Reading Madame Bovary (28 page)

‘Had to come this way to see Dolby,' he said. ‘Remember him? Thought I'd drive out to the valley while I was in the area and see how the old place was going. Then I thought I might as well drop by here on the off chance you still owned the shack.'

I had never owned the place but now that my father was dead I did. At last. When I no longer wanted it.

Seeing Mick, so unexpectedly, had the effect on me of walking through an open door, back into the past. Mick especially. To begin with he had been more Bill's friend than mine, one of those innocuous-seeming men who grew on you. Soon they were eating your food, sleeping on your couch, doing odd jobs about the place and maybe even sleeping in your bed. But my own deep affection for him derived from the time of Bill's death. It had been a violent spring, the wettest on record. In a week of storms and gale-force winds the scaffolding at one end of the construction works had collapsed and Bill and another man had been swept into the flood-swollen river.

Exactly one week after the funeral, when my parents had departed at my insistence and I was on my own again, Mick turned up. He cut the grass, chopped the wood, mended the pump and casually looked after the place for a whole summer while I grieved silently. There were days when we scarcely said a word to one another, when I made sandwiches and we sat outside under the shadecloth that Bill had tacked up, and we smoked and stared across to the hills. Friends came to see me and offered to stay but I didn't want anyone else around. Only Mick. Mick understood about silence; he was comfortable with it. One night we slept together but it didn't work, and in the morning nothing was said. With that instinctive tact that had enabled him to lead the life of an amiable nomad, Mick behaved as if nothing had happened. Eventually, when he thought I was ready, he packed up and hit the road.

Now he was back, with a yen to see the valley again, and he wanted me to come with him. But I had avoided the valley for years. After Bill's death I couldn't bear to go there; it was a site of too many promises that remained unfulfilled. Yet here I was, driving Mick along the coast beside the eroded sandhills. Each year the tides rose higher and the drop from the spiky grass to the beach below grew more and more steep. It was a windy day and a big sea was blowing in from the south-east, scattering a fine mist up over the sandbanks and across the road. ‘Wouldn't have recognised the place,' said Mick as we slowed into the outskirts of Tandarra. The town was flashier now, with a new beach promenade and ten-storey holiday apartments lined up along the foreshore. There were powerboats at the marina and talk of a canal development. But we still had an hour's journey ahead of us so we drove through the town without pause.

When at last we arrived at the turn-off to the valley there was a woman there, sitting idly by the roadside at a stall of homegrown blueberries. She looked vaguely familiar.

‘Do you recognise her?'

Mick shook his head. ‘You?'

‘No.' But I felt unnerved. Soon we would be in that lush clearing with the steep wooded hills and the filtered sunlight, that paradise of youth, and I could feel myself beginning to choke. It was too much. I could never have driven here alone.

We swung into the turn-off and began the steep ascent, up the narrow winding pass and through a passage of dense forest until, suddenly, we were gazing down into the sunlit open. At first glance the valley looked exactly as it did before: the cluster of stone houses, the old timber cabins, the rich grasslands. But there was no-one in sight. We drove on further, along the dusty unsealed track, and saw a man standing in what had been the goat enclosure. He seemed absorbed in the act of tying up a grey donkey and didn't look up, though he must have heard us drive in.

I parked beside the fence and we got out. ‘I hope you don't mind us driving in,' I said. ‘We used to have friends who lived here and we wondered if they still did.'

He was young, no more than twenty. He began to fill a wooden trough with water from a hose, then looked up from under his broad-brimmed hat and said: ‘What friends?' I thought him not so much blunt as shy.

‘Name of Eyenon,' said Mick. ‘You know 'em?'

‘No.'

‘Live here, mate?' asked Mick.

‘Nah, just keep an eye on the donkeys. Nobody lives here. People come weekends, but.'

‘Alright if we look around for a bit?'

‘Yeah,' he said, flatly, like it wasn't his place to give anyone permission to do anything.

