Each summer, we commission some of Aotearoa’s finest writers to tell us a short tale. This year’s theme is “second acts”.
It was so lovely, the cypress almost within touching distance from the opened bedroom window, and just as lovely in the photo Delia was holding before she wrote on the back, “Remember the nights outside with this!” She then slipped the photo into a copy of The Cherry Orchard on the bedroom bookcase.
Her friend Annie Weston, who was also her solicitor, laughed as she watched her. “I thought you agreed with Bruno to move anything you wanted out by next weekend?”
“That’s exactly what I’m doing. Anything I want will be gone by then.”
They were mates from way back, but Annie didn’t think it was her place to say what “matrimonial property” might be claimed. Bruno, of course, could not have been better about it. “Anything,” he had said, “short of the roof. As long as you leave the light switches.” He liked the idea of starting again from scratch. Giving Trudy a fair go.
Annie remembered – who didn’t remember – what a stunning couple Delia and Bruno had made when they first got together. Childless, unfortunately, over the decades, and disappointment hit hard. But as enviable a couple still as most of their friends knew. The theatre wasn’t always an easy place for the heart to survive. Bruno had a store of such wise remarks.
Delia, whom some thought the more gifted, called it a day with acting fairly early on. Bruno still crossed the Tasman most years, a stint at the STC, shows in Melbourne. And a lessening run of movies, mostly in rather similar roles. “Leonine” was a word that the press liked to fall back on. He found the stage harder to give up. “Not the stage so much as the audience,” Delia teased him.
They had bought a handsome old villa out of Carterton 20 years before. Delia loved the quiet of it. She had loved the cities, too, but everything to its time. She took up painting in a modest way, recorded Books for the Blind, drove into Wellington fairly often for voice-overs. And the house was her triumph. “Lovely is as lovely does.” Then mid-life hit, as it sometimes does, with a whack.
Bruno would thump his fist into the opened palm of his other hand. “Like that!” Spelled out, it was less dramatic. He was writing what he insisted was a brief modest memoir, rather than anything grander, when he fell for a 28-year-old publisher’s editor. Attractive, of course, but as he explained to Delia, “It’s her mind that so draws me.”
Delia handed him back the photograph he had shown her. “It must be something,” she said. But as the word spread, “She was marvellous about it” became the phrase most often used. Bruno wrote from Hobart, where he was on a remake of For the Term of his Natural Life, and thanked her. “Maturity like yours doesn’t grow on trees.”
* * *
After she signed various official pages, and Annie had a read over them, Delia stood and took a pinot gris from the fridge.
“But you’ve still to decide on all this?” Annie said. Her small hand with its overload of glinty stones waved about the room they sat in, and to the doors that opened from it. “The chattels,” she said, her voice heavy with irony.
What she meant was that almost every stick of furniture, every ornament or painting, came from Bruno’s earnings but Delia’s taste.
When he last spoke by phone with Annie, he had been the soul of largesse. “She must take whatever she wants. The lot. The lot.” He said they would drive across the big dark hill that always struck him as a touch drear this coming weekend. If Delia could have her stuff out by then that would be grand. And he discreetly hinted at the backstory. Trudy will have her own ideas. She’s learning, but here’s her chance. She’ll do it differently, of course, but that’s the fun of it.
Annie took up the glass Delia moved towards her. Then she said it. She worried, frankly, that her friend may have been making a big mistake. Not wanting a thing!
“Look,” Delia laughed. “I’ve had half my lifetime here. Why would I want to take it with me?”
Her friend nodded towards the big marvellous landscape of the Hawkduns. “People would die for that.”
“Landscape porn,” Delia said.
“That late McCahon?”
“I’ve had tidier letters from a 10-year-old.”
And so it went. The Scandinavian furniture. The flokaki rugs. The Italian lighting.
“Bruno will be in one of his rages when he sees all this.”
“It could bring him and Trudy closer together.”
Then Annie said, suddenly impatient with her friend, “Are you trying to get him back, or what are you doing? It’s making a fool of yourself.” She at once regretted it. She leaned across and touched her friend’s arm. “I shouldn’t have said that, should I?”
“Not if you’re charging for it.”
Once Annie had left to get back to the city before dark, Delia rinsed the glasses and took the last of the wine from the fridge and placed it in her shoulder bag. She would spend the night at another friend’s in Featherston. The moon already was edging up across the hills at Gladstone. She went through to the library, as Bruno rather grandly called it. She simply called it the room with the books. A few photos yet to place. The kind of thing a younger woman on the up in publishing would be drawn to. The signed Donna Tartt, from an Adelaide Festival. The warmly inscribed Helen Garner. One she actually propped against the books rather than slipped inside. From so long ago but it was fun. Mel Gibson still in his Jesus beard, with his arm around her, planting a kiss on her cheek as though a new disciple. Bruno hated it.
Delia was sad but not distressed as she walked through to the hallway and turned at the front door. And of all things to have forgotten! The totally corny but still touching embroidery her grandmother had worked for them as a wedding present, that was the kind of woman her Gran was. An old lady’s careful stitching, her love in every stitch. Welcome Home, the big letters spelled, with cupidy figures cavorting through them, as well as cute wee animals, and a boy carrying a pail, small as small, in the distance. When they first moved in, Bruno thought it a touch embarrassing, n’est-ce pas? But went along with Delia when he saw how much it meant to her.
Such a naked bright square where it had been, once she lifted it from the wall. She then placed it sideways inside the door leading through to the rest of the house. It would be the most natural thing in the world for Trudy to ask, “What’s this, then?” and for Bruno to say, “It always used to be up there where the mark is.” And who knows, it might be their first awkwardness simply deciding what to do with it, in the house that so needed to be cleared.
Vincent O’Sullivan is a short story writer, novelist, poet, critic, biographer and librettist.
