by Averil Kenny
‘Well, if anyone was made for fornication, it’s you. Seems like fornication might be your new favourite hobby.’
‘It is. Better workout than running. You’re one to talk, though! You don’t like to go easy on beginners, do you?’
‘Not when they’re as competitive as you.’
‘It’s not my fault I get there faster than you.’
‘No, it’s mine.’
‘You just like showing off how well you know your way around the female physique!’
‘No, showing off my appreciation for the finest physique I’ve ever seen.’
‘I do have a complaint about your bedside manner, though. Actually, more your on-the-windowsill-with-the-curtains-open manner . . .’
‘Oh, were those complaints you were making?’
‘How was I to complain properly in that position?’
‘Want to air the rest of your grievances now, then?’ Jake asked, moving smoothly over her. ‘Because I’m all ears.’
‘That’s not your ear, Jake . . .’
Yes, yes, yes.
*
Sonnet emerged from Jake’s shower to find her slacks and shirt from Friday night laid out on his bed – washed, dried and ironed. She had to laugh. ‘I could get used to this!’
‘I hope so,’ Jake said, still ironing his own shirt.
‘Will you come out to my cottage each morning to do my clothes?’
His eyes crinkled. ‘If you want the laundry service, you’ll have to move in with me.’
Yes.
‘Shacking up with the town’s doctor? That’s one way to steal Fable’s notoriety.’
‘We could start by turning up together today at the Sunday service.’
Sonnet made a choking sound. ‘I’d never step foot in that place! Bunch of bloody hypocrites sitting together polishing their throwing stones.’
‘That’s kind of the point, isn’t it?’ Jake said. ‘We’re all a mess of contradictions, in an imperfect world, with our favourite stones to cast.’
‘Yeah, but most of the heathens out here don’t hurl rocks from behind some self-righteous shield.’
‘Is that your experience?’
Sonnet saw, again, a red-checked tea towel tossed over shoulder in a braying pub crowd. ‘No,’ she said, between closed teeth, ‘women are shamed and blamed wherever they go. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t.’
‘Holds true for my mother. Devout member of a conservative church, and when she finally escaped my father, she was excommunicated. His sexual, emotional and physical abusing mattered less than her refusal to silently submit without making a dreaded fuss. It was easier for the church if the victim left than the perpetrator.’
Sonnet shook her head in disgust.
‘The reception she got outside wasn’t much better, though. She was a single mother single-handedly destroying the fabric of society, raising a delinquent, surely prostituting herself, who couldn’t be trusted to rent a property much less get a loan, and who hogged welfare she didn’t deserve.’
‘Preaching to the choir here, Jake. And how much of those attitudes do you think stem from religion in the first place?’
‘Or how much of our innate human nature infiltrates religions and societies?’
‘You think oppression is innate?’
‘I think human cruelty and lust for power permeates institutions setting out with even the noblest intentions.’
Sonnet, at first nodding, now cocked her head. ‘Don’t tell me you’re a believer?’
‘Merely a . . . “reminiscer”.’ The iron hissed, in echo. ‘I remember fondly the God of my childhood and how, according to my childlike trust, he was going to make everything right for Ma and me. But Ma had to save herself, and I haven’t managed to find him since.’
‘You are looking, though.’
‘I was angry with the God I saw no rational sense believing in for many years, until it finally occurred to me maybe it was still okay to miss him, anyway, and perhaps my professional pilgrimages, from Asia to Africa, were my attempt at reconciliation. If I couldn’t find God in a desert, I suppose he’s no more likely to be found in a church. That doesn’t necessarily stop me . . . wanting.’
Sonnet stared at Jake. She wondered how to explain her cassowary – her firebird – and how much she feared, despised and desired him.
‘So, have you found anything yet?’ she asked, not quite coolly enough.
‘Yes.’ He shot her a look of infinite warmth. ‘The gift of our stubborn human need and yearning for each other, despite our incurable imperfections and the almost certain guarantee of disappointing, failing and hurting one another.’
Sonnet found herself with a solid, stinging lump to swallow. A whole folded part of her being strained at the seams to unfurl.
