“Enchanted” had sent a frisson through art circles: the return of Frank Andrews with a major exhibition after an almost seven-year hiatus had the critics and collectors welcoming him back into the fold with open arms and, it was rumored, deep pockets.
Within days of the white envelopes arriving in various mailboxes across the city, people were saying that “Enchanted”—thirty-six paintings and line drawings—was Frank’s best work to date.
They were also asking whether Annie would have the hide to turn up.
Fergus had discarded her long ago, Frank had not taken her back, and Christa, it was said, remained furious with her for driving a wedge between her sons.
Still, I thought Annie would show up, because I was fairly sure the years wouldn’t have changed one of the things I had admired about her.
“I don’t give a stuff what people think about me, Tallulah,” I heard her voice echoing from a long-ago afternoon at the River House, “and neither should you. No one who ever truly matters does.”
Frank had chosen to show “Enchanted” not at one of the major city galleries, like Rafferty’s or Slater’s, but in our hometown, at his friend Laura Metcalfe’s art space, Bloom.
People moaned and grumbled—it was too far, what was Frank thinking, making them trek from the city on a Saturday? But they would all go, I knew, because it wasn’t just Frank’s pictures they wanted to look at.
They were going to see the other show as well, the one starring Christa, Frank, Fergus, Annie, Josh, and Annabelle—“I could sell extra tickets just for them,” Laura Metcalfe had said to me a few days before the exhibition.
With Duncan resting at Lingalonga, I’d headed home the week before the opening to check on Rose, and had run into Laura outside Bloom.
I’d known Laura since I was a little girl—Harry had done all the plumbing at the gallery, and Sam and Mattie had gone to school with her son, Brett.
“Tallulah”—she smiled—“how are you, my love?”
“Good, thanks, Laura,” I answered. “How are things with you?”
“Mad,” she said, and told me how her phone hadn’t stopped ringing since the invitations had gone out. “It’s crazy,” she said, “usually I have to beg the local rag to run up to one of my openings, but everyone’s coming, all the papers, some TV stations, and they’re all asking the same questions: Is Christa going to be there? Is Annie invited? Is Fergus? They’re all hoping for a fight, of course.” She laughed. “You know—Fergus and Frank rolling around the footpath, Christa and Annie at each other’s throats, stabbing each other with their hatpins . . .” Then she told me how grateful she was to Frank for giving her the exhibition, instead of Slater’s or Rafferty’s, adding they were mightily pissed off he hadn’t gone to them. “But that’s Frank for you, always there for an old friend,” she said, walking into Bloom. “Of course, I’ve got no bloody idea where I’m going to put everybody.”
There’s a photo of Ben and me from that night, taken for some newspaper’s social pages—Rose cut out the clipping and kept it in one of her albums.
Ben is wearing a white shirt and olive tie, black trousers, his hair cropped close to his head in a number two buzz cut he’d just had, saying it was easier for traveling. It made him look much tougher than he really was, and with his arm wrapped around my waist, he looked faintly menacing, when all he was really doing, I see now, was trying to hold on.
I’m standing beside him wearing a dark blue satin wrap dress Rose had made for me, a silk flower of some sort in my hair, and a fake smile stretched wide across my pink cheeks. I have smoky eyeliner on, and red lips, and my hair is down, out of its usual ponytail and falling in big, loose curls around my face and past my shoulders. I look nothing like the sort of girl you would leave standing by the river.
“You look amazing,” Ben had said that night at Harry and Rose’s, where we were staying.
“Thanks, I don’t know why I’m doing this.”
“I don’t know why either.” He smiled. “But if we are doing it, let’s just get it over and done with.”
We walked to the car, and when we got in he reached across the seat for my hand.
“You can do this, Lulu,” he said. “You can do this with your eyes shut.”
We were meeting Harry there; he worked on Saturdays and wasn’t sure what time he’d finish.
After driving past the gallery and seeing the crowd already gathered on the footpath, smoking and gossiping, we’d parked a couple of blocks away, the walk giving me time to breathe a little in my satin dress.
By the time we arrived, there was a queue, which Laura was sensibly keeping well oiled, sending out waiters with champagne and beer while she ran around inside, rearranging paintings she had rearranged from their previous rearrangements.
