by Jenni Ogden
“No.”
“Okay, keep your pants on.”
I smirked. “I want to take them off.” Seventeen again.
“Shameless woman. Collette will be around this side soon. I’m not sure she’s quite ready for that.”
“We could go into the bushes.”
“But we won’t. She’d know something was up if we’d disappeared from the beach.”
“So what? Are you ashamed of us? Is it because I’m too old?” My wanton feelings had evaporated.
“No, don’t be silly. I’m not interested in everyone gossiping about my private life, that’s all.”
I stood up. “Let’s get on, then.” I walked away from him, the shimmering ocean blurring. I saw Collette’s midget shape at the far end of the beach and scuffed along the sand towards her.
We all slept under the stars that night, apart in our thoughts. In the morning, after another beach patrol for laying mothers and exploding nests—none of the first and two of the second—we packed up the tents and went for one last snorkel. This time we swam out over the lagoon to the reef edge, Tom a little ahead and Collette to my side. Swimming along the edge of the reef, I watched as they dove down and explored bommies and caves, seeming to hold their breaths for longer than humanly possible. How beautiful they looked, as if they belonged in this deep blue. Tom came up to me and took my hand, and the pulse in my throat pumped with joy. He indicated that I should dive with him. I breathed in and headed down. Tom pointed into a hole halfway down the reef face and I saw the snakelike head of a large moray eel dart out and in. I jerked Tom’s hand and flippered back to the surface, spluttering as I tried to clear my snorkel. Collette’s head popped up beside me and she raised her hand in the okay sign. I signed back. Okay.
Tom was beside me and down we went again. This time I saw more, and when I came up, spluttered less. As we were circling a bommie on my fifth dive, the sun-washed corals darkened, and at first I thought the sun must have gone behind some clouds. Where the clouds had come from I wasn’t sure; it had been a cloudless sky two minutes ago. Tom was gesturing up and I turned my head and almost forgot not to breathe. Above us a massive silhouette blotted out the surface of the water. We were under a ship. But it flapped its great wings and sailed gracefully over us, its long tail streaming out behind it. I watched it, mesmerized, as we rose to the surface, and without even thinking, I blew clear my snorkel.
“You are blessed,” I heard Tom say, his mask and snorkel pushed to the top of his head. “A giant manta ray and a Queensland grouper, all in twenty-four hours.”
When we got back to Turtle Island, Tom stayed in my bed all night, and as we ate our muesli sitting on my deck in the morning, Basil walked past and gave me a huge wink.
FIFTEEN
Dear Anna,
I miss you. I hope it’s all going well with your new friends on your island.
This is difficult to write and I probably won’t even send it, but perhaps putting it down on paper will be therapeutic somehow. You are so sensible, and if you were here I could talk to you, but you’re far away and I can’t even phone or e-mail you easily.
There is only one way to say it. Greg is in trouble. A PhD student of his has put in a complaint about him: that he put pressure on her to have an affair. She wants a different supervisor and says she can’t work under Greg anymore. I found out because she wrote me a letter. I tried not to believe it, but deep down I knew it was true. Years ago a student accused Greg of sexual harassment, but he denied it, and the university backed him and got the student to withdraw her complaint. So this time I looked at his e-mail; I guessed his password because it’s the one he uses for everything. I felt like a heel, but I knew he’d deny it if I confronted him without any evidence other than the student’s word. I found all I needed. He’s such an idiot. He had e-mails from her and to her. They’ve been having an affair for at least a year. He must have broken it off about a month ago because there was one e-mail from her that made that pretty clear. She was terribly upset and angry, and accused him of getting “into the pants” of Zoe Walters; she’s that new lecturer in his department. I printed them all, so he couldn’t deny it.
