The Woman Next Door Read online

  ‘Polly’s away for a while yet. And I don’t want to tell Helen and Dennis until we’ve told the family. They’ll have far too much to say about it. I think we’ll tell them last!’

  Mac sips his coffee, watching her. The phone rings and he slides off his stool to answer it. ‘You do know that I love you as much as ever, don’t you?’ he says.

  ‘I do,’ she says, calmer now.

  Mac picks up the phone. ‘Helen,’ he says a moment later, taking the receiver away from his ear. ‘Would we like to have fish and chips down at Cicerello’s this evening?’

  *

  All the restaurants at the fishing boat harbour are packed but typically Helen had called earlier and managed to snag a cancellation. They sit now, at a table by the window, sharing a nicely chilled bottle of Semillon, four old friends very much at ease, and greet the arrival of their food with enthusiasm. They had lived next door to each other for almost three decades until a few years ago when Helen felt she needed a change – a downsize from the rambling old nineteen-thirties house in South Fremantle. She’d wanted somewhere modern, easier to manage. So they had sold up and moved to a large and elegant apartment in North Fremantle, overlooking the river.

  ‘How’s Stella?’ Helen asks.

  ‘Fine,’ Joyce says. ‘She’s in Albany filming for the new series of Cross Currents.’

  Helen rolls her eyes. ‘I thought her character died in the last series.’

  Joyce nods. ‘She did but she’s back to do a haunting.’

  ‘I wonder why she bothers,’ Helen says, ‘what is she now – eighty? It’s just attention-seeking. I wonder she hasn’t got over that yet.’

  ‘Stella’s an actor, Helen,’ Mac says, pouring the wine. ‘It’s been her life. Why should she give it up if they still want her?’

  Helen shrugs and looks out of the window. ‘Crazy if you want my opinion.’

  Joyce is about to defend Stella but stops herself; she really doesn’t want to get into an argument with Helen in this sort of mood. For some time now Helen has been increasingly snappy and critical, delivering her judgements or comments without a shred of sensitivity. Throughout their long friendship she has always had a foot-in-mouth problem, often apparently unaware of how hurtful she can be. And in recent years she’s grown harsher.

  ‘Do you feel that getting old gives you the right to be so blunt?’ Joyce had asked her recently. ‘Sometimes I wonder if you realise the effect you have on people.’

  Helen had laughed. ‘I’ve always been blunt, no bullshit. Tell it like it is. You know me well enough by now, Joyce,’ she’d said.

  And Joyce, who did indeed know her very well, had decided not to pursue it. This is who Helen is, she’d told herself, she’s important to me, I know what to ignore and what to take seriously. But these days it’s becoming harder for her to tolerate Helen’s blundering judgements and evident thoughtlessness.

  ‘We got a bit of good news,’ Dennis says. ‘Damian and Ellie and the kids are coming home for a visit at the end of March.’

  Joyce has a brief flash of nostalgia for the days when Helen and Dennis lived next door, when Ben and Gemma grew up alongside Damian and Nick, went to the same school and when, for such a long time, life had seemed like an endless series of sleepovers in one house or the other. Those days when she and Helen had been so much closer and Helen had seemed so much easier to get on with.

  ‘Lovely,’ she says, ‘you must be pleased. We must get yours and ours together, come round to our place and Mac can do one of his famous barbecues . . .’ She stops, looks up at him, suddenly realising, ‘oh . . . but you’ll be gone by then.’

  ‘Gone?’ Helen says. ‘Where to?’

  Mac raises his eyebrows, and Joyce flushes, then shrugs. ‘Um . . . well, we’re sort of . . .’

  Mac takes a sip of his wine, puts down his glass and clears his throat. ‘We were going to wait a while to tell you, until after we’d told the family, but as . . .’ he hesitates.

  ‘As I’ve just blurted it out we might as well tell you now,’ Joyce says, her face burning.

  ‘Yes, we’ll come clean,’ Mac says and starts to explain, laying it out carefully: a year living apart, Joyce here, himself in the cottage in Albany. An experiment, see how it goes for a while . . .

  ‘You’re splitting up,’ Helen says, her eyes darkening.

  ‘No,’ they say in unison.

  ‘Just spending time apart because we want to do different things, be in different places,’ Mac adds. ‘But I’ll pop back from time to time and Joyce will come and visit me in Albany.’

