In the Company of Strangers

by Liz Byrski

  Alice slips the key into the lock and lets herself into the office. It is a nightmare: the desk buried under a chaotic pile of papers, catalogues and files so large and so messy that they almost seem to have their own monstrous energy. There are days – weeks – of work needed in here but surely that is for Declan and his new partner when she arrives. She skirts the desk, glances through the reservations book and the details of the staff, and retrieves a file that she has knocked from its place on the windowsill. Briefly she pauses to study it, closes it and as she puts it on the desk in a prominent position there’s a tap on the office door and a boy, the boy in the baseball cap that she’s spotted a few times, pops his head in.

  ‘Sorry, I was looking for Mr Benson,’ he says, obviously surprised to see her, shifting his weight awkwardly from one foot to the other.

  ‘He’s out, I’m afraid,’ Alice says. ‘He said he’d be back about lunchtime. Can I help? I’m Alice, by the way, I’m staying here to help out. You work here, don’t you?’

  ‘Sort of,’ he says. ‘Do a few jobs for Cath … um … Mrs Benson. I was wondering about my pay.’

  ‘Oh dear. You will need to talk to Declan about that. Could you come back later, after lunch? I’m sure he’ll sort it out for you then.’

  He nods. ‘Okay,’ he says awkwardly, ‘I’ll get on with something else.’

  ‘I’ll tell him, shall I?’ Alice says. ‘Tell him you were looking for him and that you’ll be back?’

  ‘Okay, thanks.’ He turns away from the door.

  ‘Who shall I say … ?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Your name? So I can tell him.’

  ‘Todd,’ he says, ‘thanks, yeah thanks, see ya.’

  Alice closes the office door and goes out back along the path to the house thinking that he seems awfully young, and wondering why Declan hadn’t mentioned him when he’d told her about the other people who worked here.

  There are four bedrooms off the passage and apart from the one Declan has obviously chosen for himself it’s clear that the others haven’t been used for some time. In the grey and white tiled bathroom the only signs of recent activity are Declan’s: his toothbrush and toothpaste in a glass, towels thrown carelessly over the rail and a couple of tshirts and underpants dropped on the floor.

  The dining room has the deserted air of a long-gone dead life that belongs, perhaps, to a time when Catherine and her husband, Declan’s Uncle Harry, entertained here. The jarrah table is waxed to a high sheen and not a speck of dust mars the bottles and crystal glasses on the shelves of the cocktail bar. Alice suspects that Paula, with her vacuum cleaner, feather duster and the lavender polish that scents the air, is probably the only life form that this room has seen in a very long time.

  Only one door remains and it’s locked: Catherine’s room. Alice slips the key into the lock, wondering why there is no lounge or sitting room. But when she opens it she can see that this large room, with its pale fabrics and rugs in rich, earthy colours on the polished wood floor, was once the lounge. Bookcases line one wall from floor to ceiling and magazines, newspapers and an open handbag lie abandoned on the sofa. Opposite, below the windows that look out to the lavender beds, a long wooden table is cluttered with cosmetics, an open box of costume jewellery, a hairbrush and dryer, a laptop, papers, books, magazines, a small television and DVD player and a vase of long-dead roses surrounded by their fallen petals. Almost obscuring the beautiful stone fireplace is the carved jarrah headboard of an unmade, king size bed scattered with cast-off clothes, and a night table stacked with packets of tablets, discarded tissues, several dirty mugs and glasses and a half-eaten packet of digestive biscuits.