On the edge of the footpath, a fidgety knot of media waited, and from where Ben and I were standing we could see who was arriving, illuminated by silver flashes of lightning from the photographers’ bulbs.
Fergus Andrews was first, blithely strolling up the street with his own camera around his neck, looking, I thought, exactly as I remembered him—“Where to, for the Wahi-Wahi?”—but as he got closer, I saw how life had marked him.
He was still wearing the same clothes, khaki pants and shirt, with lots of complicated pockets with zippers and netting—“Wanker still thinks he’s in the Kalahari,” I heard one of the snappers say—but deep lines were carved into his skin, mottled by the sun.
He had lost none of his swagger though, and as the photographers swung their glass eyes upon him, he raised his own camera and began snapping them snapping him all the way to the top of the stairs.
I took a step back to let him pass just as a taxi rolled up and Duncan rolled out. “Good evening, wonderful night for Frank Andrews, isn’t it? Or are you here for me? No? What a pity. So, who’s here so far? Christa? No? What about Annie? Has she arrived? I wonder if she’ll turn up with a great big scarlet A attached to her frock, don’t you?” Then, spying Laura at the door, he strode toward her, saying, “Lana, what a pleasure it is to see you, my dear!”
A few minutes later, in a show of solidarity for Frank, I supposed, Christa and Annie arrived together, arms improbably linked.
They looked, I thought, standing in the queue, like two jewels, Christa wrapped up in an emerald kimono, her shock of white hair pulled tightly off her face in a bun, and Annie beside her wearing layer upon layer. “It’s my Sara Lee signature look,” she used to laugh, and tonight she was wearing a confusion of tights and tunics, skirts, scarves, and a wide-belted coat, like a pirate, all in varying shades of purple.
Both women smiled at the cameras but then hurried inside, Christa murmuring, “It’s Frank’s night!” to a question from a journalist. Annie demurely followed her, saying nothing at all, for once playing the dutiful, albeit ex, daughter-in-law, but in reality desperate (I would find out later) for a drink.
Then Frank arrived with Harry behind him, clutching Rose’s tea cake in a metal cake tin with a kitten on it.
“Frank, Frank, over here, Frank!”
“Look up here, Frank, just to your left!”
“Frank, Gary Clarke, Insight, how are you feeling about tonight?”
“Christa and Annie arrived together, can we take it family relations are thawing?”
“Frank—Pete Taylor, the Bulletin, is it correct half of the works inside have already been sold to the Flintoff collection?”
“Frank, can you just look over here? Sorry, mate, would you mind getting out of the way?”
“No worries.” Harry stepped back, looking embarrassed to be there, hating being accidentally caught up in Frank’s limelight.
Frank put up his hand, silencing the mob.
“Thanks very much for coming along tonight. It is, as you say, a big night for me, and it’s a night I’m very glad to be sharing with all my family. So thank you all once again.” He nodded his head, signaling to Harry to follow him up the stairs.
“Who’s that codger?” Gary Clarke, Insight, said as he walked past me.
“Dunno,” Pete Taylor, the Bulletin, answered. “Someone said he’s a plumber.”
“Come on,” Ben said, “let’s go inside and find your dad.”
I nodded and followed him through the door, feeling, I realized with a shock, not so much relieved but slightly shortchanged that Josh and Annabelle did not seem to be coming after all.
God, I thought, looking down at Rose’s beautiful frock and patting the flower behind my ear, all this for nothing.
Then I looked across the room and saw Harry standing in the middle of it, stiff as a board and clutching a cake tin.
Not quite for nothing. I smiled to myself as Ben and I made our way over to him, a slow, complicated journey through arms and elbows and shoulders and a woman who laughed like a hyena.
“Harry,” I said, “saw you with the reporters outside, suppose you think you’re big-time now.”
“Hi, Harry,” said Ben. “Want a beer?”
“Oh yeah, mate,” Harry said, reaching for his wallet.
“They’ll be complimentary, Harry,” I told him. “It’s the only way they can get people to come to these things.”
Ben left to get the drinks, and Harry and I smiled at each other.
“Complimentary, probably should have known that,” he said, then looked down at the cake tin. “Probably shouldn’t have brought this either.”
