The Geography of Solitude

Something behind him attracted her eye. Something like a flash of lightening, but no, not in this clear sky. Silhouetted against the sunset, he stood on deck and waved – a kind of jerky salute – for a few seconds. The sky turned orange. She waved from the jetty, too late. He lowered his head, back arched; loosening a line, or adjusting a winch.

She waved again, even though he didn’t look toward the shore. It didn’t matter; she waved for her, for a feeling inside. She should have worn her heavy waterproof jacket with the fur hood. Perhaps she should have brought a thermos; nothing could have prepared her for this. What was this she felt? What did she see – a cormorant, a late pelican, a pair of gulls?

Wind whipped hair into her eyes and flapped the bit of sail he hoisted. Dedication and precision. In all his years of sailing, Kerry never put a foot wrong. Things go awry on boats, of course; they always do, and it was a frightfully expensive undertaking, but he never made it worse. He knew exactly what he was doing, loving the fixing, mending, making do, improvising, he was master of all it took to take him where he was going, and bring him safely back. Fiddling and faking, he called it.

‘See you in Frankston, Annabel.’ He already had that long gaze on his face, growing impatience with proximate land things, could not wait to cast off, all on his own, and put the jetty behind him.

In his eyes, she was a diminishing speck, if he looked landward. The boat itself took on the aspect of a fleck – a bright dot whose white merged with the shimmering sea – he was absent. Even the lofty vertical mast faded from sight, a long way from her now, but not nearly as far as he wanted to get. She understood Kerry’s thing for distances. The further he sailed, the greater the distance he put between him and Albany, the happier he felt. His spirits lifted when Alabaster was the only object in the seascape. When even ships on the horizon disappeared. No land, no ships, nothing but Kerry on a deck.

‘Alabaster is not a good name,’ someone said, all those years ago. ‘Isn’t it a kind of stone? Marble? Something columns and statues are made of? Heavy! Alabaster sinks!’

The original owners must have had their reasons. Kerry was not about to push his luck with a name change. Sailors had odd perceptions of what was lucky and what was not. His ideas of good fortune were all to do with weather, time and tide, things working as they should, with little connection to words or notions of literature, or philosophy. Or of art history, Annabel’s beloved field of endeavour. For her the name conjured visions of Michelangelo’s slave forms, emerging from beds of alabaster like struggling souls freeing themselves from millennia of captivity.

‘White is the colour of freedom.’ She said to Kerry a long time ago, sitting at a café, sipping tea, debating the expense of purchasing a thirty-four foot yacht.

‘It’s the colour of surrender,’ he said. ‘Of … you know … um, letting go.’ He turned serious. ‘It’s a lot of money, Annabel.’

‘As if money matters a jot.’

‘You’re right … well, I don’t know. There are so …’

‘Nothing that really matters, Kerry.’

It was the right answer. His face lit up. ‘But …’

‘I’ve done all I’ve needed to do.’ She had; trips to Istanbul, with photos to prove it. She trailed dusty fingers on glass cases at the Topkapi Museum, walked over the Galata bridge; traced the steps of Constantine, and gazed up into the interior of ancient domes studded with Byzantine mosaics. She wrote reams, and took hundreds of carefully focussed shots. She had flown every which-way and back. She put a book together that filled three years of analysis, cerebral organization, inventive manipulation of history, history, history. Art, Art. The book was all but complete.

‘It’s like a second PhD, what you’re doing,’ he said. There was puzzlement in his voice. Sometimes she thought he knew exactly how she ticked, and how mysteries and puzzles of the past enthralled her, but it was nothing like the puzzle in his mind. Sometimes she was like a mysterious ship on the horizon. Full of imponderables; how could she be so enamoured of things that were dead, literally buried sometimes; extinct, useless?

‘I only like to travel if it leads somewhere, Kerry. You like to travel away. To leave. You love leaving.’ Perhaps he’d not sense the melancholy in her. Perhaps her meaning would not escape the tight capture of her words.

‘Ha ha! I don’t really know what I like. Being out there, all alone, in the middle of nowhere … where, you know … the only address is a bunch of coordinates.’

‘Where the only neighbour is the moon.’

