Brunswick Street was deserted on Christmas Day and Angelina parked outside my apartment.
“Is it okay if I stay again?” she said.
“Of course it’s okay. I’ve always wanted you to stay. What about your mum?”
“I’m old enough not to let her run my life.”
That was a step in the right direction. It was only a few hours since she’d spun the story about feeding the cat.
I had not noticed her putting her overnight bag into the car. Nor, apparently, had Jacinta seen her purloining the remains of the liquor, and we finished Christmas Day sitting on my bed washing down mince pies with warm vodka.
Unprompted, unless you count a lazy hand on a bare thigh as a prompt, Angelina said, “Is there anything you don’t know about me, anything I haven’t told you?”
“How would I know?” I said.
“I’ve told you everything I can think of. Is there anything that doesn’t make sense?”
“Guess,” I said.
“You want to know why I haven’t let go of Richard?”
I nodded. My question would have been, “Why won’t you promise to wait for me?” But surely part, if not all, of that answer was Richard. He had always been in the background: today at the family home, the night I asked her out, that first evening at the piano.
“You’ve met my parents,” she said. “You answer the question.”
“Your dad’s a Family Court judge. So he comes home with stories of people who’ve made stupid decisions, screwed up their marriages. Probably not flattering stories. You didn’t want to be one of them.”
“Keep going.”
“And they’ve made their own marriage work. They’re still together.”
“Despite my mum having an opinion on everything and my dad having this disgusting old jumper that he won’t throw out.”
“Bit like my dad not coming home at night.”
“Sorry. I wasn’t trying to compare. I’m just saying they’re role models for toughing it out, finding a way to make it work. You can never be completely sure you’ve found the right person, or the only person, or how you’ll both change, but you make a commitment.…”
“And you think, since my parents didn’t stay together, that I might be a bad risk?”
“I’m the one who screwed up a marriage, and did nothing to fix it except wait for Richard to apologize. I think it’s the opposite. You don’t want to screw up. So you’re cautious.” She lay back on the pillow. “What question do you think I’d want to ask you?”
Ah. It had been a circuitous path to the topic that only needed to be discussed if we had a future together. The one subject I had brushed aside when it came up. I had done that a few times.
“You’d say, ‘You left a relationship because you didn’t want to have kids. Is that going to change?’ Right?”
“Not quite. I’d say, ‘Why are you so worried you won’t be a good father?’”
It was a better question. My own ruminations on the topic had never got beyond a gut feeling that I was not ready, notwithstanding the moment at Carols by Candlelight. But if Angelina had read me right, then it went deeper, no doubt back to my desire not to follow my own father, and perhaps a fear that I had inherited more than his ear for music.
She didn’t wait for my answer. She sat up and put a hand on either side of my face.
“Adam, listen to me. I know you. I know you better than anyone else. You’d be a fantastic dad. Not just because of who you are, but because you care so much about not getting it wrong. In the same way you don’t want to get marriage wrong. If I ever had kids, I’d be happy for you to be their father.”
Then, as if to separate the part about herself, about us as a couple, she repeated, “You’d be a fantastic dad. One day, when you’re playing with your kids, wherever it is in the world, whoever you’re with, remember I was the one who told you that you could do it. That’s my real Christmas present to you.”
* * *
We stayed up all night. It was Angelina’s idea: “We’ve never seen the dawn together, and I don’t want to sleep tonight anyway.”
My warehouse did not have a balcony, but there was an external ladder to the roof. It was warm, and we told each other the story of the four and a half months we had known each other, filling in the gaps, arguing about our already diverging memories.
“He sent one of the wenches out to get the olives? In what she was wearing? He wouldn’t have.”
“He did.”
“Oh God, the poor girl.”
“That’s why you got a black olive instead of green.”
“It wasn’t black.”
“I’m promising you it was.”
She laughed. “You’re probably right. I wouldn’t have known what color to expect. It was my first martini.”
“What? You—”
“I was trying to impress you.”
“Me. You were—”
“You. The international consultant who just happens to play brilliant piano and has the answer to everything.”
“Well, now you know I don’t.”
“None of us do. We just have to find a way through with what we’ve got.”