  Dennis raises his eyebrows.

  ‘Well that’s how it’ll end,’ Helen says. ‘A year and then you’ll be splitting up. It’s a terrible idea. You must be mad.’

  This is ‘angry Helen’ whom they both know well, but rarely is her anger directed at them. Joyce feels Mac stiffen in response. ‘We’re not splitting up, Helen,’ she says, ‘that’s not what either of us wants. Just a bit of space for a while.’

  ‘And then what?’ Dennis asks.

  Mac shrugs. ‘We don’t know yet. One thing at a time.’

  Silence.

  ‘Space!’ Helen says, in disgust. ‘What do Ben and Vanessa, and Gemma think about this? I bet they’re not too happy.’

  ‘As I said, we haven’t told them yet,’ Joyce says. ‘So if you run into Ben or Nessa, please don’t say anything. We’ll call Gemma the same day we tell them.’

  Mac steps in. He talks about renovating the Albany cottage.

  ‘And you?’ Helen barks, looking at Joyce. ‘What’s your great new plan for living alone?’

  Joyce is tense now, hurt, annoyed. ‘Not sure yet,’ she says. ‘I want to do something new, different. I’ve thought about getting a stall in the markets, or maybe even going back to uni.’

  ‘Oh my god, now I’ve heard it all. You’re both having a delayed mid-life crisis. I never heard of anything so silly.’

  Joyce had known the conversation, when it came, would be difficult, but she hadn’t imagined this level of hostility.

  Dennis puts his hand on his wife’s arm as if to restrain her. ‘Calm down, Helen, calm down.’ He looks across at Mac. ‘It does sound a bit like seventies hippie bullshit if you ask me.’

  ‘Mate, we didn’t ask you,’ Mac says. ‘We told you our plan; that’s it. End of story. If you and Helen don’t like it that’s a shame, but this is what’s happening.’

  There is an awkward silence. Helen draws up her shoulders, glaring at Joyce, then tosses her serviette on top of the food she has barely touched. She gets to her feet and grabs her bag from the back of her chair. ‘That’s it, I won’t be part of this conversation anymore. Come along, Dennis.’

  ‘Well I don’t think that’s . . .’ Dennis says pushing his chair back slightly from the table.

  ‘Then I’ll go alone,’ Helen says. She leans towards Joyce. ‘You’ll regret this, don’t say I didn’t warn you,’ and she turns sharply and strides out of the restaurant.

  Dennis glances from her across to Mac and Joyce. ‘Er . . . well it looks like we’re off,’ he says. And he shrugs, raises his hand in a half-wave and follows Helen out of the restaurant.

  Mac turns to Joyce. ‘Well that was weird.’

  She sighs. ‘My fault. I should have told Helen in small increments.’

  ‘You weren’t going to tell her at all just yet.’

  ‘Mmm, opened my mouth without thinking, sorry.’

  He shrugs. ‘Can’t be helped, they had to know sometime. They’ll get over it . . . at least Dennis will. But Helen seems to have taken it as a personal insult.’

  They finish their food and the wine in comparative silence and Joyce, pushing her empty plate aside, contemplates the fact that her own anger has completely subsided and she feels nothing at all.

  ‘You know what?’ she
says. ‘I don’t give a shit what they think.’ She raises her glass. ‘Here’s to the year of living dangerously.’

  *

  Helen wakes at midnight to the sound of Dennis snoring. He has rolled onto his back and is lying there alongside her, occupying more than his share of the bed, mouth wide open, emitting a series of snorts and whistles.

  ‘Shh-shh!’ she hisses. ‘Shut up, Dennis, roll over.’ She nudges him in the ribs and he grunts loudly and rolls onto his side, facing away from her. She lies there waiting for silence, for him to rearrange his limbs and his breathing, knowing that even when he does she won’t get back to sleep. Eventually she sits up, sighing, swings her legs out of the bed, puts on her dressing gown, pads out to the kitchen and leans on the worktop, gazing out across the moonlit river. They are high up here, on the fourth floor with gorgeous views up and down the river, and across to the tree-clad East Fremantle escarpment, dotted with elegant houses. Any time, day or night, there is always something happening – even now a couple of small boats are moving swiftly up river, and others bob around on their moorings at the jetty. A few cars creep across the traffic bridge and beyond that a train glides across the rail bridge and slips out of sight. This was what she had wanted, this spacious apartment with these views, a short walk from the centre of town, and a short drive from Emerald Street.