  Alice pauses in the doorway surveying the shockingly intimate story of the last weeks of Catherine’s life. The room reeks of neglect, illness and the desperation that must have led her to confine herself here with the things she loved and needed most. The half-open doors of the wardrobe reveal clothes and shoes once organised with precision, but it appears that at some point Catherine had stopped putting things away. Alice senses the shadow of a fading and diminished woman, too sick and exhausted to hang this skirt, this blouse, to pick up these shoes, no longer caring enough to put the beads and earrings into their box, nor roll this scarf and slip it into the drawer alongside the others. Clothes have been dropped on the floor and pushed into a pile in the corner, shoes edged under the bed, underwear tossed close to the linen basket. And the effort of clearing away the old papers, the unwashed cups, the dead flowers, must have been too great. How long, Alice wonders, had Catherine struggled to keep order before giving up? Had she hoped to die here too, planned for it, only to be thwarted by a collapse that meant that her last days were lived out in a hospital bed? The room has a stale, grassy smell but Alice resists the impulse to fling open the windows and let in the fresh air. Suddenly even to step inside seems like an intrusion. Gently she moves back, closes the door, locks it and slips the beads back around her neck and stands again in the passage gripped by the sadness that seems to have leaked out into the rest of the house.

  A different room will have to be prepared for Ruby, she thinks. The main bedroom has its own bathroom so that’s probably the best bet. She opens the linen press and collects some towels, puzzling as she does so over the picture of loneliness she’d witnessed behind Catherine’s locked door. Declan had spoken of his aunt as a warm and generous person and she had lived here for decades; surely there must have been neighbours, local people in the town, friends and of course there were staff, so why was she so obviously alone in her time of greatest need? Had no one seen what was happening? Was there no one she could trust with a glimpse of her vulnerability? Was there no one who cared?

  The main bedroom is cool and peaceful, the bed already made, a couple of watercolour landscapes on the walls and a Victorian lavender-patterned porcelain jug on the dresser. Declan had told her that Catherine found Paula difficult to manage and he too seems ill at ease with her, but it’s obvious why Catherine kept her on. With the exception of Catherine’s lair everything is spotless, and while the kitchen is untidy it’s clear it is clean and things that are lying around are undoubtedly Declan’s. Paula does an outstanding job; in the cupboard from where she’d taken the towels the linen is immaculately pressed and a muslin bag of dried lavender lies between each set. So why was Paula not allowed in to clean Catherine’s room? Alice opens the bedroom windows and the white curtains flutter to life on a warm, lavender-scented breeze. She has a fleeting sense of the days when a very different life was lived here, a passionate life rich with love and laughter, and she wonders how and when it acquired its silent air of despair. She is curious now, more curious than ever about those days, that life, where it went, how it ended and why, because something tells her that this aridity goes back years, decades even, and that the desolation of Catherine’s room speaks volumes about her life as well as her death.

  Alice looks around the bedroom with satisfaction thinking she’ll cut some of the roses in the back garden and put them in the jug on the dresser to make it more welcoming. She closes the door and heads back towards the kitchen, pausing once more outside the locked room. She had recognised something in there, something not only sad but personally disconcerting. It was the desperate and failing effort to retain control and create a sense of safety. She herself had done it in prison, done everything possible to make her space into a haven, a place where she had some measure of control. There had to be some way to compensate for the loss of love and of family, the lack of purpose. There were limits in prison; you could be locked in, but only by others and you couldn’t lock those others out, and how often she had longed to do so. Catherine had, apparently, managed to do that, keeping her decline and her despair confined, struggling alone not just with pain and sickness, but with the turbulent emotions of a lifetime that would have crowded in on her.

  Alice turns away from the door with a shiver, heads to the kitchen and sits down at the table, resting her head in her ha
nds. Infected with Catherine’s sadness, her own fear of the future returns, the earlier tender ray of hope extinguished now. Catherine was seventy when she died, a woman with a beautiful place to live, a thriving business and, apparently, plenty of money, and yet she had in the end been entirely alone with no one to blur the edges of her fear or sadness with some comfort. If this could happen to her what then, Alice wonders, lies in her own future? In three months’ time she will be fifty-nine. In ten years’ time, what then? Fear surges through her blood making her heart pound, and she does what she has done for more years than she can remember, she gets to her feet and looks frantically around her for something to do, something to distract her, anything to stop the reality of being there, alone with herself in the stillness.

  still don’t understand,’ Gordon says, lifting Lesley’s bag into the back of the car. ‘It’s the sort of thing we said we’d do together when I retired – take off for a few days when we felt like it. Go down south, do some wineries, galleries, walks. And now you’re doing it and you won’t let me come with you.’

