Dr Gordon ‘Gordie’ Wallace, GP, retired, saw the lucky back of Paul Raymond being led inside by temptation. From his window opposite, he watched Scarlett lightly tripping along the grass, barefoot, beautiful, her hair tangled. She was just the sort of girl he would have fallen for too, back in the day when he was a pants man. Gordie’s late wife, Pam, had turned a blind eye to his shenanigans throughout their happy marriage of forty-nine years (she died of bowel cancer, nastily, a year off their fiftieth wedding anniversary), only ever making a single reference to his philandering. Gordie remembered it clearly: they had been at lunch at the Orpheus, in those fine, hopeful days before she got ill, when they were in the process of selling their house in Melbourne’s Malvern East and looking around for somewhere at The Landing to rent until they could buy. Gordie was enjoying the slender form of the wee Asian lassie who had just served them their drinks, watching her shapely little arse as she walked off.
‘I should get you a new business card, darling,’ Pam said. ‘Gordon Wallace, Pants Man, Retired.’
He looked at her, astonished, but Pammy was smiling, her kind eyes crinkling in her much-loved old face.
Before Malvern East, and before that, Kew, Gordie had run a medical practice with Pam working as his receptionist in a small town in the Scottish Borders. Gordie was a brilliant working-class boy from Glasgow, whose mind was lit up by an English master with a love of the poetry of Robbie Burns. Gordie caught poetry like an infection, Burns and Yeats and the long-abandoned poetry of the poet and soldier Sir Walter Raleigh; Latin, the poetry of Virgil, the long, mesmeric incantations to everything marvellous; the poetry learned by heart, reading his eyes out, deep into the cold Scottish nights. His family had worked the docks for generations and did not know what to do with a lad who was dux of his grammar school and then won a scholarship to study medicine at the University of Glasgow. He was the only remaining boy of the family, the other two having perished from pneumonia; in the 1940s, and for a decade after, Scotland had the highest child death rates of anywhere in Ireland and the United Kingdom. The way the working class lived was positively medieval, and some nights during his early years of training, Gordie broke down and sobbed. It was into Pam’s bonny bosom he sobbed. Pam, the pretty Australian nurse from the children’s ward at Glasgow Hospital, Pammy with the dimple in one cheek and masses of curling strawberry blonde hair. He did not know what strawberry blonde hair was until he saw Pam’s: golden, white, rippling, shot through with the faintest blush of orange, tumbling down from her shoulders when he took the pins out.
They already had Anna when they migrated to Australia, and Pam was pregnant with James. Simon was born in Australia too, his poor scoundrel second son, who Gordie hadn’t seen for a decade. Marijuana, amphetamines—and not, he hoped, heroin—whatever drug was going in Melbourne in the 1970s, Simon took it. Sometimes Gordie comforted himself with the thought that it was genetic: his father was a drunk, and his grandfather. But sad, sweet-tempered Pammy never got over it and Simon never got over his grief at his mother’s death.
Gordie would never have left her. He put his sexual indiscretions in a separate box to that in which Pam and the children lived. No woman was ever Pam’s equal, no woman as sweet, no woman knew him inside and out, backwards and front. His passing fancies were just that, passing, a sort of twitch, some fatal weakness that came from growing up Presbyterian, church every Sunday, eyes front, the long remorseless line of dockside workers behind him, bearing down. He had broken free, rejecting everything he might have been but not only that; rejecting everything that had made him. He had leaped a class in a single bound and for a while Gordie reckoned he deserved a mistress, in the same way he deserved his success, his comfortable middle-class house, his standing in the community, the exclusive private schools for the children. He might even have supposed himself French and not working-class Scots, lying back on expensive sheets in hotels on afternoons while the rest of the world was at work, his current mistress pouring him a drink, as in a sophisticated Continental movie.
He regretted it now. He regretted being eighty-six years old, a widower who drank too much in order to pass the time on wind-fuelled lonely evenings. He regretted mistaking the drink, the girl, the hotel room for something it was not. It was not an adventure in which he played the lead role but his actual life being lived, his future being cast, his character under construction. Now he would prefer to look back on his long life and find it blameless. Now that his ability to act on desire had fled (his last, final humiliating attempt was ten years before, with a comely young widow of sixty-six—unfortunately also the best friend of Phyllis from the shop—who had sucked and stroked his reluctant member before unceremoniously giving up and marching straight down to Phyllis and Phil and Sylv at the shop to announce he was a dud in the sack. At least that was how Gordie remembered it: the news of his failure broadcast by Radio Sylvia within minutes of his disgrace). Sex was everything, and nothing.
Now Gordie wished for those minutes back, the hours, so that he might lay them at Pam’s feet. The flowers do fade, as the poet said; fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall, he might have said, too, if he could remember the lines, while at the same time an image passed through his head of Scarlett Collins’s slender waist, leading into temptation. He feared that if he had those hours back again he might once again follow his mistakes; that his character was already set, irretrievably flawed. He wished he were a better man but he knew that he was not.
