19

Perth, 2000

Marcia sat reading the paper of a world where there was, on page five, a story about a panda in China whose carers were calling for an artificial limb to be manufactured and fitted. The creature’s front leg had been so badly injured in a fight that it had to be amputated; this had affected the bear’s sex life, strangely enough, because she now could not walk easily, balance properly, and her sensual capers had taken a dive. This piece ran cheek-by-jowl with an update on Iraq: they were in the thick of Howard’s Australia. Coalition soldiers had been found guilty of unprovoked murder and pack rape of civilians. Marcia found she could read only so much of this before she skimmed through looking for more panda stories.

Only a few kilometres away, Celia thought she might visit without phoning first, the way people can do in Perth. Or used to. What would Marcia look like now? She remembered the first time they had met and her first impressions. Marcia with the gamin face, an inward breathy laugh – ah-ah – that was more like a soft pulse of sound. You’d like to wrap it up in soft paper, tie it with ribbon and put it in your top drawer. She seldom swore. At least these were the memories Celia had of her then, when they were all young in London. Come to think of it, Marcia’s voice, before it flattened out a little in Australia later, was of a British upper-class variety that didn’t seem entirely modern to Celia – a theatrical feature she’d emulated early in her career, possibly. And the way she could fetch you a look; a sideways glance that made Celia think life was going to be just as it should be with this woman not too far away from her.

Friendship, that fragile thing. It must be, as far as Celia could see, because estrangement happens all over the place, at any time. A former trusted confidante, without apparent cause, with no quarrel, goes to ground, passes you in the street and almost involuntarily stops, then starts up again as though she has just remembered she’s not talking to you at the moment.

There had been nothing said, between Marcia and herself, to warrant losing each other. Who had stopped writing first when Celia had gone back to London? Perhaps it was she herself. Yet there had been a certain coolness across the ocean that would have caused her to turn away. She found herself now inordinately interested in news stories on television of odd behaviour, where for example people had gone missing. (One day he just didn’t come home from work and we have no idea why this normal, contented person would have been kidnapped, or just left our happy home and family.) Well, it isn’t a happy family and clearly he wasn’t contented, Celia thought. No one, even family, has much idea of the inner life of the other. If someone has to draw stumps at a given moment, that’s what they do. I wish I knew when my death was going to be, she thought suddenly; I could make plans. Could she and Marcia ever go back to that easy attachment that was once so cherished?

The worst thing that could happen was that Marse would hang up on her. Except Celia had never known her to do that. No, the very worst thing would be that cool, polite response she had heard now and then (but never towards Celia, in fact), saying that they would catch up soon but the other party surely knew that it wouldn’t happen.

She certainly couldn’t just call in without a phone call; it would be unfair and impolite. Celia hadn’t lived in London all these years for nothing. Oh well, the phone is within easy reach; nothing ventured, and so on.

‘Marcia, it’s only me, Celia.’

‘Of course it is! Only?’ The voice was warm. ‘I’d heard you were back. Hold on a minute: I’ve just put something on the stove.’

She came back to the phone.

‘Celia!’

‘What are you eating?’ asked Celia, predictably enough.

‘Oh, nothing fancy, not up to your level: a fillet of fish I’m poaching with dill, to eat with a salad.’

‘Perfect. Look, maybe I shouldn’t keep you. I don’t want to interrupt.’

‘No, no, darling. I’ve turned it off. You must keep me, it’s been so long.’

That’s how it started. Easy as, same old Marcia. They arranged a meeting.

At the door in a house Celia had never entered before they embraced affectionately, with relief. And Celia asked herself, Why did I wait so long?

‘Look at me,’ said Marcia, spreading her arms as if she were being crucified: ‘Skinny arms, I’ve grown lines down the side of my face here from nose to the corners of my mouth, like Malcolm Muggeridge; I can’t pronounce my s’s as I used to; and – I’m beginning to dribble when I sleep!’

‘Oh, ball … balderdash!’ Celia laughed.

They settled themselves with a pot of tea and before long Celia was making her speech. She was nervous and ended by saying, ‘What was the cause of this, this chasm – how do you pronounce that word, anyhow?’

‘As you did. But we’ve been through all this, Cele. It wasn’t because of the sex, I didn’t care about that. Just two bodies,’ and she raised one shoulder. ‘It just meant a certain shift in loyalties because you had always been so open before then. And I think I was going through that other stuff, old memories that I had shared with you when I’d never been used to baring my soul. Perhaps I regretted that. You two always said I was secretive, remember? I think you meant sly, but actually I was just always sorting things out by myself.’

‘Yes.’

‘I was finding some excuse to move away from you and Mickey. Ours was such an intense arrangement. I think I needed to know that I could live life alone.’

‘So I was feeling guilty for nothing! What a trio we were, all in need of something else. You needed to be by yourself more; I needed some reassurance but couldn’t countenance being close with anyone who wanted me.’ She played with the ring on her right finger. ‘I’d always had such bum jobs compared to you and Mickey in the early years: wardrobe mistress for the show in Leeds; in charge of props at the Lyric. What else? Costume sorter-cum-seamstress for that touring company which sounded flash but it meant that I had to mend tutus and tights, or breeches, as they went along – they tore something at every performance, clumsy bastards.’

Marcia was smiling by now.

‘Then I began to take myself seriously as a set designer.’

