Claustrophobia (7 page)

‘In any case,' one of the other women said, ‘she certainly hasn't let it get in the way of her teaching. But do you mean she's single again? A woman like that?'

Delys chuckled and raised her eyebrows; again, Pen thought, to avoid saying she didn't actually know. ‘Well, she does
live
alone.'

The group tutted. ‘You've been to her house?'

Delys nodded. ‘I had to collect some papers, once. I didn't go in. But the house looked lovely, and when I said so, she said, ‘Yes, but too big for one person to manage.''

‘Why would she keep it, then?' said Frank.

‘Close to the uni. And she has a lot of books, as you would expect.'

Pen itched to ask where the house was, exactly – but she pulled herself up short, knowing how odd that would look, when she hadn't said a word till now – and she wanted, for some reason, to appear indifferent.

Besides, if she really needed to know where Kathleen's house was, now that she knew it was close by, she could follow her.

She had quite naturally and accidentally observed Kathleen's car one day after class – a late-model silver Corolla. Usually Kathleen went back up to her office when the lecture was over, but on that one occasion, as Pen had been sitting in the Volvo choosing a CD for the drive home, Kathleen had walked right down into the car park and drove off.

Pen even remembered part of the numberplate. It bore the letters arg, which made her think of
argument
, or
aargh
, both somehow fitting. The plate was not personalised – they were just random letters – but it stuck in Pen's brain. Burned onto the backs of her eyelids from staring.

If she kept a secret diary of all this, she could refer to Kathleen as Arg. Or she could write it in code, as she had when she was a kid and knew her mother was trying to snoop in her things.

But Pen had decided not to write down a single scrap. Finding Derrick's letter, the letter that started it all, had brought home to her the treachery of the written word. If you wanted to keep things to yourself, if you wanted real safety, total control, you let nothing outside your head.

Inside your head, you could go where you wanted.

She remembered a song Derrick had taught her when she was first studying German:
Die Gedanken sind frei
… ‘Thoughts are free, who can guess them? They fly away like nocturnal shadows – nobody can know them, no hunter shoot them down …'

If she wanted to follow Kathleen home, just to see where she lived, it wasn't stalking or anything like that. Surely it wasn't. It was to understand, really, to get the full picture of a woman like that, a woman whose existence had shaken the very foundations of her marriage, as if she were an unseen fault line.

Pen thought of the terrible lopsided gash in the earth near Meckering that she'd visited on a school outing; the houses that had vanished, the little signs pegged in the ground that marked where each family had once lived.

The worst thing about a fault line: disaster could strike again at any time. And yet people always rebuilt, refusing to believe the worst. Was that what Pen herself was doing, stubbornly believing life with Derrick could go on as normal? Without ever telling him what had changed?

If she wanted to follow Kathleen home … she would have to be patient, because Kathleen probably stayed on campus for hours – all that marking, Pen thought, suddenly remembering the burnt essays. Pen blushed. She would have to be patient and discreet, a real nocturnal shadow. Unobtrusive, and with all the time in the world.

But she did not have all the time in the world.

All too soon it was the last day of the extension course. After this, Pen would be without excuse. No more reason to hang around the campus, drive to the city each week. She sat through that last lecture with a dull disappointment like a lump in her stomach, barely following anything Kathleen said. Glued to the spot, staring, as if trying to memorise Kathleen's image, for whatever good that would do. If you stared like that at someone, eventually it gave them a halo,
flaring against the white wall, the overhead screen. You felt as if you were leaving your body. Pen was so numb that when Delys and the others nudged her at the end, she didn't at first understand them.

‘She's going to come for a drink with us,' Delys said. ‘Being the last day, you know.'

‘She' was Kathleen.

Pen's heart thudded. ‘I don't drink, really,' she said, wondering why this immediate battle inside, this for-and-against.

Delys laughed. ‘You can still have a lemonade or something. Come on.'

