In the Company of Strangers

by Liz Byrski

  ‘I reckon Declan’s a bit of a loser,’ she’d said a couple of days ago when she arrived with clean towels and a basket of provisions from which she replenished the cottage fridge. ‘Hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing. I’m amazed Catherine couldn’t see that it would never work with him in charge. I mean, I know she was very fond of him and he was the only relative who had anything to do with her, but that doesn’t make him right to run a business like this, does it?’

  ‘Well, he’s got that old friend of hers to help him, hasn’t he?’ Lesley had said, seeing an opportunity to pump Paula for more information. She’d already learned a little about the late Mrs Benson and her friend from Declan, although neither he nor Paula could explain the interesting rupture of their friendship which had lasted for years. Paula had been better informed on the subject of Declan, who apparently has a chequered employment history. ‘And what about that woman Alice,’ Lesley had asked, ‘what’s the story there?’ Declan had carefully avoided her questions when she’d asked him about Alice.

  ‘No idea,’ Paula had said. ‘He picked her up from the Perth bus a few days before you arrived. Never seen her before.’

  Lesley stares at her reflection in the mirror. One of the things she really likes about herself is her hair. It’s thick and straight and when it’s well cut it bounces around and needs little attention. She has golden blonde foils put in every couple of months to lift the natural brown and there’s some grey in it too. She’d always dreaded going grey but now that it’s happening she quite likes it. The dress is good too, suitable, really, for however one wants to view the occasion.

  Declan’s car is already gone from its usual spot so he is probably waiting in the car park. Lesley steps out of the cottage and closes the door behind her, stopping briefly at the top of the steps. What am I doing? she wonders. What do I want from this? Why does it matter? Is this what Stephanie would call a little flirtation, the kind she’d suggested Gordon would have had on his business trips? But there are no answers and she runs down the steps to the car and slips into her seat. She likes Declan, but she has no idea why she is psyching herself up like this about going to dinner with him. No more idea than she has about what she’d really thought being here would solve, why she’s still here, or what she wants from it. She is just as confused as the day she arrived. All she does know is that she doesn’t want to be at home and she doesn’t want to talk to anyone from home, and it all seems a lot more complicated than when she arrived. She’s even annoyed that her children keep calling, whereas she usually gets annoyed that they don’t call enough. Worse still, they are calling and chastising her for her absence.

  It was Sandi who had called first, surprised because Gordon had told her that Lesley was away for a few days. She hadn’t asked why or when Lesley would be back, just told her mother about the courses she’d enrolled in for first semester. Since she’d opted for university in Canberra last year, distance had led to a certain detachment. It was, Lesley thought, probably just what Sandi needed. She had always found being the youngest oppressive, and in her final year at home when she was doing her exams and Simon and Karen were both gone, Sandi had seemed strangely displaced and awkward.

  ‘I don’t like being the third point in the triangle,’ she’d said once when Lesley had asked her if she was okay. ‘I don’t like having to be on one side or the other, yours or Dad’s.’

  ‘But there aren’t any sides,’ Lesley had said, genuinely confused.

  ‘Well I think—’ Gordon had begun, but she had cut across him.

  ‘There isn’t a triangle,’ she’d insisted. ‘How could there be?’

  So she and Sandi had talked for a while about the new semester, and Lesley had been about to hang up when Sandi said, ‘I guess you’ll be home soon then?’ And there was tension in her voice. ‘Dad must be missing you. I hope you’re going back soon.’

  It was Simon who called next. ‘You’ve never done this before,’ he’d said, and Lesley thought she heard an accusation in his tone. ‘Is everything all right? Dad seemed a bit weird.’

  Lesley, aware that she sounded unconvincing, had endeavoured to assure him that everything was fine, but added that she might stay on a bit longer than originally planned. And so it was inevitable that the next call was from Karen, the eldest, the one who really needs the status quo to be maintained with no sudden and nasty surprises.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she’d demanded as soon as Lesley answered her phone. ‘What are you doing down there?’ Disapproval and anxiety sizzled down the line.

