Читать книгу Under the Knife - Andrea Goldsmith - Страница 9

Edwina Frye is standing at the water’s edge, a sea breeze soothes a bullish northerly, murky pools cover her feet. She is avoiding her flat where Alexander Otto waits in folders of notes, as he has these past several months, waiting for her to do him justice. She has written his childhood and the first of the university years, grinding out the sentences evermore slowly. But something is obstructing her — not simply aversion, nor even boredom, there is sabotage at work and it’s wrecking the job.

This is her fourth biography in nine years, and Otto in much the same mould as his predecessors. And he is not unwieldy, in fact, if she were to believe everyone she has interviewed, Alexander Otto is flawless, with a life as spectacular and pristine as a theme park. And what does it matter if he is lying? She’s a professional, she’s dealt with lies before. So why can’t she finish him off and deliver the work to the College of Surgeons? Why this urge to plough a bulldozer through his seemingly unblemished terrain?

Something is awry and the problem — how she wishes it were otherwise — resides not with Alexander Otto but herself. The trenches of her dark centre are filling; she senses a wrestling at her foundations, something raucous and reckless is hobbling the smooth conduct of her life. She wants to write Alexander Otto into hell.

She grinds her feet into the sand; if only it were Otto underfoot, faultless Otto who should slide off her pen with ease, dedicated Otto who is too good to be true. Her own black panic is pointing the bone and it sees something suppurating in him. She wants him gone, she wants the job finished, but the end is not in sight. She loiters at the beach when she should be at work, she cooks elaborate meals that rot in the fridge, she squanders hours over coffee with friends, and slinks past her study with eyes averted. As for Otto, he keeps remembering inane details and additional people she should contact — ‘For the personal touch,’ he says, ‘to soften the image of the medical man.’ But if it were soft he was wanting he should have chosen another biographer. Yet the habits of a lifetime dictate that even Alexander Otto must be satisfied, so she follows his leads and records the new details, and his goodness accumulates in such abundance that it oozes out of him like pus.

Alexander describes himself as fortunate, yet a man who has known only good fortune would, Edwina thinks, be hostile to anything less. For every win there is a loss, for every winner a loser, so what has Otto destroyed in order to achieve so much? Edwina has searched and searched, not to use the information, the men at the College were quite clear in their instructions, but for her own curiosity.

Edwina Frye writes very specific biographies. She delivers to the commissioning body — the Retail Association, North-West Mining, the Church of Universal Connection, and soon, she hopes, the College of Surgeons — a pile of manuscript as neat and clean as newly laundered linen. But neat and clean is not necessarily the whole story, and neither is it enough to sustain her for the duration of the job. It is fortunate then, that for every prominent man there is always a submerged narrative. Long ago, Edwina discovered that as a man rises, the public face comes to obscure and eventually blot out not only the regrettable events that inscribe a life but any shoddy personal attributes as well. But peel back the edges of the great man, peel them back with the patient probing of a mother, and the pockmarks are still there — or so it was with Otto’s predecessors. Edwina has applied herself to Alexander’s edges, but the seal is suspiciously secure. As for goodness, it is easy to appear good, Edwina has been quite a success at it herself, but a good heart is quite a different matter, and disturbingly uncommon.

She is buried mid-calf in sucking wet sand, two girls dash past, deliberately close and threatening. She yells at them and they tell her to fuck off, two school-aged kids and she old enough to be their mother. She pulls her feet free and heads towards Port Melbourne. But it’s no use, like the girls she shouldn’t be at the beach at one o’clock on a Thursday, she should be home and at her computer putting Alexander Otto in order. But order has deserted her. She finds herself sticking pins into his perfect childhood, she makes him a cheat and a bully, she runs him off the rails. She flies with her creation and it’s a wonderful feeling, and the next day, returned to grey and sober mood, she reverts with guilty vigour to the main story. The work has become a voodoo doll, she sticks in the pins but the one who winces is herself.

