doorway. ‘And Jules asked me to pop down, and sort of tidy up a bit, and get the shopping and, well . . . look this wasn’t meant to happen, Zoë, she made it clear that I should stay away unless you actually wanted to see me.’
‘Yes, I see,’ Zoë says, giving him an odd sort of half smile. ‘It makes you sound like a leper.’
He shrugs. ‘I can understand that you wouldn’t . . .’
‘Did you want to see me?’ she asks, taking him by surprise.
‘Very much and not at all, if you know what I mean.’
‘Mmm. Exactly, me too,’ she says. ‘But, look, this is my fault; I took a room for one night and didn’t even tell Julia I was going to be in Rye. And then I just saw I was close to the house, so . . . I thought . . .’
‘Yes, of course.’ Richard feels hyped up on anxiety and memories and thinks he must look insane. Knowing about Zoë’s visit has had him on edge for a couple of weeks. He’d assumed she would avoid him and now she’s here in front of him; so much the same and, at the same time, so totally different. More than thirty years older, for a start, but unmistakably Zoë and she’s wearing black jeans and a red shirt, just like the red and black she was wearing that first day he saw her. He feels as though he’s back in the foyer of Broadcasting House and that all the messy years in between have miraculously disappeared; he is twenty-eight again and full of hope.
‘Look, tell Julia I can easily stay on at the hotel,’ Zoë says. ‘She’ll want to be there with Tom – she mustn’t come back for me. When’s the operation?’
Everything Julia has told him about Tom’s operation has disappeared from Richard’s memory and he has to study the figures on his watch to focus himself. ‘They were due to start about an hour ago,’ he says eventually.
She nods. ‘I hope it all goes well. Tell Julia I’ll catch up with her later in the week. I’m staying at that place opposite the Mermaid.’ She turns to go.
‘You could come in . . . I mean, if you want to,’ Richard stammers. ‘I could make you some tea.’
She pauses. ‘I was going to have a cream tea at the place on the other side of the church.’
He shrugs with a nonchalance he doesn’t feel. ‘It would take me two minutes to get scones from the bakery, cream was on Jules’s shopping list and there’s a cupboard full of homemade jam in the kitchen.’
For a moment she stands there looking at him; her eyes meet his, flick away and then back.
‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Why not?’
And he opens the door wider and steps aside to let her in.
THIRTY-ONE
Cottesloe – June 2000
‘Have you heard from your mother?’ Gwen asks when Gaby turns up late on a Friday afternoon with her backpack.
Gaby nods, dumps the bag on a chair and goes to the fridge to get herself a glass of water. She is quite at home here, and has twice stayed overnight to go swimming with Gwen early in the mornings. Gwen delights in her company, for, although Justine and Dan are downstairs in the flat, she sees much less of Justine now. She is cautious, though, about Zoë’s reaction. What does she feel about her daughter spending so much time here? Will it just add to the indefinable tension between Zoë and Justine? But right now, Zoë is away for a while, and presumably not keeping tabs on the frequency of Gaby’s visits. Archie, on the other hand, is delighted and has promised to drive over with Gaby early one morning to swim with t
he Polar Bears.
‘Yeah,’ Gaby says, ‘she’s having a great time. She’s gone to visit this woman, Julia, who used to be her sister-in-law.’
Gwen nods. Dan has filled her in on those past relationships, along with some views of his own on what happened and why. He is battling, she thinks, with the way he’s always seen his mother and the way he sees her now. Gwen is careful what she says as he tries to probe the causes of Zoë’s coolness to Justine. There are, of course, many possibilities: age, race, the chaotic feelings of mid-life, the symbolic separation from a particularly beloved son. Any, or all, of these, could be at the root of it.
Gaby has told Gwen that she has been ‘working on’ her mother, without success. She’s been letting little bits of information and opinions about Justine drop into the conversation, asking pointed questions to which, it seems, there are no answers. She even went down to the Fremantle Library and brought home the huge hardback edition of Bringing Them Home, the report on the stolen generations, together with a book called Mystical Menopause: Enjoying Your Mid-life Journey. She had left them on the coffee table, where they sat, apparently untouched, for three weeks until she stuffed them in her school bag and took them back to the library.
