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.
CHAPTER TWO
31st August, London.
AIM: to restore my former life.
METHOD: analysis of association between Edwina Frye and me. FIRST PHASE: choice of a writer for the biography, initial meeting with Edwina Frye.
No, this is wrong, quite wrong. If ever I’m to return home, I need to know more than I do now. I need to understand how and why Edwina Frye wrecked my life. I need to sort through the mess, impose some logic on a situation that got totally out of hand. I know I should have done this ages ago in Melbourne, but in those crazed days with Edwina, logic didn’t stand a chance. And during these past couple of months in London I seem to have made little headway. I’ve picked over the whole rotten carcass of the past year but to little effect.
I left home