When I confronted him, of course he did deny it, but then I showed him my evidence. He was furious that I’d gone into his e-mails, and ripped them out of my hands. I didn’t tell him I’d kept copies, hidden away. I feel sick that I’ve had to stoop so low. He stormed out and when he came back, hours later, he admitted the affair but not the new one with Zoe. I don’t believe him for a second. She’s very attractive. Then he told me that he knew the student had put in a formal complaint and he’d hoped it would all be sorted out without me finding out, because he didn’t want to hurt me. He was confident the university would be able to quieten her, and transfer her to a different supervisor. Poor girl. I almost feel sorry for her. But not really, because of her letter to me. It was vicious. Greg insists he never put any pressure on her, and that it was all her fault. She was all over him, begging for it, so he said, and he resisted for as long as he could.
That was all three weeks ago, and now it has gone public. It’s all over the university. I can feel the tension wherever I go; everyone not knowing where to look, what to say. The boys are in shock. I threw Greg out after I went to see Zoe. I know her quite well; she’s been over here for dinner a few times. She told me they had a brief fling when they were at a conference a couple of months ago and had seen each other once or twice since, but she told him to get lost when she found out about the student’s complaint. She told me I should get rid of him, and that everyone in the department knew about his string of affairs. Apparently I’m the last to know. How could Zoe sit there at my table, eating the food I had prepared, playing footsies under the table with my husband and pretending she was my friend? How can a woman do that to another woman?
Anna, did you know Greg had affairs? I don’t think so, because you would have told me. You didn’t have anything to do with the English Department, so probably not. What should I do? One minute I want to divorce him immediately and the next I can’t stop crying. We’ve been married for twenty-five years this year, and I thought we were so lucky to have got here intact, unlike so many of our friends. We’ve had plenty of rocky moments, but on the whole we had a comfortable life. He’s been a good father, at least when we go to the lake. He and the boys go fishing and boating together. He’s never been violent or abused me, not even verbally. Even up until all this happened, he could be loving. We didn’t make love much anymore but I thought that was just our age. I never missed it. In fact I was happier than he was to do without. Perhaps that was the problem. He needed more than I gave him.
I’m sorry to burden you with all this, dear Anna, but you’d find out when you came home anyway. Please write and tell me what you think I should do. He says he is sorry and wants me to give him another chance. He even said he’d go to marriage counseling. He’s always been completely cynical about any sort of therapy so I suppose that must mean something. Is it better to work on our marriage and get through this, or go through the horrors of divorce? The financial implications of that are too scary to even think about.
Love, Fran
I dropped Fran’s letter on the table and sat there, stunned. How dare he. How bloody dare he. I never liked him. Patronizing, arrogant shit. He’d certainly made it crystal clear that I was not attractive enough, too tediously boring, for him to even bother to be polite to. But I thought he loved Fran. It was beyond me what those young women saw in him. He was about as sexy as a, as a … I thought for a while … a slug. Rather an emaciated slug at that. Tall, skinny, pale, bespectacled, with longish puce-colored graying hair, and even a straggly beard. The stereotypical English professor. I occasionally caught a glimpse of the sardonic wit he was supposedly famous for. He was known as an entertaining lecturer. Entertaining lecherer. Very entertaining, obviously.
It was impossible not to make comparisons. I knew what the PhD student was going through. How well I knew. A
t least she wasn’t pregnant. I crossed my fingers. I hoped she wasn’t pregnant.
Had Phillip been as slug-like as Greg to everyone else back then? He had been younger and fitter, and surely more attractive to look at. But he had a wife who was presumably as lovely and innocent as Fran. Perhaps he’d been right to drop me like a hotcake as soon as I got pregnant and wanted more, and before his wife found out. Did she ever find out? At least I never told her. I was beginning to wonder if any male could be trusted.
I shook my head. Stupid generalization. Tom wouldn’t behave like that, and nor would Dad. He had girlfriends after he and Mum split up, but he wouldn’t have cheated on her. I could feel a little worm of doubt squirming uncomfortably in my gut. If he hadn’t had another woman to go to, why would he have left us? Perhaps Mum had found out like Fran—like Phillip’s wife.
I stuffed the letter back in the envelope and threw it across the room.