Now, all alone on the wharf, not looking forward to dislodging her winter self and travelling to Frankston, walking briskly back to the car, Annabel thought her history trips were like his; a kind of escape from the ordinary humdrum existence their friends seemed to lead. Work, mortgages, children, family holidays: not for them. Childlessness was more a vague consideration delayed too long than a conscious choice. Thinking about it now was a flash; the absence of regret.

A flash. A flash. What did she see behind the boat as Kerry drew away on Alabaster? Gone as soon as it appeared, a silvery blaze like when a large fish breaks the surface. But there was no splash. Or was there? No, no – it was behind him, between boat and horizon, visible for such a brief instant Annabel wondered whether her mind conjured it. Huh! An emotional distraction from what she felt every time Kerry left without her, so eager to go, get away from land, from strictures of life at home. From her.

Nothing could have prepared her for the feeling when the flash disappeared.

‘One day you’ll want to be there,’ Kerry said. ‘You’ll want to be in my place, sailing away. You’ll want blessed peace, solitude … you know … all that’s out there.’

‘There’s nothing out there.’

‘Precisely what I mean.’ He laughed. ‘Just because there are no museums or galleries … libraries or bookshops …’ His eyelids lowered suddenly. ‘Not that I …’

‘I know you don’t devalue what I do.’ She was more reassuring than she felt. Why did she think he needed reassurance?

‘It’s like … ’ He smiled at his lack of words. ‘Like … a church.’

‘A church?’

They had a similar conversation every year. Every time, before he took off on one of his flights from reality.

The cold steering wheel under her hand, her cold hand inside her glove made her pause. He never said church before.

Perhaps what she saw was a flash of sunlight on a chalice. On a cross. On an altar boy’s bell. On the shimmering water.

Her writer’s mind ran away, out of control. She drove home slowly. Every single window on the way was lit. Everyone was home, lighting fires, boiling the kettle, watching television. Talking. Eating dinner. Playing cards. Making love. Reading paperbacks. Talking.

Was that what she regretted, Kerry’s lack of words? He struggled to express what he felt.

The house was empty; silent but thankfully warm. Leaving the heating on was an extravagance, indulged in when all alone. No such thing on a boat. Annabel made a face at the deprivation Kerry put up with. He didn’t miss the comforts of home, except perhaps for a long scalding shower in a bathroom where one’s elbows did not hit the walls.

She turned on the full kettle, having prepared things before they set out earlier, so she’d get the full burst, the thrust and flare of solitary luxury on returning to a house that was – with Kerry away – entirely hers. Folded knee blanket, unopened box of shortbread, radio set to her station, brand new bottle of sauternes. Real Sauternes, from Bordeaux.

A real hibernation.

There was Tou-Tou. Hiding as usual, emerging once the fuss and rustle of arrival settled to a companionable silence, with Mahler or Dvořák playing softly, she slunk out and perched on a particular armchair, to survey her world.

‘So, Tou-Tou, we’re alone.’

The cat responded; a mewl, a little yes. So necessary, so real. ‘No flights from reality for us, eh?’

There was soup on the stove, and books that arrived the previous day, saved for that delicious moment of unwrapping and discovering. And yet there disquiet in all this comfort and bliss. The flash she saw, the silvery something that caught her eye, was still at the back of her mind. At the back of her throat, making her swallow and wonder.

‘What was it, Tou-Tou? What did I see out there behind Kerry? As he leaned over to catch the tiller – was I seeing things?’

A mewl. The necessary no.

‘I don’t see things. Do I?’ Questions rolled as she prepared for a solitary evening.

‘You’re a lone sailor too, in your um … in your way, aren’t you?’ Kerry often said something of the sort. They knew each other. He presumed she was more like him than she was, but she never put him right. She did like her own company.

The neat kitchen was a warm welcoming place, the fridge an ordered store full of her things, with enough perhaps, to last more than half the weeks ahead, until she drove to Perth and took the three-day train journey to Melbourne, and then to Frankston to meet him. It would stay ordered. Kerry’s rummaging habit, of opening boxes and packs to nibble a bit of this, bite into that, taste a section of the other, would not upset her sense of sequenced consumption. Still, something niggled at the satisfaction she usually felt.