We began walking in the direction of Miranda's old house. ‘She was bloody shattered,' said Mick, as if Geordie's abandonment had occurred only last week. ‘Drank herself stupid for a year.'

I looked around. ‘He left her a wonderful garden. Look, the orchard is still here.' There were apricot, apple and peach trees, ragged and in need of pruning.

Mick began to pull at some tall shoots of buffalo grass. ‘Yeah,' he murmured, ‘lots of fruit.' He yanked hard at a clump of the stubborn weed and suddenly it came away. ‘But no Geordie,' he said, casting the weed to one side. ‘And no John Lennon, either.'

I walked on ahead to where the oven had been. It was gone, completely dismantled, though you could see the concrete square where they had cemented it into the turf. The church, too, was gone. ‘Probably blew off its foundations,' said Mick, who had caught up to me. ‘They would have carted it away.' We could see, though, that some of the headstones remained upright, and the grass around them had recently been cut.

The stone houses, so sturdily built, looked just as before; if anything they seemed even more imposing. Only the wooden window frames were worn. ‘They're as pretty as ever,' I said. ‘Indestructible.'

‘You'd have to put a stick of gelignite under
them
.'

‘Dave still owns his.' I had kept this piece of information from Mick until now. I wanted to surprise him.

‘
Dave?
Still comes
here
?'

I nodded.

‘I thought the old crowd had all gone.'

‘They have, except for Dave. He comes here sometimes, at Easter, and school holidays.'

‘You're a dark horse. I didn't know you'd stayed in touch.'

‘I didn't.' And I told him of how, when I went to enrol my son in high school in the city, I had looked at the school's prospectus. There, towards the top of the staff list, was a David Eyenon. It was an unusual name and I thought there couldn't be two of them. And there weren't. It was him. ‘He's the deputy principal,' I said.

Mick laughed. I could see he was pleased. ‘That'd be right,' he grinned. ‘Dave would be running something, you could back that in.'

‘You know, he doesn't look any different. Still the same Dave, but in a collar and tie. Still a beanpole. Even wears his hair a bit longer than everyone else. He told us they'd stuck it out in the valley for two more years but the work dried up. They couldn't grow enough produce to sustain the lifestyle, and some of the women got restless. They wanted to move into the town, or back to the city.'

‘Got a new woman, did he?'

‘I think so. He said something in passing about his children, how they used to love the valley but now they're older they don't want to come. I've sometimes wondered if Ariel ever came back for Gracie but I didn't like to ask.'

Mick gave me a look. ‘Always fancied Ariel,' he said.

‘I know.' I knew what he was thinking: if it hadn't been Geordie it might have been him.

‘Look at this place,' I said. ‘It … it feels so empty. It all went wrong, didn't it?'

Mick put his arm around my shoulder and gave it a squeeze. ‘Yeah, mate, something usually does.' But his voice lacked conviction. He was gazing in the direction of Dave's house and his eyes had gone all misty. ‘I loved this placed, just loved it. It was so good while it lasted.'

Letter to the Romans

He wakes at the usual time, around dawn. He needs no alarm clock; it's as if his body had been programmed to respond at first light. It has always been his habit to lie in bed, reviewing his dreams. Sometimes he recalls nothing, but this is rare; on most mornings there is a vivid hangover of false memory, false because nothing in the dream world really happens, does it? And yet his dreams can produce such intense feeling, either of fear or rapture, that he feels compelled to conjure a meaning out of them. Why this? Why now?

On the morning that he first met her he had just had one of the most profound dreams of his life. He had been walking beside an expanse of water in the English Lake District, treading on a carpet of dry acorns in a quaint village lined with oak trees, and all that separated him from a precipice that fell away into the lake's dark surface was a dry stone wall. The stones were oval and flat and when he touched one he found it dislodged easily, as if this barrier wall were fragile. He stopped walking, the better to contemplate the relationship of the stones to one another, their surreal equilibrium, a quality even more affecting than the grandeur of the lake. In their un-mortared state of grace they seemed to embody an invitation, and perhaps even a promise. And what did all this mean? Well, nothing; it meant nothing, and yet it was so
there
, even though he knew there was no ‘there'. Some of his most vivid experiences occurred in a place that was nowhere.

