The Finding of Solitude

They sang Jerusalem because Jenna had heard it sung in a chapel in Oxford one quiet Sunday afternoon and said afterwards how much she had always loved Blake. Russell was surprised - as much by the choice of poet as by the revelation itself (he had not known Jenna to read a line of verse in all the years of their marriage) but it was the curious use of the word always that made him pause. He was struck, as he had been in Hilary's presence earlier, by a niggling sense of exclusion.

Bring me my bow of burning gold
Bring me my arrows of desire
Bring me my spear O clouds unfold
Bring me my chariot of fire

      Though the cathedral was less than half filled, there were people there, friends and associates of Jenna, he had never seen before. They kept their eyes down, caught by the unfamiliar lines of the hymn. Adrian was standing with his head raised, silent and calm. Russell wanted to take his hand but his grandmother was between them, singing with a peculiar gusto.
      The Town Planner had given the eulogy. He was a small anonymous-looking man who had occasionally brought his wife to dinner. Russell had thought him the closest of all Jenna's associates. And he had spoken of her with such warmth and intimacy he might indeed have been one of the family.
      Or a lover.
      It was a day in June, dry and uncommonly warm. Russell loosened his tie as the last verse rose and died in the great vault of the cathedral ceiling.

I will not cease from mental fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green & pleasant land.

      The minister stepped up to the pulpit. He was a dark, wiry little man, new to the diocese. He lowered his eyes for a moment in contemplation of a woman he'd never met, whose life and death were meaningless to him outside the certainties of his faith.
      Presently he looked up. His hands gripped the sides of the pulpit as if to steady himself. The eyes that cast around the heads of the congregation were the eyes of a school principal intent on fixing the guilty glance of a miscreant.
      'I did not know Jenna Dyson,' he said quietly at length. 'The mystery of her death merely deepens my ignorance of her life. I could talk to you of faith and the Resurrection and life-everlasting, and it would bring comfort to some of you, but not understanding. For it is this need to understand, I am sure, that you find the more acute. We have all said, at one time or another, "There is a reason for everything." What then is the reason for Jenna Dyson's strange disappearance?'
      Stepping back a little, he took a large red handkerchief from his pocket and noisily blew his nose. When he resumed speaking, his nasally voice seemed sharper, almost steely.
      'But let me ask you something. What comfort can one with a deep love of the mysterious and unknown give another who craves answers, reasons, understanding? The bereaved's calm, his great inner strength comes from acceptance. For is it not this needless search for all-meaning that begins the road to despair..?'


Outside they gathered in small groups on the cathedral steps. Rachel and Adrian were talking with the minister. A man came up to Russell and embraced him. He was a friend of Jenna's, someone Russell felt he hardly knew. 'I liked the old man's sermon,' he said cheerfully. 'Quite a yarn.' He had a soft pink face and a high chittering laugh. He might have wanted to keep Russell from becoming maudlin. He brought his nose close to Russell's ear again. 'And d'you know, I don't think he mentioned the Almighty once.'
      When he had walked away Russell sat on the steps and wept.

* * *

Sometimes he dreamed of her. It was old times and he was waiting for her to come home from work, or from the supermarket. Often he heard her voice as if she were in another room; she might have been behind the fence, talking with a neighbour. The house was quiet, it was always summer, the doors and windows open, curtains lifting and falling in the breeze. There was the sound of traffic on the ring road a street away. He dreamed once of the garden maze in Melbourne, of returning to look for her, laughing and calling her name. Sometimes he would wake with her name still in his ears as if he'd just that moment spoken it aloud. Those brief seconds - between dreaming and waking - were when she seemed most real, most tantalisingly alive. All else was memory and silence. And those dreams, more vivid than any he had experienced since childhood. Dreams of rooms and hallways and great open spaces. Dreams of absence.


He imagined deaths for her. These were day dreams, mad dreams, visions of sea and marshland and crumbling stone. Kedgwick had told him too of deep long-forgotten mine shafts collecting the bones of careless sheep and dogs. And what of Kedgwick himself, that capable man, with his neat little bungalow, and his binoculars, and the rumours of his faithless wife? Was he out that afternoon, crossing the headlands? Were they his hands at her throat, tearing at her mouth and hair, extracting their miserable revenge..?
      And what if it were none of these? What if she should turn up months after, covered in filth, her clothes rags? And her mind gone, more stranger to him now than ever he to her...


