Infidelity (30 page)

41

Sydney. 23 June.

In the taxi from the airport to my home in Castlecrag, I was struggling with the illusion that I had been away for years, though it had actually been barely six months. As we turned into Winter Close, I had the odd sense that this was somewhere I
used
to live; somewhere I
used
to belong.

I dropped my bags in the hallway of number six and took a quick look around. Maddy had called in the previous afternoon in anticipation of my return, opening a few windows, putting fresh flowers in a vase and leaving a litre of milk, a dozen eggs and some bread and butter in the fridge.

I picked up the phone to thank her and establish that she was going to be free to meet me for lunch. Upstairs, I took a hot shower and crawled between the sheets. There was time for three hours' sleep.

The sight of dear Maddy revived my spirits and reconnected me with the idea of Sydney. We met at a cafe in Blues Point Road and I gave her what news I could of Fiona's life in London, and enquired about Harley, her wealthy and long-retired husband. (More obsessed with golf than ever, was her summary.)

This was Maddy, so I held nothing back about Sarah, the pregnancy, Jelly and the First Wednesdays, Blair and its likely establishment in Australia. I mentioned my curious sense of disconnection from Winter Close.

Maddy was her usual brisk self. Attentive. Interested. Wise. Sympathetic about the abortion, but not about the total predicament. Pessimistic about any future with Sarah. (In all the years I'd known Maddy, she had never once said, ‘I told you so.' She didn't need to.) She had yet to meet Jelly but was already declaring her interest in the prospect of working with me at Blair, if his Australian plans came to fruition. ‘As long as he doesn't think sixty-two is too old for someone to take on a new job,' she said, and I assured her Jelly wouldn't give a hoot about her age.

The practice was going well in my absence, Maddy told me, and the locum was evidently keen to buy if I ever decided to sell. (The thought of returning to my practice hadn't entered my mind since my return to Sydney. In that moment, it became abundantly clear to me that I would never go back to that life.)

I caught the bus back to Castlecrag and picked up some fruit and vegetables on the way home. Walking back to my house, a clutch of plastic bags in each hand, I had that same sense of being out of place. No one was about. No one was waving. None of the cars looked familiar.

In the evening, after a minimal meal, I wandered into number nine on the off-chance Angus – my former editor at
Vroom
– might be at home.

He was there and pleased to see me. He ushered me into his living room and poured us a drink. He was amused by my account of the interview with Johnny O'Dowd. I mentioned my possible return to Sydney in an entirely new role.

‘Be glad to have you back,' he said, ‘but we won't be neighbours. I've sold this place. The agent's sign has just come down.'

‘Where to now?'

‘Not sure. I'm renting an apartment in Camperdown for the time being. My ex has moved permanently to Adelaide with the kids, so I'm only seeing them in school holidays. I don't need all this space.'

Angus brought me up to date on movements in the street, though his history there had been much shorter than mine. In the six months I'd been away, he told me, many of the neighbours had moved on, for one reason or another, leaving only Ruth Abel and her three children next door to me, and the reclusive historian still in number one. (‘Urban churn,' one of my colleagues used to call it, but I was surprised by its speed in my own street.)

Jelly arrived in Sydney two days after me, filled with disbelief that anywhere could be as far from London as this. With a short break in Bangkok, he'd been in the air for the best part of twenty-four hours.

‘I won't be a frequent visitor, Tom, if we set up out here. Not until they perfect the fucking ram-jet, what? Thank God for email and telephones.'

After a weekend's rest, Jelly was ready for action. He turned out to be impressed by the very things he was determined not to be impressed by – the Opera House, the harbour, the Harbour Bridge, the beaches, the blend of colonial heritage buildings and glass towers. He was less impressed by our traffic and our newspapers.

His business contacts, mostly the local offices of his London clients, were remarkably responsive. Though I had worried initially that Jelly might look to them like a caricature of a Pom, I needn't have been concerned – no amount of bluster could conceal the sharpness of his mind, the depth of his understanding of each of their businesses and his grasp of the recruitment issues they were facing. At meeting after meeting, I watched him disarm his audience with wit and intelligence: it was clear they'd like his intellectual firepower on their team. He presented me as the Australian face of the new operation, his confidence in the idea that there would be an Australian operation growing with every contact.

