In the Company of Strangers Read online

  ‘I suspect you would have survived without us, one of the few who might, but a lot wouldn’t. It’s such a fundamental thing, isn’t it, providing a safe place to leave a child in a crisis, or even just to go to work?’ Ruby crosses to the Aga, lifts the lid on a pot of soup, gives it a stir and turns back to Jessica. ‘You know, back in the seventies when it all got going, I honestly believed that twenty-four-hour childcare was just around the corner and every woman would have access to it, but here we are more than thirty years on and we’re still only scratching the surface. When you see how desperate women are … oh well, you’ve heard me say this a thousand times, you know it all … better than I do, but at least we’ve made a difference, and you, Jess, are a tower of strength.’

  ‘And you’re a handy old dame with a cliché,’ Jessica says, raising her glass. ‘Anyway, here’s to your friend Catherine, and to – what’s it called? – Benson’s … Benson’s Reach. After all, it’s not every day you inherit fifty-five per cent of a … well I’m not sure what it is, really.’

  ‘About thirty hectares of land almost three hundred kilometres south of Perth, with eight rammed-earth, self-catering holiday cottages, a lavender and berry farm, gift shop and café. And what used to be a rather lovely old house, all a bit run down by now, I suspect.’

  Jessica raises her eyebrows, as well as her glass. ‘As I said – to Benson’s Reach, and whatever you decide for it. This Declan won’t know what’s hit him. Have you ever met him?’

  ‘Once – donkey’s years ago. He’d have been about seven or eight at the time, I think. Nice kid, reddish hair and freckles. He was running around, arms outstretched, being an aeroplane. Crop dusting, he said. I thought that was sweet and preferable to wanting to be a fighter pilot. But I’ve really got no idea what I’m walking into.’ She turns to the stove. ‘Anyway, I hope you’re staying to eat. I’ve made minestrone and got some of that olive bread from the Italian baker.’

  ‘Of course I’m staying,’ Jessica says, pulling out a chair and sitting down at the table. ‘If you’re buzzing off to Australia and leaving me in charge there’s stuff we need to sort out. Besides, I’m starving, so bring it on.’

  esley, sitting on the bed, her open laptop resting on her outstretched legs, leans back against the cushions and listens to the silence. She’s never thought much about silence in the past. She’s appreciated periods of it, but never considered the nature of it. With Gordon at work and the kids at school there had been peaceful oases of silence during the day, and if she woke in the night it was to the reassuring silence of people sleeping – three kids, the dog, even Simon’s goldfish was probably asleep. But it’s not night-time, it’s midday, mid-week; the kids have long gone – adults now, with homes and silences of their own – and here she is, hiding in the bedroom, and downstairs Gordon is doing whatever it is he does these days – creating this silence which is neither peaceful nor companionable. It pulsates with resentment and disappointment, with confusion and frustration, and it’s suffocating her.

  What is he doing down there? What is the matter with him? It was his choice, after all, it’s not as though she pushed him into it. ‘Life’s too short,’ he’d said early last year, just after his sixty-sixth birthday. ‘Time to stop, make the most of what’s left, do all the things we said we’d do.’ And so he stopped. He wound up everything at the office, retired and stayed home. But it’s not like other times when he was at home – weekends, holidays. No, this is different, this is something else. Gordon retired is something else: a strange, constant and intrusive presence, expecting things – meals, ideas, attention, answers, company – all of it from her. It is so unfair. Lesley sees her own life disappearing in front of her, day by irritating day.

  She had made that life for herself in order to cope with his life, his obsession with work, the long days, the late nights, the weekend teambuilding, the work-related travel. She learned to accommodate it; he was, after all, a good husband and father, outstandingly good at his job, a generous provider. ‘Be thankful,’ she’d told herself when the kids were small, ‘and be realistic. Get used to it.’ She was, she did, and unlike some she could mention she didn’t whinge about it, didn’t nag or plead for him to change – she got a part time job as receptionist in the local dental surgery, she got on with her life, let Gordon get on with his, and for decades it had been fine. Fine when the house was full of children, then teenagers, then young adults. Fine when the place was littered with footy gear, ballet shoes, dirty washing, homework, smelly socks, scrunchies, boyfriends, girlfriends, appallingly loud music, and hormone charged mood swings. It was exhausting, entertaining, wonderfully reassuring and annoying but it worked well and kept working. Even when the kids had gone it kept working, because Gordon kept working.