When he woke he lay in bed and walked beside that stone wall again, in his mind's eye, and already the dream was vapid, had lost its potent aura. All the details were recoverable but not its mysterious charge, in this case a feeling of peace, of coming home. When his wife was alive he would sometimes describe one of his dreams, or listen to one of hers, and this was a condition of marriage, part of the unwritten contract; you had the right to bore each other with these disjointed night hauntings in the hope that someone who knew you well might decipher the code. Your dreams must mean something or why would the brain bother? Everything in biology has a function.

He got out of bed and raised the blind to let the light in.
One
day I will dive into that lake, but not yet.

After he had showered and dressed he went downstairs and already it was eight. On the table was a note he had left for himself the night before.
Milk, tomatoes,
c
horizo.
When his wife died he and his daughter, Alice, agreed they would take it in turns to prepare dinner and since he passed the shops on his walk to and from the university it was easier for him to do the shopping. But that was Alice's first year in the confinement of an office and the claustrophobia of her ten-hour days as a junior solicitor. More often than not it was he who had a meal waiting when she came home and the preparation of it yielded a quiet satisfaction. Alice is the love of his life. She is such a good girl; she has always done the right thing. But now she has met Adam and moved to live with him in Adelaide, only eight months after her mother's death.

‘I feel that I'm abandoning you,' she had said.

‘No, no,' he had protested. ‘You have to live your life. Your mother would want that.'

Now he lives under the weight of a double loss.

His walk to work is a necessary ritual; it loosens the stiffness in his
59
-year-old body and brings him down to earth, if one could describe the raffish energy of King Street as earthy. Still, there is the avenue of plane trees along City Road, the glinting silver surface of the public swimming pool and the haze of smog that hovers over the city's glassy towers. He likes the smog; it reminds him that he has escaped the rural tedium of his childhood. He turns in through the university gates and walks beside a sloping expanse of parched lawn that no amount of academic privilege can save from drought and water restrictions. When he reaches the Underwood Building he bounds up the main stairs to the second floor (yes, he can still bound) and collects his mail from its pigeon-hole. His heart rate is steady and he breathes easy: not bad for fifty-nine.

On that first morning, in the corridor outside his office, he had observed a woman, waiting. She was, he assumed, the mother of one of his students who had rung the day before to make an appointment. This woman had sounded irate, and recognising an edge of hysteria in her voice he had tried to put her off. But she had insisted it was urgent, even as she declined to say what she wanted.

He paused at the door and introduced himself. ‘John Garde.'

‘I'm Inez Charlton,' she said, ‘Daniel Charlton's mother. I rang yesterday.' She was agitated; she had black, glittering eyes.

Oh, dear, he thought, I am not in the mood for this, and turned his key in the lock of the door.

She entered his room with an air of nervous entitlement, sat without being invited and immediately began to rummage in her large, black-leather handbag for something she meant to show him. He watched her from behind his desk and he saw that she was a handsome woman with a shock of black hair, swept back, and small, fine features. He noted that she wore an expensively tailored business suit and seemed a woman of means. Despite her nervousness she had a certain presence.

Every now and then, maybe once a year, a parent materialised in his room to excoriate his influence over their child. What, he wondered, was it to be this time? Libertarianism? Nihilism? Anarchism? It certainly wouldn't be Marxism, not anymore.

He put on his polite but solemn face and waited for her opening sally. He heard himself utter the appalling words: ‘How can I help you?'

Without preamble she leaned across and thrust a cluster of printed sheets at him, some stapled-together text on A
4
paper, which she dropped onto his desk with no comment other than a look of withering scepticism.

When he glanced at the top sheet, expecting to see notes from his own lectures, he could not have been more surprised. He was looking at an extract from the New Testament. The Letter of Paul the Apostle to the Romans.