by Liz Byrski
‘You didn’t call me. I thought that meant you were with Harry,’ Richard says. ‘I didn’t find out about all that until years later. When I got back from Vietnam, I bumped into Claire one day and she told me. For years I thought I saw you together with the baby, I thought . . .’ He stops and looks up. Her face is ashen and her eyes are searching his. He wonders if he has misunderstood. ‘Are you saying that you would have . . . in spite of what had happened, and in spite of the way I’d . . . you would –’
‘Yes,’ she cuts in. ‘Of course I would. In spite of all that. I loved you and I hated you, but . . . of course I wanted you back, Richard. Of course I did.’
THIRTY-SEVEN
Fremantle – July 2000
When Dan arrives at Clancy’s pub, Archie is already there and halfway into his first beer. Dan pauses for a moment watching him sitting on a stool and staring gloomily down into his drink. For the first time, he notices signs of age. Archie is an outdoor sort of man: tall, big boned, with a fair complexion tanned by years in the sun, his hair an unruly mass of reddish curls now increasingly threaded with grey. It strikes him suddenly that Archie, always so youthful and energetic, so endlessly resourceful and generous, is getting old. Shoulders slumped, lost in thought, he seems vulnerable, as though he has suddenly lost his grip, and Dan feels the shock of recognising that one day he will lose him; this father whom he loves and admires so profoundly. He walks over quickly and puts his hand on Archie’s shoulder.
‘G’day, Arch, can I get you another one?’
And as Archie looks up and sees him, the years seem to drop away and he is the familiar Archie again – except he’s not, not quite.
They take their drinks out the back, where it’s quieter, and sit down. Large moths hurl themselves at the old street lamps that light the pub terrace, and out on the grass a couple of kids are rolling with a dog while their parents watch from a nearby table.
‘Thanks for coming, mate,’ Archie says, and they are silent again.
Dan knows he’s been asked here for a reason. They often have a beer together, but this is much later than they usually meet and Archie is different.
‘I went across to the hospital,’ Dan says. ‘Saw Rosie there. Gran seems okay, doesn’t she? I mean, it wasn’t a bad fall.’
‘No, she’ll be fine. They’re just going to keep her in a couple of days to be sure. Heard from your mum?’
Dan shakes his head. ‘Not since she left. I’m in the dog house anyway so I didn’t really expect to. What did she say about Gran?’
Archie sips his drink, looks out at the playing children, up at the moths and then at Dan. ‘She doesn’t know yet,’ he says. ‘I haven’t been able to get hold of her.’
Dan raises his eyebrows. ‘Did you try the mobile?’
‘Dozens of times, it’s switched off.’
‘Probably she forgot to switch it on. You know what she’s like with it. You could call whatsername, Julia, where she’s staying; you’ve got that number, haven’t you?’
‘I’ve done that and she’s not there. She’s in London and they can’t get hold of her either.’
‘That’s odd,’ Dan says. ‘I thought she was staying with them all the time. She just said she might go up to London to look at the house in Delphi Street – you know, where we used to . . .’
‘Yes, I know.’ Archie pauses and turns to face Dan. ‘Did Zoë tell you she was going to see Richard?’
‘Richard! Bloody hell, no. Has she? I thought she never wanted to see him again.’
‘Well, according to Julia, Zoë’s staying in London in Richard’s flat while he’s away. Julia gave me the number. She’s left a message there but Zoë hadn’t got back to her. That number’s still not answering, Zoë’s phone’s still off and so, according to Julia, is Richard’s.’
Dan whistles through his teeth. ‘That’s pretty weird.’ He looks up at Archie and sees what looks like desolation in his face. ‘Hey, Arch, you’re not thinking . . .’
‘What else can I think?’ Archie says. ‘And I know it’s not fair to be laying this on you, Dan, but it’s ten o’clock and her phone’s been off for almost twenty-four hours.’ He puts his glass on the table. ‘I must sound like a bloody idiot, but I don’t know what to do, and I don’t want to talk about this to anyone else. But you’ve got to admit . . .’
