She returns to her work and graduates Alexander in a splash of prizes and glittering prospects, then switches off her computer and heads for the bathroom. Under the shower her mood lifts. It’s a familiar game, after all, and Alexander old enough to look after himself. She selects her clothes with care, she’s determined to look her best. Alexander Otto may be rummaging around in her life, but she’s still pulling the strings.
With an hour to spare, she toys with the idea of visiting Nigel, then decides against it. Nigel has changed recently. No longer the comfortable, easygoing lover, he seems determined to move their relationship on to what he calls ‘the next phase’. He thinks it is time they lived together. ‘There’s nothing new to learn about me,’ he says, ‘not after six years. So we may as well take the plunge.’ Eddie had hoped there was more to learn about him, and besides she likes their current arrangement. She produces excuse after excuse, but Nigel’s mind is made up.
‘If this relationship is to have a future,’ he says, ‘we must move it on to the next phase.’
‘Who plans these things?’ Eddie asks. ‘Some relationship comptroller from middle suburbia? Surely we can manage something more creative?’
But Nigel is not interested in creativity. He’s fed up with living between two places. He wants one pantry and one shopping list, he wants his clothes in one wardrobe and he wants a cat; he wants to know he’ll see Eddie at the end of each day and wake up with her every morning. ‘I’m too old for a portable relationship,’ he says.
And he’ll say it again if she goes around to his place, so as much as she would like to see him, the old Nigel that is, with his sense of humour and easy manner, she drives to a local café instead. She settles to a coffee and the newspaper, blocks out the problems with Nigel and the meeting with Alexander. And of course she’ll manage with Alexander tonight as she has these past several months. He is her meal ticket, nothing more; that he could be tramping through her life and stirring up old longings is simply absurd. And later she’ll return to her empty flat to fossick around in the night hours alone, with no one watching and no need to make excuses. Nigel longs for domesticity, but there are too many restrictions having to live with another person.
She turns the pages of the paper with only a vague glancing at the articles: a lost dog, a robbery in a suburb she’s never heard of, famine and mayhem in the rest of the world. Who would look to the newspaper for distraction these days? she wonders, and keeps on turning. Through the political pages, with sluggish murmurings from the whey-faced solicitor who runs the country and thuggish proclamations from his ambitious treasurer, and on to environmental sacrilege and big business disasters, turning the pages and no longer reading, so when the photograph appears it rips the breath out of her. Paula. Paula Harding. Her face rounder, the hair shorter, but unmistakably Paula. The article is reverential. The wunderkind at forty, back home as artistic director of the Australian Festival of the Arts. She’s a star in the cabarets of Europe, she’s directed operas in London and New York, and what does it matter she’s a lesbian? She’s our own Aussie girl returned to the city of her birth. Such presence, the journalist writes, and so proudly Australian, and a voice to move you to tears.
That voice, Eddie knows that voice. It moved her to tears twenty years ago, it opened the floodgates to her desires. And what was she to do when she fell in love with a boisterous butch girl with the voice of an angel? Simply discard her tidy, manageable life and dive into the rapids that would have been life with Paula?
‘Who needs a PhD in history?’ Paula used to say, proposing instead they take on the great cities of the world. ‘We’ll be a famous artistic couple, a latter-day Alice and Gertrude. You’ll write and I’ll sing and we’ll have a life you only read about in books. Come with me,’ Paula would say. ‘It’ll be a bender without the booze and no going on the wagon.’
Edwina said yes several times, and no several times more, and Paula did everything she planned but without Eddie. And now she’s returned, the wild woman triumphant, and everyone loves her, but how could Eddie have predicted that all those years ago.
So Eddie made other choices and look where they’ve left her. Alexander wants her, the College of Surgeons wants her work, and Nigel wants a wife. So many expectations and Eddie shunning the lot of them. Her desires are running amok and now Paula is back in town.
CHAPTER TWO
31st August, London.
AIM: to restore my former life.
METHOD: analysis of association between Edwina Frye and me. FIRST PHASE: choice of a writer for the biography, initial meeting with Edwina Frye.
No, this is wrong, quite wrong. If ever I’m to return home, I need to know more than I do now. I need to understand how and why Edwina Frye wrecked my life. I need to sort through the mess, impose some logic on a situation that got totally out of hand. I know I should have done this ages ago in Melbourne, but in those crazed days with Edwina, logic didn’t stand a chance. And during these past couple of months in London I seem to have made little headway. I’ve picked over the whole rotten carcass of the past year but to little effect.
I left home two months ago and had hoped to be back by now. But obsession — I loathe the word but I can’t avoid it any longer — is as tenacious as it is portable. Edwina fills my days here, much as she did in Melbourne. I left because I reached an impasse. My life was in pieces, the affair with Edwina was going nowhere, and I worried I’d make a mistake at work. The discovery of her pink pages was simply the last straw.
Pride is a peculiar business. I’ve fallen as low as a man can go, but I remember who I once was. And while I can face my shame privately, I’d hate to watch others gloating over me. So I had to leave. I wanted the anonymity of a big city, but I also wanted somewhere familiar. London was the obvious choice. I did my post-graduate study here and have returned several times since. Cynthia and I always planned to visit for a few months when I retired, to enjoy the city at our leisure. I’ve plenty of leisure now and I don’t know what to do with it. I wander the gardens, walk down by the river, I linger in museums. But it’s a listless business on your own.
I’m confident Cynthia won’t try to find me. I told her to wait and wait she will. So desperate was I and so strong my desire to escape, I was tempted not to leave a note. The dead leave traces, the living can cover theirs; I knew I could arrange it so I’d never be found. But I couldn’t treat Cynthia so badly, couldn’t leave her to wonder if I were dead or alive. And even in the chaos of that last morning, I realised I needed to leave the note for myself. I have to believe I’ll return.
I rent a small flat close to central London, much the same size as Edwina’s. Brown and grey with a hotchpotch of furniture, Cynthia would be appalled and so once would I. But I rely on its deficiencies to remind me it’s temporary. I go out for meals, often walking miles for lunch or dinner just to fill in time. Occasionally there’ll be a deadening effect, a steady flickering of houses and shops, a bit like those psychedelic lights from the sixties, flash flash flash and your mind goes numb. It’s blessed relief, but all too rare. Mostly there’s a continual roar. Edwina, events, conversations, and my own behaviour — the awful longing, the begging, my pathetic loitering in the streets around her flat. And the long past joins in too, sometimes so insistent that all I can do is take a couple of pills and put myself to sleep. And no, I’m not capitulating to the medico’s weakness, the drugs are a last resort and well under control.
The noise has been with me for months, but it was only last week as I was watching some men jogging in the park that I identified it as panic. Strange how connections are made. A couple of years ago, I was in New York for a conference and stayed an extra day for the annual New York Marathon. I’d lunched with friends a few blocks from Central Park, and as the leaders approached the final stage of the race we walked over to watch. There were two men well ahead of the field. A short