After a week in Sydney, we flew to Melbourne and did it all over again. Jelly seemed rather more comfortable in Melbourne than Sydney, though he was struck by the energy and sophistication of both places and amused by the rivalry between them.

‘Wouldn't be taken seriously if we didn't have a presence in both,' was the conclusion he rapidly came to. ‘Start in Sydney, but get Melbourne going within twelve months would be my inclination, what? People seem to dash between these two cities as if it's a fucking bus ride.'

(He was right about that. The skies between Sydney and Melbourne are crammed with a thousand flights a week. Claims about the environmental vandalism of air travel have been as comprehensively ignored here as elsewhere.)

In addition to the meetings with potential clients, Jelly had some private briefings with politicians and journalists, all organised through his formidable network of UK contacts. At the end of two weeks, he pronounced himself satisfied.

‘So . . . showtime, Tom. Are you up for it? We can carry you for six months while you get things established. I had a productive session with your Maddy – she seems perfect for the role of general manager. I think you should offer her the job forthwith and double what she's being paid by that shrink. She knows she's wasted where she is, to be totally frank with you.

‘We'll send two or three psychologists out from the London office to start things off and help train some locals in the system – you might like to give some thought to who we should pick. Right now, I'd say you know the team better than anyone, what? We can discuss the details on the flight back. Ha – the flight back! There'll be more than enough time to discuss every conceivable fucking detail of the history of the fucking world three times over.'

Before I closed up the house again and headed for the airport and my final few weeks in London, I sent Fox a text:
Jelly confirms Sydney is a goer. I need to talk to Sarah. Can you facilitate? T
.

42

London. 14 July.

Twenty minutes early for my four o'clock meeting with Sarah at Blackfriars, I found the table where it had been agreed we should meet and tried to compose myself. I was paralysed by anxiety.

This was not my last chance, I kept telling myself; I was not a prisoner making a final plea for a stay of execution. But it felt like that, except when sheer, sunny excitement at the prospect of seeing Sarah again broke through.

She arrived with Fox – this had been prearranged in a series of phone messages relayed between us by Fox – and they walked together to my table. Fox was beaming, as though she'd accomplished an improbable mission. Sarah was visibly nervous, leaning on Fox's arm for support.

Fox accepted a kiss on the cheek; Sarah offered me her hand. There was fleeting eye contact. They both sat, and we exchanged polite remarks about the weather, the traffic and a bomb scare at King's Cross. The waiter took our orders. Sarah asked for water.

When the drinks arrived, Fox, following the script, stood and said: ‘I'll leave you two together.' She placed a reassuring hand on Sarah's shoulder, picked up her own drink and moved to a distant table, well out of earshot but facing us, so Sarah could signal if she wanted Fox to rejoin us, or to take her away. I felt as if we were in a spy movie.

I reached across the table to touch Sarah's hand, but she withdrew it and folded both hands in her lap.

At last, she looked at me – straight into my eyes, unsmiling, eyebrows slightly raised, more like a question than a greeting.

‘Thanks for coming,' I said.

‘That's okay,' she said, giving away nothing at all.

‘Sarah, I –'

‘Don't tell me you love me,' she said, ‘or I'll simply leave. Is that clear?'

‘Yes. No – that's not what I wanted to say. You know about Jelly and the job? My move back to Sydney to set up an Australian operation for him?'

‘Of course. Well done, you.' A response so coldly conventional, it stung.

I think I had gone to Blackfriars with the half-formed idea that I might try to persuade Sarah to come to Sydney, even for a short trip, as a way of testing her feelings for me and, perhaps, seeing if some time on the other side of the world might act as a circuit-breaker for whatever current was powering the force field that isolated her from me.