She watched the adept slide of his hand across plaid in silence.
‘So, we can’t share a pew, then,’ Jake said, lightening; swinging his shirt off the board. ‘But we can arrive at the Sugar Festival together?’
‘Ha! I walk in on no man’s arm today! It’s bad enough I left my dirty-stop-out-mobile lying in front of your flat all weekend.’
Jake stretched into his shirt, saying nothing. Sonnet’s hands ached to take it off again. Fastening the last button, he looked up. ‘Honestly, Son? You won’t get persuasion from me. I fell in love with a woman who knows her own mind, and runs her own life. That’s sexy as hell to me. I’m not going to undermine your independence.’
‘Not even a little persuasion?’
Jake came over to button her shirt, hands lingering at the top. ‘Nope. I want to share the life you’ve created here for yourself, not demand you rebuild it over again to suit me.’
‘There are some parts of my existence,’ she said slowly, ‘that more resemble siege ramparts than a life.’
He went to speak, but her hands moved to cover his, green eyes aglow. ‘And those walls could certainly come down.’
‘Now it sounds like you’re trying to convince me.’
‘Here, let me show you—’
*
‘I do like it when you show me,’ Jake said, as they retrieved rumpled clothing.
‘And who knew,’ Sonnet began, ‘I had such talents for persua—’ She trailed off, face grey.
‘Son?’
‘Persuasion.’
‘Yes . . .’
‘No, Persuasion! My mother’s favourite book!’
‘Oh, the Austen classic. Yeah, I don’t think Jane ever wrote the kind of trick you just pulled.’
Sonnet leapt up. ‘Holy heck, I have it! I still have her copy of Persuasion!’ She didn’t have time to elucidate, didn’t have a moment to lose. Much less to re-button her shirt.
‘See you at the festival,’ she cried, hurtling past his bafflement and down the stairs, two at a time. She burst onto a street busier than she’d ever seen it. Cars were sardined in the gutters; footpaths flowed towards the park with townsfolk carrying blankets and baskets.
Sonnet was bending to retrieve her bike, in most inglorious fashion, when Marg and Ned Johnstone exited their car kerbside. Marg tutted loudly, sending Ned scuttling to the boot to retrieve their gear. Her son, Dane the Dickhead Dux, stood under the awning, leering. Sonnet followed Marg’s eyes from Jake’s apartment to the gape of her blouse, lace bra exposed.
Sonnet’s hands clenched, desperate to mend the gape. She gripped her handlebars, instead. Sonnet Hamilton would not cover herself in front of this woman.
Marg passed her on a withering fume of Yardley, and almost kept her damned mouth shut. At the last second, she snapped.
‘You Hamilton women just don’t know how to leave a decent man alone!’
Sonnet threw back her shoulders. ‘Oh, Marg, there’s nothing decent about what Dr Fairley just did to me.’
She wheeled her bike to the centre of the busy road, shoulders still squared. Warmth flowed into her core. Sonnet stopped, turning to look up at Jake, who leaned over his tiny balcony with a hand moc
k-clutched to his heart.
A smile twisted the corner of her lips, wringing out bitterness. The last little thread of resistance snapped. Cupping hands round her mouth, Sonnet threw back her head to holler, ‘I love you, Dr Fairley!’
The grin breaking over Jake’s face sent her sailing down the road on a breeze of joy.
*
It was a different matter entirely in the privacy of her bookshop. From wall to shelf to ladder to discount rack she volleyed, cursing through tears.
‘Where did you put it, stupid? You can’t have sold it! You didn’t! Come on, think!’
It seemed improbable that she would find it now, after all these years, all her ignorance. She’d probably waved it out of her front door in a paper bag years ago.
And yet – there! On the lowest shelf of Esther’s Corner, amongst the Children’s Classics, a soft dove-grey spine, and the word she’d been searching for in gilded curlicue: Persuasion.
It was, of all things, regret that seized her upon its discovery. It was no relief to open the cover, press back the dust jacket and find her mother’s name scribed there – in the handwriting she had not seen for a decade, and yet would still have known after a hundred years.