‘No, Arch,’ Dan says, putting a hand on his arm. ‘I know what you’re thinking and there’s no way. Mum wouldn’t; she just wouldn’t.’
‘She’s been very odd lately about a whole lot of things. You know that.’
‘Yes, but not this, not Richard. Look, it’s odd, I’ll grant you, but there’s probably some simple explanation. She’s gone out, she’s forgotten her phone’s off or maybe she just forgot to charge it. And, anyway, didn’t you say Richard was away?’
‘Yes, but . . .’
‘Well, there you are, then. Forget about it, Arch, I’ll get us another round. Any minute now she’ll be on the phone, telling you she’s sorry she forgot to switch it on.’ And he takes the empty glasses and carries them inside, orders two more beers and, while he’s waiting at the bar, wonders if he’s wrong.
There’s a glorious view from where they sit on a bench at a high point on Hampstead Heath, looking out across the tree tops to the russet and grey of distant buildings blurring in the hazy light.
‘We could get a cab back to the flat,’ Richard had suggested as they walked down Delphi Street, ‘but it might be quicker to take the tube.’
‘Couldn’t we just walk somewhere?’ Zoë had said. ‘I need air and exercise.’
And so they had taken a bus to the heath.
‘It seems such a small thing,’ she says now, still wrestling with the fact that it was, in the end, just a minor trick of fate that kept them apart. ‘If only I’d . . .’
‘It’s not your fault, I should have –’
‘It’s not yours either,’ she cuts in. And they sit on in silence. Zoë feels sick and shaken, by the debilitating cocktail of too much wine, the other-worldliness of her marijuana hangover and the shock of discovery.
Richard stretches his legs out in front of him and lays an arm behind her along the back of the seat.
‘What would we have become?’ he asks. ‘A happy family, a broken family, a divorced couple lost in misunderstandings?’
‘Well, we were that anyway. But maybe we could have been a family.’
‘Who knows?’ he says. ‘But I haven’t proved a stayer in relationships, although that hasn’t been my choice. I’ve mainly been the one who was given, rather than giving, the marching orders.’
‘Perhaps it would have been different for us. What sort of people would we be now? Would we be similar, different, and what about our children?’
‘This is no good, you know, Zoë,’ he says moving his arm firmly around her shoulders. ‘It’s done, and what we lost may not have been as good as what we have, particularly in your case. Come on, let’s walk down to the pub and have a drink and some lunch. Then, I don’t know about you, but I’d like to go home and change my clothes.’
It’s as he stands at the bar waiting to pay that Richard realises that his phone is off and after switching it on, discovers several messages from Julia asking him to call. He decides to wait until later and switches it off again.
It is a strange afternoon, too bright, too hot, too noisy, and the bus ride back to Craven Terrace is too long. Zoë and Richard hold hands most of the time, not in the way of lovers but as two people united by a discovery that has left them lost and bewildered.
‘Would you like me to drive you back to Rye tonight?’ Richard asks much later, when they are back at the flat and he has returned other calls and checked his email. Zoë has made tea and is sitting on the window seat with her mug, gazing down onto the street below.
‘No thanks. I’d prefer to stay here, if that’s okay. I don’t think I can cope with anyone else at the moment.’
‘What would you like to do?’
‘Walk a bit more, maybe,’ she says. ‘That walk we used to do in the evenings when I was pregnant.’ She swallows, clears her throat and looks up at him, her eyes shadowed with sadness.
Richard nods in agreement but finds he daren’t open his mouth because he can’t trust what might come out of it. Looking down at Zoë, he thinks that Charlie was spot on when he said something about the appeal of sadness; he realises that it was part of what had attracted him to Zoë all those years ago. Behind her apparent lightheartedness and her efforts to please him was the sadness, and he had been confident he could fix that, among other things. How arrogant, he thinks now, as though he were a sort of Svengali who could make her happy and, most of all, make her different. And now? He wonders what he’s learned in the intervening years, and whether it is enough to bring her back to him. Despite all the evidence that Zoë is totally committed to her husband and children, Richard still entertains a sliver of hope. Is it just his arrogance again, he wonders; is he doing now what he did back then, feeling he can fix her life to suit himself and this time make her happier than the people whom she so clearly loves?