Seeing her – the complete absence of her trademark insouciance; the lack of any warmth in her response to me; the lack of any
life
– I realised I must have been mad even to entertain an idea like that. Fox had tried to warn me about Sarah's unwillingness to talk about me or the abortion or to discuss her plans to return to her job at King's, though, according to Fox, she was almost back to normal with the First Wednesdays, singing as well as ever. And, as Fox had said, why wouldn't Sarah have become a bit less inclined to laugh, a bit more subdued than usual, considering all that had happened?

Before this meeting, Fox's assessment was that Sarah was far better than she had been a month previously. My own assessment, sitting across the table from her, was that as far as she and I were concerned, things could hardly have been worse.

‘You've been doing it tough,' I ventured.

‘Don't go clinical on me, Tom. Okay?'

‘Okay. Only I've been concerned about you. You must know that.'

‘I knew that. Yes. But I told you in my note.'

‘You told me . . .?'

‘That I simply didn't feel anything any more. About us, I mean. It's as if it never happened, whatever happened.'

‘You mean you literally don't remember?'

‘I mean I don't try to remember. I don't choose to remember. It's like a death. The grief is there all right, so I know something has gone. But it's only the grief that's there – the thing that's died is not. It never is, is it? That's what death is.'

‘I'm not dead, Sarah. You're not dead.
We're
not dead.'

‘Don't talk to me as if I'm a child, or a mental patient. I know you're not dead. I know I'm not dead. But
we
– whatever
we
means when you say it like that –
we
are most certainly dead.'

‘Surely it's different with relationships. They can be revived. Fresh starts. It's a different kind of death. A hesitation, perhaps. An interruption.'

‘Tom, I don't want you to tiptoe around whatever it is you want to say. Whatever you brought me here to say. I'm a grown woman – a grieving woman, but otherwise my faculties are quite intact. And I'm not on medication, if you're wondering about the slow speech. I'm exhausted. I haven't slept well from worry about coming here to see you. I knew you'd have some lofty goal. Fox told me you were desperate to see me. I didn't like the sound of desperate. But I came.'

‘And I'm so glad you did.'

‘Are you? That sounds a bit hollow to me. If I were you, I wouldn't be glad. I'd be disappointed. Yet again.'

I glanced around the bar, which was starting to fill up with late-afternoon drinkers; the office crowd. I was willing people to stay away from our corner of the room, but at least the rising noise level was a welcome mask for our conversation, if that was what we were having.

‘Sarah, can we get one thing straight? You said in your note you had disappointed me. I was disappointed that we were not going to have a child together – that's true.'

As I said the world ‘child', Sarah flinched as if she'd been struck in the face.

‘But I supported you. Don't you remember that? I was completely reconciled to your point of view. I was ready to go on as before. Better than before. Once we were relieved of all that angst . . .'

I trailed off. Sarah was looking absently about the room, not at Fox, specifically – just anywhere but at me. She even stared briefly at a TV screen that seemed to be showing soundless horse races. She had completely lost interest in me. Or perhaps she had lost patience. I was a fool ever to have assumed this could be a normal conversation that might lead to another, and another.

It was not an execution I was facing. It was an awakening to a completely new reality. Sarah was right. We
were
dead, at least for now.

Yet my heart insisted otherwise. I looked at her through eyes that still wanted to see what they had seen at our very first meeting. I yearned to touch her, to feel some response in her. I ached for the laughter, the talking, the walking, even the tears. My memory had not deceived me – though she was pale and drawn, she was as beautiful, as arresting, as I had always found her. I still wanted to love her. To be loved by her.

I found her eyes again. I smiled. There was nothing in return. Nothing at all. She couldn't wait to be gone. We had not connected on any level beyond basic civility. She was like a woman I used to know.

‘Are you writing anything? Are you working up the “Puss in Boots” paper?'

Sarah looked at me as if I were trying far too hard.

‘I'll finish that one when I'm good and ready. I am writing something else, though.'

‘Can you tell me?'

‘No reason not to. It's a paper on the miracle of the loaves and fishes.'

‘Oh, yes. You once said you'd explain that to me . . .'

I broke off, suddenly recalling that Sarah had said she would explain it to me when we had run out of things to say to each other.

‘What? What did I say?'

‘Nothing. Not important. Tell me about the paper.'

