Delia makes her first serious public slip at a family christening. The ceremony is held outdoors in a sunny garden, among old apple trees just coming into blossom and twenty or thirty rose bushes frantic with their first flush of blooms. The roses are yellow, red, and a coral shade Delia particularly dislikes. A few are even multi-coloured – yellow streaked with scarlet – altogether a cacophony of colour that grates on Delia’s nerves. She is frowning over this, when a young woman walks towards her holding a baby in christening robes. The woman pauses in front of Delia and raises the sleeping infant a little higher to show them his face, for Malcolm is hovering at Delia’s shoulder.
“He’s sweet,” Delia says, a frown puckering her forehead. “Where did you get him?”
The young woman’s broad smile falters. “Well, he’s ours,” she says, “mine and Carl’s. This is Theo!”
Malcolm’s hand comes swiftly to rest in the small of Delia’s back, as if to support her if she should topple. Theo? The name rings in her head, but it has a meaningless echo in connection with this young woman and her child. The girl’s open, freckled face is familiar, but Delia cannot at that moment summon her name. Who is this person holding baby Theo, and staring at her with an almost terrified expression?
Malcolm glides to her rescue. “Pauline and Carl chose the name Theo for their son in memory of your father, Delia. You told me you were very touched that they’d done that.”
“Oh, yes,” she says gratefully. “Theo is a beautiful name.”
And it really is a beautiful name, one Delia associates with patience, and tenderness, and old-fashioned courtesy. It’s just that this Pauline, who has taken for her tiny son the name of Delia’s father, is a mystery to her. They must be related, surely. Or why make a point about the name? But related in what way? When she poses the question her mind comes up blank.
“I’m so glad you approve.” Pauline’s smile has faded. She glances around the garden. “There are some seats under the apple trees,” she says. “Would you like me to send Carl over with a drink?”
People are strolling past them with champagne flutes, and Delia thinks it might be pleasant to sit in the dappled light under the trees and fill her mouth with cold bubbles, to let them glide down her throat until the sense of calm and well-being alcohol always brings erases this moment of awkwardness and confusion.
“Two sparkling waters, please,” Malcolm says. “We have a long drive to get home.”
“Sure. I’ll tell Carl.”
Pauline backs away from them, while Delia stares into the golden curves of a rose, resentful at being denied champagne, grateful to Malcolm for covering for her.
Malcolm’s voice is pitched so only Delia can hear, as he seeks to ease her confusion. “Your niece, Pauline, she’s lovely.”
Delia dares not speak, or even look at Malcolm.
Five years before the afternoon of Theo’s christening, Delia and Malcolm were married. In the interval between those two events, Malcolm, a retired lecturer in structural engineering, has been designing, and then building, the eco-house where he and Delia now live. Constructed using materials and technology that reduces its carbon footprint, their corner house is surrounded on two sides by high gabion walls. Delia has learned that the word ‘gabion’ comes from the Italian gabbione, or ‘big cage’, and that Leonardo da Vinci designed a gabion for the foundations of the San Marco Castle in Milan.
“It was called a corbeille Leonard, or ‘Leonardo basket’.” Malcolm has never lost his zeal for teaching.
The small weatherboard house that had previously stood on the site had been surrounded by old fruit trees, and by carefully managed plantings of pale roses, and medicinal herbs, kept just tidy enough not to look untended. It must have belonged to a good witch, Delia thought the first time she saw it; a wise woman who would have turned the herbs into healing salves, into life-saving remedies, perhaps even into love potions. Malcolm had stamped up and down the brick-paved paths, crushing violets, and lady’s mantle growing between the cracks. He pointed out to Delia the building’s lack of insulation, its woeful plumbing, the water-hungry orange and lemons trees.
“But we can keep the peach trees, surely,” Delia said. “Peaches and quinces thrive in a Mediterranean climate.”
Malcolm shook his head. “They’ll look out of place alongside succulents and natives.”
So the block was ruthlessly cleared, and slowly Malcolm’s dream house emerged out of the raw scraped soil, a house with an air of being barricaded against attack, plain-faced behind its gabion walls. Malcolm explained to passers-by who had stopped to watch the fencers at work that the life expectancy of gabions relies on the lifespan of the wire, not on the contents of the basket.
“The structure will fail when the wire fails,” he said.
At the end, a team of landscape gardeners had moved in and planted tough native shrubs and wild grasses to Malcolm’s design. In time these developed messy growth habits, until Delia had trouble telling which were the plants and which were weeds. The wire cages packed with rocks, too, were something of an eyesore. She felt like apologising to their neighbours, and to the woman with the picket fence across the street whose front windows faced their gabion wall, with its stepped-back pockets of spiky, weed-like grasses. But Malcolm was so clearly pleased with the whole effect, and Delia, who was secretly a little frightened by the relentless creep of her memory loss, kept her opinions to herself.