How many of her mother’s books had she relegated to obscurity among a thousand lesser books? How many had she sold for infinitely less than they were worth?
Sonnet traced the writing under her finger, and lifted her nose as though to receive her mother’s floating scent. She pressed the book to her face and spun the pages beneath her nostril, still waiting.
An envelope dropped from the book, to rest between her feet.
Sonnet stared at it in sickened disbelief. Her first notion was to leave it where it lay, to run from what she already knew it to be.
Mama’s letters had been hidden in her books.
Sonnet could barely hold the page straight as she unfolded the letter from its packet . . .
Archer,
My love is a fever, longing still, for that which longer nurseth the disease.
But Sonnet saw not her mother’s pale, slender hand dancing across the paper; rather, a faceless, scorned wife gripping at the page; Noah’s coven of witches poring over the words; Alfred’s rheumy gaze treading down each line.
Nausea churned as she continued.
You have a daughter. A fat-cheeked little plum, with aubergine eyes. Both baby and mother are well, or so they say – since no one ever asks me.
Mama was still writing to him after they were separated? Sonnet’s eyes flew to the top of the page, searching for a date. Of course there wasn’t one – who dates a letter to an erstwhile lover? With a headshake, Sonnet read on.
Her name is Novella, born of our shortest tryst of all.
Sonnet sank heavily to the floor. Plummy was his? She was years too late, a lifetime too slow to this discovery.
I bore her silently into the world, as every time before. Then I sat and stared at the ward door, defying the sister’s canny eyes, and I waited. This time, I told myself, clutching tight our baby – this time he will come.
But you didn’t come.
And I have waited long enough.
Sonnet thought of the paintings crowding Fable’s sunroom as a living shrine to Archer Brennan; secret father who had bequeathed his talents upon her.
So, Fable already knew long ago then. But how?
I went home on the seventh day. I packed up my tiny flat, and left. You won’t find me again.
I hear you, already: this won’t last – we can’t live long without one another, Es.
Come, then; find me. Fail. Turn back to the home you chose with her. We’ll see who cannot live without.
You’re already thinking this is another tempestuous Esther tantrum, nothing time cannot remedy. It’s a familiar turn – the months of parched and searing longing, then the conflagration of us. No one burns for love, the way we do.
But it is our daughters who will be, at last, our uncoupling. They deserve more than this. Sonnet – our brilliant daughter – is a senior and in her, I finally recognise my young self. I was old enough, but I wasn’t wise enough. I understand now: I had a very girlish understanding of consequences then . . .
See Esther there? Flame-haired young woman in the library annex, come to study for her scholarship exams, with everyone’s favourite vice-principal. How lucky she is, with those far-fetched dreams, and her unstable nature, to have such a prodigiously talented teacher take an interest in her. Dear old Alfred is thinking it this instant, as he prowls the aisles, guarding our scholarly endeavours from interlopers. He’s made himself our alibi, and he hasn’t got a clue.
For, look again: her skirt is up around her waist, with her bottom raised on a dusty tome, and her tutor stands now between her legs. In the quadrangle outside, marbles clack against each other, voices smash mutely against the windowpane. Watch her face as he plunges in, his hands cradling her gaping mouth – oh yes, her entreaties finally met, but did you catch that first sting of disappointment too?
It wasn’t a love scene worthy of us.
Ours was a love grander, rarer, brighter than the sordidness we were limited to . . .
On your wife’s bed, while she was at the doctor’s rooms; under your desk, while your secretary tapped away outside; in your automobile, parked by dark canefields; and then, our new favourite – beneath the King’s portrait on the school stage, hands gripping at red curtain, thrusts metered out by the clock’s quiet outrage.
Someone must have discovered us there, long before the graduation ball. They were prepared. All the world’s a stage, and on that night we were players in a larger tale of revenge. I obsessed over the culprit and their motives for many years. Was it dog-faced Margery? Or that seething Hardy girl? In the end, though, it doesn’t matter who drew back the curtain. The point was our public shaming . . .
