Gracious Living (28 page)

‘I thought we might stay together today,’ she said.

‘But we never do.’ He stared at her. ‘Don’t you want to find Adrian?’

‘No, why should I?’

‘Come now, Lydia.’ His eyebrows were raised, he clicked his tongue in that annoying way of his.

‘What do you mean?’ The words cut at the edge of her teeth.

‘Lydia, why spell things out. It’s not necessary, you don’t want to hear it and neither do I.’

Several dancers broke off from the main crowd and performed a conga that wriggled its way to the carpark. They formed a ring around Lydia and David, beckoning and calling and trying to persuade them to join the fun; but Lydia would have none of it. She stood with David in the circle and glared at him, hating his dreadful composure. He took her arm and she tried to shake him off, he held her more firmly while he laughed and joked with the dancers who finally moved away to more obliging targets.

‘Calm down, Lydia,’ he said when they were alone again. ‘We manage all right and have done so for a long time; you’ve had your freedom and I haven’t interfered. And I won’t, as long as you maintain your family obligations. So, I suggest we leave things as they are. Now, I see Vivienne over there with Elizabeth.’ He pointed towards the main group of singers and dancers. ‘I haven’t seen her for a long time and I’d like to say hello. You are, of course, welcome to join me.’ Lydia looked in the general direction but could find neither Elizabeth nor Vivienne. ‘There,’ David said, ‘at the edge of the crowd, in front of the Eiffel Tower imitation.’

‘It has nothing to do with the Eiffel Tower, it’s a bird pavilion. And it’s all very well for you to make innuendos about my behaviour, but what about you and Vivienne?’

‘You’re being ridiculous, Lydia, and you know it, and you’re making a spectacle of yourself. Now, are you coming or not?’

She shook him off, hating his clammy hands, and walked with him to the bird pavilion. Then she saw Elizabeth, the first time in years, so young, smiling and calm, and the sight caught in her throat. She realised how much she had missed her old friend. She swallowed hard, banishing even the possibility of regret and went forward smiling; as to whether Ginnie had told Elizabeth of her visit, Lydia no longer cared. Besides, Elizabeth would be discreet, she knew the correct form – they all did. And so it was that the greetings were genial, the conversation ordinary, the entertainment from the chorus diverting. After an appropriate interval Elizabeth excused herself in order to look around. Vivienne offered to accompany her, but Elizabeth was happy to be alone. Vivienne scanned the distant buildings and found the huge terraced shape of Eden Park Lodge. ‘There,’ she said, pointing to it, ‘I’ll meet you there in an hour.’

Lydia made Elizabeth uncomfortable, an odd disquiet almost as if Elizabeth had witnessed some misdemeanour, something which she would prefer not to have known. As Elizabeth walked toward the main cluster of buildings, she recalled an incident from their childhood when she had seen Lydia cheating. Lydia had denied it, her word against a little mousy girl whom no one much liked, and Lydia was exonerated. Elizabeth had been so ashamed of her friend; unable to betray her, she desperately wished she had not been a witness. It was the same feeling now, as if she had observed a crime, one for which Lydia had no remorse, indeed, little consciousness. It had nothing to do with adultery, and certainly not adultery with Elizabeth’s husband, the crime concerned loss and waste and stupidity. Here they were, two decades on, and Lydia none the wiser. Two decades, and it was as if Lydia had nothing to show for the passage of time. Nothing, that is, of her own. Her children were older, the house bigger, her husband richer, but what about Lydia? A few dry lines about the eyes, a slimmer figure, nothing else. Not even the recognition that the
fabrication she had maintained for half a lifetime had resulted in far more serious losses than one old friend. The legacy was enormous and it would exact its penance. Elizabeth felt deeply sorry for her.

Elizabeth looked around, she wanted a place away from the crowds, she wanted to think. She noticed some empty stands overlooking a bowling green and, pushing against the crowd, made her way there. She sat high in the stands and unconsciously started rubbing her arms, as if she could remove the touch of strangers. There were people playing a leisurely game, their voices cushioned by the spongy turf; Elizabeth sat and watched and thought. The depth of her feeling surprised her; in some inexplicable way Lydia threatened her, or rather Lydia’s life threatened. Could she, Elizabeth, ever have lived the same life? Would she have taken a lover or lovers if she had stayed with Adrian? Would she have entered a life of pretence, of crafting appearances in order to maintain a marriage maimed by boredom and neglect?