  It was a good life, and getting better: tennis, lunches, Thai cookery classes, then yoga, occasionally helping out in a friend’s boutique. There was time for herself, the house to herself, freedom to come and go as she pleased. No questions, no demands and no expectations – only one other person’s needs and timetable to cater for. And then Gordon retired.

  They’d talked about it, of course, but a long time ago, years ago when it was far enough away to seem unreal. How nice, they’d told each other, the house to themselves, time to do all the things they couldn’t do with the kids around. Travel, take up hobbies, maybe buy a boat, relax, smell the roses. ‘Bullshit!’ Lesley hisses under her breath. It’s like childbirth. No one ever tells you how truly horrendous it is because if they did the human race would die out. And no one ever tells you how crushing it is when your husband retires because, if they did, marital homicides would wipe out the male of the species when they reached sixty-five.

  Lesley adjusts her cushions and tilts her head back against the wall, thinking about her parents, about the depressing little house near the railway line where she’d spent her childhood and where her mother still lives. In those days it was always too hot or too cold, too damp or draughty, the outside dunny full of spiders, mice and the occasional stray cat. It’s better now, of course. Her mother, Dolly, was always on at her father about it and while he was still working they made some improvements: put on a proper bathroom and an inside toilet, had it rewired, modernised the kitchen. But it was only when Bert retired in ’81 that all the other things that her mother wanted finally got done.

  ‘At last,’ Lesley remembers Dolly saying. ‘Well, there’ll be no sitting about all day watching the telly and reading the sports news, I’ve told your father, I’ve got plans for him, big plans.’

  Well they weren’t actually very big plans for a man like Bert Stanhope, who’d no time for sitting around and had been waiting for years for the day he could unleash his inner DIY ambitions. Within the first month of his retirement he had started knocking down old walls and building new ones and then came plastering and painting, some skylights, a covered deck, and the carport was replaced with a brick garage and adjacent shed. And he still managed to fit in bowls, RSL meetings, and delivering meals on wheels.

  ‘He was a good man, your father,’ Dolly Stanhope had said to her daughters as they waited for the funeral cars to arrive twenty years later. ‘Never idle. Always had something on the go. Made a lovely home for us in the end – a home any woman would be proud of.’

  At the time, standing in the duck egg blue room with its frills and chintzes, its dozens of ornaments and framed photographs, and a print of ‘The Shearers’ over the modernised fireplace where the faux embers of the gas heater flickered in winter, Lesley had rolled her eyes and exchanged knowing looks with Gordon and her sister, Helen. They had listened to this recital more times than they could count in the week since Bert’s death.

  ‘He did the garden too, Dolly,’ Gordon had said, grinning at Lesley, ‘don’t forget the garden.’

  ‘I’d never forget the garden,’ Dolly had said, drawing herself up to her rather unimpressive full height and crossing to the window. ‘Look at that vegetable patch, and the fishpond, built
that himself, fountain and everything. A good husband and father, the best.’ And she’d allowed Lesley to take her arm and steer her out and down the path.

  ‘What a shame she never told Dad all that while he was alive,’ Lesley had whispered to her sister as Gordon helped Dolly into the back seat. ‘Most of the time she just nagged him stupid.’

  ‘Oh I don’t know,’ Helen had said. ‘I think she probably did. It was their way of being together – Mum nagging, Dad pretending to be henpecked. But they loved each other, to the last. Some couples don’t make it that far.’