These stirrings are not new, but like stray cats fossicking in suburban garbage have been easily placated. It was mid-way through her first biography that she chanced on the solution. She found herself writing two lives: the public version, clean and authoritative and just what the commissioning agents ordered, and the private account containing the dirt. And has used the same system ever since. When each job is finished, the raw data, notes and drafts of the public life are deposited in a filing cabinet, while the much smaller wad of private musings — the parallel life — is crammed into one of the cartons she keeps in the pit of her wardrobe. The wardrobe is her version of Dorian Gray’s attic, the dirty overflow of successful lives shoved in with her own failed scribblings. Here, in letters never sent, unfinished short stories, first chapters of half a dozen novels, gnawed-on poems, is the real Edwina no one ever sees. She never reads the stuff, couldn’t bear to, just every now and then adds a new wad to the latest carton, folds the flaps, arranges her shoes in front, drapes an old blanket on top, and shuts the door on her mouldering dreams.

Not knowing what else to do she persists with her private account of Alexander Otto, but it’s a scant document. She finds herself fingering the public version, dirtying the edges, fighting the temptation to topple him. The Otto biography is biting the hand that feeds it; somehow his hidden beasts are providing a feast for her own.

The problem with Otto is he has never suffered, not as an adopted child, nor a conservative student in the sixties, and certainly not as a physician and surgeon. She has tried all her techniques. She has prodded and poked, she has listened and encouraged, but apart from Rosie, the retarded aunt, and Sybil Becker, the failed love of his student days, his life has been as perfect as if it had been planned down to the last detail. Just like her own. Yet he is happy and she is not, he is a success and she seems suddenly very ordinary.

She turns around, the wind whipping her face and fear whipping her guts. And no point in blaming Otto; Edwina Frye, aficionado of fear, has engineered her life with elegant precision, but while Alexander, who has done much the same, possesses a life all sparkle and song, hers has been a gradual extinguishing of the lights. It is possible, she is now thinking, to be too thorough, for she finds herself a straggler, not in the life she planned, but the life she really wanted. Is she always condemned to trail in her own shadow? And who is it who marches up ahead flanked by success and admiring friends? It’s the person she put together piece by piece, the person she devised according to the rules. But it’s fake, exactly as she planned and true to the blue-print, but fake nonetheless. Follow your dreams, follow every rainbow; it works well enough in popular songs but not in real life.

Edwina has left a trail behind her as definitive as an engraver’s mark. She went from A to B to C, she did exactly as she intended, but somehow, and without realising it, she has backed herself into a corner. To arrive at the wrong destination inadvertently is bad enough, but to have plotted each move, to have made a journey both arduous and short on pleasure only to find herself in a place no better than that she was trying to avoid is failure of the worst sort. As for the fear, it remains as fierce and nebulous as it has always been.

All she ever wanted was to manage; quash her renegade self, so she believed, and she would be rewarded. She was born with an imagination that kept breaking its banks, and raised in a family lodged firmly in the high ground. ‘Don’t draw attention to yourself,’ punctuated her childhood, and ‘Concentrate on what’s in front of you,’ when she shared her imaginings. She acquired friends whose expectations seemed to change from one occasion to the next, and later came lovers wanting more than was safe to give. But still she managed. Yet now she finds herself staring into the smooth-skinned face of banality. Her work is competent but ordinary, her flat, described as a studio apartment to puff a scrap of bohemia into a beige and dun box, is ordinary, her appearance is ordinary — medium height, medium build, medium attractive — and while her hair is distinctive, the hairdresser says the red will fade and the curls will frizz, and she is thirty-nine which is the most ordinary feature of all.

But not the worst. Edwina envies Alexander Otto. Not his success, but the ease he enjoys. His dreams, far from rotting in the bottom of a wardrobe, have been realised, every single one of them. They’ve shaped his life, while Edwina’s have ambushed hers. At the most difficult times, she has been tempted to unburden herself to Nigel, but he wouldn’t believe her. Together with all her friends, Nigel is convinced that Edwina Frye need envy no one. Look at her, they say, as they sit at her dining table delighting in her food; look at her, they say, as she regales them with tales from the high and mighty; look at her, they say, as she does a fulminating Pastor Jim offering to save their souls for a price. Pastor Jim, chief minister of the Church of Universal Connection and the most interesting of her subjects, was on a comet to God and eager for others to ride with him. ‘All of you,’ Eddie says to her guests, ‘all of you come fly with me, it’s not too late to collect your boarding passes.’ And pulling out her shirt tails, ‘See,’ she says, ‘I’ve room for you all.’ And the friends laugh at the performance and savour the food and linger for more entertainment, and when at last they leave, Nigel takes Edwina in his arms. ‘My little comet,’ he says, ‘my own Hailey’s princess,’ and suggests they fly away to bed and leave the cleaning up for the morning.