Adrian had turned difficult and sullen. His grief was understated, almost mute. He seemed perplexed by events, if anything. Russell would catch him at the sink, washing his hands, or in the hall, one arm outstretched for his jerkin; just standing there, mulling it over.
      He took hold of him once, shook him with a sort of sweet madness.
      'We have to learn to live without her,' Russell said. 'We have to learn to live with not knowing what happened to her. It'll be easier if we talk.'
      Adrian fingered the buttons on his cuff. There was a long silence. Then he said thickly, 'She killed herself, didn't she.'
      Russell released his arm. He felt as if he'd been burned.
      'I don't know. I can't say.'
      'Tell me the truth.'
      'That is the truth. I just don't know.'
      'It's what they're saying at school,' Adrian argued. '"Dyson's old girl done herself in." I've heard them.'
      Russell shrugged, uselessly.
      'Ignore them.'
      'I can't.'
      He waited for Russell to continue, to confuse somehow the evil certainties of his peers.
      'If she'd killed herself they'd have found her,' Russell said simply. 'Sooner or later.'
      'What if she just curled up under a bush somewhere?' the boy persisted. 'And died.'
      'They searched everywhere. For days. And they had dogs. The dogs would have found her.'
      Adrian nodded thoughtfully. He could believe in the dogs. He'd always had faith in beasts, and flowers and insects.
      'Maybe she just walked away,' he said.

* * *

They took off one afternoon, packed a weekender, got in the car and drove. They travelled north, and then east towards the coast. The day was cold but fabulously clear.
      Just before dusk, the sea burst with a flash of deep cobalt blue through a break in the dunes. Russell stopped the car and they stood for a few moments at the edge of the incoming tide. A short distance out, waves were breaking over a sandbar. Neither of them was inclined to talk.
      Further up the coast they drove into a small hamlet. There were a dozen or so fishermen's cottages stretched along the shore, and a motel with four drab cabins. Behind the dunes was a park with a shelter and swings and a monstrous piece of redundant Army artillery for children to scramble over. Wind swept across the flat featureless terrain. Reminders of Cornwall were stark and painful.
      They booked into the motel for the night. The other cabins were unoccupied. Lifting the bag out of the car Russell stopped for a moment and listened to the wind and the surf sounding relentlessly across the dunes. He trembled a little.
      If there was to be fear and a kind of panic he wanted it to be here, in the dark, with the bag at his feet, his hands holding firmly on to the door of the car.
      He closed his eyes briefly, and just as he opened them again, a window was lit up at the back of the motel lobby, and a curtain quickly drawn across. He stared at that curtained window for some moments, kept his mind on it; kept thinking how unnecessarily private it seemed, in that dark solitary place.


The owner prepared a light supper for them. Russell wanted it brought to their cabin but she insisted they come across and sit in the tiny dining area behind the front office. She offered Russell a Scotch.
      'I'll have one with you,' she said, smiling a little.
      She was about fifty, bird-like, with grey flesh and greying hair, small watchful eyes. She slipped a business card under Russell's plate as she set up the table: THE DUNES MOTEL; Marina Potter, prop. She let her hand linger over his plate for a second; Russell noticed a small gold band on her marriage finger.
      'Would you like a glass of milk?' she asked Adrian.
      He nodded.
      While they were eating, a plump white cat came into the room and jumped up on the counter. It regarded them through great yellow eyes for a second and then blinked them out of existence. It's lumpish dirty white head disappeared between spread-eagled legs as it set about the ritual of cleaning.
      Mrs Potter caught him watching.
      'Are you fond of cats, Mr Dyson?'
      'Not particularly.' He hadn't meant to sound so aloof and offhand so he elaborated with a small lie. 'My wife was allergic to cat fur.'
      He half expected Adrian to say something, to protest; but he kept his head down, eating silently. Russell wasn't sure he'd even heard him.
      Mrs Potter had reached across the counter and was digging her fingers affectionately into the cat's arching back. As she leaned forward, Russell noticed a tiny blemish, a birthmark that began just below her throat and disappeared behind the lapel of her shirt.
      'This is a boys' trip, then,' she said presently.
      He didn't speak. He resisted, though he knew that in the end it was pointless. She would have noted the tense he'd used speaking of Jenna. Stuck on this lonely road she was sustained, he imagined, by the stuff of other people's lives. Their dreams. Their nightmares too.


'My son and my late husband were the same,' Mrs Potter said, still fondling the cat. 'Always going off together, fishing, shooting. Like pals, they were, real mates. You know.' She paused and gave Adrian an odd searching look before continuing. 'Clifford - my son - works for Qantas now. Catering. As for his father...' She sighed. 'Who knows..?'
      'You just said he was dead,' Adrian said, looking up. There was an edge of hostility to his voice that seemed to catch him by surprise. He lowered his eyes again, withdrew into diffidence.
      Mrs Potter was smiling.
      'He just went out one evening,' she explained evenly, 'took a change of clothes and his fishing gear, and never came back. I tell people sometimes, he's late - the late Mr Potter. It's a sort of joke.'
      She continued stroking the cat until it mewled suddenly and turned and struck out at her, drawing its claws neatly across her knuckles. The eyes flashed yellow and black, and then it sloped off, seemingly content, like a sated lover.
      Mrs Potter examined her wounds.
      'Cats can be such ungrateful beasts,' she murmured.
      Russell heard Adrian's nervous giggle and touched his arm warningly. A moment later the boy announced he was ready for bed, and rising from his chair, walked out without looking at either of them.