“Like the manager. ‘No trouble at all, madame. Oh shit, what do I do now?’”
“That poor girl.”
The vodka was almost gone when the sky started to lighten and we finally went to bed.
* * *
The following evening, most of the local cafés were still closed. I made some spaghetti with a can of tomatoes and we drank a bottle of Yarra Valley cabernet, which we had bought on one of our days out. It was our last night but one before I departed, and we did not know when we would see each other again. We had made love most of the afternoon and were both restless.
Angelina looked out the window onto the almost empty street. “You want to see if the bar’s open?”
Surprisingly, it was. There was no one there except Shanksy.
“I thought you’d gone back to Pommieland,” he said.
“New Zealand. Day after tomorrow.”
He made us eggnogs, and we sat at the bar, happy to have him there. He turned on the television, the one I had used to watch three episodes of Mornington Police a lifetime ago. We watched the highlights of the one-day cricket match between Australia and Sri Lanka, and drank two more eggnogs each, quietly writing ourselves off.
At 9:30 P.M., Shanksy turned off the television.
“I think it might be closing time,” he said.
“I think so, too,” said Angelina. “I think everything’s been said that’s going to be said.” She turned to me and her big brown eyes looked into mine. “Do you know ‘Angel of the Morning’?”
I walked to the piano, and played an A, just as I had on the night she walked into the bar and my world changed. And, like the first time, I let her sing the first line unaccompanied: there would be no strings to bind my hands, if her love couldn’t bind my heart.
I continued, hitting a chord at the beginning of each line. E again. A. E. It was she who chose to start. B minor: facing the dawn, alone.
Her voice was soaring, absolutely soaring, in the empty bar. I played the piano properly as she started the chorus, and kept the accompaniment going into the next verse. I had never played with such passion, and our audience of one had stopped in the middle of the room, transfixed.
Angelina’s voice wavered as she sang the last verse, and I was puffing my cheeks out and blowing through pursed lips like a goldfish to keep back my own tears.
At the end of the final chorus I did a reprise, because the tears and the days and the years bit works like a pre-chorus, as though the song has no ending. The traditional way to finish the song is to stretch out the last “baby”—bay-ay-bee—and follow with some dramatic instrumental work to bring things to a close.
Angelina didn’t take that option. I was ready to go around again, but then realized she was finishing as she started, that night five months ago, a cappella.
Then slowly turn away
I won’t beg you to stay
(D chord, long, long pause) With me.
Then, with an actress’s sense of drama, Angelina slowly turned away and walked out of the bar. The goldfish trick stopped working, and Shanksy came over and put a clumsy arm around me.
* * *
I spent the next day packing up. Angelina had left her bag, and I put her bits and pieces from the bathroom into it. Toothbrush, contact lens case, a vial of Obsession.
It was feeling like a breakup. I was still trying to make sense of how the night had ended. You can only read so much into lyrics, especially as the song in question had other meanings for us, but the line about the strings that bound her hands had surely been directed at Richard on the first night.
I held out some hope that I would see Angelina before I left. She knew where to find me and had the excuse of the bag. At ten P.M., I walked to the bar.
The place was busy, considering the time of year.
“She hasn’t been in,” said Shanksy. “The boss wanted to send you a thank-you present but we didn’t have your address. Anyway, be good to keep in touch.”
I gave him my mother’s address and my Brunswick Street one. “If he’s quick, he can save on postage. I’ll be there till about noon tomorrow.”
That message would be passed to Angelina if she turned up. I had a couple of beers, left Angelina’s bag with Shanksy, and walked home.
I had gone to bed when the doorbell rang. I pulled on my jeans and raced down the stairs. It was not Angelina but Lucy, one of the girls from the bar, out of breath and sweating. The night was still warm.
“She just came in.”
I sprinted back upstairs, grabbed shoes and T-shirt, and raced ahead of Lucy. Shanksy’s expression told me the bad news.
“She was only here five minutes. Didn’t even have a drink. Picked up her bag, sang one song, walked out.”
“Who played the piano?”
“She did. She wasn’t bad.”
“What did she sing?”
“One song,” said Shanksy. “Brought the house down. As always. ‘I Will Survive.’ Gave it everything she had.”