“I’ll take it,” I told him, “don’t worry about it.”
Harry smiled at me again.
“Well, love, you did it.”
“I did.”
“I’m glad you came, Lulu.”
“And I’m glad you’re here.”
“I stick out like balls on a bull, though, don’t I?”
“You’re fine,” I said.
“So are you,” he answered.
When Ben came back with the drinks, I took the tin off Harry and went to the bathroom, checked no one was looking and dumped the cake into the bin, crossing myself for the sin I was committing against both my mother and her favorite recipe.
Then I went into a stall, closed the door, and sat down to breathe.
“Lulu,” came a hoarse whisper from outside the door, a pair of white-tasseled shoes underneath it.
“Duncan,” I hissed, “what are you doing in here?”
“Let me in,” he said, then, affecting a girlish giggle. “I’m busting.”
“Duncan, get out before someone catches you.”
“Open the door,” he said again.
“No.”
“If I’m in there with you, there’s less chance of someone seeing me out here, now isn’t there?”
I opened the door. “What do you want?” I whispered as he barged his way into the cubicle. “What are you doing? Duncan, I am not doing cocaine in here with you if that’s what you’re after.”
“Don’t be stupid, Lulu, it’s about six hundred dollars an ounce at the moment, not that I can’t afford it, I just refuse to pay such ridiculous prices so that some pimp in Colombia can get a diamond in his tooth. . . .”
“Duncan,” I clenched my teeth.
“What? Oh yes, I came in here to talk to you privately, now get up on the seat.”
“What?”
“Get up on the seat—didn’t you ever smoke in the toilets at school? Of course you didn’t, Miss Goody Two-shoes—you get up on the seat so there’s only one pair of feet under here and it won’t look suspicious.”
“Oh no, as if we don’t already look suspicious.”
“Ssshh,” he said, putting his fingers to my lips. “Someone’s coming.” We stood stock-still, facing each other and holding each other’s shoulders in the small cubicle, while I held my breath and Duncan pulled a series of what he thought were amusing faces at me.
When the woman left he said, “Right, up on the seat.”
“I am not getting up on the seat, Duncan.”
“Fine,” he said, “but don’t blame me if Sister Scholastica catches us.”
“Duncan, enough . . . What do you want?”
“Well, I just wanted to tell you that I have just seen Annabelle and Josh arriving, so you don’t get a shock when you go outside—forewarned is forearmed and all that.”
A little knot began curling its way around my stomach.
“Now, Lulu,” Duncan was saying, “I know this is not an easy night for you, and I am very proud of you for coming.”
“Thank you,” I whispered, resigned to my fate of listening to “Monologue in a Toilet” by Duncan McAllister.
“I also wanted to tell you that you look absolutely breathtaking and I have checked out Annabelle, who I have never seen in the flesh before in my entire life, but who I can tell you is far too skinny and has aged badly, and also Josh, who I can tell you has definitely had his teeth whitened, and not very well.”
The bathroom door opened once more, and we both stood still and waited for whoever it was to leave.
“The coast is clear, my dear,” Duncan said a few minutes later. “Now, we may make our escape—you go first, I’ll follow in a few minutes.”
I made it as far as the door when he whispered again.
“Lulu?”
“Yes,” I said, “what now?”
“I just wanted to let you know I also brought Barney. He’s on a lead out the back and I have told him, should this toothy Josh person give you any trouble, he has my permission to eat him.”
I walked out of the bathroom with the now empty cake tin in my hands and gave it to a passing waiter.
“Could you please put this in the kitchen?” I asked him. “I’ll collect it later.” Then I walked over to where Ben was standing in the crush.
“What were you and Duncan doing in the toilets?” he asked, more curious than concerned—he had known my employer long enough now not to be bothered about any departures from normal behavior.
“Did you see him follow me in?”
“Lulu, everyone saw him follow you in. He did everything but drop to the floor and roll in behind you.”
Wonderful.
“Lulu,” Harry’s voice beside me said, “here’s someone who wants to say g’day to you.”
I turned and looked straight into Frank Andrews’s familiar face, older, a bit more weather-beaten, whiskery, graying at the temples, and that lovely mouth breaking into one of its wide-split smiles.