‘It's obvious you can't feed five thousand people with five loaves and two fishes. Jesus wasn't a magician. The story isn't about supernatural powers – it's a fable. Like all fables, the miracles are meant to inspire us through their symbolism. The loaves and fishes are symbols of love – the sustaining power of love. Do you have any idea what I'm talking about?'

I nodded uncertainly. ‘I'm not sure. Go on.'

‘The meaning is simple – if you give your love freely, it multiplies. Compassion, generosity, kindness – the classic signs of love that spread out across the world. If you keep it to yourself and your own tight little circle, and ignore the five thousand who are hungry for love, it will be consumed. Nothing left over. No multiplier effect.'

She looked straight at me, expecting a response.

‘I like that interpretation,' I said.

‘Interpretation? You
like
that interpretation? I've just given you the inner meaning. The true meaning.'

‘Have you been spending more time at the cathedral, now you're more or less full-time in Littleton?'

‘I've always been down there on weekends. What are you talking about?'

‘This loaves and fishes thing. I wondered if perhaps you'd been thinking more about religious questions . . .'

‘The fact that I'm capable of some intelligent exegesis doesn't entitle you to caricature me as some kind of mystic. Of course I'm interested in religious questions. I've always been interested in religious questions. Have you forgotten? That doesn't make me
religious
. I'm the infidel inside the gates of the temple. Haven't you always known that about me?'

‘Infidel?'

‘Can we not pursue this? I think you're just trying to make conversation to detain me. Is that possible?'

I looked in vain for a sign that I was being teased. Sarah's eyes were casting about the room again and any moment, I sensed, she would be beckoning Fox. Were these final precious moments to be wasted? I had to make one last attempt at a connection.

‘Sarah, when I get back to Sydney, would you mind if I wrote to you occasionally? Would you like me to do that?'

Sarah considered this for a moment. ‘Would I like you to? No, I couldn't say that in all honesty. Would I mind? No, I wouldn't mind, as long as you didn't descend into sentimentality. As long as you had something interesting to say. And as long as you didn't expect a reply, of course.'

In response to a signal I hadn't detected, Fox was at our table again and Sarah was standing and taking her arm.

‘Thank you for the drink,' Sarah said, her manners intact.

‘Thank you again for coming,' I replied, also standing. ‘Oh, I almost forgot. Your keys. I moved out of Vincent Square weeks ago – before I went to Sydney, in fact. Fox probably told you. I should have sent you these.' I moved towards Sarah, holding out the keys to her apartment and intending, I must admit, to give her a hug, or at least a peck on the cheek. She took a step backward. Fox frowned at me and gave a tiny shake of her head. It was she who took the keys.

‘I imagine I won't be seeing either of you again before I leave London.'

‘Not me, anyway,' said Sarah.

Fox said nothing. Her eyes were filling with tears.

I sat down again, trembling, and watched them leave. Sarah, leaning into Fox's shoulder, seemed quite unsteady on her legs.

I ordered another drink and wondered, as the day began to fade to its long twilight, whether I could have handled any of that differently.

Death? Grieving? It was as though, in Sarah's mind, the death of the foetus had somehow
entailed
the death of our relationship. Perhaps Sarah had blamed me for the pregnancy and couldn't find a way to forgive me. Or had this been entirely about the termination, the grief transferred in her mind from the baby to me – to
us
? Over the years, I had counselled many people struggling to deal with grief. ‘Only time can heal' (I dutifully recited that mantra), but I knew that sometimes, in the case of a child or a deeply cherished spouse, the work of healing was beyond even time's power.

I fished in my pocket for the letter I had been carrying with me for weeks, and read again those terrible words:
This feels like a dark mystery – I can remember that we were together, but I can't remember why, or how it came about. Isn't that strange? It's as if a light has gone out in my soul. I can't explain it any better than that. I seem to have lost the capacity for feeling whatever it was I once felt about you. I don't feel anything much, except grief for our poor, broken relationship. I am truly sorry.

Sitting there in Blackfriars wine bar, I had caught a glimpse of the dark place where that light used to burn. I had seen with my own eyes a woman who had lost whatever capacity for loving me she might once have had.