A couple of years before Delia and Malcolm married, they had abandoned their separate living arrangements – a rundown but convivial share house for Delia, and a one-bedroom flat close to the university for Malcolm – and moved into a two-storey town house Malcolm had inherited from his mother: it was the eventual sale of this place that would finance their eco-house. Delia was both excited and nervous at the commitment this move implied. It wasn’t that she didn’t love Malcolm, but she had been so long on her own, and while she had shared domestic spaces with other people it had always felt somewhat temporary; housemates came and went as their circumstances changed, so that Delia could have moved on at any time without tears or ill feeling.
Moving in with Malcolm was different. Delia found herself thinking back to the misery of living with, and leaving, her first husband, of how Roger had cowed her, physically and mentally, until she had agreed to let him take Josh and be satisfied with keeping Katie. If she forced him to go to court he would take both children, Roger had said. Delia had believed him, for although her husband had failed his law exams and gone into insurance, his father was a senior partner in a law firm. The court would hear of her depraved behaviour, Roger threatened. Delia had no idea what he meant, but she had known when she was beaten.
Women in Roger’s family did not go out to work, and after their honeymoon Roger had suggested that Delia quit her job. She was receptionist to an accountant and the work was dull, so she hadn’t minded; once they had children she wouldn’t be able to, anyway. But then when she’d wanted to leave Roger, she saw the trap. With no money, beyond what little she could borrow from friends, Delia had signed the papers her husband had drawn up, and watched him drive off with Josh’s face a pale blur in the car’s rear window. It was years before she saw her son again, and when she did he was angry with her. By then Delia had concluded that those papers Rob had pressed her to sign might not have held up in a court, that most likely he had been bluffing, but it was too late for her and Josh.
While she was packing to move into Malcolm’s place, Delia considered keeping her books in storage for a while, in case things didn’t work out. There were boxes and boxes of them, the spoils of having worked in a bookshop for almost twenty years, too many to shift by herself. Aside from the books, she lived lightly, and could have packed up and moved all her belongings in the boot of her small hatchback. But even to be thinking this way seemed half-hearted, a betrayal; it was tempting fate to bring her relationship with Malcolm crashing down at the first hurdle. How could they form a lasting partnership if she wasn’t prepared to bring her whole self to it? Hadn’t this always been her trouble?
When she dithered for too long over the move, Malcolm had come and helped her pack. Delia took the books. Eventually, when she’d seemed reluctant to deal with the boxes of belongings piled up in the garage at the townhouse, he had helped her to open them, and that was how he came upon the shoe box full of old photographs.
Delia had forgotten its existence, but the moment she saw it in Malcolm’s hands she felt a rush of recognition, a twist of anxiety in her gut. Once he’d realised what the box contained, Malcolm was jubilant.
“At last,” he said, “a clue as to who this woman I’m planning on spending the rest of my life with really is!”
Delia had smiled weakly, wondering what was in the box, hoping she’d disposed of anything that would make her feel tacky or ridiculous. There were times when she, too, would have welcomed a clue to who she was, and who she had once been, though she didn’t fancy receiving these revelations in Malcolm’s presence.
Together they inspected snapshots of a younger Delia pushing Katie on a swing, feeding ducks on a pond, blowing out three candles on a cake for Josh, whose solemn little face looked so much like Delia’s. There was a photograph of Delia and Roger and the children standing in the driveway of the last house they had lived in together. That suburb where the smell of barbequed meat hung in the air on fine weekends, and where the magpies had sung in the early mornings as Delia stumbled from bed after a night of broken sleep, to change nappies, to set out the breakfast dishes, to make coffee for Roger before he left for work.
“What’s going on in this one?”
Malcolm passed it to Delia, a Polaroid photograph, milky with age. It showed a brick-paved suburban patio at night; adults in fancy dress, drinking and dancing. They had been partying for some time judging by the sweaty faces of the drinkers, the abandon of the dancers.
Delia held the picture gingerly by its white borders and peered into it, at first with a look of wonder and then with a secretive narrowing of her eyes. There she was, flame-haired, with a high, choppy fringe that exposed her eyebrows, red-lipstick mouth caught half open, like the mouth of a goldfish, or a porn star. What astonished her was her own raw beauty; at the time, she had judged herself awkward looking, even plain. She had sewn the flapper dress herself out of a pair of old lace curtains. To her relief the figure she was dancing with was a blur, except for one pinstriped sleeve and an inch of white shirt-cuff.
“Who’s this?” Over Delia’s shoulder, Malcolm pointed to her dance partner.
Delia shrugged. “No idea. Just someone who was at the party, I guess.”
It was Erris Cleary, her savage haircut plastered to her skull with her husband’s Brylcreem, Erris as Jay Gatsby in an op-shop suit. Among a group of men standing to one side of the dancers, Roger’s face was swollen with drink and disgust. Malcolm didn’t notice this, so Delia said nothing. Erris’s husband, the doctor, was nowhere in sight, having stalked off to retrieve their coats just before the picture was taken. Delia recalled the flash-bulb exploding, and how moments later he had loomed beside them, long thin fingers clamped around Erris’s wrist.
“Time to go,” he said. “You’ve had too much to drink.”