Richard clears his throat. ‘Okay,’ he manages to say. ‘A walk, it is.’
They walk later, still largely in silence. They sit outside a pub by the park and watch the passing parade.
‘I’d forgotten how beautiful these long evenings are,’ she says. ‘There’s a sort of magic about them. England feels like another country on summer evenings, somewhere peaceful and exotic.’
‘You could always come back,’ he says watching her, only half joking.
‘No,’ she says firmly, stopping to look at him. ‘No, Richard, I couldn’t do that. It’s far too late for that.’
Back at the flat, Richard grills steak, makes a salad and opens a bottle of wine. They eat at a table near the open French windows, and then move their chairs onto the balcony, looking out at the first stars in the darkened sky.
‘My life is falling apart,’ she says quietly.
‘Zoë, you mustn’t let this . . . this flashback ruin . . .’
‘No.’ She stops him. ‘It’s not that, not what you told me today. It’s at home, what’s happening there. Somehow I thought that coming here would help and, in some ways, it has. It’s helped with the past. But in a few days I’ll be back home, in the present, in the same situation I left behind.’
‘But your family,’ he says, puzzled. ‘You have so much . . .’
‘I have had,’ she says, and slowly she begins to tell him what she told Julia.
He listens attentively. ‘And now it’s falling apart?’
‘It’s all changing, being taken over, and what will be left? I can’t bear to think about it but I do think about it – all the time. Your kids go from needing you one hundred per cent to the point when you wake up one morning and they’re making their way out the door. And then, worse still, someone so wrong comes along to speed it all up, to chip away what might have remained, and to push you out of the way.’
‘Poor Zoë,’ Richard says and, in the light from the street lamps, she sees a flicker of amusement on his face.
‘You’re laughing at me.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘No. I’m just remembering a weekend I usually prefer to forget, the time I took you home to meet my parents.’
Zoë sighs. ‘I remember it well.’
‘Do you? Do you really? Do you know what it was all about? Not the argument at lunch but all the rest of it?’
She shrugs. ‘They didn’t like me. Your mother, in particular, hated me because I was so unsuitable. Australian for a start and my skirt was too short, I said all the wrong things, I shared a house with a black man. I was entirely unsuitable.’
‘And you forgot the bit about being descended from a convict. Yes, you were entirely unsuitable. My parents, especially my mother, had a very clear idea of the sort of girl I should bring into the family.’
‘Yes,’ Zoë laughs. ‘Definitely not Australian. I was supposed to be upper class, and probably living with my parents somewhere in Surrey; someone, a bit like Julia, I suppose. Like Julia as she was then.’
‘Exactly! Someone bland and unthreatening; a girl who would slip nicely into the family without dislodging my mother from her domestic throne. I could only see it years later, Zoë, the reason why everyone I took home was bound to be wrong. I was just never attracted to the sort of girl my mother needed me to marry.’
There is a long silence.
‘You mean,’ Zoë says eventually, ‘that I’m doing the same thing.’
‘It does sound that way.’
‘But I’m not like her, I’m not like your mother. I had a job until a few weeks ago. I’m really busy, I do things with the girls, like I used to with Dan; it’s not the same.’
‘You are not remotely like my mother,’ Richard agrees, ‘nor your own mother, for that matter. But they were both women who were totally focused on protecting their territory, irrespective of how that felt for Jules and me, or for you. Zoë, you’re an entirely different sort of person and I’m sure you have the sort of relationships with your children that Julia and I would have given our right arms for, but you are doing just what our mothers did. Daniel’s fallen in love with someone whom you find entirely unsuitable because she’s so different from what you wanted. Have you wondered why Archie and your daughters love her and you don’t? Could it possibly be that, despite decades of loving and raising Daniel under difficult circumstances, you are no longer the best judge of what’s right for him?’
