Cooee (17 page)

So Bianca was delighted to be invited. She used up a roll of film with languishing shots of us standing in our finery on the flat white sand, gazing together at the sunset, walking hand in hand into the golden beyond, kissing against a tangerine sky. She sent us copies later and Max said they looked like ads for Jim Beam and coke.

Max had a friend who was a celebrant. She was a plump, motherly lady who wore a rather lovely, black tailored pant suit and read a beautiful service; and she kissed me afterwards with, it seemed to me, real feeling and affection.

We drove to a swanky hotel in Portsea and got tipsy over dinner and made love several times in a gorgeous suite with a four-poster bed. It was so romantic I almost didn't feel married. That's a laugh, now.

I kept my name. Weaving is my own name, not Steve's. At the time of our marriage, it was unusual for a woman to retain her maiden name, but Steve's surname is Bell. Even so rigid a conservative as my mother could see that I didn't want to be called Isabel Bell. Steve's mother wasn't so sympathetic, but her name was Marjorie, so the problem hadn't presented itself for her. And by now, of course, I had a professional name — not a huge one, but in certain circles well known enough for me to want to keep it.

Bea was as difficult about it as everybody else. I told her I'd be away on the Monday (married on Saturday: two days' honeymoon didn't seem unreasonable to me). She asked why and I told her. She sniffed disapprovingly.

‘Oh, Christ, Bea!' I said. ‘You're my oldest friend as well as my partner. Don't you go and put me in the doghouse, too.'

‘It's not a matter of putting you in the doghouse. It's a matter of seeing you stuff up your life, your husband's life, your kids' lives.'

‘Steve's not my husband any more. The divorce is through. I haven't stuffed up anyone's life. I'm just living my own.'

‘Izzie,' she said, stretching out her hand. ‘Izzie, just living your own life isn't possible. You know that. Everything we do touches on other people, on other people's lives. You
know
that. It's so awful to watch. I just find it infinitely depressing to see you permanently infatuated with that — that —
gigolo.
'

I shrugged and turned away. I was so wounded and so angry that I couldn't trust myself to say anything.

It hurt a lot, of course, that everyone was so harsh to me, so determined to judge me, not to understand. Sometimes I felt oppressed by the malice they all seemed suddenly to be sprouting, by the burble and hiss of spite. At first, as I've said, I tried to explain. To Bea, to Zoë. I could no longer explain to my mother, since she was dead, but she hadn't wanted to understand, any more than they did.

But I was happy; I was incredibly, wildly happy: that was what they couldn't understand, how essential that happiness had become to me. Happiness bubbled through my blood: I felt I had little neon glows flickering like Christmas lights through my veins. When I walked down the street, when I went to the shops, it seemed to me everyone must notice and admire my incandescence.

Yet, although I was so happy, it was at this time that the Lost Dream started. This is not something I can explain. I woke one night next to Max, perhaps two hours after making love, in a cold sweat, weeping.

I had never before woken from a dream, from sleep, with actual tears sliding down my face. The dream had begun as it always has done, subsequently, with a stroll through bushland, walking through the dull silver gleam and tangy air of eucalypts. I am content: it is warm; I am secure; the bush is beautiful, restful. Magpies chortle; rosellas dart and chatter.

But the air turns colder and the path more winding and the trees more swarming, pushing their way over the path. I walk on, knowing I have to get to the end of the path, knowing I have to reach a certain point. But it is colder and darker all the time. I panic; I try to turn back, but the seething trees block my way. And I cry
cooee
.

It is what we were taught to do as children, if we walked or played in the bush — at regular intervals, to stop and shout
cooee.
It is what Australian children have always been taught to do. Well, that is the myth, anyway. Most Australian children these days are brought up in the synthetic environment of the suburbs: they may see a gum tree in a park occasionally but they wouldn't know real bush if they fell over it.

But there are old legends of the bush, old legends of the children who were lost in it — some whose bodies were never found. The bush scoops a wandering child into its heart quicker than you would believe. So, if you are lost, you cry
cooee
. And back, strong and sweet, comes the answering
cooee
of father or brother or friend. If you remain within cooee, we are told, you will never be lost.

And now I call
cooee, cooee —
but I have gone beyond cooee; there is nobody to hear me; nothing around me but the teeming, muttering bush that could contain anything, anything at all.

I feel rather than hear a low vibration emanating from the crowding leaves, which quiver above me, sage-green, pale silver, thin as paper, thin as skin. I am so cold I can hardly breathe. The wild cackle of kookaburras explodes in my ears.

My heart's in a flurry; it's like a lunatic, plump pigeon hurling itself against the cage of my ribs, heavy, panic-stricken.

Cooee
, I cry, and again, in accelerating desperation.
Cooee
. No one answers; no one is there to answer; I am alone in the world. Fear possesses me utterly. I wake, weeping.

Max was not generally speaking a patient man, not perhaps somebody who readily sympathised with psychic ailments and traumas of the imagination; but he was always tender with me after this dream. He used to call it the Lost Dream, capitalising it somehow, as if to acknowledge its searing power over me, its horror. I still have the dream sometimes; and now it doubly sears me: when I wake from it, sweating and shaking, I miss his hard arms around me, his murmur in my ear, his long, kind fingers stroking my neck, soothing me.

I miss him so. I miss his kind-heartedness, his gentleness, his generosity.

How they disparaged him, my friends and relations! They insisted — in direct contradiction to all my evidence — that he was dubious and underhanded. Crooked, grubby.

‘What have you put your name to?' Bea asked me one day at work.

‘What do you mean?'

‘Have you signed papers for him? Have you stood surety for him, or anything like that?'

‘You're referring to Max?'

