Later in the day Sheila said, ‘Let’s have a natter,’ hooked an arm through Dan’s and walked him out to the garden, which was small and densely planted, and mercifully part-shaded by the slender arching boughs and foliage of a Chinese tallow.
Dan liked Sheila enormously: a touch loopy, but well meaning, big-hearted. She was generous with her laughter, and she liked to talk but she could listen, too. She was so colourful, her speech seasoned with idiom, her clothes a layered collection of ethnic prints, garments collected on her travels. Like the flora and fauna around them, Sheila seemed too tropical to hail from the north of England; he found it hard to imagine her enduring a slate-grey winter, even in her youth: she’d surely emerged fully formed from the red earth of Australia, rising like a firebird in the sun-scorched bush. She sat herself down on a swing seat built for two, but he didn’t fancy squeezing into the small space left beside her, so instead he sat opposite her, on a low stone wall, the perimeter border of a desert rockery where miniature cacti and succulents shared their arid patch with amulets from overseas, an evil eye, a silver shamrock, an alligator tooth; they hung from the tips of the plants like earrings. There was a low table in glittering mosaic, and on it she’d placed two jewel-coloured bowls, one bearing hummus, the other baba ganoush, and she scooped up these dips on fingers of pitta bread and shovelled them in as she listened to Dan answering her questions. She wanted to know all about canal life and Crazy Diamond, and then all about his job, and had he been to Australia before? Yes, he said, Sydney, April 1997, when INXS released Elegantly Wasted, and Michael Hutchence gave him an interview, but only after nearly killing him on the back of his motorbike. The most beautiful man she’d ever seen, Sheila said wistfully, and then this, by way of contrast, got her on to her German ex-husband Kalvin – the least beautiful man she’d ever seen – and all the details of their disastrous marriage, and the metamorphosis she’d gone through after she’d left him. Then she said, ‘Now, tell me this – are you free to love Alison as she deserves to be loved?’ and Dan hadn’t seen that coming, not at all.
‘No,’ he said, after only the briefest pause, deciding in that instant to be as direct as the question demanded. ‘Not in the sense you mean.’
‘And what do you think I mean?’
‘You mean, am I single, am I unattached? I’m not. I have a partner at home, and we have a son, just a bit younger than Alison’s Thea.’
Sheila shook her head. ‘No, I mean, are you emotionally free?’
He hesitated.
‘It’s very important, Daniel,’ Sheila said. ‘I never understood how Michael won that girl – I suppose he caught her at a low ebb or something – but I believe they’re not connected, except materially.’
Dan looked at her with interest, suddenly warming to her theme. ‘Would she leave him, do you think?’ he asked.
‘Would you ask her to?’
He was silent for a while, not certain how best to answer, then he said, ‘Yes, I would, as long as I was sure it was what she really wanted.’
‘Don’t you already know it’s what she really wants?’
He gave a short laugh and said, ‘Well, the early indications are good, Sheila, but we haven’t had time to have this conversation yet.’
‘Oh, come on, what does your heart tell you?’ she asked impatiently.
‘OK, my heart tells me we belong together,’ Dan said. ‘But my head tells me it’s not that simple.’
‘Fiddlesticks. Don’t give me that: it’s so disappointing.’
He felt a little irritated now: Dora with her sixth sense; Sheila giving him the New Age third degree. ‘You barely know me,’ he said. ‘So I don’t see how I could disappoint you.’
‘Sometimes I understand very quickly what makes people tick,’ she said. ‘And I saw right to the heart of you the moment I saw you.’
‘OK. So Dora sees an old soul in me, and you saw – what?’
‘Well, I could tell you loved her, as soon as you walked into the kitchen.’
‘Right. How?’ Dan didn’t mind the gist of this conversation – he was coming out of it well, after all – but even so he didn’t even try to keep the scepticism out of his voice.
‘Look,’ Sheila said, ‘I know this sounds like hokum, but seeing you two in the same room? It’s like walking into a warm house on a winter’s day. Alison hasn’t been within a coo-ee of our place for a long time, but lately I’ve seen her twice in short order and I’m telling you, she’s a different woman with you. There’s something inevitable about you and Alison.’
And all this was pure gold, but Dan didn’t comment, he only looked away from Sheila’s smile and considered the fact that he and Alison really did need to address exactly where all this was heading. During his solitary sleepless night in Adelaide, he’d contemplated a future without Katelin, and it had been hard, but not impossible; loving Katelin was a habit, but maybe not a necessity – maybe not. She was strong and clever and resourceful, and she’d been a peerless mother to Alex, but he, Dan, had begun to accept, over the past weeks, something that he’d possibly always known: that she wasn’t the one he adored. When Alison had appeared in the bar of the Exeter Hotel, he’d feigned a kind of relaxed, easy pleasure at their reunion, but in truth, she’d bowled him over just like the first time. He was no fool, he knew all about the mirage of greener grass, the siren call of lost youth, but he also knew the pure joy he’d felt when he saw her again, and that the world was wonderful simply because it still contained Alison Connor.