‘That wasn’t very subtle,’ Gwen had told Gaby in what she felt was a massive understatement. ‘It might be best just to do nothing and see what happens.’
But Gaby took a lot of convincing.
‘Well, I hope she enjoys her trip,’ Gwen says now. ‘She probably needs a break.’
‘She’s never been away on her own before,’ Gaby says. ‘She hardly does anything on her own, so we were all, like, totally amazed when she started going to that art class, and now she’s gone off like this.’
‘Really?’ Gwen says, surprised. ‘Why do you think that is?’
Gaby throws herself onto the sofa by the window and looks out across the garden, to the street and, beyond it, the ocean. ‘She’s frightened, I think.’
‘Of what?’
‘Oh, I dunno; it’s like she’s not sure who she is if we’re not there.’ She pauses. ‘Anyway, I’m glad she’s gone away, because she’s upsetting everybody. We want to talk about the wedding and everything, and we can’t do it with her around because she makes us feel guilty. Like, because we’re all excited about it, we’re not being loyal to her.’
‘But has she said that?’
‘Oh no, she never actually says anything. She’s just there, making a weird atmosphere, being disapproving. So I don’t talk to her about it now. I mean, what can I do? If it was the other way round, she’d be giving me a mega hard time.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, if I’m yelling at Rosie if she’s going somewhere, Mum’s, like “Oh, Gaby, you’re so selfish, spoiling it for Rosie,” and everything. But it’s okay for her to do it. But that’s – well, that’s parents, isn’t it?’
Zoë sits by the open window of her hotel room, watching pedestrians making their way up the steep street to gaze at the famous facade of the Mermaid Hotel. She had forgotten these long summer evenings, when it is still light at nine-thirty and the air is mild and gentle. She feels as though she is suspended in a life that is not her own, in which anything could happen, and, indeed, in which the strangest thing has already happened.
When Richard opened the door, her first reaction had been panic; she had even felt she might faint. That he was equally shocked was obvious from his expression. How long had they stood there, staring at each other as the past swam before her eyes like a series of slides? He looked older, much older, and, while he was still an attractive man, it was clear from his ravaged face that life had not been particularly kind to him. His hair, only a little shorter than it had been in the sixties, was almost completely grey and she had never seen him with a beard before – although this was more what Rosie would call designer stubble. He was wearing jeans and a blue-and-white cotton shirt, and his feet were bare against the polished floorboards. She remembered sliding down a stony beach on a late afternoon in summer, just like this one, and taking his cold feet in her hands, tickling them, and then, as he begged for mercy, kissing them, tasting sea water on his skin. It seems impossible now that she could ever have done that.
Zoë had so often wondered what it would be like, how she would feel, if they met again. She had even rehearsed the biting sarcasm she would employ, that would leave him crushed. And when he’d offered her tea she had almost refused, but something intrigued her; something about the way Richard was behaving and about the way it made her feel.
‘Okay,’ she’d said. ‘Why not?’ And she’d followed him down the central passage to the large light kitchen where shopping sat in carrier bags on a big scrubbed pine table. ‘This is beautiful,’ she’d said, looking around her and out through a glazed breakfast room to the garden and beyond, to where the land dropped steeply away to the sea.
She thinks she must have appeared comparatively calm and confident, but all the time she had been wondering why she was there in Julia’s kitchen with Richard. He had moved around in confusion, unloading the shopping, attempting to make tea; clearly distracted, obviously wanting to stare deeply at her and through her into the past, in just the same way she wanted to stare into him.
‘If you tell me where the bakery is, I’ll go and get the scones,’ she’d said, thinking it would give him time to sort himself out.
‘But you will come back?’ he’d asked as he’d pointed across the churchyard, and indicated that she should follow the path to the square and wouldn’t be able to miss the bakery.