What was it? Ah – a cheese omelette, fresh and hot. She’d eat it straight from the pan. Absentminded, tonight, with her thoughts on Alabaster and her single solitary sailor. She did not usually muse like this.

Tou-Tou sauntered in and looked up.

‘Hoping for some omelette, are you? It’s tiny.’

There was no mewl of response.

‘You’ll get some anyway, and you know it, Tou-Tou.’ It was a perfect supper, pan on a raffia mat bought on impulse in Italy, glass of sauternes glinting in the lamplight.

Armchair and lap blanket beckoned, and that pile of books. Her reality. In the morning, she’d return to her manuscript, add footnotes, and book a fact checker from UWA to verify references. Her work. Her life. The order of her days.

Perhaps it was order born of necessity. Perhaps it replaced something she simply could not get. Ah! How impatient she got with herself. How a glimpse of something momentary she couldn’t identify upset her in this way was a mystery. The ethereal flash stayed in her mind, and she stayed in the armchair long after she should have, tired as she was. A series of what-ifs reeled back and forth, on the white screen of a late-night mind filled with the demi-silence of a warm room. Mussorgsky’s drunken trajectory up the Bare Mountain did not help.

What if she’d never met Kerry? What if they had not matched in temperament – even if she knew the matching was mostly done on her part? What if they had blown onto totally separate flightpaths? What if her notion of what it was to travel was the same as Kerry’s?

What if they’d had a son … or a daughter, a daughter to keep her company on such nights? Ah, but surely a daughter would have made a life for herself by now. No young person stayed on forever, to salve the loneliness of a solitary land-bound soul.

There – she thought it. But it was not loneliness, surely it wasn’t. Surely she would have felt it before, on one or another of his dozens of flights from ordinariness. What was this feeling that came suddenly, like a flash, and lasted all night? She was usually so happy to be pottering about on her own, devising the following day’s work. Never having sat up so late, Annabel now fought a sense of dismay at her own desolate weakness, her break in a perennial system.

‘You ruined your own routine, you silly old –’ she rose from the chair just as her phone, hooked to its charger for the night, sent out its silly peal of summons.

‘… lost trace of the Alabaster, I’m afraid, and …’

This was what she saw. This.

‘Are you all right? Hello?’

Annabel swallowed. ‘Hello, I’m here. What …’

‘We have your husband’s last coordinates, Mrs Elsegood, but we can’t raise him. Haven’t been able to for a good three hours now. Have you heard from him since departure? Or in the last three hours?’

‘No!’ A silvery flash; a flash in her mind’s eye. ‘He’s on his way to Frankston. I’m meeting him there. And after that, across the Tasman.’

‘Yes – we’re aware of that. I suggest you contact the water police in your state if you don’t hear for another hour.’

‘In my state? Where are you?’ A map in her mind, a map she might not have to traverse. Or traverse sooner than she thought.

‘Coastguards Melbourne, Mrs Elsegood. Um … This is Coastguards Melbourne. We keep track of national – ’

‘How did you get my number?’

‘Kerry Elsegood … is that right? Annabel … Annabel? Your husband registered a number of details here, and this is …’

‘Oh.’

Tou-Tou leapt onto the kitchen counter. It was something she never did. Annabel took her gently in one arm and lowered her to the armrest of a chair, then walked around as if she’d just risen from sleep. Perhaps she had. Perhaps she dozed in her chair. That was it. That was why she felt so drained, so dizzy.

‘Call water police in an hour?’ Her voice was louder now, competing with radio music. Prokofiev; a ballet she knew but couldn’t name.

‘Yes, that’s right, Mrs Elsegood. Here’s their number. Have you got a pen?’

‘A pen? Yes.’

‘Everything will be all right. Good night.’

How could they possibly know he’d be all right?

All she wanted now was her bed. She needed to curl up into a tight quilt-held ball and try to get warm. Her hands and feet were gelid. The tip of her nose froze.

The cat stared from her perch.

‘What shall we do, Tou-Tou? What shall we do, girlie?’

A small sharp mewl, and then another longer one.

‘No. I won’t wait an hour. What will an hour do?’ She keyed in Kerry’s number, and immediately got his voicemail.