Then Sheila started up again, a little impatiently, and decisively, as if she’d waited long enough for him to speak and would wait no longer. ‘Two things in life you need to remember,’ she said. ‘One: follow your heart. Two: if you ever hurt her, I’ll have your guts for garters.’
‘I never will hurt her,’ Dan said.
‘And will you follow your heart?’
He gave a small shrug, a rueful smile. ‘I’ll give it a go.’
‘And Katelin, is she the enlightened type? Will she understand?’
‘Ah,’ Dan said. ‘No, Katelin will be fucking furious,’ and this made Sheila howl with laughter, and the sound brought Dora and Ali out of the house to join them. Dora wedged herself tightly into the swing seat next to Sheila; Ali sat down on the low wall with Dan. He put an arm around her.
‘Sheila rates me,’ he said, very quietly, into her ear.
‘Dora does too,’ Ali said. ‘And I do, I rate you very highly, so it looks as if you’re all the go.’
They smiled at each other, but then his expression altered and he said, ‘Look, we need to talk,’ and she understood his tone at once, stood up again and held out her hand. Sheila and Dora looked at them enquiringly, but without offering an explanation the pair walked into the house and went upstairs.
Big subjects: love, trust and loyalty. Big subjects, thorny subjects, although there was a time when Ali thought them unnegotiable; a deal was a deal: she could’ve had these words engraved around the inside of her wedding ring, or above the door at the McCormack mansion, translated into Latin. Margaret McCormack raised her boys to put loyalty above all other virtues, despite – or perhaps because of – their father’s philandering, and Ali, too, in the Italian summer of 1980, had married Michael with solemn promises and a commitment to throw in her lot with this likeable, generous boy from Adelaide. There were no fireworks for her, not even much of a spark, but she recognised in him the kind of dependability she believed she needed. That, plus his patent devotion, and a one-way ticket to Australia, where people went to start all over again. But today, sitting with Dan, talking about the future, she thought, Where are those values now? They were in pieces on the floor, because all she wanted was here in this room. She wanted him. She wanted him, and this wanting was simplicity itself.
They sat facing each other on the sleeping mat under the Tibetan prayer flags, and they clasped hands. I can’t let you go, he said. No, she said, don’t let me go, I need to be with you. These were their vows. They didn’t talk about how this might be managed, the faith they’d have to keep in each other during the coming storm, they only made a statement of mutual intent, knowing the road ahead would be long, and that sorrow as well as joy lay in whatever they chose to do.
‘Hey, it’s not just about the music, is it?’ Ali asked, a little later, and Dan said, ‘No, but it might be just about the sex.’ They laughed, and Ali thought, I do love this man; I love the very bones of him.
‘What happened to the band?’ she asked. ‘What happened to the Union?’
‘Didn’t make it,’ Dan said. ‘Nick Lowe showed an interest, but then he didn’t.’
‘Were you gutted?’
‘I was long gone by then,’ he said. In fact, he never went back after she disappeared, never went to another rehearsal, but he didn’t mention that now. He pushed her gently backwards until she was lying down, then he hung over her, scanning her face, and said, ‘Alison Connor.’
‘Daniel Lawrence.’
‘Look at you.’
‘What?’ she said, smiling, knowing where this was going.
‘You’re bloody lovely,’ he said, just as he had in 1978, at Kev Carter’s party, on a nest of coats, on a single bed, in a box room lit sodium yellow by a street lamp. They lay side by side, as they had back then, and looked for shapes in the lines on the ceiling – Australian shapes here in Quorn, lizards and snakes – and then Ali talked about her novel, and explained what she understood about the songlines and about the Dreamtime, when spirit ancestors moved across the barren earth and altered its form, created the present-day landscape of mountains and rivers, trees and hills, and made the people and the animals and the elements, then the sun, the moon and the stars, before sinking back into the earth. The sacred places were those features such as rocks, or trees, or mountains created from spirit ancestors themselves, so where the white man would see only geology, an indigenous man saw the mighty coils of an endlessly sleeping serpent.
Dan listened to her and watched the movement of her mouth as she spoke. He said, ‘We could only see a Toblerone on Kev Carter’s ceiling. D’you think we lacked imagination?’ and Ali said, ‘I think I said it was a bolt of lightning,’ and Dan said, ‘There you go, the emergent novelist.’
‘Have you read Tell the Story?’
‘Ah, no, I’m a sport and biography kind of guy, haven’t read a novel for years.’
He glanced at her, to see if she minded, but she only smiled and said, ‘What about Katelin?’