‘I’m getting scones for both of us; of course I’ll come back.’ But she had taken her time, pausing once out of sight of the house to sit briefly on a seat against the church wall, in order to gather her thoughts. And when she got back, the tea was made, the table cleared of shopping, and Richard was spooning cream into a small dish that matched the one into which he’d already put the jam.
It wasn’t the easiest of conversations, peppered as it was with awkward silences as they both struggled to keep it up, when it kept veering towards dangerous ground. She had told him about Archie and the girls, and about her mother, to whom he could remember having spoken a few times over the phone.
‘And Daniel?’ he’d asked, looking down into his tea, and Zoë thought she saw his hands shaking.
‘He’s well,’ she said, swallowing hard, also unable to look up at Richard as she spoke. ‘He’s an officer in the Australian army; the SAS, actually.’
Richard’s head jerked up. ‘The army, really? I never imagined . . . although, of course, what would I know about . . .’
‘I never imagined it either,’ she said. ‘And, frankly, I hate it. It’s the last thing I wanted for him, especially his being in the SAS. Sometimes we haven’t a clue where he is, even if he’s alive or dead. The last time, he was away for about three months and then turned up out of the blue on crutches on New Year’s Eve. His leg was broken in two places and he’d had two lumps of shrapnel removed from it.’ She swallowed hard, determined not to cry in front of Richard, and unsure why she felt she might.
‘It must be incredibly hard,’ Richard said quietly, and she looked across at him and saw her own sadness reflected in his eyes. ‘Where had he been?’
‘East Timor.’
They sat in silence for a moment and then Richard said, ‘You must be very proud of him. I have a daughter, Carly; she’s a journalist, she works for a newspaper in San Francisco. And she’s getting married in September.’
Zoë looked up at him. ‘Dan’s getting married then too. We’re getting old, Richard.’
‘Not you, Zoë,’ he’d said then. ‘Not you. I, on the other hand, am a wreck, for which I only have myself to blame.’
He did look wrecked, Zoë thinks now, sitting in the twilight, enjoying the feeling that she has survived this extraordinary encounter; in fact, enjoyed it. Had she known she would meet him, her fevered imagination would have conjured up a painful encounter fr
aught with recriminations and resentment. But all her long-held anger towards Julia had simply dissipated in the early days of their correspondence, and so it had today with Richard. The past was done and perhaps Archie was right; the person she really needed to forgive was herself.
Their conversation had finally been interrupted by Julia’s call to say that Tom had come through the operation and the surgeon had insisted that everything would be fine.
‘What are you going to do now?’ Zoë had heard Richard ask. And, apparently, Julia had told him that she was going to stay a while longer at the hospital and then go back to the flat, and asked if he would be coming back there.
‘No,’ he’d said then. ‘No, I’m not going to drive back tonight. I’ll stay down here and drive up in the morning. And by the way, Jules, Zoë’s here.’
There was a horrified squawk and then a fast, high-pitched torrent of indistinguishable words.
‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘At least, I think it is, isn’t it, Zoë?’ he asked, raising his eyebrows. ‘She’s nodding and smiling, so it must be. We’ve had tea together and I might . . .’ But Julia had interrupted and he had listened to her for a moment, shrugged and pulled a face. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘hang on. She wants to talk to you,’ he said, handing Zoë the phone.
She had assured Julia that things were fine and they then spoke briefly of Tom. ‘Don’t hurry back,’ Zoë said. ‘I can stay on at the hotel, or maybe come up to London and meet you.’
‘Let’s talk in the morning,’ Richard had interrupted. ‘We’ll know more about how Tom is by then.’
As she’d put down the phone, Zoë had suddenly felt her energy drain away, as though shock and emotion had sucked everything from her.
‘I’m going to head off now, Richard,’ she’d said. ‘I’m really tired, but I’m so glad about Tom.’
‘Me too,’ he said. ‘He’s a lovely man, you’ll like him, Zoë.’
‘Not another Simon, then? Although I did rather like Simon, he was so . . . so . . .’