He saw Bites coming down the road, a what-fun-is-about-to-happen-now look on her face. He was inordinately attached to the stupid wee creature, the only living thing in the entire world who was entranced by him, as if every single time she laid eyes on him she could not believe her luck. She trailed him everywhere, except when she was not off like a Glasgow bint, following other men. She was a darling, his darling, and he moved away from the window to the front door and called her. Hearing his voice, everything in her sprang to attention: her tail, her ears, her head, her legs, bringing her bounding towards him, covered in love. If dogs could smile, and Gordie was very sure Bites could, she was not only smiling but grinning from ear to ear. Her favourite person in the whole wide world, him, Gordie Wallace, pants man, retired.
Gordie was concentrating on Bites and hadn’t seen Jonathan bringing up the rear. Jonathan had been into Cooroy, to the butcher shop, to buy good rump steak and fresh organic beef sausages, and had just put them in the fridge when he decided that rather than ring old Gordie, he would wander up and ask him in person. He was fairly sure that even though the invitation was a late one, Gordie would be free. Jonathan prided himself on turning on a decent barbecue and was fond of the irregular social occasions held on the enormous back deck flowing out from his house. He fancied himself a social sort of man, a joiner, an active—and useful—member of society. Sarah liked to portray him as awkward or socially clumsy, when he considered himself socially adept. ‘Making smart-arse comments is not my idea of witty repartee,’ she once said. He reasoned that men and women had different ideas about humour, about friendship, about love—about everything, really, now that he thought about it. He was hardly friendless; not for him city manners of minding your own business and a preference for keeping neighbours at a respectful, safe distance. Jonathan had no truck with Brisbane people who owned houses at The Landing but who never joined in.
‘Comrade! Grand to see ye!’ said Gordie in curly Glaswegian, clinging, still, to his tongue. Gordie sometimes turned it up a notch but he could not retreat the other way, to the flat, featureless plains of the Australian accent. He was always surprised on his irregular trips home to see his remaining sister, Nene, that she thought he sounded Australian.
‘How are you, my friend?’ Jonathan said, loping over, ducking his head shyly. No wonder the ladies fancy him, Gordie thought, as Jonathan enveloped him in a huge, affectionate Australian hug. Gordie could not get over how personable Australians generally were. On his trips to Brisbane to see some medical specialist or other (don’t ask) he caught buses and trains and noted that people frequently said ‘Morning!’ or smiled at each other, often tossing a cheery ‘Thank you, driver!’ over their shoulders when getting off a bus. In certain parts of Glasgow, when he was growing up, you were in danger of getting glassed if you looked sideways at someone.
‘Well, I woke up this morning—that’s something,’ Gordie said. ‘Getting old’s better than the other thing.’ By nature a convivial man, he immediately perked up. Being in the company of other souls was excellent for mental health.
‘Do ye feel like a wee dram?’ he said. ‘I’ve an excellent Burgundy, just cracked.’
‘Too early for me I’m afraid,’ Jonathan said, suspicious, as ever, of Gordie’s improbable, pantomime accent. ‘Oh, go on, why not? Sun’s over the yardarm,’ he added, out of kindness.
Gordie was already on his way to his filthy kitchen, where plates of half-eaten food lay about, strung with insects. Piles of encrusted dishes were piled up, various tins and bottles. Jonathan regretted saying yes, but what disease could you possibly catch drinking from a dirty glass? He had never met Gordie’s late wife, Pam, long dead before Jonathan got to know him, but he didn’t doubt they had one of those marriages in which the duties of life were strictly divided along gender lines. Not for the first time he wondered if his own marriage might have fared better if Sarah had been one of those women who stayed at home gently tending the hearth, instead of dropping the girls at childcare and going off to become a high-ranking health department bureaucrat. On certain afternoons, leaving the office, he had longed for Sarah to be waiting at the end of the road, a bright, steady fixture, permanent as stars. If, these days, the stars were no longer steady, nor the earth itself assured, what hope was there for love? What was love but the frailest rope, thrown out to infinity, cast off into nothingness? Jonathan looked around the slovenly room, shorn of a woman, shorn of the warm, organising hand that belonged to Sarah and all the other women who had shepherded and shaped male life, starting with his mother. He had no answers.
He took the glass, which was oily.
‘Santé,’ said Gordie, knocking it back as if it were water.
Jonathan took a sip. It was surprisingly open, velvety, warm in the throat.
‘Good, isn’t it,’ said Gordie. It was not a question. ‘From my old mate Trevor’s cellar. Twelve years old.’
‘Excellent,’ Jonathan said. ‘Now what have you been up to, you old scoundrel?’
‘Oh, you know, continuing my valiant search for a wealthy widow with a bad cough,’ he said.