  Lesley has thought about that in the intervening years, thought about the sort of relationships that hold people together. Some of their friends had broken up after years together and she’d wondered why. What could happen in your fifties or sixties to make you want to change everything after decades together? Surely people knew each other well enough by then to be able to work things out? Her parents had frequently driven Lesley mindless with boredom but she loved them dearly. She admired their restrained affection, their mutual trust, tolerance and tenacity, but she had wanted more for herself, more of everything. More money, more fun, more passion, more choices, more children, more stylish and luxurious surroundings, more satisfying and interesting things to do, more freedom and independence than her mother. Most of all she’d wanted the safety net that money provided. Bert and Dolly had struggled when Lesley and Helen were young. There had been lots of darning, the turning of frayed collars, and of sheets sides to middle. Their school shoes had been resoled and heeled while their friends were getting new ones, there was rarely any money for school outings, and food had been wholesome but plain. It wasn’t exactly hardship but Lesley knew that her parents had struggled to make ends meet, and it was only once she and Helen had left home that there was something left over for things Dolly wanted for herself. Her mother’s example had instilled prudence; Lesley knew the value of money and she wasn’t going to settle for anything less than a solid and secure financial future.

  She’d had a few fairly uninspiring boyfriends by the time she met Gordon at a Sunday cricket match where she was helping with the afternoon teas. She was twenty-one, working at the city council, and had just been promoted from the typing pool to secretary to one of the managers. Gordon was twenty-nine, a geologist with a budding career in a mining company. He looked dashing in his cricket whites and racked up a respectable score for the local team. Lesley liked him; he seemed thoughtful, not brash and noisy like some of the other players, a bit serious – maybe even a bit too serious. She plied him with tea and scones, and by the end of the afternoon he’d asked her to go to the cinema with him the following week. More than halfway through Play Misty For Me he’d reached out to hold her hand, and soon his warm thigh was pressed against hers and his arm moved along the back of the seat. She’d thought he was a bit slow getting around to kissing her, leaving it until close to the end of the film, but perhaps that was a good thing. He was courteous and cautious and a pretty good kisser. A year later they were married and Lesley got what she wanted – got it in spades, really. Gordon moved rapidly up the corporate ladder as the mining company spread its operations around the country and overseas. And she loved him; she had loved him from the start. He was reliable, uncomplicated and she’d trusted him.

  ‘Straight down the line,’ Bert had said in his speech at their wedding. ‘A real gentleman. Couldn’t ask for a better husband for my girl.’

  No one, including Lesley, had doubted that – at least not until recently; but now as she sits here, listening to the silence, mulling over the past, Lesley wonders how it ended up like this. What is she expected to do when, after thirty-five years of marriage, of intimacy and distance, of fights and making up, of shared responsibilities, joys, satisfactions, pleasures and disappointments, she finds she is living with a stranger, an alien space invader who wants to suck her dry, monitor her movements, be part of everything she does. What shall we do today? Where are you going? When will you be back? What time is lunch? What are you reading? Have you seen my glasses? Shall I come with you? Shall we go there together? And her answers are always the same and always wrong. And so there is the silence, this burdensome, highly charged, suffocating silence. Does Gordon honestly think that because he’s retired from his life she’s going to do the same to keep him company?

  This room, which used to be Sandi’s and which Lesley has commandeered as her ‘study’, is now her refuge. Gordon has always had a study to retreat to, but some flash of insight had inspired her to claim this room once Sandi left home. There’s the bed that she’s dressed up with cushions like a sofa, her yoga mat, her books, a CD player, tennis cups, pictures, her laptop. The only place in the house which is hers alone, the only thing that has helped her to retain her sanity over the last year.

  ‘He’s driving me to distraction,’ Lesley had told her tennis partner when they were sitting on the shady deck of the tennis club a couple of weeks ago (no, Gordon, you can’t come to tennis with us, find your own friend to play with). ‘It’s like he’s always there, waiting around every corner, occupying the whole house and wanting something from me.’

  ‘Well of course he’s there, it’s his home,’ Stephanie had said. ‘You need to give him time to adjust, retirement is a big thing. Even Pete found it difficult.’

  ‘But Pete wasn’t like this,’ Lesley had protested. ‘He didn’t follow you around and want to do stuff with you, and get in the way of everything.’