Without breaking step, Erris had twisted free. “But I’m having so much fun,” she said. “And I’m not ready to leave.”
That morning, Delia and Erris had gone together to the hairdresser, both, as they discovered on the bus, disgusted with their husbands – Erris because she had learned that John Cleary had talked to her gynaecologist about her at a hospital social function, Delia because Roger refused to eat cereal and insisted she cook bacon and eggs, even on mornings when she’d been up and down all night to the children. Delia hadn’t known that Erris was planning such a radical cut, and she’d been shocked to see her hair lying on the floor of the salon – a warm chestnut mass, enough to stuff a small pillow. Meanwhile, another stylist had talked Delia into a new kind of perm. She called it a ‘Min Vague’, and afterwards Delia’s hair was minimally curly, it was vaguely waved: the two of them had almost wet themselves laughing at this as they walked from the salon. At the bus stop, helpless with laughter, they had waved the first bus on and waited for the next one.
It was Erris’s haircut that had shocked people as much as anything she did that night. After all, everyone was drinking, everyone was dancing, just not as wildly as Erris, and not with just one partner. But it was as if the hilarity of the morning had crept into their bones; they felt awfully avant-garde in their retro dress-ups, they felt, as they screamed to each other over the music, “so Min Vague!”
Delia didn’t remember getting home from that party, but she remembered Roger dismissing the babysitter and then dragging her into their bedroom. The flapper dress was curtains again; he pushed her down onto their bed.
“Roger, please! You’ll wake the chil …”
Next day, as she nursed her hangover, Delia’s right eye-socket had filled with blood. She had hidden it behind dark glasses, but everyone knew, from the teachers at Katie’s school to the woman at the corner shop. For Delia, being punched by her husband marked the end of the marriage, though it had gone on a little longer while she worked out an escape plan. The strangest part was that she had not felt sexually attracted to Erris that night, as Roger had insisted everyone at the party believed. But in the weeks that followed, all she yearned for was to rest her cheek in the curve of Erris’s white neck. She had imagined the two of them, lying together in a quiet, sunny bedroom, their soft exchange of breath, their bubbling laughter.
She had moved back to live with her mother. With Katie to care for, no job and no money, she’d had no choice. The first night after she left Roger, waking early, Delia had sat up and leaned into the lemon sunlight streaming through the uncurtained window, and the ache in her chest was all for Erris.
Delia’s GP has carried out a cognitive assessment and the results are not as terrible as she has feared. Still, he recommends further tests with a memory specialist, and Malcolm takes her to the hospital for her appointment. They arrive with thirty minutes to spare, and slip into the ground floor cafe. The first person Delia sees is Claire Delaney – Claire, at whose house, all those years ago, the now infamous fancy dress party was held.
“Delia!”
Claire hasn’t weathered too badly, considering the years that have passed.
“I’m waiting to visit a friend,” Claire says. “It’s Tommy’s wife, Rosanna, actually.”
Delia hears the words ‘breast cancer’, she hears ‘double mastectomy’. She says how sorry she is. “It must be horrible.” She asks Claire where she’s living now, hoping she won’t ask why she’s at the hospital.
“I’ve been in the same little flat for years,” Claire says.
Malcolm has drifted to the counter to order their coffee, so Delia tells Claire that she, too, would like somewhere smaller, but Malcolm is attached to their eco-house. While Claire describes where Tommy and Rosanna live, Delia allows herself to picture a cottage like the one their eco-house replaced, something pretty, with a soft brush fence rather than their rock-filled wire cage. The wire is beginning to show signs of wear, and this makes Delia anxious. She remembers Malcolm telling anyone who would listen that the life expectancy of gabions relies on the lifespan of the wire, not on the contents of the basket.
Delia flicks a nervous glance to where her husband hovers before a display of cakes, all of which are disastrous for his heart. He will not buy one for himself, but he will choose a treat for her, and as Claire rattles on about her ex-husband, Delia experiences a wave of affection for Malcolm. Ever since he stumbled into the bookshop that time, he has been doggedly devoted. She sees how dear he is, how gentle.
Claire is talking about Erris Cleary. “It was in the paper,” she says. “She’d had a breakdown, but that was a while back.”
“Oh! I had no idea.”
Delia realises that Claire is speaking of Erris in the past tense, a mock-solemn tone that means Erris is dead, or in serious trouble. Delia tries to think … Erris had been the youngest of all of them … she can’t be more than … fifty-two or three. With shocking clarity, Delia hears Erris’s warm, cigarette-grained voice: I was a child bride! She hears her friend’s self-deprecating laughter.
“There were a few from the old days at the funeral.” Claire leans closer. “Not that she particularly cared for any of them.”
Delia’s throat aches with tears. Most days, she will struggle to remember what she ate for breakfast, yet suddenly here she is, flooded with grief for the loss of a long-ago moment, and for other moments that must have passed unnoticed between her and Erris – at all those barbecues in someone’s garden, at the beach, or at drinks after tennis – moments around which her life might have begun to pivot, to evolve towards happiness. If she had been truly avant garde, if she had been less Min Vague.