“Lulu,” he said, “I’ve missed you.”
He held out his arms, and I went to him.
Deep breath.
Coffee, cigarettes, turpentine, red wine, paint.
I breathed him in and nothing had changed; I flew through the green door, back to that house with its flickering river, back to the Andrews’ yard swinging on a rope as Frank held on to my legs saying, “It’s all right, Lulu, I’ve got you.”
Safe.
I closed my eyes and breathed him in, my friend Frank.
We stood close.
“So, Lulu, your dad’s been filling me in on what you’ve been up to all these years. You’ve done really well,” Frank said.
“Thanks, Frank, but what about you? These paintings are beautiful, and there’re so many people here to help you celebrate—you even got Harry into an art gallery, and that’s not easy.”
“I’m sorry Rose couldn’t come,” Frank said.
“Yeah,” I said, “me too. She just wasn’t up to it.”
“I know. Harry keeps me in the loop.”
I nodded, watching impatient arms begin to pull at him.
“I shouldn’t monopolize you, Frank, there’re lots of people who want to congratulate you—but I’d love to come to the Uxbridge Arms with you and Harry sometime.”
He nodded and held his arms out once more, brushing his mouth to my ear.
“Before you go, see Laura Metcalfe, the gallery owner. She has something for you, Tallulah de Lovely.”
When Frank walked away I was left by myself for a few minutes. Harry was advising the art critic from the Bulletin about installing a gray-water system, and Ben, I could see from the corner of my eye, was at Laura’s makeshift bar.
I decided to get another champagne, scanning the crowd for Josh or Annabelle, so I could hide if I spotted them, and headed for a table sprinkled with amber flutes.
“So, I see you’re finally old enough to drink legally.”
Josh.
Standing just behind me, his voice in my ear.
I turned around to face him. Josh who, unlike Fergus, did not seem marked by life at all. He looked, I thought, exactly the same, except his hair was longer and he’d filled out more, a man version of the boy I had known.
All the times I’d rehearsed this, what I’d say, how I would behave (I’d thought the right move might be to act like I had just run across a long-gone and distant friend: “Josh?” I’d say, a slight question mark in my voice, “I thought it was you, gosh, I’m not even sure how long it’s been, how are you?” putting the inflection on the “are” just the way I’d heard Simone do it) proved fruitless as I stood there struck mute by the shocking familiarity of him.
I am not sure what I expected, but I did not expect this, for him to look and sound so much the same that I almost tucked my head under his arm, almost took a step toward him.
Instead, I saw him move toward me, saw the way his eyes opened slightly, his mouth forming a half laugh, his hand leaving the pocket of his corduroy jacket to reach out to my cheek and stroke it, like it still belonged there.
And I stood there, letting him, somehow stuck beneath that stroking hand until my father released me.
“Well, here’s a turn-up for the books.”
“Harry!” said Josh. “How are you?”
“Good, thanks, Josh. . . . Well, this is something to tell Rose later, all of us here together after all these years.”
“Yeah, yeah it is.” Josh smiled. “It’s really great to see you, Harry.”
I stood between the two men whom I had spent years watching through besotted eyes, standing at the bottom of the ladder as they cleaned the gutters of our house, stamping about the roof in their big work boots, calling out for someone to put the kettle on. I had seen them stand together at the smoking incinerator, rubbing their chins, drifts of their conversation floating up on curls of smoke to the veranda, and I had watched Harry let him go after the night I came home from the river.
“What’s happened, love?” he’d said when I came through the door. “What’s wrong? You look terrible; I’ll get your mother.”
They had put me in my pajamas, and into bed with a cup of tea, while Rose soothed and patted and Harry turned his back on Joshua Keaton.
Josh had gone to see him once, Rose had told me, just before he and Annabelle left. Josh had gone to Harry’s office and waited until Harry came out. Harry had said a few words to him, then refused to shake his hand.
Rose was upset and told Harry that no matter what had gone on between his daughter and Josh, we were young and who knew at that age what they really wanted? People, she told Harry, fell in love with people they weren’t meant to all the time. She said that Josh was immature, with no father to guide him, but Harry was having none of it. “I trusted him to take care of our daughter,” he said, “and he didn’t.”