Mrs Potter brought the bottle of Scotch to the table. She filled the glasses. Russell looked at her hand, the hand the cat had mauled, the one without the ring.
      'You should clean that with something.'
      She smiled ruefully.
      'He always scratches.' She lifted her sleeve a little and showed him the scars. 'He likes to play. He's rather excitable. It usually heals.'
      He waited while she buttoned her cuff.
      'I'm sorry about my son. He was very rude.'
      'Poor baby,' she sighed. 'Is it his mother?'
      He told her about Jenna. He told her everything. It spilled out of him, every small detail from the attack on Dr Christie to the memorial service. At first it came from the head; names, places, incidents, the driest of narratives. She listened with interest, without speaking except occasionally to prompt or to raise a question. Slowly he loosened up. They drank steadily. Once she got up to open a window. The wind had dropped and the air in the room was warm and fuggy. He began again, the same story, but differently this time: not from the head, from within, a new voice, breaking with anger and confusion and despair. She took hold of his hand and caressed it, stroked it as she had the cat's arching back.
      'It's all right,' she murmured.
      He hardly heard her. Her shirt had opened a little and there was that birthmark again, reaching for her throat; livid like an angry welt. He wanted to withdraw his hand but it would seem self-conscious and brutal. 'It's all right,' she kept saying, 'it's all right, it's all right.'
      Soothingly, over and over, as if he were a child.


During the night he woke with a sharp pain in his chest. He got out of bed and paced the room until it eased. Moonlight was streaming through the open curtains. Moving away from the window he stood over his sleeping son for a few moments. Adrian was curled up on his side, facing the wall. His lips were slightly apart but his breathing was so light it was easy to imagine him lifeless. The feeling left Russell numbed.
      He returned to the window and faced the night outside. The Scotch had left a slight ache over his right eye but his head was surprisingly clear. He'd only slept a few hours yet already he felt revived, fully awake. In fact, restless. In a moment he was dressed and leaving the cabin.
      The cold salty air brought him up sharp. He watched his breath vaporise in front of his face. Moonlight and a myriad bright stars had illuminated the motel: dew sparkled on the car. Listening to the sea pounding the far side of the dunes he broke almost joyfully into a run.


He'd always been a solitary person. He remembered Jenna accusing once, 'You're happiest in your own company.' It seemed such an extraordinary statement he felt helpless to answer. She saw his helplessness and seized on it.
      'It's not that you're selfish,' she explained. 'It just seems to me you don't find other people's feelings real. I've watched you. Even at your most sociable there's a sort of barrier between you and everyone else. It's as if the people you're talking to aren't really there. They're an illusion, a part of your imaginary world.'
      It signalled, he thought, a shift in their relationship, perhaps even the beginning of the end of their marriage. He became alert to the small domestic changes, the hints of separation.
      Later he realised he'd read too much into it. It was simply how she saw him. She wasn't criticising, particularly. She just liked these things in the open where they could be realised and lived with. If there was much of her own life that was private and denied him, it seemed now somehow understandable that he didn't really care to know. He was grateful then that she could accept so much and live with seemingly so little.
      Crossing the dunes that night, the conversation came back to him with sudden freshness. He couldn't help thinking there had been more space in their imperfect lives than was necessary to keep them from suffocating. Space enough perhaps to take even this great ocean stretching before him to the Americas.
      As he began running along the hard wet sand, he recalled the waves breaking over the sandbar where he and Adrian had stopped earlier. He'd been drawn to that sandbar, imagined himself out there with the waves breaking over his head. As his mouth filled with the sea, so his mind was mercifully freed from the past. Here had been suffocation of a different kind; the suffocation of guilt.
      The truth was, Jenna had been more real to him than either of them would have believed. He knew, as he'd known since the day she disappeared, he should have taken better care of her.

