what the era. She recognised Paula immediately. For weeks the campus had been plastered with posters advertising the Paula Harding concert. Paula, only twenty-four years old, with several shows to her credit and an opera that had created an uproar among the Puccini and Verdi set, was the music world’s wunderkind and feminism’s favourite child.
Paula helped Eddie to her feet, gathered up her books and notes, then pulled a crumpled piece of paper from her pocket. ‘Where in the hell is the Monash Theatre?’
Eddie started to explain, but with the direction part of her brain a ‘black hole’, Paula asked to be guided to the door. And once there Eddie stayed. How could she not when Paula sat her on a stool in the wings promising to soothe her bruised and battered body? As for Chaucer: ‘He’s been around for six hundred years,’ Paula said. A few more hours won’t make any difference.’
Paula Harding filled the stage. A ruby-red figure with red-rimmed glasses, she sang with her whole body. Her head swayed with the music, she sent the words flying, her hands flounced over the keys, her feet danced, and the voice, a magical braiding of loose layabout strands, was pure silk. Edwina sat in the wings, her copy of Chaucer clenched to her chest while her desires took flight. This, she realised, was another way of living.
Most of the songs were Paula’s own compositions. She sang about politics and the ironies of love, she sang the blues and torch-song seductions, and in between she’d talk to the audience with the same ease and intimacy one would use with old friends. Whether singing or talking, she managed to be both outrageous and serious, and the audience loved her. Edwina, with beating heart and Chaucer biting her skin, marvelled that anyone could be so bold, so indifferent to expectation that she could trounce one sacred cow after another.
‘Don’t you ever worry what other people think?’ Eddie asked a few weeks later.
‘Honey,’ she replied in a southern drawl, ‘Ah don’t have the time.’
Paula resented sleep. There was nothing to interest her in unconsciousness, she said, and besides the night was ‘so divinely succulent’. So it happened that a month after their first meeting, at exactly twenty-five past one in the morning, Eddie awoke to music outside her bedroom window. It was a love-song with guitar backing, no pianissimo seduction but a full-throttle, you-can’t-refuse-me, country and western plea. It was Paula, and threatening to wake the neighbourhood. Eddie was out of bed and at the window begging her to stop. ‘Not until you come outside,’ she says. Eddie grabs some clothes, anything, just be quick, a girl serenading her in the wee hours and not what Harry and Beverley Frye have in mind for their daughter. She clambers across the dressing-table and through the window. And how can she be furious when Paula is so pleased to see her?
Eddie begs her to leave. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, I’ll see you any time, just leave now before you wake my parents.’ But having extricated her from the family bosom, Paula is not about to give up. Soon she has Eddie ensconced next to Dinah, and the three are speeding down the highway to the hills. Paula stops at the edge of Sherbrooke Forest. With the bike turned off, the night is dark and fiercely hushed, but it doesn’t worry Paula. She pulls a rug from her pack, a bottle of champagne and a handful of Baci chocolates. She settles Dinah and a jittery Edwina, then opens the bottle.
‘I love you, Edwina Frye,’ she says, dipping a finger in the fizz and running it round Eddie’s lips.
And suddenly finding herself a trespasser in another life where the rules aren’t her rules and she’s no longer responsible, Eddie takes Paula’s face between her hands and kisses the full, smiling mouth, and then is kissing the whole face, the ears the neck, and slipping her cold hands beneath the red clothes to the warm woman’s skin. Another life or her own and it no longer matters, and she is swarming over that body, scooping its softness and warmth, making love in the still, crisp air.
‘I always knew you had this in you,’ Paula says.
It is a moment of absolute clarity, but by the time Eddie is back home it is lost. She’s devastated, she can’t believe what she’s done, she wants to erase the whole event.
‘Are you happy yet?’ Paula used to ask. But how could she be when her old familiar garb was being ripped off her?
Not happy then and not happy now, Eddie is thinking as she finishes her wine. She reads the article one more time before folding it into her purse. Paula always thrived on exposure and clearly has done well out of it. In her dreams Eddie used to be no less outrageous, but life demanded a stiffer spine. And still does. It shouldn’t matter that Paula Harding is back in Melbourne; it cannot matter. Edwina hears the call of her life. She checks the time, drags herself from the café and goes to meet Alexander.
2nd September, London.
I was happy during those first few months with Edwina. Indeed, in many respects it was the best of times. Simone and Greg became engaged and moved in together, Claire was less impossible, and work couldn’t have been better. We’d just completed the pig experiments with excellent results, and the submission for limited human trials was with the Ethics Committee. All very satisfactory.
Edwina and I would meet for an interview every couple of weeks, and in between she’d see my friends, family and colleagues. She also honed up on the bowel as she said she would, studying monographs and journals as well as my own published work, and a formidable task for a layperson. There were days, and I liked these best of all, when she’d shadow me as I went about my work. She even observed me in theatre, proving to be of sterner stuff than a good many of my students.
It’s a quality of any intricate task that it creates its own seemingly airtight world. A dense world and complex too, fired by a shared concentration. This is the atmosphere of the operating theatre and it has always appealed to me. The noise of the machines, the theatre staff, their voices and hands are all components in this world, all working in harmony. So when I’d catch a glimpse of Edwina, it was from another place, as if I were in the cabin of an aeroplane and she out on distant clouds. The shock of it, and a feeling I can only describe as rapture.
She’d keep her questions for an appropriate time and I was surprised how much I welcomed them. In a pleasant, easy way her inquiries provided the impetus for a mid-career stocktake. I felt refreshed, more alert, less likely to perform out of the habit that’s an avoidable side-effect of a long career.
I’ve never been the type to talk about myself. The facts are what matter and the facts are clear: surgeon and medical scientist, leader in artificial intestine research, married to Cynthia for twenty-five years, two daughters, Simone a physiotherapist and Claire in her last year at school. Yet I went beyond the facts with Edwina. She was so receptive, so attuned to me, she made it so easy.
I’ve never attended therapy, have always found repugnant the idea of exposing myself to a stranger, yet in those early months with Edwina I found myself wondering whether biography mightn’t be a little like therapy. You start talking at a familiar point, wander off into unexpected territory, then, when your time is up, you spring back into the present, take up your medical bag and re-enter your life. But the diversion leaves its mark, you feel lighter, invigorated. And your listener, Edwina, has been so focussed on you that you’re convinced she regards you as more than just a job. Certainly she was more than just a job for me.
I looked forward to our interviews. It was not only the career investigations I enjoyed, but revisiting childhood with the unexpected appearance of people and events long forgotten. There was the milk bar man with the missing finger who would always throw in a few extra lollies, and fishing with Charlie Slonim near Port Campbell, and the Guy Fawkes weekend on a farm with the Faines when