  ‘Well no, but he was a bit odd, you know – sort of displaced for a while. And anyway, Pete’s different, he was never like Gordon about his job. It was always a means to an end and he was raring for the end, dying to get out. You just need to give Gordon time.’

  ‘He’s had months,’ Lesley had said irritably, sucking warm lemonade through a straw, ‘almost a year in fact. Nothing’s changed except for the worse.’

  ‘Maybe it’s you, you might just need a break, get out of the house, go away somewhere alone for a bit. A little holiday, to think about what’s really happening and how to handle it. It’s always easier to see things clearly from a distance. And Gordon can have some space to sort himself out.’

  Lesley leaned forward and looked at her friend. ‘Go away on my own?’

  ‘Sure, why not? It’ll do you the world of good. Him too.’

  Lesley had sat there, silently watching the four women reckless enough to be playing a fast final set in the scorching afternoon sun. ‘I’ve never been away on my own,’ she said.

  Stephanie turned to her in amazement. ‘You’re kidding?’

  ‘No – never. Oh well, I’ve stayed over at my mum’s place for a couple of nights when she or Dad were sick.’

  ‘That doesn’t count. Surely you must’ve gone away alone for a weekend or something? What about your sister’s place?’

  Lesley shook her head. ‘My sister lives in Dubai. We went there once with the kids. I’d never go alone, I hated it and Helen and I don’t get on all that well anyway.’

  Stephanie blinked. ‘Hmm. Sounds like you need some time out. Why don’t you give yourself a treat? Book a couple of weeks somewhere lovely. Vanuatu, or Fiji. It’s not as though you can’t afford it. Isn’t there somewhere you’ve always wanted to go?’

  ‘Not really. Certainly not on my own.’

  ‘Well then maybe a holiday together would help,’ Stephanie had said.

  Lesley could tell from her tone that she was becoming bored with the conversation – or was it something else, not boredom, more a sort of bewildered pity? Lesley twitched her shoulders defensively. ‘So you really think … ?’ She hesitated.

  ‘I really do,’ Stephanie said. ‘It’s about claiming things for yourself. Gordon’s been away on his own heaps of time.’

  ‘That was work.’

  ‘But I bet there was play as well – all those overseas trips.’ There was a brief awkward silence. ‘Well you don’t think he’s been keeping himself pure for you all these years, do you?’

>   Lesley stared at her in shock. ‘Yes,’ she’d said eventually, ‘I do – I really do. Gordon has his faults but he’s very loyal, and he always says he’s risk averse. Doesn’t take chances, doesn’t really rock any boats. He’s very straight, boringly so sometimes.’

  ‘Well your faith in Gordon’s fidelity is touching, but he’s an attractive man, you can’t honestly believe that he hasn’t sat in the odd Shanghai nightclub or some bar in KL playing games and imagining what might happen next. He’s a man, Les, get real. At the very least he’ll have had some harmless little flirtations.’

  Lesley thought about this and dismissed it as unlikely but the conversation had left her feeling as though she had failed some sort of test of independence. Well, not failed exactly, because that would mean she had tried and not succeeded whereas she had simply never considered it, but of course if this was what was needed to graduate into feminist self-sufficiency she could still take the exam. So this morning she has spent some time surfing different holiday destinations on the internet, ending up at a site that caters specifically for women. There are walking holidays, safaris, fashion and shopping holidays and art and culture tours, but she can’t imagine doing any of them with a group of strangers, any more than she can imagine lying alone on some tropical beach, or browsing the galleries and cathedrals of a city. Staring now at a picture of a group of women, laughing together as they trawl for souvenirs in a Spanish street market, Lesley recognises that what she’s feeling is not simply shyness, not even awkwardness, but actual fear. The realisation disturbs her. She is known for her confidence and assertiveness, but right now, as she considers the possibility of going somewhere alone, she understands that she only knows how to be that confident, assertive person within the boundaries of her present life – within the cocoon of her family and friends. Outside of that she might be someone else entirely – indecisive perhaps, anxious, vulnerable. When did she last – or ever – step outside of her comfort zone, test herself in a broader, different context?