Archie sits alone in the darkness out on the deck, where he has sat most of the night, watching the first slivers of dawn lightening the sky. Gaby is sleeping over at Gwen’s place, and Rosie staying with Rob’s family at the winery. The place is horribly still; everything is still except for his head, which is seething with anxiety and resentment, and aching from lack of sleep. There is no point in calling again; he can’t bear to hear the recorded message and, in some ways, doesn’t even want to talk to her. He prefers to reflect on how it was when they first met all those years ago, when he saw her on the jetty trying to bait Dan’s fishing line hook. She’d been so defensive that day, as though she wished he’d disappear once the problem of the bait was solved. It had been Dan who kept him there, kept asking things, and eventually he’d caught a very small fish. Archie knew it should have been thrown back, but hadn’t had the heart to make him do it. He was a lovely kid and Archie didn’t want it to end in tears; in fact, he didn’t want it to end at all.
‘We should celebrate your catch with an ice cream,’ he’d said and, over Dan’s head, saw Zoë’s reluctance.
‘Go on,’ he’d said. ‘It’s only an ice cream. Live dangerously.’
And she’d given him a half smile, shrugged, and followed him and Dan along the jetty back to the kiosk. Later, weeks later, when she had finally told him her story, he could only admire the determination and strength of character it must have taken for her to raise her child. As he grew to know her better, he could imagine no one less equipped to withstand the shame and rejection that had been dealt her.
Archie knew he was at his best as a loving protector; it came easily to him. Now he wonders if this has been bad for Zoë. Perhaps he should have pushed her to test herself in other ways; to get a more demanding job, to study for something, to venture out of her comfort zone? He has always thought they had a fortunate life together, but perhaps she has wanted more. Has he failed to notice because the situation suited him too well? Is this his come-uppance? He remembers the anger he saw in Zoë after Julia’s email arrived, anger that he suspected was not directed just at Julia and Richard, but at herself. Now he wonders whether he, too, is part of the cause.
The sound of the phone jolts him from his thoughts and his heart rate doubles instantly. Perversely, he now wants to ignore it; he has no desire to speak to her while she is in this black hole that he is trying not to imagine. There is the matter of Eileen, though, so he picks up the phone.
‘Arch,’ Zoë says. ‘I’m so sorry, I forgot to put the phone on and when I did go to check the messages last night, the battery was almost flat and I’d forgotten to bring the charger with me to London. I had to borrow a charger, so I only just got your messages. How’s Mum?’
Eileen, he tells her, is okay. She tripped on the step coming out of her unit, and although she has a badly grazed knee and elbow, and is very dizzy, there appears to be nothing more serious.’
‘So why is she in hospital?’
‘They thought at first that the fall might have been caused by a slight stroke,’ he says, ‘so they’re doing some tests, and keeping her in for a couple of days to observe her.’
‘I don’t need to rush back? I’ll be home on Friday anyway.’
‘No need to change it,’ he says.
He wants to ask her where she is, and, more importantly, who she’s with but he doesn’t want to know the answer.
‘Are you okay, Arch? You sound a bit odd. Are the kids okay?’
‘We’re all fine.’ He is incapable of having a conversation.
‘Good. Well, let me know if anything else happens with Mum, and if not, I’ll see you at the airport on Friday.’
‘Sure.’
‘Um . . . okay then. Give everyone my love.’
‘Will do.’
‘I love you, Arch.’
But he hangs up, unable to cope with any more words. He is imagining her in London, and in the background the shadowy image of a man whom he has never met, but always despised and now fears.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Rye – July 2000
It has been a testing time for Julia. Tom’s illness, Zoë’s presence, her own concerns about Richard putting his foot in it, and the inevitable raking over the past have been exhausting. And Zoë is leaving tomorrow and she wishes they had more time together. Despite their differences, Julia has felt the threads of that precious early friendship strengthening again; felt herself grasp at them across the years and across the cavern left by Hilary’s death. As she walks back up the hill from the town towards home, she thinks they have spent too long dwelling on the past. What she wants is to nurture this friendship that was so painfully cut off at the root.