And now they were standing together, the years and Josh’s obvious delight at seeing him mellowing Harry as Josh spoke eagerly to him, his hand all the while resting on the small of my back.
“How’s Rose?” Josh was saying, “I was hoping she might be here tonight. . . .”
I excused myself and weaved my way back through the crowd and out onto the street, needing to get away from the gallery and Josh’s hand on me.
It had left me confused, unsure of what was more shocking, the fact that he would, after all these years, after everything, touch me so casually, or the fact that I had enjoyed it way more in the Deep South, as Simone would say, than I had a right to.
I sat down on a step outside a closed café, pressing the backs of my hands into my eyes.
“Tallulah.”
So this was how it was going to happen.
I looked up and saw her face, Annabelle, pale under the café light, long and angular and thin beneath a strapless black dress, a silver choker around her neck, some sort of talisman hanging off it.
Annabelle, like Josh, the same face, but older, surer.
Her green eyes danced.
“I’ve just met your mate Duncan”—she smiled— “in a whirl of polyester.” She gave an awkward laugh. “He warned me off you actually, said I wasn’t to hurt a hair on your head—must be nice to have a friend like that.”
“It is.” I found my voice and thought, Do you not remember, Annabelle? Do you not remember? “I will shove your arse clean through your ears.”
“Move over,” she said as the years fell away and Sister Scholastica bustled between us. “I’ll just sit here.”
We sat shoulder to shoulder on the steps, and it felt like that first day of school when we circled each other at lunchtime, offering up bits of our lives to each other for approval—Annabelle saying, “Dolly magazine’s ‘Poet’s Corner’ makes me want to varf.”
“Varf?”
“Yes, Tallulah, varf, it’s a cross between vomit and barf.”
“Oh, well, then it makes me want to varf too.”
It felt like we hadn’t moved since that first day in Sister Scholastica’s class. While I had been struck dumb upon seeing Josh at the gallery, with Annabelle I couldn’t stop talking.
There was so much to tell her, so much to fit in, and it wasn’t until I began speaking that I realized how much of a void she had left in my life, and how eager I was to fill it.
I could talk to Duncan and Simone and Stella about anything, but there was something in Annabelle’s green gaze, something that gathered at the corners of her eyes and in the way she threw her head back laughing, saying, “Stop, stop, I can’t stand it, wait, yes I can, go on!” that had always made me brighter, funnier, more vivid than when I was with anybody else.
I talked and talked. I told her about how I’d met Duncan, how Harry and Rose were—“Rose,” Annabelle said, “how I have missed Rose.” I told her about my job at the radio station and living with Simone and Beth, and meeting Ben, and it seemed like there weren’t enough words to tell her all I needed to say, except of course the one thing I couldn’t bring myself to speak about.
When I finally stopped talking—nerves, I see now, nerves and that same old feeling of wanting to be enough for her—and the silence played out between us, she said quietly, “Tallulah.”
She turned to face me, her eyes on mine.
“I know what Josh and I did was wrong, inexcusable actually, and I wish we had told you earlier that we were falling for each other, but it was just so hard, you know, because we so didn’t want to hurt you.”
What I should have done at that moment was told her.
Told her how I had never been quite the same since the day by the river, how I’d spent years after it suspended in time, how angry I had been, and how it sometimes simmered still just beneath the surface.
I should have told her that seeing them together made me want to varf.
I should have told her that they broke my heart.
I wish I had.
I wish I had, but instead I faltered, caught up again in the excitement that was Annabelle Andrews sitting next to me.
I smiled at her.
“Honestly, it’s fine; it was so long ago now, Annabelle. We were teenagers—everything seems so dramatic, doesn’t it, when you’re a teenager? I’m happy,” I told her, “we don’t have to go back there.”
“Are you sure?” she said, “because I could try and explain what happened.”
I did not want her to explain what happened, I did not want to hear how she and Josh didn’t mean to fall in love, how they tried not to see each other, how they kept apart until they could not stand it for one more minute.
How I got in the way.
“I’m sure,” I told her. “Absoletely,” the lie falling like a lifetime of incorrect names from Duncan McAllister’s lips.