  She had wanted an end to living in an old house which, although it had never been a thing of beauty like Joyce and Mac’s place, had served them well for years. Built in the nineteen-thirties it lacked any of the attractive art deco features of some others of that period, but it was spacious and practical, and sat on a very large block of land. It had been a sound investment in the long term and they had turned it into a comfortable family home, but over the years Helen had struggled to make it look the way she wanted. Perhaps an expert with a big budget could have transformed it but Helen couldn’t, and by the time the kids had left home, Dennis, who had grown accustomed to going along with what she wanted, dug in his heels.

  ‘I’m not spending thousands on some tosser who’ll turn it into a place where I can’t feel at home,’ he’d said.

  But Helen was desperate for some sort of change. She felt trapped by the house. She had had enough of the skirtings that never quite met the floorboards, the window frames that were always slightly wonky, and the cockroaches and mice that found every crack and cranny. She was sick of the dust that the house seemed to generate, the creaks and drafts, the constant maintenance. She was sick of the endless lists of things that needed doing. She had wanted gleaming tiles, smooth white walls, pale carpets, pale fabrics, a perfect modern kitchen and two and a half bathrooms, top of the range air-conditioning and heating, lots of built-in cupboards and robes. And an end to the garden with its wobbly brick paths, overgrown natives, and ancient roses with thorns like daggers, where everything seemed to grow faster than she could cut it back. She had been so over it all she couldn’t wait to escape.

  It had been fun when they were younger, when Damian and Nick were kids, and when Joyce and Mac bought the house next door. Ben and Gemma were similar in age and all the children moved freely between the two homes; sometimes it seemed as though they were just one big family. But the kids grew up and left; Damian eventually married Ellie, got a high profile job in oil and gas, and they and the two children are now in Dubai. Nick, still single, is in his early forties, and seems more interested in studying bats in a cave in South Australia than thinking about a relationship. There had been a time when Helen had thought that Nick and Gemma might get together. They were always around together as teenagers and Helen loved Gemma. She had always wanted a daughter, and Gemma had filled a little of that space for her. Back then Helen and Joyce had cautiously speculated on the possibility of it being more than friendship and Helen had fondly imagined a beautiful white wedding, but it never happened. Gemma and Nick remained close friends, but that was where it stopped. Nick ended up in weird places across the country recording bat movements, and a few years later Gemma took off for a job in Geneva.

  Helen sighs. Yes, she had wanted this place so much, and now, five years later, here she is in the middle of the night, gazing longingly across the river, back to the old part of the city, imagining what lies beyond her line of sight: the leafy streets, the elegant old red brick and limestone houses and weatherboard cottages of South Fremantle. The cafés and eccentric little shops, the bakeries, the Italian deli, all just minutes from the cappuccino strip, the bookshop, the banks, the markets.

  ‘I wish you weren’t going,’ Joyce had said at the time. ‘I’ll really miss you, but if it’s what you want . . .’

  It had been, but she hadn’t expected to feel like this – like an outsider, cut off from her best friend and her neighbours, watching those precious relationships stretch and fade away from her for lack of daily attention. She had thought it would last forever, that she and Dennis could move and that everything would otherwise stay the same, but somehow they haven’t. Living next door, or close by in the same street, is so different: popping in for a coffee, borrowing or lending things, slipping through the side-gate that Dennis and Mac had made in the dividing fence, sitting on the verandah with a bottle of wine on summer evenings. She hadn’t realised how she would miss all that, how impossible it would be to sustain or recapture its essence once they had left. She hadn’t anticipated the boredom, the lassitude that so often settled on her for days on end. She had expected freedom but found herself trapped.