“Leave him, Fran. Leave the lying, cheating scumbag. He was never worth you. You’ll be much happier without him,” I muttered, my jaw so tight I could barely get the words out. I couldn’t face replying right away. I needed to calm down a bit first. Tonight would be soon enough. Jack could take it to the mainland to post when he left tomorrow.
I checked the time. The tide would be just about high enough for a snorkel in the lagoon. I needed to wash these feelings away.
“Yoo-hoo.”
Pat. I couldn’t help grinning. She always hollered like that when she got near my cabin.
“Hi, Pat.”
“Hi, you.” She came up the steps onto the deck, a book in one hand and a plastic box in the other. There would be goodies of some sort in the box. Pat never arrived empty-handed.
“What’s up? You look a bit pale.” She dumped the box on the table.
“I just had a letter from a friend back home, and she’s having a bad time. Her shit of a husband has been having affairs and she’s chucked him out.” I hadn’t intended telling anyone about Fran and here I was spilling the beans to Pat within seconds of her arrival.
“Oh, that’s awful. Poor woman. Is she a close friend?”
“Yes, my best friend in Boston. Fran. She’s the doctor.”
“Of course. It was her son who put you on to coming here. We owe him for that.”
“You remembered that? Thanks for the vote. I owe him too, for that. And I owe Fran. I would never have considered such a crazy thing if she hadn’t encouraged me.”
“How is she coping? You’ll be feeling a long way from her, now she needs you.”
“She’s not coping. I’ve never known her not to cope, and she’s had a few hard things to get through before. Do you think I should go back to Boston?”
Pat patted my hand as she walked past me into the cabin. “Cuppa and chocolate cake first. You look like you need it,” she said, filling the kettle and plonking it on the stove.
It really helped, having a chat. Pat was the only woman, other than Fran, that I’d ever wanted to talk to about personal things. I suppose that’s why I was so surprised when she told me about her marriage. I was hopelessly naïve about human nature. I’d rather ignore it and hope it goes away. But being there had changed me. The islanders were so unafraid to let it all hang out. I didn’t know if that was a small community thing or an Australian thing. A bit of both, I suspected.
Pat always seemed to me to be so balanced, so content, so loving. I imagined—well I didn’t imagine, but I assumed—that her marriage would have been just like her, and when her husband died she would have been devastated for a while but then picked herself up and got on with life. And she had done that, and she was all those good things, but she told me, at first calmly, and then, as she talked more, not so calmly, that her husband had cheated on her more than once. She had stuck with him the first time, thrown him out the second time then taken him back, and taken him back again after a third affair.
“But why?” I asked, gobsmacked.
“Because I couldn’t imagine life without him, I suppose. He seemed truly repentant each time, so I forgave him.”
“Three times?”
“I know. It’s stupid. But finally, after the third time, he agreed to counseling and he really tried to change. I had to change as well. Like your friend, I hadn’t been taking the intimate side of our marriage seriously enough.”
“And did he change? Did it last?”
“He did. And as far as I know he had no more affairs. If he had, that would have been the end. He knew that.”
“How old were you when all this was going on?”
“I was in my mid-forties when I first found out about him. It was another ten years before we worked it all out and I began to trust him again.”
“How old was he when he died?”
“Exactly my age now: sixty-six. I was sixty, so we had about five content years. When we were first married we were blissfully happy for a while, and even when the children were small we were mostly happy.”
“Looking back now, do you think you should have left him for good when you first found out abut his philandering? Ten years of misery seems a high price to pay for a few reasonable years at the end.”
“You’re thinking about Fran, and what would be best for her.”
“I suppose so.”
“Well, only she can decide that, and even then she’ll probably never know for sure whether she made the right decision. For me, I think I did what was best. Going through a divorce would have been much harder, and the consequences much worse. At that age, splitting the family finances is hard to recover from, and although our children were adults with their own lives by the time it all came to a head, they would have been terribly upset. They loved their dad, and I didn’t want them to see that side of him.”
“They didn’t know?”
“No. Well, if they did—if they suspected—we never discussed it. Gordon and I were both masters at putting up a front.”
“That can’t be healthy, surely?”