* * *

In the evenings he went for long walks. The streets were dark and empty; mist came stealing up from the river. Each night he ranged a little further: parts of the city he'd never been in before were opened up to him, long unfamiliar streets with wide grassy verges kept shaded and green by hundred year old trees.
      Sometimes dogs would come barking up to the gates. He always ignored the bigger ones but poodles and terriers were an invitation to tease. One evening, while a coifed pekinese shrieked and jumped at a low gate, Russell looked up and saw a woman watching him furtively from an upstairs window.
      It was a still mild night and there were a few other people around. He walked on, absorbed with an idea he'd had of going to America for a while after Adrian had finished school. He was tinkering too with the thought that he might sell the house.
      He crossed two or three dark streets and then returned the way he'd come. As he passed the garden with the pekinese a patrol car shot out of a side lane and a policeman pulled him over.
      Rachel was slightly shocked when he told her about it later. 'Who on earth did they think you were?' she asked incredulously. She said it must have been the flat cap he'd taken to wearing. She thought it made him look like a plumber.


Russell asked Adrian to walk with him some evenings but he always refused.
      Sometimes the boy wouldn't even talk to him. Then Russell would be reminded of Jenna in one of her black moods, remote and difficult. Adrian might lighten up the following day but there was still that air of self-absorption about him. It was as if he had set himself a complicated mathematical problem and was trying to work it out in his head.
      Russell had noticed how much he was changing.
      He was taller, fuller, his eyes seemed bluer. There was hair on his upper lip itching for a razor. Russell watched him as he ate at the dinner table, or mooned around the house when he was at a loose end. He watched for looks, gestures that confirmed the boy as his own. He wanted to see in Adrian something of himself, of Hal, of Jenna: a continuity.
      And there was one other change, one that stood out from the others. Each evening he went out for his walk Russell left the boy alone, reading or watching TV. The house had become safe for him: he no longer felt compelled to run from its shadows. Was it the loss of his mother that had released him from lingering childhood terrors?
      Or the finding of solitude.


Russell began keeping a journal. Jenna had kept a diary when they were married. He remembered it, a little red covered book with a metal clasp. She abandoned it after a few months, tore the pages out and burnt them in the grate. It was tedious, she said, just recording everyday events, and she lacked the imagination to invent. She said this without looking at him. He thought she must have discovered she had the gift of insight and found it too painful.
      Russell wrote his journal late at night.
      He propped himself up, slipped a sweater over his shoulders. The house was silent and cold. Everything appeared clear in the small hours, unconfused. It was the short winter days, buried in his work, he seemed to sleep and dream through.
      He wrote at first mostly about Adrian. He wrote about the boy's silences. They were talking less and less. Even their small domestic conversations became ludicrously one-sided. Adrian would sit with a bowl of cereal, or a book, or in front of the TV and not look at him. Or look at him without recognition. Or recognise in him something rare and disturbing that he couldn't articulate.
      Until finally, one evening over supper, they began quietly to talk. It was as if they had both realised there had to be an end: to silence, and to waiting.
      Russell looked into the boy's mute white face.
      'What's the matter with you?'
      'Nothing.'
      'Something's the matter. Something's been eating you for weeks. What is it?'
      Adrian took a moment to answer.
      'You.'
      'What have I done?'
      'You let her go.'
      (This wasn't his son: this was Hal, blunt, one-eyed, unforgiving.)
      'You're wrong,' he said quietly.
      Adrian began to shout.
      'She needed help. And you couldn't see it.'
      'The perception of youth,' Russell laughed. 'You think you see everything.'
      Adrian calmed then, seemed almost serene.
      'I see more than you think,'
      'What's that supposed to mean?'
      'I saw you. With that woman.'
      Russell hesitated, just for a second. 'What woman?'
      'The one in the motel. The one who was all over you. I went back, you were so long coming to bed. I saw you through the window.'
      Russell was silent. It was simple to understand, difficult to put into words. Adrian's own feelings of hurt and loss were so great he was blind to them in others.
      Russell remembered the woman at the motel sometimes with a tenderness he hadn't felt at the time. That other thing, that inky little blemish, the birthmark that had both intrigued and repulsed him, he had almost pushed from his mind.
      Adrian was watching, waiting. Russell felt helpless to explain.
      'It was nothing...' he murmured, 'emotions. We were drunk.'
      'It made me sick.'
      His disgust stung more than anything. It seemed so unjust, so inappropriate. Russell struck him hard across the mouth.
      He wasn't really aware he'd hit him until he saw the dribble of blood and the look of surprise on the boy's face. It was the failure to anticipate the blow that seemed to hurt the more.
      'I'm sorry,' Russell said. 'I didn't mean to do that.'
      Adrian walked away, went upstairs to his room. In the morning he packed a bag with the clothes and books he thought he needed most, and went to live with his grandmother.

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The Lizard | Panatellas | A View of the Mechanics Institute | Disinterested Bystanders | The Finding of Solitude | Unfinished Business | Table of Contents