She sighed. Appearances? – she knew all about them; pretence? – it had girded her marriage. Although she could not but think the Dadswell marriage had been very different to the Branch one. Suddenly she laughed, she supposed everyone with a failed marriage used the same excuse: theirs was the exceptional bad marriage. And yet what would have happened if some of the time David had spent at work had instead been channelled towards his wife and family, and if some of the inspired energy Lydia must have used to keep Adrian entertained had instead been directed into her own marriage? The Dadswell marriage seemed irredeemable, but was Lydia and David’s? Surely the Branch marriage could have fared better, could have been quite satisfactory. But then satisfaction is not what most people desire from a marriage; excitement is much more attractive, although a lot more exhausting.

In the old days, the days of her own marriage, Elizabeth had been exhausted most of the time but it had nothing to do with excitement. The doctors diagnosed depression and prescribed valium; the doctors did not explore the reasons for her depression, they thought they knew: any young mother burdened with a
handicapped child was expected to be depressed. But the doctors were wrong. The genesis of her exhaustion was pretence: the daily grind of pretending to be happy, pretending she was managing, pretending fulfilment when there was only disappointment. Now, despite twelve-, fourteen-hour days, Elizabeth was seldom exhausted, and never in that old debilitating way. Could she have been like Lydia? Could she have evolved like her old friend?

The first twenty years of their lives had been remarkably similar – same school, same friends, same aspirations; the same life of parties and tennis and dressmakers. The first significant event to distinguish Elizabeth’s life from Lydia’s was Ginnie’s birth. Ginnie was Elizabeth’s first struggle, the first scar in an otherwise perfect life. Nothing had prepared her for this child; just to get through the days required an effort new to her experience, and not just a physical thing, but an effort of mind: suddenly she was forced to think. And she met new people, people with no preconceived notions of who she was and how she might react, and they made her think too. Without Ginnie, Elizabeth’s life might have paralleled Lydia’s, with her, it could not.

But perhaps this was too simple, for even as girls Elizabeth and Lydia had viewed the world differently, a difference so marked that sometimes when recalling an event at which both had been present, one might have no recognition of what the other was describing. A couple at a party for example: Lydia would see a fellow with blond curls and gorgeous body saddled with a talkative, sallow-looking woman dressed in last year’s fashions; two people standing close ‘with the girl doing all the touching because he’s not the least bit interested in her’. Elizabeth looking at the same couple would see intimacy in his arm across her shoulders, and familiarity in the way she touched him; Elizabeth would see how attentive they were to each other, how utterly engrossed in their conversation. And the next day while Lydia was making plans to meet the blond man, Elizabeth would recall the ideals the couple had represented. ‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ Lydia would say, ‘it was perfectly obvious he thought she was a bore.’

The same event, the same people, and such different visions.

Maybe she could never have been like Lydia, never had been like her, maybe she was wasting her time even thinking about it. She stood up, scanned the acres of Eden Park, flinched, actually flinched – she could never be a part of this – and left the bowling green. Immediately she found herself in the thick of a crowd.

‘Now where did you spring from?’ a man said, and at the same time an arm grabbed her waist. She turned around, he was about seventy, quite drunk, and unknown to her. She pulled away. ‘Don’t go, darling, what’s the hurry?’ But already she had pushed ahead. Then it struck her that everyone was keeping to the paths; she moved to the edge and stepped off into open space, and as she watched the slow sludge of people she wondered why more of them hadn’t had the same idea.

She looked around, there were crowds everywhere, but they were thicker near the buildings; she checked the time and decided to visit the native animal reserve. She walked across some rough ground and joined the path where it entered an area of Australian bush. Even here there were crowds, tanned and bare-skinned men and women in linen shorts, wide leather belts and loose cotton singlets, each with a drink in hand, talking and walking, leaning towards each other, seemingly oblivious to their surroundings. There were many animals, wallabies mostly, and a few emus strolling through a clump of bracken; and there were koalas in the trees, so the signs said, but Elizabeth, looking up in search of the furry fat bottoms wedged in the branches, saw none. And there was music, rollicking bush songs and droving ballads, and copies of the words in English and Japanese at the information stand.

