The Feel of Steel (9 page)

Martin, slow-moving on a walking stick now, takes me to lunch in Chinatown. He speaks with great warmth about how happy he was when the four of us, two couples, were all friends together.

‘Ten wonderful years,' he says with passion, ‘but it's gone now.'

On his face the open softness of someone whose eyes
are full of tears, though I can't actually see any. He seizes my hand across the tablecloth and kisses it.

‘Last time you were at our place,' he says, ‘M.B. had just sent us a photo of himself. When you came into the kitchen, I saw it lying there and quickly whisked it out of sight. That was when I knew what I'd lost. And when I heard that Text wanted to publish my book, I called M.B. and I called you, but what I really wanted was for all four of us to sit down together and celebrate, and drink some champagne. I suppose it's selfish but that's what I wanted, and I was miserable that I couldn't have it.'

At church today, a kids' choir from Tamworth. My snobby heart sank, but shame on me, for they sang with thrilling freshness Vivaldi's
Gloria
and some African songs. How small boys carol in choirs: their rapt faces, soft mouths opened in an egg shape, their heads tilting this way and that on their springy necks. The older boys with broken voices. The girls modest and composed. I wanted them to sing on forever.

The cotton pin of my sewing machine snapped off last night, as I was about to sit down and start sewing my curtains. Normally, these days, I would have collapsed
in tears, but I just looked at it with a cross, disappointed feeling, and found something else to do with my evening: a cocktail party at the French Consulate. The consul was a very sweet man. He led me away from the racket, through a heavy door into the kitchen, to show me the family dog. His daughter was sitting at the table neatly doing her homework.

The boogyman was in the flat last night. He walked along the hall to my bedroom. I kept my eyes shut, and lay there with thumping heart, but before he got into the open space between door and bed he evaporated. Now it's a cool, windy day. Across the sea off Bondi, parallel to shore, lie one or two long streaks of darker blue, for which I have no explanation.

Rain in the night. Raining at dawn. I'm annoyed because my washing is down on the line, but I'm filled too with . . . wonder, really, at the quiet breadth of the rain, its long slow endless breathing, the enormous area it can cover without effort, its simple fallingness. Another cloud of it moves towards me from the sea. Now it's here, softly hissing, blotting things out.

This separation is a dull wound, aching dully, on and on. What I'm doing, month after month, is parting, inside myself, from my husband. Years ago he told me about having visited the painter John Passmore when he was very old. Passmore said to him that dying was ‘hard work'. Separation, too, is work that will not be hurried.

Steve the builder came over for tea, took one look at my racked and scrawny person, seized me in his arms and gave me a hard hug. I served a roast chicken. It was under-cooked. He showed me some photos of himself taken twenty years ago, ‘before I was a builder – see? I had more hair but no shoulders.' When he stood up to leave, we realised that for the entire visit he'd been sitting on my glasses, which like a fool I'd left on the chair before he arrived. I picked them up in dismay but to our amazement they were hardly even bent.

To church at Advent. The imagery of the expected baby, the coming miracle. I didn't know I was rostered to read the lesson, and found myself suddenly up there facing a slab of Isaiah and a psalm, studded with unpronounceable Hebrew names. I ripped into it with a will: ‘Restore us, O God, let your face shine!'

And then the parish lunch to farewell our vicar, forced by a hostile diocese into early retirement. I saw three grown men cry. At the mike their voices choked and became faint, higher, weaker; their faces either distorted or broadened, clarified, sweetened.

To Melbourne for Christmas and New Year. I go for a walk with S.H. round the elm-shaded streets of North Carlton. We make ourselves laugh so hard that we can barely stumble along. She leads me to the gate of a large, splendid old house at the top of Drummond Street: ‘Look!'

We stand peering over the gate into a thick garden. A middle-aged man with his shirt off is working in some shrubbery at the far end of the drive. He is waist-deep in foliage, with his plump, pale back turned to us.

She nudges me and hisses, ‘It's X!' – an old lover of each of us. She calls his name. He half turns, very slowly; gives us a squinting, suspicious stare over his shoulder – two beats – then turns his back again and continues his task.

We stagger away, doubled over, then, once out of earshot, utter crazed squawks. ‘He turned away! He didn't want to speak to us! Did he see it was us? Is he shortsighted as well as
fat
and
white
?'

As we lurch along, sobbing with laughter, holding each other up, she gasps, ‘This reminds me of something Bill Garner said to me about you, right after you split up.
He said, “If all there was to life was walking along the street, Helen's the person I'd like to do it with.” '