Bites, who had been standing between them wagging her tail, torn between two lovers, suddenly rushed off to the front door, barking uproariously. A woman walked in, a small, pretty woman in a pair of skimpy shorts and an unbuttoned shirt revealing overflowing breasts. Jonathan took her in—two seconds, three—his eyes travelling quickly to her face.
‘Anna!’ Gordie said. ‘My God! What are you doing here?’
‘Hello, Pa,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t locked.’ No-one locked their houses at The Landing, not even after a small band of teenage thieves from Gympie was found to be regularly knocking over empty holiday homes.
‘Charles has left me,’ she said. ‘I had nowhere to go.’
‘Sweetheart!’ said Gordie, opening his arms. ‘Why didn’t you call? When did you fly in? Is Gaspard with you?’
‘It’s term time,’ she said. ‘He’s still in school. Oh, Pa, I’m exhausted, that trip is a nightmare. And then I had to drive all that way from the airport. I only stopped to change my clothes.’
Where had she come from? Jonathan wondered. Gaspard?
‘Darling, I have a guest,’ said Gordie, letting her go and turning to face him. ‘Anna, this is my dear neighbour Jonathan. May I introduce my daughter, who appears to have lost her husband? She’s had four already. The next one’s bound to be the right one.’ He winked at Jonathan over his daughter’s skinny shoulders.
‘It’s not a joke, Pa!’ said Anna, beginning to cry. ‘I feel as if I’m dying of sadness.’
‘Aye, darlin’, I know, I know,’ said Gordie in his terrible, corny accent.
As he walked home, Jonathan had a picture in his head of Anna’s slim back, the full breasts on the elegant frame. He was conscious, too, of a great rope of hair snaking down her back like Rapunzel’s, but dark, not golden. She had just flown all the way from London, which—as far as fleeing wrecked marriages goes—was as dramatic a gesture as you could get. Why hadn’t she gone to a friend or a nearby hotel? Clearly she was not that sort of woman. She had a son at a posh boarding school somewhere, Winchester or Westminster, not quite Eton, but one of those schools in which the British ruling class perpetuates its rights of succession. Four husbands! How could anyone man up a second time, let alone a third and a fourth? Jonathan’s heart recoiled from love as if from a striking snake; his once fulsome heart cowered in his chest. He recalled one of the last exchanges he’d had with Sarah, just before she left to set up house with Cath; he had been away, in Cairns, and he sent what he thought was an affectionate email, telling her of everything he had been doing. He signed off fondest regards, and it was this she had flung back in his face. ‘Fondest regards? Who signs off an email to their wife fondest regards? You are unbelievable!’ She said he was tone deaf when it came to love and, furthermore, he no idea what intimacy was. ‘Who are you, Jonathan? What moves you? What scares you? I have no idea.’ Of course she knew who he was! She was being ridiculous, yet everything she said struck him like an arrow: he had a sensation of being under physical bombardment, as if cowering from attack. He loved her! If the right words for love were dumb on his tongue, his love was everywhere manifest, in the life they had built together, in the children they had made. How had he failed to notice the moment when emotive womanly feelings became the benchmark of everything good, replacing the restrained, chin-up blokeish moral code he had grown up with? Now, men like him who had failed to become feminised males were regarded with suspicion, considered buttoned-up, secretive, repressed. Surely Sarah knew that everyone was filled—to an astonishing degree—with what they could never say? What words could ever possibly hope to speak the dimensions of love? He didn’t know what Sarah wanted, not really; what she wanted him to do, what she wanted him to say or to be. How had he failed to notice how unhappy she must have been?
Walking along, his head down, he was suddenly overwhelmed by the endless exercises demanded by love, its interminable arm-wrestling. He was overcome by pity, a great unending pool of useless pity, for himself, for Sarah, for Anna, for old Gordie, for every man and woman who had ever tried to master love and failed.
He had experienced erotic adventures since Sarah’s departure, of course, many of them happy; he could still conjure in his mind’s eye the gleaming haunches of the young black woman from Nigeria straddling him, joyfully drawing his orgasm from him. He remembered Donna, hot-headed young Donna, who for a time he believed he might love, until he recognised that she did not care for intellectual debate or, like him, see life as a test of courage. Donna had no capacity for commiseration.
To distract himself from memory he went through the ever-expanding list of barbecue guests as he walked: Rosanna; Penny, and now her mother, Marie, who had apparently turned up like a bad penny; Gordie and his attractive daughter, Anna; that miserable bastard PP, ex-husband of Penny, and Cheryl from the rental agency, who PP shared a house with; and Glen and Celia Quinn, his immediate neighbours. That made ten, counting him. He hadn’t asked Penny’s daughter, Scarlett, and Paul Raymond, but maybe he should have. He walked on, faster. He had thirty or even forty years left to him; he had plenty of time, and yet he felt as if time were running out. Two years since Sarah left, more; he was practically divorced! Enough, mate, enough.