Edwina writes her biographies, she cooks her banquets, she makes people laugh, and when her friends in more sombre mood download their troubles she knows how to listen and empathise. Edwina Frye need envy no one, so of course she does not confide in Nigel. She suspects that if she were to write a proper biography, plunge with the obsessive abandon of a lover into a life safely over, she would feel less of a fake. But she is not the type to plunge, she tests the water, she treads gently, she enters each day as if it were infested with crocodiles.

Edwina Frye has shaped herself with care, and this from her earliest years, as if she were born knowing the penalties of being different. And she was different, too clever for happiness, or so her parents thought, and too big for easy femininity. A big, clever girl, and her parents, or rather her mother — her father, a silent presence on weekends and family holidays, always gave the impression of being absent — would have preferred a daintier, less clever version. Born imperfect, she set about rectifying her faults, and those that couldn’t be fixed she was determined to hide. But it was far from easy. Among her earliest memories is her sense of bewilderment at kindergarten as she sat at the tiny table, the miniature chair cutting into her spine, while she watched the other children. It was like peering through one of those stereoscopic viewers, the scene so real and inviting and she trapped on the wrong side of the lens. She takes a step forward but is no closer, she puts out a hand but it closes on air, she sees what she most desires but is forced to remain at a distance. Bewilderment and the threat of exclusion. So she watched and she copied. She learned to cut and paste, she learned to climb the monkey bars despite her terror, and she kept her big-girl dreams and clever-girl desires hidden like jewels in a velvety box to glitter for her alone.

These days her external life is as decorous as a Flemish interior, and any doubts or discomforts she stuffs into notebooks and shoves into the depths of her wardrobe. The wardrobe is bursting, her neatly pressed clothes fighting for air. Edwina, who writes parallel lives for her prominent men has, she realises, constructed much the same for herself.

She wants to blame Alexander Otto, she wants to blame the blistering heat, but it was she who sucked the life out of her. Alexander has managed much better; no suffering, no fear, he knew what he wanted and tolerated no diversions.

‘He was always going to be a doctor,’ his mother said at their first interview. ‘He knew his mind from the beginning. It was one of the qualities that made him so special.’

Lorraine Otto, a youthful eighty-four-year-old, thrives on love for her son, gardening and bowls, in that order of preference. Every detail about Alexander’s life has been lovingly preserved, remarkable details from Lorraine Otto’s perspective, chronically numbing from anyone else’s. She has stockpiled her son’s life: school reports, scrapbooks, countless snapshots, university assignments, even a brace of home movies that take Alexander from his first day at school through annual prize-givings, holidays at the coast, visits to the zoo, weekends at the snow, birthdays, Christmases, parties, graduations. The peculiar feature of the movies is that their star, despite the passage of time and the changing backdrops, remains fundamentally the same. His gaze is always directed to the camera, he winks, he smiles, he cavorts, he always gives a perfect performance. And he was always going to be a doctor.

‘Alexander was fascinated by the body, even as a baby,’ Lorraine Otto said on a later occasion. ‘Blood, scars, nothing bothered him.’ She lowered her voice, ‘Not even faeces. He’d sit in his cot playing with it, as if it were clay.’

A modern-day Wolfman, Edwina found herself thinking. Excited by his excreta as a child, he becomes a bowel specialist and dedicates himself to the stuff. And must have smiled, for Lorraine continued, ‘It wasn’t so funny at the time. His beautiful wicker cot would be so badly soiled I’d have to drag it outside and hose it down.’ After a pause she added, ‘Of course, being such a clever child, it didn’t happen often. And when we learned he wanted to be a doctor, suddenly it all made sense. He was always a special child.’

A special child, this said over and over again, with a clarity of vision not found in other children. ‘Alexander noticed everything,’ Lorraine said, ‘and was always absolutely sure what he saw. I’d point out the shapes in the clouds, the bearded old west wind of the fairy story, the huge white-winged sailing ships, but he saw only what was in front of him. A cloud was always a cloud.’

‘Perhaps,’ Edwina suggested, ‘he was drawn to certainty because of his own uncertain beginnings.’

Mrs Otto dismissed this as she did anything that emphasised Alexander’s adoption. ‘We never made any secret of his birth. I’ve told you, he was a child who knew his own mind.’

‘But surely the mystery of his biological parents — ’

‘There never was any mystery, Alexander simply wasn’t interested.’