  ‘Oh do stop moaning,’ Lesley says, aware as she does so that he is not actually moaning, he is attempting to understand something that she can’t fully understand herself. What can she say? That’s she’s taking some sort of test of independence? That she actually can’t bear to be around him right now? It’s not even as though she really wants to go. She doubts it will do anything to solve the real problem, which is Gordon himself in retirement. ‘I’m just going away on my own for a few days.’

  ‘For two weeks actually,’ Gordon says, and she can hear he’s getting tetchy now, irritated, hurt probably, and understandably confused; as confused as she is. Years ago they could have talked about what was happening but the channels of communication have been shut down.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ she says, ‘I’ve left you plenty of meals in the freezer.’

  Gordon slams down the lid of the boot and turns to her. ‘Of course I’ll be fine,’ he says, and his tone is angry now. ‘I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself. But this is about us. There’s more to our marriage than frozen meals, or at least there used to be, but now I’m beginning to wonder.’

  Lesley puts her trainers into the back of the car, and straightens up. ‘I don’t know what you’re making such a fuss about. Women do this all the time, get away on their own for a while.’

  ‘You don’t.’

  ‘Well I am now.’ She turns away and opens the driver’s door. ‘And it’s really not long.’

  Gordon grasps the car door to stop her from getting in. ‘Why did I do this then?’ he asks. ‘Why did I retire? I could have stayed on, you know, five years, more probably.’

  Lesley tries to push his hand off the door but he’s immovable. ‘I don’t know, why did you?’

  Gordon runs his hands through his thinning hair in exasperation. ‘I did it for you, for us, for all the things we talked about for years, for our marriage, our future. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?’

  Lesley opens her mouth to speak, pauses and then looks straight at him. ‘I don’t know, Gordon,’ she says. ‘I really don’t know anymore.’ And as his hand drops away from the door she slips into the driver’s seat. She closes the door, starts the engine and accelerates out to the road, leaving him standing there in the middle of the drive, aware that she has wrought terrible damage, but somehow no longer able to care.

  Lesley’s immediate reaction to Benson’s Reach is disappointment; the place has lost its edge that’s for sure. There is no one in the office and the rather dowdy woman who opens the door to the house seems to know little or nothing about the place.

  ‘I spoke to Mr Benson on the phone,’ Lesley explains, ‘just a few days ago.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m new here and I’m afraid I don’t know anything about the business end of things,’ the woman says. ‘I’m Alice, by the way, and I’m so sorry about this. Let’s go over to the office – Declan will be back soon, but meanwhile I can probably find the reservation and then I can take you to your cottage.’

  She retrieves a reservations book from the monstrous pile of paperwork on the desk and seems relieved to find details of the booking. ‘Declan has a note that you’d be arriving after two o’clock,’ she says. ‘Not that it matters – your being early, I mean – but it does account for why he’s not here.’

  There is some messing about with a booking form, and eventually the woman says it’s best to leave the paperwork until Declan gets back. She opens a glass cabinet filled with keys hanging on hooks, selects one, and gestures to Lesley to follow her out of the office.

  The cottage is just as Lesley remembered, light and pleasantly cool, the rammed-earth walls a soft shade of terracotta, the furniture simple but good quality, beds made up with white linen and on each one white towels, folded to make a nest for a sprig of lavender and two foil-wrapped lavender chocolates.

  ‘Did Declan explain that the café is closed?’ Alice asks, opening the fridge. ‘Fresh bread and croissants will be delivered early each morning.’ And she goes on to point out milk, cereals and fruit. ‘I know Declan will be up to see you as soon as he gets back,’ she says, edging towards the door. ‘He can fill you in on anything else.’

  ‘When exactly did Mrs Benson die?’ Lesley asks.

  ‘Last month, although I believe she was very sick for a quite a long time prior to that.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I only stayed here once before,’ Lesley says, trying to make up for her irritability in the office. ‘But I liked her very much.’