They all walked down-campus to the student tavern, Pen lagging behind, eyes to the ground, stealing a glimpse of Kathleen now and then: her long, mesmerising skirts, her sharp-heeled boots – Perth was on the verge of spring, but the campus was still a cold place. Overhead, wattlebirds looped in and out of branches, indifferent to their presence as the women's heels rang on the brick pavement.

Kathleen had not walked with the group outside class like this before. There was always a kind of detachment or distance. But today was different, because it was ending.

Just once, Kathleen turned around, as if to check who was straggling back there, and smiled at Pen. Pen could not smile, but only nodded.

The tavern was noisy and beery inside, and full of young people who paid them no attention whatsoever, after an initial head-swivel. Not that much older, Pen thought, than Derrick's own students. The air was thick with the odours of chip fat and burgers, and the clamour of desperate straining for amusement. The group found themselves some seats, and Kathleen brought a couple of carafes to the table.

‘It should be the other way around,' Frank said. ‘We should be shouting
you
.'

‘No, it's a bit of a tradition,' Kathleen said. ‘Aren't you having any?' she asked Pen.

Pen hesitated, not wanting to make herself stand out. The one killjoy, the wowser. ‘Thanks,' she said simply, and proffered her glass. There was no law against it.
One
wouldn't make any difference, she supposed, to driving home.
One
wouldn't tell on her breath if Derrick should kiss her.

It might even make things easier …

Pen could not help looking at Kathleen. Being so unused to the wine, Pen was all the more under its sway, all the less inclined to stop staring. Of course Kathleen became aware of this, glancing back now and then, but Pen guessed she was used to being looked at. Professionally as well as personally. It almost hurt your eyes to see her, because there was no flaw. Like a sculpture.

Pen thought dimly of something she had read about the perfection of statues, of a likeness between the acts of murder and making love. Fixing someone to absolute stillness, complete possession. It was in a Patricia Highsmith book. At the time it had chilled her, and she had put the book aside; now, as she gazed at Kathleen, the idea wouldn't go away.

‘You're very quiet,' Kathleen said to her, and Pen lowered her eyes a moment. ‘What's your name again?'

Pen told her, at once aglow with the attention and yet coldly irritated that the woman didn't even know. The disproportion of it. The lopsidedness of the relation between them. Could she not even understand …?

‘And how did you like the course?'

Pen gushed suddenly now – she was all words, and some of her fellow students turned in surprise, having heard so little from her till now.

‘I could almost worship Baudelaire,' she said, and though she saw some of the others smile into their drinks, she couldn't stop herself. ‘I don't think it's at all true that women can't take pleasure in reading him; I think it's more complex than that. Yes, it's misogynistic on the surface, but you have to see it on a larger scale …'

Kathleen nodded, excited, flipping open a book to show Pen a particular page, and scribbling lines out on a beer coaster.

‘And Mallarmé: don't you think every translation is inadequate? No translator has really managed that honed, chiselled turning of his lines, the way the white space seems to gape at you after them.'

Kathleen refilled Pen's wine glass and sent back a volley of her own. For the next quarter-hour they were no longer themselves but a live dialogue, a disembodied argument. It was like a blowtorch.

Kathleen said, when Pen quoted a poem, ‘You speak French very well, where did you learn it?'

Pen said awkwardly that she had taught herself.

Kathleen stood up, nodding. ‘Well, perhaps we'll see you here again, on another course,' she said, and then her attention was turned back to the group, as if Pen had never existed, and she said her farewells, gathered up her bag, and left.

‘Well, you're a dark horse, Pen,' Frank said, to break the sudden silence. ‘You wouldn't say boo to a goose all winter, and you come out with all that on the last day. Talk about teacher's pet!'

‘Mixing your metaphors, aren't you, Frank?' said Delys, and everyone laughed. Discreetly, Pen pocketed the beer coaster Kathleen had written on, stood up, and excused herself.

She slipped outside and surveyed the paved area. Kathleen was nowhere to be seen now, though if Pen hastened her step, she might catch her up. But for what, exactly?