My favourite green gown in rustling protest, high on my thighs, my teeth latched on the webbing of your hand. But listen now, for that sudden winding rustle. There’s a rush of cool along my legs, and our leaping shadows are starkly thrown. A single discordant piano note rings out, then that unearthly hush. I strain for a glimpse behind us, hissing your name. You pitch onto my bare back, and now I can see them over your neatly pressed collar. All of them, staring at us agape. My smothered cry turns to horror; yours erupts, and then the crowd begins to shriek, too . . .
How could we ever outlive such shame?
For nearly two decades, we’ve tried.
Before our discovery, I would beg you: Take me away! You thought I pled for the ecstasy which transcended slapping flesh in another woman’s sheets. In truth, I wanted you to save me from the natural restrictions of my young life itself, and especially that small-minded, godforsaken town.
Eventually, we did escape – you first, with a forced resignation and your family’s expulsion, a sleight of hand to reposition you, for my later arrival. In the anonymity of that city, beneath your wife’s averted eyes, we believed we had a fresh start, and a love story to transcend it all. No, we were merely reliving the same tale: yearning and combustion, over and again. While ever in reach of one another; we were burning up, or out. I fled and you followed, you fled and I followed.
But you always belonged to your little boys, to her.
‘Those who control their passions,’ you would quote, to hush my jealousy, ‘do so because their passions are weak enough to be controlled.’ I pitied the dry, pallid loves around us, and in your marriage. I believed myself the true victor. Your wife kept only the crackling cicada shell, while I alone possessed your singing flesh, and hungering artist’s heart.
So many years you’ve castigated yourself for your infidelity and faithlessness, and yet; you’ve never left her, refused to abandon them. I might have loved you all the more for that wounded nobility limping on and on, if we hadn’t both depended so much on your weakness.
And what have our daughters had? A shadow man, refusing to be seen or known; little mo
re than stolen kisses as they slept, notes slipped into my purse for their birthdays, new books hidden beneath their pillows. Only Fable has been blessed to meet you in any real sense – fleetingly, in disguise as a dispassionate art tutor.
But you never stopped promising; one day, you’d finally make a true family of us. When the boys might be easier to care for, when the war was over, when your finances were better, when it wouldn’t hurt Vera so much . . . when, when, when.
Of all the things I might have been, I have become this: a covetous, kept woman. Not kept by the seasonal trespasses and steady donations of a bewitched benefactor – kept by shame, and the caged hell I have made of it.
How easily my life might have taken another turn, if only Alfred had taken three steps closer to the concertina door that first day. Or, when we were caught, if there had been just one person to say: Esther, there is nowhere you can go too far from home, nothing you have done so unforgivable; no place you cannot come back from. If I’d known that kind of love, how different my options might have been.
All my life I’d believed in my too-muchness – the blinding heat and black hole of my intensity. But I’ve met someone who doesn’t buy it for a moment.
Her name’s Maria. She’s one of those earnest Christians so easy to mock, but I’ll forgive Maria even her stubborn, stupid faith, for she is my first true friend. The only one who has never said, ‘Too much, Esther, you’re too much.’ Maria is helping me to heal myself. She reminds me of Olive, and perhaps that’s why I have grown so quickly to love and depend upon her, why I long now to go home.
I’m making a plan for my homecoming.
It always seemed preposterous I should ever take myself, and our children, back to Noah. But Noah calls, anyway.
Remember, Archie: the holy, harrowing night we glimpsed the cassowary – our last, stolen forest embrace, before you escaped Noah. Meeting there, we had disturbed that majestic bird from his plum foraging. Recall that look he cast on us – as though he meant to hold us ever in his thrall. The eye of creation trained upon us, and how we quailed beneath it.
There were handprints stinging on my face from days earlier, our ears still ringing from the howling hall, a hawk of spit long since washed from my chest – soiling me forevermore – and none of it mattered; for I had you in my arms, helpless as a boy, hand on my belly, sobbing your fervid vow: ‘This is not the end. I’ll fix what I’ve broken, I promise you, Es.’