  Once alone she drags her suitcase into the bedroom, throws herself on the bed and lies there gazing up at the sloping timber beams of the low ceiling. Several times during the three hour drive down here she had been on the point of turning back, trying to unpick the damage before it was too late. She really hadn’t set out to hurt Gordon, but of course she has, probably very badly, but she can’t go back because she wouldn’t know what to say. This morning, after months of irritation and resentment, something weird had happened. As she packed her bag for the trip south she felt confusion, exhaustion and the longing to be gone. Her sharp tone and harsh words were self-defence rather than attack, and then Gordon had asked that question, ‘Doesn’t that mean anything to you?’ and in that instant she realised that she no longer knew the answer, she no longer knew what she felt or what she wanted. The only thing that was clear to her then was that this was the reason she had to go, in order to work it out, to find the answer to a question she had never expected to be asked.

  But being here makes no difference, it simply opens her up to the distraction of more practical and comparatively trivial questions. What is she going to do with herself now that she’s here? Last time they had visited wineries – well, she won’t be doing that alone, although there are some nice little galleries nearby. They’d gone to the beach, but she’s really not much of a beach person, especially when it’s hot; walking in winter is when she likes it best. They’d gone out for dinner every night, and she won’t be doing that – lots of women do, of course, and seem not to mind, but Lesley cringes at the thought of eating dinner alone in a restaurant, being stared at and whispered about by couples and families. She’ll put stuff in the fridge and heat food in the microwave. And while Margaret River certainly has some very nice shops it won’t take long to check them out. But what about the rest of the time?

  The oppressive silence of the cottage wraps itself around her. She can’t go home, and she can’t call the kids because they’ll ask all sorts of questions, and so for that matter will her mother. For the next two weeks she is stuck with herself, in this little cottage in a place where, in spite of its many charms, there is absolutely nothing she wants to do.

  Todd loves the taste of raspberries more than anything else he’s ever tasted. Just thinking about that taste makes his mouth water. It’s late in the season, though, and as he wanders slowly between the canes searching for the last of the fruit, he’s pretty sure he’s going to
be out of luck.

  ‘You can eat as many as you want,’ Catherine had said to him the first time she’d brought him here and asked him if he’d like to help with the picking. ‘And I’ll pay you five dollars an hour.’

  ‘It won’t seem right to eat them if you’re paying me,’ he’d said, surprising himself as he did so; usually he’d grab whatever he could get, but he’d liked her. Weird she was, old and maybe a bit crazy. It was only later that he came to realise that she was the sanest person he’d ever met.

  ‘I doubt that even you could devour all my profits, Todd,’ she’d said with a laugh, ‘tuck in, eat what you want.’ So he had, and the funny thing was that he discovered there was a certain amount that you could eat that was enough, and then you were happy to stop. It was cool, once you knew you could have as much as you wanted, you didn’t need to pig out. He liked that.

  But this year the raspberries have been neglected. A couple of months ago the reticulation for this part of the land packed up. He’d told Catherine about it and so had Fleur, but it was one of those things that just didn’t get fixed. Todd kicks at the dusty ground wondering whether the plants will ever recover from a summer without water. Eventually he finds a couple of poor specimens, shrunken and dried up, but they are raspberries and he stuffs them in his mouth. They’re a disappointment, dry little lumps, and he spits them out, sits down on the ground between the canes, extracts one of the two cigarettes he has in his pocket, and lights it. He’s not supposed to smoke out here, fire risk, and he’d never have dreamed of doing it when Catherine was around. But she’s not anymore, she’s gone, and Todd can’t work out what’s happening up at the house, and what it all might mean for him. The sun scorches the back of his neck and he turns his baseball cap around so that the peak protects it, and draws slowly on the cigarette, watching the blue smoke curl up and away above the tops of the canes. He wonders why he’s smoking because he doesn’t really like it much and just does it to look grown up – but what’s the point when there’s no one around to see?