‘But not knowing, couldn’t that have had some effect on the person he became?’

‘It might in some children, but not Alexander.’

So Alexander Otto became what was ordained. His mind was medical, his vision was medical, he was a complete medical entity. As for anything else, the spirit, the soul, he has converted it to flesh and knows it as others might know the intricacies of tripe. And when he looks up at the sky he still sees only clouds. Just like Edwina, but unlike him, she struggles to ignore what else is up there. Edwina wants her life to be tidy, and a mind that infuses the sky with fantasy is not to be trusted. It is best to see only clouds so she does.

She walks up the beach and sits on the sand, leaning her back against the stone wall. The beach is dotted with workers on their lunch break; stretched out on the sand, their clothes discarded in neat piles, their skin reddens in the blazing sun. And more children playing truant, as carefree and defiant as Edwina always wanted to be but never had the courage.

From her earliest years Edwina acted as if she believed life made sense, that all she needed was a knowledge of the rules. By the time she finished kindergarten she was well-versed in kindergarten rules, but quite a different set was required at school. Everyone watching and waiting for her to make a mistake, and she determined not to give them satisfaction. Ever vigilant, she did not give herself much satisfaction either, although the basic rules, hiding her cleverness and listening to friends relate in extravagant detail the rhythms of family life, were easy enough. And she must have got most of it right because she was popular. The girl who policed every one of her actions with the cold eyes of a zealot was the first to be selected for teams, was always surrounded by a crowd at lunchtime, and was invited to all the birthday parties.

In fourth grade, another scholarship girl, Faye Gilling, started at the school. Faye, too, was different, but rather than stitch herself up with fear, Faye was outrageous. Loud-mouthed and flamboyant and always in trouble, she said she was a witch and perhaps she was; certainly she had courage, given the standing of the occult in Methodist schools. While Eddie sought acceptance in convention, Faye, flashy and brilliant and shunned by most of the other girls, didn’t seem to care. Such bravado for walking the edge and walking it alone. In fourth grade Faye was going to be a painter, by the ninth grade she was going to be a poet, when she left school she became a journalist with a drug habit, who’s still propelling herself with the same old swagger.

Faye wasn’t a friend, popular girls couldn’t afford to mix with outsiders, but secretly Eddie admired her. Faye had fun while Eddie shadowed herself; Faye was knowing while Eddie, refining her role for each situation, seemed to know less and less. But having decided on her path, Eddie seemed unable to change. Dreams don’t stand a chance against relentless knowledge of one’s shortcomings. In the end, Eddie’s desire for change became a paralysed limb she learned to work around.

Edwina still wants to believe that life makes sense, even though she knows that if it were true, a smart girl like her would have learned the rules long ago. And yet she remains guided by this belief in her biographies. She searches for patterns and she finds them. Every contradiction, every unpredictable act can be explained, and if not, is omitted from the biography, although may find a place in her private musings. To her prominent men she makes a gift of her own lifelong desire for order.

Alexander Otto has found order whether he wants it or not, but alerted by her own experience, Edwina is suspicious. She wishes she were not, she wants to close the shutters on her own curiosity and close the book on him. His life is turning the spotlight on to her and it makes her uncomfortable. And not why she chose this work. She wanted the mutterings of other lives to silence her own, other promises, other secrets, other flaws.

How can you work with such despicable people? her friends ask, all of them well-educated, well-employed and politically to the left of centre. And while she lies to them, she does not to herself: she has no desire for subjects who will point the finger at her own less-than-satisfactory life. So, good socialist that she is, she chose a capitalist for her first subject, and environmentalist that she is, a mining magnate for the second, and atheist that she is, a fundamentalist preacher for the third, and now Otto with his artificial intestine research and Edwina a long-time opponent of transplant medicine. It is their very difference that has kept them out of her hair. But not so Alexander Otto. An insidious merging is occurring. She focusses on his conservatism, and comes face to face with her own; she adds up his successes, and finds her own contemptuously short list. As for the pivotal events that are found in most lives, Otto could recite his without hesitation: the luck of the adoption draw, meeting mentor and friend Dr Faine, choosing this particular university and that particular hospital, marrying Cynthia, having daughters not sons. When Edwina searches for her own pivotal points, she might well be on the Nullabor plain.