When Ben found us a couple of hours later we were passing a joint between us “like drunken teenagers,” as he said on the way home, Josh, Annabelle, and Duncan all asleep in the backseat, Barney spread out over the top of them like an enormous throw rug.
Ben wasn’t happy when he found us. He’d spent most of the evening at the bar with increasingly inebriated men who kept looking at the soles of their shoes to see if his company had made them, and cheering each time the Moreton’s logo was discovered on a pair.
He’d also been keeping an eye on Duncan, getting louder in the center of the room and rapidly moving out of his “Hail, fellow, well met” phase to dip his toes into more belligerent shoes. Usually when this happened it was my job to distract him, and Ben had been about to try to find me when Josh joined him at the bar and introduced himself.
“If you’re looking for Tallulah and Annabelle,” he told Ben drunkenly, “they’re outside.” Josh had raised his glass. “To old times, good times.”
Ben had hated him on sight. “For you maybe,” he had muttered in response.
When he found us sitting on the café steps, I half stood and introduced him to Annabelle. “Ben, I was just coming inside—this is Annabelle Andrews.”
“Hello, Annabelle.”
“Hello, Ben.”
The silence gathered under the awning above us.
“Well, that went well, didn’t it?” Annabelle said brightly, and the two of us—Annabelle and I—dissolved into giggles.
With that, Ben walked off toward the gallery and said, “I’m leaving in five minutes, Lulu.” Somewhere through my marijuana haze I understood it would be a good idea to go with him.
“Jesus, Lulu,” he said in the car. “I feel like a bloody chauffeur service.”
“Ben, nobody could get a taxi, you offered to take people.”
“No, Lulu, you offered for me to take people.”
We drove on in the sort of brittle silence only late nights that have gone on too long can bring.
“I don’t know why you’re so angry, it’s not far, and they’re all staying at the same hotel,” I said.
“That’s not what I’m angry about, Lulu, and you know it.”
“What then?”
“You want me to spell it out to you?”
“Yes, Ben,” I answered wearily, “I do.”
“Fine,” he said. “I’m angry that you left me at a party for more than two hours while you went outside with the one person you have told me has really let you down, and when I finally find you, you’re smoking marijuana with her like some loser drug addict, and the two of you sit there and laugh at me—”
“We weren’t laughing at you, Ben.”
“Well, that’s how it looked to me.”
We drove on in more silence until I thought about Ben calling me a drug addict after seeing me have one joint in the two years I had known him.
I started to giggle.
“What are you laughing at?”
“You,” I told him.
“Me?”
“Yeah, you.”
“Why?”
“You called me a drug addict.”
Ben smiled. “I know, you’ll be dealing crack cocaine next.”
I reached over, put my hand on his knee. “I’m sorry, Ben, I shouldn’t have left you there.”
“It’s just not like you, Lulu.”
“I know,” I said, looking down at my hands.
He was right, it wasn’t like me, but then again, I hadn’t been the girl he knew from the moment I’d felt Joshua Keaton’s hand on my back.
Frank Andrews’s exhibition at Bloom would, over the years, achieve a sort of mythical status, with every single painting and sketch sporting a discreet little red sticker by the end of the night, most of them fetching record prices.
Anecdotes about the evening would be told at dinner parties for months afterward, people would brag about being there, and someone would steal the green cherub knocker off Bloom’s front door.
“There was far too much drink,” Laura Metcalfe would sum up a decade later on the Sunday Arts program. “My fault, I overcatered, and everyone was overexcited anyway . . . it was just one of those nights, I guess.”
Two women would physically fight over Frank’s Twelve Apostles painting, Annie Andrews would leave very publicly with Fergus, Maxine Mathers would turn up at Duncan’s hotel room and demand to be McAllistered, and Harry and I would lie to Rose and tell her everyone had enjoyed the tea cake.
I would wake up the next day with Frank’s gift to me beside the bed, a small frame holding the merest hint of two little girls behind its glass.
Ben had already gone for his run, and for once I was thankful.
Usually his insistence on running every morning, even on Sundays, annoyed me and made me resentful as he slid out of our bed, creeping around the room getting dressed even on those mornings when I reached for him.
But on that particular morning I was glad to be alone, feeling strange and unsettled, closing my eyes to the frame beside me and remembering Josh’s hand on my skin.