He looked at her askance now, but her eyes were guileless and she said, ‘It’s a book written by a woman, and therefore more women than men will read it. Fact.’
‘Well, believe it or not, my mother accidentally bought your book for her, for Christmas.’
Ali gasped, and started to laugh.
‘Mum didn’t know it was you,’ Dan said. ‘But Dad did. He saw your photo on the back and said, “That there is Alison,” and thereby started a right old hoo-ha.’
‘What sort of hoo-ha?’
‘The “Alison? Alison? You never mentioned an Alison” kind.’
‘Did Katelin like it?’
‘She did. I think she hoped she wouldn’t, but she loved it.’
Ali thought about this: Dan’s Katelin, loving her book about South Australia, over there in Edinburgh. Then she said, ‘I’d like to see your dad.’
‘I’ll take you,’ Dan said.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Don’t know what?’
‘If I can go to Sheffield.’
‘You could if you went with me.’
She considered this, but didn’t speak.
‘So forget Sheffield for now,’ he said. ‘Do you think you could come to the UK?’
‘I could,’ she said, but then felt the vastness of this small statement, and modified it. ‘I think.’
Dan closed his eyes and thought about Alison, fragile, perhaps traumatised, plucked from hearth and home in Adelaide and plonked back down in Blighty, with only him for solace and company. He thought, too, about Katelin and Alex, especially Alex, whom he had never hurt, by word or deed. He imagined their faces as he wilfully dismantled their family life. Could he do this? Demolish beliefs and break hearts? Here, now, he knew he could, if it meant waking up beside Alison Connor day in, day out, being her man, getting to know every atom of her being, body and soul. If this made him a monster, then God, the world was full of monsters, the music industry especially so, a repository of failed relationships; but look, nobody had ever died of grief at being left, everyone moved on in the end, the details of their lives rearranged, often for the better. He could handle this. He could.
‘Let’s listen to Crocodiles.’
‘What?’
‘I need to make you love Echo and the Bunnymen. I discovered them without you. That was heartbreaking.’
‘OK,’ she said. He was on his feet, fetching her phone, so she sat up and leaned against the wall, hugging her knees, watching him search online for the album, and said, ‘They passed me by, I don’t know why, bad timing I suppose.’
He said, ‘I saw them in Liverpool in September seventy-nine, blew my fucking mind, the personification of cool, the four of ’em in a straight line – I mean, no riser at the back for the drums. Pete de Freitas was upfront with his kit, so it was de Freitas, Pattinson, Mac, Sergeant, all in a row. They looked awesome, sounded awesome, I was spellbound, then when they started playing I thought I might stop breathing.’ He delved into the pocket of his rucksack and pulled out his earphones, then sat down next to her. ‘We’ll share,’ he said, passing her a bud, keeping the other for himself. ‘Ah God, this is another box ticked, listening to Crocodiles with Alison Connor. If you don’t like it, you can sodding well lump it.’
She grinned at him. ‘Get on with it,’ she said.
They were seven tracks down and just getting started on ‘Villiers Terrace’ when Sheila’s head appeared round the door. Her face was grave.
‘Darlings,’ she said. ‘Michael’s downstairs.’
How swift and disappointing was that journey from heartsease to sheer panic, and how undignified. Ali caught what Sheila said, Dan didn’t, so he was startled when she leapt up, dragging the bud from his ear, and he said, ‘Hey, what’s up?’ but she didn’t answer him, didn’t even hear. Michael was downstairs. This fact had an instant physiological effect on her, whipped her heart into a racing overdrive, turned her blood to a kind of poison which coursed through her body spreading fear and self-loathing; it melted her resolve, and shattered her promises, so recently made.
‘Alison, what is it?’ Dan asked. He was on his feet now, trying to reach her, but she’d gone – not physically, no, she was still in the room, but she wasn’t seeing him, wasn’t hearing him, she was simply trying to process the fact that her husband was downstairs, waiting to speak to her. Dan grabbed her arm, made her turn. ‘What is it?’ he asked again, very emphatically.
‘Michael’s here,’ Ali said, and she shook her arm free and ran from the room. She would regret this later, regret not taking time to talk with Dan about how to navigate this first great obstacle on their long road to happiness. She would regret her craven instincts, her childish fear, her inability to react with dignity and calm at the first hurdle. But that would be later. Now, she only wanted to be clear of suspicion and blame, keep everything in its place, preserve the status quo. She did at least register her own shock and disappointment at how weak she’d proved when courage was called for, but she didn’t express this out loud, and all Dan witnessed was the flight.