Not that anyone would guess, for in all aspects of her life she provides the perfect performance for a well-educated person of stable background. She is offered more commissions than she can accept; Nigel, who considers himself a feminist, compares well with the partners of her girlfriends; she is known for her sense of humour, her soufflés and her social conscience. Indeed, if a person were all surface, Edwina is as perfect and predictable as Alexander. But unlike him, there has always been her inner world of desire.

As a child she wanted books when her friends wanted roller-skates, and to play in her mind when she was supposed to be playing netball. She had a crush on the singing mistress when the science master was all the rage, and when periods and breasts appeared she longed to be invisible. Yet she managed the ball games, and the breasts and the periods, even the science master with his sulphurous breath and hairy ears. And later at university she wanted Paula Harding, wanted her mightily, but settled for musty Keith instead. There seemed no easy way of airing her desires and still being accepted, at least not in the abstract, so she locked her desires away intending to come back to them once the rest of her life was in order. Now she realises she waited too long and her life will never be in order. And wonders why this occurs to her now. Why not with Pastor Jim and his concern over her infidel’s soul, or years ago and the failure with Paula? And knows it is Otto, something about him, like the smell of garlic, and it lingers in the air, on her skin, long after he’s left the room.

‘There’s an aura about Alexander,’ his wife said recently. ‘He’s a man with presence. I recognised it when first we met and I’ve been aware of it ever since.’ She paused a moment, fiddling with her diamond ring. ‘He’s a good man,’ she said finally, ‘and one day he’ll be a great one.’

His wife, his mother, his friends, even his colleagues refer to him in much the same manner, but Edwina is convinced that a man who hasn’t suffered, a man who appears to be without enemies is a man with secrets.

Edwina shuffles on the sand trying to escape the sun; in the end she gives up and continues along the beach. Edwina knows all about secrets, yet hardly knows what she’s hiding any more. What she remembers most is the effort they require, while the secrets themselves lie leaden and stained like rocks at the bottom of the ocean. She looks along the beach to the breakwater and sees her fate reflected there. For all her assets — her work, her sense of humour, her feminist boyfriend, she’s going nowhere. She’s trodden far too carefully, eyes directed always to the final destination, her mask of steel fitted ever more snugly.

‘You’re a control freak,’ Nigel said a few nights back as she hopped on top of him while they were watching the mid-evening news.

Busy with buttons and zips, Edwina did not bother to answer; besides, she knows he likes her to run the show.

‘It’s not necessary to be good at everything,’ Paula Harding used to say. ‘Let yourself go, give those demons of yours a holiday.’

And her mother’s advice: ‘Just do the right thing, that’s all people can ever expect of you.’

Even Alexander Otto has commented on Eddie’s need for control, but like Nigel, he has learned he will benefit. Edwina Frye can be trusted to do a job well, and given her current job is his biography, it’s in his interests she doesn’t change.

‘Pull yourself together,’ her mother used to say when Eddie was unhappy. ‘Just pull yourself together.’

Pull yourself together, Eddie now tells herself, and with a last uneasy glance at the breakwater wanders up the beach to the road.

The flat is stifling. Eddie dumps her mail on the desk and her clothes on the bed, and dressed only in underwear goes to the kitchen for a drink. The tiles are cool; she slides to the floor, sits with legs outstretched and sips slowly. And there’s no miraculous cleansing, no flashes of insight, just too much time wasted and too much work to be done. She refills her glass and goes to the study, sifts through the letters, then turns her attention to the parcel. It contains her author copy, long overdue, of J.M. Walker: Man of Faith, bound in ethereal blue with titles in gold. She flips through the volume — crazy, crass Jim so elegantly reproduced — and places it on the shelf between Man of Steel: The Life of Bernard Pierce, maroon leather with silver lettering, and King of Shopping, green leather, gold print. She runs her hand along the shelf; three biographies since finishing her doctorate, with another on the way. The books look impressive, far more impressive than they really are; stylish exteriors and flawed within, just like their author. And what, she wonders, would a biographer do with her? Simply wouldn’t bother. Which is what she would like to do with Otto. But there is the contract, and her reputation to consider, not to mention the problem of knowing what to do instead.

On her desk is a small pile of manuscript and nearby several folders of raw data. She had hoped to discover the identity of Alexander’s biological parents, but if anyone knows they are not telling, and with no one left to probe she has no excuse but to proceed. She leafs through the manuscript, such a tidy childhood — doting parents, adoring grandparents, the special relationship with the retarded aunt Rosie, friends, prizes, the meeting with Dr Faine and the nurturing of young Alexander’s medical ambitions. An impeccable beginning.