People strolled around the area while the animals watched the parade, hopping out of the way should the people, so engrossed in their conversations, come too close. Elizabeth squatted down and reached out to a huddle of wallabies; the animals came closer, allowed her to pat them. She rummaged in her bag and found a handful of almonds which she offered to them. The nuts were popular, so much so that one little fellow put his head inside her bag hoping to find more. When the food was finished she stood up, gave the animals a final pat and left the area.

The scrub changed almost immediately; the ferns became more numerous, the undergrowth thicker and the eucalypts were replaced by huge trees that looked like giant red cedars. Elizabeth was entering Eden Park jungle, so a sign said, and, indeed, it bore a certain resemblance to Tarzan movies even down to the ropes of ivy cascading from the branches of the huge old trees. She went up to one, studied its gigantic trunk and discovered that it was made from a type of sculptured styrene foam, cleverly painted, and anchored to the ground with an intricate bolt system. Giant red cedars indeed! But no one else seemed to mind, she could hear people admiring them as they wandered through; better than California, she heard one man say.

She came to a footbridge straddling a pool. The water was stagnant, with a surface of bright green algae broken only by floating logs of wood. She expected a smell but there was none and decided to stop a while on the bridge. She leaned against a rail, allowing people to pass behind her. Then all of a sudden one of the logs moved, and with a shock Elizabeth realised she was staring at a crocodile, its craggy head breaking the surface like a giant tree trunk. She could see its eyes, open and watchful staring at her, and then it turned, heaving its long body through the green sludge. The primordial sludge of Eden Park, she joked to herself. And now someone in the passing mob shouted, ‘Crocodiles! Here in the pond!’ and there was a sudden crush of people hungry for danger. Elbows jostled ribs and feet rubbed shins and soon Elizabeth gave up and forced her way out, but not before she had offered a gesture of solidarity to the waiting watchful crocodiles.

A few metres further on the forest stopped and she entered an area with rows of cages. Here the guides had discarded the Eden Park purple and silver swimsuits and were sweltering in white laboratory coats; for this was a farm, a scientific crocodile farm, for meat and skins.

There was a row of cages each about two metres square and containing a few concrete rocks and a puddle of water. In the cages at one end, the nursery cages, the puddle was a pool and there were dozens of tiny crocodiles only a few centimetres long, while at the other end, the last cage contained only three crocodiles of
a little under a metre in length. Beyond that was the factory.

‘How long does it take for the crocodiles to move from that end,’ Elizabeth pointed to the nursery cages, ‘to this?’

The white-coated guide launched into a speech on the history and life cycle of the crocodile; she named continents, she used figures, there was a liberal sprinkling of anthropomorphic depictions – ferocious creatures but also fearful, gregarious but appreciative of privacy, loyal, shy, maternal – but no mention of these particular crocodiles in these particular cages who started life at one end of the row and finished it at the other. Other people came to listen and the guide smiled a greeting to each newcomer without disturbing the flow of words. She talked about production and demand, she talked about scientific tanning and special processes to remove odours from the skins, but she did not talk about animals. When she had finished she asked Elizabeth if there were any further questions; Elizabeth shook her head. The guide thanked her for her interest, wished her a nice day and turned to the other customers. Elizabeth slipped away, past the crowds – crocodiles were clearly a popular attraction – and back over the footbridge into the Eden Park metropolis.

‘It’s all here,’ she heard someone say, ‘that Dadswell fellow has thought of everything.’

And he had.

Where the buildings began, the footpaths stretched into avenues, gleaming strips decorated with blue and mauve tiles. Elizabeth kept close to the buildings, making people walk around her rather than forfeit her little piece of space. And as she walked she peered into doorways of shops, apartments, gymnasiums, club houses, with no desire to enter, no desire to join the mass of undifferentiated faces all nodding together. So when she saw Lauren and Stewart Warneke her first impulse was to run, but too late – Lauren was dashing across the foyer of one of the club houses, her pleasurable noises clearly audible above the general rabble.