Pen ran all the way to the parked Volvo, got in, and locked the doors with one snap. Brightly scarved and coated students went by, brushing the sides of the car in their haste, laughing and shouting. She covered her ears and closed her eyes. What was she doing here? She had embarrassed herself, enthusing like that – it was not what she had meant to do. Not at all. She rested her head on the steering wheel, but could not think. Thinking was not enough – she was as bad as Hamlet, she could not act. She could not even cry, though that was what every cell of her tired body wanted to do.

Now the course was over, it was back to scratch. She would have to come up with a new plan. If she had ever had a plan in the first place.

5

‘Every time I come here,' Pen's mother said, ‘I can't help but think of that poor man.'

‘And you
say
it every time, too,' Pen thought. They'd come up for a Sunday picnic at Mundaring Weir, because Mrs Stone had wanted to visit, and it was easier that way than having her at the house. Now that they were planning renovations, there was an excuse, but it was really because Pen couldn't bear having her mother in her so-called ‘personal space'.

‘I do love her, but …' Pen often said to Derrick privately, and he would interrupt: ‘You don't have to say any more. I understand.'

Derrick thought Mrs Stone meant well, but there was only so much of her people could take. Pen wasn't even sure she meant well.

‘What a tragic waste of a life,' Mrs Stone said now, leaning over the edge of the walkway and gazing into the vast body of water as if it were no more than a puddle.

Pen couldn't bear to look down into the depths – it made her dizzy. She always had the feeling, looking at the great dam wall, that it was about to fall, the way you sometimes felt the sky could fall. Or that a chink might suddenly appear and before they knew it, they'd be swept away. Pen both feared and desired it at the same time, a sensation she did not like. It was like the belly of the earth, or as if you were teetering on the edge of a giant's cradle.

The place had an eerie magnetism, all sheer planes and gravity, as if some force could impel you to leap over the barrier, or to push someone over. Like that time she'd come here as a kid with Sally Fearn's family, and Sally's dad was playing the fool at the side of the walkway, and Sally said, ‘I wish he would slip.'

Pen had said, ‘You don't mean it.'

‘Yes, I do,' Sally had said, and they'd stared at each other.

‘If he'd only had more patience.' Mrs Stone gripped the edge of the barrier as she walked. She was talking about CY O'Connor, the man behind the pipeline that carried water hundreds of miles from this place out to the goldfields; that infamous suicide, on the coast, every child here learned about in primary school history lessons. Legend held that he thought his great engineering vision had come to nothing. ‘The thing wasn't a failure at all. He gave in too soon.'

‘Shall we find a place to spread the rug and have our lunch?' Derrick said, with a sixth sense for how much of this Pen could stand. It wasn't just the clichés, no worse than you'd find in any sentimental tourist brochure. It was the way Mrs Stone repeated them, verbatim, no matter how long had passed since they'd last come up here together. No matter how often she was corrected with the facts. As if there were only so many scripted lines, so many available conversations, and they were stuck in a familiar pattern. As if nothing could be spontaneous.

Mrs Stone sighed and nodded. ‘I just can't imagine,' she said, ‘how anyone could get to the point of wanting to take their own life. It's so selfish.'

‘Here, Mum,' Pen said, patting a corner of the blanket. ‘I've poured you some tea.'

She tried not to catch her mother's eye, knowing what the conversation was really about. So many years and still her mother wanted to harp, indirectly, on Derrick's weaknesses.
How could you marry a man like that?
Pen had heard it often enough in the early days, and now it had gone underground. Mrs Stone saw breakdowns, suicidal thoughts, anything mentally negative, as a moral failing.

It wasn't so much an attack on Derrick as a snipe at Pen for choosing him. Her mother probably liked Derrick in spite of herself, Pen supposed, but thought his past was a pity. He was not quite what Mrs Stone considered a man, despite having got on his feet and made something of his life in the years that followed.

Despite Pen having got him on his feet, and made something of their life together.

And what would she say if she knew about the letter to Kathleen?

Yet Pen knew too that if she'd married a big, blustery, insensitive type that had ‘go' in him, to use her mother's word, she'd have come under fire for that too.