The End of It All

The last time they spoke, although she did not know it would be the last, she was sitting on the lounge in their daughter’s house and he came into the room and sat down opposite her. He leaned against the armrest on the turquoise plush couch or did he cross his legs and recline back?

It was a warm autumn evening. She’d seen him arrive just before her with his wife and the woman’s daughter. As she’d looked for a place to park he’d emerged from his car. He’d made a traditional European cucumber salad and cooked up a batch of schnitzels that he’d brought along between absorbent paper. He carried them in ovenproof dishes into the house. She didn’t think his wife had made any contribution to the meal.

She remembers how sun-bronzed his face was, but she has to imagine his glasses, the line of his shirt where it tucked in beneath an open jacket as he reclined or sat cross-legged, and the relaxed, kindly look he must have worn on his face, talking to her while his wife was in the other room. She knows she was aware of how she appeared to him, sitting barefoot in the corner of the lounge, and that in the presence of their daughter she might trigger sad memories for him, but also that he might still find her attractive. He went into the kitchen after a short time, she supposed in case his wife got angry with him for spending time with her.

Not long afterwards, she was touring the beaches down south with a friend, not far from the town where she’d heard he lived. She decided to see if she could find his house. The holiday had been awkward so far, because she felt unusually distanced from the man she was with. The first night, during a storm, she walked alone along the top of the cliffs, and tried to stay warm in the ferocious wind, while he watched television in the motel room. The second night she sat on the bed with her computer and hardly spoke to him. She spent all the next morning exploring the paths that led to the beaches, striding briskly down the tracks and up again while he, angry with her, walked up the main road looking for somewhere for breakfast.

Travelling away from the seaside villages their conversation became more relaxed again, and as the train moved north along the coast she read some funny anecdotes from the newspaper but the closer they came to the town where she’d been told he lived, the more closed down she became. She stopped turning the pages of the newspaper and looked out the window, but she saw only disparate shapes: a kookaburra watching from the branch of a leafless tree, a lagoon with paddle boats, a hotel high on the hill beside a flame tree, a bridge over a river that flowed on either side of them. When they headed west towards the town the train swung away from the coast and through a section of track that had been tunnelled through rock.

She set off on her own next morning to visit the tourist office. They gave her a map. She looked closely at it as she sat by an open fire in the lounge area of a hotel. The woman behind the bar said the street she was looking for was too far to reach on foot, but she went off along the footpath anyway. She passed camellia gardens and full-brick Federation houses. She crossed one road after another, the brown brick houses opening up around her.

She had not known the bitumen could go on so far beside a noisy main road or how hot she would become. She had not known how the noise and exposure walking along the highway would drain her after a time, how step after agonising step, her legs and hips would ache. She stopped for a while but there was no relief from the noise or the glare of the sun.

At last she reached the street where she knew he lived. It was the middle of the day on a weekend. Children threw a ball to each other on the grass of the cul de sac. There was no traffic. The sun was high and the tips of the trees were silvery. The street was as she’d imagined it would be in this part of the town. The house was painted white, well-maintained, colourful leadlight inside the window frames. She took in every detail from a café across the road, sitting under an umbrella on which was advertised a brand of coffee, though her coffee cup had a different brand written on its side.

For more than a year now, since she had been told his address, she had seen in great detail, as though it were a postcard, a hilly street lined with large trees with cars entering and exiting long driveways and she had also imagined herself driving past slowly, keeping an eye out for him. She had imagined him getting out of his car, locking the door with the remote, glancing around, then hurrying in to the house. Or walking to the other side of the car and opening the door for his wife, as she had seen him do that day at their daughter’s house when he hadn’t realised she was watching him from a distance.

She wasn’t sure she would cross the road and speak to him, because when she pictured it she was upset by the annoyance she saw on his face and in his posture. Shock, then irritation and then annoyance, because he didn’t want to be disturbed.

She sat opposite drinking coffee, which was time enough to feel she had seen what she needed to see, she’d reached the end of this necessary search.

She had stuck with her decision to find his house that was too far away to get to by foot even when the day had heated up, and when she was unable to walk a step closer. Her strength had begun to return when she caught sight of his house. She paid for her coffee and walked past his new home towards the monthly craft market, the Men’s Shed workshop, and a train station. Consulting her map, a quiet acceptance at having been there felt good. She had not experienced such an emotion since he had left, as if, even though she didn’t see him there, she knew exactly where he was. 

Maybe the fact she hadn’t seen him made this acceptance possible, and put an end to it all. Because if she had seen him and spoken to him, things as they were would have continued. She would have had to make another plan. Now she would be able to stop imagining that he might come back to her.

But the moment when she knew she had let go of him, when she knew her fantasy had ended, came some hours later. She was sitting on the train in that town, with the taste in her mouth of unsweetened cranberries given to her by a man at the markets.

She had rested on a bench next to a dried fruit stall while men and women and children moved busily around her. The man had bent down to her and asked in a kind voice if she would like to try a sample of the dried cranberries, and when he gave her a small packet she thanked him and took them with her to the station.

The cranberries were dry and sour, and so foul-tasting, she found them hard to swallow. She spat them out and wiped her mouth, and felt a surprising sense of relief.

Libby Sommer lives in Sydney. Her fourth book, a collection titled Stories from Bondi, will be released by Ginninderra Press in September