But he wasn’t going to hide upstairs; he wasn’t going to oblige by playing the role of Ali’s guilty secret. Some signal, instinct or information had brought this guy, this Michael, up to Quorn to confront his wife, so, thought Dan, let him confront the lover too, let’s ramp up the emotion in this next act of their drama. He clattered down the wooden stairs after her, so when he appeared in the living room it was only seconds after Ali had got there, but she was already standing with Michael, and they stared at Dan together, two against one.
‘She’s coming back with me,’ Michael said. ‘I don’t know who the fuck you think you are, but you’re nobody now.’ He was so sure of his rights, so certain of his superiority over this interloper. The McCormacks of Adelaide: social mafia, invincible, entitled. He hadn’t yet discovered the details, he’d acted only on a word of concern from Beatriz and a hunch of his own, and he’d yet to decide how he felt about Ali’s betrayal, but he already knew he would neither leave her, nor ask her to leave, yet nor would he do what his mother always did and turn a blind eye. He would simply get her home, get to the bottom of this fiasco, and keep a closer eye on her in future.
Dan looked at Ali, who looked back at him with some sort of plea in her eyes, although he couldn’t say what. Help me? Deck him? Don’t make my life more difficult than it is already? Yeah, he thought, probably the last one, probably that.
‘OK,’ Dan said to Michael. ‘Since Alison obviously doesn’t feel up to introducing me, I’m Dan Lawrence, a long-lost friend of hers from Sheffield days.’ Then he turned to Ali. ‘Is this it?’ he said. ‘Is this how it ends?’
‘Yes, mate,’ Michael said, ‘you can bet your bottom dollar it is.’
Dan ignored him, didn’t even blink, just stared at his girl. ‘Alison?’
Tears ran down her face, and she took a step towards him. Dan held his ground. He wasn’t going to help; it was up to her now: she stood between the past and the future, and only she could choose.
‘Her name’s Ali,’ Michael said. ‘And you just spoke your last word to her. You don’t get to help yourself to my wife. Ali, grab your things and get in the car.’
Now Sheila, who’d been hovering in the kitchen, agitated, eavesdropping, uncertain how to help, came into the room and said, with a kind of desperation, ‘Michael, you should at least give these two some space to talk,’ and he turned on her, his face contorted by fury, as if he’d kept a lid on his anger for just this moment, and said, ‘Shut your mouth, you wicked old dyke, you’ve done enough damage already.’
Ali was crying, and through the tears she said, ‘Michael, be quiet. Sheila played no part in this. Sheila, I’m so sorry.’ Sobbing into her hands, splintered by grief, no comfort to be had from anyone in the room. Dan watched her with a detachment that came from extreme sadness. He hadn’t realised she would be so easily overcome.
‘Get your stuff and get in the car,’ Michael said to Ali.
He shouldn’t speak to her that way, Dan thought; I would never speak to her that way, infantilising her, treating her like a wilful child, assuming authority over her fate, as if she had no mind of her own, or couldn’t be trusted to use it. But look at her; she had no mind of her own. Sheila moved to be beside him, reading heartbreak and loss in his expression, and anger too, and bottomless disappointment. She hooked an arm through his, staking a claim, planting her flag.
Ali, in abject misery, hung her head and thought about Thea and Stella, and about Beatriz, and, finally, Michael. She couldn’t leave them all. She hadn’t understood this before, but their four hearts mattered more than her one, and if she abandoned them, their united pain would kill her. When she looked up, Dan was staring at her, dry-eyed. ‘I’m sorry, Daniel,’ she said, choking on sobs, her face a mess of tears. ‘We’ve each made our choices.’
‘Don’t apologise to him!’ Michael said. ‘This pathetic soap opera ends here.’ He glanced at his watch, and this small action filled Ali with new despair, because she knew he’d be thinking about the traffic, calculating their arrival in Adelaide, hoping to avoid congestion in the city; and the fact that he was capable of such a dull, practical consideration amid the white heat of this crisis was why Ali knew she should take her place next to Daniel, whom she loved like no other, and who had come to find her on the strength of sixteen songs.
‘Time to go,’ Michael said, not with love, but with finality.
And so that she might spare Dan the pain of watching Ali gather her possessions and follow her husband to the car, Sheila said, ‘Come, Daniel, let this settle,’ and she walked him to the garden, and kept him there until they heard the roar of Michael’s Porsche, driven in anger, screaming away from the kerbside.
He sat for hours in the garden with Sheila and Dora, drinking gin, talking, playing music. They were wise women, and their love for Alison kept them from judging her, or criticising, but they were on his side here, and he felt held by them, comforted, and Sheila wanted him to believe it was a stage in the process, not a conclusion. Dan didn’t know, couldn’t believe; he just let the combination of the gin and their concern anaesthetise his pain to get him through the night ahead.
Alison was still on his lips, on his hands, and the fragrance of the night-time garden recalled the smell of her hair. She was everywhere, and she was gone. He talked and nodded and smiled, but he was quietly destroyed.