  Helen opens the fridge and takes out a half-empty bottle of wine. She’d polished off the first half before she went to bed. She hesitates, glances guiltily over her shoulder, pours some into a glass, and takes bottle and glass with her to the sofa. That stupid business in the restaurant had given her a headache and she plumps up a cushion and stretches out, half sitting, half lying, wondering if she can take something for her head or whether she’s already had too much wine for that. Ah well, the view, she thinks, that’s one thing that’s always here, the million-dollar view, from this open living area, the kitchen and their bedroom. The view and the clean lines, the minimal housework, the domestic convenience of it all, but you can only look so long at the view, and five years on it hasn’t even started to feel like home. She has grown to take those things for granted now and yearns instead for some of the earthy, chaotic aspects of life in Emerald Street. She had changed their lifestyle and changed herself to suit it. Previously content with her mix of casual clothes and a few more formal pieces Helen had taken pride in the way that her height and naturally slim build enabled her to look pretty good in most things. But since casting off the trappings of that life she has been opting for a more upmarket, dressy look, paying too much for everything, especially shoes, shoes, shoes. From a perfectly adequate and well-chosen wardrobe she now has two wardrobes of expensive and fashionable clothes that she rarely wears. It was how she had envisaged the new life that she and Dennis would have here, but in reality their way of living has changed little except to be more isolated and less relaxed.

  Helen knows that she’d behaved badly when Joyce and Mac explained what they were going to do. It had touched the raw nerve of her discontent, and she’d felt it as another loss. She had forced a change in her own and Dennis’s lives, and it was a bad move, although she won’t admit that. Now Joyce is planning a big change without discussing it, mentioning it only by mistake. What Joyce wants will simply widen the gap between them. And Joyce and Mac’s decision feels deeply personal, as though it is aimed at her and her alone, as though Joyce is saying: well you’re the one who moved, now wait and see what I can do. Helen had wanted to slap her tonight, and she knows she did that, not physically but with her words and the way she left the table. Maybe she was a bit over the top walking out of the restaurant like that but, really, Joyce should have discussed it with her. It came as such a shock.

  Helen hears a step behind her, tucks the glass and bottle on the floor under her legs and turns. Dennis
in his pyjama trousers is standing in the doorway, rubbing his balding head and yawning.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asks. ‘Can’t sleep? Or are you sick or something?’

  Sick, Helen thinks, sick of this life, sick of you.

  ‘Can’t sleep,’ she says. ‘Go to bed, I’ll be back soon.’

  Dennis yawns and shuffles to the bathroom and she hears him peeing copiously against the porcelain. Then he belches, huffs and puffs, and she waits angrily for the sound of him washing his hands, but of course he doesn’t. ‘Fuck off, Dennis,’ she murmurs, rage rising up within her. ‘I want something to change, I don’t want to be in this life any longer and I can’t bear to think about what the next twenty years will be like.’

  Chapter Two

  Albany, Western Australia, Early March

  The trouble with Albany, Stella thinks, is that even in summer that wretched wind off the Southern Ocean can freeze your bones. Everyone goes on about the purity of the air but they fail to mention that it comes directly from the Antarctic. I’m too old for this: too old to be sitting here at five in the morning, barefoot, wearing a long white nightdress waiting for the director to decide that the light is right for him to start shooting. They’d already made a start this morning but bloody Gareth decided to take a break. It wouldn’t be so bad, she thinks, if she was over there with the others, but Gareth had set her up here on this great expanse of rock called The Gap, above all this wild and churning white water, and then there’d been this hoo-ha about having to wait for the light.

  ‘You stay here, Stella,’ he’d said. ‘I know you hate having to get back and forth across the rocks. One of the minions will bring you some tea.’ And he’d shaken out a blanket and wrapped it around her shoulders.

  Stella has spent much of her working life waiting for directors to make decisions about light or distance, background distractions or minor adjustments to costume, make-up or hair. It’s the nature of television and she is an old hand: costume drama, soaps, crime, and commercials for everything from dog food to cosmetics, sliced bread to car tyres and, in more recent years, retirement villages and incontinence pads. She’d learned early that physical stamina, emotional restraint, and an ability to tolerate the worst excesses of fellow actors, directors and crew were as important as learning her lines and turning up on time. It was always a waiting game: waiting for her agent, waiting for directors, waiting for yet another take, or for some fresh-faced prima donna of either sex to get over themselves, waiting for the last take and the ride back to the accommodation, waiting to get paid. After this, she thinks, it is definitely time to say no. She’s already retired twice and been lured back, first by an actor turned director with whom she’d had a wild affair decades earlier, and this time by the revival of Cross Currents, a long running soap opera in which she’d been killed off some months before the whole series was canned.