  There have been times when Lesley has wondered if her eldest daughter is a changeling. She might look a little like both herself and Gordon but Karen is quite unlike either of them in temperament. She is a total control freak, and although Lesley’s mother, Dolly, attributes that same characteristic to Lesley, she herself believes that’s unfair.

  ‘You’re bossy and you take too much for granted, that’s what,’ Dolly had said to her recently when she had grumbled about Gordon’s presence in the house. ‘It comes of having too much money and nothing to worry about. You feel entitled to be in control of everything, but you’re not. One day something will happen where you can’t get your own way, and then you’ll be sorry.’ Lesley thinks of this as she drives into town and makes the clucking noise she always makes when she thinks of her mother talking too much about things she doesn’t understand. Karen’s obsessive desire to control everything is, she’s sure, of her daughter’s own making. Karen is also cautious, conservative and conventional, and irascible whenever life turns out to be not quite as she planned. She was clearly suspicious when Lesley told her that she’d just needed to get away on her own for a few days.

  ‘But it’s not a few days,’ she’d said angrily. ‘It’s two weeks and Dad seems really worried.’

  Lesley had realised that her reassurances sounded wobbly, so it’s not surprising that Karen has called every day, sometimes twice a day, since then, to chide her and to ask, yet again, when she’s coming home. Lesley finds Karen something of a challenge. She can be sulky when she doesn’t approve of something or feels slighted, and she has domestic standards higher even than Lesley’s own. It’s not as though Karen needs her; she and Nick have a perfectly ordered life running their own interior design business and are usually too preoccupied with their own friends and with wooing new clients to spend much time with Lesley and Gordon. But Karen will still be put out when she finds her mother has extended her time away.

  Simon and his partner Lucy, on the other hand, are a different sort of challenge. They rent a pretty but rundown weatherboard house with a hugely overgrown garden, have four-year-old twins, Tim and Ben, and are always needing help of some sort – babysitting, short-term loans, the loan of tools or the lawnmower.

  For the first time in her life Lesley finds she doesn’t want to speak to any of her children. Neither does she want to talk to Stephanie or other friends who have left messages. And she certainly doesn’t want to talk to Gordon, although the fact that he hasn’t even attempted to call her is unsettling. She could tie herself up for hours speculating on the possibilities of his silence with various levels of anxiety but as she turns into the car park and pulls up near Declan’s car, a frisson of excitement brings her back into the moment.

  Declan gets out of his car to greet her and open the passenger door. How nice! She walks towards him, knowing as she does so that she is walking in a way that she hasn’t walked for years – with a swagger, with just enough confidence to turn a few heads. Declan has scrubbed up well, she thinks. He’s wearing a dark blue linen jacket, a lighter blue shirt and he seems to have had his hair cut. Dinner is different, she tells herself, it has possibilities that lunch does not. And as she slips into the passenger seat Lesley feels herself a different sort of woman, a woman she once might have been had she not opted for safety and security. She feels sophisticated, daring; the sort of woman who breaks rules and worries about it later. Dinner is definitely different.

&n
bsp; Gordon stops at one of his favourite places along the cycle path, drops the stand on his bike, takes off his helmet and sits down on a seat dedicated to the memory of a former member of the town council. He’d bought the bike about six months ago in the hope that he might persuade Lesley to get one too.

  ‘You’re joking!’ she’d said irritably when he’d wheeled it proudly around to the back of the house and suggested they might go and choose one for her. ‘Ride a bike! Why would I want to ride a bike now when I haven’t been near one since I was seventeen?’

  ‘It’d be good,’ he’d said. ‘Really, you should give it a go, it’s a very liberating feeling after years of driving a car. It’s something we could do together, and it’ll keep us fit.’

  ‘I’m fit already, thank you,’ she’d said sharply, and had promptly disappeared inside and up to her room.

