A Bird on My Shoulder (7 page)

I stared at her.

‘I can do a test now, if you like,' she said briskly.

A few moments later she came back into the room.

‘It's all very straightforward,' she said. ‘Congratulations. The test is positive.'

•••

I left the surgery feeling dazed.

Although Julian and I were now almost inseparable, I wondered how he would react. We had discussed having
children, but I think we both imagined this would happen later rather than sooner. I rang his office and asked him to meet me for lunch in a downtown café.

I sat near an open window, ordered a soft drink and kept breathing deeply. Out in the port I could see large container ships, rusting and ugly, against a hopeful sky. A sickly smell of copra drifted through the air.

Julian arrived and apologised for being late. He had barely sat down before I blurted out my news. He took my hand and kissed it.

‘That's marvellous, darling,' he said. ‘Well, we should get married as soon as we can. I'll organise everything.'

•••

Looking back, it still amazes me how quickly my life changed in a matter of weeks, how I had gone from staunch independence to a deep level of connection and commitment in such a short space of time. This transition took place without any hesitation.

Before the wedding, Julian decided we should fly to Korea so that I could meet his second son, Charlie, who was studying at university in Seoul. I had met his other boys, Oliver, Henry and Edward, when they had come home on holidays. We had managed to negotiate these initial meetings without too much difficulty; in my own mind, I was simply someone their father knew. However, with a baby on the way,
whatever Julian's sons thought of the situation before, it would have been very confronting for them to realise that I would now be a permanent part of their lives. At the time, I was quite naïve. I had no real idea of how they felt, nor any real ability to empathise; their situation was completely outside my experience. I was caught up in the bubble of being in love, and had little insight into the enormity of what was happening for them.

Surprisingly, I found being a stepmother in waiting slightly nerve-racking. I really wanted to be accepted by Julian's sons and I could see it was not going to be easy. My presence created a minefield of bruised feelings – there was no point in pretending it was otherwise – and I felt powerless to change it. For the most part, we all got on very well and I liked the boys a great deal. However, I was excruciatingly aware, at times, of the undercurrents between us, of what was not being said. Naively, I just wanted to be myself, not occupy some awful maligned stereotype. But the relationship between children and their step-parents is one that has everything stacked against it from the start. I often found myself feeling self-conscious and slightly intimidated by the power of these confident, strong-willed young men.

Julian was more philosophical. While he was not immune to the deeper emotional layers at work, he managed to stay above the fray and, like the sailor he had been since his youth,
resolutely maintained an attitude of quiet understanding and a determined focus on the far horizon.

•••

I was happy to go to South Korea to visit Charlie, but my enthusiasm was somewhat dampened by the fact that I was constantly nauseous and tired and hardly in the mood for travel. I shuffled off the plane, creased and bloated. At the end of a long sloping gangway, hundreds of people milled around quietly.

‘Dad!' A dark-haired young man pushed through the crowds to embrace Julian. Unexpectedly, an enormous bunch of flowers was thrust into my arms.

‘You must be Lucy,' said Charlie, looking at me with a warm smile. ‘It's really great to meet you.'

•••

During our time in Korea we took a trip to Seoraksan National Park, about a four-hour bus ride from Seoul. One night we went for dinner at a hotel which boasted several karaoke bars. After a few drinks Julian suggested that we should all get up and sing. Charlie and I laughed.

‘But you can't sing,' I said.

‘I know,' he replied.

I thought he was joking. For a start, Julian was deeply reserved – singing in public was the last thing I'd imagine he
would ever want to do. He walked over and collected two books of lyrics from across the room.

‘No way,' I said. ‘I'm not doing this.'

Julian sat idly flipping through the song sheets.

‘Ah, yes. This is the one,' he said. He walked over to the stage and a group of men started clapping. Oh no, I thought, surely this isn't happening.

Julian nodded to the operator and the opening bars of the unrepentant ‘My Way' began to float across the room.

In that moment, I was in absolute awe of his ability to put fear aside and launch into the moment. Julian genuinely did not care that he couldn't sing or that people were watching; he was having the time of his life.

•••

My mother flew over from England the week before the wedding to ‘give me away'. Having never met Julian I can only imagine the trepidation with which she anticipated meeting her prospective son-in-law, who was only slightly younger than she was. Like my father, she was gracious, but I could tell this was not an easy situation for her.

One day she had gone out shopping with one of the young men from the AAP house, John. Although she was relatively young, still in her late fifties, I was concerned that some young street boys or
raskol
might take advantage of her.