Walking around the living room in confusion didn’t help. Neither did peering out into the dark through the curtains. Kerry was out there somewhere, in pitch darkness, shouting himself hoarse, yelling at ships on the horizon, perched like a wet cat on the keel of his capsized boat.

Oh – her silly imaginings. Those boats didn’t turn over. Kerry said a thousand times it was practically impossible. The Alabaster would right itself. It would. But he also said a thousand times it was impossible to reach a boat if one fell overboard. It would just sail on, and one could never catch it. A silver flash filled her eyes, blinding her. She knew it was in her head, but it startled her enough to seek the number she wrote and thumb it into her phone.

‘I’m all alone.’ She turned to the cat. ‘All alone, Tou-Tou.’

A single mewl. Yes.

‘I shan’t wait another hour.’

The voice on the other end was so distant she could hardly hear what was said.

‘Alabaster,’ she said. ‘Alabaster. White, like marble.’ She was going mad. She was taking flight from all that was sensible. ‘Michelangelo’s slaves.’ It was a whisper she hoped they couldn’t hear.

‘Yes,’ someone said, from a hundred miles away. ‘Yes. We heard from Melbourne coastguards.’

‘Oh. Have you?’

‘Yes. Hold on. Stay on the line.’

What did they think she’d do, put the phone down?

‘We have him, Mrs Elsegood. Annabel? We have him now.’

Everyone knew her name.

‘We have the Alabaster. We’ve spoken to a … Kerry Elsegood … that’s right, isn’t it?’

The room swam. The cat jumped off the armchair. Something outside sounded like rain. Like thunder.

‘It’s raining.’

The person on the other end sounded puzzled. ‘He’s fine. We’ve spoken to him. He’s somewhere near Bremer Bay. His coordinates are … ’

‘What happened?’

‘We don’t know exactly. For a few hours there, he was, urgh, off the chart, so to speak.’ A gruff laugh seemed to mask embarrassment. Or relief. Or impatience.

‘So …’

The words were so faint she could ignore them. ‘Goodnight.’

This was what she saw. It was this, this departure from what she usually felt. But he was now safe, somewhere out there, on a sea black with danger. Somewhere in the Bight, tackling a sharp easterly wind, soaked to the skin. And enjoying every minute, unaware she, the coastguards, and the water police hovered over his shoulder, their anxiety and concern making aerial flashes of their own.

Oh, she was dramatic. She and her words.

A peek through the curtains showed her a line of light in the distance. Dawn. The birds would start soon, and she was still in yesterday’s clothes. Exhausted, she was, and drained of anything like gratitude. A kind of anger took its place, frustration she needed to sidle around.

Kerry had taken flight, eager to be rid of land strictures, thinking she craved solitude as much as he did. But she was not so sure. Talking on the phone to strangers placed her very definitely on her own, cast off, even though she was safely on land, anchored in her solid home. He could have no concept of how much worry he caused.

The bed was warm, but her feet were stiff and cold, thrust downward, seeking more than the electric blanket could ever provide. A flash of something started this; a flash of something else could end it. A vague determination planted itself in her head, but sleep, and Tou-Tou settling on the empty half of the bed, took over.

And there he was, in the middle of her toast brunch, gabbling on the phone like nothing had happened in the night. But it had, it had.

‘Absolutely brilliant, Annabel! Gorgeous. Um … Cut off from the world, out there, where nothing and no one could …’

‘Kerry – the coastguards, the water police …’

‘And you should have seen the moon! Huge, orange, like a balloon stuck on my prow, full of … like …’ His wish for words, his desire to express what he felt was on the line, tangible. He would never understand how her unease had punctured the very same night that to him was bliss.

It would be useless to scold him on the phone. He was barricaded inside his watery world, and soon he would sever his connection to her land-bound one completely.

‘So what … why … how …?’ For once words failed her.

‘I’m in Bremer Bay, in a little boat harbour here. That’s why I’ve got a connection. Isn’t it wonderful?’

She never asked where. Where was not what she wanted to know. They were on opposite poles, observing separate, distinct geographies.

‘See you in Frankston!’ And he was gone, brilliantly insular, inured to anything that went on ashore.

He would not want to arrive, of that she was certain, in Frankston or anywhere else. Arrival was to him like the drawing of a line underneath an experience he wished would never end, coming to the end of idyllic freedom from impossible demands that stalked him on land. Even if it was just her.