  Gordon thinks about it now as he sits here looking out over the river to the tall buildings of the city on its opposite bank. Her sharpness had wounded him. When did it all go so wrong? Was it just when he retired? But no, it began before that, during the time before Sandi left home. It had become so different then, the atmosphere often strained and tense – as though the three of them hadn’t known how to talk to each other. It wasn’t as bad as recently but it was often pretty uncomfortable.

  The evening is still and warm and out on the river half a dozen pelicans float calmly as a flurry of gulls scramble for something in the shallow water by the rushes. Gordon sighs, rubbing his hand over his eyes. He has tried to keep the whole thing low key with the children, although yesterday, when he and Simon were fixing the ladder to the tree house, he’d found it hard to maintain that. What he’d felt like doing was to rant and rave and throw himself on his son’s sympathy, but that would just generate more anxious calls from Karen and then from Sandi. No point upsetting them when this might all come to nothing, but Gordon knows that nothing is what it has become. The sexual fire dimmed years ago but that, he thought, was not uncommon. He knew that intensity eventually gives way to something gentler and richer, but not, apparently, for them. It’s more as though a slow drip of cold water has extinguished what they once had, leaving the coals dull and smoking in the grate of their life together. Does he still love her? He realises he no longer knows. He feels like a toy that has had all the stuffing ripped from him. His emptiness is frightening.

  According to what she’d said when she left, Lesley should have been home two days ago, but this morning she had sent him a text saying that she’d be staying on for a while, but no mention of how long, and no explanation. It drove the final nail into the coffin of Gordon’s attempts to get things right. As he sits here now watching the pelicans turning pink and orange in the light of the setting sun, Gordon knows he’s had enough. He has, he thinks, two choices. He can get in the car, drive down to Margaret River and confront her, ask her to come home so they can try to make things work again, or he can opt out and do his own thing, just as Lesley is doing hers.

  A small dog with a rough white coat, one black ear and a couple of black and tan smudges on his body appears around the end of the seat and stands looking up at him. Gordon leans forward, arms on his knees, and strokes the dog’s head, scratching behind its ears. ‘Are you a Jack Russell?’ he asks, and it moves closer and sits down, leaning against his leg. Gordon looks around for the owner but there is no one in sight. The cycle path and the recreation area beyond it are empty. Everyone, he thinks, has gone home to their families, to a glass of wine and a meal on a beautiful evening. Everyone except him. He strokes the dog again.

  ‘Where did you spring from then, mate?’ The dog cocks its head to one side, as if indicating that the other ear needs scratching. Gordon obliges. The dog is wearing a green leather collar with an identity disk and Gordon takes his glasses from the pocket of his shirt to read it. Bruce, it says, and on the other side is a phone number.

  ‘Bruce?’ Gordon says, and the dog pricks up his ears and springs suddenly up onto the bench beside him. Gordon looks around again – still no sign of an owner. ‘Perhaps I’ll give them a call,’ he says, reaching into his top pocket for his phone. Bruce looks up and wags his tail ever so slightly. The number has been disconnected.

  ‘Now what?’ Gordon asks, and Bruce, in what seems like an extraordinary stroke of emotional manipulation, leans against Gordon’s leg and looks up at him, his whole face a question mark. ‘Abandoned, are you?’ Gordon says. ‘Well join the club. I suppose you’d better come home with me and tomorrow I’ll try and find your owner.’

  Out on the water something disturbs the pelicans and they flap their wings and sweep forward majestically lifting their ungainly bodies from the water and heading off up river towards the city.

  ‘So it’s just you and me then,’ Gordon says, and Bruce stands bolt upright and gives a short bark and wags his tail furiously. ‘Have you ever ridden a bike before?’ Gordon picks him up and dumps him in the canvas saddle bag, and Bruce gives another bark and settles into the bag as though he has lived there all his life.

