Nine
BRISBANE, 1981
The letter is in the top drawer of my desk where I am sitting to write. It radiates enough light that I don’t need the lamp on.
I have often said to people that I am not a person who carries regrets. The word regret becomes egret without the r and an egret is a bird nothing like a crow. It has a t. It is an odd word. It sounds sad. It sounds like you lost everything. I am not a person who carries regrets. Perhaps they carry me.
I am not an egret.
I let my memories settle as sludge at the bottom of the pond of my mind, so that only every now and then are they stirred up by what happens in the world.
Dare I revise them?
It has been my whole life since I first met them. My whole life.
There are things we might wish to discuss. That’s what she said. There are things we might wish to discuss. There is nothing I would wish to discuss with her. She says she would love to hear from me. Please, she says at the end. Please write. I don’t have much time left.
What on earth would I say after all this time, Helen? What would I say to you? I had thought you were my friend.
“If this were the three bears story, I’d be the porridge that’s just right,” Helen said to me the first day we met.
“Am I too hot or too cold?” I said.
“I don’t know yet.” She turned her head to one side to regard me, a gesture I would come to know then imitate.
Sometimes, in the autumn, I have the strangest feeling of yearning. It wells up from the depths of me, or perhaps from outside, from the earth’s turning, the sun on its journey away from us, the sea already cold. It’s as if I knew, as if I’ve always known in some small part of myself, some small place where I kept my disbelief, where I kept my hope, that the letter was coming.
I look at the drawer, a plain brass handle. I might take the letter out again one day soon. I am not a person who has egrets.
Andrew Shaw came in to say he’d finished for the day. It wasn’t quite three p.m. I was back in the past but no longer the painful past. I had placed my thoughts elsewhere. Sometimes you can do this. I learned it in one of the books from the Pentecostals with the picture of Jesus, his glowing heart exposed in his chest. Heartburn, I would never say aloud to them.
Now I was recalling, of all things, having a bath in the kitchen sink, the same kitchen sink I had washed the teacups in an hour ago. Mummy would bathe us, one after the other, me then Edward then Bert, John. By the time the twins arrived, I took over bathing the little ones. I could make lighter work of it than Mummy, who’d bathed enough children for a lifetime, she often said. She wasn’t built for bathing children, I’d have said. She didn’t have the mind-set you need, which has something to do with not minding water all over a floor.
Sometimes now I climb up on the bench and into the sink to write. All that fits are my two feet, but it makes me feel like a child again, before anything happened to grow me up. I’m not sure it helps the writing, but my feet feel delicious.
It was early for Andrew Shaw to finish, I didn’t say. How he expected to make money without doing much actual work escaped me, but I didn’t say anything about that either. What business was it of mine how he spent his day? I wasn’t paying him.
“There’s a bit of work needs doing,” he said.
“And I suppose you’re the one to do it?” I said.
“Not necessarily, but some of it . . . I made a list.” He gave me a sheet of paper torn from a spiral notebook. The first item was steps. He was frowning fairly convincingly. “I’ll do up a proper report and drop it off.”
“Well, the steps are perfectly serviceable,” I said.
“In terms of treads, you mean,” he said.
I nodded.
“Yes, except for the two eaten out by rot, they’re all right, but I think they’re going to fall down unless you rebuild them.”
“Do you now?”
“I do, and your knight in shining armor agrees with me.”
Ed, who should have sobered a little during the morning, was behind him. He stepped into view. “He’s right, Maddie. There’s things need to be done here.” I don’t know why he was still swaying. He couldn’t have taken a drink in these four or five hours unless he sneaked home or brought a flask, and yet he swayed like the newly drunk. Perhaps drink never really leaves you once you reach a certain stage of pickling.
“Well, I don’t have time to think about all this right now.”
“No, I just wanted . . .” Andrew Shaw paused. “Let me do you a quote, at least, on the bare minimum.”
“Am I going to be forced by the neighbors?”
“No,” he said. “Of course not. Your house is no risk to theirs. And their plans are nothing to concern yourself with. It’s . . .” He looked at Ed. I felt ganged up on. “Like, look at the second one. Termites. We have to get rid of your termites.”
“For the neighbors,” I said.
“No, for you,” he said, seeming a little exasperated. “Just because you’ve got termites doesn’t mean you’ll give them to your neighbors. Termites are everywhere.” He looked around. “And they’ve plenty to be getting on with here without having to move in next door.
“Good news is, they probably won’t touch your foundations. Termites like an easy life and you’ve got a hardwood frame. It’s the cladding under the aluminum we should be worried about. Pine. Some of it’s gone back there. The walls connect to the earth so it’s easy for them to get up. Really we ought to dig it out and cap it.”
“It’s your conflict of interest that concerns me,” I said—cleverly, I thought. “Not your ideas.”
“When I say the steps might fall down,” Andrew Shaw was saying, “I mean it in the literal sense rather than some metaphorical falling-down.”
I liked that he said metaphorical. “I see,” I said. “How old are you?”
“I’m twenty-six,” he said, looking bewildered.
“Well, I’m seventy-eight,” I said, “so I know things.”
“Of course,” he said. “I might call in later in the week and see where you are.”
I didn’t like him pushing me. “No,” I said. “I will call you if and when I want your help. Now leave me be.”
“Best go then,” Ed said, nudging Andrew Shaw in the back.
“I’ll just get the ladder,” Andrew said. “Thanks for your time.”
I wouldn’t say he looked hurt, just resigned. I suppose times must be tough for builders. But he’s not my problem, I thought. The last thing I needed was another person sucking my savings from me. When you get to my age, you don’t know how long your money has to last you.
After he went out to pick up his ladder, I looked at Ed. “I would have expected a bit more support from you,” I said.
“But, Maddie, he’s right. You have to get a bit done or the house is going to come down around you.”
“Well, I can think of worse outcomes than that, Edward.”
He hates when I call him Edward.
“Maddie, there might be possums up in your ceiling, but there are rats too. He’s right about that. And you can’t ignore termites. And there’s a leak in the bathroom floor, and a—”
“Stop, Ed,” I said. “I have the list. I’ll look at it. But right now, I want to be left on my own to write.” It upset me to hear talk of my house as old and decrepit, for the house was exactly my age.
“All right, love. I’ll pop back later in the evening.”
Ed would be drunk later in the evening and forget, but I didn’t mind.
Andrew Shaw came through then and said good-bye. “I’ll drop back when I get a chance,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be me who does the work. I’m not trying to railroad you here. But you should think about getting it done.”
“I will,” I said. “And tell those people next door to mind their own business.”
I didn’t want to be so difficult. Andrew Shaw seemed a lovely young man, but I know the world.
After they left, I went into the lounge and turned on the television. I put in the videotape I recorded last night and began to watch.
She was as beautiful as she would ever be, her arm tucked under her prince’s arm, her eyes so hopeful, looking up toward him constantly to see if she’d been a good girl. A child. She looked more child than adult. She looked as if she had won a prize.
Little did she know there would be no prize for her, not now, not ever, only heartbreak and loss. I could see it as plainly as that. Who was it said, “If youth knew; if age could”? I didn’t know when I was her age either. Now I did know and couldn’t act to save her.
It was the prince I wanted to look at when I played the tape a third time. You might mistake him for a coyote or a wolf, but you might equally see him as a rabbit caught in headlights.
Perhaps he had no idea either. But he should have. He was thirty-two years old. He should have known better.