‘Come on, Izzie: you know I am.'

‘I haven't, but there's no reason why I shouldn't, and if he asks me to I certainly will.'

‘Listen, love,' said Bea, sitting down on the chair in front of my desk where Max had sat when I had first met him. ‘Izzie, just don't sign anything, okay?'

‘You all drive me mad,' I said, furiously. ‘Completely mad. He's a lovely, lovely man, and I'm the luckiest woman in the world to be married to him, and you all carry on as if he were a serial killer.'

‘It's up to you, Isabel. I'm telling you. Don't sign anything.'

‘Why shouldn't I? Why do you all behave as if there must be some deep, shameful secret attached to him? I'm telling you, he's the most straightforward, transparent, honest man I've ever known. Leave me alone, Bea.'

Bea did her heavy sigh and trudged out.

‘Sign these, ma Belle, my sweetheart,' said Max one night not long after this conversation, brandishing a sheaf of papers and dropping a kiss on my forehead.

‘What are they?'

‘A surprise, my love. A small surprise for the belle of my heart.'

I unfolded the papers. ‘Can I look at them?'

Max burst out laughing. ‘Is it likely I'd ask you to sign anything without looking at it?'

I leafed slowly through them. They were legal papers, title papers.

‘Max,' I said. ‘Max, what are you doing?'

‘I'm giving you Rain.'

I couldn't believe it. ‘What do you mean?'

‘Look, we're married now, aren't we? We should share things. All my worldly goods, and all that.'

‘But this isn't sharing. This is giving.'

‘I love you, Bella. I love giving things to you.'

‘Max, this is ridiculous.'

He spread his hands. ‘You're going to beat the truth out of me,' he said, shaking his head mournfully. ‘The fact is, I'm only doing it as a tax break.'

‘Max. Darling Max. Please be serious.'

‘Well, it seems a shame to be serious when I don't have to, but I'll do my best for a little while. Bella, my love, this is our house; we live in it together, but it's all in my name, and you had so much input into it that it's absurd for you not to own it. Rain is your invention, my darling. Your creation.'

‘We did it together.'

‘Yes, but you were the guiding spirit, the inspiration, the genius of it all. You know you were. This is only a logical extension of that fact. The other thing, my sweetheart, if I'm going to be perfectly honest, is that it actually is a good tax move for me. My accountant tells me I ought to cut down on my assets. He's advised me on this one. I always take my accountant's advice.'

‘But you can't just give something away like that, can you? Aren't there tax penalties to gifts, too?'

‘Arthur says to trust him,' said Max, grinning. ‘As I always do. He'll manage it all for me. But in the meantime we need you to sign these. Don't do it now, but read through them so you're sure you understand what's going on, and tomorrow, if you can take an hour or so off, we'll wander down to Arthur's solicitor and talk about it so you understand it all and we'll make it all legal.'

He was set on this, fixed on the course he had described. I tried to dissuade him, at first. I was uncomfortable about accepting so enormous a present. But Max could be stubborn, when he wanted something badly enough, and it became apparent that this was something he wanted. We signed the papers; the title was handed to me. Rain became mine.

I told Bea, after it had happened, of this transaction. I must say I told her with triumph, with a strong flavour of
I told you so
mixed with
How could you say those things
. She was nonplussed, though she tried not to show it.

‘Well, good,' she said, staring at me across her desk. ‘Good. I'm pleased for you, Izzie.'

‘So you were wrong. Aren't you going to admit you were wrong, Bea?'

‘Nothing's proven about my rightness or wrongness. Not yet.'

She was unrelenting. I didn't care — or not much, anyway. I had Max to comfort me. Max, and Rain. I'd never owned property before. When Steve and I married the house had been in his name. I'd never questioned that, though now I find it hard to believe that I could have been quite so pliant, so yielding to the master's voice.

I wandered through Rain now, familiarising myself to the curiousness of possessing it. I ran my hand along the jarrah banister and gazed out the study window, feeling a kind of new richness — a material, selfish richness, which complemented my inner and less selfish spiritual richness.
All this is mine
, I said to myself, in active and questioning wonderment at the strangeness of it.

Max never mentioned it. It had been done; the gift had been given, and that was the end of the matter so far as he was concerned. We lived in the house together as if it belonged to us together, without reference to who its actual owner was.

Sometimes I would wake before Max did, and I would lie there studying him, not just his face, but the contours of his body. He was a lean man, tanned and sinewy, strong and incisive in his movements. His presence dominated: it was impossible to be in a room where Max was and not know he was there; and somehow this innate and effortless habit of authority made him seem all the more vulnerable when he was asleep. Sometimes he would lie on his back, one arm flung up so that the inner arm was exposed. I found its whiteness, its susceptibility, intensely moving. He had curiously pointed elbows. Is it ridiculous to swoon at a man's elbows? I dare say.

I was obsessed by him, infatuated with him. I freely admit it. But it wasn't merely obsession or infatuation. It was a dense, profound and lasting love. Luminous and expansive, it had invaded every particle of me. He was the love of my life.

The supposed love of Kate's life, Gavin, hove onto the horizon when Kate was, I suppose, eighteen and studying not very hard at a fine arts course. Fine arts was the kind of woolly thing she
would
be interested in. He was a postgraduate, studying for his doctorate, which in Kate's eyes, I suppose, invested him with some
cachet
. He was unimpressive from the start: tall, gangly, he would come to pick Kate up and (because she was never ready) would be trapped in conversation with Max and me.

Max was especially good at this kind of encounter: easy and fluent in his behaviour and his language, he was adept at the kind of genial bonhomie that comes in so useful in potentially strained situations. But Max never really succeeded with Gavin.