Martha walked with Ada to the bus. Ada didn’t need her, but Martha wanted to go; it was one of the simple rituals of motherhood still available to her. PJ needed the walk too. It was the right distance for a three-legged dog. It only took twenty minutes. She could give her whole attention to it. And Ada and PJ were the easiest beings to walk with: Ada’s little hand nestled in hers, and PJ’s lopsided waddle accompanied her bird-like chatter, so that the world felt as if it had been dreamed into existence. Someone had told Martha that listening to birdsong was good for one’s health. So there was that too. Health was important. And then to watch the morning take hold, to be borne up by the unfolding motion of it, as if she too was just a tree shaking its branches in the growing light.
Afterwards, with just PJ, she felt a slight downturn in mood, as if through a crack in atmosphere, her simple, timeless morning was losing air. Was it that the bus had taken Ada and her task away? That PJ panted and plodded—an incontrovertible sign of old age, which was dismal, inevitable and looming? Soon she would be the one to plod and pant or hobble inelegantly along. And that now the walk was almost over, she would be home again, and life would surge in with all its vague dissatisfactions and petty irritations: the kitchen would be in a mess, the day would be too hot, the garden would need to be watered. Even worse was the sense that none of this mattered and that whatever it was that did matter eluded her.
Today at least was swim club. Today she’d meet Susie at the pool. She could never talk herself into exercise; she had to arrange to meet Susie there or she wouldn’t go. Even then she was reluctant. She didn’t like swimming—she liked having swum. She liked moaning with Susie afterwards in the sauna. It was possibly more therapeutic to moan than to swim. She only swam for her arthritic toe. When she first got the pain and the doctor had said the word arthritis, her heart dived down and hid from the diagnosis. It was the first sign, a harbinger of the degradations of age. She had arrived on that other side of life where bodies start to undo.
Of course, it wasn’t exactly like that. Life was fluid; she had been undoing for a long time, and every now and then something had the bad taste to make a stark announcement. The woman at the desk didn’t have arthritis yet, it had to be said. She wore cornflower-blue eye shadow and a sun visor. She was cheerful and always said, ‘Enjoy your swim.’ The pool had recently been subjected to a renovation. What satisfaction it must have given that cheerful lady to set that potted palm down in the reception area, endowing it with a hint of hotel-lobby pizazz.
But Martha missed the old pool. Or she just missed the man at the desk who called her mate as he leaned on one over-sized arm. ‘Mate, it’s bloody hot, isn’t it?’ Always sunstruck or slightly hungover or just so lazy his voice dropped out as if by mistake. He had once mentioned the difficulty of getting his double bass in the car. It had surprised her. How had he mustered the energy to learn an instrument when he could barely be bothered to talk? Another time he told her that the pool was closed on certain Fridays for nude swimming. She couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. He was one of those men. Dry, large, laconic. She loved how devoid of ambition or drive he was. He was another country to her.
Then, one day he was gone. No one knew what happened. He just skipped town. So he was a scoundrel, really. Martha was glad to have known a scoundrel. The pool was closed for months. And she hadn’t realised till then that the man at the desk, the scoundrel whose name she didn’t know, had been part of her life and now it didn’t feel the same to go swimming. The pool was bright now, as if someone had just turned the lights on and cleaned out all the shadows.
Susie was all for the new brightness. She was in the changing room, already humming, one foot on the wooden bench, stuffing her hair under her rubber cap, and probably ignoring Sheila who was head down, drying her hair with the hand dryer, her showered body pink and gleaming like a pig. Sheila was older and doing pottery and waiting for grandchildren to appear. At that end of life. Brimming with observations, Sheila guffawed a lot and said things like, what rubbish, what utter rot, and since these disparagements issued from the authority of a naked body, they seemed to Martha irrefutable, even if she disagreed. Even Sheila’s flat sloping-down breasts were not obliged to be otherwise. There was some dignity in this. Sheila’s body was as comfortable as an old tracksuit. Martha’s body was a site of faultlines, from which she averted her own gaze with an anxious sense of failure.
Sheila paused to give forth on her lover Peter—why did Martha always imagine him in striped pyjamas?—whose house had recently flooded and who bored her in most ways, but she put up with him for the sex. Martha blushed inwardly, but outwardly she laughed like a compatriot. As if she too would take a boring man as a lover just for the sex. But Martha could never be that casual about sex.
Martha undressed quickly. Then she swam as fast as she could. She always did it this way. The idea of exercise made it tiring. She was tired of feeling there was something she should have done, have arrived at, have vanquished. She gave it all she had and then collapsed. Susie paced herself, went steady the whole way. Her doggedness was unnerving, if only because it accentuated Martha’s flimsiness.
