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Authors: Steven Carroll
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conversation. Then she notices the journalist, George, whom she sees often enough because he is also the art critic for the paper. He is wearing that distinctive gabardine coat that no doubt his heroes (Graham Greene and whoever else they are) also wear. For George thinks of himself as a writer as much as a journalist. Not that he has ever really said so, but she has noticed there is always a paperback in the pocket of hiscoat. And he is apt to pull whatever he is reading from his pocket in the course of conversation and share a line or two.
It is a familiar scene. Too familiar. And she is suddenly distracted by the ache of old feelings. Well, not such old feelings. But old enough to make her ache. When she fell in love the previous winter with a painter called Sam she was surprised, almost shocked. But no, not shocked because that carries with it an air of disapproval. And there was nothing to disapprove of, she had told herself, again and again, throughout their winter together. She had simply fallen in love. If anything, it was the fact of falling in love that took her quite by surprise. It happens. Yes, it happens. Every day people fall in and out of love. But it hadn’t happened to Tess since she was nineteen and fallen into marriage the same year she’d fallen in love for the first time.
Something that she’d always thought would only ever happen to other people (and quite possibly silly people at that) had happened to her. And just after it did, just after she’d been swept up and carried away as though she had suddenly lost control of her life, she’d sat in her lounge room one morning before work and watched, at the same time involved and curiously detached, as the car carrying her husband and daughter slipped from the kerb in front of her house and onto the street. Her husband, as he did every morning, drove their daughter to school then continued to work. A bank. Loans. People, she suddenly found herself musing, are like the large terrace she and her husband and daughter lived in — houseswith many rooms. And she’d suddenly felt like a character in a novel, probably a nineteenth-century novel, dwelling on a bourgeois marriage that is not all it seems. A portrait of a house with many rooms. And retribution (as it would in the pages of Flaubert or Zola, whom she read in French at her school in Switzerland) just waiting to fall upon the heroine for the crime of falling in love when she had no right to. But it did not, in the end, fall upon her , and the affair ended — as she always knew it would — as abruptly as it began. And she knew it would end like that because it had to. But how did it end?
One day, towards the end of their winter, he proposed that they run away together. She said it was impossible. Because it was. Best to let things stay as they were. For as long as their time allowed. She had said this knowing that they could not stay as they were, that their time was borrowed or stolen and had been dwindling from the start, that they had more than likely stayed as they were for as long as affairs allow, and that soon everybody would scatter anyway. With this in mind, she had silently resolved that she would choose the moment of their parting. This much, at least, she would be able to control. Although she never breathed a word of this to Sam. They hibernated that winter. Then, with the hint of spring in the air, they parted. Or did they both simply bow to the inevitable, and did she merely make the first move?
She leaves the front of the café (to which she sometimes went with Sam), follows the dark lane, turns at St Paul’s and is soon standing at her stop waiting for thetram home, the evening crowds of office workers disappearing into the gaping mouth of Flinders Street Station. It’s that time of day when her thoughts always turn to the previous winter. That time of day when she had always just come from seeing Sam, but doesn’t any more. That empty time of day that she fills with
It is a familiar scene. Too familiar. And she is suddenly distracted by the ache of old feelings. Well, not such old feelings. But old enough to make her ache. When she fell in love the previous winter with a painter called Sam she was surprised, almost shocked. But no, not shocked because that carries with it an air of disapproval. And there was nothing to disapprove of, she had told herself, again and again, throughout their winter together. She had simply fallen in love. If anything, it was the fact of falling in love that took her quite by surprise. It happens. Yes, it happens. Every day people fall in and out of love. But it hadn’t happened to Tess since she was nineteen and fallen into marriage the same year she’d fallen in love for the first time.
Something that she’d always thought would only ever happen to other people (and quite possibly silly people at that) had happened to her. And just after it did, just after she’d been swept up and carried away as though she had suddenly lost control of her life, she’d sat in her lounge room one morning before work and watched, at the same time involved and curiously detached, as the car carrying her husband and daughter slipped from the kerb in front of her house and onto the street. Her husband, as he did every morning, drove their daughter to school then continued to work. A bank. Loans. People, she suddenly found herself musing, are like the large terrace she and her husband and daughter lived in — houseswith many rooms. And she’d suddenly felt like a character in a novel, probably a nineteenth-century novel, dwelling on a bourgeois marriage that is not all it seems. A portrait of a house with many rooms. And retribution (as it would in the pages of Flaubert or Zola, whom she read in French at her school in Switzerland) just waiting to fall upon the heroine for the crime of falling in love when she had no right to. But it did not, in the end, fall upon her , and the affair ended — as she always knew it would — as abruptly as it began. And she knew it would end like that because it had to. But how did it end?
One day, towards the end of their winter, he proposed that they run away together. She said it was impossible. Because it was. Best to let things stay as they were. For as long as their time allowed. She had said this knowing that they could not stay as they were, that their time was borrowed or stolen and had been dwindling from the start, that they had more than likely stayed as they were for as long as affairs allow, and that soon everybody would scatter anyway. With this in mind, she had silently resolved that she would choose the moment of their parting. This much, at least, she would be able to control. Although she never breathed a word of this to Sam. They hibernated that winter. Then, with the hint of spring in the air, they parted. Or did they both simply bow to the inevitable, and did she merely make the first move?
She leaves the front of the café (to which she sometimes went with Sam), follows the dark lane, turns at St Paul’s and is soon standing at her stop waiting for thetram home, the evening crowds of office workers disappearing into the gaping mouth of Flinders Street Station. It’s that time of day when her thoughts always turn to the previous winter. That time of day when she had always just come from seeing Sam, but doesn’t any more. That empty time of day that she fills with
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