LITMIR.BIZ

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      I had moved to the small upstairs sitting-room for her interview, a favourite of mine at the College. Rich and leathery, comfortable and established, it represented everything my own background lacked yet seemed entirely appropriate for the man I hoped I had become. I sat in one of the wing-back chairs, while she occupied a smaller, straight-backed seat. I remember she looked down on me, but I felt calm and in control so it didn’t matter. Although I recall being briefly fazed by one of her early comments. She looked around at the wood panelling, the heavy-framed portraits, the dark leather, the magnificent carpet. Such a masculine space, she said, and I was immediately on the alert. The last thing I wanted was a ball-breaking feminist writing my life. Then I decided that given her appearance, if she were a feminist it was of the benign kind, and I knew I could cope with that.

      She was dressed in black and white — short skirt, fitted blouse, cropped jacket. Fashionable clothes with a whiff of raunchiness. She wore bright lipstick, which I like in a woman, but otherwise no make-up. The face and the wild red hair were gorgeous. So, too, the body, large-breasted and all curves, and so luxurious compared with the thin, muscular figures favoured by most of the women I knew. I’ve never been particularly attracted to redheads nor large blowzy women, but when Edwina entered the room she struck me as quintessentially feminine.

      That first interview was the only occasion in the whole of our acquaintance when our roles were reversed. Not that I didn’t encourage her in the following months to talk about herself, but she remained very guarded about her own life while she blasted her way through mine. On that first day, she answered my questions with an openness and a professionalism that impressed me. She described herself as a factual biographer, one who left the conjecture to others. Being a factual man myself, this appealed to me. I asked if she had a special interest in medicine. Her response was delightfully blunt. Her last subject, she said, required a knowledge of alternative religion, the one before steel, and the one before that retailing. For you, she said, I’ll hone up on the bowel.

      I wanted no complications. It was to be my life in the firing line, my life as fodder for dinner party gossip and dissection at medical meetings, my life squeezed by fresh-skinned ambitious fingers and poked by older more envious ones. Would anyone be interested in the truth? Would anyone judge me on my merits? Or would my colleagues simply peer at me through the pall of their own failed ambitions and use the biography to settle old disappointments? I worried, too, about those closest to me, Cynthia, the girls, my mother. Edwina’s practical approach was reassuring. I offered her the job on the spot, and within forty-eight hours she had accepted.

      There were no other stirrings at our first meeting, I’d remember if there were. Memory, so careless with pleasure, has an affinity for pain. Not physical pain, any doctor can testify to that, but psychological discomfort. Any man who has lived life to the full knows what I mean. In twenty-five years of marriage I’ve not been entirely faithful. I’ve been faithful to the marriage, but not always to Cynthia. Nothing too significant nor long-lasting, but other women I’ve enjoyed and at times been reluctant to leave. The pleasure of these affairs is now vague, but the acrimonious leave-takings are etched in memory. And no, there was never any guilt, my marriage was solid and I’m sure Cynthia suspected nothing.

      Although I’m not so sure now. I used to be certain of everything, but Edwina changed that. Perhaps Cynthia did know about the other women and hid her distress, perhaps she knew and didn’t care, perhaps she had indiscretions of her own. The man who said knowledge is power must have lived in an ivory tower with only books and the sound of his own voice for company. Knowledge is torment. Before Edwina, I knew enough to lead a satisfying and successful life; after her, I know too much for satisfaction and too little for wisdom.

      I hate this confusion. My days are clogged with it and my nights are cluttered with her. Flashes of Edwina standing, seated, arguing, gesticulating, wet with sex, high on power. And a recurring image: a stream of mercury in a blackened landscape, a mysterious silver dream, hypnotic and compelling, which cannot be grasped. And I know it’s deadly. Even while I stretch out my arms and plunge my fingers into the stream, I know it is deadly.

      I curse the day she entered my life. I want my old life back. I want Cynthia, I want my daughters, I want my work, I want to be happy.

      What claim do you have on happiness? Edwina once asked.

      The same as the next person, I wanted to reply. But by then I’d seen the stream of mercury and kept my thoughts to myself.

      So what was the pleasure with her? Running on empty as I was, I never stopped to think. You are driven, on edge, you have to keep going. But I’ve stopped now, and the questions, the blame too, are relentless. They’re kicking the man when he’s down, they’re mocking the man weakened by conscience. I told you so, I told you so, but you wouldn’t listen — a cruel voice and it never stops, and the fact that it’s mine just makes it worse. The pleasure then? The returns? It was the intensity of the thing, an intensity I’d not known since the old days with Sybil. I felt alive — not comfortable and I longed for that, but alive. And, as with Sybil, I truly believed I’d have her in the end.

      That’s the essence of unrequited love. You’re convinced you’ll be rewarded for your suffering, as if there were some just God with a soft spot for toiling lovers waiting for the right moment to dole out your reward. I’m amazed at my stupidity. I sit here, a stranger in a strange country, a stranger to myself, shocked at what I’ve done and terrified I’d do exactly the same if circumstances were to repeat themselves.

      I truly believed that eventually she’d be mine. I would imagine her coming to me full of love, and taking her into my arms knowing at long last she wanted me as much as I’d always wanted her. She’d allow me to undress her, and I’d stroke the lush white skin and make love to her with the deft caress of the lover who knows he is desired. This I imagined, over and over; wherever I went I lugged my romantic baggage with me. Thus the will to continue, and the pleasure. But not the only one. After we had made love, after I had wallowed in her desire for me, after I had gazed at her sweet adoring face, I’d imagine my love shrinking to normal size, then smaller still, until it evaporated completely. Then I’d walk away.

      It never happened. I gathered my secrets and my sick, swollen love and fled. And while I realise it’s the sort of act that precludes going back, I hold on to the knowledge that I, and I alone, constructed myself; more than fifty years of selecting, discarding and refining, I made myself as surely as a car emerges from the production line. And I want to believe, even after all that’s happened, I can remake myself, assemble a new life, and happiness — damn Edwina’s theories — will be mine once more.

      ‘Are you happy yet?’ Paula used to ask Eddie. ‘Are you happy yet?’

      Eddie is sitting in the café, the newspaper in front of her. She stares at the photograph, she stares at the newsprint, Paula is back in Melbourne. Slowly and carefully she tears out the article as if that will smooth her puckered nerves. The coffee is cold, she orders a glass of wine, sinks back in her chair willing herself to be calm.

      ‘Are you happy yet?’ Paula would ask.

      And while there were moments, breath-stopping, gilt-edged moments, Eddie never managed to get a grip on happiness. She was happy to sit in the audience while Paula sang and marinate in her honey-rich voice. She was happy in that skin against skin silence in the minutes before sleep, and walking in the strange lemony light before a storm; happy during all those times when Paula was offering the world but not demanding a response. And happy perched in Paula’s fifties-green bathroom while Paula cut her hair. The light touch on her ear, the fingertips on her cheek, gentle and so persistently accidental, and sliding down her neck to the top of her spine to linger in the notches at the base of the skull. Snip, snip go the scissors, and how, Eddie wonders, can Paula play at being a barber when her fingers are making love to Eddie’s neck?

      ‘The curls’ll hide my mistakes,’ Paula says, stepping back to admire her handiwork.

      Don’t stop, Eddie is thinking. Butcher the curls, leave me bald, just don’t stop.

      And

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