‘Yours was an impeccable beginning,’ she said to him early in the project.

Alexander had looked surprised. ‘Just a normal childhood.’

‘No problems? No upsets?’

He supposed there were but nothing important enough to remember. T was a happy child.’

Pastor Jim had reported a childhood of dingy neglect, Bernard Pierce was sent to boarding school at the age of six, and the king of shopping had to wait until his first job before he wore anything other than second-hand clothes. But not Alexander. His childhood was as slick and sure as his surgeon’s knife.

Edwina leans back in her chair and closes her eyes. She sees the young Alexander, the adored only child, Lorraine fussing over him, the father so proud. And at school, among the bluestone buildings and clipped playing fields, a prized student with a golden future, his name inscribed on honour boards, his photograph in the school magazine. And then is blundering into her own past — different playing fields and different buildings, yet the same sour smell of school. And now her classroom, and in front of the blackboard chilly Miss Dawe freezing the girls into ladylike submission. She turns to Eddie, is walking towards her, holding between thumb and forefinger as if it were filth Eddie’s poem about death. ‘You wrote this?’ Miss Dawe is flapping the paper in Eddie’s face. ‘You wrote this all by yourself?’ And when convinced it is Eddie’s own work, promptly sends her to the school psychologist.

Death, Eddie discovered, was an unsuitable topic for a nine-year-old. And while she had already excised numerous taboo topics under the watchful eye of her mother, she was forced to acknowledge the job was far from complete.

The psychologist was a sweet, shabby woman with no feeling for poetry, but by her own account, considerable feeling for young lives. She was sorry, she said, that Edwina was so unhappy, but if she would only trust her, she would soon feel much better. Eddie was not unhappy, she was furious she had not kept the poem private, but the poem itself had been unbridled pleasure. She had imagined death as a sleek lion with treacly eyes who wrapped her in his tail and lifted her high on his haunches, and together they roamed the jungle for all eternity. It was a good poem, of that she was sure, and if she had been a steel and bravado sort of child like Faye Gilling, might have challenged the psychologist. But she was neither so strong nor so confident, and with a hefty bag of similar mistakes, she realised she had yet to master the knack of childhood. So she decided to exploit the psychologist’s expertise, and posed question after question until she was equipped with knowledge enough to erase taboo from her public repertoire. By the time she was discharged, not only had she acquired a comprehensive list of taboo topics, she had learned that childhood was a barbed-wire cage, and everything she held precious must be kept private.

So the secrets accumulated, the lies too, but she thought them integral to childhood, in much the same way as school milk and compulsory sport. And what was the alternative? With a mind that ranged far beyond netball and ‘The Brady Bunch’, that brought fictional characters to life and saw death as a kind and handsome lion, she was afraid people would reject her if they discovered what she was really like. When you’re the one who is different, you don’t try to change the others, clearly you’ve got it wrong. So you watch and copy and try to be perfect, and you sew up your differences with thick threads of fear. And while you know you cannot become other than who you are, at least you can try and hide the worst.

So pull yourself together, she now tells herself, opening her eyes, just pull yourself together and finish the job. She presses a key and the screen lights up. Alexander is at university, he’s a serious student, top of his class, but nonetheless a ‘good fellow’. Sybil Becker would disagree, but all Eddie’s attempts to find her have failed. She scrolls down the screen.

At the end of 1962, with his second-year examinations just finished, Alexander met Sybil Becker. She was a few months older than he and studying philosophy. A bright girl, according to Alexander, and the only girlfriend to prove troublesome. ‘We were different, too different,’ he recalls. ‘She never understood me.’

Yet she was to have a significant effect on the young Alexander. And to this day, having forgotten the names of his other girlfriends, Sybil Becker enters his conversation frequently.

Edwina expects this section will have to go. Without further information, Sybil is no more relevant than the forgotten girlfriends, at least not to the official biography. But the parallel life is another matter. She reaches for her notebook, makes some jottings under the heading ‘Sybil’, and returns to the main story.