Thinking back a bit, considering his moods over the last few trips, Annabel saw it was getting more intense. His desire to be free was expanding, swelling slowly, like sails sensing a breeze and opening up to it. Another year, and it might be a gale, forcing those sails out, forward, onward, accelerating, speeding. Away from her.

The cat mewled, uttered a full miaow, arched herself into a grey curve, her tail a question mark.

‘No, no, Tou-Tou … it’s not you. It’s from me, from me he needs to get away.’ Her hands were steady as she tidied away her half-eaten meal and cleared the counter. Steady hands, capable, sure. She was done with the mystery and confusion of the previous night. Even without thinking of the task she did, it was second nature, and she did it all capably.

‘There’s a course to steer, girlie.’ Half to the cat, half to herself, she spoke aloud, picking her way through the living room, folding the lap blanket, closing the box of shortbread, returning the wine bottle to the fridge. The debris of the night was quickly dealt with. ‘It’s funny how we all relinquish freedom, isn’t it? How we paint ourselves into corners of dependence.’

The cat pounced onto a windowsill.

‘Hm … exactly what I mean. Out you go.’ A sharp draught of cold air sliced into the room and she closed the window again quickly.

‘Quite willingly, I’ve done it.’ She found the realization comforting. ‘I gave up my liberty quite willingly, taking on Kerry’s notions, his belief we are exactly alike, wanting to be alone above anything else.’

She turned up the music, and turned it right down again. Perhaps she was not quite in the mood for Ponchielli. For Kerry, solitariness was freedom, for her it was … what was it, exactly?

‘I can’t call it a prison, exactly, can I? I can’t call it confinement. Is a journey confinement?’

The cat was not around to mew a response.

She went on anyway, seeing she had thought journey. ‘This is not a prison, is it? Not a gilded cage, then, surely?’

Perhaps it was exactly that. The fact she thought it made it suddenly real, but a predicament impossible to quantify after all those years. She’d done a lot of what she wanted. There were books and papers to prove it. Fancy accolades and laudatory praise had accumulated, from academic heavyweights she admired. But her work was not her. Surely she was distinct, separate from what she did. Kerry was what he did; there was no other thread to him. He was a lone yachtsman, and quite happy with it. She hoped there was more substance, more layering, more texture to her. More distance covered in her journeys.

There was, somewhere at the back of her neck, between her shoulder blades, an urge to fly. Flee. Now. Unexpectedly. From something she could not name. It would take another silvery flash to change things, she had thought last night.

She let in the cat, thinking it had to be that. Something silvery, like a bullet, streaking towards her; no, away from her. No, no; with her on board.

She could proceed along her own trajectory, although to where, it was impossible to know just yet. But hers was not a physical grounded geography she traversed, like that which would whizz past her train window when she travelled to Frankston on the train. If she travelled to Frankston on the train.

Hers was a geography in stasis, a stable one, which did not blur and move in any direction. Her passages were written ones, ones she could compose, read, and listen to, like Mussorgsky’s climb up that bare mountain. She walked two fingers along her neat shelf of CDs and found it.

Loud, loud, loud and meaningful, the music seemed to come from the top of her head, in the warm room where unexpected sunlight streamed in. Shafts of light landed on the checked rug. Tou-Tou took advantage and sat in a puddle of transient golden light. It was neither a flash nor silvery, and it disappeared as soon as the cat settled, but it was what Annabel needed.

Two calls, in quick succession, anchored her in a room full of a strange silence; full of resolve that neither frightened nor delayed her. But she freed herself, at least, from the need to travel to Frankston. First, the train cancellation. Then, Kerry.

She got him on the first ring. There was something in that. ‘No, I’m staying here. Yes, yes I know you’ll go on to Milford Sound and all that …’ She did not apologize.

His voice did not falter. ‘Okay then!’ No hesitation, no deliberation, no disappointment.

His tone needed no foil, thrust, or parry from her. She stood taller. Her voice strengthened. ‘I’ve decided to start a new project. I’m going on a journey of my own.’ She was free.

‘Bye then!’

It was too late, or perhaps too early, to think he might have asked where she was going. And why.

**