Susie had first approached Martha at the kids’ school, wearing lipstick and a tube skirt and showing straightaway that she had an animal nature. Since Tilly had made friends with her daughter, Alice, Susie thought she and Martha should have a cup of coffee. Martha didn’t drink coffee—her system was too fragile—but she said yes anyway, as she was ashamed of her fragility and the caution it required, and she sometimes staged minor, fleeting rebellions, which she later regretted. Susie instantly consulted a diary. Martha thought they could never be friends, but later in Susie’s kitchen, Susie had laughed avidly and given Martha the sense that there was something else to be got at in life, something Martha had not yet uncovered. She spoke of everything as if it was still alive with possibility. Susie had peered over her mug of coffee. ‘Well, my dear husband, Joe, kindest man alive, but he has some trouble you know…’
Martha didn’t know. She waited.
Susie put her hand to her mouth as if sheltering the admission, though no one was there except Martha, ‘Getting it up,’ she said.
Martha had met Joe already. He was a big, kind, weary man, with a slight paunch. Martha felt for him. He looked like someone whose will had been stamped on early in life and who had given in to his own diminishment. Not like Mike. Mike strutted from one posture to the next, a real rooster. He was always ready for action.
‘Oh, my husband has the opposite problem—of not keeping it down.’ Martha shocked herself for saying such a thing. She had meant it to be funny—even though it was true.
But Susie didn’t laugh; she slid luxuriously forward across her peach laminate bench. ‘Honey, in my books, that is not a problem.’ She spoke the words with great dramatic effect.
Martha laughed to cover up a sudden feeling of inadequacy. She felt so unwomanly, so lacking in carnal impulse. Yet it was thrilling to be in the midst of such a conversation and she wanted it to keep going. No one had ever before spoken to her about the deep and personal intricacies of relationships. Maybe she and Susie would be friends after all.
Over the years, Martha had been surprised at how much she was able to divulge, how Susie’s candour had led her out of herself, and how it was a relief to say it: to admit she was bored; her husband was tiresome; he only thought about one thing, no two things—sex and tennis.
That wasn’t completely true, of course. Though the possibility of it had shocked Martha, once she had said it. She tried to think of what she loved in Mike. His jaw for instance when he leaned in to kiss her. His good humour and steadiness. His reliability. If he said he would do something, then he would. That was something after all. Mike had nice hands too; when he irritated her, she would look at his hands to see if they might strike in her that little flare of love.
Martha summoned another burst of energy and plunged into her laps again. She tried to keep her head down and watch the painted line beneath her and not think so much. When she fatigued, she thought of her big toe and pushed on. If she stopped for too long, the ache in her toe joint would get the better of her. There was another woman who swam for her arthritis, an English woman with buck teeth, who told Martha that when she was a young mother in England she had been so poor that she had eaten chips from a rubbish bin. Martha couldn’t offer anything that would compare. She wanted to have lived beyond the bounds of her own small existence. She wanted to be a loudmouth, to have skipped town, played the double bass, driven trucks across deserts, got drunk in dive bars and been dirt poor, lost in the wilderness or jailed for protesting. The things she hadn’t done seemed more character-building than those she had, and she suspected that those sorts of experiences were what she was lacking. She hadn’t transgressed. She had simply kept going. What had made her so careful?
After the pool, she and Susie steamed themselves in the sauna. Susie leaned back, lifted her feet and circled her ankles. ‘What’s on today?’ she said.
‘Dishes, chickens, dog, children—my exciting life.’ Martha didn’t mention Arnold Buch. He was coming for tea and she was trying not to think about him.
Susie rolled her eyes.
Martha went on. ‘I dreamed I came home and everything in my house had been stolen. It was completely empty. I started to tell someone what I needed, what I would miss, and I couldn’t remember—I couldn’t remember what was even in the house.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Okay, you’re sad about some loss, but you don’t know what that loss is?’
Youth, Martha thought, but she didn’t say it, because this was obvious and dull. She had fallen to thinking about how there was really nothing in the house after all, nothing she would need to take with her, nothing she could count in the big tally at the end of it all.
‘Joe is depressed,’ Susie said. ‘He was reading about John Lennon today. It’s two years since he was shot. Joe’s got such a tender heart. He despairs about a world in which John Lennon can get assassinated.’
Martha felt a pang of love for Joe. It made sense that Joe loved John Lennon. He was the guiding star of her burst of youth. He stood against the tide of opinion and Martha had admired that. A madman had gunned that all down.
‘Apparently the man who shot him was reading The Catcher in the Rye. Have you read it? I was in love with Holden Caulfield when I was young,’ Susie said.
Martha had read it. She wasn’t sure she would like it now. She felt old and despairing. It was as if in failing to escape a steadily advancing orthodoxy, she had been flattened by it. It crushed the peace movement and John Lennon, and it turned the ear away from birdsong.
And then, on top of all that, Arnold Buch was coming.