Just before four o’clock, with the university years finished and Alexander about to graduate, the phone rings. It is the man himself and Edwina not surprised. Alexander has often spoken of his ‘standards’, a common approach amongst adulterers, and the word ‘fidelity’ rolls off his tongue far too easily. Oh yes, Edwina has been expecting this phone call. A cancelled meeting, he says, and would she like to have a drink with him. And despite having anticipated this, despite having actually colluded in it, now that he shows his cards, she doesn’t want to play. There were no drinks with mad Jim, although several arid conversations about the state of her soul, and no drinks with Bernard Pierce, who had drunk enough in his youth to give it up for good, and the shopping king was too busy to give more than a few hours of his time, social drinks definitely not included. Flirting is a form of ballast, but it’s shark-infested waters beyond. She should refuse, but does not, and notes with satisfaction the pleasure in his voice as they make the arrangements.

She returns to her work and graduates Alexander in a splash of prizes and glittering prospects, then switches off her computer and heads for the bathroom. Under the shower her mood lifts. It’s a familiar game, after all, and Alexander old enough to look after himself. She selects her clothes with care, she’s determined to look her best. Alexander Otto may be rummaging around in her life, but she’s still pulling the strings.

With an hour to spare, she toys with the idea of visiting Nigel, then decides against it. Nigel has changed recently. No longer the comfortable, easygoing lover, he seems determined to move their relationship on to what he calls ‘the next phase’. He thinks it is time they lived together. ‘There’s nothing new to learn about me,’ he says, ‘not after six years. So we may as well take the plunge.’ Eddie had hoped there was more to learn about him, and besides she likes their current arrangement. She produces excuse after excuse, but Nigel’s mind is made up.

‘If this relationship is to have a future,’ he says, ‘we must move it on to the next phase.’

‘Who plans these things?’ Eddie asks. ‘Some relationship comptroller from middle suburbia? Surely we can manage something more creative?’

But Nigel is not interested in creativity. He’s fed up with living between two places. He wants one pantry and one shopping list, he wants his clothes in one wardrobe and he wants a cat; he wants to know he’ll see Eddie at the end of each day and wake up with her every morning. ‘I’m too old for a portable relationship,’ he says.

And he’ll say it again if she goes around to his place, so as much as she would like to see him, the old Nigel that is, with his sense of humour and easy manner, she drives to a local café instead. She settles to a coffee and the newspaper, blocks out the problems with Nigel and the meeting with Alexander. And of course she’ll manage with Alexander tonight as she has these past several months. He is her meal ticket, nothing more; that he could be tramping through her life and stirring up old longings is simply absurd. And later she’ll return to her empty flat to fossick around in the night hours alone, with no one watching and no need to make excuses. Nigel longs for domesticity, but there are too many restrictions having to live with another person.

She turns the pages of the paper with only a vague glancing at the articles: a lost dog, a robbery in a suburb she’s never heard of, famine and mayhem in the rest of the world. Who would look to the newspaper for distraction these days? she wonders, and keeps on turning. Through the political pages, with sluggish murmurings from the whey-faced solicitor who runs the country and thuggish proclamations from his ambitious treasurer, and on to environmental sacrilege and big business disasters, turning the pages and no longer reading, so when the photograph appears it rips the breath out of her. Paula. Paula Harding. Her face rounder, the hair shorter, but unmistakably Paula. The article is reverential. The wunderkind at forty, back home as artistic director of the Australian Festival of the Arts. She’s a star in the cabarets of Europe, she’s directed operas in London and New York, and what does it matter she’s a lesbian? She’s our own Aussie girl returned to the city of her birth. Such presence, the journalist writes, and so proudly Australian, and a voice to move you to tears.

That voice, Eddie knows that voice. It moved her to tears twenty years ago, it opened the floodgates to her desires. And what was she to do when she fell in love with a boisterous butch girl with the voice of an angel? Simply discard her tidy, manageable life and dive into the rapids that would have been life with Paula?

‘Who needs a PhD in history?’ Paula used to say, proposing instead they take on the great cities of the world. ‘We’ll be a famous artistic couple, a latter-day Alice and Gertrude. You’ll write and I’ll sing and we’ll have a life you only read about in books. Come with me,’ Paula would say. ‘It’ll be a bender without the booze and no going on the wagon.’

Edwina said yes several times, and no several times more, and Paula did everything she planned but without Eddie. And now she’s returned, the wild woman triumphant, and everyone loves her, but how could Eddie have predicted that all those years ago.

So Eddie made other choices and look where they’ve left her. Alexander wants her, the College of Surgeons wants her work, and Nigel wants a wife. So many expectations and Eddie shunning the lot of them. Her desires are running amok and now Paula is back in town.