The Narrow Road to the Deep North(121)

The third time he picked her out in the crowd she was closer. She was wearing fashionable sunglasses and a sleeveless dark-blue dress with a white band around the hips. She had two children with her, small girls, each holding one of her hands. The traffic noise reverberating in the riveted iron ribcage of the bridge meant he could see the children, laughing, chattering, and her replying. If he could not hear, he still knew: she was no ghost.

He had thought her dead, but here she was, walking towards him, noticeably older, though to him time had made her more, not less, beautiful. As though, rather than taking, age had simply revealed who she really was.

Amy.

The abyss of years—with their historic wars, their celebrated inventions, their innumerable horrors and miraculous wonders—had, he realised, all been about nothing. The bomb, the Cold War, Cuba and transistor radios had no power over her swagger, her imperfect ways, her breasts longing for liberation and her eyes rightfully hidden. Her lighter, bleached hair seemed to him more becoming than her natural colour; her body, if anything perhaps a little thinner, making her more mysterious; her face, slightly gaunt with its defining lines, seemed to him full of some hard-won self-possession.

Over a quarter of a century after he had first seen her through dusty shafts of light in an Adelaide bookshop, he was shocked by how little her changes meant to him. So many feelings that he thought he had lost forever now returned with as great a power as when he had first known them.

Would he stop or would he walk on by? Would he cry out or would he say nothing? He had to decide. So few moments to weigh lives known and unknown, his life now, their life then, her unimaginable life now. He could see the children well enough to recognise in them what he felt to be her unmistakable features. And something in them that was not her and which pained him far more than he thought possible. Perhaps she was happy in her marriage. He was finding it hard to breathe. A thousand mad, maddening notions ran through his mind as he kept on walking towards her. He told himself that he could not barge into her life, causing chaos; he told himself he must, that all was not lost, that they could start again.

She was drawing nearer. He tried to slow his step as his mind sped ever faster. His stomach churned and his balance was uneven. He was close enough now to see the small mole that defined her upper lip. Now he did not think she was as beautiful as ever, or that she was beautiful at all. Only that he wanted her. She was wearing a necklace that sparked an uncontrollable insurrection of memory. Had she seen him? He would call out to her. He would! And then, with the full light of the sun behind her, he saw her pinch her dress between her thumb and forefinger and tug it back up her cleavage. For a moment, perhaps, he expected that in that transcendent light she would now welcome him into her arms and her life.

But there is only light at the beginning of things.

As he went to say something, he realised they had walked past each other without a word. He kept on walking in the shadow, continuing to look straight ahead. He had got it wrong. Her, him, them, love—especially love—so completely wrong. He had got time wrong. He could not believe it, yet he had to. Her death, his life, them, everything, everything wrong. And the gravity of his error was so great, so overwhelming, that he could not fight it and turn around, call out, run back. Only when he reached the other end of the bridge did he find the strength finally to turn.

Amy was nowhere to be seen.

He stood in the middle of the walkway, with people spilling all around him—as though he were just one more urban obstruction, a bollard, a bin, a body—and he thought of Lot’s wife and what a lie that story was. You become a pillar of salt when you don’t turn and look back. He realised he should have stopped her and he realised he now never could. He should never have walked on and yet he had.

Had he chosen? Had she? Was there ever a choice? Or did life just sweep people up, together and away?

Around him, behind him, beyond him were people, moving every which way. Wild flying particles in the light, lost long-ago, as he knew everything now was lost, in the steel and the stone, in the sea and the sun and the heat rising and falling in the cloudless blue sky, lost in the ochre cranes and the thundering expressway.

For a moment longer he remained there, an insignificant figure amidst the soaring iron half-circles and the roaring traffic, the blue day and the sparkling water. Thinking: How empty is the world when you lose the one you love.

And he turned back around and kept on walking, pathless on all paths. He had thought her dead. But now he finally understood: it was she who had lived and he who had died.





10



AFTER THEY HAD walked across the bridge, Amy bought her two nieces ice-creams at Circular Quay and caught the ferry back to her sister’s home in Manly. For many years she had thought him dead. She had become aware that he had not died during the war only in recent times, as his fame had begun to grow. Why, why, she thought once more as she sat on the ferry’s rear deck, watching the coruscating waters recede, why if he had been alive, had he not come back to find her? Why? she thought on arriving back at her sister’s home. Why? she thought as she lay down on her bed, so very tired. For she could not forgive him for having broken his promise.