“It wouldn’t do today, but it served us well.” Pat grinned. “And we had some fair dinkum fights when we were alone.”
“How did you feel when he died so soon after you came right?”
“Sad, very sad. And lonely. We’d been married thirty-eight years and I still loved him.”
AFTER PAT LEFT, I SAT DOWN TO WRITE TO FRAN. I wanted to write a real letter, not something written on the computer and printed out; that seemed too impersonal. But I couldn’t get the words right, and the floor was soon littered with balled-up paper. I wanted to tell Fran to give the cad the boot and begin again, but Pat’s story kept intruding. They were quite similar in many ways, Pat and Fran. Who was I to judge what was best? The only serious relationship I’d ever had had been a disaster, and it was me who’d ended up a mess. Even though I was only twenty-five, I never had another serious relationship. Not until Tom, that is, if what we had could be called serious. Perhaps Fran needed to have a partner, and at fifty, if she lost Greg, she mightn’t find anyone better.
Tom’s shadow falling over me was a welcome relief, and when he raised his eyebrows at the paper strewn across the floor, I shut my pad and by way of explanation told him I was writing to a friend who’d been having some problems. Being Tom, he didn’t question me and handed me one of the beers he had brought with him, icy cold from his fridge.
Later than night, as we lay like a pair of commas in the narrow bunk, I finally let it all out. I felt nervous. What if he didn’t share my disgust? He was, after all, a man.
Tom didn’t say much, but he held me as if he knew how I felt. When I insisted he tell me what he thought, at first I found his sentiments unhelpful.
“Greg is a cad, and Fran deserves better. But even cads can have good characteristics, and almost anyone can change if they truly want to. Me, I find it impossible to judge relationships other than my own”—he tickled me—“and even that’s not an easy call. It’s hard to fathom what draws some couples together in the first place, let alone what keeps
them together given all the trauma most relationships seem to go through.”
“So what can I say to Fran?”
“What do you think she wants you to say?”
“What I honestly believe?”
“Perhaps. Or perhaps she hopes you’ll support her in whatever she wants, even if it sticks in your craw.”
“How can that be true friendship? That’s as bad as lying to her. It’s treating her no better than bloody Greg.”
“You’re probably right. I’m no psychologist. I guess I was thinking that given how deeply you care about her you’d want what’s best for her. Not what might be best for you in the same situation.”
“Mmmm. I think, Tom Scarlett, that your definition of an honest opinion is different from mine.”
“I suspect Fran wants your support, not your opinion. But I don’t know her, and you do.”
Long after Tom’s breathing softened into sleep, my head churned with one carefully worded phrase after another. When Tom woke at four and found me gone, he got up and made me a cup of tea, kissing the top of my head as he placed it beside me.
“Thanks. I’m sorry I woke you.”
“No problem. I’ll get dressed and go home; leave you to your thoughts.”
“No. Please don’t go. I need you to stay. I’ve finished my letter now.”
“Well done. A letter written at this time of the night is sure to be from the heart.”
“Would you read it and tell me if you think it is okay?”
“No, Anna. I’ve no doubt it will be what Fran needs from her best friend. I can tell by your face.”
“What about my face?”
“It looks soft.”
SIXTEEN
Early May and the island was emptying ahead of the cooler weather. The noddy terns had disappeared and the last of the adult shearwaters were leaving, abandoning their fledged chicks, who were still learning to fly. Turtle hatchlings had hatched and swum away, not to be seen again until they were dinner-plate size. Collette, as well as Diane and Ben, had just left. Everyone was at the wharf to say goodbye—to Diane and Ben, at least. I wasn’t sure they would have come out for Collette. But she seemed pleased. She’d probably never had a goodbye wharf session when she’d left before. I hugged her, briefly to be sure, but it was spontaneous. What’s more, she hugged me stiffly back and thanked me for all my help. I could feel Tom and Pat’s grins through the back of my head. Saying goodbye to Diane and Ben was a wrench. We’d shared Kirsty’s birthing and the miracle of Hamish’s arrival, an unbreakable bond.