My fears were well founded. They soon returned home, John brimming with the story of how a young man had grabbed my mother's small purse as they left a shop. My mother could be quite an anxious person in many ways but in a crisis she was amazing; clear, level-headed and in no doubt about what needed to be done.

‘I let the bag go because I didn't want to lose my finger,' she said very matter-of-factly with no trace of trauma. ‘John went with the police to track the lad down but they couldn't find him. When he came back from chasing the chap, he said to me: “I find him, I kill him, I fuck him.'''

My mother's instinct for understatement, a very English trait, came to the fore.

‘I said to him, “I don't think you want to do that, dear.”'

•••

The wedding day was memorable but perhaps not for all the reasons I'd anticipated. Unbeknown to me, I had contracted malaria, and I spent the entire day before the late-afternoon ceremony drifting in and out of sleep, wondering if my blinding headache was a sign that I was having second thoughts.

That morning, ML had organised a raiding party to steal branches of bougainvillea from various hotspots around the city with my mother and another friend from Australia, Steph Clark. When I arrived at the cathedral in the late afternoon,
dosed up on paracetamol in order to loosen the large vice of pain squeezing my forehead, I walked into the service through a glorious arch of vivid, tropical flowers. Even in my happy daze I could see it was hard on Edward and Henry. They were polite and friendly, but this was a very uncomfortable, painful and confronting occasion for them.

Our vows seemed imbued with the age-old spirit of the tribal cultures that we lived among. ‘With my body I honour you. I share with you all that I have. Where you go I will go. Where you stay I will stay. Your people shall be my people.'

‘I take you as my husband to have you and to hold you from now on; for better for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. To love you and take care of you until death separates us.'

At the time, I did not realise that this was not just a promise I was making to Julian – it was a much deeper declaration about the kind of woman I wanted to become. I had no idea, of course, how hard these promises would be to live up to, or how much I would come to rely on them in later days, when so much of our marriage dissolved into darkness.

•••

In my mind I trace back over those early, heady days, searching for missed clues. Were there any signs, even then, that Julian's health might be compromised in some way?

I certainly thought he drank a lot, but it was no more than many did. It was just a normal part of being an expatriate and living in constant oppressive heat. At least, I reasoned, he did a lot of exercise. I knew his mother had died of cancer but I dismissed that as not being a particular cause for alarm – rather, I had focused on his father, who reached nearly ninety before his death in the accident.

To me, Julian seemed invincible. His life force was so strong that it was impossible for me to imagine him in any other way. So I was surprised when he casually mentioned one day that he was going to hospital to have a blood test which had been organised by an old friend of his, haematologist Dr John White. He'd been having them regularly for years because of a permanently swollen left calf, the result of a botched operation several years before.

Julian was a little vague about why he was being asked to do this, but he had a huge respect for the medical profession and was content to follow instructions. I certainly had no concerns at all. I felt that Julian's zest for life and passion for sport would keep him active for many years. There was nothing to suggest that anything but a long and robust life stretched before him.

8 December 1995

9

Married life in those early days was magical;

the world seemed to gleam anew.

The spirit of generosity between Julian and me transformed my rather immature and untested ideas about the constraints of married life. Among all the dinners and jazz, laughter and sailing, there were moments where life leaped out at me, full and vibrant: the early-morning screech of birds, the sight of an aching sky at sunset, the frangipanis outside the window whose scent seduced me as I slept.

I felt so blessed to be living with someone who had such a level perspective on life. Even though I could see that our union was unconventional and clichéd to outsiders, the marriage made absolute sense to me. For the first time in my adult life I felt absolutely accepted by a man. Finally, here was someone who was not at all troubled by my extremes of mood; the force of my
temper and my capacity for deep tenderness were both accepted within the safe harbour of his personality.

Julian was an introvert who led a very external life – I was an extrovert who led a very internal life. While I was spontaneous, disorganised and fiery, Julian was fixed, methodical and always calm. Strangely, I did not feel stifled by his predictability and never felt he was trying to impose his values or opinions upon me. We were polar opposites politically. I was definitely left-leaning with a few twists and he was conservative with a flair for surprises. He was an absolute creature of habit, eating the same breakfast – two Vitawheat biscuits with lime marmalade, half a pawpaw with fresh lime juice – and the same lunch – ham and coleslaw sandwiches – every day. After work he would immediately go out for a run or a walk. If the boys were home, they would play squash together at lunchtimes.