I once heard a famous actor being interviewed on the radio about the breakdown of her marriage. When pressed to name its cause she replied succinctly: shirts. I knew instantly what she meant. The symbol of a married woman’s unscripted yet unavoidable role in the relationship. No clause in the contract stipulating the care and maintenance of the male shirt, yet somehow they took over, with their demands to be soaked, ironed, fresh and alert on hangers ready for the next excursion into the working world. It took a stout feminist to withstand the onslaught of the shirt.
My particular argument had never been with shirts, since Archie’s work gear was casual. And even if it had been, I would never have left him over a shirt because, despite his domestic blindness, Archie had given me more than I deserved. But there had been times when I could see how it might have been possible to leave. I doubted he had ever understood how tight a thread I had been all these years. And now that one thread was about to be snipped. And if on the very edge of that scission, I was still unable to fall back, stop being the commander of the household, what did that say about me? Control freak, I guessed. Yet I suspected there was something more to it than that. Yet another thing for which I could not find the right words.
I wondered what happened when women disappeared from a family. Another woman enlisted to take their place? A paid housekeeper, or a wife? Despite his occasional flirtatiousness I couldn’t see Archie rushing into anything. That didn’t fit with the father in him. I knew he would be assisted by his mother and my mother, who between them would probably make life easier for him than I ever had. Then, after a while, depending on how Estelle and Daisy reacted, a new partner would come, followed possibly by marriage. Secretly I was hoping for Charlotte, Archie’s part-time bookkeeper, which seemed logical to me, although I’d tried and failed to discuss the subject with him. I liked Charlotte, I admired her. She was a serene young woman who was completing a diploma in business management. She worked with percentages and bottom lines and, I suspected, had never made a sponge cake or done French knitting in her life. She came one day a week and worked in the corner of Archie’s shed which was also his office, sending out invoices and settling accounts with suppliers, decoding then dispensing all the paperwork of the tax system that Archie found so mystifying. Estelle and Daisy adored her and only ever wanted her to mind them if Archie and I went out. If she married Archie it would be almost perfect.
Oh, and it would be cruel. Another woman to usher the girls into their teenage years, into their adulthood. To be there for their first period, to buy the most expensive hair products, to offer advice on skin care, to tolerate teenagegirl cravings for Nutella or obsessions with vegan diets. To pretend to understand how vital MySpace was. To be there when their boyfriends abandoned them. Gasp at their mobile phone bills. Shake a head over their newest piercing. Tell them, every day, how beautiful they were. And how much they were loved.
Cruelty. What exactly did Eliot say again? I found my undergraduate copy of the Selected Poems, and prepared to torment myself further with his gloomy words. But when I read ‘The Wasteland’ again I had to admit that Mr Eliot was right: it was winter that had kept me warm, in a strange sort of way. Muffled me in its state of suspended animation, kept me from the cold steel of memory and desire before they sliced through my soul in the expectant warmth of spring.
An attack of wind shook the wisteria so furiously the petals rained onto the verandah. Opening the office window wide I took in its scent. I heard the clicking of Mr Lambert’s wheelbarrow next door. This time of year, he was more than particular about his garden: he was obsessive. He would be sweeping up the leaves and blown petals as they dropped, cursing my messy flowering vines and clipping every tendril that sneaked its way past the fence. Instead of shaving his front lawn today, he was probably pruning, the mock orange hedge being his chief target. I never smelled the mock orange during the day, but some nights the entire atmosphere was saturated with it. It could not be just from Mr Lambert’s abject specimens, which he trimmed into order every week in the warmer months.
Winter would soon be just a chill memory. The scent on the wind told me that. It might have been the freesias, planted around the letterbox. The fragrance always filled me with a strange distracted yearning, a restless and aching expectation. Perhaps because it contained the promise of summer, the season I loved the most. I remembered the freesias which grew along the railway embankments and in vacant lots all the way down the south coast. The ones that filled a room with a scent at once wild and comforting. They brought suggestions of many things: memories of rough childhood holidays on the south coast beaches; weekends away in holiday shacks with friends; the evidence of the first garden I ever helped plan, plant and nurture into life, when we first came to live here. The garden hadn’t existed then: the house perched disdainfully at the front of a long narrow stretch of buffalo grass. There was a Hills hoist rotary washing line, immobilised by age, and nothing else. We brought clumps of the wild freesias and, after hacking away at the grass to uncover cracked but serviceable paths and the faint outlines of former garden beds, planted them here and there.
For all the years I caught their first scent each spring, I experienced a small stab deep within. A distinct physical ache, and one that always made me feel momentarily emotional, though whether on the verge of tears or shouts or laughter, I could never say. This seasonal feeling was so common I had always registered it unthinkingly. Until now. For I would no longer smell these flowers, and it seemed important to define accurately what the scent meant. And it wasn’t only the freesias. All the spring flowers taunted me in their postcard perfection, as unwelcome as the memory and desire that now encroached on the day. They all seemed to have come out of the dead land, the garden that I once revelled in.
On the desk beside me the phone rang.
Hello?
There was no one at the other end but I sensed a presence. I suspected it was the same person who also hung up after a few rings, before I could answer it.
Hello? I repeated more loudly, but the presence was not to be provoked by shouting. I slammed the phone down. I had no idea who it was. The caller ID function told me it was a private number.
I closed Mr Eliot, more carefully than I otherwise might, adding him to the collection of books on the bedside table. They probably wouldn’t make their way back to the bookshelves in the hall.
Dear Delia
Don has been very good to me, and my husband has neglected me for years for his work. You still didn’t advise if I should bleach my lace tablecloth or not. And as well as the red wine it is smeared with green stains where Don knocked over his avocado and prawn entrée.
Uncertain.
Dear Uncertain
Don, Don, Don. It’s all about Don, isn’t it? And why is it that you are attracted to such clumsy men? I advise you to sever relations with Don and concentrate on your husband. Maybe he works too hard because you are the sort of person who uses lace cloths and makes avocado and prawn cocktails. What were you thinking? It’s not 1975 any more. Of course soaking an antique lace cloth in bleach would be crazy. Try lots of salt, cold water, then hang it out in the sun for a day. Let me know how you go.
By the time it was nearly dark and the families had come and gone in the late afternoon rush with their Happy Meals and movie-deal specials, I felt ready to drive off again.
I’d see if I could find Mitchell. If he was still around he would be at one of three places. The first was the café on the way back to Amethyst. It had a new name, and when I pulled up and saw the sign I assumed it was a facetious one. But when the waiter, dreadlocks flying, rollerbladed to my table with the menu, I understood it really was the Roadkill Café. She explained that they were out of wallaby.