‘Well, and you did have some success with that in Italy. In fact, you made a success of all these things you took on – think of the skills those tasks involved. You’re a very widely accomplished person. And now you’re in print as a poet with an international publishing house behind you? Yes, I’ve heard. What more could anyone possibly want to make them happy? Put it on a tray and look at it, as Sandrina once said to you!’

‘I know, I know,’ and Celia was laughing. ‘Oh dear, you’ll think I’m an ingrate; I’ve had a sort of charmed life when you look at it. Yet it seems I haven’t had a serious calling like you.’ She paused for breath. ‘And can only love people in a cerebral way; in fact I only ever really wanted to be with you. But you were with Mickey.’

‘Who wanted you in the circle, but you would have none of it.’ Marcia looked out of the window. ‘Oh, Cele. Each of us had our own demons. There was nothing posh about what I did. A jobbing actor, on the road, in squalid digs a lot of the time. Mickey was going from one thing to another; just when he seemed to be making his way as a director it seemed he couldn’t bear to have any success and would go on a binge. I didn’t know what was the matter with him. And I don’t know about you, I’m not asking, but as I think I hinted once, the sex with him wasn’t exactly great. And I did have some expectations.’ At this her face changed from wry calm to something like distaste. For herself, Celia thought.

‘You were knowing, as you said to me that day in Calabria.’ But they were looking at each other with sympathy.

Marcia was shaking her head more as if she couldn’t understand the past, rather than that she was denying it:

‘You were always analysing everything, asking questions, and it was infectious. I started looking at every part of my life, going over the past … disturbing, knowing I wasn’t the person inside that I presented to the world.’

Here they were then, eating together again, after being separated for so much time. They talked long into the evening while Celia recounted to her old friend her setting off on a new path, how the long sojourn had happened while she wasn’t looking. She talked about poetry, investigating new possibilities, and Marcia nodded, alert as a bird waiting for the next morsel. Celia tried to explain how she missed the house they’d shared, the way people do – always thinking that what had gone before was better than the present.

‘But I realised that time in Daglish was a happy time, all in all. And I never stopped thinking about you.’

‘And Mickey?’

Mickey, she reported, had said a couple of shrewd or funny things about their whole arrangement, three grown-up people living together, when she found him again, but he had worn himself down so that he was by then getting beyond prolonged rational talk; perhaps fewer affectations than before, more of an air of lumpen misfortune hanging about him.

‘Funnily enough, when I was happier, younger, I didn’t have much creative push,’ Celia said. ‘The years in Daglish, we used to fool around a lot and get about often to see other people’s art, do you remember. Perth is said to be Dullesville, I even called it that, but there was always an exhibition or a concert or something we had to see! It was later, when I felt loneliest, that I was able to get the poetry going. Does that make sense?’

‘Oh yes.’

The radio which had been playing softly in the background gave out the tenor and baritone duet from Bohème and they turned it up, sitting together, listening in silence, at one.

Marcia noticed that her friend’s face formerly of a rare kind of severe beauty now had an offset aspect to it, a tired softness, no doubt wrought by years of striving, and possibly an edge of emotional deprivation.

The music finished and the conversation turned to old friends.

‘And what about James?’ Marcia said. ‘I’ve had him here a couple of times. He’s past entertaining, I think. Doing it, that is.’

‘Yes,’ said Celia, ‘oh, he’s still the same, don’t you agree – more or less? We went to a concert recently. But he likes his solitude, even though he complains that nobody rings him. He hasn’t been so well, lately.’ She went silent, thinking briefly of their old friend’s respiratory problems, of his unrealised hopes, settling for teaching and not performing, of how he reinvested his own potential into Jeremy.

‘And Jeremy,’ Marcia continued. ‘Well I heard that Jeremy died some time ago. And I haven’t seen James though I rang him when I heard. But he didn’t have much to say on the subject. Give it time. More wine? No, water, yes, let’s hit the water. We’ve had enough tea.’

Celia did a mock gesture with her arms and face: ‘Richer Lanka Tea!’ and Marcia tilted her head and winked. She drew the blinds. They settled onto sofas. ‘It’s late – we’ve been talking for hours. We should have a snack. Do you want to stay over, Cele? There’s a spare bed over there.’

‘No, I’ll get going soon. The cat frets if I stay away the whole night.’

‘How do you know that?’

Celia grinned: ‘I don’t. I imagine she does. Also I love my own bed, thanks. Anyway, yes, Jeremy: James loved him, as we all know, from the time he was a child, coming with his mother for the weekly piano tuition.’

‘A teacher’s dream. Who wouldn’t have loved him.’

‘Immigrant grandparents from China, wanting their grandson to have an English name.’

Marcia gestured she had noticed this. ‘Funny that. What’s in a name?’

‘Well everything, to some. It says We’re of this place now.’

‘You’re right of course.’

‘James did tell me that the last time he saw Jeremy in hospital he was thin to the point of emaciation,’ Celia went on, ‘could hardly talk, let alone walk. But calm, and ‘‘tamed’’, James said. On medication, as it’s now called. I think that was the last time they saw each other.’

They said nothing for a while, each focused on Jeremy.

‘I’ll never forget the way he was at that party, do you remember?’ Celia said.

‘Which one? There were several. At the first, soon after we arrived, we were invited to see and hear Jeremy who was the star; at the last – well.’

‘Ah yes of course. I was thinking of the first one. He was so gentle, Jeremy, and shy with all that talent.’

They gave themselves up to the memory of it, the old familiarity established between them; not exactly as though it had never been broken, but enough health in it to have become restored. What a boon, thought Celia, reclaiming a long-ago covenant.