  Gordon kicks away the bike stand, swings his leg over the crossbar and takes off along the path back towards home, and as he does so he’s absolutely clear about what he’s going to do. There will be no begging dash to Margaret River, no painful discussions about what has gone wrong, because he no longer has the energy or the desire for it. It’s gone, Lesley’s gone, and his heart has abandoned the fight. He feels nothing. Somehow he has unhooked himself from the central drama of his life and is free, free to do what he’s wanted to do for ages and what he has tried to persuade Lesley to do with him. Tomorrow morning he’ll find the dog’s owner and then he’ll get it organised. It shouldn’t take long – he might even be on his way before she gets back. It’s weird to feel the machinery of more than three decades of his life grinding to a halt, but he’s absolutely clear that he’s banged his head against the same wall for long enough. Something has died and he can’t bring himself to try, yet again, to resuscitate it.

  Declan has been wondering if this was such a good idea after all. Having someone to talk to has been good, he’d meant what he said about the value of talking to strangers, but now he feels he might have had enough. It’s his pattern, really, he knows that, moving in close and then backing off at a million miles an hour. On the other hand she’s a good looking woman, and his ego can do with a bit of a boost.

  ‘Sorry,’ Lesley says, slipping into the passenger seat. ‘I lost track of the time. Hope you haven’t been waiting long.’

  ‘Just a couple of minutes,’ he says gallantly, because it’s nearer fifteen. ‘It’s okay, we’ve got plenty of time, I booked the table for eight.’ And he looks across at her. ‘Nice perfume.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she says, buckling her seatbelt. ‘It should be, it cost a fortune.’

  Declan smiles and pulls out onto the main street. She is, he thinks, very attractive for a woman of her age – not that he knows how old she is but she’s a good bit older than him, ten years perhaps, maybe more. She pulls her skirt down but it’s still rising above her knees and he is trying to ignore them.

  ‘I extended your booking, like you said,’ he tells her when they are free of the town. ‘How did your husband take the news that you weren’t heading home?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says, ‘I didn’t talk to him, just sent him a text.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, why not?’

  Declan hesitates. ‘It’s a bit … it seems a bit blunt.’

  Lesley shrugs and Declan looks across at her, uneasy suddenly. It seems odd to break that kind of news by text, and certainly not the best move if you’re trying to sort things out. But what do I know about relationships, he thinks, except how to stuff them up? He gives her a sideways glance. He hasn’t had much to do with women like this, older, strong minded and, more significantly, married. Lesley, he thinks, is a challenge; everything she’s told him about this current standoff with her husband has rung warning bells. He can sense the needi
ness in her as well as the inability to entertain compromise. Everything she has told him about what she sees as her husband’s failure to adjust to retirement seems to Declan to be perfectly reasonable for a man going through such a significant change.

  ‘Retirement must be pretty confronting for him. It just sounds as though he wants to make things work between you,’ Declan had ventured. But it hadn’t gone down well.

  Catherine, he is sure, would have disliked Lesley; they were too similar. And he suspects Lesley’s neediness may have a ruthless streak and that is both scary and sexy. Tonight it seems to be more of the latter.

  ‘So how’s it all going?’ Lesley asks when the waiter has taken their order. ‘Are things getting sorted out?’

  Declan nods. ‘It’s starting to look more manageable now we’ve taken on some promising staff for the café and Alice is almost ready to open it. Ruby is making sense of all the piles of paper in the office. It feels quite good, really.’

  ‘And you’ve still got that boy staying there?’

  ‘Todd? Yes, he’ll be with us for a while yet, I suspect. We’ll find a decent job for him. Catherine was very fond of him.’

  ‘Paula says he should go,’ Lesley says, indicating to the waiter to pour her wine.

  ‘Paula?’

  ‘Yes, I was chatting to her the other day. She seems to know the place really well, and she says he’s nothing but trouble.’

  ‘She told me that,’ Declan says, biting into a bread stick, ‘but she didn’t back it up with any evidence. I suspect that Paula herself is a far greater potential source of trouble than Todd.’